Caracas Chronicles

This Blog has Moved

2011-04-21T08:57:00.002-04:30

Sorry, folks, only archives here.

Check out the new blog at

CaracasChronicles.com

Major Technical Problems

2010-09-27T11:43:00.003-04:30

We're now experiencing major technical problems due to the traffic spike last night.

Apparently, CANTV is not linking to Wordpress blogs now. (What is this, Iran!?) Please bear with us.

For now, here's my post from the other Alternate Site, on Wordpress:

PSUV edges MUD in National Popular Vote; neither clears 50%

My tally from CNE’s first set of official results has the government winning 5,400,132 to the MUD’s 5,311,552 in the list vote.

Ignore all others, and in the two-way match-up between PSUV and MUD, the government had 50.41% of the vote and the opposition had 49.59% of the vote.

Oh, and plug 49.59% into our Legislative Election Forecasting Tool and it predicts 66 seats for the opposition. So far, the CNE is giving us 61 seats, with seven seats still to be declared. If we get 3 of those, I’ll have at least won the Reto Puzkas.

In relative terms, we beat our target in in Barinas, Carabobo and Miranda, but fell short everywhere else.

Update: If you include PPT in the tally, the government had about 48.9% of the vote, the opposition had 48.1, and PPT 3%. If you include all the minor parties, the government tally is down to about 48%, with all others on about 52%. That, it appears, is where the 52% figure that went around last night comes from.

If you're a CANTV ABA user, do let us know if the Wordpress blog loads or not:

Back on Blogger - CANTV will not link to Wordpress Blogs

2010-09-27T11:37:00.000-04:30

We're back on Blogger out of sheer desperation. Wordpress is inaccessible from Venezuelan CANTV servers. (What is this friggin' Iran?!) My post from earlier today:

My tally from CNE's first set of official results has the government winning 5,400,132 to the MUD's 5,311,552 in the list vote - bringing in PPT and other minor parties)
Ignore all others, and in the two-way match-up between PSUV and MUD, the government had 50.41% of the vote and the opposition had 49.59% of the vote.
Oh, and plug 49.59% into our Legislative Election Forecasting Tool and it predicts 66 seats for the opposition. So far, the CNE is giving us 61 seats, with seven seats still to be declared. If we get 3 of those, I'll have at least won the Reto Puzkas.
In relative terms, we beat our target in in Barinas, Carabobo, Miranda, but fell short everywhere else.

This site has gone to sleep...

2010-02-15T08:24:00.000-04:30

The dormant site will remain online in case you need the archives.

For updates, check out the brand new site on:

CaracasChronicles.com

Beginner's Guide the Chavez Era

2010-02-14T06:03:00.000-04:30

Why a Beginner's Guide?

First, caveat lector: it's surprisingly tough to find insightful material on Venezuela online. Wild overstatement is rampant: Chavez provokes such strong emotions that both his supporters and his critics tend to check their common sense at the door. When you start out, it's crucial to be aware that most of what you'll find about the Chávez era online, for or against, is little more than propaganda.

This guide is my little attempt to push back against all that: a collection of smart, stylish, sophisticated pieces about Venezuela by genuine heavyweights in academia, journalism and the human rights community.

Of course, I'm a Chávez opponent, so the stuff I've put together here tends to be rather critical. What it's not, though, is partisan pablum or unhinged polemic: lord knows, there's too much of that around as it is.

1. Best overall introductions

If you only have 90 minutes to spend catching up with all the recent craziness in Venezuela, you can't do better than this November, 2008, Frontline documentary for PBS. It's simply brilliant:

The Hugo Chávez Show

Next, for the academically minded, there's this journal article where political scientists Corrales and Penfold bracket matters of discourse to focus on the way power operates in Venezuela in the Chávez era. Published in the April 2007 issue of the Journal of Democracy, this real gem will put everything else you read about the country into much sharper perspective.

Venezuela: Crowding out the opposition

If you're looking for a much shorter introduction to the evidence on Chávez's growing authoritarianism, check out this marvel-of-concision in Open Democracy by government-scourge Phil Gunson:

Hugo Chávez: yo, el supremo

If I had to point readers to a single one of my own pieces, I'd go for this one on the subtle ways chavismo has reversed the concepts of left and right, just like a mirror does:

The Looking Glass Revolution

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2. Journalistic Pieces

To get a journalistic feel for Venezuela in the Chávez era, be sure to check out these two articles by Alma Guillermoprieto, which appeared in The New York Review of Books in late 2005. They're stylish, carefully researched, and scrupulously fair. Unfortunately, they're also subscription-only.

Don't cry for me, Venezuela

The Gambler

In January 2007, Wesleyan University's Francisco Rodríguez, a one-time Chávez official, wrote these two pieces on the Chávez-helps-the-poor myth:

Why Chávez Wins (in Foreign Policy)

Should Egalitarians Support Chávez? (in The Guardian)

In May 2006, this lucid feature on Chavez by The New Republic's Editor Franklin Foer appeared in The Atlantic. The focus here is more on what Chávez means to US foreign policy, but the overall reportage is excellent as well:

The Talented Mr. Chavez

In March 2009, distinguished Mexican historian Enrique Krauze wrote this piercing intellectual history of chavista authoritarianism. The piece, which summarizes Krauze's book "El Poder y El Delirio", is a real eye-opener:

The Shah of Venezuela

Jon Lee Anderson wrote the best character profile of Chávez I've read. It was published on the September 10, 2001 issue of The New Yorker. Unfortunately, it's no longer up on their website, so you have to go to a library and dig up a paper copy.

In January 2007, The New Yorker published this piece by James Surowiecki about Chávez's contradictory relationship with global capitalism:

Synergy with the Devil

An excellent, feature detailing Chavez's takeover of the Venezuelan State and its implications appeared in the January/February 2006 issue of Foreign Policy. Written by Amherst political scientist Javier Corrales, it argues that Chavez is inventing a new form of authoritarianism for the democratic age. Sadly, subscription only:

Hugo Boss

Just after the December 2005 parliamentary elections, Italian journalist Guido Rampoldi wrote this piercing piece for Rome daily La Repubblica. I like his style!

That Useless Election for the Red Caudillo

In this May 2006 Sunday Times opinion piece, Ian Buruma nails Chavez in one of the most clear-headed, digestable-to-foreigners anti-Chavez polemics I've seen in print.

Thank you, my foolish friends in the West

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3. Human Rights Reports

In this 2004 report, Human Rights Watch documents the way Venezuela's Supreme Court was politicized and stripped of its autonomy.

Rigging the Rule of Law: Judicial Independence Under Siege in Venezuela

The Interamerican Commission on Human Rights - an official, intergovernmental body under the Organization of American States - has carefully documented the government's Human Rights' record. Its 2005 and 2006 reports - though admittedly written in the worst sort of plodding, lawyerly bureaucratese - provide a systematic dissection of the a number of troubling tendencies:

In this April, 2007 report, the Committee to Protect Journalists published this report on the government's decision to shut down opposition TV-network RCTV:

Static in Venezuela

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4. From the archives

At this point, my archive contains well over a thousand posts stretching back to late 2002. Here are just a few posts I think might be useful to someone coming to the crisis without much prior knowledge.

It's impossible to understand the Chavez era without a minimum of historical context. Most foreigners, for perfectly understandable reasons, just don't have it. This essay is meant to fill in the more important gaps:

The Petrostate that was and the petrostate that is

One of the most confusing and misunderstood chapters of the Chavez saga is the brief coup that saw him kicked out of office for 48 hours in April 2002. The vast majority of the material available on the internet about the 2002 coup/countercoup is aggressively propagandistic and often plain wrong. In this essay, which I spent months researching, I try to summarize the baffling, fascinating story without airbrushing out inconvenient facts:

The Untold Story of Venezuela's 2002 April Crisis

In this short essay, I set out to explain why Chavez's vision of revolution is incompatible with democracy as usually understood:

The "democratic revolution" is a contradiction in terms

It's not that often that I blow my top at a piece of net-bound pro-Chávez propagandizing - there's just too much of it around for me to go after all the targets - but for some reason this piece by Johann Hari in The Independent really set me off, goading me to write a detailed response. I'm kind of proud of it.

Johann Hari and the Solidarity Journalist's Pose

No archive selection could ignore the biggest of the many scandals chavismo has caused over the years. In this case, I'm picking a kind of voyeuristic reportage from just one tiny little piece of the sprawling Maletagate scandal that rocked Venezuela from August 2007 on.

My Dinner with Guido

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5. Critical Theory of Chavismo

In trying to understand some of the stranger aspects of what's happened in Venezuela over the last seven years, I ran accross the writings of Jose Manuel Briceño Guerrero, a Venezuelan philosopher/critical theorist/poet who wrote this fascinating essay, way back in 1980, about some aspects of Venezuelan culture. Briceño Guerrero is, erm, not exactly light reading, but I still think this essay in particular is one of the most useful texts out there for understanding the Chavez phenomenon:

The Savage Discourse

Later, I tried to write an essay specifying how Briceño Guerrero's writing can inform an understanding of the Chavez era. It's part effort to bring Briceño Guerrero up to date, part effort to place chavismo in cultural and historical context...I'm not really so happy with the finished product, but other people have found it helpful:

Towards a critical theory of chavismo

That's a lot of reading, I realize, but work through this list and you're pretty much a Chávez expert.
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6. Skypecasts

Sometimes you don't want to read about Venezuela, you want somebody to tell you. In these two interviews, two of the leading Venezuela scholars discuss the country's economic growth implosion after 1978:

Back to the Top

Added bonus: WTO Stuff

When I'm not rambling about Chavez, I'm preparing a doctoral dissertation about the World Trade Organization. Here are a few posts on that entirely unrelated topic.
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Supermassive

2009-12-21T10:29:00.003-04:30

Quico says: I'm still not over Chávez's speech in Copenhagen last week. It's been a long time since Hugo Chávez has sent my blood pressure to those lofty levels. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but the speech’s mass of contradictions grabs me, calls at me. It is Exhibit A in this blog’s raison d’etre for the future.

Chávez's speech in Copenhagen was no ordinary one. More than a mass of contradictions, it was a kind of discursive black hole: a bulging heap of inconsistencies so unfathomably dense, so tightly entwined and pure, it actually traps truth. It's as though, once past the Chávez Event Horizon, no logic can escape.

If contradicting yourself is an art, COP15 was Chávez's Mona Lisa.

Sheer cynicism is not an adequate explanation for what happened in Copenhagen. While an inborn gift for demagoguery certainly helps, I just can't believe that any thinking human being who is consciously aware of what he is doing could have the chutzpah to deliver such a deliriously self-defeating speech.

The only convincing explanation, for my taste, is that Chávez was genuinely unaware that the industry that keeps his revolution in place is also primarily responsible for anthropogenic climate change. Nobody put those dots together for him, and he failed to put them together himself. It's a thought the man has apparently never been exposed to.

And that's the scary part, because it suggests that, in Venezuela, the mechanisms that normally keep a world leader from making a flaming ass of himself on the world stage have irretrievably broken down.

Here, I'm not talking about "constitutional government," formal checks and balances or any of that. I'm talking about the simple, human process that takes place when you think of an idea, discuss it with the people close to you, weigh up its pros and cons, and refine it to make it better, more useful, more fit-for-purpose. It's the sort of thing you do, unconsciously, all the time.

-"Honey, I was thinking about making chicken for lunch...alright?"
-"Nah, your mom is coming, she hates chicken..."
-"Ah, ok, maybe pasta then."
-"That's a better idea."

By now, anybody willing to engage in the kind of communicative process that might help Chávez avoid evident pitfalls has been purged. Those guys are, for the most part, whiling the years away in Ramo Verde or Miami.

That's communicative action: one of the primary mechanisms human beings have to protect themselves from making really bad decisions on a daily basis. The Chávez entourage appears to have given it up altogether.

Picture that plane ride over to Denmark. At some point, Chávez must have turned to his foreign minister and said something like,

-"So Maduro, I was thinking of giving a pretty tough speech to the conference. Bit of red meat. Blame this whole climate thing on the rich countries, on capitalism and such. Think that'll go over?"

At that point, if anything even remotely approaching Government by Discussion operated in Venezuela, Maduro might have turned to him to suggest that perhaps that wasn't the best tack to take in this occassion, considering Venezuela's deep involvement in the oil business. He might have suggested a different line - perhaps something about the way capitalism had forced countries like ours into the role of primary commodity producers, pigeonholing us into an earth-raping link in the international value chain. He might have suggested to just let Evo do the fire-breathing. He might, in other words, have helped Chávez save himself from himself, in a cooperative process where the two men, together, moved passed the initial, hopelessly flawed idea and onto more defensible territory.

That Chávez gave the speech he did suggests that, in his inner circle, nothing remotely resembling this type of communicative action takes place. Maduro cannot, will not consider suggesting a change in rhetoric to the Comandante Presidente. That, in fact, is the main reason Maduro is where he is now.

What's left is a coterie of people who sustain their positions by treating the president with the unending deference he fantasizes the rest of the country - or the rest of the world - gives him. It's the kind of deference that leaves Chávez totally exposed to the ravages of, possibly, the single most destructive element in Venezuela today: his own mind.

The implications of this state of affairs, on a more abstract level, are far from trivial.

In Chávez’s Venezuela, power’s refusal to hold itself accountable to reasoned debate has become its own Achiless Hell. Power is now its own worst enemy, continuously undercutting itself, fanatically devoted to depriving itself of the safeguards it needs the most. The cult of personality this attitude engenders provides the guarantee of its own failure.

There is a reason why the Spanish version of this site is going to be called EsferaPublica.com. What we're seeing in Venezuela today is a form of exercise of state power that can only be sustained where the Public Sphere is critically wounded, marginalized, and shut out of any ability to hold power to account.

The liquidation of the democratic public sphere in Venezuela preceded the establishment of the dictatorship we now have. And unless something like a democratic public sphere can be re-established, unless the habits of thought that sustain Government by Discussion can be re-enshrined, any return to institutional democracy will be precarious.

In a comments link a few days ago, somebody said they were glad there was some kind of initiative to create some space for "rational thinking" about Venezuela. At the risk of picking nits, I have to say I think that's the wrong way to look at it.

Rationality is not a quality of thought, it's a feature of deliberation. Where ideas are presented vigorously, debated openly and adjudicated on the force of the better argument, rationality ensues. Where power and identity trump reasoned deliberation, rationality withers away and dies, no matter how many brilliant individual thinkers may be around.

Reason is the province not of any one intellect but out of the collaborative process that is communicative action.

The goal here is to start making spaces, online, for the kind of public sphere able to sustain the deliberation democracy depends on. Without such a public sphere, democracy is helpless and hopeless, and reason cannot flourish. With it, it's unstoppable.

Feliz Navidad, people. And a happy new year.

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Big Oil has landed: Hugo Chávez in Copenhagen

2009-12-16T14:04:00.020-04:30

Quico and Juan Cristobal say: What do you think would happen if the head of one of the world's five largest oil companies started lecturing the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen about the evils of global warming?

How do you think the most esteemed delegates to the world's premier forum on the pressing issue of our time would react if a man who's leveraged his control over hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil rents into a spot in Forbes' list of the world's 100 most powerful people started to tell them what they need to do to save the planet?

Why, they'd fall all over themselves cheering him, obviously.

Hugo Chávez’s Copenhagen speech today was such an event, though on its face, the speech itself was boilerplate. The Venezuelan strongman delivered his usual twenty-minute anti-capitalist tirade, full of quasi-religious rhetoric about saving the world and such. Developing world delegates ate it up with mustard, spiraling into rapturous applause each time he blamed the rich countries for "destroying the planet."

It's insane. Cheering Chávez as he lectures you on climate change is like cheering Joseph Fritzl as he lectures you on fatherhood.

As far as Chávez can tell, it's not CO² that's changing the climate, it's "capitalism." The specific mechanism through which this happens, the whole pesky issue of the actual fuel that generates all that carbon, the bucketfuls of petrodollars he makes out of the whole dirty business...the less talked about such things, the better.

Chávez’s green-standing, echoed by his hapless delegation and the minions in his vast media empire, stands in sharp contrast with the actual policies Venezuela has put in place.

Instead of taxing oil consumption, Chávez has spent a decade subsidizing it, making Venezuelan gasoline the cheapest in the planet. In fact, in real terms, gasoline is 85% cheaper in Venezuela today than it was when Chávez came to power ten years ago. The price of a liter of gas has not moved in ten years, while accumulated inflation is 655%.

This is a leader who subsidizes not just gas but car sales, a man whose idea of foreign aid is giving cut-price fuel oil to people in Boston. A gallon of fuel in Caracas costs less than a lolly-pop, a policy Chávez has no intention of relenting on. The man responsible for feeding oil junkies the world over - that's the guy who brought down the house in Copenhagen?

Talk about a real climate scandal.

In the days leading to the Summit, some in Venezuela wondered what the country's position would be. Chávez has rarely discussed the complexities of how climate change and the policies to stop it can affect Venezuela. You wouldn't expect him to: any decision that seriously cuts demand for oil at Copenhagen would directly undermine the whole material basis of his power.

Although Chávez has famously adopted every third-world, anti-imperialist, "us vs. them" pose in the book, it's not like the developing world was coming to Copenhagen with a unified voice. The Chinese and Indians do not want to sacrifice their development, the Africans are desperate for action sprinkled with a little bit of cash, and the Saudis would prefer the status quo. Countries like Bolivia have a real interest in curbing greenhouse emissions, which is causing melting glaciers. Bolivia’s vast reserves of lithium, which can be used to power the batteries in hybrid vehicles, mean it is poised to reap the benefits of a green economy.

Yet, Venezuela's position was a big question mark.

Chávez’s speech cleared up it up. He embraced the environmental movement and gleefully served as a spokesman for countries such as Cuba and Bolivia, highly vulnerable to changing weather patterns.

But the world would be foolish to confuse rhetoric with values.

Chávez knows the end of the oil era would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. He will peddle his oil while denouncing everyone else for burning it. He will demand a binding agreement but will not tolerate any imposition on his insane environmental policies.

This gasp-inducing pileup of ironies and contradictions can only be interpreted as a joke. Hugo Chávez came into the global warming summit and made a big hot mess of it. Thankfully, at least some of the world’s newspapers took note and shunned him.

The rest of the delegates - at least the ones looking for progress on this issue - should do the same.

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Ten Years on From The Stillborn Constitution

2009-12-15T20:31:00.002-04:30

Quico says: ...rumors, partly fueled by Aristóbulo's keynote address to the National Assembly, are now heavy that Chávez is considering launching a fresh constituyente - a Constitutional Convention to draft yet another new constitution.

Crazy enough to be true?

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Where the Maisanta Bodies Are Buried

2009-12-15T15:09:00.007-04:30

Quico says: Venezuela is far from the first country where an autocratic regime has used its economic muscle to systematically punish dissidents where it hurts: in their pocketbooks. It may, however, be the first where the government has left an evidentiary trail meaty enough for economists to pick over and analyze.

The following slide is taken from the latest version of a research paper on the costs of signing petitions against Chávez back in 2002-2003 carried out by a team led by Francisco Rodríguez and including Chang-Tai Hsieh, Edward Miguel, and Daniel Ortega. It shows the change in your chances of being employed if you did not sign the third and final petition against Chávez (top line), if you did sign that petition (bottom line) and for the population as a whole (solid line) between 1997 and 2006.

Notice how the top and bottom lines basically track one another...right until the Maisanta List was published.

The authors estimate that the use of the Maisanta list cost the Venezuelan economy as a whole in the order of 3 points of GDP (which, for the non-economists out there, is massive) before concluding, a bit laconically, that:

There is a sense in which this paper’s findings are not terribly surprising, namely, that there are regimes that punish their political opponents and that these costs can be substantial. What is unusual about the case we study is the availability of the voter database actually used to target the opposition, and that the punishment was carried out on such a large scale that we are able to measure the labor market outcomes of the everyday individuals that suffered from political retaliation. We find that one third of Venezuelan voters that signed any of the three recall petitions suffered from an average 5 percent drop in their earnings and a 1.5 percentage point drop in their employment probability. This wage drop is largely borne by the 20 percent of voters who signed the third and decisive petition round, which is suggestive that the main instrument of political retaliation was the widely circulated Maisanta database that contains the list of signers of the third petition.

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ME-O bids adieu-o

2009-12-15T05:49:00.004-04:30

Juan Cristobal says: Chile held the first round of Presidential voting yesterday, and since I'm married to the place Quico asked me to pitch in. While most news services focused on the strong showing of right-wing billionaire Sebastián Piñera and the stiff problems facing the governing Concertación coalition, to me the real story was the abject failure of the two chavista options.

Of the four candidates, two represented variations of the chavista movement. Communist party candidate Jorge Arrate did not hide his sympathy for the Venezuelan strongman. The links between his party and our government run deep, something I witnessed first-hand on numerous occasions. Yet Arrate, polling at 6%, was never a threat.

The real chance for the chavista option came thanks to the at-times surging candidacy of independent congressman Marco Enríquez-Ominami.

ME-O, as he is commonly known, saw his chances grow quickly in the middle of the year as the ruling Concertación candidate, former President Eduardo Frei, languished. A filmmaker by trade, ME-O once gushed about making a documentary centered on Hugo Chávez and he has served as an observer in Venezuelan elections, where he thought everything was excessively normal.

Of course, in a conservative country like Chile, a full on chavista candidate will always face long odds. So ME-O decided to "Correa-size" his chavista past, wrapping it in an attractive package of rebellious populism, rive gauche lefty promises, and pledges of change and "participatory democracy," including a proposal for a Constitutional Assembly. ME-O's curious approach to "moderate chavismo" included criticisms of Chávez's "style" but the endorsement of scandalous policies such as the closure of RCTV.

For a while, it seemed like it could work. The young ME-O surged on the strength of a few high-profile endorsements, and thanks to his appeal to a pseudo-intellectual middle class tired of the same-old faces and smitten by the malaise of politics where the big issues have largely disappeared.

But it only went so far. One of the biggest hits to his candidacy was when opposition research unearthed a three-year old interview, where ME-O called being Chilean "a tragedy" and longed for French or Italian nationality.

ME-O's 20 percent is a much worse showing than was feared, and barely reaches the level of "political phenomenon." He tried to be Hugo Chávez, but he's stuck in Ross Perot territory. Even more damning, ME-O managed to score not a single member of Congress. Like the petulant child raised-by-Paris-lefties that he is, he refused to endorse Frei or Piñera, accusing them of being agents of the past.

The Chilean election has several interesting stories: the renaissance of Chile's right-wing after twenty years and the seeming demise of Latin America's most succesful democratic coalition are two of the most important ones. But this script is yet to be written, in a runoff scheduled to take place in mid-January.

For now, the real story is yet another big defeat for the Espada de Bolívar movement in one of the continent's most significant countries. News organizations love to talk about a "wave of leftist sentiment" sweeping Latin America. Chile is sitting out the narrative, at least this time.

