Category: Miguel Henrique Otero

The document notes five “external channels of transmission:” decrease in economic activities of commercial partners, fall in prices of basic products (the example of oil is the most visible of all), disruption of supply chains, drop in the tourism industry (which is also, for countries like France, Italy, Spain, and England, extremely costly), and the growth of “risk aversion and worsening of worldwide financial conditions.”

It adds a fundamental issue: that the sectors most affected by social distancing and quarantine, those that depend on contacts between persons, like commerce, transport, and services of a distinct nature — generate 64% of formal employment.

Issues like the limited levels of Internet access, the precariousness of healthcare systems, the multiple failures of educational systems, the disproportionate percentages of informal employment, the extensive sectors of the population who live in poverty and extreme poverty, the high levels of social vulnerability, and many others, are elements that form a scenario of vulnerability, for the possible damage that COVID-19 could cause (only alleviated by the fact that the majority of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean is made up of children and young people), as well as for the negative economic and social effects.

But if this is the menacing prospective that the study of trends produces for the region, it is valid to ask, for the state of things in Venezuela — now only comparable, according to experts’ criteria, to the historic situation of misery in Haiti — as well as the available resources of the country destroyed by Chávez and Maduro, what to do to confront a pandemic that has been capable of putting in jeopardy the best healthcare systems in the world, like those of Spain, the United Kingdom, and some regions of the United States.

The results of the National Survey of the Impact of COVID-19, done by the National Commission of Health Experts to Confront the Coronavirus Pandemic, created by the interim president, Juan Guaidó, are terrifying. Simply terrifying.

I note several figures which report on the reality suffered by millions of families all throughout Venezuelan territory: 87.7% do not receive reliable electricity service, but rather the opposite with frequent failures, surges and drops and powers. Something else: almost 3% of the population receives no electricity service.

Almost 18% of homes are victims of what, right now, is much more than a failure of service: it can be considered a crime against life. I refer to the lack, for prolonged periods of time, of potable water, the most essential of resources necessary for combating contagions. But there is more: another 75.1% receive water in an irregular manner and, more importantly, water of low quality.

And what to say of public transit, which half of the citizens absolutely lack, and the other half has access to one that is costly, negative, and irregular? What to say, at this time in Venezuelan life, on the threshold of an epidemic that can have disastrous consequences, that ours is a country without fuel, that the Latin American nation that was the paradigm for its oil industry, and that had a capacity in place to produce a million and a half barrels of fuel every day, can today barely supply fuel to less than 1% of the population, and that its refineries are almost totally paralyzed?

And I still must note an inescapable reality: the situation of the hospitals, where doctors, paramedics, and health workers are absolutely exposed, without resources to protect themselves, as defenseless as their patients, who come to the health centers that have no water, nor constant electricity, nor medical technology, nor equipment, nor supplies of any kind, nor medicine, nor gloves, nor masks, nor body protection, nothing.

If to this whole panorama we add that the Maduro regime’s only response is detaining and persecuting political leaders of the democratic opposition and journalists, for the fact of reporting and denouncing what is happening, then the scenario that could ensue in Venezuela could be simply devastating. And that, because essentially, Maduro and those who surround him are drastically accelerating it: the even greater decimation of the Venezuelan citizenry.

Editors’ note: Luis Henrique Otero is director of the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional.

Translated by: Sheilagh Herrera

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The entire southern region of Venezuela, especially the Great Savannah, which has National Park status meaning that it should be especially protected, and the Venezuelan Amazon — which extends more than 450,000 square kilometers and is distributed throughout the territories of the Bolivar, Amazonas, and Delta Amacuro states — is a kind of invisible and opaque area for a wide majority of Venezuelan society. The main reason for this, among many other reasons, is the fact that it is a precarious region in many senses: its highway administration is irregular and risky, its infrastructure fledgling and ruinous, its public services nonexistent, sporadic, or simply terrible.

The main thing is that it is one of the most dangerous areas in the world, spread out in fragments. The most peripheral strip is in the care of military officials, whose primary function is to impede free circulation, preventing photojournalists, television teams, journalists, special investigators, academics, parliamentarians, NGO members, and others from entering. Their task consists of guaranteeing that the area is an unlimited field of mineral extraction, under the most brutal techniques, without taking notice of the consequences of that activity that advances without any controls.

Operating in this territory, as has already been reported, are groups of narcoterrorists from the National Liberation Army (ELN) from Colombia; gangs who practice illegal mining, supported by armed groups who operate with an arsenal of extraordinary power; and mafias composed of civilians and soldiers, who control the distribution of food, fuel, medicine, and other basic goods.

Brazilian journalists working in the media in the north of that country, who have managed to travel to some of these settlements, refer to the “overpopulation” of weapons, drug trade, brothels, illegal alcohol sales, gambling houses, and other presences, which show how violence and the groups who exercise it in a systematic way have control over almost the entire territory.

The destruction surpasses the worst expectations. Satellite images show devastated land and lakes contaminated with mercury. The arrival of the rains is a disastrous factor: it drives contaminated water toward the rivers and small sown fields. As a result of all this, traditional fishing and vegetable harvesting leads to the consumption of contaminated foods.

