My country has become a scare tactic...
How embarrassing. In the final few days before the Brazilian presidential election, the doomed right-wing candidate has started likening Lula, the lefty front-runner, with Chavez, all in a final desperate ploy to win some last minute votes. "Elect this lunatic and we'll end up as screwed up as Venezuela is," seems to be the crux of Serra's campaign these days. Sad...Venezuela has become a scare tactic in foreign elections.
What's really telling, though, is Lula's reaction. An old-time lefty with two decades of experience in politics and four presidential elections behind him, Lula's seasoned enough to realize how lethal the association is and has decided to run full speed in the opposite direction. He called Serra's statement "electoral terrorism"...yikes! And to think chavistas of all sorts had been licking their lips over a supposed Fidel-Chavez-Lula axis. Doesn't look likely, does it?
Of course, it's just an international iteration of a trend that's been evident here for a long time. Serious Venezuelan left-wingers have been horrified by Chavez for years. Responsible people of the left are alarmed by the way Chavez is blackening the progressive movement's name here. We're talking people with unimpeachable credentials as social activists, people who risked their lives as guerrillas in the 60s, who've been working for radical reform since Chavez was at his mother's teat...we're talking Americo Martin, the old Revolutionary Left Movement leader, we're talking Teodoro Petkoff, who spent years in jail after organizing an incredibly daring raid for the Communist Party's guerrilla movement. We're talking Pompeyo Marquez and Douglas Bravo and Luis Manuel Esculpi and Pablo Medina and Andres Velasquez and even Jorge Olavarria; leaders who've devoted their lives to actually improving the lives of the poor, rather than talking crap about it. These people realize that, in the long-term, Chavez is doing incredible damage to the movement by convincing the middle-class that leftists really are the deranged lunatics they'd always feared they might be. The irony is that with this grotesque charade of a people's government, Chavez is actually making it harder and harder for any serious leftist to be taken seriously in the future. It's pretty sad. Ask Lula.
October 18, 2002
This riot is brought to you by...your government!
It's hard to contain the seething anger I feel when watching the TV footage from yesterday's riot downtown. I've written again and again about the need to de-escalate the crisis here, to chill out, to negotiate, to take chavistas seriously, to take their hopes and fears into account, to include them in a democratic solution. But then I watch the Lina Ron sponsored little affair downtown yesterday, I can't help but fall into despair. How, how is it possible to de-escalate a confrontation with a government that condones this shit? How is it possible to trust a government whose supporters have tacit permission to shoot guns at their political opponents in the streets?
Takes two to tango. Takes two to de-escalate. And yesterday made it, once again, totally obvious that the government has no interest at all in de-escalating.
It depresses me to no end that Lina Ron now sets the national agenda in this country. A full time provocateur, professional riot-organizer who coined the hideous phrase "a shut shop is a looted shop" to intimidate shop-keepers into staying open next monday, she's the incarnation of the basest, the vilest in the chavista regime. In any halfway serious country she would've been locked away months ago: she's been captured on camera inciting her underlings to violence so often it's become a journalistic cliché here. How can we be sure her little acts are government-backed? It's not just her evident immunity from prosecution, her constant hyper-heated pro-government rhetoric. It's that she's so assured of the official backing she enjoys that yesterday she even took a short break from the riot to pop over next door into the National Assembly to consult strategy with the government's congressional delegation. All in full view of the cameras. So how do you trust a government that operates this way enough to negotiate with it? How do you de-escalate with people that are this deeply committed to violence?
I mean, my God, at this point we've just gotten used to the phrase "disturbances generated by backers of the government" as a standard journalistic phrase...it doesn't even strike us as odd anymore, it's just...routine...
If moderate chavistas (are there any left?) had any sense at all - or any power at all - they'd realize that it's precisely this kind of crap that's pushing this country towards violence. The grotesque scenes last night marginalize doves like me, making us look like fools for calling for an accomodation with these people. It incites the non-chavistas in the army, who have it rubbed in their faces one more time that government-supporters can do anything they want downtown and the law just doesn't apply to them. It raises tensions across the whole society, pushes it towards a coup, towards a confrontation, towards a war. It's insane...
In the end, it was just Lina and a few dozen hot-heads making trouble downtown. The hotheads are not the problem. The problem, what's totally unacceptable about these episodes, is their evident coziness with the government, the obvious fact that nobody in power is willing to move against them, that they're protected. Whatever it takes, the government must be made to understand that this is not an acceptable way to do politics, not to 90% of Venezuelans. We can't accept it.
It's hard to contain the seething anger I feel when watching the TV footage from yesterday's riot downtown. I've written again and again about the need to de-escalate the crisis here, to chill out, to negotiate, to take chavistas seriously, to take their hopes and fears into account, to include them in a democratic solution. But then I watch the Lina Ron sponsored little affair downtown yesterday, I can't help but fall into despair. How, how is it possible to de-escalate a confrontation with a government that condones this shit? How is it possible to trust a government whose supporters have tacit permission to shoot guns at their political opponents in the streets?
Takes two to tango. Takes two to de-escalate. And yesterday made it, once again, totally obvious that the government has no interest at all in de-escalating.
It depresses me to no end that Lina Ron now sets the national agenda in this country. A full time provocateur, professional riot-organizer who coined the hideous phrase "a shut shop is a looted shop" to intimidate shop-keepers into staying open next monday, she's the incarnation of the basest, the vilest in the chavista regime. In any halfway serious country she would've been locked away months ago: she's been captured on camera inciting her underlings to violence so often it's become a journalistic cliché here. How can we be sure her little acts are government-backed? It's not just her evident immunity from prosecution, her constant hyper-heated pro-government rhetoric. It's that she's so assured of the official backing she enjoys that yesterday she even took a short break from the riot to pop over next door into the National Assembly to consult strategy with the government's congressional delegation. All in full view of the cameras. So how do you trust a government that operates this way enough to negotiate with it? How do you de-escalate with people that are this deeply committed to violence?
I mean, my God, at this point we've just gotten used to the phrase "disturbances generated by backers of the government" as a standard journalistic phrase...it doesn't even strike us as odd anymore, it's just...routine...
If moderate chavistas (are there any left?) had any sense at all - or any power at all - they'd realize that it's precisely this kind of crap that's pushing this country towards violence. The grotesque scenes last night marginalize doves like me, making us look like fools for calling for an accomodation with these people. It incites the non-chavistas in the army, who have it rubbed in their faces one more time that government-supporters can do anything they want downtown and the law just doesn't apply to them. It raises tensions across the whole society, pushes it towards a coup, towards a confrontation, towards a war. It's insane...
In the end, it was just Lina and a few dozen hot-heads making trouble downtown. The hotheads are not the problem. The problem, what's totally unacceptable about these episodes, is their evident coziness with the government, the obvious fact that nobody in power is willing to move against them, that they're protected. Whatever it takes, the government must be made to understand that this is not an acceptable way to do politics, not to 90% of Venezuelans. We can't accept it.
October 17, 2002
Anatomy of (yet another) downtown riot …
(sigh…these are getting predictable…)
At first, people weren’t sure what to make of the protests at the Metropolitan Police. A pretty good number of PMs (as the cops are known) started protesting about back-pay, which seemed reasonable. The Greater Caracas Mayor answered that he sympathized, but that the money to pay them had not been handed down to him by the National Government, where all of the Mayor’s money originates. That seemed reasonable too. But as the protests got more drawn out and militant, people started to get suspicious. There was a definite whiff of the political about this protest – the Metropolitan Mayor is a fierce Chávez critic, after all, and the Metropolitan Police has been a key to the big anti-government protests over the last 10-months. Without a big PM presence, a lot of opposition activists would’ve been too scared to protest in public. So the idea that the protest was a ploy to undermine, maybe even destroy the PM began to take shape. And those suspicions were born out when Channel 8, the doctrinally chavista State-run channel, started devoting more and more air time to the protests.
So today, when the dispute finally got out of hand, when the dissident cops tried to set fire to the Metropolitan Mayor’s Offices, when other PMs had to disperse them with tear gas, when groups of masked trouble-makers joined them and fired gunshots at the PM lines, and when no one in the National Government lifted a finger to stop the whole sorry exercise in Avenida Urdaneta, we weren’t surprised. We’ve come to expect this madness from the government. Time and time again they've shown that this is how they deal with opponents: round up some street thugs, set them on your enemies. Preserves plausible deniability.
Frankly, we're scared. We're scared that when they manage to provoke an incident that gives the government an excuse to take over the Metropolitan Police our right to protest in the streets will be truly in peril. Without a well-armed PM presence standing guard, marching would just be too scary. And these days, marching is one of the last means of protest we have left.
(sigh…these are getting predictable…)
At first, people weren’t sure what to make of the protests at the Metropolitan Police. A pretty good number of PMs (as the cops are known) started protesting about back-pay, which seemed reasonable. The Greater Caracas Mayor answered that he sympathized, but that the money to pay them had not been handed down to him by the National Government, where all of the Mayor’s money originates. That seemed reasonable too. But as the protests got more drawn out and militant, people started to get suspicious. There was a definite whiff of the political about this protest – the Metropolitan Mayor is a fierce Chávez critic, after all, and the Metropolitan Police has been a key to the big anti-government protests over the last 10-months. Without a big PM presence, a lot of opposition activists would’ve been too scared to protest in public. So the idea that the protest was a ploy to undermine, maybe even destroy the PM began to take shape. And those suspicions were born out when Channel 8, the doctrinally chavista State-run channel, started devoting more and more air time to the protests.
So today, when the dispute finally got out of hand, when the dissident cops tried to set fire to the Metropolitan Mayor’s Offices, when other PMs had to disperse them with tear gas, when groups of masked trouble-makers joined them and fired gunshots at the PM lines, and when no one in the National Government lifted a finger to stop the whole sorry exercise in Avenida Urdaneta, we weren’t surprised. We’ve come to expect this madness from the government. Time and time again they've shown that this is how they deal with opponents: round up some street thugs, set them on your enemies. Preserves plausible deniability.
Frankly, we're scared. We're scared that when they manage to provoke an incident that gives the government an excuse to take over the Metropolitan Police our right to protest in the streets will be truly in peril. Without a well-armed PM presence standing guard, marching would just be too scary. And these days, marching is one of the last means of protest we have left.
[it occurs to me that, especially for non-Venezuelans, the column above might not make that much sense without an…]
Explicative note on how this crazy city is organized
The municipal structure of Caracas is a daunting tangle. When my grandmother was born 90 years ago, Caracas was a town of maybe 200,000 confined to what is now known as el centro, downtown, over on the west side of the valley, in what was known as the Distrito Federal – a DC type federal entity. With the advent of oil and modernity, it grew incredibly quickly, like many third world capitals, to its current 4 million inhabittants. In the process, it spilled out of the central core, growing eastward along the valley into areas that laid outside the D.F., in Miranda State. Many towns that for centuries had been quite separate from the city were swallowed up in the sprawl – Chacao, Petare, El Hatillo. But each of those had their own municipal governments. By the 1990s, these had become neighborhoods of Caracas rather than towns of their own, leaving the broader city without a unified municipal government.
When the Constituent Assembly was convened in 1999, many proposals surfaced to bring chaos to the madness by consolidating these into a single administrative entity. But the Miranda State government didn’t like the idea one bit: the wealthy East-side Caracas neighborhoods held a huge proportion of its population and its tax base, and the governor realized it would be a disaster for the state if those were taken out of its jurisdiction. So the proposals faced serious resistance, and a compromise was eventually reached: a new Metropolitan Mayorship would be created, encompassing the East-side neighborhoods, but without dismembering Miranda State. Each of the East-side neighborhoods would retain its own municipal government, which would coexist with a Greater Caracas mayorship. The result was a municipal structure even more complicated than before: the city now has both a Metropolitan Mayor with jurisdiction over both the East and West-sides of the city, stradling both the D.F. (which, just to make things even more convoluted, had its name changed – it’s now the Distrito Capital, D.C.) and parts of Miranda State AND five local mayors. In the Eastern Districts, there are three levels of regional government: the municipal, the greater-caracas municipal, and then the state governor, whereas the Distrito Capital has no governor, so in that part, the metropolitan mayor acts as de facto governor. Confused? So’s everyone else.
The point is that whenever you hear someone say “the mayor of Caracas” you have to ask “which one?”
The thing is that unlike normal municipal governments, the Greater Caracas mayorship has no autonomous tax-raising powers at all. It relies completely on the National Government for its funding. And the Greater Caracas mayor, Alfredo Peña, is now an ardent antichavista (though, once upon a time, he sat on Chávez’ cabinet,) and has become a major bete noire for Chávez’s followers. So, not surprisingly, the National Government nickel-and-dimes Peña’s bureaucracy to no end. The municipal workers get paid verrry irregularly, if at all, and that includes Peña’s Metropolitan Police officers.
Explicative note on how this crazy city is organized
The municipal structure of Caracas is a daunting tangle. When my grandmother was born 90 years ago, Caracas was a town of maybe 200,000 confined to what is now known as el centro, downtown, over on the west side of the valley, in what was known as the Distrito Federal – a DC type federal entity. With the advent of oil and modernity, it grew incredibly quickly, like many third world capitals, to its current 4 million inhabittants. In the process, it spilled out of the central core, growing eastward along the valley into areas that laid outside the D.F., in Miranda State. Many towns that for centuries had been quite separate from the city were swallowed up in the sprawl – Chacao, Petare, El Hatillo. But each of those had their own municipal governments. By the 1990s, these had become neighborhoods of Caracas rather than towns of their own, leaving the broader city without a unified municipal government.
When the Constituent Assembly was convened in 1999, many proposals surfaced to bring chaos to the madness by consolidating these into a single administrative entity. But the Miranda State government didn’t like the idea one bit: the wealthy East-side Caracas neighborhoods held a huge proportion of its population and its tax base, and the governor realized it would be a disaster for the state if those were taken out of its jurisdiction. So the proposals faced serious resistance, and a compromise was eventually reached: a new Metropolitan Mayorship would be created, encompassing the East-side neighborhoods, but without dismembering Miranda State. Each of the East-side neighborhoods would retain its own municipal government, which would coexist with a Greater Caracas mayorship. The result was a municipal structure even more complicated than before: the city now has both a Metropolitan Mayor with jurisdiction over both the East and West-sides of the city, stradling both the D.F. (which, just to make things even more convoluted, had its name changed – it’s now the Distrito Capital, D.C.) and parts of Miranda State AND five local mayors. In the Eastern Districts, there are three levels of regional government: the municipal, the greater-caracas municipal, and then the state governor, whereas the Distrito Capital has no governor, so in that part, the metropolitan mayor acts as de facto governor. Confused? So’s everyone else.
The point is that whenever you hear someone say “the mayor of Caracas” you have to ask “which one?”
The thing is that unlike normal municipal governments, the Greater Caracas mayorship has no autonomous tax-raising powers at all. It relies completely on the National Government for its funding. And the Greater Caracas mayor, Alfredo Peña, is now an ardent antichavista (though, once upon a time, he sat on Chávez’ cabinet,) and has become a major bete noire for Chávez’s followers. So, not surprisingly, the National Government nickel-and-dimes Peña’s bureaucracy to no end. The municipal workers get paid verrry irregularly, if at all, and that includes Peña’s Metropolitan Police officers.
October 16, 2002
Yes, yes, I've been delinquent about posting. In my defense, I've been battling a dreadful cold and sinking under a pile of work. And really, it's been an eventful few days. The government held a big counter-march on Sunday, 3 days after ours, and the scene soon descended into an infantile "mine was bigger - no, no, mine was bigger" affair. I think the numbers game is quite silly, frankly, but more or less unavoidable.
Then, yesterday, OAS finally noticed that the country is about to implode. Peru's president Toledo, bless his heart, called for a meeting of Andean-region foreign ministers to at least talk about it, within the framework of OAS's Democratic Charter. This is significant because it suggests that Toledo now thinks that the government might be in violation of the charter - though he hasn't quite said that, yet. The government threw a hissy-fit: until Toledo's speech, its attempts to throw up a facade of "absolute normalcy" - at least in international circles - had held. Yesterday, it started to crack. Not that OAS can really do much about our problems here, but it's just nice that the outside world has finally picked up on the idea that all is not sweetness'n'light here.
And into this already complicated stew you throw in the threat of a General Work Stoppage starting next Monday. Oh dear...
