And the Design Contest Winner is...

...99ideas, for this stunning layout:

Click to enlarge.

It still has to be coded, so it won't be up right away. Still. I'm really excited about it. I think it looks great. Thank to everyone for your feedback, it really helped a lot.

¡Golpista!

Quico says: We're so used to hearing the word "coup-monger" tossed around indiscriminately as an all-purpose slur against government critics, we're pretty much inured to it by now. Perversely, the wanton overuse of the term makes it easy to forget that, back in the early morning hours of April 12th, 2002, there really was a hard core of civilian and military conspirators who went fishing in troubled waters and very nearly made off with complete control of the state.

Few of them had a higher profile than Allan Brewer Carías, who along with his Hollywood-villain moustache spent that night milling around the Army's General Command in Fuerte Tiuna, is widely credited with writing at least the "considerandos" in Carmona's decree, and by all accounts was knee-deep in the conspiracy.

So why the hell is The New York Times running this mind-blowingly vacuous interview he gave on Sunday's referendum?! Set aside the sheer colominaesque banality of Randy's Ranting - complete with the standard, oligophrenic charge of "totalitarianism" - and focus on the editorial decision itself. Is the Gray Lady absolutely determined to lend credibility to the charge that, in Venezuela, oppo = coupster? What does it take to get removed from the ranks of polite company in New York these days?

Weak, weak, weak, weak, weak! Dr. Brewer Carías...buy a car-wash or something. Please. No nos ayude más, compadre! Seriously.

The designs just keep coming...

Quico says: I am loving this 99designs thing. Two new designers have joined the fray. Check them out here and here.

And another one...

Quico says: Designer #1 - he of the eye-busting yellow-pollito theme - has recanted his chromatic folly and resubmitted. Have a look:

World's Weirdest Scam

Quico says: A hearty congratulation goes out to Alex Dalmady, only guy I ever met who's blown the top off a multibillion dollar fraud. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, so I want to go on the record saying I used to hang out with him before he became an international media darling!

The underlying story is truly bizarre. Apparently, a very large percentage of Stanford's fraud hit Venezuelan investors. We're talking billions, perhaps as many as $5 billion out of the $8.5 the Antiguan bank had in deposit, though nobody knows the exact number.

At this point, I have many more questions than answers: have you ever heard of a Cricket-promoting Texas-billionaire who specializes in swindling Antiguans and Venezuelans? How can it be that a fraud that was operating in 130 countries ended up focusing such a high percentage of the losses on just ours?

There are a ton of rumors going around of Chavista big fish getting hit hard by this scam, but it's all rumint so far.

And then, there's one very obvious subtext here that nobody seems to want to acknowledge, ABCNews has started to look into. There is only one reason off-shore banking got so big in the Caribbean in the first place: money laundering. And there is indeed some evidence that Stanford was involved in helping Mexico's Gulf Cartel launder its money.

Hmmmm, lets review the bidding: ...dodgy Texans...off-shore Caribbean banks...Venezuelans who are suddenly gazillionaires and are looking for places to invest...massive profits that vanish into thin air. These are not hard dots to connect, and if Clodosbaldo Russian's EEG ever registered anything beyond a persistent vegetative state, I'm sure he'd have no trouble.

But we shouldn't forget that Stanford was running a Fogade-insured retail bank in Venezuela alongside its scam-laden Antigua operation. And not every Venezuelan taken in by the Antigua scam was an obvious crook: in fact, the only people I know for sure to have lost their money are normal Venezuelan savers, not chavista pesados.

It's all incredibly murky: where this goes from here, I can only guess.

Help me choose

Quico says: We now have four proposals for the blog redesign.

Designer #1: 99ideas


Designer #2: JoeComins



Designer #3: DeUitvreter


Designer #4: AlfredMS

The Caracas Chronicles we need [Updated again!]

Quico says: The first redesign proposal has been submitted on 99designs. Click here to have a look. Click here to give the designer feedback.

UPDATE: A second designer has thrown his design into the rink. Check it out.
UPDATE II: And a third designer...
UPDATE III: Design #4

The opposition we need

Quico and Juan Cristobal say: Yesterday we had an interesting but somewhat circular discussion about the ills of the opposition. Though much huffing and puffing ensued, we failed to reach a consensus and were mostly talking past each other. This happens, I think, because we're hung up on the problem. We'd be better off focusing on the solution.

Typically, when we discuss our screwed up opposition, we start with the here and now, asking, "what's wrong with the opposition as it is, what makes it so ineffective at fighting Chávez?" The discussions that follow can't go anywhere because they can only tells us why we don't want to be here, but they can't tell us where we want to go, much less how to get there.

So maybe we should work backwards instead, starting out imagining what an opposition able to really take the fight to chavismo would be like and then retracing the steps it'll take to get us there.

This brings us to questions that, for some reason, we almost never hear asked. If the opposition was serious about putting a real challenge to the Chávez regime, what would it look like? What would its organizations and its structure be like? How would it be different from how it is today?

To my mind, the opposition organization we need will have five characteristics that the current opposition lacks. It needs to be,

1. National
2. Organized
3. Credible
4. Connected
5. Well-funded
   

1. National
First off, the opposition we need is national in scope. An opposition that only operates in a few big cities (Caracas, Maracaibo, Valencia) is not enough. Just remember, last Sunday our win in Miranda was more than offset out by chavismo's win in Trujillo, our win in Zulia was totally cancelled out by chavismo's win in Guárico. Fully a fifth of chavismo's edge came from Portuguesa alone...I mean: Portuguesa!!

The opposition just can't afford to have "dead areas" like this, whole regions that we just tacitly hand off to chavismo because we can't organize there.

While the opposition's absence is most visible in really rural places, it's easy to forget how absent we are even from much of urban Venezuela. In fact, only 10 million Venezuelans live in the 8 biggest cities, meaning that a further 10-12 million urban Venezuelans live in towns and small cities with populations between 20,000 and 400,000. We're talking places like Charallave, San Carlos, Carúpano, Valera, and any number of others that the Caracas-based oppo political class just doesn't talk to.

The opposition needs a nationwide presence, a nationwide reach and a nationwide strategy to get beyond the patchwork approach it has now. Howard Dean had his 50-state strategy. We desperately need a 24 state strategy!

2. Organized
Second, the opposition we need has to step up to the plate and start competing with chavismo in terms of organization. We will, of course, never have the resources to match chavismo's petrostate control, but we can certainly do better than we have. Ahead of Sunday, chavismo had a proper ground game, patrulleros, people knocking doors in every town, barrio and caserío in the country. They ran robocalls. They had guys out in trucks with loud speaker. They were doing retail politics, hard, all over the country.

In other words, chavismo had the organization to put together a coherent nationwide groundgame. We had Aló, Ciudadano. Yes, we were outspent, but in the end the gap on this score may have been as much about volunteer organization as about money. Partly because it has no nationwide presence, the opposition could only rely on a fractured, patchwork response, with different groups running different activities in the places where they happen to be strong, but nobody really running a coherent national ground game.

