If the government does get its way, and the Central Bank does hand over the "millardito", what will the government do? It can't pay Venezuelan farmers in dollars, the dollar is not the currency here!
The government will have to use that billion dollars to buy a corresponding number of bolivars (Bs.1.6 trillion!) And what is the only institution the government is legally allowed to use to trade dollars for bolivars? Why, the Central Bank, of course!
So the government would turn right around and return the billion dollars to the Central Bank. In return, the Central Bank would have to "pay" for those dollars in Bolivars. The rub, of course, is that the central bank will have to print those Bs.1.6 trillion, just crank up the printing presses and go!
This is why the proposal is crazy, and hyperinflationary. The billion dollars will end up right where it started: in Central Bank reserves. But the same number of dollars will back 1.6 trillion new bolivars, bolivars created out of thin air.
So the "request" for a millardito is just a bit of smoke and mirrors: those reserves aren't going anywhere, not under the current control system. What the government is really saying is, "central bank! hermanazo! we're having a bit of a cash-flow problem...how about printing us up a fresh batch of Bs.1.6 trillion to spend?"
And when you run a currency like that...well, ask any Peruvian or Argentinian or Weimar German what happens...
January 9, 2004
January 8, 2004
Note on the latest deranged Chavez plan…
The president's plainly unconstitutional request for the Central Bank to hand over “just one little billion” in foreign reserves lays bare, yet again, his economic obscurantism, not to mention his criminal tendencies. I mean, this is no longer just about stupid policy: this is actually theft.
Yes, yes, I know...I shouldn't even blog about it. These types of topics tend to make a sure cure for insomnia. It's the kind of story only bankers and economists seem to get worked up about: discussing the details heatedly in a kind of secret code only they understand. Most people can't start to make heads or tails of what's at stake.
But it's important, really important: fantastic sums are at stake. We're talking about the outright theft of a sum roughly 70 times larger than the $16 million Carlos Andres Perez was impeached for misappropriating!
For the non-economically minded, I'll try to make it as painless as possible:
Imagine an economy where the currency is the wristwatch.* Twice a month, you're paid your salary in a certain number of watches. You go to the store, do your groceries, and at the check-out counter you hand over some of your watches to pay. The system has been in place for so long that it's seen as natural by everyone in the society.
However, there are some fairly obvious drawbacks: people are forced to walk around with little bundles of watches to spend, and making change is hard – what good is 0.25 of a watch?
Seeing these difficulties, a bright young technocrat proposes an idea. Why not set up a central repository for the watches - call it the Watch Bank - and have that new institution issue a voucher for each watch a citizen decided to store there. Citizens would consign their watches, and thereafter use the more convenient vouchers for day to day transactions.
Vouchers could be issued for multiple watches, coins worth fractions of a watch could be made available to help with making change, the voucher system would be far more convenient for everyone involved. And, of course, at any time any citizen could back to the Watch Bank and redeem his vouchers for the number of watches they stand for.
Impressed, the government implements this proposal, and the new voucher economy is launched. People like the new system much better: it’s just much less of a hassle than carrying all those watches around all the time.
In time, the country’s constitution is altered to make the role of the Watch Bank more explicit. The Bank, clearly, must be a public sector, not-for-profit institution. Trust in the Bank’s vouchers will become the cornerstone of the financial system’s stability, so preserving their value will be established as the Watch Bank's main goal. Our hypothetical constitution might read (in an Art. 318), “the fundamental purpose of the Watch Bank of Venezuela is to achieve price stability and preserve the value, in Venezuela and abroad, of its vouchers.”
In particular, the constitutional framers will explicitly seek to shield the Bank – and its watches - from the grubby designs of the politicians in power. Some article of their constitution (say, oh, Art. 320, just to throw out a number), might read, “the Watch Bank of Venezuela shall not be subordinated to orders from the executive branch, and shall not aid or finance fiscal deficits.”
The reason is intuitively evident: the watches the Bank holds are not the Bank's property – they are the voucher holders’ property. The watches belong to the voucher holders - this is why every Watch Bank voucher is stamped with the words "pagable en las oficinas del banco" - payable at the bank's offices.
If the Bank suddenly decides to start giving away those watches to the government - or anyone else - some citizens will find themselves holding vouchers for watches that the Watch Bank no longer holds.
At first, say, the Bank holds 100 watches. If it has 100 outstanding vouchers in the economy, the system is obviously solid: plenty of watches to go around.
But what happens if, say, the government forces the Bank to hand over 20 of the watches? Well, then the bank will be left holding just 80 watches, but - big but - there are still 100 vouchers for watches swimming around the economy. If all 100 voucher-holders decide to all go to the Bank at the same time and ask for their watches back, there's gonna be a problem.
If you have 100 vouchers, but just 80 watches in the Bank, what is the real value of each of those 100 vouchers? Is one voucher still really worth one watch? Of course not. For all practical purposes, the vouchers have been devalued. The assets they stand for have been stripped. If those 100 vouchers can only buy 80 watches, each voucher is now really only worth 0.8 of a watch. 20% of their value has vanished.
It’s been stolen.
Substitute dollars for watches, Bolivars for vouchers, and Central Bank for Watch Bank, and this is pretty much the situation we have in Venezuela right now. In demanding the Central Bank hand over a substantial chunk of its foreign reserves to the government, the President is proposing, in the most public way possible, the theft of a billion dollars from the holders of Venezuelan currency. It’s little wonder the current Central Bank directors will not even consider the request: if they went along with this lunacy, they’d open themselves up to massive criminal charges in any future government.
Honest now, I want to hear from a Chavista on this one. Please explain this one to me…because I see this kind of thing and it becomes harder and harder for me to fathom how anyone who’s not on the take can continue to support a government that launches public campaigns to piss all over its own constitution in order to steal from its own citizens.
I mean, some significant line is being crossed here. This isn’t even just bad policy anymore: it’s outright thievery.
*apologies to Alex Dalmady for shamelessly ripping off his analogy…
Yes, yes, I know...I shouldn't even blog about it. These types of topics tend to make a sure cure for insomnia. It's the kind of story only bankers and economists seem to get worked up about: discussing the details heatedly in a kind of secret code only they understand. Most people can't start to make heads or tails of what's at stake.
But it's important, really important: fantastic sums are at stake. We're talking about the outright theft of a sum roughly 70 times larger than the $16 million Carlos Andres Perez was impeached for misappropriating!
For the non-economically minded, I'll try to make it as painless as possible:
Imagine an economy where the currency is the wristwatch.* Twice a month, you're paid your salary in a certain number of watches. You go to the store, do your groceries, and at the check-out counter you hand over some of your watches to pay. The system has been in place for so long that it's seen as natural by everyone in the society.
However, there are some fairly obvious drawbacks: people are forced to walk around with little bundles of watches to spend, and making change is hard – what good is 0.25 of a watch?
Seeing these difficulties, a bright young technocrat proposes an idea. Why not set up a central repository for the watches - call it the Watch Bank - and have that new institution issue a voucher for each watch a citizen decided to store there. Citizens would consign their watches, and thereafter use the more convenient vouchers for day to day transactions.
Vouchers could be issued for multiple watches, coins worth fractions of a watch could be made available to help with making change, the voucher system would be far more convenient for everyone involved. And, of course, at any time any citizen could back to the Watch Bank and redeem his vouchers for the number of watches they stand for.
Impressed, the government implements this proposal, and the new voucher economy is launched. People like the new system much better: it’s just much less of a hassle than carrying all those watches around all the time.
In time, the country’s constitution is altered to make the role of the Watch Bank more explicit. The Bank, clearly, must be a public sector, not-for-profit institution. Trust in the Bank’s vouchers will become the cornerstone of the financial system’s stability, so preserving their value will be established as the Watch Bank's main goal. Our hypothetical constitution might read (in an Art. 318), “the fundamental purpose of the Watch Bank of Venezuela is to achieve price stability and preserve the value, in Venezuela and abroad, of its vouchers.”
In particular, the constitutional framers will explicitly seek to shield the Bank – and its watches - from the grubby designs of the politicians in power. Some article of their constitution (say, oh, Art. 320, just to throw out a number), might read, “the Watch Bank of Venezuela shall not be subordinated to orders from the executive branch, and shall not aid or finance fiscal deficits.”
The reason is intuitively evident: the watches the Bank holds are not the Bank's property – they are the voucher holders’ property. The watches belong to the voucher holders - this is why every Watch Bank voucher is stamped with the words "pagable en las oficinas del banco" - payable at the bank's offices.
If the Bank suddenly decides to start giving away those watches to the government - or anyone else - some citizens will find themselves holding vouchers for watches that the Watch Bank no longer holds.
At first, say, the Bank holds 100 watches. If it has 100 outstanding vouchers in the economy, the system is obviously solid: plenty of watches to go around.
But what happens if, say, the government forces the Bank to hand over 20 of the watches? Well, then the bank will be left holding just 80 watches, but - big but - there are still 100 vouchers for watches swimming around the economy. If all 100 voucher-holders decide to all go to the Bank at the same time and ask for their watches back, there's gonna be a problem.
If you have 100 vouchers, but just 80 watches in the Bank, what is the real value of each of those 100 vouchers? Is one voucher still really worth one watch? Of course not. For all practical purposes, the vouchers have been devalued. The assets they stand for have been stripped. If those 100 vouchers can only buy 80 watches, each voucher is now really only worth 0.8 of a watch. 20% of their value has vanished.
It’s been stolen.
Substitute dollars for watches, Bolivars for vouchers, and Central Bank for Watch Bank, and this is pretty much the situation we have in Venezuela right now. In demanding the Central Bank hand over a substantial chunk of its foreign reserves to the government, the President is proposing, in the most public way possible, the theft of a billion dollars from the holders of Venezuelan currency. It’s little wonder the current Central Bank directors will not even consider the request: if they went along with this lunacy, they’d open themselves up to massive criminal charges in any future government.
Honest now, I want to hear from a Chavista on this one. Please explain this one to me…because I see this kind of thing and it becomes harder and harder for me to fathom how anyone who’s not on the take can continue to support a government that launches public campaigns to piss all over its own constitution in order to steal from its own citizens.
I mean, some significant line is being crossed here. This isn’t even just bad policy anymore: it’s outright thievery.
*apologies to Alex Dalmady for shamelessly ripping off his analogy…
January 7, 2004
The bonfire of the government's rhetoric...
Pointing out inconsistencies between Chavez's rhetoric and his government's actions is like shooting fish in a barrel. Still, sometimes it's fun to shoot fish in a barrel.
Five years ago, Chavez built his economic vision around an angry diatribe against surreptitious attempts to privatize the nation's oil industry.
Today, the Chavez government surreptitiously sells off Venezuelan oil assets abroad under cover of darkness, with no public consultation or debate whatsoever.
Five years ago, Chavez roused crowds by denouncing the opaque business practices and outright corruption in the public oil sector.
Today, Chavez agrees a no-tender, one-on-one sell-off of a key state oil asset to none other than a Russian oligarch-led conglomerate, Alpha, which initially made its billions by bribing Russian officials to walk away with billions in dollars in assets paid at a tiny fraction of their value - the infamous 90s sweetheart privatization deals.
Five years ago, Chavez laid out a vision of radical democracy, grassroot people power, with direct voters' participation in key decisions.
Today, Chavez makes every key government decision in isolation, and his government is fighting tooth and nail against a very broad-based call for a recall vote, one of the very people-power reforms he championed as recently as two years ago.
Five years ago, the government denounced the economic enslavement of the foreign debt burden, and started to only borrow in bolivars, instead of going to international credit markets to borrow dollars. Economists of every stripe warned that they would soon tap out Venezuela's banks, crowding out local borrowers, and would end up being forced to borrow larger and larger sums of shorter and shorter term bonds at higher and higher interest rates from more and more exposed banks.
Today, the government implicitly admits that the critics were right all along. The government announces, finally, a $1 billion bond placement in New York, as part of a massive restructuring plan to swap bolivar denominated bonds with long term dollar denominated bonds - i.e., what critics had demanded all along. As usual, it's too late: the local debt has already more than sextupled in bolivar terms, and tripled in dollar terms, leaving the nation many millions of dollars worse off than it would be if the government had followed independent advice all along. And the new dollar bonds are no bed of roses: yielding over 10% (in $$$! - country-risk, is the relevant euphemism) the bonds are a massively expensive way for Venezuela to borrow...though still less suicidally non-sustainable than the crazy borrow-only-in-bolivars strategy.
Five years ago, Chavez slammed the old regime for the judicial "tribus" and the absence of truly independent legal institutions.
Today, the government unilaterally shuts down politically-uncomfortable apellate courts, creating a massive constitutional vacuum, and now proposes, through a plainly illegal maneouver, to pack the Supreme Tribunal with 10-12 additional (Chavista) judges, to ensure the Tribunal's tractability. Coming at the political moment it comes, the move is widely feared by the opposition who see it as part of a broader plan to strike down the recall referendum petition through a court decision with the Made in Miraflores seal.
And, the jewel:
Five years ago, Chavez was still celebrating his coup-plotting days, spending successive February 4ths - the anniversary of his bloody attempted coup in 1992 - as though they were national holidays. After April 2002, and in a truly Orwellian inversion, he switches and starts calling ALL of his opponents - from the catholic church to the far right to the far left to the far center - "golpistas", coup plotters, as the ultimate political epithet.
Today, having established the word coup-plotter as the worst political insult, and after having repeatedly grumbled about the U.S.'s supposed role in the April 11th coup - what that role might have been was, of course, never specified - reports emerge that the US believes Chavez directly financed the protests that brought down president Sanchez de Lozada in Bolivia - in fact, financing a coup!
So is this a government of the left, the right, or what? Is that even a meaningful question when you're faced with this kind of absurdist excess?
As Manuel Caballero once said, Chavez is neither a communist, nor a leninist, nor an anarchist nor a trotskyite nor a castrista nor a fascist nor a reactionary nor a militarist; Chavez is a chavista.
Five years ago, Chavez built his economic vision around an angry diatribe against surreptitious attempts to privatize the nation's oil industry.
Today, the Chavez government surreptitiously sells off Venezuelan oil assets abroad under cover of darkness, with no public consultation or debate whatsoever.
Five years ago, Chavez roused crowds by denouncing the opaque business practices and outright corruption in the public oil sector.
Today, Chavez agrees a no-tender, one-on-one sell-off of a key state oil asset to none other than a Russian oligarch-led conglomerate, Alpha, which initially made its billions by bribing Russian officials to walk away with billions in dollars in assets paid at a tiny fraction of their value - the infamous 90s sweetheart privatization deals.
Five years ago, Chavez laid out a vision of radical democracy, grassroot people power, with direct voters' participation in key decisions.
Today, Chavez makes every key government decision in isolation, and his government is fighting tooth and nail against a very broad-based call for a recall vote, one of the very people-power reforms he championed as recently as two years ago.
Five years ago, the government denounced the economic enslavement of the foreign debt burden, and started to only borrow in bolivars, instead of going to international credit markets to borrow dollars. Economists of every stripe warned that they would soon tap out Venezuela's banks, crowding out local borrowers, and would end up being forced to borrow larger and larger sums of shorter and shorter term bonds at higher and higher interest rates from more and more exposed banks.
Today, the government implicitly admits that the critics were right all along. The government announces, finally, a $1 billion bond placement in New York, as part of a massive restructuring plan to swap bolivar denominated bonds with long term dollar denominated bonds - i.e., what critics had demanded all along. As usual, it's too late: the local debt has already more than sextupled in bolivar terms, and tripled in dollar terms, leaving the nation many millions of dollars worse off than it would be if the government had followed independent advice all along. And the new dollar bonds are no bed of roses: yielding over 10% (in $$$! - country-risk, is the relevant euphemism) the bonds are a massively expensive way for Venezuela to borrow...though still less suicidally non-sustainable than the crazy borrow-only-in-bolivars strategy.
Five years ago, Chavez slammed the old regime for the judicial "tribus" and the absence of truly independent legal institutions.
Today, the government unilaterally shuts down politically-uncomfortable apellate courts, creating a massive constitutional vacuum, and now proposes, through a plainly illegal maneouver, to pack the Supreme Tribunal with 10-12 additional (Chavista) judges, to ensure the Tribunal's tractability. Coming at the political moment it comes, the move is widely feared by the opposition who see it as part of a broader plan to strike down the recall referendum petition through a court decision with the Made in Miraflores seal.
And, the jewel:
Five years ago, Chavez was still celebrating his coup-plotting days, spending successive February 4ths - the anniversary of his bloody attempted coup in 1992 - as though they were national holidays. After April 2002, and in a truly Orwellian inversion, he switches and starts calling ALL of his opponents - from the catholic church to the far right to the far left to the far center - "golpistas", coup plotters, as the ultimate political epithet.
Today, having established the word coup-plotter as the worst political insult, and after having repeatedly grumbled about the U.S.'s supposed role in the April 11th coup - what that role might have been was, of course, never specified - reports emerge that the US believes Chavez directly financed the protests that brought down president Sanchez de Lozada in Bolivia - in fact, financing a coup!
So is this a government of the left, the right, or what? Is that even a meaningful question when you're faced with this kind of absurdist excess?
As Manuel Caballero once said, Chavez is neither a communist, nor a leninist, nor an anarchist nor a trotskyite nor a castrista nor a fascist nor a reactionary nor a militarist; Chavez is a chavista.
Snippet of conversation with my Malaysian prof...
Him: But how much democracy is there, exactly, in Venezuela? I mean, the situation there is not like in Malaysia, is it, where the opposition are not allowed anywhere near a TV camera, and elections are "blacked out" if the governing party don't get over 2/3rds of the vote?
Me: Well, it's a far different thing. In Malaysia you have an actual authoritarian regime, full stop. In Venezuela, the problem is that we have some kind of tropicalized dadaist fantasy instead of a government. Your problem is bigger, no doubt, but ours is much more entertaining.
Me: Well, it's a far different thing. In Malaysia you have an actual authoritarian regime, full stop. In Venezuela, the problem is that we have some kind of tropicalized dadaist fantasy instead of a government. Your problem is bigger, no doubt, but ours is much more entertaining.
January 6, 2004
Contrast and compare:
(or, case study on what happens when your vote is secret, but your signature ain't...)
