Six years on: Usón's April 11th

Quico says: On my trip to Caracas, I picked up a copy of "Opinion Prisoner: General Usón Speaks". It's a book of interviews with former Finance Minister and jailbird Francisco Usón by Agustín Blanco Muñoz. What follows is drawn from Usón's recollections of the evening of April 11th, 2002.

There was a gun on Chávez's office table. A pack of cigarettes and a lighter, an ashtray with some stubs in it, an empty cup of coffee, and a gun. That's the detail that sticks out in General Francisco Usón's memories of going to Miraflores to resign his post as Finance Minister. It was about 8:30 p.m. on April 11th, 2002.

It's not the only detail, of course. He remembers people crying in the halls of Miraflores, army officers running from one place to the other like chickens with their heads cut off. He remembers José Vicente Rangel hanging about the scene like a sleepwalker, muttering to himself again and again that Chávez must not resign, that handing over power was unthinkable, that it had to be avoided at all cost, in a kind of loop, like a drunk you meet on an El Silencio sidewalk late at night. And he remembers Chávez's vacant, disoriented expression, how nervous he seemed, how it was impossible to tell if he was actually listening to you as you talked, the way his own speech bordered on the incoherent. The Chávez Usón saw that evening was despondent, defeated.

Mostly, though, he remembers that gun.

It couldn't have been for self-defense. When you keep a gun for protection you keep it in a holster, on your body. Usón, like Chávez, is an army man: it's not the kind of detail either of them would miss. A gun sitting on top of a table like that...it was only ever going to be used for one thing.

The thought alarmed Usón. He was seriously worried that if something happened to Chávez that night the country would careen towards civil war. He was concerned enough to consign his own handgun to one of the president's bodyguard before going in to see him. He even raised the importance of keeping Chávez safe as he resigned and, on his way out, went as far as to have a quiet word with one of Chávez's bodyguards to plead with him to hide that gun when he got a chance because "nothing must happen to Chávez."

That glimpse of a suicidal Chávez is not one Usón would forget. At 8:30 p.m. on April 11th 2002, Hugo Chávez genuinely thought his gig was up.

From Miraflores, Usón headed straight to the fifth floor of the Army General Command Center in Fuerte Tiuna, where he ran into the chaotic conspiratorial verbena so many others have also described. The collapse of the chain of command was obvious to him right away. In the middle of the biggest military crisis Venezuela had seen in half a century, some of the assembled generals were drinking whisky.

General Efraín Vásquez Velasco, whom everyone looked to for leadership, was way out of his depth. He was the army's highest ranking officer, and the hierarchy-minded military men all around him were naturally waiting for his orders. But Vásquez Velasco hadn't thought things through. He hadn't planned ahead, hadn't conspired. Needless to say, planning is critical to the success of a coup, and the guy everyone was looking to for leadership just hadn't done any.

Worse yet, the guys who had planned were pushing a disastrous scheme to impose Pedro Carmona as president. In fact, Carmona's presence at Army headquarters that night was one of the first anomalies Usón noticed. The officers backing him - led by General Medina Gómez and Vice-admiral Ramírez Pérez - commanded no troops. No mandaban ni en su casa, is how Usón puts it. And they weren't senior enough in the military hierarchy to tell Generals Vásquez Velasco and Alfonso Martínez what to do.

The real "power vacuum" that night wasn't in Miraflores, it was in Fuerte Tiuna. The army leadership was making it up as they went along, trying to run a coup "by consensus." In those circumstances, it wasn't hard for the real plotters to outmaneuver the hapless top brass.

Well before midnight, General Rosendo (who'd just resigned as head of the Armed Forces Unified Command) and General Hurtado Sucre (then Infrastructure Minister) go to Miraflores to negotiate a handover of power directly with Chávez. Very quickly, Chávez agrees to resign, but only if safe passage to Cuba is guaranteed for himself and his family. It's his only condition. Rosendo and Hurtado Sucre make the deal.

But the situation is fluid back in Fuerte Tiuna. Alliances shift by the minute and Vásquez Velasco completely fails to stamp his authority and impose a single course of action. So, as they try to work out the details, Rosendo and Hurtado Sucre find themselves negotiating under a mandate that changes again and again. They keep having to call Fuerte Tiuna to get instructions, but the instructions keep changing.

This provides Chávez with the first hint that he may not be as screwed as he'd figured. He asks to speak to Vásquez Velasco directly. They speak on the phone several times throughout the night. When Vásquez Velasco speaks to the president he goes into a small office by himself, so nobody can overhear what he's saying. The conversations follow on throughout the night.

Little by little Chávez starts to put 2 and 2 together. At 12:30, he calls Usón directly on his mobile and asks what's taking so long, why he isn't on a plane to Cuba yet. It's the first of six conversations between the two that night. Gradually, Chávez comes to understand it's all a bit of a bluff. Years later, in his prison cell, General Usón will have plenty of time to wonder whether he inadvertently tipped off Chávez. Maybe it was those phone calls that made Chávez realize that nobody was in overall command in Fuerte Tiuna.

Back in Fuerte Tiuna, one faction has gotten it into its head that sending Chávez off to Cuba would be a disaster. The guy would destabilize any new government from a distance, and besides, the blood that flowed down Baralt Avenue that afternoon was on his hands and he should be held accountable. Another faction argues that it's lunacy to think you can jail a guy passionately supported by 40 to 50% of the population. Characteristically, Vásquez Velasco fails to step in to resolve the dispute.

As the early morning wears on, General Rommel Fuenmayor calls Chávez and threatens to order some tanks and Air Force planes to bomb Miraflores palace if he doesn't leave power within 10 minutes. But Fuenmayor is an army officer - and one without troops under his command at the time (the guy was running CAVIM, the army munitions manufacturer). Fuenmayor had no authority over the Air Force or over any tanks. In the end, his threat only underscores the extent to which the military chain of command has gone to all hell.

By the early morning hours of April 12th, the dazed, suicidal Chávez of the previous evening is just a memory. Sensing the weakness in the generals' position, he's well and truly snapped out of it and gone on Full Survival Mode. After all, if there's one subject he genuinely is a bit of an expert on it's military conspiracies...and how to survive them when they go wrong.

Just before 4:00 a.m. Chávez decides to go to Fuerte Tiuna to negotiate directly with the army brass. This is a detail that's been lost to history: Chávez doesn't submit to an army order to go to Fuerte Tiuna, Chávez decides to go there. He needs to be there to confirm his suspicions about the coupsters' disorganization. He goes flanked by his head of security and his head of Casa Militar, (the presidential protection garrison.) Both are armed and still loyal to him. Amid the confusion, nobody finds anything strange about that.

Once he gets there, Chávez quickly confirms what he'd suspected. Rather than being met by a single officer with a single negotiating position, Chávez is faced with a petit committée of militares alzados.

They demand that he sign a resignation letter. He asks about safe passage to Cuba. They start backsliding. Suddenly, they won't guarantee that he can get out of the country right away. Chávez notes that this is not the deal he'd agreed to. He realizes his choice now is between being a head of state who's illegally detained and being a former head of state who's legally detained. So he refuses, point blank, to sign the letter.

And the generals don't have the first fucking clue what to do next.

For General Usón, what follows was a turning point in the crisis. Faced with Chávez's refusal, the assembled generals make a decision that lays bare all their weakness: they excuse themselves and go off to the room next door and start arguing about what to do next. Any pretense of being an organized force executing a carefully considered plan collapsed right then and there, and right in front of Chávez's eyes.

That was the instant when Chávez's fight back began in earnest. Chavez sensed that if they didn't obtain a signed resignation letter, they wouldn't be able to count on the support of the Maracay garrison or of junior officers nationwide, who are the ones in direct contact with the troops. A bit of bravado at a key moment completely threw the generals off their game and exposed how ramshackle their entire operation was. With his own eyes, he realized that they had no Plan B.

Within minutes, the generals were back merely to re-iterate their demand that he sign, trying to intimidate him into complying. Which only confirmed how precarious their position was, how dependent on his co-operation.

Even Usón, who spent years in jail due to a presidential whim and hates the guy's guts, is forced to recognize Chávez's courage and cunning at that critical moment.

Over the following 24 hours, plenty of other mistakes would greatly aid his fight back - the Carmonada obviously being the biggest one. But it was that one moment, that instantaneous realization that he could send all their plans into a tailspin just by refusing to play along, that made his fight back viable in the first place.

