Are we having fun yet?

The Onion says:

How low can you go?

Quico says: More than a movement, more than an ideology or a revolution or even a government, chavismo-in-power is turning into a kind of gruesome experiment. How debased can a group's discoursive standards get before it falls apart altogether? Having surrendered the tools it takes to process their differences in a minimally sane way, how long can they keep it together?

These are the questions that went through my mind as I read the genuinely weird story of Luis Tascón's final expulsion from the ranks of chavismo.

You remember Tascón, don't you? He's the National Assembly guy who pioneered Chavismo's use of IT to discriminate against millions of Venezuelan dissidents. That guy!

Turns out he's CIA. Or Microsoft. Same difference.

Tascón's now been tossed out of Chávez's budding Socialist Party. It's safe to say now that he will not be Mayor of Libertador like he'd wanted.

His crime? He put forward evidence of corruption (think of it as "El Caso de los Jeeps del Siglo 21") on the part of José David Cabello, the new Tax Superintendent who, by sheer coincidence, happens to be the brother of Miranda Governor Diosdado Cabello, a favorite Chávez protegé and revolutionary untouchable.

El Universal's writeup on this story beggars belief from start to finish. Cilia Flores, the Assembly Chairwoman, called for an overhaul of the National Assembly's corruption investigations arm, the Comptrollership Committee, over its excessive willingness to, um, investigate corruption...just one of the sorts of "details" that gets buried deep inside the story because the headline stuff is so deliriously over the top.

I mean, Diosdado thinks Tascón was conspiring directly with Bill Gates and muses that, while he was in Redmond, "maybe they injected a chip into his blood"...no bureaucratic shakeup in the Assembly can compete with that!

How did our public sphere get this far gone?

Faced with all this craziness, it's tough to organize your thoughts. But Habermas uses a concept I think is quite helpful in this context: "discursive standards".

A discursive standard is a taken-for-granted set of rules a group uses to judge whether an argument is persuasive or not. Discursive standards vary from one setting to another: what constitutes a "good argument" in a courtroom doesn't necessarily hold water in a school playground, or a Globovision studio, or a PETA meeting. In each of these settings, a different set of unspoken rules underpins the group's shared sense of what's reasonable, what's persuasive, and what's appropriate: it's those rules Habermas wants to get at when he talks about discursive standards.

The question, for me, is how chavismo's discursive standards got so freakishly warped.

Simple. The basic ingredient is just a supersized dose of Manichaeism. Reality, in this view, is a constant struggle between absolute evil and absolute good, with nothing in between. Chavista Manichaeism assigns absolute evil one label ("the US") and absolute good another ("Chávez").

Chavismo has crafted a discursive standard out of its iron-willed commitment to this worldview. Its discursive standard forces every single political, moral, diplomatic, personal, or judicial matter into that dualistic scheme. Within chavismo, arguments become "persuasive" only to the extent that they identify what's good with Chávez and what's evil with the US.

Taken to its logical extreme, this resolves into the view that nothing can be good unless Chávez did it, and nothing - not even Bolívar's death - can be bad unless the US did it. No case is exempt.

That's all there is to it, really. For chavismo, every debate must be conducted under these discursive rules. Straying is not allowed. A willingness to stray from the standard suggests the kind of disloyalty that, from the perspective of the standard itself, can only be interpreted as treasonous.

Luis Tascón, of all people, should've realized all this. But he fucked up. He said something bad had happened without saying the US was somehow responsible. Not allowed. So he got CIAed. Cabello Clan 1, Tascón 0.

Reading up on Tascón's defenestration, I couldn't help but think of Orwell's take on Stalin's trotskyite purges, and the inability of the PSFs of his age to get their minds around what was happening:

To get the full sense of our ignorance as to what is really happening in the USSR, it would be worth trying to translate the most sensational Russian event of the past two years, the Trotskyist trials, into English terms. Make the necessary adjustments, let Left be Right and Right be Left, and you get something like this:

Mr. Winston Churchill [i.e. Trotsky], now in exile in Portugal, is plotting to overthrow the British Empire and establish Communism in England. By the use of unlimited Russian money he has succeeded in building up a huge Churchillite organisation which includes members of Parliament, factory managers, Roman Catholic bishops and practically the whole of the Primrose League. Almost every day some dastardly act of sabotage is laid bare - sometimes a plot to blow up the House of Lords, sometimes and outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the Royal racing-stables. Eighty per cent of the Beefeaters at the Tower are discovered to be agents of the Communist International. A high level official at the Post Office admits brazenly to having embezzled postal orders to the tune of 5,000,000 pounds, and also to having committed lese majeste by drawing moustaches on postage stamps. Lord Nuffield ["the English Henry Ford"], after a 7-hour interrogation by Mr. Norman Birkett [who would become a lawyer at Nuremberg 7 years later], confesses that ever since 1920 he has been fomenting strikes in his own factories. Casual half-inch paras in every issue of the newspapers announce that fifty more Churchillite sheep-stealers have been shot in Westmoreland. And meanwhile the Churchillites never cease from proclaiming that it is they who are the real defenders of Capitalism and that it is the government that is no more than a set of Bolsheviks in disguise.'

Anyone who has followed the Russian trials knows that this is scarcely a parody. From our point of view, the whole thing is not merely incredible as a genuine conspiracy, it is next door to incredible as a frame-up. It is simply a dark mystery, of which the only seizable fact - sinister enough in its way - is that Communists over here regard it as a good advertisement for Communism.

Faced with Tascón's expulsion, what would Orwell think? In terms of violence, chavismo is surely far from the blood-soaked extremes of Stalinist paranoia. But in discursive terms, it's really not that far.

Every week seems to bring a new low in the Bolivarian republic, yet the govering clique limps along somehow. Each week's lunacy serves only to set a kind of "personal best" - a challenge to be out-lunaticked the following week. The discursive standards of the chavista governing elite get more and more detached from reality but, so far, the group's managed not to implode.

I'm amazed, awed even, by its neverending capacity to plumb new depths, to outdo itself for shrill craziness again and again, to keep surprising us even this late on in the game.

I sense that this can't go on much longer...but then, I've sensed at for a long time, and they keep proving me wrong.

Update: One of my better connected readers puts this befuddling possibility in my email. It may or may not be true: if anyone knows more, please share.

Here's a weird 'fact' (insofar as anything that comes via indirect sources can be regarded as a 'fact'): Jose David Cabello is not part of the Cabello clan ... apparently the two brothers, whose kleptomania and physical resemblance - not to mention their close family ties - suggest that they are as alike as peas in a pod, belong to a different power group. In fact, Jose David's recent appointment to replace Jose G Vielma Mora is the reverse of what most of us had thought ... because it's Vielma not Cabello who belongs to Diosdado's group. And this may be one reason for his mysterious ouster. All very strange.

I am not taking my hand off of this hot stove until you say uncle!

Quico says: So, for the Nth time, Chávez has threatened to stop selling oil to the US. This was a non-story the last time it came around, and it's a non-story now. But since - like the magnicide canard - it seems sure to keep coming up, I thought I might explain precisely why it's a non-story.

At the moment, Venezuela's main trade relationship is with the US. We send them oil. They send us dollars. They really depend on our oil. But we depend on their dollars much more than they depend on our oil.


Chávez says he's ready to break this relationship. But if he does, what the heck is he gonna do with all that oil we're selling them now?

One thing's for sure, he can't get by without a replacement buyer: his government's stability depends on the revenue those sales generate.

