This situation started innocently enough a few years ago when Chavez wanted to correct the inequity between the wealthy and poor in Venezuela. Chavez decided in order to speed up the policies to turbo charge the necessary results to correct this unjust situation, that he would remove all people and organisations which opposed him. He changed several defining points of the constitution, shut down media enterprises, nationalised business, etc.
Additionally, he placed his cronies in key state companies and enterprises throughout the country and these people felt entitled to "cream money off the top" from these respective enterprises. This has led to massive corruption and looting of the national treasury. Of course, when the lower ranking officers reporting to these cronies saw how wealthy their "leaders" were making themselves, they decided to follow their lead– to copy and paste–so to speak, and this rippled down the chain of command.
This level of corruption has become so endemic that it has strangled all systems in their country. The effect manifests in groceries not having stocks available in stores, etc, and the nascent "civil war" now taking place. So what is the relevance of this to T&T? Given all the continuing accusations of corruptions from all sectors of our society about Government ministers and state enterprises, I would say there are many similarities between Venezuela and ourselves in terms of our level of corruption.
Maybe Venezuela has about five years head start on us– but we are gaining swiftly. Is T&T really a corrupt society? Each of the external advisers brought in to assist in cleaning up our criminal delinquency problem has reported that there is a significant rotten core of police officers who not only protect criminal leaders, but actually are organising activities and providing guns to gangs–a level of fundamental and insidious corruption if ever there was one.
But it doesn't stop there. If you ever look at Ian Alleyne's Crime Watch show you will see a level of debauchery where man inflicts pain and hardship on his fellow man as evidenced by many base corrupt actions practised one against another. In this country we have established a platform of corruption which has also become part of our culture–unfortunately.
This corruption has become cancerous and is eating us alive externally, in terms of the fees which have to be paid to procure projects and other business, and internally in terms of how materialistic and callous we have become one to another. I ask you, do you think there are any lessons we can now learn from Venezuela?
Roger Gordon,
Cascade