The Modernism Of Toilet Paper

By Adriaan van Ginkel

Only two rolls left. As most of you will agree with me, finding out that only two rolls of toilet paper are smiling at you on an early Tuesday morning is a sure sign that some shopping needs to be done. But what if you find out that there IS no toilet paper in any shop or supermarket? Believe me. In Venezuela, the only way to get four or eight of these precious rolls is to stand for half a day in an endless queue in front of some supermarket where they happen to sell those darn things. If you happen to have a large family, plan ahead and mark a “toilet roll day” in your weekly schedule. Because that’s the way things are going here, if you don’t have some 80-year-old granny who is willing to spend days and hours under the burning sun, sacrificing herself for the family’s toilet relief. There are elderly people who HAVE died these past weeks here in queues of a heart attack or heat stroke, I’m not kidding. So, on second thought, let’s not send Granny to the death queue, but some useless spotty teenage second cousin who has nothing to do but stalk the neighbor’s daughter. At least he will be doing something useful for the family.

So, what to do? What can you really do if you are stuck in a country that has no toilet paper freely available? The disappearance of the roll of toilet paper, true symbol of post-war modernism, has forced me to reprogram my thinking. DO we need toilet paper at all? Is the total absence of toilet paper, aside from bringing really awkward moments and panicky walk-abouts with sagging pants in that little room, a real disaster, if there are other alternatives available? My dad as a little boy “did it” with newspaper, which did the trick of course but stained his bum black with ink. Some way not to be in the news, but the news being on you.

Then there are true millenary paper-free methods like the French bidet, which would do the trick nicely if Venezuela hadn’t such tiny toilets in her apartments. The spout of water in Persian toilets (I lived in Iran a long time ago) is yet another traditional yet modernized way of cleaning your nether parts after the job (left), with a highly decorative handle bar attached to the wall to prevent any disaster of yourself falling to the side and getting stuck in that gaping hole to hell. It seems that in Iran, you have to have true Cirque Du Soleil acrobatic skills if you have to relieve yourself. How would our 80-year-old granny in Venezuela get that thing done? “Look family, no toilet paper!” could have been her last happy words before she fell forward and into that hole. There are advantages of having that unobtainable roll of toilet paper. So, back to the death queue she goes.

But seriously, folks. The sanitary problem in Venezuela (a country slowly crashing through the 21^st century floor and reaching that of the 19^th ) is such that moms are at a loss – we are again talking about the excrement problem – at how to control the babies’ uncontrollable urge to crap at any time in any place, with no disposable diapers on. As many grown-ups must have a problem of how not to walk around with smelly pants after a disastrous visit to the paperless toilet, toddlers are making their moms’ lives a true brown-stained misery. Now, you might laugh. But it’s the plain shitty truth, uncensored. There are NO diapers freely available in Venezuela, and this is a problem that has been going on for months. Diaper queues are monstrous at times. Now, Caracas is not really a city smelling of flowers, but imagine the situation in crampy homes full of children having no toilet paper and no disposable diapers. Imagine the smell in the tropical heat, if above all these disasters your tap water gets cut off without warning for hours on end because of some rationing plan drawn up by the city authorities. I had the thrilling pleasure of having to live for almost a week in my apartment without running water, at 30 degrees centigrade temperatures, but that was because the water pump in our condo had broken down and there were difficulties in getting spare parts to fix that contraption. So we had time to put the buckets of water in place, fill all bottles with drinking water and make sure our home stayed fresh and free of nasty smells. It is a day-filling job, I assure you. And to finish our good news, we have NO toddlers or smelly teenagers at home, only some very clean kitties who do know their way about with the litter box.

Returning to crapping babies. You might ask: why do Venezuelan moms not apply alternatives like the cotton diapers of the golden olden days? It is done in highly developed countries nowadays with an eye towards ecology, since disposable diapers are slowly but surely increasing the mass of our planet with fermented baby poop and plastic wrappings. Why torture yourself looking for disposable, highly expensive ones and fighting with other poop-stained moms over that single left-over pack in the shops? Now, that is a question I ask myself too. The suggestion has been made in public, and a howl of disapproval greeted it nationwide. Modern Venezuelan moms will NOT be caught washing crapped-up cotton diapers. End of story.

