August 2010
10 posts
Crime in Venezuela
Maybe I should change this blog’s name to that, since that’s obviously the biggest problem we have. Then I would tell you about the young man who was murdered last night to steal his car:
A young 23-yearl-old student, Javier Perez, was murdered last night in Los Palos Grandes by a group of criminals who intended to steal his Toyota Meru car, according to El Universal.
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The noose tightens around Freedom of the Press in... →
It is a very simple story:
One month and eight days before the the National Assembly elections, the number one concern of the electorate is:
Crime
And as the press notes and emphasizes the fact that crime has tripled in the eleven years of Chavismo, a Judge issues the following prohibition:
For the next four weeks, no newspaper, magazine or weekly of the country can...
“Among all the countries where we have played, the security in Venezuela is the...”
– Lin Chen-chuan, team leader of the Taiwanese women’s baseball team, regarding the shooting of a player at the Women’s Baseball World Cup in Caracas.
After seeing government officials literally laugh off claims of high crime rates in Venezuela, I can help but feel massive, epic...
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Women’s Baseball World Cup suspended after a... →
The second day of the Women’s Baseball World Cup, which is taking place in Caracas, has been suspended due to an incident during the game of Netherlands vs. Hong Kong.
According to the Ultimas Noticias newspaper, citing the commander of the 5th Regional Command of the National Guard, Antonio Benavides, one of the players from the team from Hong Kong playing in the Women’s Baseball World...
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80 kids in a vacation program robbed in Higuerote →
A Marcopolo-type bus transporting 80 kids of a vacation program was intercepted yesterday at 10 am in the Caucagua-Higuerote road by two robbers armed with a shotgun, according to information from the journalist Daivis Ramirez Miranda of El Universal
The thugs robbed the young kids and their guides, after blocking the road on which the group intended to reach the Curiepe river to spend the...
How Chávez tries to hide the truth about his... →
Mr. Chávez also focused his attention on Larry Leon Palmer, the veteran diplomat nominated by the Obama administration as its next ambassador to Venezuela. Some Republicans question whether the United States should retain ambassadorial relations with Mr. Chávez’s government, and the nominee received a searching set of “questions for the record” from the Senate Foreign...
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The scariest part of the violence in Venezuela is that all the talk about the increase in the number of homicides is not because homicides are the type of crime that has increased the most, but because it’s the only one where there’s a chance of obtaining objective evidence of its occurrence.
Crimes like robberies, rapes, assaults, and so on have probably not just tripled, but increased...
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5,186 venezuelans were murdered between January... →
Crime is a taboo in the venezuelan government. It not only scares the common citizens, who are afraid of losing their life or properties. It causes panic among ministers, parliamentaries and in the President himself, who avoid the subject because they know it’s a pocket of social and political instability.
Sociologist Ramón Piñango explains that besides the human pain and collective...
July 2010
19 posts
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Chronicle of a kidnapping →
The story of how journalist Roberto Franchi was kidnapped and robbed in Caracas the other night. This is why I absolutely dread living here. No one is safe from this; it’s only a matter of time.
A Tuesday evening, one of those in which you think life is passing by while stuck in a rut, served as an excuse to accept an invitation from three friends to meet at El Alazán [a restaurant in...
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Analyst estimates Chávez’s family fortune at... →
Criminal Justice International Associates (CJIA), a risk assessment and global analysis firm in Miami, estimated in a recent report that the Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has “amassed a fortune” similar to that of the Castro brothers in Cuba.
According to Jerry Brewer, president of CJIA, “the personal fortune of the Castro brothers has been estimated at a combined...
Behind exhumation of Simón Bolívar is Hugo... →
A must read article from The Washington Post. So good that I can’t help quoting a big part of it:
Shortly after midnight on July 16, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez reached back in time. He presided at the exhumation of the remains of Simón Bolívar — Latin America’s greatest independence hero, who helped liberate the region from Spain in the 19th century, and the object of...
El País: “Chávez ‘resuscitates’ Bolívar to save... →
While Chávez theorizes about the causes of the Liberator’s death, his critics maintain that it’s a maneouver of distraction to try to cover up the reality of a country sunken in a profound crisis. The inflation — 31% in June, the highest in Latin America — forces citizens to pick their pockets more and more; the economy went into recession last year and is still in the...
Chávez is now showing Simón Bolívar’s corpse on...
This is a fucking outrage. Unbelievable.
