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Meat, sugar scarce in Venezuela stores

By NATALIE OBIKO PEARSON, AP Business Writer 32 minutes ago

CARACAS, Venezuela - Meat cuts vanished from Venezuelan supermarkets this week, leaving only unsavory bits like chicken feet, while costly artificial sweeteners have increasingly replaced sugar, and many staples sell far above government-fixed prices.

President Hugo Chavez's administration blames the food supply problems on unscrupulous speculators, but industry officials say government price controls that strangle profits are responsible. Authorities on Wednesday raided a warehouse in Caracas and seized seven tons of sugar hoarded by vendors unwilling to market the inventory at the official price.

Major private supermarkets suspended sales of beef earlier this week after one chain was shut down for 48 hours for pricing meat above government-set levels, but an agreement reached with the government on Wednesday night promises to return meat to empty refrigerator shelves.

Shortages have sporadically appeared with items from milk to coffee since early 2003, when Chavez began regulating prices for 400 basic products as a way to counter inflation and protect the poor.

Yet inflation has soared to an accumulated 78 percent in the last four years in an economy awash in petrodollars, and food prices have increased particularly swiftly, creating a widening discrepancy between official prices and the true cost of getting goods to market in Venezuela.

"Shortages have increased significantly as well as violations of price controls," Central Bank director Domingo Maza Zavala told the Venezuelan broadcaster Union Radio on Thursday. "The difference between real market prices and controlled prices is very high."

Most items can still be found, but only by paying a hefty markup at grocery stores or on the black market. A glance at prices in several Caracas supermarkets this week showed milk, ground coffee, cheese and beans selling between 30 percent to 60 percent above regulated prices.

The state runs a nationwide network of subsidized food stores, but in recent months some items have become increasingly hard to find.

At a giant outdoor market held last weekend by the government to address the problems, a street vendor crushed raw sugar cane to sell juice to weary shoppers waiting in line to buy sugar.

"They say there are no shortages, but I'm not finding anything in the stores," grumbled Ana Diaz, a 70-year-old housewife who after eight hours, had managed to fill a bag with chicken, milk, vegetable oil and sugar bought at official prices. "There's a problem somewhere, and it needs to be fixed."

Gonzalo Asuaje, president of the meat processors association Afrigo, said that costs and demand have surged but in four years the government has barely raised the price of beef, which now stands at $1.82 per pound. Simply getting beef to retailers now costs $2.41 per pound without including any markup, he said.

"They want to sell it at the same price the cattle breeder gets for his cow," he said. "It's impossible."

After a meeting with government officials Wednesday, supermarkets association head Luis Rodriguez told the TV channel Globovision that beef and chicken will be available at regulated prices within two to three days. He did not say whether the government would be subsidizing sales or if negotiations on price controls would continue.

The government has urged Venezuelans to refrain from panic buying and is looking to imports to help.

Jorge Alvarado, trade secretary at the Bolivian Embassy in Caracas, told the state news agency that Venezuela's government plans to import 330 tons of Bolivian beef next week, eventually bringing that to 11,000 tons a year. It also plans to import 8,250 tons of beans, chicken, soybeans and cooking oil, Alvarado said.

Government officials dismiss any problems with price controls, while state TV has begun running tickers urging the public to "denounce the hoarders and speculators" through a toll-free phone number.

"The weight of the law will be felt, and we demand punishment," Information Minister Willian Lara said Wednesday.

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Chris Dodd's Vendetta

By Robert D. Novak

CNSNews.com Commentary

May 02, 2002

Venezuela's agony under a leftist demagogue elected by the people has enabled Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd to revive his vendetta against Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich. Dodd blames Reich for approving the 48-hour removal of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The problem is that the aborted coup was not approved by Reich or anybody in the U.S. government.

Dodd has wisecracked that Reich, in charge of Western Hemisphere affairs, lacked "adult supervision" in handling the coup while Secretary of State Colin Powell was in the Middle East. In fact, Chavez's government holds the U.S. blameless, recognizing that Reich neither encouraged nor condoned the Venezuelan president's temporary removal.

Why, then, are Dodd and his allies in Congress elevating Chavez, who as an army officer once bungled a left-wing coup himself, as a symbol of Latin American democracy? Dodd, who appears to be gearing up for an investigation of Reich's performance and is reported to be contemplating a trip to Venezuela, never seemed exercised about Chavez trampling democratic practices in trying to model himself after Fidel Castro. Nor do Reich's critics mention that Chavez's brief fall from power came after his troops opened fire on unarmed demonstrators.