I have discovered three main reasons for this “no” to cotton diapers. First, cotton is very hard to come by, as it has to be imported and there is no currency available for that. Using synthetic fabrics would be true sadism to a baby’s skin. Second, Venezuelan moms haven’t got a choice: they cannot spend their entire day changing soiled cotton diapers on their babies, as many have explained to me, because they have to go to work. 80-year-old granny is standing in the toilet roll queues and having trouble not to grow roots, spotty teenage second cousin is no choice for changing pooped baby diapers all day long, and mom’s mom has to go to work too, as is the toddler’s dad. So who is left? No one. And third, there is some kind of psychological angle to the problem. Letting go of disposable diapers is maybe losing the last element linking a tortured mother in impoverished Venezuela to the 21^st century. Officially, we are living in a modern age, and for so many third-world countries, being able to at least enjoy some aspects of it (like disposable diapers wrapped in a colorful bag identical to those being sold in richer countries) is more than a commodity. It is an essential part of participating in that modern age, if only on a psychological level. You see people living in barrios in crudely-built huts, and you assume they live in misery, but you’d be surprised if you step into such a home. Newest flat-screen TV in the living room connected to a satellite dish, and every member of the house has an intelligent phone in their pocket. Even if the roof is leaking, but spending your last dime on symbols of modernism is absolute priority to the lower classes in this and other similar countries in the Third World. One of these modernist symbols is the disposable diaper. And women here will sacrifice their time, their health and their feet to make sure their little princes and princesses are clad with a modern crap-control device around their hips. It’s a mental thing as well as a practical one. 

I keep asking myself where those “poor people” get the money from. If I can’t even afford an intelligent phone or a flat-screen TV nowadays, with such absurd inflated prices, how can they? 

Some days ago, my wife and I were shopping in a supermarket or frigorifico just outside Caracas. Outside, we saw the tell-tale long queues standing outside the shop. They were selling coffee. We went in and saw a depleted shop, with empty shelves here and there. The meat freezer was totally empty. The people – really humble persons - coming in in groups were told to take no more than four packs of coffee of one kilogram each. We saw whole families, each member – mom, dad, granny, spotty second cousin, children – carrying 4 packs of ground coffee each, in some cases coming to 16 (!) packs or more of coffee purchased by one single family. I thought for a moment, tonight there will be some deaths by caffeine intoxication here and there; what are those people planning to do with so much coffee? My wife told me that the shop employees were just putting a quantity of canned tuna on the shelves. So we went there, and we saw a whole bunch of people grabbing ten, twelve cans of tuna in one go. I walked towards that shelf and shouted in Spanish something like “come on!” The people, some who had their four big packs of coffee clutched under one arm and maybe six or seven tuna cans under the other, looked at me, said nothing and just walked away. And we stared at a totally empty shelf on which just moments ago I had seen maybe twenty or thirty cans of tuna. If the supermarket hadn’t put those people in queues outside, maybe they would have emptied the shop completely.

My question once more: where do these people get the money from to buy so much stuff at once? Bachaqueros, my wife told me with a wink. Resellers. On the street, they sell the products they get in the shop, at twice or thrice the price, taking advantage that you cannot find them – like the tuna cans of the coffee or the meat packs – and with the money badly earned, they get in queue to yet again clean out another shop and sell everything on the street with sometimes 200% profits. These people are an universal by-product of any economic crisis in the world, where the misery of some means opportunity for others. 

And without wanting to stigmatize, maybe there lies the answer as to why so many “poor” people here can afford to buy luxurious goods like the latest intelligent phones and the like. Many make a real business out of standing in queues, cleaning out stores and selling everything on the streets at double the price, generating enough income (without paying taxes of course) to lead a comfortable life in the barrio. They are not the main cause of the economic crisis in Venezuela, but their activities surely worsen it.  

A crisis does heighten criminality as well as inventiveness. Here you can see how far people can go to protect their way of living in difficult times, even if it means to let others suffer for it. Diapers and toilet paper, here you go! Long live modernism, even if the country is sinking away.