In Chile, the story is ME-O, the phenomenon that wasn't.

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Book 'em!

2009-12-14T16:44:00.001-04:30

Quico says: As I think about it, the truly newsworthy aspect of the jailing of the judge who freed Eligio Cedeño isn't that they jailed her - hell, that's almost normal - but that they jailed the whole damn court!

We're talking bailiffs jailed for carrying out a judge's order to release a prisoner. Apparently, in the chavista version of Judicial Review, bailiffs are now supposed to act as a kind of first court of appeal: carefully reading through any judge's order to make sure everything's on the up'n'up before carrying our their orders. We're talking - bizarrely - one of Cedeño's defense lawyers, José Rafael Parra Saluzzo, jailed for the unspeakable crime of being in the room as his client was released.

Chavismo now inhabits its new identity as basically unapologetic dictatorship so brazenly, so openly, so shockingly blithely it's hard to imagine how we could sink any deeper. And yet one thing we've learned: we can...oh yes we can.

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Siempre queda por caer

2009-12-14T03:57:00.007-04:30

Quico says: The decision to jail judge María Lourdes Afiuni, following a bizarre series of events that saw Hugo Chávez flip out after the judge ordered - apparently without permission - the release of disgraced Bolibanquero Eligio Cedeño (who promptly fled the country), is a timely reminder that, no matter how bad you think things have gotten, there's always farther left to fall.

Judge Afiuni was jailed after a furious Chávez launched the kind of tirade against her that, had anyone made it about him, would immediately have raised howls of "magnicide" from the government side. Saying that in Bolívar's time people who did what Afiuni did would've been shot, Chávez presented his decision to throw her in jail almost as a humanitarian concession.

One way or another, Afiuni must have realized the risk she was taking: the first judge to rule in favor of Cedeño - on a procedural motion in 2007 - lost her job, had her kids almost kidnapped, and ended up having to seek asylum in the U.S. The last judge to do so lost her seat on the court of appeal.

It's easy to forget now that less than six months ago, we were incensed by the sight of Chávez ordering judges merely fired for making judicial decisions he didn't like. Our outrage from that time already looks positively quaint by contrast, and that was this year!

Yesterday, judges paid for handing down the "wrong" decisions with their jobs, today, they're paying with their freedom, tomorrow, they'll pay with...you finish that sentence.

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Making believers out of us...

2009-12-11T13:51:00.001-04:30

Quico says: The Latinbarómetro Poll, published by The Economist, always has an eyebrow-raising stat or two to offer. This year's study, for instance, asks the age old question: in which large country in the region do people have the strongest faith in the market economy's ability to help the country as a whole?

...cálatelo!

Read the whole thing...

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Technoutopian Chronicles

2009-12-11T11:21:00.017-04:30

Quico says: If citizens' ability to reason together on issues of common concern in the public sphere is the cornerstone of real democracy, Venezuela is in more trouble than we know. These days, in Venezuela, the public sphere looks like this.

If we're going to start the long, slow process of rehabilitating our public sphere, reclaiming it as a place for sane interaction between responsible adults, we're going to need mechanisms that allow us to tamp down on pure vitriol and outright ad hominem attacks, to make space for a more reasoned kind of discussion. Caracas Chronicles 2.0 is mi granito de arena: a way to empower an online community to defend itself from the total mayhem on sites like N24.

I've been working on it for a few months, and I really think this software could do the trick - even in Spanish. The system is designed to be self-correcting, marginalizing nutters and empowering people with something to say by using the input of the entire community.

I've thought long and hard about how to make a software platform that's easy enough to use even for the casual, once-in-a-while commenter but that allows people who want to spend more time on a forum to get much more out of it as well. We'll see if it happens.

For now, here's that FAQ.

What is Community Powered Comments?

Community Powered Comments is a new way of moderating the comments section that puts the reader community in charge.

Instead of relying on one or two moderators to decide which comments are good enough to publish and which should be deleted, it asks the entire community to help identify the comments that really drive debate forward. It then makes sure those comments stand out in every comment thread, while it lowers the visibility of comments that add less to debate.

Think of it as the community’s vaccine against gallinerization, a way of protecting Caracas Chronicles as a space for serious debate.

In 2010, we’re going to roll out this system in Spanish, to try to launch a platform for political debate about Venezuela that doesn’t immediately degenerate into the kind of thing we see on Noticiero Digital.

So how does it work?

At the end of each comment, registered users are asked to answer two questions about it:

Do you agree with this comment?
and
Does this comment add value to the discussion?

All you have to do is answer those two questions fairly and honestly: the software does the rest.

First off, it highlights the comments that add most value to the debate, making them easy to spot in a thread. At the same time, it makes comments that contribute less to the discussion a little harder to read, by displaying them in gray text over a white background. The very lowest ranking comments – plain old trolls – get hidden.

Notice: nothing is ever censored in Community Powered Comments! No comment gets erased outright. Even if everybody hates a comment, you can still click on it and read it.

The goal here is to make trolling relatively unrewarding, by depriving trolls of visibility.

What’s the point of asking people to rate each comment twice?

Sometimes, the comments that do most to sharpen your understanding of an issue are comments that you totally disagree with! So we want you to keep the question of whether you personally agree with a comment separate from the question of how useful it is to the debate.

The point here is to avoid Groupthink: the situation that develops when people just rate up comments they agree with willy nilly. Groupthink bumps off dissenting views merely because they’re unpopular, even when they’re valuable to a debate. Community Powered Comments is designed to avoid that pitfall.

Of course, this will only work if the community really makes an effort to vote fairly on each issue separately. The site asks a lot of you, and gives a lot back.

Do I need to open an account and log in to post a comment?

You don’t: anyone can post a comment, with or without an account. To post without an account, you just have to convince the system you’re a human being by answering one of those captcha word puzzles.

So what’s the advantage of opening an account and logging in?

First, you need to log in to rate other people’s comments. Anonymous cowards don’t get a say on how visible others’ comments will be.

Second, if you don’t log in, the system gives your comments a pretty low visibility setting by default – if you write a good comment and people vote it up, it will become more visible, but to begin with, its visibility won’t be great.

Also, by logging on, you get to decide how choosy you want to be in filtering out comments the community doesn’t like very much. This can range from not choosy at all (“Show me every comment”) to highly choosy (“Show me only the best comments”).

Logged in users get to decide how choosy they want to be.

If you’re not logged in, the system assumes you’re “medium choosy” – showing you most comments but hiding the lowest rated ones (pure trolls).

Finally, you need to log in for the system to be able to track your Reputation Score, which allows it to recognize your contributions to the community in the past and rewards users who add the most value to the community.

What’s my Reputation Score?

Your reputation score is a summary measure of your overall contribution to the community over time. Every time a comment you write is rated by another user, your Reputation Score ticks up or down accordingly.

Write a lot of smart, substantive, interesting comments that drive debate forward and your reputation score will rise over time. Write lot of silly, inflamatory or uninteresting comments that don’t add value to the discussion, and your reputation score will suffer.

Why should I care about my Reputation Score?

The better your reputation, the more influence your ratings have over the way other people’s comments are displayed. The worse your reputation in the community, the less influence you have over others within it.

That’s another reason to really try to write comments that drive debate forward: if you don’t, your reputation score suffers, and if you have a bad reputation score, the system doesn’t take your opinions as seriously as it takes the opinions of your better reputed peers.

There are other reasons, too. If you have a high reputation score, any new comment you write will be highly visible by default. If your reputation in the community is not so good, your new comments will be less visible to start with.

Community Powered Comments sets out to replicates the way these things are (or should be) in the real world. The better your repuation is, the more seriously your opinions are taken. That’s how it is in the real world, and that’s how it is on this site.

How do I improve my Reputation Score?

It’s simple: by writing smart, substantive comments that other community members recognize add value to the debate, and by rating others’ comments fairly, whether or not you agree with them.

Where can I see my Reputation Score?

You can’t, and for a reason. We don’t want people to fixate on an arbitrary number, or to treat reputation building as a game. We want you to focus on contributing as much as possible to the community by writing quality comments and rating others’ comments fairly

What are Trusted Users?

Trusted users are the 10% of users who got the highest reputation score over the previous seven days. The list changes every week, so the universe of trusted users is always changing.

This is all done automatically: every Sunday night, the site analyzes the previous week’s worth of commenting activity to identify the top 10% of contributors to the community over the last seven days. It then automatically contacts them to let them know they’ve been chosen as “Trusted Users” for the next seven days.

Because the set of trusted users changes every week, even if you had a terrible time of it last week, you can still be a trusted user next week if you work hard to contribute to the community. Community Powered Comments believes in giving people second chances.

What are the perks associated with being a Trusted User?

As a Trusted User, the system gives you more say over the way the community operates for the next seven days. Specifically, you’ll get a limited number of “tokens” you can use to promote or demote a given comment.

Think the community is being too harsh on a given comment? You can use one of your tokens to Promote a comment, making it much more visible. Think the community is voting up a really stupid comment? Then go ahead and spend one of your tokens sinking its visibility.

As a trusted user, you have the last word: once you’ve promoted a comment, all voting on it ceases.

And there’s more. As a trusted user, any comment you make on the site will come with a “Trusted User” seal of approval and receive high visibility setting by default. Trusted users are allowed to put images into their comments, and they’re allowed to edit their comments after they’ve posted them.

Can I become a permanent Trusted User?

You can’t. Every Monday morning the system starts compiling data on the following week’s trusted users from scratch.

I have a great idea for improving the system, where can I send it?

Community Powered Comments is very much a work in progress, and we expect it to generate lots of debate – and not a few hiccups.

If you want to contribute an idea or – better yet – code a fix in PHP, we’d love to have it!=

Caracas Chronicles 2.0: Sneak Preview

2009-12-10T11:08:00.017-04:30

Quico and Juan Cristóbal say: The new software platform for Caracas Chronicles is finally here! After several months of intense work, the site is now presentable enough for everyone to look at.

Check it out!

For now, the new site is at EsferaPublica.com, which we hope will be the URL of the new, Spanish version of Caracas Chronicles. Over the next few weeks, we'll be posting in parallel here and in the new site. Early next year - once we've brought over the archive - we're going to put this old blogger site to sleep.

At the heart of the new site is an innovative system for managing the comments section that, we hope, can solve the age old problem of ceaseless flame-wars in Venezuela's political cyberspace.

The idea, basically, is that Juan and Quico don't get to decide which comments get top billing and which comments get hidden; you do.

With this new system, the community collectively gets to decide which comments get top billing by voting.

The system asks you to vote not just on whether you agree with a given comment, but also on whether it helps drive debate forward. Read all the details in the new system's FAQ.

Remember, you don't have to create an account to comment on the new site, but we strongly encourage you to do so anyway. It's free, and it only takes a minute or two.

By logging on, you allow the system to track your reputation within the community, and the better your reputation is, the more impact you'll have on the way the forum works, the more visible your comments will be, and the more weight the system will place on your opinions. And if you're among the top 10% of commentators in any given week, the system gives you a whole set of additional goodies regular users don't get.

Early next year, we'll be launching Caracas Chronicles 2.0 in full, which will include a Spanish version. This will open up CC to a whole new cast of characters, but hopefully the new software will steer the conversation away from the troll wasteland you find in places like Aporrea or Noticias24.

We look forward to your feedback, but not here.

As of today, the old comments platform on this site will be disabled.

Please comment on the new site.

Mental Health View From Quico's Window

2009-12-09T10:47:00.001-04:30

Northeasternnnnn!!!

(Taken 10 a.m. I'm actually a recent-enough immigrant to Quebec to get excited by this kind of thing...)

Subverting Chavismo's Discursive Standard

2009-12-09T01:01:00.003-04:30

Quico says: Judging from the reaction, rather a lot of you misinterpreted my last post as some kind of woolly call to hold a nice, reasonable debate with chavismo.

I want to be quite clear about my position here: no critical engagement with chavismo is possible. And, actually, that's the crux of my problem with the regime.

It's easy to mistake that for a rather shrill, impetuous stance; a kind of misplaced haughtiness masquerading as high principle. But lets be clear about this: it's not that I reject a debate with the people I oppose. It's that I oppose people who reject debate.

Obviously, a lot hinges on how you understand chavismo, how you interpret its discursive essence. Some people see Chávez's tendency to respond to any and every criticism with an ad hominem attack as a kind of curiosity, one trait in a broader political philosophy. Over the years, though, I've come to see it as the lynchpin of the intellectual edifice that is chavismo: a defining trait and organizing principle at the center of a strategy for crafting a totalizing worldview.

For Chávez, and for the cult-like political movement he has created around himself, the world is neatly divided between two sides. The good and the bad. The key thing to grasp - and I think there's a nearly limitless documentary evidence to illustrate this - is that for chavismo, the things that bad people believe are bad by virtue of the identity of the person believing them. Escualidos are not evil because they're wrong; they're wrong because they're evil.

Take, to choose one example out of a zillion simply because the clip is conveniently in English, this interaction between Chávez and a FoxNews journalist at this year's UN General Assembly meeting:

Notice what happens here. Chávez is asked a question that, through its own content, suggests that the questioner does not share his views. The question, in Chávez's hands, becomes merely a mechanism for identifying the questioner as a dissenter. That Chavez will not in engage with its substance goes almost without saying. Instead, the journalist expression of dissent serves as a springboard for an attack on him, on his motives and his affiliations, all by way of explaining - apparently self-evident to Chávez - that his identity as a journalist for a conservative provides all the evidence anybody could need of the evil that lurks in his heart, and exempts Chávez from any duty to account for his actions.

You don't have to be a fan of FoxNews to grasp the dire consequences of extending this mode of reasoning to every single interaction with a dissenting view a leader engages in.

The dirty little secret is that, within the ideology Chávez has stamped on his movement, the sorting mechanism that allows you to determine whether any thought, book, argument, documentary, bank, mural, film, newspaper, foreign leader, TV channel, multilateral institution or person is good or bad is, conveniently enough, whether he will submit to Chávez with unquestioning loyalty. In fact, from the totalizing standpoint chavista discursive standards creates, failing to snap unthinkingly into line is prima facie evidence that you belong to the Evil camp, and immediately voids your right to hold Chávez to critical scrutiny.

To take chavismo's worldview seriously is to see dissent itself as intrinsically evil. How evil? Evil enough to imperil the possibility of life on this planet. That evil.

This absolute sorting of the world into good and evil according to the single, totalizing criterion of loyalty to the boss seems to me both irreducibly authoritarian and absolutely central to the chavista system for organizing reality and making sense of the world. Manicheanism is not "an aspect of" chavismo; it is chavismo.

That there is no serious possibility of a frank and open exchange of views with people who hold on to such an ideology seems to me perfectly self-evident.

It's definitional, actually, because within the worldview chavismo espouses, the willingness to treat an idea that Chávez personally rejects as potentially valid is wholly incompatible with revolutionary principle. But real debate, genuine, free and open debate, can't accept such arbitrary exclusions. If you begin by sectioning off whole provinces of reality and declaring them out of bounds before you've critically engage them, what you are doing is not debating. It may look and feel like a debate, but it's not.

The hopelessly flattened discursive standards chavismo espouses - Chavista = good, dissident = evil - is not one we could engage through the practice of public reasoning, even if we were minded to. Instead, the habits of mind chavista ideology is built on are precisely that which we need to subvert through the practice of public reasoning.

When we hold the government to account, when we point out the absurdities of its exchange rate regime, when we rail against the injustice of its repressive actions, when we demand a justification of its spending priorities, we are doing it not to engage chavismo but to subvert it, because when you are facing a totalizing ideology, demanding an explanation is in itself a subversive act.

When we cultivate the habits of mind that allow people to think critically about the actions of those in power, to question them and demand they account for their decisions, we're keeping alive the possibility of democracy for future generations, because we're keeping alive the modes of interaction that we will need to sustain a discursive democracy at some point down the line.

The question, for me, is how we can exploit the particular characteristics of the internet to carry out this kind of subversive work. I think there's a ton to be done in this regard. And, personally, I intend to do it.

Dictatorship means never having to say "the reason is..."

2009-12-08T09:07:00.016-04:30

Quico says: One thing all critics of the Chávez regime seem to agree on is that democracy in Venezuela is pretty much dead. But what exactly do we mean by that?

When we talk about democracy we're usually talking about two separate but related ideas.

On the one hand, you have the institutions of democracy. We mean parliaments and banking regulations; election day rules and procedures; habeas corpus and constitutional principles of due process; decentralization, and all that. When we say that Venezuelan democracy has died, we mean that none of these institutional mechanisms is operating the way the constitution says they ought to. This, alarming as it is, is not all there is.

There's another level where democracy has been dying, a much more intimate level that manifests itself in the ways we communicate when political matters are at stake. I call it the "discursive level" in that it concerns itself with the kinds of arguments people in the political sphere find compelling at any given time. It's about the habits of thought of our political actors.

This distinction is not trivial.

One thing is the National Assembly and another is the quality and style of the debates that are held within its chambers. The question, from a discursive point of view, is what constitutes a "powerful reason to act" in the eyes of its members? Alongside any abstract principle and any formal institution there are the tacit rules actual people use to apply them the world.

Political systems are democratic to the extent that they maintain possibility of holding reasoned debates in the public sphere that tend to generate consensual understandings. On the contrary, they are authoritarian to the degree that appeals to straight-out authority - jefe es jefe - are enough to secure compliance from political decision-makers.

Venezuelan intellectuals tend not to distinguish clearly enough between these two levels, the institutional and the discursive. We tend to be much clearer, more explicit, and more eloquent talking about what has gone wrong institutionally than what has gone wrong discursively.

But if our institutional democracy has died it's because the discursive habits of mind that support it have been hunted to extinction. Chavista discourse was dictatorial long before chavista government.

In Venezuela, a return to democracy will entail much more than a return to institutional democracy. It will mean focusing on the discursive realm as well, on re-establishing a certain set of unwritten rules and expectations about what is "normal" behavior in the public sphere. These rules, which Habermas calls "discursive standards," are the criteria people use to decide if an argument is persuasive or not. When the rules of engagement in the public sphere are democratic, what you get is what Amartya Sen calls "government by discussion."

Discursive democracy is what you get when the main question asked of a given political argument is: "does that position make sense?" Discursive authoritarianism is what you get when the main question asked of a given political argument is: "who put that argument forward?"

An escualido?! Booooo! A chaburro?! Hisssss!!!

Democracy in Venezuela has collapsed in the face of a full frontal attack not just at the institutional level, but also in that deeper, discursive sphere. So subverting chavista hegemony requires liquidating the discursive standards that sustain its power.

Bringing discursive democracy back to life means putting in place policies hashed out in real debates, where ideas are grappled with, confronted and crafted into consensual roads forward by people more interested in the content of a position than the identity of the one expressing it.

This is not an easy thing to do. Building a discursive democracy runs counter to some very old habits. Throw yourself into a genuine discussion and, suddenly, you've made yourself vulnerable. In a genuine discussion, you go in without any guarantee that you'll come out on the winning side. Discussion requires humility, flexibility, a willingness to learn and an acceptance that you may be called on to alter your positions in the light of what the other side says. This may be one of the reasons true architects of democracy have, to some degree, possessed a healthy dose of greatness.

Dictators will not subject themselves to genuine debate, because genuine debate is risky, unpredictable, dangerous. A dictator will join no communicative interaction in which he (and it's usually a he, isn't it?) is not guaranteed the upper hand from the start. This is why Chávez simply refuses to be questioned by journalists who will throw anything but the softest of soft balls at him.

The sad fact is that unless the opposition shows it's better than Chávez at engaging with ideas, doing away with Hugo Chávez will do almost nothing to re-establish democracy in this deeper sense. If we fail to enshrine genuinely democratic discursive standards, the return to institutional democracy will be as shallow, fleeting, and incomplete as the system we had until 1998.

More than an adherence to constitutional standards, more than respect for the forms of the democratic game, what Venezuela's democratic movement needs to develop is the frame of mind needed to engage with an opponent (even chavista ones) in genuine debate, in the understanding that the power of the strongest argument will carry the day.

That's the habit of mind that creates the social underpinning of democratic government. Without that attitudinal bedrock, that basic predisposition to accept discussion as the arena where decisions are made, there is no possibility of democracy.

Faced with a government that experiences debate as a threat, merely creating spaces for genuine debate constitutes a subversive act. As long as Venezuelans sustain spaces where matters of public policy are subjected to free and open debate, chavista autocracy will never be complete and will never be secure.

The internet offers tremendous possibilities for this kind of subversion, possibilities that are not yet being fully exploited. The democratic movement needs to step up its game in this regard, creating spaces where genuine debate can take place. Who's up for it?

The three-legged stool

2009-12-07T05:59:00.001-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: Lately, this story about the 1988 Referendum that ended the Pinochet dictatorship keeps coming to mind.

(Translated from Spanish Wikipedia):

"At 12:18 AM on October 6th (the night after the Referendum, when results were trickling in), Pinochet meets his cabinet and informs them: "Gentlemen, the referendum has been lost. I want your immediate resignations. That is all."

An hour later, he finally meets the other members of the Military Junta. On his way up the steps of La Moneda Palace, Chile's Commander of the Air Force, General Fernando Matthei, tells journalists: "It's pretty clear the (opposition) No has won, but we are calm." General Matthei's statement was transmitted by Radio Cooperativa at 1:03 AM on October 6th.

In the meeting, [Interior] Minister Sergio Fernandez recognized the government's defeat and expressed the high percentage obtained was, in any event, a source of pride, to which General Matthei ironically replied: "Why don't we bring in some champagne to celebrate?"

According to Matthei's memoirs ("Matthei, my testimony"), Pinochet then handed the members of the Junta a decree through which he assumed all the country's powers and disavowed the results of the Referendum. This threw the Junta's members, specially Matthei, into a rage, and Matthei himself ripped the decree with his own hands.

"After that," Matthei recalls, "and without insisting on the decree, the President informed us that he would leave Santiago for a few days to get some rest, and the meeting was adjourned."

Right at that moment, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suffered a heart attack, presumably caused by the heated confrontation among military leaders. After the meeting, Pinochet accepted the situation and ordered the release of the third electoral bulletin."

Someone once said that Hugo Chávez's support is like a three-legged stool. Those legs are

Popular support
Oil money
The military

Our goal, to obtain power and reinstate democracy, can only be met once all three pillars of support have worn away.

One out of three, two out of three - those don't seem to cut it anymore.

Chavismo has engineered a state system where alternation is tantamount to regime change. Under those circumstances, consolidating a majority and winning an election are not going to be enough. Popular support is just one of the legs of the stool. Our recent history confirms this.

In April of 2002, Chávez's popularity was waning and his oil income was shaky. With PDVSA momentarily paralysed, the military tried to overthrow him, and for a second it looked like all three legs had gone.