Dodd may be less interested in protecting democracy in Venezuela than in settling old scores with Reich. That seems out of character for the easy-going, politically ambitious Connecticut senator. But Dodd's longtime adviser on Latin American affairs, Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer Janice O'Connell, has not forgiven Reich for his aggressive support for Nicaraguan Contras. She also sees the Cuban-born Reich as an obstacle to warm relations with Castro's Cuba.

O'Connell impresses on State Department officials that she represents the permanent government whose word must be heeded by temporary presidential appointees. When Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage went to Capitol Hill to confer with Dodd last week, O'Connell was at the senator's side.

As chairman of the Foreign Relations subcommittee dealing with the Western Hemisphere, Dodd refused even a hearing on Reich's nomination. Reich took office this year as a recess appointment to avoid the confirmation process, but President Bush plans to submit the nomination again in 2003. When a Reich supporter asked Dodd whether he would convene a hearing giving him a chance to refute charges spread by the senator's staff, Dodd replied: "Over my dead body." The Venezuelan fiasco now has generated new accusations.

I asked one senior U.S. intelligence official whether the CIA had a hand in the coup, and he replied: "I assure you that if we did, we wouldn't have made such a mess of it." While the Agency surely lacks the capability of removing hostile regimes in Iran or Guatemala as in Cold War days, neither is it capable of making the mess in Caracas. This was an amateur affair with the brief succession to president of businessman Pedro Carmona concocted by billionaire Venezuelan oil families, on the telephone from Miami.

While pro-Chavez legislators in Caracas have blamed Washington for plotting a coup, Chavez's minister of defense has denied it. "I think this is reckless," Jose Vicente Rangel said last week. Nor were reports accurate that Reich telephoned Carmona during his two-day reign. Charles Shapiro, the career diplomat newly installed as U.S. ambassador in Caracas, did call Carmona at Reich's instruction in two futile efforts to dissuade him from dissolving the National Assembly.

Last week, I interviewed two non-political eyewitnesses to the tumultuous events in Venezuela: a newspaper reporter and a police officer. They described in detail the course of events that led to Chavez's removal and restoration. There was no mention of a hidden hand from Washington.

The surest signal was the lack of uproar, outside of Havana, about Yankee intervention. The false dawn of Hugo Chavez's removal was greeted with relief in private corridors of power throughout the hemisphere -- as it was by Venezuela's people. Objective observers believe his popularity has diminished radically as he has driven down the economy.

None of this in itself will save Otto Reich. Dodd's vendetta poses a threat because of a potential stab in the back from career foreign service officers at the State Department. Reich must rely on constancy from the president and the secretary of state, who share his views and support his positions.

Link

Isn't Dodd, the foreign policy expert, running to be the Democrat candidate for President?

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New Telephone Greeting.

"GOOD MORNING, WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES"

"Press "1" if you speak English." "Press '2' to disconnect until you can .

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Leszak Kolakowski, is a Polish philosopher who was expelled from the Communist Party in 1968 for his heretical views. He makes the following insightful observation about the morality of socialism from "My Correct Views on Everything,"

Socialism as a social or moral philosophy was based on the ideal of human brotherhood, which can never be implemented by institutional means. There has never been, and ther will never be, an institutional means of making people brothers. Fraternity under compulsion is the most malignant idea devised in modern times; it is the perfect path to totaltarian tyranny.

My Correct Views on Everything

by Leszek Kolakowski

link

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"Socialism cannot survive without dictatorship" -- Uncle Earle

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Also don't forget the participation of America's most incompetent president. Another Democrat who loves dictators.

Observers Rush to Judgment

Jimmy Carter gets rolled--first by Fidel Castro, now by Hugo Chávez.

BY MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Saturday, August 21, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

When Jimmy Carter went to Cuba in 2002, Fidel Castro reveled in the photo-ops with a former U.S. president. Mr. Carter seemed to think he was heroically "engaging" the Cuban despot. But in the documentary "Dissident," celluloid captures something most Americans didn't see: Castro giggling sardonically as Mr. Carter lectures the Cuban politburo on democracy. That foreshadowed what happened when the media splash ended and the former president went home: Dissidents he went to "help" today languish in gulag punishment cells.

I was reminded this week of how Castro so artfully used Mr. Carter when Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez took a page from his Cuban mentor's playbook. On Monday, the Carter Center along with the head of the monumentally meaningless Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, endorsed Chávez's claims of victory in the Venezuelan recall referendum, rather too hastily it now seems.