The real irony, considering the turn official rhetoric would take in the months and years to follow, is that it was only because April 11th wasn't the product of a well planned, carefully orchestrated conspiracy that Chávez was able to beat the coup.

Mark & Doug's excellent Venezuelan adventure

Katy says:

"Exit poll results show major defeat for Chávez"

Caracas Chronicles headline, August 17th, 2004, citing a press release from Penn, Schoen & Berland.

The long anticipated departure of pollster, best-selling author and political guru Mark Penn from Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign brought back some unkind memories. While the gringo press obsesses about the myriad ways Penn screwed up Hillary's presidential run, we Venezuelans let our minds wander back to his tour of our country between 2004 and 2006, when Penn's firm played a critical role in launching the opposition into three years of self destruction by our misguided abstention strategy.

Mark Penn is a larger-than-life figure. Having worked - sometimes succesfully, other times not so much - with the Clintons, Al Gore and Tony Blair, he is admired and despised in roughly equal measures in First-World political circles. A formidable intellectect with an even more formidable ego, he's apparently the kind of person who never doubts himself.

In a keen new piece, New Republic writer Michelle Cottle describes him as:

"rough, arrogant, antisocial, controlling, manipulative, brutally ambitious, and occasionally downright abusive--a hurler of cell phones, pagers, and Chinese food."

I know that what follows will probably get me an eggroll, hurled straight at my noggin', but here goes anyway. The story goes like this.

Mr. Penn, along with his partner Doug Schoen, worked with Venezuelan opposition NGO Súmate during the Chávez Recall Referendum of 2004. Their firm advised the opposition in the run-up to the referendum and was supposedly in charge of organizing the all-important exit poll on the day of the vote. The evening of the Referendum, PSB announced that Chávez had been handily defeated, and the rest is history.

That poll was the original bit of evidence that convinced everyone that something was dodgy about the referendum. How could it be dismissed out of hand? It was Bill Clinton's pollster! To a remarkable extent, the strategy of the opposition in the coming months and years was shaped by what happened that night.

So, what was the real story behind the exit poll? We'll probably never know, but I can tell you my version of the story, which is shared by Quico and Lucía and has been corroborated by two independent sources close to important opposition players. It goes something like this.

In the months leading up to the Recall Referendum, the polls began to change dramatically. The government had played the clock brilliantly, all the while launching the popular misiones social programs. Opposition elites - with few exceptions - were very slow and/or unwilling to believe Chávez's rise in the polls. They failed to understand the power of the misiones and Chávez's message and put their decline in the polls down to a mythical "fear factor" not supported by the evidence.

The opposition's umbrella group, the Coordinadora Democrática, failed to offer a compelling, competing message. An amalgamation of disparate political groups and NGOs, the Coordinadora failed to act effectively and its leadership was notoriously slow, disorganized and ineffective. All this is common knowledge, right?

Enter Penn, Schoen & Berland. After taking Súmate's hard-earned money, PSB told them that they simply did not have the time to design the exit poll themselves. Instead, they said Súmate should do it and kindly offered to let Súmate put the PSB stamp of approval on the results.

Súmate, an electoral NGO with no experience in polling, probably did their diligent, engineer-like best. It was probably not enough.

Exit polls are tricky to design and run under the best of circumstances. This was a well-intentioned amateur effort, from start to finish.

In the aftermath, Súmate had a lot of accomplices. There should have been tough questions asked about the reach and scope of the exit poll results. Very rural areas and unsafe urban areas, both Chávez strongholds, appeared curiously under-represented. Amid all the anger over the CNE's screwed up "hot audit", it's remarkable that nobody stopped to audit Sumate's PSB endorsed exit poll at all.

Nobody that night asked those questions with anything resembling academic rigor. The wider opposition community, including some very smart people, kept their skepticism to themselves and failed to ask the obvious questions about the exit poll. Instead, academic papers were produced at heart-stopping rates using the exit poll as the major data source, treating it like something it was not: a random sample representative of the population at large.

Opposition leaders had been treated to weeks of bad poll numbers preceding the referendum. Some of them were simply unwilling to believe the bad news. Some of them honestly believed, and still do, that the exit poll is accurate. It is not.

This period marked the beginning of the great "fear factor" myth, through which it wasn't that voters liked the new misiones, it was that they were afraid of pollsters! Most of the opposition leadership, including Coordinadora leader Enrique Mendoza, didn't buy this. They did understand that Chávez's numbers were rising steadily in the weeks before the vote. One has to wonder what would have happened if our leadership had adopted a more skeptical approach that night.

The belief that the exit poll had been correct was shared by the international media. Chavista media outlets were incensed that their man's victory was not being universally recognized. PSB put their reputation on the line with their exit poll, and a lot of people believed it.

The belief that they had uncovered massive fraud thanks to their polls, along with historical ties to major AD figures, paved the way for Doug Schoen to be hired by the Manuel Rosales campaign in 2006. Rosales ran an energetic campaign to unseat Hugo Chávez, yet it failed to show in the vote tallies. Rosales's defeat was somewhat of a foregone conclusion, given how a majority of the opinion polls released prior to the election predicted it.

Again, there were a couple of outliers. Only one high-profile DC poollster showed the race getting tighter, though. Who ran it? If you guessed PSB, you guessed right.

After going against the tide and predicting a few weeks before the poll that the race was tightening, Schoen was mysteriously replaced by Penn the weekend before the election.

You know what happened next: we got trounced, and Rosales accepted defeat gallantly. But if you went by what Penn and Schoen had predicted, you would believe we were robbed all over again.

For the past few months, Quico, Lucía and I have been talking to some of the people involved, and after confirming the story with different sources, this is what we believed happened: a hack-job of an exit-poll conducted by the opposition itself and rubber-stamped by a prestigious polling firm resulted in a collective belief that differed from reality and led to disastrous political decisions for the opposition in the following years.

You may choose to believe something else, but we call it like we see it. I believe there was some vote tampering the night of the Recall Referendum, but it did not make a difference overall. I also believe the exit poll was garbage.

The impact of releasing an exit poll like that at a time like that cannot be underestimated. Has this been tagged as a Súmate exit poll - which is what it was - rather than a PSB exit poll, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. The fact that it came out at a moment of maximum tension, where it was the only piece of information available, only helped build up the myth.

Social phenomena are sometimes marked by instances where the momentum for change and for the establishment of an idea is unstoppable, a "tipping point" if you will. This concept has been been recently popularized by writer Malcolm Gladwell.

Penn, Schoen and Berland's faulty exit poll may have been our tipping point - the moment when we decided that we were the majority and that anyone who said differently was lying. We've been paying the price ever since.

Media Terrorism Chronicles...

Quico says: Turns out that Simpsons/Baywatch story has legs:


...hey, 290 editors can't all be wrong.

Update: Wow. Homer vs. CJ made it onto the BBC News front page!



Does Conatel grasp they're an international laughing stock now?

Also In The News, we salute you.

What do you do when you don't have time to post original stuff?

You pimp your blog out to YouTube, of course! Today's theme is crazy stuff we saw on TV in 1998:

Reality and Discourse

Weil says:I liked this image a lot in simply because it shines a spotlight on the key to understanding Venezuela's current reality: the delirious, rampant mismatch between official discourse and reality.

If I'm going to get really picky about it, though, I guess what I don't like is the implication that some big dust-up is imminent, that the incompatibility between a discourse careening forever leftward and a reality on an unstoppable rightward trajectory is somehow unsustainable.

Venezuela's tragedy is, precisely, that it is sustainable, because there's always enough oil money around to paper over the incoherences the mismatch engenders and prevent an ultimate crash. So I think the cartoon would've been even better if he'd drawn the two trains running along parallel tracks, or along the same track, but pulling away from one another.

Still, in Venezuela today, the discourse-reality mismatch is the story. Anything that helps focus attention on it is all to the good.

The Economics of Quítate Tú Pa'Ponerme Yo

Quico says: Francisco Rodríguez has become something of a force of nature in the field of Chávez scholarship. While most of us bullshit at excruciating length, FR brings creativity and rigor to the task of documenting the effect chavismo is having on Venezuela's economy and society.

