Chavezland - Not The Magic Kingdom

I had the opportunity to make a little trip to Venezuela and went very near its border with Guyana to look at a project that a big Canadian companyhas there in the jungle. They have some challenges similar to ours in Peru and some that are very different. I flew into Puerto Ordaz, and the community’s manager picked me up. We drove about five hours south of the city. I think I could write a book just about my adventure there. I had been there before, but it has changed.

A budding socialist state with a megalomaniac for a leader and a place of vast confusion, on the one hand, practically every care is on the high end of modern but there are still twenty year old Pontiacs rolling around. Lest I miss my guess, I think that a good seventy percent of the women there have undergone some sort of plastic surgery. Pretty much everything is modern but there is no sugar, chicken eggs, milk, toilet paper and apparently, even coffee is in short supply. We crossed one bridge that had collapsed and they had routed around it. The driver told me that the entire highway was in the same danger.

Anyway, we wandered down to the camp and had a look around. The property I went to see is pretty responsibly managed in terms of environment and community relations. Right next door is another gold project and it is a nightmare. They are surrounded by the worst sort of environmental abuses and indeed, right their on their land.

The boundary with Guyana is a veritable no man’s land, full of outlaws and informal miners who sluice nuggets away from the jungle and screw up the environment with mercury and just silting up the rivers. They live in tin and scrap wood shanty towns in hideous conditions that you see on the Learning Channel programs about evil miners. They merit the distinction. The streets are clogged with filthy men lugging gold pans and shovels on their backs. Prostitutes stand in ramshackle doorways, beckoning the men in. Surely drugs abound and alcohol is very in the open. Everything is red from the lateritic mud, slung by passing trucks in the rainy season. We passed one group of men burning off mercury in a spoon to reduce their find to a few gold nuggets. I asked my guide, “Are we alright here?”

“I think so…” he said. That made me feel really confident.

We stopped in other villages for me to see the company’s social programs that have been very successful. They have a good relationship with these people. Their situation is not so dire as in our projects. The mix is Creole and Indigenous with the Creole being a mix of the Indigenous, Spanish and African extractions, pretty exotic looking mixes. All are Spanish speaking as far as I could tell. Closer to Guyana, they speak more and more English.

The next two days consisted of work more related to Environmental concerns. The project lies near the Cuyuni River. It houses an area that the agency that designates this stuff has designated it a World Heritage site. As a matter of fact the mining company has partnered with the group Conservation International to study the area and preserve it.

I went down the river two hours in launches to check out the study camp and then got to tramp all over on jungle roads and check stuff out. I love the jungle and, at the risk of sounding like some lame Hollywood or Rock ‘n’ Roll do-gooder, am quite mesmerized and captivated by its beauty and majesty. It rained very little in my two days at the site and on the third it began to rain when we drove out. It rained and cleared, anywhere from flooding the road out and running red muddy rivulets to cloudless skies. We rose up out of the jungle and through the savannah and dropped back down to the River where Puerto Ordaz sits.

A dictator runs this state and he wants to replace Castro, his mentor. There can be no doubt about it. He wants to be king of South America and is in power thanks to the ridiculously poor in this land of plenty. Gas is virtually given away at their pumps but they can’t get it together enough to keep sugar stocked on their shelves.

Of late he has rattled sabers against Colombia calling Uribe a Bush puppet and putting troops along their border. He has called for the removal of the FARC from the list of terrorists. The king of Spain told him to, “Shut up,” in Chile the other day and now there are telephone ring tones with the regent of Spain saying, “¿por que no te callas?...¿por que no te callas?” (Why don’t you shut up)? Pretty funny but alarming to hear a king lose his cool that way. Chavez is also rumored to have had catholic priests killed.

The military is in your face at every turn. Traveling to the project there were no less than five checkpoints with fully armed teenage boys strutting around in brand spanking new uniforms. I say fully armed but their expensive, unworn FN-FALs did not have clips in them but still… They stop you and superciliously ask who you are and where you are headed, then wave you on. I had the distinct sense at that this thing could run off the rails badly at any point.

I once heard Chavez say that if Christ were to come now he would whip the catholic cardinals… Now, I am certainly not a fan of theirs but what a way to win friends and influence people in Latin America. His minister of the interior is a bus driver from Caracas. His latest trick has been to revalue their money calling them Bolivares Fuertes and it cost him millions of this funny money to do it. He just printed all new bills with three less zeros. Nothing else, oh, except that to see the pictures on the bills you have to hold them vertically… It has made inflation scream. The other thing is that you cannot even talk about dollars or the exchange rate. That supposedly will get you sent to jail. I had to exchange on the black market to pay for my airplane ticket. Say what you will about Castro but he can read and he has moderated with his 80 years. If the Venezuelan Secret Police get a look at this before I get out of here…I probably won’t get out of here.

There is much to love about Venezuela. Its people are handsome. Food is a lot like Colombian fare but with a little more zing to it. They have a malt based soft drink that is sweet and tasty. They have great chocolate.

Now I said that the Venezuelans are good looking and I think that is true. It must be but you cannot really tell. Unless I miss my guess, but I usually err on the side of stupid slobbering males everywhere when I say, “you really think those are fake?” I think that there are vast numbers of boob jobs in Venezuela.

You would like to think that chest compressions can do that but you would only think that if you were a stupid slobbering male. But then the fact is that you don’t even really care… There is an impossible preponderance of nearly perfect figures, faces etc. in Venezuela. Even women in military uniforms cut a very foxy figure sort of like a butch sort of swat team swagger, but, well you get the drift.

Faces too… Droopy turkey chins, Zero. There are no Cher lips that I saw either.

Now I have been thinking a bit about this and its effect on the whole population and the breeding issues involved, natural selection and so forth. Suppose you are a natty looking young Venezuelan couple both have been doctored up to look like JaLo and Antonio Banderas. The attraction is, of course kicked off by first looks at the perfect eyes, noses, ears, lips, boobs and butts.

Now, the attraction matures and all of the rest progresses. You fall in love, get married, maybe… Months pass, and along come the little ones. Will they look like a mix of the two new faces, like you? Recalling the whole natural selection thing and the effects of DNA, rest assured they will be different and if you had more than minor tucks and snips here and there, this could be a genetic train wreck. You are set up for kids who look as bad as the post re-construction Joan Rivers or even a Michael Jackson look alike. They could have tiny flat chests, gigantic bulbous noses and Dumbo ears to the point that paternity gets called into question.