You've got to know when to hold'em and when to fold'em

Juan Cristóbal says: In the last few months, the government has ratcheted up the pressure against the only opposition TV station left in Venezuela, the small all-news outlet Globovisión. Chavismo is going all out, charging the company and its executives with everything from tax evasion to psychological war to environmental crimes (on account of a few head of stuffed moose hanging in the walls of the station's owner), not to mention a relentless propaganda campaign on state media against the station.

It's not hard to piece together that the outcome of this whole charade is Globovisión's shut down, and soon. Today we even learned that the Supreme Tribunal decided, against the Constitution, that the government could impose prior restraint (a.k.a. censorship) whenever it wants to.

So in light of all this, it's fair to ask: is it all worth it?

When you think about it, something doesn't fit. The government has all the power to shut Globovisión down. It has had it for a long time. And yet, they're still broadcasting. Why?

Inside sources suggest elements in the government are open to some sort of cohabitation arrangement. Chávez's furious tone in ordering, on national TV, a harder line against the station hints at his frustration: his orders aren't getting followed, because they're meeting resistance from some of the less suicidal elements in the administration.

People like Diosdado and Jesse Chacón know full well that shutting down Venezuela's last independent station could carry tremendous political costs. The benefits, on the other hand, are obviously limited. Globovisión's audience is tiny, overwhelmingly urban, largely cable-or-satellite-TV subscribing, resolutely middle class, and rabidly antichavista to begin with. So it's not like the station costs Chávez any swing votes as it is: Chuo Torrealba's heroic efforts notwithstanding, Globovisión no sube cerro.

In light of this, maybe Globovisión editor Alberto Ravell can save some of the jobs his station provides and keep an important source of independent information for Venezuelans alive if he gave a few of his most shrill anchors the boot.

Perhaps he should give himself the boot.

Envision this scenario: Alberto Ravell comes out and says that their editorial line is wrong and that they are going to tone it down. He says he is resigning to make way for a more impartial editorial voice, that he is laying off some of the shrillest voices (Adiós, Ciudadano?) in the channel and that he is hiring more unbiased reporters and anchors. Imagine a new editor coming in and saying that, for the sake of balance, they will hire (gulp!) a chavista anchor.

The Maria Alejandra Lopezes of the world would, of course, go apoplectic. But the government may end up backing down. Sure, some of the radicals will continue to huff and puff, but is it entirely out of the realm of possibility to imagine them saying something like "well, we'll continue to monitor them and see if they live up to their promise of balance" ?

I believe that, in terms of costs and benefits, it's better to have a moderate outlet where to voice our ideas than to have none at all. And let's face it, it's not like the shrill tone is convincing anyone out there that isn't already convinced. Hell, it may even be good for their ratings.

I'm no media insider, so I don't even know if compromise is at all possible. I have been paying attention, though, and I haven't heard anyone on either side seriously exploring this possibility.

I know I'm not the right person to be writing this post. I haven't watched Globovisión for some time now, and I've never been a big fan. But I recognize the importance of Globovisión's right to exist.

I don't watch Venevisión, a channel that chose to water itself down for the sake of survival. I'm not suggesting Globovisión become Venevisión or, God forbid, the government-propaganda sewer that is VTV.

But if there is room for compromise, it should be explored. Venezuela is better off with some independent media than without it, even if said media is a milder, blander version of Globovisión.

Thanks!

...to everyone who came last night. You reminded me of why this blog's biggest asset is its readers. And if you missed it, well...what happens in 360, stays in 360, 'mafraid.

Iran-alogy

Juan Cristóbal says: - Thousands of citizens march on highways, demanding the elites in power recognize popular will. Students protest against a fraudulent election, the power of a petro-state hanging in the balance. Armed government militias roam the cities freely, attacking civic-minded protesters with total impunity. The streets of the capital stained with the blood of pro-democracy activists.

Pardon me for stating the obvious, but Venezuelans have seen this movie before. Hell, we've lived it. And there's no happy ending.

What will happen in Iran? Is the Islamic Republic really hanging in the balance? What lessons can we learn from the Venezuelan experience?

Sadly, if anything, Venezuela's experience does not provide much hope for Iran's Mousavi backers. I'm no Iran expert, but judging by what we've gone through, this slow kabuki dance will be long on drama and short on substance. We learned long ago that not to underestimate a petro-dictatorship's ability to ignore what happens on the streets. Marcha no mata mullah, chamo, y Twitter no mata dictadura. Just ask the Burmese monks.

First off, the facts. The government claims Ahmadinejad won in a landslide. The opposition, as well as many foreign journalists and "experts," believed the election was going to be much closer, with reformist Mousavi gaining significant momentum.

But with very few reliable pre-election polls, the only fact out there is the scarcity of facts. Skim the Iran-related articles in the website fivethirtyeight.com and you'll see that (gasp!) there is already a paper out there "showing" there was fraud by applying la bendita Benford's Law. What's the term in farsi for "here we go again"?

I don't really know where the truth lies. The marches in favor of reform have been impressive, but so were Manuel Rosales' marches before the December 2006 Presidential election, which Chávez won in a Mahmoud-sized margin.

It's easy to forget Iran is a relatively poor petro-state, and we all know what that means: great power (and popularity) for the incumbent, even more so if he's a populist. We also know that there are no checks and balances, and that Ahmadinejad and his status-quo-lovin' posse are the types of fellas that will stop at nothing to maintain their grip on power.