The river basins are being deforested, with the impact that has on the climate and the water cycle. Experts have warned that the quantity of sediment that is being deposited in the rivers will continue to cause increasingly lethal floods. The systematic destruction of the Caroni river basin will end up affecting the entire country, because its capacity to feed the Guri Dam is in decline.

The Venezuelan environmental disaster, which will not occupy the place it deserves in the agenda of the Climate Summit beginning on December 2 in Madrid, is the gravest of all Latin America, almost comparable to those of China and Russia: infected drinking water systems; accumulation of toxic waste in all the oil and mining operations of the country; unmanageable quantities of trash in the State companies; collapsed systems of waste collection; cities, towns, and small settlements eaten away by black water, rodents, and bad odors.

Of the multimillionaire operation of Arco Minero one can only say that its results are on display: the social and economic conditions of the region’s inhabitants have n improved, nor has the promise of “ecological mining” (a false statement in itself) been kept, nor has any good been generated for the Venezuelan economy. Arco Minero is the purest and most extreme expression of the savage, murderous, violent, and impoverishing extraction that is the hallmark of the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro.

Editors’ note: Miguel Henrique Otero is director of the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional.

Translated by: Sheilagh Herrera

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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

One of the theses on display was that López Obrador would have a relatively narrow margin to set a style of government, because there was a series of problems of a large scope that would obligate him to that prudence that complex realities impose.

On the list of matters that were mentioned, standing out was the turn of the foreign policy of the United States under Donald Trump, who was pressuring for urgent solutions to stop the progress of migrants coming from the Northern Triangle of Central America.

It was written that López Obrador’s most important task would be to assure the flow of economic exchanges between the two countries — and also with Canada — and he was called to put into movement an appropriate and even aggressive policy of commercial expansion toward the markets of Europe and Asia, and one of greater penetration in Latin America, which would grant him more autonomy with respect to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

To this first current of optimism were added two others. One of them rose from López Obrador’s own trajectory as a public official.

In the years in which he was the head of government of the Federal District, between 2000 and 2005, he was a moderate administrator, judicious in spending, austere in making decisions.

Thus, what could be expected is that, once installed in the National Palace, he would dedicate himself to meticulous administration, to the fight against corruption, and, urgently, to the question every day more grave of drug trafficking and the uncontrollable spreading of criminal violence.

I’m interested in stopping at that laughable statement made by that left that defines itself as democratic, which then firmly maintained that López Obrador’s references to Fidel Castro, that his reiterated leftist and nationalist exaltations, were no more than rhetorical uses for a purely electoral purpose, and that, once installed in power, pragmatic management would prevail.

In the January 2019 edition (number 208) of the magazine Letras Libres, Enrique Krauze published an extraordinary essay in which he spelled out the books that López Obrador has dedicated to Mexican history. It’s called The historian president. It is especially revealing reading because it exposes, with meticulous argumentation, how, distorting facts, López Obrador uses history for political means. In the words of Krauze himself: “politicizes history.”

Although he was never the author of any book — fortunately — one of the most persistent efforts of Hugo Chávez was that of distorting the history of Venezuela, of Latin America, and of other countries, so that it would serve his purposes and fit with his objective of perpetuating himself in power.

To the mania for Castroism and the deliberate manipulation of history, a third and profound megalomania unites Chávez and López Obrador: that of presenting themselves as milestone figures in a grand history.

While Chávez proclaimed himself as the direct continuer of the liberating work initiated by Simón Bolívar — Bolívar himself would have handed him the baton — López Obrador declares himself the genius of “the fourth revolution” inthe history of Mexico.

According to that narrative, the history of the great Spanish-speaking country of the world gathers around four moments: Independence, the liberal reforms of the 19th century, the Mexican Revolution, and the arrival of López Obrador to power.

These three coincidences are not cosmetic: they shape a like-mindedness, a common messianism that defines their modes of governing. Like Chávez in his time, López Obrador has put into circulation a discourse and practices of tolerance toward drug trafficking and the armed mafias, with the argument that the criminals are victims of capitalism.

Like Chávez, he is working to attain complete control of the electoral institution, and thus have use of a structure that allows him to remain in power for an indefinite time. Like Chávez — under direct tutorial of Cubans — he is politicizing the armed forces, proclaiming people-army unity, while he creates privileges for certain of its sectors. Like Chávez, he has taken the first steps toward establishing a communications hegemony. Like Chávez, he has centered the function of the government in a television program — in López Obrador’s case, daily.

Like Chávez, he has been gathering together around him the most extremist sectors of his party — Morena. Like Chávez, he is moving forward in the paralyzation of the economy. Like Chávez, he makes pugnacious, absurd, and provocative declarations, like, for example, the demand that he made to the king of Spain, Felipe VI, to ask forgiveness for the events of the conquest of Mexico.

Like Chávez, his declarations are full of that ambivalence between truth and lie, certain and uncertain, possible and impossible. Like Chávez, his hostility toward the independent media and the professional practice of autonomous journalism is more evident every day.

Is it perhaps still possible to doubt that Chávez and López Obrador are dancers of the same waltz?

Editors’ note: The author is director of the Venezuelan daily El Nacional.

Translated by: Sheilagh Herrera

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The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by now becoming a member of 14ymedio. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.