Chávez's regime expropriated the bottle-manufacturing factory Owens-Illinois Venezuela just a few days ago. The action was part of a plan to control every aspect of income generation in Venezuela and as a way of getting hold of all companies supplying POLAR, the largest private company in Venezuela. Here you can watch a propaganda video the military regime produced to explain its version of why it expropriated that factory. The video shows Owens-Illinois workers applauding, but it does not allow really tell viewers why and when exactly. The believers in Chávez are supposed to imagine workers were supporting what Chávez's henchman and vice president, Elias Jaua, was saying in another place and moment. State "journalists" did not ask workers to talk freely about their "liberation". That is no surprise: what worker would feel like talking openly when the whole factory is chock-a-block with armed soldiers? What worker would talk freely after union people from Agroisleña, another recently expropriated factory, were sacked after voicing their opinion?
The military regime wanted to have a show with "workers supporting the liberation". As it does not have real workers' backing, the regime sent 7 buses to look for some one-hour actors among the eternal jobless hanging around Bolívar's square in Los Guayos, where Owens-Illinois is located. Half of Venezuelans work - according to governmental INE statistics - in what the government calls "informal sector". In reality most of them are basically unemployed, depending on some fictitious "scholarship" or selling Chinese toys or working as pirate taxi drivers when they can. This time, as some people from Los Guayos tell me, the regime did not manage to fill even 3 of the buses. In previous years they would have been able to fill in all 7 buses immediately and the ones outside would be trying to to get in for the privilege of "defending the revolution". Not anymore. The regime's popularity is definitely going down even if Venezuela still is experiencing the longest oil boom of its history.