But things might get a bit awry for the bachaqueros. Just two days after I saw the shopping frenzy at the supermarket I talked about, the government of Nicolás Maduro decided to introduce, starting yesterday, biometric controls at the supermarkets (it was world-wide news, in fact) in a desperate attempt to stop people from shop-hopping from one spot to the other. But apart from the

fact that we are now confronted with digital rationing by putting your thumb on a reader every time you buy a coke, to name an example, the measure will deal a blow to informal commerce in Venezuela and of course increase corruption and cronyism which are already the highest in Latin America, if we belief Transparency International. We are talking about at least 30% (and growing) of the national workforce who can be called self-employed, because new jobs are NOT created, despite all the hullaballoo statistics and propaganda published by the Chavist government. We are talking about millions of people depending on street commerce, no matter what statistics you look at. Putting all those people out of business will have a political cost, and I don’t think Maduro will be able to take that risk now. Parliamentary elections are due this year, the danger of rioting hasn’t receded at all because the queues in front of shops are really getting bigger and bigger, SIMADI has turned out to be a fraud, the black-market dollar is sky-high thanks to that, and really, Maduro and his team have done everything these two years except running the country. It seems that all they care for is staying in power, no matter the cost.

So, as things go in this country, many people in the coming months will not be able to buy more than let’s say four cans of tuna a week nationwide, to name a typical example, because their recorded thumbprints will stop them from doing so. But other people, with the right connections, will be getting all they want at the proverbial backdoor. With popular unrest lurking around the corner these days, rampant corruption will again be the escape valve for a government doing everything to stay in power. And in the end, nothing will be solved; acute shortages will stay indefinitely and street sellers will go on offering disappeared articles at double the price. Except that some government bloke in a red shirt now might know exactly how many tuna cans I bought last week. If that isn’t Big Brother talking, then I don’t know what else it might be.   

Whether with the biometrical controls shop shelves might stay a bit fuller the coming weeks, will depend on the government measures to increase domestic production or spend more on imports. If that doesn’t happen, the scene will look much alike that in front of that chain of supermarkets expropriated weeks ago. The shortages have increased as well as the rows of desperate housewives looking for their rolls of toilet paper, among other disappeared articles…

Meanwhile, I’m stuck with the problem of how to get toilet paper without having to lose a day standing in a queue. Those two rolls will be gone before the week has ended. Maybe it’s time for that water spout…

Till tomorrow! There is more news coming, so stay tuned! 

© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015

Time Out

I'm busy with a little time-out. See you all next Wednesday - or earlier, if something really interesting happens here.

Adriaan van Ginkel 2015

The Middle Finger

By Adriaan van Ginkel

Well, well, well. My move of last Sunday, partly intended to see how quickly the uniformed hordes toting Kalashnikovs would run up the stairs and crash through my apartment’s door to put yet another “CIA-paid troll” (as an American leftist activist lovingly called me last weekend on the social media) behind bars, has apparently had no effect yet. CIA-paid, yeah right. There are worse jokes than that. Maybe the Venezuelan authorities aren’t so fluent in English, or maybe my backward-running prose has their heads reeling. 

Anyhow, I feel relieved for now. After having said what I wanted to say last Sunday, and still being able to entertain you yet again with another of my letters, I promise you that from now on, you will read my Venezuelan adventures “in the raw”. I won’t insult any politician or minister or president, or any person unlucky enough to wake up the irony in me. But I plan to transform this news brief into a dialogue between you and me. I invite you to write to me, leave some comment on my blog, call me nice or troll or whatever. But I hope that my blog will provide you with an open window to Venezuelan life.

What is this week’s theme? The middle finger. Rude? Nay. It’s another way of saying exactly what is wrong with this country. Although Venezuelans, as I have described it in my Miss BBQ -brief some weeks ago, see themselves as buena gente, good folk - cheerful, boisterous, loud-mouthed, party going, joking and life-loving - it’s an entire different story when you try to discover some third dimension within their firecracker personalities. Generally speaking, there is very little depth in the typical Venezuelan, sorry to say. If you like people whose reactions are primary, i.e. they react the way they feel without thinking twice or counting to ten, then Venezuela could be a place for you. 

Of course there are many “untypical” rational exceptions, sensible careful persons (regardless of their background) who think thrice before pulling your mother into the argument. But most just don’t. And since I’m busy completing my tenth year here, I guess I have the right to hold an opinion about this country and the inhabitants. You are free in your own opinion of course, but this is my space. If you disagree with me and want to cross swords, start your own blog. En garde!