Thankfully, in today's world there's never a shortage of oil buyers. So, lets say, he sells it to China.

There's just one problem: it's not like nobody sells oil to China now! These days China gets its oil, basically, from the Persian Gulf. That market is spoken for. To get into the Chinese market, Chávez would have to elbow the Arabs out of his way.


Lets say, hypothetically, he manages to do that. (And this's really hypothetical, because there aren't any refineries to process Venezuelan crude in China...but just for illustrative purposes.) Next thing you know...


The Gulf producers realize, "shit, we don't have a buyer for all that oil we used to ship to China!"

What to do? What to do?

Soon enough, the Gulf producers would go "Ah ha! Turns out that there's one big fat consumer out there that's suddenly facing a shortfall just as we're looking for a buyer for all our excess production!"

Lucky break, huh?

So they just move into the market that we've vacated!

And, in the end, all you've done is go from this:

To this:


When all is said and done, nothing's really changed. The US would be getting the exact same amount of oil as before, and Venezuela would be selling the exact same amount of oil as before. Same for China and the Gulf producers. Oil musical chairs.

Granted: in the short run, the adjustment would cause a great deal of disruption. That's why Chávez's threat still manages to spook the oil market to some extent. But everyone can see it's not a very credible threat because the disruption to the US would pale in comparison to the sheer chaos Venezuela would face during the adjustment period, when we wouldn't be able to sell our extra-heavy crude to anyone.

Very expensive new refineries would have to be built in China to process Venezuelan crude. What's more, PDVSA's refineries in the US would become practically worthless, because it would probably be cheaper to restart from scratch than to adapt them to process Gulf crudes.

Which, when you think about it, is deliciously ironic: Chávez is protesting the PDVSA asset freeze by threatening a policy that would make those assets worthless!

True, oil would have to be shipped longer distances to reach both the US and China, but all that means is that the real beneficiaries here would be, weirdly enough, South Korean companies like Hyundai that dominate the tanker shipbuilding business, alongside firms that operate tanker fleets. Consumers would pay a bit more for oil, producers would get a bit less for it, and the difference would go to the shippers. Oil socialism indeed.

The basic point here is that oil is a fungible commodity: its price is set in a global market, so it's sensitive to the total worldwide supply and demand levels, not to supply and demand in any particular bilateral relationship.

To grasp why, imagine what would happen if Venezuela switched its production from the US market to the Chinese market and the Gulf producers didn't respond by switching a corresponding amount of their output to the US. Suddenly, oil would be relatively more scarce in the US than in China. Oil prices would rise in the US at the same time they're falling in China.

But, at that point, any marginally awake oil trader (and oil traders, in general, are far more than marginally awake) would realize he faced a massive arbitrage opportunity. He could make a riskless profit by buying oil at the Chinese price and re-exporting it to the US for the higher price there. And traders would continue to do that until the prices equalize. Given today's electronic commodity marketplace, this process would run its course in a matter of seconds.

It's called the Law of One Price, y no perdona.

The only way Chávez can affect the global oil market in the long run is by reducing the overall supply level. He'd have to refuse to sell oil not just to the US but to anyone at all. But Chávez needs to sell his oil far more urgently than the US needs to buy it. So everyone can see it's an empty threat: like threatening to stain somebody's freshly whitewashed wall by shooting yourself in the head next to it.

Or, as Edo puts it:

¿Qué pasaría en Venezuela si no existiera Globovisión?

Quico says: Nobody who reads this blog regularly could mistake us for fans of Globovisión, Venezuela's 24-hour opposition news station.

For years Katy and I have been taking potshots at Globo's frequently amateurish and breathlessly partisan reporting, at its role in keeping oppo supporters cooped up in a claustrophobic little bubble of know-nothing anti-Chávez fundamentalism, its inability to reach out to NiNis and its general tendency to play into Chávez's polarization strategy.

It's straightforward: Globo sucks. In many ways, the government has a lot to be grateful for: a more effective counter-propaganda arm would have made its life much more difficult than Globo has.

Which is why I'd always assumed chavismo would just let Globo do its thing: Venezuela's swing demographic (low-income, politically uncommitted people) don't watch Globo, and if they did, they'd probably go running straight back into the chavista fold.

Anyway, the point is moot: Globo only broadcasts free-to-air in Caracas and Valencia these days. For most Venezuelans, the station's already off the air. Why would the government tarnish its democratic credentials even further by shutting Globo down for good?

Five words: Ud. lo vio por Globovision - the station's deadly 30-second agitprop spots.

Set to music, with no commentary, You saw it on Globovision spots are short, sharp and devastating. A kind of Greatest Hits of the craziest, most degenerate and demonstrably false things Chávez and his cronies have said, they're like communicational hand grenades lobbed straight at the heart of chavismo's discursive authoritarianism.

Lets look at a few.

In this one, Globo recalls Chávez's charming recent boast about his coca-paste based breakfast routine:



Here, Chávez blatantly distorts TV audience numbers:



In this one Iris Varela flat out denies the existence of any videos showing people shooting from motorbikes inside UCV ahead of last year's referendum - except Globo has the videos.



And here Chávez swears "on his mother" that he will never back FARC over and against the democratically elected government of Colombia:



You can see plenty more on YouTube: here, here, here, and (my favorite) here.

Personally, I think these spots are brilliant. Usted lo vio por Globovisión points a camera straight into the dark heart of chavista intellectual bankruptcy. It's compelling viewing.

Insofar as government-friendly intellectuals try to articulate a reasoned critique of Ud. lo vio - and, frankly, that isn't very far - they focus on the way the clips decontextualize the information they present. But that's exactly backward. Context - additional information that makes an initial message more meaningful - is what these clips are all about.

It is in the context of his earlier promise (por mi madre) never to back the guerrilla that Chávez's recent U-Turn becomes fully meaningful. It is in the context of the photographic evidence of motorcycle gunmen at the UCV campus that Iris Varela's flat denial morphs from a claim that may or may not be true into clear evidence of a whopper. You want context? These clips are chock full of context!

But this kind of calm, collected critique is the exception. For the most part, the clips make doctrinaire chavistas really, really mad. As in ranting-and-raving furious. At times, the rants that result get breathtakingly silly. Take José Acosta over at Aporrea who - without a hint of irony - launches an angry tirade against Globovisión for giving the impression that Chávez uses drugs by...showing a video of Chávez bragging about using drugs! (This stuff has been brilliantly satirized by Laureano Márquez.)

Acosta's essay then dissolves into the standard chavista conspiracy theory about the State Department, the CIA and something he calls "the Jewish Mossad." Charming.

In the end, what makes these people mad is that Ud. lo vio torpedoes Chávez's ultimate power fantasy: his deranged will to set reality by decree.

It's their role in resisting the imposition of a docile, partisan truth that gives these clips their unique power. They're our last line of defense, our final recourse against the total deformation of our public sphere. No other format could make the point as powerfully.

"NO!" the clips shout, "reality is not made of plasticine! You cannot bend it to your will or set it by decree! Eurasia has not always been at war with Eastasia! We can prove it, damn it!"

Ud. lo vio por Globovision may be the last vestige of political democracy that still operates in Venezuela. In a normal democracy, politicians face a series of incentives to avoid saying things that are crazy, or brazenly contradictory, or easily-demonstrably false. Questions get raised in parliament. Pundits go to town on you. Your prestige and credibility suffer. If your fuck up happens to be against the law, you even face jail.

