A place for life?
Once in a while, the bizarro-meter in Venezuela reaches such elevated heights, you have to catch your breath.
Case in point: this short Globovisión news item on the death of a nurse.
The nurse in question apparently saw two patients at the maternity hospital where she worked purposefully damaging an elevator. When she tried to stop them and went to Security, they beat her up.
She subsequently died from her injuries, leaving behind three children. The women who beat her up – who, mind you, had been patients at the maternity hospital for a month and a half – were released on bail.
So much flies out of this one, like for example
- What kind of sociopath beats up a nurse at a hospital?
- Why were these women tinkering with the hospital elevator?
- Why were they given probation when they clearly represent a danger to society?
- What kind of illness requires a 45-day stint … at a maternity hospital?
- If they’re sick enough to be hospitalized, how can they have the strength to beat up a nurse?
- Who paid for these ladies’ hospital bill?
Final footnote: the ladies were apparently members of a chavista Colectivo, one of the many irregular urban paramilitary groups the government has promoted under the apparently harmless guise of “social participation.”
I had to gasp at this one. The degradation, she is intense.
Caracas Chronicles 
Agree. For now, it looks like the reflection of what the country has become: a free state for malandrismo that trumps any decencia o buenas urbanidades, God forbid any one should call out on the behavior of the perraje. Their life is at risk.
LikeLike
There are now many of these women in all public hospitals around Venezuela working as “security people”. They tell doctors what to wear (even under the white coat), control patients and regulate the plundering of hospital material (I mean, are supposed to work on curbing it). They get some money from the Revolution, they are usually part of the local gangster scene.
Their presence has increased in the last few months.
LikeLike
cagá ‘e país, chico
LikeLike
Attempting to answer some fo the questions : Evidently the lady members of the Colectivo which murdered the nurse had been extended ´guest´privileges at the Maternity with right to free beds , free food and perhaps pilfering privileges . At the Hospital Universitario during the night residents and nurses must be careful not to move to floors other than those in which they are stationed to avoid being assaulted and robbed . Maybe this ´socialist´practice has extended to the Maternity as well !! Last , for the ladies giving birth in the maternity all hospital services are free of charge but at bottom all the costs are charged to us , ordinary Venezuelans who pay our taxes and have at least some notional title to the wealth that is recieved by the Government to use for the benefit of all Venezuelans .
LikeLike
What is the percentage of Venezuelans who pay taxes? (let’s not say “everyone pays taxes as the government is taking our oil and using it as it pleases: unfortunately this does not count for the vast majority of people)
I don’t know the current proportion of Venezuelans filling in a tax form. Does anyone have an idea? I’ll ask someone there.
LikeLike
IVA, to start with,
LikeLike
Everyone pays IVA.
LikeLike
Income tax.
LikeLike
Kepler, who the hel care, we have oil.
LikeLike
I do
LikeLike
Maternidad has been like this for ages, remember the woman that threw the baby out of a 7th storey window? It’s been miserable, dangerous and filthy for years, and horrible asthis is, it shouldn’t come as a surprise for anybody. As I hear, one of them was there to have her tubes tied and her surgery kept being postponed for lack of a variety of resources, not that I can fathom why they would keep a person there for that long for no reason. The other had a child there, my mother says she might have been a part of a scheme at MCP that allows mothers who live far away to stay there for however long their child needs to stay so they can visit and nurse them. The ward where those women stay, according to one of my mother’s former patients, is rife with malandras and just all around dreadful and scary.
LikeLike
pfff I though the two beasties were complaining about the malfunctioning of the elevator, not purposely trying to damage an elevator on an Hospital for the love of God.
Now it makes more sense, a pair of Chavistas malandras. That answer the rest of the questions, since they were not real patients, I mean who stays on a maternity for a month and a half and it’s not a baby and also not even Tony Soprano can beat somebody to death and be sick, hospital sick…. you cannot invent shit like this
LikeLike
A long time ago, in the 60’s and 70’s, an accountant friend of mine said that, if in addition to the major companies, everyone in Venezuela paid taxes, many problems would be avoided
LikeLike
Here I hear all the time people talking about “we Venezuelan tax payers” but I am puzzled. Do they mean Venezuela as a street in some First world country?