3. Credible
A third thing Chavismo has and we need is credible messengers. In their case, they have just one credible messenger: Chávez himself. Like him or loathe him, when Chávez speaks people listen, he commands the respect of the room. Always has.

We have nobody like that. This is not personal - I have no reason to doubt that people like Henry Ramos Allup and Julio Borges are absolutely fine human beings. But they've just lost the battle over their own branding.

Unfair as it may be, most swing voters look at them and think "oh gawd, not these dinosaurs again!" They've simply been around too long, even the newish ones, to command the respect of a room. The messages they read out almost don't matter, because they don't have the credibility it takes for ni-nis to listen to any message that comes out of their mouths.

4. Connected
In fourth place, the opposition we need connects with people with a new message that's tough but positive, couched in unapologetically moral language that's not afraid to call bullshit on chavismo's catastrophic utopianism. Hurricane Feces should make this theme easier to sell, but we still need to develop it, stepping away from the language of technocatic, unthreatening, post-Plaza Altamira apologetics and start telling people "look, chavismo socialism is socially, politically and ethically bankrupt for you for reasons X, Y and Z." We need to find the kinds of words that connect with people's real values and aspirations, appealing to their better nature, without patronizing them or lying to them.

5. Well-funded
Finally, the opposition we need has some money to put all of its plans in action. Our funding efforts are virtually non-existent, and we haven't even begun to tap the power of the Internet. An effective campaign is expensive, and part of the job of opposition leaders leaders - hell, part of the standard with which they should be measured - is in terms of how they bring the cash in. In the last campaign, we had no money. They failed to do their job, so they must assume responsability.

Those are the five ingredients, that's the thing to shoot for. You could sum it up in one phrase. What we need is,

A well-funded national organization with credible leaders able to connect with people

Shortcuts won't do. Four out of five is not good enough. Take an attractive message and put it in the mouth of a leader who lacks credibility or a national organization and you don't connect. Instead, you end up with...Mi Negra! Take a credible leader and set him loose without an attractive message or a national organization and you end up with...El Conde del Guacharo! Take a rock solid organization that has an attractive message but lacks credible leaders or a genuinely nationwide presence and you end up with...the Student Movement! Take a well-funded organization that fails to connect with people and you get ... Súmate!

The reality is that we need to advance on all five fronts at the same time.

That's what we need to take on Chávez. To really take him on. We need to visualize it, to imagine what Venezuela would be like, how profoundly different 2012 could be, if we headed into that election with a well-funded national organization with credible leaders able to connect with people.

Until you know where you're going, you can't tell if you're on the right road or not. If our (well-founded) critique of the current opposition is not to peter out into the usual torrent of anti-politics bile, we need to get clear on what we do want, not just on what we don't want.

It's only once you know what the ultimate goal is that it becomes possible to work backwards, tracing a line back from your objectives to the things you are able to do right now to achieve them.

It becomes, in a sense, possible to reverse-engineer the opposition's program: to start with your goals and set out programs to achieve them, rather than to just bitch.

Anti-Dino

Quico says: Agree the opposition needs to shed its dead wood?

Join the Facebook Group!

Elections have consequences

Juan Cristobal says: You know the old saying, "elections have consequences"?

Well, I think we need to put it in practice. What's it going to be? Who lost this election? Who's gonna take the fall for this one?

Omar Barboza (who, in case you didn't know, was Blanca Ibañez's handpicked governor of Zulia back in the 80s) - your time is up.

Julio Borges should step down from the helm of Primero Justicia.

Luis Ignacio Planas - Gracias por sus servicios...piiiiiiip!

Henry Ramos Allup - here's your Witness Protection Program packet.

The students - back to your books.

Alberto Federico Ravell - how about focusing on telling the news as they are?

Maria Corina Machado - can't Sumate be led by someone else?

Seriously people. What we have ahead is too crucial to be doing the same things and trying the same old message.

I'm not saying we need to reinvent the wheel. I'm not saying these people can't play a public role - they can. I'm saying the opposition should introduce accountability.

Maybe that will help convince the voters that, indeed, we can be better than Chavez.

Redesign this Blog!

Are you a web-designer?

Know any good ones?

JC and I have decided Caracas Chronicles needs a professional makeover.

We've launched a contest on 99designs, an innovative crowdsourcing site that allows anyone to bid on a design project.

We're offering $400 to the winning design...and we intend to give you, the reader, a vote on a pre-selected shortlist!

This should be a fun thing, bringing CC's visual identity up to par, finally.

So if you know anyone who might be interested in submitting a bid, please send them the link to our design brief on 99designs.

I just called to say you love me

Quico says: Imagine you were a ni-ni, or a government employee, weighing whether or not to go out and vote yesterday. The phone rings. Who could it be, bothering you on this lazy Sunday afternoon?

"Compatriota, es Chávez..."

Believe it. According to Descifrado, echoing a story from El País, robocalls made their grand debut in Venezuelan politics yesterday.

In what would be a direct borrowing of a GOP campaign tactic by President Chávez, millions of his supporters picked up their cell phones yesterday to hear that voice reminding them to go and vote for "la Venezuela bonita."

It's kind of demeaning, really. Pol Pot never had to call the peasants. Stalin never had to grovel to his comrades like this. But Chavez - he's on TV, on the radio, and now he's in your phone, too. He knows where you are.

You just gotta imagine the look on the face of your average government bureaucrat picking up the phone to hear...him! It's disgusting, but also kind of brilliant. And it highlights the impossible odds we were up against yesterday.

Hat tip: Juan Cristobal.

More Excel Fun

Quico says: Interestingly, last night was, in a way, the opposition's best result ever: 5 million votes is well more than had ever voted for our side before, while 6 million votes is 1.2 million below chavismo's high water mark. (And the Grammy for grasping at straws for good news goes to...)

Both sides increased their vote tallies relative to 2007. It's just that chavismo increased its tallies much more than we did.

Click to enlarge

We actually got less votes than last time in six states (Aragua, Cojedes, Delta, Guarico, Portuguesa and Sucre) - that only happened to chavismo in one place - Táchira. But chavismo had strong gains in much of the rest of the country, and positively slaughtered us in places like Aragua, which went from pretty red to deepest crimson. Our best states, in terms of improvement from last time, were Táchira and Anzoátegui.

Chavismo's were Amazonas, the Delta, where nobody lives, and Portuguesa, where they shredded us.

A Tale of Three Elections

Quico says: So I've been thinking of new ways to visualize the data from last night's massive bummer. I thought comparing them to the 2007 referendum and last november's regional elections might be interesting.

In the next couple of charts, "Oppo 2008" includes dissident chavista gubernatorial candidates. Click on any of these images to enlarge them...

And this is the same thing expressed in percentage terms:

These next two charts call Zulia, Falcón and Lara "Noroccidente", Miranda, DC and Vargas "Gran Caracas," Yaracuy, Carabobo and Aragua "Centro", and treats Guayana as part of "Oriente."