Item 1:
Article 145 of the Venezuelan Constitution: Civil servants are at the service of the state, not of any political partiality. Their hiring and dismissal shall not be determined by their political affiliation or orientation[...]
Item 2:
26 fired for participating in signature gathering drive. Opposition lawyer Tulio Alvarez has taken on the cases of 26 civil servants, "tenured" employees at the Planning Ministry, who have been unceremoniously fired for participating in the signature gathering drive for a Recall Referendum. "They are not respecting the Civil Service tenure, nor the right to stable work, and the only way those affected can raise their voice is to go to the Administrative Courts, but any decisions those courts take can only be appealed to the Corte Primera (First Administrative Court,) which is currently closed."
[Remember that the government unilaterally ordered the Corte Primera shut down after its magistrates handed down a string of rulings deemed insufficiently revolutionary. The Corte Primera has yet to be replaced with anything.]
Item 1:
Article 145 of the Venezuelan Constitution: Civil servants are at the service of the state, not of any political partiality. Their hiring and dismissal shall not be determined by their political affiliation or orientation[...]
Item 2:
26 fired for participating in signature gathering drive. Opposition lawyer Tulio Alvarez has taken on the cases of 26 civil servants, "tenured" employees at the Planning Ministry, who have been unceremoniously fired for participating in the signature gathering drive for a Recall Referendum. "They are not respecting the Civil Service tenure, nor the right to stable work, and the only way those affected can raise their voice is to go to the Administrative Courts, but any decisions those courts take can only be appealed to the Corte Primera (First Administrative Court,) which is currently closed."
[Remember that the government unilaterally ordered the Corte Primera shut down after its magistrates handed down a string of rulings deemed insufficiently revolutionary. The Corte Primera has yet to be replaced with anything.]
December 31, 2003
Today, I will break a personal rule...
...and blog about a subject other than Venezuela. Kind of.
The BBC (and everyone else) reports today that US authorities have named a special counsel to lead an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband opposed the Iraq war. Demonstrating that, battered though it clearly is, US democracy keeps on ticking, more or less, the investigation into this highly politically charged case will pass from a political appointee to the hands of a prosecutor with real independence.
Those of you who read the blog know where I'm going with this: there is no comparable legal mechanism in Venezuela. At all. No special counsel statute. No state or local criminal jurisdiction. Nothing. There is only the Fiscal General, a position that, on paper, is fully independent of the government, but in reality is held by perhaps the single most obsequious member of the chavista inner circle: former Vicepresident Isaias Rodriguez, the ultimate pushover, the regime's perennial number two man, an inveterate presidential yes man who has shown again and again that he will never, ever act against the president's interests.
For evident reasons, the personality and character of those called to investigate the most powerful men in a country are of key interest. The newly appointed special counsel in the US, Patrick Fitzgerald, is described by colleagues interviewed by the New York Times as "Eliot Ness with a Harvard law degree and a sense of humor," and a man with "a brain like a mainframe computer."
Former opponents agree. A lawyer who once had to face Fitzpatrick tells the Times: "Let me put it to you this way: If John Ashcroft wanted any favors on this one, he went to the wrong guy. This guy is tough."
This, of course, it what it takes to investigate the most politically sensitive cases. This is the standard that the citizens of a free republic are entitled to. If Fitzgerald decides not to charge anyone in the white house, it will be difficult for political opponents to cry foul. If he does move forward, his reputation will infuse those indictments with credibility that a politically motivated prosecutor would never enjoy. This is what it takes for institutions to have any sort of credibility, and for the law to apply equally to all.
Can you imagine a corresponding profile of Isaias Rodriguez? Could anyone argue that he meets this standard without provoking guffaws?
It's not a minor matter...this problem is at the center of the betrayal of democratic values at the center of the Chavez government.
You wouldn't necessarily know it, because he has a very low public profile, but Isaias Rodriguez is the lynchpin of the Chavista system. He shies away from microphones, works to make himself invisible, to not draw attention to himself, and he's successful. People don't notice him much. But his monopoly on the power to order criminal investigations, authorize indictments, and proceed on all criminal matters has produced a situation of utter lawlessness in the country.
I can, just off the top of my head, think of at least half a dozen cases in Venezuela where there is prima-facie evidence of criminal activity by Chavez personally that is far, far more direct and straightforward than the evidence linking the White House to the Valerie Plame fracas. Think of the FIEM, where Chavez admitted publicly to having ordered the Finance Minister to violate the Salvaguarda Law by failing to make the required deposits in 2001 - a criminal offense in Venezuela. Think of April 11th, when Chavez continued to give a speech for over two hours while a massacre unfolded just meters from where he was sitting, taking absolutely no action to stop it and later congratulating some of the gunmen. Think of the blatant disregard for the constitutional guarantee of privacy in personal communication, for its ban on the use of public property for party political purposes. Think of the continued and exceedingly public flouting of the regulations on the use of military uniforms for non-active military personnel. Think of the National Guard's action to tear-gas children while they slept, before dawn, to evict them from PDVSA housing in Paraguana. Think of the hundreds, probably thousands of instances of incitement to violence against journalists, priests, opposition organizers, anti-Chavez NGOs, etc. in any number of presidential speeches since 1999.
The newly appointed Special Counsel in the US says "the attorney general, in an abundance of caution, believed that his recusal was appropriate." In Venezuela, Isaias Rodriguez has continually and consistently refused to take himself off of cases involving Chavez and the government, despite the blindingly evident, indeed obscene, conflict of interest involved.
Attempts to force him to recuse himself through the courts have died at the Supreme Court level. With no legal lever to force the crony off of any of these cases, the government and its supporters can act under a kind of pre-announced blanket amnesty for any crimes they may choose to commit.
Had any one of the cases outlined above been impartially investigated by a truly independent prosecutor, it would have been an open-and-shut case. Because the lawbreaking in the Chavez government is not subtle, not a matter of careful legal interpretations that could go either way. It's open, brazen, proud, public.
Any of these cases would have provoked a serious constitutional crisis in a country with properly functioning legal institutions. In Venezuela, they get as far as the Fiscal's desk, and then die. It's the perfect scam: the government maintains the appearance of a properly functioning institutional system, all the while enjoying total impunity, absolute carte blanche to break any law it wants. This, in effect, is an outlaw government.
I do wish that those on the left who were so passionately angered by the wholesale violation of the constitution during the April 2002 coup would show at least a shard of that same indignation when faced with this less visible but equally thorough betrayal of constitutional principles at the hands of those who, ironically, wrote the current constitution!
The BBC (and everyone else) reports today that US authorities have named a special counsel to lead an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband opposed the Iraq war. Demonstrating that, battered though it clearly is, US democracy keeps on ticking, more or less, the investigation into this highly politically charged case will pass from a political appointee to the hands of a prosecutor with real independence.
Those of you who read the blog know where I'm going with this: there is no comparable legal mechanism in Venezuela. At all. No special counsel statute. No state or local criminal jurisdiction. Nothing. There is only the Fiscal General, a position that, on paper, is fully independent of the government, but in reality is held by perhaps the single most obsequious member of the chavista inner circle: former Vicepresident Isaias Rodriguez, the ultimate pushover, the regime's perennial number two man, an inveterate presidential yes man who has shown again and again that he will never, ever act against the president's interests.
For evident reasons, the personality and character of those called to investigate the most powerful men in a country are of key interest. The newly appointed special counsel in the US, Patrick Fitzgerald, is described by colleagues interviewed by the New York Times as "Eliot Ness with a Harvard law degree and a sense of humor," and a man with "a brain like a mainframe computer."
Former opponents agree. A lawyer who once had to face Fitzpatrick tells the Times: "Let me put it to you this way: If John Ashcroft wanted any favors on this one, he went to the wrong guy. This guy is tough."
This, of course, it what it takes to investigate the most politically sensitive cases. This is the standard that the citizens of a free republic are entitled to. If Fitzgerald decides not to charge anyone in the white house, it will be difficult for political opponents to cry foul. If he does move forward, his reputation will infuse those indictments with credibility that a politically motivated prosecutor would never enjoy. This is what it takes for institutions to have any sort of credibility, and for the law to apply equally to all.
Can you imagine a corresponding profile of Isaias Rodriguez? Could anyone argue that he meets this standard without provoking guffaws?
It's not a minor matter...this problem is at the center of the betrayal of democratic values at the center of the Chavez government.
You wouldn't necessarily know it, because he has a very low public profile, but Isaias Rodriguez is the lynchpin of the Chavista system. He shies away from microphones, works to make himself invisible, to not draw attention to himself, and he's successful. People don't notice him much. But his monopoly on the power to order criminal investigations, authorize indictments, and proceed on all criminal matters has produced a situation of utter lawlessness in the country.
I can, just off the top of my head, think of at least half a dozen cases in Venezuela where there is prima-facie evidence of criminal activity by Chavez personally that is far, far more direct and straightforward than the evidence linking the White House to the Valerie Plame fracas. Think of the FIEM, where Chavez admitted publicly to having ordered the Finance Minister to violate the Salvaguarda Law by failing to make the required deposits in 2001 - a criminal offense in Venezuela. Think of April 11th, when Chavez continued to give a speech for over two hours while a massacre unfolded just meters from where he was sitting, taking absolutely no action to stop it and later congratulating some of the gunmen. Think of the blatant disregard for the constitutional guarantee of privacy in personal communication, for its ban on the use of public property for party political purposes. Think of the continued and exceedingly public flouting of the regulations on the use of military uniforms for non-active military personnel. Think of the National Guard's action to tear-gas children while they slept, before dawn, to evict them from PDVSA housing in Paraguana. Think of the hundreds, probably thousands of instances of incitement to violence against journalists, priests, opposition organizers, anti-Chavez NGOs, etc. in any number of presidential speeches since 1999.
The newly appointed Special Counsel in the US says "the attorney general, in an abundance of caution, believed that his recusal was appropriate." In Venezuela, Isaias Rodriguez has continually and consistently refused to take himself off of cases involving Chavez and the government, despite the blindingly evident, indeed obscene, conflict of interest involved.
Attempts to force him to recuse himself through the courts have died at the Supreme Court level. With no legal lever to force the crony off of any of these cases, the government and its supporters can act under a kind of pre-announced blanket amnesty for any crimes they may choose to commit.
Had any one of the cases outlined above been impartially investigated by a truly independent prosecutor, it would have been an open-and-shut case. Because the lawbreaking in the Chavez government is not subtle, not a matter of careful legal interpretations that could go either way. It's open, brazen, proud, public.
Any of these cases would have provoked a serious constitutional crisis in a country with properly functioning legal institutions. In Venezuela, they get as far as the Fiscal's desk, and then die. It's the perfect scam: the government maintains the appearance of a properly functioning institutional system, all the while enjoying total impunity, absolute carte blanche to break any law it wants. This, in effect, is an outlaw government.
I do wish that those on the left who were so passionately angered by the wholesale violation of the constitution during the April 2002 coup would show at least a shard of that same indignation when faced with this less visible but equally thorough betrayal of constitutional principles at the hands of those who, ironically, wrote the current constitution!
December 27, 2003
Radicales y comeflores
Most newspaper readers in the English speaking world know alarmingly little about Venezuela in general, so it's hardly a surprise that their notions about Venezuela's opposition movement remain vague and contradictory.
On the one hand, almost every newspaper article on Venezuela has some throw-away phrase about Venezuela's "diverse and disjointed opposition, a loose coalition of businessmen, labor unions, NGOs and political parties." At the same time, when I talk to Europeans about Venezuela, it's clear that they have a vague notion of the opposition as a kind of undifferentiated mass of nasty rich assholes, reactionary, heartless and antidemocratic.
I find that this basic misunderstanding of what the opposition is, how it's made up, and how it operates, makes it very hard to hold any kind of sophisticated conversation about Venezuela. Because it's true, the opposition is remarkably diverse, fragmented, and in some ways chaotic. There isn't one clear leader, and it isn't clear that any one leader could ever lead the whole of it. And it is true that a substantial part of the opposition is prey to all of the same vices that rendered Venezuelan democracy disfunctional from the mid 70s to 1998.
What is lost in the standard journalistic vision is the key current within the opposition, a current I consider myself a part of, with a long if untold history of citizen activism, democratic idealism, and an earnest desire for real, systemic change. This section of the opposition - which I call the Democratic Movement, to differentiate it from the anachronistic pols and the opportunists - is known in Venezuela as the "comeflores" - the flower-eaters, literally, for our moderate posture and our stress on basic democratic values like tolerance, open debate, and respect for those we disagree with.
This label - comeflor - actually started as a slur pointed by the radical wing of the opposition towards us. The radicales, like all radicals everywhere, think of us as pathetically naive idealists, cannon-fodder for the totalitarian designs of our opponents. As far as they can see, the logical response to a government like Chavez's is to prepare for war. For our part, we believe that the logical response to a government like Chavez's is to build the peace, one day at a time, one act of tolerance at a time.
Comeflorismo antecedes chavismo. Elias Santana was organizing neighborhood committees to empower communities to exercise their democratic rights long before anyone in the country knew who Hugo Chavez was. Andres Velasquez was unionizing steelworkers when Chavez was a cadet in the military academy. Teodoro Petkoff was leading the democratization of the country's leftist movements when Chavez was in High School. Chavista mythology not withstanding, the struggle to truly democratize Venezuela is both far older and far more ideologically coherent than chavismo could ever hope to be.
Me, I think we should own the label comeflores. Sure it was meant as a slur, but what a nice slur! The label places us squarely in the tradition of Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., of Mandela and of the Czech velvet revolutionaries and the anti-Milosevic movement in Serbia. Each of them faced an opponent more ruthless and brutal than Chavez, each faced an opponent with a far bigger body-count than our opponent has. Each understood that the time to start to build their democracies is right now, and the way to do so is to put into practice the ideals we seek to establish in the government.
Little by little, this view has gone from the naive fringe to the center of the opposition movement. People like Elias Santana, once seen as a hopeless dreamer, have been vindicated again and again by the turn of events. Santana - the closest thing we have to an MLK figure - is today perhaps the intellectual father of the opposition. His quiet activism has left a real trace in the way more and more Venezuelans see the struggle against Chavista autocracy. His endlessly, tediously repeated motto - "sin violencia, dentro del marco de la ley" (without violence, within the law) - has gone from fringe to center in less than two years. If the current crisis passes off without significant violence, the country will owe him and those who've taken on his message a huge debt of gratitude.
This is not to say that the shrill voices of reaction have been silenced. They haven't. They exist, and they are a threat. Every non-violent democratic movement has had to contend with a similar fringe. And the successful ones have defeated it through the strength and effectiveness of non-violent tactics. I believe Venezuelans can do the same.
So here's to Elias Santana, and Chuo Torrealba and Leonardo Carvajal and Teodoro Petkoff and Ruth Capriles and Luis Ugalde and Vladimiro Mujica all those who've worked tirelessly since 1998 to show Venezuela that it can re-join the community of free nations without a bloodbath. They haven't quite pulled it off yet. But they're closer than they've ever been, and they're getting closer each day. Ultimately, they are the country's best and only shot at a decent future. Should they fail, the country's choice will be between the authoritarianism of the left and the authoritarianism of the right.
They must not fail.
On the one hand, almost every newspaper article on Venezuela has some throw-away phrase about Venezuela's "diverse and disjointed opposition, a loose coalition of businessmen, labor unions, NGOs and political parties." At the same time, when I talk to Europeans about Venezuela, it's clear that they have a vague notion of the opposition as a kind of undifferentiated mass of nasty rich assholes, reactionary, heartless and antidemocratic.
I find that this basic misunderstanding of what the opposition is, how it's made up, and how it operates, makes it very hard to hold any kind of sophisticated conversation about Venezuela. Because it's true, the opposition is remarkably diverse, fragmented, and in some ways chaotic. There isn't one clear leader, and it isn't clear that any one leader could ever lead the whole of it. And it is true that a substantial part of the opposition is prey to all of the same vices that rendered Venezuelan democracy disfunctional from the mid 70s to 1998.
What is lost in the standard journalistic vision is the key current within the opposition, a current I consider myself a part of, with a long if untold history of citizen activism, democratic idealism, and an earnest desire for real, systemic change. This section of the opposition - which I call the Democratic Movement, to differentiate it from the anachronistic pols and the opportunists - is known in Venezuela as the "comeflores" - the flower-eaters, literally, for our moderate posture and our stress on basic democratic values like tolerance, open debate, and respect for those we disagree with.
This label - comeflor - actually started as a slur pointed by the radical wing of the opposition towards us. The radicales, like all radicals everywhere, think of us as pathetically naive idealists, cannon-fodder for the totalitarian designs of our opponents. As far as they can see, the logical response to a government like Chavez's is to prepare for war. For our part, we believe that the logical response to a government like Chavez's is to build the peace, one day at a time, one act of tolerance at a time.
Comeflorismo antecedes chavismo. Elias Santana was organizing neighborhood committees to empower communities to exercise their democratic rights long before anyone in the country knew who Hugo Chavez was. Andres Velasquez was unionizing steelworkers when Chavez was a cadet in the military academy. Teodoro Petkoff was leading the democratization of the country's leftist movements when Chavez was in High School. Chavista mythology not withstanding, the struggle to truly democratize Venezuela is both far older and far more ideologically coherent than chavismo could ever hope to be.
Me, I think we should own the label comeflores. Sure it was meant as a slur, but what a nice slur! The label places us squarely in the tradition of Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., of Mandela and of the Czech velvet revolutionaries and the anti-Milosevic movement in Serbia. Each of them faced an opponent more ruthless and brutal than Chavez, each faced an opponent with a far bigger body-count than our opponent has. Each understood that the time to start to build their democracies is right now, and the way to do so is to put into practice the ideals we seek to establish in the government.
Little by little, this view has gone from the naive fringe to the center of the opposition movement. People like Elias Santana, once seen as a hopeless dreamer, have been vindicated again and again by the turn of events. Santana - the closest thing we have to an MLK figure - is today perhaps the intellectual father of the opposition. His quiet activism has left a real trace in the way more and more Venezuelans see the struggle against Chavista autocracy. His endlessly, tediously repeated motto - "sin violencia, dentro del marco de la ley" (without violence, within the law) - has gone from fringe to center in less than two years. If the current crisis passes off without significant violence, the country will owe him and those who've taken on his message a huge debt of gratitude.
