Part 2

No industry has been harder hit by the flight of talent than Venezuela's oil sector. A decade ago, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) ranked as one of the top five energy companies in the world. Everything changed under Chávez, who named a Marxist university professor with no experience in the industry to head the company. PDVSA's top staff immediately went on strike and paralyzed the country. Chávez responded by firing 22,000 people practically overnight, including the country's leading oil experts. As many as 4,000 of PDVSA's elite staff are now working overseas. "The company is a shambles," says Gustavo Coronel, a former member of the PDVSA board, who now works in the Washington D.C. as an oil consultant. Up until 2003, researchers at the company's Center for Technological research and Development generated 20 to 30 patents a year. Last year it produced none, even though its staff has doubled. PDVSA produced 3.2 million barrels of crude oil a day when Chávez took control. Now it pumps 2.4 milion, according to independent estimates.

The decline has spread across Venezuelan society, heightened by cronyism, corruption and censorship. In May, on the pretext that scientists were pursuing "obscure" research projects such as "whether there is life on Venus," Chávez began to slash budgets at the university science centers, where the country's cutting edge public health research was carried out. Instead he poured petrodollars into official "misiones cientificas" (scientific missions), where the purse strings are controlled by Chávez allies. Now the country's most respected research institutes are falling behind. Earlier this year, Jaime Requena. a Cambridge University trained biologist at the Institute of Advanced Studies, was forced into retirement and stripped of his pension after publishing a paper charging that scientific research in Venezuela was "at a 30-year low." The number of papers published by Venezuelans in international scientific journals fell from 958 to 831, a 15 percent drop in just the last three years. At aged 62, with an aging mother, Requena has few options. "It's not easy to get another job at my age. I would leave Venezuela if I could. My friends and colleagues all have."

An estimated 9,000 Venezuelan scientists are currently living in the U.S. - compared to 6,000 employed in Venezuela. One of the victims is an internationally acclaimed life sciences expert, who quit his job as chief of a major research laboratory in Caracas to try his luck in the U.S. in 2002, but always nursed hopes of returning. "I sent the government a number of proposals and they never got back to me," he says asking not to be named for fear of reprisals against his relatives in Venezuela. "Now it's all about politics. If you are not with Chávez you will never get grants. You will be persecuted. This is a war on merit." Venezuelan medical science, he said, is groping in the dark. "The last epidemiological report Venezuela published was in 2005," he says. "We don't even know what diseases we have and whether they are increasing or decreasing. This is the Cuban model, of keeping people in the dark."

The Bolivarian diaspora seems to be getting worse. Though census data is patchy, Latin American analysts say that outmigration from Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador has created sizeable enclaves in the U.S., Spain, Colombia and Central America. Panama City glistens with new buildings built by moneyed Venezuelan expatriates, who number some 15,000, up from a few thousand at the beginning of the decade. So many Venezuelans have flocked to Weston, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, locals call it Westonzuela. There is hardly a middle class family in Venezuela without a son or daughter abroad," says Fernando Rodríguez, a columnist for the anti Chávez newspaper Tal Cual. In fact, far more people from the Bolivarian countries might be emigrating if it weren't for the global recession and rising hostility to outsiders, Venezuelan emigrants do not qualify as political refugees and enjoy no special advantage in the fierce competition for the 400,000 H1B work visas issued yearly by the U.S. for highly skilled migrants, three quarters of which go to Indians, who have an edge because they can speak English. "One reason we are not seeing more dislocation from these countries is that many people have no place to go," says Alejandro Portes, a sociologist who studies global migration at Princeton University.

Latin America has seen this before. Virtually the entire Cuban middle class fled to the U.S. after Fidel Castro's revolution, turning Miami into a business hub for Latin America while Havana moldered. The Cold War, stagflation, serial debt crises and massive unemployment drove the brain drain through the 1980s, Latin America's lost decade, especially in Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Peru and throughout Central America. By the early 2000s, some of the countries convulsed by dictatorship or guerrilla insurgency, such as Chile and Peru, had managed to reverse course, making their societies prosperous and safe. But other countries have struggled to bring their expatriates home. In the 1980s and 1990s, Colombia had become synonymous with cocaine, violent crime and guerrilla warfare, all of which drove some four million Colombians from their homes. Targeted by kidnappers and political thugs, tens of thousands of middle class professionals left the country. In 2002 Pres. Álvaro Uribe declared war on drugs and crime, and now onetime bandit cities like Cali, Medellin and Bogota are safer than ever and have even become models for the rest of crime-ridden Latin America. Yet the brain drain has not reversed. "Either the [emigrants] have found the American dream or they are not yet convinced that it's safe to return," says Jorge Rojas, of Codhes, a Colombian thinktank that tracks refugees. "It shows how difficult it can be to recover lost talent."

For the nations of the Bolivarian Revolution, this means some dark days are likely to be ahead. Even the wealthiest nations could ill afford to lose their best and brightest, and Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have all fallen in the World Economic Forum's competitiveness index. Fitch ratings recently demoted all three countries' debt to junk status, while the World Bank placed the Bolivarian trio of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela in the bottom quarter of its ease of doing business, along with most of the African continent.

