Veneconomy: Chavez' Venezuelan State of the Union -- A Banal 7 Hours and 30 Minutes

The Editors of Veneconomy express their thoughts on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez' 2008 Annual Report that took over radio and TV in a cadena that lasted 7 hours and 30 minutes after starting 3 hours late.

This Tuesday, Hugo Chávez presented his Annual Report for 2008 to the National Assembly and took the opportunity to launch, in a live nationwide networked broadcast, a long-winded speech of banalities that lasted 7 hours 30 minutes.

There are four aspects of this marathon event worth highlighting:

1) By arriving three hours late, he showed his contempt -- or at least scant
respect -- for the time of the parliamentarians, members of the other branches
of government, ambassadors, special guests, and members of his cabinet.

2) By, once again, taking over the radio and television airways for a
long period of time, he highlighted that same contempt or lack of respect for
millions of Venezuelans. Any editor could have cut the long, tiresome
presidential speech to 25 minutes without detriment to content. But, as is
common knowledge, long speeches are a trait of dictators the world over, some of
the best examples being Hitler, Mugabe, and Castro. Only great men, such as
Winston Churchill, have been aware of the value of people's time. (Churchill, as
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, after giving a 45-minute speech,
apologized to the public for speaking so long, and his excuse was that he had
not had time to prepare one that lasted 15 minutes.)

3) Another notable
aspect of this marathon was that the President repeated the habitual falsehoods,
like a scratched record. Among them was that inflation for those who buy at
Mercal is zero, a tall story that none of its users could possibly believe;
that, in four years, he has injected $25 billion into Fonden, but without
mentioning that the majority of those resources flew abroad to support causes
that have nothing to do with the Venezuelan population; that, between 2009 and
2013, he would invest some $225 billion in a whole load of projects, but without
saying where the funds are to come from now that the price of Venezuelan crude
is in the region of $25 per barrel; and that his government has reduced the
number of homes in extreme poverty to 9.1% and that there are no street children
in Venezuela, when it patently obvious that neither is true.

He even lied when admitting to the mistakes of the revolution. Chávez questioned his team for lacking a “dose of creativity” when it came to informing the country about the government's works and programs, despite the fact that the government has practically the monopoly of television stations and control over a huge number of other media; yet everyone agrees that the only area where the government is effective is propaganda. And last of all, the most outstanding aspect of this long-winded annual speech was what was omitted: the President said not a word about the issue that most worries the population, the total lack of security and the high crime rate. He also lost a golden opportunity to explain to people the extent of the economic crisis into which the country is plunged and the measures he is planning to take so that the effects of that crisis will hit them less hard.