This is not to say that the shrill voices of reaction have been silenced. They haven't. They exist, and they are a threat. Every non-violent democratic movement has had to contend with a similar fringe. And the successful ones have defeated it through the strength and effectiveness of non-violent tactics. I believe Venezuelans can do the same.
So here's to Elias Santana, and Chuo Torrealba and Leonardo Carvajal and Teodoro Petkoff and Ruth Capriles and Luis Ugalde and Vladimiro Mujica all those who've worked tirelessly since 1998 to show Venezuela that it can re-join the community of free nations without a bloodbath. They haven't quite pulled it off yet. But they're closer than they've ever been, and they're getting closer each day. Ultimately, they are the country's best and only shot at a decent future. Should they fail, the country's choice will be between the authoritarianism of the left and the authoritarianism of the right.
They must not fail.
December 21, 2003
Perceptive as usual...
...Erica Stephan writes in to let me know I totally missed the point in my last entry...
From "Erica Stephan" Date Sat, 20 Dec 2003 9:03 PM
To "Francisco Toro"
Subject Re: Why am I blogging?
for the record, I don't think your latest entry really addressed what for me is the key venezuelan question these days: Realistically, if an opposition candidate were elected president, would that regime be any better than Chavez's as far as respecting the equality of all persons before the law? Would that regime treat "deposed" chavistas with scrupulous fairness, would it change the constitution - if it did so - respecting a truly democratic process, would it give substance to the Chavez-era programs to help the poor like schools and credit schemes rather than tossing them out as retrograde populism? Would it institute land reform that worked? If your answer is yes, you've got some convincing to do, since the dominant voices in the opposition seem - to my amateur eye at least - seem mostly interested in booting Chavez at any cost. And if your answer is no, why should people interested in democracy support a recall effort?
FT sez:
In a sense, of course you are right. I can't guarantee that the post-Chavez era will come any closer to realizing the vision I set out than the pre-Chavez era. Certainly, any number of opposition dinosaurios give little room for hope. From Rafael Marin to Medina Gomez to Antonio Ledezma to Salas Romer himself, the opposition is full of "leaders" who don't really seem to get it at all, in my view. So the uncomfortable bed-mates problem is a real one, of course it is.
However, for every Rafael Marin in the opposition we have a Teodoro Petkoff, for every Ledezma we have an Elias Santana, or a Jesus Torrealba, or an Andres Velasquez, or a Manuel Cova. The opposition obviously has something of a split personality, yes, but one side of that split is made up of people of impecable democratic credentials, of considered views, of a deep commitment to tolerance.
Other than Greg Wilpert, I challenge you or anyone else to come up with a corresponding list of Chavistas who are willing to stick their necks out for the basic principles of the rule of law and the republican form of government. It will be a short list, an exceedingly short list, for the simple reason that all those who at one point dared to question anything that Chavez has said or done - from Jorge Olavarria to Pablo Medina to Javier Elechiguerra - were all promptly kicked out of the chavista movement, banished for what amount to thought-crimes against the carismatic leader's total control of his movement.
I do think that the opposition has changed, and continues to change and evolve. It's been a steep learning curve. In April 2002, at the time of the coup, the movement was barely five months old. We had no historical guides, no rule-book, no pre-fabricated idea about how to proceed against a democratically elected autocrat. And we made lots of mistakes, all of us, in thinking that Chavez's constant flouting of the constitution somehow excused us doing the same.
Two horrendous political train wrecks later, we're the wiser for it. The coup and the 2002-2003 general strike were, everyone now understands, truly disastrous failures, not only of tactics but of principles. It has taken a lot of time and debate and internal wrangles and angry diatribes for the opposition to come to understand that you can't protest the flouting of the law by flouting the law.
But today, the movement is closer to understanding that than it ever has been. The recall strategy in itself - scrupulously constitutional and carefully monitored by both sides, international observers, and CNE - is a powerful symbol in itself of this change in mentality. Teodoro Petkoff writes beautifully about this (Read Tal Cual, I beg you!) The fast-tracks and shortcuts and extraconstitutional hanky-panky strategies are really out of favor now, and the opposition's new maturity has been demonstrated again and again in its handling of the flood of chavista provocations on the days preceeding, during, and following the signature gathering drive. My point is that people do change, and so do political movements. They evolve, they learn, slowly, collectively, they do learn. In my view, this is the single most heartening sign in Venezuelan politics today.
Can the movement backslide? Of course it can. Do I have a crystal ball that allows me to guarantee that it will do the things you ask of it? I don't, and I can't. All I can do is guarantee that if it does backslide, I will be lining up behind Teodoro and Manuel Cova and Andres Velasquez and Elias Santana and Chuo Torrealba to fight for the same principles that we have all been fighting for since we started looking at the world in political terms.
What the opposition offers is a possibility for moving forward, a chance to solve a 173 year old problem. Chavismo, through its actions, has demonstrated again and again that it cannot, will not, and does not want to cut the gordian knot of arbitrary state power. If, like me, you think that solving that problem is really the key to solving all the rest of Venezuela's problems, then I think it's imperative to support the opposition, this opposition, warts and all, all the while keeping the eye firmly on the ball, reiterating again and again the point of this entire exercise.
With the opposition, success is far from guaranteed. But with Chavez, failure is guaranteed.
From "Erica Stephan" Date Sat, 20 Dec 2003 9:03 PM
To "Francisco Toro"
Subject Re: Why am I blogging?
for the record, I don't think your latest entry really addressed what for me is the key venezuelan question these days: Realistically, if an opposition candidate were elected president, would that regime be any better than Chavez's as far as respecting the equality of all persons before the law? Would that regime treat "deposed" chavistas with scrupulous fairness, would it change the constitution - if it did so - respecting a truly democratic process, would it give substance to the Chavez-era programs to help the poor like schools and credit schemes rather than tossing them out as retrograde populism? Would it institute land reform that worked? If your answer is yes, you've got some convincing to do, since the dominant voices in the opposition seem - to my amateur eye at least - seem mostly interested in booting Chavez at any cost. And if your answer is no, why should people interested in democracy support a recall effort?
FT sez:
In a sense, of course you are right. I can't guarantee that the post-Chavez era will come any closer to realizing the vision I set out than the pre-Chavez era. Certainly, any number of opposition dinosaurios give little room for hope. From Rafael Marin to Medina Gomez to Antonio Ledezma to Salas Romer himself, the opposition is full of "leaders" who don't really seem to get it at all, in my view. So the uncomfortable bed-mates problem is a real one, of course it is.
However, for every Rafael Marin in the opposition we have a Teodoro Petkoff, for every Ledezma we have an Elias Santana, or a Jesus Torrealba, or an Andres Velasquez, or a Manuel Cova. The opposition obviously has something of a split personality, yes, but one side of that split is made up of people of impecable democratic credentials, of considered views, of a deep commitment to tolerance.
Other than Greg Wilpert, I challenge you or anyone else to come up with a corresponding list of Chavistas who are willing to stick their necks out for the basic principles of the rule of law and the republican form of government. It will be a short list, an exceedingly short list, for the simple reason that all those who at one point dared to question anything that Chavez has said or done - from Jorge Olavarria to Pablo Medina to Javier Elechiguerra - were all promptly kicked out of the chavista movement, banished for what amount to thought-crimes against the carismatic leader's total control of his movement.
I do think that the opposition has changed, and continues to change and evolve. It's been a steep learning curve. In April 2002, at the time of the coup, the movement was barely five months old. We had no historical guides, no rule-book, no pre-fabricated idea about how to proceed against a democratically elected autocrat. And we made lots of mistakes, all of us, in thinking that Chavez's constant flouting of the constitution somehow excused us doing the same.
Two horrendous political train wrecks later, we're the wiser for it. The coup and the 2002-2003 general strike were, everyone now understands, truly disastrous failures, not only of tactics but of principles. It has taken a lot of time and debate and internal wrangles and angry diatribes for the opposition to come to understand that you can't protest the flouting of the law by flouting the law.
But today, the movement is closer to understanding that than it ever has been. The recall strategy in itself - scrupulously constitutional and carefully monitored by both sides, international observers, and CNE - is a powerful symbol in itself of this change in mentality. Teodoro Petkoff writes beautifully about this (Read Tal Cual, I beg you!) The fast-tracks and shortcuts and extraconstitutional hanky-panky strategies are really out of favor now, and the opposition's new maturity has been demonstrated again and again in its handling of the flood of chavista provocations on the days preceeding, during, and following the signature gathering drive. My point is that people do change, and so do political movements. They evolve, they learn, slowly, collectively, they do learn. In my view, this is the single most heartening sign in Venezuelan politics today.
Can the movement backslide? Of course it can. Do I have a crystal ball that allows me to guarantee that it will do the things you ask of it? I don't, and I can't. All I can do is guarantee that if it does backslide, I will be lining up behind Teodoro and Manuel Cova and Andres Velasquez and Elias Santana and Chuo Torrealba to fight for the same principles that we have all been fighting for since we started looking at the world in political terms.
What the opposition offers is a possibility for moving forward, a chance to solve a 173 year old problem. Chavismo, through its actions, has demonstrated again and again that it cannot, will not, and does not want to cut the gordian knot of arbitrary state power. If, like me, you think that solving that problem is really the key to solving all the rest of Venezuela's problems, then I think it's imperative to support the opposition, this opposition, warts and all, all the while keeping the eye firmly on the ball, reiterating again and again the point of this entire exercise.
With the opposition, success is far from guaranteed. But with Chavez, failure is guaranteed.
December 20, 2003
Back-and-forth with Greg Wilpert
I really don't agree on much with Greg Wilpert, the Venezuelanalysis.com guy, but I respect his integrity and his intellect, and have a great time sparring with him. With his permission, I'm publishing this back and forth argument between us. Long, too long, like everything I write (currently accepting applications for a pro bono editor!) but hopefully interesting...
From "Francisco Toro" Date Thu, 18 Dec 2003 9:46 AM
To ""Gregory Wilpert"
Subject rumanian rambling
You wrote, in Venezuela Analysis -
"Also, if the pro-Chavez camp numbers are correct, this time could be used to forge signatures, so that the total turned in equals the number the opposition reported it collected from the different signature locations in the country."
I say: Remember the actas. The actas are there. They are signed by both sides. Forging signatures after the fact is impossible - CNE would automatically throw out any signature totals not already signed off on at the acta stage.
Overall, it is a cogent argument you put forward. This theory about political participation among the poorest rising due to increased mobilization is provocative, but not born out by turnout figures in 1998-2000, the peak of chavista popular mobilization. If you're really suggesting that the poorest people are MORE politically engaged now than in July 2000...well, it's an empirical question, but it seems wildly unlikely to me.
But, again, only an actual vote will tell.
BTW, after Chavez's little outburst of the second to last alo presi, do my concerns about committing the gov't to follow a CNE decision, whatever it may be, sound a little less shallow? Sure, he contradicted himself last Sunday, but that's just the point - the nation's political stability seems predicated on which particular side of the bed the guy gets up on each morning.
Oh, and also - do you read Teodoro Petkoff very often? You really ought to - we don't have that many sane commentators with integrity on our side, so it's worth taking the time to read the ones we have. Last Monday he had this to write, which I think gets to the heart of what is unacceptable about the Chavez regime, to me anyway:
¿Etica? ¿Con qué se come eso?
El desprecio del Presidente por las normas legales y el descaro de sus procederes alcanzan una cota elevadÃsima con la transmisión que hizo ayer de la grabación de una conversación entre Ramón Escovar Salom y su hijo. Rebajándose al nivel de Juan Barreto, de Tascón o de cualquiera de sus acólitos, en los cuales ese tipo de conducta no sorprende, Chávez ha transmitido una grabación que en sà misma ni siquiera podrÃa ser presentada bajo la coartada de que en ella se revelan secretos de una conspiración, de un golpe o un magnicidio, lo cual, al menos, la explicarÃa. Es una conversación banal, con apreciaciones polÃticas generales, sin ningún valor "policial", por asà decir. Eso hace aún más repugnante el acto de Chávez. Es la admisión pura y simple de que las leyes le importan un carajo. Pinchar teléfonos está prohibido. Divulgar las grabaciones también. Sin embargo, el gobierno lo hace.
Y lo hace sin disimulo. Se jacta de eso. Pero hasta ahora la divulgación de lo grabado quedaba en manos de los atorrantes de costumbre. Ahora es el propio Chávez, con un descaro inaudito, quien cumple con la sucia labor. Porque no sólo las leyes le importan un carajo.Tampoco la ética.
Greg, Greg, Greg...I shall forever remain baffled by how it is anyone sane could think anything good could come out of a government that behaves this way. Yes every previous government has failed, spectacularly, at the central task of establishing a rule-of-law based system of government as well. But excusing Chavez amazing flaunting of the law on that grounds is like excusing my decision to beat my wife cuz her previous husband used to beat her too!
ft
From "Gregory Wilpert" Date Thu, 18 Dec 2003 3:09 PM
To "'Francisco Toro'"
Subject RE: rumanian rambling
> Overall, it is a cogent argument you put forward. This theory about
> political participation among the poorest rising due to increased
> mobilization is provocative, but not born out by turnout figures in
> 1998-2000, the peak of chavista popular mobilization. If you're really
> suggesting that the poorest people are MORE politically engaged now than
> in July 2000...well, it's an empirical question, but it seems wildly
> unlikely to me.
I think you have to talk more to people from the barrios. Perhaps you have and we each get a wildly distorted picture of what's going on there because we end up talking to unrepresentative samples. But I have a very strong impression, from talking to both barrio organizers and folks like my cleaning lady, that the barrios are more politicized now than they ever were. Chavez got elected by the middle class back in 1998 and 2000. Next time around, however, I would bet he will be elected by the folks who live in the barrios (and participation will be correspondingly higher, of course).
> But, again, only an actual vote will tell.
Indeed.
> BTW, after Chavez's little outburst of the second to last alo presi, do
> my concerns about committing the gov't to follow a CNE decision, whatever
> it may be, sound a little less shallow? Sure, he contradicted himself
> last Sunday, but that's just the point - the nation's political stability
> seems predicated on which particular side of the bed the guy gets up on
> each morning.
Obviously, I think you give Chavez less credit for being a rational person than I do. I realize that he has emotional outbursts ALL of the time. However, in the end, I see him as being swayed by rational argument and that's what, in the end, guides his decisions. I have seen him make emotional statements plenty of times, only to in the end do the rationally right thing. I basically agree with you that he is a narcissist, but I don't see much evidence that this has a major impact on policy decisions. Unlike you, I do not think that Chavez makes all or most decisions alone.
> Oh, and also - do you read Teodoro Petkoff very often? You really ought
> to - we don't have that many sane commentators with integrity on our
> side, so it's worth taking the time to read the ones we have. Last Monday
> he had this to write, which I think gets to the heart of what is
> unacceptable about the Chavez regime, to me anyway:
>
> ¿Etica? ¿Con qué se come eso?
Taping the phone conversation was indeed an illegal and unethical act. Releasing it was certainly highly questionable. On the other hand, if it contributes to proving that there was large-scale fraud, to which the public should be alerted, it might be acceptable. Unfortunately, the conversation was somewhat ambiguous, which makes the ethics of releasing it all the more questionable. I don't know. Obviously, if you believe that there was no fraud, then the conversation proves nothing. If, however, you are convinced that there was fraud, then it's a confirmation to which the public should be alerted. In other words, I see both sides of this issue, but would tend to agree with you and Petkoff that it was wrong to release it.
> Greg, Greg, Greg...I shall forever remain baffled by how it is anyone
> sane could think anything good could come out of a government that
> behaves this way. Yes every previous government has failed,
> spectacularly, at the central task of establishing a rule-of-law based
> system of government as well. But excusing Chavez amazing flaunting of
> the law on that grounds is like excusing my decision to beat my wifecuz
> his previous husband used to beat her too!
This is a quite absolutistic statement of yours: "how it is anyone sane could think anything good could come out of a government that behaves this way" If previous governments also behaved this way (and you seem to imply that this true), then nothing good ever came from them either? Here you are basically using a mirror argument of what the Chavistas use (to which the opposition always objects), which says that there was nothing good about the previous governments because they were unethical in many cases. I am not defending unethical activity, but I do think we can separate the unethical from the ethical and the good - i.e., not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
--Greg
From "Francisco Toro" Date Fri, 19 Dec 2003 1:22 PM
To "Gregory Wilpert"
Subject RE: rumanian rambling
> Taping the phone conversation was indeed an illegal and unethical act.
> Releasing it was certainly highly questionable. On the other hand, if it
> contributes to proving that there was large-scale fraud, to which the
> public should be alerted, it might be acceptable. Unfortunately, the
> conversation was somewhat ambiguous, which makes the ethics of releasing
> it all the more questionable. I don't know. Obviously, if you believe
> that there was no fraud, then the conversation proves nothing. If,
> however, you are convinced that there was fraud, then it's a
> confirmation to which the public should be alerted. In other words, I
> see both sides of this issue, but would tend to agree with you and
> Petkoff that it was wrong to release it.
My point is that the content of the conversation doesn't make any difference one way or another. The content is a red herring. The country's problem for 173 years since 1830 has been the absence of the rule of law, of basic citizen guarantees, the existence of governments always based on force, on the caudillo or the party, rather than on the law. It's the constant flouting of the law that made the pre-1998 governments totally unacceptable, that made it imperative to change them. It's the reason my very first involvement in Venezuelan politics, in 1996, was with the radical opponents of the Punto Fijo system, and why it grates so fucking much when Chavez tells me, tells us, that we are accomplices of the old regime simply because we do not dogmatically accept everything he says.
Ese es el centro de la mezquindad de Chavez, and the center of his falsification of the history that brought him to power. But me? I haven't changed positions. My position is the same: people are only free when the powerful are bound by the law as much as the weak. It's the flouting of the law, the gleeful pissing all over the constitution, that makes the Chavez government precisely as unacceptable, unfair, retrograde, undemocratic and ultimately destructive to the nation as the old regime. And that I will not accept, can never accept - and I continue, naively, to think that deep down inside you cannot really defend it either.