This next one focuses just on the gap between the sides in each region.

Chavismo improved its performance over the opposition's 2007 showing in every region. It turned a 163,508 deficit in the Northwest into a 25,000 vote advantage, an 8% improvement over 2 years. It also turned a 144,586 vote shortfall in Gran Caracas into an 80 vote (literally, 80 people) lead in Caracas - a 6% improvement. In the Andes, chavismo did just 4% better than in 2007.

But where it improved the most was in the Center of the country - particularly Aragua, wher we got shalocked - and the rural areas. In the Centro, the government added 230,483 net votes, a 12% improvement over its own performance of 15 months ago. Proportionally, it's the Llanos that really came home for Chávez: the 164,914 net gain over his result of 2007 represent a 15% improvement over his showing then.

Tentative morning-after conclusion? The urban rural split is getting deeper, not shallower. And Aragua is a weird place.

The concession speech you didn't hear

Juan Cristobal says: - If I were in charge of the opposition (hear hear!!), I would demand my concession speech was carried on cadena nacional.

Before you scoff, think about all the effort the government put in forcing the opposition to commit to respecting the results. Somebody in the opposition should have taken his word for it and said, "Fine, we'll concede, but as long as you give us a cadena." Who knows? They might have said yes.

I would then have conceded, but said something that touched these themes, themes that need to be a central core of our message in the coming months and years:

"Desde ahora comienza la batalla para revertir este resultado y volver a enmendar la Constitución para que la democracia continúe siendo una realidad para todos y para que la tolerancia y la alternancia en el poder que soñó el Libertador en el Discurso de Angostura prevalezca."

One of the things our message has been lacking is punch. Even when down, Chávez sounds threatening. But we manage to sound defeatist even when we win! Is it possible that our meekness is working against us?

Show some sack folks! There are four years left in Chávez's term and an economic crisis in our hands. It may be hard to tell, but the winds are actually shifting in our favor. If we recover the AN we could change the Constitution back. Plus, 5 million dejected people voted for you - they need for you to throw them a bone, give them a little bit of hope. It would also be nice to take back the Liberator as a symbol for all.

"Venezolanos, muchos de ustedes votaron por la esperanza que representa Chávez. ¿Ustedes quieren saber qué es el socialismo que promete Chávez? Esperen unos meses, cuando todo suba de precio, cuando suba el desempleo, cuando Chávez no pueda cumplir sus promesas, cuando los Mercales y los Barrio Adentro comiencen a cerrar. Cuando sigan los malandros matando sin que nadie se preocupe. Eso es el socialismo chavista - ineficiencia y corrupción. Cuando eso suceda, cuando la decepción del socialismo chavista se haga evidente, aquí los recibiremos con los brazos abiertos. Porque aquí no hay ni escuálidos, ni vendepatrias, ni pitiyanquis, ni fascistas ni golpistas. Aquí lo que hay son hermanos y hermanas. "

The opposition needs to tackle the ideological battle in Venezuela straight on. So far, Chávez has tried to frame socialism as a lovey-dovey free-for-all where poor is rich, rich is rich and we all get along.

BS. We need to start talking about what chavista socialism really is - a wealth-destroying machine that threatens to bring all of us down.

We are at the threshhold of a massive economic crisis caused by Chávez's reckless policies and, yes, socialism. We need to hit him back with that, and there is no better place to start than with a high-profile speech that many chavistas are bound to be watching.

"No crea, Sr. gobierno, que estamos desarmados. La revolución está armada, pero nosotros también, y si ustedes quieren morir por la patria, pues nosotros tambien. De usted depende que esto no explote - sea sabio y entienda lo que le conviene."

This gets back to the meekness theme, but also goes a bit further.

Chávez loves to talk about how there would be a civil war without him. We need to tell him straight on that, yes, civil war is not impossible in Venezuela, but it depends on him, not on his absence, and that we are not afraid of him nor of it.

Too many times it seems like we're trying to run from the legacy of Plaza Altamira and appear as more comeflor than we really are. It comes across as dishonest.

Perhaps we should tell the government we have our own locos desatados, and that they have their guns too. No use in denying they exist - everyone knows they do, and the government should know we can't control them.

But aside from that, it helps to get the message across that Chávez does not have the monopoly on crazy-bravado talk. Two can play that game.

"No crea, Sr. gobierno, que el pueblo se come el cuento de que nosotros estamos en contra de las misiones. No lo estamos! Estamos en contra de la corrupción en las Misiones, de los módulos de Barrio Adentro que no funcionan, de los hospitales que están por el piso, de los regalos al extranjero, de los dólares para los ricos y para los conectados del gobierno, de los Mercales con estantes vacíos mientras que los buhoneros y los militares matraquean al pueblo, de Misiones que prometen empleo pero no dejan nada, de la falta de vivienda. Las misiones han ayudado, pero el pueblo venezolano merece más!"

"Pero sobre todo, deje de mentirle a la gente metiéndoles miedo. No estamos en contra de las misiones, estamos en contra de la exclusión, de la corrupción y de la idiotez a la hora de formular política social. Queremos misiones, pero misiones sin ladrones y sin exclusiones."

This idea that we are against the Misiones may be hurting us with crucial constituencies. It's not enough to say "it's not true" - we need to spell out what our vision is with respect to social policy. No, we are not against them, but no, we are not for them either. I'll be posting on this particular topic in more detail in the coming weeks - the opposition needs a "Misiones" policy, but more importantly, it needs a "Misiones" message.

"Mañana comienza la próxima batalla. El reto de la oposición es conquistar la Asamblea Nacional en el 2010 para imponerle la tolerancia y la convivencia a un gobierno que se cree dueño de todo. Queremos una Venezuela donde quepamos todos, donde todos tengamos una voz en la mesa."

This is the crucial part. The National Assembly elections are all that matters for the year and a half. If the opposition doesn't get its act together for this, it may be our last chance for a very long time. It would be nice if they began talking about primaries or some way in which they can work out the details of presenting a unified platform.

Seriously folks. It's back to the drawing board.

First Official Bulletin: Sí 54.4%, No 45.6%

At 9:30 pm, the National Elections Council says:

Sí - 6,003,594
No - 5,040,082

With 94.2% of tally sheets accounted for.

It's really not a surprise. If you control the question, you control the answer.

Chavismo's real problems start tomorrow.

Epilogue from Our Man in Catia:

We're leaving the polling center. Tibi gave the results and Chavez is shouting the national anthem on the radio. Everyone is in a commotion because a motorcyclist has just been shot in the head and killed near this polling station. His name was Ismael and it seems many people knew him. Before I left, I told one of the Chavista, member of the mesa, that I was afraid that today we gave a blank check and too much power to a single guy, and that they day they wanted to change presidents it could be too late. Her reply: "el pueblo es sabio y paciente, nosotros sabremos pasar factura". I sure hope so.