Now, what has the middle finger to do with all this? It’s what I WISH the Venezuelan would show defiantly at the ink-black clouds over their country’s head, and at all the problems ruining their lives. Because although the flamboyant Venezuelans say they don’t care about the disaster unfolding in their lush tropical country, they DO care and worry. Men worry and drink too much, women are over concerned with appearances, and the enormous national consumption of erection-enhancing drugs points to an unhealthy stress living among Venezuelan males, afraid of losing “it” and an unhappy wife as well to another guy. 

Many of my neighbors get up at 3 AM, jump into their cars at 4 AM with their sleeping children in the back – dressed up in their school uniforms – and try to arrive on time to drop their exhausted offspring at school before 7 AM and get themselves behind their bad-paying desks before 8 AM, before infernal traffic makes that impossible. People who don’t own cars (and that number is growing) depend on a mediocre to almost-absent public transport that converts trips into daily odysseys. Offices close down at 4 PM, but my neighbors start arriving home between 7 and 8 PM – all because of the traffic jams clogging all Caracas into a daily infarct – giving them only one or two hours of dining and preparing themselves for bed before another day starts with alarm clocks ringing away at 3 AM. Weekends are spent sleeping or watching movies. Not a way of unloading stress and frustration, on the contrary. And to add to the stress, getting home after dark nowadays means exposing yourself and your loved ones to rampant criminality. It happened to some of my neighbors, fortunately without loss of lives.

Do you really think living in the tropics is all leisure in eternal summers and drinking cocktails on the beach? Think again.

Excessive promiscuity is yet another symptom of unloaded stress and frustration. Don’t let yourself be fooled by macho arguments. I’ve clearly noticed that chasing women here is not so much a leisurely machista pastime as well as a desperate attempt to shove aside the frustrations of daily life. Some do liquor, others do food, and still others other do women. I haven’t noticed that Venezuelan women are as promiscuous as men. My theory is that is has to do with upbringing and their way of controlling men through their beauty, the classical winding around one’s finger. Something that very few men can ever achieve here, unless you are called Brad Pitt.

Showing the middle finger would surely unload a lot of stress here. If Venezuelans knew how to unload their stress and aggression without resorting to unhealthy methods like the ones I described earlier, things would look a lot better here. The motto “Life Is Beautiful” is not applied here, sadly. When I see how people unload their tons of built-up frustrations on their children, pets, or animals on the streets by running them over intentionally, I ask myself: what is wrong with these people? Why don’t they find a way of just caring for the really important things in their lives and let all other just go? Why accept the ridiculous fact of your children having to be at school before 7 AM, even when they are at kindergarten age? Why accept losing every day of your life in senseless traffic jams just like that? Why consent with working for really miserable wages and letting yourself be abused by managers whose ideas of motivating employees go back to the Neolithic? Why adapt yourself to the spiral of deadly criminality that has transformed Venezuela into a little hell? Why not choose for life? Do they care so little for it? 

Venezuelans think that the proper way to deal with the crushing weight of stress is to crack jokes and play the happy carefree clown all the time. From what I’ve witnessed, they are dead wrong. The more they are trying to act as if nothing is happening, the worst the situation gets. I’m no psychologist, but I see some very toxic dynamics in this way of thinking. 

And of course, how could we not speak about what these dynamics do to political life? 80% of the population thinks the country is going in the wrong direction and most point at the incumbent president – the one with the moustache – as the main culprit for expensive beer, unpayable meat and unobtainable milk, soap, deodorant and maize meal. But I personally think it’s so easy to blame the guy or girl at the front for everything. I’m no friend of president Maduro, but I have to be fair at this point. 

Let’s not forget that Chávez and Maduro came to the presidency in a democratic way. Election after election confirmed the enthusiasm of the majority of Venezuelans for the revolution that would bring them wagonloads of cheap beer, more meat than you can put on all barbeques, and all the milk you could gulp down in your lifetime. When I first came to Venezuela, I was surprised at the enormous quantity of obese people waddling about. I like a good steak, but I was unpleasantly surprised at the sight of true human carnivores pushing incredible quantities of meat into their faces. There is no other way of describing it from my point of view. Venezuela still holds the second place in the world in consuming pasta right after Italy, did you know that? And of course, back in those golden olden days, life was really payable for most people here. Look at it now.