The vast majority of Venezuelans haven’t paid income tax since…ever.
LikeLike
For the second time, many of them pay IVA. And yes, the IVA money is supposedly going to pay for the Maternidad.
LikeLike
Funny, it’s almost as though the same points get repeated again and again as though they hadn’t just been refuted…
LikeLike
I am saying: VAT is paid USUALLY in legal shops, supermarkets, etc.
Else: most people don’t get VAT bill, whether it’s charged or not, and most buy from the black market mostly for most of their expenses. That is not the El Cafetal experience but that is what you get once you get out of it – not all the time, but most, with most of the expenses.
LikeLike
Black market pays IVA from their providers. (I think)
LikeLike
Juan, for the third time: IVA is something you perceive when you go buy a book or go to a normal restaurant in a coye-area of Caracas, Valencia, Maracaibo. IVA you perceive when you go to buy shoes in a “normal” shoe shop. And even in many of those places they ask you beforehand: con IVA o sin IVA?
Now, go to Mercal. Go to buy a cachapa not in a fancy restaurant but where most people buy it…try to see where Jorge Gregorio Rodríguez spends 90% of his money. Nada de IVA. And anyway: it does not have the same power as income tax to make people visualize from where most state money should come from.
LikeLike
Acabo de llamar a un par de personas en Carabobo. Me confirmaron lo que dije. Aquellos que trabajan en empresas legales están pendientes del IVA a cada rato, lo piden, etc. Aquellos a su lado que usualmente compran las cosas en Mercal o con los buhoneros de Los Guayos, del centro de Valencia, de la Avenida La Feria, etc, verán el IVA en pocos de los pagos que tienen que realizar.
LikeLike
Que pasa con la inflacion causada por imprimir dinero, a todas las personas les afecta en especial a los mas pobres y si te pones a analizar es un impuesto a ahorros y a sueldos fijos.
LikeLike
Imprimir dinero es una devaluación; no causa necesariamente inflación. Lo bueno de usar la impresión de dinero como impuesto es que le logra “cobrar” hasta a los narcolavadores de dinero. Es el equivalente a un flat capital tax. Los pobres, quienes son los que tienen menos capital, son los que lo sufren menos, hasta que los proveedores de bienes y servicios empiezan a compensar. De ahí que la combinación de distribución de efectivo en conjunto con impresión de dinero se convierte en una dupla poderosa para reducir la inequidad económica.
—
LikeLike
Of course income tax payers are a minority, IVA payers represent a much larger number simply because the system works that way , whatever the percentage, people who honestly pay their taxes do feel that the taxes they pay must serve a legitimate public purpose , the fact that this isnt so in one more grievance taxpayers have against this regime . But going beyond the taxes ordinary people feel that whatever the govt recieves, from whatever source should be spent judiciously and exclusively for the public good. Not to fund sectarian clienteles or feed a partisan patronage system or to support failed ideological allies with moneys they cannot raise for themselves, or putrid and corrupt regime big wigs and their friends . Some friends tell me that paying taxes in Venezuela is a crime , that a good citizen should try to evade them because of the corrupt use made of any taxes collected by the govt , and yet some feel that it is a citizens duty to pay its taxes and hope for a day when we all will have a govt that spends them well.!!
LikeLike
I frankly don’t get the “Venezuelans don’t pay taxes” stuff. Of course, many make a living on informal economy, and those don’t usually pay income tax. But anyone that holds a job in any kind of formalized corporation (and earns over the legal limit) gets his/her taxes deducted from the payroll. That includes the public sector.
LikeLike
Santiago,
Do you know how many taxes (not talking about the contribution for the seguro) the average person pays? and do you know how many work in the informal sector? Half the population does.
LikeLike