In fact, a provocative article on Politico.com argues that it's very likely that Ahmadinejad won the election, that the thousands of middle class Iranian students are not representative of the majority of Iran's population, and that we should all get over it and move on. The article alleges that the current perception in the West - that Mousavi was robbed - is a product of shallow understanding of Iranian politics and demographics. In other words, Iran-watchers better get their heads out of their escuálido asses, 'cause Iran ain't Chacao.

So while the election was, to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, a sham, and the Islamic Republic is not a democracy by any meaningful standard, it may also be true that Ahmadinejad's victory reflects the will of the people. In that scenario, is it healthy to harbor hope that the current events will result in a dramatic shift in power? And what tools do the green masses have at their disposal to effect change?

Just like in Venezuela, what happened in Iran could be a combination of fraud and Ahmadinejad being the legitimate winner. Faced with Mousavi's surge, it is perfectly reasonable for the government to tweak the vote in order to give it a more comfortable margin of victory. If that is the case, this lends legitimacy to both camps' arguments.

Whatever happens in Iran, it's undeniable that the opposition has shown a force not seen in thirty years, and this could sow the seeds for the future demise of the Islamic Republic. In that scenario, the medium-term effects of the protests may be more important than the likely short-term effects.

In that context, there are at least three lessons that Iran holds for us. One is the advantage of having a visible, courageous and, most of all, free leader. If it were not for Mr. Mousavi being free and at large, it's hard to imagine the current movement going as far as it has.

Another lesson is the importance of participating, even when elections have little chance of bringing change about. Had Mr. Mousavi and his backers abstained, they would have no legitimate argument to be out in the streets, and their ability to pressure and make change happen would be even lower than it is now.

The other lesson is in the power of alternative media as a way of overcoming official censorship. As we see the last independent TV station in Venezuela gasping for air, it's easy to think of its demise as the end of the possibility of regime change.

But the world is changing, and old media is not the only media out there. The role of alternative media sites such as Facebook or Twitter or (hell, why not) blogs in the current crisis should be carefully analyzed, specially by Venezuela's hapless opposition.

They have yet to take advantage of new networks and XXI-st Century forms of communication. They better learn quickly. 'Cause pretty soon, they may be the only weapons they have.

(Hats off to the great Lucía for providing some of the insights in this article)

Labor's Love Lost

Quico says: My trip here's been extremely hectic, so I apologize for the sparse posting. Every day, I seem to add one or two topics to my list of issues-the-media-really-isn't-covering-nearly-as-well-as-it-should. And I notice that a lot of those have to do with labor issues.

More and more, labor activists find themselves facing criminal charges over work disputes with state owned firms. The charge is typically some variation on the theme of "boycott" and "sabotage"; words whose meanings have been extended to delirious new extremes. The problem is compounded by the fact that the state refuses to conduct further collective bargaining talks with its own unions, and refuses to implement the few it does complete (e.g., the Caracas Metro.)

The real irony here is that, from an organized labor point of view, dealing with the bloodsucking fascist private sector is now immeasurably preferable to dealing with the revolutionary workers' state. Private companies can't get away with a tenth of the shit state firms pull without some Inspectoría del Trabajo flunkie getting up their nose. But work for an SOE and you get no collective bargaining rights and, como si fuera poco, threats of jail time if you do something about it.

Go figure.

Chavista Hopes Die Hard

Quico says: Last year, these posters blatantly politicizing Venezuela's olympic team made a bit of a splash in the opposition media - especially after the government's brazen stunt catastrophically backfired when "the sporting revolution" failed to bring home a single gold medal from Beijing.

So much for that, I thought. One more petty official idiocy come, gone and forgotten...

Except that, almost one year on, the posters are still up! Bizarrely, they're plastered all over Caracas Metro stations even now. And we're not talking one or two posters the apparatchiks forgot to bring down, mind you: there're dozens of them, in high visibility places, throughout the Metro network.

What's the thinking here? Is the idea that, with just that extra little bit of encouragement, these guys still have a shot at some of those gold medals? What gives!?

...then again, all of the advertising in the Metro these days is political propaganda. As in, literally 100% of it. So, realistically, the alternative to these preposterous Beijing posters is just more mindless boosterism for the world's most expensive Cable Car.



Yeek.

Roger and out

Juan Cristóbal says: - My friend Roger used to be my mole in the government. A committed escuálido working undercover deep inside chavista bureaucracy, he somehow managed to tolerate the mind-numbing paper-pushing and the constant backstabbing from colleagues and underlings alike, to say nothing of the forced participation in chavista rallies.

But over the last year, Roger also got a crash course on the true nature of chavista bureaucrats, people for whom corruption, inefficiency and amateur Machiavelianism are the norm.

Unwilling to play along, Roger got fired last month.

---

Roger is a classic example of the underpaid overachiever. After getting his law degree in Venezuela, he went to Switzerland on a scholarship and got his doctorate. There, he specialized in an obscure area of international law that, luckily, is also incredibly relevant for Venezuela.

As it happens, he never got around to signing the recall petition against Chávez so he's not in the Tascón or Maisanta Lists. Long story short, that meant he could get a job in the government institute that handles the exact area of his expertise, doing the things he was actually trained to do. His legal knowledge and his ability in three languages became important assets and helped him stand out in the many international conferences he went to.

"Deep inside," he fesses up, "I kidded myself with the idea that I was giving something back."

These days, Roger whiles away his afternoons in his apartment in La Urbina, where he lives alone with his computers, his books and his view of Petare. He hasn't worked in weeks and is living hand to mouth.