His latest, a paper entitled The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela’s Maisanta co-authored with Chang-Tai Hsieh, Daniel Ortega (of IESA, not that other one) and Edward Miguel, sets out to measure a phenomenon we all "already" knew about but hadn't been able to prove: the impact of political discrimination on personal and corporate income in the Chávez era.

At the heart of this paper is some startlingly innovative research design. Turning the government's main tool for political discrimination - the Maisanta Database - on its head, the research team crossed its data with income data from the Venezuelan Household Survey by "exploiting the fact that most individuals in both datasets are uniquely identified by their gender, date of birth, and parroquia of residence."

This allowed them to isolate the specific impact of signing for or against the government on individuals' incomes, and lo and behold, they found statistically significant and robust evidence that signing against Chávez cost the average opposition supporter 3.8% of his or her income and massively increased their risk of unemployment.

Among other results, the team documented big shifts in sectoral employment, with a 6.1% reduction in government supporters' propensity to work in the private sector and a 5.7% reduction in government opponents' propensity to work in the public sector.

For firms, the research design was even more ingenious. They sent a small army of flunkies research assistants to pour through public registries in Caracas, Maracaibo, Maracay and Valencia so they could assemble a little database of company board members. They then matched that with the Maisanta Database to construct an index of how pro- or anti-Chávez each corporate board was. That allowed them to regress various indicators of firm performance against their board's scores on the pro- or anti-Chávez scale.

The results were pretty clear: pro-government firms have far easier access to Cadivi dollars than pro-opposition firms. Output and profits grew faster in pro-government firms, but labor productivity fell, indicating that pro-Chávez firms are more politically favored but less efficient than anti-Chávez ones. And oppo firms were paying 40% more in taxes than pro-government firms, suggesting that Tax Enforcement is politically selective.

Though fiendishly clever, this research design does have its limitations. Neither the personal nor the corporate analysis can account for the Arias Cardenas Effect: people who signed against Chávez but then saw the way the wind was blowing and made amends. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Chávez is quite willing to forgive these folks, with Gustavo Cisneros and Omar Camero being the paradigmatic examples. There's no data to differentiate the round-trippers from the hasta las últimas consecuencias oppositionists: one suspects the effects found would be even larger if there were.

The final section of the paper estimates that political polarization itself made the Venezuelan economy as a whole substantially less efficient, with Total Factor Productivity declining 5% in response to political discrimination. (If I'm reading this right, that means that for the same level of total capital, labor and natural resource inputs, the economy generated 5% less in output after the Maisanta List than before.)

On one level, you could say these results are prime candidates for publication in the "Well Duh Journal of International Economics", or perhaps the "Annals of Painfully Obvious Results". But in a country where everybody bullshits and nobody researches, there's something satisfying about having the actual figures.

For Venezuelan newpaper readers, there's nothing new here, but in broader theoretical perspective, this is crucial work. Rodríguez, Hsieh, Miguel and Ortega document a key process I keep trying to write about: the way the petrostate mobilizes its resources to create a socio-economic elite in its own image. And, academically speaking at least, the more detail we can get on the precise mechanics of this elite-generation process, the better.

Now they're making me mad!

Quico says: Some bits of rampant revolutionary idiocy hit closer to home than others, and for me, few hit closer than this one: chavismo wants to drive The Simpsons off of Venezuela's airwaives.

Conatel, Chávez's telecoms regulator, is demanding that Televen stop running the show during children's viewing hours, as the revolution's crack squad of semiologists and culture critics (¡¡que el que te conté nos agarré confesados!!) has determined that the gang from Evergreen Terrace is a clear and present danger to Venezuelan family values.

And what do the moral guardians of Venezuela's tender youth want to replace all that Simpson degeneracy with?

Baywatch Hawaii.

I. Shit. You. Not.

Yeah, I know, in the grand scheme of things, nationalizing the cement industry is probably a bigger deal that this...but....but...it's The Simpsons!

Those evil exporters

Katy says: Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced yesterday that he was nationalizing the cement industry, "no matter the cost." With no previous warning, he gave the order on national television that factories should be expropriated and that he would foot the bill - with our money, of course.

The reasons he gave are that cement companies are allegedly exporting the country's cement and therefore making it difficult for his government to build houses. Instead of blaming his abysmal record in housing construction on his highly deficient administrative style, he blames a made-up enemy - in this case, evil cement companies.

As we take a breath and try to make some sense of this latest idiocy, a few facts about the cement industry are in order.

Cement is a perishable product - after thirty days, either you give it away or you throw it away. Cement is also notoriously expensive to transport. It is highly unlikely that a significant portion of Venezuela's cement production is being exported, because cement markets tend to be regional or local and plants tend to be located close to where demand is.

Furthermore, there have been few reports of cement shortages. The ones I have seen, such as this one and this one, are from early to mid 2007, at the peak of the government's infrastructure spending boom. Let's recall that the new Viaducto was not yet finished and the government was in a rush to finish a bunch of new stadiums and subways in time for the election.

I have no doubt that cement companies are exporting cement. Given how Venezuela's demand for cement is largely driven by the government, and given how government spending on large infrastructure projects has decreased considerably, I'm sure they have a lot of excess inventory. I'm also sure they have the incentive to export their products given how prices inside the country are controlled.

But instead of congratulating them for exporting or finding other ways of dealing with the problem of producers preferring external markets to internal ones - and here, a quick call to his employee Cristinita K would help - the President goes nuts.

Buy off all the plants, nationalize the industry, my way or the highway - that's his approach. In East Asia, exporters are rewarded. In Venezuela, they are punished. Such is the screwed-up mentality of the chavista military regime.

Furthermore, the government already has a cement factory - it's a pharaoh-like joint venture with Iran. Last I heard this project was going to have an installed capacity of a million tons and was going to cost Venezuelan taxpayers 250 million dollars. Whatever happend to that?

Venezuela's cement industry has a long history behind it. The first cement factories were founded by pioneering businessman Eugenio Mendoza, and large multinationals such as Mexico's Cemex and Switzerland's Holcim have invested heavily in the local industry. The Mexican government is not amused.

It's not clear if the President will follow through with this. While he is obviously looking for a scapegoat, he has threatened before to nationalize companies only to back down and get them to do what he wants - the Sidor example comes to mind. But he has also nationalized companies that did not need to be nationalized - the Electricidad de Caracas example comes to mind.

The cement industry has always been entangled with politics. After all, military strongmen and construction go together like cement and water. Here's hoping the industry survives this latest chapter and that we don't find ourselves importing cement five years from now because our factories have been sacked or gone bankrupt.

Cadivi Hassles at Maiquetía

Quico says: So there's a rumor going around that people are getting asked to produce receipts and stuff at Maiquetía when they fly back into the country after taking Cadivi junkets abroad. Anybody else heard of this? Know of anyone who's been checked?

Felipito says:

Godzilla vs. Bambi

Quico says: So, not long ago, the revolution's favorite "economist", Mark Weisbrot, published a rebuttal of all the main points in Francisco Rodríguez's by-now famous Foreign Affairs piece evaluating the data on the revolution's poverty reduction record. This week, Rodríguez ruthlessly picks apart Weisbrot's rebuttal. As you can imagine, it gets pretty brutal:

[First], there is no evidence that the Chávez administration is devoting a higher share of resources to pro-poor spending. Second, inequality increased between 1999 and 2006, unless by inequality one means inequality among everyone except those who earn no income. Third, the Venezuelan government did not teach 1.5 million persons how to read and write – at most the magnitude of the program was 1/30th of what was claimed. Fourth, however one calculates it, Venezuela’s income elasticity of poverty reduction is below typical values for developing countries. Fifth, the majority of human development indicators do not show striking improvements under Chávez, and some show deteriorations.

Weisbrot has not produced a convincing counterargument to any of these claims. He has argued that social spending has increased by using series that are distorted by the inclusion of regressive pensions, large infrastructure projects, and even military spending. He has argued that inequality has declined on the basis of a series that excludes the poorest families from the sample. He has argued that the Venezuelan government put more than a million persons in literacy courses while presenting regression estimates that indicate that at most forty thousand persons were enrolled in these courses. He has misinterpreted the concept of elasticity, and furthermore argued that the reason why government statistics do not show an improvement in the health of newborns is that the monitoring system has collapsed. To top this all off, he has presented an incredible conspiracy theory of the 2001 Venezuelan balance of payments crisis according to which the private sector withdrew funds from the domestic system during more than a year in order to provoke a political crisis.

