¡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.