The last time I was in Venezuela, I never quite figured out what time it was. My laptop clock was always off by a half hour, in one direction or the other. When I got home, I remembered that Chávez had ordered the clocks moved back by half an hour to give kids more time to get to school.
In the realm of wacky, dictator-like decisions, putting your country one half hour off the entire rest of the world is pretty competitive. (Though it’s not nearly as awesome as building a gold statue of yourself that rotates to face the Sun. Get on it.) These days, however, Venezuela’s business folk are saying that putting the time back the way it was will save electricity.
Maybe they’ll compromise and move it back 15 minutes.
Anyway, this is as good an excuse as I’ll ever get to post this “who’s-on-first/what’s-on-second” exchange between Chávez and his education minister when the time change was implemented back in 2007. Right, OK, adelante. Wait.
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4 Comments
HUH? Venezuela, stradding two time zones, has been a half hour off standard GMT -4 for several years. All this does is coordinate with world clocks (and the Atlantic Time Zone). It’s been under discussion for some time, and hardly whimsical or dictatorial.
Right, like I said in the post, it’s been off for several years (since 2007), which was whimsical/dictatorial when Chávez did it at the time. Putting it back to GMT -4 (which is what the business folks want now) would make sense.
India, as well as Newfoundland and Labrador, also set their clocks a half hour off to put their entire territory on a single time zone. Whimsical too?
I’m not a knee-jerk Chavista, it’s silly to see a Latin American site going out of its way to paint everything done by the Venezuelan government as a whim of Hugo Chavez, or to repeat the nonsense about an elected president with a broad parliamentary majority being a “dictator”.
yeah, you know a couple years ago I would have agreed with you about the dictator thing, but I don’t anymore… totally compromised judiciary, unlimited spending of oil wealth by the ruling party on campaign material, shamelessly gerrymandered congressional districts, punishment of those with differing political opinions, decrees that remove power from opposition politicians elected to regional posts, criminal prosecution of street demonstrators, constant harassment of opposition media, to the point of closing down a dozen radio stations last year…hell, if you want more, just look at the IACHR’s 319-page report they released last year.
http://www.cidh.org/countryrep/Venezuela2009eng/VE09.TOC.eng.htm
dictator/not a dictator is by this point an argument over semantics, not substance.
And yeah, maybe the time-change thing is not the best example, but come on, you gotta admit that video is hilarious.