Adamant: Hardest metal
Thursday, May 22, 2003

Venezuela, the land where (almost) anything goes...

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Tuesday, May 13, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel

VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: By this I mean that you can invade private property, build your shack and plant your corn and stay there, as long as you come under the wing of the Institute of Lands.

Or you can pump a few bullets into your favorite enemy without much fear of being caught.  Some 30,000 Venezuelans have been murdered during the last 4½ years, only a few receiving adequate attention from the police. You could also go into the kidnapping business, in special the "kidnap Express" ... of short duration ... designed for the common folk and involving modest ransoms of $1,000-$2,000.  You could take over a street and seal it off from traffic by means of a barricade and no one will stop you. Or you can install a fish market in front of PDVSA's main offices and leave the garbage on the streets.

You could perforate the main waterline to get your free water supply or, if you have some basic knowledge of electrical wiring, tie your home on to the nearest light post. You could start your cell phone renting business on any corner of the city, for local and international calls, although it would be a good idea first to vandalize nearby public phone booths, to eliminate unfair competition.

Anyone can have his/her blood pressure taken under the shadow of a tree and, if not too shy, lower their trousers to get a quick vitamin B1 injection, excellent as a general tonic.

Fortune tellers, palm readers, tarot experts, certified witches from Colombia or from the mountains of Sorte, the kingdom of Maria Lionza, lottery ticket sellers, beggars of all ages and genders will try to catch your attention as you try to drink a coffee at a sidewalk cafe. And be careful in how you say no... You will be called names and given the finger for your lack of social solidarity...

Drivers will be offered a clean windshield at all red light signs. When parking in any given street you will find a self-appointed watchman/woman. The whole country is now a single parking lot. Of course, you do not have to pay, but you soon realize you're dealing with a mild case of extortion, with the necessity to pay protection money ... or, if you want to be philosophical about it, think of it as the way national wealth is being redistributed.

It seems that there is almost nothing you can not do in Venezuela, as long as it is illegal. A cursory observer might even take this as a sign of total freedom. In fact, is more a sign of Anomie (from the greek, meaning, without laws or values), a malady characterized by destruction, crime and dissolution of social order.

But, in parallel with Anomie, Venezuelans are also experiencing physical and spiritual restrictions as they had never seen before, unless we go back almost 200 years...

Our currency is now really worth about one third of what it was only a year ago...

Inflation is running at 35% per year ... this means that Venezuelans can only buy less than half goods and services with their money than they could a year ago ... those who are formally employed ... this is only 35% of the working population.

However, the situation is still worse...

Everyday there is less to buy ... eggs, chickens, pasta, bread, corn flour for the indispensable "arepas" are rapidly disappearing from the shelves, as the government has stopped the sale of foreign currency for 120 days now and ... as a result ... no imports can be made.

This is a situation unheard of, in a country which pretends to be "modern" and has already led to significant isolation for Venezuela, being taken out of the list of countries where international business can be conducted. Lack of money to import raw materials or plant and equipment has forced the closure of hundreds of industrial concerns.

Venezuela is living, inexplicably, in a war-type economy ... at a moment in which petroleum prices are very high. Where is the money going?

The principal victim of this tragedy is the lower-middle and the middle class ... or what is left of it.  This group is the only one in the country still responding to some measure of social discipline and responsibility. The Venezuelan poor have already abandoned, by necessity, most pretexts of playing by the rules while the rich mostly never did.

The Chavez government creates its own rules on national TV, on a Sunday-to-Sunday basis ... there are no plans or programs since they have been replaced by the impromptu ideas of the President.  "Let us build vertical chicken coops," he says... "Everybody who has a flat roof should use it it to raise chickens..."  As of that moment the vertical chicken coop becomes one of the cornerstones of revolutionary economy, together with the "conuco" and the government handout. But, mercifully, the concept is not applied. "You know Hugo ... he forgets about these things ... let us wait until next Sunday." And, sure enough, next Sunday is something new: A Bank for the Military ... the eighth employment plan (none of the others have yet started) ... a refinery for Lula ... an interminable parade of fantasies.

In parallel with this exhibition of stupidity, Chavez shrewdly makes some headway on his real project: the private sector is being strangled, the Catholic church discredited, labor unions wiped out, independent media harassed, landowners driven out, the middle class encouraged to emigrate...

Because, you see, we are not in the middle of a "normally incompetent" Presidential term. If this were the case, we would patiently wait ... as we have been advised to do by well meaning external observers.

We are in the middle of an attempt at a takeover by a totalitarian ideology, one which collides head on with democratic values which we have come to embrace.

We are fighting for our freedom ... and this is what gives the Venezuelan situation an urgent, tragic flavor...

Unfortunately we seem to be only a side show in the three ring circus of international politics.

Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983.  In 1998, he was presidential election campaign manager for Henrique Salas Romer and now lives in retirement on the Caribbean island of Margarita where he runs a leading Hotel-Resort.  You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email gustavo@vheadline.com

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