Breaking news... Chávez had arepa for dinner last night!
With avocado. And some other stuff.
MORE SOON.
Thursday 28 January 2010
¡Tas ponchao!
So, it's a dreary day and Sr. Chávez is currently on all the channels (again!) so it seems like it's blog times!
Sunday night was the final of the baseball... something or other. Anyway, the two teams in Caracas (Magallanes and Leones) (oh, probably - I have the same interest in sport here as back home!)... I'll start that sentence again. The two teams in Caracas were having some sort of final. Some sort of baseball final. We went over to a cousin's apartment a while after the protests started, and it was great to hear all night people banging pans and shouting and hooting car horns, from high above. (Great in the circumstances - free speech would be greater.)
¡Tas ponchao! has become an unofficial slogan of the anti-Chávez movement - it means 'you're out!' in baseball. And the three strikes are: luz, agua, inseguridad.
Luz - light - in some states, the power is cut every night for a couple of hours. When we were in Merida, it was about 7pm every night - just when it gets dark. Government workers are only working mornings.
Agua - water - this is rationed, especially in the north. Caracas, for example, has the water switched off two days a week (ish). It's not the whole city at once - where I'm staying, it's Tuesday and Friday, other areas have other days. Although sometimes they switch it off anyway, or forget to switch it back on.
Inseguridad - crime is high, there's corruption, most of the police don't police. Political dissent is difficult. And now they've lost RCTV - the voice of the opposition.
(It's interesting to note that you can still see RCTV in other countries around here. Just not in Venezuela, where it broadcasts from!)
They weren't showing shots of the crowd at the game - someone said the channels weren't allowed to, in case there were protesters in the crowd - but you could see people wearing RCTV shirts and some students managed to get behind where the batter stands (this is where it would be useful to know any sports vocabulary at all) with a banner saying 'Chávez - Tas Ponchao.' They couldn't really avoid broadcasting that, and it was quite heart-warming. A little while later, the National Guard escorted them all away (although they held the banner up all the way out!), which was less heart-warming.
This week, the students in Caracas have been protesting. They've been avoiding the police/guards, I think, but have managed to make themselves heard. And so: Chávez, ruminating to himself on national TV for hours and hours. I think it's the 'if you can't see it, it didn't happen' approach. He's doing a speech; there's definitely not a protest going on right now and the students definitely aren't avoiding violence but moving in massive numbers, definitely not. No, no, no.
Sunday night was the final of the baseball... something or other. Anyway, the two teams in Caracas (Magallanes and Leones) (oh, probably - I have the same interest in sport here as back home!)... I'll start that sentence again. The two teams in Caracas were having some sort of final. Some sort of baseball final. We went over to a cousin's apartment a while after the protests started, and it was great to hear all night people banging pans and shouting and hooting car horns, from high above. (Great in the circumstances - free speech would be greater.)
¡Tas ponchao! has become an unofficial slogan of the anti-Chávez movement - it means 'you're out!' in baseball. And the three strikes are: luz, agua, inseguridad.
Luz - light - in some states, the power is cut every night for a couple of hours. When we were in Merida, it was about 7pm every night - just when it gets dark. Government workers are only working mornings.
Agua - water - this is rationed, especially in the north. Caracas, for example, has the water switched off two days a week (ish). It's not the whole city at once - where I'm staying, it's Tuesday and Friday, other areas have other days. Although sometimes they switch it off anyway, or forget to switch it back on.
Inseguridad - crime is high, there's corruption, most of the police don't police. Political dissent is difficult. And now they've lost RCTV - the voice of the opposition.
(It's interesting to note that you can still see RCTV in other countries around here. Just not in Venezuela, where it broadcasts from!)
They weren't showing shots of the crowd at the game - someone said the channels weren't allowed to, in case there were protesters in the crowd - but you could see people wearing RCTV shirts and some students managed to get behind where the batter stands (this is where it would be useful to know any sports vocabulary at all) with a banner saying 'Chávez - Tas Ponchao.' They couldn't really avoid broadcasting that, and it was quite heart-warming. A little while later, the National Guard escorted them all away (although they held the banner up all the way out!), which was less heart-warming.
