Cheating Incomprehensibly

I do understand that eyes glaze over en masse when you turn to the subject of twin party slates as applied to mixed proportional representation/single member constituency voting systems...but hey, it's not my fault. It's the government that chose this particularly exotic mechanism to manipulate the vote on Dec. 4th.

Trying not to get technical, I'll just say that the "Twins" - Las Morochas - are a pretty dubious mechanism that allows the largest single party to greatly increase the number of seats it gets in parliament under our current, complicated voting system. The method seems plainly unconstitutional, since it's designed to circumvent the constitutional guarantee of proportional representation. But this hasn't stopped CNE from allowing the government to use it, or the opposition from defensively retaliating by coming up with a "Twin slate" of its own.

Well, the Supreme Tribunal has agreed to hear a case on the constitutionality of the twins. CNE says if the Twins are ruled unconstitutional, the election will have to be delayed. We'll have to see...

Media Law Dynamics

Steven Dudley has this to write in today's Miami Herald about the self-censorship dynamic at play since the Media Law came into effect:

Every time journalist Ana Karina Villalba enters a Radio Mágica studio to do her afternoon show, she sits in front of a photocopy of the many provisions of Venezuela's new media law. Whenever a guest says anything that may be interpreted as inciting violence or has sexual content, she reminds the guest of the law and its sanctions. And every time that happens, her boss reminds her that the station could be shut down.

No one has been thrown in jail or fined yet because of the 10-month-old law. But it has clearly forced the media to censor itself, especially when reporting on controversial President Hugo Chávez and his socialist policies.

More (free registration required)...

Repression-cum-farce

Twenty guys with BIG GUNS storm into your apartment one night. They say they're from the Prosecutor General's Office. They're looking for materials relating to [radical oppo lawyer and RR-fraud-conspiracy-theorist-in-chief] Tulio Alvarez's "terrorist activities." You explain to them, as calmly as you can, that Mr. Alvarez's parents-in-law did used to live there, but sold the apartment to you years ago. Oh. Erm. Rats. They leave, a bit embarrassed. The next day, the prosecutors' office says it has no idea who the 20 guys were.

The Three Armed Forces

Yesterday's front page editorial in Tal Cual describes the alarming design of the new Armed Forces Law. This new LOFAN creates whole new military organizations and places them under Chavez's direct operational command, not under the traditional military chain of command. Teodoro Petkoff, who has always been a big skeptic about "cubanization" claims, seems to be catching up with new realities. I'll translate...

As set out in the new Armed Forces Law, the National Reserve is completely independent of the military hierarchy; it's a parallel force alongside the Army, Navy, Air Force and National Guard. Unlike them, the National Reserve is in no way under the Defense Ministry's control. [Notice the shades of Garrido here -ft]

This radically alters the traditional doctrine of the Reserve. The raison d'etre for a Reserve was to provide back up manpower for the Armed Services in a hypothetical armed conflict, according to each service's specific needs. Previously, each service (Army, Navy, Air Force and National Guard) had its own Reserve Command in charge of training its own reserve batallions.

For instance, in the old scheme, if a tank driver (Army) was struck, he was replaced with a similarly trained reserve soldier coming from and trained by the Army. How will it work from now on? Will the National Reserve have its own armored divisions, its own infantry, navy, air force and national guard? If so, we will have a parallel Armed Forces - which, incidentally, is supposed to have far greater manpower than the four traditional armed services, according to Chavez's speeches.

We can only conclude that the National Reserve and the Territorial Guard were designed for purposes other than those for traditional Reserves. The duties assigned to the General Command of the Reserve and to its Commander include "bringing trained replacements to active units and Reserve Units engaged in combat operations" (though, as we pointed out, its very unclear how that will work) to taking part in operations to "maintain internal order."

And this seems to be the nub of the matter. If, one day, the National Guard is unable to cope with a situation, and the army is also overrun, we'll have a third organization (The National Reserve and Territorial Guard) involved in this sensitive task.

Given the very low likelihood of a foreign conflict, what has been created is an organization for internal repression, now directly commanded by the Commander in Chief/President.

What the new Armed Forces Law designs is a Pretorian Guard, not an Armed Force "at the exclusive service of the nation and under no circumstances at the service of any person or political faction," as written in article 328 of a Constiutition that, by now, reads like a subversive manifesto, so opposed is its letter and spirit to the government's conduct.

Chávez FAQ

Under Reconsideration

The Trouble with Juan Forero

In today's New York Times we see a story by Juan Forero on Chavez's growing rhetorical anti-Americanism. It's heartening to read a story in a major US paper that questions the ulterior motives for Chavez's always-popular BushWhackery. Unfortunately, the piece fails to connect some pretty obvious dots.

Juan notices the obvious parallels between Chavez' and Fidel's rhetoric. But he doesn't push it. He doesn't mention the 49 signed agreements between the two countries or Chavez's repeated expressions of fawning, drooling admiration for Fidel, so he doesn't note the possibility that Chavez's talk is part of his push to "fuse" the Venezuelan and Cuban revolutions.

An outsider reading the piece could be excused for thinking it's just a funny coincidence how Chavez and Fidel seem to agree on what a bad guy Bush is. Coordination? Collusion? No signs of it here!

More annoyingly, and related to his failure to connect the Caracas-Havana dots, Juan entirely glosses over the little matter of the creepy "Reserva" created by the new Armed Forces Law. He doesn't explain how gringophobia is being used to justify the arming and paramilitary organization of chavista civilians. And since he fails to do that, it's not surprising the he entirely glosses over opposition fears that the reserva will, in time, be used to repress internal dissent - again along the Cuban "Comite de Defensa de La Revolucion" pattern, where ostensibly anti-invasion groups become, in practice, instruments of dictatorial control.

Which is the usual problem with Forero's reporting. He's not usually wrong, but he fails to tease out the (to us) obvious implications of the news he reports. He still seems to roll his eyes when the opposition talks about cubanization - even as Chavez makes it a more and more explicit plank. Forero gives you the flour, the eggs, the milk, and the sugar...but he never gives you the cake.

The No-BS Nuclear Option

Not to get too Robertsonian about this, but Alberto Garrido's interview got me thinking. As Garrido points out, Chavez's whole strategy is predicated on the hypothesis that the US will invade Venezuela sooner or later. Antichavistas usually see the asymetrical warfare stuff as a paranoid delusion, or as a government smoke-screen to justify setting up a repressive paramilitary aparatus to counter dissent.

But what if we borrow a page from Garrido and actually take the guy seriously?

Well, first we have to recognize that, under current geopolitical circumstances, with an overstretched US military struggling in Iraq and US defense strategists focusing narrowly on North Korea and Iran, the chances of an invasion in the short term are nil. Chavez the Military Man probably understands that, even if Chavez the Demagogue wouldn't say it.

So if he earnestly believes there will be an invasion, it seems reasonable to infer that he is planning to change the geopolitical equation somehow. To change it in some drastic way that would take a US invasion from the realm of paranoid fantasy to that of real possibility.

What could possibly get the Pentagon's panties up into such a frightful bunch that they would actually consider invading?

Well, you tell me.

Here are a few hints: over the last few months and days, one of Chavez's top tier intellectual advisors has gone on the record arguing Venezuela should develop nuclear weapons. We've seen a bid from Venezuela to buy a nuclear reactor from Argentina. We've seen Venezuela take a lone stand in favor of Iran's nuclear program at the recently enNobeled IAEA. Even more ominously, we've seen Chavez cozying up to North Korea, complete with language about launching commercial relations.

Now, what is the ONE and ONLY thing North Korea has to sell that Venezuela might like to buy?

Give up?

Listening to Chavez, Garrido Style

Alberto Garrido occupies a peculiar space in the universe of Venezuelan oppo punditry. While most antichavista hacks (including, I'm afraid, your truly) tend to just run their mouth about whichever Chavez outrage last caught their eye, Garrido has carved out an analytical niche by carefully scrutinizing Chavez's actual words, both now and in the past, and - novelty of novelties - taking the guy at his word.

Perhaps because he gives Chavez what he seems to crave most - detailed attention - Chavez actually praised him this year as the most objective oppo writer...which is VERY CREEPY given that Garrido has, for years, been one of the most consistent voices claiming that Chavez wants to implement what amounts to a dictatorship.

He's been ridiculed for implying that everything Chavez does has been planned out years in advance (Chavez hatched the plan to expropriate Polar when he was in kindergarten! He's wanted to change the name of the country since he was in the womb!) but the fact is the guy's been right so often - and the rest of oppo hackistry has screwed up so often - that I for one am ready to spend a Sunday evening translating the interview he just gave to El Nuevo Herald's Casto Ocando.

[This being the Sunday Supplement, I'll give myself permission to write (or rather, translate) a bit longer this time...]

Casto Ocando: How would you define this moment in Venezuela's revolutionary process?
Alberto Garrido: It's a moment of historic change because Venezuela, barring the unforeseen, is becoming the second Latin American revolution, after Cuba. And we're witnessing a merger of revolutions between Cuba and Venezuela, which president Chavez has pointed to repeatedly.