In Venezuela, these sanctions have withered into nothingness: either worn down by the chavista onslaught or idiotically surrendered by the abstentionist opposition Globovision did so much to engender. It doesn't matter how nutty their discourse gets, Chavez and his cronies face almost no consequence. Only the chance of earning a spot on the Ud. lo vio Gallery of Rogues acts to constrain them by now.

These clips are the last, weakly social sanction against the total debasement of our public life we have left. It really ain't much, but it's all we've got. Seeing the way chavismo has been gradually turning up the rhetorical heat on Globo, it's hard to know for how much longer.

Selecting for halabolivarianismo

Quico says: So Chávez went out to Santa Bárbara de Barinas to tour one of his revolutionary co-ops. At one point, some of the actual co-op workers got close enough to complain about how badly the project was going, making for one of those enthralling moments when reality manages to pierce through the layers of security and ideological insulation Chávez has so carefully built around himself.

To Chávez, bad news like this are an intolerable impertinence: baffling evidence that reality can't always be badgered into ideological conformity.

Try as he might to insulate himself, these episodes keep happening. And Chávez keeps looking baffled and genuinely hurt by them. How could this go on? His instinct is to look for a culprit. Some traitor must have infiltrated this project and sabotaged it. Root the traitors out, and these baffling anomalies will cease.

Except they don't cease, and each reshuffle seems to make things that little bit worse.

The reason?

Two words: adverse selection.

Chávez doesn't know it, but his obsession with loyalty weeds out the honest and selects for halabolivarianos.

It's a process fueled by his narcissism. As Jimmy Carter told Gustavo Cisneros, if there's one thing Chavez can't stand is to be contradicted: avoid doing that, and you can pretty much keep him on your good side. Problem is, if Jimmy Carter knows that, then everyone in the chavista elite knows it too...and the less scrupulous you are, the more likely you are to exploit it for personal gain.

How does this work? Well, once upon a time, quite a few honest, competent people backed Chávez. Alongside them, of course, were more than a few crooks and opportunists.

Of course, ex ante, there's no way to tell who's a C and who's an H (that's the information asymmetry here).

Along comes Chávez and says something fantastically controversial. He calls for the country's name to be changed, say, or demands a sprawling Enabling Law.

As is natural, some of his supporters will agree with him and some will disagree. Honest chavistas who honestly disagree will do the honest thing and express that disagreement. But the crooks and opportunists, being crooks and opportunists, will not. Angling to stay on his good side, they'll express agreement whether it's genuine or not:



But Chávez sees dissent as pure disloyalty, and disloyalty is the one fault he is not prepared to overlook. So he purges everyone who expresses dissent, and ends up with...

...an elite with more and more Cs and fewer and fewer Hs.

Then, some other issue comes up. Pick your controversy. Again the elite is divided:

Again, the crooks voice support for el Comandante. If the issue is central enough, the honest folk will put their heads above the parapet even knowing that it could cost them their ticket to the chavista inner circle (c.f. Baduel ahead of the constitutional referendum.)


The point, of course, is that when you make absolute loyalty your basic selection criteria, you provide huge incentives to fake absolute loyalty. And only the truly morally repugnant can fake it consistently for a decade or more.

Crooks and opportunists in every corner of Venezuela long ago realized that there's nothing easier than jumping on the bolivarian gravy train: you just have to suck up to the guy all the time. Narcissists are, after all, touchingly predictable creatures. In a strange way, Chávez is dead easy to manipulate.

It can surprise no one that, in time, we ended up with the governing elite we got:

A sea of crooks, with a couple of extremists thrown into the mix: people who actively favor authoritarianism and take perverse pride in their willingness to turf out their judgment to the big man unconditionally. But I think the true zealots are the exception. The bulk? Halabolivarianos...

And this explains Chávez's perplexity when cold, hard reality somehow breaks past the cordon and meets him face to face: he can't for the life of him figure out why things don't go as planned. As far as he's concerned, he's already thrown out the bad apples. Hell, he's spent the last nine years vigilantly looking for any sign of disloyalty and nipping it in the bud: as far as he can see, there's no reason why the government shouldn't work with Prussian efficiency by now.

Here, the paranoid side of the Narcissist mind kicks in. Narcissists are convinced they have special powers and abilities, that they are uniquely gifted and good. When things go wrong, a narcissist won't even consider looking in the mirror for a culprit. Instead, they look around them, sure that some kind of conspiracy is afoot to thwart them. If only their will had been carried out, they reason, things would have gone well. Only disloyalty can explain failure. The scale of a narcissist's self-regard is the measure of the conspiracy he figures must have been in place to thwart him.

This is the dead end Chávez has reached. The people who might have been able to sit him down for a stern talk about this stuff got purged years ago. His advisors, these days, are people he selected mainly for their willingness to feed his ego come hell or high water. He intuits some of them must be betraying him, but how to figure out who? You can spy on them more, but what if the spies are the conspirators? When nobody around you will tell you the truth, isn't the reasonable response to trust no one?

It's a spiral. And it's really driven Chávez to extremes of paranoia that more and more transcend the bizarre and bleed over into psychiatric territory. The harder Chávez tries to root out the "fifth columns" all around him, the more he locks in the circle of amoral sycophants craven enough to lie to him all the time, alongside a dwindling cohort of extremists who just refuse to disagree no matter how plain his lunacy becomes.

It's no wonder we're governed by crooks and kooks: nobody with a conscience could withstand the selection system Chávez has instituted without going mad.

This can't last, it's too stupid...

Quico says: Everybody talks about how crazy Mario Silva is. Not living in Venezuela, I don't much watch Chávez's favorite TV talk show host. This clip, out of Noticias 24, settles it pretty much once and for all, though. The guy is batshit insane. De manicomio.



This can't last. It's too stupid...

Silence is golden, words are made of lead

Quico says: You can always tell when a news story genuinely catches the chavista propaganda machine unprepared. Terrified of publishing anything that may, in retrospect, turn out to have been "off message", the state media just seizes up completely and waits for the boss to tell them how the tale is to be told.

So, 18 hours after ExxonMobil went nuclear by freezing PDVSA's assets abroad, check out what's making the "front pages" of the government's main propaganda arms:








It's pretty remarkable. If you got your news exclusively from chavista sources, you still wouldn't know anything in particular happened.

There's a heavy stench of panic hanging over this latest chavista media blackout, a deer-in-the-headlights quality to it, a deep, deep pathos...

Update: Ernesto Villegas did run with it on VTV this morning.

All your refinery are belong to us

Quico says: Exxon Mobil has obtained a series of court orders freezing up to $36 billion (no, that's not a typo) worth of PDVSA assets in the US, UK, Netherlands and Dutch Antilles, pending arbitration over the seizure of their assets in the Orinoco Belt upgrading projects.

Guess Chávez should've sold off all those foreign assets before randomly stealing Exxon's stuff. Ooops.

Big story. Big consequences. Stay tuned.

Update: It turns out that was a typo. This Reuter's article clarifies that the maximum sum that could be frozen world wide by the three concurrent court orders is $12 billion.

This Bloomberg piece provides lots of interesting detail:

The U.S. freeze is less than 3 percent the size of the U.K. and Netherlands orders because Exxon Mobil reckoned it would be more difficult to obtain a freeze on PDVSA's U.S. refineries and filling stations without first winning at trial. In the meantime, PDVSA probably would sell the plants, Exxon Mobil's U.K. lawyer said.

The asset freezes will damage PDVSA's ability to raise funds from international investors for drilling and refinery projects, said Asdrúbal Oliveros, chief economist at Caracas-based Ecoanalitica. He estimated PDVSA has $13 billion in ``liquid'' international assets.