OK, below, VenEc's weekly editorial, penned by me.
Risky business
From the government’s point of view, it was a propaganda triumph. Through fair means or foul, Sunday’s pro-government march managed to create the appearance of roughly equaling Thursday’s opposition march. As usual, Hugo Chávez insulted common sense by claiming no less than three million people were in attendance, when in fact 100,000 might have been closer to the mark. Presidential hyperbole aside, though, the government turned out enough people to manipulate the resulting TV images into a media triumph.
In fact, there’s little doubt that the opposition march from last week was substantially larger. Experts speculate the ratio might have been anywhere from 4:1 to 12:1, though getting an accurate count of the opposition marchers was much more difficult, since they tended to dissipate upon arrival at their Avenida Bolívar endpoint, unlike the government marchers, who stayed to wait for the president’s speech there. The two marches bear out what pollsters have been saying for months: that the opposition now enjoys the support of a clear majority of Venezuelans – some two-thirds, according to most polls. But that hardly means that the government has been left in the lurch: it retains the impassioned support of a significant minority of the population, perhaps as much as a third of the Venezuelan public.
This overall breakdown has remained substantially unchanged since the second half of last year. What makes the situation so volatile is the fact that both sides insist on acting as though they enjoy near-unanimous popular support. The government stubbornly refuses to accept the drastic drop in its popularity, continuing to govern as though four-fifths of the electorate still supported it, as in March 1999. Angered by the government’s pigheaded refusal to accept the obvious, the opposition has fallen into an equally dangerous trap: acting as though support for the government had collapsed entirely, which is also a gross misrepresentation of reality. With each side unwilling to concede that the other has significant support, with neither side accepting the need to play by rules that are seen as acceptable by the other, and with each side overestimating its strength, the stage for miscalculation and violence is set.
It’s against this backdrop that the opposition has called for a 12-hour “general stoppage” to demand the president either resign or call early elections. This is a high-risk operation, one that faces many pitfalls. For one, the government has implemented a fierce campaign of intimidation to cow business owners into staying open. Companies that depend on the public sector for contracts are especially easy targets, but given Venezuela’s business climate, almost every company can be pressured one way or another – bureaucratic permits can be withheld, tax inspectors can become suddenly much more conscientious, labor disputes can tilt the way of the workers, etc. As though all of that were not enough, the government has recently published a draft of its much-feared “co-management” amendments to the Labor Law’s regulations, and government spokesmen have issued repeated threats to use those amendments to summarily take over any private companies that join a strike. In such circumstances, it will take real courage to buck the intimidation and join the stoppage.
So Carlos Ortega certainly has his work cut out for him. At this stage, it’s impossible to say whether such key sectors as the oil industry and Caracas’ transport workers will join the action. The CTV is taking a big risk on this mobilization, and it’s not yet possible to say whether it will pay off.
Overall, though, two points are obvious: as far as the government is concerned, its broad, Marxist vision for Venezuela’s future is not up for debate, and that vision is simply unacceptable to a broad majority of Venezuelans. The only resource the opposition has left is sustained, ongoing street pressure. Even if results are not immediately evident, even if individual actions do not lead to a same-day solution, democratically-minded Venezuelans have a historic duty to register their revulsion at the government’s plans at every possible juncture.
At the same time, it bears remembering that even if the Chávez regime were to collapse next week, the 20-33% of Venezuelans who believe passionately in the president’s message would still be there the next day. The real challenge for any transition government will be to incorporate those people into the post-chavista political process, reassuring them that their concerns are taken seriously and overcoming the urge towards facile triumphalism. Failure to do so would imperil the nation’s stability for years to come.
October 10, 2002
7 kilometers, packed solid...
I'm just about to step outside and go march, but one last update: it's huge. My boss just called me...he's at the end of Avenida Libertador, about 7 km. out from the starting point. Says there's asolid crowd there. The TV images show that there's a solid crowd stretching all the way back to the Parque del Este starting point: the people at the back haven't been able to even start walking, and those . That's 7 solid kilometers of wide streets packed solid with marchers (that's 4.4 miles, for the metrically impaired.)
As of 12:15 pm, the march remains fully peaceful. Fingers crossed.
ft
World Mental-Health Day
An inside story in El Nacional tells us it's World Mental-Health Day today. How apropos. Mental health is not particularly on-show out there today, though...not in Venezuela, anyway.
In the early morning, two separate convoys of busses carrying protesters to the march in Caracas were basically ambushed: the roads were blocked, either with hijacked 18-wheeler trucks or burning tires, and then someone started shooting into the buses. One guy was killed in one of the ambushes, apparently an innocent by-stander, in Guarico state. The other ambush was on the main east-west highway, on the border between Aragua and Carabobo States, and left six people wounded with gunshots, three of them Carabobo State police officers. Once again, the events were carried live on the radio, as people on the scene got on their cell-phones and called news radio stations. It was eerie: you could hear the shooting in the background.
Significantly, the second raid happened just outside a highway tunnel, directly in front of a National Guard outpost. Some reports from the scene were adamant that the National Guardsmen did the shooting. Certainly, they stood by and did nothing for over four hours while the access to the tunel remained blocked in both directions by trucks. At about 9:30, they finally lifted the blockage and let people through.
I'm just now hearing there was a similar blocked-road incident in Sucre State also.
Three ambushes, miles and miles apart, with people shooting guns on busloads of opposition supporters, all at the same time. This just couldn't have happened without coordination. Ugly, ugly stuff.
Anyway, the TV images are quite eloquent. The march looks huge. Arial shots taken from a high-rise on Francisco de Miranda Avenue show the entire area from the Parque del Este metro stop to the Plaza Altamira packed solid. I don't know how many people that is, but it's a lot. Once again, it's obvious: the bungled "repression" from the last few days only provoked people more. After the Rosendo/Medina Gomez circus last night, nobody but nobody is intimidated.
An inside story in El Nacional tells us it's World Mental-Health Day today. How apropos. Mental health is not particularly on-show out there today, though...not in Venezuela, anyway.
In the early morning, two separate convoys of busses carrying protesters to the march in Caracas were basically ambushed: the roads were blocked, either with hijacked 18-wheeler trucks or burning tires, and then someone started shooting into the buses. One guy was killed in one of the ambushes, apparently an innocent by-stander, in Guarico state. The other ambush was on the main east-west highway, on the border between Aragua and Carabobo States, and left six people wounded with gunshots, three of them Carabobo State police officers. Once again, the events were carried live on the radio, as people on the scene got on their cell-phones and called news radio stations. It was eerie: you could hear the shooting in the background.
Significantly, the second raid happened just outside a highway tunnel, directly in front of a National Guard outpost. Some reports from the scene were adamant that the National Guardsmen did the shooting. Certainly, they stood by and did nothing for over four hours while the access to the tunel remained blocked in both directions by trucks. At about 9:30, they finally lifted the blockage and let people through.
I'm just now hearing there was a similar blocked-road incident in Sucre State also.
Three ambushes, miles and miles apart, with people shooting guns on busloads of opposition supporters, all at the same time. This just couldn't have happened without coordination. Ugly, ugly stuff.
Anyway, the TV images are quite eloquent. The march looks huge. Arial shots taken from a high-rise on Francisco de Miranda Avenue show the entire area from the Parque del Este metro stop to the Plaza Altamira packed solid. I don't know how many people that is, but it's a lot. Once again, it's obvious: the bungled "repression" from the last few days only provoked people more. After the Rosendo/Medina Gomez circus last night, nobody but nobody is intimidated.
The Revolt of Los Palos Grandes
Last night was a circus. First, Rosendo Struck Again. Major General Manuel Rosendo, in full military uniform, gave a fire-breathing press conference where, among other things he,
-Accused the president of war crimes, saying that on their final phone call on April 11th, after he refused to implement Plan Avila for the first time, the president told him he was "wearing his uniform with his rifle in hand and he was going to fight for this revolution that had cost him so much."
-Reminded the defense minister of 1991, when Rosendo was a student of the current minister, and Prieto taught him a course on the importance of countering urban guerrillas early-on rather than waiting for them to become full blown wars: "we have urban guerrillas now, Mr. Minister, what are you going to do about it? Why do you do nothing?"
-Warned that the president might issue the same orders today he'd issued on April 11th, but that this time all the military officers around him were unconditionals and would not dare defy him. He reminded the army's troop commanders of their responsibility under the Statute of Rome and reminded them that "following orders" is not an admissible defense in a case of crimes against humanity.
-Decried the hideous treatment of dissident army officers at the hand of their leaders, pointing out that while those who agreed to April's violence had been rewarded with plum ambassadorships, those who refused to shoot on the people were facing trial.
-Sprinkled various other harsh criticisms on the Vice President, the Attorney General, General Belisario Landis, and half a dozen others I can't remember right now.
Rosendo definitely missed his calling: he should've been a politician. He's good at it! Much of the reason his testimony is so damaging is that, until April 10th, he was a chavista loyalist, the head of the Unified Command of the Armed Forces, and as such was privy to a lot of high-level, very compromising discussions in those days. e's a turncoat, basically, and knows way too much. He's also a terrific public speaker.
But his statement was only the beginning. Just an hour or so after the press conference, a DISIP patrol tried to arrest him. The idiots tried to do it on the Third Avenue of Los Palos Grandes, the antichavista heartland of East-side Caracas, during rush hour. As they tried to nab him, an old lady who was driving next to Rosendo's car recognized him, got out of her car, and started shouting "It's Rosendo! It's General Rosendo!! They're trying to arrest Rosendo!" As more and more people in the traffic jam realized what was going on, they started pouring out of their cars, shouting "Leave Rosendo alone!" and "Rosendo! Rosendo! Aqui yo te defiendo!" (a clever on-the-spot rhyme: "Rosendo, Rosendo, I'll defend you here!") With traffic stopped, and a quickly gathering mob surrounding them, these DISIP agents saw which way the wind was blowing and high-tailed it out of there, barely on time. Meanwhile, neighbors were coming down from their apartment buildings in droves, March-Kits (TM) in hand, for another - but this time, much bigger - Insta-Protest. There must have been four blocks full of ecstatic people shouting anti-government slogans and cheering Rosendo. Eventually, somebody took the guy into one of the neighboring apartments to shelter him, while several thousand people stood guard outside, singing the national anthem and such. It was quite a scene.
[Venezuelan readers will be amused to know that, for about the first 20 minutes of this whole thing, the only reporter anyone could get close to the General was Valentina Quintero, who apparently lives nearby. It was hysterical! She kept trying to act all serious and reporter-like, but couldn't quite carry it off and kept digressing on how nice Rosendo looked out of military uniform...very funny. [Valentina Quintero writes a fun, but very vapid, tourism column in El Nacional, and is about as far-removed from a hard-knuckled political journalist as you can possibly imagine.]]
That was the evening for Rosendo. Meanwhile, General Medina Gomez had a somewhat similar experience. He decided to start giving a round of TV interviews, starting in Globovision where he told Norberto Mazza of Grado 33 that he more or less advocates a coup (not in those words, of course.) Then he drove off to Televen for a chat with Cesar Miguel Rondon. DIM finally caught up with him as he was leaving Televen, but in no time at all the neighbors from around Televen caught un, grabbed their March-Kits (TM), and surrounded the TV station, copying the scene in Los Palos Grandes. That siege went on most of the night. Result, they couldn't arrest either Rosendo or Medina Gomez.
October 9, 2002
Ineffectual authoritarianism…
What a farce! The TV images from the joint Secret Police/Military Intelligence raid of Colonel Antonio Guevara (suspected coupster) looked like something out of TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. Something like thirty heavily armed intelligence officers, many wearing ski masks, poured into the apartment at 5 in the morning, blocking traffic around the neighborhood. Within minutes of their arrival, the colonel’s wife has managed to sneak out of the apartment and call several radio and TV stations to tell them what’s going on. As a result, when my radio alarm wakes me up I’m treated to the very surreal experience of a Secret Police raid being brought to me live, blow-by-blow, on the radio, as described by the raidee’s wife.
Eventually, the raiders realice that they’re on the air and go find the lady, but by then everyone in Caracas knows what’s going on. By six in the morning, the neighbors had started a huge cacerolazo, the very folkloric Venezuelan practice of protesting by banging pots and pans with wooden ladles outside your window. It was a huge cacerolazo, showing the people there weren’t the least bit intimidated by the DISIP/DIM presence. Significantly, the neighborhood (La Rosaleda in San Antonio de los Altos) is a military community where 9 out of 10 apartments is occupied by a military family. But then, it got even more farcical: angry at the raid, all these women from the nearby apartment buildings got out their protest “kits” (flags, pots, pans, whistles and such which they’d been doubtlessly preparing for tomorrow’s march) and put together an impromptu little street protest in the access road to the neighborhood. They got some cars out and blocked the access road, leaving the intelligence officers stuck there: once the raid was over, they couldn’t get out. The officers marched down to the streets and tried to scare the ladies into letting them through, but the remarkable thing was how totally unimpressed these housewives were…all the TV showed was a string of forty and fifty year old middleclass ladies shouting their heads off and jeering at these dressed-to-impress, heavily armed military dudes. It was really surreal.
Finally, showing just how misplaced the word “intelligence” is in these people’s job titles, they decided to disperse the mini-protest with tear gas. This was incredibly dumb, cuz tear gas will disperse the jeering women but not the cars parked right on your way. So it just made the marchers angrier without getting the officers unstuck. They looked so pathetic with their little machine guns slung over their shoulders standing there as these housewives gave them hell. It made for great TV footage, that’s for sure.
Eventually, at about noon, the opposition mayor of that area showed up, talked the protesters down, and negotiated an end to the "siege.”
That was two nights ago. Last night’s raids were, if anything, even more ridiculously bungled. First, they turned up at this apartment on a tip that this one colonel had been plotting a coup only to find out that the colonel in question had moved out of there six years earlier…yup, you read that right, Military “Intelligence” information on some of the nation’s most wanted conspirators is six years out of date. Christ! A different colonel was living there, and so they went around on this wild-goose chase looking for the fascist coupster’s current address.
Worse than that, they tried to raid the house of General Efraín Vásquez Velásquez, who was the top commander in the army during the April coup. Another swing, another miss: Vásquez Velásquez’ neighbors ringed his house in another little mini-protest and the DIM/DISIP teams couldn’t get anywhere near the place.
The message here is that nobody takes the government seriously here anymore. They’ve lost all respect, even fear of Chávez. They send these thugs out to prove how tough they are and just end up looking ridiculous, faced down by the fearsome fascist shocktroops known as housewives. They have 6 year old addresses for supposed conspirators. It’s really, really pathetic.
It’s obvious that the raids are meant to intimidate, it’s even more obvious that they aren’t working. If they were really police raids, you’d think they’d have done them all at the same time, no? Imagining for just a second that there really was a conspiracy afoot, what sense would it make to raid the conspirators one at a time, on successive nights? Isn’t it blindingly obvious that if you’re a member of a conspiracy and you see your co-conspirators being raided one after the other on successive nights you’re going to either move, burn, shred, hide or eat any compromising documents you have before it’s your turn? As a policing strategy, the successive raids are totally absurd, as an intimidation strategy, they’re totally ineffectual.
What a farce! The TV images from the joint Secret Police/Military Intelligence raid of Colonel Antonio Guevara (suspected coupster) looked like something out of TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. Something like thirty heavily armed intelligence officers, many wearing ski masks, poured into the apartment at 5 in the morning, blocking traffic around the neighborhood. Within minutes of their arrival, the colonel’s wife has managed to sneak out of the apartment and call several radio and TV stations to tell them what’s going on. As a result, when my radio alarm wakes me up I’m treated to the very surreal experience of a Secret Police raid being brought to me live, blow-by-blow, on the radio, as described by the raidee’s wife.
Eventually, the raiders realice that they’re on the air and go find the lady, but by then everyone in Caracas knows what’s going on. By six in the morning, the neighbors had started a huge cacerolazo, the very folkloric Venezuelan practice of protesting by banging pots and pans with wooden ladles outside your window. It was a huge cacerolazo, showing the people there weren’t the least bit intimidated by the DISIP/DIM presence. Significantly, the neighborhood (La Rosaleda in San Antonio de los Altos) is a military community where 9 out of 10 apartments is occupied by a military family. But then, it got even more farcical: angry at the raid, all these women from the nearby apartment buildings got out their protest “kits” (flags, pots, pans, whistles and such which they’d been doubtlessly preparing for tomorrow’s march) and put together an impromptu little street protest in the access road to the neighborhood. They got some cars out and blocked the access road, leaving the intelligence officers stuck there: once the raid was over, they couldn’t get out. The officers marched down to the streets and tried to scare the ladies into letting them through, but the remarkable thing was how totally unimpressed these housewives were…all the TV showed was a string of forty and fifty year old middleclass ladies shouting their heads off and jeering at these dressed-to-impress, heavily armed military dudes. It was really surreal.
