This is what the vigilant and sharp mind of Alberto Quiros-Corradi says in his column in El Nacional of Sunday November 10:

"…our ineptitude in searching for explanations to our failures --wherever they may be-- have turned us into a prototype of permanent "excuse maker" blaming the deeds of others for our failures".

He is undoubtedly right. This incapacity is greater since do not use it just to explain our failures; it also prevents us from understanding that there are certain "rules of the game" of which we must be aware, that we must learn and respect in order to break away from the backwardness condition in which we eternally find ourselves, Said "incapacity" perhaps goes back to our deficient educational process, both in school and home, preventing us from understanding an external world governed by rules that are different from those that were taught to us at home, or those we see as true and immutable in our environment.

When we talk to cultivated people who emigrated to Venezuela in the "fat years" --and these are often good observers of our way of being-- they have told us more than once that one of the features of the Venezuelan individual, one possibly acquired through most young people's street learning, is what we know as quick-wittedness (the classical Spaniards' "picardía"), something that at first sight could appear as a favourable feature, but that --perhaps due to this initial deceiving view-- in the long run becomes a quite negative trend, since it may lead those who base their behaviour on such kind of actions to think that it may turn to their advantage on each occasion, hence avoiding --or trying to avoid-- the rules of common sense, good behaviour and even binding legal norms.

In our current "global village" world there is no room for parochialism under the permanent disguise of nationalism.

I recall my years as a post-graduate student in the USA and my contacts and living experiences shared with other fellows of my generation, exposed to the delicate and requiring transculturation process, to having to learn a foreign language, and trying to understand and share life in a society with values and behaviours being quite different from those we were used to. In many of these young Venezuelan students there appeared a frontal rejection for the strange and new, and this of course prevented them --even if sometimes just partially-- from taking full advantage of the brilliant opportunity being offered to them. This intimate rejection --at times subconscious-- is the first hurdle we must overcome when facing change and innovation. This does not mean that all that is different and new is good and convenient, but then it is not for us to bluntly refuse to observe it, study it, evaluate it and finally decide if it is something convenient, to be used accordingly

Other companions, on the contrary, had this simple and obvious thought: "they have advanced whereas we have systematically stayed behind; they are accordingly right and we are wrong; we should rather learn what they know and try to use it in our environment as best as possible". They, with their pragmatic vision --some would say that they adopted the Anglo-Saxon attitude-- are those who have kept struggling, all throughout their lives, for gradual yet firm change in our society. They feel frustration when noting how little progress has been made until now.

I have asked myself many times: what is happening to us?; where does the problem lie?
There have been numerous and changing excuses. When some of these lack support, there is always some one to offer the succeeding one, that which gets support and becomes the fashionable candidate of the moment. Going back through time I remember that when I was a child our backwardness was attributed the scarce population decimated by our wars (independence and federal) and by until then untreatable endemic diseases (malaria, syphilis, tuberculosis among other). When these factors were no longer prevalent, we looked for a new excuse with the unavailability of capita resources. When the oil dollars came we had an additional explanation: we are short of able human resources. Under the "Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho" scholarships plan we sent thousands of young people to study abroad at the world's leading higher education centres. We have made use of important resources to shape up our youth, both domestically and overseas.

Currently, with the economic crisis we are suffering, not only those who are studying abroad do not return, but also many of those who did come back are leaving. The exodus of Venezuelan talent, an until recently unknown phenomenon in our environment is eroding our human resources in an alarming way. And there is also what is being called "unqualified mobilisation", where the prepared individual changes his occupation when failing to find, within his area of capacitation, any possibility of attractive and well remunerated insertion into the work market; this is a live social problem with perverse consequences.

Ultimate "brain flight" and "unqualified mobilisation" result in considerable losses for a nation having invested huge economic resources in preparing qualified citizens, people who have not been able to make use of their knowledge for the benefit of a society that provided them with an educational opportunity, either because they found "greener pastures" in other lands, or because they were not able to fit in our own environment to apply the knowledge they acquired. This is undoubtedly a huge failure in an area having vital importance for our future.