My take? Weisbrot has one genuine "gotcha" moment in his rebuttal: Francisco pretty blatantly cherry-picked the two data points for his original GINI coefficient comparison (2000 and 2005) to make the government look bad, something even Francisco's retort shows clearly. Surely this kind of data massaging gets us no closer to the serious academic debate he claims to favor. Having been caught with his hands in this particular data-manipulation cookie jar, Francisco should just have waved a white flag on this point: the data do not show a steady trend towards increased inequality throughout the Chávez era, which is what his original piece clearly implied.


(Having cited him on this point, I feel particularly burned here.)

On every other point, though, it's a bloodfest. Francisco's deconstruction of Weisbrot's stunningly dishonest claims on adult literacy is especially noteworthy for showing in stark terms Weisbrot's Goebbelsian tendency to accuse his opponent of precisely what he's doing: cherry-picking outliers in the data and using them to back up claims even the outliers cannot support.

But it's in the discussions of government spending priorities and of the efficiency of poverty reduction that what remained of Weisbrot's intellectual reputation curls up into a little ball and dies. Here is a man with a Ph.D in economics who gives every sign of not understanding what elasticity means! (The magnitude of the incompetence this flub reveals may not be immediately evident if you haven't studied economics...to get a sense, picture an MD confusing your aorta with your placenta.)

Worse yet, here is a native speaker of English who appears not to understand what the word priority means: Weisbrot "rebuts" Francisco's argument about the sectoral distribution of government spending with claims about the absolute magnitudes of government spending. At one point, Francisco is reduced to babbling homespun anecdotes about rich uncles and poodles in a (futile) attempt to elicit some sign of comprehension from the guy. It's painful.

Lets be clear, here: Weisbrot's rebuttal is crammed full of the kind of rookie mistakes that typically get undergraduates an F in Econ 101. How this guy worked up the nerve to challenge Francisco Rodríguez to a mano-a-mano totally defeats me. It's just pathetic that this is the best spin all the government's millions can buy.

Update: Speaking of "statements not backed up by the data cited to support them," Francisco Rodríguez just wrote in to point out that:

...if you take the correctly calculated Gini series (including zero-income households) and fits a post-1999 trend through it, you find a statistically significant increase of .001685 points/semester, or .0253 points since the first semester of 1999. This is statistically significant at 1.8% (not a bad fit for 23 observations). One can get hung up on particular semester-to-semester changes here, but you also have to remember that there can be significant measurement error in this series, so you want to be able to identify general trends. In any case, it seems to me that the correctly calculated series does indicate (at least in a statistical sense) a significant trend of increase after 1999.

The Looking Glass Revolution

Quico says: For such a familiar object, there’s something quite bizarre about a mirror, that strange device that seems to represent reality “as it really is” while quietly reversing it, making your right side your left side and your left side your right. The effect is at once familiar and, when you think about it, weirdly counterintuitive…not unlike the profoundly mystifying political contraption that now rules Venezuela by subtly, almost imperceptibly, turning left into right and right into left all the while leaving everything precisely as it was.

The Maisto Doctrine (“watch what he does, not what he says”) makes for a good starting point as we try to understand the deep conceptual reversal chavismo operates. It primes us for an awareness that, when it comes to chavismo, the discursive and the factual have a troubling propensity to diverge.

Back in 1999, nobody could have guessed the bizarre extremes this divergence would reach. Today, the “what he does” and the “what he says” are not merely "in tension with one another" but, rather, diametrical opposites, with the discursive rushing headlong to the left while the factual gallops triumphantly rightward.

In today's Venezuela, that split is the story. The smooth cohabitation between a radical leftwing discourse and a basically regressive policy posture based on de facto trickle-down economics is the essence of what chavismo has become.

On a discursive level – but only on a discursive level – chavismo really does fall squarely into the tradition of leftist totalitarianism. There’s really no other word for it. The revolution’s discourse is proudly, self-consciously totalizing. Chávez proposes a highly simplified explanation for the whole of social experience, the whole of political life and the whole of Latin America's history. At its core is a totalizing dualism, a clean split between pure Good (a conceptual nexus you could characterize as Chavez - emancipation - socialism - left- pueblo - solidarity - revolution) and pure Evil (Bush - empire - capitalism - right - oligarchy - greed - reaction.)

What rounds out chavismo's discursive totalitarianism is that this uncompromising dualism is coupled to a Redemption Narrative, the mythic story line of the revolution, which systematizes and explains historical experience by subsuming all events under the totalizing categories of Good and Evil. The story is short enough and simple enough to summarize in just one sentence:

Bolivar had a dream that was cruelly betrayed by the mantuano elite and lay dormant in the hearts of the pueblo for a long time until it re-awakened on February 27th 1989 and was instantiated and tempered by the joint heroism of Chavez and the pueblo in a series of heroic trials: the coups of 1992 and 2002, the oil strike, and the ongoing imperialist-mantuano aggressions against the revolution.

Every episode in this history is expressed in terms of a struggle of good vs. evil. Every day-to-day development is similarly characterized. Whether it’s the Battle of Carabobo or the Milk Shortage, the toppling of Arbenz or a dengue outbreak in Carora, when bad things happen Evil is to blame and when good things happen, Good deserves the credit. Nothing escapes the totalizing perspective of chavista manicheism.

The state, with its growing communicative might, has been fully mobilized to support this World View. The most striking feature of Venezuelan television these days the simultaneous proliferation of official media outlets and their soul crushing repetitiveness. Chávez’s discursive totalitarianism is now hawked aggressively, around the clock, in a whole bunch of new radio stations and TV channels, from VIVE to TVES to ANTV to Telesur to a bunch of smaller, regional channels.

Yet the growth in the number of channels of distribution has resulted in no more variety of points of view on offer: the content in all the government media is essentially, drearily predictable.

The station logos and anchor people are different, the typeface on the screen graphics is different, but the content itself amounts to a virtual, neverending cadena: it’s the same stuff, the same endless variations on the very simple themes repeated ad nauseam. Watch this stuff for just a couple of hours and you can tell exactly the way each story, each agit-prop video, each 30-second spot is going to go from the second it comes on screen.

There’s a mind-deadening predictability to it. You can taste the producers’ fear of breaking the script. Little by little, the essential, tutelaged sameness overwhelms you until you either switch off or turn into a zombie. Nothing surprising ever happens on state TV, and won’t, no matter how many new channels they ad. Nothing even remotely like a real debate, a non-choreographed exchange of views or a contrarian perspective has the faintest chance of being heard.

So we really do have all the characteristics of leftist totalitarian communications here: the dualism, the unthinking sameness, the siege mentality, the systematic demonization of opponents, the none-too-subtle denunciation of dissidents as enemies of the state and, above all, the repetition, the dreary, obdurate repetition, the drip-drip-drip of the same messages packaged and repackaged again and again and again, at every chance and on every space available.

Venezuela is witnessing every element of a communicative practice that, in other times and other places, has typically gone hand in hand with the massive use of state violence to intimidate, marginalize and, ultimately, physically eliminate dissidents.

And yet…where are the concentration camps? The secret police torture rooms? The death marches? Where is the reality to back up all that talk? It just isn’t there…and, nine years into all of this, I really don’t think it’s coming.

When Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and the Interahamwe mobilized the state media to systematically demonize their opponents, the real world cost of those discursive practices was measured in millions of lives. When Chávez does it, the cost is measured in tons of bullshit, because in his hands the discursive somehow never quite bleeds through to the factual.

It's when we come to understand the dynamics of the political economy of chavismo, the real channels through which money and influence flow through society in the Chávez era that we start to grasp the scale of the disconnect between the world of meanings state TV creates and the orgy of clientelist rent seeking the real revolution has slowly morphed into.

Again, it pays to think Maisto here. What would the revolution look like if we watched it "on mute,” as it were: tuning out the discourse entirely and focusing exclusively on the way money, power and influence flows through society. What would we see then?

Well, we'd see a tiny elite, well connected to the centers of state decision-making that control petrodollar flows, exploiting its access to grow enormously rich and live extravagant lifestyles.

We'd see a much broader middle class benefiting handsomely from petrostate largesse in the form of deeply subsidized travel, imports, internet transactions and energy.

