Red Meat Alert

By Adriaan van Ginkel

In other times, Venezuela was a good place to get yourself a good steak or a prime rib from a sizzling BBQ. Not anymore.  In fact, Venezuela, a country once filled with lots and lots of cows, pigs and cackling fowl, is nearing a general “No Meat” alert this coming Friday.

This morning we got alerted by the news on TV, and by an alarmed phone call from family in Caracas, that butcheries were closing down all over the capital one after the other. It had nothing to do with early Easter break, they were really closing down. The reason, in brief, is that there is no meat. Why? Because the meat offered by wholesalers and distributers to the butcheries is “too expensive”. Why is it too expensive? Because the government has bolted the meat prizes and put heavy fines on all those butchers who dare sell above those prizes. For example, the beef prize is put officially at 220 bolivars per kg. , but wholesalers sell the meat to the butchers at between 215 and 240 bolivars. That leaves a negative profit for the butcheries, so they simply refuse to sell meat, because if they sell it at the prize it should be (e.g. 240 plus 20% profit = 288 bolivars per kilogram), they will get fined and their merchandise will even get confiscated by the state authorities. If they sell it at the prescribed prize, they will go broke in no time. So, they prefer to close down till the government raises the legal prizes. You might call it a general butcher strike. No steak for a long time for many people. That will in turn lead to raised prizes for fish, sausages and veggies, whispers my conditioned predator brain to me. Let’s see, is there enough room in the freezer? How much money do we have? Get in the car, go, go, let’s buy stuff before it gets expensive or disappears!

Then you might say: get those wholesalers, they are cheating! Well, that is more or less what Maduro’s government wants you to think. Always blame the guy on the other side of the street. But the wholesalers have a different story to tell. They maintain that they get the beef, pork and chicken at an elevated prize from the breeders. So, you might scream in a revolutionary fervor, get those greedy land-owning, feudal ranchers! But they also have a story of their own to tell. The problem, as their organization FEDENAGA puts it, is that the costs of feeding and keeping the livestock healthy have risen to astronomical heights. The enriched food and the mandatory inoculations have all to be imported (as national produce is nowhere to be found), and for years the vast majority of independent cattle breeders – those who haven’t been expropriated till now - have unsuccessfully implored the Chavist government to provide them with cheap dollars to import, as the country’s own production of maize and other grains has been tumbling down a precipice for years.

So, since the government won’t give them the cheap dollars, as they simply deny there is a problem, the breeders import the cattle food and all other necessary things, like vaccinations and machinery, with own dollars changed illegally, which explains the often absurd differences between products of a same line on the market. And that explains why national products turn out to be so expensive. Since most basic goods have to be imported nowadays, turning them into ready-for-sale products takes a heavy toll on either your own pockets, if the government won’t give you dollars at a cheap price, or that of the state. It’s a classical lose-lose situation in which one side blames the other for the ship going down. But between high production costs, a labor law that only benefits the (lazy) employee, a state which does everything to block free national enterprise and a bolivar gone totally crazy, the biggest losers are us, the consumers on that sinking ship. The country, in short.

The government denies that domestic cattle food production has all but disappeared and blames the shortages on smuggling to Colombia, among other things - in other words, Venezuela’s state enterprises and ranches produce enough maize to feed farm animals great and small, but it never gets to the poor things. So, they just shove all complaints from the food producers aside and simply refuse to talk to either cattle raisers or butchers. The story of “we produce enough thanks to the Bolivarian Revolution” is however countered by data from the same government which tell a story of a country massively importing maize, meat and milk products from abroad. And remember, the only party that allows you to import, whether it’s cotton wads or condoms or milk or machines, is the Venezuelan state. And the only place where you can get legal dollars to import is the Venezuelan state. So, who is right? The facts tend to give the thumbs-up to FEDENAGA, who then states that, with the greatest regret, they have to offer their life stock at elevated prizes to the market to compensate for the expenses made to import the food with black dollars, and at least not risk going broke. And the circle closes. Expensive cattle turns into expensive meat and results in a clash with government regulations. Maduro’s government has, as of now, yet to react to this meat strike. 