``This is going to put a lot of pressure on country risk, and on the price of the company's bonds in the international market,'' Oliveros said. ``Loaning money to a company that's in this kind of dispute, and also is facing this kind of injunction, is going to be very delicate.''

Reuters also tries to assess just how screwed PDVSA is now.

Dial C for conscience

Katy says: Last night I went to see a grown-up movie for the first time in months, and it was a great one. Michael Clayton is a superior Hollywood story about greedy, ruthless corporate lawyers and the chaos that ensues when a few of them actually develop a conscience.

The movie got me thinking about conscience, something we seldom see in the public sphere.

I've been emailing back and forth with loyal reader Kepler about the fact that, more than two months after the December 2nd Referendum, the CNE has not yet released updated results. All we have so far are the results from the 1st Bulletin and a 2nd Bulletin that has no results and, literally, does not add up.

To be quite honest, this has not been on my radar screen, and I wasn't much interested in revisiting this topic. We won the referendum, the government accepted it, and that's what's important. End of story ... or is it?

Kepler and all his fellow skeptics have a point - something about this smells fishy. The eerie silence that has followed the first bulletin has been met with a passive shrug of the shoulders by most of the opposition - parties and students alike. It seems like Súmate, ESDATA and a few other opposition groups and individuals are the only ones asking the obvious questions, questions like "how many votes did the opposition get?" or "how high was abstention?".

I asked some of my contacts in opposition parties about this to get their side of the story. The response I got disturbed me.

Their answer was that some people in the opposition believe final results will never be revealed. They think that the actual margin of victory was smaller than what the CNE is currently reporting, and therefore they are not too worried about the CNE finishing the count. They suggest we all turn the page and let sleeping dogs lie.

It goes without saying that this was not the answer I was looking for. In my response, I listed the many reasons why this was a bone-headed idea. I talked about how important it was that people now believed in the vote, and that this could be compromised by the CNE's reluctance to do their job and by the political parties' and the students' indifference.

I told the people I spoke to that they had the chance to position themselves with this issue. By not keeping quiet and puting this issue on the table again, they could claim a stake in a different position from the rest of the crowded opposition field. I mentioned how this could be a way of getting back some of the radical skeptics without alienating the median voters they are clearly gearing for. I highlighted the importance of voters overseas, and how they need to know that their vote will always count.

My long email was a laundry list of reasons why I thought pressing on would be convenient. Yet after coming down from my soapbox, I realized what I forgot to mention: that pressing on with this issue is important because it is the right thing to do.

Too many times we find ourselves thinking in terms of costs and benefits, of what we gain and what we lose. Yet it is much easier to live by the Golden Rule.

With political power comes responsability. Millions of Venezuelans decided to trust opposition groups and vote because they believed that they would defend their vote all the way. And while they did a decent job and we won the referendum - something that should not be forgotten - capitulating now, before all the votes have been counted, is a betrayal of that trust. You can argue it is a minor one, but it's a betrayal nonetheless, and an unnecessary one at that.

Perhaps they are thinking that, if they press the CNE further with this issue, they would highlight their incompetence, and the electoral conditions we now have - a clear improvement over what we had in previous elections - could be lost. Perhaps they think pressing the CNE could endanger the regional elections and that communication channels could be cut off. In short, perhaps they don't want to piss off Tibisay Lucena.

There comes a time when all these issues have to be put aside. We must learn to differentiate the personal from the work in public life, and make the case that the Lucena et al. have to finish what they started, without regards for the consequences and without this being offensive to anyone.

Not doing so hurts our credibility with the CNE as well. Ultimately, if the CNE sees that we are willing to compromise on our stances, it will try and get us to compromise on bigger, more important things.

I gave my connections a mouthful with all of this, and at least they read it and said they would consider my opinion. I honestly hope they do, not because they will lose my trust if they don't, but because this is a great opportunity to show they actually listen to their conscience. Let's hope they don't pass it up.

Yes, but what does the Chávez era feel like?

Quico says: If you live in Venezuela or follow it closely, you probably won't learn anything new from Andrés Martínez's snarky little "My Summer Vacation" piece over at Slate.com. Still, you should read it...the guy's a wonderful, idiosyncratic writer, and his article manages to convey the weirdly unhinged feel of Caracas in the Chávez era better than almost anything else I've read in English.

A taste:

Go to China or Vietnam, and you see a pre-existing Communist state paying lip service to its old Marxist orthodoxy as it embraces consumerist modernity. But the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez is a real oddity—a fantasyland that isn't in on the joke, that doesn't seem to realize those tired socialistic slogans are nothing more than retro kitsch. Even the thousands of Cuban advisers who come to Venezuela must know this, but they still gladly come to proselytize, especially since it gives them a chance to drink Coca-Cola and eat at McDonald's. There is a rich future for a Latin American left, I am sure, and it will take many forms, but one reason Chávez has gotten as far as he has is that his project is so crudely passé and unsubtle, it is hard to take seriously.

Read the whole thing.

Chávez's 4F Semiotic Mindfuck

Quico says: No, the two arm bands aren't quite identical. Still, exactly what message was Chávez trying to send by wearing this armband on the day he announced that Venezuela's border to the west is with FARC?

If he recognizes FARC as "being in a state of war with Colombia" (which, after all, is what "beligerent" means) and then allies himself politically and symbolically with FARC, what state does that leave Venezuela and Colombia in? Crazy stuff.

My Coup's Super Sweet 16

Quico says: The anniversaries come thick-and-fast around this time of year. Sixteen years ago today, an even younger, skinnier Lieutenant Colonel showcased his commitment to Democracy by trying to shoot dead the elected President of the Republic. Today, as the world pauses to protest FARC's brutality, Hugo Chávez will be busy celebrating his own.

February 4th is always an auspicious time to leaf through the decrees Chávez had drafted ahead of his putsch. Highlights include plans to dissolve the Supreme Court as well as every popularly elected assembly and office in the country, from Parish Councils and mayors on up. Preciously, they also planned to crack down on corruption and drug trafficking.

Prohibido olvidar and all that.

Documenting it: Chavez, FARC and the coke trade

Quico says: Last month, Spain's El País caused a stir with this bombshell of an article on the collusion between FARC and the Venezuelan government. The journo, John Carlin, gets major props for digging up the story in detail even before Chávez took his support for FARC public.

Today, The Observer* publishes a revised version of Carlin's story. If anything, this English version is even stronger: better edited, clearer and even more hard hitting. It makes for a devastating indictment of Venezuela's creeping metamorphosis into a narco-state. Some key grafs:

The varied testimonies I have heard reveal that the co-operation between Venezuela and the guerrillas in transporting cocaine by land, air and sea is both extensive and systematic. Venezuela is also supplying arms to the guerrillas, offering them the protection of their armed forces in the field, and providing them with legal immunity de facto as they go about their giant illegal business.

Thirty per cent of the 600 tons of cocaine smuggled from Colombia each year goes through Venezuela. Most of that 30 per cent ends up in Europe, with Spain and Portugal being the principal ports of entry. The drug's value on European streets is some £7.5bn a year.

The infrastructure that Venezuela provides for the cocaine business has expanded dramatically over the past five years of Chávez's presidency, according to intelligence sources. Chávez's decision to expel the US Drug Enforcement Administration from his country in 2005 was celebrated both by Farc and drug lords in the conventional cartels with whom they sometimes work. According to Luis Hernando Gómez Bustamante, a Colombian kingpin caught by the police last February, 'Venezuela is the temple of drug trafficking.'

