Age of disaster.
The blackouts last for hours, the water service is gone for weeks, and the internet connection is as intermittent and unreliable as the telephonic lines.
For years there was an enormous shortage of cash and the electronic and telephonic platforms of the banks aren't very reliable. The public transport and the subway are always in the brink of collapse. In the past year the combination of lack of cash and public of transportation make many people quit his jobs or his classes. The simpler tasks became unbearable tortures.
An enormous amount of products and brands have disappeared of the supermarkets. The deposits of the morgue are full of cadavers, the hospitals are desperately short of medicines and basic supplies. Is not false that the number of people begging for money in the streets, eating from the garbage can or exchanging sexual services for food is increasing.
Today's Venezuela could be symbolized with so many images: a malfunctioning rusted machine, a caged animal left alone to sore, hunger and rot, a deserted city full of garbage.
But those would be just metaphors. Bad metaphors.
So many are the signs and images of this disaster, so strong they are that we don't need those supplementary images: ¿is not enough with the clean waters of the Pao Cachinche river corrupted by the blacks and putrid for the Lake of Valencia, the banks of the Caroni river deforested and liquefied until what was forest become mud and dirt, the brown shitty water that comes out from the taps?.
¿Is not enough with the inmates rotten in the dungeons of the municipal police –without a hearing, and habeas corpus, water or even food- with all those who search in the garbage for food?
Those are the first signs. Signs of contamination, of rottenness.
There are another ones: of need and neglect. The plastic and paper bags that are impossible to find, the empty spaces in the supermarket, the closed factories and stores, the malfunctioning ATM´s, the home appliances damaged by the blackouts, the endless public bathrooms closed because de lack of running water, the untraceable or unaffordable medicines, the desperate waits for an electronic transfer of money, the people murdered by criminals, the people murdered by policeman, the millions of emigrants that will never come back, the emaciated body of the governed ones.
But we don´t lack of signs of plenitude. The billions dollars that flight of the country, the mansions in Spain, Florida and Dominican Republic, the price-controlled products trafficked in front of the nose of policemen an military. The endless lines to buy anything, the fat which engulf the swelled body of the governing ones, the inmates who overflow the jails, the garbage that overflows the streets.
But no sign is so vehement, as destructive as the hyperinflation, plenitude of zeros with no value at all, of money that can´t buy anything. ¿Can the apologist of the chavismo, the nostalgic left wing, understand the feelings of those who find out that buy the simplest things has become impossible?
Signs of rottenness, of need, of plenitude and also of failure. The signs and traces of failure are everywhere in the country, from Tocoma in the south to the Andes –and through the course of the Guaire river. In those places a new kind of ruin, a premature one, is the most visible result of the incomparable failure of the chavismo, of his disaster: abandoned or unconcluded projects, neglected infrastructures, nationalized factories that failed to produce anything.
In their abandonment they remind a little to the ruins of the soviet period but these ones don´t have the grandeur or glories of the past that can give them some dignifying aura, no pervasive achievement to wave as a banner: those are the inventions of the chavismo the premature ruins, the living ruins, as in PDVSA, the state owned oil company, that produces a little more of a million of barrels of oil every day, as in the oil and aluminum companies, as in anything that the Supreme Leader, with his touch of an inverse king Midas pump dry and destroy.
In Venezuela even the worst of tyrants left something of worth: roads, national unity, and infrastructure of some kind. But Hugo Chavez only left ruins, and those ruins are the most distinctive sings of the past of Hugo Chávez on this earth. They scream that the caudillo, the Eternal, the avatar of Bolivar-Crist, passed over there, that made a cheesy and sentimental TV show, that lie to himself and to others speaking of the big achievements of the revolution, that got drunk with the same illusions of his followers, that he assigned resources that ended in the very deep pocket of bureaucrats that are as corrupts as are useless.
Wealthless Country, Worthless rulers.
So, in a first level there is nothing complex in the Venezuelan disaster. There is a general state of decomposition caused by massive loss of wealth that was caused by a massive loss of freedom that was caused by a massive loss of forces.
First, there is a massive decapitalization that begins in the Chávez administration and continues with Maduro’s: according to Navarro and Giordani, two former minister of Chavez, at least 300 billion dollars had been embezzled between 2006 and 2015 and left the country . The dissident chavistas of Marea Socialista –Socialist Tide- put the number in 320 billion of dollars.
There is not public figures of the indebment but firms as Torino Capital estimate the debt, only in bonds and notes over 70 billions dollars . Other sources put the bilateral debt with countries like Russia and China in 39.3 billion and the total debt in 184 billion .
Just Alejandro Andrade, the one-eyed former head of the national treasury, according to the Department of Justice of the United States has documented gains for bribes of one billion dollars . With the fall of the oil prices this fantastic loss of wealth deepens, and the drop on the oil production (from 3 million barrels per day to only a million )
So, the inner works of the disaster are easy and don’t ‘require any conspiracy theory: a fantastic corruption and a crippling economic crisis left the country with very limited resources. Such decapitalization, such ruin explains the magnitude of the crisis. But is merely and effect. The loss of capital explains the crisis but is not explained itself.