Government exhumes Simón Bolívar’s remains →
The Bolivarian Government of Venezuela exhumed, on friday morning, the remains of The Liberator Simón Bolívar, in a procedure announced by President Hugo Chávez at around 1:00 in the morning through this @chavezcandanga Twitter account.
“Hello, my friends! What an impressive moment we’ve lived tonight! We’ve seen the remains of the great Bolívar! I said as Neruda: Our...
CANTV reports countrywide Internet failure →
They have no estimates of when it’ll be repaired. Ah, government monopolies are great.
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Not so Random Chavismo Target of the week: Twitter →
The Devil’s Excrement:
But it does mean that a message is being sent. After all, how can the CIPCC (investigative police) have so much time to look for Twitteros the same week that a girl’s finger is cut with a Machete by her kidnappers to send it to her parents as proof of life? Are they doing something about this case, or is that irrelevant to them? has the investigative police become...
Hugo Chávez’s Twitter Strategy
If you can’t beat them, join them, and if you still can’t beat them, arrest them.
Government plans to arrest another fifteen Twitter... →
The CICPC [Scientific, Penal and Criminalistic Investigations Corps] are investingating another fifteen people for spreading rumors on Twitter, according to Wilmer Flores Trosel, Director of the CICPC. He said that they have “identified approximately fifteen people to be detained and they will have to explain to the country the intentions behind these rumors”.
He also said that if...
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Twitter users arrested for spreading rumors →
Officers from the Scientific, Penal and Criminalistic Investigations Corps [CICPC] arrested a man and a woman for being allegedly involved in spreading false rumors on Twitter to destabilize the banking system.
Wilmer Flores Trosel, director of the CICPC, said that the detained have been identified as Luis Enrique Acosta Oxford, who had in his power a cellphone with the Twitter comments...
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Kidnappers abduct pregnant woman and her... →
On Tuesday night, the kidnappers of the school teacher Jhoana Zambrano, who is 8 months pregnant, and her 7-year-old daughter, sent their family a finger, presumably from the girl, which was left near the “Volteos García de Hevia” cooperative, in La Fría.
It’s bad enough that the country is completely overrun by crime, but the abject cruelty and inhumanity of the criminals...
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Reuters: “Venezuela starts legal transition to the... →
Venezuela is taking steps to turn into a “communal state” that substitutes the “neoliberal and bourgeois” model, by transferring power to neighborhood organizations that nevertheless will depend on the designs of president Hugo Chávez.
The Government and the National Assembly, dominated by the chavismo, are fine tuning a package of laws that enable from social...
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A man is murdered in the restroom at Sambil mall →
A man who was murdered inside the men’s restroom in the Autopista level, close to Plaza Jardín, at Sambil Shopping Mall in Chacao, was identified as Euclides José Silva Pérez, 32 years old.
Officers of the Scientific, Penal and Criminalistic Investigations Corps (CICPC) and Chacao Police cordoned off the place while they inspect the body, which received two gunshots.
Silva Pérez...
Reuters: “Venezuelan young professionals flee...
(Abridged translation of this article by Patricia Rondón Espín.)
Laura Bolívar, a marketing professional, is afraid of venezuelan crime, can’t find a future in president Hugo Chávez’s “socialist revolution”, and wants to offer a better future for her baby.
That’s why she’s moving in August from the sunny, warm country to the cold of Quebec in Canada.
...
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Quinto Día warns of impending dollar crisis
A report from the Quinto Día newspaper:
I’m warning you, so that you’re not caught off-guard, about the impending crisis in several industries because of the dollar shortage. The latest measure the government came up with is in the text of a letter the Ministry of Light Industries sent to several mobile carriers. In the letter, they tell them very clearly that they won’t...
June 2010
11 posts
Government admits it has 89,120 tons of...
When you were a kid, did your mom ever tell you not to waste any food because lots of people don’t have any? Mine used to tell me that all the time, but apparently no one in the venezuelan government must have had a mother, because the government has admitted in a report it has 89,120.22 tons of “non-conforming” food in its inventory, meaning foods that possess “special...
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Reuters: “Venezuelans build fortresses against...
CARACAS (Reuters) — A dozen luxury cars are worked on at a workshop in Caracas, capital of Venezuela. Workers dismantle the body and remove the windows in a meticulous process to turn the vehicles into fortresses on wheels.
The work must be done quickly because the queue is long.
According to figures from NGOs, Venezuela carries one of the biggest crime rates in the continent,...