CO: What makes you think we're facing a real revolution, rather than a series of acts that often seem incoherent?
AG: They're not incoherent. Rather, we're in a transition. Because you have to remember that Chavez gained power through the ballot box, not through armed struggle. He can't simply replace the old regime, like Fidel did, like the Chinese and Russian revolutions did. So he started out governing in the straitjacket of the rule of law within representative democracy. And yet, he has very resolutely followed a strategy set out years before in the so-called Valencia Assembly of MBR-200 (Chavez's original party), which had decided to accept elections as a tactic for taking power within representative democracy in order to replace it.

CO: Is Chavez replacing democratic institutions for revolutionary ones?
AG: We should be very clear on the definition of democracy. In 2001, at the Quebec Summit, Venezuela refused to sign a declaration backing representative democracies. We're seeing a plan hatched from within the state to create a parallel, revolutionary state.

CO: Which are those parallel institutions?
AG: Well, we used to have a separation of autonomous powers, in the style of representative democracy. By now Chavez, who knows perfectly well that revolutions are hegemonic and not pluralistic, has very skillfully, almost following the Fujimorista playbook for controling institutions, managed to tilt the public powers in order to place them at the service of the revolution.

CO: Don't you think that rather than Fujimori, he's following the Cuban experience?
AG: No, because as Fidel said a few days ago, "we don't believe in democracies or in elections." In Chavez's case, elections are legitimizing instruments. Fidel doesn't need elections for legitimacy. He's the revolutionary boss and that's that. On the other hand, electoral legitimation has been fundamental for Chavez, because it's his protective armor vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

CO: That explains chavismo's control over the electoral institutions?
AG: Not just the electoral institutions which, as we all know, have always been the product of a political discussion.

CO: But now it's entirely dominated by chavismo.
AG: I think Chavez already announced that the Assembly, which will change in December, will have over 80% of revolutionary members. Not long ago, the chairman of the Assembly, Nicolas Maduro, already said the next Assembly will legislate to establish the bases of socialism. It's a process towards socialism.

From the Venezuelan left, Chavez is often attacked by those who say there hasn't been any revolution, and they forget that Chavez has recognized that there is no revolution. What there is is a revolutionary process, there are a series of changes tending towards a revolution that hasn't happened yet, and that's expected to unfold over a given period of time which could extend to two decades including the so-called consolidation period.

CO: Which elements of the Cuban system is Chavez successfully applying in Venezuela?
AG: There are 49 signed agreements, which cover practically all areas of national life. The most important are in health, education and literacy. There are growing high-level military links.

There's always a lot of deafness regarding what Chavez says, and we need to listen to Chavez closely, because whatever he says, he does. Chavez has said that the revolutionary processes of Cuba and Venezuela, more than towards integration, are marching towards fusion. We're talking about a revolutionary merger.

CO: Does this transitional process involve also a greater police control and greater state security in Venezuela?
AG: It's like this. A new Framework Law for the Armed Forces (LOPAN) has just been approved. In the LOPAN they talk about six components. You have the four classical components of a regular military: Army, Air Force, Navy and National Guard. They add the reserves. But moreover, they add the Territorial Guard, with resistance duties. Because the entire civilian-military structure is organized around a war hypothesis, which Chavez has defined as Asymmetrical Warfare.

CO: That is, resistance against a possible invasion.
AG: There is a new defense doctrine in place. An army General, Isaias Baduel, has formulated for hypotheses for possible wars. One: a growth in the border conflict with Colombia. Two: the possibility of a multilateral intervension under a UN or OAS mandate, which I see as very unlikely. Three: a coup d'etat. Four: the possible US invasion of Venezuela.

CO: There are reports of discontent within the armed forces
AG: That may be so, but the problem is that restricting the analysis to the inner workings of the Armed Forces is a major mistake today. The process is horizontal accross the civilian-military divide, and it grows day by day. We're not just facing a single regular force, which would be the traditional framework. We're facing a horizontal force, where we find parallels with the Cuban framework. In Cuba they call it the Guerra de Todo el Pueblo; in Venezuela they call it Defensa Integral de la Nacion.

CO: How far are people to follow Chavez blindly in all of this?
It's impossible to say for a single reason: there's a numerically significant opposition to Chavez. That opposition has no leadership, it doesn't feel represented by those leaders who constantly show up in the media. For me, the most important opposition Chavez faces today is inside his own organization.

CO: Fidel Castro managed to discipline his followers even through the use of terror. What about the proverbial indiscipline of Venezuelans when it comes to following a party line?
AG: There have been many warnings, from Chavez and his main political operatives such as Deputy Willian Lara, asking for reasonableness in internal dissent. That dissent is not an antichavista dissent, it's an internal dissent against the management of the process by the chavista government.

CO: There are those who say that the revolution will last as long as the money.
AG: Was there money in the Soviet Union? In China? Is there money in Cuba? Did they have money in Nicaragua? No!

In fact, just the opposite. The excess of money has really hurt the central factor in the process, which is ideological and moral. Because if Chavez himself recognizes that there is corruption in his government, that corruption is there because there's an overflow of money. The cabinet keeps tossing around trillions and trillions of bolivars, but you never see facts on the ground that reflect the supposed investment. So Chavez will need to distance itself from that whole corrupt sector that surrounds him if he really wants to push forward a revolution with clear ideological content.

CO: What factors could do Chavez in?
I don't know if it makes sense to talk about "doing Chavez in", because the process has advanced so far that, with or without Chavez, we're going to see some events not just in Venezuela but in other parts of Latin America.

CO: You seem to see the revolutionary process with optimism.
I don't know what optimism means. In Venezuela we need to be realistic, you can't be either pessimistic nor optimistic. Of course, we will have a crisis. We still haven't seen an explosive crisis, and we will see that in the not too distant future.

CO: Will Chavez lose power through the ballot box?
Representative alternation is not foreseen in a radical revolutionary system such as the one Chavez is putting forward. One of the central slogans is "there is no turning back from revolution." Chavez keeps saying he'll be around until 2030.

Election? What election?!

I find it amazing that, with less than two months to go, nobody but nobody seems to be talking about the December 4th National Assembly elections. If the opposition slate has a campaign, it must be one of the best kept secrets in Venezuela.

What little talk there is seems to be stuck in an endless, totally barren debate on the Elections Council. And it's no wonder: the one thing the oppo leadership succeeded at over the last year was in convincing their own supporters that CNE stole the recall referendum. Never mind that the "evidence" of electronic manipulation was circumstantial at best (more like entirely speculative, if you ask me), never mind that the oppo leadership had an obvious motivation to pass the buck after having bungled the RR campaign so badly. They spared no effort to trash CNE. They made their bed, now they get to lie on it.

The opposition leadership's big problem is no longer how to win over chavistas, but how to mobilize a base they've spent over a year demobilizing through their strident claims of fraud.

The tragic part is that all of this comes at a time when Chavez is again sliding in the polls, when the initial euphoria over the misiones has decidedly faded, when the government has launched a radical drive against private property that even chavistas reject, when increasing numbers of chavistas are dissatisfied with the government, when even Lina Ron and Ramon Machuca are getting restive...all of this at a time when a minimally organized, minimally competent election campaign could rock the chavista establishment to the core.

Instead, we'll get a qualified chavista majority in the AN that will waste no time amending the constitution to make Chavez endlessly re-electable.

Ugh!

Revolution without institutions

I've been rereading Political Order in Changing Societies, the book Samuel Huntington should be famous for, and would be, if he hadn't gone and mucked up his legacy with the horrid Clash of Civilizations. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on his earlier book, and go back to it now and then for insight.

His chapter on revolutions is pretty lucid. "Revolution," he writes, "is one means of political development, one way of creating and institutionalizing new political organizations and procedures, of strengthening the political sphere. Every major revolution of the twentieth century has led to the creation of a new political order to structure, to stabilize and to institutionalize the broadened participation in politics. It has involved the creation of a political party system with deep roots in the population. The triumph of the revolution is the triumph of party government."

He is thinking of Mexico, the USSR, China, Turkey and Yugoslavia - cases where, love it or loathe it, the political system that the revolution brought about was highly institutionalized and stable.

The problem, though, is that it doesn't always work. "Not all revolutions end in triumph, and not all triumphs are irreversible. It is possible for a society to suffer the agonies of revolutionary dislocation without achieving the stability and integration a revolution might bring."

It's worth thinking about the Chavez era in these terms, because the personalism and institutional fragility of the Fifth Republic is so obvious. For all the dislocation of the last few years, the revolution has not innovated in institutional terms at all. Instead, it has bulldozed all institutional structures in its path and replaced them with Chávez's personal will.

Huntington suggests that revolutions that do not manage to institutionalize themselves usually end up as footnotes in their country's histories. His paradigmatic example of a revolution that failed at the institutional game is Bolivia's MNR period in the 1950s...and who on earth gets worked up about that one anymore?

A time honored Venezuelan tradition: botching the oil cycle

Between 1936 and 1978, the Venezuelan economy grew faster than any other anywhere on earth. From 1978 onward, it shrunk faster than almost any other in the world. What happened?

The standard explanation is all about corruption.

Most economists, however, see it differently. The wonkish take centers on the instability of the world oil market. Starting with the 1973 oil crisis, what had been a relatively stable energy market went all out of whack. Prices became much more variable.