It turned out that his popularity was not as low as all that and, in fact, reaction to the coup quickly raised it. The popular support pillar still had some life in it.

Then it also turned out that the military leg was not broken either - the military's unity cracked, as we all know, and a good chunk of the Armed Forces backed the President. And so, ultimately, the stool regained its balance.

Later that year, the opposition led an (ill-advised) Oil Strike. The subversive act of shutting down PDVSA entirely chopped off one of the legs for a good six or seven weeks. But by that point, the Misiones were starting to work and Chávez's popularity was on the rise. More importantly, the military did not support the strike, and the people turned against the oil workers. A few weeks after the strike began, oil income began to recover and PDVSA was operational again.

The assault on one of the legs was over.

Fast-forward to Chávez's shock electoral defeat December of 2007. We showed, at the ballot box, that dissent could be more popular than the chavista status quo even amidst a dizzying oil boom. Unlike in normal democracies, that reality was a subversive act - a "golpe electoral", as José Vicente Rangel would say - surprisingly spearheaded by a group of students.

Did it work? Partially. It took considerable military pressure, spearheaded by jailbird Baduel, for Chávez to accept defeat, and then only for about two seconds. But a few days later, he appeared - not coincidentally - in front of the military high command, and practically announced to the country the referendum results did not mean anything. Two years out, most of the things he'd been denied the power to do at referendum have become law.

Why? Because after an initial wobble, military support of the regime resumed, the dissidents were purged, and the oil boom kept going for another few months.

Fast-forward to next year.

Imagine that Chávez becomes really unpopular and, by some act of God, the opposition gets its act together and manages to win a majority of seats in the AN, fair and square.

Will the CNE accept the results? Will our friend Socorro stand by and validate an opposition-controlled National Assembly, with all that entails? Maybe, maybe not.

And even if that miracle panned out, can't you just see the AN, through an act of its outgoing majority, stripping itself of most of its powers? Do we have any doubt the almighty, reverential Constitutional Chamber of the TSJ would rubber-stamp such a monstrosity in the blink of an eye?

Some last minute re-think is not entirely impossible, but it's looking increasingly foolhardy to gamble the country's future on the democratic scruples of the chavista State.

Hanging on to power without regard to the majority's rejection is the distinguishing trait of authoritarianism. Chavismo is an authoritarian regime.

And that, in the end, is what it means to come to grips with chavismo's inherent authoritarianism: for our side, majority support is not enough.

Necessary? Yes. Sufficient? Not by a long shot.

At some point, all of this makes us very uncomfortable. We are democrats, and part of the normal game of a democracy is that you don't tip stools over or smash them with an axe. You work with the stool you're given and do what you can to adjust it. And certainly, the chavista Venezuelan military nomenklatur is so disgusting to some of us that the thought of accepting and even embracing them as political players is mighty unappealing.

But the reality of the chavista dictatorship is that, in the unlikely event the CNE recognized our victory in an election, we would find it all but impossible to work with the stool we're given. By now, it's Chávez's stool: made to order and able to accommodate only his fat ass. The kind of 2009 Antonio Ledezma has had is living proof of that.

The upshot is that we need a three-legged strategy.

One of the legs - oil income - is pretty much beyond our control, especially after the PDVSA purge. But, despite the fantasists' fondest daydreams, the global oil market is beyond Chávez's control, too. Still, it wouldn't hurt to have a strategy for countering the vast difference in disposable income between them and us. For the moment it's enough to note that, even with oil prices well above $70/bbl, Chávez can't raise enough cash to finance the level of public spending it would take to keep GDP growing.

What's clear is that any serious attempt to subvert the Chávez dictatorship will require concerted action on the two other legs.

Yes, we need an effective political strategy. There's no way out of this without people's hearts and minds.

But given the conditions chavismo has created, there's just no way out of this hole without a military strategy, too.

Before chavistas out there go postal and begin crying "golpista," we should clarify. That doesn't mean having a strategy for rebellion. A mad idea like that would only lead to a bloodbath. It means having a strategy to challenge the unconditional support the military gives Chávez, in very much the same way as the Chilean democracy movement's rising clout created the key cracks needed at the right time to force Pinochet's hand.

The Chilean democrats of 1988 had a political strategy that led them to a convincing electoral victory. But without a military strategy resulting in Matthei & friends willing to subvert the Pinochet regime, the Chilean stool would have been left in place.

We should be crystal clear about this: a military strategy is not a para-military strategy, and it's not a call to golpismo. It means making sure that, when the chips are down, the military support for the dictatorship is not unconditional. It means having the guts to remind the military that the loyalty they swear is to a Constitution, not an autocrat, and that that constitution's article 333 creates clear obligations they, sooner or later, will be held accountable for.

The Chilean democrats, Corazón Aquino, Boris Yeltsin. In key moments, they all had military strategies in place that helped propel their movements to subvert dictatorial regimes. In all three cases, the military played a fundamental role in knocking down the status quo forces.

Without it, popular support is easily mocked. The Burmese monks did not have a military strategy. They now rot in jail. Back in 1928, Venezuela's students didn't have one either, so they spent the next eight years in La Rotunda.

This is how it goes, folks. It sucks, but it's how it goes.

Mental health break for the weekend

2009-12-04T23:54:00.004-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - It's easy to forget, but before we were oligarchs, squalid ones and betrayers of the homeland, we were simply - his invisible friends.

I can't think of a better tonic to Hugo Chávez's vulgarity than the warm lessons of Arturo Uslar Pietri.

See you all Monday.

Rules for Subversives

2009-12-04T07:42:00.010-04:30

Quico says: "Opposition" has become an obsolete concept in Venezuelan politics. Opposition is what you do to governments capable of being opposed: those that see the practice of periodically alternating in power with their critics as normal.

Chavismo has denormalized alternation, crafting a state system where the practice would imperil regime stability. Chavismo can't be "opposed" in the normal sense of the word, because it doesn't conceive of itself as a temporary occupant of executive branch. Instead, it claims ownership of the state as a whole.

What can you do if you dissent from a government that is not opposable in the normal democratic sense? A government that has repeatedly stressed that it does not conceive of alternation in power as a normal feature of the system, and explicitly vows never to allow it to happen?

There's only one thing you can do if you don't wish to submit to a government like that: subvert it.

I think Chávez himself grasped this long before those of us who disagree with him did. Maybe his obsession with plots and conspiracies all around him speak not so much of paranoïa as of a dirty conscience. A kind of "if they knew what I know, they'd be trying to subvert me."

Me, I never set out to become a subversive. Never chose that. Doesn't really fit my personality in any way. But like everybody else who opposes the vision of state power chavismo represents, I have now been made, effectively, into a subversive.

There is a long, deeply unsettling set of consequences that flow out of this realization. A set of consequences Venezuela's anti-chavista establishment really hasn't quite processed yet. It's hard to see our movement having any success until we come to grips with our new condition, a condition that is no less ours because we never chose it.

Subversion is the game the entire anti-chavista country is now engaged in, whether consciously or unconsciously.

To dissent from the hyperleader is to subvert the state system he has crafted, a system based on mindless obedience, complicit sycophancy, and an essentially limitless willingness to lie to the public for political benefit. It's a system you won't find described in any official document, certainly not in the 1999 constitution. It is the state of The State in fact, not in law.

And article 333 of that same document tells you all you need to know about your duties in such an eventuality.

Subversion is not a road we've chosen, it's a road that's been chosen for us. The only question now is whether we can subvert the chavista state creatively, effectively and constructively, in a way that helps us lay out the basis for something better down the road.

I think subversion of the current regime will need to take place along many axes. Some overt, some covert. Obviously, as bloggers, we can't do much about the latter, other than hope for their success. But we can, in our small way, contribute to the former.

Because subverting the chavista state is also about subverting the habits of mind that sustain it: the endless willingness to subjugate reality to political convenience, the mindless cult of personality that raises a single man's will above the law. It means challenging the cognitive cornerstone of the entire chavista system: the out and out refusal to submit the leader's dictates to critical scrutiny, to hold them up against the measuring bar of reason.

Call it cognitive subversion. That's the business this blog is in. Time we faced up to it.

Chavez throws hissy fit, your savings lose 15% of their value

2009-12-03T15:48:00.004-04:30

Quico says: Reuters is reporting that the parallel bolivar plunged as low as Bs.6.2 to the dollar today in response to Chávez's bank nationalization histrionics. Funny to think how just a few weeks ago Nelson Merentes was pledging the Voldemort rate would climb to Bs.3.45:$ by the beginning of December (i.e., now.)

You almost have to pity the guy...the bureaucratic equivalent of a hired shopkeeper in a china shop owned by a wildebeest.

Intervention!

2009-12-03T09:09:00.008-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - A reader in Caracas told us yesterday that he was disappointed in Caracas Chronicles. He usually came to CC to find information and solace, but lately, there's been no solace.

He got that right.

Quico and I have always tried to find the proverbial silver lining in current events. But lately, that's been hard to find. I blame it on El Niño.

So, bloggerfam, this is a cry for help. We demand an intervention!

Is there any hope? And if so, where do you find it? 'Cause the light at the end of the tunnel seems to have flickered out with the latest blackout.

I think of my friend Rafa, who years ago told me something that has stuck in my mind: "Este país es una mierda, pero como se goza!"

Maybe he's right. I should give him a call.

PS.- Quico read the previous version of this post and hated it. He asked me for a re-write, demanding I make it short and funny. Short I can do, but it's hard to make a post about how depressing everything is ... funny!

Picking up on new memes

2009-12-02T14:21:00.003-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - Way back in the early days of 2005, Hugo Chávez declared himself a socialist.

These were the lazy, hazy days of the post-Recall Referendum. The government had consolidated power, and was fresh off a sweeping victory in the 2004 Regional Elections. In the words of then-Vice President José Vicente Rangel, chavismo had the highway "all to themselves."

That was the moment Hugo Chávez decided to amp up the rhetoric.

It's easy to forget, but Chávez didn't say he was a socialist prior to then. His rhetoric was wrapped in a vague, nationalistic, state-centered, pseudo-Bolivarian, militaristic shtick that was hard to define. Only in 2005 did he reveal himself to be a socialist.

We all know what came afterward.

I started thinking about this when, today, Chávez reiterated something he has been saying a lot lately: his Revolution is about "class struggle," about "poor versus rich."

It seems clear this is chavismo's new meme. This is how they will frame the next phase.

Perhaps this is the reason why they are moving against the kleptocrats within their own ranks. Perhaps this explains why Chávez has his sights set on the nations' banks, who have, so far, escaped the wrath of the autocrat and have played silent partners to his policies.

Long gone are the days when chavismo would say there was space in his Revolution for the middle class, when he would try and forge an alliance with the business elite that was willing to work within the bounds of socialism. Will we soon long for the days when he would kid around with Juan Carlos Escotet? There is no space for these shenanigans in class warfare.

The questions Juan Carlos Zapata and others asked ourselves back in 2006 - well worth revisiting here and here - stemmed from the contradiction between the "socialist" rhetoric and the cozy government/business clique operating on the ground.

Perhaps this new meme signals chavismo's willingness to purge this alliance.

If so, a lot of people should be shaking in their Ermenegildos.

Annals of the Vulture Meat Guardianship Corporation

2009-12-02T12:01:00.011-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: -

"I will be in any corner the fatherland demands me to be in, fulfilling my duty, fighting from my trench, backing the President and his political process. I will join in battle, whether from the most humble place or from the most decisive one. We all know we are of value to the Revolution, to the country, to the transformation of society and to the chances of saving the planet. Because I believe that without socialism, life will not be possible."

Socorro Hernández, former Minister of Telecommunications, former head of CANTV, chavista sycophant. May 15th, 2009.

Yesterday, Ms. Hernández was named as one of the five members of the board of the CNE, Venezuela's supposedly impartial elections arbiter.

This is the person in charge of counting our votes.

Socorro!

A useful illusion?

2009-12-02T08:20:00.005-04:30

Quico says: Watching this video, I can't decide if Ciudadanía Activa is performing a valuable civic service by keeping alive the pretense of constitutional government or if this is the discursive equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight.

What do you think?

Edo-what?

2009-12-01T09:43:00.005-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - It's not every day that you learn something about your own country from the New York Times. So do yourself a favor and don't miss Simón Romero's article about the people of the upper Caura river in Bolívar state. It's a tour-de-force.

The article focuses on the daily lives and current struggles of the native Ye'kuana and Sanema peoples, centered in a tiny hamlet called Edowinña. Anyone venture to guess how you pronounce that correctly?

It's also about conservation efforts, the clash of civilizations and how these people are caught in the middle. While you're there, don't miss the accompanying audio slide show.

One of the many surprising passages is this one:

More recently, the Ye’kuana and Sanema fought a brutal war in the 1930s, apparently over Sanema raids for metal and women, forcing the Sanema into a subservient role in some Ye’kuana villages.

Personally, I knew nothing about these people, this region or even this war, so a big thank you to Romero.

PS.- Along these lines, Kepler pointed me to a great blog written by a capuchin friar working in the Gran Sabana. It's worth a read (in Spanish).

Hondurans go rogue

2009-11-30T17:24:00.009-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - I should know better than to post about Honduras given how badly it went the last time, but here goes: by electing a President yesterday in imperfect but legitimate elections, the Honduran people have decided their fate, rest of the world be damned.

Good for them.

President-elect Porfirio Lobo has been recognized by the US, Peru, Panama, Colombia and Japan. Spain has announced it will soon re-visit its tough stance.

Brazil is leading the guys with the pitchforks, a group that includes our very own Hugo Chávez, Cristina Kirchner, Michelle Bachelet and the OAS. That Brazil's Lula da Silva has refused to recognize this election when, just last week, he embraced the illegitimate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks volumes about his idea of democracy.

Lula's stance toward Lobo is even more hypocritical given how quick he has been to rubber-stamp Hugo Chávez's elections. Tainted elections are OK, as long as the Left wins, nao é verdade companheiro?

Tancredo Neves must be rolling in his grave.

As for Chávez, it has been quite the sight to see his diplomats grasp for straws, questioning the legitimacy of this election because of supposedly high abstention. 2005, anyone?

Regardless of Brazil's claims to leadership in the region, they really have zero leverage when it comes to Central America. The Honduran people couldn't care less what Lula, Cristina, Insulza and the rest of the gang think of their elected leader. With the US and its allies on their side, they are fine.

So much for Brazil being the region's giant. The Emperor has no clothes.

Come to think of it, the Lobo administration should not even try to get in the good graces of this gang. If the region's left-leaning governments refuse to recognize their democratically-elected President, so be it. Honduras is probably better off not being in the empty shell that is the OAS anyway. Good riddance!

Fun with Skype

2009-11-30T09:47:00.004-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - Ta-da-dun... ta-dun...

I'm sitting in my ofice. It's Friday afternoon. I'm waiting to finish a report, and the familiar Skype bell interrupts me.

Damn, bad timing. Should I take it?

It's Rafa, my best friend from college, godfather to my oldest daughter. We haven't spoken in a few months. In between my schedule and his newborn twins, we haven't found the time.

"Hermano!"

We talk a little bit about everything. Family stuff, mostly. Then, as it must, the conversation veers toward ... la situación.

Rafa is in Caracas, and he's doing really well. The son of a "pick-myself-up-by-my-bootstraps" Cuban immigrant, he's the local manager of a multinational, living in an Altamira condo, as well as it's possible to live in one of the most dangerous, politically unstable cities in the world. Sure, in the last few years he's had to adapt to the situation. He had his car armor-plated for security and he hired a bodyguard. But all in all, he's doing fine.

"You know what? Sometimes, I understand ninis. It's just so damn difficult to like the opposition!" he says.

I ask him to elaborate.

"Well, take the Chacao municipality. You know how our offices are in Altamira, in one of the swankiest buildings in the city? Well, it took us five years to get the paperwork from the Chacao municipality cleared up. Their reason for holding up our permits was that an internal door was, according to them, not where it should be."

I tell him that speaks well of them, that they are taking their job professionally.

"No, you don't understand, they were wrong," he explains with more than a tad of frustration. "Chacao firemen came to the office and verified everything was correct. That meant nothing to City Hall. One day, municipal workers showed up at my doorstep to shut down my offices. All because a door communicating a couple of offices was in the wrong place! I swore to them if they didn't back off and let us do our work, I would go down to VTV immediately and denounce their abuse of power."

"As it happened, they were wrong about the door. It took them five years to figure that one out, fess up and give us our permits. No apology was provided."

"Here comes the annoying part: they were on the brink of shutting me down, but our office building is where Trios, one of Caracas' poshest whorehouses, does its business."

Huh? I ask him to explain.

"Yes, it's right there where Le Club used to be. This is not a love motel, mind you, it's a burdel. You don't bring your date, you pick your date. Actually, you pick two or more - hence the name of the joint. It's the most exclusive place in the city - and they have all their permits! In fact, all of the city's poshest brothels - D'angelo, Divas - they're all in Chacao, they all have their permits, granted by our very own opposition. All of them are prominently advertised all over the city. And yet companies like mine doing legitimate business - we are the ones that have to stand City Hall breathing down our neck."

"Is it any wonder people are fed up?"

--------------------------

I hang up with Rafa a bit disheveled, trying to concentrate on my report that centers on how competition favors consumers and fosters innovation. The Skype ring interrupts me again.

"Primo!"

It's Patricia, my second cousin. Last year, Patricia graduated from high school and came to live with us a few months to learn English and help us with the girls. A few weeks ago, she went back home, unsure about her future.

When Patricia came to the States, she did not know what she wanted to study or where. Her parents are not wealthy, and certainly could not afford the private universities all of Patricia's girlfriends were going to. They, and the rest of the family, were strongly steering her toward Maracaibo's public university, LUZ.

Patricia had convinced us that she was going to go to URBE, an expensive private university in Maracaibo that acts as a magnet for kids looking for an easy, uncomplicated BA. The place is the epicenter of the MMC (mientras me caso) crowd that many of Patricia's friends belong to.

We could understand her not wanting to push herself too much - she's no brain surgeon, and has the grades to prove it. Still, LUZ seemed like the only choice available to her.

Patricia would have none of it. With the unbridled confidence of a teenager who thinks she knows everything, she announced she would get a scholarship and go to URBE.

"How?" we all asked. "You don't have the grades, you are unsure of what you want to study, and neither you nor we have any connections."

"That's what you think," she would say. "I'll have you know one of my best friends is dating one of Manuel Rosales' kids."

As it happens, the Zulia state government has a scholarship program called "Programa de Becas Jesús Enrique Lossada," established under the leadership of former governor Manuel Rosales as a smaller, supposedly better-run version of Chávez's Misiones. The scholarships pay your tuition in the university of your choice. Rosales spoke a lot about this program during his brief run for President back in 2006, and I was not surprised to find out it was still working under the new Pablo Pérez administration.

While the state government claims all scholarships are given out randomly, it turns out there is a back door. And it was through that back door that Patricia got in, which was why she was calling me.

"They gave me the scholarship!" she beamed. "I'm going to URBE for Media Studies. I begin in January!"

In a matter of three weeks, Patricia managed to talk herself into an expensive government scholarship, covering the tuition on her fluff-choice of a career in a less-than-serious institution. And this is supposed to showcase the opposition's approach to public policy?

I speak to my cousin, Patricia's mom, and ask her if she thinks it's right for Patricia to accept that scholarship. "Of course it is," she says. "We couldn't pay her tuition if she didn't have the scholarship. She deserves it."

I ponder that while I remember her yearly Cadivi-subsidized trips to visit us.

--------------------------

I go back to my report on competition, wondering if we will ever have true competition between our opposition political parties.

Because of this consensus that favors "consensus" over all else, opposition voters are shielded from a healthy competition between our parties. All our darts are directed at Chávez, so we end up being duped into accepting the Chacao municipality's pimping and the Zulia scholarship program as sensible public policy, forced to look the other way.

Opposition primaries would have been the perfect time to highlight those shortcomings among our own, but that idea turned out to be a non-starter. UNT is not about to let pesky voters foray into their domain in Zulia, and whichever party Leopoldo López is in this week will protect its Chacao turf. Suggest that a bit of competitive pressure might just do those areas some good and you're seen as some kind of wild-eyed radical.

Just like in business, lack of competition between parties engenders lazy institutions full of petty bureaucratic vices. The result is that instead of being the repository of the nation's moral fiber, we end up giving permits to high-end brothels and handing out scholarships to friends of our friends.

Rafa is right. Some days, it's easy to understand ninis.

The view from your window: The big apple

2009-11-30T09:09:00.001-04:30

New York City, New York, USA. 10:00 AM.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

Q-atharsis

2009-11-27T01:36:00.007-04:30

Quico says: In case you haven't noticed, I have been struggling with writer's block for months. Ever since I came back from Venezuela and witnessed the deterioration in the conditions on the ground, the urge to write has been swallowed by a profound sense of pessimism and futility.

In trying to make sense of my block, I realized it was useful to think of it as an actual physical block. My block is located at the intersection of the two latest posts in the blog: Juan Cristobal's on the opposition primary accord and mine on Chávez and blood.

Venezuela's opposition is doing pretty much conventional democratic politics. Our politicians are sitting around a table, hashing out agreements, being careful where they place their commas and building their little empires. Outside, we witness the development of a political system that makes such conventional politics irrelevant.

In fact, thinking about conventional politics in this environment strikes me as vaguely grotesque. The deep despondency in that mismatch is the source of an anguish that has made it extremely difficult for me to write.

Four years ago, this blog made a sadistic little sport out of making fun of people like Hermann Escarrá and Antonio Ledezma, for striking out a ludicrously theatrical pose in their little "Comité Nacional de la Resistencia."

That resistance-fighter pose was easy to mock because, at the time, there was plenty of space for independent political action in the country, in the form of largely unimpeded media access for dissident voices, strong safeguards against electoral fraud, reasonable guarantees that going to a protest march wouldn't land you in jail, and a state that moved to repress dissent only very sporadically.

In those conditions, calling yourself a "resistance movement" was vaguely laughable, as illustrated vividly by the CNR's hilariously self-parodying habit of going back again and again to file injunctions, motions and petitions with the very same authorities they claimed to be resisting.

Fast forward to the end of 2009 and the vast bulk of those spaces have closed. Opposition voices now have extremely limited access to radio and TV, all meaningful guarantees against numerical fraud at election time have been stripped out of the latest electoral law (as the project currently stands), and protesting the government now routinely lands people in jail. The spaces for "conventional democratic politics" are desperately narrower now than they were back in 2005.

In these circumstances, what do Ledezma, Ramos Allup, and the rest of the 2005-abstention crowd do?

They hurl themselves at the train of conventional politics, getting sucked into an orgy of horse-trading over parliamentary candidacies in a way that would be unseemly but imaginably necessary in a normal country, but is vulgarly out of place in 2009 Venezuela.