Sí wins : 54% to 45%

Quico says: With 80% of the votes tallied, very reliable sources are confident. At 7:50 pm Caracas time, we're calling it: Sí will win by a wide margin.

Our Man in Catia [UPDATE VIII: 7:21 pm - Sí wins but loses ground slightly]

Our Man in Catia says:

My mesa: 229 Sí (56.2%), 172 No (42.2%), 16 nulos for atotal of 417 which matches the cuaderno.

In 2007, that center voted 57.7% in favor of Sí, 42.3% for No. (CNE never reported the null votes from 2007.)

Our Man in Catia [UPDATE VII: 6:45 pm]

Our Man in Catia says:

6:45 pm: Just spent talking 10 mins with the other witness for the SI, and talked politics. Freddy is a 35 year old father of 4 and owner of his own clothing store in La Hoyada who supports Chavez. He dressess very smart, wears cool glasses and is articulate. He defines himself as a non-active member of the Psuv who only mobilizes when there is an election as a witness.

A summary of our exhange:

Me: How can you support Chavez if you own your own store; your not worried about private property?
Freddy: That's a lie, Chavez is not against private property, only against some type of private property: monopolies that exploit people.
Me: But Chavez is just replacing a private monopoly for a state monopoly?
Freddy: But it's different, state monopolies redistribute the wealth.
Me: but are you really better off today?
Freddy: Yes, several times better, economically, socially, etc. I've made all my money the last 10years, and before Chavez I didn't even have money to pay for public transport.
Me: But how much of that is the result of high oil prices?
Freddy: Oil prices have nothing to do with it, with another president even with oil at $5,000per barrel, we wouldn't feel the difference. Maybe in your area in the east of the city you haven't felt the difference, but here in my barrio, the increase of our stanard of living has inreased several times. Before I couldn't go to a public hospital and not that hospitals are any better now but at least they do look after you and if not we have Barrio Adentro, where my children are treated with respect and love by the cubans. Even this week I went to a private hospital where I was paying and I was mistreated by the doctor, in Barrio Adentro that doesn't happen.
Me: But don't you get angry with the money he's giving away to other countries?
Freddy: But he's not giving away anything, he is paying for help, look at the cuban doctors that costs money. The problem is that the radicals of both side take over the debate, and all you hear is the noise, but in reality, we the base, are not represented by those radicals.

In all, Freddy is just like me, a father of 4 (I'm a father of 3) looking after was best for their family. But obviously we can't agree what is really the answer that will secure our families future. Still he's someone I wouldn't mind having a beer with and trying to convince anyway.

That's it, I'm hitting the bottle...

Gewurztraminer 2007, from Alsace. It's nice and spicy, cinnamon-scented. I suggest you do the same...this is going to take some time.

Seijas has Sí ahead comfortably

Quico says: We can confirm that IVAD's (Seijas) exit poll, commissioned by interests close to the government (but not by the government itself), shows the Sí ahead by 7-9 points.

Chilllllllllllllll

Quico says: I'm posting this on behalf of Juan Cristobal, who's been talking to his contacts in the opposition. Word is, chill. The rumors going around right now are just that, rumors. It looks close. Turnout appears to have been relatively high. But they have no specific numbers yet.

Also: CNE head Tibisay Lucena calls an end to voting.

Our Man in Catia [UPDATE VI: 5:50 pm - Subdued Atmosphere]

Our Man in Catia says:

5:50 pm: No one came today dressed in red with the Si slogan to vote. Only one guy, came with a Psuv cap and a red shirt, but he he was very respectful and was carryng his cap in is hand hiding the logo against his chest. He was also carrying his son, a two year-old approximately, and was voting with pride. But the norm was ordinary peolple, just doing their duty, no pride, no shame, just doing their duty.

Curioser and curioser

Quico says: On UnionRadio, the No-campaign headquarters sounded like a massive party, Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro sounds like he just came out of a funeral. (¿¿¡¿!?!???) Polling centers close in 11 minutes.

Leopoldo López Very, Very Nearly Claims Opposition Victory

Quico says: Under National Elections Council rules, neither side is allowed to say anything about results until the council itself unveils its first official bulletin. Still, on UnionRadio just now, opposition Golden Boy Leopoldo López spoke in not-particularly-veiled tones about seeing results that are "very very similar to what we saw on December 2nd, 2007" (when the government was defeated in a similar referendum). He's talkin' all David and Goliath, waltzing very, very close to the line of claiming victory outright. Bravado? Bluff? Who can tell?

Jorge Rodríguez recommends the opposition make itself a camomille, López prescribes valerian root to the government. Wacky.

Our Man in Catia [UPDATE V: 4:41 pm - Psycho Mesa President]

Quico says: One longtime Caracas Chronicles reader is working as a No-camp witness at the Escuela Nacional 24 de Julio in Catia (by Plaza Sucre Metro Station), in deep red chavista territory in Caracas's West Side. In the last referendum in December, 2007, this voting center went for the Sí by a 58% to 42% margin. Three months ago, PSUV's candidate for Metro Caracas mayor, Aristobulo Izturiz, beat the opposition's Antonio Ledezma 61% to 36%, with 60% turnout.

Our Man in Catia has agreed to discretely email sporadic reports from his blackberry.

Photo added 4:00 p.m.

12:26 p.m.: Everything's OK, although the Presidenta of my mesa is a pain in the neck. She wouldn't allow me to verify that the Cédula (ID card) of the voter was in the cuaderno de votación (the voter registry). This was a mayor hassle and the coordinadora of the CNE and Plan República came up to my table. My position was that I couldn't be a witness of the process if I wan't allow to have a look. She said I was obstructing the process. I then said I wasn't going to impose but that I requested we made an Acta that said that they would'nt allow me to verify this, but they (the presidenta and the coordinadora) wouldn't allow that either, it was getting very tense when a National Witness came up with a compromise; I was allowed to check one cédula at random every 10 to 15 voters. At least there appears to be mechanisms to resolve disagreements.

Of 550 voters in my mesa about 250 have voted already.

1:15 pm: A red truck with booming loudspeakers and a Sí sticker drove in front of the center making a call against abstention. The volume was unbelievably high!

2:05 pm: It's a bit slower now, might be because it's lunchtime. The school I'm working at is right in the middle of Catia. The streets are narrow, filthy and full of people out on a Sunday. It's more like a scene from an outdoor market, with buhoneros selling all sorts of things from little tents: pirate DVDs, clothes, fruit.

The school is not small. It's clean but pretty much run down. From the classroom where I'm working I can hear the odd vendor announcing their goods through loudspeakers.

I can't say people seem very excited about being here, either to work at the voting center or to vote. I chatted a bit with the witness for the Sí-camp. Her name is Isabel and she's a nurse who lives in Catia and works in Barrio Adentro. She was quite frank with me and said that she couldn't care less what the result turns out to be; she had to be here as an obligation, because she doesn't want to risk losing her job so, just in case, she comes and works as a witness, and votes (Sí).

