Daniel Pardo of BBC Mundo went on a shopping spree to see how many household goods he could find while waiting on the notoriously long lines in Venezuela. On the first day he was able to obtain a grand total of only three items out of a shopping list of eight but promised he would return the next day to see if he could get any of the rest. Well, as far as the world knows tomorrow never came. In fact, following the March 16 Spanish language broadcast of his first day shopping for the three items, it seems Daniel Pardo never returned. Neither to BBC nor anywhere else including his Twitter feed, @pardodaniel, where he mysteriously stopped tweeting on that same day, March 16, with his last tweet in Spanish about the difficult task of explaining shortages in Venezuela with a link to his video broadcast.
I sure hope he is not currently a guest at the Leopoldo Lopez wing of the Grand Chavista Hotel for exposing to the world in a video that went viral how absurdly bad the shortages in oil rich socialist Venezuela are. However, if Pardo does return, I hope he will understand if your humble correspondent hesitates to shake his hand since toilet paper was on his list of items which he still hasn't found. First let us look at Pardo's informative video about spending all day to find 3 items which would have taken all of about 5 minutes to purchase in a typical American supermarket.
As you can see, Pardo's list of eight items included corn flour, milk, coffee, cooking oil, shampoo, detergent, dish washing soap, and, yes, toilet paper (aka papel de tush). After spending a full day waiting on extremely long lines, Daniel was able to buy only three items; detergent, dish washing soap, and corn flour. After a tiring day, Pardo promised that "tomorrow the search for goods starts again." Unfortunately, as far as we know, tomorrow never came. No broadcast, no Pardo. I would recommend that Daniel Pardo's picture be placed on Venezuelan milk cartons but, as you can see from his fruitless search, milk is pretty much unavailable down there.
So where is Daniel Pardo? Check out his Twitter feed and you will see that Pardo tweeted daily, usually several times a day until March 16 the date of his Spanish language broadcast about the shortages. If Daniel Pardo is reading this, please tweet or let us know another way that you are okay. At least BBC Mundo should inform us as to Pardo's status.
Okay, I feel a bit bad about being critical of his failure to mention socialism as the obvious cause of Venezuelan shortages. Perhaps he knew his limits and, in fact, went over what was tolerated in Bolivaran paradise as evidenced by his possible disappearance.
Exit question: Which was wiped more cleanly: Pardo's, uh, followup broadcast or Hillary's e-mail server?
UPDATE: Daniel Pardo has tweeted that he is on vacation and will return to Venezuela on Monday. Will he resume his shopping trip?
