Peter Krupa

Yesterday, Chávez made the remarkable move of devaluing the Venezuelan currency – the bolivar – by 50% against the dollar. One dollar used to be officially worth 2.15 bolivares. Now it’s worth 4.3. Fundamentally, this will be very painful for Venezuela’s withering middle class.

Because Venezuela imports nearly everything it consumes, and importers will now be buying dollars from the government for twice as many bolivares as before, the street bolivar price of nearly everything will simply have to go up, by a lot. The price of everything, that is, except food and medicine, the exchange rate for which Chávez is wise enough to continue subsidizing at 2.15 bolivares per dollar.

So the poor (Chávez supporters) remain happy because the prices of the basics they buy don’t change. The rich are not happy, but they’ve got their dollar accounts and properties outside of Venezuela. And the middle class – well, the middle class gets screwed, because their bolivar savings are now worth significantly less, traveling internationally now costs twice as much, and buying anything domestically other than the basics for life is about to become hellishly expensive.

Venezuelans are lining up to buy stuff before prices skyrocket. They thought last year’s 26.9% annual inflation was bad…

Ask any taxi driver in Latin America who he’s going to vote for and he’ll probably say, “El menos malo.” The least bad one. The lesser of two evils. Lots of people say this in Costa Rica as well. That doesn’t mean you should put it in a campaign advertisement.

Luis Fishman was a late-in-the-game replacement for his party’s nomination for the presidential elections. The prior nominee had to be replaced when he was sentenced to prison for taking bribes the last time he was president, meaning that, at least in this context, Fishman is indeed el menos malo.

Fishman is polling in the low single digits for the February voting, and somehow I don’t see ads like this whipping the electorate up into a frenzy.

This fascinates me. From the New Yorker:

The gradual devastation of the Amazon—the felling of thousands of square miles of forest, the clear-cutting of the jungle—has produced, paradoxically, one of the greatest archeological discoveries: a vast and complex ancient civilization. In cleared-away areas of the upper Amazon basin, researchers, using satellite imagery, have recently pinpointed a vast network of monumental earthworks, including geometrically aligned roads and structures, constructed by a hitherto unknown civilization. According to a new report published in the journal Antiquity, the archeologist Martii Pärssinen and other scientists have documented more than two hundred and ten geometric structures, some of which may date as far back as the third century A.D. They are spread out over an area that spans more than two hundred and fifty kilometers, reaching all the way from northern Bolivia to the state of Amazonia in Brazil.

Probably not the best way to make such amazing discoveries. Anyway, it reminds me of the Guayabos site in Costa Rica. In general, Costa Rica doesn’t have much – no monuments, few artifacts, no large indigenous population – to suggest that any ancient civilization beyond the hunter-gatherer variety ever lived here.

But there it is, out in the middle of the jungle, a stone road 10 feet thick and wide enough for two cars, along with a system of aqueducts and a few houses. Clearly (and delightfully), there is still much we don’t know about our world.

Jorge Castañeda published a nifty little piece in Foreign Policy on why Mexico’s drug war is ill-advised and unwinnable:

The Mexican drug war is costly, unwinnable, and predicated on dangerous myths. Calderón has deployed everything from distorted statistics to bad history as weapons to convince the country, and the world, that the war must be joined.

Fair enough, but that being the case, now what? You can’t just say, “Never mind” and withdraw the troops. The cartels are broken up and at war with each other, some $30 billion in illegal cash is crossing the border every year, and Americans are still hoovering up vast amounts of ski, recession and bonus reductions notwithstanding.

It’s only a matter of time before the extreme violence honed in Mexico crosses the border. In some cases it already has. (Did you know when they dissolve a body in acid, Mexican gangsters call it a pozole? Ha!) I don’t have any answers. Violence just has a way of spreading.