And that's the real irony today. Venezuela really is getting to the point where the government has to be resisted more than it has to be opposed. But now that a daring, innovative, outside-the-box resistance movement is starting to look like the only viable option to fight an all-powerful petro-crat with a still plentiful wallet, the opposition has gone into a time warp.

They're haggling like it's 1999.

The kinds of arguments that were trotted out in favor of abstaining from electoral politics in 2005 were bogus then, but they cut mighty close to the bone now. Of course, by now, the opposition has shot its abstention wad - there is simply no way it can credibly play that card again next year after the exceedingly traumatic experience of 2005.

But when you go through the reasons people like Ledezma gave for not participating in the elections in 2005 - lack of credible guarantees that votes will be counted fairly, the suspicion that the government will do whatever it takes to win, the feeling that it's nonsensical to participate in a democratic election against an undemocratic government - each of them is much closer to the reality of 2009 than to the reality of 2005.

So the opposition is stuck. Unable to abstain from an election that it has plenty of reason to boycott, it simply has to take the lemons it's being given and make some lemonade, to turn the 2010 National Assembly vote into a "teachable moment," a time when it dramatizes its own transformation into the nation's only hope for democratic renewal. If there was ever a time to showcase its capacity for self-sacrifice, patriotism, and putting nation over personal interest, this is it.

Instead, the opposition is taking those lemons and shoving them up its own ass, leveraging the need to select candidates for a probably about-to-be-rigged vote into an opportunity to show itself at its petty, self-serving, cuarta-republick-esque worst.

The opposition needs to forget about turning itself into an alternative and take seriously the need to turn itself into a real resistance movement, a repository of the nation's moral fiber, an entity able to inspire the kinds of admiration and sacrifice a nation has to make to face down its dictatorial demons. It needs to find its own "fierce urgency of now."

Chavismo's authoritarian escalation this year has dramatically raised the bar in terms of what will be needed from a movement committed to unseating him. The opposition does not, to put it charitably, appear to be rising to the occasion.

And where's the fun in writing about that?

Chávez's achievement

2009-11-25T08:38:00.009-04:30

Quico says: It's a question people seem to ask me a lot outside Venezuela, and it came up again the other night, in a conversation with an old and dear friend of mine:

"Now, I know you hate the guy, and probably for good reason...but if you had to pick out one achievement, one virtue in Hugo Chávez, what would it be?"

I've known my friend too long and respect him too much to fall back on the old, Teodoresque bromide about how Chávez put poverty at the top of the political agenda, yada yada yada. I'm sure there's something to that, but it feels like a cop-out at this oint. The mood was more reflexive than that, so I tried a more real riff.

"Chávez's real achievement," I said, draining the last of that bottle of wine, "the thing that sets him apart from any other charismatic leftie autocrat I can think of, is that he's put himself in the position he's in today without the massive use of state violence. It really is unprecedented, when you take the long view. Countries just don't get to where Venezuela is today without mass graves ...but we did."

"Think it through: Venezuela today is a society controlled from top to bottom, with practically no spaces left for meaningful independent political action, with a hyper-ideologized army and public administration responding unflinchingly to the orders of one man. The media? Neutered. The priests? Irrelevant. The bourgeoisie? Either cowed, fled or co-opted. The state's power? Virtually unchecked. And all this in a country that was a warts-and-all democracy as recently as a decade ago."

"It took Lenin a pile of bodies from here to Siam to get to this level of political control over Russia. Mugabe had 20,000 Ndebele bodies to bury before he had Zimbabwe by the cojones like Chávez has Venezuela. Tito's secret police had to keep shooting up people on 3 continents for decades to keep Yugoslavia nice and docile for forty years. That's what it takes, normally, to stamp your control over a country in the kind of total way Chávez has."

"But Chávez, what kind of body count does he really have? Juan Carlos Sánchez, from the Danilo Anderson case? Danilo himself? A dozen others, maybe, on the lower end of Avenida Baralt on 11A? And fifty more in jail? A disgrace, certainly, by the standards of a proper democracy...but measured against the kinds of deliriously murderous regimes Chávez loves to praise and lionize, almost embarrassingly little."

"Che Guevara had these many scalps under his belt within a week of the revolution taking Havana. Idi Amin, Khadafi, the Iranian mullahs, the Kims in North Korea these are rulers who pile up body counts and fill up prisons with a speed and efficiency Chávez both clearly admires and absolutely refuses to replicate. So far, anyway."

"And that's the real enigma, because to be sure Chávez's pantheon of leaders-to-be-emulated all have one thing in common: they're on an entirely different plane of murderousness than he is. That's the anomaly, man, the real headscratcher."

"A lot of it, I think, has to do with timing: the revolution's just moved much more slowly, much more gradually than any of the regimes I just mentioned. Classical dictatorships come in by force of arms and keep right on using those arms to maintain their control. Within a year or two, they've spilled all the blood they needed to spill to convince people not to fuck with them. And so people don't fuck with them. That's normal."

"What your normal dictator does in a year Chávez has done in ten. Ten long and miserable years, yes, but also ten years of a bark that far outstrips the bite."

"Maybe our problem is that we keep measuring him up against the standard of the normal democratic regime we'd like, rather than against the bar of the blood-soaked tyrannies he holds himself up against. Chávez has, to his own mind, made a lot of compromises over the last ten years, eaten a lot of shit to get the kind of control over Venezuelan society he has without a spasm of fratricidal violence."

"No other revolutionary that I can think of has been more willing to let opponents stay and grow rich under his watch, so long as they agreed to go-along and get-along. Khadafi had no Gustavo Cisneros, Idi Amin did not rule over a Blackberry boomlet, and Fidel certainly had no Pedro Torres Ciliberto. So the extension of political control here has gone hand in hand with the kind of softly-softly approach to 'class enemies' - in fact, if not in rhetoric - that, while shot through with insecurity, has also seen a huge number of bank accounts bulge very significantly."

"In a way, I think Chávez understands power better than almost any of his historical predecessors. More subtly, more finely. Chávez grasps that you can set up a society where even people who hate your guts get the message that they have no choice but to go along with what you say, and do go along with what you say, without having to shoot up the place until it looks like a Swiss cheese."

"And in that sense, if in no other, I think there really is something to the whole idea of 21st Century Socialism. In the 20th century, all left-wing tyrannies were baptized in rivers of blood. The first 21st century left-wing tyranny has dispensed with all that..."

Por ahora...

The people get shoved under the table

2009-11-24T21:52:00.020-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - A few days ago, Venezuela's opposition announced with much fanfare it had finally reached an "agreement" on how to select candidates for the looming parliamentary elections. The announcement, praised as a positive development, instead sucked the air out of the room. The agreement amounts to the death knell of a nationwide opposition primary next year.

The text was put together by the opposition parties' quasi-umbrella group, unhappily named the Mesa de Unidad (literally, "Unity Table"...). Careful about its comas and couched in language that could only stir a vogon, the text centered on solving the problems of the opposition political class, not of their voters.

As much as it claims to represent the opposition universe, this "table" lacks a few important things: a webpage, a coherent image, and, more importantly, an important group of civil society groups led by Leopoldo López, among others. So right off the bat, serious players in our opposition fauna are not included, putting a big fat question mark over the table's legitimacy and the impact of anything it does.

What this incomplete assembly has done is approve an unwieldy compromise where some parliamentary candidates will be chosen via ~~smoke-filled room haggling~~ consensus, and those that can't be haggled over successfully will be put to a primary vote next year.

What that means is that the mesa's announcement kills the one truly transformational idea on the table, the one proposal able to not just settle the opposition's unity and organizational problems but to re-brand it as a modern, forward-looking, even daring and innovative force in National politics: a nationwide primary.

Instead of viewing popular participation in decision-making as a matter of principle, the agreement relegates primaries to the status of "last resort", just the thing you do when you've argued yourself hoarse and aren't getting anywhere. Voters like you and me are denied a voice, but parties-in-paper-only such as the MAS get a seat at the table. It's clear primaries are the last thing on the mesa leaders' minds, a mechanism they'll be dragged to kicking and screaming after all else has failed rather than an opportunity they'll seize with any kind of strategic vision.

Primaries are to the table like divorce is to a marriage.

What about the rest of the agreement?

Well, there's nothing there. After weeks of talks, most of the important decisions have been postponed. The rules for the fabled "consensus" have yet to be established, and they're giving themselves 15 days for the fifty (yes, 5-0) political organizations around what must be a truly massive table to agree them.

They claim that, by February, they'll have a clearer picture of where they've reached agreements and where they'll need to go to primaries. The actual primaries would take place in April at the latest, and they vow to have a complete roster of unity candidates by April 30th.

The table seemed rather pleased with itself over this agreement, or at least tried its best to present it as some kind of breakthrough. But they're sadly deluded. They're confusing a timeline with a deadline, establishing no enforcement mechanisms and giving no sign of real commitment by the table's players. They provided no details on progress regarding the rules and no hints as to how the table plans to incorporate those who have so far not participated.

The table's spokespeople asked for our trust, reminding us that in 2005 they reached a unity roster, but then gingerly papering over the fact that the 2005 parliamentary election was a disaster and that, had we not refused to participate, we would have lost by a huge margin. And let's not even touch how those agreements panned out at last year's regional elections, when picking unity candidates was a simpler proposition and much less was at stake.

The hazy deadlines, the blind faith in mechanisms that haven't worked in the past and the little consideration given to the idea of primaries are all hugely disappointing.

Worst yet, they've again failed to show the slightest hint of imagination or daring, the least shred of strategic vision, or any hint that they're aware of the need to drastically rebrand, reposition and relaunch a movement that even Venezuelans who detest Chávez have come to see as sclerotic and almost allergic to the idea of a strategic vision.

The principle-driven primary, where the people themselves take ownership of the movement to re-establish democracy in our country, has been sacrificed for the benefit of the smoke-filled-room-failure primary, where the voters are frog-marched out to clean up the messes their putative leaders leave in various bits of the Venezuelan map.

Así seguro ganamos...

PS.- Reader GTAC tells me Leopoldo López is on board with this, and he actually met with the Table. So maybe their decisions are more legitimate - but they are still not the right ones.

The view from your window: Miami

2009-11-24T10:28:00.001-04:30

Miami, FL, USA. 3:13 pm.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

Alleged news agency allegedly strips the word "alleged" of any meaning whatsoever, sources allege

2009-11-22T12:33:00.017-04:30

Quico says: I almost choked on my breakfast burrito this morning when I read Ian James's write-up for the AP of Chávez's lunatic little dithyramb to Carlos the Jackal the other day:

Hugo Chavez has defended the alleged terrorist mastermind Carlos the Jackal, saying the Venezuelan imprisoned in France was an important "revolutionary fighter" who supported the cause of the Palestinians.

Wait a minute: alleged?! ALLEGED?!!!? Is this some twisted joke?

Calling Carlos the Jackal an "alleged terrorist" is like calling Barack Obama an "alleged US president" and Ian James an "alleged AP hack"!

We're talking about a guy who's not just been convicted in open court of killing two French police officers, but who's publically taken responsability for any number of notorious terrorist acts, including classics like kidnapping eleven OPEC oil minister all at once, and who's publicly defended such acts not only at the time, but also in retrospect, in a prison-cell book that accepts responsibility for and stridently vindicates his multi-decade campaign of threats, murders, kidnappings and bombings; a virtual compendium of terrorist acts.

I'm no ranting critic of the gringo MSM, but this article shows it at its spineless worst. Whatever editorial guideline it is that landed that adjective before that word makes no sense at all. The AP's decision to qualify the only profession Ilich Ramírez has ever known drains the word "alleged" of any meaning whatsoever, and tends to cast a patina of respectability on Hugo Chávez recent, full-throated defense of his brand of terrorist tactics.

Inexcusable, guys. Just inexcusable.

Fernandez Barrueco Busted...but why?

2009-11-21T10:32:00.004-04:30

Quico says: On the day after Bolibourgeois operator extraordinaire Ricardo Fernández Barrueco got shuffled off to a prison cell at Disip - Venezuela's secret police - the questions far outnumber the answers. It's easy to guess that Fernández Barrueco - head of such bankruptrrific banks as Banco Confederado, BanPro and Banco Canarias - did something serious to displease his higher ups. Suspicions will fall most heavily on Infrastructure Minister Diosdado Cabello who, as far as we can tell (which isn't very far at all), is very much the man behind the curtain on these matters.

Part of me wants to imagine Fernández Barrueco sharing a Disip cell with his little banking empire's also imprisoned-without-trial former boss, Eligio Cedeño. Seriously, those banks are jinxed...

Yet beyond that broadest of outlines, there's no real way to discern the power politics at play here. Chalk it up to the lethal combination between the regime's opacity, its willingness to silence the media, and the pathetic disinterest that most Venezuelan media have always shown towards investigative journalism in general. Even if somebody in the Venezuelan media had the capacity and the budget you'd need to do justice to the story of Fernández Barrueco's downfall, nobody would dare to.

So no, I don't really know why he went to jail. If you do: dish!

Caracas Chronicles 2.0: Help us Test the Beta

2009-11-19T09:11:00.006-04:30

Quico says: So the new software for Caracas Chronicles 2.0, including its custom-coded, state-of-the-art Community Powered Comments system, is now in testing. And we're looking for volunteers to tell us what they like about it, what they hate about it, what needs to improved, and what needs to be flushed altogether.

If you're interested in spending some quality time playing around with the interface and writing us some feedback on it, please send me an email: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm

The Collected Wit and Wisdom of Nelson Merentes

2009-11-18T09:30:00.011-04:30

Quico says: One day after Venezuela officially went into recession with a harsh 4.5% decline in 3rd quarter GDP amid alarming signs of stagflation, let us pause to reflect on the wisdom of the man in charge of the nation's money, Central Bank chief Nelson Merentes.

January 14, 2009:

"In Venezuela there is no and there shall be no recession because the world financial crisis has had no impact on the Venezuelan economy."

"If the financial crisis lasts some five or six years, Venezuela could be affected and suffer its consequences."

31st August, 2009:

(on third quarter growth) "We won't end up very high up, we'll come in just above zero. Nonetheless, I believe we'll come out in positive territory."
"There was an inflection point, upward, and that means that it's going to be better than in the second quarter, but so far we don't know how far that point will go."

November 12th, 2009:

(on how to spur economic growth) "It's like economic accupuncture, where you have to touch the launching points so as to guarantee lift off."
"...the country is reaching a point of deflation."

Well, lets count our lucky stars we dodged that deflation bullet, at least...

I think a recession on this scale would be a big deal anywhere. But in a normal country, you could just spend your way out of the hole. Run the Keynesian playbook, the way the Americans and Europeans have been doing. You pile up a lot of debt doing that, yes, but it tends to work.

Thing is, the US and the EU could do that because they went into the crisis with their macroeconomic houses more or less in order: low inflation, credible central banks, no massive imbalances lurking just beneath the surface ready to sabotage any attempt to run the Keynesian playbook.

Venezuela, on the other hand, is going into its recession with core inflation running at 36%: i.e., facing a clearly stagflationary scenario. That means that any attempt to run the Keynesian playbook will yield not growth but, instead, more inflation.

In any event, the government doesn't really have that option because even with oil flirting with $80 a barrel they can't find enough money - or enough people crazy enough to lend them money - to try to inflate their way out of the crisis.

So, instead of countercyclical demand management, Chávez's 2010 budget calls for a brutal 33% spending cut in real terms, suggesting that, instead of Keynes's, the playbook they're really looking to run is Paul Volcker's: wringing the inflationary expectations out of the economy through a series of spending cuts, in the middle of a recession!

Just to dwell on the ironies involved here, notice that this means Chavismo is going to get forced to apply precisely the kind of harsh, pro-cyclical fiscal policy that chavistas have spent a decade criticizing the IMF for forcing countries like Argentina to apply!

Pause to take stock of what this means: what we're looking at here is Chávez making a recession deeper, on purpose, to get rid of inflation! And all on his own innitiative, not because some IMF apparatchik forced him to! Fin de mundo!

In fact - and this here is my candidate for least likely sentence ever written in the English language - on one point I do agree with Jorge Giordani, Paul Volcker, Nelson Merentes, Milton Friedman, Alí Rodríguez, Margaret Thatcher, Hugo Chávez and Ronald Reagan: purposefully cutting aggregate demand even though you're in the middle of a recession is the right fiscal response to Stagflation.

"Right", that is, in the same way that amputation is the "right" medical response after you've shot yourself in the foot, dallied for a week trying various voodoo remedies, and allowed gangrene to develop.

[Hat tip: LV]

Chavismo's Crazy New PR Strategy: Telling the Truth

2009-11-17T06:45:00.024-04:30

Quico says: OK, people, we're through the looking glass here. Just when we thought chavismo had exhausted all the rhetorical curve-balls it could possibly throw at us, they pitch us the ultimate change-up: the truth.

Late last week, we had Arias Cardenas just come out and say Chávez would pipe down about the Colombia-US military deal if Obama would just give him an oval office audience. At the weekend, Chávez told the truth again, saying the opposition didn't have the balls to run primaries. And now, Alí Rodríguez just about busts the truth-o-meter with this neocortex-scrambling statement, which defends the government's exchange rate policy noting that "the overvalued bolivar is a mechanism for economic redistribution."

Oh wow. Turns out that the government doesn't see keeping an insanely overvalued currency as a problem in need of a solution. Just the opposite: they see it as a key means calculated to bring about a cherished end.

La vaina es a proposito!

Make no mistake about it: Alí is speaking unvarnished truth here. An overvalued currency is a mechanism for economic redistribution. Any econ undergrad could tell you that.

It's just that our esteemed Minister of the People's Power for Finance left out one small detail: redistribution from whom, precisely, and to whom?

An overvalued currency redistributes wealth from people who produce stuff in Venezuela to people who buy the same stuff abroad and then import it. That's the main effect of a policy that, in layman's terms, could be rendered as "making sure a bolivar buys more stuff abroad than at home."

Or, to be a little bit more exact, an overvalued currency means a currency that buys more once it's turned into a foreign currency (at the official rate, bien sur) than it buys internally. After all, what would you rather find when you're rooting around between couch cushions, two bolivars and fifteen cents or four quarters?

If we're going to be precise about it, it's not imports that overvaluation makes cheaper, it's the currency that imports are priced in. So overvaluing a currency is a way of redistributing wealth from people without access to those official-rate-dollars to people with access to them.

Not, of course, that you need a degree in economics to explain that to any of the thousands of poor, connectionless saps banging their heads against a keyboard in frustration that Cadivi won't release their official dollar requests while Chávez's army of Crony Socialists make off with the nation's petrodollars at bargain basement prices.

For the third time this week, we can fault chavismo for many things, but not for dishonesty. Alí Rodríguez got at a core truth here. Keeping the bolivar deliriously overvalued is no mistake; it's a cherished policy goal.

Those Hummers don't come cheap, y'know?

Chávez shoots at an open goal, scores

2009-11-15T17:05:00.010-04:30

Quico says: Noting that "sovereignty" starts from the bottom up, Chávez today challenged the opposition to follow PSUV's lead and hold internal elections for important party posts. For once, the guy has it exactly right, calling the oppo leadership on its simply inexcusable paralysis on the issue of primaries.

In fact, one of the frustrations of the endless opposition debate on how to choose its candidates for next year's parliamentary election its the way it tees Chávez up for this kind of attack, which is exceptional only in the sense of being totally justified.

Come to think of it, it's something of a novelty to hear Chávez slamming us for something that's real rather than a paranoid delusion. Odd feeling, actually. But the oppo's never-ending bickering on the issue leaves him shooting at an open goal.

Of course, his criticism is not without its ironies: PSUV may be holding internal elections for delegates for its upcoming party congress, but nobody could be under any illusion that the delegates elected will have any substantive say over the way the party (or the country) are run. Jefe es jefe, y'know. It's easy enough to guess that the moment any of the delegates goes rogue and issues any kind of substantive criticism of the hyperleader is the moment Disip discovers his previously unnoticed paramilitary connections, or the contraloria dusts off some corruption allegation or other hanging over him.

In PSUV, what party members ultimately compete for when they stand for election is the right to agree with Chávez from a better spot on the tarima.

And yet, it's also easy to guess that if there's one thing Chávez fears is the kind of reinvigorated, relegitimized opposition that could only imaginably emerge out of primaries. In a wacky, reverse-double-dare kind of way, you could see his attack today as a ploy to prevent opposition primaries. After all, nothing delegitimizes an idea more effectively among antichavistas than presidential support. How long can it be until anyone on our side who calls for primaries is slammed as a collaborator who "backs Chávez's position" on the issue?

Sneaky SOB, he is...

Chávez names his price

2009-11-12T13:26:00.002-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - This buried little nugget in state-owned wire service ABN is startling in its honesty.

In it, Under-Secretary Francisco Arias Cárdenas very clearly declares what Chávez wants in exchange for returning relations with Colombia to a semblance of normalcy: a face-to-face meeting with Barack Obama.

According to Arias, the region's diplomats should not waste their time organizing summits with Uribe. The OAS, Lula and the rest are all barking up the wrong tree, Arias says, because Chávez's beef is no longer with Uribe but with Obama. Only Obama, he claims, can give Venezuela the guarantees it needs regarding the military agreement between Colombia and the U.S.

In criollo, "yo no vengo a hablar con los payasos, vengo a hablar con el dueño del circo."

After much huffing and puffing, after declaring wars and announcing troop movements on national TV, after $4 billion+ in weapons purchases, we now know it was all the price we needed to pay to get Chávez his much-desired photo-op in the Oval Office.

Remarkable, ain't it?

Not red enough for VTV: Squalid media and revolutionary discontent

2009-11-11T23:33:00.014-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: Many of Venezuela's public servants are mad. They, the red-wearing base of the Revolution, are mad because they don't get paid, because their places of work are under-equipped and they don't have benefits. Mostly, they're mad because they've been promised collective bargaining that never materializes and because their dignity is being trampled on.

But if you didn't watch Globovisión, you probably wouldn't know this.

The list of ironies and internal contradictions of the Bolivarian Revolution is long. One of the more notable recent additions is the fact that Globovisión, one of chavismo's most overused scapegoats, has become the outlet of choice for rank-and-file chavistas with an itch to bitch against the government.

A brief scan of what's been in the news lately could give you a flavor of massive dollop of irony involved.

Here we see a video of the very angry employees of the government-run Hotel Alba Caracas (what used to be the Caracas Hilton before Chávez ... never mind). The employees, more than 400 of them, are incandescent because they haven't been paid and are being harassed by management. They complain about their appalling working conditions - chefs decry the lack of butter, laundry attendants fret over washing machines that don't work. And Globovisión is the only channel there, listening and reporting.

Government oil workers in Anzoátegui State, in eastern Venezuela, are also causing a ruckus. They denounce the government for not signing a new collective bargaining agreement. Union leaders are quick to point out that they will defend their rights just like they "defended the industry during the oil strike of 2002-2003." Globovisión is there to air their frustration.