I dunno how long it's gonna take for us to learn that the laws are binding, not just on your enemies, not just on the poor, not just on those without connections or cronies or old school friends in power, but on EVERYONE. Every time Chavez gives a speech, every time he uses state money and state property for party political purposes, every time he shits all over the rule of law with the certain knowledge that he is above the reach of the instutions (cuz the Fiscal General is a crony) Chavez deepens the central problem of the venezuelan polity - its total disregard for the law.
Chavez did not create this problem. He has just deepened it immensely. And again, it's hard for me to see how you can support a government that behaves this way, simply cuz the ideological background music happens to please you.
ft
From "Gregory Wilpert" Date Fri, 19 Dec 2003 4:17 PM
To "'Francisco Toro'"@fas
> My point is that the content of the conversation doesn't make any
> difference one way or another because the country's problem for 173 years
> since 1830 has been the absence of the rule of law, of basic citizen
> guarantees, the existence of governments always based on force, on the
> caudillo or the party, rather than on the law. It's the constant flouting
> of the law that made the pre-1998 governments totally unacceptable,that
> made it imperative to change them. It's the reason my very first
> involvement in Venezuelan politics, in 1996, was with the radical
> opponents of the Punto Fijo system, and why it grates so fucking much
> when Chavez tells me, us, that we are accomplices of the old regime
> simply because we do not dogmatically accept everything he says. Ese es
> el centro de la mezquindad de Chavez, and the center of his falsification
> of the history that brought him to power. But me? I haven't changed
> positions. My position is the same: people are only free when the
> powerful are bound by the law as much as the weak. It's the flouting of
> the law, the gleeful pissing all over the constitution, that makes the
> Chavez government equally unacceptable, unfair, retrograde, undemocratic
> and ultimately destructive to the nation. And that I will not accept, can
> never accept - and I continue, naively, to think that deep down inside
> you cannot really defend it either.
As I said before, I tend to agree with you about the unacceptability of breaking the law. However, I find your position so purist that I find it hard to believe that you could be active in politics anywhere. I mean, how does the taping and broadcasting of a private conversation compare to the wholesale trashing of the constitution, which is what many in the opposition did and almost everyone at least supported during the coup? Even someone you look up to, such as Teodoro Petkoff, was much lamer and tamer in his critique of the coup than he was of Chavez and the phone conversation in the editorial you sent to me recently. I did not see anyone (I mean this literally) from the opposition get as upset about the coup as they are getting now about this publicized phone conversation. I mean, how can you possibly work together with people who are so hypocritical? I think, given your standards, you should really be much more ni-ni than you are.
Besides, while it is illegal to tape and broadcast phone conversations in most countries, it's something that happens all of the time. Just think of the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal. This does not excuse it, but it should put such practices into perspective and they have to be weighed against other values. I mean, what if someone in the conversation had actually said directly "we forged xx number of signatures"? Would you still say that under no circumstances could the conversation be revealed? If you say it can't, fine. Your position would be well based on legal precedent, which forbids the use of illegally obtained evidence for convicting someone (at least in the U.S.).
I guess my main problem with the whole line of argument you present, which is quite rational, is that while you present an admirable standard, it's not all that realistic in the Venezuelan context. That is, I agree in principle, but cannot draw the same conclusion that something like this proves that the whole government is corrupt. I have myself questioned the legality of some of the government's practices before (most recently in an article on the Globovision microwave
equipment case). While such incidents exist all over the place, I have to weigh them against the practices of the opposition, which I find much more objectionable, and the other aspects of the government that I find positive. In other words, I don't find your position realistic in the sense that it does not seem to weigh the real alternatives. I find your position honorable, but inconsistent if you are not equally harsh against the opposition. I know you can be, but in the end, in your comparisons the opposition always comes out ahead of the government.
> Chavez did not create this problem. He has just deepened it immensely.
> And again, it's hard for me to see how you can support a government that
> behaves this way, simply cuz the ideological background music happens to
> please you.
First of all, I do not think that Chavez deepened the problem. True, though, he has not contributed much towards resolving it. Secondly, I do think there's more positive things to the government than pleasing "ideological background music."
--Greg
From "Francisco Toro" Date Fri, 19 Dec 2003 5:36 PM
To "Gregory Wilpert"
Subject RE: rumanian rambling
I use the term "flouting" for a reason. It's not that playing that Escobar Salom recording is a great sin. It's that it's a simbol, an EXCEEDINGLY EVIDENT demonstration of the shallowness of the government's commitment to a system of law. This is not a detail. This is the crux of the Venezuelan problem. There is no republic, for 173 years there has been no republic. There is only power, and those who wield it. And until we learn to understand the law as, um, mandatory, we have no chance at all at advancing on ANY OTHER field!
So fuck the opposition, the opposition is half full of goons, I know that, I can do nothing about them but criticize them in public, which I do constantly. I do believe that the saner, democratically idealistic faction within the opposition is much closer to totally controlling the opposition movement now than it ever has been before. (Again, Petkoff writes very eloquently about this.)
But ultimately, as far as I'm concerned, I am not a member of the Venezuelan opposition. I am a member of a democracy movement, a movement for the institution of a system of government based on the rule of law. Both because this is right in itself, and because establishing a proper vibrant democracy based on respect, tolerance and inclusion is the ONLY way to move the country forward over the medium and long term. So I will continue to oppose this government for its catastrophic failure in this regard, and I will judge any future government by this same standard. Simple.
Because achieving this, finally establishing a government of laws for the first time in the country's entire history, that Greg would be the real revolution. This is the challenge, the ball we need to keep our eye on. It would change everything, it would constitute a far more fundamental alteration of the power system in the country than anything Chavez has ever even come close to achieving.
So yes, Greg, if what you think insisting on democratic legality makes me unfit for politics, then yes, I am gleefully, proudly unfit for politics. I admit it, I am the wildly unrealistic one here - the one unrealistic enough to insist that, as a citizen of a free republic, I should enjoy the same protection to my citizenship rights as those taken for granted in all semi-functional democracies.
Remember how angry you were when you saw the US Republicans abuse their privileged position on the Supreme Court to give Bush the presidency? Remember how you felt your citizenship rights had been raped, that you'd been stripped of the basics of your political freedom? Remember how unacceptable it felt, how violent, how insolent, how wrong? That's basically how I feel Greg. And quite rightly.
You would not accept this type of wholesale scorn for the rule of law in your country, and I don't accept it in mine.
What's so damn unrealistic about that?
Isn't it a hateful, discriminatory, borderline racist but at the very least exoticist vision of Latin America one that leads you to argue that the basic procedural and citizen rights that you take as non-negotiable in the first world are "unrealistic" in Venezuela? Is real democracy, real political freedom, then also unrealistic in Venezuela? Are we not entitled to it? Are we not fully justified when we fight for it? Or is it only in gringos and Europeans who are entitled to political freedom?
Societies need wildly unrealistic people, Greg, they call us intellectuals. Me, I will wildly unrealistically support any political movement that demands the democratic rights of all its citizens, whichever side of the political divide those people my be on. It's just that I can see, to my utter spookment, that many of the governments cadres - the ones I know are in Obispos municipality in Barinas, not the Caracas barrios - have an ultimately autoritarian attitude to political power to match Chavez's perfectly! Dogmatism and intolerance of dissent are a fundamental part of the president's political imagination, it's very hard for me to see how the resulting instability and extremism can be anything but damaging.
ft
I really don't agree on much with Greg Wilpert, the Venezuelanalysis.com guy, but I respect his integrity and his intellect, and have a great time sparring with him. With his permission, I'm publishing this back and forth argument between us. Long, too long, like everything I write (currently accepting applications for a pro bono editor!) but hopefully interesting...
From "Francisco Toro" Date Thu, 18 Dec 2003 9:46 AM
To ""Gregory Wilpert"
Subject rumanian rambling
You wrote, in Venezuela Analysis -
"Also, if the pro-Chavez camp numbers are correct, this time could be used to forge signatures, so that the total turned in equals the number the opposition reported it collected from the different signature locations in the country."
I say: Remember the actas. The actas are there. They are signed by both sides. Forging signatures after the fact is impossible - CNE would automatically throw out any signature totals not already signed off on at the acta stage.
Overall, it is a cogent argument you put forward. This theory about political participation among the poorest rising due to increased mobilization is provocative, but not born out by turnout figures in 1998-2000, the peak of chavista popular mobilization. If you're really suggesting that the poorest people are MORE politically engaged now than in July 2000...well, it's an empirical question, but it seems wildly unlikely to me.
But, again, only an actual vote will tell.
BTW, after Chavez's little outburst of the second to last alo presi, do my concerns about committing the gov't to follow a CNE decision, whatever it may be, sound a little less shallow? Sure, he contradicted himself last Sunday, but that's just the point - the nation's political stability seems predicated on which particular side of the bed the guy gets up on each morning.
Oh, and also - do you read Teodoro Petkoff very often? You really ought to - we don't have that many sane commentators with integrity on our side, so it's worth taking the time to read the ones we have. Last Monday he had this to write, which I think gets to the heart of what is unacceptable about the Chavez regime, to me anyway:
¿Etica? ¿Con qué se come eso?
El desprecio del Presidente por las normas legales y el descaro de sus procederes alcanzan una cota elevadÃsima con la transmisión que hizo ayer de la grabación de una conversación entre Ramón Escovar Salom y su hijo. Rebajándose al nivel de Juan Barreto, de Tascón o de cualquiera de sus acólitos, en los cuales ese tipo de conducta no sorprende, Chávez ha transmitido una grabación que en sà misma ni siquiera podrÃa ser presentada bajo la coartada de que en ella se revelan secretos de una conspiración, de un golpe o un magnicidio, lo cual, al menos, la explicarÃa. Es una conversación banal, con apreciaciones polÃticas generales, sin ningún valor "policial", por asà decir. Eso hace aún más repugnante el acto de Chávez. Es la admisión pura y simple de que las leyes le importan un carajo. Pinchar teléfonos está prohibido. Divulgar las grabaciones también. Sin embargo, el gobierno lo hace.
Y lo hace sin disimulo. Se jacta de eso. Pero hasta ahora la divulgación de lo grabado quedaba en manos de los atorrantes de costumbre. Ahora es el propio Chávez, con un descaro inaudito, quien cumple con la sucia labor. Porque no sólo las leyes le importan un carajo.Tampoco la ética.
Greg, Greg, Greg...I shall forever remain baffled by how it is anyone sane could think anything good could come out of a government that behaves this way. Yes every previous government has failed, spectacularly, at the central task of establishing a rule-of-law based system of government as well. But excusing Chavez amazing flaunting of the law on that grounds is like excusing my decision to beat my wife cuz her previous husband used to beat her too!
ft
From "Gregory Wilpert" Date Thu, 18 Dec 2003 3:09 PM
To "'Francisco Toro'"
Subject RE: rumanian rambling
> Overall, it is a cogent argument you put forward. This theory about
> political participation among the poorest rising due to increased
> mobilization is provocative, but not born out by turnout figures in
> 1998-2000, the peak of chavista popular mobilization. If you're really
> suggesting that the poorest people are MORE politically engaged now than
> in July 2000...well, it's an empirical question, but it seems wildly
> unlikely to me.
I think you have to talk more to people from the barrios. Perhaps you have and we each get a wildly distorted picture of what's going on there because we end up talking to unrepresentative samples. But I have a very strong impression, from talking to both barrio organizers and folks like my cleaning lady, that the barrios are more politicized now than they ever were. Chavez got elected by the middle class back in 1998 and 2000. Next time around, however, I would bet he will be elected by the folks who live in the barrios (and participation will be correspondingly higher, of course).
> But, again, only an actual vote will tell.
Indeed.
> BTW, after Chavez's little outburst of the second to last alo presi, do
> my concerns about committing the gov't to follow a CNE decision, whatever
> it may be, sound a little less shallow? Sure, he contradicted himself
> last Sunday, but that's just the point - the nation's political stability
> seems predicated on which particular side of the bed the guy gets up on
> each morning.
Obviously, I think you give Chavez less credit for being a rational person than I do. I realize that he has emotional outbursts ALL of the time. However, in the end, I see him as being swayed by rational argument and that's what, in the end, guides his decisions. I have seen him make emotional statements plenty of times, only to in the end do the rationally right thing. I basically agree with you that he is a narcissist, but I don't see much evidence that this has a major impact on policy decisions. Unlike you, I do not think that Chavez makes all or most decisions alone.
> Oh, and also - do you read Teodoro Petkoff very often? You really ought
> to - we don't have that many sane commentators with integrity on our
> side, so it's worth taking the time to read the ones we have. Last Monday
> he had this to write, which I think gets to the heart of what is
> unacceptable about the Chavez regime, to me anyway:
>
> ¿Etica? ¿Con qué se come eso?
Taping the phone conversation was indeed an illegal and unethical act. Releasing it was certainly highly questionable. On the other hand, if it contributes to proving that there was large-scale fraud, to which the public should be alerted, it might be acceptable. Unfortunately, the conversation was somewhat ambiguous, which makes the ethics of releasing it all the more questionable. I don't know. Obviously, if you believe that there was no fraud, then the conversation proves nothing. If, however, you are convinced that there was fraud, then it's a confirmation to which the public should be alerted. In other words, I see both sides of this issue, but would tend to agree with you and Petkoff that it was wrong to release it.
> Greg, Greg, Greg...I shall forever remain baffled by how it is anyone
> sane could think anything good could come out of a government that
> behaves this way. Yes every previous government has failed,
> spectacularly, at the central task of establishing a rule-of-law based
> system of government as well. But excusing Chavez amazing flaunting of
> the law on that grounds is like excusing my decision to beat my wifecuz
> his previous husband used to beat her too!
This is a quite absolutistic statement of yours: "how it is anyone sane could think anything good could come out of a government that behaves this way" If previous governments also behaved this way (and you seem to imply that this true), then nothing good ever came from them either? Here you are basically using a mirror argument of what the Chavistas use (to which the opposition always objects), which says that there was nothing good about the previous governments because they were unethical in many cases. I am not defending unethical activity, but I do think we can separate the unethical from the ethical and the good - i.e., not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
--Greg
From "Francisco Toro" Date Fri, 19 Dec 2003 1:22 PM
To "Gregory Wilpert"
Subject RE: rumanian rambling
> Taping the phone conversation was indeed an illegal and unethical act.
> Releasing it was certainly highly questionable. On the other hand, if it
> contributes to proving that there was large-scale fraud, to which the
> public should be alerted, it might be acceptable. Unfortunately, the
> conversation was somewhat ambiguous, which makes the ethics of releasing
> it all the more questionable. I don't know. Obviously, if you believe
> that there was no fraud, then the conversation proves nothing. If,
> however, you are convinced that there was fraud, then it's a
> confirmation to which the public should be alerted. In other words, I
> see both sides of this issue, but would tend to agree with you and
> Petkoff that it was wrong to release it.
My point is that the content of the conversation doesn't make any difference one way or another. The content is a red herring. The country's problem for 173 years since 1830 has been the absence of the rule of law, of basic citizen guarantees, the existence of governments always based on force, on the caudillo or the party, rather than on the law. It's the constant flouting of the law that made the pre-1998 governments totally unacceptable, that made it imperative to change them. It's the reason my very first involvement in Venezuelan politics, in 1996, was with the radical opponents of the Punto Fijo system, and why it grates so fucking much when Chavez tells me, tells us, that we are accomplices of the old regime simply because we do not dogmatically accept everything he says.
Ese es el centro de la mezquindad de Chavez, and the center of his falsification of the history that brought him to power. But me? I haven't changed positions. My position is the same: people are only free when the powerful are bound by the law as much as the weak. It's the flouting of the law, the gleeful pissing all over the constitution, that makes the Chavez government precisely as unacceptable, unfair, retrograde, undemocratic and ultimately destructive to the nation as the old regime. And that I will not accept, can never accept - and I continue, naively, to think that deep down inside you cannot really defend it either.
I dunno how long it's gonna take for us to learn that the laws are binding, not just on your enemies, not just on the poor, not just on those without connections or cronies or old school friends in power, but on EVERYONE. Every time Chavez gives a speech, every time he uses state money and state property for party political purposes, every time he shits all over the rule of law with the certain knowledge that he is above the reach of the instutions (cuz the Fiscal General is a crony) Chavez deepens the central problem of the venezuelan polity - its total disregard for the law.
Chavez did not create this problem. He has just deepened it immensely. And again, it's hard for me to see how you can support a government that behaves this way, simply cuz the ideological background music happens to please you.
ft
From "Gregory Wilpert" Date Fri, 19 Dec 2003 4:17 PM
To "'Francisco Toro'"@fas
> My point is that the content of the conversation doesn't make any
> difference one way or another because the country's problem for 173 years
> since 1830 has been the absence of the rule of law, of basic citizen
> guarantees, the existence of governments always based on force, on the
> caudillo or the party, rather than on the law. It's the constant flouting
> of the law that made the pre-1998 governments totally unacceptable,that
> made it imperative to change them. It's the reason my very first
> involvement in Venezuelan politics, in 1996, was with the radical
> opponents of the Punto Fijo system, and why it grates so fucking much
> when Chavez tells me, us, that we are accomplices of the old regime
> simply because we do not dogmatically accept everything he says. Ese es
> el centro de la mezquindad de Chavez, and the center of his falsification
> of the history that brought him to power. But me? I haven't changed
> positions. My position is the same: people are only free when the
> powerful are bound by the law as much as the weak. It's the flouting of
> the law, the gleeful pissing all over the constitution, that makes the
> Chavez government equally unacceptable, unfair, retrograde, undemocratic
> and ultimately destructive to the nation. And that I will not accept, can
> never accept - and I continue, naively, to think that deep down inside
> you cannot really defend it either.
As I said before, I tend to agree with you about the unacceptability of breaking the law. However, I find your position so purist that I find it hard to believe that you could be active in politics anywhere. I mean, how does the taping and broadcasting of a private conversation compare to the wholesale trashing of the constitution, which is what many in the opposition did and almost everyone at least supported during the coup? Even someone you look up to, such as Teodoro Petkoff, was much lamer and tamer in his critique of the coup than he was of Chavez and the phone conversation in the editorial you sent to me recently. I did not see anyone (I mean this literally) from the opposition get as upset about the coup as they are getting now about this publicized phone conversation. I mean, how can you possibly work together with people who are so hypocritical? I think, given your standards, you should really be much more ni-ni than you are.
