Someone is laughing at Venezuelans…

…and people in good faith who do not live in this country.

Por Caridad

HAVANA TIMES – Those who know Havana would never believe that one morning a government spokesperson would wake them up with the unusual news of the annihilation of a mercenary invasion, which tried to penetrate the country through… the Bay of Havana.

Could anyone believe it? If we add to this that the country has more than five thousand kilometers of land border, as is the case of Venezuela, the news would be, more than unheard of, clowning.

Today the news around here has resulted in the neutralization of a pair of speed boats commanded by mercenaries from Colombia (at least one of them was Venezuelan), in order to infiltrate the country and “create chaos.” “Thanks to the immediate, timely and effective action of our Bolivarian National Armed Force and the Special Actions Police Force, some were killed, and others detained,” the report said.

Then they clarified that there were 8 mercenaries. (Coincidentally 8, like the 4 Venezuelans and the 4 Cubans who arrived at Venezuelan coasts in 1967 by order of Fidel Castro). These 8 mercenaries had the momentous task of creating chaos in the country and eliminating important (government) political figures.

Chaos.

That reminds me of what Venezuela has been living for almost 10 years.

If Colombia is the country with the largest number of kilometers of land border with Venezuela, would someone from that territory think of accessing Venezuela by sea, and at a commercial and inhabited area?

I’m not going to delve into the ridiculousness of the new smokescreen, whoever wants can look for the details that will emerge on the internet. Be careful, I don’t recommend TeleSur news about it at all.

I wonder about those 8 “mercenaries” in boats; are they really drug dealers? A couple of weeks ago there was an anti-drug operation in the state of Falcón. “Well-known merchants” from the free trade zone of that state were arrested. For many inhabitants of Falcón these merchants were, openly, capos of a drug cartel. And they are not even remotely the only ones.

Government spokespeople allege that these mercenaries were under the training of Clíver Alcala, who a couple of months ago turned himself in to the justice of the US government, which had put a price on his head for his ties to drug trafficking.

Could it be a war between drug traffickers exploited as a diversion from what is really happening in Venezuela?

Another event the government could try to hide with this “invasion”, is the Guanare Massacre: Three or four days ago, the chilling butchery occurred in one of the prisons in western Venezuela. More than 100 prisoners are wounded and 50 dead, after the National Guard machine-gunned them amid negotiations for a Mutiny.
Family members allege that the riot was caused by hunger, since the prisoners weren’t receiveing the food they brought to them: instead it remained in the hands of the guards. I cannot guarantee this detail, but the dead and wounded in the photos (because there are photos) look very skinny. And there are no military deaths.

So far, the government has not spoken on the matter. The relatives of the deceased have not been handed over the bodies either.

Will the supposed mercenary attack be the news the government needs so that this other news item does not reach the international community?

I wonder, is not the slaughter in this prison also part of another smokescreen?

You will think that the fact of living a second “Special Period” crisis has loosened my screws or made my Cuban dose of paranoia go up to a thousand. But if the National Guard riddled prisoners who were not escaping, but protesting for food, it costs the government nothing to lie and say that they killed each other or something like that.

People would speak on the social networks and it wouldn’t go beyond there, since they are already used to the high levels of violence and impunity in Venezuelan prisons. The point is that, in the absence of an official statement, doubt is created among those who do not support the government.

With suspicion, people begin to dedicate time to this news, while forgetting that, at the moment, it is almost impossible for millions of Venezuelans to consume something other than rice, flour and plantains… and many don’t even have that daily. This is not only due to inflation, I already commented in my previous post: there is no gasoline for transportation.

What little there is, they distribute it among themselves or sell it to those who can pay in dollars, at higher prices than in the United States itself. And that’s the significant detail; according to various sources, the government is going to privatize the sale of gasoline and, if so, its price will be the same as at the international level.

If this is true, and if it is to happen in the coming days or weeks, it would not hurt to create one or more smokescreens, because the days of free gasoline in Venezuela are already history.
If the price of gasoline is dollarized, the price of public transportation will have to be dollarized, because “public” transportation in Venezuela is private. If the price of gasoline dollarizes, the cost of transporting food and any type of merchandise will rise.

If the price of gasoline increases… it will revive the ghost of what Venezuelans call the “Caracazo” uprising (1989) and it is the one thing that Maduro has been running away from all these years. Without Rosneft in Venezuela, and with the broke national refineries, there is no way to have a constant inflow of this coveted product that moves the world.

The privatization and dollarization of gasoline is already a fact, and what else?