The meat crisis of today has also had a dramatic effect on the actual situation on the farms. Since breeders won't sell their livestock at the price they have to (which as I explained, is lower than what it should be), wholesalers are stopping buying the animals, which has led to horrific situations on the hen and pig farms, where it is reported that animals are now killing and eating each other due to overcrowding. Pull your own conclusions out of this. 

Till very recently, the state’s answer to the agricultural problem has been to expropriate ranchers who wouldn’t believe the story of the imperialistic bear that ate the people’s honey. This has led to the proliferation of abandoned “socialist communal” ranches and a dramatic drop down the whole agricultural production line. Was Venezuela once a country that produced so much milk they had to dump the surplus into the Maracaibo Lake, now the milk you find, whether liquid or in powdered form, comes from abroad. Countless ranchers from Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador and Nicaragua now bless Venezuela and burn candles in front of the Virgin for the neat profits they make on exporting their milk, cheese, meat and even coffee to a country whose countryside resembles more and more the land it was before the Spaniards set foot on the continent. If the government has not filled these barren empty lands with cities of social

housing, like it happened with the sugar cane plantations in the state of Aragua, something I have repeatedly seen with my own eyes. In the picture on your left, this is what is left of the vast sugar cane fields of Aragua. Under the plastic, only barren earth gathers dust instead of bell peppers. In a short time from now, the make belief greenhouses will make way for social housing. While remembering that once, Venezuela exported the same products it now imports. So, whatever side is right, there is something very rotten in the kingdom of Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro… something the latter won’t deny.

And as for myself, there is a silver lining to those dark clouds. Since the prize of fish, long unobtainable because it was too expensive, is now lagging behind that of meat, we are eating yummy fresh tuna again at home, and even our pets join us in that omega-3 delight. This has resulted in me losing necessary weight and fitting again in those nice suits I couldn’t wear for so long. Till fish goes up, up and away, we will enjoy the brief lull in the Bolivarian Food Wars. 

Thanks for your reading. Please leave a comment behind. Have a great week and till next Wednesday!

© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015

In Memoriam - Special Edition

Today's entry has nothing to do with Venezuela really. But maybe in a certain sense, it does. I am a faithful "born-again" Catholic who was raised as such, then found the whole thing ridiculous as a young man, till somehow I wound up again in mass, as a student in Leyden, in a beautiful Franciscan church with a magnificent Latin mass and an excellent Gregorian choir, and listened in amazement at the fantastic sermons and the dutiful priests whom you could contact day and night. For those whom it doesn't say much, let me say that for someone who feels at home in the Roman Catholic Church, what I describe is tops. 

Spiritual growing is a process done in a strictly individual way. Many don't need a faith, others do. Personally, I think all roads are valid and have the same unique worth, as long as they all lead to spiritual growth. For me, Catholicism is my spiritual castle from which I have been able to manage the world around me, and refresh my energies. I studied St. Augustine's and St. Thomas of Aquinas' teachings and couldn't do anything but agree with them. During my studies, I had lots of friends from all denominations. Protestants, Muslims, Mormons, Jehova's Witnesses, Bahai's, atheists, hedonists, non-conformists (the people who say no to everything), we all got along well, learned from each other and respected each others' idea's. As for me, I rediscovered Catholicism and for more than a quarter of a century I rarely missed a mass on Sunday or Saturday evening. 

