It was indeed a surreal holiday, to be reminded in full all what an organized society can achieve in general happiness for its people; and the return was even more surreal as I was welcomed by a giant poster of Chavez with some silly slogan while I was waiting in turn for my immigration check. Brutally I was reminded that I was back in a country on the edge of 4th-world-ization.
I came back suffering from a bad cold, made the worse by hours and hours of AC in planes and airports. And yet I cannot blame the cold for the impression of delirium I got as I was trying to catch up with the news. In a way it is good, I can resume in this single post two full weeks of events because all that matters is the symbolism of a regime that has no idea on how to regain its popularity and stay in office, a regime reduced to threats as the way to hang on.
Let's start with Luisa Ortega asking the Interpol to arrest Carlos Andres Perez, CAP, ex president of Venezuela, the one against whom Chavez made his failed coup. I have already described to you this sorry personage, the one in charge, we are told, to prosecute crime in Venezuela and who is miserably failing at it as crime keeps getting redder numbers while the jail system keep getting worse as the courts are everyday less efficient. In other words she is one of the responsible folks as to why I can sleep soundly in Seattle in a basement with my window open and I need a triple set of iron doors and a dog to do the same thing in San Felipe.
Luisa Ortega should be way too busy with the current disastrous situation to get personally invested in looking for events that happened two decades ago. Amen of not looking into the chavista share of crimes of 2002. Why is the woman after ten, 10, years of chavismo deciding to arrest a senile and near death ex-president, an arrest that this late in time will not solve any of the mysteries of those days?
But Luisa Ortega is acting on orders of Chavez, to try to distract opinion from the current crime disaster, trying to have people forget that in a few moths Chavez will have been 11 years in office and that none of the 1998 problems have been solved, at least not in a long term fashion. And she abides willingly with all sorts of actions for which one day she shall be punished because when everything is said and done she is the ultimate "resentido social", unable to see beyond her own personal condition. She is the wall flower of past decades who now thinks she is the Carrie of the XXI century socialism ball macabre.
Another bit of news is that now the government will decide up to three hours of programing in independent TV and radio networks. Apparently lengthy cadenas are not enough, forced free advertising is not enough, now Chavez wants to decide what people should see. The government, according to the circulating proposal, will decide from the shows and stuff "independent producers" produce and force TV and radio to pass them, at the time the government decides to present them. I am not sure if it will be 3 hours weekly or daily but in a way it is totally irrelevant: right now there is not enough material produced to even cover the needs of TVes, the network that was robbed from private hands in 2007 by Chavez. How can they expect to fill the grids of Globovision, Venevision and Televen when they cannot fill up Tves, and can only come up with political garbage for VTV, Vive and ANTV?
To add insult to injury the woman in charge to organize and decide the application is Blanca Eekhout, a woman who since Chavez picked her up from obscurity has not demonstrated once any taste or intelligence for the TV programming she has been in charge of. In other words what this means is that the government genuinely thinks that its message is not reaching all, in addition of course of thinking that any criticism of its actions is just a bunch of lies that need to be countered. A creepy fundamentalist should solve that issue.
The thing here is that after ten years there are those within Chavez regime that still think that after 10 and soon 11 terrible years if people like me still do not support Chavez it is because we just have not received 'the word'. How retrograde and fundamentalist can one get? I have met relentless born again Christians that have considerable broader spirit and tolerance than the Eekhout(s) of this world.
To give you a sense of perspective, if that proposal were to be applied in full, Globovision would pass an average of 6 hours of prime time a day of pro Chavez propaganda. That is when we take in and average the cadenas, the forced advertising for free and the new programs to be imposed we shoudl come up with that number at the very least.
And yet it gets better as the government is again trying to find a way to force pay for TV to transmit Chavez cadenas. Yes, that is right, according to chavismo BBC or National Geographic should allow confiscation of their broadcast lines, for which I pay for anyway, so as to pass Chavez cadenas.
You know something, I cannot think of a more unwilling surreal admission from the part of chavismo that its message has failed. They are simply unable to comprehend that I might prefer to watch Discovery's Animal Planet rather than the animalistic rants of Chavez.
-The end-