Thursday, November 14, 2013

Talking 'Aparicio & Gabriela' is the only distraction in Venezuela these days

(My new American Thinker post)
It is very hard down in Venezuela. I understand that we are caught up in ObamaCare and other issues.  However, let's not forget how Venezuela is falling apart and people are suffering.

 I have many Venezuelan friends.  We need to tell the world about their day to day misery "made by Chavez."
We just heard that the Maduro regime deployed troops into stores, as reported by The NY Times:
"In announcing that military personnel would occupy the five-store electronics chain Daka, Mr. Maduro said that the government would supervise sales at significantly lower prices and that the store's stock would be liquidated.  
"Let nothing remain on the shelves!" he said during a television broadcast. 
Mr. Maduro also dispatched officials to inspect other stores around the country, saying they, too, would be forced to charge what the government considers fair prices. 
Officials said over the weekend that several store managers had been arrested and would face charges of setting overly high prices.
Luisa Ortega, the national prosecutor, said that some people had also been arrested and accused of looting."
The Spanish word for this is "PANICO" or panic. We are watching a Maduro regime totally out of tricks and forced to deal with the economic mess that it inherited from the Chavez' years. 

 The problem is not greed or bad merchants.  The real problem is shortages - from cooking oil to other basic foodstuffs. 

 President Maduro has now gone on TV to tell people to "calm down" after the government took over some stores.

 As one Venezuelan friend say to me last week:   "We never had (Spanish expletive deleted) like this before!  This (Spanish expletive deleted) Chavez should be burning in hell."

 All over Venezuela today, men and women wait in line to purchase goods.  The "lines" are another reminder of "the Cubanization of Venezuela".

 My friend was in one of those lines last week.

 He said that the men wait in line and talk baseball.  They remember the golden years when Luis Aparicio (White Sox) and David Concepcion (Reds) made them so proud of their country.     

 The women talk about the other wonder of Venezuela, the Miss Universe pageant. 

 Last week, a young woman from Venezuela won The Miss Universe content:   
"For the seventh time in Miss Universe history, Venezuela took the crown as 25-year-old Gabriela Isler was given the title of most beautiful woman in the universe in Moscow's Crocus City Hall on Saturday night."
And so it goes. Talking "shortstops" and "beauty pageants" is how most Venezuelans take their minds off of this terrible disaster that they are living today.

P. S. You can hear more Venezuela with Fausta Wertz & follow me on Twitter @ scantojr.


New Politics Podcasts with Silvio Canto Jr on BlogTalkRadio



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US-Latin America issues this week


We spoke with Fausta Wertz of Fausta's Blog about the top US-Latin America stories of the week.  

 Fausta posted this article by Ernesto Talvi of The Brookings Institute.  

 Mr Talvi looked at the near future and raised some important points:

 "This cycle of elections will thus take place at a moment when social and political contestation is on the rise and, in many cases, reflects the concerns of an emerging but still vulnerable middle class that not only fears for its economic well-being, but is also dissatisfied with the quality of government services and personal security. As a result, incumbent presidents in the current electoral cycle are much less popular than their predecessors at the same point in their terms. For example, the current Brazilian incumbent Dilma Rousseff is much less popular going into this election than her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was.  The same goes for other current presidents, for example, President Juan Manuel Santos vs. former President Álvaro Uribe in Colombia; Sebastián Piñera vs. Michelle Bachelet in Chile; José Mujica vs. Tabaré Ramón Vázquez in Uruguay; and Cristina Kirchner I vs. Cristina Kirchner II in Argentina.
The new wave of leaders to be elected in the next 14 months will have to deal with a more adverse external environment, stricter financial constraints and significant economic challenges. Reigniting growth will require domestic transformations that are politically complex (e.g., education reform in Mexico) and take time to produce effects. At the same time, preserving macroeconomic stability and fiscal probity at a time when a dissatisfied electorate, with high expectations due to a decade of very high growth, will put pressure on governments to accommodate immediate popular demands at the expense of sound policies. How these tensions are resolved will be key in determining the economic prospects of the region in the coming years.
On the other hand, democracy itself faces major challenges. Although they no longer benefit from the tailwinds provided by a decade of economic exuberance and in spite of a loss in popularity, incumbents and familiar faces are still favored to win upcoming elections. Given the level of dissatisfaction registered in public opinion polls, the predicted outcomes reflect the power of incumbency across Latin America and the Caribbean.  In a small number of states this is the result of creeping authoritarianism. In others, electoral rules and campaign finance laws may need reform to ensure a scrupulously level playing field for all political contenders.
Moreover, dramatic levels of criminal violence in Mexico, Central America, Venezuela and some Caribbean island states have heightened public concern not only over personal safety but over the capacity of organized crime to challenge the institutional power of the state. As a result, there is already an increasing diversity of policy responses to criminal violence and organized crime. Mexico’s new administration has reconsidered confrontational tactics against organized crime. Colombia, Guatemala and Uruguay have raised questions on the global consensus on drug policy and called for greater attention to the possibility of decriminalizing some narcotics. El Salvador has experimented with fostering a truce among its highly violent gangs, raising the possibility that governments may facilitate agreements among criminals to reduce conflict, in spite of the impact this may have on the rule of law. The lack of success of many existing counternarcotic and anti-organized crime efforts in the region will only prompt further experimentation by governments, with uncertain outcomes.
Finally, the region enters into this electoral cycle increasingly divided geopolitically, with the members of the Pacific Alliance (Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico) deepening their commitment to free trade, free markets and a fluent relationship with the U.S., while the large members of Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela) remain committed to protectionism and to a more adversarial relationship with the U.S.
To summarize, the region is at a decisive juncture. For better or worse, in the next decade we will witness the emergence of a very different Latin America than the Latin America we saw in the previous one."
Click below for this week's show:

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(Babalu post) A “human rights council” of countries who don’t guarantee human rights!

(My new Babalu post)
They took a vote at the UN yesterday.  The results speak very loudly about the UN and their so called "human rights council".    

 According to news reports, the UK and France got less votes than Russia and China:
"In the Latin America contest, Cuba went up against Uruguay and Mexico for the two available seats. The result was Cuba 148, Mexico 135 and Uruguay 93.
Asia put up a closed slate, with four candidates running for four seats. All received well over the simple majority vote of 97 votes required – Vietnam (184), China (176), the Maldives (164) and Saudi Arabia (140). Jordan earlier pulled out of what would have been a competitive Asia contest, but still received 16 votes on Tuesday – presumably from democracies troubled by the lack of choice and nature of regimes on the slate.
In Africa, five countries went up for four seats, with South Africa (169), Algeria (164), Morocco (163) and Namibia (150) successful, and South Sudan (89) not.
The last two groups also offered closed slates, with France (174) and Britain (171) taking the two Western seats and Macedonia (177) and Russia (176) the two Eastern European ones."
The UK and France are allies and democratic countries.  We can not say that about the others countries who got more votes!
Yes, this is a very sad day for human rights!
P.S. Here is my chat with Marc Masferrer about Cuba and the UN:



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