A visibly frail Teodoro Petkoff was awarded the Ortega y Gasset Prize yesterday. The honor is given by the Spanish newspaper El País, and it is one of our language’s most important awards for journalism. Petkoff is barred from leaving the country courtesy of a defamation lawsuit initiated by Diosdado Cabello, so he could not attend. Instead, former Spanish…
Over the last few years, Father Alejandro Moreno has established himself as an authority on the topic of Venezuela’s crime epidemic. For years, he has toiled in Venezuela’s toughest neighborhoods. This has given him an insider’s look at what makes these criminals tick. This interview of the father by the Venezuelan news outlet Contrapunto is astonishing.…
Covering the quagmire that Venezuela has become in a fair way has always been the main purpose of Caracas Chronicles. As bloggers we try to unveil to the world what’s really happening on the political, economic and social fronts, providing our humble analysis of the status quo. Yet recently it has become extremely hard to justify our arguments given…
Today, I spoke to Luz Mely Reyes, co-founder of Efecto Cocuyo. After a few technical glitches, we got down to business: a visit to Venezuela by Barack Obama’s envoy; the current status of scarcity; the shuffles in Maduro’s cabinet; and the continued hiding of the country’s economic figures. Among the highlights, Reyes told me that she thinks…
A few days ago, Bloomberg’s Anatoly Kurmanaev published a story on the black market for bullets. After reading it, one comes away with the clear impression that the military’s negligence is a big part of the story behind Venezuela’s soaring crime rates. But the saddest part is that these revelations barely caused a blip in our…
Yesterday, to commemorate “Chávez Day,” the government spent countless dollars on ads in several of the world’s newspapers. The version that came out in Canada’s The Globe and Mail contained the typo “the peoples” in its main title, a huge embarassment for the government. As if to put salt on the PR wound, today our founder Quico…
I loved Efecto Cocuyo’s via crucis through several government-owned Farmapatria drug stores. “In the Ipasme location, we read the list to the sales person and he did not even wait until hearing the entire list before blurting out: “we have nothing here. Here we only have what people do not want.” After listening to our…
This was a tough post to write. I love the work that ‘the folks at Prodavinci do, but man, their latest gimmick really rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it’s me. I dunno. Yesterday marked the first anniversary of the street protest that began a new cycle of political violence in Venezuela. To “commemorate” the date, Prodavinci invited…
(This week I am starting a new Caracas Chronicles column: the weekly Friday-afternoon-suggestion-for-a-controversial-conversation-topic-over-Sunday-lunch post. Many extended Venezuelan families get together around the lunch table on Sundays, and after the meal is done, they engage in the “sobremesa,” a sacred Venezuelan tradition where people have dessert, drink coffee, chat, gossip, and generally bitch about the government. The sobremesa is…
(Disclaimer: A few weeks ago, AD leader Henry Ramos Allup wrote a stinging op-ed claiming that some overseas bloggers were supposedly part of a “disgusting dirty war laboratory” looking to defame certain sectors of the opposition. The whole thing is demeaning – full of baseless allegations, innuendo, and even homophobic slurs. Without naming them, we all knew…
Venezuelan creativity at work. (HT: Joseph)
(The full 5,500-word leaked email in Spanish and English) As teleSUR prepares to launch an English-language satellite station in July 2015 (its 10th anniversary), there is unrest in the Caracas and Quito headquarters. Several high-level employees have been mistreated and/or expelled by the inner circle in Caracas, and disparities in wages, shift schedules and workloads are…
I loved this piece by Boris Muñoz on the evacuation of the Tower of David. Painstakingly, Boris took the time to visit the Tower and get to know its residents. He went deep into their back stories, their fears and aspirations – why, he even got to go to a wedding at the Tower! (Which begs the…
Five weeks ago, our pal Setty published a terrific article for the Columbia Journalism Review on scams and the media. Using Arevenca, the scam Venezuelan company whose president, Francisco Javier González, has allegedly been involved in several shady deals, Setty goes on to explore the role of the media in (sometimes) publicizing scams. The money quote: “The website looked fine—dozens…
This video by the young Guatemalan leader Gloria Álvarez is better than anything I’ve heard from many of our so-called leaders in quite a while. Unlike most, Ms. Álvarez takes the battle for ideas head on. Ms. Álvarez makes an impassioned plea for the use of technology to spread republican ideas and values that can…
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