For oil exporters, the result was dizzying macroeconomic instability. Money would flood into the country during booms, internal consumption would grow fast, and in time, the economy would overheat. When the bubble burst, demand would collapse and severe recessions followed. Each turn of this merry-go-round would leave people poorer than the last.

The fault is not just with impersonal global forces, though. Since the 1970s, every government Venezuela has had has mismanaged the oil cycle, and all in the same way. Instead of evening out the highs and lows, they accentuated them. Instead of saving during booms, they went into debt to spend even more than they were taking in. Instead of going into debt during busts to stimulate the economy out of crisis, they were forced to spend less because, by then, they had tapped out their creditors.

Lots of petrostates have suffered through this kind of mismanagement, and all have ended up poorer than they started.

Now, it's happening again. Once again oil prices are sky high. Once again the government is rushing to spend every dollar it gets its hands on, and then some. Once again the economy is overheating.

For now, times are good - just like they were in 73, 79, and 91. GDP is way up. Nothing surprising about that. The question is, what happens when the bust comes? Care to hazard a guess?

I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried...

Moneda de Plata Pura. Presidente Chavez y Acosta Carles.

Winning bid: Bs. 85,000

Berenjenal Chronicles

Guaicaipuro Lameda's take on the here-and-now...

For now, the opposition trumpets a precarious unity, shorn of political purpose, forced into being by reality and meant only to place a few people in "winning positions" on the election lists, and so much so that only the most daring venture to assure us that they will deny the revolution a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.

And so, its clumsiness in the face of traps, its cowardice when the time comes to defend itself against powerplays, its lack of concrete achievements and its naivete when it comes to responding to the nature of its adversary have disqualified this leadership which neither acknowledges past failures nor learns from them and, as a result, the voters who oppose the revolution find themselves fragmented and confused as they drown in a mix of feelings that range from anger and frustration to disappointment and hopelessness.

Today, the opposition people, without a discernible future or a winning spirit and having lost faith in themselves, have given themselves over to prophecizing about coming revolutionary events. Thus we hear people who go as far as to say they'll lose their homes or have to share them with those the revolution imposes. This is a sign that defeatism is imposing itself on the opposition while triumphalism becomes the real adversary of the revolutionaries. They have no one left to fight with, and to cover up their mistakes they're reduced to blaming the problems their incompetence bars them from solving on those who haven't been anywhere near power for seven long years.

And so, and "for now", it seems the revolution is here to stay and to inflict terrible damage on Venezuelan society, enslaving it to a government that deifies poverty as an instrument of domination and subjugation that allows it to keep itself in power. We shall have to see if those who have lived in poverty and exclusion are willing to suffer through such a fate while a revolutionary oligarchy grows in an opulence that magnifies the inequalities that brought forth its own birth.

Groping for a Coherent Stance on CNE

The political opposition (i.e. the anti-Chavez political class) has painted itself into a strange corner over the upcoming elections. After months of saying there was massive fraud in the recall referendum, they've turned on a dime and put together a single slate of candidate for Dec. 4th's parliamentary vote. But there was no very coherent explanation for the turn-around, because they've never renegued on their original fraud allegations. So their line, as it stands, goes something like "CNE cheated last year, and now CNE is even more chavistified, and just a couple of months ago we were telling you not to vote because CNE would cheat again...ergo, please go vote for us on Dec. 4th."

Huh!?

Teodoro Petkoff, who understood the longer-term implications of claiming fraud on not-much-evidence earlier than almost anyone else, is taking a much more constructive position. No grandiloquent declarations about bolichoros at CNE, just a set of basic demands on the elections authorities scrupulously grounded in law.

1- Quit running out the clock on inviting an EU observer mission.
2- Open communication channels between local election boards and local opposition representatives (i.e. local boards can't continue talking only with chavistas.)
3- Enforce the legally-established role of the military at voting centers (i.e. men with guns are there to provide security, not to run the voting center.)
4- Apply the legal requirement that vote tallying to be open to the public (i.e. no more counting votes behind closed doors.)

This little list will hardly get oppo pulses raising, it just makes some basic demands while forthrightly accepting CNE's right to run the election.

QUE HORROR! people will say, HE ACCEPTS CNE's LEGITIMACY?!!??

Well yeah...and so do the oppo politicos, from the moment they decide to run candidates in the election.

The Strong Oil Card is a Bluff

People see it as the "nuclear option" in Chávez's escalating pissing match with the Americans. Chávez himself calls it his "strong oil card," and likes to threaten to use it. If things get out of hand, the story goes, Chávez could stop selling oil to the US and then the brown stuff would really hit the fan.

Problem is, the story is based on faulty economic reasoning. Oil is fungible. The only way Venezuela can cause a supply shock is by pulling out of the oil market altogether.

To see why, imagine Venezuela cuts off the US tomorrow and starts selling all its oil to China. (Not that the Chinese would go for this, but this is a thought experiment.) China would find itself buying an extra 2 million barrels per day. Logically, they would then buy 2 million fewer barrels per day from other suppliers. And the 2 million barrels the Chinese free up would eventually find their way to the US.

In the short run, this would mean some added costs as US and Chinese refineries are tweaked to process different crudes, and of course shipping would get more expensive for everyone involved. But, in the long run, world supply wouldn't change, so the Law of One Price would kick in. There's no reason to think the "strong oil card" would even push up prices, let alone cause some sort of crisis for the US.

So don't be fooled. The price of oil is set by the interaction of global supply and global demand. The only way Venezuela can cause a supply shock is by selling oil to no one. But this is the ultimate empty threat, because Chávez needs his oil revenue far more than the world needs our oil.

Venezuela Feverishly Strives for Axis of Evil Membership

Chavez, we have to conclude, will be bitterly disappointed if Venezuela doesn't make the next Axis of Evil list. Really, he's done everything he can think of:

Make provocative noises about developing nuclear energy? Check

Support Iran's proliferation effort? Check

Support the "creeping coup" to bring the Sandinistas back to power in Nicaragua? Check

Threaten to pull Venezuela's reserve holdings out of dollar-denominated bonds? Check

Build relations with North Korea? Check

What do these items have in common? None of them make any economic or strategic sense, unless you've decided "antagonizing the State Department" is your main strategic goal...

Honestly, I have this image of the guy heading a brainstorming session in Miraflores, pounding the table with his fist and shouting "Come on! people! there must be some other way to piss off the gringos! think damn you! THINK!!"

The blog is back!

Partly because I have a bit of time on my hands, partly because I just got a snazzy new net connection at home, but mostly because, erm...how to put this? JESUS H. CHRIST does it look like Chávez is out of control these days!

La Marqueseña, Walter Martinez, urban expropriations, the weird Pyongyang-Tehran-Caracas axis, escalating summit hissy fits, escalating gringophobia...scary stuff.

What I want to do (OK, try to do) is emulate the gringo blogger style by writing much shorter, more frequent posts picking up on little news items that often go unnoticed...I'm thinking of undercommented news like these two gems:

Getting technical on "forced disappearances"

Think Pinochet and Videla invented the "desaparición forzosa"? Think again.

José Vicente Rangel wants us to believe that Rómulo Betancourt invented the "forced disappearance." Not to get too pedantic about this, but isn't it well known that Pérez Jiménez disappeared people too? Adecos and communists and copeyanos together? Why doesn't J.V.R. want to inquire into those deaths?

My guess: there's no political gain to be made from pointing out that once Adecos and Commies made common cause against dictatorship and to establish democracy. The sooner that can be swept under the historical rug, the better.

Psychopath autocrats of the world, unite!

Mindless radicalization, anyone?

Deputy Foreign Minister William Izarra received Yang Hyong Sop in Caracas and discussed the possibility of energy cooperation between Venezuela, the world's fifth largest oil exporter, and North Korea.

Hyong Sop, who was in Cuba earlier Wednesday, applauded "the important achievements in the process of constructing 21st-century socialism" in Venezuela while the oil-rich country works toward the "economic and political integration of Latin America," the statement said.

North Korea's commerce minister plans to visit Venezuela in November to discuss trade, Hyong Sop said.

More...

The Hidden Middle Class

Picture a Venezuelan middle class family. What image comes into your head?

If you're like most people, you're thinking of the Mavesa family. You know, the one in the commercial. Husband comes home, tie loosened on the car ride home from the office, to meet his dashing young wife in their beautiful Caracas apartment. Bima furniture. Cocina empotrada. Cell phones. Mayonnaise. That sort of thing.

We all know what that middle class is about. The Venezuelan dream. It's an image. A set of associations. A lifestyle. It hardly needs much elaboration. We all know what we're talking about when we say "middle class." Don't we?

Well...don't we?

But what if...what if that image distorts as much as it reveals? What if the associations we've built up around it blur out whole groups of people who, on closer scrutiny, should be seen as middle class?

What is this Mavesa family like, anyway? For one, they live in the city. Almost certainly in Caracas. In the Mavesa scheme of things, there is no such thing as a rural middle class. What's more, the Mavesa middle class is professional. It has a university degree. It's made up of managers, lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers. It wears a tie to work every day, and depends on its salary. Most pointedly, the Mavesa middle class has money. Not too much money, granted - we are not talking about the rich here - but certainly more than the vast majority of people in Venezuela. All those nice kitchens and cars and cell phones, those are expensive. Having the money to buy these things has become a marker of middle classness.