This is the first time I meet someone who thinks like this. In a polarized society like ours, it's weird to meet people who couldn't care less what the result is, who would rather stay home, but vote for the government "just in case". She says "there's only one government, I worked for the government and I have to vote for them just in case I get found out". I tried to explain to her that the government and the state are two separate things and that she works for the state and the government is temporary. I don't think she cares about that either.

The members of my voting table are very quiet except for the President, a fierce and authoritative lady. I can't say they lean either way, but the Presidenta sure likes the sound of her own voice. After our last confrontation when she didn't want to allow me to stand next to the Cuaderno that logs the people's ID, and I almost got kicked out by Plan Republica she's a lot calmer. I gave her some Marilu cookies as a peace offering which she accepted and laughed about.

I just saw from the classroom window a red pickup truck with several guys with red shirts and red flags with the Si slogan all over. I asked the witness for the Sí-camp whether this was not allowed and she said "Yes, they are not allowed to do that but who is going to stop them?"

It's 2:05pm and 307 of 550 people have voted.

3:33 pm: Already we have more turn out at this mesa than last November. 359 people have voted whereas last time only 345 voted.

We were all offered food by the CNE, a very simple spaghetti with platano in an aluminum foil box. It was funny to hear the Presidenta of the mesa complain about the food and say she would rather get an allowance so she could go to McDonalds instead. Deep in Chavista territory, they have a taste for the food of the empire...

4:19 pm: A funny thing just happened. I'm just a newbie on this but we had to read the official regulations (reglamento) yesterday to be somewhat prepared.

Some time ago one of the mesa members announced that at 5pm we should do draw lots to choose the mesas to audit. But the rules say that this can only be done after the voting is finished, the actas de escrutino are printed and the results are transmitted to CNE.

So we called the CNE center coordinator and she also said it we should draw lots at 5pm. I explained that art 112 says that we have to wait until the results are transmitted and the blank stare in her face was a classic.

She said she was going to look into this and at a distance I checked she was reading the rule book. She agreed with our coordinator that we were right.

4:41 pm: I couldn't make this up if I wanted to: the Presidenta of my mesa is the worst of the whole center. All my other collegue witnesses in the other mesas are verifying cedulas with the mesa members. Not my Presidenta. But the funny thing is that my coordinator explained she is very well known here in Catia as a "landro", which is a new word to me but it appears it means she is the owner of about 50 buhonero (street hawker) stands in the area. Capitalism is alive and kicking in deep chavista territory.

If you have any questions for him, put them in the Comments and I'll try to forward them to him.

Venezuela's First Twitter-Election?

Quico says: The folks at Twelección certainly think so.

little "f" fraud

Quico says: I didn't want to post my prediction earlier than necessary, but here goes. The only place where 12 year olds knock out Evander Hollyfield is Hollywood, and this ain't Hollywood.

So we're going to lose tonight. Probably by a lot.

The reason is straightforward; a polling cliché, really. Control the question and you control the answer. Not much more to it than that.

Even Penn & Teller know this:



In a referendum, framing is everything. Control what people figure they're voting on and you control the result. Even subtle changes in question wording can have noticeable impacts on polling results. More substantial changes in framing can have very substantial effects on the answers you get, as the Pew Research Center found out just before the invasion of Iraq:

When people were asked whether they would: "favor or oppose taking military action in Iraq to end Saddam Hussein's rule," 68% said they favored military action while 25% said they opposed military action. However, when asked whether they would "favor or oppose taking military action in Iraq to end Saddam Hussein's rule even if it meant that U.S. forces might suffer thousands of casualties," responses were dramatically different; only 43% said they favored military action while 48% said they opposed it. The introduction of U.S. casualties altered the context of the question and influenced whether people favored or opposed military action in Iraq.'

To pollsters, that's old hat.

We know Chavismo wrote a deliriously partisan ballot question, and that in itself would probably be worth a few points to them today. But more importantly, they enjoyed a hugely disproportionate share of the resources used to frame the referendum's meaning in voters' minds'. I've written a lot about this recently, so I won't go over it again here.

Long story short: the fraud's already happened. We're playing with a marked deck.

I want to be clear about what I mean by this. I have no doubt that the results announced by Lucena tonight will accurately reflect the actual votes cast by people at the polls today. As I've explained many times before, you can't get away with numerical fraud where paper ballots are checked against electronic results.

So no, there will be no capital "F", old-school, ballot-stuffing Fraud. But little "f" fraud? It's signed, sealed and delivered.

The Sí will win by a comfortable margin tonight. 10 points, easy. Possibly more. I hope I'm wrong. But I know I'm not.

The existential problem for chavismo starts tomorrow, not today.

A Better Way to Spend Referendum Sunday

Quico says: Typically, I waste election days obsessively following news sites and radio feeds that tell me nothing beyond that "the winner is Venezuela," to pick just one of a dozen hoary broadcasting clichés sure to be repeated ad nauseam today as talking heads struggle mightily to fill 12-16 hours of nothinghappening.

This is a monumental waste of time and worry energy, so instead, I propose a Better Way to Spend Referendum Sunday.

Check this out:

What's cool is that the software used to make this presentation is available online! This, my friends, is quality time-wasting: addictive and educational to boot. Here's the one I made...make your own, and be sure to post it to comments.

The Predictions Thread

Quico says: So, what's gonna happen tomorrow?

Glutton for Punishment

Quico says: I'm back for more abuse on The Guardian's Comment is Free site.

Deep Impact

Quico says: Everyone loves 90s disaster movies, but before we get to that, a little Thought Experiment.

(Stop me if you've heard this one before...and if you've spent more than 20 minutes in a microeconomics course, you have heard this one before.)

Imagine your house is a mess: laundry hasn't been done in ages, the kitchen sink is overflowing with dirty dishes, mop-to-floor contact hasn't been achieved in like forever. You really need to clean. But you're lazy. You value having a neat house, but you also value laying around watching TV.

Now, what is the optimal amount of time you should spend cleaning your house today?

The scientifically rigorous answer is, it depends.

When you're cleaning your house, what you're doing is trading off enjoyment in the present against enjoyment in the future. You're saying that a little bit more enjoyment in the future (from having a clean house) is worth a little less enjoyment in the present (cleaning sucks.)

Your optimal trade off point will depend on how much you value enjoyment in the future relative to enjoyment in the present. If you're more future oriented, you'll invest more time cleaning. If you're more present oriented, you'll consume more TV.

Now, imagine that as you're laying around watching TV, a NewsFlash comes on saying NASA has just discovered an asteroid hurling towards the earth, big enough to kill everyone instantly, and due to hit in 20 minutes.

What is the optimal amount of time you'll spend doing dishes now?

The point of this slightly hackneyed little parable is that the solution to any intertemporal optimization problem hinges critically on one thing: your time horizon. Economists call it your discount rate, basically: how much consumption you're willing to forgo now in exchange for how much in the future. The shorter your time horizon, the more heavily you discount future consumption's value relative to current consuption. In fact, those are just two ways of saying the same thing.