We'd notice that the truly weighty macroeconomic policies, the ones that move sums large enough to alter the overall distribution of national income, channel resources resolutely up the economic scale.

And we'd see some mass based social programs that are unsustainable, lack systematic evaluation mechanisms and are funded mostly in the run-up to elections and designed to benefit only politically docile clients, such that their portion of oil rents becomes the price they’re paid for their votes.

What we'd see, in other words, is the political economy of puntofijismo. Petrostate clientelism, plain and simple.

Discourse and reality, moving in opposite directions along parallel plains. Never touching, never penetrating one another, never clashing with one another, never encumbering each other in their onward march. As estranged as though they belonged to radically different realities rather than to a single country.

What explains this impermeability? To my mind, it's the totalitarian features of the state discourse itself that ensures that no aspect of "real" reality can ever bubble up through into the revolution's discursive awareness. Having committed completely to a discourse that automatically dismisses any critical thought as "media terrorism" or "CIA psy ops" geared at planting destabilizing "opinion matrixes", Chávez supporters effectively ban themselves from engaging critically with the mass of contradictions the revolution daily generates.

The revolution can't "see" the connections between the issue of Notas Estructuradas and Victor Vargas's lifestyle, it can't join the dots from the operation of Cadivi to the transfer of wealth from the state to the wealthy, it never notices any of these and a thousand similar anomalies because such matters are systematically blacked out from the state media. And they're systematically blacked out from the state media because the lament they carry, their implicit political message, is embarrassing to the government and therefore, a priori, deemed suspicious, likely part of some gringo plot to undermine the regime, of some ploy by absolute Evil to undermine absolute Good.

The cronies at the top of the bolibourgeois game understand this dynamic plenty clearly enough and daily manipulate it to their advantage, tarring any one who seeks to hold them up to public scrutiny as agents of evil, deploying the revolution's deeply warped discursive standards to protect their particular positions in the rent seeking game.

Locked in this watertight discursive bubble, unable any longer to distinguish truth from fantasy, the revolution has destroyed its own ability to process reality reasonably and fatally undermined its own capacity to integrate "what it says" with "what it does", to harmonize the two, or at least ensure a minimum of coherence between them.

As far as I know, there really is no precedent for what we’re seeing here. Some people compare it to the Mexican PRI’s brand of rhetorically incandescent clientelism but, as far as I know, no Mexican government ever even approached the extremes of discursive totalitarianism we’re seeing here. Because what we’re witnessing is no garden variety political hypocrisy, no run-of-the-mill opportunism. What we’re seeing is a kind of political schizophrenia, an incapacity to integrate what is said with what is done that strikes me as closer to a mental illness than to a political ideology.

The paradoxes that this divorce engenders are almost endless. The government we have is passionately hated by the people it benefits the most, and passionately upheld by many it treats as an afterthought. Its preponderant social policies, its costliest, most far reaching and radical redistributive policies (the gas and foreign exchange subsidies) are unarguably regressive, redistributing income from its supporters to its detractors, and are almost never discussed by the official media.

Like a looking glass, the revolution has made the right into the left and the left into the right, but the effect is so subtle and the outcome come to seem so “normal” we don’t quite spot it, can’t quite process it, can’t quite see just how bizarre it all is.

After all, what could be more normal than a mirror?

Chronicle of a Devaluation Foretold

Quico says: So, as I mentioned, in the middle-class-to-escualidón circles I tend to frequent in Caracas, Cadivi has become a constant, ever-present worry, a universal obsession. Everyone you meet seems to be at some point along the process of getting Cadivi dollars, everyone you meet has a Cadivi story to tell.

Which, really, shouldn't surprise us. People get excited enough about a bargain when they’re shopping for clothes, or when they find an airline tickets at below-the-going-rate… but money? Money sold for less than it's worth?! That’s something else! The notion itself is counterintuitive, perilously close to the definition of "too good to be true".

But it is true. The Chávez government really is hawking dollar bills for 40 cents a pop. Can you really call it a surprise that a bit of a frenzy ensues?

And so Cadivi has become a conversation set piece, the petrostate's answer to the weather. Everybody has something to say about the weather, right?

In particular, the weirdly dysfunctional Cadivi website has become an object of collective obsession. The site - which you must use to file a currency application - works sporadically, erratically, shuts down completely for hours on end, and generally seems designed by an unreconstructed sadist.

How to beat it? Is it better to log on late or early? From a PC or a Mac? Firefox or Explorer? What, pray tell, is the secret!??

In fact, the secret isn’t hard to fathom. The government needs a rationing mechanism for dollars. Cadivi itself is supposed to be a formal rationing mechanism, but the demand for subsidized dollars is so overwhelming that a secondary, informal rationing mechanism has become a must. After all, if the state approved the $5,000 traveller's allowance people are technically "entitled to get" for the ten million Venezuelans who probably want it, the entirety of the nation's $50 billion in oil income would go up in smoke right there, before they've even paid for any imports.

The principle behind all this is pretty straightforward, though it systematically eludes the government's economic policy makers: When you price a good – any good – at below it’s market value, it’s going to run out.

If the going price for apples is $1 and you start selling apples for forty cents, you’re going to run out of apples. Why? Because people will soon realize that they can buy apples from you for forty cents and turn right around and resell them for a dollar, pocketing the difference. So you will run out. It's a mathematical certainty. How big an orchard you have or how loaded the trees look is neither here nor there.

For the exact same reason, if the going rate for a dollar bill is one dollar and you start selling dollar bills for forty cents, you’re going to run out. It's a certainty. That, in for-dummies form, is what Cadivimania comes down to.

Of course, people say, “well, with oil at $110 a barrel and $32 billion in reserves, what’s the problem?” But that’s just fundamentally flawed reasoning. No level of reserves, no level of income is "high enough” when you’re selling dollars off at less than half their value.

Problem is, the government can’t let dollars run out, or even appear to be running out. Again, for an economist, what comes next is simple: they either have to either raise the price of dollars (devaluation) or they’re going to have to ration them…whether it’s through a ration book, long lines outside banks, a dollar lotery, or Cadivi’s peculiar, 21st Century contribution to the fine art of rationing price controlled goods: the Kafka-inspired website.

The experience of using Cadivi’s website pretty much defies description. It appears purpose engineered to magnify your frustration. The system spends far more time down than up, and in the highly unusual case that you do manage to log on, will reject your application for the most inanely arcane reasons you can imagine. One night, I wasted three hours because Cadivi could not fathom that the name of my educational institute had a non-Alpha Numeric character in it (the humble dash.) And that after I had, miraculously, managed to log on to the system after "just" 45 minutes.

And so a generation of middle and upper class Venezuelans are spending the best days of their lives mindlessly hitting “refresh” on their browsers for hours and hours on end to try to get into Cadivi’s website. Social events get planned around Cadivi’s curious, día de parada style restrictions on when you can and can’t log on. (“Dinner Wednesday night…mmmm, well, that’s my Cadivi night… could we do it Thursday instead?”) Entire evenings are wasted. It’s futile. It’s maddening. It’s obsession forming.

This idiotically inefficient rationing mechanism has given rise to a bizarre twist on what was already a real anomaly. It was already weird that the revolutionary people’s socialist government was handing out wads and wads of free money to the (relatively) privileged through Cadivi, but thanks to the website, we class enemies are now taking that money with a sense of grievance!

“Pssshh! The nerve! Ransacking the national treasury should not be this aggravating!”

It’s easy to sneer but, if I’m going to be honest, I have to admit that more than once, during those long hours of hitting "refresh," that’s exactly how I felt.

Of course, this direct use of their website to get dollars is just the visible tip of the Cadivi iceberg…the much more relevant portion is below the surface, in the tens of billions of dollars worth of subsidized imports coming into the country now, making huge profits for importers, underselling local producers that can't compete with half-off dollars, wreaking havoc with the country’s industrial structure and subsidizing the lifestyles of, for the most part, the rankest of the rank oligarchs.

In the grand scheme of things, the rationing-via-404-error-screen thing is a relatively minor warning sign that Cadivi can’t keep up with the demand it has created for subsidized dollars. A more ominous sign is the long delays many importers are facing in getting their dollars. One prominent multinational that sells equipment to PDVSA is getting its dollars six months late; stories of three and four month delays are common.

