Election time

With less than a month to go until the elections to the National Assembly, the politicians are pulling out the big guns.... or big boobs in fact... In Valencia, the nearest city to where I am, one of the candidates is holding a raffle to raise funds for his campaign. The prize?? A boob job of course. The article I read didn't make it clear whether the winner had to claim the prize themselves or could elect a friend or relative to receive the privilege of going under the knife. If not then I would imagine that the raffle would be a bit of a failure... I mean, it's unlikely many men would enter, and given than a large percentage of women will already have had their boobs operated, the pool of unoperated ladies is rather small...

The other clear sign that the election is up and coming was the governments decision to ban print media from publishing "violent images", after a number of national papers published a gruesome image of a morgue in Caracas, with bodies piled up on trolleys and laid out on the floor. It was indeed a striking image, and I have to say, that Venezuelans do love a gory spectacle, (for example, when I used to get the bus from Maracay to Caracas, if we passed a crash the people would crowd to the window on that side of the bus to take photos on their mobile phones) and personally I don't think that the newspapers should pander to this voyeuristic desire to see other people's pain. However, ever one to favour freedom of the press, I am not in favour of the government's desire to dictate what the papers can and cannot publish. And more to the point, protecting children from violent images does not address the fact that everyday they are subject to violent acts and images all around them in their lives. Last week, one family friend was killed because someone tried to grab her bag and she fell in front of a lorry. Neither the theif nor the lorry driver stopped. The previous day another family friend had been followed coming out of the bank, on foot and then on motorbike, and when he arrived at his home was robbed and lost the considerable sum of money that he had withdrawn from the bank (equivalent to 5 months minimum wage). And this is just people known to our family. And these are not even shocking events anymore. There is no hope of justice. Nothing will be done to find the perpertrators of these crimes. Venezuelans will become more and more scared to go out of their house, or more and more resigned to the possibility of losing their money, their possessions and ultimately their lives.

The Economist wrote about the government's decision to ban violent images and in the comments section, amongst all the people who argue with national statistics and political arguments, was a comment from a young Venezuelan that gave me goose pimples to read. It gave his personal experience and summed up the glum resignation to the situation here that so many people feel:

"all the comments are about the whole picture, i´ll talk about my pov, the people i kno, the murders i´ve been touched by...about the "chavez Generation" kids who had lived their childhood and teen years in the past decade (like me), i´ve known at least 3 teens killed by people their own age (one time i even knew the killer)...i´ve been robbed two times by people my own age, i´ve had friends of friends been kidnapped, insanely killed or involved in unfair attacks, the kind of attack that is the result of hate and resentment, all of my friends have seen a gun at least once pointing at them just to take away their cell phones and nothing ever happens, here you just say "thank god they didn´t kill me" we don´t even complain any more, we don´t ask for help anymore..."