Now, the thing to grasp is that the Consumption/Investment tradeoff facing the Venezuelan petrostate is, in principle, not that different from the dilemma facing our lazy housekeeper. The fundamental decision to be made about any given dollar that reaches PDVSA, Venezuela's public oil comglomerate, is whether they invest it to yield more production capacity for the future or they consume it right now. The balance between the two is at the heart of petrostate politics.

In fact, much of the struggle over control of PDVSA from 1999 to 2003 can be rendered in the language of intertemporal optimization, as a violent disagreement over the appropriate discount rate for the oil industry.

In 1975, when PDVSA was originally nationalized, everyone could see that elected governments were hard-wired to have relatively short time-horizons, and that if they could control PDVSA directly, they would tend to choose more consumption and less investment than is optimal over the long run. The experience of Pemex, Mexico's bloated, dysfunctional state-owned oil company, was widely seen as a cautionary tale of what could happen when politicians' hands are allowed to get too close to the honey pot.

That's why PDVSA was consciously designed to be functionally independent of the government, and overseen by a weak regulatory agency (MEM). If, before 2003, PDVSA invested more and generated a smaller revenue stream than the government wanted, that's because it was designed to do precisely that: optimize the revenue stream over a longer time horizon than any one government would prefer.

Theoretically, at least, chavismo had a point: it's possible to be too farsighted as well as not farsighted enough. In the housekeeping parallel, you might imagine someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, cleaning house all day, every day and never stopping to enjoy their spotless house. In effect, chavismo's claim was that PDVSA had developed a case of institutional OCD, adopting a time horizon so long it had essentially become more concerned with endlessly expanding capacity than with producing a usable revenue stream for the government.


Of course, there's always something a bit artificial about translating Cháveztalk from the ranting of a lunatic into economically meaningful positions. You're forced to reverse engineer his train of thought, working backwards as you ask yourself: "if, instead of Chávez, it had been a sane person making this argument, how might the argument have come out?" I think what would've come out is something like this:

As of 2002, PDVSA's discount rate only made sense from the point of view of middle class people. Long-termism is a privilege that only folks who are reasonably certain they are going to get three meals a day can afford. But the "right" discount rate for the poor is higher than the "right" discount rate for the middle class: when you're hungry now you need to eat now. So there are good reasons for the poor to have a shorter time horizon than the middle class, and a responsive, democratic government needs to be attuned to the needs and preferences of the poor and reflect that shorter horizon in the management of the oil industry.

There's nothing wrong or contradictory about that argument. To retort something like, "but that only makes poor people poorer in the long run!" is to miss the point spectacularly: the whole point of the exercise was to refocus PDVSA on the short run, to make it more democratic in the sense of adopting a time horizon more congruent with the majority's.

Another way to get at this dynamic is to borrow the language of the "principal-agent problem". They may not have known the academic terminology, but when it came to the Old PDVSA, chavismo had no trouble understanding that when a "principal" - the Venezuelan people - delegates authority over a common resource to an "agent" - the old PDVSA - getting the agent to act the way the principal wants will always be a problem. How can the Venezuelan people exercise their authority to make sure their agent really is acting on their behalf and doesn't gradually start to focus on its own interests, instead?

This, when you overlook all the scatology, is the "sane chavista" rap against the old PDVSA: the agent forgot all about the principal. The Old PDVSA was all about imposing a time horizon on the oil industry that didn't match the principal's own, much shorter, time horizon.

Whether it makes sense to force the agent to be just as short-sighted as the principal is another question altogether. Personally, I think that's crazy and counterproductive, but for now, all we have to do is concede that this re-constructed, "sane chavista" argument is not internally inconsistent or self-evidently wrong.

But of course, there's a catch: good as chavismo may have been at noticing the principal-agent problem with regard to the old PDVSA, it catastrophically fails to apply the same insights to itself. Now that the "agent" that effectively controls the oil industry is Chávez himself rather than a technocratic elite, the possibility that he might strike off and start working in his own interest, rather than the people's interest, never seems to occur to them.

Partly, the inability to see this is ideological: years of "Chávez es el pueblo" propaganda have totally blinded some to the possibility that Chávez could have one set of interests and the people another.

But the agent-control problem is, if anything, far worse now than it was before. The whole strategic stance of PDVSA, in terms of the investment/consumption trade off, has been molded to the needs, indeed the whims, of a single human being. If the old PDVSA's time horizons were, arguably, longer than the principal's, the Chávez controlled oil industry's time horizons are insanely, suicidally shorter.

In effect, Chávez is treating the referendum just like our lazy housekeeper would treat the Deep Impact asteroid! Just as there'd be no sense in cleaning house 20 minutes before an asteroid destroys the planet, Chávez seems to have decided there'd be no point in keeping the oil industry able to function if he can't have indefinite re-election. And so, he's focusing all of the oil industry's resources on the economic policy equivalent of the next 20 minutes. That his time horizon doesn't match the pueblo's is neither here nor there because the principal has lost all control over its agent. Chávez se olvidó del pueblo!

It bears noting that, in acting this way, Chávez is showing with some precision why the 1975 nationalizers were wise to keep PDVSA at some distance from its political masters. The thinking back then was that, if allowed, politicians were sure to try to manipulate the oil industry's revenue stream to try to swing elections. The principal-agent problem was very much front and center in policy-makers' minds back then; everyone understood that there's no easier way to wreck the oil industry than injecting it into the electoral game. Their warnings, our reality.

Just as the most outrageous kinds of delinquent housekeeping - say, tossing old chicken bones on the carpet instead of taking the trouble to walk them to the garbage bin - become "rational" if an asteroid is about to vaporize the planet, the absolutely craziest ways of managing the oil industry - failing to pay the people who run the drilling rigs, for instance - become "rational" if you decide all you care about is winning the next election.


Now, this is a conceptual post, so it's not really the place to go into a long litany of complaints about what's been happening inside the oil industry. "Tossing chicken bones on the carpet" is about the size of it, though: a form of extreme, kamikaze short-termism that completely boggles the mind.

My sense is that PDVSA is now approaching a series of critical thresholds where the sticking plaster that's been holding it together is bound to give way. The company is just too far behind on too many payments to too many critical service providers. We're not talking catering or la Fuller here, we're talking core payments to core contractors without whose help PDVSA cannot lift oil out of the ground. It's reached such an extreme that what's news - man-bites-dog-wise - is no longer when PDVSA doesn't pay its bills, but when it does!

That's how far to the left we are on that Investment/Consumption trade-off chart.

Distracted by yet another pointless vote, nobody's paying attention to the Tsunami of Piss brewing in the oil fields - truly the leading edge of Hurricane Feces. Because, lets be clear here, a petrostate can just about muddle through when oil prices are merely low, but it absolutely can't function if it can't lift it to begin with.

My sense is that this, and not the referendum result, is going to be the story we'll remember about 2009-2010. In the big scheme of things, the referendum will be remembered as an asterisk, not an asteroid: "that crazy campaign when Chávez spent all of PDVSA's money trying to amend the constitution right before the Great Oil Collapse of 2009."