In effect, Cadivi is taking forced-loan after forced-loan from importers, and speculation is rife about just how big the accumulated backlog of requests has gotten. Cadivi sources admit, off the record, a $12 billion backlog. The independent estimates I’ve heard range between $16 and $20. Which is pretty alarming, considering the operative reserves at the Central Bank (i.e. excluding the gold) amount to just $25 billion: pay off the backlog, and the grim reality of a highly precarious reserve situation would be plain for all to see.

“The reserves are a mirage,” is how one well connected friend put it, “if Cadivi isn’t executing its backlog it’s precisely to preserve the illusion.”

Where this is all headed is painfully obvious, and has been since the second the words “exchange controls” were first uttered: devaluation. Everybody knows this, and that knowledge fuels the antsy sense of urgency that hangs around East-side Cadivi-mania. And yet, for reasons that make exactly zero sense to me, the government keeps putting it off.

As one unconfirmed, unconfirmable, quite possibly false but nevertheless suggestive rumor would have it, the reason is simple. As the story goes, soon after taking on his post as Finance Minister, Rafael Isea sat down with President Chávez and showed him a carefully worked out power point presentation demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that devaluation was now inevitable and doing it sooner would be less traumatic than doing it later. Chávez, the rumor has it, listened carefully, thanked his minister warmly, and sentenced, “that’s all very good Isea, but you can just forget about it: No devaluation!”

Isea, shocked, tried to plead, “but, comandante…” only to get cut off “my decision is final.” End of conversation.

Such are the ways of policing making in the Chávez era.

And so, Isea is left to think up yet another new batch of tricks, accounting gimmicks, and ley-de-salvaguardia defying stunts to keep this whole Rube Goldberg Machine of a fiscal and monetary policy sputtering on for another few months. So far, they've tried:

• Stretching out Cadivi’s payments over longer and longer periods of time, creating what amount to forced loans from importers to the state.
• Setting up the website to accept just a handful of new requests a day, holding the line against even greater expansion of the backlog.
• Getting PDVSA to demands payment for oil sooner, and to sell on future’s markets, literally selling oil before it’s pumped it out of the ground, to try to squeeze some extra cash out of the cash cow.
• Issuing crazed amounts of “Notas Estructuradas” – dollar denominated domestic debt sold for bolivars - to try to relieve the pressure from the parallel market.
• Holding up tens of thousands of new, imported cars up for weeks at a time in Puerto Cabello as Cadivi checks whether they meet new regulations.

And, no doubt, a thousand other gimmicks that you can bet are out there, but we're not hearing about. One could only wish the government would devote the kind of ingenuity it shows for concocting accounting smoke-screens to solving the country's actual problems.

None of these tricks really addresses the underlying non-viability of Misión Cadivi, none of them alters the ultimate inevitability of devaluation, but each of them puts off the day of reckoning for that little bit longer.

And then, of course, there’s the political economy of all this lunacy. Because each of these gimmicks creates a new rent-seeking opportunity and spawns its own little ecosystem of parasitic intermediaries and financiers with more connections than scruples who long ago figured out how to monetize Chávez’s economic illiteracy. Each new patch stuck on the Cadivi money hole corrupts our society just that little bit more and helps transfer wealth from the socialist state to those who need it least, deepening the trends towards inequality the government daily swears to be combating.

And all for the sake of adding just a few weeks or months of life to a policy that isn’t even viable in the medium term, much less in the long term, and that will necessarily, self-evidently collapse…carrying with it a hugely destructive new wave of financial instability, corporate failures and heightened inflation that’s as sadly predictable today as it was in ahead of Viernes Negro in 1982, of the collapse of Recadi in 1989, of the Caldera controls in 1996 and of every other experience with the macroeconomics of populism Latin America has ever seen.

...just some thoughts to keep you entertained (and motivated) as you down another cup of coffee and keep hitting "refresh" on that %*#^)*^! Cadivi page.

No Hay Material

Quico says: Ask anyone at all and they'll tell you: hands down, the three most feared words in Venezuela’s bureaucratic vocabulary are "there's no material."

It's a kind of code phrase, meaning something like “no, seriously, there’s no use trying to bribe me: I genuinely can’t help you.” The cargo gods have not come through. For whatever reason, the tenuous link with the fairy country that manufactures the little physical booklets that, provided a photo and a battery of official stamps, become passports, has been severed.

For what reason? For how long?

These are questions no sane Venezuelan ever asks.

I ran into the dreaded phrase at El Llanito’s INTTT Inspectoría, Venezuela’s DMV, as I went to get my driver’s license renewed.

“No, mi amor, es que no hay material."

Oh shit. Well, “y ¿cómo hago?” I say in a gambit to see if there’s some back channel way to get that covetted bit of laminated plastic.

Amazingly, uncharacteristically, it works…for some baffling reason, she takes a shine to me and decides to confide.

“Mira,” she says, “word on the street is that they’ll have material tomorrow in Los Chaguaramos. Otherwise, you can try again here next week.”

I can’t believe my luck. I have a tip, an actual dato, straight from the functionariate’s mouth, good as gold.

“Muchas gracias, amiga,” I say and rush out smiling, actually happy, as though I haven't just wasted a trip that cost me an hour and a half in traffic.

The next day I go to the bank to pay my fee and then rush off to the Inspectoría in Los Chaguaramos, getting there at about 9:00 a.m.

Or, rather, I get to the metal fence setting off the Inspectoría from the sidewalk. A little hubbub of maybe 20 or 25 people are crowding in on the gate, as one single guy – a security guard – holds off the barbarian masses, trying to give out information one case at a time.

I kind of jostle my way up to the front and eventually get to ask him, “amigo, to renew my license?” as I show him my documents.

“Yeah, ok, we have 30 spots, and it’s first come first serve, so you better get in line right there.”

He points to a spot just outside the gate, on the sidewalk. I’m amazed, there’s just a handful of people in line there. “This is going to be a piece of cake,” I think to myself.

“Disculpe, is this the line for license renewals?” I ask the guys in line. They nod.

“And do you know what time they’ll let us in?”

“At 1:30,” one of them says.

“What?!”

“Yeah, 1:30…this is the line for the afternoon spots…the morning people already went in.”

Oh Christ.

“Ay coño,” I say, and add… “pero, sí hay material, ¿verdad?”

They all nod, a little too eagerly for my taste, as though they’re trying to convince themselves.

“That’s what they said…30 plásticos this afternoon.”

Bueno…nothing to be done. Just hunker down for four and a half hours on a sidewalk in Los Chaguaramos breathing exhaust fumes and passing the time who knows how.

Damn it, I should’ve had breakfast.

The vexation on my face must’ve been pretty clear, cuz one of the guys looks at me and says “c’mon, chamo, don’t make such a face: just think, this señor here’s been doing this for a whole week.”

I look at the round faced man just ahead of me in line.

“Really?”

He smiles, beatifically, obviously way past getting exasperated by this kind of thing anymore.

“You have no idea what they’ve put me through this week…” he pauses, thinking through the memories. “I spent all day queuing at El Llanito on Monday just to be told at the end that they’d run out of plásticos…on Tuesday they said they had no more material and didn’t know when any more would be coming in. Lost day. Wednesday a friend told me to head out to Los Teques and try there so I had to shell out for transport to get all the way out there, but it was a bust there as well. They told me to come here…and yesterday it was just like today, they said they had 30 plasticos, and I was number 23 in line, but right as I got up to the front, after 8, count them, eight hours standing here taking the sun like a rooftile, they said no, 'es que se acabó el material' and sent me home.”

He pauses, savoring the string of disasters.

“Bueno, the good thing is that at this point I’m immunized against frustration," he says, shrugging the whole thing off. "Today I came even earlier and now I’m fifth in line. If they turn me away again I’ll toss a Molotov cocktail in there.”

It’s the kind of story to put my own problems in perspective.

“Thing is, I’m a transportista, a bus driver," he continues, "so every day without a license is a day I can’t work, and a day I don't work is a day I don't bring home anything to my family."

A bit of a circle is forming around the guy’s story. Everybody's nodding. Pretty soon one of the other guys pipes in as well.

“That’s where I'm at too. The guy who owns the microbus I drive won’t let me go out without a license. The bribes we have to pay the cops if we get caught are so high they’d wipe out two weeks worth of work. But in the meantime…hell, you know how it is, we’re contractors, we don’t work we don’t earn.”

