In the last month, people close to me in Venezuela have suffered the following incidents:
– Armed robbery involving a Blackberry.
– Attempted vehicle theft, followed by a confrontation with knives.
– Armed robbery of a car and personal belongings (wallet, cell phones, documents, etc.)
– Express kidnapping lasting only 3 days, with release following payment of 100 to 400 million Bs. This was properly reported to the police, and the kidnappers tortured the victim upon discovery (how did they find out?).
Then, one has to read @RaulAular arguing that we must “recover the territory,” stating that we need to invest our wealth in Venezuela, and blaming the “elite” for the future of the country and the actions that must be taken accordingly—basically burying their money in Venezuela so that chavistas or common criminals can come to expropriate, rob, kill, rape, or kidnap at will… All of this, in Raul’s opinion, disregards the regime’s actions.
Then one has to read about a certain Juan Carlos Sosa Azpurua running for president while complaining about the absolute lack of transparency from the CNE…
It’s also hard to ignore the empty, hypocritical “lovefest” of the opposition politicians, pretending to live in “democracy” and already counting the positions, and the cash, they supposedly will obtain in the upcoming “elections”…
Venezuela, as a nation occupying a geographical space, does not exist in the physical realm. Venezuela is a utopia. What exists now doesn’t truly call itself Venezuela. A more appropriate definition would be “apache territory,” “Hugo Chávez’s Anarchic Estate,” “Kingdom of Hugo I,” “federative state of the leaders from Cubazuela,” “21st-century kleptocracy,” “federal territory of Fidel Castro, FARC, and Co.”… And those who live there are, without exception, at the mercy of the elements. Note that it’s not at the mercy of the law, understood as a collection of rules and legislation that courts and justice system bodies are supposed to implement as in rule-of-law states. The law that prevails is that of the revolver, the club, the persecution, that of the caudillo, whether that be a president or a neighborhood crook. There is no other. But, as they say when one calls to ask how things are, “nothing happens here…”