And yet, he's at peace with himself. When I ask him the story behind his firing, he is almost wistful, disconcertingly zen about the whole thing.

He says the beginning of the end of his public service career came when his institute got a new chairman a few months back, his fourth new boss in as many years.

"This last guy took part in the 4-F military coup," he says. "The fact that he was dispatched to a relatively obscure technical outpost of chavista bureaucracy as compensation speaks volumes about his performance that day."

From day one, the chairman decided he didn't like Roger one bit. His language skills, the depth of his knowledge and his personal demeanor all rubbed him the wrong way.

"The problem is that you don't fit in with the culture," one of his assistants told Roger.

How so? he asked.

"Well," she said, "you don't socialize, all you do is come in, do your work and you're out. You don't joke around with everyone, you don't seem to like us. You're very Swiss that way."

Roger spent six months trying to get a meeting with the chairman, trying to get him to read his reports. In six months, he got nothing.

Well, not quite. He did get a lot of work on weekends.

In the months leading up to last November's State and Local Elections, Roger got dragged to election meeting after meeting and rally after rally. On several occasions, he was part of special PSUV cleanup operations in the squares and plazas of Caracas.

The demands on public employees before elections became difficult to put up with. Right before February's referendum, Roger was forced to sell BsF. 1,000 worth of raffle tickets to raise funds for the PSUV's campaign. Needless to say, Roger couldn't think of anyone who would want to buy his tickets, so he had to pay for them out of pocket.

"Did you at least win anything in the raffle?" I ask, all hopeful.

Hardly. As it happens, the raffle tickets were fake. The real ones were supposed to have a serial number and a bank account where the funds should be deposited. Roger's had none of that. The chavistas in the office forcing him to sell them had given him tickets chimbos.

Under the new chairman, office life soon took a turn to the bizarre. One Saturday, the guy decided to stage his own little backyard version of "Aló, Presidente." He made all senior and middle management go to work and sit in a conference room, from 8 to 4, hearing him talk about whatever was on his mind.

His secretary, who is actually his mistress as well as the niece of one of Chávez's ministers, was in charge of filming. During the proceedings, she would point the camera and focus on managers who looked bored, were staring at the ceiling or sending text messages. The chairman would review the tape and reprimand managers who weren't devoting 100% of their attention to the boss.

The level of paranoid control just kept getting ratcheted up. During regular weekdays, all managers had to text message the chairman every time they left the office. The Saturday seances soon became compulsory, with attendance strictly enforced. One Saturday, Roger arrived an hour late and was asked to provide the reasons why he was late ... in writing. Needless to say, he had to suck it up and say it wouldn't happen again, just like ministers do on Aló, Presidente when the big guy humiliates them.

In the Chávez administration, imitation has gone from highest form of flattery to outright obsession.

One of the problems Roger faced was the lack of personnel. Even though he was technically a manager, he never got an assistant or a secretary, so all his department's work fell on his lap.

Conveniently, the 28-year old daughter of his longtime nanny was looking for a job. Thanks to her mother's hard work, Judith had received a technical degree and had just arrived from a stint living in London.

Since she was bilingual, qualified and available, Roger pushed hard to hire her as his secretary. After many interviews and even after sucking up to all the right people, he was told they couldn't hire her because she was in the Tascón List. Roger was forced to apologize, saying he didn't know and simply forgot to check. Had he known, he said, he never would have insisted.

Judith is still unemployed.

In the weeks leading up to his firing, Roger got assigned an "advisor." Edgar, a PSUV apparatchik, had a simple job: sit across from Roger's desk every day and make his life miserable. While Roger tried to focus on his work, Edgar would talk on his cell phone non-stop, only pausing to bark at Roger demanding he finish his reports so he could take them up to the chairman and pass them off as his own. Roger later found out Edgar was making twice as much as he was.

The day Roger was fired - by Edgar, of all people - he received several anonymous text messages. "The institute is rejoicing," one read, "so much for your fancy degrees and your languages. Go eat shit, you show-off."

I ask him what the source of so much animosity is. It turns out that, with Roger being in charge of international legal analysis, his office was responsible for most of the trips abroad. The decision of who to send in each delegation frequently fell on Roger, and he obviously preferred sending the few qualified people available.

This, of course, did not sit well with the rest of the sprawling bureaucracy. Thanks to Misión Cadivi, going to one of these international trips was a quick and easy way of landing some hard currency in the form of juicy per diems, which everyone simply kept and later sold in the black market. Plus, you could have a good time abroad too. Roger recalls one particular conference in South Africa where the head of the delegation simply did not show up for the meetings, preferring to go on safari with his mistress instead.

I ask Roger about the laws Chávez has passed, banning the firing of employees. He tells me he really isn't an employee. Since the institute is relatively new, they have not established the positions and their role in the larger picture of the government's bureaucracy.

This is on purpose. Done this way, everyone is under contract and can be fired at any time. Plus, this allows the institute bigwigs to bypass regular budget laws and just hire all their friends, giving them cushy jobs as payback for political favors.

---

These days, Roger is reinvigorated. Leaving all those negative vibes behind, he says, he's starting to enjoy life again. He'd gotten to the point where he was spending most of his energy thinking up ways to outscheme the schemers out to get him. Now, he says, he's glad to have the time off, getting in touch with his friends again, teaching.

