Venezuela doubles oil production and gets much needed export revenue

Venezuela is estimated to have produced 800,000 barrels per day in 2021, doubling from 374,000 barrels a day in 2020.
 
The government received $11 billion in oil revenue last year, a 38% increase from the previous year. According to a forecast, revenue will grow to around $15 billion this year. The rising oil prices, consequent to the Ukraine crisis, will boost the earnings of Venezuela.

 
One key factor fueling the turnaround is the help of powerful allies. China buys the majority of Venezuela's production through middlemen. 
 
The second factor is that Iran provides the condensate the country needs to mix with its Orinoco heavy crude.

Thirdly, PDVSA, the national oil company, has overcome the exodus of big international service and maintenance companies, such as Halliburton Co., Schlumberger and Baker Hughes Co., that pulled from the country as U.S. sanctions prohibited them from drilling wells or selling, buying or transporting oil. In their place, local contractors are increasingly filling the void, quietly stepping in to do repairs and maintenance.

Venezuela has the capacity to export 3 million bpd but the country has been crippled by US sanctions and local mismanagement. The US, which has ramped up its domestic oil and gas production and exports, is quietly taking over the markets of Venezuela such as India. Last year, India became the largest market for US crude exports. In the first nine months(April-December) of 2021, the US exports to India were 11.7 billion dollars, while Venezuela's supply to India was a meagre 0.06 million, the lowest in the last twenty years. In 2012-13, Venezuela had supplied 14 billion dollars of crude to India.

The government of President Maduro has become stronger after the opposition lead by the presidential pretender Juan Guaido has lost his credibility and the failure of the US government's regime change operations. The Maduro government can feel much safer in the coming years since the US has shifted its focus of regime change to Russia

More information.. https://www.stripes.com/theaters/americas/2022-02-26/venezuela-diminished-oil-industry-mounts-unlikely-recovery-5155962.html
 

Costa Rica elections go unnoticed by the world media

There is a reason why the world media has not paid any attention to the Costa Rican elections held last Sunday for Presidency and the Congress. There was no extreme rightist or radical leftist candidates like Trump or Ortega nor was there any serious polarization, electoral fraud, outrageous fake news, controversial conspiracy claims or refusal of the verdict by the defeated. The media finds the peaceful, quiet and predictable Costa Rican elections as ‘boring’ and devoid of any juicy sensational stuff. Even the Costa Ricans showed indifference to the elections and 40% of the voters failed to show up at the polling stations.
 
Out of the 25 Presidential candidates,  Jose Maria Figueres of the National Liberation Party (PLN) got the largest number of votes with 27.3% followed by 16.7% of Rodrigo Chaves of the Party for Social Democratic Progress (PSD). Figueres is the favorite to win in the second round of elections to be held on 3 April.
 
Figueres has a degree from Harvard and has worked in the business sector both inside the country and outside. He is the son of the legendary Jose Figueres (Don Pepe) who was President three times in 1948-49, 1953-58 and 1970-74. He was the President who abolished the armed forces in 1948 and made history.

 
The Costa Rican constitution does not allow two consecutive terms for Presidency or for .  membership of the Congress. Just six of the newly elected 57 Deputies have served in the Congress before. 

In the elections for the Congress, the National Liberation party of Figueres got 27% of the votes and got 18 seats. The Social democratic party of Rodrigo Chavez came second with 14.6% and 9 seats. The rest of the seats were shared between four other parties. 
Irrespective of whoever wins the presidential elections, the country will continue with its tradition of consensual and mature governance focusing on sustainable development, renewable energy, eco-friendly tourism and peaceful coexistence with the neighbours. 
 
Costa Rica has remained as a beacon of solid and vibrant democratic stability and maturity in Latin America in the last seven decades. The country has held regular elections every four years and peaceful transfer of power in the last sixty years. This is remarkable and distinct in the contemporary history of Latin America where many countries had suffered military dictatorships, civil wars and interruption of democracies.