When I moved to Rotterdam about twenty years ago, I came across a run-down church in the southern part of the city, went in, and was amazed. I saw young people waiting in a queue to confess. Something you only saw in old movies. The church was filled to the back during High Mass. What was going on in that parish? I then came eye to eye with the parish priest, Cor Stam. A short, stout man in his early sixties with curly, greyish, well-kept hair and piercing yet kind blue eyes looking through small spectacles, walking around in his soutane (the long black robe buttoned top to bottom worn by priests in the old days) topped with the eternal dog collar. He seemed soft-spoken but had won a reputation within the Dutch Catholic community as a bulldog who wouldn't be bent to new or liberal ideas. I won his confidence, became involved in the parish's daily activities, taught cathecism to boys (not girls!), and became one of the acolytes assisting him every Sunday during High Mass.  From him I learned the true Roman mass ritual. It looked to others like some silly ballet, but Stam took it very seriously, and demanded that from us too. Every rule and movement was to be made in full respect because what we all did - celebrate Mass - is a truly holy thing with a capital H. Do it well and with dignity, he said, because you are serving God. He believed from the bottom of his heart, a former law man and notary who became a priest in his forties, in what he was doing, every single moment of his life as a priest. His inmaculate, unblemished example of living was even copied by many single members of the parish. To many others, like me, he was the ideal priest. He was not a fanatic, but his faith was unshakeable. He could be a true pain to those who didn't reach his standard of perfection. Like the poor church choir, with whom Stam was always quarreling. I remember one particular mass  when during the Sanctus - Stam was sitting on his chair, eyes closed, behind the high altar - one of the singers slightly missed a tone. Within a second, Stam opened his eyes wide, and during the rest of the singing it seems like he was shooting arrows with his piercing blue eyes at the hapless singers. Poor choir. Stam gave them hell after the mass. He could tolerate many imperfections, except when it came to the rituals and the Holy Mass. In that, he was unrelenting.  

Needless to say, Stam suffered serious blows from people who hated the Catholic church (for whatever reason), and even from within the episcopate, he was attacked continuously by liberal-minded persons who wanted this priest to be put away and replaced by a kumbaya-singing clergyman with a guitar. The enormous success of the St. Michael and Clement parish, which so contrasted with the emptyness of other more liberal-minded church buildings, stung in the eyes of the liberal Catholics, because they knew that the packed church every single Sunday was thanks to one factor: the man at the helm, the unwavering, Don Camillo-like priest who fought for every single member of his parish, who answered to every smear, every low attack on his ministry, and whose acting as a priest was an example to us all. I learned from him that whatever you believe or do,  do it with your heart and your mind, from the bottom of your soul. You will always win, and people will come to you, because in a world with so much artificiality, a genuine thing is like a diamond. Brilliant and not to be destroyed by anything.

After my divorce, I lost contact with Father Stam. It seems the right thing for me, as I didn't want to embarrass him, doing what a married Catholic should never do. He never told me anything, but the only letter I received from him after my separation, had a bitter, dissappointed sound to it. I felt, and still feel bad that I let him down. When I came to Venezuela, officially a Catholic country but with little true observance to the teachings of the Church, I felt lost. I stopped going to church here, as it wasn't the same as I had lived before, and kept my faith to my own home from then on.

On December 5 last year, I got notice that father Stam had passed away, 79 years old. Strangely, I miss my teacher more than ever now. I don't know if you have ever met a teacher, or a mentor, who put an indeleble stamp on you, making you the person you are in a positive sense. I did. And I am glad that I was able to be with Father Stam, help him, assist him and learn from him and his example. He was a strong-willed, stubborn man at times. But he was filled of love for mankind, for his people, for his church. Many who knew him, declared in blogs and the like that he was a true holy priest. I think so too. And I an grateful to have met and known a man like Cor Stam. With a thousand priests like him, the Catholic Church would be shining new. 

Today I asked myself: would Father Stam have agreed with Pope Francis? He would never ever have said anything negative to anyone about the Holy Father. But knowing Stam, I am sure he wouldn't have agreed with the style of this pope or with the social, almost political character of his pontificate. Christianity is a social religion who has in her banner the compassion for the weak, the sick and the poor. Why put an extra emphasis on that? There are many priests who don't do enough for those who stand at the margin of life. But there are even more who sacrifice themselves for them. Father Stam was one of those brave, humble little persons who against all odds, managed to influence the lives of all of us and give them a bright shine of the true love of Christ. Even to Muslims, he was patient and compassionate. And I noticed that many respected him because of the genuity of his faith. 