"It's funny," he says, "but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Of course the government doesn't work. My former boss is an ex-con, a convicted felon, an anonymous military man whose sole claim to fame was to break the very oath he had taken and violate the democracy he had sworn to defend. Of course they don't believe in building institutions! Their only talent, the thing they spent years planning, is how to do away with them. What was I supposed to expect - decency?"

My sense is that Roger is going to be OK. He may have lost his job, and may well end up having to live abroad, but he is well on his way to getting his life back.

The Pundit

Quico says: The Pundit feels at home here. We're in one of the restaurants he promotes on his show. The waiters greet him by name. He sits down and orders a rum with orange juice, but my feeling is that the order is superfluous. They know that's what The Pundit drinks.

Me, I'm launching into my pitch. I'm telling him about Caracas Chronicles 2.0, telling him about my plan to relaunch it in two languages, explaining to him the need for a Noticiero Digital For Sane People, an online space where cool-headed people can come and have a real debate about political events and ideas that doesn't immediately get drowned out by the usual hyper-polarized shit. I'm telling him I see a massive gap in the market, an odd mismatch between Venezuelans' confirmed taste for discussing politics and the lack of online spaces where they can do so without getting drowned out by the chaos. I'm telling him about the need for news in Spanish that digs beneath the superficial crap we get on El Universal, El Nacional and Noticias 24 on a daily basis.

The Pundit smiles. "Yeah," he says, "it would be great to have a news outlet in this country."

It's a provocation, and he knows it.

"A news outlet?" I say, walking right into it, "I mean, I do realize this country is already crammed full of news outlets..."

"Except it isn't," he says. "This country is crammed full of news, yes. And this country is crammed full out outlets, certainly. It's just that the outlets we have don't actually publish any of the news that happen here."

With this, the pundit launches into a rant I can sense is well rehearsed, but one his broadcast listeners never get to hear. Frustration pours out of every orifice in his body as he gets going.

"The media here have built a fence around democracy - around the possibility of democracy. That's the thing. The opposition media is full of black spots, of taboo subjects that you're just not allowed to touch. The newspapers are vast silences - sheets crammed full of words but drained of content. Because they have no sense of news, no feeling for what actually constitutes news, as opposed to politically useful information."

"Think," he says, "of yesterday's story on the opposition's Unity Table. An actual news outlet might have told you what that was about. They might have told you that the opposition parties were under such pressure from a few powerful interests to show some unity they really had no choice but to come together and make a statement together. They might have mentioned the actual power politics behind the whole shindig, the news behind the news event. But it turns out that those powerful interests are the media owners themselves. So the story, the actual news of what happened yesterday, doesn't get told. It can't get told. Because the media is structurally barred from reporting the news. In its place, they give us Interested Opinion packaged as news, passed off as news, treated as news, smuggled as news."

He's grabbing my arm now, peering straight into my eyes.

"Los medios le tienen un cerco a la democracia, chamo...but you can't say that without immediately getting creamed, written off as a chavista, or blacklisted by Ravell."

The pundit is in a position to know. He's been working inside the oppo media establishment for too many years to dismiss. A mass of frustration shines through as he speaks. This stuff gets to him.

"The escualido media is a minefield of taboos. On almost every story, there's a pre-determined interpretation you can tell, you can get through. Stray beyond that, and you walk into a thicket of taboos. Even on totally banal subjects, on topics where you might think the heterodox position is too well establish to really sting anymore."

"One time," he recalls, "I got invited to do one of the morning talk shows on TV alongside Manuel Felipe Sierra and Armando Durán. I argued that the Paro Petrolero (back in 2002 and 2003) had been a failure, deluding myself in thinking this was too obvious to qualify as controversial anymore."

"The other two lost it, turned on me like I'd just started chanting 'Uh! Ah! Chávez no se va!' All I'd done was say something anyone with a pair of eyes already knew. Cuz hell, Chávez is still there: by friggin' definition the paro was a failure.

"But I'd stepped on one of their taboos. They couldn't deal with it, turned on me like I'd just said the Holocaust never happened. The opposition media has become a mechanism for furiously repressing truths everybody already knows, and for preserving and upholding the hysterias of a tiny slice of people living in the East Side of Caracas."

"Coño, pundit," I say, "I thought I was critical of the media, but my stuff is mild compared to this."

"Son vainas que no se pueden decir," he says, turning bitterly ironic, "cuz apparently the defense of freedom of the press demands that they be hushed up. But the problem we have, fundamentally, is only secondarily about chavismo's intransigence. The underlying problem with political discourse on our side is that the opposition media son una mierda."

"These days people think Chávez made it up. They think that, because he says it, it can't be true. But how did elections use to get decided in this country? RCTV would have their guys and Venevision theirs. And they fought it out, in those terms. Los nuestros contra los de Uds. Our guys against yours. Chávez, of all people, knows how that system works - how do you think that presidential seat got warmed up for him?"

A lady from a nearby table comes by to talk to him. "Muy bueno, Pundit, I love your show" she says, "keep sticking it to the government like you do." She obviously hasn't been listening in on us. Pundit is gracious, but annoyed. She's broken his flow. She seems on the verge of asking for an autograph, but doesn't.

As she walks off, he turns back to me,

"Convéncete," he says, "the way the private media operates in this country is incompatible with the exercise of democracy. Chávez knows that, by attacking it, he makes it certain that the opposition will reflexively align itself with the private media. So he has every incentive in making the opposition line up behind a media system that makes democracy impossible. It's win-win for the guy. For the umpteenth time, he's playing us."

Settling back out of rant mode, he seems to remember that this was supposed to be a business meeting, of a sort, and comes back to my pitch.