Besides, while it is illegal to tape and broadcast phone conversations in most countries, it's something that happens all of the time. Just think of the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal. This does not excuse it, but it should put such practices into perspective and they have to be weighed against other values. I mean, what if someone in the conversation had actually said directly "we forged xx number of signatures"? Would you still say that under no circumstances could the conversation be revealed? If you say it can't, fine. Your position would be well based on legal precedent, which forbids the use of illegally obtained evidence for convicting someone (at least in the U.S.).
I guess my main problem with the whole line of argument you present, which is quite rational, is that while you present an admirable standard, it's not all that realistic in the Venezuelan context. That is, I agree in principle, but cannot draw the same conclusion that something like this proves that the whole government is corrupt. I have myself questioned the legality of some of the government's practices before (most recently in an article on the Globovision microwave
equipment case). While such incidents exist all over the place, I have to weigh them against the practices of the opposition, which I find much more objectionable, and the other aspects of the government that I find positive. In other words, I don't find your position realistic in the sense that it does not seem to weigh the real alternatives. I find your position honorable, but inconsistent if you are not equally harsh against the opposition. I know you can be, but in the end, in your comparisons the opposition always comes out ahead of the government.
> Chavez did not create this problem. He has just deepened it immensely.
> And again, it's hard for me to see how you can support a government that
> behaves this way, simply cuz the ideological background music happens to
> please you.
First of all, I do not think that Chavez deepened the problem. True, though, he has not contributed much towards resolving it. Secondly, I do think there's more positive things to the government than pleasing "ideological background music."
--Greg
From "Francisco Toro" Date Fri, 19 Dec 2003 5:36 PM
To "Gregory Wilpert"
Subject RE: rumanian rambling
I use the term "flouting" for a reason. It's not that playing that Escobar Salom recording is a great sin. It's that it's a simbol, an EXCEEDINGLY EVIDENT demonstration of the shallowness of the government's commitment to a system of law. This is not a detail. This is the crux of the Venezuelan problem. There is no republic, for 173 years there has been no republic. There is only power, and those who wield it. And until we learn to understand the law as, um, mandatory, we have no chance at all at advancing on ANY OTHER field!
So fuck the opposition, the opposition is half full of goons, I know that, I can do nothing about them but criticize them in public, which I do constantly. I do believe that the saner, democratically idealistic faction within the opposition is much closer to totally controlling the opposition movement now than it ever has been before. (Again, Petkoff writes very eloquently about this.)
But ultimately, as far as I'm concerned, I am not a member of the Venezuelan opposition. I am a member of a democracy movement, a movement for the institution of a system of government based on the rule of law. Both because this is right in itself, and because establishing a proper vibrant democracy based on respect, tolerance and inclusion is the ONLY way to move the country forward over the medium and long term. So I will continue to oppose this government for its catastrophic failure in this regard, and I will judge any future government by this same standard. Simple.
Because achieving this, finally establishing a government of laws for the first time in the country's entire history, that Greg would be the real revolution. This is the challenge, the ball we need to keep our eye on. It would change everything, it would constitute a far more fundamental alteration of the power system in the country than anything Chavez has ever even come close to achieving.
So yes, Greg, if what you think insisting on democratic legality makes me unfit for politics, then yes, I am gleefully, proudly unfit for politics. I admit it, I am the wildly unrealistic one here - the one unrealistic enough to insist that, as a citizen of a free republic, I should enjoy the same protection to my citizenship rights as those taken for granted in all semi-functional democracies.
Remember how angry you were when you saw the US Republicans abuse their privileged position on the Supreme Court to give Bush the presidency? Remember how you felt your citizenship rights had been raped, that you'd been stripped of the basics of your political freedom? Remember how unacceptable it felt, how violent, how insolent, how wrong? That's basically how I feel Greg. And quite rightly.
You would not accept this type of wholesale scorn for the rule of law in your country, and I don't accept it in mine.
What's so damn unrealistic about that?
Isn't it a hateful, discriminatory, borderline racist but at the very least exoticist vision of Latin America one that leads you to argue that the basic procedural and citizen rights that you take as non-negotiable in the first world are "unrealistic" in Venezuela? Is real democracy, real political freedom, then also unrealistic in Venezuela? Are we not entitled to it? Are we not fully justified when we fight for it? Or is it only in gringos and Europeans who are entitled to political freedom?
Societies need wildly unrealistic people, Greg, they call us intellectuals. Me, I will wildly unrealistically support any political movement that demands the democratic rights of all its citizens, whichever side of the political divide those people my be on. It's just that I can see, to my utter spookment, that many of the governments cadres - the ones I know are in Obispos municipality in Barinas, not the Caracas barrios - have an ultimately autoritarian attitude to political power to match Chavez's perfectly! Dogmatism and intolerance of dissent are a fundamental part of the president's political imagination, it's very hard for me to see how the resulting instability and extremism can be anything but damaging.
ft
December 5, 2003
This blog...
...is about to go more or less quiet, since I'm off to Romania for the holidays starting today. I may post from net caf�s now and then, but obviously not as often as I'm doing now.
It's really been a historic week in Venezuela, and even though I'm far away now, it has been a lot of fun to chronicle it blow-by-blow. Do keep writing in, though, even if you don't hear back from me right away (which you won't.) I especially enjoy reading emails from people who have a coherent argument against something I have written - from any direction. (Philochavistas with integrity are my favorite correspondents.) Your feedback has been enormously stimulating over the last week. I think the possibility to exchange views is really one of the best things about a blog as a medium. So thank you for writing in, it has made this intense bit of blogging that much more interesting.
Also, please write in if you notice any factual mistakes. One of the joys (and challenges) of blogging is that you don't have an editor, but this does mean that mistakes are far more likely on a blog than if you read a newspaper (caveat lector.) I want to thank everyone who wrote in to point out mistakes. They are acknowledged when appropriate, and I do make an attempt to correct factual errors.
So I will read all mail when I get back, and respond to a selection. Please tell me explicitly if you want me to keep your correspondence private, or if you want your name and/or email address omitted. Unless you request otherwise, I will assume that anything sent to the CaracasChronicles fastmail address is meant for public consumption. Similarly, I will assume things sent to my personal address are not for publication.
I do intend to write a long (probably excruciatingly long) and detailed post about what actually happened on April 11-14, 2002, sometime in January. Many questions about the coup and The revolution will not be televised will be better addressed then. I want to read Sandra La Fuente and Alfredo Meza's highly lauded book on the subject before putting my foot in my mouth here. I don't know Alfredo, but I do know Sandra, and I'm thrilled she took on the project. Los que leen castellano really should get it. El Acertijo de Abril is the title - the first edition is, encouragingly, sold out, but we are promised an even better second edition early next year. The book, as far as I'm aware, is the most comprehensive and professional effort yet to document and describe exactly what the hell happened during the bizarre days of April 2002.
[And no, the plug is not only because Sandra is a member of the same pro-media balance NGO I am a member of, Los del Medio, which if anything is only to her credit. Sandra is a journalist of scrupulous fairness: exactly the kind of reporter you would want investigating a reality as complex and thorny as the coup.]
(Romania? Vacation? In December?!? Long story...don't ask...)
So if I have any readers in Transylvania, please, please, please get in touch and buy me a beer! Otherwise, heavy-blogging will resume in January when the signature tallies are announced.
Happy holidays to everyone,
ft
If you are a first time reader, I recommend you actually scroll to the bottom of this page and read the entries from bottom to top, in the chronological order they were written. It will take a while (I tend to write a little too much, as you will soon find out) but I think it's worth it. This is a blog for people who like to read, and read, and read, produced by someone who likes to write, and write, and write. Especially if you know relatively little about Venezuela, it will make a lot more sense to read it in chronological order. Also, if you really need a (somewhat polemical) primer before delving into the minutiae of the fascinating saga in Caracas over the week of Nov 28-Dec 5th, I really recommend you spend some time reading the long but hopefully entertaining essay on the evolution of the Petrostate, from the 60s through Chavez. I wrote it because it seems to me one basic reason people don't understand Venezuela's complex reality is that they just don't know enough about the back story, the dynamics that brought the country to do something as dramatic as vote in Hugo Chavez with successive 60% majorities. The essay is my attempt to answer that question, in a way I hope isn't too too boring. To my mind, it's essential background: the rest of the story is unlikely to make much sense until you're a little bit immersed into the peculiarities of Venezuelan polititical culture. I mean, think about it: could you explain George W. Bush and his significance to US politics to someone without any understanding of the history of christian conservatism in the US? Could you make heads or tails of the middle east conflict without understanding the difference between an arab and an israeli?
...is about to go more or less quiet, since I'm off to Romania for the holidays starting today. I may post from net caf�s now and then, but obviously not as often as I'm doing now.
It's really been a historic week in Venezuela, and even though I'm far away now, it has been a lot of fun to chronicle it blow-by-blow. Do keep writing in, though, even if you don't hear back from me right away (which you won't.) I especially enjoy reading emails from people who have a coherent argument against something I have written - from any direction. (Philochavistas with integrity are my favorite correspondents.) Your feedback has been enormously stimulating over the last week. I think the possibility to exchange views is really one of the best things about a blog as a medium. So thank you for writing in, it has made this intense bit of blogging that much more interesting.
Also, please write in if you notice any factual mistakes. One of the joys (and challenges) of blogging is that you don't have an editor, but this does mean that mistakes are far more likely on a blog than if you read a newspaper (caveat lector.) I want to thank everyone who wrote in to point out mistakes. They are acknowledged when appropriate, and I do make an attempt to correct factual errors.
So I will read all mail when I get back, and respond to a selection. Please tell me explicitly if you want me to keep your correspondence private, or if you want your name and/or email address omitted. Unless you request otherwise, I will assume that anything sent to the CaracasChronicles fastmail address is meant for public consumption. Similarly, I will assume things sent to my personal address are not for publication.
I do intend to write a long (probably excruciatingly long) and detailed post about what actually happened on April 11-14, 2002, sometime in January. Many questions about the coup and The revolution will not be televised will be better addressed then. I want to read Sandra La Fuente and Alfredo Meza's highly lauded book on the subject before putting my foot in my mouth here. I don't know Alfredo, but I do know Sandra, and I'm thrilled she took on the project. Los que leen castellano really should get it. El Acertijo de Abril is the title - the first edition is, encouragingly, sold out, but we are promised an even better second edition early next year. The book, as far as I'm aware, is the most comprehensive and professional effort yet to document and describe exactly what the hell happened during the bizarre days of April 2002.
[And no, the plug is not only because Sandra is a member of the same pro-media balance NGO I am a member of, Los del Medio, which if anything is only to her credit. Sandra is a journalist of scrupulous fairness: exactly the kind of reporter you would want investigating a reality as complex and thorny as the coup.]
(Romania? Vacation? In December?!? Long story...don't ask...)
So if I have any readers in Transylvania, please, please, please get in touch and buy me a beer! Otherwise, heavy-blogging will resume in January when the signature tallies are announced.
Happy holidays to everyone,
ft
If you are a first time reader, I recommend you actually scroll to the bottom of this page and read the entries from bottom to top, in the chronological order they were written. It will take a while (I tend to write a little too much, as you will soon find out) but I think it's worth it. This is a blog for people who like to read, and read, and read, produced by someone who likes to write, and write, and write. Especially if you know relatively little about Venezuela, it will make a lot more sense to read it in chronological order. Also, if you really need a (somewhat polemical) primer before delving into the minutiae of the fascinating saga in Caracas over the week of Nov 28-Dec 5th, I really recommend you spend some time reading the long but hopefully entertaining essay on the evolution of the Petrostate, from the 60s through Chavez. I wrote it because it seems to me one basic reason people don't understand Venezuela's complex reality is that they just don't know enough about the back story, the dynamics that brought the country to do something as dramatic as vote in Hugo Chavez with successive 60% majorities. The essay is my attempt to answer that question, in a way I hope isn't too too boring. To my mind, it's essential background: the rest of the story is unlikely to make much sense until you're a little bit immersed into the peculiarities of Venezuelan polititical culture. I mean, think about it: could you explain George W. Bush and his significance to US politics to someone without any understanding of the history of christian conservatism in the US? Could you make heads or tails of the middle east conflict without understanding the difference between an arab and an israeli?
In breathless praise of Sumate:
(or, Essay on the difference between voter intimidation and colossal bullshit)
From: "Erica Stephan" Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 1:06 AM
To: "Francisco Toro"
Subject: & what about
These reports that people were having slips of paper stamped as they
signed, to take to their employers? if you're going to rant about pdvsa
pressuring their workers to sign, you should acknowledge/address the
accusations on the other side, no?
From: "Francisco Toro" Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 10:41 AM
To: "Erica Stephan"
Subject: Re: & what about
Sigh. I'd been hoping not to write about this, simply because it is a fairly technical question, and I thought it would be horrifically boring. But since these stories are now percolating up to first world consciousness, I might as well set the record straight.
About a month ago, as Chavez blustered again and again about imminent opposition fraud and insisted repeatedly on the need to check the opposition signatures "under a magnifying glass, one by one," the opposition started to get nervous. We know the guy, we've had plenty of occasion to get used to the way he and his cronies operate. We've come to realize that he'll often announce his dirty tricks publicly ahead of time, though through their mirror image. The second Chavez says the opposition is planning a given dirty trick, it's a pretty good bet that's what he intends to do!
As President of the durn Republic, Chavez was in an excellent position to carry out any such a plan. His government had already started intimidating state workers. They had already started offering jobs to the unemployed provided they did not end up on the list of those who had signed against the government. Chavez had personally thrown a number of hissy-fits demanding elaborate security procedures for the signature gathering drive which I described in yesterday's post.
(Said hissy fits, satisfyingly enough, have reverted dramatically against his interests, since all those security measures now make it exceedingly difficult to "prove" a fraud that did not take place.)
So the opposition was nervous, understandably so.
One wave of rumors that swept the opposition had to do with the electoral registry. The registry, which by the way is publicly available for anyone to look at online, had started to throw up some weird inconsistencies.
The most widely publicized bit of weirdness was the Case of the Missing "De"s. In Latin America, when a woman is married, she does not stop using her last name. Instead, she adds a "de" and then her husband's last name. So if you Erica Stephan were to marry, say, a Paul Cheney, your new married name would be Erica Stephan de Cheney (unfortunately, I guess he has a wife already - bet you two would've gotten along great!)
Now, the problem is that as women started checking the CNE's online registry, they started to find their "de"s had mysteriously vanished. They had become merely Erica Stephan Cheney, which is just not right. Of course, in normal circumstances, this would be seen as a very minor thing. But with Chavez ranting and raving about the coming fraud, it started to seem anything but benign.
Married antichavista women started to get very concerned that the government would move to have their signatures invalidated en masse because they had signed under a name that did not quite match the names as they appeared in the Electoral registry. CNE assured people this would not happen, but paranoia roams free, and people were understandably concerned. We are only too aware that we get ONE shot to recall Chavez per each 6 year term, so it was crucial to get it right this time.
As the missing "de" hubbub started to spread, other inconsistencies in the Electoral Register began to become apparent. Birthdates, for instance, seemed to be all over the place. When my sister Ana went to sign, the old lady in front of her in line found, on checking her registry entry, that her birthday had been switched to February 30th!
Why was all this weirdness taking place?
Could it have anything to do with the fact that the government had recently appointed a couple of criminals to run the National ID system? There goes Toro, exagerating again, is what some of you are thinking!
But this is not hyperbole, Erica. This is just what happened! It's a matter of public record!
At this point, I'll allow myself to quote at length from this remarkable, mind-altering article from the Miami Herald, signed by Phil Gunson, who heads Venezuela's Foreign Press Association and is, for my money, the best foreign journo in town.
So it's not like the opposition was pulling these concerns about Registry-tampering out of thin air. Since the registry is fully available online, lots of middle class Venezuelans who have net access could actually go there and check their registration info themselves. Too many were finding inconsistencies, data fields that would mysteriously change from one visit to the site to the next. With the National ID office in the hands of the gruesome twosome described above, anything was possible.
This is where Sumate, the opposition NGO, comes into the picture.
Sumate (which, incidentally, is NOT a for-profit corporation, as the lyingtie lying liars on the pro-Chavez side insist,) is a volunteer-run organization that organized the entire signature drive back in February, running the signing centers, transcribing the data, and auditing the results. CNE later ruled those signatures were invalid because they were collected too early. Still, Sumate, as an organization, had gained important experience and know-how. This, to my mind, is civil society at its best.
Sumate realized that, given the potential for confusion generated by the bum Electoral Registry, it would be helpful to set up laptop computers run by volunteers outside each the signing centers. That way, each prospective signer could check his or her official registry data right there, minutes before signing, minimizing the scope for inconsistencies between the information on the forms and the information on the registry.
The point was to minimize the number of signatures accidentally spoiled due to weirdness in the registry. After checking each signer's data through their national ID card number, Sumate would then make a little print out of each person's exact data as it appeared on the official registry. They would give each signer their paper as a cheat-sheet so they could fill out the form exactly right.
Abuse! Fascism! Conspiracy!
Now it's true that CNE barred Sumate from participating directly in last weekend's Reafirmazo. At the same time, as CNE board members said again and again in public, the elections' authorities has the power to rule on what happens inside the signature gathering centers. What happens outside those centers is, as CNE accepts publicly, none of its business. Citizens have the same right to assemble, discuss, participate, organize and check their electoral registry entry and print one meter away from a CNE signing center as they do anywhere else or at any other time.
Still, the chavistas - who seem to have some magical idea of what a Laptop computer is and what it can and can't do - saw the Sumate folk sitting right outside the signature gathering centers and freaked out. Manipulation! Fraud! Conspiracy! We're used to these epithets by now...and to the peculiar brand of antilogic that sustains them (like a laptop sitting outside a signing center has some magical power to stamp signatures on a form 10 meters away!)
Sumate, not wanting to do anything to derail the process, agreed to place the data-base checkpoints further away from the entrance to the signature centers. 20 meters away was the rule of thumb. Note that they were not legally obligated to, they just did it to avoid problems.
In some cases, they were invited to set up shop in the living rooms of people living close to the signing center. This is scrupulously legal: since when does the government have the right to tell me what I can and can't do in my living room on signing day simply cuz I happen to live next door to a collection center?