Costa Rica has made history in the world by having abolished its armed forces in 1948. It is a civilisational advance. The country proclaims proudly that they spend their money on education and healthcare instead of arms. Oscar Arias, the former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner said ¨ Our children walk with books under their arms rather than guns on their shoulders. We are an unarmed people, whose children have never seen a fighter or a tank or a warship. We are a people without arms and we are fighting to continue to be a people without hunger. My country is a country of teachers and peace. We discuss our successes and failures in complete freedom. We believe in dialogue, in agreement, in reaching a consensus, in convincing our opponents, not defeating them. We prefer raising the fallen to crushing them, because we believe that no one possesses the absolute truth".
 
It is true that most of the political leaders come from the small number of oligarchic families in the country, as in many other countries in the region. But the Costa Rican oligarchy is an enlightened one with a social conscience. The governments have pursued a policy of inclusive development, irrespective of whether they are conservatives or liberals. The four million citizens enjoy the benefits of a modern social welfare state including pensions, labor legislation, national health care and a life expectancy of 77. 
 
In 1869, the country became one of the first in the world to make education both free and obligatory, funded by the state’s share of the great coffee wealth. The literacy rate of over 95 percent is one of the highest in Latin America. Even the coffee growing land is distributed among 100,000 families and not monopolised by the oligarchy. Costa Rica was the first country in Central America to give voting rights to women and people of African origin in 1948. It is because of this equity in the society that there has been no revolutionary leftist outsider to challenge the status quo as it happened in some other countries in the region.
 
Costa Rica is a leader in sustainable development, clean energy and ecotourism. It was one of the first in the world which combined its ministries of energy and the environment back in the 1970s. The country generates an impressive 99 per cent of its energy from renewable sources. 
 
The Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado signed a decree in February 2019 to fully decarbonize by the year 2050. "Decarbonisation is the great task of our generation and Costa Rica must be one of the first countries in the world to accomplish it, if not the first”. He has set a goal of  zero-emission public transportation system by 2035.  This is not the personal agenda of the President Alvarado. This policy was pursued by his predecessor and there is a consensus among all the political parties of the country and continuity of policies by successive governments.
 
Costa Rica has remained as a beacon of peace, right in the middle of the Central American region which has suffered so many conflicts and civil war till the nineties and is even now continuing to face very high rates of crime and violence. 
 
I wish more countries in Latin America follow the example of the “boring” elections of Costa Rica, a small country of five million people but has a big lesson for the world.

Chinese credit to Latin America

China is the largest creditor to Latin America. Since 2005, China has provided around 134 billion dollars of credit to Latin American countries, according to the China-Latin America Finance database https://www.thedialogue.org/map_list/
 
The major recipients are as follows:
 
Venezuela 62.2 billion
Brazil          29.7 bn
Ecuador     18.4
Argentina  17.1
Bolivia.       3.4
Mexico       1
 
Of the total, 93.5 bn has gone to energy sector, 25 billion to infrastructure, mining 2.1 bn and the rest to the other sectors.
 
China Development Bank is the top lender with 97.9 bn followed by Chinese EximBank with 25 billion dollars.
 
The Chinese started with a token credit of 30 million dollars in 2005 and ramped it up to a peak of 35.7 billion in 2010. Thereafter the credit declined but went up again in in 2015 to 21.5 billion. Since 2016, the amount has come down to 6.3 bn in 2017, 2.1 bn in 2018 and 1.1 bn in 2019. There has been no new credit for the last two years 2020 and 2021. 
 

Isabel Allende’s latest novel “Violeta”

Violeta, the protagonist in the novel, is born at the time of the Spanish Flu in 1920 and dies during the Corona virus pandemic in 2020. Her final thought, “It is a strange symmetry that I was born in one pandemic and will die during another”. 
 
Allende starts the book with the Spanish Flu which “brought first a terrible chill from beyond the grave, which nothing could quell, followed by fevered shivering, a pounding headache, a blazing fire behind the eyes and in the throat, and deliriums, with terrifying hallucinations of death lurking steps away. The person’s skin turned a purplish-blue color that soon darkened until the feet and hands were black; a cough impeded breathing as a bloody foam flooded the lungs, the victim moaned and writhed in agony, and the end arrived by asphyxiation. The most fortunate ones were dead in just a few hours”. The Chilean government responded to the crisis with “a stay-at-home order to curb the spread, but since no one heeded it, the president decreed a state of emergency, a nightly curfew, and a ban on free circulation of the civil population without due cause, under penalty of fine, arrest, and, in many cases, beatings. Schools were closed, as well as shops, parks, and other places where people typically congregated.”
 

