In Venezuela: an orgy of national destruction while the hemisphere watches silently.

Red Venezuela....no one seems to care in the hemisphere.

In Hitler’s Germany, history says, millions of Jews were displaced, robbed of their property or murdered before the largely indifferent eyes of the “civilized” world. Even today this “civilized” world minimizes the tragedy known as the Holocaust, in order to appease a sector of the Muslim world that claims it never happened and that the mountains of corpses one sees in documentary films are not real.
Compared to such a monumental case of collective blindness and cowardice the Venezuelan tragedy seems minor. There are no extermination camps and political prisoners are probably less than one hundred. A perverse version of freedom of speech allows dissidents to criticize the government without critics suffering overt retaliations, although they soon find that their civic rights and the obligations of the state to treat them as equals magically disappear. There are rather frequent elections that look great from the distance but which are strongly biased in favor of the regime, a situation that would be obvious for anyone wanting to take a look (no one seems interested). Although popular protests take place very day they never reach the degree of intensity and confrontation that would produce enough human losses to merit the attention of those looking at geopolitical really hot spots, where suicidal bombers can take 100 lives with him/her into “paradise”.
And yet what has been taking place in Venezuela during the last ten years is an orgy of national destruction as systematic and efficient as any other, perhaps more spectacular process that could exist elsewhere in the planet. Consider this:
· All existing democratic and autonomous institutions existing at the start of the decade have been eliminated, in favor of simple appendices of the executive. Today, the president legislates, orders the judicial system around and takes mostly intuitive decisions on matters of national importance during his TV Sunday show. Independent powers and checks and balances have simply disappeared;
· The main and almost single source of income and foreign currency for the nation, the oil industry, has been converted into a political tool, diverted from its core business into importing and distributing food and deteriorated to the point of having lost about 800,000 barrels per day of production capacity during the decade;
· The army has been prostituted through large money handouts to the top ranks, to the point that now is just a political extension of the presidency, while an armed popular militia has been installed, following the Cuban model;
· Public administration is in the hands of the military. Active officers control most of the ministries and state-owned companies. However, the so-called efficiency of the military has been nowhere in sight, as the country’s public services, physical infrastructure and finances are in extreme disarray. There are increasingly frequent electrical interruptions, water is rationed, food is scarce, hospitals and schools are in ruins and not one single new highway has been built during the decade. Government social “programs” are essentially restricted to handouts and subsidies to the poor, which provide an illusory sensation of well being (a fish a day, not teaching how to fish).
· Although the government has received close to one trillion dollars in total income during the decade (60 percent from petroleum sales), which represents a massive income for a country of only 27 million people, the national debt has almost been quintupled, from $22 billion in 1999 to close to $100 billion today. In parallel, the strongman has bought about $7 billion in weapons and given away some $25 billion to foreign, ideologically friendly countries (about $12 billion have gone to Cuba), a mass of money that should have been used in improving the lives of Venezuelans.
· In primary schools a new history is being introduced, one in which Columbus was a mass-murderer, Bolivar a socialist mulatto, the heroes have become villains and the villains heroes. Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Lenin are the new paradigmatic trinity and the personality cult has spread everywhere, with roads and public buildings saturated with large posters of Hugo Chavez pictured as a tropical version of North Korea’s dictator.
· The strongman has abandoned all pretensions of domestic governance and is dedicated to ruling the country through “ukases”, while putting all national resources to the service of his supreme objective: creating a global anti-U.S. alliance, a task in which he has made important progress before the passive eyes of the U.S. government. He has intervened openly in the internal affairs of Latin American countries, has financed presidential candidates in Argentina, Peru, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Mexico and El Salvador and has aligned the country with the Colombian terrorist group, FARC, and with Hezbollah, establishing a terrorist axis with Iran.
*************

All of these activities, far from civilization, freedom and democracy, have been done in daylight and, often, in an arrogant and challenging manner, for the hemisphere and the world to see. As in the children’s story about the rich garments worn by the king, no one in hemispheric leadership roles has noticed that the king has no clothes. They keep acting as if the rich and colorful garments existed, a case of self-imposed blindness that is beyond the understanding of the ordinary citizen.
As an ordinary citizen I can easily see the nakedness of the Venezuelan regime and I can also see the cowardice and immorality of people such as Jose Miguel Insulza, at the OAS; Miguel Scoto at the U.N. (what is the problem with the Miguel’s?); fence-sitters such as Spain’s Zapatero and Brazil’s Lula and the unhealthy pragmatism of top leaders such as Barrack Obama and France’s Sarkozy. As Berlioz used to say about his pupil Camille Saint Saens, these leaders seem to lack a proper dose of inexperience.