"But seriously, the thing you want to do with your blog," he says, "it's viable. You could do it without too much money. And it will reach a few thousand people, a smallish but influential elite that wants to, needs to, look beyond the tiny little horizons the escuálido media serves up to them. And that, in itself definitely makes it worth doing, because like you say, those people don't have a place to turn to online."

"But your idea can't drive the news cycle. It can't challenge the wall of normal news consumers get. For that, you need a newsroom, a staff, a bunch of journos dedicated full time to breaking, one by one, the layers upon layers of taboos that the oppo media elite is dedicated to protecting. And that, that you can't do with a few thousand dollars. You just can't."

And The Pundit, I realize, is absolutely right.

Caracas Chronicles @ 360

Quico says: Mark your calendars. On Wednesday, June 17th, I'll be hosting a Meet & Greet at 360, the skybar on top of the Altamira Suites hotel. Come one, come all.

If you've never been there, the 360 is simply gorgeous. If you get there early enough, you get to see the most spectacular sunset over Caracas. So I'll be there from 6:00 p.m., if the weather permits on the roof terrace, eager to meet lurkers and regulars alike.

Altamira Suites is on the 1era Transversal & 1era Avenida in Altamira, one block Northeast of Plaza Altamira, just next door to CAF. The scheduling is after-work-drink friendly. But stick it out 'til the bitter end and you'll (likely) get the extra bonus of seeing me drop-down drunk.

"The rich are not human"

Quico says: In Caracas, sleeping through the constant ringing of car alarms can be a challenge. It seems as though every half hour an alarm goes off and the sound bounces from the walls of the Ávila, echoing through the entire city. When you think of the sounds of Caracas, you think of the sapitos at night, and of car alarms.

But it's the alarms coming off of the political world that are most worrying. And nothing is as alarm-worthy as Chávez's straightforward, dehumanizing discourse against his critics.

In this clip, we hear Chávez argue, repeatedly and vehemently, that "the rich are not human", to the applause of his accolytes. It's not something that slipped out. It's something he says four or five times, underlining it by saying "and I take responsibility for this" just before repeating it yet again.

The rich man, we're told, is an animal in human form. It's not just that "being rich is bad." It goes way beyond that.

The use of superheated, over-the-top rhetoric against anyone who fails to toe the President's ideological line has been one of the mainstays of chavista rhetoric from the very beginning. But the final step, the out-and-out denial of the humanity of those who criticize him, that step is new.

I think at this point we at least owe the President the courtesy of taking him at his word. He has told us, many times, that Venezuela's Constitution is second to none in protecting human rights. We note with some concern, however, that the constitution is silent on the topic of the rights of animals in human form.

We know, from history, that the deployment of dehumanizing discourses is a necessary pre-condition for the physical extermination of one human group by another. As Michelle Maiese puts it,

Once certain groups are stigmatized as evil, morally inferior, and not fully human, the persecution of those groups becomes more psychologically acceptable. Restraints against aggression and violence begin to disappear. Not surprisingly, dehumanization increases the likelihood of violence and may cause a conflict to escalate out of control. Once a violence breakover has occurred, it may seem even more acceptable for people to do things that they would have regarded as morally unthinkable before.

Parties may come to believe that destruction of the other side is necessary, and pursue an overwhelming victory that will cause one's opponent to simply disappear. This sort of into-the-sea framing can cause lasting damage to relationships between the conflicting parties, making it more difficult to solve their underlying problems and leading to the loss of more innocent lives.

The spread of dehumanizing discourses are a typical feature of pre-genocidal situations. We know that the Rwandan genocide was preceded by a long and dedicated campaign by Hutu extremists to convince their people that Tutsis were not human in the same sense they are.

We know that a decade of Khmer Rouge propaganda on the dehumanizing effects of urban life was necessary to prepare its followers to accept the need to empty the cities and kill their inhabitants.

We know that Sudan's arab militias are bombarded with messages equating Darfuris with apes and slaves to soften them up to commit acts of mass murder.

We know how important the dehumanization of Japanese people, their portrayal as a subhuman race of near-chimps, was in American military propaganda ahead of the decision to indiscriminately firebomb Tokyo and to use nuclear weapons against civilian populations.

And the German example is too notorious to need more than a mention.

Dehumanizing discourses are a necessary - if not sufficient - precondition to genocide. Hugo Chávez declares that he takes full responsibility for a discourse that explicitly denies the humanity of his critics.

I hate to sound alarmist, but you do the math.

"Nos fueramos quedao con las contratistas"

Juan Cristóbal says: - (Note: An anonymous reader gives us a first-hand impression of what is going on in the eastern shores of Lake Maracaibo after Chávez nationalized most of the local economy - see here for background).

The situation is dire. Ciudad Ojeda, traditionally a city with lots going on, looks like a ghost town. There are few cars out on the street, few people in the local banks. Friday the 8th of May, the day everything was nationalized, right before Mother's Day, they were practically empty. This past weekend, end of the month, there were fewer than 20 people in each of the three banks I went to. Normally, these are so crowded that ATMs drop out of the network due to congestion.

Everyone owes everyone else. Yesterday, during the protests, local TV showed a few people saying "Nos fueramos quedao con las contratistas" ... "we should have stayed with the contractors." Another said, "I support 12 people, my wife, my children, my parents, and I haven't been paid in three weeks. I want to be paid so that I can at least sell Panorama in traffic lights."

