Podemos | Fausta's Blog

June 20, 2016 By Fausta

Venezuela: Enter the CLAPs

Yes, siree, in the midst of the chronic, acute food shortages, Venezuelans now have to deal with the CLAPs.

The unfortunately-named CLAP, Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción (Local Committee for Supply and Production) are the latest blight inflicted by the communist regime on the Venezuelan people. According to the official TV station, the CLAPs are

una “nueva forma de organización popular encargada, junto al Ministerio de Alimentación, de la distribución casa por casa de los prodcutos [sic] regulados de primera necesidad”

[My translation: A new form of popular organization in charge, along with the Ministry of Food, of distributing, house by house, the first-need restricted products.]

Which means the regime distributes to its supporters.

Three links on the rolling disaster,

Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation

In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.

As Imports Seem To Rise In Venezuela, Everything Else Seems Negative (emphasis added)

The consequence is that as the scarcity levels have increased, higher imports are simply not felt by the population. Meanwhile, the Government remains in control of what may be or not imported, while at the same time increasing its power over distribution channels. Its latest invention, ironically called the CLAPs, are committees to distribute food to only Government sympathizers, thus creating an apartheid in which if you don’t sympathize with the Maduro administration, there will be no food for you.

Food only for chavistas, money to communists everywhere else: Venezuela Assembly probes Podemos funding from Chávez regimePablo Iglesias and other leaders asked to come to Caracas to explain €7.16 million payments from former president for advisory work

April 5, 2016 By Fausta

Venezuela: Seen in the Panama Papers

The Panama Papers show Venezuelans among Mossack Fonseca’s documents (emphasis added),

The insider files also illustrate what happened in Venezuela over the last 15 years with the enormous flow of oil money. The Panama Papers reveal that Mossack Fonseca created tailor-made corporate structures for several Venezuelan clients who wanted to conceal their presence in incorporated companies, or else sought to generate external debt through transactions with shell companies – often owned by themselves – that could later be submitted to the relevant agencies in the Venezuela of controlled exchange rates

For now, the ICIJ Power Players page only lists Jesús Villanueva and Víctor Cruz Weffer.

From the information released at the ICIJ website, it is not clear who the several clients are.

I’ll be posting more on the PP by country this week.

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In other Venezuela news,
Spain’s ABC reports that they have positive proof of Hugo Chavéz’s direct financing of Spain’s Podemos party by transferring €7million to its creator, the CEPS foundation (link in Spanish)
Chávez pagó 7 millones de euros para «crear en España fuerzas políticas bolivarianas».
El «comandante» firmó la entrega de fondos a la fundación de Iglesias, Monedero y Errejón para propiciar en nuestro país «cambios políticos afines al Gobierno bolivariano»
[Chávez paid 7 million euros for “creating in Spain a bolivarian political army”
The “comandante” assigned the funds to Iglesias, Monedero and Errejón’s foundation to bring about in our country “political changes agreeable to the bolivarian government”]

The article states the €7million was in addition to any other fees Podemos founders Iglesias, Monedero and Errejón received from Chávez, which were detailed last year in the Wall Street Journal’s article, How Hugo Chavez Helped Inspire Spain’s Far-Left Podemos Movement. For instance,

Dividing his time between Madrid and Caracas, Mr. Monedero appeared often on Venezuelan state TV. From 2006 to 2009 he was employed by Centro Miranda, a Caracas-based think tank funded by the government to advise its leaders. He toured the country to monitor Mr. Chávez’s socialist programs, touting them on Venezuelan TV as “the political path Southern Europe should follow” to shore up the welfare state.Mr. Monedero said he was paid an additional €425,000 ($482,885) for work in 2010 to help the Chávez regime and allied governments in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua develop a proposal for a single Latin American currency.

Mr. Iglesias, a former Communist who in 2012 called Venezuela “one of the healthiest democracies in the world,” established a separate tie to the regime. In 2008 he joined the board of a Madrid-based think tank, the Center of Political and Social Sciences, that lists the Venezuelan government as the source of more than 60% of its income from 2004 to 2012. Mr. Errejón joined the board in 2013.

The WSJ reported then,

Podemos officials say the party relies on crowdfunding and has never received money from CEPS.

I doubt that the revelations will alter Spain’s or Venezuela’s political landscapes (it certainly hasn’t since the publication of the 2015 WSJ article), but, as a commenter mentioned on Facebook, €7million is a lot of toilet paper.

Time capsule post: Spain, moving towards Chavismo?

January 22, 2016 By Fausta

Venezuela: Leopoldo Lopez’s wife, mother, stripped and molested

Despicable:

Venezuelan prison authorities strip-search both wife and mother of jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. Leopoldo Lopez’s wife and mother have been strip-searched on entry to a Venezuelan prison

“Yesterday in Ramo Verde they put me in a room, took away all my clothes, my bra, my sanitary towels,” she said.

“Totally naked they made me open my legs various times.

“They did the same to Leopoldo’s mother, but in the room when the children were with her. Manuela and Leopoldo Santiago saw everything.”

NTN24 interviewed them (in Spanish),