So this is ALL they were doing Erica. They were taking people's IDs, checking the numbers against the CNE database and making triple-sure that the two matched. They then went over the information with each voter to make sure nothing was odd about it, and that if something was odd about it, the signer was aware that they needed to sign using the official registry data, even if that data was wrong. Sumate volunteers would even give people the chance to "practice" filling out the forms on non-official dummy papers to make sure there were no mistakes due to unfamiliarity with the forms.
Don't forget that going through this procedure was a rigorously voluntary decision. Nobody was forcing anyone to do anything. If I wanted to go straight through to the CNE signing center and sign without stopping to check my data at the Sumate stand, there was nothing to stop me.
So yes, the little papers do exist. There is absolutely nothing illegal or untoward about them. After signing, you were free to scrunch up your Sumate cheatsheet and throw it in the garbage...or save it, to show your grandchildren one day.
If anything, Sumate merely embodies the opposition's determination to get it right, to outsmart any government plan to strip citizens of their constitutional right to vote yet again. This kind of careful planning and iron-willed determination not to screw up this time is driving the government crazy!
This, in my opinion, is the real reason they're mad at the little printouts - through their volunteer operation, Sumate totally outflanked the government. Sumate nutralized their plan to claim massive fraud because the information on the forms did not match the registry information, which appears to have been their plan all along. If the government seems desperate it's because Sumate has driven them to desperation. They now find themselves very much up a creek without a paddle.
Frankly, I'm tremendously proud of the huge amount of work Sumate's volunteers put in. Think about the spirit of civic involvement this reveals. The thousands of unpaid Sumate volunteers who gave their time to help set up these database checkpoints are one of the seeds of idealism, citizen participation and grass-roots involvement that gives me the hope, the near-certainty, that the post-Chavez era will be one of real civic renewal. Six years ago, it would have been nearly impossible to find thousands of volunteers to get trained and give up four days of their lives to do anything at all political. These days, for Sumate, it's a cynch!
This is how Social Capital is generated, Erica. My view of the opposition as a democratic awakening in waiting is not just something I made up in a fit of wishful thinking: there is solid evidence that their mindset has changed, and continues to change, as more and more opposition members realize that the "fast track options" (coups and strikes) were a huge mistake - and that re-institutionalizing the country is the only way out of the crisis. You, Erica Stephan, of all people, know that I've been arguing this point since 1999! (Remember those long emails about the central importance of the rule of law? If you can dig a couple up and send them to me, I can even put them up on the site!)
But I digress. You asked about voter intimidation. Think about this for a second. Even on the government's own, plainly dishonest terms, the accusations literally makes no sense. It just doesn't pass the test of internal coherence.
If employers wanted to pressure their workers, there was no need for any stinking bits of paper, because remember, tu voto es secreto, tu firma no. If I, evil private employer capitalist running dog oppressor businessman profeteer, want to find out if you, downtrodden revolutionary chavista proletarian, did or did not sign, all I have to do is go to CNE and get the list! It's a matter of public record!
Now, this obviously does not mean that the shards of paper could NOT have been used to pressure private workers. If anyone really was asked to present those Sumate printouts when showing up to work the following Monday - who knows, maybe somebody somewhere did - I just have two things to say to them.
1-It was perfectly simple to just go to the sumate tent, get your printout, then walk off without signing the official petition. You're a chavista under pressure? Just get your sumate form and don't sign!
(a much better plan than Labor Minister Iglesias's: she called on chavistas to break the law by signing with deliberate mistakes, which itself constitutes incitement to break the law and should get her arrested...but this is the chavista era, so...)
2-If you really were pressured and did sign, this is illegal, wrong, and destructive to the democratic process. Please protest. Get your act together. Document your complaint. Get witness statements from co-workers who had the same problem. Go to the labor ministry and get help with documenting precisely what happened. Then turn the whole mass of papers over the CNE (the 3-2 majority pro-Chavez CNE, may I add). If enough people were so pressured, then CNE will throw the referendum out. Simple! But remember, ONLY CNE can decide. And CNE can ONLY decide on the basis of official, documented complaints. So get to it!
*There was, incidentally, a rule in the CNE regulations saying that electronic machines could not be used over the weekend to publish partial results of the signature gathering process. It's plainly evident to me that using a computer to check your electoral registry information is entirely different from using a computer to publish preliminary numbers.
**And yes, Sumate did once get funding from N.E.D. Your point being...?
(or, Essay on the difference between voter intimidation and colossal bullshit)
From: "Erica Stephan" Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 1:06 AM
To: "Francisco Toro"
Subject: & what about
These reports that people were having slips of paper stamped as they
signed, to take to their employers? if you're going to rant about pdvsa
pressuring their workers to sign, you should acknowledge/address the
accusations on the other side, no?
From: "Francisco Toro" Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 10:41 AM
To: "Erica Stephan"
Subject: Re: & what about
Sigh. I'd been hoping not to write about this, simply because it is a fairly technical question, and I thought it would be horrifically boring. But since these stories are now percolating up to first world consciousness, I might as well set the record straight.
About a month ago, as Chavez blustered again and again about imminent opposition fraud and insisted repeatedly on the need to check the opposition signatures "under a magnifying glass, one by one," the opposition started to get nervous. We know the guy, we've had plenty of occasion to get used to the way he and his cronies operate. We've come to realize that he'll often announce his dirty tricks publicly ahead of time, though through their mirror image. The second Chavez says the opposition is planning a given dirty trick, it's a pretty good bet that's what he intends to do!
As President of the durn Republic, Chavez was in an excellent position to carry out any such a plan. His government had already started intimidating state workers. They had already started offering jobs to the unemployed provided they did not end up on the list of those who had signed against the government. Chavez had personally thrown a number of hissy-fits demanding elaborate security procedures for the signature gathering drive which I described in yesterday's post.
(Said hissy fits, satisfyingly enough, have reverted dramatically against his interests, since all those security measures now make it exceedingly difficult to "prove" a fraud that did not take place.)
So the opposition was nervous, understandably so.
One wave of rumors that swept the opposition had to do with the electoral registry. The registry, which by the way is publicly available for anyone to look at online, had started to throw up some weird inconsistencies.
The most widely publicized bit of weirdness was the Case of the Missing "De"s. In Latin America, when a woman is married, she does not stop using her last name. Instead, she adds a "de" and then her husband's last name. So if you Erica Stephan were to marry, say, a Paul Cheney, your new married name would be Erica Stephan de Cheney (unfortunately, I guess he has a wife already - bet you two would've gotten along great!)
Now, the problem is that as women started checking the CNE's online registry, they started to find their "de"s had mysteriously vanished. They had become merely Erica Stephan Cheney, which is just not right. Of course, in normal circumstances, this would be seen as a very minor thing. But with Chavez ranting and raving about the coming fraud, it started to seem anything but benign.
Married antichavista women started to get very concerned that the government would move to have their signatures invalidated en masse because they had signed under a name that did not quite match the names as they appeared in the Electoral registry. CNE assured people this would not happen, but paranoia roams free, and people were understandably concerned. We are only too aware that we get ONE shot to recall Chavez per each 6 year term, so it was crucial to get it right this time.
As the missing "de" hubbub started to spread, other inconsistencies in the Electoral Register began to become apparent. Birthdates, for instance, seemed to be all over the place. When my sister Ana went to sign, the old lady in front of her in line found, on checking her registry entry, that her birthday had been switched to February 30th!
Why was all this weirdness taking place?
Could it have anything to do with the fact that the government had recently appointed a couple of criminals to run the National ID system? There goes Toro, exagerating again, is what some of you are thinking!
But this is not hyperbole, Erica. This is just what happened! It's a matter of public record!
At this point, I'll allow myself to quote at length from this remarkable, mind-altering article from the Miami Herald, signed by Phil Gunson, who heads Venezuela's Foreign Press Association and is, for my money, the best foreign journo in town.
Hugo Cabezas and Tareck el Aissami were appointed last month as director and deputy director of the Identification and Immigration Directorate, in charge of border controls and issuing passports and national ID cards. The agency also works with electoral authorities on voter registration.
Both were top student leaders at the University of the Andes in the western city of Merida, described by senior school officials as a virtual haven for armed Chavez supporters and leftist guerrillas.
When El Aissami served as president of the student body from 2001 to 2003, his armed supporters controlled the university's dormitories, said Oswando Alcala, a professor and director of student affairs.
Cabezas and El Aissami declined several Herald requests for interviews.
Their appointments to the passport office raised eyebrows both because of the reports of Arabs obtaining Venezuelan ID documents and the possibility of fraud in an ongoing drive for a referendum to recall Chavez. His popularity stands at less than 40 percent.
[...]
Born in Venezuela of Syrian parents, El Aissami is the son of the president of the Venezuelan branch of Hussein's once-ruling Baath Party, and nephew of Shibli Al Aissami, a top-ranking Baath Party official in Baghdad whose whereabouts are unknown.
Tareck El Aissami's father, Carlos, defended him in an interview with The Herald as an outstanding student and said he was not a member of the Baath Party.
In an article the father wrote after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and showed to The Herald, he called President Bush ''genocidal, mentally deranged, a liar and a racist,'' and al Qaeda's leader ``the great Mujahedeen, Sheik Osama bin Laden.''
So it's not like the opposition was pulling these concerns about Registry-tampering out of thin air. Since the registry is fully available online, lots of middle class Venezuelans who have net access could actually go there and check their registration info themselves. Too many were finding inconsistencies, data fields that would mysteriously change from one visit to the site to the next. With the National ID office in the hands of the gruesome twosome described above, anything was possible.
This is where Sumate, the opposition NGO, comes into the picture.
Sumate (which, incidentally, is NOT a for-profit corporation, as the lyingtie lying liars on the pro-Chavez side insist,) is a volunteer-run organization that organized the entire signature drive back in February, running the signing centers, transcribing the data, and auditing the results. CNE later ruled those signatures were invalid because they were collected too early. Still, Sumate, as an organization, had gained important experience and know-how. This, to my mind, is civil society at its best.
Sumate realized that, given the potential for confusion generated by the bum Electoral Registry, it would be helpful to set up laptop computers run by volunteers outside each the signing centers. That way, each prospective signer could check his or her official registry data right there, minutes before signing, minimizing the scope for inconsistencies between the information on the forms and the information on the registry.
The point was to minimize the number of signatures accidentally spoiled due to weirdness in the registry. After checking each signer's data through their national ID card number, Sumate would then make a little print out of each person's exact data as it appeared on the official registry. They would give each signer their paper as a cheat-sheet so they could fill out the form exactly right.
Abuse! Fascism! Conspiracy!
Now it's true that CNE barred Sumate from participating directly in last weekend's Reafirmazo. At the same time, as CNE board members said again and again in public, the elections' authorities has the power to rule on what happens inside the signature gathering centers. What happens outside those centers is, as CNE accepts publicly, none of its business. Citizens have the same right to assemble, discuss, participate, organize and check their electoral registry entry and print one meter away from a CNE signing center as they do anywhere else or at any other time.
Still, the chavistas - who seem to have some magical idea of what a Laptop computer is and what it can and can't do - saw the Sumate folk sitting right outside the signature gathering centers and freaked out. Manipulation! Fraud! Conspiracy! We're used to these epithets by now...and to the peculiar brand of antilogic that sustains them (like a laptop sitting outside a signing center has some magical power to stamp signatures on a form 10 meters away!)
Sumate, not wanting to do anything to derail the process, agreed to place the data-base checkpoints further away from the entrance to the signature centers. 20 meters away was the rule of thumb. Note that they were not legally obligated to, they just did it to avoid problems.
In some cases, they were invited to set up shop in the living rooms of people living close to the signing center. This is scrupulously legal: since when does the government have the right to tell me what I can and can't do in my living room on signing day simply cuz I happen to live next door to a collection center?
So this is ALL they were doing Erica. They were taking people's IDs, checking the numbers against the CNE database and making triple-sure that the two matched. They then went over the information with each voter to make sure nothing was odd about it, and that if something was odd about it, the signer was aware that they needed to sign using the official registry data, even if that data was wrong. Sumate volunteers would even give people the chance to "practice" filling out the forms on non-official dummy papers to make sure there were no mistakes due to unfamiliarity with the forms.
Don't forget that going through this procedure was a rigorously voluntary decision. Nobody was forcing anyone to do anything. If I wanted to go straight through to the CNE signing center and sign without stopping to check my data at the Sumate stand, there was nothing to stop me.
So yes, the little papers do exist. There is absolutely nothing illegal or untoward about them. After signing, you were free to scrunch up your Sumate cheatsheet and throw it in the garbage...or save it, to show your grandchildren one day.
If anything, Sumate merely embodies the opposition's determination to get it right, to outsmart any government plan to strip citizens of their constitutional right to vote yet again. This kind of careful planning and iron-willed determination not to screw up this time is driving the government crazy!
This, in my opinion, is the real reason they're mad at the little printouts - through their volunteer operation, Sumate totally outflanked the government. Sumate nutralized their plan to claim massive fraud because the information on the forms did not match the registry information, which appears to have been their plan all along. If the government seems desperate it's because Sumate has driven them to desperation. They now find themselves very much up a creek without a paddle.
Frankly, I'm tremendously proud of the huge amount of work Sumate's volunteers put in. Think about the spirit of civic involvement this reveals. The thousands of unpaid Sumate volunteers who gave their time to help set up these database checkpoints are one of the seeds of idealism, citizen participation and grass-roots involvement that gives me the hope, the near-certainty, that the post-Chavez era will be one of real civic renewal. Six years ago, it would have been nearly impossible to find thousands of volunteers to get trained and give up four days of their lives to do anything at all political. These days, for Sumate, it's a cynch!
This is how Social Capital is generated, Erica. My view of the opposition as a democratic awakening in waiting is not just something I made up in a fit of wishful thinking: there is solid evidence that their mindset has changed, and continues to change, as more and more opposition members realize that the "fast track options" (coups and strikes) were a huge mistake - and that re-institutionalizing the country is the only way out of the crisis. You, Erica Stephan, of all people, know that I've been arguing this point since 1999! (Remember those long emails about the central importance of the rule of law? If you can dig a couple up and send them to me, I can even put them up on the site!)
But I digress. You asked about voter intimidation. Think about this for a second. Even on the government's own, plainly dishonest terms, the accusations literally makes no sense. It just doesn't pass the test of internal coherence.
If employers wanted to pressure their workers, there was no need for any stinking bits of paper, because remember, tu voto es secreto, tu firma no. If I, evil private employer capitalist running dog oppressor businessman profeteer, want to find out if you, downtrodden revolutionary chavista proletarian, did or did not sign, all I have to do is go to CNE and get the list! It's a matter of public record!
Now, this obviously does not mean that the shards of paper could NOT have been used to pressure private workers. If anyone really was asked to present those Sumate printouts when showing up to work the following Monday - who knows, maybe somebody somewhere did - I just have two things to say to them.
1-It was perfectly simple to just go to the sumate tent, get your printout, then walk off without signing the official petition. You're a chavista under pressure? Just get your sumate form and don't sign!
(a much better plan than Labor Minister Iglesias's: she called on chavistas to break the law by signing with deliberate mistakes, which itself constitutes incitement to break the law and should get her arrested...but this is the chavista era, so...)
2-If you really were pressured and did sign, this is illegal, wrong, and destructive to the democratic process. Please protest. Get your act together. Document your complaint. Get witness statements from co-workers who had the same problem. Go to the labor ministry and get help with documenting precisely what happened. Then turn the whole mass of papers over the CNE (the 3-2 majority pro-Chavez CNE, may I add). If enough people were so pressured, then CNE will throw the referendum out. Simple! But remember, ONLY CNE can decide. And CNE can ONLY decide on the basis of official, documented complaints. So get to it!
*There was, incidentally, a rule in the CNE regulations saying that electronic machines could not be used over the weekend to publish partial results of the signature gathering process. It's plainly evident to me that using a computer to check your electoral registry information is entirely different from using a computer to publish preliminary numbers.
**And yes, Sumate did once get funding from N.E.D. Your point being...?
December 4, 2003
Last thing
If you need any more convincing of which side collected the signatures it says it collected, witness the Bs:$ rate on the semi-legal bond-dollar market. The currency has rebounded all the way to Bs.2,133 (from lows at one point of over 3,000 to the dollar) according to descifrado. Suddenly, a bolivar at that prize looks a reasonable bet.
This is how hungry for good news Venezuelan investors are!
If you need any more convincing of which side collected the signatures it says it collected, witness the Bs:$ rate on the semi-legal bond-dollar market. The currency has rebounded all the way to Bs.2,133 (from lows at one point of over 3,000 to the dollar) according to descifrado. Suddenly, a bolivar at that prize looks a reasonable bet.
This is how hungry for good news Venezuelan investors are!
The thing about the actas
The other aspect that people often lose sight of is that we are ALL being spun silly with numbers. Somebody is plainly lying: all of these widely varying estimates (from 1.8 million to as many as 4.4 million signatures, depending on which side you believe) are all drawn from the same raw data.
These data are all drawn from the famous actas, an official CNE document signed officially not only by the official opposition organizers, but also by official pro and anti-recall witnesses at each of the 2700 official signing centers, as well as the official itinerant witnesses that accompanied all official itinerant signature gatherers, who were officially allowed to canvas signatures door-to-door in the official CNE rule book.
These actas contain precise signature tallies. The actas, and the tallies they generate, must be accepted as prima facie valid, simply because representatives of both sides already signed off on their validity one by one, at over 2700 signature gathering centers, all over the country (with the very occasional exception.)
Over 90% of collection centers are reported to have done their work under "absolute normality", as the politicians' cliche goes, meaning that the chavistas themselves have already signed off on the validity of the central ement in the signature collection process. It's important to understand that the Coordinadora cannot imaginably tamper with the actas now, because all parties have exact copies of the documents.
People outside Venezuela often find strange the elaborate checks and security features that were built the procedures. Even the forms were a monument to mutual mistrust. They were very officially printed on security paper issued by the same office that prints the nation's currency. Each form is numbered and assigned to a definite vote signing center. And chavista witnesses were present at *all* gathering centers, along with hundreds or thousands of signers, the army, the OAS, the Carter Center and the news media. A process cannot be more transparent than that!