(Translator's Note: In Zulia, people refer to "newspaper" as "Panorama", the name of Maracaibo's leading daily)

My students at the University are terrified - they are being affected, either directly or indirectly. Their parents either work in some of the expropriated companies, or in the services sector that is seeing their customers disappear. Many of them are on scholarship and believe at any moment the state government will stop paying them. Two former students who are doing their internships and dissertations in some of the expropriated companies were literally crying to me yesterday, not knowing what to do because PDVSA won't acknowledge the work they have done, and if the employer doesn't validate their work, the University won't deem it sufficient to graduate.

Two students told me yesterday about how workers haven't been paid since Chávez took over. Another one told me his father made BsF 4000 a month (about US$700 at black-market rates), and now he will struggle to reach BsF 1500. The few that got paid were paid roughly the same, BsF 340 for the first week with PDVSA, and they weren't paid on Friday as is customary but the following Wednesday. Private clinics don't want to see them because they don't have anything to pay with, drug stores won't fill their prescriptions for the same reason, and the latest rumor is that Chávez is going to take over the region's three private clinics in retaliation.

Many service boats have burnt-out engines, other have been "cannibalized" in order to sell the spare parts. Many boats haven't been out yet because PDVSA has not complied with the customary logistics (water, ice, food for employees, etc) and the workers refuse to board.

The picture is bleak.

Clueless in Caracas

Juan Cristóbal says: - President Chávez canceled a trip to El Salvador last Monday, alleging concerns regarding a possible assassination attempt. The finger points to the usual suspects - the CIA, Luis Posada Carriles, the opposition.

Normally, this wouldn't deserve the slightest of interest. We've lost count of the number of times Chávez has denounced someone was *this close* to killing him, and by now it's pretty clear to everyone that he's bluffing.

Why do we think that? Are we that naive? After all, Interior Minister Tarek El-Aissami came out today saying that the plot was in the later stages of development, and that forensic work indicates the plan was "almost perfect."

What he didn't give were details. In fact, nobody in El Salvador, Venezuela or the US has been arrested for this foiled "conspiracy," no details have been given, and no evidence has been presented. That's probably because they have nothing. That, or they're still cooking up the evidence.

A couple of things set this staging of the President's "they're-out-to-get-me" kabuki apart from past ones. First of all, it marks the first time he is accusing the Obama administration of trying to kill him.

Sure, Chávez may say that he believes Obama has good intentions and isn't involved. But how can anyone with a minimal knowledge of how the US government works believe the CIA would be planning to kill a head of state without the President's knowledge?

Perhaps he thinks Leon Panetta has gone rogue on Obama. Perhaps he thinks the CIA behaves like the Disip, with a mind and an agenda of its own.

But the CIA is no ISI, and Obama is no Zardari. Furthermore, it would make no sense for the CIA to be acting on its own toward a country the administration is actively seeking to mend fences with. The administration has had its run-ins with the CIA and it may be true that the agency is doing a few things on their own, without the White House's knowledge. But the imperial bureaucracy in Langley would never go so far as to risk their necks for Hugo Chávez. He's just not that important.

So if you believe the plot was real and that the CIA was behind it, you believe Barack Obama is trying to have Hugo Chávez murdered. There's no two ways about this. Good luck selling that one.

Still, the information is filtering out in bits and pieces, exactly as the government wants it. Yesterday, it was Chávez denouncing the plot. Today, it's El-Aissami saying basically nothing. Tomorrow, they will show pictures of some random machine gun that was supposed to knock down Chávez's plane. Friday, it will be an unfortunate member of a mara who will be blamed. Saturday, the government will threaten the media for not taking this seriously enough. Sunday, Chávez will insult Hillary Clinton.

Just like that, a made-up story has given the newspapers a week's worth of news, a week in which they don't talk about the economy, labor problems, shortages, inflation, crime. The whole thing is so transparent it almost plays out like a game of Clue - this week, it's Posada Carriles, in El Salvador, with a bazuca. Next week, it'll be Guillermo Zuluaga, in Los Chorros, with the stuffed head of a moose.

There is no ridicule they will not touch to distract us from the real issues.

The Most Important Story Nobody's Talking About

Quico says: While Caracas is consumed by gossip about whether Chávez stood up Vargas Llosa or Vargas Llosa stood up Chávez, some serious trouble is brewing on the Eastern Shore of Lake Maracaibo, the so-called COL (for Costa Oriental del Lago) which is still Venezuela's number one oil producing area.

Last month, the government seized control of a wide array of oil service contracting companies in the region, vowing to absorb the workforce into PDVSA. But of the nearly 8,000 workers who should've been put on the state oil giant's payroll, fewer than 300 have apparently been processed so far. That leaves a huge floating workforce, suddenly out of a job, all concentrated in a single area, milling around and getting increasingly pissed off by the delays.

The knock-on effects of all those de facto layoffs for the local economy are pretty severe. For instance, Union Radio reports that 80% of Lagunillas municipality's income was directly related to the service companies, meaning their effective confiscation sets off, among others, a local fiscal crisis that threatens to force the municipal government to make drastic budget cuts.

Today, the situation was tense on the COL, with the main thoroughfare (the "Intercomunal") closed down, rumors of a "paro cívico" making the rounds, stores shutting down early to avoid trouble, groups of protesters milling around, and military patrols rumbling up and down the street.

And unlike 2002-03, it's not just a white-collar problem over there anymore. This time around, everyone's mad.