Finally, showing just how misplaced the word “intelligence” is in these people’s job titles, they decided to disperse the mini-protest with tear gas. This was incredibly dumb, cuz tear gas will disperse the jeering women but not the cars parked right on your way. So it just made the marchers angrier without getting the officers unstuck. They looked so pathetic with their little machine guns slung over their shoulders standing there as these housewives gave them hell. It made for great TV footage, that’s for sure.
Eventually, at about noon, the opposition mayor of that area showed up, talked the protesters down, and negotiated an end to the "siege.”
That was two nights ago. Last night’s raids were, if anything, even more ridiculously bungled. First, they turned up at this apartment on a tip that this one colonel had been plotting a coup only to find out that the colonel in question had moved out of there six years earlier…yup, you read that right, Military “Intelligence” information on some of the nation’s most wanted conspirators is six years out of date. Christ! A different colonel was living there, and so they went around on this wild-goose chase looking for the fascist coupster’s current address.
Worse than that, they tried to raid the house of General Efraín Vásquez Velásquez, who was the top commander in the army during the April coup. Another swing, another miss: Vásquez Velásquez’ neighbors ringed his house in another little mini-protest and the DIM/DISIP teams couldn’t get anywhere near the place.
The message here is that nobody takes the government seriously here anymore. They’ve lost all respect, even fear of Chávez. They send these thugs out to prove how tough they are and just end up looking ridiculous, faced down by the fearsome fascist shocktroops known as housewives. They have 6 year old addresses for supposed conspirators. It’s really, really pathetic.
It’s obvious that the raids are meant to intimidate, it’s even more obvious that they aren’t working. If they were really police raids, you’d think they’d have done them all at the same time, no? Imagining for just a second that there really was a conspiracy afoot, what sense would it make to raid the conspirators one at a time, on successive nights? Isn’t it blindingly obvious that if you’re a member of a conspiracy and you see your co-conspirators being raided one after the other on successive nights you’re going to either move, burn, shred, hide or eat any compromising documents you have before it’s your turn? As a policing strategy, the successive raids are totally absurd, as an intimidation strategy, they’re totally ineffectual.
October 8, 2002
The rumor mill on overdrive...
Well, Ana and Pedro, if you read this from Rome, I hate to alarm you but Caracas was spooky today. The rumor mill is on overdrive. We heard all kinds of crazy things...the old stand-bys like the State of Exception and the coups and such, but also relatively new ones like a definite deployment of the Batallon Bolivar, which is a heavy tank batallion (not tanquetas) in downtown Caracas. The ongoing little soap opera in Cotiza between the chavista PM officers and the "Peñista" PM officers continued and worsened: at some point someboy pulled out a baseball bat and started swinging and some officers were hurt. Tear gas, too. It's an ugly scene and there's a torrent of speculation about an imminent intervention of the Metropolitan Police. But if the government takes over the PM, who'll guard the march on Thursday? People see it as a ploy to depress march turnout...
Of course, the new rumors might not seem so credible if it wasn't for the new stuff that's not a rumor. Those 18 year old soldiers with giant machine guns standing at every metro stop are certainly not a rumor: everyone saw them. The light tanks outside the GN headquarters are not a rumor. The reports of a large number of soldiers being sent out to Mecedores, where the radio and TV broadcasting towers for Caracas sit, well, those are kind of in a gray area between fact and rumor, but apparently are fact. And it's also a fact that Stratfor cites inside sources saying a coup is hours away - I know, I know, Stratfor's gotten things like these before, but I talked to Jack and he insists he has people on the inside who know what's what.
As though all of that wasn't enough, an email is making the rounds claiming that the big, evil, chavista plan to sabotage the opposition march on Thursday is to infiltrate it with undercover street hawkers, who'll sell the marchers water and ice cream that's been spiked with laxatives, giving 800,000 opposition marchers the runs all at the same time and thereby clearing out the streets...it's crazy, but everyone I know has gotten it, and people are paranoid enough to actually believe it, or if they don't quite totally believe it, to be wary enough that they won't buy from buhoneros at the march. Poor guys, I feel bad for them...they rely on march-days for little spikes in business, and this won't do them any good at all.
So, there it is. A very very jittery city. Very jittery.
Stay tuned, more to come.
Well, Ana and Pedro, if you read this from Rome, I hate to alarm you but Caracas was spooky today. The rumor mill is on overdrive. We heard all kinds of crazy things...the old stand-bys like the State of Exception and the coups and such, but also relatively new ones like a definite deployment of the Batallon Bolivar, which is a heavy tank batallion (not tanquetas) in downtown Caracas. The ongoing little soap opera in Cotiza between the chavista PM officers and the "Peñista" PM officers continued and worsened: at some point someboy pulled out a baseball bat and started swinging and some officers were hurt. Tear gas, too. It's an ugly scene and there's a torrent of speculation about an imminent intervention of the Metropolitan Police. But if the government takes over the PM, who'll guard the march on Thursday? People see it as a ploy to depress march turnout...
Of course, the new rumors might not seem so credible if it wasn't for the new stuff that's not a rumor. Those 18 year old soldiers with giant machine guns standing at every metro stop are certainly not a rumor: everyone saw them. The light tanks outside the GN headquarters are not a rumor. The reports of a large number of soldiers being sent out to Mecedores, where the radio and TV broadcasting towers for Caracas sit, well, those are kind of in a gray area between fact and rumor, but apparently are fact. And it's also a fact that Stratfor cites inside sources saying a coup is hours away - I know, I know, Stratfor's gotten things like these before, but I talked to Jack and he insists he has people on the inside who know what's what.
As though all of that wasn't enough, an email is making the rounds claiming that the big, evil, chavista plan to sabotage the opposition march on Thursday is to infiltrate it with undercover street hawkers, who'll sell the marchers water and ice cream that's been spiked with laxatives, giving 800,000 opposition marchers the runs all at the same time and thereby clearing out the streets...it's crazy, but everyone I know has gotten it, and people are paranoid enough to actually believe it, or if they don't quite totally believe it, to be wary enough that they won't buy from buhoneros at the march. Poor guys, I feel bad for them...they rely on march-days for little spikes in business, and this won't do them any good at all.
So, there it is. A very very jittery city. Very jittery.
Stay tuned, more to come.
October 7, 2002
Closer and closer to the edge…
Soldiers in the metro, soldiers at the big east-side shopping mall (the Sambil), soldiers downtown. Tank and APV movements around Caracas in the middle of the night over the weekend. A president convinced that a conspiracy is a foot. The mayor of greater Caracas warning that the order to put a tank batallion on the streets has already been handed down. Over the weekend, the Secretary General of the most moderate of the opposition parties (Unión) was picked up off of the streets, roughed up, and dumped back out again, in an episode that’s too reminiscent of the Estrella Castellanos incident, (though unlike Estrella, Esculpi was also robbed, so it may not have been politically motivated.) Raids on opposition figures’ houses, yielding evidence that looks blatantly trumped up. Chávez saying flat out that more raids are coming. More threats against opposition leaders. And to top it all off, a mass-march, called for Thursday, that will probably bring out tens of thousands of people into the streets, into this suffocating nerve-wracking atmosphere…
Things have been tense in Caracas for so long you’d think we’d have gotten used to it by now. But the tension is palpably rising now, reaching suffocating extremes. The big headline in El Universal, one of the big opposition-run dailies, today is “The Armed Forces have an obligation to intervene,” it’s a quote from an interview with Tejera Paris. Meanwhile, General Medina Gómez syas he has a secret bunker that military intelligence hasn’t found yet and that he’s leading the military resistance from there. That, however, is no insider tip: it was quite shamelessly published in El Nacional! The rumors keep on coming, thick and fast. Total militarization is imminent, they say, stoking that old favorite, the fear of a State of Exception (our very own euphemism for a state of emergency, which allows for constitutional guarantees to be temporarily suspended.) The Metropolitan Police is on the cusp of being taken over by the central government. Chávez will declare Thursday’s march illegal and bring soldiers out on the streets to block it. The government has a secret plan in case of a coup, and it’ll be bloody as hell. The rumors keep coming, intermingling with the truth in a complex soup that’s increasingly hard to pick apart.
After reading Ibsen’s Sunday piece, all of the above is freaking me out in a way that I’d never been freaked out before. Until recently I’d found it all vaguely ridiculous, laughable. I was sure it couldn’t last, it was too stupid. But now…
October 5, 2002
"This can't last: it's too stupid."
Caracas can't be said to have the most vibrant intellectual life in Latin American, but at least we've got Ibsen Martinez. Witty, agoraphobic, shamelessly erudite, misanthropic and totally brilliant, Ibsen really has no peer in the intellectual life of the country. A theoretical mathematician by training, the guy made his name writing soap opera scripts, believe it or not...which says something about the intellectual climate around here, doesn't it - where else could a serious intellectual get his start writing soaps? He proved too unpredictable and prima donnaish to make a proper script-writer - he'd just get sick of them at some point and stop writing, but eventually found his niche in the newspaper and the world of the novel. His weekly screeds in El Nacional have a following, more than a readership, a following I'm proudly part of. Ibsen's writing is really in a class of his own as far as op/ed writing goes in this country: deeper, clearer, wittier, sharper, and more illuminating than anyone else writing in Caracas, and often by a long long ways. He's like our own little Garcia Marquez, but without the international acclaim, or the fidelismo.
His column today is one of the more sobering things I've read in a while: one of his better ones, which is really saying something. It's useless trying to gloss it, since it's so good, so I'm going to take the time to translate the whole thing. It really is that good. [The original in Spanish is here.]
He starts off by citing Camus' The Plague:
"Plagues, in fact, are quite common, but it's hard to believe in them when you see them fall on your head. There have been in the world as many plagues as wars, and yet, plagues and wars always catch people by surprised. When a war starts, people say "this can't last, it's too stupid." And, without a doubt, war is obviously too stupid, but that doesn't keep it from lasting. Stupidity always insists; one would realize that if one were not always thinking of oneself. Our countrymen, in this respect, were like everyone else. They were humanity. They didn't believe in plagues."
"The plague is not made on a human scale, and therefore men always say that the plague is unreal, a bad dream that must pass.
"But it doesn't always pass, and from one bad dream to the next, it's the men who pass, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken precautions.
"Our countrymen were no more guilty than others; they forgot their humility, that's all. And they thought everything was possible for them, which meant that as a matter of course that all plagues were impossible.
"And how could they have thought of the plague, which suppresses the future, their movements and their discussions? They thought themselves free and no one could be free so long as there were plagues.
leaving the quote, Ibsen writes,
On this Saturday, I want to call the reader's attention to a disquieting notion that Camus slides in front of us: that plagues and wars always catch people unaware. Especially civil wars, I'd add.
It bears stopping to reflect on Camus' words, right now, in the wake of a very justified protest work stoppage that some -very few, but very powerful- people would like to twist and stretch until turning it into the pretext for military intervention.
Camus, as is well-known, wasn't precisely the contemplative kind, nor a coward: he did for the French resistence what very few of his own intellectual establishment did, and with such daring and intelligence, during the nazi occupation. So Camus knew what he was talking about when he said that the first reflex you have towards the absurdity that war engenders is to tell yourself that "this can't last, it's too stupid."
"This can't last: it's too stupid," says the father in "The bicycles are for summer," the acclaimed Spanish film by Jaime Chavarri, based on a play by the great Fernando Fernán Gómez, with the whole family gathered at dinnertime, one night in July 1936, commenting on the news that had come over the radio that afternoon: in a remote overseas garrisons an obscure colonel named Francisco Franco had led an uprising against the Spanish Republic.
The head of the family shrugs his shoulders and, next to him, all the characters keep on living their petty bourgeois Madrid lives, neither too rich nor too poor, neither conservative nor leftist enough to feel that what had just started could have anything to do with them, much less that any of its consequences might reach them.
But things don't turn out the way they'd imagined - "how could they have thought of the pest, which suppresses the future, their movements and their discussions? They thought themselves free and no one could be free so long as there were plagues" - and the movie ends when only the viewers know that there will be no other summer with bicycles because that "which couldn't last, because it was too stupid" has become a frightful war that in three indelible years left a million dead and one of the most abhorrent and ignominious dictatorships of the last century.
It just happens that both sides made the same mistake: underestimating the other. The fascists thought it would be enough with a military coup, the republican government calculated that it could put the coup down easily.
It's taken almost sixty years for the philosopher Julián Marías - the father of Javier, the novelist - to come to grips with the decisive event for three generations of Spaniards. He does it in Being Spanish, a book that should be required reading for all of those - chavistas or not - who aspire to act constructively in Venezuela's XXI century politics.
They would then witness Marías elucidating how it was possible to reach war, and saying that, to our discomfort, the primordial cause of the catastrophe was not "the disagreements, or the confrontations, not even the struggle, but rather the will to not get along, the determination to see the 'other' as unacceptable, intolerable, unbearable."
It's inevitable to think of today's Venezuela when Marías carefully recreates as a gift to his reader, the mechanism whereby "groups were formed that would enter the category of the mutually irreconcileable." Or when he points out how that diabolical will to not get along brought about "the successive entry of parts of the social body in what one might call automatic opposition."
Slowly at first, but later on incredibly fast, the entire material and social life of Spain gave in to the primacy of the political, "such that every other aspect was obscured: the only thing you needed to know about a man, a woman, a book, a company, a proposal, was whether it was from 'the right' or 'the left' and your reaction was automatic. Politics eclipsed every other consideration."
These burning pages, written by a Spaniard on his own history, discuss something that many suppose cannot happen in Venezuela "because it's too stupid." What's interesting - and alarming - is that almost every paragraph seems to refer to the current political scene in Venezuela.
The similarities are laid bare when Marías discusses the way the intellectual life and the social production of meaning in Spain went up in smoke, in what he describes as "a collective retreat from intelligence, a frightful narrowing by way of simplification: the infinite variety of reality was, for many, reduced to mere stencils or labels, designed to unleash automatic reflexes, elementary, unnuanced reflexes. This led to a tendency towards abstraction, dehumanization, a necessary condition to generalized violence. And lazyness, especially, when it came to thinking, to looking for intelligent solutions to problems; to imagine the others, to imagine their point of view, to understand their reasons, their fears. And also to carry out with continuity the acts needed to solve or lessen those problems, to put in place an attractive alternative. Magic was easier, the verbal solutions that do away with thought.
"The war was a consequence of frivolity. This seems to me the key word. Spanish politicians, almost without exception, most of the church, a large number of those who thought of themselves as 'intellectuals' (and, of course, of the journalists), most of the economically powerful (bankers, businessmen, large landholders), the union leaders, gave themselves over to playing with the gravest matters, without the least sense of responsibility, without imagining the consequences of what they did, said, or failed to say.
I read Being Spanish on the urging of a friend who had found in it the same parallels with our current situation, which I comment on today. When I closed it, I realized that if we went and asked people like Hugo Chávez, or Carlos Ortega, or Diosdado Cabello or Andrés Velásquez, or Carlos Fernández, or William Lara or Cecilia Sosa or Iris Varela or Marta Colomina if they want a Civil War in Venezuela they would surely answer that of course not, what an idea! who would wish a thing like that?
But one can only consider with infinite sadness the clear-eyed wisdom of Julián Marías, poured into words that read as though composed for us: "They didn't want a civil war, but they wanted what turned out to be a civil war: A) Dividing the country in two bands. B) Identifying the 'other' with evil. C) Not taking them into account, not even as a real danger or an efficient adversary. D) To eliminate them, get them out of the way (politically; physically if necessary.)"
And then: "Stupidity always insists. One would realize it if one didn't always think like oneself." Will we Venezuelans know how to prove Camus wrong, just once? There may be less than a week to go to decide."