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Oliver Stone’s “South of the Border” bombs in... →
Oliver Stone’s latest documentary ‘South of the Border,’ which offers a mostly favorable view of Venezuela’s anti-U.S. government President Hugo Chávez, has been a flop at theaters in Venezuela, according to the entertainment trade magazine Variety.
In the 12 days after its June 4 debut, it grossed only $18,601 on 20 screens in Venezuela, U.S.-based Variety said on...
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Oliver Stone’s Latin America →
Asked about the discrepancy, Mr. Ali [the British-Pakistani historian and commentator who helped write the screenplay] replied that ‘we can talk about all this endlessly,’ but ‘the aim of our film is very clear and basic.’ In ‘South of the Border,’ he added: ‘We were not writing a book, or having an academic debate. It was to have a sympathetic view of...
Parliament considers legalizing barter for... →
The National Assembly passed a law for the constitution of communes in the country, which will be complemented with a law of communal economy that proposes the legalization of barter for commercial trade. […]
Vivas [promoter of the law] said that the commune will be “the ultimate expression, the fundamental foundation of territorial organization which will consolidate the...
Recommend us. →
Would you mind recommending us in the news category for Tumblr Tuesday? It’d be nice to get a few more followers to get this thing going. Thanks.
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Chávez mulls fate of banker’s Globovisión TV... →
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez suggested on Wednesday he might take control of shares in the opposition Globovisión television station owned by a director of the channel whose bank was taken over this week.
Chávez claims “he just found out” what everyone else in Venezuela knows: that Nelson Mezerhane, the president of the bank the government seized last week, is also a...
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Venezuela calls for arrest of TV channel owner →
Venezuela on Friday called for the capture of a government opponent who owns a critical television channel and who recently fled the country after authorities sought to arrest him.
The government put out an international request for Guillermo Zuloaga’s capture through Interpol, Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami said.
Zuloaga is the majority owner of Globovision, the...
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September 2009
7 posts
Caracas Chronicles: “Contempt of Vote” →
Francisco Toro:
If the Chávez regime retains some patina of legitimacy in international circles beyond the know-nothing lefty fringe, that sense arises almost exclusively from one source: his electoral mandate. In our era, the vote is sacred: simply noting that Chávez governs by the will of the people is a powerful legitimating discourse.
But, last Sunday, Chávez showed once again just how...
Caracas Chronicles: “Elite Permutations” →
The distortions introduced by Venezuela’s de-facto, dual currency, permuta-dependent exchange system are remaking Venezuelan society from the bottom up.
And yet, as I read back on that sentence, I realize that the phrase — that “de-facto, dual currency, permuta-dependent exchange system” — is obtuse enough, impenetrably technical enough to send most sane people’s interest’s waning.
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“But, who can make one of these trips without spending money? It’s like they want...”
– Hugo Chávez, responding to critics about the high costs of his international travels, which include stays at luxury hotels, and buying “bagfuls of books” at a library in Madrid.
It should be noted that venezuelan citizens aren’t allowed to travel and spend their money freely. Under strict...
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Student Julio Rivas will be held at El Rodeo I →
The 22-year-old student who was arrested a few days ago for taking part in a protest against the Organic Law of Education on August 22nd, will be held at El Rodeo I, the most dangerous wing of one of the most dangerous prisons in the world. He has been charged with “instigation to civil war, instigation to commit crimes, instigation to disobedience of the law, damage to public property, use of...
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Richard Blanco’s death sentence →
Francisco Toro:
It’s hard to write something cheerful about Venezuela these days. The tenor, the saña, of the chavista onslaught on civil liberties is now so aggressive it’s hard to know what to do with the huge well of despair that comes over you when you contemplate it.
The new rules of the game are clear: every time there is a protest there will be violence. Chavista thug squads like...
August 2009
21 posts
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The face of Chavismo today →
Francisco Toro:
Luisa Ortega Diaz is something else altogether. She doesn’t just have the extremist ideology, she also has the energy, the clarity of vision and the sense of her own power to become a leading player in the drive to entrench a chavista dictatorship.
Because, lets be clear, her office is powerful: much more powerful than analogous offices in most other countries. It has a...
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El País: “Protesting in Venezuela will be a crime”
Protesting in the streets of Venezuela is, from now on, synonymous with crime. The venezuelan Attorney General, Luisa Ortega, has announced that she will prosecute any citizen that marches for any reason and who, in her opinion, only seeks the de-stabilization of the constitutionally elected Government. I want all those people uprising in a hostile attitude against the legitimately constituted...
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“Dulce bellum inexpertis”
– War is sweet to those who have never experienced it. Pindar.