Talking about the ongoing clusterflock in Venezuela’s power outage.

For some reason, an old Venezuela saying popped in my head.

“No quiero que me den, quiero que me pongan donde haya.”

Roughly translated means “I do not want them to give me, I want them to put me where I can get it myself” and the “it” is money. Basically, elected politicians would place people who worked for them in a campaign or did “favors” in public office where they could not only get well remunerated by the government in a legal way, but could dip their fingers in the till or demand bribes to outsiders wanting to do business with their office.  Depending on the level of help, these positions would  run from 2 and a half years to the full five of the presidency back then prior to Chavez.

But it was El Comandante who elevated this practice to an art form. The positions were basically shielded from prosecution or even investigation, they would control the office purse and approval of external contracts plus the very generous salary, but would only last a year.  The reason was to give somebody else a chance to line his/her pockets with the good petro-money.  That is how you saw people who were literally living in shanty towns in a tin roofed shack buying luxury condos in Miami’s beach front. There is this guy who was a teacher, broke as hell and driving a Chevette who now is living in a yacht after a couple of stints as Education Minister.

Basically nobody gave a crap about the country other than doing some basic decoration work to say they were doing something. The time they had was short and the priority was to steal as much as you could. Money for maintenance of dams and electrical grids? I would be surprised if 10% of the allotted money actually went to do work.

So in response to Angus, a crapload of people would have to stand in front of a wall and face the AKs. Five years’ worth of no-good stealing bastards.