In day-to-day speech in Venezuela, then, middle class has become more an income category than an occupational grouping. Roughly, when you say middle class what you mean is "not rich, but certainly better off than most." This image of the urban, professional, educated, employed, relatively well off middle class is so ingrained in public discourse in Venezuela it's difficult for people to see beyond it. It takes a bit of sociology to realize just how badly the Mavesa image distorts our understanding of who is and who is not middle class.

What you do, not what you earn
To start to see the problems with the Mavesa image of the middle class, you have to stop thinking just about income and focus instead on people's relationship with the world of work.

For Marx, your class affiliation has nothing whatsoever to do with income; it has everything to do with your relationship to the world of work. Those who own the inputs that generate wealth are capitalists, those who make a living by selling their work to the capitalists are proletarians. That's that. By this reckoning, of course, the Mavesa middle class is not actually middle class at all: that flawlessly groomed husband sells his labor to an employer. For Marx, at least, he is merely a privileged member of the working class.

The problem is that this kind of understanding leaves no space at all for the middle class as such, as a class distinct from both owners and workers. Seen in this way, what we think of as "middle class" is merely a group of particularly privileged proletarians or particularly pela-bola capitalists. Marxists have always presumed that these people "in the middle" would eventually have to choose sides between the two dominant classes. In fact, Marxist sociology tends to erase the middle class from the picture altogether. Marx presumed that the conflict between capitalists and proletarians would be the driving motor of history, so why waste time examining the position of the residuals in the middle?

Marx did recognize the existence in Europe of a large number of people that occupied a somewhat paradoxical position between capitalists and proletarians. These were the armies of small time shop-owners and small-fry manufacturers working in the tiny workshops that proliferated in 19th century Europe. The por-su-cuenta squad.

Marx thought of these people basically as capitalists. They certainly own the means of production they use, and since this was the key litmus test for Marx, he labeled this group the "petty bourgeoisie", the small-time capitalists.

But thinking of this strata as being "just like" regular capitalists, just on a smaller scale, misses the particularity of their position. The day-to-day reality of working life for very small-scale producers and traders often has more in common with the day-to-day life of the traditional working-class than with that of capitalists. They may own the means of production they use, but they basically work for a living. Unlike capitalists, they can't rely on their capital to keep them fed. Unlike workers, they have no access to a steady quince-y-ultimo salary, or collective bargaining, or statutory vacation pay. Their position, if anything, is more precarious than that of the organized working class: if they work, they earn; if they don't, they don't. They are not small-time capitalists as much as they are owner-workers.

Now, it won't have escaped an alert reader that this group that Marx described as the petty bourgeoisie corresponds, in contemporary Venezuelan terms, to the informal sector. An owner-worker class does indeed exist in Venezuela, and a big one...it's just that, in Venezuela, this part of society earns its living beyond the scope of the law.

Here we begin to see why the Mavesa family image is such a lousy reference point when you're trying to picture the Venezuelan middle class. Because Venezuela's current petty-bourgeoisie, Venezuela's genuine occupational middle class, has almost nothing in common with the Mavesa family. It is a nation of buhoneros. Of mata-tigres. Of taxi-drivers and conuqueros. Of people who can't get proper jobs, but they own a tiny little bit of capital, and they try their best to make a living out of it.

That middle class, that occupational middle class, has always lived beyond the reach of the state. It shares none of the characteristics of the Mavesa family. It is more likely to come home with a gunshot wound the neighborhood tough than it is to come home smiling from a nice air-conditioned day at the office.

Venezuela's informal economy - its real middle class - is huge. Since 1994 has made up roughly half the country's work force. It is by no means solidly urban. It counts as members hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers, as well as owner-workers in small-scale agricultural input and processing activities in the countryside. It far from professional. Informal economy workers are, statistically, less educated than formal sector workers. And its members are certainly not relatively well-off: according to a 2002 UCAB Poverty Project study, 9 out of 10 informal sector workers earn less than the legal minimum wage.

When you start to think of the informal economy as the hidden middle class, you're hit by the startling realization that Venezuela's occupational middle class - its owner-workers - has long been worse off than its working class. The post-1958 political system, with its corporatist emphasis on balancing the demands of capitalists and workers, systematically excluded the ranks of the owner-workers from political power.

This structural exclusion is made dramatically visible in the composition of the old tripartite commissions that, before Chavez, were charged with negotiating wage policy. The system formally included capitalists (Fedecamaras) and workers (CTV) in wage-bargaining, but did not even recognize the existence of a sprawling universe of small scale owner-workers. The por-su-cuentas had no seat at the table. The fourth republic had no structures for including or empowering the hidden middle class. In the end, it was the small-scale owner-workers' anger at their marginalization that propelled Hugo Chavez into power.

From this perspective, the 2001-2004 alliance of CTV and Fedecamaras against the government played perfectly into Chavez's game plan. Relying on exploiting the sense of resentment of the excluded against the included, Chavez had no trouble painting CTV and Fedecamaras as the Enemy. His main constituents - who had always been shut out of the legal economy and therefore had no personal stake in the outcome of tripartite commission negotiations - applauded his refusal to deal with either of the two bodies.

The weirdly counterintuitive conclusion, if such a reading is correct, is that what Chavez is leading is a revolution of the middle class. It sounds strange to put it that way because the images we associate with middle classness are based on images based on income rather than occupation. Whatever sociological theory says, most of us will always have a hard time looking at a buhonero or a conuquero and thinking of them as archetypes of middle classness. In income terms, buhoneros and conuqueros are among the poorest people in Venezuela, what's "middle" about that?

What's middle about it is the dual nature of owner-workers' relationship to capital and work. Those who live off their capital and do not work are capitalists, those who live off their work and have no capital are workers, and those who both own their capital and work to make a living are, well, in the middle.

The hidden middle class and the East Asian Economic Miracle
This whole stream of unorthodox thoughts occurred to me while reading "Discipline and Development : Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America", the startlingly lucid new book by MIT historical sociologist Diane Davis. The book's starting point is one of the hottest debates in development economics today: why have East Asian economies outperformed Latin American economies so decisively over the last fifty years.

To make sense of Davis' thinking, you need to take a little side-trip into the history of the East Asian economic miracle. Davis focuses on just two countries: South Korea and Taiwan.

In the four decades after 1960, the South Korean and Taiwanese economies grew faster than any economy ever in the history of the world. In forty years, these countries went from having the per capita income of today's Haiti to having the per capita income of today's Spain. This success brought them more than a little bit of attention from development economists. What they found made uncomfortable reading for many of them.

Even the most superficial look at the economies of South Korea and Taiwan showed major differences with the standard, "Washington Consensus" style recipe for development. Though many US trained economists saw liberalism as a kind of divinely ordained absolute good, it didn't take long to realize South Korea and Taiwan had in no way given free rein to the "invisible hand" of the market during their economic take-off years. Instead, they relied on peculiar combinations of private enterprise and public planning. Industrial production was in the hands of capitalists, certainly, but industrial financing was controlled by state-owned banks. Foreign direct investment was essentially banned in South Korea until the late 1980s. Technology transfer provisions were prominent, and the state had a clear strategy to help local companies crack into particular export markets.

The industrial development vision was based on exporting manufactures for the world market, certainly, but companies were often pushed to participate in the export drive by government fiat. In some cases, the government literally forced companies to enter particular export markets by threatening to withold financing if they did not. Governments made special efforts to help private companies produce for the export market, rewarding successful exporters with further directed credit and subsidies while punishing unsuccessful exporters by witholding such facilities. Companies that could not compete in export markets were simply allowed to fail.

South Korea and Taiwan, then, relied on a highly peculiar combination of private and public institutions to achieve their development gains. They did not, as the Washington Consensus crowd might have wished, minimize government intervention in the economy. Just the opposite. South Korean and Taiwanese bureaucrats identified the most promising industrial markets for export growth, coordinated the financing and know-how for local companies to enter those markets, they administed financial resources to foster them and systematically sought to reward capitalists who acted in accordance with their development priorities while punishing those who did not. Both civil servants and businessmen in East Asia have always understood and accepted that it is the public sector that is in the development driver's seat, with capitalists acting within the narrow bounds allowed to them by the state's development policy.

Autonomous states?
A very big literature now exists on how exactly these East Asian states managed to launch their countries on the path to self-sustaining economic growth. Scholars like Linsu Kim, Alice Amsden, Robert Wade, Chalmers Johnson and Margaret Woo Cummings are among the most prominent in this field. The policy-mix the East Asians used has been labeled "state-led, export-oriented development," and the type of state able to pull off this kind of policy has been described as the "developmental state."

Studies of the developmental state have traditionally stressed "state autonomy" as the key to the success of the east asian development model. Following Berkeley sociologist Peter Evans, they've highlighted the East Asian state's ample authority, its space to act autonomously of pressures brought to bear by various social groups.