Sobering stuff. You really can't afford not to read the whole thing.

* for reasons I could never quite fathom, English newspapers are run by a separate editorial staff on Sundays, and publish under a different name. The Observer is basically The Guardian in its Sunday best.

Time flies when you're being opressed

Katy says: It's hard to fathom, but today marks the 9th anniversary of the Chávez Era. Nine years ago today Rafael Caldera (still alive!) bestowed the Presidential sash on a young, energetic, skinny president-elect who swore on the "moribund" Constitution to refound the republic and put us all on a path to progress.

It's easy to forget how hopeful we all were back then, how we secretly hoped his government would be a change for the better. Mind you, I never believed in Chávez, nor did I vote for him, but since things couldn't get much worse, for a milliseconds or two I harbored the secret hope that things would actually get better. Watching Chávez entrance crowds with his rhetoric, we could see the stirring of something different. We didn't know what it was going to be, but we sure could sense it wasn't going to be business-as-usual.

A lot has changed since then. The youthful Chávez you see in the pictures has been replaced by a Fat Man in a Palace. The man is older, crankiner, nuttier, fatter, and almost never seen in the kind of conservative suits that he once used to wear. Marisabel Rodríguez divorced from him, both in the legal and the political sense, and it's been a while since the shoulder pads she is seen wearing were in fashion.

Nine years ago...

1. The coast of Vargas looked a lot different.
2. The words "squalid", "oligarch", "Zamora", "Cadivi", "Carmona", "11 de Abril", "espionar", "misiones", "supra-constitutional" and "endógena" were not part of our everyday lexicon.
3. Chávez was a media darling, with all the private channels competing to have him in their interview programs.
4. The horse on the Presidential stash was moving someplace else.
5. The highway heading East from Caracas was named after Rómulo Betancourt, the ships sending our oil to the US were named after hot girls.
   
6. Y2K was an upcoming catastrophe we weren't going to be ready for.
7. US policy toward Venezuela was "watch what he does, not what he says."
8. Cecilia Sosa ran something called the Supreme Court.
9. Carlos Andrés Pérez had recently been elected a Senator for Táchira.
10. Hermann Escarrá was considered a heavyweight chavista intellectual and the hot gossip in Caracas was about which ministerial post Alfredo Peña would get.
    
11. José Vicente Rangel made a living convincing people to buy his wife's statues.
    
12. Francisco Arias Cárdenas was a chavista (oh, wait...never mind).
13. The press kept talking about how the Viaducto to Vargas could collapse in the near future.
14. Inflation and crime were some of our top concerns.
15. George W. Bush was the Governor of Texas, Barack Obama a state senator in Illinois.
16. Ingrid Betancourt was free.
17. RCTV was the most popular Venezuelan TV channel.

Nine years, folks...nine years...

Department of Abiding Irony

Quico says: Technically, the Comptrollership Committee (Comisión de Contraloría) is the National Assembly's key oversight body: parliament's corruption watchdog. Turns out that, of the 80+ people who draw a salary from the committee's payroll, perhaps 60 actually work there.

Les états unis n'ont pas eu lieu

Quico says: So there's this kid, Amar Bakshi, who somehow managed to persuade the Washington Post to send him all over the place to find out "how the world sees America." (Rest assured, I've already fired off the inevitable email complaining about gringo appropriation of the word.) Anyway, he's in Venezuela this week, writing up more or less what you'd expect, at least as far as chavistas are concerned.

I wrote him an email the other day with pretty much my standard rant about the way Chávez leverages anti-US rhetoric strategically as a mechanism of political control. Bush whacking is his one stop shop for political legitimation: it's where he goes to cast off blame for every single one of his failures at the same time he impugns dissident's patriotism. I think that's pretty much the consensus view by now, at least among the non-KoolAid drinking sections of the commentariat, and on a political level I think it accounts for 99% of the antigringoism we keep hearing.

I was going to leave it at that, but something was bugging me about my response. It's not that it isn't right...it's that, on a cultural level, it's not really enough. Why? Because it doesn't really answer the question. I mean, if the question is "how do Venezuelans see the US?" the only honest answer is: we don't.

I don't mean that we don't talk about the US. Heavens knows, with a guy like Chávez in power, hardly a day goes by without him banging on about it. What I mean is that the entity that goes by the name "USA" in Venezuelan political discourse (whether chavista or anti) has precious little in common with the actual chunk of territory between the Rio Grande and the 49th parallel or the people who live there. We talk about it, sure, but we don't really see it.

This is clearest, of course, in Chavista discourse, where what's passed off as "El Imperio" is a monstruous caricature, one so deliriously two-dimensional only a bona fide zealot could recognize it. For all intents and purposes, Chavez uses "the US" as a synonym for "pure evil."

What gets me is that it's a weirdly essentialist take. As far as chavista discourse is concerned, the US does bad things not in an attempt to advance some strategic goal, but merely to instantiate its inner nature. It's not that it does bad things, it's that it is bad...so bad, indeed, that whenever anything bad happens in Venezuela it is the presumptive culprit. There's something circular, almost tautological about this: when evil things happen, they are explained by the presence of evil.

It's this essentialism that accounts for chavista anti-Americanism's all encompassing nature, for its versatility, for its ability to convincingly (in the chavista mind) explain any and every bad thing that happens, whether it's a dengue outbreak, a milk shortage, or a bus drivers' strike.

As, I think, any marginally well informed person will realize, the disconnect between this Disney villain version of the US and the strategic and military calculations that underpin Washington's decisionmaking is pretty much total. But the opposition too tends to have wildly unrealistic views of the pulchritude of American institutions, the purity of its ideological commitment to democracy, the scale of its technological sophistication and the might of its armed forces.

In either case, the US as it exists in Venezuelan public discourse has really almost nothing in common with the US as it actually is. We talk about the US, but we don't see the US...instead we use it as a screen, a kind of cultural space we can use to fight out a symbolic strugggle over Venezuelan identity, our own little psychodrama about who we are and what we are and what makes us us rather than them.

So that's the first thing: it's crucial to get clear about what it is we're really talking about when we're talking about the US. For the most part, we let that label, "United States" stand in for a set of symbolic associations around which we're fighting a society wide battle for self definition. It's our own little tropical culture war.

Superficially, this is a battle between Capitalism and Socialism, but I think that doesn't really get you very far. What it's really about is about whether Venezuela does or does not belong within the cultural sphere of the Western rationalist tradition.

We equate this mysterious entity, "the US", with the whole philosophical tradition of enlightenment rationalism: the 18th century view of a calculating human agent able to leverage its capacity to reason calmly and instrumentally as a way of extending its dominion over nature. This is a view with an almost interminable set of consequences in areas as diverse as science, technology, capitalism, art, environmental management...the entire organization of social life, really.

The opposition tends to see instrumental rationality as the only road to any hafway plausible development strategy and so we champion it. The government sees it as a cover for dehumanizing exploitation and so it furiously condemns it. The US-as-it-actually-is really has nothing to do with it: this is our fight.

Trouble is, "instrumental rationality" is a really clunky, abstract concept. It gets no one's blood pumping. Only academics talk that way. To really get our juices flowing, we need to embody the idea, we need to ascribe that nexus of associations to a far more resonant object. We need to pour our associations into a more strongly branded vessel, if you like. Somehow, tacitly, we've agreed that "the US" will be that vessel.