Caracas can't be said to have the most vibrant intellectual life in Latin American, but at least we've got Ibsen Martinez. Witty, agoraphobic, shamelessly erudite, misanthropic and totally brilliant, Ibsen really has no peer in the intellectual life of the country. A theoretical mathematician by training, the guy made his name writing soap opera scripts, believe it or not...which says something about the intellectual climate around here, doesn't it - where else could a serious intellectual get his start writing soaps? He proved too unpredictable and prima donnaish to make a proper script-writer - he'd just get sick of them at some point and stop writing, but eventually found his niche in the newspaper and the world of the novel. His weekly screeds in El Nacional have a following, more than a readership, a following I'm proudly part of. Ibsen's writing is really in a class of his own as far as op/ed writing goes in this country: deeper, clearer, wittier, sharper, and more illuminating than anyone else writing in Caracas, and often by a long long ways. He's like our own little Garcia Marquez, but without the international acclaim, or the fidelismo.
His column today is one of the more sobering things I've read in a while: one of his better ones, which is really saying something. It's useless trying to gloss it, since it's so good, so I'm going to take the time to translate the whole thing. It really is that good. [The original in Spanish is here.]
He starts off by citing Camus' The Plague:
"Plagues, in fact, are quite common, but it's hard to believe in them when you see them fall on your head. There have been in the world as many plagues as wars, and yet, plagues and wars always catch people by surprised. When a war starts, people say "this can't last, it's too stupid." And, without a doubt, war is obviously too stupid, but that doesn't keep it from lasting. Stupidity always insists; one would realize that if one were not always thinking of oneself. Our countrymen, in this respect, were like everyone else. They were humanity. They didn't believe in plagues."
"The plague is not made on a human scale, and therefore men always say that the plague is unreal, a bad dream that must pass.
"But it doesn't always pass, and from one bad dream to the next, it's the men who pass, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken precautions.
"Our countrymen were no more guilty than others; they forgot their humility, that's all. And they thought everything was possible for them, which meant that as a matter of course that all plagues were impossible.
"And how could they have thought of the plague, which suppresses the future, their movements and their discussions? They thought themselves free and no one could be free so long as there were plagues.
leaving the quote, Ibsen writes,
On this Saturday, I want to call the reader's attention to a disquieting notion that Camus slides in front of us: that plagues and wars always catch people unaware. Especially civil wars, I'd add.
It bears stopping to reflect on Camus' words, right now, in the wake of a very justified protest work stoppage that some -very few, but very powerful- people would like to twist and stretch until turning it into the pretext for military intervention.
Camus, as is well-known, wasn't precisely the contemplative kind, nor a coward: he did for the French resistence what very few of his own intellectual establishment did, and with such daring and intelligence, during the nazi occupation. So Camus knew what he was talking about when he said that the first reflex you have towards the absurdity that war engenders is to tell yourself that "this can't last, it's too stupid."
"This can't last: it's too stupid," says the father in "The bicycles are for summer," the acclaimed Spanish film by Jaime Chavarri, based on a play by the great Fernando Fernán Gómez, with the whole family gathered at dinnertime, one night in July 1936, commenting on the news that had come over the radio that afternoon: in a remote overseas garrisons an obscure colonel named Francisco Franco had led an uprising against the Spanish Republic.
The head of the family shrugs his shoulders and, next to him, all the characters keep on living their petty bourgeois Madrid lives, neither too rich nor too poor, neither conservative nor leftist enough to feel that what had just started could have anything to do with them, much less that any of its consequences might reach them.
But things don't turn out the way they'd imagined - "how could they have thought of the pest, which suppresses the future, their movements and their discussions? They thought themselves free and no one could be free so long as there were plagues" - and the movie ends when only the viewers know that there will be no other summer with bicycles because that "which couldn't last, because it was too stupid" has become a frightful war that in three indelible years left a million dead and one of the most abhorrent and ignominious dictatorships of the last century.
It just happens that both sides made the same mistake: underestimating the other. The fascists thought it would be enough with a military coup, the republican government calculated that it could put the coup down easily.
It's taken almost sixty years for the philosopher Julián Marías - the father of Javier, the novelist - to come to grips with the decisive event for three generations of Spaniards. He does it in Being Spanish, a book that should be required reading for all of those - chavistas or not - who aspire to act constructively in Venezuela's XXI century politics.
They would then witness Marías elucidating how it was possible to reach war, and saying that, to our discomfort, the primordial cause of the catastrophe was not "the disagreements, or the confrontations, not even the struggle, but rather the will to not get along, the determination to see the 'other' as unacceptable, intolerable, unbearable."
It's inevitable to think of today's Venezuela when Marías carefully recreates as a gift to his reader, the mechanism whereby "groups were formed that would enter the category of the mutually irreconcileable." Or when he points out how that diabolical will to not get along brought about "the successive entry of parts of the social body in what one might call automatic opposition."
Slowly at first, but later on incredibly fast, the entire material and social life of Spain gave in to the primacy of the political, "such that every other aspect was obscured: the only thing you needed to know about a man, a woman, a book, a company, a proposal, was whether it was from 'the right' or 'the left' and your reaction was automatic. Politics eclipsed every other consideration."
These burning pages, written by a Spaniard on his own history, discuss something that many suppose cannot happen in Venezuela "because it's too stupid." What's interesting - and alarming - is that almost every paragraph seems to refer to the current political scene in Venezuela.
The similarities are laid bare when Marías discusses the way the intellectual life and the social production of meaning in Spain went up in smoke, in what he describes as "a collective retreat from intelligence, a frightful narrowing by way of simplification: the infinite variety of reality was, for many, reduced to mere stencils or labels, designed to unleash automatic reflexes, elementary, unnuanced reflexes. This led to a tendency towards abstraction, dehumanization, a necessary condition to generalized violence. And lazyness, especially, when it came to thinking, to looking for intelligent solutions to problems; to imagine the others, to imagine their point of view, to understand their reasons, their fears. And also to carry out with continuity the acts needed to solve or lessen those problems, to put in place an attractive alternative. Magic was easier, the verbal solutions that do away with thought.
"The war was a consequence of frivolity. This seems to me the key word. Spanish politicians, almost without exception, most of the church, a large number of those who thought of themselves as 'intellectuals' (and, of course, of the journalists), most of the economically powerful (bankers, businessmen, large landholders), the union leaders, gave themselves over to playing with the gravest matters, without the least sense of responsibility, without imagining the consequences of what they did, said, or failed to say.
I read Being Spanish on the urging of a friend who had found in it the same parallels with our current situation, which I comment on today. When I closed it, I realized that if we went and asked people like Hugo Chávez, or Carlos Ortega, or Diosdado Cabello or Andrés Velásquez, or Carlos Fernández, or William Lara or Cecilia Sosa or Iris Varela or Marta Colomina if they want a Civil War in Venezuela they would surely answer that of course not, what an idea! who would wish a thing like that?
But one can only consider with infinite sadness the clear-eyed wisdom of Julián Marías, poured into words that read as though composed for us: "They didn't want a civil war, but they wanted what turned out to be a civil war: A) Dividing the country in two bands. B) Identifying the 'other' with evil. C) Not taking them into account, not even as a real danger or an efficient adversary. D) To eliminate them, get them out of the way (politically; physically if necessary.)"
And then: "Stupidity always insists. One would realize it if one didn't always think like oneself." Will we Venezuelans know how to prove Camus wrong, just once? There may be less than a week to go to decide."
"Today, we aborted a coup..."
If Enrique Tejera-Paris is the best the opposition can come up with for a coupster, man, we're all in trouble here. Last night, in a comando raid broadcast live on the State-run TV channel, about 20 intelligence officers swept down on the home of Enrique Tejera-Paris, the octogenarian former foreign minister and slightly kooky intellectual. Slightly bewildered and still wearing his pajamas, Tejera-Paris went on to give a very strange interview to the Channel 8 reporter, who more or less accused him of plotting a coup. The avuncular alleged coupster put on a display of absolutely flawless manners, answering the questions as though he had been invited to a morning talk show, and endearingly referring to his tormentor as "joven."
The Channel 8 guy pointed his camera at a big map of Caracas with the words "Solucion Final" scribbled across the top, which supposedly spelled out the evil plan for staging some riots to serve as an excuse for a putsch. Tejera-Paris said they'd been planted by the DISIP agents. By the afternoon Chavez was giving another grandiloquent speech, boasting about how his intelligence services had aborted yet another fascist conspiracy.
It's hard to know what to make of the whole story. For one thing, Tejera-Paris really is a sort of walking incarnation of all that is most distasteful about the old regime: a kind of amoral insider said to be knee-deep in some very murky business in connection with the Las Cristinas mine development in Bolivar State. (Inside story is he was hired by the Canadian junior miner Crystallex to tamper with some local land registry records to bolster Crystallex's claim to the mine...unconfirmable (but then Crystallex is now in bed with the chavista CVG...it gets complicated).)
That doesn't change the fact that Tejera Paris is old. Very old. Retired. Out of the game. Mayyyyybe he's pulling all sorts of strings behind the scenes. Sounds a little fanciful to me, but it's not impossible.
On the other hand, the entire way the government has dealt with this is just another typical concatenation of abuses of power, violations of due process, and political-propagandeering. The presence of the Channel 8 camera crew stinks to high-heaven...suggesting a complex propaganda ploy rather than a standard law enforcement operation. The whole mess will need to be added to the long list of bizarre events in Venezuela's contemporary history.
October 4, 2002
"Gaviria Go Home!"
More coup rumors today. My colleague has gotten three different anguished phone calls from friends who've heard the show's gonna go down tonight, but at this point we've learned to discount calls like that. Not that they're not unsettling. It's more that it seems like a matter of commonsense that by the time a coup-plot's made its way to the cellphone circuit, it's pretty well doomed to failure. So it's the days when there are no rumors that I worry. That's when the coup's going to come.
The head of the Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, left town this morning. OAS is one of these organizations that most people in the US barely give a second though to, but which actually carries quite a bit of weight here. Gaviria cooked up a fantastically bland little "declaration of principles" to try to get the government and the opposition to sit down together and, y'know, agree to something. Even then it proved incredibly difficult to get them to agree. It was a motherhood-and-apple-pie affair, the kind of thing no one can really disagree with. But opposition figures dithered...it's too bland, some said, it lets the government off the hook! Others refused to sign on unless Chávez personally signed first, saying that if the VP or the Foreign Minister signed on the government's behalf the declaration would have no credibility because Chávez overrules them all the time. One suspects that what's really going on here is that the idea of co-signing a document with Hugo Chávez just makes the stomachs of too many opposition leaders turn. It would grant him a level of implied legitimacy they're just not willing to concede.
On the government's side it's much the same thing. They said they would sign, but then when it became clear they'd be putting their names to a document also signed by Carlos Ortega, they didn't like that one bit. Ortega, the head of the big Labor Union Federation (CTV), is just as unacceptable to the Chavistas as Chávez is to us: Two years after he was elected by the rank-and-file (in an admittedly horribly murky election) the government still refuses to acknowledge his leadership of the federation. Signing a document along with him would mean implicitly accepting his leadership, and that's a pill the government finds it very very hard to swallow.
My guess was that this declaration of principles was Gaviria's way of testing the waters, to try to get a feel for how likely a broader agreement might be. Signs are not encouraging. So long as the government and the opposition see each other as enemies rather than adversaries, the impetus for violence will still be there.
I don't know what the solution is, but I'm pretty sure mindless intransigence isn't part of it.
More coup rumors today. My colleague has gotten three different anguished phone calls from friends who've heard the show's gonna go down tonight, but at this point we've learned to discount calls like that. Not that they're not unsettling. It's more that it seems like a matter of commonsense that by the time a coup-plot's made its way to the cellphone circuit, it's pretty well doomed to failure. So it's the days when there are no rumors that I worry. That's when the coup's going to come.
The head of the Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, left town this morning. OAS is one of these organizations that most people in the US barely give a second though to, but which actually carries quite a bit of weight here. Gaviria cooked up a fantastically bland little "declaration of principles" to try to get the government and the opposition to sit down together and, y'know, agree to something. Even then it proved incredibly difficult to get them to agree. It was a motherhood-and-apple-pie affair, the kind of thing no one can really disagree with. But opposition figures dithered...it's too bland, some said, it lets the government off the hook! Others refused to sign on unless Chávez personally signed first, saying that if the VP or the Foreign Minister signed on the government's behalf the declaration would have no credibility because Chávez overrules them all the time. One suspects that what's really going on here is that the idea of co-signing a document with Hugo Chávez just makes the stomachs of too many opposition leaders turn. It would grant him a level of implied legitimacy they're just not willing to concede.
On the government's side it's much the same thing. They said they would sign, but then when it became clear they'd be putting their names to a document also signed by Carlos Ortega, they didn't like that one bit. Ortega, the head of the big Labor Union Federation (CTV), is just as unacceptable to the Chavistas as Chávez is to us: Two years after he was elected by the rank-and-file (in an admittedly horribly murky election) the government still refuses to acknowledge his leadership of the federation. Signing a document along with him would mean implicitly accepting his leadership, and that's a pill the government finds it very very hard to swallow.
My guess was that this declaration of principles was Gaviria's way of testing the waters, to try to get a feel for how likely a broader agreement might be. Signs are not encouraging. So long as the government and the opposition see each other as enemies rather than adversaries, the impetus for violence will still be there.
I don't know what the solution is, but I'm pretty sure mindless intransigence isn't part of it.
October 3, 2002
Is the glass two-thirds full...
...or one-third empty? As Cesar Miguel Rondón - Venezuela's fat, balding version of Larry King - kept insisting on his Channel 10 show last night, the polling data has been remarkably steady over the last 10 months or so. Two out of three Venezuelans are broadly opposed to the government, one out of three supports it. According to Datanalisis' quarterly polls, the numbers haven't changed much, except for a short-lived "sympathy spike" right after The Restoration on April 14th. Whether you ask people whether they like or dislike Chávez or whether they'd vote to unseat him in a referendum, the two-to-one pattern holds up. Moreover, two-thirds of respondents consistently oppose the institutions that are most widely seen as controlled by Chávez (Congress, the Attorney General's Office, the Ombudsman's Office, etc.), and one-third supports them.
I'm sure most chavistas would dismiss Datanalisis' numbers as part of the giant conspiracy against the revolution, but then they think anything and everything that's the least bit out-of-synch with the guy's latest whim is part of the giant conspiracy against the revolution. Certainly, we heard no complaints from them between December 1998 and November 2001, when Datanalisis' polls had the Comandante in the 60-85% popularity range.
Interestingly, support for the Supreme Tribunal followed that same two-to-one pattern until August 14th, when the magistrates voted 12-8 to exonerate the army officers who'd shoved Chávez out of power in April, unleashing a storm of presidential condemnation. Chávez' could barely contain the bile he poured all over the Tribunal, repeatedly saying the decision had been bought, calling it "a turd" (una plasta) and at one point, ominously, vowing to publish a book with the photographs of the magistrates who'd voted against his wishes "so the people knew who was responsible for this outrage." It should probably worry the president's supporters that the Supreme Tribunal's standing in the polls shot up immediately after this particular tirade, with more and more people saying they see it as a genuinely independent institution, and fewer and fewer people calling for the magistrates' resignation. In fact, the Supreme Tribunal became the first institution to fall out of the two-thirds/one-third pattern. The change happened almost immediately after Chávez' set of bombastic condemnatory speeches. The Supreme Tribunal is now liked by a third and disliked by another third of the electorate, leaving the third third bewildered. I count myself in that third-third: we've heard lots of reports that the August "majority" against Chávez was a one time fluke, and that the magistrates are now falling back in line behind the president. If so, Chávez's attacks could imaginably have been a shrewd maneuver to bolster the tribunal's appearance of independence (and therefore its standing) through a single high-profile decision, only to then bring it back as a meek member of the presidential herd.
The other place where the two-to-one ratio falls apart is in the hypothetical presidential match-ups. When Datanalisis asks the open-ended question, Chávez wins of course. He gets thirtysomething percent, while the opposition vote is fractioned among like 15 challengers. But when Datanalisis limits the question to Chávez vs. this or that hypothetical challenger, his weakness becomes clear. His strongest challengers would be Enrique Salas-Römer and Enrique Mendoza: both would beat him 61%-39%. That's a landslide in my book, even if it's not the two-to-one majority you see in the popularity questions. Salas-Römer is the right-wing former governor of Carabobo State, who lost the '98 election against Chávez by...58-39% (with the remainder going to minor candidates, including the former beauty-queen I voted for.) Mendoza, on the other hand, is a far more moderate centrist who is now governor of Miranda State, which is the state where I live and where the Eastern half of Caracas sits. Other opposition figures also beat Chávez, but by smaller margins. Greater Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peña beats him 54%-46%, former Central Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma barely ekes by 51%-49%. That's too close for comfort, so the opposition would really do well to stick by one of the Enriques.