The government's postal service is also in upheaval. Workers carp that their rights are being trampled upon, saying that "socialism is not being applied here." Unions are being harassed and so they are sending a message to "Comrade Hugo Chávez" ... in case he's watching Globovisión. The union leader interviewed rues that all media has been invited, but only Globovisión came, bitterly singling out a State media that won't air their views.

Apparently, chavismo has not grasped just how dangerous a disgruntled postal worker can be.

Workers from the El Algodonal hospital, west of Caracas, also criticized the government recently for their terrible working conditions. They talk about the crime spree inside the hospital, the lack of doctors and the scarcity of supplies. The person interviewed alerts us that the hospital's Emergency Room has been shut for a year. Another group of workers says they haven't been paid in more than two months, that there's no water, and that sewers run openly next to the hospital.

Retired National Assembly workers also aired their beef in downtown Caracas recently. More than a thousand former workers made a fuss because their pensions haven't been paid. Again, Globovisión carried it prominently.

Even in far-off Portuguesa state, Health Ministry workers use Globovisión as a vehicle to air their grievances about the capacity of their manager and their working conditions. At least these workers managed to get the attention of a chavista Assembly-woman.

And this is just a flavor from the past few days.

But scan VTV's web page and there is no mention of the hotel maids, the oil workers, the El Algodonal ladies, or any of the other government employees who are up in arms. Off-script revolutionaries are strictly verboten on "the channel of all Venezuelans".

The workers' gripes stick to a well-defined script. Worker says she is "with the process", a necessary qualifying statement in order to keep her job. Worker then pledges allegiance to Comrade Chávez and to socialism. Worker goes on to complain that the government is a mess and demands a piece of the petro-pie. Worker reminds the viewer that she and her compañeros are with the process - just in case it wasn't clear. Worker hands it off to fellow worker with a different gripe. And so on...

Once in a while, the worker on the screen will express their surprise and disappointment at the fact that Globovisión is the only channel willing to listen. In a way, Globovisión has become the de facto voice of the proletariat. One would hope the proletariat would ask themselves where they will take their grievances if their beloved "comrade" fulfills his pledge to shut down the only TV channel willing to take them seriously.

This bizarre pattern underscores the vital role that independent media plays in a well-functioning society. On VTV, revolutionaries are useful as props, as abstract tokens of support for the whim of the leader. The second those revolutionaries transcend that role and acquire any depth, any complexity, any individuality, they become dangerous provocateurs to be silenced rather than citizens to be served.

We've been very critical of Globovisión's harsh, strident anti-Chávez content on this blog. But when the channel does what it should - report the news and tell the stories nobody else is telling - it plays a pivotal role in the preservation of what little democratic space we have left.

Villa del Tukiti

2009-11-11T20:43:00.005-04:30

Quico says: Don't miss Mac Margolis's epic mauling of Villa del Cine, Hugo's vanity movie studio, in the current issue Newsweek. To wit:

Just inside the studio gates, a man-made canal leads to an artificial stream and lakebed—but there was no water in them when I visited recently. Indoors, the corridors and edit bays are vacant except for one or two stray techies in jeans and tennis shoes. Rows of sewing machines lie idle under dust covers in the costume atelier. An electrical fire earlier this year knocked out most of the studio's work-stations, forcing producers, editors, seamstresses, carpenters, and engineers to relocate. "Here is Studio 1. Six to eight different film sets can fit in here," a perky Cinemaville PR aide chirps, opening the door to an empty warehouse.

The entire thing is couched in this kind of hyper-acerbic tone. Just brutal. Great fun.

[Hat tip: EC]

The Universal Yawn

2009-11-10T07:09:00.016-04:30

Quico says: The really remarkable thing about the reaction to Chávez's latest obscene little warriorist hissy fit against Colombia is the sheer universality of the disinterest it elicited. You'd think that when the head of state of a country that's just come out of a five year weapons buying orgy openly announces imminent war on his neighbor people would worry, at least a little bit. What's bizarre and, in a way, heartening, is the extent to which that didn't happen following Sunday's loon-a-thon.

With the exception of this alarmist little rant from no-less-discredited-a-figure than former president Carlos Andrés Pérez (still, remarkably enough, alive and kickin'...his foot into his mouth) reaction to the war that-exists-only-in-Chávez's-head has been remarkably clear-eyed: the equivalent of a national roll-of-the-eyes, swiftly followed by speculation that the guy must be really hurtin' for a way to rally the faithful if we've entered the Rhetorical Galtieri phase already.

This is certainly Teodoro's reading, and the main vibe I get from scanning oppo responses. Nobody seems to be in any doubt that this is a smoke-curtain: what passes for an official response to the overlapping water/electricity/crime crises now buffeting the country.

The whole narrative about a virtual US occupation of Colombia and the imminent threat of gringo-prodded invasion is too weird, too unhinged to take at face value. This may, indeed, come to be remembered as one of the most catastrophic misreadings of a declared presidential intention in the Chávez era, but I really don't think so.

Instead, what I'd say to my Colombian friends is this: Hugo Chávez has decided to cast you in the role of villain.

He's been pushed into it for lack of a better alternative: Barack Obama doesn't really make a credible bogeyman, and the Venezuelan opposition is too disjointed and threadbare to really work in that role anymore. That's a real problem for Chavismo. By its nature, chavismo needs an enemy: an external threat it can vilify and rail against and use to justify any and every authoritarian excess at home. (How long until protesting students are arrested on suspicions of working for DAS?)

Chavismo's internal logic demands an enemy: a totally evil other to put flesh on the bones of the little Manichaean melodrama inside Huguito's head. And now, you're it.

It's not a pleasant fact, but it's a fact.

For Chávez, it's not important that an enemy be real, or recognize itself as an enemy, or even be much interested in what happens in Venezuela at all. The only thing really required of you in this role is that you be - that you exist long enough and semi-plausibly enough to play Dr. Moriarty to his Sherlock Holmes...at least in his supporters' eyes.

As we in the Venezuelan opposition can certainly tell you, it's not a nice role to be cast in. And yet, it's a role. He can't force you to really inhabit it, and the only way you can lose is if you take the bait. So try to grasp the dynamic at work here, and take a deep breath. A very deep breath. In fact, for your own sake, my advice is to join us...in the universal yawn.

The view from your window: Parque Central

2009-11-10T06:00:00.000-04:30

Caracas, Venezuela. 11 am.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

War games

2009-11-09T14:50:00.009-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - Once in a while, Quico and I get emails from readers in Colombia asking about Hugo Chávez’s latest antics vis-a-vis their government. Since yesterday Mr. Chávez decided to up-the-ante on the war talk and spent several minutes saying everyone should get ready for war, I assume Colombians' anxiety over their neighbor to the East is on the rise. The question that begs asking is where this is headed. Are we going to war with Colombia?

The short answer is no.

It's easy to talk about war when you don't bother explaining the specifics of how that war is supposedly going to take place.

In the modern world, there are many ways you can wage war. You can wage a war the old-fashioned way like Saddam did in the early '90s, or the modern way, a-la Donald Rumsfeld. You can do what the VietCong did, or what Al-Qaeda is doing now. But whether by air, by land, by sea, by the Internet or by an army of renegade militants willing to blow themselves up, there is one thing all these tactics require: a plausible course of action.

As it stands, it's hard to conjure up a plausible scenario where all these winds of war translate into an actual, palpable guerre between the two sister countries. Because, what exactly is it that Chávez is telling us to prepare for? And after we're ready, what next?

An air war? Really? Venezuela doesn't have the air power to make a serious dent in Colombia's military infrastructure, and if it did, Colombia has the US covering its back. Starting an air war with Colombia would be suicidal.

A ground war? Most Venezuelan generals have a hard time summoning the strength to stir a glass of 25-year old Scotch with their pinky. The Colombian army is much larger and better equipped than the Venezuelan army.

A guerrilla war? Yeah, like that's gonna work. The Colombian army has been waging a guerrilla war for almost fifty years now. They triple us in experience. As the saying goes, cuando tú vas, yo vengo.

Militant war? Check. Technological war? Check.

The only plausible reason to take the President seriously is if the government expected Colombia to invade Venezuela. But really, does anyone outside the Kool-Aid drinking left believe Colombia (and the US) are going to invade Venezuela any time soon?

Think of the headlines - Nobel Peace Prize-winning US President launches invasion of Venezuela. Makes perfect sense, right?

The only question that remains is why The Fat Warmonger in the Palace would be talking about this.

Easy - the more you talk about war, the more you get the Evos and Lulas of the world to worry about you. Cheap talk of war keeps the talking noggins at Globovisión busy for a couple of days and provides a welcome respite from all the talk about flashlights and buckets. Firing up the guns of war gives you insight into the barracks, and may ultimately provide clues as to who is with you and who is not.

It's understandable that Chávez's words cause discomfort in Bogotá's political circles. Cachacos are, after all, a cultured lot, genetically programmed to be repulsed by the ordinary antics of Veneco power players. But you shouldn't let your prejudices guide your perception of what is real and what isn't.

So my message to my Colombian friends is this: ignore him. It's not about you. When un certain bouffon starts talking crazy about war, the only war that should concern you is the shouting match between the voices in his head.

Chávez is part crazy, part astute political animal. So while the crazy voice may be asking for a war, the rational one knows that would be his doom, just like it was for Videla and Galtieri. That's the voice that is likely to prevail, the only one you really need to pay attention to.

The view from your window: Chicago

2009-11-09T06:00:00.001-04:30

Chicago, Illinois, USA. 4 pm.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

The expected begins to happen

2009-11-07T13:27:00.004-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - Courageous Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez was briefly kidnapped from the streets of Havana by unidentified thugs and beaten. Her harrowing account is here, in Spanish.

PS.- Alek Boyd has met the woman and has a unique take on this.

Owning up to one's bad calls

2009-11-06T14:57:00.003-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - Barely a week after we were declaring the Honduras crisis all but over, we get news the agreement has collapsed.

Not only that, a US Senator and leading Micheletti supporter is claiming the US will recognize the outcome of the election, with or without Zelaya.

This takes a ton of pressure off of Micheletti's shoulders and severely diminishes US bargaining power. It also hurts the notion that the US is playing a new ball game in the region.

Somebody pass me a towel.

Game Over

2009-11-06T08:22:00.005-04:30

Quico says: Over on BoingBoing, loyal reader and one-time avid gamer Guido Nuñez Mujica has this lovely, meaty rant on the government's just approved ban on video games it deems violent.

As a non-gamer myself, it's easy to overlook how sensitive the gaming-ban is for some people, so I especially liked Guido's passionate description of the way gaming burrows its way into people's identities. It made me realize that gaming may not matter to me, but it definitely matters:

This situation is painful to behold. Even if I barely game at all these days, I am a gamer at neocortex. I spent countless hours solving puzzles, riddles and fighting monsters in dungeons. I rescued Toadstool many times, only to be told that thanks, but my Princess was in another castle, later I joined Link and rescued Zelda from Agahnim and Ganon, using the Master Sword and the Silver Arrows. I got the Zantetsu sword and cut metal, I summoned Ifrit, Odeen and Behemoth. From Dragoon, I became a Paladin. I sneaked on Big Boss' fortress in Zanzibar and stopped doomsday with Solid Snake. I fought along a Double Dragon trapped on a Final Fight, using my Killer Instinct in a Mortal Kombat in which only the greatest Street Fighter would come alive. I was Linked to the Past by a Chrono Trigger, my Soul Blazing, as I lived my Final Fantasies, Wandering from Ys, arriving to a Lagoon, to learn about the Secret of Mana, and finally understood that there is Ever More to life.

These games are a cherished part of my life, they helped to shape my young mind, they gave me challenges and vastly improved my English, opening the door to a whole new world of literature, music and people from all around the world. What I have achieved, all my research, how I have been able to travel even though I'm always broke, the hard work I've done to convince people to fund a start up for cheap biotech for developing countries and regular folks, none of that would have been possible hadn't I learned English through video games.

Now, thanks to the tiny horizons of the cast of morons who govern me, thanks to the stupidity and ham-fisted authoritarianism of the local authorities, so beloved of so many liberals, my 7 year old brother's chances to do the same could be greatly impacted.

Killer fact: in Venezuela, giving a child a toy gun is now more heavily punished than giving a child a real gun.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

The view from your window: Asunción

2009-11-06T06:01:00.000-04:30

Asunción, Paraguay. 1 pm.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

Loser boasts of taking from winner

2009-11-05T18:01:00.003-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - This video, secretly taped, shows the loser in last year's election for Caracas Metropolitan Mayor, chavista Aristóbulo Istúriz, explaining the raison d'etre and the modus operandi through which they simply took the winner's budget, and reassigned it to chavistas.

In other words, it's as if John McCain took away most of Barack Obama's budget and gushed about it.

(Hat tip: Pelao)

The view from your window: Addis Ababa

2009-11-05T05:00:00.000-04:30

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 2:30 PM.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

The Huffington Post ...

2009-11-04T15:34:00.004-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - ... discusses harassment of gays and lesbians at the hands of Venezuelan government goons. Check it out - I wonder what Sean Penn thinks about this.

BCVSA and The Exchange Rate that Must Not Be Named

2009-11-04T01:24:00.005-04:30

Quico says: Two and a half years ago, when Chávez announced PDVSA would start manufacturing shoes and selling beans and I wrote this snarky little post about the acute outbreak of role confusion in Venezuela's institutions, I could not have imagined that the trend would reach the extremes it has. As the decade comes to a close, Venezuela faces a macroeconomic reality that is bizarre on so many levels that it seems almost normal that our oil company is now, effectively, our Central Bank.

It all goes back to this blog's favorite hobby horse: the dual foreign currency market.

Your economics textbook will tell you that a country's Central Bank is the public entity charged with issuing the nation's currency and preserving its value. Operationally, that usually translates into a mandate to fight inflation by keeping the money supply from growing too much, too quickly.

But in a port economy like Venezuela's, where the vast bulk of consumption goods are imported, inflation is driven as much by the price of foreign exchange as by the absolute amount of money in circulation. The reason is easy to grasp intuitively: if you eat a lot of imported rice at $1 per kilo, and the price of that dollar rises from Bs.2 to Bs.4, you've just imported 100% rice inflation via the exchange rate.

Which is why, in import-dependent economies like ours, managing the foreign exchange market is one of the Central Bank's main tools as it seeks to control inflation. After all, if you want to control the price of dollar-denominated goods, you would be well advised to control the price of the dollar.

Enter Venezuela's Alice-in-Wonderland exchange-rate system, where the gap between government-speak and reality gets wider every passing year. While the Central Bank controls the official exchange rate, this rate is increasingly irrelevant to the Venezuelan economy. Everybody knows that in Venezuela, the price of imported goods tracks the Voldemort Exchange Rate - you know, the one that must not be named.

Which makes the Central Bank an ever more marginal player in the management of the Venezuelan economy: its control extends only to the de mentirita exchange rate, not to the real one.

Over time, even the nullities that govern us were forced to come to grips with the obvious: that prices in Venezuela are highly sensitive to an exchange rate that's not supposed to exist. The policy of wishing it away was not sustainable. The catch is that there wasn't an evident way to intervene the other market without acknowledging its existence.

To come to grips with the no-kidding exchange market, the authorities needed to find some highly opaque, politically docile institution with lots and lots of dollars on hand that it could spend off-budget and off-adult-supervision and with an upper management greedy enough to jump at the chance to manage the Voldemort market...and, well, in Venezuela that brief describes just one entity.

For months now, PDVSA has been more or less openly intervening the parallel dollar market, sporadically stepping in to keep the Voldemort Rate from climbing too high. But...that kind of macroeconomic management is supposed to be the Central Bank's job...ergo, PDVSA is, in all but name, the new Central Bank: BCVSA.

What we have in Venezuela is an all-but acknowledged dirty float, a system where the government accepts that the currency's fluctuations are beyond its control but nonetheless steps in now and then to manipulate the exchange rate.

The problem with this - aside from the whole "illegal", "unconstitutional," yada yada boring counter-revolutionary stuff people like me always write - is that it's insanely, incredibly opaque. Billions of dollars are at stake in a market that the government actively fosters and periodically intervenes, but whose existence it can't acknowledge.

Maybe a "self-loathing float" is a better description: what we have here is a heavily meddled with float that the government refuses to even talk about, subject to interventions it sure as hell won't let anybody audit. The truly remarkable thing would be if such an extraordinarily cash flush, deliriously opaque arrangement didn't breed a mass of corrupt practices.

Take a moment here to think through the possibilities. If you have the inside information to accurately time the fluctuations of the Voldemort Market, you suddenly put yourself in a position to make genuinely obscene amounts of money off of that information. Say you know that BCVSA plans to intervene tomorrow, selling $200 million to operators to take 20 cents off of the Voldemort rate. You just go to your bank, borrow some dollars, use them to buy bolivars, sit tight, and sell the bolivars tomorrow, when each of them is 20 cents more valuable. Then you pay back your bank and you pocket the difference. Money for nothing and chicks for free, no risk involved.

Sure, 20 cents may not sound like much, but do this kind of thing on a big enough scale and you can make millions and millions of dollars. Which is why I'm convinced that every time the secret dollar ticks up or down 20 cents, another batch of Bolivarian millionaires is made.

Now, imagine you're working in BCVSA and you're in a position to directly decide when you're going to step in to inject dollars into the Voldemort market. In that situation you're not just able to profit for yourself handsomely, but you're also in a position to make or break fortunes all around you.

One call to your friend with that tip and you've turned him into an instant millionaire. The same call, recorded by spies in Miraflores, earns the Executive Power the unwavering loyalty of the civil service reaping the benefits of the Revolution's discretion.

That's the stuff power is made of in the Chávez era.

There is simply no way a system that works on such levels of secrecy and opacity and that handles the kinds of sums BCVSA handles is anything less than writhing, heaving cesspool of corruption. The benefits from diving in are too strong, and the disincentives are practically non-existent.

Reproduced Verbatim

2009-11-03T15:22:00.008-04:30

The North Korean State (what other kind is there?) News Agency says:

National Seminar on Juche Idea Held in Venezuela

Pyongyang, November 1 (KCNA) -- A national seminar on the Juche idea and the Songun politics took place in Venezuela on October 17 on the occasion of the 64th birthday of the Workers' Party of Korea.

Omar Lopez, chairman of the Venezuelan National Society for the Study of the Juche Idea, explained the essence of the Juche idea founded by President Kim Il Sung, saying that the idea is fully displaying its vitality in the Venezuelan people's efforts for building socialism.

Diego Antonio Rivero, chairman of the Venezuela-Korea Friendship and Solidarity Association, said that Kim Il Sung was the great leader of the Korean people and the world people as he led the socialist revolution and construction in Korea to victory and devoted himself to the cause of global independence. That is why the progressive people are still highly praising his immortal exploits, he added.

A professor of Bolivar University stressed that all the achievements made by the Korean people are a brilliant fruition of the Songun politics pursued by General Secretary Kim Jong Il. The cause of the Korean people facing down imperialism gives strength and courage to the world revolutionary peoples including the Venezuelan people and it has become a model of anti-imperialist struggle, he stressed.

A message of greetings to Kim Jong Il was adopted at the seminar.

Hat tip: SG

Update: In the comments section, GTAC adds:

This is not really a fringe group, even if they are small in numbers.

The Venezuelan far left splintered during the Guerrilla experience in the 60's-70's because of many tactical and strategic disagreements. The monolithic PCV, which was pro-USSR (a country which did not support guerrilla warfare by the late 60s), was then divided in a number of factions: pro-PRC, pro-Albania, pro-Cuba, Eurocommunist, School of Frankfurt types, and so forth.

Of course, there had to be a pro-Juche idea faction. This group was led by, among others, former guerrilla and philosophy professor Jose Rafael Nuñez Tenorio, who in 1969 published a book called “Bolivar y la Guerra revolucionaria”, basically creating the final blend of the Bolivar-as-antiimperialist-guerrilla-leader trope (already stated by Cuba and Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic), stating that liberal democracy was in fact a dictatorship which had to be violently toppled, just as the Spanish Colonial power needed to be defeated. As the guerrilla failed, he was among the advocates of an alliance between civilians and ideologically oriented leftist members of the military.

This could mean nothing, unless you take into account that Núñez was founder of the Vth Republic Movement, a member of its National Tactical Command, and one of the men inside the board of the Chávez’ 1998 presidential campaign: he gave an interview with Duno and Mieres to El Nacional’s revista PRIMICIA, which exposed the mid-to-long term plans of a potential Chávez presidency: the dismantling of congress and the Judicial power through the constituyente; the penetration and eventual dissolution of the Armed Forces, Central Bank, and the de-technocratization of PDVSA.

As member of the MVR, he was posthumously elected as Senator for Caracas in 1998, unable to serve as a congressman because of his death in October. During his funeral, which I attended as a curious UCV student and which was held at the Patio Cubierto del Rectorado, the late professor Núñez’ coffin was draped with… a North Korean flag!

What's happening in Táchira?

2009-11-03T09:38:00.002-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - The border is closed.

Two National Guardsmen were murdered.

Nine Colombians were murdered last week.

What's going on? Is this related to the government's crackdown on the illegal smuggling of gasoline?

If you're on the ground or have relatives in the Land of Presidents, tell us what you know.

The view from your window: Montreal

2009-11-03T06:00:00.000-04:30

Montreal, QC, Canada. 31 October 2009, 5:00 pm.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

Is Iberdrola scamming Venezuelan taxpayers?

2009-11-02T12:00:00.008-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: Why does it cost 39% more than average for a Spanish company to build a power plant in Cumaná than anywhere else in the world? Why does it cost 12% more than its next most expensive project anywhere in the world? And what does it take these days to get anyone in Venezuela to take a hard look at these numbers?

These are just some of the questions arising from the deals now being struck between the Spanish government, Spanish multinationals and the Chávez administration. Using estimates from the International Energy Agency, I've argued there is no way the 1,000 MegaWatt (MW) combined-cycle electric plant being built in Cumaná for 1.4 billion Euros is being purchased at market rates. The multi-million dollar overcharge is out in the open.

Of course, whether or not you believe you're being overcharged depends entirely on how reliable you think the benchmark is. If you believe the IEA is a questionable benchmark, then on the face of it, there is no way of knowing whether the Iberdrola project is based on real costs or whether something far more sinister is at hand.

As it turns out, there is another set of benchmarks available: Iberdrola's combined-cycle projects in other parts of the world.

As we said in the previous post, Iberdrola's project costs Venezuelan taxpayers 1,400 Euros per KiloWatt (kW) of installed capacity. To get that number, simply divide 1.45 billion Euros by the 1 million kW capacity the plant will have (1 MW is 1,000 kW, so 1,000 MW is 1 million kW).

The question that begs asking is: what were the costs of Iberdrola's other combined-cycle projects? Let's see.