Thousands of families have seen their livelihoods collapse in the last few weeks, making for a volatile stew of labor unrest that the Caracas-centric media really ought to be covering, but isn't.

How PDVSA can continue to operate in the area even though they're short by thousands of service suppliers and amid this level of social tension is anybody's guess.

BlackBerry Nation

Quico says: So I flew into Maiquetía yesterday and man, what a let down. Not one dirty look, or extra check or even the vaguest hint of intimidation. Buenas noches - stamp - in you go. And that was after I'd announced I was coming, right here on CC!

My Q-Score must really be in the dumps. Or maybe el-que-te-conté's not so scared of the mouse as some would have you think.

First impressions are the usual jarring juxtaposition of an extremely visible consumer society still trying desperately to convince itself that everything's gonna be alright with the just-as-unmissable-signs that it's really not.

At the luggage pick-up area in Maiquetía Airport, a gigantic "Building Bolivarian Socialism" sign looms over the Banco Federal ATM (Maestro & Cirrus welcome.) On the highway into town, massive billboards for Heinz Tomato Ketchup (¡Picante!) jostle for space with others lauding the takeover of transnational corporations' assets by the revolution.

Just to look at it, you can't avoid the sense Venezuela suffers a bizarre case of social schizophrenia: it's half all-encompassing state-control-of-everything, half wannabe-Miami-mall-culture.

The state-control-of-everything part is the one we always hear about, but it takes coming back here to be reminded that, after all these years, bits and bobs of the professional middle class is still here, still rich, still totally weirdly disconnected from the country's problems.

Caracas is still a place where thousands of people wear suits to their offices five days a week and make a comfortable living in investment banking, or corporate accounting, or software consultancy. And they're not the least bit shy about flaunting the money involved, either. Turns out that, per capita, Venezuelans are the second highest buyers of BlackBerries in the world. (If your model is more than 9 months old, you're a nobody.)

It's also a place where the most visible initial sign of the revolution is that the bulbs lighting up the shanty-covered hillsides around Gramoven are now an energy-saving pale blue rather than the traditional yellowish-white. Es que el país cambió...

I should add that, media-wise, the first thing you notice is just how relentless the campaign against Globovisión has gotten on State TV. It's become the new obsession on VTV: just about every other spot is a furious rant against JunkBroadcasting and the dangers to your mental health of watching heterogeneous ideas on the toob. Softening up the base for a manotazo, it seems to me.

Yeeks...

Mad with Power Chronicles

Quico says: I swear when I first heard that Chávez wanted to do a 96-hour marathon version of Aló, presidente to celebrate the show's 10th anniversary on the air, I just took it for granted the story was a Chigüire Bipolar-style spoof.

But no. He's really doing it. It just started...runs through Sunday night.

Radicalism and its consequences

Juan Cristóbal says: - In the last few months, the Chávez administration has gone into overdrive radicalism. Whether it's the forced takeover of vast sectors of the economy, the harassment of private opposition media, the passage of draconian new legislation, the attacks on opposition politicians or the massive tax increases recently passed, there seems to be few aspects of public or private life that are safe from the government's scorched-earth approach to governance.

But has it hurt Chávez's standing in public opinion? Yes, to a point.

Alfredo Keller's latest survey shows a couple of interesting trends. One of the most important one is the graph on whether people think things are going well or not. (click on image to enlarge)

For the first time since the middle of last year, more people think things are going badly than well. This is a flip from the first quarter of 2009 of almost 20 points. And lest you think this is not important, remember that the 59-40 margin in the fourth quarter of 2006 roughly coincided with the 63-37 margin of Chávez's election that year. Also worth pointing out that in the fourth quarter of 2007, when the opposition won the Constitutional Referendum, a majority of Venezuelans thought things were going badly, but by the first quarter of 2009 when the government won, a majority thought things were going well.

Is this margin reversible? Certainly. Nothing is set in stone. But the trend is there.

Another interesting result came about when people were asked whether or not their problems had gotten better or worse.


A large majority of Venezuelans think the country's problems have either stayed the same or gotten worse in the last year. Crime is, of course, the main concern, and deteriorating safety conditions are clearly being felt by everyone. The government's bright spots are "poverty", "housing" and "the economy," and even there the percentages of people that actually think things have gotten better are a paltry 27, 35 and34% respectively. Keep in mind those are the issues most vulnerable to the current economic downturn.

One of the arguments being bandied about is that Chávez is much more popular than his government. There may be some truth to that. A slim majority of Venezuelans now think Chávez is becoming a dictator, as can be seen in this graph.


Likewise, a less slim majority think Chávez is doing things the wrong way, mostly because they are starting to realize Chávez wants to mold Venezuela after Cuba's communist system.

The troubling thing about this is that a whopping 47% of Venezuelans don't think Chávez is becoming a dictator, and 45% of them think he is doing things right, even though all the major problems in our society have gotten worse.

Clearly, the teflon effect is still there, though not quite as strong as it used to be.

Finally, people were asked who they would vote for in a hypothetical election - for Chávez, or for someone else.


This is always a tricky question. It's one thing to say "the other guy/gal", it's quite another to actually go and vote for, say, Antonio Ledezma. Nonetheless, there is something to be said about the fact that, for the first time since the IVth quarter of 2003 (six years, though the graph is abbreviated), a majority of Venezuelans would rather vote for a hypothetical other than for Chávez by a six-point margin.

Clearly, the government's radicalism has not gone unnoticed. The challenge (protracted sigh) is for our current opposition leadership to capitalize on this. Will they be able to? Will this even be a possibility? Who knows, but don't keep your hopes up.