Yet, even if the opposition doesn't manage to agree on a single candidate, it's not necessarily the end of the world. Even in a worst-case-scenario where both the Enriques chose to run, chances are that the election would tend to get polarized between just one of them and Chávez. Getting an early poll-lead would be the key: once voters saw which way the wind was blowing, they'd almost certainly coalesce around whichever candidate they saw as having the best chance to beat Chávez. The other Enrique would be condemned to the fate of my beauty-queen, who saw her poll-numbers drop literally 60 points between May and December. My feeling then is that if the opposition can just force an election somehow, they take Chávez out. This seems to be Chávez's theory as well: he's doing everything imaginable to avoid one.
And it's critical that Chávez is replaced through an election. Aside from all the valid idealistic reasons for demanding democratic decision-making, the fact is that he does retain the support of a third of the population. Much more relevantly, he maintains the fervent support of about 20% of the electorate, the so-called chavistas duros (hard-core chavistas) who see him more as a mystical figure than a politician. If Chávez is pushed out of office unconstitutionally, by force, these people will never accept the outcome. At best, they'd be a constant thorn on the side of the next government, at worst they could start a civil war. It worries me that the most radicalized opposition figures out there don't seem to realize how much of a problem this is, and continue to push for extra-constitutional means of getting rid of the guy. Making sure that 20% feels included - or at least doesn't feel openly violated - by the transition to the post-chavista era will probably be the most important task of the next government. Let's hope they don't screw it up.
...or one-third empty? As Cesar Miguel Rondón - Venezuela's fat, balding version of Larry King - kept insisting on his Channel 10 show last night, the polling data has been remarkably steady over the last 10 months or so. Two out of three Venezuelans are broadly opposed to the government, one out of three supports it. According to Datanalisis' quarterly polls, the numbers haven't changed much, except for a short-lived "sympathy spike" right after The Restoration on April 14th. Whether you ask people whether they like or dislike Chávez or whether they'd vote to unseat him in a referendum, the two-to-one pattern holds up. Moreover, two-thirds of respondents consistently oppose the institutions that are most widely seen as controlled by Chávez (Congress, the Attorney General's Office, the Ombudsman's Office, etc.), and one-third supports them.
I'm sure most chavistas would dismiss Datanalisis' numbers as part of the giant conspiracy against the revolution, but then they think anything and everything that's the least bit out-of-synch with the guy's latest whim is part of the giant conspiracy against the revolution. Certainly, we heard no complaints from them between December 1998 and November 2001, when Datanalisis' polls had the Comandante in the 60-85% popularity range.
Interestingly, support for the Supreme Tribunal followed that same two-to-one pattern until August 14th, when the magistrates voted 12-8 to exonerate the army officers who'd shoved Chávez out of power in April, unleashing a storm of presidential condemnation. Chávez' could barely contain the bile he poured all over the Tribunal, repeatedly saying the decision had been bought, calling it "a turd" (una plasta) and at one point, ominously, vowing to publish a book with the photographs of the magistrates who'd voted against his wishes "so the people knew who was responsible for this outrage." It should probably worry the president's supporters that the Supreme Tribunal's standing in the polls shot up immediately after this particular tirade, with more and more people saying they see it as a genuinely independent institution, and fewer and fewer people calling for the magistrates' resignation. In fact, the Supreme Tribunal became the first institution to fall out of the two-thirds/one-third pattern. The change happened almost immediately after Chávez' set of bombastic condemnatory speeches. The Supreme Tribunal is now liked by a third and disliked by another third of the electorate, leaving the third third bewildered. I count myself in that third-third: we've heard lots of reports that the August "majority" against Chávez was a one time fluke, and that the magistrates are now falling back in line behind the president. If so, Chávez's attacks could imaginably have been a shrewd maneuver to bolster the tribunal's appearance of independence (and therefore its standing) through a single high-profile decision, only to then bring it back as a meek member of the presidential herd.
The other place where the two-to-one ratio falls apart is in the hypothetical presidential match-ups. When Datanalisis asks the open-ended question, Chávez wins of course. He gets thirtysomething percent, while the opposition vote is fractioned among like 15 challengers. But when Datanalisis limits the question to Chávez vs. this or that hypothetical challenger, his weakness becomes clear. His strongest challengers would be Enrique Salas-Römer and Enrique Mendoza: both would beat him 61%-39%. That's a landslide in my book, even if it's not the two-to-one majority you see in the popularity questions. Salas-Römer is the right-wing former governor of Carabobo State, who lost the '98 election against Chávez by...58-39% (with the remainder going to minor candidates, including the former beauty-queen I voted for.) Mendoza, on the other hand, is a far more moderate centrist who is now governor of Miranda State, which is the state where I live and where the Eastern half of Caracas sits. Other opposition figures also beat Chávez, but by smaller margins. Greater Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peña beats him 54%-46%, former Central Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma barely ekes by 51%-49%. That's too close for comfort, so the opposition would really do well to stick by one of the Enriques.
Yet, even if the opposition doesn't manage to agree on a single candidate, it's not necessarily the end of the world. Even in a worst-case-scenario where both the Enriques chose to run, chances are that the election would tend to get polarized between just one of them and Chávez. Getting an early poll-lead would be the key: once voters saw which way the wind was blowing, they'd almost certainly coalesce around whichever candidate they saw as having the best chance to beat Chávez. The other Enrique would be condemned to the fate of my beauty-queen, who saw her poll-numbers drop literally 60 points between May and December. My feeling then is that if the opposition can just force an election somehow, they take Chávez out. This seems to be Chávez's theory as well: he's doing everything imaginable to avoid one.
And it's critical that Chávez is replaced through an election. Aside from all the valid idealistic reasons for demanding democratic decision-making, the fact is that he does retain the support of a third of the population. Much more relevantly, he maintains the fervent support of about 20% of the electorate, the so-called chavistas duros (hard-core chavistas) who see him more as a mystical figure than a politician. If Chávez is pushed out of office unconstitutionally, by force, these people will never accept the outcome. At best, they'd be a constant thorn on the side of the next government, at worst they could start a civil war. It worries me that the most radicalized opposition figures out there don't seem to realize how much of a problem this is, and continue to push for extra-constitutional means of getting rid of the guy. Making sure that 20% feels included - or at least doesn't feel openly violated - by the transition to the post-chavista era will probably be the most important task of the next government. Let's hope they don't screw it up.
October 2, 2002
not sure how happy my boss will be if he sees I've posted VenEconomy's subscription-only editorial on this free website, but christ, Caracas Chronicles has like 15 readers at this point...
It’s the deficit, stupid...
How irresponsible is the government’s financial management? Look at it this way: in the first eight months of this year, the public sector’s current income averaged about Bs.1.66 trillion per month. That works out to just under Bs.20 trillion per year. Yet for 2003, the president has just announced that spending will total Bs.40 trillion. That’s twice this year’s current income, at a time when inflation is expected to run no higher than 40%.
Of course, Venezuelan budgets have always been exercises in creative accounting, legal formalities largely removed from reality. But traditionally they’ve erred on the side of understating spending. This time, it’s the opposite. Based on a hopeful 3-3.5% GDP growth projection, even the Onapre (national budget office) admits that current income won’t exceed Bs.28 trillion. That leaves the terrifying sum of Bs.12 trillion to be financed somehow (and that’s if the government’s growth estimate holds up; otherwise, it will be more.) And how is this gap to be bridged? By once again squeezing every last penny out of PDVSA, conjuring up some money out of thin air (they call it “exchange profits”) and then borrowing the rest – per Onapre estimates, a full Bs.10 trillion.
The simple conclusion is that the government just doesn’t learn. Already, the unreasonable chavista demands on PDVSA have caused a 25.5% drop in the corporation’s production capacity – with no money to spend on keeping up production, the country’s capacity has dropped from 3.5 million b/d four years ago to just 2.6 million b/d today (not including Orinoco Belt extra-heavy crudes), according to IEA estimates. This means that for the first time in history, Venezuela finds itself unable to cash in on the upside oil-shock caused by the looming US war in Iraq: there’s just no spare capacity to speak of.
The broader strategy is just as bad. By now, one might expect the chavista ruling clique to have caught on to how badly the public sector’s oversized thirst for borrowed cash has distorted the economy’s performance. By making massive deficit spending the norm irrespective of whether times are good or bad or whether oil prices are high or low, the government has already shut out the private sector from the credit market. The public sector’s snowballing demand for borrowed money keeps interest rates high, private investment rates low, and markets jittery.
As the pressure to raise more and more money increases, the government has opted for more and more unorthodox means of financing itself. First, it instituted the Bank Debit Tax, which might be described as relatively benign even though it undoubtedly generates destructive market distortions. Then, as the pressure for new cash intensified, it adopted more serious self-destructive practices, from the accelerating merry-go-round of increasingly bigger and more expensive short-term bond issues to the frankly perverse tactic of declaring purely fictitious “exchange market” profits to bankroll the government. The results are all around, and plain to see: a virtual investment freeze, rising unemployment, galloping inflation, and an unremittingly bleak outlook for the future.
Of course, much of the excess spending next year is due to higher debt service payments: the chickens of the wrong-headed financing strategies of the past coming home to roost. But rather than trying to tackle this vicious circle, rather than trying to implement a plan to return the nation’s finances to relative health, the government looks set to exacerbate the problem. Its financing plans for 2003 are a paragon of amateurish irresponsibility: on top of massive new borrowing, the government has already announced it will issue Bs.1.5 trillion in printing-press monies. Sadly, there’s just no medium-to-long-term strategy to ever break out of the deficit-spending trap. In fact, there’s no indication that the government even understands it’s in a trap at all. Under such circumstances, the only reasonable forecast is steady, ongoing deterioration.
Four years into its mandate, the Chávez administration hasn’t learned even the bare-bones basics from the mistakes it has made to date. The broad outlines of the budget plans announced so far make it clear that the wild goose chase that is the government’s quest for fresh cash will only intensify next year. The outcome is sadly predictable, and as usual, those who will suffer most will be those the president claims to champion.
It’s the deficit, stupid...
How irresponsible is the government’s financial management? Look at it this way: in the first eight months of this year, the public sector’s current income averaged about Bs.1.66 trillion per month. That works out to just under Bs.20 trillion per year. Yet for 2003, the president has just announced that spending will total Bs.40 trillion. That’s twice this year’s current income, at a time when inflation is expected to run no higher than 40%.
Of course, Venezuelan budgets have always been exercises in creative accounting, legal formalities largely removed from reality. But traditionally they’ve erred on the side of understating spending. This time, it’s the opposite. Based on a hopeful 3-3.5% GDP growth projection, even the Onapre (national budget office) admits that current income won’t exceed Bs.28 trillion. That leaves the terrifying sum of Bs.12 trillion to be financed somehow (and that’s if the government’s growth estimate holds up; otherwise, it will be more.) And how is this gap to be bridged? By once again squeezing every last penny out of PDVSA, conjuring up some money out of thin air (they call it “exchange profits”) and then borrowing the rest – per Onapre estimates, a full Bs.10 trillion.
The simple conclusion is that the government just doesn’t learn. Already, the unreasonable chavista demands on PDVSA have caused a 25.5% drop in the corporation’s production capacity – with no money to spend on keeping up production, the country’s capacity has dropped from 3.5 million b/d four years ago to just 2.6 million b/d today (not including Orinoco Belt extra-heavy crudes), according to IEA estimates. This means that for the first time in history, Venezuela finds itself unable to cash in on the upside oil-shock caused by the looming US war in Iraq: there’s just no spare capacity to speak of.
The broader strategy is just as bad. By now, one might expect the chavista ruling clique to have caught on to how badly the public sector’s oversized thirst for borrowed cash has distorted the economy’s performance. By making massive deficit spending the norm irrespective of whether times are good or bad or whether oil prices are high or low, the government has already shut out the private sector from the credit market. The public sector’s snowballing demand for borrowed money keeps interest rates high, private investment rates low, and markets jittery.
As the pressure to raise more and more money increases, the government has opted for more and more unorthodox means of financing itself. First, it instituted the Bank Debit Tax, which might be described as relatively benign even though it undoubtedly generates destructive market distortions. Then, as the pressure for new cash intensified, it adopted more serious self-destructive practices, from the accelerating merry-go-round of increasingly bigger and more expensive short-term bond issues to the frankly perverse tactic of declaring purely fictitious “exchange market” profits to bankroll the government. The results are all around, and plain to see: a virtual investment freeze, rising unemployment, galloping inflation, and an unremittingly bleak outlook for the future.
Of course, much of the excess spending next year is due to higher debt service payments: the chickens of the wrong-headed financing strategies of the past coming home to roost. But rather than trying to tackle this vicious circle, rather than trying to implement a plan to return the nation’s finances to relative health, the government looks set to exacerbate the problem. Its financing plans for 2003 are a paragon of amateurish irresponsibility: on top of massive new borrowing, the government has already announced it will issue Bs.1.5 trillion in printing-press monies. Sadly, there’s just no medium-to-long-term strategy to ever break out of the deficit-spending trap. In fact, there’s no indication that the government even understands it’s in a trap at all. Under such circumstances, the only reasonable forecast is steady, ongoing deterioration.
Four years into its mandate, the Chávez administration hasn’t learned even the bare-bones basics from the mistakes it has made to date. The broad outlines of the budget plans announced so far make it clear that the wild goose chase that is the government’s quest for fresh cash will only intensify next year. The outcome is sadly predictable, and as usual, those who will suffer most will be those the president claims to champion.
October 1, 2002
“They’d told me what made Venezuela tick was oil…
…but now that I get here, I see that what the country really runs on is rumors.” It was the US ambassador who said that, talking to reporters last week. He’s obviously right: the twin Venezuelan love-affairs with gossip and the cell-phone leave the city awash in speculation. A constant stream of conjecture flashes across my inbox and my phone, and the topic is always the same: the near political future. Caraqueños are obsessed with the government’s overthrow…and it’s not just the opposition who talk about it constantly, even the government won’t shut up about it, denouncing coups and plots at every turn.
So what are the main theories going around these days?
Theory 1: The Crimes Against Humanity charge will do him in…
The lawyers who represent some of the victims of the April 11th shootings (that’s the day of the coup) went to the Supreme Tribunal to ask for the president’s impeachment several months ago. Though the Tribunal Members were originally handpicked by Chávez and his people, a bunch of them have bolted over the last two years as the comandante has gotten crazier and crazier. The tribunal appears to be on a knife edge: last August, for the first time, it handed down a ruling that went against the president’s wishes. That prompted a furious presidential outburst calling them a bunch of corrupt bastards, basically, and threatening to “publish their pictures in a book” so they can be picked out, one presumes.
Back then, Chávez warned that that was just the first step in a process designed to have him impeached and booted out of office, calling it a conspiracy to carry out an “institutional coup.” He said, flat out, that neither he nor the army would pay any attention to the Supreme Tribunal if they started impeachment procedures, (so what’s the point of having a judicial branch, then?)
A lot of opposition members still have their hopes riding on a court ruling on this one case. It’s not that they think that the court can really unseat him. It’s that they think that if the court rules against him and he refuses to abide by the ruling, he would be stepping so far outside the democratic norm that he would give the dissident officers in the armed forces all the cover they need to topple him. From this point of view, the dissident army officers are just itching for Chávez to screw up, so they can take action without eliciting too much international condemnation.
Problem is, it probably won’t happen. Most credible head-counts at the tribunal suggest the dissidents are still two or three votes shy of the majority they’d need to put the whole strategy in motion. Still, a ruling will be handed down in the next few days. The tribunal might just leave me looking silly by ruling against Chávez, and at that point we’d go through the looking glass: a major constitutional crisis is almost guaranteed.
[Those of you wondering about the actual legal merits for impeaching him on these grounds…come on! In this atmosphere every court decision is politically motivated!]
Theory 2: Chávez is trying to provoke a coup attempt.