It's not hard to see why such autonomy from vested interests is important. In Latin America, where states have been much less autonomous from social pressures, efforts at state-led industrialization have generally morphed into giant corruption rackets. States beholden to the interests of capitalists seek to accommodate their clients: a state that cannot act autonomously of capitalists is most unlikely to work to discipline them.

Instead, capitalists' work to use their privileged access to the state to get their hands on state resources. Venezuela's post 1973 history is one long case-study of this dynamic. Similarly, states beholden to the narrow interests of workers lack the autonomy to discipline the working class's wage demands. Peru and Argentina, with their long histories of hyperinflation, are classic examples of the economically catastrophic consequences of continually seeking to accommodate the working class to the detriment of other segments of society.

The suggestion, then, is that the East Asian states had a special ability to discipline rather than accommodate both capitalists and workers, and that's how they managed to resist corruption.

The Middle Class core of the developmental state
It's a this point that Davis' fascinating book picks up the story. The question she wants to ask is not so much how the East Asian Developmental State operates, but rather what the social foundations of such a state might be. What are its key constituencies? What is its "social base"? Who does the government play to? Whose values does it encarnate? And how did those values allow a few countries to turn the remarkable trick of setting up a professional state able to plan and coordinate Export-Oriented Development without becoming hopelessly corrupt?

Davis' answer, you will not be surprised to hear, is all about the middle class. And what she understands by "middle class" is much closer to the informal-economy model of owner-workers than to the Mavesa image that predominates in Venezuela.

Davis questions the very notion of an "autonomous state." States cannot act in a social vacuum, with no organic rooting in the society where they operate. Not even dictatorial states. All states need some form of social base, and the base they choose will, to some degree, determine the kinds of values they embody and the forms of policies they will apply.

In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, she explains, South Korea and Taiwan were overwhelmingly rural countries. Both implemented wide-ranging, successful, US-backed land reform programs aimed at creating a kind of Jefersonian society of small-scale farmers. By the early 1960s, 70% of South Korea's population lived in the countryside, and 90% of farmers were owner-workers. They were South Korea's conuqueros - a class created by land reform, and demographically dominant over the rest of the country. That they were poor - very poor, even - nobody could deny. But they owned the capital they used to make a living, so Davis labels them the rural middle class.

In the pages that follow, Davis traces the hidden history of the relationship between rural owner-workers and export-oriented industrialization. Going directly against the grain of almost all development theorizing on East Asia, she argues that it was the state's decision to privilege rural development over urban development, and rural middle class values over urban capitalist or working class values, that allowed the East Asian states to become autonomous enough from capitalists and workers to discipline them properly. Based on a close reading of the political history of South Korea and Taiwan, she stresses the way both governments saw small-scale rural producers as both a key constituency and a moral reserve for the nation.

At the heart of Davis' contribution is a discussion about values. Much has been made about the supposed role of the protestant ethic and of "Asian Values" to account for the first and last waves of industrialization. Indeed, the values claimed for protestants and Asians in turn are remarkably similar: hard work, thrift, individual responsibility, respect for authority, a high propensity to save rather than consume. For Davis, however, both labels are wrong...the values that Weber pinpointed over a century ago and Lee Kwan Yew highlighted in the last decade are neither uniquely protestant nor especially Asian. What they are, she says, are middle class values, and in particular, rural middle class values.

For Davis, owner-workers, particularly rural owner-workers, tend towards certain values by virtue of their relationship to work. Small-scale farming, in particular, is an occupation that virtually demands self-discipline, hard work, thrift, and forward planning in order to be viable at all. The vicissitudes of the weather and the ever-looming possibility of crop failure makes it imperative to save rather than consume whenever possible. The long lag times between sowing and reaping force small scale farmers to plan ahead. And the sheer botanics of the job demand very long hours of very hard work.

In the Korean case, Davis stresses the life history of Park Chung Hee, the country's military ruler from 1961 through 1979. General Park himself grew up in a small-scale farming household, and remained ideologically committed to the values of the rural middle class throughout his career. His emphasis, once in power, was both to symbolically honor its values and to orient South Korea's development to the service of small farmers. As Davis puts it (p. 83),

"Park initially conceived of industrialization as a means to an end, not an end in itself, and not necessarily as his principal development goal. 'Whatever else we may consider at this moment,' Park proclaimed in 1962, 'the most urgent and fundamental need is that the rural communities should have precedence over everything else. It is the top priority.'"

Unearthing seldom recognized parts of the history of South Korea's breakneck development, Davis shows us how it was this ideological commitment to farmers that kept the government in a strong position vis-à-vis industrialists and workers in the cities. Unlike Latin American leaders, who sought to accommodate capitalists and/or workers by protecting urban industry from imports, General Park's industrialization was all about keeping his rural base happy. Exports were promoted for the purpose of earning foreign exchange to finance rural development plans. Park's export-oriented development strategy was based not on some ideological commitment to urban development, but on the need to export manufactures in order to earn dollars that could be spent on importing agricultural inputs.

Park was in a strong position in relations to urban capitalists and workers precisely because they were NOT its main constituencies. Since his main concern was to accommodate the values and lifestyles of the rural middle class, he could afford to play hardball with urban constituencies, to discipline them rather than accommodate them. And it was this discipline, meted out both to capitalists and workers, that laid the groundwork for the spectacular success of the country's urban development, which would end up completely outstripping the gains made in the countryside.

Unintended industrialization
The story of South Korea's development, then, is paradoxical on several counts. It took a government concerned chiefly with the values and priorities of small farmers to set the stage for the quickest industrialization in human history. The law of unintended consequences is, perhaps, the single biggest driver of Davis' theory. Governments, she suggests, are seldom aware of the ultimate consequences of their actions. The runaway industrialization in East Asia in the 80s and 90s was, from the point of view of the rulers who engineered the development miracle, a kind of accident.

What's important for development, she suggests, is the way the state in South Korea and Taiwan adopted the values of hard-work, forward-planning, fair play and thrift into their ideological DNA. The East Asian state, in this perspective, is not so much "autonomous" as it is embedded in the values of a class that prizes hard work and thrift above all else. This has not often been recognized simply because middle classes have become invisible to development theorists used to a marxian, class-polarized vision of society as a contest between capitalists and workers.

These are dangerous thoughts for a Venezuelan antichavista to harbor. The Chavez government is, in many ways, a middle class embedded regime. And middle class embeddedness seems to be a key ingredient for successful industrialization. Certainly, the Chavez government has dealt harshly with both organized labor and the organized business class. And while export-led development is obviously not Chavez's stated aim, we have already seen that intentions and outcomes can diverge very widely in such settings.

Could it be that, in the most bizarre way imaginable, Chavez has stumbled into something like a Latin Americanized version of the Asian development state?

Frankly, I doubt it. All sorts of studies of the East Asian Miracle specify what is meant by "discipline" in this context. "Disciplining capitalists" does not mean badgering them out of insistence, intimidating them into submission, or persecuting them through the courts. Disciplining capitalists means setting out a clear, stable, predictable set of institutions and incentives designed to allign capitalist's private interests with wider social interests, with a view to attenuating corruption. Similarly, disciplining workers does not mean randomly abusing them, imprisoning their leaders, and declaring their organizations enemies of the state. It means bringing them into a broader framework for development where their own interests are balanced off against those of the nation as a whole.

In short, what Chavez does is not to discipline capitalists and workers, but to brutalize them. His random, arbitrary treatment does little or nothing to allign their incentives with those of society as a whole. More importantly, it's based on a set of values that - although it has been widely adopted by the Venezuelan owner-worker class - stands in sharp contrast with the traditional values of the rural middle class.

And here, Venezuela's peculiar history of owner-worker exclusion and petrostate clientelism plays an important role in explaining the path the country is transiting now. Though the Venezuelan has a huge number of owner-workers, those owner-workers have not learned the same experiences from their day-to-day relationship to work as their South Korean counterparts in the 1960s learned.

Venezuela's recent history of sharp macroeconomic instability brought on by successive oil-market boom-and-bust cycles has weakened owner-workers' perception that their success depends on hard work, discipline and thrift. Instead, the only reasonable lesson an informal worker in Venezuela can draw from his or her work experience is that success depends on the inscrutable workings of the international oil market or, more precisely, on the waves of government spending that come in the wake of sporadic oil booms. Failure is equally beyond the control a Venezuelan owner-workers' success - again and again, oil market busts have led to collapses in demand that overwhelm any efforts to prepare.

Meanwhile, the only exit from this cycle seems to lie in building clientelist relationships with those in power, an old and terrible habit Chavez has not been shy about exploiting.

The bad news for the opposition is that it has alligned itself with organized workers and capitalists against the one class whose values could conceivably serve as a springboard to development. The good news is that the Venezuelan middle class is far bigger than commonly believed. Learn to communicate with them, learn to put them at the center of a development vision and discourse, and the opposition has a nearly limitless pool of potential supporters.

What is to be done?
How, then, do we woo back the owner-worker class and, at the same time, lay the foundations for meaningful development? This is a political question, requiring political vision and political leadership.