The persons who stand up for what they believe in, whatever it may be, are the most attacked and the most ridiculed. But they always win in the end. Father Stam gave me that example I will follow for the rest of my earthly existence. Rest in peace, Father Stam.

"C" Adriaan van Ginkel 2015

Gathering Storm

By Adriaan van Ginkel

Yesterday I had to travel to Caracas. There is one main freeway entrance, the Valle-Coche, accessed from the so-called Tazón or “cup” which swoops you down in a vertiginous ride known as one of the steepest and most dangerous freeways in the world. If the freeway is not clogged with hundreds of lorries and motorists who have no clue what they are doing (which it usually is) it shouldn’t take you too much to reach the center of Caracas. If not, make sure you have a bottle of mineral water handy, a working cell phone and airco, and lots of patience. 

There are studies – non-official ones, as the Chavist government lives in an eternal denial of anything negative to its image – that indicate that the actual infrastructure of the Venezuelan capital is apt for only one-third of the existing motor park. In other words, there are three times too many cars and lorries for the existing roads. Apparently the government has quietly acknowledged, after so many lost years and traffic disasters, that the seventies-era infrastructure of Caracas needs a serious overhaul. Big revolutionary works are under way now at several points on the main freeway, the Francisco Fajardo Ave., which goes through the city from east to west and cuts it in two. Broadening of the freeway plus new fly-overs and by-passes have in fact made it easier for the motorist to reach his destination in a city that still hasn’t lost anything of its chaotic charm. Kudos for the government of president Maduro, then!

But yesterday something bad had happened on that section entering Caracas, smack right in front of the main army HQ at Fuerte Tiuna. The whole access was shut off by police. A car was attacked and repeatedly riddled with bullets by motorized criminals, causing the death of one person inside, a 31-year-old woman who was seven months pregnant, and wounding her husband and her father-in-law. Apparently the car didn’t heed the warnings to stop for a funeral cortege that was anarchically blocking the whole freeway, and continued on its doomed course. The motorized hoodlums took this “sign of disrespect” seriously and dealt with it using the hapless car for target practice. The whole incident caused me and scores of others to take the southern alternate entrance through Baruta, a country road with only two canals and lots of steep and curvy parts. And from there enter Caracas from the opposite direction. I was hours and hours late for my appointment. And it was so hot!

If you happen to be surprised at my story, let me tell you that this is not unusual at all. Again, non-official numbers indicate that the weekly death toll through violence in Caracas alone, which normally hovers around 30, has touched the 70 mark these last weeks. Official numbers are never released because according to a spokeswoman of the justice ministry years ago, “they don’t exist”. So we have to rely on the reporting work of independent journalists who roam around the municipal morgues every Monday and make a body count. The reported numbers are no fantasy at all, since I had to look at many lifeless bodies on the streets and the roads, shot for any reason imaginable, and what to think of a verified report some days ago of a pair of criminals who stole a motorbike from some hapless guy and then shot that guy in the back because the bike wouldn’t start? Venezuela is rife with senseless, disproportionate violence, in which anyone who makes someone else angry – a look, a word or a gesture is enough - can start fearing for his or her life. Or just have the bad luck to be at the wrong place in the wrong time. This is one of the main factors for the growing apathy among Venezuelans, especially the poor ones, who deliver the major number of corpses to this unholy feast of daily massacre. 

