Let them eat Chavismo

Food and Venezuela
Let them eat Chavismo
The UN honours Venezuela for curbing hunger—which is actually getting worse

Jun 20th 2015

NEWS that the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) had given Venezuela a diploma for its “notable and exceptional” efforts to curb hunger did not reach Joseína Rodríguez. Recently unemployed, and living with her family in a farm outhouse in the south-west of the country, she was too busy working out where her next meal was coming from.

“Joseína” (not her real name) helps run one of the community councils that are the building blocks of the “socialist revolution” set up by the late President Hugo Chávez. “Chávez used to say that with the revolution everything would keep getting better,” she sighs. “I don’t know why this president (his successor, Nicolás Maduro) hasn’t kept the promise.” Sitting on an upturned bucket in the dusty yard of a farm that was taken over (before Chávez) by its workers, she says she used to work making meals for her neighbours, but stopped “because they can’t pay the prices I have to charge.” Staples reaching her community via the main state-subsidised food network cover only 200 of the 1,000 families who are supposed to benefit.

The word “hunger” has been heard a lot in Caracas lately, mostly thanks to a hunger strike by Leopoldo López, the jailed opposition leader, and dozens of his supporters. Their demands—that political prisoners be freed, and a date set for parliamentary elections with foreign observers watching—have so far been ignored. This week some Brazilian senators were the latest senior foreign visitors to back the detainees.

So the UN plaudit was a relief for the government. According to the FAO, which presented the diploma on June 8th, Venezuela is one of 72 countries that have reached the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving the percentage of their populations suffering from hunger. But the prize, based on government data up to 2012, comes amid growing evidence that the trend has reversed.

In his speech to the FAO, Vice-president Jorge Arreaza cited the government’s claim that 95% of Venezuelans eat three meals a day. But in a survey carried out last year by three leading universities, more than 11% said they ate just twice a day or less.   

The FAO said it saw no reason to doubt the statistics it used. But many of the numbers needed for a full evaluation have not been published for years. The central bank has issued no monthly inflation or food scarcity figures for 2015. In November, even by official accounts a minimum wage only bought 76% of the food required for the average family. Independent estimates suggest three-and-a-half minimum wages are now required. About 40% of those in work get the minimum wage or less.

Marianella Herrera, a nutritionist at the Fundación Bengoa, a private foundation, calls official data partial and inconsistent. “Other studies show an increase in malnutrition,” she says. “Children are showing up in hospital emergency wards with severe malnutrition, and some are dying because of a lack of basic supplies.” The government’s own figures, which show it reached the UN target for reducing malnutrition in children by 2008, indicate that by 2013 Venezuela was close to crossing the line again, in the opposite direction.

Joseína finds it a mercy that local authorities help where central agencies fail. “Last week they brought chicken, the week before it was milk.” Another lifeline comes from plantain from local farms and occasionally fish. Getting to a supermarket takes an hour and a half by motorcycle-taxi and bus; queues are long. “Sometimes when we get to the door, nothing is left.”

Venezuelan Presidential Campain - Leopoldo Lopez

Very good information about Leopoldo Lopez, from The Economist. Arriba Leopoldo, vas por buen camino

vdebate reporter

http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2011/10/venezuela%E2%80%99s-presidential-campaign?fsrc=nlw%7Cnewe%7C10-21-2011%7Cnew_on_the_economist

Venezuela’s presidential campaign
As clear as MUD
Oct 21st 2011, 12:15 by P.G. CARACAS
LEOPOLDO LÓPEZ is free to seek election in 2012 as Venezuela’s next president. But if elected, he will be barred from taking office. Or maybe not. The government had asked the country’s supreme court for a pronouncement on the “applicability” of a ruling last month by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), which overturned an administrative ban on Mr López holding public office. On October 18th the tribunal responded by muddying the waters.
The matter is of more than academic interest. Mr López, the leader of the centre-left People’s Will party, is among the front-runners for the presidential candidacy of the opposition Democratic Unity alliance—known by its initials, somewhat ironically, as the MUD. One recent poll even showed him in the lead. In 2008, when he was on course to become mayor of greater Caracas, he was barred from standing on account of unproven corruption allegations. According to the IACHR that ban, due to last until 2014, was a breach of Venezuela’s international human-rights obligations because it did not arise from a sentence handed down by a court.
That decision produced a strong reaction from Hugo Chávez, the president, who is standing for re-election. He called the IACHR “worthless”. The government condemned what it deemed interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs, saying the ruling would only be applied if the supreme court found it compatible with the Venezuelan constitution—even though IACHR rulings are binding on member states, and the constitution itself, rewritten during Mr Chávez’s presidency, grants precedence to international human-rights treaties.
It was therefore not surprising that the court, which has a record of dancing to the government’s tune, failed to uphold the ruling. The decision, written by justice Arcadio Delgado, accuses the IACHR of acting “as if it were a colonial power” by usurping the role of Venezuela’s own institutions. What did raise eyebrows was the apparent contradiction between Mr Delgado’s reaffirmation that Mr López was “temporarily barred from holding public office” and the opinion expressed by Luisa Estella Morales, the court’s president, at a subsequent press conference. According to Ms Morales, the court will issue a ruling on whether Mr López can take office as president if and only if he wins the election.
In effect, the supreme court is hedging its bets. By leaving open the possibility that the ban might later be overturned, its president may be signaling a willingness to facilitate a transition to a post-Chávez government if necessary. At a time when Mr Chávez was having tests in Cuba to determine whether the cancer operation he underwent in June was successful—he recently declared he is now cancer-free, but one of his former doctors said on October 16th that he probably has no more than two years to live—that speaks volumes about the uncertainty in government ranks over his political future. Suspicious commentators have suggested that the court’s ruling on Mr López might even have been brought forward to distract attention from a news item that seemed certain to weaken the president.
Meanwhile, by leaving the situation unclarified, the court may also have damaged Mr López’s chances of winning the MUD primaries, which are set for February 12th. Many potential voters could be put off by the fear that, if chosen, he would be less likely to win, and that if he won, he might be barred from taking office. Although Mr López himself has insisted he will stay in the race, and rival candidates have publicly supported that position, in private, some opposition members feel he should withdraw in order to minimise the damage to their cause. For the moment, however, he is at least receiving a great deal of free publicity.

