‘Their Country Is Being Invaded’:
Exodus of Venezuelans Overwhelms Northern Brazil
PACARAIMA, Brazil — Hundreds turn up each day, many arriving penniless and gaunt as they pass a tattered flag that signals they have reached the border.
Once they cross, many cram into public parks and plazas teeming with makeshift homeless shelters, raising concerns about drugs and crime. The lucky ones sleep in tents and line up for meals provided by soldiers — pregnant women, the disabled and families with young children are often given priority. The less fortunate huddle under tarps that crumple during rainstorms.
READ MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/world/americas/venezuela-brazil-migrants.html?
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Dear readers,
Criminal organizations require – at least – one non-negotiable trait from their members: LOYALTY.
Mob bosses have many ways to exact loyalty from their henchmen. Prospective gang members are usually vetted through tests that involve a criminal activity.
And this is not just a test of the goon’s loyalty and ability to follow orders, but also a way to create some leverage when things go south and that loyalty needs to be, let’s say, enforced.
We all know that Chavismo works like a criminal organization, it’s pretty much all we have been writing about for 15 years. It never ceases to amaze, however, how Bandera have Maduro & Co. been waving their guns lately.
The case of the two Chevron managers who were apprehended for refusing to participate in a corruption scheme is, by now, an international bestseller.
“I demanded loyalty and you didn’t give it to me. Traitor.”
Raúl Stolk | Caracas Chronicles
Chevron Managers Face Treason Charges for Refusing to Steal
Francisco Toro | Caracas Chronicles
Since the dawn of the catastrophic Quevedo Era in PDVSA, we’ve been hearing the same thing: the oil industry’s paralyzed because managers are terrified of doing anything. The ongoing purge of managers suspected of “corruption” has left the oil industry incapable of doing even normal, routine things because everyone is scared that any signature they put down will land them in jail.
An air of menace pervades the halls of La Campiña, and as PDVSA seizes up administratively, oil production falls off a cliff.
Now, in a particularly Kafkaesque twist, Quevedo is throwing people in jail for refusing to sign paperwork too!
The case of the two Chevron managers now facing treason charges has to stand as one of the most aberrant and self-destructive episodes of today’s Venezuela.
The specifics are not clear, but Reuters’ Marianna Párraga and Alex Ulmer report that what brought on the charges isn’t what they did, but what they did NOT do.
The two Chevron employees were jailed when they refused to sign a supply contract written by PDVSA executives under an emergency decree, which skips the competitive bidding process, according to a half dozen sources close to the case. Such decrees have been cited by Venezuela prosecutors as a means of extracting bribes in some recent PDVSA corruption cases.
Read between the lines, man: Chevron’s people are facing decades in jail for refusing to go along with corruption.
As Stolk tweeted, in Venezuela NOT stealing is treason.
There’s a heavy dose of Undercook/Overcook, Parks & Rec black comedy here – sign the procurement deal, jail; don’t sign the procurement deal, jail right away – but the broader strategic aspect, not to put too fine a point on it, is simply baffling.
PDVSA needs Chevron. – I mean, PDVSA NEEEEEEEEEEDS Chevron.
With the bottom falling out of its own production capacity, PDVSA has never had a weaker negotiating hand vis-à-vis its foreign partners.
It’s never a good time to bite the hand that feeds you, but this is a step beyond.
This is chomping on the hand that feeds you when you’re emaciated, delirious from acute malnutrition, on the verge of quite literal starvation, then severing the hand, dousing it in gasoline, setting it on fire and shitting on the ashes.
We’re in a space beyond corruption here, beyond ideological turpitude and moral abasement beyond garden variety self-harm into the realm of spiteful, sadomasochistic national self-immolation.
En serio.
Wondering.. with some “righteous” Guyanese vilifying Trump for his “anti immigrant”, “racist” attitude; what will they say if Venezuelans start pouring into Guyana.
On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 12:33 AM, Guyanese Online wrote:
> guyaneseonline posted: “‘Their Country Is Being Invaded’: Exodus of > Venezuelans Overwhelms Northern Brazil By ERNESTO LONDOÑO APRIL 28, 2018 > – New York Times PACARAIMA, Brazil — Hundreds turn up each day, many > arriving penniless and gaunt as they pass a tattered fla” >
But they are expecting almost a quarter of a million of Trumps from America to arrive in Guyana as “expats” for the oil industry. I hope that Guyana will not turn into a South Africa where the foreigners exploit the locals and treat them worse than animals.
Guyana’s resources will be stolen by the Americans. The government is too dumb to stop or control the invasion. There’s hope for a better life with the oil money but I don’t think so. I see red flags everywhere. There are also Venezuelans crossing over to Guyana, but no one takes notice. God help us.
The Dirty and Racist Origins of Donald Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Slur
How the connection between race and waste shapes not only slurs but policy and economics
Prof. Carl A. Zimring | The Washington Post
When President Trump described Africa and Haiti as “shithole countries” – or, from some accounts, “shithouse countries” – in a meeting about immigration policy with lawmakers, he used racist imagery ripped straight out of the Ku Klux Klan’s playbook at the turn of the last century to equate non-white immigrants with waste.
While many might have assumed he was simply being vulgar and generally racist, he was actually tapping into a specific long-standing and corrosive idea — that whites are clean and those who are NOT white are dirty.