Despite the Mad Max movie  mood in the country, Venezuela can claim to be one of the few Latin America countries that haven’t shot a bullet in anger for a long time. More than a century of peaceful coexistence among Latin and Caribbean neighbors has prompted the Chavist government to repeatedly assert that Venezuela is a country of peace, and constitutes a threat to no one. Looking at the current state of the armed forces, and watching fat-bellied officers and scrawny recruits on guard who do little else but texting, one is inclined to confirm that. Last weekend, “anti-imperialistic” military maneuvers were held on orders of Maduro. The toll of that weekend was one tank blown up by accident, another one drowned in a river, plus one dead and three wounded. The howling laughter of antichavists could be heard everywhere, of course. And although I am no fan of laughing at such disasters, the Dad’s Army image of the Venezuelan army really makes you ask: how can a country like this represent a threat to anyone else? The mediocre Russian tanks and ordinance, which I suspect are left-overs of the Soviet Afghanistan campaign, are a bigger threat to the own soldiers than to anyone else. As it was duly proven last weekend. 

Remember what I wrote in my last blog about U.S. president Obama stating that Venezuela IS a threat? Well, apart from the furious gringo-go-home campaign fired up by the Maduro regime, anti-imperialistic maneuvers that I think shouldn’t ever have taken place (read above why) and shows of solidarity from client countries in the Caribbean and Latin America, plus a notable middle-finger from Raúl Castro directed at the Evil Empire Up North, strange friendly sounds emerged from Caracas. Summed up: Let’s be friends, Obama. Insults and accusations are packed together with olive branches of peace and sent in a very strange-sounding message to Washington D.C.. Remembering what really happened some weeks ago will probably give an explanation for this strange, almost bi-polar attitude of Maduro.  The whole argument between Venezuela and the U.S., which was simmering for years, exploded when the U.S. government decided to block the visa and freeze the bank accounts of a number of Venezuelan generals and other functionaries. And that hurt! This measure was taken by Maduro c.s. as an aggression directed not at shady generals with unaccounted dollars on a U.S. bank, but against the whole nation. And Obama’s remark about the national threat was a welcome trigger for an all-out anti-U.S. campaign that still goes on.

What to make of Maduro’s strange forward, backward barn dance?  First of all, Maduro is doing everything to stay in power. Never mind the fact that the country is rapidly sinking into an economic and social swamp. His approval rates are abysmal – no more than one in five Venezuelans still approve of him, and numbers are still going down. Then, he needs the army to keep the restless population in check, and for that he needs happy generals. These generals are not happy now because their main source of income, the dollars from abroad, has dried up. The pressure from the army HQ and barracks on the mustached president is growing to solve this mess with Obama or else, bad things may happen to his regime. The dispute with Guyana over oil drilling in disputed territory is another sign that Maduro is adopting stances to keep the nationalistic factions within the army happy. Under Chávez, Venezuela had de facto renounced its century-old claim on the Essequibo, which it had lost four centuries ago at the hand of roving Dutch seafarers and constitutes approx. 70% of that impoverished country. Interesting fact: the Essequibo and its bordering sea are full of oil and natural gas. The screaming of dismembering Guyana by grabbing that territory has come mainly from the radical Venezuelan opposition, while Chávez just wanted a happy neighbor in the east and ignored that claim. This Falklands-like dispute has now taken a new turn as the Guyanese government has apparently decided to stop living in poverty and finally exploit the oil in that territory. The expected howling from the opposition at this “infringement of sovereignty” has unexpectedly been joined by Maduro who half-heartedly sort of warned Guyana to stop the drilling – or else?

Apart from going against Chávez’ policy to leave Guyana alone – a remarkable step - Maduro’s change of heart points in a very troubling direction. If the Bolivarian government is joining the radical opposition’s stance on the Essequibo (I personally find the claim as absurd as that of the Falklands), then things are looking very bad for Maduro. It seems like he needs friends and allies to ward off the gathering storm clouds above his head. The queues in front of supermarkets and stores are multiplying and growing. Scarcity is everywhere, and the normally noisy Venezuelans have grown silent. Too silent, really. It’s like the calm before the storm.