A vote about nothing

Juan Cristobal says: - I've been in a funk lately.

The inspiration to post about the upcoming referendum has been harder to come by than a kilo of sugar at Mercal. Maybe the reason I'm not inspired is because this really is an election about nothing: it doesn't change anything, it has no real consequence on the balance of power in Venezuela. Mostly, it's an unnecessary distraction.

Let's walk through the scenarios. Suppose that the No wins. Can we really expect this to be the last time Chavez is going to try to eliminate term limits? Will it represent a turning point in our decades-long struggle?

Not a chance. If the No were to win, Chavez would keep insisting until he got his way. In fact, it's amusing to hear him promise he will accept the results when this election is the consequence of his refusal to accept the will of the people.

A Chavez loss would only mean he will try again, and again, until some way or another he does away with term limits. Who can honestly picture him not running in 2012? Who or what is going to stop him?

If the Si were to win, on the other hand, the government will claim a huge victory, but is it really? It doesn't change the imbalance of power in the country, it doesn't put us any closer to unseating him, but it doesn't put us further away either. Does the government really gain anything by winning?

In fact, putting the amendment behind us means we can focus on building a platform to take the National Assembly in 2010. It will also shift the focus of public opinion to the government's serious failures, and a looming Hurricane Feces that we're utterly unprepared for. Just today, the Planning Minister basically admitted the government's only hope is for the price of oil to rise by 150%. Good luck with that, Haiman.

The government has flexed its financial and logistical advantage more than in any previous election. In a way, Chavez is right - this isn't an election, it's a battle within a war. We're not fighting a party or an ideology - we're fighting a state.

The threats being hurled at voters and the torrent of lies being told about the opposition have reached unheard of levels, even for a government that lies in its sleep. Chavez is a guarantee of peace? Has he not checked the statistics on violent crime? No, he hasn't. Are we supposed to believe Antonio Ledezma and Cesar Perez Vivas are doing away with the Misiones? Please. They can barely get to work every morning without being attacked by chavista gangs.

The sad part about this is that by repeating these lies day and night, surely some people believe them. In the face of all of this, is it all that surprising that the Si is running neck and neck?

So we've come to this, an election we didn't want, where nothing really is at stake, where the only thing we have learned is that the Revolution has finally fessed up and admitted this is a one-man show. That aside from Chavez's obvious charisma, his sheer willpower and his ability to sign checks, the Revolution is just an empty shell; that without Chavez, there's nothing. How sad.

In 2007, I wondered about the positive side of eliminating term limits. I wrote,

Sometimes, to cheer myself up, I think of the day when Chavez himself, in power, is no longer popular nor wanted. When we finally see him leave power, it will be that much sweeter to see him do so as a result of a voter revolt rather than by force of nature or the Constitution preventing him from running again. So indefinite re-election may not be such a bad thing. At least it leaves the door open for Chávez's last election to be one where he loses badly.

If going through Chavez himself is the only way this is going to end, so be it. Getting over the uncertainty will let us focus on the important stuff.

Punked by a Pebble

Quico says: Readers may be shocked to learn I don't really keep up with the ins-and-outs of the weird and wonderful world of gun-toting para-revolutionary chavistoid vigilante street gangs-cum-rebel community activists in el 23 de Enero. I always get confused somewhere between Colectivo Alexis Vive, the Tupas, the Coordinadora Simón Bolívar, the Fuerzas Bolivarianas de Liberación, the Vega Warriors, and these Pebble people. Who can keep up?

The whole scene is baffling and vaguely upsetting. In a way, it reminds me of nothing so much as this classic bit from Monty Python's Life of Brian:



If anything, our home-grown paras are even more bizarrely self-parodying than this lot: at least the People's Front of Judea had the decency to be against the government of the day. The whole concept of a pro-government guerrilla makes zero sense to me...if you want to take up guns to defend the revolution, why don't you just join the army?

In the ideological grab bag that is the ultra de la ultra de la ultra de la ultra, flavor of the month is obviously La Piedrita (lit: "the pebble") a group that, whether due to uncommon bravado or excess stupidity, seems to have gone too far even for Chávez. In effect, La Piedrita broke the cardinal rule of chavismo: thou shalt not get too specific when talking about the illegal shit thou gets up to.

In talking openly about La Piedrita's various attacks and threats against opposition activists to Quinto Día, their leader Valentín Santana - who apparently has had an arrest warrant out for murder for over a year - broke the unspoken agreement that sustains chavismo's entire relationship with its own para-police arm: "you pretend not to attack our enemies, we pretend not to know you're attacking our enemies."

If he'd taken 10 minutes to read my handy How-To Guide, he would've known that chavismo needs to keep this sort of thing tacit. What Santana did, when you get down to it, is admit that he'd punched Marcel Granier in the face, and - worse - that he would do it again. Rookie mistake! Nothing destabilizes chavismo like unplanned truth-telling.

Chávez couldn't let it stand. For the sake of the dominance hierarchy, he had to send an unambiguous message: nobody's threatening anybody around here unless it's me! La Piedrita had to be brought into line.

But how? Santana isn't going down without a fight, and the last thing Chávez needs five days before a referendum is to send soldiers into what is supposed to be his biggest stronghold to pick up some glorified street thug whose underlings have better weapons than the police.

I really disagree with those who think this is a calculated electoral ploy, a repositioning to the center ahead of Sunday's referendum. I think Santana forced Chávez's hand with a spectacularly mistimed interview that left Chávez in an impossible situation: having to spend the final week of a critical campaign running around trying to convince people that the CIA pays people to try to kill Marcel Granier, looking weak if he can't catch the traitors, but having to send out all the wrong signals to his own hard core of supporters if he really does want to catch him.

I mean, picture it: Soldiers. In el 23. Running around trying to catch...a chavista. Madness!

This is not the Chávez who, alone, can safeguard the peace. This does not cast him in the role of sole guarantor of stability he's been so keen to claim for himself. This is a Chávez who's getting punked by a two-bit para who, para colmo, is chavista!

I just can't see how any of this can be good news for him. All it does is stink, this story.

EmergenSIa

Quico says: This Noticiero Digital thread is a keeper.


Most of them document the way Sí propaganda's been plastered all over all kinds of public spaces, but the one that made me laugh out loud was:


H/T: Tank

Hinterlaces Says

Quico says: In their latest set of slides, Hinterlaces (Oscar Schemel's outfit) break down the results of their polling in the second half of January:


Now, Schemel is an oppo pollster, no question about it. Bear in mind that his cities-only methodology unquestionably undercounts rural voters, who have broken decisively in favor of chavismo in every recent election. On the other hand, Schemel's not completely hackish. He actually does poll people at home, in large and mid sized cities spread over 21 states, using reasonable sample sizes: 1190 interviews per week here.

So, whether you buy the absolute numbers or not, the trend should mean something. And the trend here is...there is no trend!