- In Lithuania, it is building a 440 MW plant for 330 million Euros. The cost of the Lithuanian plant is 750 Euros per kW.

- In Algeria, it is building a 1,200 MW plant for 1.47 billion Euros. The cost of the Algerian plant is 1,225 Euros per kW.

- In Russia, it is building a 403 MW plant for 311 million Euros. The cost of the Russian plant is 771 Euros per kW.

- In Qatar, it is building a massive 2,000 MW plant for 1.63 billion Euros. The cost of the Qatari plant is 815 Euros per kW.

- In Latvia, it is building a 420 MW facility for 300 million Euros. The cost of the Latvian plant is 714 Euros per kW.

The numbers don't lie. The Cumaná project is, by far, the most expensive combined-cycle power plant in Iberdrola's investment portfolio.

There may just be a perfectly valid reason for all of this, but I doubt it. What possible explanation, other than corruption, can there be for such a difference? Are Iberdrola's stockholders aware that, because they list their ADRs in the New York Stock Exchange, Iberdrola would fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? What does European legislation say about this? Why aren't European MPs looking into this?

And why are Venezuelan journalists simply ignoring this issue?

Venezuelan taxpayers deserve an answer.

Headline of the Year

2009-11-02T00:08:00.006-04:30

Quico says: I dare you to click on this and not laugh.

Go on, click.

You laughed, didn't you?

Oh sure, a second later you caught yourself. You realized this isn't actually funny at all. You felt vaguely guilty that you couldn't contain that chuckle. The man is dead, for god's sake. It's no joke.

But admit it, before all that, you chuckled.

[Hat tip: CL.]

The Real Winner in Honduras

2009-10-30T08:02:00.019-04:30

A longer version of this post appears on The New Republic's blog, The Plank.

Juan Cristóbal and Quico say: The Honduran tragicomedy that has consumed the hemisphere's diplomats for months is at an end (read the details here). Barring the unforeseeable - which is always an iffy thing to do in Honduras - Micheletti is out, Zelaya is in (pending a face-saving vote by Congress and the Supreme Court), and an election to replace him will be held on November 29, as planned.

In light of all this, who was the winner in the Honduran crisis?

Certainly not Zelaya. He's back in power, but is significantly weakened. He will not be allowed to push for the Constitutional Reform that precipitated the crisis in the first place. He'll be forced to head a "unity government" (a.k.a., an "amarren-al-loco government") and he'll have to find himself another job in January.

Certainly not Micheletti. By giving up power to Zelaya, he loses a massive amount of face and may face criminal charges down the road. In spite of having stopped the illegal referendum Zelaya was pushing for, his fate is up in the air.

Certainly not Chávez, who can say goodbye (for now) to his main objective: ensuring Zelaya remained in power through indefinite re-election and permanently adding Honduras as an ALBA satellite. His intervention in the crisis, which went from ridiculing Micheletti to threatening to ignite civil war, was as hyperbolic as it was ineffectual; it left him sounding like a clown. Count on Chávez to ignore reality and call this a heroic, historic, glorious triumph of the Revolution, though.

Certainly not the OAS. In a futile attempt to compete with Chávez's maximalist rhetoric, the regional body let its presumed power get ahead of its actual leverage, effectively sidelining itself from the negotiations that eventually brought the crisis to an end. The hypocrisy of the organization's scorn toward the Honduran Supreme Court became overwhelming when Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua pushed an illegal, clearly unconstitutional Supreme Court ruling giving him the power to be re-elected indefinitely and the OAS erupted in silence. The region's heavyweights (a.k.a., Brazil) showed that, without US influence, they have little to no leverage.

No. The real winner in this drama is the power broker, the top diplomat for the key power who quietly, patiently pushed for this settlement all along.

If this deal leads Honduras away from crisis and toward a legitimate Presidential election, if it leads Zelaya and Micheletti to the dustbin of history - I think we have the lady in the picture to thank.

The view from your window: Reading

2009-10-30T06:00:00.000-04:30

Reading, Pennsylvania, USA. 10 AM.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

Iberdrola and Elecnor supply the electricity to cook the books

2009-10-28T18:00:00.006-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - Venezuela is in the grips of an unprecedented electricity crisis, and much of it has to do with festering corruption and boundless incompetence.

Since Hugo Chávez nationalized the electricity sector, blackouts have become the norm in much of the country, and the President has gone so far as to threaten shopping malls and love motels - Miraflores not included - with cutting their power. Our Commander-in-Chief is now our Conserje-in-chief, quite literally looking to pull the plug on the undeserving.

The corruption that seeps through all levels of the chavista administration and its international allies is a big part of the problem here.

Take the deal, announced last July, by Spanish companies Elecnor and Iberdrola (IBE in the Madrid Stock Exchange). The companies said they had signed an agreement with the Venezuelan government to build a power plant in Cumaná, in eastern Venezuela. The plant, which is being built for PDVSA and will use combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT), wasn't tendered. As has become usual, the contract was just assigned, a dedo, on a presidential whim.

(We'll leave it to far more cynical minds than ours to wonder whether the Spanish government's longstanding reticence to criticize any aspect of chavista governance had anything to do with the fact that this deal went to Spanish firms...)

So what do we know about the particulars of the deal? Sadly, little, and mostly what the companies themselves - rather than the government - has chosen to make public.

Funny detail, Elecnor's press release curiously left out a key component of this deal: the plant's capacity. They only disclose the plant will cost 1.4 billion Euros, roughly $2 billion at current exchange rates.

However, Iberdrola's press release goes all chatty Cathy. It proudly pegs the plant's capacity at 1000 MW. It also goes into great detail, boasting about who was in on the deal. The agreement was signed in Miraflores Palace by high management of both Elecnor and Iberdrola, and by the President of PDVSA Gas, Mr. Ricardo Coronado. Present in the signing ceremony: Spanish Foreign Minister Moratinos and Hugo Chávez himself.

So far, so kosher, right? Not so fast.

It turns out that the 2008 World Energy Outlook, an annual publication put out by the International Energy Agency, says that the typical construction cost for a CCGT plant in Latin America is on the order of $750 per kW. It's right there, in Table 2.

In other words, the estimated cost of a 1000 MW CCGT plant in Latin America should be in the order of $750 million, not $2 billion.

Now, some may say that the World Energy Outlook estimate is an average, that there is a lot of variation between Latin American countries. Others might argue that the contract may include other things, such as maintenance or the actual operation.

Baloney. The gap between $750 million and $2 billion is too large to reconcile. Any of these considerations should have, and would have, been made public. They haven't been. Google the cost per kW of building a CCGT plant and the figures vary, as they should. Nowhere do they reach the astonishing figure of $2,000 per kW the Venezuelan government is paying.

Assuming $750 million is the true cost, can anyone doubt that if the government had run a proper public tender, we would collectively be $1.25 billion richer than we are? At what point do the crimes against public coffers reach the tipping point when people realize their country is being pillaged from the inside out?

Of course, Chávez has a few madre patria enablers in this deal. And while it is impossible to claim they are in on it, they are hardly innocent bystanders.

The irony reaches pitch level when you find out Iberdrola is listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, scoring highly on, among other things, "social responsibility." One has to wonder: are Iberdrola's and Elecnor's shareholders aware of these shenanigans?

What do episodes like this one say about Chávez's priorities? If the Venezuelan government was worried about the electricity sector, it would spend more time thinking of ways to increase investment in this vital industry, and doing so in an efficient manner. Instead, it spends its energies currying favor with foreign governments by paying their firms for an electric plant three times the going price.

It's not about the people. It's all about staying in power and keeping the cronies happy.

Dear Editor

2009-10-28T09:17:00.008-04:30

Quico says: I was about to send this as an email to an editor who asked me to write something about Chávez's hypertrophied presidential office budget. But as the rant took shape, I found myself thinking... "hmmmm, did I just write a post without meaning to?"

Dear [Name withheld],

Thanks for getting in touch. It's always a bit funny getting to realize which kinds of stories about Venezuela pique a foreign editor's interests: if you'd asked me a week ago, I wouldn't have guessed that a largely bureaucratic story about the Presidential Office's budget allocation would get so many papers abroad interested, though in retrospect I guess I can sort of see why it's a resonant theme. My blog partner, Juan Nagel, sure got into it.

I don't think I can write it, though, for two reasons. The first is a bit technical and has to do with the way the budget process works in Venezuela, or rather, doesn't work. The second goes more to the heart of the issue...

First, the technical bit: Venezuelans who follow these things all know that the official budget the Finance Minister presents to our National Assembly each year is more like an opening gambit than a finalized statement of what the state expects to spend in the following fiscal year. For as long as anyone can remember, Venezuelan law has allowed the government to go back to parliament in the course of the fiscal year and ask them to top up whichever accounts have run dry earlier than expected, a handy little procedure known as an "additional credit" ("crédito adicional").

On some abstract plane, I guess having some mechanism in place to make sure the budget is flexible enough to adjust to changing realities is a good idea. But as with most good ideas in Venezuela's political system, this one has been abused out of any semblance of good sense over the years.

I'm not blaming Chávez here, this is one of those old-regime vices the revolution just sort of forgot to revolutionize. But the long and the short of it is that initial budget figures are an extremely misleading thermometer of how much a given government office in Venezuela will spend at any given time, because actual spending is often many multiples of the original figure, thanks to "additional credits."

In this case, in particular, the amount the government is budgeting for Chávez's office in 2010 is several multiples what they had budgeted for 2009, but I doubt very much it's what they actually spent this year: take the time to go through the additional credits and I bet the rise looks a lot less scandalous.

So it seems likely that what we have here is a kind of accounting mirage: the government deciding to ask for more of what Chávez will spend up front rather than returning to the parliamentary teat again and again over the course of next year. If you were so minded, you could even see this as an advance in terms of monetary transparency. (Though, of course, to make Venezuelan budgets genuinely useful as analytical and planning tools they would need much tighter controls over the "additional credit" mechanism overall, and the government sure isn't about to consider such a thing.)

I tried to think of a pithy way to explain all that in 3 sentences in a way that would make sense and wouldn't put your readers to sleep, but couldn't really think of one.

But beyond the accounting angle, there's this thing that's been gnawing away at me about the way the presidential budget is being reported abroad: when you're talking about a political system like the one we have, the whole notion of a "presidential office" budget that's somehow separate from the rest of the budget seems quaintly out of place. In Venezuela, every ministry and every agency's budget is at the president's unrestricted discretion...that's what petrostate autocracy boils down to!

You could multiply the examples here. I could tell you about Chávez's explicit threat to private shopping mall owners last week to get their own power generators or face power cuts from the public utility companies: a guy who micromanages the operations of even parastatal agencies like the utilities like that doesn't need a ringfenced private budget to spend as much as he wants on whatever he wants, he can just pick up a phone, call any agency head, issue a direct order and get his way, pre-existing budget commitments be damned.

I could go into the details of Fonden, the government's hyper-opaque "national development fund" which hasn't presented a balance sheet in public in over a year, whose actual holdings are a matter of simple-conjecture, but which by most accounts has at least several billion dollars and, according to some government spokesmen earlier this year, as many as $50 billion at its disposal: all money that's spent at Chávez's discretion, with simply no oversight, no previous budgeting, no form of outside accountability or control whatsoever.

I could go into the way the New PDVSA's management also spends money discretionally, on Chávez's orders, before handing that money over into the finance ministry's budgeting stream, such that that nearly endless money-stream is also, in effect, part of Chávez's no-oversight, no-controls budget.

When you think through the realities of the way money gets spent in a country like ours, where no public institution is ever able to put a check or a balance on the president's whim, getting upset over a $341,000 allocation for the president's clothing seems grotesquely out of place. I mean, what we're focusing on here is the fig leaf, the part they had the decency to declare, the equivalent of the profits Vito Corleone reported through Genco Olive Oil.

It's the millions upon millions of dollars they're spending off the books, to fund FARC or Iranian uranium exploration in Bolívar state, or extremist groupies' presidential campaigns in the rest of the hemisphere that I'm worried about. It's the unbudgeted, unreported, unaccounted for and officially non-existent billions flowing from PDVSA through various financial intermediaries and into the accounts of Ricardo Fernández Barrueco and Pedro Torres Ciliberto and Arné Chacón that I'm concerned about. It's the whole black underbelly of the parallel, off-the-book Chavista Second (and Third, and Fourth) Budget that we need to focus on, not the vanilla $1.4 billion they had the modesty to own up to!

In conditions like these, writing a story about the presidential office's official budget allocation is, in itself misleading. A first world reader looking into is bound to read the story and think, "so...they have budget debates, we have budget debates, they have controversies about particular budget items, we have controversies about particular budget items, they have venal politicians who make a grab for the sweet life while in office, and so do we!...hey, Venezuela seems like a pretty normal country!"

But it's not like that, my friend...it's just not like that at all...

cheers,
ft

Tell me how you budget and I'll tell you who you are

2009-10-27T09:52:00.013-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - Hugo Chávez's administration introduced a draft 2010 budget a few days ago. The project promises a whopping $84 billion in spending that somehow manages to disappoint. It is lower than the 2009 budget in real terms, and assumes an optimistic 0.5% GDP growth and a frankly fantastical 22% inflation, in itself nothing to shout home about. But a few hidden gems are raising significant eyebrows.

The main one: Spain's El Pais, through the inimitable pen of Maye Primera, is reporting that Chávez's discretionary spending will rise by 638% in 2010, to an astonishing $1.5 billion. This is twice as high as the entire budget of the Energy and Oil Ministry, higher than the budgets of the Agriculture, Mining or Foreign Affairs Ministries.

Nevertheless, the more egregious comparison is with the funds assigned to our embattled judicial system. Chávez's personal budget is on par with the $1.7 billion allocated to all the country's courts, and several times larger than the miserly $474 million that go to Prosecutors. Both amounts are 16 and 9% lower, respectively, in nominal terms than they were in 2009.

But it's just as well. The budget instructs the "justice" "system" to work in advancing the government's socialist agenda. If the courts are ordered to defend a political project instead of the rule of law, then there must be some sort of silver lining in them getting the axe, right?

The numbers underlying Chávez's discretionary spending offer cynics a not inconsiderable serving of red meat. There is a paltry $9 million allocation for Chávez to give out freely to those pesky people asking for help at the front door of Miraflores Palace, while security for the President (presumably to guard him from those very people) gets $16 million. The President's trips overseas (to get away from those people) get another $9.1 million, while his weekly TV show Aló, Presidente (so those people can be entertained while keeping quiet) gets $2.6 million.

Chávez's appearance clearly shall not bear the brunt of budgetary restrictions. The president's clothing gets $361 thousand per year - three times what Sarah Palin scandalously got for the 2008 US Presidential elections. This amount is, according to Chile's La Tercera, the highest in South America, exceeding even Cristina Kirchner's gaudy, unseemly $350 thousand-a-year wardrobe (which, come to think of it, Venezuelan tax-payers also help pay for.)

But as any fashion consultant will tell you, it's not just the clothes, it's how you wear them. That's why dry-cleaning gets $92 thousand, while $84 thousand are earmarked for stocking the President's palaces with "personal care" products. Assuming the President spends three minutes in the shower each day, his grooming costs taxpayers $76 per minute. Quite literally, he is throwing our money down the drain.

As snicker-inducing as these numbers are, they are not the most astonishing part of the Miraflores budget. Chávez is a well-documented narcissist, so these figures fit the bill. Unless you were still under the delusion that Chávez was sincere in his zest for socialism and his constant decrying of consumerism, these numbers are "dog-bites-man."

What these figures point to is Chávez's increased reliance on discretionary spending for his own political survival. As poll numbers for the President go from red to very red, Chávez knows his fate cannot be left to the headless bureaucracy he has fed all these years. As in 2003, he is well aware that the key is to have the cash ready to spend on quick, easy fixes that will somehow dupe the population into thinking he's solving their problems.

So the real headline shouldn't be what Chávez spends on clothes. The real headline is Chávez's strategy to stay politically relevant. In a country with the highest crime rates in the world, where personal safety is by far people's top concern, the President cuts funding for the justice system to increase his own discretionary funding. He clearly believes his own political survival depends not on solving people's problems, but on having the cash to look like he's doing so.

Chávez thinks you suck; you agree

2009-10-26T01:45:00.004-04:30

Quico says: As Chávez takes to blaming more and more of the nation's problems on you, the latest Datanalisis poll confirms it: 23.9% of respondents identify "la gente" (the people) as the main culprit for the nation's problems, just beating Chávez (23.2%) for top spot.

You suck, and you know it.

Killing capital

2009-10-23T05:59:00.006-04:30

Quico says: Hernando de Soto's conception of "dead capital" is one of the genuinely intriguing ideas spawned by the development literature in recent years. For de Soto, the problem facing the third-world poor is not just that they own too little, but that the things they do own are economically "dead."

In the absence of clear titles, the shanty where you live or the buhonero stall you sell from can't be used as collateral, or rented, or even sold. Because it can't do any of those things, it doesn't earn you an "in" into the formal financial system like the capital of the middle class or the rich. It's yours only in the sense that you can use it, nothing more.

But capital is much more than just the right to use the things that belong to you: it's the right to leverage them as tools for your economic empowerment and advancement.

Dead capital is the capital of the unfree.

What de Soto is getting at is an old idea in economics: that property is about more than just possession. Capitalism can only work when ownership carries with it a set of rights that include your ability to transact what you own, to borrow against it, to rent it or subdivide it or otherwise leverage it into a tool for attaining your goals. A major reason that the poor find themselves trapped in poverty, in this analysis, is that their property rights are partial and tenuous: they exclude many of the key features that turn mere stuff into living, breathing capital.

The debate in Venezuela's public sphere has too often missed this distinction between "property" and "property rights." Earnest chavistas have often pilloried the opposition for scaremongering, putting down their 2007 referendum defeat to a successful opposition scare campaign to convince people that the government was going to literally disposses them: kick them out of their ranchos or move cubans into their apartments.

"Nationalization is about the means of production," they'll argue, "about factories and farms and banks...not about people's houses!"

And while fears of reds knocking down your door may indeed be overblown, what can no longer be doubted is that even if chavismo won't take away your property, it sure is eager to truncate your property rights. They may let you keep your stuff, but your ability to dispose of the things you own in the way you judge most likely to bring your family prosperity is being aggressively fenced in.

This is the real story of Official Gazette No. 39,272 . Without having to expropriate anybody outright, the Gazette truncates hundreds of thousands of caraqueños' property rights, eroding their ability to leverage their belongings into tools for their own economic empowerment.

What we have here is a kind of capital massacre: the willy-nilly deadening of a massive store of previously living capital. The second your apartment is designated a "historically protected site" it takes a massive step from the category of capital to mere belonging.

When historic-site status is conferred on entire swathes of Caracas at one go, what we're seeing is the indiscriminate degradation of thousands upon thousands of families' rights to dispose of what belongs to them as they see fit, and all for the most tenuous of public-interest reasons. The government kills capital, apparently, for fun.

"Well, of course they do," you may be tempted to say, "they're communists: railing against capitalism is their whole thing."

But that's not right either. Marxism, for all its faults, at least offers a coherent response to the question of how to generate investment in a post-capitalist order. By socializing the ownership of the means of production, the workers' revolutionary state itself acquires the tools to leverage the society's material base into a (hoped-for) better standard of living for everyone. You don't have to agree that this is a good or even a feasible solution to recognize it as, at least, a solution: a serious, internally consistent stab at explaining how to bring prosperity in the absence of individual property rights.

The problem is that chavismo fails to rise to the threshold of intellectual seriousness Marxism sets out. In Venezuela the state is eroding individual citizens' rights to leverage their property into capital without proposing any coherent alternative.

Rather than nationalizing all industry and accepting responsibility for the management of society's productive processes, the state has created a thicket of stifling regulations instead. Those regulations keep a truncated version of ownership in private hands while at the same time preventing private owners from doing the things capitalists normally do for society's welfare: invest, produce, grow and generate jobs.

They wash not, and yet they refuse to lend out the wash basin.

In Venezuela, capital is not being socialized; it's being hunted for sport.

Our future at fire-sale prices

2009-10-22T18:00:00.001-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - Not content with issuing debt to finance capital flight, as they did a few weeks ago, the Chávez administration recently announced a new round of debt to finance even more capital flight, this time backed by the third-world thrift store that is PDVSA. One small problem stood in its way: not enough buyers.

Investing in Venezuela is way too risky even if you earn an infinity rate of return.

So what does the government do? Why, sweeten the debt emission deal, of course!

Yesterday, PDVSA said they would not change the conditions. The Central Bank chief parroted that line. But since they have no credibility to save any more, today they did the exact opposite and announced a heavily edulcorated new set of incentives to get people to buy their bonds.

The new rules exempt the interest earned from holding the government's debt from taxes. With this measure, the government ups the ante: not only is it encouraging you to take you capital abroad, it's actually paying you to do so.

The rules also say that holdings of these Boli-delicious, guapo-doble-con-queso bonds will not count toward bank holdings of foreign currency. As you may recall, a few months ago the government decreed to place a limit on the percentage of their capital Venezuelan banks could keep in foreign currencies. This caused a lot of scrambling among bankers who, wouldn't you know, held a lot of foreign currency.

Well, in a reversal, banks can now hold these PDVSA dollar bonds and not have it count. And bankers who buy the bonds will be eligible for a free weekend at the Margarita Hilton ...

Apparently, the constant threat of nationalization wasn't enough to keep them on their toes. Now the government has to sweet-talk the banks into buying their debt.

But that's how it is. We've gone to this proverbial well so many times, nobody wants to lend to us any more. Cuz you know the government's finances are in desperate shape when it has trouble pimping its papers to the Victor Vargases and Arne Chacons of the world.

What El Sistema teaches us about social policy

2009-10-22T13:00:00.004-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - The well-deserved, near-universal praise heaped on Venezuela's Youth Orchestra Program ("El Sistema") is a source of pride for all Venezuelans. And yet, reading the latest article to sing its praises, this time courtesy of The Toronto Star, I was left wondering: what is it about El Sistema that makes it so succesful?

Simple. It's José Antonio Abreu.

Of course, Abreu is mortal, and we would be selling the program short if we were to place its success on his shoulders, condemning it to oblivion once he is not there anymore. It's the parents, the musicians, the government - they all keep the train humming along.

But through it all, the fact is that Abreu has been persistent, leading the ship since the mid-70s.

It's hard to imagine El Sistema having this kind of impact without someone there, day in and day out, with a vision, navigating the perilous waters of political turmoil, oil-price shocks and a society that is, at times, at war with itself.

Abreu never set out to make this program for political gain. He doesn't appear to have wanted it as publicity, or to gain fame, or to boast in international forums. In his own words, "those of us who have been involved from the start were never really aware of what we were doing."

All he set out to do was create orchestras.