When Venezuelans argue about "the US" we're basically just talking about ourselves. The fears chavistas express about a "US invasion" really have to be read laterally, almost psychoanalytically, as expressions of a deep, underlying rejection of the project of enlightenment rationalism, a visceral rejection of the coldly calculating view of human relations it seems to imply. Opposition hopes for deliverance from Chavez through US intervention really have to be read as expressions of hope that the superior power of reasoned thinking may be able to deliver us from an onslaught of obscurantism. The "real US" never enters into it.

Of course, Venezuelans are hardly unique in this respect. It strikes me that in "talking about Venezuela", gringos perform almost exactly the same operation, but in reverse. A left wing fringe projects its deep frustration with the current state of affairs in the US on the Venezuelan screen, seeing in it the promise of deliverance from everything they think is wrong with their own society. The right sees in Chávez's buffoonery the confirmation of their own deeply held beliefs about the lunacy of the left's take on the world. And the "debate" ends up using a version of "Venezuela" that's every bit as reductionist and removed from the real country as the version of "the US" we use in our debates.

Sometimes I wonder if any country ever actually manages to see across its own borders. Think back on the whole dadaist charade over France and "Freedom Fries": the actual France was entirely absent from a debate that was really by gringos, of gringos and for gringos. Look at the way Venezuelan public opinion has reacted to the current diplomatic crisis with Colombia, the way the Uribe-FARC split maps precisely onto the Chavismo-Opposition split. Or the way Russia looks at Britain, or China at Japan, or North Korea at the rest of the world and, well, you get the sense that all anybody is really interested in talking about is themselves, their own identities, their own position in whatever little symbolic battles they are invested in.

After all, it doesn't matter where you are: "abroad" is always an abstraction, and a uniquely useful abstraction at that. By definition, "abroad" is always far and always vague...far enough and vague enough to be assimilated into the categories of any national psychodrama.

"Abroad" is too tempting a target not to press into symbolic service: as sociologists have realized since Durkheim, any definition of who you are is, by implication, also a definition of who you are not...so much so that it's always tempting to try to define who you are through the expedient of ascribing the traits you reject to the outgroup and defining the ingroup in opposition to it.

In other words: Who are We? We are Not Them. And who are They? They are the opposite of Us.

Culturally speaking, that is the role US bashing plays in chavista discourse: it's a mechanism for establishing an identity. First, Chavez sets up a series of binary oppositions and then associates Us to one trait and Gringos to its opposite. Gringos are greedy, we are solidary. Gringos are aggressive, we are peace loving. Gringos are coldly calculating, we are socially sensitive. Gringos are capitalists, we are socialists. Gringos are bad, we are good.

As for the actual US? We just don't see it.

Misión Cadivi: The story that just keeps on giving...

Quico says: In yesterday's FT, Benedict Mander took a stab at explaining the weird tangle of distortions exchange controls have created. Killer fact:

According to Cadivi, from January to November last year, Venezuelans spent more than $4bn on credit cards abroad, compared with just over $1bn the year before. By contrast, Cadivi approved only $2.2bn for food importers...

Something to mull next time you're rushing around Caracas frantically looking for a kilo of caraotas...

Katy likes to say that there's a fine book just waiting to be written about all the nuttiness that Misión Cadivi is generating. I'm inclined to agree.

The only problem is, who would buy it?

My experience is that when I try to explain exchange control arbitrage to people in Europe, they just don't believe me. Something deep in the First World psyche rebels at the notion that you can fill out some forms and get permission to buy dollar bills for 30 cents a pop.

It really is unique, Planet Cadivi. I mean, plenty of Chávez policies are misguided or mismanaged, counterproductive, badly thought through or just plain silly...but how many are actually, literally crazy?

Annals of Accomodation Artistry

Quico says: Don't miss this eye-popping profile of Banco Occidental de Descuento head honcho and all around rancid oligarch Victor Vargas. It's out today in what is probably the most coveted bit of journalistic real estate in the United States: the Wall Street Journal's front page.

Your vote or your life

Quico says: Just recently, Javier Marías wrote this thought-provokingly quasi-reactionary little screed in The New Republic presenting a "defense" of democracy startling for its frank avowal of its shortcomings:

Few people would deny that, however imperfect, democracy is still the fairest, most acceptable and most reasonable system of government. Not so much because the voters always choose the right candidate (in fact they rarely do--one has only to look at the United States, Venezuela, Iran or, until very recently, Italy, where voters kept Silvio Berlusconi in high office for years), but because the citizenry as a whole is prepared to put up with the results, however crazy or pernicious they might seem.

The important thing about democracy is not who emerges from it as leader (remember, Hitler reached power via a combination of the ballot box and pacts made with other parties), but the fact that the population agrees that those chosen by the majority to govern will be allowed to govern without further argument. Those of us who are appalled by the majority decision will not attempt to foment rebellion; instead, we'll either go into exile or be patient and try to persuade the majority to vote differently next time.

Democracy guarantees only two things: that we renounce force as a way of gaining power and that we renounce force as a way of ousting a government, even if many people believe a government has acted wrongly or against the interests of the country. What it never guarantees--and this is something we should be quite clear about--are fair and honest leaders.

Words to ponder as we consider Chávez's increasingly repetitive, dark hints that, if he loses an upcoming election, "war" will ensue. Already last year he'd mused publicly about how much he'd relish taking up guns and fighting his way back into power from the hills.

It's an attitude that pretty much sums up the guy's view of "alternability": you can alternate between voting for me and fighting me.

What strikes me is the way Chávez manages, with this kind of rhetoric, to wipe out even the barest, most cynically stripped down defense of his government's democratic credentials. Even if you jettison all the pretty talk about popular sovereignty, even if you bracket the entire Western philosophical tradition on equality and human dignity and you follow Marías into a wholly cynical defense of democracy as simply a mechanism for the prevention of civil wars, you can no longer describe Chávez's government as democratic.

"Do as I say or face my violence," is his (now explicit) message. It's the kidnapper's logic, pure and simple. Is it any wonder the guy can't quite grasp why everyone's so upset about FARC's tactics?

The slippery slope

Katy says: It's always a challenge to write about Venezuela from abroad. Much of what happens in the country depends on moods: the mood of the government, the press, the opposition, the voters, and obviously tapping into them is more difficult when you're not there.

However, I get the feeling that the government is slowly entering into panic mode. Increasingly, the tone I get - from the scandals, from what bureaucrats are saying in public, from what chavista talking heads say on the air - is that the revolution is in trouble, perhaps more trouble than we on the other side acknowledge.

Repeated defeats at the hand of chavismo have taught us not to have high expectations. But it's hard to shake the sense that chavistas are on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Take, for instance, the case of former Finance Minister Tobías Nóbrega. Yesterday the Prosecutor general's office, in an unprecedented move, indicted Nóbrega on some pretty serious accounts. These include paying millions of dollars above budget for hospital renovations and the construction of a market in a poor area, projects that were never completed.

Nóbrega's slimy dealings have been the talk of the town for many years now. What is surprising is that chavismo is willing to open up this can of worms at this particular juncture. There are a lot of important people in the government involved with Nóbrega and in similar schemes (Antonini, anyone?), so this could ignite a turf war that could cause serious damage to chavismo. Can more scandals be on the way? You bet.

Take the fresh new scandal involving Maracaibo mayor Giancarlo DiMartino (PSUV). A video posted on YouTube allegedly shows DiMartino supplying Colombian guerrillas with food and other basic stuffs inside Venezuelan territory.

Whether or not the video is a montage is not clear. However, the Colombian government - all the way up to President Uribe - is taking this very seriously.