And I don’t think that giving children weapons to defend the Revolution, as it has been suggested by a Chavist member of parliament last week (see picture at the top), will make any difference to the outcome. I foresee big trouble for Maduro and his team. If his barn dance to lift the sanctions – in other words, unfreeze the generals’ assets in the U.S. – doesn’t have the desired effects, then it might be a matter of time for the population, tired of so much hardship and violence on the streets, to raise its voice. And then, what will the army, the only factor that might keep Maduro in power, do?

Thanks for your reading. Please leave a comment behind. Have a great week and till next Wednesday or earlier if there is news!  

© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015

Evil Empires

By Adriaan van Ginkel

I guess that since the swastika flag was struck from German embassies world-wide in 1945, not a single government has been so demonized over the last 70 years as the one sitting in the building on your right. Not even that of the Soviet Union in its day. After Stalin got his stroke and died some days later in 1953, the Kremlin got at lengths to rid itself of the fetid blood smell of millions surrounding it since the mustached ogre from Tbilisi held his reign of terror. Soviet politics got smarter over time, and ever since the United States got historically unlucky in being branded internationally as a baby killer and a war criminal during the Vietnam War in the sixties, that image of the U.S. stuck to the rest of the world for the times to come. True, the United States were a guarantee of peace and democratic freedom to the Western nations not under the Soviet totalitarian boot, but the baby-boom generation, to which I belong, didn’t feel the gratitude of their parents when U.S. soldiers came over to free Europe from Nazi dictatorship. 

That negative image of the U.S. has never been fully erased, even after the enormous efforts the White House put into pointing out that the True Evil Empire resided in Moscow and not in Washington D.C.  Anti-imperialism and human rights were not synonymous with America, the self-proclaimed “arsenal of democracy”. After the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, global attention turned fully to the left-over superpower.  And that did no good to the international image of the U.S., really. The Soviet crimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Chechnya or Afghanistan, the downing of the KAL 007 flight in 1983, or all of Moscow’s proven involvement in international terrorism and unlimited weapon trade with whoever paid, never weighed up to what the U.S. did in the two Desert Storms, Afghanistan and Iraq. Never mind Saddam Hussein, U.S. cruise missiles were killing innocent civilians and that was what counted in public opinion. And of course, Vietnam became a part of the world’s historical conscience together with the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One might say that after 70 years, the U.S. has turned out to be a PR disaster.

Even now, a revolutionary leadership in the Oval Office – a non-white president with clearly antimilitarist, socialist and humanist tendencies, and a drive to “do things differently” – hasn’t deleted the baby-bombing blot from the U.S.’ image. Quite the contrary. Never mind the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. President Obama has failed the world opinion test with his foreign policy. Fidel Castro already predicted in 2009 that Obama would turn out to be “worse” than George W. Bush, and denied that the U.S. would ever change course. Quarrels with Israel over the relationship with Iran and the fumbling over the bloody Syrian civil war – an offshoot of the 2011 U.S. intervention into Syrian internal affairs - have without doubt damaged the reputation of Obama, who doesn’t seem to guarantee global stability as a world leader. ISIS’ reign of terror, as yet unchallenged by any serious power, is a clear proof of that. Relationships with Putin’s Russia are windy cold because of the ill-managed Ukraine/MH-17 crisis and the verbal conflict with North Korea which despite the latter’s mentally deranged leadership has always remained a protégé of Moscow. And the relationships of Obama with the EU and Asian blocks are best represented with a question mark.  

Obama has lately tried to polish up his questioned world leadership with opening up to communist Cuba, clearing the way to end the trade embargo of the impoverished island and thus close a symbolic chapter of the Cold War. But bumps have appeared lately on the road which could endanger the thawing of relations between Cuba and the U.S. The biggest bump is called Venezuela, you guessed it. 