Why the FARC's defeat looks to be only a matter of time

LAS FARC are a terrorist group, they are drug dealers and kidnappers.

The Economist 29/05/2008
Colombia
Peace for Colombia?
May 29th 2008 BOGOTá

From The Economist print edition
Why the FARC's defeat looks to be only a matter of time
AFP
PRESIDENTS have come and gone over the past four decades in Colombia but one man remained constant. Pedro Antonio Marín, better known by the noms de guerre of Manuel Marulanda or “Tirofijo” (“Sureshot”), led his FARC guerrillas through army bombardments, bogus cease fires and failed peace talks, never giving up his quixotic and destructive campaign to turn a large South American democracy into a clone of the long-vanished Soviet Union.

Mr Marulanda's death was always going to be of moment for Colombia. In the event, it has almost certainly coincided with the FARC’s demise as a serious military threat to the state.
A FARC commander announced that Mr Marulanda died on March 26th of a heart attack. Army chiefs believe that he might have expired as a result of their bombardments. In the same month, two other members of the FARC’s seven-man secretariat were killed, Raúl Reyes by a bombing raid on his camp across the border in Ecuador and Iván Ríos by his own bodyguard.

Mr Marulanda will be replaced by Alfonso Cano (real name: Guillermo León Sáenz), the FARC's chief ideologue. But there are reasons to suppose that the guerrillas will never recover from their March setback
Mr Marulanda was the last link to the FARC’s origins as a peasant self-defence force against landowners, an offshoot of a rural civil war in the 1940s and 1950s between Liberals and Conservatives. A man of peasant cunning and stubbornness, he was said never to have visited any city larger than Neiva, of some 315,000 people. Later recruits were middle-class Marxist students, such as Mr Cano.
The FARC survived the end of the cold war, but at the cost of its ideological purity, by turning to drug-trafficking and kidnapping. Mr Marulanda was by the mid-1990s leading a force of 19,000 operating in large units, overwhelming army garrisons and threatening Bogotá, the capital. That prompted the government to open peace talks, abandoned after three years in which the FARC carried on kidnapping, bombing and recruiting.
Colombians turned in despair to Álvaro Uribe, their tough president since 2002. He has expanded the security forces by a third, to 270,000, including a core of 80,000 professional soldiers, some of them in mobile brigades and special forces. They are backed by a large helicopter fleet, Brazilian-made Super Tucano tactical bombers and American advice, especially in intercepting communications.
This build-up transformed the war, driving the FARC away from the towns. Recent changes of government strategy are now bearing fruit. These involve encouraging guerrilla desertions and targeting the leadership. The FARC are now losing more deserters than they are gaining new recruits, according to General Freddy Padilla de León, the armed-forces’ commander. “They are reduced militarily, isolated politically, have a reduced social base and we are cutting their finance [by acting against their drug business]. It’s impossible for them to return to the cities,” he says.
What has worried Colombian officials most has been signs that Venezuela has been helping the FARC. But Venezuela’s government is likely to be more circumspect after evidence of ties emerged from documents on Reyes’s computers.
So what future do the guerrillas have? Mr Cano is sometimes portrayed as a moderate, in contrast to Jorge Briceño (aka “Mono Jojoy”), the FARC’s military commander. But in a two-hour interview with The Economist in 2001, Mr Cano showed himself to be a rigid Marxist, unprepared to accept democracy. “Our struggle is to do away with the state as now it exists in Colombia,” he said. The FARC wanted power and would not demobilise in return for “houses, cars and scholarships” or a few seats in Congress.
Mr Cano’s first task will be to prevent the FARC from fragmenting into its constituent “fronts”. Constant army pressure means the fronts now find it hard to communicate with each other. Some, including Mr Cano’s in the centre-south, are on the run; others, such as that in Nariño, in the south-west, are still awash with drug money. Yet others rely on havens across the borders in Venezuela and Ecuador.
By maintaining the pressure, the government hopes to force the FARC into negotiations. Relations of hostages kidnapped by the guerrillas hope that the death of the obstinate Mr Marulanda will speed their release. Neither may happen soon. “Marulanda’s death is not the death of the FARC,” says Camilo Gómez, who negotiated for the government during the peace talks.