The first thing to accept is that, more than anything else, Venezuela's owner-workers crave a government that will show a little backbone when dealing with its capitalists (and to a lesser extent, its organized workers.) They are disgusted by the perception - often justified - that the traditional elite wants to re-take control of the state only in order to go back to accomodating capitalists and organized workers, marginalizing owner-workers once again in the process. In light of the South Korean and Taiwanese experience, this middle class thirst for a government that disciplines capitalists rather than accommodating them is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Unfortunately, much of the opposition's discourse serves to convince this urban middle class that it wants to return to an accommodationist posture if it retakes power. Each time an opposition leader decries Chavez's "scaring away investors" he simply reinforces this perception. Such a discourse will never mobilize the owner-worker class around an alternative vision. And it's a good thing, because chavistas may never have heard of Diane Davis, but their seat-of-the-pants feeling that handing decision-making over to capitalists would be a disaster for the country's development prospects is spot on.

What the opposition needs to do, then, is to re-gain the confidence of Venezuela's hidden middle class, of the group of owner-workers who have always underpinned rapid development experiences. That this key constituency now overwhelmingly supports Chavez is an alarming first realization. But armed with Davis' brilliant critique of East Asian growth, we can suggest some tentative themes for a successful drive to woo the owner-worker class.

First things first: Chavez, in seeking to solidify his base of support, has always charged the opposition with having a secret-agenda to go back to the system of accommodating capitalists and organized workers. Venezuela's owner-workers viscerally reject this idea, and Chavez has been brilliant at exploiting that rejection. Any alternative leader needs to make it abundantly clear that there will be no going back to the tripartite model of corporatist accommodation. Instead, the purpose will be to discipline capitalists more fairly, effectively and constructively than is possible under Chavez's chaotic authoritarianism.

Secondly, Chavez has managed to build up a huge reservoir of owner-worker good will by playing to some owner-worker values, while ignoring others. The reality - which you would never guess from listening to Chavez - is that Venezuelan owner-workers work incredibly hard, with little outside help, relying mostly on themselves. Any challenger to Chavez should emphasize these values - which coexist with those Chavez exploits - in seeking to make an emotional connection with those voters.

"You, Mr. Buhonero, you live off of your work. You get no special deals from powerful people, you don't get wined and dined by politicians, you don't get to influence decisions at the highest levels. You work, and if you work hard and do things well, you get some money. If you don't, you don't. Those rules, which have always applied to you, are the ones we're going to apply to Shell and Polar and General Motors and the Cisneros."

That is the basic message.

From my point of view, only a politician of the left has any reasonable chance to carry off such a strategy. Only someone with real left-wing credentials can be taken seriously when he says that opposing Chavez does not mean giving the country away to the capitalists. In fact, the political project Davis' work suggests to me could well be labeled "reformismo de avanzada." And there's just one Venezuelan with a real prospect of carrying it off: Teodoro Petkoff.

The Killing Machine

by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
From The New Republic

Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs, hoodies, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandannas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and of course those omnipresent T-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda, of the socialist heartthrob in his beret during the early years of the revolution, as Che happened to walk into the photographer's viewfinder--and into the image that, thirty-eight years after his death, is still the logo of revolutionary (or is it capitalist?) chic. Sean O'Hagan claimed in The Observer that there is even a soap powder with the slogan "Che washes whiter."

Che products are marketed by big corporations and small businesses, such as the Burlington Coat Factory, which put out a television commercial depicting a youth in fatigue pants wearing a Che T-shirt, or Flamingo's Boutique in Union City, New Jersey, whose owner responded to the fury of local Cuban exiles with this devastating argument: "I sell whatever people want to buy." Revolutionaries join the merchandising frenzy, too--from "The Che Store," catering to "all your revolutionary needs" on the Internet, to the Italian writer Gianni Minà, who sold Robert Redford the movie rights to Che's diary of his juvenile trip around South America in 1952 in exchange for access to the shooting of the film The Motorcycle Diaries so that Minà could produce his own documentary. Not to mention Alberto Granado, who accompanied Che on his youthful trip and advises documentarists, and now complains in Madrid, according to El País, over Rioja wine and duck magret, that the American embargo against Cuba makes it hard for him to collect royalties. To take the irony further: the building where Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, a splendid early twentieth-century edifice at the corner of Urquiza and Entre Ríos Streets, was until recently occupied by the private pension fund AFJP Máxima, a child of Argentina's privatization of social security in the 1990s.

The metamorphosis of Che Guevara into a capitalist brand is not new, but the brand has been enjoying a revival of late--an especially remarkable revival, since it comes years after the political and ideological collapse of all that Guevara represented. This windfall is owed substantially to The Motorcycle Diaries, the film produced by Robert Redford and directed by Walter Salles. (It is one of three major motion pictures on Che either made or in the process of being made in the last two years; the other two have been directed by Josh Evans and Steven Soderbergh.) Beautifully shot against landscapes that have clearly eluded the eroding effects of polluting capitalism, the film shows the young man on a voyage of self-discovery as his budding social conscience encounters social and economic exploitation--laying the ground for a New Wave re-invention of the man whom Sartre once called the most complete human being of our era.

But to be more precise, the current Che revival started in 1997, on the thirtieth anniversary of his death, when five biographies hit the bookstores, and his remains were discovered near an airstrip at Bolivia's Vallegrande airport, after a retired Bolivian general, in a spectacularly timed revelation, disclosed the exact location. The anniversary refocused attention on Freddy Alborta's famous photograph of Che's corpse laid out on a table, foreshortened and dead and romantic, looking like Christ in a Mantegna painting.

It is customary for followers of a cult not to know the real life story of their hero, the historical truth. (Many Rastafarians would renounce Haile Selassie if they had any notion of who he really was.) It is not surprising that Guevara's contemporary followers, his new post-communist admirers, also delude themselves by clinging to a myth--except the young Argentines who have come up with an expression that rhymes perfectly in Spanish: "Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué," or "I have a Che T-shirt and I don't know why."



Consider some of the people who have recently brandished or invoked Guevara's likeness as a beacon of justice and rebellion against the abuse of power. In Lebanon, demonstrators protesting against Syria at the grave of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri carried Che's image. Thierry Henry, a French soccer player who plays for Arsenal, in England, showed up at a major gala organized by FIFA, the world's soccer body, wearing a red and black Che T-shirt. In a recent review in The New York Times of George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, Manohla Dargis noted that "the greatest shock here may be the transformation of a black zombie into a righteous revolutionary leader," and added, "I guess Che really does live, after all." The soccer hero Maradona showed off the emblematic Che tattoo on his right arm during a trip where he met Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. In Stavropol, in southern Russia, protesters denouncing cash payments of welfare concessions took to the central square with Che flags. In San Francisco, City Lights Books, the legendary home of beat literature, treats visitors to a section devoted to Latin America in which half the shelves are taken up by Che books. José Luis Montoya, a Mexican police officer who battles drug crime in Mexicali, wears a Che sweatband because it makes him feel stronger. At the Dheisheh refugee camp on the West Bank, Che posters adorn a wall that pays tribute to the Intifada. A Sunday magazine devoted to social life in Sydney, Australia, lists the three dream guests at a dinner party: Alvar Aalto, Richard Branson, and Che Guevara. Leung Kwok-hung, the rebel elected to Hong Kong's Legislative Council, defies Beijing by wearing a Che T-shirt. In Brazil, Frei Betto, President Lula da Silva's adviser in charge of the high-profile "Zero Hunger" program, says that "we should have paid less attention to Trotsky and much more to Che Guevara." And most famously, at this year's Academy Awards ceremony Carlos Santana and Antonio Banderas performed the theme song from The Motorcycle Diaries, and Santana showed up wearing a Che T-shirt and a crucifix. The manifestations of the new cult of Che are everywhere. Once again the myth is firing up people whose causes for the most part represent the exact opposite of what Guevara was.



No man is without some redeeming qualities. In the case of Che Guevara, those qualities may help us to measure the gulf that separates reality from myth. His honesty (well, partial honesty) meant that he left written testimony of his cruelties, including the really ugly, though not the ugliest, stuff. His courage--what Castro described as "his way, in every difficult and dangerous moment, of doing the most difficult and dangerous thing"--meant that he did not live to take full responsibility for Cuba's hell. Myth can tell you as much about an era as truth. And so it is that thanks to Che's own testimonials to his thoughts and his deeds, and thanks also to his premature departure, we may know exactly how deluded so many of our contemporaries are about so much.


Guevara might have been enamored of his own death, but he was much more enamored of other people's deaths. In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his "Message to the Tricontinental": "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine." His earlier writings are also peppered with this rhetorical and ideological violence. Although his former girlfriend Chichina Ferreyra doubts that the original version of the diaries of his motorcycle trip contains the observation that "I feel my nostrils dilate savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood of the enemy," Guevara did share with Granado at that very young age this exclamation: "Revolution without firing a shot? You're crazy." At other times the young bohemian seemed unable to distinguish between the levity of death as a spectacle and the tragedy of a revolution's victims. In a letter to his mother in 1954, written in Guatemala, where he witnessed the overthrow of the revolutionary government of Jacobo Arbenz, he wrote: "It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches, and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in."