There has been no shortage of magic solutions, and we have even seen hybrids of what is magical and scientific --a small amount of rational ingredients and abundant magical ones, as to the grandiose nature attributed to their possible effects--, and so many plans and projects --filed in drawers, abandoned or being executed-- offering a lot and often hardly achieving anything.

Imagination, then, is something that has always been available when explaining our failures and I am sure that new hypothesis will appear in bulk. There seems to be no limit to our rhetoric.

I ask myself whether it would be convenient, rather, to start thinking that what we need is not "big", but modes and reachable. Perhaps we should remember Scumaker and his book "Small is Beautiful".

In the field of ideologies we have been immensely fertile and we have entered into all imaginable possibilities, going from words to action as it occurred with armed subversion and the guerrillas which left painful and indelible scars in our society.

We remember, however, that in this century, cultivated and powerful nations did have to suffer from these "mirages". This led them to become the protagonists of two big world conflicts, resulting in millions of deaths. Curiously, however, the defeated and military occupied countries, Japan and Germany, in just a few years became the second and third economic powers in the world. These defeated, devastated, humiliated, military occupied countries, had no other way out or option than to accept their fate, to forget the tempting political, colonialist and military protagonism that had once blinded them and to understand --a hard but yet true lesson-- that the world was governed by rules imposed by the victors, and that rather than having to argue against them, it made more sense to accept them and find within them some "niches" allowing them to develop a society with an acceptable level of life for its citizens. They realised that in that democratic, liberal, respectful of human rights society that they had not chosen with their votes but that was rather imposed on them by the vanquishing powers, they could develop a solid economy based on the intelligent use of their human resources and of a tradition of abidance to work and discipline. Hence, the results of this strategy.

If the young people in Venezuela, rather than going into the jungle with the guerrilla, or than passionately dedicating themselves to political scheming in universities and high schools had endeavoured to look for these possible "niches" in order to achieve with them the highest criteria of excellence, perhaps we would not find ourselves in our current critical situation.

But then, it is never late, and perhaps if we co-ordinate our actions and concentrate our efforts in a logic, reachable plan, to be executed in modest, successive stages, we might get out of the hole and progressively attain the social and well being to which our citizens are entitled.

PDVSA's example is interesting and should be studied. It recognises that Venezuela is essentially an oil producing country and that, in order to achieve excellence in this field they must have very clear priorities. This strategy may be questioned but it exists, and it is being executed, step by step, with precision and discipline, trying to educate the public at large, including political leadership, in order that they may understand its reasons and consequences.

Oil business is the country's prime economic activity and it will be so for many years. Next to it we can and should find many other "niches" of productive economic activity, allowing us to be competitive in a globalized world, something that is not going to change nor less set back the protected and nationalist economies we left behind sometime ago.

Doctor Aníbal Latuff tells us about what he calls "intellectual multures", that is to say activities with eminent intellectual contents, performed specially in our territory by our most qualified human resources for exclusive export purposes. It is quite an interesting concept, and, if successful, it could be the quickest and most effective answer to the exodus of talent current plaguing under strict economic reasons.

Time has come to accept, abide to, and follow "the rules of the game", whether we like them or not. Any effort to alter them is a Byzantine exercise for some academicians with abundant leisure time, but it may never be a government strategy. It must be guided under logic and pragmatic considerations, looking for and supporting private initiatives within these multiple "niches" where there are structural reasons leading us to think that we may develop activities meeting the indispensable excellence criteria, being internationally competitive.

Among these "niches" there is clearly the software mini-enterprises. Hence the support being given to them by computer science experts from the TALVEN program. The idea of Dr. Eladio Muchacho Unda of concentrating this effort in the Andean valley between Esnujaque and La Puerta is an interesting possibility asking fro a deep analysis.

There are many other "niches" such as this one, yet an excessive dispersion could be negative. The several possibilities should be reviewed, choosing the most viable one and concentrating our efforts in them. We must forget about "grandiose" schemes with utmost humility and pragmatism allowing us to be intelligently placed within our size and our possibilities.

Paris, November 10, 1996

* Ambassador of Venezuela to France and UNESCO.