I stress that the process was observed by 55 expert elections observers from the Carter Center/OAS mission dispatched to 20 of Venezuela's 24 states (counting Caracas.) Out of those seasoned observers, 50 of described the signature gathering process as good, while 5 thought it was "reasonable." These observations cannot be faked - Jimmy Carter did not win a nobel peace prize for lying.
What's more, thousands of rank-and-file soldiers, probably about half the army, directly witnessed with their eyes the turnout at each of the two signing processes. Many had not been allowed to watch any TV other than Canal 8 for months. This has to have been a very big eye opener for many of them.
So the chavistas, the opposition, the CNE and the Carter Center/OAS mission all have the same raw data. With the raw data, it's banal to obtain a precise raw signature tally - just a few hours of database work. The reality is that all the main actors know the real number, and it's the same real number they know. So somebody is evidently lying through their teeth.
Now, cross your heart and hope to die, what do you really think the real story is? Was the process 90% clean, or was there mass-scale fraud? Whose version do you believe?
Jimmy Carter's, or Hugo Chavez's?
The other aspect that people often lose sight of is that we are ALL being spun silly with numbers. Somebody is plainly lying: all of these widely varying estimates (from 1.8 million to as many as 4.4 million signatures, depending on which side you believe) are all drawn from the same raw data.
These data are all drawn from the famous actas, an official CNE document signed officially not only by the official opposition organizers, but also by official pro and anti-recall witnesses at each of the 2700 official signing centers, as well as the official itinerant witnesses that accompanied all official itinerant signature gatherers, who were officially allowed to canvas signatures door-to-door in the official CNE rule book.
These actas contain precise signature tallies. The actas, and the tallies they generate, must be accepted as prima facie valid, simply because representatives of both sides already signed off on their validity one by one, at over 2700 signature gathering centers, all over the country (with the very occasional exception.)
Over 90% of collection centers are reported to have done their work under "absolute normality", as the politicians' cliche goes, meaning that the chavistas themselves have already signed off on the validity of the central ement in the signature collection process. It's important to understand that the Coordinadora cannot imaginably tamper with the actas now, because all parties have exact copies of the documents.
People outside Venezuela often find strange the elaborate checks and security features that were built the procedures. Even the forms were a monument to mutual mistrust. They were very officially printed on security paper issued by the same office that prints the nation's currency. Each form is numbered and assigned to a definite vote signing center. And chavista witnesses were present at *all* gathering centers, along with hundreds or thousands of signers, the army, the OAS, the Carter Center and the news media. A process cannot be more transparent than that!
I stress that the process was observed by 55 expert elections observers from the Carter Center/OAS mission dispatched to 20 of Venezuela's 24 states (counting Caracas.) Out of those seasoned observers, 50 of described the signature gathering process as good, while 5 thought it was "reasonable." These observations cannot be faked - Jimmy Carter did not win a nobel peace prize for lying.
What's more, thousands of rank-and-file soldiers, probably about half the army, directly witnessed with their eyes the turnout at each of the two signing processes. Many had not been allowed to watch any TV other than Canal 8 for months. This has to have been a very big eye opener for many of them.
So the chavistas, the opposition, the CNE and the Carter Center/OAS mission all have the same raw data. With the raw data, it's banal to obtain a precise raw signature tally - just a few hours of database work. The reality is that all the main actors know the real number, and it's the same real number they know. So somebody is evidently lying through their teeth.
Now, cross your heart and hope to die, what do you really think the real story is? Was the process 90% clean, or was there mass-scale fraud? Whose version do you believe?
Jimmy Carter's, or Hugo Chavez's?
An Ibsen Martinez tour de force
Rather than boring you with yet more of what I think - which I think is pretty well established by now - I will regale you with a translation of this extraordinary interview with Ibsen Martinez in Tal Cual Today
[Shameless ad: Para los que leen castellano, si no lo han hecho ya les recomiendo suscribirse y leer Tal Cual. These guys are not as cash flush as people think - the business has always been on a feeble financial footing. If you can afford it, and want to support the very best side of the democratic movement, then please subscribe. It's only $30 for six months (cheap!) and it's a daily compendium of sound common sense and keen analysis.]
on with Ibsen's interview, translated and republished very much without permission:
"Chavez still hasn't actually gone to work."
Questioner: Shouldn't we judge the government with a little more forebearance now that the president has confessed that watching TV is one of his daily activities?
Ibsen Martinez: I don't think so. If he is watching Venezuelan TV, he is being submitted to torture because, except for a very few deliciously rawnchy shows, it's really awful.
Among the reams of things that have been written about this political pathology in which we live, it's bears wondering if in all these six years there has been a single real cabinet meeting, in the strict sense of the term. I mean, a meeting that starts, has an agenda, in which ministers are subjected to scrutiny, give explanations, sometimes disagree with the President. I seriously don't think there has been.
What there has been is this agit-prop stuff, the obsession with being on TV. In that sense Chavez reminds me of those guys who go to the TV channels and spend the whole day waiting at the door hoping that some well-known artist might come out to ask for an autograph, and they waste their lives on that idiocy.
The obsession with the media, together with the fact that he never holds a cabinet meeting, make me think that in all these years Chavez still hasn't settled down to work.
Q:Between vicepresident Jose Vicente Rangel, PPT Labor Minister Maria Cristina Iglesias and MVR Infrastructure Minister Diosdado Cabello, the Golden Cynic goes to...? [all three major hate figures for the oppositon now, especially Rangel, whose peculiar brand of rhetorical curlicues often borders on the psychotically detached from reality as the rest of humanity knows it. -ft]
Ibsen Martinez: To the vicepresident. Diosdado is a guy who has never deceived us, he is transparent. But the vice presidents is one of the most sensationalistic cynics of contemporary politics.
It's a topic worthy of study. It's the question that brightens up conversations at parties, when these are dying down: "so what do you think of Rangel?"
Q: And what do you reply?
Ibsen Martinez: For a long time I thought he could be a key factor for moderation and, even, an element that could help teach the chavistas to improve their performance.
Until the last minute we were on speaking terms, after the coup in april 2002, when he was the head of a mis-named "Dialogue Table" that was no such thing, in which I participated very briefly, I still thought he embodied the soul of a moderator. But they tell me that now he defines himself as the most taliban of the taliban, which is a pity. (taliban, folklorically enough, has become established in Caracas Spanish as a synonym for "political extremist." -ft)
Q: Isn't Chavez in power about as dangerous as Michael Jackson let loose in a kindergarten?
Ibsen Martinez: I don't believe so. Chavez is not a dangerous guy, in the sense that we usually give the word in a personality like his, which is authoritarian, ambitious and autocratic.
What I find most harmful in him is his disregard for the rule of law. The absolute absence of a relationship with the world of plato's forms. That is what has exasperated so many Venezuelans.
This is a guy who invents a constitution for himself, made to measure, only to violate it permanently, and to no avail because those violations don't even benefit him, but still he gets into that huge mess. The image is of the cartoon in which a guy draws the floor to a corner and finds suddenly he has cornered himself there. Probably when he is evicted from power, he will not be able to explain to himself what actually happened.
Q: Name three acts of pennance (gawd! catholic country -ft) that any repentant chavista should undertake now that he is on the opposition's side.
Ibsen Martinez: - First, he has to help sustain in a convincing way the democratic calling of each of the members of the G-5 (the five main opposition leaders), and dissert for half an hour about the democratic spirit of AD chief (and, imho, rascal -ft) Henry Ramos Allup. Second, write 150 times that phrase so often used by chavistas when talking about Chavez: "well, that's just his style, that's who he is." The last is to dissert coherently on the word "process" (the tag chavez uses interchangeably with revolution), which he kept talking about when he was a chavista and wouldn't shut up about the process.
(he is cruel!)
Q: Do you still celebrate 4F? (Which is how Venezuelans refer to the coup Chavez led on February 4th, 1992 - not to be confused with 4D, which is an ice cream shop!)
Ibsen Martinez: Yes. It's not that I celebrate it, it's that it seemed to me something like that was going to happen. It shows how bad off we we were with the adecos (the AD government) that I even felt this little frisson just from seeing (AD dinosaur) Morales Bello at the end of his wits. That moment may be one of the few things I can thank Chavez for, having given me the pleasure of seeing some adecos running around like sprinters.
I did not celebrate the violence, rather the inflection point in a political system that just went to hell. Even with all we're going through now, the fact is that we'll no longer have a situation where (AD party chiefs) Lauria and Alfaro decide all of our futures and we hear about it afterwards. Just think, we were kept informed by Gonzalo Barrios! who they wanted us to see as some kind of master tactician but who was so old he couldn't even talk, only mumbled. This, well, I don't know if it is better, but it is different, more entertaining. Now we can feel we will have a recall, but that we will not go back to the days of Alfaro. Can you imagine the country if Alfaro had won, or Irene Saez, the dumb blonde?
Q: In one of your articles you recommended celebrating the "Day of the asslickers." If your motion is accepted, who should preside over the event?
Ibsen Martinez: We've always had great asslickers, but when life gives you one of those personalities they call "charismatic", the other side of the coin is the bash of the asslickers. Otherwise, the chief cannot be persuaded that he actually is. When we were invited to that Dialogue Table, Janet Kelly and I were absorbed looking at the faces at the chavista side of the hall when Chavez arrived and sat down. It was a drooling contest. I remember the girl who used to run CatiaTV, who would succumb to ecstasy, and there was one who was especially ecstatic, a Sidor labor leader, chubby guy. What was his name again?
Q: I can't remember.
Ibsen Martinez: That is the thing with asslickers, you can never remember their names.
But one of the great asslickers, without a doubt, is el negro Isturiz (Education Minister, PPT.) I remember when he was head of the Constituyente and Chavez was traveling, and he felt icky about changing the name of the Republic, and he said so repeatedly. But it didn't take more than one bang of the shoe from Chavez for him to cosponsor the motion. I don't know him personally, but I find him particularly disagreeable.
Precisely for that reason, because he does what he can to be seen as an individual in that amorphous mass, and asslickerism cannot deal with him. He has opinions, he jumps ahead with them. I imagine he must open the doors to the cabinet meetings with Chavez.
Q: Do the members of (young, middle-class, center-right party) Primero Justicia need a bit more whorehouse in 'em? (Venezuelan expression, meaning do they have enough malice to face down the big boys?)
Ibsen Martinez: I don't think so. In general, that illustrated and enlightened right wing that a country needs, I find that they've had a pretty good go of it, and you can see how fast they're progressing. About the proliferation of NGOs and that whole pathology of ours where nobody wants to be a member of a party now but everyone wants to be a neighborhood leader, the fact that they've run away from NGOism and into party political life with a clear electoral goal, that I think is quite positive. And I realize that they've been getting whore housed up, with time.
Q: In this tornado of events, do those who opine much err much?
Ibsen Martinez: Certainly. Since the political environment started to heat up, expressing your opinions has stopped being a cathartic act. The revolution takes us to a space where you don't have opinions, you have pronouncements of faith.
I would rather live in a society where you can have an opinion, retract, think about one thing today, another tomorrow.
Q: Should we have a media contents law? (the politically explosive government proposal that most think would gag the private media.)
Ibsen Martinez: Not at all. I find it futile to write a code that stipulates what can go out over the airways, because their intention is to gag. If chavistas could look towards the past, they would realize that it's useless. The most docile TV in the world was the soviet one, and that was the system that collapsed the hardest. They managed to make TV something so useless, that Russians didn't watch it. Then, these pendejos, Nora Uribe and all the other geiniuses of revolutionary semiology, can't see that such a TV is useless. It's futile that a country that's so uppity, so free-spirited and so stubborn as this one that they could try to make a totalitarian communist revolution.
Chavez should reflect about what these six years have meant, because they've been a real nightmare for him.
[Ibsen Martinez is mathematician, essayist, novelist (in more ways than one!), top notch provocateur, and all around public intellectual...a national treasure.]
Rather than boring you with yet more of what I think - which I think is pretty well established by now - I will regale you with a translation of this extraordinary interview with Ibsen Martinez in Tal Cual Today
[Shameless ad: Para los que leen castellano, si no lo han hecho ya les recomiendo suscribirse y leer Tal Cual. These guys are not as cash flush as people think - the business has always been on a feeble financial footing. If you can afford it, and want to support the very best side of the democratic movement, then please subscribe. It's only $30 for six months (cheap!) and it's a daily compendium of sound common sense and keen analysis.]
on with Ibsen's interview, translated and republished very much without permission:
"Chavez still hasn't actually gone to work."
Questioner: Shouldn't we judge the government with a little more forebearance now that the president has confessed that watching TV is one of his daily activities?
Ibsen Martinez: I don't think so. If he is watching Venezuelan TV, he is being submitted to torture because, except for a very few deliciously rawnchy shows, it's really awful.
Among the reams of things that have been written about this political pathology in which we live, it's bears wondering if in all these six years there has been a single real cabinet meeting, in the strict sense of the term. I mean, a meeting that starts, has an agenda, in which ministers are subjected to scrutiny, give explanations, sometimes disagree with the President. I seriously don't think there has been.
What there has been is this agit-prop stuff, the obsession with being on TV. In that sense Chavez reminds me of those guys who go to the TV channels and spend the whole day waiting at the door hoping that some well-known artist might come out to ask for an autograph, and they waste their lives on that idiocy.
The obsession with the media, together with the fact that he never holds a cabinet meeting, make me think that in all these years Chavez still hasn't settled down to work.
Q:Between vicepresident Jose Vicente Rangel, PPT Labor Minister Maria Cristina Iglesias and MVR Infrastructure Minister Diosdado Cabello, the Golden Cynic goes to...? [all three major hate figures for the oppositon now, especially Rangel, whose peculiar brand of rhetorical curlicues often borders on the psychotically detached from reality as the rest of humanity knows it. -ft]
Ibsen Martinez: To the vicepresident. Diosdado is a guy who has never deceived us, he is transparent. But the vice presidents is one of the most sensationalistic cynics of contemporary politics.
It's a topic worthy of study. It's the question that brightens up conversations at parties, when these are dying down: "so what do you think of Rangel?"
Q: And what do you reply?
Ibsen Martinez: For a long time I thought he could be a key factor for moderation and, even, an element that could help teach the chavistas to improve their performance.
Until the last minute we were on speaking terms, after the coup in april 2002, when he was the head of a mis-named "Dialogue Table" that was no such thing, in which I participated very briefly, I still thought he embodied the soul of a moderator. But they tell me that now he defines himself as the most taliban of the taliban, which is a pity. (taliban, folklorically enough, has become established in Caracas Spanish as a synonym for "political extremist." -ft)
Q: Isn't Chavez in power about as dangerous as Michael Jackson let loose in a kindergarten?
Ibsen Martinez: I don't believe so. Chavez is not a dangerous guy, in the sense that we usually give the word in a personality like his, which is authoritarian, ambitious and autocratic.
What I find most harmful in him is his disregard for the rule of law. The absolute absence of a relationship with the world of plato's forms. That is what has exasperated so many Venezuelans.
This is a guy who invents a constitution for himself, made to measure, only to violate it permanently, and to no avail because those violations don't even benefit him, but still he gets into that huge mess. The image is of the cartoon in which a guy draws the floor to a corner and finds suddenly he has cornered himself there. Probably when he is evicted from power, he will not be able to explain to himself what actually happened.
Q: Name three acts of pennance (gawd! catholic country -ft) that any repentant chavista should undertake now that he is on the opposition's side.
Ibsen Martinez: - First, he has to help sustain in a convincing way the democratic calling of each of the members of the G-5 (the five main opposition leaders), and dissert for half an hour about the democratic spirit of AD chief (and, imho, rascal -ft) Henry Ramos Allup. Second, write 150 times that phrase so often used by chavistas when talking about Chavez: "well, that's just his style, that's who he is." The last is to dissert coherently on the word "process" (the tag chavez uses interchangeably with revolution), which he kept talking about when he was a chavista and wouldn't shut up about the process.
(he is cruel!)
Q: Do you still celebrate 4F? (Which is how Venezuelans refer to the coup Chavez led on February 4th, 1992 - not to be confused with 4D, which is an ice cream shop!)
Ibsen Martinez: Yes. It's not that I celebrate it, it's that it seemed to me something like that was going to happen. It shows how bad off we we were with the adecos (the AD government) that I even felt this little frisson just from seeing (AD dinosaur) Morales Bello at the end of his wits. That moment may be one of the few things I can thank Chavez for, having given me the pleasure of seeing some adecos running around like sprinters.
I did not celebrate the violence, rather the inflection point in a political system that just went to hell. Even with all we're going through now, the fact is that we'll no longer have a situation where (AD party chiefs) Lauria and Alfaro decide all of our futures and we hear about it afterwards. Just think, we were kept informed by Gonzalo Barrios! who they wanted us to see as some kind of master tactician but who was so old he couldn't even talk, only mumbled. This, well, I don't know if it is better, but it is different, more entertaining. Now we can feel we will have a recall, but that we will not go back to the days of Alfaro. Can you imagine the country if Alfaro had won, or Irene Saez, the dumb blonde?
Q: In one of your articles you recommended celebrating the "Day of the asslickers." If your motion is accepted, who should preside over the event?
Ibsen Martinez: We've always had great asslickers, but when life gives you one of those personalities they call "charismatic", the other side of the coin is the bash of the asslickers. Otherwise, the chief cannot be persuaded that he actually is. When we were invited to that Dialogue Table, Janet Kelly and I were absorbed looking at the faces at the chavista side of the hall when Chavez arrived and sat down. It was a drooling contest. I remember the girl who used to run CatiaTV, who would succumb to ecstasy, and there was one who was especially ecstatic, a Sidor labor leader, chubby guy. What was his name again?
Q: I can't remember.
Ibsen Martinez: That is the thing with asslickers, you can never remember their names.
But one of the great asslickers, without a doubt, is el negro Isturiz (Education Minister, PPT.) I remember when he was head of the Constituyente and Chavez was traveling, and he felt icky about changing the name of the Republic, and he said so repeatedly. But it didn't take more than one bang of the shoe from Chavez for him to cosponsor the motion. I don't know him personally, but I find him particularly disagreeable.