This theory’s been going around a lot, but it reached its fullest development in an opinion piece written by Argelia Ríos in El Universal. Her point is that Chávez has everything to gain from a coup-attempt against him. It would allow him to finally smoke out and boot out all the dissidents in the armed forces. It would bolster his democratic credentials by painting him as a victim in international opinion. If it was violent, it would wash away the memories of the April 11th deaths. Even if it was succesful, it could play into his hands, turning him into a martyr, a victim, an unrealized promise, a dashed popular dream. A succesful coup might even see him end up taking to the hills and starting a guerrilla resistance, which is what he’s really cut out for.
This, according to Ríos, is the point of the systematic harrasment of dissident military officers (and their wives, and their daughters.) The more incitement there is, the more likely the coup will be rushed, leaked, and infiltrated – so given that a coup was likely, in any event, in the post-April atmosphere, inciting it only makes sense for the government: it multiplies the chances that it will fail. In a sense, though, inciting a coup is a desperate call for help, an acknowledgement on the part of the government that the current situation is unsustainable. Trying to strongarm the country into a post-failed-coup scenario is trying to accelerate a postdemocratic solution to the current stability crisis.
I actually think this is a generally reasonable interpretation, mostly because I think that Chávez really is that crazy, but I could be wrong. I can easily see it as a sort of semi-conscious strategy. I imagine Chávez understands the likely outcome of running roughshod over some of the best respected officers in the armed forces, as a former army officer, I’m sure he understands the intense dissent his decisions are causing within the ranks, and as a former coup-plotter himself I’m sure he understands the way that dissent is bound to lead to a coup attempt. I guess he’s calculated he can survive it and even be strengthened by it. But I also know that Chávez miscalculates all the damn time, and as Medina Gómez says, “nothing is improbable.”
Theory 3: The opposition needs to hold its breath until he goes away
Another seemingly crazy theory that more and more people are going for: this one’s championed by Cecilia Sosa, the far-right wing former chief justice of the Supreme Court. Her theory is that people should just lock themselves at home, “toss the key out the window”, and refuse to leave the house until Chávez gives up and resigns.
It’s that old leftist canard, the insurrectional General Strike, back from the grave and warmed over in a strange right-wing guise. Like the leftist precursors of this strategy, the people who actually think this could work appear to adhere to some sort of alternative system of rationality. In a country where 9 out of every 10 families live hand-to-mouth, this strategy is fairly fantastic: for most Venezuelans, if you don’t work you don’t eat, and it’s fairly hard for me to imagine that enough of them are willing to not eat for long enough to bring the government down.
But even if they were, the actual mechanism whereby a strike obligates the president to resign remains murky and shrouded in mystery. The most likely mechanism is the one we already saw in April: a last minute military push that brings matters to a head. But after the horrid experience of April, that’s something no one wants to go through again. Fact is, these people aren’t thinking: they’re just desperate, and desperation is about the worse adviser imaginable in a situation like this.
What’s worrying is that it’s not some small lunatic fringe that’s pressing for this crazy maximalist strategy. It’s CTV, the million+ member labor union federation. It’s Fedecamaras, the big employers’ federation. It’s Acción Democrática, still the biggest opposition party, which got 400,000 people out to vote in its last primary election. It’s large chunks of the opposition. It’s a testament to how polarized the country is that so many people are really thinking of a general strike as a viable option. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures, as the old saying goes…
That’s just a smattering, but this is a long enough post. More of these to come.
September 27, 2002
Tic tac tic tac tic tac…
Luis Alcalá was leaving his house to go pick up his eight year old kid from school. The man he’d seen scoping out his home several times in the last few days walked up to him, pulled out a 9 mm, shot him twice, and ran off. Two days ago, Luis Alcalá became the first victim of a targeted political assassination in Chávez era Venezuela.
Alcalá had been working with Army lieutenant colonel (ret.) Hidalgo Valero, at an antichavista NGO called Popular Defenders of the New Democracy. Valero announced that Alcalá had been investigating the financing of the Circulos Bolivarianos, chavista neighborhood groups that are widely seen as fronts for a paramilitary organization. Alcalá had received two death threats in the last few weeks. Lots of antichavista activists have. Two days ago, for the first time, they made good on those threats.
It’s hard to know what to do with the sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach as I write these lines. On the “you are here” map of political conflict, we are now where Colombia was in 1948, where El Salvador was in the mid-70s. You can see it starting to happen, you can actually see the polarization turning to threats and intimidation, and the intimidation turning to violence. But you can’t stop it. And you have no idea how far it will go, when it will stop, or when it’ll catch up with you, or your family.
Alcalá’s funeral was held yesterday. In a totally baffling decision, the chavista chief justice of the Supreme Tribunal, Iván Rincón, decided to attend. He was almost lynched by the mourners. They had to carry him off in the middle of a melée as people swung fists his way, hurling insults at him for protecting Chávez. At one point, before it got really bad, one of Alcalá’s relatives fell to her knees in front of him, crying and imploring him to do something to stop the spiral of violence.
Meanwhile, in Mérida (about 500 kilometers southwest of here), Monsignor Baltasar Porras, the head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, had a similar experience when he turned up to an event dominated by chavismo. The church is seen more and more as an apendage of the opposition, and Monsignor Porras barely managed to get away unscathed.
Last week, a chavista mini-mob went after one of the cars that carries around Globovisión’s crews – that’s the antichavista all-news TV station. One of the best known opposition figures, Henrique Salas Römer was harshly attacked as he tried to lay a floral wreath at Bolívar’s statue in downtown Caracas…some guy walked up behind him and hit him in the head twice, hard, with a rock he was holding. I’ve lost the count of how many opposition figures I’ve heard on the news saying they’re being threatened, imploring the police for protection, begging the government to call of its thugs. Doesn’t seem likely.
This is the nasty, ugly side of the situation here. Except for Alcalá’s murder, you could say it’s relatively minor stuff, more bluster than anything else. But what people are worried about is not so much what’s already happened but rather what seems to be on the verge of happening. There’s this hard-to-describe but unmistakable atmosphere of dread here, this sense that what we’ve seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg. The country hasn’t quite blown up so far, but it’s hard to shake the sense that that could happen any minute now. Luis Alcalá’s murder is a very, very bad sign.
Tic tac tic tac tic tac…
Luis Alcalá was leaving his house to go pick up his eight year old kid from school. The man he’d seen scoping out his home several times in the last few days walked up to him, pulled out a 9 mm, shot him twice, and ran off. Two days ago, Luis Alcalá became the first victim of a targeted political assassination in Chávez era Venezuela.
Alcalá had been working with Army lieutenant colonel (ret.) Hidalgo Valero, at an antichavista NGO called Popular Defenders of the New Democracy. Valero announced that Alcalá had been investigating the financing of the Circulos Bolivarianos, chavista neighborhood groups that are widely seen as fronts for a paramilitary organization. Alcalá had received two death threats in the last few weeks. Lots of antichavista activists have. Two days ago, for the first time, they made good on those threats.
It’s hard to know what to do with the sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach as I write these lines. On the “you are here” map of political conflict, we are now where Colombia was in 1948, where El Salvador was in the mid-70s. You can see it starting to happen, you can actually see the polarization turning to threats and intimidation, and the intimidation turning to violence. But you can’t stop it. And you have no idea how far it will go, when it will stop, or when it’ll catch up with you, or your family.
Alcalá’s funeral was held yesterday. In a totally baffling decision, the chavista chief justice of the Supreme Tribunal, Iván Rincón, decided to attend. He was almost lynched by the mourners. They had to carry him off in the middle of a melée as people swung fists his way, hurling insults at him for protecting Chávez. At one point, before it got really bad, one of Alcalá’s relatives fell to her knees in front of him, crying and imploring him to do something to stop the spiral of violence.
Meanwhile, in Mérida (about 500 kilometers southwest of here), Monsignor Baltasar Porras, the head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, had a similar experience when he turned up to an event dominated by chavismo. The church is seen more and more as an apendage of the opposition, and Monsignor Porras barely managed to get away unscathed.
Last week, a chavista mini-mob went after one of the cars that carries around Globovisión’s crews – that’s the antichavista all-news TV station. One of the best known opposition figures, Henrique Salas Römer was harshly attacked as he tried to lay a floral wreath at Bolívar’s statue in downtown Caracas…some guy walked up behind him and hit him in the head twice, hard, with a rock he was holding. I’ve lost the count of how many opposition figures I’ve heard on the news saying they’re being threatened, imploring the police for protection, begging the government to call of its thugs. Doesn’t seem likely.
This is the nasty, ugly side of the situation here. Except for Alcalá’s murder, you could say it’s relatively minor stuff, more bluster than anything else. But what people are worried about is not so much what’s already happened but rather what seems to be on the verge of happening. There’s this hard-to-describe but unmistakable atmosphere of dread here, this sense that what we’ve seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg. The country hasn’t quite blown up so far, but it’s hard to shake the sense that that could happen any minute now. Luis Alcalá’s murder is a very, very bad sign.
Tic tac tic tac tic tac…
September 26, 2002
"Please crush our movement, sir."
The thing about these "Security Zones" is that by decreeing them, the government set out an implicit dare. "You can`t come here," Chávez said, "off limits!" So, of course, following the 6-year-olds-at-the-playground mentality that dominates opposition strategizing these days, they obviously had to go and protest inside the security zone, didn't they? It was a dare! What do you think we are, a bunch of sissies?
Not to belittle the issue. The opposition's obviously justified in its anger at the security zones. It's obviously unacceptable for any government to try to tell me where I can and can't hold a political march, much less for this government to do so. But I do mean to point out how sadly predictable and slightly infantile the opposition's tactics are: there's no provocation they won't fall into, no waving red cape they won't charge.
So they went and called their rally. It's happening right now, and it looks like they got the typical, quite solid turnout...100,000 or so, I'd guess. My sisters are there, but I had to deal with a plumbing emergency so I didn't make it. From what's on the TV, it's the usual: standard noisemakers, standard waving Venezuelan flags, standard hysterically overhblown anti-chavista speeches ("This is the WORST, the most CORRUPT, the MOST CRIMINAL government Venezuela has EVER had!!!!" loud cheers "Mr. President, if you want to live in communism, go move to Cuba like you wanted to on April 11th!!!!" more loud cheers...and so on...these were thrilling 8 months ago when they were new, but at this point...sigh...]
The funny thing is that the government is normally quite savvy about not picking stupid fights like this one. Don't get me wrong, they pick about every other type of fight imaginable, but this type of fight they usually avoid. They've actually been really liberal about allowing protests and media dissent - though, yes, individual journalists are attacked by little chavista mobs with startling regularity. Still, the newspapers are still running, and absolutely chock-full of harsh antigovernment rhetoric, same for the magazines, radio stations and TV stations, all the media. Though the criticism clearly drives Chávez half insane, the government's been quite skillful about not giving the opposition any martyrs or symbols to rally around, either in terms of censored newspapers, jailed opponents or banned protests.
It's clearly the best way they could deal with it: trying to repress the huge opposition movement would blacken the government's international reputation badly, and it obviously wouldn't work because the opposition is just too large and too determined. Besides, when protest isn't banned, it's ever so much less sexy. Half the point of protesting is the transgressive thrill of challenging authority...witness the beaming pride of anti-globalization protesters everywhere as they're hauled off to jail.
Chávez hasn't fallen for it, which is what makes this latest goof with the security zones so odd. The opposition was obviously thrilled to finally get dared. The government, realizing that the likely, 100,000 strong crowd would be impossible to stop or tear-gas into submission, decided to backtrack. Chavez ordered the defense ministry to issue a permit for the march -- a permit which, incidentally, nobody had asked for.
It was a smart move, and really took the wind out of the sails out of a lot of opposition members. One disgruntled sister called me this morning saying, in a half-joking sort of tone "this damn government! I don't believe this! how dare they give us permission to march? Makes me not even want to go!" I suggested she organize a march to protest the government's decision to allow marches. Very silly, yes. But then farce is what Chávez era Venezuela is all about.
The broader point is that the opposition has an Alex Keaton problem: how do you rebel when you have a hippie dad who lets you do whatever you want? We're desperately itching to rebel, we want to so so much because we find this government so so deeply deplorable. But the more we push, the more the government digs in to its velvet-gloves policy, leaving us in a state of collective frustration.
It's vintage Chávez, come to think of it...guy's so useless he can't even repress our movement properly...
The thing about these "Security Zones" is that by decreeing them, the government set out an implicit dare. "You can`t come here," Chávez said, "off limits!" So, of course, following the 6-year-olds-at-the-playground mentality that dominates opposition strategizing these days, they obviously had to go and protest inside the security zone, didn't they? It was a dare! What do you think we are, a bunch of sissies?
Not to belittle the issue. The opposition's obviously justified in its anger at the security zones. It's obviously unacceptable for any government to try to tell me where I can and can't hold a political march, much less for this government to do so. But I do mean to point out how sadly predictable and slightly infantile the opposition's tactics are: there's no provocation they won't fall into, no waving red cape they won't charge.
So they went and called their rally. It's happening right now, and it looks like they got the typical, quite solid turnout...100,000 or so, I'd guess. My sisters are there, but I had to deal with a plumbing emergency so I didn't make it. From what's on the TV, it's the usual: standard noisemakers, standard waving Venezuelan flags, standard hysterically overhblown anti-chavista speeches ("This is the WORST, the most CORRUPT, the MOST CRIMINAL government Venezuela has EVER had!!!!" loud cheers "Mr. President, if you want to live in communism, go move to Cuba like you wanted to on April 11th!!!!" more loud cheers...and so on...these were thrilling 8 months ago when they were new, but at this point...sigh...]
The funny thing is that the government is normally quite savvy about not picking stupid fights like this one. Don't get me wrong, they pick about every other type of fight imaginable, but this type of fight they usually avoid. They've actually been really liberal about allowing protests and media dissent - though, yes, individual journalists are attacked by little chavista mobs with startling regularity. Still, the newspapers are still running, and absolutely chock-full of harsh antigovernment rhetoric, same for the magazines, radio stations and TV stations, all the media. Though the criticism clearly drives Chávez half insane, the government's been quite skillful about not giving the opposition any martyrs or symbols to rally around, either in terms of censored newspapers, jailed opponents or banned protests.
It's clearly the best way they could deal with it: trying to repress the huge opposition movement would blacken the government's international reputation badly, and it obviously wouldn't work because the opposition is just too large and too determined. Besides, when protest isn't banned, it's ever so much less sexy. Half the point of protesting is the transgressive thrill of challenging authority...witness the beaming pride of anti-globalization protesters everywhere as they're hauled off to jail.
Chávez hasn't fallen for it, which is what makes this latest goof with the security zones so odd. The opposition was obviously thrilled to finally get dared. The government, realizing that the likely, 100,000 strong crowd would be impossible to stop or tear-gas into submission, decided to backtrack. Chavez ordered the defense ministry to issue a permit for the march -- a permit which, incidentally, nobody had asked for.
It was a smart move, and really took the wind out of the sails out of a lot of opposition members. One disgruntled sister called me this morning saying, in a half-joking sort of tone "this damn government! I don't believe this! how dare they give us permission to march? Makes me not even want to go!" I suggested she organize a march to protest the government's decision to allow marches. Very silly, yes. But then farce is what Chávez era Venezuela is all about.
The broader point is that the opposition has an Alex Keaton problem: how do you rebel when you have a hippie dad who lets you do whatever you want? We're desperately itching to rebel, we want to so so much because we find this government so so deeply deplorable. But the more we push, the more the government digs in to its velvet-gloves policy, leaving us in a state of collective frustration.
It's vintage Chávez, come to think of it...guy's so useless he can't even repress our movement properly...
September 25, 2002
"We've reached the breaking point and nothing is improbable."
It's a scary thought. But it's much much scarier as a screaming headline leading the nation's most widely read newspaper. Especially when it's in the mouth not of some pundit, but of a Major General on active duty, one of the top ranked commanders in the armed forces. But Major General Enrique Medina Gómes statement yesterday didn't stop at that: "We're seeing an abuse of power on the part of the government, and if that's the case then there is no rule of law. A lot of people are playing with fire here. But every society has a limit to how much its willing to tolerate, it would seem that an eventuality is on the cusp of taking place."
Yikes.
Statements don't get very much more straight-forward than that.