Poverty is reclaiming lost ground all over the country. And people are very unhappy and dissatisfied, not as much with the crackdown on democratic rights that is taking place right now, but with what they see as “broken promises”. The Chavist government promised a lot of things but doesn’t deliver now. And empty stomachs and receding waist lines make people here very unhappy. Tragically, it’s essentially only that what makes Venezuelans unhappy. The mental connection between scarcity, bad government and better administration is not made. Because most people, as I described it, are already drowning in everyday frustrations and dealing with them in the wrong way. In my country, there is a saying for it: looking at so many trees, they don’t see the forest anymore. 

Yesterday, in San Cristóbal, a 14-year-old scholar was shot pointblank in the head by a trigger-happy policeman during a demonstration. The boy was unarmed, and while breaking free from a scuffle with the police and running away – he was turning his back on the policeman with the shotgun – the policeman aimed and shot the boy in the head. Now, if that had happened in the US for example, the next thing would have been bloody riots. But except from some apologies by the president on TV and the announcement that “steps” would be taken against that killer in police uniform, the country isn’t stirred at all. Everyone is horrified for a while, but then shakes off the thought and go about bearing their unbearable lives.  

And this indifferent way of reacting to so much horror is deeply disturbing. Why don’t people react in a humane way to this inhumanity, this brutality? They should go out on the streets, poor and rich, Chavist, non-aligned and opposition, and demand justice for that single heinous crime representing all other crimes. And show their middle fingers to everything that is turning their daily lives into a horror movie, and shout: enough is enough. 

The day this happens will be a great day, because then the Venezuelan people will have understood that, instead of accepting all horrors and bad things as inevitable, they can change the course of history together, in a constructive way. Shouting insults at some guy at the front doesn’t turn around the boat, nor do coups or senseless violence. Toxicity will only generate more toxicity. 

I guess I’m an optimist, because I know that the Venezuelan has that inner force that will one day push them to true greatness and unity. Till then, we’ll have to wait till Venezuela awakes from its Snow-white slumber.  

Have a great week and till next Wednesday!

© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015                    

EXTRA EDITION - The Thin Red Line

By Adriaan van Ginkel

It is possible that after publishing, this might be my last news brief for now. I hope not; my plan is to keep on writing and publishing my briefs about Venezuela, the country in which I am living and working, and cover all kind of topics. I was planning to write about something else, like the sad situation in the animal shelters – one of the worst on this continent – and as an active animal protectionist, this subject stays very close to my heart. But what happened these last days here on the political scene has pushed me to devote some lines on what is happening at this very moment in Venezuela concerning freedom of speech and conscience. 

I think it would be like writing about the local cuisine while a natural disaster has struck the region. Totally ridiculous and unethical. Self-censure has been one of the biggest evils of our modern times. So I’ll give it a shot, telling you one or two things about what is really threatening my blog, and maybe risking a knock on the door by uniformed guys afterwards. The internet here is almost prehistoric and has hampered my publishing more than once, but what is now looming over freedom of speech and conscience is far worse than wobbly technology.

First a word or two about the main picture. It’s noticeable that authoritarianism has become more and more common in our world, don’t you think so? Consider Putin’s Russia, for example. But supposedly democratic countries like the US are increasingly linked to cloak-and-dagger activities like massive email monitoring and peeping into what people are saying in the social media. Within the European Union, it has become risky to say or publish anything that might be considered an attack on Islam or Muslims - which is explained officially as acting against racism and discrimination, but in fact is an authoritarian move against freedom of speech and conscience. In an earlier news brief featuring the banned Venezuelan cartoonist Rayma, I already touched the subject. Venezuela is no exception to the growing power of governments trying to control our minds these days. Very few media worldwide can be trusted on their independence. Political lobbies are not the only forces bending news behind the scenes to someone’s benefit. State meddling has become an even darker force. But the extremes, to which the Venezuelan government has ventured the last years, are notable. And increasingly troubling. 

Writing about Venezuela from within has become a tricky business these last years. I have to be very careful in my wording to not tread on some sore revolutionary toes. My knowledge about how people in the Eastern Europe of before 1989 managed to read and tell the truth between the lines has helped me a lot till now. It’s like walking on a thin red line. But how thin is that line really? Or is it more like walking on sheet-thin ice?