I have no doubt that chavismo's knee-jerk reaction will be to blame the opposition or the CIA for this. The underlying story, though, is more likely related to the rivalry between DiMartino and former Finance minister Rodrigo Cabezas. The latter has always wanted to be Governor of Zulia, and effectively resigned from the Cabinet in order to run. However, the mayor - who is popular with independents and moderate chavistas - has hinted at running for years now. This has the look of a smear operation guided from inside chavismo itself.

Chavista heavyweights have been sounding downright panicky as of late. Yesterday, for example, Caracas Mayor Juan Barreto admitted the revolution was "stuck". He even went on to praise the opposition, which he claimed was showing itself as "wide" and "diverse" and willing to put "fresh voices" center stage, whereas chavismo was looking "tired", "sectarian", "uniformed" and "bureaucratic."

This has been echoed in other quarters. Every day, I get in my Inbox the transcripts of the main chavista opinion programs, and some of the things they have been saying are really surprising. Two days ago, on the VTV program "Dando y Dando ("Give-and-take"), Ministers and former Ministers talked about how the government's aggressive stance toward private industry was coming back to bite them, and how it was in part causing scarcity. They were extremely critical of Mercal and the Mercalitos, which are showing serious signs of breakdown. They went on to say that chavismo had to go back to its popular roots because it had lost touch with people's problems.

These developments would have been unthinkable two months ago. The monolithic essence of chavismo and its unreflexive triumphalism were shattered December 2nd, and it's not clear what it's being replaced with. It's extremely unlikely that chavismo can adapt and become a modern, effective, pluralistic, moderate movement. The pile-on of problems and scandals is starting to look like an increasingly slippery slope for the government, and the polls are starting to show it. Trouble is, with a looming world recession in the horizon, it's not clear they will have the means to recover.

Opposition agrees on...

Katy says: Today the opposition to Chavez signed an agreement on 10 points for the future of the country. The 10 points they committed to are:

1. Rescuing public institutions and respecting their autonomy
2. Respect for ideological plurality
3. Descentralization
4. Security, the defense of human life and the end to impunity
5. Respect for private property
6. Fighting against poverty
7. Education without ideology, respect of the freedom to teach and autonomy in universities
8. Foreign policy based on solidarity with neighboring countries and a return to the Andean Community
9. Institutionalization of the Armed Forces
10. Unity to reach changes

Here are my first takes on this:
a) Everything seems awfully vague, so its long-term effects - aside from the effect it may have on public opinion - may not be important.
b) Who was the genius that thought that the first word in the agreement should be "rescue"? Probably some adeco.
c) Weird that the Andean Community is mentioned, weird that solidarity with neighboring countries should be in there given that people are fed up with Presidential "gifts". Perhaps they meant solidarity with Uribe.
d) Where's their oil policy?

Anyway, it is what it is. Not much else in there to quibble about.

Post-Referendum Blues

Quico says: How big a hit did Chávez's popularity take after his referendum defeat last year? According to Datos, by the third week in December just 30% of Venezuelans were expressing confidence in Chávez personally, and a paltry 21% still had confidence in the government. That's just dismal. We haven't seen numbers like these since the height of the hyper-polarization period in 2002 and 2003.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa thinks he knows why that is: the misiones have basically fallen apart.

If this keeps up, OD will be shooting at an open goal in October. Can they miss?

AD/OD

Quico says: I'm on record complaining bitterly about the fragmentation of Venezuela's opposition into more and more tiny and ineffective parties. But recently, I've been wondering how new this structure really is...and to what extent can we think of these little parties as real parties?

It was this story that got me thinking: a spokesman for MAS, one of the parties that has been most comprehensively splintered into insignificance, just announced it wants to negotiate "unity candidates" with the other oppo parties ahead of October's state and local elections.

Hardly earth shattering stuff. Pretty much everyone in the oppo galaxy grasps the arithmetic realities of first-past-the-post elections: it's coalesce or perish. This is not controversial.

But if MAS, Causa R, Primero Justicia, UNT and the others recognize that they will have to put forward a single candidate in most places, in what sense are they really separate parties anymore?

After all, agreeing on a single candidate to represent you in elections is pretty much the defining trait of a political party. That's what parties are for! From the moment all agree to nominate a single "unity candidates" per district, don't they become, de facto, one big meta-party? And, at that point, doesn't each of the "little parties" come to look more like an internal faction within that larger, unacknowledged party?

For the sake of clarity, I think we should give this phantom party a name. I propose "Oposición Democrática". Its internal organization is tacit, yes, and remarkably fluid, (a euphemism, perhaps, for "chaotic".) Its most striking characteristic is factionalism: OD's faction leaders seem to spend nearly as much time trying to outmaneuver one another as they spend fighting the government.

For those leaders, jockeying for internal position is an engrossing blood sport. Anything goes, albeit with one important proviso: when the dust settles, only one odeco gets to be nominated in any one district.

The obsession with internal jockeying is no accident. When it comes right down to it, everyone knows it'll be the OD faction bosses who will decide the unity candidate in any given district. At the end of the day, the backroom horse-trading session that will make or break younger politicos' careers is one only OD faction-heads get to attend.

And so, an aspiring politico's career prospects depend entirely on finding a powerful cacique to fight their corners at that meeting. And a cacique's willingness to fight hard for a given protegé depends on a calculation about how useful the protegé is likely to be to him in the neverending factional fight within OD.

Unless you're clinically brain dead, you catch my drift by now. In many ways, the structure of the current opposition ressembles nothing so much as the heavily factionalized Acción Democrática in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The only difference is that, these days, instead of calling them factions we call them parties. We no longer call the forum where caciques argue the CEN, but we fully realize that it's in that setting that ultimate decisions are made. And we don't have disciplinary tribunals to enforce loyalty to the broader party because we've finally gotten honest enough to accept loyalties are focused on patrons, not on the Oposición Democrática.

The incentives pushing politicos to concentrate on strengthening their clientelistic bonds with patrons hasn't changed one bit. And just as in the era of the AD factions, the current opposition spends so much time obsessing about its relative strength within OD it seems to have totally lost sight of the public. Jockeying for position inside OD is a full time job: it leaves no time for extra-curriculars like articulating a vision for the future that resonates with voters' concerns and wins them over to our side.

The more I think about it, the more I think the virulent anti-party mood in much of the opposition base has to do with this. People intuit the isomorphism between AD and OD. The government exploits that intuition ruthlessly. And oppo politicians are so deeply immersed in the world of OD factional jockeying, they scarcely realize they are repeating the mistakes that destroyed AD in the first place.

Update: As if to confirm my thesis, Copei has just announced that OD will sign an agreement to present a single slate of candidates in October. Note that even to "announce unity" one of the factions gets out ahead of the curve, making the announcement on its own! Happy 23 de enero, everyone...

Confessions of a Militant Heisigista

[Quico warns: I don't usually allow this blog to stray too far from its core subject - Venezuelan politics - but every so often I do indulge one of my subsidiary obsessions. Today, it's Japanese study. If your computer doesn't have a Japanese character set installed, much of the punchline will be garbled - sorry in advance.]

So, I made a New Year's Resolution: this year, I will learn the meaning and writing of all 1945 "general use kanji" - the basic Chinese characters needed for high school level literacy in Japanese.

During my entire first year of Japanese study I avoided the Kanji like the plague. But I realize shooting for illiteracy is no way to learn a language, so this year I'm honkering down and working on the writing system.

