Monthly Archives: May 2010

We all but predicted Antanas Mockus would coast to victory in the Colombian election, but Colombia’s voters had another plan. Today, in the first round of voting, Colombian voters gave Uribe protegé and Chávez nemesis Juan Manuel Santos a whopping … Continue reading →

A few days ago, I wrote a piece for the Venezuelan Internet magazine Prodavinci on the importance of property rights in Venezuela’s poor barrios. (Click here if you’d like to read it, it’s in Spanish) A commenter left a link … Continue reading →

France’s L’Express news weekly publishes this chilling photo-essay stemming from a police ride-along in Petare.  [Hat tip: EE]

A while back, when I was writing about the jailing of Oswaldo Álvarez Paz, a reader who spends a lot of time in Petare wrote in to tell me that nobody in the barrios was talking about this. I’m sure … Continue reading →

Yesterday marked another insane low in the festering of Hugo  Chávez’s Revolution. In the process of slamming the opposition for supposedly rejoicing over the first quarter drop in GDP, Chávez, in effect, rejoiced over the first quarter drop in GDP.  It’s … Continue reading →

 By now you’ve seen the hair-raising numbers: Venezuelan GDP plunged 5.8%, year on year, in the first quarter. The detail that got me, though, was this: according to the Central Bank, the oil economy contracted by 5% and the the … Continue reading →

Former taxman José Vielma Mora will now be known as something other than "the only chavista who is semi-competent": a traitor to the Revolution! Here is Vielma Mora’s hilarious, totally unbelievable attempt to stake out a position as some sort … Continue reading →

The New Republic’s website has a nice article by Daniel Lansberg-Rodríguez on the tendency in Latin America to write and re-write our Constitutions, a phenomenon he cleverly calls "Wiki-constitutionalism."    We haven’t had the pleasure of Lansberg-Rodríguez acquaintance yet, but … Continue reading →

Seen this morning on the National Assembly website: tons of information about the governing PSUV party, not much on the institution itself or the work they claim to do. The use of government resources to promote their partisan agenda is … Continue reading →

If the extraordinary allegations in this documentary book pan out, we’re through the looking glass here. El Palestino comes out on Tuesday. The journo who wrote it, Antonio Salas, seems bona fide. He spent six years working on it, and he’s … Continue reading →

Like "neoliberalism", speculation is a concept people feel comfortable decrying before they’ve quite understood it. Used by government and opposition alike as a term of abuse, the whole notion that speculation plays a constructive – indeed vital – role in … Continue reading →

Chavista svengali José Vicente Rangel puts on quite a performance: "The government has not stopped and will not stop trying to establish a dialogue with the opposition on the future of the country." 

With the election season upon us, Hugo Chávez is going to try to convince voters that he is not the fire-breathing socialist leviathan that we’ve come to know, but rather a meek social democrat wishing to make society simply more … Continue reading →

An anonymous reader points out an interesting paradox. Instead of rehashing it, I’ll just reproduce her point verbatim: "I know you’ve already gone on at great length about the Fat Man’s slender grasp of basic economics. But I don’t think … Continue reading →

To the list of unfair practices that could conspire to keep a chavista minority in the country as a chavista majority in the National Assembly, add this one: while Venezuela’s six most urban states contain 52% of the voters, they … Continue reading →