Since perhaps 9,000 guerrillas are still under arms, that is clearly true. But defeat looks only a matter of time.

Country report forecast - January 2008

Excellent!!!!!!!

Link below:

Country Report Forecast_2008

Highlights
Outlook for 2008-09

• Mr Chávez's defeat in the December 2007 referendum on constitutional reform will give a boost to the beleaguered opposition. However, internal divisions and a lack of influence over policy remain significant challenges.
• The government will continue to use the state’s wealth of energy resources as leverage to deepen diplomatic and commercial relations with countries it considers "friendly" within and outside the region.
• The government is unlikely to move towards full state control of the economy, but concerns about further nationalisation will curb private-sector investment.
• The central government deficit is forecast to widen, as non-oil revenue falls, but the true fiscal position will be worse, as an increasing burden of expenditure will be placed on PDVSA and Fonden.
• Deficiencies in the policy environment and a stabilisation of fiscal revenue will combine to produce a deceleration of GDP growth in the forecast period.
• Assuming that oil prices remain high, the authorities are unlikely to devalue the bolívar until 2009. Sales of dollar-denominated assets will increase, but the gap between the premium and official exchange rates will remain large.

The political scene: Referendum defeat boosts opposition

On December 2nd, the electorate voted to reject a government-sponsored reform of the constitution, whichwould have significantly enhanced the powers of the president, Hugo Chávez (November 2007,

The political scene).

The vote was divided into two blocks, the first relating to changes proposed by Mr Chávez and the second to changes proposed by the National Assembly. The result was close; according to the official figures from the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE, the electoral authority), the first block was repudiated by 50.7% to 49.3%; the second was rejected by 51.1% to 48.9%. There were several hours of considerable tension before the CNE announced that with 87% of the ballots counted, the result was "irreversible". Mr Chávez conceded defeat, although there was speculation that this concession might have been wrung from a reluctant president by implicit or explicit threats from elements within the armed forces.
Mr Chávez's defeat can be attributed in large measure to the recent coalescing of a mass student-based opposition movement, combined with the open rebellion of former Chávez allies. A retired general and popular former minister of defence, Raúl Baduel, campaigned strongly against the constitutional changes and urged Venezuelans to come out in force to vote "no". A small party allied to Mr Chávez, Podemos, also rejected the proposed reforms. The relatively high rate of abstention (45%) also hurt the government's campaign, since many of those who stayed at home were Chávez supporters. This suggests that support for the president rests mostly on his social spending programmes and generally pro-poor policies, rather than on his socialist ideology. A deteriorating economic situation has also contributed to disillusionment with the government, with price and exchange controls generating shortages of basic goods and rampant inflation (see Economic policy). Outside the economic sphere, there is also growing disillusionment with failure to improve delivery of basic services, such as water and housing, to the poor, which is blamed in large part on corruption and mismanagement of the oil windfall.
This result is a major political and personal defeat for Mr Chávez, as it marks the first time that he has lost a national election since winning the presidency in 1998. Mr Chávez has insisted that his planned reforms have been delayed rather than abandoned. He could use his significant powers, including the ability to legislate by decree under the Ley Habilitante and complete dominance over the National Assembly, to push through some of the proposed changes.

However, given the lack of public support this could deepen divisions within his own ranks. Some of the proposed changes would still require a reform of the constitution via a petition by voters, which is unlikely. Much will depend on how the opposition positions itself over the coming months. The victory of the "no" campaign was evidence of the emergence of a "third pole" (as Ismael García, leader of Podemos, calls it), comprising those who have become disillusioned with Mr Chávez but are reluctant to join the ranks of the discredited and unpopular opposition parties. This could be a dangerous development for the president, who has been very successful in presenting his adversaries as belonging to pro-US camp. This places the opposition in a position to reap considerable gains in regional elections due in October, but this will require the traditional and new opposition elements to forge a workable alliance.

Venezuela Glance 2008

Venezuela Glance 2008

Check the following link. Chavez is going down.

http://www.vdebate.org/archive/the_economist_02_dec.pdf