Monthly Archives: June 2010

I’ve long had this hunch – just a hunch, really – that sooner or later, in a fit of ideological fervor, Hugo Chávez is bound to align Venezuela with North Korea. It just seems like the logical end that his … Continue reading →

Hugo Chávez has been included in Foreign Policy’s list of the world’s worst dictators. For any reasonable Venezuelan, this is just another embarrassment. For Chávez, it reads like a Facebook page: so many new friends to make! You know it’s … Continue reading →

BBC News has a video on the efforts to reduce crime in Petare. Reporter Will Grant toured with the Sucre police, and the piece is boiler-plate, a missed opportunity. Not helping to disguise the piece’s stench of journalistic tourism is … Continue reading →

It takes a moment to digest the chart Setty puts up in his latest post. Overall, the Electricity Rationing measures the government imposed in the first half of the year did basically nothing to cut down electric consumption. They annoyed everybody, … Continue reading →

Oh, admit it: you didn’t watch the whole thing either. Who would!? Chavez’s blood pressure raising hour-long tussle with the BBC’s Stephen Sackur never risked showing us anything we didn’t already know. In a long series of evasions, ad hominem attacks, … Continue reading →

By now you’ve heard the news: that bank that the half owner of Globovision runs got taken over. The bank is Banco Federal, the guy is Nelson Mezerhane and, for once, this is not what it looks like. In a society where everything … Continue reading →

It always goes like this. Every four years. I think I’m too old for it. I tell myself it’s all just a bunch of marketing and hype, anyway. But every four years, it gets me. I’m not proud of it. … Continue reading →

With just under 24 hours to go, I have one word to say to you all: Serbia.. Slovenia. Slovakia. Remember where you heard it first.

Hugo Chávez just announced the suspension of enforced blackouts across the country. The rationing scheme was triggered by Venezuela’s electricity crisis. The suspension coincides with an increase in the reservoir levels in the country’s main dams…but also just happened to … Continue reading →

Drogba, Mikel, Pirlo, Ballack and now…Quico. (Fell off my damn bike and broke my arm…and JC is on vacation! No more blogging until further notice.)

By my watch, it’s 6:23 a.m. in Caracas. The Central Bank’s new solution to all our Forex woes – the  "Transaction System with Foreign Currency Assets" (SITME) - is supposed to go into operation in just over two and a half … Continue reading →

INE’s May inflation report is out now. The headline number, 2.6% is a lot better than April’s, but still high: on an annualized basis, it’s still-climbing, and now over 30%. More politically sensitive than the headline number is the food … Continue reading →

You know how, normally, each months’ inflation figures get published on the first working day of the following month? Right. Did anybody else notice that we’re eight days into June already and the May inflation numbers still aren’t out? Sure, … Continue reading →

Setty captures the zany criminality that permeates everything about the massive Las Cristinas mine so well in this post, he makes all further comment superfluous. Added bonus: I can just about guarantee that, 10 years from now, his post is … Continue reading →

The attempts to convince Venezuelans he’s just a middle-of-the-road guy are not restricted to economics. As the fat man said yesterday, while a chavista "priest" blessed him by creepily fondling his head on TV: "Christianity and socialism can perfectly go … Continue reading →