As one door opens, the other one closes, so to speak. Cuba seems to be ready, to many, to change from a Stalinist society to a more open, democratic one (something which to my opinion remains to be seen). But as Gringo-Go-Home posters are replaced all over Cuba with pro-US shows of sympathy, Venezuela, Cuba’s junior partner, has turned extremely sour. While Cuba seems economically on the way out of orthodox socialism, Venezuela is tumbling head-first into Che Guevara world. The country is going in exactly the opposite direction, baffling even many from the left world-wide. This is to my opinion the main reason why Venezuela, the “new Cuba”, is currently in the middle of general collapse – an outdated, overruled and totally non-functioning economic structure from a dark past that has Venezuelans to their knees nowadays. 

But not only has the Chavist regime explained the collapse of Venezuelans’ standard of living with Marxist arguments that could be summed up under a euphemistic “socialist remodeling of bourgeois society”.  It points at the U.S. as the main culprit of all the country’s woes, in the best 1960’s Fidel Castro fashion. Venezuelans are made to believe, through increasingly state-controlled

media, that the U.S., the center of “murderous imperialism” together with the “world’s fascist movements” have made it their mission to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution that would bring socialism, peace and well-being to all Venezuelans, just as it had done on Cuba under the Castro’s. After all, all Cubans are dirt-poor, according to the same rhetoric, because of the U.S. trade embargo or “blockade” as they keep naming it. The rhetoric employed by the state media is, by the way, a carbon copy of tag-team partner Cuba’s, which of course comes from the Soviet era. It shows how far the Cubans have come in mentoring the Chavist leadership over the last 15 years. Mentoring, of course, not leading.

The truth looks different, as the ones who want to see it, know. Most Cubans are dirt-poor, true, but there are enough multi-nationals active on the island (except from U.S. of course) and a lot of sympathetic millionaire investments from especially Europe that have led to bitter trade disputes with the U.S. in the past. And there exists a very rich upper class on Cuba, born and grown under Fidel, whose members talk like Marx but live like Rockefeller. Which sums up the character of the Castro regime, to my own opinion. The Caribbean version of the old-time Soviet nomenklatura with all its cronyism and abuse of power, money and influence, keeping the masses dirt-poor and ignorant in the best Orwellian fashion. 

You are free to believe either of the above views. What keeps baffling me, however, is the Cold War rhetoric gushing out of the Venezuelan state media’s channels. Ever since I came here, I was looking at a déjà-vu of what I had read and seen through Soviet and Warsaw Pact media in the seventies and eighties, when I was studying Russian. In Venezuela, listening to government speeches always gave you the feeling as if 1989 had never happened and the red flag was still flying over the Kremlin. Still, I discarded it as pure rhetoric back then. And since smart brains were still to be found in Chávez’ government, like Alí Rodríguez Araque, a true Marxist-Leninist with a realist view on the world, I and many others here trusted sanity would prevail at the end in Venezuela under Chavism instead of revolutionary utopia. It turned out now that I was dead wrong.

Under Bush, the U.S. kept a surprisingly low profile with respect to the gringo-bashing and the cascade of personal insults and accusations that gushed out of late president Chávez’ mouth year after year. That changed when Obama came, who took an interest into what Venezuela’s government had to say. It pleased Chávez of course, and did lower the tone of his anti-U.S. rhetoric for a while. Towards the end of Chávez’ life, when Obama was dirtying his hands with kicking old allies like Libya’s Gaddafi and Syria’s Assad in the infamous “Arab Spring”, the dying president jumped back to his old rhetoric. Even Colombia, as an U.S. ally, got a kick or two and a lot of threats – one in the form of unabashed support of the FARC - from Caracas. When Chávez died and his minister of Foreign Affairs Nicolás Maduro succeeded him in 2013, the tone got unexpectedly worse and worse. Currently there are no ambassadors in either country and what is left of the diplomatic staffs is routinely kicked out piece-meal in a series of escalating diplomatic punches in the face. Like last week, when it was decreed that 75% of the U.S. embassy staff had two weeks to leave Venezuela. Of course, the U.S. reciprocated with own measures, which include annulments of visa and freezing of assets of prominent members of the Venezuelan state. Like a table tennis ball insults, accusations and threats ping-pong from one capital to the other. 