Medina Gómez' role in the April coup remains unclear. He had been working as Venezuela's military attaché in Washington. Then, just a few days before the coup, he returned to Venezuela. As a barely concealed anti-chavista, it's little wonder that so many rumors and conjectures followed his judiciously timed return. Some people are convinced he served as a sort of secret liaison between the coup-plotters back home and the Pentagon, that when he returned right before the coup he was carrying all manner of military equipment, from weapons to communications encryption gadgets. It may be true, it may be just talk, but Medina Gómez has certainly come to be seen as the stand-in for old style Latin American military conservatism in today's Venezuela. The government must be watching him like a hawk: I doubt if he's uttered a word in the last six months that Military Intelligence and/or DISIP haven't recorded. Even then, lots of people are convinced he's actively working towards a hard-right coup...ahem...a hard-right "eventuality." Right. The right wing fringe sure is starting to see him as its knight in shining armor, a much hoped for Pinochet option. Then again, I bet Pinochet wasn't making bombastic statements to the Chilean press right before he toppled Allende.
It's a scary thought. But it's much much scarier as a screaming headline leading the nation's most widely read newspaper. Especially when it's in the mouth not of some pundit, but of a Major General on active duty, one of the top ranked commanders in the armed forces. But Major General Enrique Medina Gómes statement yesterday didn't stop at that: "We're seeing an abuse of power on the part of the government, and if that's the case then there is no rule of law. A lot of people are playing with fire here. But every society has a limit to how much its willing to tolerate, it would seem that an eventuality is on the cusp of taking place."
Yikes.
Statements don't get very much more straight-forward than that.
Medina Gómez' role in the April coup remains unclear. He had been working as Venezuela's military attaché in Washington. Then, just a few days before the coup, he returned to Venezuela. As a barely concealed anti-chavista, it's little wonder that so many rumors and conjectures followed his judiciously timed return. Some people are convinced he served as a sort of secret liaison between the coup-plotters back home and the Pentagon, that when he returned right before the coup he was carrying all manner of military equipment, from weapons to communications encryption gadgets. It may be true, it may be just talk, but Medina Gómez has certainly come to be seen as the stand-in for old style Latin American military conservatism in today's Venezuela. The government must be watching him like a hawk: I doubt if he's uttered a word in the last six months that Military Intelligence and/or DISIP haven't recorded. Even then, lots of people are convinced he's actively working towards a hard-right coup...ahem...a hard-right "eventuality." Right. The right wing fringe sure is starting to see him as its knight in shining armor, a much hoped for Pinochet option. Then again, I bet Pinochet wasn't making bombastic statements to the Chilean press right before he toppled Allende.
September 24, 2002
Reinventing the hyperinflation wheel
Probably the hardest part of my job is writing about monetary and fiscal policy, impossibly technical topics that tend to make readers’ eyes glaze over. Inspired by the great and mighty Paul Krugman, I go to any lengths necessary to try to make these topics easily digestible. Not sure if I always succeed. In any case, today’s post is an attempt to write an interesting (or, at the very least, understandable) critique of the Venezuelan Central Bank’s monetary policy. Let me start with a bit of a story:
In 1941, a British officer by the name of R.A. Radford was captured by the Nazis and confined to a POW camp. At the camp, Radford and 2400 other inmates were forced to live on meager rations delivered by the Red Cross. The rations issued to each prisoner contained a bit of bread, some sugar, biscuits, jam, margarine, tea and chocolate bars, with small rations of canned meat sporadically made available. They also included 25 cigarrettes per prisoner per week. Radford, who had been trained in economics before the war, noticed how even in the extreme conditions of a Nazi prison camp, a rudimentary market system developed as prisoners traded with one another to maximize their satisfaction. The British army's Gurkahs, for instance were eager to trade their meat for other foods, since as Hindus they were strict vegetarians. Prisoners who didn’t smoke were eager to trade their cigarettes for food. At first, each of these trades was a simple barter. But soon enough, the inmates realized the need for a more sophisticated system of exchange. Lacking money, they started using cigarettes as prison currency. A ration of margarine might be bought for seven cigarrettes, which could then be used to buy one and a half chocolate bars, and so on.
Soon after his release, Radford described the system that developed in a classic paper entitled “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp,” a write-up that's much appreciated by undergraduates everywhere for its skill at explaining the mysteries of monetary systems. What interested Radford the most was the way that cigarrettes, as a means of exchange, were subject to all of the fluctuations of normal currency. So long as there was a roughly steady relationship between the number of cigarettes in circulation and the goods those cigarettes could be traded for, “prices” in terms of cigarettes remained more or less stable. But when a shipment of cigarrettes unexpectedly arrived, an inflationary spiral was set in motion. With the camp suddenly awash in “unbacked cigarettes” (additional cigarettes that circulated without a corresponding increase in the amount of other goods they could buy) prisoners would demand more and more of them in exchange for other goods. Alternatively, when cigarettes failed to arrive for one reason or another (an allied bombing raid, for instance,) a liquidity crunch took hold of the camp. These currency shortfalls would actually lead to recessions at the camp: with inmates eager to hang on to their scarce cigarettes, it became more and more difficult to find people to trade with.
If you want to understand why so many Venezuelan economists are alarmed by the Central Bank’s decision to monetize Bs.6.2 trillion worth of “exchange profits”, go read Radford’s piece. As Venezuelan analysts keep saying, but few people seem to quite grasp, exchange market profits are just unbacked money. The effect of financing a government deficit with unbacked money is just the same as the effect of sending a huge new shipment of cigarettes into Radford’s prison camp. The balance between the money supply and the goods available for purchase goes all out of whack, and prices begin to rise out of control.
“Exchange market profits” is one of those expressions that tends to baffle people. My boss likes to explain it with an example. Imagine you run a company whose only asset is an apartment. The company bought that apartment for $100,000 a few years back. But now, due to inflation, that apartment is worth $120,000. Would you say you’ve made a $20,000 profit? Well, not really. Not unless you’ve actually sold the thing, right? But what if, before selling the apartment, the company declares a $20,000 dividend and distributes it among its shareholders? Does that seem kosher to you? It's Enron-accounting, isn’t it?
Well, that’s precisely what the Venezuelan Central Bank is doing. Over the years, the Central Bank receives a certain stream of dollars, mostly from oil sales. It books each of those dollars at their bolivar cost at the time they’re bought. A year ago, for instance, they could get a dollar for about Bs.750. Now, that same dollar is worth Bs.1450…so what they’re doing is saying that they’ve made a Bs.700 profit on that dollar, booking it, and sending the profits to its only shareholder: the government. The government takes those bolivars and uses them to cover its budget spending commitments, paying wages, state contractors, past-due bills, etc. In short, they pump the resulting bolivars into the economy. Crucially, they do all of this before they’ve actually sold that dollar.
And how can they get away with it? Because they’re the central bank, and they get to print the money! Because our hypothetical private company can certainly book that fictitious $20,000 profit, but they can't make that profit materialize out of thin air. But the Central Bank can. It doesn’t matter to them that the profits are purely an accounting fiction because they can just order up a fresh batch of crisp new bolivar bills from the printers to cover their declared “profit.” Devious, huh?
Of course, the Chávez administration has been pumping such funny money into the Venezuelan economy for several years now. What sets this latest initiative apart is the scale of this year’s injection. In the past, the exchange gains injected never exceeded Bs.1.5 trillion. This year, following the Bolívar’s sharp devaluation, the Central Bank’s unrealized exchange profits amount to a whopping Bs.6.2 trillion. Printing that many new bolivars would boost the currency base by an eye-popping 38%. Put another way, for ever 100 cigarettes now circulating in the POW camp, the government wants to pump in another 38. The results can only be a very strong spike in inflation.
It’s difficult to overstate how wrong-headed this policy is. For years, academic economists have been investigating the effects of inflation on economic performance and social well-being and, for once, they agree: not only is economic growth impossible to sustain when inflation is out of control but, crucially, runaway inflation hurts the poor the most, impoverishing them farther and faster than almost any other economic phenomenon.
In fact, the inflationary effects of printing money and the effects of inflation on economic performance and on the poor are so well understood it’s just plain embarrassing that Venezuela is having to rehash this discussion well into the 21st century. The outcome of the policy the Chávez government is hawking was fully clear by the 1920s, when the German economy imploded in a flood unbacked marks, paving the way for the rise of the Nazis who eventually took R.A. Radford prisoner. They’ve been confirmed again and again by generations of Latin American populists, from Juan Perón to Alan García. The rest of Latin America has been clear on the disastrous effects of monetizing deficits for at least 20 years now, consigning these policies to the dustbin of history. Only Venezuela, it seems, continues to be determined to reinvent the hyperinflationary wheel.
Probably the hardest part of my job is writing about monetary and fiscal policy, impossibly technical topics that tend to make readers’ eyes glaze over. Inspired by the great and mighty Paul Krugman, I go to any lengths necessary to try to make these topics easily digestible. Not sure if I always succeed. In any case, today’s post is an attempt to write an interesting (or, at the very least, understandable) critique of the Venezuelan Central Bank’s monetary policy. Let me start with a bit of a story:
In 1941, a British officer by the name of R.A. Radford was captured by the Nazis and confined to a POW camp. At the camp, Radford and 2400 other inmates were forced to live on meager rations delivered by the Red Cross. The rations issued to each prisoner contained a bit of bread, some sugar, biscuits, jam, margarine, tea and chocolate bars, with small rations of canned meat sporadically made available. They also included 25 cigarrettes per prisoner per week. Radford, who had been trained in economics before the war, noticed how even in the extreme conditions of a Nazi prison camp, a rudimentary market system developed as prisoners traded with one another to maximize their satisfaction. The British army's Gurkahs, for instance were eager to trade their meat for other foods, since as Hindus they were strict vegetarians. Prisoners who didn’t smoke were eager to trade their cigarettes for food. At first, each of these trades was a simple barter. But soon enough, the inmates realized the need for a more sophisticated system of exchange. Lacking money, they started using cigarettes as prison currency. A ration of margarine might be bought for seven cigarrettes, which could then be used to buy one and a half chocolate bars, and so on.
Soon after his release, Radford described the system that developed in a classic paper entitled “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp,” a write-up that's much appreciated by undergraduates everywhere for its skill at explaining the mysteries of monetary systems. What interested Radford the most was the way that cigarrettes, as a means of exchange, were subject to all of the fluctuations of normal currency. So long as there was a roughly steady relationship between the number of cigarettes in circulation and the goods those cigarettes could be traded for, “prices” in terms of cigarettes remained more or less stable. But when a shipment of cigarrettes unexpectedly arrived, an inflationary spiral was set in motion. With the camp suddenly awash in “unbacked cigarettes” (additional cigarettes that circulated without a corresponding increase in the amount of other goods they could buy) prisoners would demand more and more of them in exchange for other goods. Alternatively, when cigarettes failed to arrive for one reason or another (an allied bombing raid, for instance,) a liquidity crunch took hold of the camp. These currency shortfalls would actually lead to recessions at the camp: with inmates eager to hang on to their scarce cigarettes, it became more and more difficult to find people to trade with.
If you want to understand why so many Venezuelan economists are alarmed by the Central Bank’s decision to monetize Bs.6.2 trillion worth of “exchange profits”, go read Radford’s piece. As Venezuelan analysts keep saying, but few people seem to quite grasp, exchange market profits are just unbacked money. The effect of financing a government deficit with unbacked money is just the same as the effect of sending a huge new shipment of cigarettes into Radford’s prison camp. The balance between the money supply and the goods available for purchase goes all out of whack, and prices begin to rise out of control.
“Exchange market profits” is one of those expressions that tends to baffle people. My boss likes to explain it with an example. Imagine you run a company whose only asset is an apartment. The company bought that apartment for $100,000 a few years back. But now, due to inflation, that apartment is worth $120,000. Would you say you’ve made a $20,000 profit? Well, not really. Not unless you’ve actually sold the thing, right? But what if, before selling the apartment, the company declares a $20,000 dividend and distributes it among its shareholders? Does that seem kosher to you? It's Enron-accounting, isn’t it?
Well, that’s precisely what the Venezuelan Central Bank is doing. Over the years, the Central Bank receives a certain stream of dollars, mostly from oil sales. It books each of those dollars at their bolivar cost at the time they’re bought. A year ago, for instance, they could get a dollar for about Bs.750. Now, that same dollar is worth Bs.1450…so what they’re doing is saying that they’ve made a Bs.700 profit on that dollar, booking it, and sending the profits to its only shareholder: the government. The government takes those bolivars and uses them to cover its budget spending commitments, paying wages, state contractors, past-due bills, etc. In short, they pump the resulting bolivars into the economy. Crucially, they do all of this before they’ve actually sold that dollar.
And how can they get away with it? Because they’re the central bank, and they get to print the money! Because our hypothetical private company can certainly book that fictitious $20,000 profit, but they can't make that profit materialize out of thin air. But the Central Bank can. It doesn’t matter to them that the profits are purely an accounting fiction because they can just order up a fresh batch of crisp new bolivar bills from the printers to cover their declared “profit.” Devious, huh?
Of course, the Chávez administration has been pumping such funny money into the Venezuelan economy for several years now. What sets this latest initiative apart is the scale of this year’s injection. In the past, the exchange gains injected never exceeded Bs.1.5 trillion. This year, following the Bolívar’s sharp devaluation, the Central Bank’s unrealized exchange profits amount to a whopping Bs.6.2 trillion. Printing that many new bolivars would boost the currency base by an eye-popping 38%. Put another way, for ever 100 cigarettes now circulating in the POW camp, the government wants to pump in another 38. The results can only be a very strong spike in inflation.
It’s difficult to overstate how wrong-headed this policy is. For years, academic economists have been investigating the effects of inflation on economic performance and social well-being and, for once, they agree: not only is economic growth impossible to sustain when inflation is out of control but, crucially, runaway inflation hurts the poor the most, impoverishing them farther and faster than almost any other economic phenomenon.
In fact, the inflationary effects of printing money and the effects of inflation on economic performance and on the poor are so well understood it’s just plain embarrassing that Venezuela is having to rehash this discussion well into the 21st century. The outcome of the policy the Chávez government is hawking was fully clear by the 1920s, when the German economy imploded in a flood unbacked marks, paving the way for the rise of the Nazis who eventually took R.A. Radford prisoner. They’ve been confirmed again and again by generations of Latin American populists, from Juan Perón to Alan García. The rest of Latin America has been clear on the disastrous effects of monetizing deficits for at least 20 years now, consigning these policies to the dustbin of history. Only Venezuela, it seems, continues to be determined to reinvent the hyperinflationary wheel.
September 23, 2002
Correction...
The previous post wrongly reported that the La Carlota security zone includes Francisco de Miranda Avenue and the Plaza Altamira. It doesn't. It does include a big part of the East-side highway, and Chacaito's Plaza Brión.
In other late-breaking news, TalCual reports that the government is planning to take these security zones nationwide, with the next batch including military bases in Lara, Aragua and Carabobo states. Dear lord.
The previous post wrongly reported that the La Carlota security zone includes Francisco de Miranda Avenue and the Plaza Altamira. It doesn't. It does include a big part of the East-side highway, and Chacaito's Plaza Brión.
In other late-breaking news, TalCual reports that the government is planning to take these security zones nationwide, with the next batch including military bases in Lara, Aragua and Carabobo states. Dear lord.
Security zones? OK…but for whose security?
Another Monday, another feverish political row in Caracas. This week, the hot issue is the decree Chávez issued last week declaring eight “security zones” around key installations in Caracas: Four military bases, two presidential facilities and the state-owned TV and Radio stations. It will have escaped no one that these eight facilities are at the top of any coup plotter’s target list, making it none too hard to piece together what it is that the government is worried about. In essence, the decree sets out a sort of exclusion zone outside each of the eight installations where demonstrations are not allowed. It was this decree that the government invoked in repressing last week’s Fuerza Solidaria protest, saying it was too close to the La Carlota air-force base.
The opposition is up in arms about it, calling the decree a gross violation of fundamental citizenship rights to freely assemble and demonstrate peacefully. The government seems to be walking on thin-ice here, basing the decree on a law that was meant basically for border regions, and designed to give the state legal basis to keep foreigners from buying real estate too close to the borders. Caracas, of course, is nowhere near a border, and the decree is about anything but real estate. The opposition is approaching it as a civil rights issue, treating it as the thin end of the wedge of an attempt to militarize the whole city and ban protests altogether. An Interamerican Press Society spokesman says the next step will be to shut down an opposition newspaper. Not surprisingly, the injunctions to have the decree quashed as unconstitutional have started raining down on the Supreme Tribunal.