This notion has a history that spans back to white insecurity in the middle of the 19th century as emancipation and mass immigration transformed American society.
The result was a nation where ideas about race and waste have shaped where people have lived, where people have worked, and how American society’s wastes have been managed.
Immigration informed this stereotype in the 19th century, as it does today.
Racism conflating non-white immigrants with filth originated in that era — though then, unlike now, the population of immigrants considered “unclean” was more expansive, including Eastern and Southern Europeans, along with peoples originating from the Americas, Africa and Asia.
Epithets like “greaser” and “sheenie” became common insults. These terms presupposed that Italians, Mexicans and Jews had greasier, oilier skin and hair, and that this condition was a biological fact and a social problem.
These ugly slurs were common in taverns and streets, and if the words were not used in university lecture halls, the ideas that created them certainly were.
University of Wisconsin sociologists John R. Commons and Edward Alsworth Ross were two of the many educated eugenicists who saw the new immigrants as racially inferior to native-born whites.
Ross, in his book The Old World in the New – published on the eve of World War I – laid out a complex and occasionally contradictory classification scheme for the newcomers to American shores.
On the differences between Jews from different parts of Europe, Ross claimed that the type of Jew depended upon the region, with Romanian Jews being of “a high type” and Jews from Galicia being the lowest.
These scholars helped formulate and advance the notion of “race suicide”, a fear that white Americans were losing a demographic battle against ostensibly inferior immigrants who would pollute the pure racial character of white Americans.
Repackaged as “white genocide,” such ideas trended on Twitter nationwide in the weeks after Trump’s election.
Pseudoscientific assertions were common enough that Mark Twain satirized them in his 1905 story “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes”. Twain imagined himself as a cholera germ — one of the most feared contagions in American society in the late nineteenth century — coursing through the veins of an “incredibly dirty” tramp “shipped to America by Hungary because Hungary was tired of him.”
So pervasive was the association between non-white features and filth that it became a dominant trope in soap and cleanser advertisements.
Several manufacturers boasted of cleansers so effective that they made black features appear white. Advertisements featuring the Gold Dust Twins showed them scrubbing the bottom of kettles and pots clean.
The confirmation that the job was done came when one twin saw his reflection clearly in the pot. Staring back at the pitch-black face was a white face with light brown hair.
Lautz Brothers sent out at least two cards with white men washing young African American boys with their soap. In both of these images, the blackness was literally washed away by the white soap. The caption of each was “beat that if you can!”
Similar ads depicted indigenous Americans and Turkish immigrants, whose cleansing gave them not only white skin, but elevated stations in American life and, in the case of Turkish men in a Larkin Soap ad, the ability to marry white women.
These advertisements, preserved in the National Museum of American History, are relics of an age when eugenicists like Ross and Commons were common presences on American university faculties.
Woodrow Wilson, an avowed racist and fan of the KKK hagiography Birth of a Nation, served as president of Princeton University before enacting segregationist polices from the White House.
Indeed, an IDEOLOGY CONFLATING WHITENESS AND PURITY WAS SUFFICIENTLY POPULAR TO WIN ELECTIONS, build academic careers, sell products and enact immigration restrictions.
This ideology had long-term consequences for immigrants.
It informed the immigration restrictions Congress passed between 1882 (the Chinese Exclusion Act) and 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act).
The ugliness of century-old images still resonate today because the stereotypes behind them are still ingrained in our culture.
Recent advertisements by Dove and Nivea elicited outcries because they conflated women of color with dirt.
Indeed, President Trump did NOT choose his xenophobic slurs in a vacuum — his use of shithole or shithouse reflects the vicious racism that swept him into office and, as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, portends tragic, inhumane, racist, exclusionary policies related to people he equates with excrement.
Prof. Zimring is author of “Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States”
Why treat Venezuelan refugees worse than dogs, but allow Americans to treat locals worse than cockroaches and rodents? This I don’t understand at all when it comes to this article.
From: Compton De Castro
May 1, 2018 — 4:09 AM
To: Guyanese Online
Nice one …
My lil village BonFin in Brazil… near the Guyana border at Lethem… is now invaded with hundreds of Venezuelan refugees fleeing.
My friends say some are not only exhausted but they are starving.
The Brazilian military are feeding them.
Guyana’s borders are under threat from these refugees and the numbers are startling.
UN’s dilemma !
It is a crisis that is developing which UN must address ASAP.
Your opinion on how to address this issue would be interesting…mad Maduro may not invade Guyana but his “dissidents” are/will.
It can become a dangerous situation for the Granger government.
Regards
Compton uk 🇬🇧
@ Ali,
Bill 18 will make it illegal to cause “disaffection” for the GoG using online means such as forums or email. Criticizing Exxon is technically criticizing and causing “disaffection” for the GoG. Freedom of expression is being compromised in Guyana. Exxon has already displayed contempt for Kaieteur News, and even refused to invite them to their offshore oil operations.
Importantly, only twenty Guyanese so far have been hired to work for Exxon, while plans are being made to accommodate over 200,000 “expats” who will somehow gain employment for Exxon. I’m not sure how only 20 Guyanese are being hired, but 200,000 foreigners are getting jobs in Guyana. It doesn’t make sense.