By the last week in January, the Sí resurgence had run its course.

The government is working with a pretty limited ceiling here. Its only hope lies in massive, extremely aggressive mobilization. Buses, buses and more buses. They need to go all out to get every single one of their supporters to the polls and to keep oppo supporters away somehow. They're not short on resources, and it's in no way a foregone conclusion that they won't pull it off. But it's going to be very close.

As always, if you have access to a poll, any poll, please send it along: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm

Running Against the Petrostate

Playing now on Huffo...

It's a campaign ad, entitled "Hall of Fame". It opens in a computer-generated museum. As the camera pans from one dictator's portrait to the next, we hear a famous passage written by Venezuela's independence hero, Simon Bolivar, all the way back in 1819:

"Nothing is so dangerous as allowing a single citizen to remain in power for a long time. The people get used to obeying him, and he gets used to giving them orders, and that is the root of tyranny."

As the words sink in, we see portraits of Robert Mugabe (Caption: Zimbabwe - 29 years in power), Alfredo Stroessner (Paraguay: 35 years in power), Fidel Castro (Cuba: 47 years in power), and others. As the 30 second spot ends, the camera pans one last time and settles on a blank picture frame captioned "Venezuela". The announcer closes, saying: "it's up to you to ensure that no more Venezuelans enter this hall."

The ad was produced on behalf of the No-camp ahead of Venezuela's February 15th referendum on lifting term limits, a proposal that would allow Hugo Chávez to stay in power for life. You can see it on YouTube, if you want.

Where you probably won't see it, though, is on Venezuelan television.

Under rules set by the pro-Chávez National Elections Council, the Council itself gets to decide at what times campaign ads can go out, and on which channels. They deny that this amounts to prior restraint, but unexplained "delays" are keeping "Hall of Fame" and a series of other "No"campaign spots mostly out of sight. The ads show only on a few channels, and never in prime time.

"It's not that we've gone away, it's that we've been gagged: they've taped our mouths shut," is how No-campaign leader Julio Borges puts it.

As it gets shut out of the air-war via mysterious administrative delays, the opposition's boisterous student movement is systematically harrassed on the ground. In a speech last month, Chávez urged his security forces to "give them some of that good old tear-gas" whenever student protests got out of hand, a green-light that was immediately followed by a spike in heavy handed repression against the kids. Last Friday, he ordered the security forces to "step up surveillance" of the student movement, on vague allegations that they are "plotting to cause chaos".

More than campaigning, the opposition is just struggling to keep its head above water. Chávez, meanwhile, is going all out to ensure he wins Sunday's referendum "by a knock-out". Deploying the massive resources at the disposal of Venezuela's cash-flush petrostate, he's taking no chances and sparing no expense.

"Evander Hollyfield against a 12-year old kid. That's how it feels," according to one Caracas resident.

Eleven state owned TV channels and hundreds of government financed "community radio stations" broadcast Si propaganda round the clock. All sorts of public buildings, from schools, to state government offices, to Venezuela's IRS to the country's national worker re-training institute are plastered with "Si" propaganda. State owned electric utility crews are tasked with putting up Si signs. Civil servants are strong-armed into "volunteering" and raising funds for the Si campaign. Nearly every government website sports a "Si" banner ad.



Nothing is off-limits. "Si" propaganda gets piped into the Caracas Metro, over the PA system. "The next station is Sabana Grande - please remember to vote Si on February 15th." Even the wording of the referendum question itself is unabashedly partisan, a 77 word long ramble that consciously echoes Si campaign themes by asking voters whether they approve of "broadening people's political rights" without ever mentioning term limits as such at all.

Perhaps most worrying is that PDVSA, Venezuela's giant state-owned oil company, is getting in on the game. At the end of January, a massive caravan of PDVSA tanker-trucks paraded through the streets of Caracas, decked out in "Si" propaganda. Cars parked at PDVSA parking lots have their windows decorated with "Si"s, in big white letters, whether the driver likes it or not. Reuters reports that, on a recent visit to the Energy Ministry, one oil industry executive found the building nearly empty. When he asked where all the civil servants had gone, one of the few left holding the fort told him everyone had taken the day off to go to a "Si" rally.

In effect, Chávez has turned the state itself into an appendage of the Si campaign. It matters little that this is blatantly unconstitutional. With die-hard Chávez loyalists installed in every key post in the state - from the state-owned media to PDVSA from the courts to the Elections Council - there's really no down-side to flouting constitutional rules. No matter how well documented, opposition cries of foul are flatly denied or, more usually, ignored altogether.

Of course, this kind of shenanigan isn't new in Venezuela: fifteen months ago, Chávez was defeated in his first attempt to abolish term limits after a campaign that saw its share of abuses. But the scale of the Si's advantage this time around is simply unprecedented, especially on the air. It's not just the Ad Gap, it's the Free Media gap too. A study released last week by Venezuelan and Swedish media researchers found that 93% of the news stories in the flagship State-run TV channel, VTV, favor a "Si" vote with the remaining 7% classed as "Neutral". Another prominent State-run station broadcast 100% Si-friendly news coverage. Neither of the two main state broadcasters has aired a single news story favorable to the "No" campaign.

On the other side, neither of the last two remaining dissident TV stations can broadcast free-to-air to a nationwide audience. Globovision (59% "No-friendly" news coverage) broadcasts only in a handful of cities, while RCTV (91% "No-friendly") is available only via cable and satellite, now that its broadcast license has been revoked in retaliation for its critical news coverage. Mr. Hollyfield, meet your opponent.

The extremely aggressive Si-campaign shows a government well aware that large majorities of Venezuelans oppose lifting term-limits in principle. They know only an extremely lopsided campaign is likely to bring those numbers around. So far, it's working: while polls taken in December showed the No-side ahead by 15 to 20 points, polls taken in late January show a dead heat.

Even if the Si camp were to lose again, all signs are that the government will simply keep holding new votes, year after year, until it eventually gets the answer it wants.

The government campaign is centered on a simple message: Voting "Si" does not mean making Chávez president for life. It means giving the people the chance to re-elect him as many times as they want. The proposal would expand people's political rights, they say, by removing an arbitrary restriction on their choice of candidates. Since free and fair elections will still be held every six years, the voters will always get the final say.

It's an argument that refutes itself. The massive abuse of state resources we've seen this year tells us all we need to know about how free and fair those future elections are likely to be. In addition to the natural advantages of incumbency, Chávez's perpetual re-election bids would leverage the full might of the Venezuelan petrostate, just as the Si-camp has: a massive built-in advantage that makes Simón Bolívar's 190 year old warning urgently relevant today.

As one of the other TV spots that the chavista Elections Council is keeping mostly off the air puts it, there's one other country in the region that holds massively unfair elections at scrupulously regular intervals: Cuba. With political speech limited, the state fully mobilized against dissidents and the incumbent enjoying unlimited access to state resources, Cuban elections are about as democratic as the regime whose windows they dress. All signs are that that's the model Chávez wants to follow.