The problem was that the "observers" hadn't actually observed the election results. Messrs. Carter and Gaviria were only allowed to make a "quick count"--that is, look at the tally sheets spat out by a sample of voting machines. They were not allowed to check this against ballots the machines issued to voters as confirmation that their votes were properly registered.

If there was fraud, as many Venezuelans now suspect, it could have been discovered if the ballots didn't match the computer tallies. The tallies alone were meaningless. The problem was clear by Tuesday but it didn't stop the State Department spokesman Adam Ereli from chiming in. "The people of Venezuela have spoken," he proclaimed.

Mr. Carter marveled at the huge turnout on Sunday. Venezuelans, who have been voting 2-to-1 against Chávez in opinion polls, waited in absurdly long lines to cast more meaningful votes on electronic machines. But did the machine really record the vote as registered on the paper ballot?

According to experts, it is relatively simple to tamper with encryption codes in electronic voting machines. American Enterprise Institute resident scholar John Lott says, "You can easily write a program that tells the voting machine to record something different in its memory than what it prints out on the receipt that is to be dropped in the ballot box."

To rely on the tally sheets alone, as Messrs. Carter and Gaviria did, is to abdicate the heavy responsibility an observer accepts when overseeing an election. A Venezuelan who is a former U.N. deputy high commissioner of human rights wrote of his suspicions in Wednesday's International Herald Tribune (right beside a pro-Chávez New York Times editorial, by the way). Enrique ter Horst cited as cause for concern the fact that "the papers the new machines produced . . . were not added up and compared with the final numbers these machines produce at the end of the voting process, as the voting-machine manufacturer had suggested."

An exit poll done by the prominent U.S. polling firm of Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates showed 59% of voters opposed to Chávez and only 41% in favor. (Messrs. Penn and Schoen both worked for Bill Clinton in his 1996 re-election bid.) Raj Kumar, a principal at the polling firm, told me Thursday that the firm has gone back to try to explain the 34-point spread between the PSB poll and the results announced by the government. "While there are certainly biases that can impact any exit poll, we do not see any factor that could account for such a significant difference," he said.

At 3:00 on Monday morning two members of the National Electoral Council who are politically opposed to Chávez announced that they had been shut out of the audit process and warned the public that the established protocol had been violated. Some 50 minutes later pro-Chávez Electoral Council member Francisco Carrasquero emerged alone to proclaim Chávez the winner.

There is much to question. Mr. ter Horst cites one example: "In the town of Valle de la Pascua, where papers were counted at the initiative of those manning the voting center, the "yes" vote had been cut by more than 75%, and the entire voting material was seized by the national guard shortly after the difference was established." "Yes" was a vote to remove Chávez.

There is also a reasonable accusation that the number of "yes" votes at some polling stations was "capped" by software tampering. The charge is supported by the discovery, in some locations, of two or three machines recording the exact same number of "yes" votes and substantially more "no" votes. The opposition is claiming that it has proof that this occurred at 500 polling stations. Again, if Mr. Carter and the OAS observers had demanded an open auditing process instead of blindly endorsing government claims, cheating would have been uncovered. But Chávez refused open audits and the observers went along with him.

In the desperate attempt to divert attention from observer negligence, few have been as ardent as Mr. Gaviria, who is flailing about in the waters he helped muddy. He has no idea whether there was fraud because he never conducted an audit. So now he floats the idea that the whole problem is that the PSB exit poll was flawed. Yeah, right.

The Electoral Council is now engaged in a minimal audit with Mr. Carter and the OAS. But the opposition has wisely refused to participate on the grounds that the ballot boxes and the machines have been in Chávez control since Sunday and based on what is already known, further tampering can't be ruled out. As of yet there has not been an agreement on how to conduct a fair audit.

Chávez has already said that his "victory" cannot be reversed. To underscore that point on Tuesday, a pro-Chávez gang opened fire on a group protesting that the referendum had been rigged, killing one woman and injuring others.

There is some speculation that Messrs. Carter and Gaviria threw a veil over a gross deception on the grounds that it will prevent further violence. But Americans have a right to expect a sterner approach from the administration of George W. Bush. State's endorsement of this referendum without a fair audit is a sorry betrayal of not only the Venezuelan people but American ideals. It is tantamount to yielding to terrorism. Observing Washington's supine reaction, Chávez will not hesitate to escalate his efforts to restore authoritarianism on the South American continent.

Ms. O'Grady edits the Americas column, which appears in The Wall Street Journal Fridays.