The enigma would be ¿why the country allowed to be ruined? ¿and what is the chavismo that caused such loses?
Which has been lost is not merely capitals: is wealth. “Behind” the loss of wealth is a loss of force, of productive forces, and “behind” (¿or inside?) of that loss of forces there is a loss of organization, information, structure and complexity.
If Venezuela still produced the three millions barrels that had been producing for decades there would be much more resources and money for imports, investments and the ability of solicit credits, then the crisis would not be that severe. But that is not the case.
If the –always weak- industrial network of the country were, at least, in the level in which were in 2007 there would be much more supply and the scarcity and the inflation less severe. But that is not the case.
It takes wealth to produce wealth, it takes force to produce force, and freedom to produce freedom. If there are not resources to increase the oil production then there is impossible to pay debts, and import food, medicines or supplies. Is impossible to obtain credits. And so, the loss of wealth continues in a nasty and vicious circle.
That loss is not merely economic: is ontological. The loss of money and resources express a loss of many other kinds of wealth, and many kinds of forces (since wealth and force are always immanent one to another): population, forests, clean water, rain, electric power, productive forces, public transportations, knowledge…
Our hypothesis is that there is a relation between this catastrophic loss of wealth, force and freedom in Venezuela with the massive extinction of animals, the death of the bees, the global warming, the ecological disasters and the continuous state of war in some regions of the world. In an age of disasters the chavismo is nothing more than another disaster on this critical point of the anthropocene.
As for the Venezuelan disaster there are not mystery in his inner works: is a fantastic failure of stratification –in the deleuzian sense of the word. It works in a very simple way: Whatever is taken, seized, ruled or controlled by the government stop working or works in a very crooked way. Is as tragic as is comical.
Whatever is seized stop working because is corrupted and everything is seized or captured in one way or another. After the takeover it loses shape, form, information, matter, energy. The process is simple, banal: the managers and directors of anything would be put in charge not because of his merits or preparation but because of his loyalty, because their ability to produce chavismo.
They would bring with themselves more people loyal and unprepared. Whatever resources and office, institution or organization have would be sacked –because there are not comptrollers, attorneys or courts that do anything that held them accountable- the procedures legal and technical would be considered bourgeois or outdated, the maintenance, the training, the supervision would be abandoned.
If a factory is nationalized and seized by the government a new manager, usually a member of the military, would be put in charge. There would be great celebrations and a great deal of propaganda and television shows as a semiotic expression of that takeover. From then, the factory will collapse. And not only because the problems of a planned economy as delays and bureaucracy but also because the money destined to fund the factory will be stolen just like the products, and even the machinery, the tools, etc. The factory will be, by all practical purposes, dismantled or metamorphosed in a crooked business.
But this process of take over and collapse happen in all the extension of the state apparatus: a hospital, a jail, a public bank, a television station, a road, a power grid a water supply network. Even PDVSA the almighty oil company and the armed forces are prey of the corruption.
As in comics or science fiction there is an entity that assimilates and consumes everything. One could say that a virus of corruption that spreads with the chavismo. In this point even the government blames the collapse of PDVSA in former ministers of Chavez as Rafael Ramirez or in mafias or mobs. Even Maduro speaks of “red mobs” meaning mobs of chavistas. Nobody in the government claimed the innocence of Alejandro Andrade the friend of Chavez who sacked de public treasure.
In this contagion of corruption everything became a bad imitation: of a factory, of a jail, of a hospital…Not a simulacrum, not something new but a bad copy of whatever the things are supposed to be.
In fact there are mutations, becomings and metamorphosis but those are terrible and sad and inconvenient: the jail, privatized to the gangs, transforms in a concentration camp but also becomes a fief, and a business. Many things that are public became private business of the mob who controls it as the corruption performs a the facto privatization.
In the thesis of the antichavista opposition (which a natural history of the political entities could find closely related not only to the Cuban Exile or the Colombian uribismo but also to the Alt Right) there is a master plan behind the collapse: or the plan of Fidel Castro, working since the late sixties, or the plan of the Foro de Sao Paulo, since the 90’s.
But in fact there is no plan anymore. The recent history of Venezuela is that of the failure of the plan of the chavismo: to become a regional power, a super oil producer that have “food sovereignty” and would have eliminated the poverty by 2021. Plans that supposed that the beloved leader would have a “long and prosperous life” and the cost of the oil barrel would be very high. Two hundred years charging 100 dollars per barrel and some of that time obeying blindly a leader that would die in a very old age like Fidel Castro did. That was the masterplan.
It didn’t workout.
But all the projects of Hugo Chavez had collapsed before his death, and his achievements lived only in the imagination of the caudillo, the scams of his ministers and the television shows that that thrown all those fantasies over us. And when the leader died and the price of the oil plummeted the master plan of the chavismo was over in less than two years. Since then, has been trying to administer, manage or rule a continuous disaster, the void, the corruption and the mourning for all those things that never were.