“¿Oh yeah?” one-week-running-after-a-license-man says, “¿what part of town do you cover?”

Pretty soon, it’s social hour at the license renewal line. Everybody knows we’re in for a long wait and conversation seems like as good a way to pass the time as any.

I find Venezuelans remarkably good humored in situations like this. I’m surrounded by people suffering real economic hardship because the damn government can’t get it together to source enough drivers’ license cards, but nobody really bitches. They crack jokes, trade stories, share anecdotes about being held up during work, and soon a pretty strong esprit de corps is arising in our group.

In my little sector of the line we have three bus drivers, a taxi driver, a guy who runs an ice delivery truck, a housewife who needs her license to drive her kids to school, and a guy doing a PhD in political science in Europe. It strikes me that standing in line waiting to be humiliated by the bureaucracy is one of the few spaces for genuine social equality in Venezuela. Right here, right now, there are no social distinctions: we really are all the same.

One thing is clear, though: nobody brings up politics. We’re strangers. More than likely some of us are chavistas and some are anti-. Bringing it up could only bust the vibe we’ve developed. It’s not a risk worth taking.

Just to keep things from getting too chaotic, somebody pulls out a pen and a note pad and starts making little numbered slips so we each know what our exact place in line is. The move makes the gate guard nervous. He comes over and warns us in no uncertain terms that the inspectoría will not recognize those numbers, that come 1:30 it’ll still be first come, first serve. His tone is that of a dad warning a 6 year old kid.

We grin and bear it: however squalid his little quota of power may be, right here, right now, he is the one guy we can’t afford to piss off. We reassure him we’re just doing it to keep track of who’s where among ourselves. But, actually, by this point, it’s kind of superfluous…we’ve spent 2 hours in this line already, talking, hanging out, and by now everybody knows who’s in what spot in line. The chances of someone cutting and getting away with it are nil.

Come to think of it, if the gate guard wasn't treating us like shit, would we be bonding the way we are? I kind of doubt it...when you get right down to it, the only thing bringing us together is the disdain of officialdom.

Still, we’re antsy…we kind of feel better with an actual number in hand, whether Power chooses to recognize it or now.

At about 11:30 I fall into a one-on-one conversation with Nelson, one of the bus drivers. After asking me a few questions about public transport in Holland (yes, a bus ride really does cost Bs.7,000 there, no, you don't get a Welcome Drink for that kind of money) he decides to confide.

“Really I’m an accountant,” he tells me, “I got my degree from INCE, but you know how the vaina is, I couldn’t get a job so…now I drive a bus.”

I ask him about his work. He lives up in El Junquito and drives down into downtown Caracas a couple of times per morning. He tells me about the intricacies of timing his runs just right to maximize his take. Go too early and there aren’t any passengers. Go too late, and there’s too much traffic. You only make money when you’re loading passengers, and you can’t load passengers if you’re stuck in a traffic jam.

The best, he reckons, is to set off at about 5 a.m., that’s pretty much the sweet spot when good passenger numbers meet relatively unclogged streets. Then he gets back to El Junquito by about 6:30 and has a nice, leisurely breakfast just long enough to miss the student-heavy time slot; another variable in his little optimization problem.

“Students? Why do you go out of your way to avoid them? Are they really that rauckous?”

“Nah,” he says, “it’s the student ticket thing.”

He explains that they’re not allowed to charge students full fare. Technically, the government is supposed to make up the difference but, surprise surprise, refunds are invariably late.

“Right now, the delay in getting paid is about three months," he says, “and hell, I studied accounting, so I know exactly what that's called: a forced loan. Interest free, to boot.”

With inflation running as high as it is, the bolivars they get paid three months late can be worth a good 8% less than the bolivars they were originally forced to loan the government, he explains. It’s just not good business, driving during time slots when half your customers are going to be students, he explains. Not surprisingly, kids have a hell of a tough time finding a bus to get on to get to school in the morning...just one more downside to schooling, one more prod to drop out.

Just then, we see a military vehicle pull up to the Inspectoría gates. Three, four, five army guys in uniform make their way inside. The line goes from sociable to restless.

“¡Que arrechera, chamo!” one of the guys says, “man that pisses me off! Each one of those guys going in is one less plástico for us.”

We’ve been standing out there for three and a half hours, now. It’s noon, it’s hot, some of us haven’t had breakfast. Nobody dares make too much of a fuss, though. Those guys are army, y’know.

Within five minutes, the gate guard comes out to announce that, mysteriously, there are now just 25 plásticos to hand out today. The back of the line (which, in effect, has just been told that no hay material) is more deflated than furious. They slink off, muttering cuss words but resigned to come again the next day.

It’s the DMV, after all: it’s not like you can go to the competition if they give you shitty service.

As 1:30 draws near, a palpable sense of expectation builds in the line. Soon, the carefully differentiated lines for license renewals, first-time licenses, and car registrations that had remained neatly separate all morning all clump together into a mass around the door.

The gate guard definitely can’t cope. Soon, he's pretty much forced to rely on the little scribbled numbers he’s already told us he wouldn’t accept. People shove and push and yell and you can’t really tell if people are cutting in line in front of you or if they’re just from one of the other lines that’ve gotten all mushed up into one big melée. The people from "my" line try to help each other out, as far as possible, but frankly that’s not very far. It’s pretty much chaos as the gate guard gets into a series of increasingly testy exchanges with the hordes clamoring to get inside.

“Lo que pasa,” he yells at us in exasperation, “is that you people aren’t properly organized! You need to get organized, otherwise look at the chaos we’re left with!”

In time, a Tránsito Terrestre official comes out to look over this mess. He sees the gate guard arguing with the users, shakes his head, and reprimands him, saying – loud enough for all of us to hear – “why do you waste your time talking to them? Don’t talk to them, man…no hables con ellos.”

In his own, haplessly testy way, the gate guard was treating us like human beings. Rookie mistake, obviously.

In the end, I manage to sneak in somehow and hand in my documents:

• One cédula copy – check.
• One bank payment slip – check.
• One certificado médico – check.
• One renewal form – check.

Now we wait inside the gate, finally sitting in proper chairs and under a bit of shade, it feels like relative luxury as we finish the conversations we’d started earlier. A half hour later, a Tránsito Terrestre official comes out and starts calling out names, handing out our 25 renewed licenses. I tremble in anticipation when he calls out Toro...

Then, just as suddenly as it had formed, our little community disappears.

As I stroke my still warm plastic, I can't help but muse on how thoroughly, gallopingly pointless the whole exercise is. Nothing I did, no part of the bureaucratic nightmare at all had even the slightest, most oblique bearing on my ability to drive a car. None whatsoever. There were no tests, practical or theoretical, no checks of accident records, no part of the procedure has anything to do with driving at all…and yet, if you want to drive a vehicle in Venezuela, you have to subject yourself to this baffling set of low level humiliations once every ten years, just because.

For me, normally stuck away in a Dutch provincial town, the whole thing was a bit of a curiosity, almost worth it just for the chance to talk at leisure with an accountant buseta driver. But for these other guys, the hours or days spent dealing with all this idiocy are days of real economic hardship, days of wages foregone for people living a hand-to-mouth existence.

Their good cheer baffled and charmed me, yes, but seemed to me also just a case of learned helplessness, of a deeply justified intuition that it’s just always been like this and it’s just never going to get better so what’s the point of getting upset?

As I left the Inspectoría with my plástico burning a hole in my pocket, I noticed a sign gracing the inside of the gate. In big, propagandistic blue letters it belted out,

“Now getting your license is easier!”

Heh. Quite.

Striking Oil in Terrazas del Avila

Quico says: My arrival in Caracas seems to have coincided with Milk’s. Everyone was real happy about that. It was all UHT, no fresh stuff, but I guess it’d been months since there’d been any kind of milk around so people weren't minded to be picky.

Personally, I don't really have much use for the stuff. I detest cereals, don't bake much, and I always have my coffee black. Still, particularly during those first few days, people were just so damn happy to have milk, I couldn’t help but feel it’d be rude to refuse it. “Would you like a café con leche?” they’d ask all proud like, with a big smile beaming from their faces, and I’d just nod meekly, unable to muster the courage to ask for the negrito I really wanted instead.