In her one hundred years of life, Violeta witnesses extraordinary events and historic changes in the world, in her native country Chile and in her personal life. The Great Depression causes bankruptcy of her father’s business and he commits suicide. The family, evicted from their large mansion in the capital city Santiago, moves to Nahuel, the remote Patagonian part of the country in the south “a landscape of vast cold forests, snowy volcanoes, emerald lakes, and raging rivers”. Violeta comes of age surviving and working in the primitive and tough conditions of the rural life among the native Mapuche Indians. Shelearns to fish, trap rabbits, milk cows, saddle a horse, smoke cheeses, meats, fish, and hams in the circular mud hut where a pile of embers perpetually glowed. When she was fourteen, the local Mapuche Indian chief asks for her hand in marriage, either for himself or one of his sons. He offers his best horse as payment for the bride.
 
The major event which upends her life and leaves a scar in the country’s history is the violent overthrow of the socialist president Salvador Allende (her father's first cousin) by the military coup in 1973. Her son, a leftist militant student, escapes to Argentina and eventually gets asylum in Norway. Some of her relatives and friends are killed, tortured and jailed by the regime. Her second husband, a pilot with private aircraft, makes money by collaborating with the military regime and the CIA. Her daughter dies of drug addiction in the United States. Her grandson Camilo, a rebellious young man, decides to become a priest and devotes himself to the service of the poor.
 
Allende has narrated the story of Violeta as a series of letters to her grandson Camilo in which the hundred year- old grandmother wants to leave a testimony of her life.  Allende had conceived her first novel “House of Spirits”(published in 1982) when she received news that her 100-year-old grandfather was dying. She began to write him a letter that ultimately became the manuscript of the novel. It was influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel “One hundred years of solitude”. 
 
The only difference between her first novel (House of Spirits) and the latest one (Violeta) is that magical realism is missing in the last fiction. The story of Violeta is narrated without fantasies and fables, miracles and mysteries. 
 
Allende said in an interview, “All fiction is ultimately autobiographical. I write about love and violence, about death and redemption, about strong women and absent fathers, about survival. My life is about pain, loss, love and memory. Most of my characters are outsiders, people who are not sheltered by society, who are unconventional, irreverent, defiant. Struggle, loss, confusion, memory—these are the raw materials of my writing”. These are clearly evident in the story of Violeta who is a strong independent woman who defies the matriarchal Chilean society of the first half of the twentieth century and goes through three marriages. This is similar to the real life story of Allende who has also married three times, the last one at the ripe age of  77 in 2019 with a New York lawyer Roger Cukras, of the same age.  Violeta’s experience of turbulence, exile and grief are not much different fromthe real life suffering of Allende who had to go into exile to Venezuela during the Chilean military regime.  Violeta’s grief over the death of her young daughter is similar to the untimely death of Allende’s own daughter Paula at the age of twenty nine. Allende’s novel “Paula” is based on the life story of her own daughter.
 
I have read most of Isabel Allende’s books and enjoyed her epic storytelling. Reading her books is like taking a long journey filled with poignant moments and recollection of memories. I like and admire even more Allende’s own real life story of adventures and romance. She describes her personal life with fantastic wit and self-deprecating humour.  She had suffered terrible personal tragedies from which she has come out with her strong-willed spirit. Even now at her advanced age of eighty years, she lives a free-spirited California life with a full-blooded Chilean passion. She says, "all the fundamental things in my life happen in Spanish, like scolding my grandchildren, cooking, making love and writing".

While her spirit is wild, she is rigorously disciplined in her writing work. She works ten hours a day and six days a week. She says, “I get up every morning around six. First I have a cup of coffee, then a shower and then I put on full makeup as if I was going out to the opera. I get dressed and put on high heels, and then I climb the stairs to the attic where I work. I won’t see anyone, not even the mailman, yet I dress up for myself.” She starts work on a new book every year on 8 January. 

Allende has certainly enriched the world literature with more than twenty memorable books which have been translated into forty languages and sold over seventy million copies. I believe that she is due for a Nobel Prize.