This week, the students in Caracas have been protesting. They've been avoiding the police/guards, I think, but have managed to make themselves heard. And so: Chávez, ruminating to himself on national TV for hours and hours. I think it's the 'if you can't see it, it didn't happen' approach. He's doing a speech; there's definitely not a protest going on right now and the students definitely aren't avoiding violence but moving in massive numbers, definitely not. No, no, no.
Sunday 24 January 2010
Un cacerolazo
The first thing to post about then:
outside the window right now is a cacerolazo which is a sort of impromptu protest where you grab a pan (una cacerola) and keep hitting it. And then when you hear the noise, if you agree with the protest, you pick up a pan and hit it too. It can go on for up to an hour, I think. And cars driving past honk their horns (and nearby dogs will start barking, as well. There are a lot of dogs on this street so this is a FACT.) And I can hear shouting and crowds, I think.
It's started because the government just now took the only major (I think) Venezuelan anti-Chavez/critical of government channel remaining - RCTV - off the air. They'd been stopped transmitting as a public television channel previously (the government refused to renew their license to keep transmitting), but then they moved to cable. Last month, there was a new regulation created that said that all channels must broadcast Chavez's speeches ('government programming') on cable (alongside what we would call terrestrial TV). There was a rally and a speech by Chavez yesterday morning, which RCTV didn't broadcast - and neither did many local stations. (I'm guessing it doesn't apply to overseas channels, only Venezuelan broadcasters - Fox didn't show the speech either!)
It's interesting because these are private channels - paid for by subscription, advertising and donations - whereas these rules have previously only applied to national TV. I say interesting - I possibly mean disturbing, or worrying, or very-much-removing-of-free-speech-ing. (I can't really think of the correct word for that last one. Dictatorial?)
And also at the same time I was told that hundreds of workers from Exito - which was a French/Colombian-owned supermarket taken over by the government last week for 'price-fixing' - were also protesting.
(I say 'price-fixing' because the Bolivar was devalued around the same time so it's really difficult to know what prices are, what they should be, and what they're worth. How anyone would know if they were price fixing is beyond me. There's now three different exchange rates from dollar to Bolivar!)
More about RCTV here and here.
More about Exito here.
It's strange to be here whilst this is going on, and know that I can go back to the UK in a couple of months and not have to deal with it in every day life. And it's also interesting to see how quickly news of protest spreads and how quickly people mobilise, even though the government won't be listening.
outside the window right now is a cacerolazo which is a sort of impromptu protest where you grab a pan (una cacerola) and keep hitting it. And then when you hear the noise, if you agree with the protest, you pick up a pan and hit it too. It can go on for up to an hour, I think. And cars driving past honk their horns (and nearby dogs will start barking, as well. There are a lot of dogs on this street so this is a FACT.) And I can hear shouting and crowds, I think.
It's started because the government just now took the only major (I think) Venezuelan anti-Chavez/critical of government channel remaining - RCTV - off the air. They'd been stopped transmitting as a public television channel previously (the government refused to renew their license to keep transmitting), but then they moved to cable. Last month, there was a new regulation created that said that all channels must broadcast Chavez's speeches ('government programming') on cable (alongside what we would call terrestrial TV). There was a rally and a speech by Chavez yesterday morning, which RCTV didn't broadcast - and neither did many local stations. (I'm guessing it doesn't apply to overseas channels, only Venezuelan broadcasters - Fox didn't show the speech either!)
It's interesting because these are private channels - paid for by subscription, advertising and donations - whereas these rules have previously only applied to national TV. I say interesting - I possibly mean disturbing, or worrying, or very-much-removing-of-free-speech-ing. (I can't really think of the correct word for that last one. Dictatorial?)
And also at the same time I was told that hundreds of workers from Exito - which was a French/Colombian-owned supermarket taken over by the government last week for 'price-fixing' - were also protesting.
(I say 'price-fixing' because the Bolivar was devalued around the same time so it's really difficult to know what prices are, what they should be, and what they're worth. How anyone would know if they were price fixing is beyond me. There's now three different exchange rates from dollar to Bolivar!)
More about RCTV here and here.
More about Exito here.
It's strange to be here whilst this is going on, and know that I can go back to the UK in a couple of months and not have to deal with it in every day life. And it's also interesting to see how quickly news of protest spreads and how quickly people mobilise, even though the government won't be listening.
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