Learning the Kanji is easily the scariest part about learning Japanese. For a westerner, there's something deeply alienating about staring at a page of Kanji: a wall of senseless little squiggles that all look pretty much the same. To my eyes, their very look on the page epitomizes foreignness.

You instinctively feel it's impossible to get to grips with kanji, and the strong temptation is to give up before you start. After all, it takes Japanese schoolchildren 9 years of grueling schoolwork to learn to write their own language: what chance could a foreigner possibly have?

Kanji - (or 漢字 - which literally means chinese (漢) characters (字) - since the Japanese adopted them from China about 1350 years ago) work in a fundamentally different way than an alphabet. While each alphabetic letter represents a sound, each Kanji represents a meaning, which is why they're sometimes referred to as "ideograms".

So the relationship between image, sound and meaning is just sliced up in a fundamentally different way. Alphabetic writing links the image of the word on the page with a sound and leaves it up to us to memorize its (arbitrary) meaning. Ideographic writing links the image of the word on the page with a meaning and forces us to memorize an (arbitrary) sound.

The easiest way to explain this is to notice what happens when you run into an unfamiliar word. In English, when you see an archaic word you often have no idea what it means, but you have some notion of how to say it. Take a word like "sibilate". Even if you don't know what it means, you know more or less how it will sound just by looking at it on the page. (Actually, it means "to whistle.")

In Japanese it's the other way around: looking at archaic kanji, Japanese people can more or less figure out their meaning by looking at them. But more often than not, they'll have no idea how to actually say it.

The most conspicuous feature of the Kanji, of course, is that there are a lot of them. How many, exactly? It's surprisingly hard to get a straightforward answer to that.

Studies show that the 500 most common kanji account for 80% of the characters in a typical newspaper, but the subtler you want your writing to be, the more unusual kanji you'll probably use. The most comprehensive dictionary in Japan lists just under 50,000, but the vast majority of those are "dead kanji": archaic scribbles from China that fell out of usage centuries ago. A standard computer these days recognizes about 6,350 kanji, but even most of those are pretty arcane: the kanji equivalent of "sibilate".

Now, I know everybody loves to hate gringo imperialism, but I'll put in one good word: it was the American occupation authorities after World War II that finally brought a measure of order to the madness, drawing up a list of the most commonly used 1,945 kanji and decreeing that compulsory education would include only those. Henceforth, newspapers, official documents and the like would include only these "General Use Kanji". This is some (but not much) consolation to that uncommonly disconsolate bunch: the poor, beleaguered western student of Japanese.

Enter our very own patron saint. His name is James W. Heisig. In 1977, Dr. Heisig pulled off a feat that, as he puts it, "raised more eyebrows than hopes" at the time: he memorized the meaning and the writing of all the General Use Kanji in less than two months.

Though dismissed as a freak with a photographic memory, Dr. Heisig insisted anybody willing to study Kanji full time could replicate his achievement. To prove it, he wrote up his method and published it as Remembering the Kanji I: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters, an instant classic in the torpid world of Japanese literacy acquisition methods.

The key, he said, is to divide and conquer. First, divide the easier task of learning the meaning of Kanji from the harder task of learning their pronunciation, and focus on the former initially. Then, divide the Kanji themselves into their parts, and learn to associate those elements through mnemonics.

Why? Because, though they typically look utterly inscrutable to the uninitiated, Dr. Heisig realized that most kanji are really just combinations of other, simpler kanji. The key, then, is to work from the simple to the complex, learning to take them apart in your mind and understanding them on the basis of the elements that make them up.

Take a typical, initially terrifying kanji:

銘="inscription"

Now, how the heck are you supposed to remember that that means "inscription"!? At first sight, it looks like one big jumble...just weird lines jutting this way and that with no rhyme or reason.

But look at it closely. Notice how the big jumble is actually made up of smaller, simpler jumbles? As it turns out, each of those sub-jumbles has its own meaning:

金 = "gold"

and

名 = "name"

Suddenly, the big jumble becomes that much less inscrutable.... After all, what's an inscription if it isn't a name written on gold?!

This same process of decomposition works for each of those two elements as well, though you need a bit more of an active imagination to take them apart. Start with the character for gold. Nothing about it immediately suggests "gold", but what if you knew this:

王 = "king"

Suddenly, you can imagine a "king" with two bars of "gold" in his pockets (below his belt) sitting underneath an umbrella. Of course, there's no particular reason why a king should keep his gold in his pockets and sit underneath an umbrella, but the very arbitrariness of the image is what makes it effective as a mnemonic: it "shocks the memory" into recognition, as Dr. Heisig puts it.

Similarly, "name" (名) is really just made up of two simpler kanji:

夕="evening"
and,
口="mouth"

Here, the leap of imagination needed is more challenging still. Why would evening + mouth = name? Dr. Heisig encourages us to think of the customs of the Dinka tribe in Sudan. In order to "name" their children, Dinka fathers sneak into their newborn babies' huts in the middle of the night and whisper their names into their ears. By using their "mouths" in the "evening", they give their babies a "name."

It's a fairly convoluted explanation, granted...but that, Dr. Heisig insists, is its strength rather than its weakness. After all, I guarantee that, having read this, you'll never forget how the Dinka name their babies. And that's the miracle of mnemonics: out of seeming senselessness, a clever mnemonic can establish connections between disparate signs that become actually very difficult to forget.

The Heisig method is all about extending this logic to cover all of Japan's General Use Kanji. Starting from a limited number of simple primitive elements like "mouth", "evening" and "king", it creates silly little stories that build up into Kanji. By the end of the book, initially terrifying monsters like:

驚="wonder"

...completely lose their ability to intimidate you. You just take one glance at 'em and identify the primitives, in this case: "awe" and "team of horses". Then you make up a story to link them, like, "people watch in awe as a team of horses is skillfully driven by Stevie Wonder . 'Wonder how he does it?' they say." With minimal effort, the story and the image are linked indissoluble in memory.

After a while, this way of thinking comes to seem perfectly natural. Flower + bound up + rice? Must mean "chrysantemum" (菊). Soil + reclining + mouth + dish? That's "salt" (塩), of course.

For me, Dr. Heisig is a genius. He makes learning the kanji not just approachable but actually quite fun. His method engages the imagination in a way that renders the whole task more like a game than a chore. Personally, for the last few weeks, I've been "hooked on Heisig" kind of the way I was once "hooked on Tetris". You can spend hours and hours, pencil in hand, going through these little stories and scribbling kanji...there's just something addictively entertaining about it. And, unlike with Tetris, at the end of the session you're left with solid knowledge of how to write a new batch of kanji, instead of that vaguely guilty feeling of the tetris addict.

It's only been four weeks since I've started, and I'm already on Kanji #327. That still leaves lots of kanji to go, but at this pace it should take less than six months to memorize them all.

Of course, learning the "meaning and writing" of Kanji is not the same thing as learning to read and write Japanese. At the moment, what I'm doing is closer to memorizing the letters of a very, very long alphabet. Letters duly memorized, I still face the much tougher task of remembering how to pronounce all these little beasties, to say nothing of learning how they go together to make up words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.

But Rome was not built in a day. Like learning the language itself, Japanese literacy is a long term proposition. It's unlikely I'll be able to read even children's books before the turn of the decade...but hey, the future is long.

[One last note: anyone who stumbles on this write-up as they consider whether to give Heisig a try really must check out Reviewing the Kanji. It's a beaaaautifully designed, free companion website to the book. In fact, though inspired by the Heisig method, Reviewing the Kanji is arguably better than the book...and did I mention it's free?]