One concern is that the security zones are so big that they stray into areas of the city that aren’t really anywhere near the installations they’re supposed to protect. What’s worse, many of them are areas that have traditionally been used for political protests. For those of you who know Caracas, consider that the La Carlota security zone extends all the way to Chacaito in the west, which is a long bloody way from the Air Force base. Moreover, Plaza Brión in Chacaito has been the starting point to a lot of opposition marches. Not anymore, I guess. The zones would also take up big chunks of the Francisco de Miranda Avenue, including Plaza Altamira, big chunks of the East-side highway, and of course the square in front of PDVSA Chuao: all pretty-well established spots for opposition rallies. Will the National Guard start lobbing tear gas canisters at demonstrators in Plaza Altamira, then, because it’s “too close” to La Carlota? Seems like a recipe for chaos, if you ask me. Or, alternatively, like a recipe for ghettoizing opposition protests into smaller and more remote parts of the city.
But the broader, more important, point is that the government doesn’t have any right to tell me where I can or can’t hold a peaceful demonstration. This is a bedrock democratic right, a matter of principle, and the opposition seems fully justified to feel alarmed that the government is now undermining such fundamental political rights.
Together with the ongoing reports about the government persecuting dissident military officers, and even civilians, more and more actively, the security zone decree is just one more element poisoning the political atmosphere here. Some people are fully convinced that the government is trying to goad the dissident officers into another coup attempt, harassing them, pushing them and prodding them until they feel they have no choice but to act. Once they do, the government can crush them outright, issue a big I-told-you-so about ongoing conspiratorial activity, and go into serious-repression mode.
Maybe.
But then, if what they wanted was carte blanche to purge the military and crack down on civilian dissent, they could’ve done that in April right after the first failed coup. They didn’t back then. What’s changed now? The standard answer is that Chávez is far more desperate now, far more aware of how tenuous his hold on power has become, and has little choice but to take strong action soon. But the alternative explanation, the one that I tend to believe, is that the Chavista governing clique is so isolated from sound, independent advice that they’re once again miscalculating on a big scale. To my mind Chávez’ hold on reality is so tenuous that he really does think that six million people poured onto the streets on April 13th to demand his return. And with a narcissist leader who’s that cut-off from reality, political miscalculation is the order of the day.
In other words, it’s a tightrope act, except the guy on the tightrope is drunk, and mad with power.
Another Monday, another feverish political row in Caracas. This week, the hot issue is the decree Chávez issued last week declaring eight “security zones” around key installations in Caracas: Four military bases, two presidential facilities and the state-owned TV and Radio stations. It will have escaped no one that these eight facilities are at the top of any coup plotter’s target list, making it none too hard to piece together what it is that the government is worried about. In essence, the decree sets out a sort of exclusion zone outside each of the eight installations where demonstrations are not allowed. It was this decree that the government invoked in repressing last week’s Fuerza Solidaria protest, saying it was too close to the La Carlota air-force base.
The opposition is up in arms about it, calling the decree a gross violation of fundamental citizenship rights to freely assemble and demonstrate peacefully. The government seems to be walking on thin-ice here, basing the decree on a law that was meant basically for border regions, and designed to give the state legal basis to keep foreigners from buying real estate too close to the borders. Caracas, of course, is nowhere near a border, and the decree is about anything but real estate. The opposition is approaching it as a civil rights issue, treating it as the thin end of the wedge of an attempt to militarize the whole city and ban protests altogether. An Interamerican Press Society spokesman says the next step will be to shut down an opposition newspaper. Not surprisingly, the injunctions to have the decree quashed as unconstitutional have started raining down on the Supreme Tribunal.
One concern is that the security zones are so big that they stray into areas of the city that aren’t really anywhere near the installations they’re supposed to protect. What’s worse, many of them are areas that have traditionally been used for political protests. For those of you who know Caracas, consider that the La Carlota security zone extends all the way to Chacaito in the west, which is a long bloody way from the Air Force base. Moreover, Plaza Brión in Chacaito has been the starting point to a lot of opposition marches. Not anymore, I guess. The zones would also take up big chunks of the Francisco de Miranda Avenue, including Plaza Altamira, big chunks of the East-side highway, and of course the square in front of PDVSA Chuao: all pretty-well established spots for opposition rallies. Will the National Guard start lobbing tear gas canisters at demonstrators in Plaza Altamira, then, because it’s “too close” to La Carlota? Seems like a recipe for chaos, if you ask me. Or, alternatively, like a recipe for ghettoizing opposition protests into smaller and more remote parts of the city.
But the broader, more important, point is that the government doesn’t have any right to tell me where I can or can’t hold a peaceful demonstration. This is a bedrock democratic right, a matter of principle, and the opposition seems fully justified to feel alarmed that the government is now undermining such fundamental political rights.
Together with the ongoing reports about the government persecuting dissident military officers, and even civilians, more and more actively, the security zone decree is just one more element poisoning the political atmosphere here. Some people are fully convinced that the government is trying to goad the dissident officers into another coup attempt, harassing them, pushing them and prodding them until they feel they have no choice but to act. Once they do, the government can crush them outright, issue a big I-told-you-so about ongoing conspiratorial activity, and go into serious-repression mode.
Maybe.
But then, if what they wanted was carte blanche to purge the military and crack down on civilian dissent, they could’ve done that in April right after the first failed coup. They didn’t back then. What’s changed now? The standard answer is that Chávez is far more desperate now, far more aware of how tenuous his hold on power has become, and has little choice but to take strong action soon. But the alternative explanation, the one that I tend to believe, is that the Chavista governing clique is so isolated from sound, independent advice that they’re once again miscalculating on a big scale. To my mind Chávez’ hold on reality is so tenuous that he really does think that six million people poured onto the streets on April 13th to demand his return. And with a narcissist leader who’s that cut-off from reality, political miscalculation is the order of the day.
In other words, it’s a tightrope act, except the guy on the tightrope is drunk, and mad with power.
September 22, 2002
Notes on a civil war that may or may not happen...
How tense is Venezuela these days? It's an odd, difficult question. If you go by what's published in the newspapers, you'd think that a huge society-wide train-wreck is imminent. The tenor of political debate here is incredibly bellicose, far, far outside the bounds of the normal give and take of a lively democracy. Opposition leaders routinely and quite non-chalantly calling President Chávez a mad narcissist, a genocidal psychopath, a castrocommunist dictator's apprentice, and so on and so forth. The rhetoric coming the other way is hardly tamer - golpista being the preferred term of abuse. That translates literally but clunkily as "coupster", and yes, it's a delicious irony that Hugo Chavez, of all people, should be using it as an insult. More broadly, though, the government sees the "opposition" as a ruse for a plutocratic conspiracy, a well-organized, well-funded reactionary plot intent on driving the country back to a sort of quasi-feudal past when they could oppress the poor unhindered. The long and the short of it is that these people do not see each other as adversaries, they see each other as enemies.
It's little wonder the country's so damn tense. How tense? Well, according to a survey by Alfredo Keller, the best pollster in Caracas, 62% of Venezuelans think there's going to be a civil war here. Now, there are several remarkable things about that figure. Beyond the evident, incredibly alarming fact that 3 out of 5 people here think some sort of gory fratricidal bloodbath is on the way, there's the deeply weird fact that "do you think there's going to be a civil war?" has become a standard survey question! Y'know, just part of the work-a-day routine of public opinion research, "do you approve of the way the president does his job?" and "is the country on the right track?" and "do you think the streets will run red with the blood of the rancid oligarchs/godless communists?" And then the results get reported matter-of-factly on the front pages, just above a story about the Venezuelan team losing in the Davis Cup to Germany and an interview with a Caracas artists whose exhibit is opening in New York soon. Just a normal sunday paper...
But the 62% figure isn't even the worst of it. The worst it, if you ask me, is that 25% of respondents say they would be willing to fight for their beliefs in a hypothetical civil war. 12% of Venezuelans would take up guns to defend the president, while13% would fight to bring the government down. [Reading these figures, my boss snickers and says "great news! it's 13% to 12%, we win!"] It's enough to make me choke on my morning coffee.
Now, maybe I'm just naive, but it's impossible for me to really believe those figures. My take on this is that people are talking out of their asses here. Aside from the sporadic little scuffles at some political marches (magnified a million times by the media circus that inevitable results), the atmosphere on the streets just doesn't suggest an imminent war. Yes, yes, i've read the narratives from pre-war Sarajevo, and I'm aware that I'm echoing what people were saying there circa 1991. I understand that there are extremely radicalized, dangerous men on both extremes, but a civil war? Do these people even know what they're saying when they answer these poll questions? Are they aware of what civil war would actually mean for the country? I just don't think so.
Aside from a small little outburst of guerrilla fighting in the early 60s, Venezuela hasn't had a real out-and-out war in 150 years. People like to think that it's just not in our national character, and I want to believe that. No one in Venezuela has seen a real war here, which probably explains why they're so weirdly blase about the whole thing. But the flipside is that relative ignorance can be incredibly dangerous. People who haven't quite assimilated the scale of the disaster that a civil war could entail seem far more likely to carry out the provocative, confrontational acts that could, little-by-little, escalate towards a civil war. And with big-time civil conflicts, they're easy enough to start but there's just no telling how or when they end. After all, as some of the saner pundits keep reminding us, when the first shots were fired in Colombia in the 1940s, nobody could possibly have known that sixty years later the war would still be going on there. It scares the crap out of me to imagine that some day circa 2050 some grandchild will come up to me and ask what Caracas was like before the fighting started.
How tense is Venezuela these days? It's an odd, difficult question. If you go by what's published in the newspapers, you'd think that a huge society-wide train-wreck is imminent. The tenor of political debate here is incredibly bellicose, far, far outside the bounds of the normal give and take of a lively democracy. Opposition leaders routinely and quite non-chalantly calling President Chávez a mad narcissist, a genocidal psychopath, a castrocommunist dictator's apprentice, and so on and so forth. The rhetoric coming the other way is hardly tamer - golpista being the preferred term of abuse. That translates literally but clunkily as "coupster", and yes, it's a delicious irony that Hugo Chavez, of all people, should be using it as an insult. More broadly, though, the government sees the "opposition" as a ruse for a plutocratic conspiracy, a well-organized, well-funded reactionary plot intent on driving the country back to a sort of quasi-feudal past when they could oppress the poor unhindered. The long and the short of it is that these people do not see each other as adversaries, they see each other as enemies.
It's little wonder the country's so damn tense. How tense? Well, according to a survey by Alfredo Keller, the best pollster in Caracas, 62% of Venezuelans think there's going to be a civil war here. Now, there are several remarkable things about that figure. Beyond the evident, incredibly alarming fact that 3 out of 5 people here think some sort of gory fratricidal bloodbath is on the way, there's the deeply weird fact that "do you think there's going to be a civil war?" has become a standard survey question! Y'know, just part of the work-a-day routine of public opinion research, "do you approve of the way the president does his job?" and "is the country on the right track?" and "do you think the streets will run red with the blood of the rancid oligarchs/godless communists?" And then the results get reported matter-of-factly on the front pages, just above a story about the Venezuelan team losing in the Davis Cup to Germany and an interview with a Caracas artists whose exhibit is opening in New York soon. Just a normal sunday paper...
But the 62% figure isn't even the worst of it. The worst it, if you ask me, is that 25% of respondents say they would be willing to fight for their beliefs in a hypothetical civil war. 12% of Venezuelans would take up guns to defend the president, while13% would fight to bring the government down. [Reading these figures, my boss snickers and says "great news! it's 13% to 12%, we win!"] It's enough to make me choke on my morning coffee.
Now, maybe I'm just naive, but it's impossible for me to really believe those figures. My take on this is that people are talking out of their asses here. Aside from the sporadic little scuffles at some political marches (magnified a million times by the media circus that inevitable results), the atmosphere on the streets just doesn't suggest an imminent war. Yes, yes, i've read the narratives from pre-war Sarajevo, and I'm aware that I'm echoing what people were saying there circa 1991. I understand that there are extremely radicalized, dangerous men on both extremes, but a civil war? Do these people even know what they're saying when they answer these poll questions? Are they aware of what civil war would actually mean for the country? I just don't think so.
Aside from a small little outburst of guerrilla fighting in the early 60s, Venezuela hasn't had a real out-and-out war in 150 years. People like to think that it's just not in our national character, and I want to believe that. No one in Venezuela has seen a real war here, which probably explains why they're so weirdly blase about the whole thing. But the flipside is that relative ignorance can be incredibly dangerous. People who haven't quite assimilated the scale of the disaster that a civil war could entail seem far more likely to carry out the provocative, confrontational acts that could, little-by-little, escalate towards a civil war. And with big-time civil conflicts, they're easy enough to start but there's just no telling how or when they end. After all, as some of the saner pundits keep reminding us, when the first shots were fired in Colombia in the 1940s, nobody could possibly have known that sixty years later the war would still be going on there. It scares the crap out of me to imagine that some day circa 2050 some grandchild will come up to me and ask what Caracas was like before the fighting started.
September 21, 2002
Billowing clouds of tear gas...
It hardly came as a surprise. After some not very fruitful attempts at on-site mediation, the National Guard went after the Fuerza Solidaria protest pretty heavy handedly. At about 5:30 the tear gas started, and I have to say that I've never seen that much tear gas used against such an innocuous demonstration. The Guardsmen, who already outnumbered the demonstrators by at least 2 to 1, fired canister after canister into the little crowd. There were some reports of rubber bullets being used as well. It seemed like an absurd overreaction: the demonstrators had been peaceful throughout. A couple of women just passed out under the thick cloud of gas. The guard prevented municipal ambulances from reaching the scene, which again seemed entirely out of hand. On the other hand, in the first world they might have gone in with batons swinging and arrested half the crowd. At least they stopped short of that.
Why?, is the obvious question. The crowd had its municipal permits in order, was unarmed, didn't threaten anyone. Some people think this was basically a show of force, the government putting other potential demonstrators on notice that the velvet gloves have come off. But the gorila-tactics seem more likely to embolden the opposition, who see it as another sign that the more-or-less benign phase of chavismo is ending and that an out-and-out police state is being instituted in stages. One way or another, it's a bad sign that the government is now declaring certain parts of Caracas no-go areas for opposition demonstrators. The rationale, that they were too close to the air-force base's newly declared "security zone" seems pretty weak. In any event, the government has no clear legal basis for declaring security zones in the first place, and a very clear and explicit constitutional obligation to let people demonstrate where and when they want, so long as they do so peacefully and with the proper permits.
Overall, yesterday's little to do outside La Carlota should've been page 17 news. Instead, the little media-circus that ensued generated huge front page headlines, and disturbing pictures of people getting hammered by the guard. How this helps the government's case is beyond me.
It hardly came as a surprise. After some not very fruitful attempts at on-site mediation, the National Guard went after the Fuerza Solidaria protest pretty heavy handedly. At about 5:30 the tear gas started, and I have to say that I've never seen that much tear gas used against such an innocuous demonstration. The Guardsmen, who already outnumbered the demonstrators by at least 2 to 1, fired canister after canister into the little crowd. There were some reports of rubber bullets being used as well. It seemed like an absurd overreaction: the demonstrators had been peaceful throughout. A couple of women just passed out under the thick cloud of gas. The guard prevented municipal ambulances from reaching the scene, which again seemed entirely out of hand. On the other hand, in the first world they might have gone in with batons swinging and arrested half the crowd. At least they stopped short of that.
Why?, is the obvious question. The crowd had its municipal permits in order, was unarmed, didn't threaten anyone. Some people think this was basically a show of force, the government putting other potential demonstrators on notice that the velvet gloves have come off. But the gorila-tactics seem more likely to embolden the opposition, who see it as another sign that the more-or-less benign phase of chavismo is ending and that an out-and-out police state is being instituted in stages. One way or another, it's a bad sign that the government is now declaring certain parts of Caracas no-go areas for opposition demonstrators. The rationale, that they were too close to the air-force base's newly declared "security zone" seems pretty weak. In any event, the government has no clear legal basis for declaring security zones in the first place, and a very clear and explicit constitutional obligation to let people demonstrate where and when they want, so long as they do so peacefully and with the proper permits.
Overall, yesterday's little to do outside La Carlota should've been page 17 news. Instead, the little media-circus that ensued generated huge front page headlines, and disturbing pictures of people getting hammered by the guard. How this helps the government's case is beyond me.
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