That concentrated focus has, almost miraculously, allowed him to gain the favor of governments left and right. He has sold his foundation as a Venezuelan institution, and has worked to resist being framed by either side in the current political squabbles. He has involved the communities, the parents and the local authorities, making them all have a stake in the outcome.

El Sistema could only work because of what it is not: a government program. Although the government supplies much of the funding, and the current administration has shamelessly tried to appropriate the fruits of their labor, El Sistema is not the product of the State.

It's the product of a single man's vision and the tireless work of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Venezuelans. It is not the fruit of some politician's imagination. It is not a three-headed bureaucracy run by a random army general who is replaced every six months. It's not a cash-distribution scheme concocted on the fly to help win an election.

This isn't to say that government social programs can't work. They can, and do. It's government programs run by the Venezuelan state which have proven to be ineffective and inefficient. They could be made to work, as long as they learn some lessons from successful experiences such as El Sistema.

Think about it:

clarity of vision,
persistence and permanence of its leadership,
resistance to using the program as something it is not intended to be,
positioning of the program above day-to-day politics,
minimizing of direct State involvement,
involvement of the community no matter what their political views.

All those things make El Sistema work. All those things are lacking in Venezuela's Misiones. Is it any wonder The Toronto Star is not raving about Misión Ribas?

With no electricity, nobody can hear your cadenas

2009-10-22T08:00:00.008-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - The two short videos are fascinating. In a few short minutes, you can see Chávez the deranged (hiring "planes" to bomb the clouds and create rain), Chávez the amusing (telling people three minutes are more than enough for showering, saying that's what he does, "and I don't stink"), Chávez the authoritarian ("why do people need hot water? why do they need jacuzzis?"), and Chávez the loose-tongued, Freudian-slip communist ("what kind of communism are we building here?").

My apologies, but they are in Spanish only.

The stuff about the showers, in particular, is another manifestation of a tendency we don't talk about enough: for Chávez, Venezuela's problems are Venezuelans' fault. They have nothing to do with him.

No food in store shelves? You're all shopping too much. No electricity? You bunch of wasteful pricks. No water? Get out of your jacuzzis! No dollars? Stop drinking Scotch and we might come up with some.

It used to be his Ministers' fault, or the IVth Republic's, or the Empire's. But those scapegoats doesn't seem to be working anymore.

Now, it's all your fault ... yours, and the weather's!

Your apartment is their heritage

2009-10-21T11:51:00.009-04:30

Quico says: Chavismo has surely entered its churrigueresque period when the government decrees a gas station as a protected historical site, an irreducible part of the nation's cultural and ethnic heritage. Yet there it is, in the official black and white of Official Gazette No. 39,272.

Mind you, Estación de Servicio Los Caobos is merely one item in a list of over 1,200 buildings, homes, parks, schools, churches, streets, highways and entire neighborhoods that figure in the Culture Ministry's new list of "protected historical sites" in Caracas' Libertador district.

The decree is a classic statement of dadaist tropical despotism. In one fell swoop, the government designates whole swathes of the city as protected heritage sites. El Nacional's headquarters is on the list, as is Banco Mercantil's. Not even the Distribuidor La Araña (pictured here), the crucial highway interchange that links up the Francisco Fajardo Highway with the one that goes to La Guaira, is saved from the mighty sword of cultural protection. Do you feel your ethnic heritage safer already?!

The slight bemusement this piece of bureaucratic protectionism stirs up quickly dissipates when you realize that, as protected heritage sites, all these areas come under a slew of new regulations. Suddenly, if you live anywhere in El Paraiso, Bella Vista, San Bernardino, La Florida or Los Caobos, you live in a protected historical site. Even if you manage to find someone willing to buy it, you can't just up and sell your house whenever you want. You can't even rent it, or get a mortgage loan against it.

No siree. Now, because your dilapidated, 50s-era, never-renovated San Bernardino apartment building is deemed part of the nation's "cultural heritage," you need special permission from MinPoPoCulture to do anything with it.

Another bit of paper, another chavista ideologue looking to screw with your life as long as you don't pony up and get off your mule. One more hoop, and one more layer of political control added to the mix of an already asphyxiated society.

The part that gets me most about this is that these people just don't have the courage of their convictions. If, as is clearly the case, they just plain don't believe in private property rights, why don't they come out and say it? Why all the sniveling, semi-covert, back-door, fine-print nationalizations? Why don't they make an honest woman out of their convictions? If they did, we may just be able to have a serious debate about it.

As things stand, we can at least take some comfort from knowing we can pump our massively subsidized gasoline from historically protected pumps.

Evita G. officially loses it...

2009-10-20T21:06:00.005-04:30

Quico says: Read this and tell me Eva Golinger hasn't lost her marbles completely.

I can't even piece together what the specific offense she's accusing MM of was in the first place. Seriously!

No good, two-timin' SOB...

2009-10-19T17:54:00.003-04:30

Quico says: OK, I admit it: I haven't been posting very much recently cuz I've been...gasp...two-timin' this blog!

The shame!

The other blog project is, erm...a lot different.

The final frontier

2009-10-19T08:36:00.003-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - Loyal reader Kepler has a post on his blog about Amazonas state. It's well worth a read, if anything for the links and the work he has put in mapping demographic and political trends in the state (inasmuch as there can be "trends" in a crimson-red state such as this).

Iranian uranium turns Iranian centrifuges into silly putty

2009-10-16T10:01:00.007-04:30

Quico says: For the longest time, the conventional wisdom was that it would be senseless for Iran to seek uranium supplies outside its own territory, because they could source plenty of the stuff domestically.

It now turns out that impurities in Iran's uranium supply may be wrecking their enrichment hardware.

Now, I'm no nuclear scientist...but isn't this precisely the kind of thing that might send you off looking for higher grade supplies elsewhere? Say, in a close ally's sparsely populated jungle regions?

Speaking truth to power, Cuba-style

2009-10-16T07:54:00.002-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - Blogger extraordinaire Yoani Sanchez fights for her rights. In Spanish only...

Former communist guerrilla blasts state intervention in the economy

2009-10-15T08:49:00.011-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says:

(With my apologies to Teodoro-groupie Quico, but that headline wrote itself.)

In today's Tal Cual, Teodoro Petkoff sensibly butchers the Chávez administration for involving itself directly in every last corner of the economy and making a mess wherever it pokes its nose. I was stratled by the tone of the piece, specially considering who the messenger is.

The Venezuelan government has a knack - the understatement of the day - for involving itself in the direct production of goods and services that could be supplied better and more cheaply by private industry. Every time, yes, every time it does so, the results are sub-par and all Venezuelans end up poorer for it. Teodoro echoes this idea more strongly than I recall him ever doing so, and for that he earns two thumbs up from me.

It's funny that a right-wing talking point like that could come from a man like Petkoff, no ifs, ands, or buts. It's not just that he's correctly framing Chávez as the anti-Midas that he is, it's that he does it so vehemently. It's as if he's channeling his inner Margaret Thatcher.

Now, the issue with this argument has always been how to sell it. How can we convince Venezuelans that state-owned enterprises are a waste of money, that when the chavista heads of the Venalums, the Banco Industriales and the Venirans of the world call for the government to "capitalize" their companies, we all end up paying? Where is the outrage when the government announces its foray into the hospitality industry? Where is the outcry when we hear our tax money will be used to sell cars?

After all, explaining this is just a matter of math: it's a whole lot easier to simply pay workers in these companies wages for doing nothing than have them be a part of a company where you also have to pay bribes, managers, distributors and foreign suppliers, with all the "surplus" pricing that comes with it.

It's also a lot less time consuming for government decision-makers who, instead of focusing on these empty shells, should be thinking about education, national security and crime. How much time does Chávez spend coming up with funky names for his new companies?

The fiscal and welfare consequences of a badly-run state-company are unequivocally sub-optimal relative to simply giving the workers cash.

This is an issue some Venezuelan politicians have meekly tried to sell, and time and again, they retreat. Ultimately, it always proves easier to just continue doing what we're used to and keep feeding the statist beast.

But how can we break this vicious cycle?

We may never find out.

The curious case of the missing panic

2009-10-13T11:42:00.012-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: As the government's authoritarian noose tightens, and next year's Legislative elections draw ever nearer with zero progress on a unity platform, it's fair to ask: is it time to panic yet?

Panic is underrated. It can be just the thing to get you going. As the great Billie Jean King puts it, "pressure is a privilege." But it can also shut you down. Deer, meet headlights.

Politicians who figure out how to turn their moments of panic into "the fierce urgency of now" are often the most successful. Frankly, in Venezuela, we could use some of that fierce urgency.

Surely, some opposition politicians are panicking, but none are panicking constructively. Come to think of it, it's our leadership's total inability to do constructive panic that's been spinning me into, well...a panic.

That's the first thing that crossed my mind when I read that the government is apparently considering bringing forward the Parliamentary elections currently scheduled for December 2010. According to El Nacional's sources in Miraflores, the government is seriously pondering holding the elections as early as March. Some deputies have admitted they have discussed the issue, and you know it's true when Darío Vivas says it ain't.

A move like this would catch the opposition with their pants down, and it wouldn't be the first time. All the talk about unity would have to give way to real results, and the shift would need to happen yesterday. A change in the schedule would dramatically compress the time available for selecting candidates and raising funds.

It shouldn't have to be like this. Here we are in October, and the progress on choosing unity candidates can be measured in millimeters. The alarm has been sounding for months, but our guys can't hear it.

We've been saying since at least February that the congressional elections are the central issue we face, that failure will seal our chances until at least 2018, that the work needs to begin right away. Nobody seems to understand this.

Leopoldo Lopez has brought up the idea of primaries, and I have enthusiastically boarded the bandwagon. But his failure to bring specifics to the table - in fact, his failure to even sit at the table - has all but doomed its chances. And while there has been much huffing and puffing about "reaching consensus" or "using opinion polls," so far, these debates have the air of a carrito-por-puesto discussion instead of the desperate urgency of a firefighters' huddle by the side of a blaze.

Tranquilo, chamo, we have all the time in the world, right?

Well, we don't. People may not remember, but Manuel Rosales didn't begin his Presidential campaign until the idea of primaries had fizzled (yes, we've been down this road before) and the World Cup had ended. In fact, the precise date of Rosales' selection was August 9, 2006, less than three months before the election.

With so little time to pick a team, settle on a message, and campaign, is it any wonder we got our asses handed to us? That's what "consensus" gets you - a weak candidate with an incoherent message selected way too late.

Regardless, the discussion of primaries vs. consensus vs. Pérez the Mouse deciding unity candidates would be completely beside the point if the schedule changed. The CNE throwing down the gauntlet should, in theory, force our politicians to zero in and focus on finding a solution, any solution, quickly.

Don't count on it. Instead, our Scotch-soaked, 360°-haunting geniuses are busy worrying about the OAS, visiting hunger strikers, collaborating on fluff pieces and, generally, avoiding jail. But where are the politicians telling people the truth - that unless we start playing as a team now, not only will we lose the 2010 elections badly, we will also have sealed our fate for 2012?

Some of our politicians are feeling the panic and acting on it, but it's not the good type of panic. Instead of running around like headless chickens or fleeing to Lima, they need to jujitsu that pressure into stamina. They need to do their job.

Catch My (Authoritarian) Drift?

2009-10-13T07:46:00.006-04:30

Quico says: In the Guardian today, Rory Carroll manages the impossible: getting a major first world paper to buckle down and give detailed attention to Chávez's authoritarian drift. No cutesy hook hung around Miss Venezuela, no quirky angle with El Vergatario. Not even a clear news hook. No bullshit at all. Chávez's drift towards authoritarianism is the story.

Well halle-friggin'-lujah....

Listen, lets get real. Stories like this one are always going to be rare. When they appear, they're never going to generate the kind of torrent of click-throughs that you get whenever Chávez does that thing he does and starts decreeing that underwear must be changed every half hour and worn on the outside, so they can check.

Carroll's story isn't sexy. Its forlornly imprisoned generals and its exquisite neoscholastic distinctions between imperfect democracies and authoritarian regimes with democratic characteristics won't send you rushing to twitter the link. Like Venezuelan reality, the whole thing is just grim.

Nobody likes grim.

But, more and more, stories like this are vital.

The view from your window: Alexandria

2009-10-13T06:19:00.000-04:30

Alexandria, Virginia, USA. 6:40 AM

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

Venirán...pero, ¿será que después se devolvirán?

2009-10-12T09:48:00.009-04:30

Quico says: So, in this era of participatory and protagonic democracy, what would happen to you if you flat out refused to discuss a labor contract with the workers you hired? How do you think LOPCYMAT inspectors would take it if you failed to supply them with adequate safety equipment and refused to even talk to them about breaks?

How do you figure the government would react if you just fired, willy-nilly, some two-dozen workers who were trying to organize a labor union in your non-union factory? How do you think Chávez would react if those fired workers filed a complaint against you at the local Labor Inspectorate, won, got a ruling ordering you to hire them back, but you still refused to put them back on the payroll, ignoring the Labor Ministry point blank?

You could never get away with stuff like that in the revolutionary workers' socialist paradise that is Chávez-era Venezuela, right? I mean, you'd get expropriated right away, wouldn't you?

Of course you would...unless you happen to be the government of Iran and your business is making knock-off 80s Peugeots, in which case Chávez would shower you with praise you and throw in a little unpaid advertising on the side.

The View from Your Window: Perth

2009-10-12T08:08:00.002-04:30

Perth, Australia

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

Merentes's line in the sand gets washed away by the very first wave

2009-10-09T15:30:00.025-04:30

Quico says: There's one thing monetary authorities need more than anything else: credibility. When a Central Bank chief commits to a policy goal, he has to make sure he has the tools at his disposal to really make it happen. In a world of rational expectations, the general belief in a Central Bank's ability to make its policy commitments stick is one of the most powerful determinants of a Central Bank's actual ability to make its policy commitments stick.

So how credible did Central Bank of Venezuela chief Nelson Merentes's target to keep the parallel rate below BsF.3.45 per dollar turn out to be? Ermmm...not very.

As you know, I'm not actually allowed to tell you the parallel rate today, but between you and me and 27 million other people, it rhymes with thive dolivars firty cents per bollar. That's nearly three times the 60% gap Merentes says it's the most he'll allow.

In other words, the market had one look at his announcement, had a good chuckle, and went right on doing what it'd been doing.

It's easy to laugh it all off, but this stunning monetary own goal could really undermine Merentes's hold on the economy down the road. Once the market starts to discount the Central Bank's announcements, the bank's ability to actually keep a handle on the macroeconomy starts to evaporate: cuz Merentes can do what he want to the macroeconomic aggregates he control, but if people don't believe he's going to really do what it takes to achieve his goals, the market will just keep eating his announcements for breakfast.

Update: A reader retorts that, to be fair, Merentes only said the bolivar would rally to Bs.3.45 by early December, not right away. That's true, as far as it goes, but irrelevant. If Merentes had any credibility, the bolivar would've rallied today.

To see why, ask yourself this: if you truly believed that the bolivar would rally to 3.45 by December, what would you do? Simple: you would rustle up as many dollars as possible and run, not walk, to the permuta market to buy bolivars at 5.40 while you still have the chance.

Then you'd sit pretty.

Come early December, you would take your bolivars and use them to buy dollars at BsF.3.45 a pop. Do that and you turn each October dollar into $1.56 in December - a better than 50% profit margin in just a couple of months.

I believe the technical term for that is "a killing".

Now, you're not the only one able to do that calculus. Anyone can. If the market had taken Merentes seriously, tons of people would've followed that reasoning and tons of money would've rushed to get in on the deal, lining up to buy up bolivars in the permuta market ASAP.

Via normal supply and demand - i.e., lots of dollars chasing relatively few bolivars - the rush itself would have driven up the value of the bolivar in the parallel market. In other words, we would've seen a mad scramble for bolivars in the permuta market, and that scramble would have continued until the gap between the expected value of holding bolivars and the expected value of holding dollars had been erased.

Which means that, if investors collectively had any confidence in the government bringing the permuta market to heel by December, we'd already have the evidence: the bolivar would've rallied to (near) 3.45:$ today.

That's rational expectations.

The fact that the bolivar rally stalled at 5.40:$ tells you all you need to know about how seriously the markets took Merentes. They laughed off his announcement, man.

Off Target

2009-10-08T14:59:00.010-04:30

Quico says: The imbecilities of Venezuela's Foreign Exchange Control Regime just keep piling up one on top of another, accumulating in layers that some future archeologist of macroeconomic incompetence will have to peel back one at a time. The latest is Central Bank chief Nelson Merentes's announcement that the gap between the official dollar exchange and the parallel market - which, mind you, doesn't officially exist - shouldn't exceed 60%.

In effect, Merentes is announcing an upper target for the permuta rate, committing the central bank to keep the parallel rate below BsF.:$ 3.45. Trouble is, the permuta rate has been well above that, trading at a gap that's more like 150%.

But that's just the start because, idiotically, it's actually against the law for me to tell you exactly what the permuta rate is. That means that the single most important number in the debate on Venezuelan macroeconomics today is strictly verboten, off-limits...what's the word I'm looking for? Censored.

Now, think this through for a minute. Venezuela now has an official exchange rate. And an official target for the unofficial exchange rate. But we can't mention what the actual unofficial rate is. Which, effectively, means we're not allowed to know if we're meeting Merentes's target or not because - stay with me now - we now have public targets for secret variables!

And, come to think of it, we're now committed to defending an exchange rate we don't admit exists!

Apples and Oranges: A Parable of Distorsiolandia

2009-10-08T07:47:00.029-04:30

Quico says: OK, time for a thought experiment/parable.

Welcome to Distorsiolandia, a land of simple rural folk where everyone works in agriculture. Distorsiolandia's economy is so simple, in fact, that the country has no money. It's not really necessary, because Distorsiolanos produce only two goods: apples and oranges. It's a tropical place, mind you, so there are a lot more oranges around than apples.

In fact, there are three times as many oranges as apples in Distorsiolandia. So its GDP looks something like:

Remember, we said there's no money in Distorsiolandia, but there is trade. As people barter apples for oranges, they soon settle on the terms of trade between them: one apple is worth three oranges.

In other words, the price of an apple is three oranges, and the price of an orange is one-third of an apple. Not having discovered money, Distorsiolanos have to quote the price of each product in terms of the other.

And those price, of course, match the relative scarcity between them.

One day, a radical revolutionary people's government comes to power in our fictional little country on the back of a radical redistributive discourse.

The revolutionaries rail against the way a parasitic elite has hoarded all the oranges, making them far too expensive for regular people to afford. So they decree that, from now on, the price of an orange will be controlled: for an orange, you can charge no more than one-quarter of an apple.

Which means that, instead of three oranges, an apple will buy you four.

People love oranges, so this decree makes the government very popular indeed. Lots of people who were happy to hold apples - back when an apple would only buy three oranges - now come forward to trade those apples for four oranges a pop.

But notice what the decree doesn't do: it doesn't change the underlying distribution of apples and oranges in the economy. You still have just three oranges around for every apple.

The relative scarcity of the two products hasn't changed: apples are still 3 times more scarce than oranges.

That means that, at the new price, the total stock of apples in the economy can buy more than the total stock of oranges. If everybody who has an apple tries to trade it for four oranges, you soon realize there are too many apples around chasing too few oranges. Soon enough, every orange has been sold off, but you still have people holding apples, wanting oranges, and finding nowhere to buy them.

What you end up with, in other words, is Orange Scarcity. At the government set price, there are simply too many apples chasing around too few oranges.

Now, notice what's happening here. There are oranges around. And there are apples around. There are people with apples who want oranges. And there are people with oranges who want apples. The only thing that's keeping the two apart is the government set price. Orange holders just sit there, holding their oranges, because they realize that, at that price, selling an orange only makes you poorer.

The revolutionary people's socialist government sees this and is outraged!

"Hoarding!" it cries, "speculators!"

Soon, the government is sending off soldiers with Kalashnikovs to round up people who are holding oranges and refusing to sell them for the controlled price. It makes them do a perp walk, holds them up to public contempt, blaming them in front of the cameras for the fact that people can't find any oranges in the shops! It never for one moment occurs to them that, at the price they've set, there simply aren't enough oranges to satisfy all the apple-holders in the system!

What happens next is also clear enough. If sellers aren't allowed to hold oranges and buyers can't find anyone to sell to them at 0.25 apples, soon enough somebody will decide to sell oranges on the down-low, for 0.33 apples a piece.

Of course, you're not allowed to do this openly, so you have to sneak around. A black market for oranges crops up. Soon, the government cracks down, threatening permuta orange sellers with jail and - here's the precious part - actually blaming them for the rise in the price of oranges!

So the government faces down the distortions created by one policy intervention - fixing the price of oranges - with another intervention: jailing black-market orange-mongers. But that second intervention itself creates a distortion. By making orange-selling riskier, it ensures black-market oranges will sell at an even more inflated price, since orange-mongers will now demand a risk-premium for participating in this dangerous illegal activity. So instead of 0.33 apples, they may demand 0.4, or even half an apple for an orange. By now, orange-buyers are out of options: they're bound to pony up.

And how will the government face up to the distortions created by the policy it implemented to confront the distortions created by the previous policy it had implemented?

You guessed it! By implementing yet another policy that brings with it yet another distortion!

Will they take over the Orange processing and distribution system? Will they threaten orange farmers with jails if they don't plant enough oranges? Who can tell? The sky is the limit!

Welcome to Distorsiolandia, where the solution to the problems created by one distortion is always...another distortion!

Lost in the thicket of laws and regulations that this kind of thinking generates is a simple insight: no bureaucratic dictate can change the fact that if there are three oranges out there for every apple and you force people to hand-over four oranges for an apple, oranges are gonna run out as sure as night follows day.

What's scary is that that thought, simple as it is, will cause a chavista's head to implode. When these people say they're against capitalism, what they really mean is that they're against arithmetic.

[Hat-tip for the "distorsiolandia" thing: AA, which, come to think of it, I'm not even sure if she reads the blog...]

The view from your window: Olanthe

2009-10-08T06:00:00.000-04:30

Olanthe, Kansas, USA. 6:25 PM.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

"I'll have a second serving of crazy please"

2009-10-07T16:12:00.005-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - We've discussed the insanity of the government's recent bond extravaganza here and here. The great Miguel summarizes the whole carnival here.

What does the government do?

Why, announce there will be more bonds to come!

Yup, that's right. More debt, more arbitrage, more corruption. Just what the doctor ordered.

I guess this proves Alí Rodríguez does not read this blog...

(Hat tip: Capablanca)

This socialism thing is hard!

2009-10-07T11:58:00.001-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: -

"It's hard to build socialism in this country."

Wise words coming from the mouth of chavista apparatchik Aristóbulo Istúriz.

Socialism is hard, he claims, because "state employees" want to be "shareholders." Instead of building socialism, they are prey to their old habits, fighting for personal vindication, focused on trying to get a bigger share of the state-owned-enterprise pie.