Guevara's disposition when he traveled with Castro from Mexico to Cuba aboard the Granma is captured in a phrase in a letter to his wife that he penned on January 28, 1957, not long after disembarking, which was published in her book Ernesto: A Memoir of Che Guevara in Sierra Maestra: "Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and bloodthirsty." This mentality had been reinforced by his conviction that Arbenz had lost power because he had failed to execute his potential enemies. An earlier letter to his former girlfriend Tita Infante had observed that "if there had been some executions, the government would have maintained the capacity to return the blows." It is hardly a surprise that during the armed struggle against Batista, and then after the triumphant entry into Havana, Guevara murdered or oversaw the executions in summary trials of scores of people--proven enemies, suspected enemies, and those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: "I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain.... His belongings were now mine." Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim "was really guilty enough to deserve death," he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: "He had to pay the price." At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture.

Luis Guardia and Pedro Corzo, two researchers in Florida who are working on a documentary about Guevara, have obtained the testimony of Jaime Costa Vázquez, a former commander in the revolutionary army known as "El Catalán," who maintains that many of the executions attributed to Ramiro Valdés, a future interior minister of Cuba, were Guevara's direct responsibility, because Valdés was under his orders in the mountains. "If in doubt, kill him" were Che's instructions. On the eve of victory, according to Costa, Che ordered the execution of a couple dozen people in Santa Clara, in central Cuba, where his column had gone as part of a final assault on the island. Some of them were shot in a hotel, as Marcelo Fernándes-Zayas, another former revolutionary who later became a journalist, has written--adding that among those executed, known as casquitos, were peasants who had joined the army simply to escape unemployment.



But the "cold-blooded killing machine" did not show the full extent of his rigor until, immediately after the collapse of the Batista regime, Castro put him in charge of La Cabaña prison. (Castro had a clinically good eye for picking the right person to guard the revolution against infection.) San Carlos de La Cabaña was a stone fortress used to defend Havana against English pirates in the eighteenth century; later it became a military barracks. In a manner chillingly reminiscent of Lavrenti Beria, Guevara presided during the first half of 1959 over one of the darkest periods of the revolution. José Vilasuso, a lawyer and a professor at Universidad Interamericana de Bayamón in Puerto Rico, who belonged to the body in charge of the summary judicial process at La Cabaña, told me recently that


Che was in charge of the Comisión Depuradora. The process followed the law of the Sierra: there was a military court and Che's guidelines to us were that we should act with conviction, meaning that they were all murderers and the revolutionary way to proceed was to be implacable. My direct superior was Miguel Duque Estrada. My duty was to legalize the files before they were sent on to the Ministry. Executions took place from Monday to Friday, in the middle of the night, just after the sentence was given and automatically confirmed by the appellate body. On the most gruesome night I remember, seven men were executed.

Javier Arzuaga, the Basque chaplain who gave comfort to those sentenced to die and personally witnessed dozens of executions, spoke to me recently from his home in Puerto Rico. A former Catholic priest, now seventy-five, who describes himself as "closer to Leonardo Boff and Liberation Theology than to the former Cardinal Ratzinger," he recalls that


"there were about eight hundred prisoners in a space fit for no more than three hundred: former Batista military and police personnel, some journalists, a few businessmen and merchants. The revolutionary tribunal was made of militiamen. Che Guevara presided over the appellate court. He never overturned a sentence. I would visit those on death row at the galera de la muerte. A rumor went around that I hypnotized prisoners because many remained calm, so Che ordered that I be present at the executions. After I left in May, they executed many more, but I personally witnessed fifty-five executions. There was an American, Herman Marks, apparently a former convict. We called him "the butcher" because he enjoyed giving the order to shoot. I pleaded many times with Che on behalf of prisoners. I remember especially the case of Ariel Lima, a young boy. Che did not budge. Nor did Fidel, whom I visited. I became so traumatized that at the end of May 1959 I was ordered to leave the parish of Casa Blanca, where La Cabaña was located and where I had held Mass for three years. I went to Mexico for treatment. The day I left, Che told me we had both tried to bring one another to each other's side and had failed. His last words were: "When we take our masks off, we will be enemies."

How many people were killed at La Cabaña? Pedro Corzo offers a figure of some two hundred, similar to that given by Armando Lago, a retired economics professor who has compiled a list of 179 names as part of an eight-year study on executions in Cuba. Vilasuso told me that four hundred people were executed between January and the end of June in 1959 (at which point Che ceased to be in charge of La Cabaña). Secret cables sent by the American Embassy in Havana to the State Department in Washington spoke of "over 500." According to Jorge Castañeda, one of Guevara's biographers, a Basque Catholic sympathetic to the revolution, the late Father Iñaki de Aspiazú, spoke of seven hundred victims. Félix Rodríguez, a CIA agent who was part of the team in charge of the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia, told me that he confronted Che after his capture about "the two thousand or so" executions for which he was responsible during his lifetime. "He said they were all CIA agents and did not address the figure," Rodríguez recalls. The higher figures may include executions that took place in the months after Che ceased to be in charge of the prison.

Which brings us back to Carlos Santana and his chic Che gear. In an open letter published in El Nuevo Herald on March 31 of this year, the great jazz musician Paquito D'Rivera castigated Santana for his costume at the Oscars, and added: "One of those Cubans [at La Cabaña] was my cousin Bebo, who was imprisoned there precisely for being a Christian. He recounts to me with infinite bitterness how he could hear from his cell in the early hours of dawn the executions, without trial or process of law, of the many who died shouting, 'Long live Christ the King!'"



Che's lust for power had other ways of expressing itself besides murder. The contradiction between his passion for travel--a protest of sorts against the of the nation-state--and his impulse to become himself an enslaving state over others is poignant. In writing about Pedro Valdivia, the conquistador of Chile, Guevara reflected: "He belonged to that special class of men the species produces every so often, in whom a craving for limitless power is so extreme that any suffering to achieve it seems natural." He might have been describing himself. At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over other people's lives and property, and to abolish their free will.

In 1958, after taking the city of Sancti Spiritus, Guevara unsuccessfully tried to impose a kind of sharia, regulating relations between men and women, the use of alcohol, and informal gambling--a puritanism that did not exactly characterize his own way of life. He also ordered his men to rob banks, a decision that he justified in a letter to Enrique Oltuski, a subordinate, in November of that year: "The struggling masses agree to robbing banks because none of them has a penny in them." This idea of revolution as a license to re-allocate property as he saw fit led the Marxist Puritan to take over the mansion of an emigrant after the triumph of the revolution.

The urge to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of others' territory was central to Guevara's politics of raw power. In his memoirs, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser records that Guevara asked him how many people had left his country because of land reform. When Nasser replied that no one had left, Che countered in anger that the way to measure the depth of change is by the number of people "who feel there is no place for them in the new society." This predatory instinct reached a pinnacle in 1965, when he started talking, God-like, about the "New Man" that he and his revolution would create.

Che's obsession with collectivist control led him to collaborate on the formation of the security apparatus that was set up to subjugate six and a half million Cubans. In early 1959, a series of secret meetings took place in Tarará, near Havana, at the mansion to which Che temporarily withdrew to recover from an illness. That is where the top leaders, including Castro, designed the Cuban police state. Ramiro Valdés, Che's subordinate during the guerrilla war, was put in charge of G-2, a body modeled on the Cheka. Angel Ciutah, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War sent by the Soviets who had been very close to Ramón Mercader, Trotsky's assassin, and later befriended Che, played a key role in organizing the system, together with Luis Alberto Lavandeira, who had served the boss at La Cabaña. Guevara himself took charge of G-6, the body tasked with the ideological indoctrination of the armed forces. The U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 became the perfect occasion to consolidate the new police state, with the rounding up of tens of thousands of Cubans and a new series of executions. As Guevara himself told the Soviet ambassador Sergei Kudriavtsev, counterrevolutionaries were never "to raise their head again."



'Counterrevolutionary" is the term that was applied to anyone who departed from dogma. It was the communist synonym for "heretic." Concentration camps were one form in which dogmatic power was employed to suppress dissent. History attributes to the Spanish general Valeriano Weyler, the captain-general of Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century, the first use of the word "concentration" to describe the policy of surrounding masses of potential opponents--in his case, supporters of the Cuban independence movement--with barbed wire and fences. How fitting that Cuba's revolutionaries more than half a century later were to take up this indigenous tradition. In the beginning, the revolution mobilized volunteers to build schools and to work in ports, plantations, and factories--all exquisite photo-ops for Che the stevedore, Che the cane-cutter, Che the clothmaker. It was not long before volunteer work became a little less voluntary: the first forced labor camp, Guanahacabibes, was set up in western Cuba at the end of 1960. This is how Che explained the function performed by this method of confinement: "[We] only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail ... people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals, to a lesser or greater degree.... It is hard labor, not brute labor, rather the working conditions there are hard."

This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and other such scum, under the banner of Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded into buses and trucks, the "unfit" would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros's wrenching documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.