Yesterday however president Obama committed what I would call a big tactical error. He called Venezuela a “national threat” to the U.S.. This new escalation was greeted with revolutionary fury by Maduro and his team, who lost little time in fully capitalizing on it. Obama’s words are now seen by the state media as just an inch short of a true declaration of war, a blatant interference in the country’s internal affairs to topple Maduro, and a solid proof that the U.S. does want to invade Venezuela, after having failed – I quote - in tumbling Maduro by “paid” street rioting in 2014 and an attempt on the president’s life some weeks ago, which resulted in a wave of arrests of high military officials and the mayor of Caracas. The old Chavist slogan “the gringo is after our oil” has been pulled out again, and Maduro and his team are happily beating the anti-U.S. drums over and over again, looking for allies all over the world with similar anti-Yankee grudges. Yesterday evening Maduro asked parliament in a life TV broadcast to grant him full legislative powers in “fighting imperialism inside the country and abroad”, which most probably will be given to him. If so, Maduro will enjoy unlimited power to deal with the opposition and any dissenters within his own ranks as he pleases, thus finally installing the de facto dictatorship he was after for the last two years. 

Obama’s move was a stupid one because he didn’t anticipate that he would surrender a winning game to a president who had hopelessly cornered himself and his government in a succession of the most unwise economic measures, pushed by political opportunism and sheer ignorance of economics. His fall from power at the hands of his own party, the loss of parliament in the upcoming elections or his constitutional impeachment due in 2016 would have cleared the stage. But now, Maduro has been given the excuse to proceed, with parliamentary permission, against anyone he wants out of the way. I have the impression that the truth of this fact has not sinked yet into the Venezuelans’ conscience. But for the democratic opposition, already badly beaten and split up, Mr. Obama’s move could have devastating effects, because theoretically their leaders could now all end up in jail accused of conspiration and treason. Maduro was faring badly in 2014 in polls till the students came out and started burning tires and busses. The guarimbas of 2014 boosted his leadership amidst the Chavist faithful and the army. Now, Maduro was till recently again faring very badly in the polls because of the abysmal managing of the economy. The Obama incident will be grabbed with both hands to divert public attention from the economic disaster, pulling every string possible to boost patriotism and anti-gringo emotions already present within many people here. And from there, Maduro can now do anything. Even suspend the elections, calling out a “national emergency”. Theoretically, nothing stops him from holding power indefinitely.

Why did Obama commit such a mistake? I think it has to do with his own weakened political position after he lost the entire U.S. Congress to the Republican Party, whose most radical and anti-Obama wing is called the Tea Party. Senator Marco Rubio, a son of anti-Castro Cubans, a prominent leader of the rightist Tea Party and a presidential hopeful, has pushed for a good time to keep U.S.-Cuban relationships frozen and to move against Chavist Venezuela. I get the impression that a kind of quid pro quo, a political barter trade was closed between the president and the Republicans. Obama might get support from senator Rubio c.s. for some law or project, and in exchange he would sign the executive order putting sanctions on Venezuelan government and army members. If Obama had let it at that, he would have pulled the necessary hostile fire from Caracas, but then it would have died out. Now, with that misplaced announcement of “national threat”, Obama has given the game away and pushed the Maduro regime to a further radicalization of its policies, which will leave less and less options open for a peaceful transition of Venezuela towards a more democratic, more open form of government. 

It’s easy to view the Venezuela board game from above and give this or that opinion. But for persons like me, a strengthened president Maduro will mean a continuation and radicalization of the disastrous course we are in. And I wonder whether president Obama has said what he has said, on purpose. I truly wonder whether he has any conscience of the course he has kicked this country in. If he had continued the Bush game, and just ignored Chávez or Maduro or whoever, the rotten barn might have collapsed upon itself. But now? Who will save the people in Venezuela from what is to come? 

Thanks for your reading. Please leave a comment behind. Have a great week and till next Wednesday or earlier if there is news!  

© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015