Istúriz then comes to a fateful conclusion: "If we don't change consciences, there will be no revolution."

Sigh. Ten years on and they are still wondering where their revolution is.

Of course consciences haven't changed. The government's model to sustaining power has been to enhance the expected value of rent-seeking while endlessly repeating that rent-seeking is bad.

Bad, that is, for everyone else except the guys on top. With this logic, is it surprising people aren't buying this "Bolivarian socialism" gimmick?

Take health care. The government's health system is a disaster, and all they can think of is "re-launching" what hasn't worked in the first place. The crisis has reached such proportions that Chávez himself acknowledges up to 50% of Barrio Adentro modules are abandoned. Is it any wonder the government's allies are worried about next year's elections?

Earth to Aristóbulo: if you really want state employees earning less than half the cost of the basic food basket to stop squabbling over oil rents, why don't you start by sending a team of auditors to go ask some real questions about how exactly it is that Ricardo Fernández Barruecos got to be worth $1.6 billion dollars even before he got control of Banco Canarias, BanPro, Bolívar Banco and Banco Confederado? Or ask Wilmer Ruperti to take you on that big yacht of his and ask him, in between sips of '78 Romanée Conti, to tell you where he thinks the Revolution went off the rails.

These whopping internal contradictions are one of the reasons why they're finding it so hard to control the working class, one that refuses to be brainwashed when the evidence of the regime's corruption is all around them.

People aren't stupid. They were sold "socialism" but once the petro-feast dried up, all they were left with was crime, official apathy, a stalling economy and the unmitigated rise of a new crony-capitalist class. Even the few things they accomplished ended up in the trash heap of negligence amidst an orgy of rent-grabbing. Before creating the Ministry of Popular Power for Conscience Modification, can we clarify whose conscience it is that needs reprogramming?

Come to think of it, Istúriz's words are not all that wise. It's not socialism that's hard - what's hard is getting people not to notice the hare the government is handing them ... is meowing.

The Bonos Soberanos Scam for Dummies

2009-10-06T20:56:00.012-04:30

Quico says: Oh goody...an excellent excuse to make some powerpoint slides!

And just keep in mind, while this is happening, the government is shutting down panaderías and auto parts store for - I shit you not - "excessive profits".

Plop!

Chavista porn

2009-10-06T17:00:00.005-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - Our chavista readers complain that all our blog does is talk smack about the government nonstop. That's a fair criticism, so I decided to throw them a bone.

Here is a video of your revolution in action. A farm is being taken over, no ifs, ands or buts. The pristine procedures and the group of red-shirted "facilitators" should make your heart flutter. And Willian Lara's supporting role should get him a nomination. Asi... asi... asi es que se gobierna.

Selling bonds, selling our future

2009-10-06T15:30:00.008-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: In what the government is hailing as a positive development, the Chávez administration has just "sold" $5 billion worth of bonds in order to ease pressure on the black market exchange rate. The auction was hailed as a huge success - reports indicate demand for the papers was more than twice what was available, the black market rate is going down, and everyone is happy.

Funny, because when you really think about it, the only thing the government was "selling" was our future.

It's all in the wording. By framing this as a "sale," the government makes it appear as if it's just doing a bit of business.

"Sale" is a word filled with positive connotations. When you have a "yard sale", you're being frugal, getting rid of some excess knick-knacks and bringing in some extra cash. When a business "sells" more, it's doing well. Sales are good - good for buyers, good for sellers.

Except selling bonds isn't like selling stuff at a garage sale. When you "sell" a bond, you're really issuing an IOU. All you're selling is a claim on the government's future revenues, a share of everyone's future taxes, a right of ownership on future oil revenue streams - yours, and your kids'.

Now, I'm not opposed to new debt in principle. New debt can be good - if you use it for things that create value in the long term, like improve our roads, building schools or advancing technology. Those are all assets that will presumably lift the country's potential GDP and raise productivity, and all of them may justify going into debt.

But that's not what is going on here. Most of this money will go to pay for current government spending, things like salaries, subsidies, and military purchases. The money will end up in the hands of people who will, sooner or later, want to convert it into dollars and take it out of the country - either through the permuta market, or indirectly, by buying imported stuff that does not help the country's productivity, and has to be financed with dollars. And the bonds themselves are convertible into US dollars, which means the buyers will sell them in New York for cold, hard greenbacks.

This supposed "sale" is, in reality, a massive uptake of debt for the sake of the powerful. The government is borrowing so the rich, the almost-rich and the well-connected can buy cheaper dollars, hold on to them, and perhaps sell them in the domestic market when the economy deteriorates further. The government is taking on debt to appease speculators, most of whom are in the upper classes, and not a few of which are in the Chávez-spawned parasitic crony-capitalist cohort popularly known as the Boli-bourgeoisie.

This being Venezuela, the bond "sale" was about as transparent as a burqa. The government's attempt to explain the details was a disaster and resulted in brokers illegally creating money supply in order to get in on the game. The allocation of the bonds was anything but transparent.

Instead of hailing the government's latest "sale of bonds," we should call things what they are. The government didn't sell anything. Chávez is borrowing in the name of all to pay for capital flight by a few.

I don't think it sounds so pretty when you frame it that way.

Chávez numbers tank just when it matters the least

2009-10-06T07:43:00.007-04:30

Quico says: Teodoro Petkoff spills the beans today on Chávez's god-awful poll numbers these days. In the latest IVAD (Seijas) poll, Chávez gets whooped by two-to-one margins on all kinds of domestic issues (the electoral law, private property, whether he's a threat to democracy) and by closer to three-to-one margins on most foreign policy questions (how he's dealing with Colombia, with the US, etc.)

All this from a Seijas poll, mind you - we're talking about the government's in-house "serious" pollster, who's had a pronounced pro-government lean in the past.

The August poll even has Chávez losing in the generic "would you vote for Chávez or for another candidate?" question, which - forget about 50% - now puts Chávez below 40%.

Read all about it here

What's ironic is that all this happens as Venezuela enters a period when poll numbers really don't matter any more. Back in the "hybrid regime" days, when our authoritarianism was at least competitive, these poll numbers would've been a real problem for the government.

These days? Hell, the guy just got through telling us how Gaddafi is to Libya as Bolívar was to Venezuela! He's well past caring.

The view from your window: Cabudare

2009-10-06T05:34:00.000-04:30

Cabudare, Estado Lara, Venezuela. 8:30 AM.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

Only in Venezuela, part 58,271,943

2009-10-05T06:29:00.001-04:30

Quico says: The thicket is everywhere:

It seemed like a minor bureaucratic change at the time: in March 2008, the government led by president Hugo Chávez downgraded the import status of books. Once listed as “essential goods”, all imported books would now require government certification, either demonstrating they were not produced domestically, or else not produced domestically in sufficient numbers. In practice, this means that for all titles they want to import, publishers or distributors have to submit an application describing the books in question and request that a share of foreign currency be allocated for their import. (In Venezuela, the government regulates the use of foreign currency for imports.) These applications are then reviewed by a government bureaucrat, who has the power to decide how many copies will be imported.

The decisions the government has made over the year that the law has been in force seems somewhat arbitrary. For example, the international bestseller The Secret could reasonably be expected to sell ten thousand copies or more, yet only several hundred were approved. What’s more, publishers must then wait six months to reapply to import additional copies — by which time demand may have dropped.

[Hat tip: CL.]

The View from Your Window: Concón

2009-10-05T04:53:00.001-04:30

Concón, Chile: 6:45 p.m.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

Please ensure the window frame is visible, and tell us the place and time the picture was taken. And don't try to "pretty it up" - just show us what you see when you look up from the seat where you typically read the blog. Files should be no bigger than 400 KB.

An Oppo Fit For Primaries

2009-10-02T13:27:00.000-04:30

Quico says: Throughout the day yesterday, Juan and I had a sprawling big fight about his Primaries post, all revolving around the question: is there any way the oppo leaders we have can be imagined signing on to an agreement like this?

After sleeping on it, here's my view: it's imaginable. Hard to imagine, but imaginable. But only, only, if there is very substantial pressure from below. In fact, it's going to take a virtual intra-opposition insurgency to get it done.

Right now, the calculus for the party bosses - Omar Barboza, Ramos Allup, Julio Borges and whomever-ends-up-least-maimed-by-the-COPEI-dust-up - is straightforward. Select candidates in a smoke-filled room - como toda la vida - and your own power, standing and status within the opposition is strengthened. Let grubby voters select them via primaries, and you start to become superfluous. Ergo, if possible, avoid primaries.

Simple stuff. These guys are weighing up costs and benefits and coming to their own conclusions. That what's best for them doesn't happen to coincide with what's best to the opposition (or the country) is neither here nor there. That's public choice for you.

So it's not enough to say you want primaries. You have to spell out what you're going to do to get them. Convincing us primaries are the best thing from your point of view or from the country's point of view isn't good enough, because it's not you or "the country" that's going to make this decision. This decision is going to be made the day Barboza, Ramos Allup, Borges and COPEI-survivor-man (plus assorted hangers on) sit up in bed, weigh up their costs and their benefits and conclude, "shit, if I don't support this primaries thing estoy jodido..."

How you do this, operationally, is an open question. I have no specific idea how it is that you create a climate where saying you're against primaries is seen as utterly unacceptable, tantamount to coming out against motherhood and apple pie. I guess making sure these guys get asked about it every single time a microphone is put in front of them is a good start.

The second consideration here - and I think this one is too easily dismissed - has to do with resources. To an extreme that I think most oppo supporters find difficult to comprehend, the oppo parties are just flat broke. I mean, really broke. Not-sure-how-I'm-going-to-pay-my-mobile-phone-bill broke. Can't-actually-afford-to-implement-any-of-the-thousands-of-good-ideas-people-come-to-me-with-every-day broke.

The natural base of donors you might expect them to go to for funds are tapped out: terrified of Disip finding out they finance the opposition and utterly certain that a bolivar given to the opposition is a bolivar wasted because these guys are just never going to come to power.

Now, campaigning costs money. The travel costs money, the ads cost money, the billboards cost money, the events cost money, everything costs money. The opposition doesn't have it. And organizing the actual primary costs money. Voting stations cost money. Ballots cost money. Counting infrastructure costs money. Information campaigns cost money. The opposition doesn't have it.

Now sure: when you're not the one having to write the checks that are going to bounce all over town like vulcanized little tokens of your pelabolismo, it's easy to sort of wave that away, to figure "well, c'mon, they just gotta do better," or even "hey, the excitement a primary campaign would create will be its own financing boom." Maybe. What's for sure is that, from the insiders' points of view, they've been working their butts off for years now trying to step up their fund-raising and have been finding an extraordinarily, unprecedentedly hostile atmosphere for it.

So the demand for primaries is, at this point, a little bit like shouting at a homeless man again and again at the top of your voice demanding that he go get a suite at the Ritz-Carleton and then rolling your eyes in disgust when he starts to tell you about the obstacles.

Which comes back to saying that what we need is not so much primaries as such. What we need first is something subtly different: an opposition political establishment able to hold primaries, in two senses. First, because its leaders are drawn to them as a result of their own, hard, cold cost-benefit analyses, and because the material resources are in place for candidates to actually compete and the event to actually be held.

But then, the debate needs to be different. The question isn't "primaries/no primaries." The question is "an opposition able to hold primaries/an opposition unable to hold primaries."

The indefatigable push for primaries

2009-10-02T07:40:00.005-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - As most of you know, I've become a strong supporter of holding opposition primaries. In my view, they would be good for our chances of winning the upcoming Parliamentary Elections, good for the country, and good for the ultimate goal of stopping Chávez.

But the idea, first proposed by Leopoldo López and now supported by Yon Goicoechea, among others, is not getting a ton of traction.

Part of it has to do with the lack of details, but a big chunk of it has to do with the typical laziness in our political class, with their whiny attitudes and their disgraceful tendency to get discouraged at how haaaaaard it is to be the opposition to a dictatorship.

Their knee-jerk reaction to reject proposals that takes power away from them and puts it in the hand of their constituents is, in a way, totally understandable. If things keep going the way they are, the decision over the Assembly elections will likely evolve into a huge fight between those who want popular participation and those who want to preserve the power that the status quo gives them.

Still, it’s early enough in the process to believe a rational discussion can still take place.

An op-ed piece today by Eugenio G. Martínez goes a long way toward focusing the discussion. Martínez lashes out with abandon, listing a barrage of questions for this and other proposals. Are we going to have 167 primaries?, he asks. Who can vote in the primaries? Is a "consensus better"? Who will make the decision in this "consensus"? Who will make the ultimate decision?

And on he goes, circling around one basic question: do we have our s**t together?

Well, we don't. But one way to start getting it together is by asking the right questions, and that is what Martínez gets right.

The next step consists of knowing what we are discussing, bringing down our options from the terrain of the hypothetical to the realm of the concrete, and arguing about that.

It's easy to dismiss primaries as overly complicated, expensive, ill-defined behemoths when they have not been properly defined. It's much harder to do that when you're discussing a very specific, limited proposal.

So, in light of his fair questions, and in view of the fact that a lot of the opposition's traditional talking heads have proposed a vague and uninspired combination of primaries and consensus, I have the following proposal that tries to reach some sort of middle ground. Here goes.

We hold primaries by state.
Súmate is in charge of organizing the logistics.
Primaries are open to any and all voters.
Each voter chooses one political party.
Parties do not have to be restricted to official organizations recognized by the CNE and, in fact, can be open to anyone. For example, we can think of "Movimiento Estudiantil" as one of the options available.
Voting is manual, following the successful experience in Aragua last year.
Ahead of the vote parties make proposals to the voters, pointing out who their likely candidates and platforms will be.
Campaign are based on these personalities and proposals, with the understanding that by voting for these parties, people are really voting for these people.
Once results are in, the parties come together in state-wide "Mesas de Unidad."
Each party gets votes in the "Mesa" in proportion to the votes they got in the primary. So if, say, in Zulia, UNT gets 45%, Movimiento Estudiantil gets 30% and PJ gets 20%, then those would be the proportion of votes in the Mesa de Unidad for each party or group.
The Mesa then determines unity candidates for that state, with the "order" in which they are listed based on party negotiations, opinion polls and natural leadership.

If we did it this way, the rosters of candidates would broadly reflect the results obtained in the primaries, plus or minus a few "special cases."

Each party would decide who their eligible candidates are according to their own internal rules. The decision of which "tarjeta" to list the unity roster under would be based on a more detailed understanding of electoral rules, and acknowledging the fact that if a party does not register candidates, it may be deemed illegal.

The way I see it, this makes the process simpler and faster. You don't turn primary voting process into a complicated disquisition on the merits of individuals, and you get a mix of popular participation and political negotiations.

Most importantly, you weed out parties that don't really count for much.

You don't like this proposal? Fine - lay out your reasons.

Think Súmate is not capable of organizing this? Let's hear from them, or let's propose an alternative organization.

Do you think it's too expensive? Ok, give me a cost estimate. But keep in mind that opinion polls are expensive too, and the Scotch that will be served in those closed-door meetings where this mythical "consensus" will be reached ain't gonna come cheap either. If we're going to argue the merits of each proposal on the basis of costs, let's! But let's do it with actual figures. And be prepared to argue why we can have a potazo for Globovision but not have one for a more organized, better opposition.

The discussion should also center on the benefits. One of the main obstacles holding the opposition back is lack of organization. By allowing the electorate to decide who should get a seat at the table and, more importantly, who shouldn't, we would go a long way in streamlining the decision-making process while at the same time giving it some much-needed legitimacy.

Primaries aren't a panacea, but the lack of primaries will be our undoing. While some of the points against primaries (cost, complications) are valid, they are surmountable. Pushing the idea of primaries aside in favor of doing what we've been doing so far and which, frankly, simply has not worked - that's just suicidal.

Folks, this is not rocket science - if Colombia's opposition can have primary elections, there is simply no reason why we can't have ours. It's one thing to be a naysayer, it's quite another to propose real arguments.

A hunger for change

2009-10-01T11:22:00.009-04:30

Juan Cristóbal says: - There is one news item we have neglected and we really shouldn't have: Venezuelan students and political prisoners held a massive, successful hunger strike during the past week.

The strike caught the attention of the opposition media, but more importantly, of the OAS. Secretary Insulza was sufficiently moved to oh-so-politely ask the Chávez administration to let the Interamerican Commision for Human Rights come to Venezuela for an inspection and see what all the fuss is about (pretty please). The strike also resulted in the liberation of Julio Rivas, a student leader, unjustly jailed for protesting a couple of weeks ago.

The Commission itself agreed to give the students a fair hearing and listen to their concerns. So far, Venezuela continues to refuse the Commission permission for a visit, and by doing so, bolsters the notion that it has something to hide.

I still have a problem understanding our side's love-hate relationship with the OAS. While some of us correctly decry the organism as an ineffective bureaucracy, devoid of moral authority and completely in the pocket of the hemisphere's neo-despots, others go to great lengths to get their attention.

Still, the students came across once again as committed, effective and untainted.

Doubts about their long-term staying power remain. The government's strange acquiescence to Rivas' freedom and their snickering glee in seeing the students take the spotlight away from politicians may signal they prefer them as potentially weaker, less experienced, less organized rivals.

Regardless, their hunger strike was a big hit and a PR bulls-eye, so hats off to them.

PS.- While we're on the topic of the young'uns - check out the newest member of the Venezuelan blogosphere, the student-centered No Goat and No Rope (in Spanish only). There's good stuff in there.

Any union you want, so long as it's mine

2009-10-01T08:53:00.007-04:30

Quico says: There is one thing we can be sure about ahead of today’s oil-sector union elections: chavismo is going to win. Of the ten slates on the ballot, nine are broadly pro-Chávez. This should shock no one - virtually every anti-Chávez PDVSA worker was purged from the payroll following the 2002-03 oil strike.

So the question isn’t whether the opposition’s marginal Slate #5 or critical chavista slates like #1 and #9 are going to win. The question is which of the broadly pro-Chávez currents is going to take control of this key slice of the labor movement. And here things get murky right away, because there are chavista slates and then there are government-controlled slates, and the two are far from one and the same.

It's useful to recall that to be a pro-government aspiring PDVSA union leader is, in effect, to side with the boss. While broad ideological alignment with the government is the norm inside PDVSA, even the most ardently chavista of workers are understandably leery to vote for union representatives who are going to automatically side with the boss.

As it turns out, management appears to be spreading its money widely, trying to keep some financial links with whomever comes out on top. But management’s clear preference is for slate #7, (representing VOS, the "Socialist Workers' Vanguard") which has received aggressive, unembarrassed backing from management, helping out with money and logistics, threatening workers who don't toe the line, pulling down all other slate's advertising, stacking voting centers with VOS-friendly witnesses, working to "disqualify" 41 opposing slates' candidates, and even going so far as to enable a deliciously fake little sit-in by Slate #7 workers in PDVSA headquarters in La Campiña a couple of weeks ago.

The campaign has been full of mishaps. The actual election date has been pushed back no less than four times, as the government has struggled to define CNE’s specific role in the elections. In the event, the government’s gone so far as to activate a mini-Plan República, calling out military personnel to oversee the balloting and ensuring a National Guard presence is visible at every polling site.

The intimidatory edge of this kind of military presence is clear, and in a company that’s already established its willingness to throw the book at workers who prove insufficiently docile, it’ll take real bravery for workers to come out and support any slate other than Plancha 7.

It’s not easy for an outsider to get a read on the dynamics inside a campaign like this. Some labor watchers suggest an overwhelming win for Slate #7 would lack credibility inside the oil industry, and could set off the kind of acephalous labor unrest the government is keen to prevent. It may be more likely that a number of the most government-influenced slates will end up taking the cake. Or it may be that the independent chavista slates fight the government-controlled slates to a draw, thanks to the proportional representation system being used.

One way or another, oil-sector unions are a key asset for the government, and it’s easy to see Ramírez mobilizing the resources at his disposal to make sure he ends up with a labor movement that toes his line in contract negotiations.

One thing’s for sure: the vitality of independent labor within the oil industry is at stake today. So today’s elections are worth watching, even if there’s no proper way to forecast a result.

The view from your window: Lilongwe

2009-10-01T06:00:00.000-04:30

Lilongwe, Malawi. 5:48 PM.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

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Caracas Chronicles

This Blog has Moved

Major Technical Problems

Back on Blogger - CANTV will not link to Wordpress Blogs

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Beginner's Guide the Chavez Era

Why a Beginner's Guide?

Contents

1. Best overall introductions

2. Journalistic Pieces

3. Human Rights Reports

4. From the archives

5. Critical Theory of Chavismo

6. Skypecasts

Added bonus: WTO Stuff

Supermassive

Big Oil has landed: Hugo Chávez in Copenhagen

Ten Years on From The Stillborn Constitution

Where the Maisanta Bodies Are Buried

ME-O bids adieu-o

Book 'em!

Siempre queda por caer

Making believers out of us...

Technoutopian Chronicles

What is Community Powered Comments?

So how does it work?

What’s the point of asking people to rate each comment twice?

Do I need to open an account and log in to post a comment?

So what’s the advantage of opening an account and logging in?

What’s my Reputation Score?

Why should I care about my Reputation Score?

How do I improve my Reputation Score?

Where can I see my Reputation Score?

What are Trusted Users?

What are the perks associated with being a Trusted User?

Can I become a permanent Trusted User?

I have a great idea for improving the system, where can I send it?

Caracas Chronicles 2.0: Sneak Preview

Mental Health View From Quico's Window

Subverting Chavismo's Discursive Standard

Dictatorship means never having to say "the reason is..."

The three-legged stool

Mental health break for the weekend

Rules for Subversives

Chavez throws hissy fit, your savings lose 15% of their value

Intervention!

Picking up on new memes

Annals of the Vulture Meat Guardianship Corporation

A useful illusion?

Edo-what?

Hondurans go rogue

Fun with Skype

The view from your window: The big apple

Q-atharsis

Chávez's achievement

The people get shoved under the table

The view from your window: Miami

Alleged news agency allegedly strips the word "alleged" of any meaning whatsoever, sources allege

Fernandez Barrueco Busted...but why?

Caracas Chronicles 2.0: Help us Test the Beta

The Collected Wit and Wisdom of Nelson Merentes

Chavismo's Crazy New PR Strategy: Telling the Truth

Chávez shoots at an open goal, scores

Chávez names his price

Not red enough for VTV: Squalid media and revolutionary discontent

Villa del Tukiti

The Universal Yawn

The view from your window: Parque Central

War games

The view from your window: Chicago

The expected begins to happen

Owning up to one's bad calls

Game Over

The view from your window: Asunción

Loser boasts of taking from winner

The view from your window: Addis Ababa

The Huffington Post ...

BCVSA and The Exchange Rate that Must Not Be Named

Reproduced Verbatim

What's happening in Táchira?