So Time magazine may have been less than accurate in August 1960 when it described the revolution's division of labor with a cover story featuring Che Guevara as the "brain" and Fidel Castro as the "heart" and Raúl Castro as the "fist." But the perception reflected Guevara's crucial role in turning Cuba into a bastion of totalitarianism. Che was a somewhat unlikely candidate for ideological purity, given his bohemian spirit, but during the years of training in Mexico and in the ensuing period of armed struggle in Cuba he emerged as the communist ideologue infatuated with the Soviet Union, much to the discomfort of Castro and others who were essentially opportunists using whatever means were necessary to gain power. When the would-be revolutionaries were arrested in Mexico in 1956, Guevara was the only one who admitted that he was a communist and was studying Russian. (He spoke openly about his relationship with Nikolai Leonov from the Soviet Embassy.) During the armed struggle in Cuba, he forged a strong alliance with the Popular Socialist Party (the island's Communist Party) and with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, a key player in the conversion of Castro's regime to communism.

This fanatical disposition made Che into a linchpin of the "Sovietization" of the revolution that had repeatedly boasted about its independent character. Very soon after the barbudos came to power, Guevara took part in negotiations with Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet deputy prime minister, who visited Cuba. He was entrusted with the mission of furthering Soviet-Cuban negotiations during a visit to Moscow in late 1960. (It was part of a long trip in which Kim Il Sung's North Korea was the country that impressed him "the most.") Guevara's second trip to Russia, in August 1962, was even more significant, because it sealed the deal to turn Cuba into a Soviet nuclear beachhead. He met Khrushchev in Yalta to finalize details on an operation that had already begun and involved the introduction of forty-two Soviet missiles, half of which were armed with nuclear warheads, as well as launchers and some forty-two thousand soldiers. After pressing his Soviet allies on the danger that the United States might find out what was happening, Guevara obtained assurances that the Soviet navy would intervene--in other words, that Moscow was ready to go to war.

According to Philippe Gavi's biography of Guevara, the revolutionary had bragged that "this country is willing to risk everything in an atomic war of unimaginable destructiveness to defend a principle." Just after the Cuban missile crisis ended--with Khrushchev reneging on the promise made in Yalta and negotiating a deal with the United States behind Castro's back that included the removal of American missiles from Turkey--Guevara told a British communist daily: "If the rockets had remained, we would have used them all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including New York, in our defense against aggression." And a couple of years later, at the United Nations, he was true to form: "As Marxists we have maintained that peaceful coexistence among nations does not include coexistence between exploiters and the exploited."

Guevara distanced himself from the Soviet Union in the last years of his life. He did so for the wrong reasons, blaming Moscow for being too soft ideologically and diplomatically, for making too many concessions--unlike Maoist China, which he came to see as a haven of orthodoxy. In October 1964, a memo written by Oleg Daroussenkov, a Soviet official close to him, quotes Guevara as saying: "We asked the Czechoslovaks for arms; they turned us down. Then we asked the Chinese; they said yes in a few days, and did not even charge us, stating that one does not sell arms to a friend." In fact, Guevara resented the fact that Moscow was asking other members of the communist bloc, including Cuba, for something in return for its colossal aid and political support. His final attack on Moscow came in Algiers, in February 1965, at an international conference, where he accused the Soviets of adopting the "law of value," that is, capitalism. His break with the Soviets, in sum, was not a cry for independence. It was an Enver Hoxha-like howl for the total subordination of reality to blind ideological orthodoxy.



The great revolutionary had a chance to put into practice his economic vision--his idea of social justice--as head of the National Bank of Cuba and of the Department of Industry of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform at the end of 1959, and, starting in early 1961, as minister of industry. The period in which Guevara was in charge of most of the Cuban economy saw the near-collapse of sugar production, the failure of industrialization, and the introduction of rationing--all this in what had been one of Latin America's four most economically successful countries since before the Batista dictatorship.

His stint as head of the National Bank, during which he printed bills signed "Che," has been summarized by his deputy, Ernesto Betancourt: "[He] was ignorant of the most elementary economic principles." Guevara's powers of perception regarding the world economy were famously expressed in 1961, at a hemispheric conference in Uruguay, where he predicted a 10 percent rate of growth for Cuba "without the slightest fear," and, by 1980, a per capita income greater than that of "the U.S. today." In fact, by 1997, the thirtieth anniversary of his death, Cubans were dieting on a ration of five pounds of rice and one pound of beans per month; four ounces of meat twice a year; four ounces of soybean paste per week; and four eggs per month.

Land reform took land away from the rich, but gave it to the bureaucrats, not to the peasants. (The decree was written in Che's house.) In the name of diversification, the cultivated area was reduced and manpower distracted toward other activities. The result was that between 1961 and 1963, the harvest was down by half, to a mere 3.8 million metric tons. Was this sacrifice justified by progress in Cuban industrialization? Unfortunately, Cuba had no raw materials for heavy industry, and, as a consequence of the revolutionary redistribution, it had no hard currency with which to buy them--or even basic goods. By 1961, Guevara was having to give embarrassing explanations to the workers at the office: "Our technical comrades at the companies have made a toothpaste ... which is as good as the previous one; it cleans just the same, though after a while it turns to stone." By 1963, all hopes of industrializing Cuba were abandoned, and the revolution accepted its role as a colonial provider of sugar to the Soviet bloc in exchange for oil to cover its needs and to re-sell to other countries. For the next three decades, Cuba would survive on a Soviet subsidy of somewhere between $65 billion and $100 billion.



Having failed as a hero of social justice, does Guevara deserve a place in the history books as a genius of guerrilla warfare? His greatest military achievement in the fight against Batista--taking the city of Santa Clara after ambushing a train with heavy reinforcements--is seriously disputed. Numerous testimonies indicate that the commander of the train surrendered in advance, perhaps after taking bribes. (Gutiérrez Menoyo, who led a different guerrilla group in that area, is among those who have decried Cuba's official account of Guevara's victory.) Immediately after the triumph of the revolution, Guevara organized guerrilla armies in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Haiti--all of which were crushed. In 1964, he sent the Argentine revolutionary Jorge Ricardo Masetti to his death by persuading him to mount an attack on his native country from Bolivia, just after representative democracy had been restored to Argentina.

Particularly disastrous was the Congo expedition in 1965. Guevara sided with two rebels--Pierre Mulele in the west and Laurent Kabila in the east--against the ugly Congolese government, which was sustained by the United States as well as by South African and exiled Cuban mercenaries. Mulele had taken over Stanleyville earlier before being driven back. During his reign of terror, as V.S. Naipaul has written, he murdered all the people who could read and all those who wore a tie. As for Guevara's other ally, Laurent Kabila, he was merely lazy and corrupt at the time; but the world would find out in the 1990s that he, too, was a killing machine. In any event, Guevara spent most of 1965 helping the rebels in the east before fleeing the country ignominiously. Soon afterward, Mobutu came to power and installed a decades-long tyranny. (In Latin American countries too, from Argentina to Peru, Che-inspired revolutions had the practical result of reinforcing brutal militarism for many years.)

In Bolivia, Che was defeated again, and for the last time. He misread the local situation. There had been an agrarian reform years before; the government had respected many of the peasant communities' institutions; and the army was close to the United States despite its nationalism. "The peasant masses don't help us at all" was Guevara's melancholy conclusion in his Bolivian diary. Even worse, Mario Monje, the local communist leader, who had no stomach for guerrilla warfare after having been humiliated at the elections, led Guevara to a vulnerable location in the southeast of the country. The circumstances of Che's capture at Yuro ravine, soon after meeting the French intellectual Régis Debray and the Argentine painter Ciro Bustos, both of whom were arrested as they left the camp, was, like most of the Bolivian expedition, an amateur's affair.

Guevara was certainly bold and courageous, and quick at organizing life on a military basis in the territories under his control, but he was no General Giap. His book Guerrilla Warfare teaches that popular forces can beat an army, that it is not necessary to wait for the right conditions because an insurrectional foco (or small group of revolutionaries) can bring them about, and that the fight must primarily take place in the countryside. (In his prescription for guerrilla warfare, he also reserves for women the roles of cooks and nurses.) However, Batista's army was not an army, but a corrupt bunch of thugs with no motivation and not much organization; and guerrilla focos, with the exception of Nicaragua, all ended up in ashes for the foquistas; and Latin America has turned 70 percent urban in these last four decades. In this regard, too, Che Guevara was a callous fool.



In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, Argentina had the second-highest growth rate in the world. By the 1890s, the real income of Argentine workers was greater than that of Swiss, German, and French workers. By 1928, that country had the twelfth-highest per capita GDP in the world. That achievement, which later generations would ruin, was in large measure due to Juan Bautista Alberdi.

Like Guevara, Alberdi liked to travel: he walked through the pampas and deserts from north to south at the age of fourteen, all the way to Buenos Aires. Like Guevara, Alberdi opposed a tyrant, Juan Manuel Rosas. Like Guevara, Alberdi got a chance to influence a revolutionary leader in power--Justo José de Urquiza, who toppled Rosas in 1852. And like Guevara, Alberdi represented the new government on world tours, and died abroad. But unlike the old and new darling of the left, Alberdi never killed a fly. His book, Bases y puntos de partida para la organización de la República Argentina, was the foundation of the Constitution of 1853 that limited government, opened trade, encouraged immigration, and secured property rights, thereby inaugurating a seventy-year period of astonishing prosperity. He did not meddle in the affairs of other nations, opposing his country's war against Paraguay. His likeness does not adorn Mike Tyson's abdomen.