Cont.,

Part 3,

Though much has been made of how developing world migrants can mitigate underdevelopment by sending precious savings back home, remittances will not close the widening talent gap that is sapping societies of their ablest hands. "If a 20-something engineer or computer specialist leaves the country, who cares? But in ten years we'll be feeling the loss," says Rául Maestres, a human resources expert in Caracas, whose son and daughter recently left Venezuela -he to work at U.S. architecture firm, she to study advertising in Buenos Aires. "When you think about the opportunities we have lost, you could sit down and cry."

Still there may be a glimmer of revival. Ostracized at home and unwelcome abroad, expatriate communities are trying to turn distance into strength. Using the web, universities and the expatriate grapevine, foreign nationals from the populist countries are talking to each other and building ties with dissidents around the world. Back home opposition movements are making a stand, launching protest marches and candidates in a major city in each country--Guayaquil in Ecuador, Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia, Maracaibo in Venezuela. "We are putting together a web of exiles as a counterbalance to authoritarianism," says Coronel, who is tapping the diaspora for a gathering in Ecuador or Argentina in the next few months. "You could call it a kind of axis of freedom." That may sound optimistic given the stranglehold Chávez and his followers have on their countries. But given the growing numbers and brain power of Latin America's new dissidents, uniting their voices might just make a difference.

I thought it was South Africa and Iraq.

Thanx for sharing, TH...I've been studying the Bolivian situation very closely and my honest opinion the movement the article mentioned as emanating from Santa Cruz de La Sierra, the so-called Camba movement, looks to be nothing more than a reactionary right-wing movement with strong racist overtones seeking to sever the nation in two.

ciby deals the slimy race card off the bottom of the deck

Fred takes it in the brown..... Find out what brown can do for you

Go and wait in the car chill adults are talking

A sad day,


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090710/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_venezuela_media

Tex it is a sad day indeed when people like ciby an intelligent young man does not see the future coming with chill and glimmerbrain they just dont know any better and think of nutty hugo like their Daddy ....
Venezuela announces new rules affecting cable television they dont care as long as they can watch Sponge Bob and eat Big Macs


CARACAS, Venezuela – President Hugo Chavez's government is imposing new regulations on cable television while revoking the licenses of more than 200 radio stations, the top telecommunications official said Thursday.

The new regulations will soon require cable TV companies that use largely locally-produced content to comply with Venezuelan laws governing broadcasters, said Diosdado Cabello, who heads the telecommunications agency.

He said in a speech to the National Assembly that cable channels with at least 70 percent of their content produced in Venezuela would begin to be regulated by local broadcast laws, which include a measure requiring all broadcasters to carry Chavez's speeches when the president deems appropriate.

Cabello said the government also will no longer allow radio networks with more than three stations — a change that could force the breakup of various nationwide radio networks.

The moves come amid tensions over the government's previous announcement that it will revoke the licenses of 240 radio stations, and over multiple investigations into opposition-aligned television station Globovision that could lead to its closure.

Cabello, who is also Chavez's public works minister, said during a speech to the National Assembly that the new rules affecting cable television would take effect Friday following their publication in the Official Gazette.

The changes would affect Venezuelan-produced cable channels such as Radio Caracas Television, which moved to cable and satellite in 2007 after Chavez refused to renew its broadcast license.

Until now, cable and satellite channels have not been required to carry Chavez's speeches when the president takes over the airwaves in a so-called "national network" — and polls say that has helped boost such channels' audience among Venezuelans who prefer not to listen.

Cabello also warned that the government could "intervene" in cable television providers it accuses of interfering with the signals of the state TV channel Venezolana de Television and Caracas-based Telesur, a region-wide network funded by Venezuela and his allies.

"If it persists... that the volume of Telesur goes, that the signal of Venezolana de Television is interfered with, the government ... is going to intervene in those companies so that those channels' signals are never again lost," Cabello said. He did not elaborate on details of what had triggered his warning.

Evelyn Gonzalez, who leads the Venezuelan business chamber comprised of cable television companies, attributed the signal troubles to technical glitches but said "this can't be attributed to it being sabotage or anything like that." She declined to comment on the new regulations.

Cabello defended the decision to revoke the licenses of 240 radio stations — nearly 40 percent of the country's stations — because they didn't update their registration information with the National Telecommunications Commission. He also said "networks of more than three stations will not be permitted" — a change that could be a blow to at least six large, nationwide radio networks.

The government last month began a process of updating the registrations of TV and radio stations under a law regulating broadcasters, and demanded all outlets to turn in information including details on assets and ownership.

Venezuela's Radio Chamber called the move an "attack" on freedom of expression and "a direct violation of our Constitution."

Cabello said the decision is legal and the socialist government has no plans to discuss how the airwaves are divvied up with the radio chamber. "We'll go directly to the people to see the needs of the different communities," he said..........

socialism is like a gun. a gun couldnt kill a person unless a person uses it with the intent to kill. socialism is the gun in chavez hand an he is using it much in the same way castro did. most of the people that are big chavez supporters probably just got done reading the che guevara story an now want to start an andes rebellion. chavez wants to rule with an iron fist an regulate everything no matter how hard one may have worked for what they have. now for him to control the tv an radio stations is just another step toward dictatorship.