Call it a case of political paranoia.This past weekend a 10K race was held in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. Participants were provided with t-shirts handed out by the event’s sponsor though one of the runners- an opposition figure- was upset that the clothes were colored red. Since President Hugo Chavez “has adopted red as a main symbol of his movement”, former Caracas mayor Leopoldo Lopez was not a happy camper.
Cue the controversy:
"The color red in Venezuela is loaded with political symbolism and shouldn't be a part of a sporting event like this," said Lopez, who went to his internet Twitter page to issue more disgruntled remarks about the shirts.What do you think?
Uberto Brunicardi, marketing manager for Nike in Venezuela and an organizer of the race, dismissed any allegations that Nike chose the color red with any politics in mind.
After all, he points out that the race shirts were yellow one year, blue the next and orange after that. For this year, he said Nike had mass-produced hundreds of thousands of the red-colored shirts for its worldwide Human Race held last month in cities all around the world, and they simply decided to use the same shirts for Caracas.
"For us, red is just another color," Brunicardi said.
Image- BBC News
Online Sources- Wall Street Journal
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How Hugo Chavez has driven Venezuela into Misery, Poverty and the Most Ridiculous Socialism - Report from Newsweek Magazine
Newsweek Magazine
Atención Deficit
Hugo Chávez looks like he's preparing for war with Colombia. Don't be fooled: he's just wagging the dog.
Newsweek Web Exclusive
By Mac Margolis
November 11, 2009
Atención Deficit - Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/id/222301/page/1
Some excerpts :
Instead of steering his country into combat with its neighbor, Chávez is simply wagging the dog: his popularity is plummeting precipitously, and this is little more than an act of political desperation.
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But, despite Chávez's new cache of Russian tanks and fighter jets ("How can he maintain an Army if he can't maintain the economy?" former Brazilian Navy minister Mário Cesar Flores told me recently), conflict is unlikely because this isn't so much an international standoff as it is a a domestic political crisis. Chávez—whose country has been hit by economic shortages, blackouts, and water rationing—is pressed to the wall, and analysts are starting to talk not of a shooting war, but of a poor man's cold war.
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The animating problem here is Venezuela's growing crisis. The steady erosion of the Venezuelan economy has turned his 21st-century socialism into a tropical version of 20th-century communism. Food shortages, power failures, spiraling prices, and speeches are the hallmark of the Bolivarian republic. Inflation is rising at 29 percent a year, the highest in the region.
The power failures are particularly glaring. Wedged between the Andes, the Amazon rainforest, and the Caribbean, and swimming in crude oil, Venezuela ought to be an energy powerhouse. It boasts one of the largest hydroelectric power matrixes in the world. But it has been plagued by electrical failures, including a half dozen nationwide blackouts since 2007. Now homes in some rural areas are dark for four hours a day, and steel mills have had to get by with reduced electricity and water.
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Worse, the infrastructure failures have come as Chávez has tightened state control over the Venezuelan economy by seizing private energy and utility companies in the name of the Boliviarian cause.
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Eggs and milk are hard to find. The government is scrambling to replace medicine imported from Colombia. Despite vast domestic stores of natural gas, Venezuela must pipe in gas from Colombia because it lacks infrastructure and cash to mine its own reserves.
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The droughts that drained the reservoirs of hydroelectric plants—and provoking rolling blackouts in homes and factories—recently led Chávez to scold Venezuelan "elites" for such indulgences as air conditioning, switching on the lights in the bathroom, and loitering in the shower. "Some people sing in the shower for half an hour," he reportedly admonished his ministers at a cabinet meeting. "What kind of communism is that?" He went on to order his compatriots to limit bathing to three minutes, and even appeared on national television to demonstrate how to bathe with a gourd, giving cartoonists and comedians a windfall. No wonder there's been a run on water-storage tanks and electrical generators in Caracas.
The Future of Foreign Policies :
Prophesizing.com
Vicente Duque
Point taken Vicente and that article is definitely an interesting read. But what does it have to do directly with this post?
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