Precisely for that reason, because he does what he can to be seen as an individual in that amorphous mass, and asslickerism cannot deal with him. He has opinions, he jumps ahead with them. I imagine he must open the doors to the cabinet meetings with Chavez.
Q: Do the members of (young, middle-class, center-right party) Primero Justicia need a bit more whorehouse in 'em? (Venezuelan expression, meaning do they have enough malice to face down the big boys?)
Ibsen Martinez: I don't think so. In general, that illustrated and enlightened right wing that a country needs, I find that they've had a pretty good go of it, and you can see how fast they're progressing. About the proliferation of NGOs and that whole pathology of ours where nobody wants to be a member of a party now but everyone wants to be a neighborhood leader, the fact that they've run away from NGOism and into party political life with a clear electoral goal, that I think is quite positive. And I realize that they've been getting whore housed up, with time.
Q: In this tornado of events, do those who opine much err much?
Ibsen Martinez: Certainly. Since the political environment started to heat up, expressing your opinions has stopped being a cathartic act. The revolution takes us to a space where you don't have opinions, you have pronouncements of faith.
I would rather live in a society where you can have an opinion, retract, think about one thing today, another tomorrow.
Q: Should we have a media contents law? (the politically explosive government proposal that most think would gag the private media.)
Ibsen Martinez: Not at all. I find it futile to write a code that stipulates what can go out over the airways, because their intention is to gag. If chavistas could look towards the past, they would realize that it's useless. The most docile TV in the world was the soviet one, and that was the system that collapsed the hardest. They managed to make TV something so useless, that Russians didn't watch it. Then, these pendejos, Nora Uribe and all the other geiniuses of revolutionary semiology, can't see that such a TV is useless. It's futile that a country that's so uppity, so free-spirited and so stubborn as this one that they could try to make a totalitarian communist revolution.
Chavez should reflect about what these six years have meant, because they've been a real nightmare for him.
[Ibsen Martinez is mathematician, essayist, novelist (in more ways than one!), top notch provocateur, and all around public intellectual...a national treasure.]
The less enlightening face of chavismo writes in...
From: Richard Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 2:39 PM
To: caracaschronicles@fastmail.fm
Subject: Back on line
> Francisco,
>
> I note that Caracas Chronicles is back on line and still peddling the same
> unconvincing "information" and opinions.
>
> It really is a pity that you are trying to redeem it after all the flawed
> predictions published since you launched the site.
[I wonder if he's referring to my Nov 27th, 2002 prediction that the general strike would fail, or to my April 10th, 2002 prediction that unless a post-Chavez government was scrupulously inclusive it would quickly lose support and collapse? -ft]
> As I wrote to you in one
> of our first e-mail exchanges when are you going to go to the west of
> Caracas, if not just to collect your passport or I.D. card?
>
> As G. Wilpert says in Venezuela Analysis, Caracas Chronicles is one of the
> best examples of "ant-chavista triumphalism" on the web, which is a certain
> sort of backhanded compliment.
>
> There is no right and wrong in this situation, just winners and losers and
> it would be good for your morale to exorcize your demons by focussing on
> the political reality of Venezuela, instead of going on another dreamboat
> cruise and ending up in cloud cuckoo land - AGAIN!!.
>
> Best of luck
> Richard
From: caracaschronicles@fastmail.fm Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 2:49 PM
To: Richard
Subject: It's simple, really.
Hey! It's Richard!
The man who loves to disagree with the strawmen he creates and then calls my position!
The thing, Richard, is that all the bullshit either of us could write would not begin to make a difference. What you think, and what I think, and what Alan thinks and what Greg Wilpert thinks for that matter, all of that is of precisely no transcendence.
The only thing that matters anymore is what the electorate thinks. You're convinced you have the majority. I'm convinced we have the majority...so the solution is simple, really: let's vote! Find out who had it right!
ft
From: Richard Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 2:39 PM
To: caracaschronicles@fastmail.fm
Subject: Back on line
> Francisco,
>
> I note that Caracas Chronicles is back on line and still peddling the same
> unconvincing "information" and opinions.
>
> It really is a pity that you are trying to redeem it after all the flawed
> predictions published since you launched the site.
[I wonder if he's referring to my Nov 27th, 2002 prediction that the general strike would fail, or to my April 10th, 2002 prediction that unless a post-Chavez government was scrupulously inclusive it would quickly lose support and collapse? -ft]
> As I wrote to you in one
> of our first e-mail exchanges when are you going to go to the west of
> Caracas, if not just to collect your passport or I.D. card?
>
> As G. Wilpert says in Venezuela Analysis, Caracas Chronicles is one of the
> best examples of "ant-chavista triumphalism" on the web, which is a certain
> sort of backhanded compliment.
>
> There is no right and wrong in this situation, just winners and losers and
> it would be good for your morale to exorcize your demons by focussing on
> the political reality of Venezuela, instead of going on another dreamboat
> cruise and ending up in cloud cuckoo land - AGAIN!!.
>
> Best of luck
> Richard
From: caracaschronicles@fastmail.fm Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 2:49 PM
To: Richard
Subject: It's simple, really.
Hey! It's Richard!
The man who loves to disagree with the strawmen he creates and then calls my position!
The thing, Richard, is that all the bullshit either of us could write would not begin to make a difference. What you think, and what I think, and what Alan thinks and what Greg Wilpert thinks for that matter, all of that is of precisely no transcendence.
The only thing that matters anymore is what the electorate thinks. You're convinced you have the majority. I'm convinced we have the majority...so the solution is simple, really: let's vote! Find out who had it right!
ft
CNE: Rediscovering the institutional wheel
(or, more email from Alan)
On Wed, 3 Dec 2003 22:53:28 -0400, Alan said:
> Francisco,
>
> If I understand correctly, what you're essentially saying is that five
> individuals, all appointed by Chavez, the majority of whom have
> demonstrated marked sympathies for the regime's policies, are in fact, in their heart
> of hearts, impartial arbiters whose first, and only, commitment is to uphold
> the rule of law.
>
> This in the face of what I expect will be a most brutal exercise in
> political arm-twisting and intrigue -- including the time-honored Venezuelan
> practices of attempted blackmail, outright threats of violence, physical
> coercion and, of course, the crossing of palms with industrial quantities
> of silver --in recent history.
>
> It's conceivable that, despite all this pressure, the CNE will nonetheless
> Do The Right Thing -- because the OAS and the Carter Center are watching,
> and because somehow institutions will work this time (even though they've
> been systematically subverted in the past) because the whole world is
> watching and you can't "tapar el sol con un dedo", so to speak -- and that a
> month from now we'll learn that we can expect elections sometime next
> spring. Let's hope so.
>
> I do agree with you that it's important to publicly give the CNE the benefit
> of the doubt, and egg them on in the right direction, as Teodoro and
> others are doing. They're going to come under more pressure than they've ever
> known in their lives, and they need to know that at least one side of the
> political equation expects them to live up to their institutional
> mandate, and will support their eventual (we hope) courageous decision to defend
> the rule of law.
>
> But what's at stake for Chavez and his hard-core supporters makes it
> unlikely, in my view, that we will get to fair and free elections any time
> in the foreseeable future. The CNE may prove to be an extraordinary
> surprise, and in this most important decision of its history come down on
> the side of transparency. But you can be sure that Chavez, Cabello and
> Rangel will deploy absolutely every trick in the book and then some
> between now and early January to discredit and torpedo the outcome.
>
> Let's assume they can't get to the CNE. Or let's assume they beat a
> tactical retreat and figure it will be easier to fix an election (no paper trail)
> than strong arm the petition certification process. After all, vote
> tampering and election fraud is not unknown in Venezuela (hah!), and
> Chavez has used it before (just ask William D?vila and the Cura Calder?n). In
> fact, electronic vote fraud is alive and well all over -- just read Paul
> Krugman's last article on the burgeoning scandal involving the backdoors in
> Diebold's voting machine software which in practice allow one to fiddle the vote
> tally in real time, as the returns are coming in (see
> Krugman's NYTimes editorial on Diebold)
>
> If the Repubs in the U.S. can do this -- as one could easily surmise
> after reading the immense body of research on the Diebold scandal -- under the
> eye of the FEC, well, hell, it would be a lead-pipe cinch to do the same in
> Venezuela under the Plan Republica, especially when all the CNE
> informatics are in Chavista loyalist hands.
>
> No, Francisco, the stakes are too high for Chavez to play by the rules.
> Venezuela subsidizes Cuba to the tune of $2 million a day, with 82,000 bpd
> of essentially free petroleum. Fidel can't afford to take a chance on
> democracy, no way. He's not going to let what's left of the life of his
> revolution stand or fall on the whims of Venezuela's electorate -- and
> Venezuelan oil is the only thing propping up his dictatorship today. And
> do you really think that Chavez's hard core supporters, the ones who depend
> on him for their own political legitimacy, since without him they would be
> nobodies, are going to choose to fight fair instead of resorting to
> badass skullduggery, fraud and even violence, to stay in power? They're in too
> deep. Some of them, the real sleazebags, know the only future they have
> without Chavez covering for them implies jail time, exile or the
> meathook.
>
> If the OAS airlifted in a complete voting system infrastructure and
> 10,000 well-trained international observers, supported by a U.N.peacekeeping
> force, stood watch over the elections, I'd say Venezuela could expect free and
> fair elections. Otherwise, in the current state of play, nope.
>
> Let's wait until the fat lady sings. I'll be glad to give you a bottle of
> Santa Carolina if the petition-counting process comes off without a
> hitch. But I'll bet you a Marqués de Caceres Reserva Especial that Chavez will
> "win" the eventual electoral contest.
>
> Alan
Alan,
If I sit down and look at the situation coldly and analytically, using past patterns to forecast likely future events, then I have to agree you're right. I mean, everything you write checks out with the nation's sad historical experience. It sucks, but it's true. And if the past is any guide to the future, then granted, your analysis is probably dead on.
My point is that we may just be facing one of those unique situations where real society-wide change can take place; where, uniquely, the past ceases to be a useful tool for predicting the future. Having been pushed to the very edge of survivial, democratic institutions are either shocked into adaptation or they perish. My hunch is that CNE has been well and truly shocked and now it's adapting. The dynamics at play from here on out will be fundamentally different from the dynamics we're used to.
I know, I know, I know. Such starry-eyed idealism probably goes against everything your political gut has taught you over the last 25 years. But if not now, when? If not us, who?
The thing is, Alan, the opposition has learned. The politicians have gotten their Ph.Ds from the school of hard knocks. The country has learned. Things are different.
It may be that the society is undergoing the traumatic process of rediscovering the institutional wheel. Venezuelans are now coming to understand what every society must realize anew every couple of generations - that if one partiality within the political scene attempts to turn 51% popular support into 100% power, with no respect for institutions or the honor of the minority, the resulting system is chaotic and unstable. And, as Venezuelans have found out, if that once-majority becomes a minority but continues to pretend the other side doesn't exist, then the situation can become disastrously unstable.
From this point of view, the rebirth of CNE doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the personal qualities of the five board-members - though surely their character and integrity has been destructively and needlessly maligned over the last few weeks. What's important is not that CNE members have hearts of gold. What's important is that they understand that impartiality and adherence to the rule of law is the most pragmatic, in fact the *only* workable solution to the problem at hand, the only option that holds out a reasonable prospect of stability in the coming months and years.
One thing I'll say, though: the nice thing of debating with you is that the positions stated are always falsifiable! No arcane theoretical speculation here, just testable hypotheses, damn it - like that time in mid 2001 you told me Chavez had six months left, tops! ;)
Four months from now, we'll know conclusively who won that bottle of wine. For my money, a Santa Carolina goes much better with dulce de lechoza than a Marqués de Caceres Reserva Especial. (Though, from the tone of my last few posts, I'll be washing down that dulce de lechoza with a refreshing tossed salad of chrysanthemums, orchids and sunflowers...)
ft
ps: it really is fun!But it's very important to get it right this time. Comeflores al rescate!
(or, more email from Alan)
On Wed, 3 Dec 2003 22:53:28 -0400, Alan said:
> Francisco,
>
> If I understand correctly, what you're essentially saying is that five
> individuals, all appointed by Chavez, the majority of whom have
> demonstrated marked sympathies for the regime's policies, are in fact, in their heart
> of hearts, impartial arbiters whose first, and only, commitment is to uphold
> the rule of law.
>
> This in the face of what I expect will be a most brutal exercise in
> political arm-twisting and intrigue -- including the time-honored Venezuelan
> practices of attempted blackmail, outright threats of violence, physical
> coercion and, of course, the crossing of palms with industrial quantities
> of silver --in recent history.
>
> It's conceivable that, despite all this pressure, the CNE will nonetheless
> Do The Right Thing -- because the OAS and the Carter Center are watching,
> and because somehow institutions will work this time (even though they've
> been systematically subverted in the past) because the whole world is
> watching and you can't "tapar el sol con un dedo", so to speak -- and that a
> month from now we'll learn that we can expect elections sometime next
> spring. Let's hope so.
>
> I do agree with you that it's important to publicly give the CNE the benefit
> of the doubt, and egg them on in the right direction, as Teodoro and
> others are doing. They're going to come under more pressure than they've ever
> known in their lives, and they need to know that at least one side of the
> political equation expects them to live up to their institutional
> mandate, and will support their eventual (we hope) courageous decision to defend
> the rule of law.
>
> But what's at stake for Chavez and his hard-core supporters makes it
> unlikely, in my view, that we will get to fair and free elections any time
> in the foreseeable future. The CNE may prove to be an extraordinary
> surprise, and in this most important decision of its history come down on
> the side of transparency. But you can be sure that Chavez, Cabello and
> Rangel will deploy absolutely every trick in the book and then some
> between now and early January to discredit and torpedo the outcome.
>
> Let's assume they can't get to the CNE. Or let's assume they beat a
> tactical retreat and figure it will be easier to fix an election (no paper trail)
> than strong arm the petition certification process. After all, vote
> tampering and election fraud is not unknown in Venezuela (hah!), and
> Chavez has used it before (just ask William D?vila and the Cura Calder?n). In
> fact, electronic vote fraud is alive and well all over -- just read Paul
> Krugman's last article on the burgeoning scandal involving the backdoors in
> Diebold's voting machine software which in practice allow one to fiddle the vote
> tally in real time, as the returns are coming in (see
> Krugman's NYTimes editorial on Diebold)
>
> If the Repubs in the U.S. can do this -- as one could easily surmise
> after reading the immense body of research on the Diebold scandal -- under the
> eye of the FEC, well, hell, it would be a lead-pipe cinch to do the same in
> Venezuela under the Plan Republica, especially when all the CNE
> informatics are in Chavista loyalist hands.
>
> No, Francisco, the stakes are too high for Chavez to play by the rules.
> Venezuela subsidizes Cuba to the tune of $2 million a day, with 82,000 bpd
> of essentially free petroleum. Fidel can't afford to take a chance on
> democracy, no way. He's not going to let what's left of the life of his
> revolution stand or fall on the whims of Venezuela's electorate -- and
> Venezuelan oil is the only thing propping up his dictatorship today. And
> do you really think that Chavez's hard core supporters, the ones who depend
> on him for their own political legitimacy, since without him they would be
> nobodies, are going to choose to fight fair instead of resorting to
> badass skullduggery, fraud and even violence, to stay in power? They're in too
> deep. Some of them, the real sleazebags, know the only future they have
> without Chavez covering for them implies jail time, exile or the
> meathook.
>
> If the OAS airlifted in a complete voting system infrastructure and
> 10,000 well-trained international observers, supported by a U.N.peacekeeping
> force, stood watch over the elections, I'd say Venezuela could expect free and
> fair elections. Otherwise, in the current state of play, nope.
>
> Let's wait until the fat lady sings. I'll be glad to give you a bottle of
> Santa Carolina if the petition-counting process comes off without a
> hitch. But I'll bet you a Marqués de Caceres Reserva Especial that Chavez will
> "win" the eventual electoral contest.
>
> Alan
Alan,
If I sit down and look at the situation coldly and analytically, using past patterns to forecast likely future events, then I have to agree you're right. I mean, everything you write checks out with the nation's sad historical experience. It sucks, but it's true. And if the past is any guide to the future, then granted, your analysis is probably dead on.
My point is that we may just be facing one of those unique situations where real society-wide change can take place; where, uniquely, the past ceases to be a useful tool for predicting the future. Having been pushed to the very edge of survivial, democratic institutions are either shocked into adaptation or they perish. My hunch is that CNE has been well and truly shocked and now it's adapting. The dynamics at play from here on out will be fundamentally different from the dynamics we're used to.
I know, I know, I know. Such starry-eyed idealism probably goes against everything your political gut has taught you over the last 25 years. But if not now, when? If not us, who?
The thing is, Alan, the opposition has learned. The politicians have gotten their Ph.Ds from the school of hard knocks. The country has learned. Things are different.
It may be that the society is undergoing the traumatic process of rediscovering the institutional wheel. Venezuelans are now coming to understand what every society must realize anew every couple of generations - that if one partiality within the political scene attempts to turn 51% popular support into 100% power, with no respect for institutions or the honor of the minority, the resulting system is chaotic and unstable. And, as Venezuelans have found out, if that once-majority becomes a minority but continues to pretend the other side doesn't exist, then the situation can become disastrously unstable.
From this point of view, the rebirth of CNE doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the personal qualities of the five board-members - though surely their character and integrity has been destructively and needlessly maligned over the last few weeks. What's important is not that CNE members have hearts of gold. What's important is that they understand that impartiality and adherence to the rule of law is the most pragmatic, in fact the *only* workable solution to the problem at hand, the only option that holds out a reasonable prospect of stability in the coming months and years.
One thing I'll say, though: the nice thing of debating with you is that the positions stated are always falsifiable! No arcane theoretical speculation here, just testable hypotheses, damn it - like that time in mid 2001 you told me Chavez had six months left, tops! ;)
Four months from now, we'll know conclusively who won that bottle of wine. For my money, a Santa Carolina goes much better with dulce de lechoza than a Marqués de Caceres Reserva Especial. (Though, from the tone of my last few posts, I'll be washing down that dulce de lechoza with a refreshing tossed salad of chrysanthemums, orchids and sunflowers...)
ft
ps: it really is fun!But it's very important to get it right this time. Comeflores al rescate!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)