Actually, March was a fairly benign months in terms of shortages: toilet paper, sugar, beans, chicken, and beef were pretty easy to find. The biggest problem seemed to be with rice, but cooking oil and gas canisters (which, as I wrote, is a huge problem for people who can’t get them) were touch and go, and specific stores seemed to have specific shortages of oddball stuff, like paper napkins.

Even with the newly available staples, people were still antsy and minded to stock up while they could, so de facto rationing at the cash register remained quietly in force in many places.

Venezuelans being Venezuelans, all kinds of informal, back channel methods to beat the shortages now operate. When you find a scarce product, you’re fully expected to SMS your closest circle of friends and family about it. My sister, who hosted me, seemed to get at least two or three of these messages a day. “Toilet paper at Makro La Urbina”, or “rush for cooking oil at Cada La Florida,” they'd read.

With the supply situation a bit better, the messages during my trip weren’t so urgent but, she told me, a month back any “Milk” message would see her immediately drop whatever she was doing and rush to the place mentioned. "What can I say, Quico?" she'd shrug, "I have five children and a husband and all of them are hooked on Quick."

It was pretty clear that the milk shortage, in particular, had really messed with people's life.

One day during my trip she got a message, “corn oil at Exito Terrazas del Avila, 6 per person”…and we rushed out. While the cooking oil problem was not as dire as the rice drought, getting more than a bottle or two at a time had been hard for a while, and finding corn oil specifically, which Venezuelans typically prefer, had been really quite a challenge. For a long time, all you could find was weird stuff like peanut or soy oil or some gnarly tasting and alarmingly underlabeled stuff sold as "multipurpose vegetable oil."

So the prospect of six bottles of corn oil was still enticing enough to get her moving. We braved the traffic on the Cota Mil to get to the hypermarket out there and my sister went to work right away, making eyes at the guy behind the counter, blatantly flirting with him to see if he’d stretch the 6 per person rule.

“How many people are you?” He asked.

“Three,” she lied (it was just the two of us.)

“OK, so that's 18 bottles…” he says, but she's having none of it.

“¿Cómo?" she says, teasing him with a big smile, "You weren’t so good at math in school, were you? Three times six is 24, everybody knows that!”

He laughs and quietly lets her have the whole 24-bottle pack. It’s a big score. She’s thrilled. Very discretely, she slips him a Bs.5,000 bill. Everybody’s happy.

As we come out, she whips out her cell phone and starts banging away messages right away.

"Letting everyone know you struck oil, right?" I say, thinking I'm catching on. But she shakes her head.

"Nope, this message I'm sending out to my freebie network. Twelve of those 24 bottles I'm going to give out to them."

"Huh?" I couldn't believe it. "After all that, you're going to just give this stuff away?"

“It might seem crazy,” she says, “but I figured out a long time ago that the best insurance against running out of the basics is to just give stuff out. Whenever I get my hands on a hard-to-find item, my rule of thumb is to give half of it away. Of course, that means that whenever someone in my little network finds a hard-to-find item, they give me a freebie too. You know that rice we’ve been eating at home? I didn’t buy it: our neighbor Andrea just gave me three kilos cuz two months ago, when nobody could find toilet paper, I knocked on her door one day and gave her six rolls.”

She had her distribution list all worked out. Four bottles for her best friend, and then two-packs for four other lucky members of her little freebie network, each of them a tried-and-tested sourcer whom she knew she could count on, but only if they knew they could count on her.

And then it hit me. That sunuvabitch Chavez did it! We all made fun of him when he announced it, but now it’s happening! And not in some podunk nowhere town in Apure or something but right here in foufy East Side Caracas...she may not call it that, but what Ana is doing is trueque!

We never even noticed it creeping up on us, and now the Barter Economy is here!

Bring Back the Maisto Doctrine!

Quico says: So, wondering why posting’s been so light recently? Here’s the deal: I spent the last three weeks in Caracas. Elementary paranoia kept me from disclosing as much before coming back, but now that I am safely ensconced in a forgotten little bit of the Dutch countryside I will, of course, be posting at length about the trip.

Now, I’d love to tell you I went back to immerse myself in the politics of a renascent opposition, or the travails of my nearest barrio, or the wonders of our natural heritage. Alas, my motives weren’t so pure: basically, it was Misión Cadivi that brought me back. As a Europe-based Venezuelan student, I qualify for a
irresistible cupo of $1,800 each and every month, payable at a scrumptious, nibbliscious Bs.2,150/$.

Hell, I’m just a grad student: I’m in no position to pass up that much free cash.

Filthy lucre, yes, how very counterrevolutionary of me…or, is it?

On the one hand, I realize it’s a bit problematic to get on my high horse and denounce the systematic ransacking of the nation’s oil wealth as I sign on enthusiastically on the side of the ransacketeers.

On the other hand, what I’m doing is scrupulously (if counterintuitively) legal: I really am Venezuelan, really do study in Europe, and ultimately am just taking advantage of a policy that wouldn’t even exist if the revolution hadn’t put it there. As far as petro-state plunder goes, it doesn’t get much more zanahoria than my case: I’m not even scamming the system! Hell, it's almost unvenezuelan to do it this way...

Still, the irony is hard to get over: I, great escualido cyber-scourge of the revolution, just about doubled my income on the revoluion’s dime just by filing a few forms.

In Caracas, I found that I was far from alone. In the appallingly sifrino circles I tend to inhabit when I’m down there, Cadivi has become a kind of universal obsession: everybody I met had either just finished asking for their dollars, was fighting the Cadivi website for their cupo, had an aunt who’d just come back from Miami to cash out her’s, or some cognate of these stories.

At my sister’s house, where I was staying, even the maid was in the loop: the bureaucratic nightmare she was facing trying to send family remittances back to her folks in Colombia was easily the most hairraising of the bunch.

My second day in town (first day I was getting my cédula, so here's lookin' at ya, syd) I went down to my bank in Sabana Grande to explain my situation to them. I was told that, on top of my student cupo, I could qualify for a $5,000 traveller cupo as well.

To do so, I would need to take out one of their credit cards…for which processing times had risen to TWO MONTHS because, these days, everybody and his cousin's cat is desperately trying to get a credit card, precisely so they can get those 5,000 insanely subsidized dollars.

It’s a policy I found especially telling. To get the travellers’ cupo, you have to have a credit card, and to get a credit card you basically have to be middle class. My sister’s maid, as you can guess, can’t get one: she has neither a credit history nor a high enough salary for any sane bank to give her one. So, in practice, the revolutionary socialist state systematically discriminates against her (and everyone else who is poor) in one of the most expensive and systematic wealth ridistribution policies it runs.

This is no detail. Because, trust me, you’d have to add up a lot of misión scholarships to match the implicit subsidy in the 5,000 official-rate-dollars handout that only credit card-holders can even apply for.

It’s a realization that brought me back to a point Katy made a long time ago, but whose deeper truth only really sank in during my trip: if you revisit the Maisto Doctrine and judge chavismo by what it does rather than what it says, you have to conclude what we have in Venezuela is something like a right wing dictatorship.

All revolutionary/discursive paja aside, the government lets nothing stand in its way in its drive to redistribute oil income up the income scale. The mountains of bullshit that come out of Chávez mouth have tended to obscure this reality, yes, but have never altered it.

For those with the courage to revisit Maisto's supposedly (but only superficially) discredited theory, it’s really no surprise that the Central Bank finds income inequality is rising in Venezuela: the socialist revolutionary government’s two weightiest macroeconomic policies uniformly shift income up to the privileged.

A staggering seven percent of GDP is spent on a deliriously regressive gasoline subsidy, while untold billions of oil dollars are spent subsidizing the imported toys the rich amuse themselves with.

Needless to say, Maisto and his doctrine aren’t particularly fondly remembered in opposition circles these days. To my mind, though, the man was a visionary, a misunderstood genius. He was the first to intuit a truth that grows harder to ignore every day in Venezuela: that government discourse and government reality aren’t just “in tension” with one another, or “not always easy to reconcile” or even “sporadically contradictory", but rather run in completely opposite directions, and do so systematically, on the most salient policy fronts, and have done for a long time.

Seriously, take it from me: a Mantuano-descended reactionary and incorregible government critic just back from a Cadivi-funded junket that doubled his income.