The day the Maduro government arrested the metropolitan major of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, at his office and a huge force of secret police armed to the teeth pushed the 59-year-old opposition politician around like some criminal in front of CCTV camera’s, I knew that things are getting serious in Venezuela. Ledezma has been accused of conspiring to stage a coup and overthrow Nicolás Maduro. The proof? His signature under an opposition alliance declaration calling for a transition government following that of the incumbent, but within the frame of the constitution. This was taken by Maduro as an incitement to overthrow his government. Ledezma is now locked up and the (mock) trial will almost surely condemn him to a lengthy stay in prison. And all for having voiced his disagreement with Chávez and Maduro over the years, and for his signature under that declaration. 

In a normal democracy it’s OK to voice your dissent against the sitting government, right? As long as it’s done in a democratic and respectful way. But Maduro has now clearly crossed the line between apparent democracy, something the macchiavelic juggler Hugo Chávez left behind, and true authoritarian rule. Maduro sees every criticism against his person, no matter how carefully put, as a direct attack on Venezuela, and thus high treason if it concerns domestic critics. To me, Maduro’s style of ruling, together with a personality cult that is surpassing that of Chávez in a quick tempo (as I have personally witnessed), has turned a corner right into Autocrat Street that leads to true dictatorship. He is not there yet. His authority is as yet challenged within the government party PSUV, and there has been a growing protest within and outside the country against the arrest of Ledezma. His government record since 2013 has been so disastrous that about a week ago, Maduro asked his audience, in a jokingly way, NOT to take the first two years of his presidency into account. The new state currency exchange machine SIMADI that I commented on lately, by the way, is still grounded because of lack of currency, need I say more? More on SIMADI further below. 

Apart from the fact that the statement above, coming from a head of state, is downright pathetic, it also shows that Maduro is fully aware that things are not going well for him. Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez has stated in her blog some days ago that it has become apparent that Maduro is incapable of governing. Her words, not mine.

The sudden arrest of Ledezma – and others may follow the coming days – is, to my personal opinion, a show of force coming from a unpopular president who tries desperately to show to everyone that he is in control and that he is the boss. It might carry him further for some months, and between constant reports (true or not) of conspirations against him and uncovering of assumed assassination plots (again, true or not) by unhappy military or opposition members “paid by Miami”, Maduro might survive the economic tsunami that will engulf us all the coming months. 

SIMADI has turned out to be not a way for people like me or you to buy dollars or euro’s in exchange of bolivars, since the system stipulates that you have to buy at least 300 US dollars in ONE single day to participate (IF the dollars are available), leaving the average person out of the game. 300 dollars at the government’s exchange rate equals two average monthly wages, and who can pay that money and buy dollars legally? Only the rich, the powerful and the famous. Some social justice! It is apparent that with yet another failed attempt to control the economy, confidence in Maduro’s government to stabilize the economy, and hence the country, is quickly vanishing. And the government’s new method of smashing any political dissent to bits, together with arbitrary expropriations and verbal threats to private business, does not restore at all that vanishing confidence. There are many threats to Maduro’s government, even from within the own ranks, and I am not stating that all opposition members are cute little daisies either. There are some hardliners I really wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, mind you.

What is becoming more and more apparent to me, is that Nicolás Maduro has very little clue as to what he is doing. His rambling and incoherent speeches don’t add anything positive to the record, and his disastrous approach of the economy, without apparent course or purpose except the consolidation of his own power, really does frighten me as a resident of this country. You can have bad presidents (whom you can kick out of their seats at the next elections) or good dictators who really do good things in between bad, but who very rarely know when it’s time to leave power. But a bad, unfit dictator is maybe one of the worst things that can happen to any country. Is Maduro such a leader? I truly hope not!

I hope and pray (you become very religious in a country like Venezuela) that president Maduro will have the courage to admit that he needs better advisers, a new policy, or else just quits with honor and calls for new elections. And I also hope that I won’t end in some dark SEBIN dungeon just for stating that in my blog. I live and work in this country, and I and my family see with growing desperation how the money earned is worth less and less, how it’s impossible to leave the country without selling a proverbial kidney, how hope fades in your mind and your heart of ever living a normal life and not worrying that the loaf of bread that you got at the bakery, might cost you double next week, or maybe not be available at all. Living under such a pressure, and watching a president thinking only of his own power and his glory while the country is going down – man, it gives you nightmares. 

That is how walking the red line goes in countries like Venezuela. One step too much to the side, and you might be out. Ledezma slipped and fell, who is next?

Have a great week and hopefully till this coming Wednesday!

© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015