Cubanization is a process, not an event

Quico says: A year ago, when I went to Caracas, it seemed as if everyone I met had a single thing on their minds - Cadivi. Every conversation seemed to circle back to it: how to get dollars, the latest tips and tricks on how to skirt the bureaucratic hassles and reach that promised land of a greenback for just over dos bolos.

Now, as I get ready to travel back home next month, there's a new obsession in town - getting out. Everyone I talk to seems to be at some stage in the process of getting a visa, or a scholarship, or digging up a Spanish grandparent's birth certificate so they can try to claim citizenship, or find some other subterfuge to allow them to become balseros del aire.

Times have changed. It's no longer "shit, I gotta get my assets out of here". Now it's "shit, I gotta get my ass out of here".

I am, of course, already out. As I stroke my Canadian permanent resident card, I feel enormously lucky. Talking to friends back home, I'm only too aware of the desperate straits they face, the oxygen-zapping sense of living in a place where the future has been canceled, shut down, expropriated. Where the price of entry to anyone still harboring aspirations of a better life is to check his principles at the door, to file away his capacity for independent thought, to just conform.

It puts a knot in my stomach just thinking about it, and I don't even have to live it.

These are the aftershocks of The Barrage, and as Juan puts it, the strategy is practically out in the open. It's taken Chávez 10 years to get to a stage Fidel Castro reached in less than one: crafting a society where most people who dissent feel it a matter of pressing necessity to get out.

Then again, Chávez is doing it all without firing squads, those great expediters of emigratory alacritude.

In the end, the result is not so different. First came the oil professionals, who left en masse following the catastrophic 2002-03 strike. Joining them now is a steady stream of the professional classes, university educated Venezuelans determined to resist assimilation into the revolutionary hive mind.

It's now possible to envisage a Venezuela where the bulk of the dissidence has thrown in the towel, run off to the safety of Weston, or Madrid, or Montreal. I am, obviously, in no position to judge. Still, it makes me terribly sad.

These are the worst of times, the vindication of Maria-Alejandra-Lópezismo. The moment when we're forced to confront the reality that what we saw as the shrillest, most reactionary, most unhinged of Chávez's critics got to core truths that the rest of us couldn't bear to see. That cubanization - the endlessly-abused C-word, for so long the province of whacked-out, unhinged reactionary fears - really was the logical end-point of the chavista onslaught.

Por ahora, we can still say that Venezuela is no Cuba. Not yet, anyway.

I am, for instance, still able and willing to travel there, and reasonably assured I'll be left alone to get on with my business in Caracas. Which is why I'm spending most of June in my home town - hopefully meeting some of y'all, and getting on with some projects I've been cooking for some time.

That kind of thing is still possible. Just. But my confidence that it will remain possible indefinitely into the future has crumbled.

There's a new urgency to my trip, this time. A desperate sense that this kind of happy-go-lucky, get-on-a-plane-and-go travel may or may not be possible for me a year or two for now.

The Buffoon Meme

Quico says: Here's a sobering thought: it's a good bet that this month worldwide many more people have heard about Hugo Chávez giving a state-produced cel phone a vaguely cock-associated name than about his moves to silence dissenting broadcast media, strip most elected opposition politicos of any real power, steal dozens of private businesses ("nationalize" is such a spineless euphemism) and declare people who criticize him "un-human."

Not that it's surprising. The Buffoon Meme is highly contagious. Stories about Chávez doing totally ridiculous stuff are much more "email-this-story"-friendly than reporting about dictatorial moves. When Chávez calls a gringo president an illiterate donkeys, breaks out into song in the middle of addresses to the National Assignments or demands an urgent coroner's investigation into a 180 year old death, he makes natural water-cooler fodder: the kind of stuff an editor for a regional newspaper looking to plug a hole in an inside page will be irresistably drawn to.

No matter how much or how well we write about it, the looming-dictatorship stuff just can't compete. Sober-minded accounts about the rise of an ideologically extreme authoritarian regime in the heart of the Western Hemisphere are just no fun.

But the buffoonery beat? Everybody wants in on that game.

The Buffoon Meme has warped international perceptions of the Chávez era. I'm often surprised, when writing in international fora, at how large the Meme looms in readers' minds. First world lefties who are not taken in by the temptations of PSFery too often come to see chavismo as one big joke, a light hearted rump at the hands of a zany Apatowcrat too bumbling to really harm anyone.

None of which is to imply that Chávez isn't a buffoon. Of course he is.

What I mean, instead, is that the Buffoon Meme conceals much more than it reveals. It impedes the rise of a clear-eyed understanding of chavista autocracy in international public opinion. It makes the whole macabre experiment seem fun and harmless and wacky, rather than scary and mindlessly destructive and atavistically oppressive. It doesn't help.

Oligarcas Temblad!

Quico says: So, there's an earthquake. It wakes you up. You turn on the TV and see a report about it. What do you think is more likely to leave you feeling alarmed, fearful, anxious or panicky? The earthquake, or the news story about it?

Gah...it's like fish in a barrel, this story...except we're the fish.

As I think about it, I can't shake the feeling that the very ridiculousness of the charge tells its own story. There's a message in it; a conscious decision to go after Globo on the most self-evidently ridiculous grounds possible, precisely as a way of flaunting the government's arbitrary power.

After all, if you go after Globovision on grounds that someone could imaginably mistake as being rooted in the law, you might not quite get your message across. But go after them on grounds as transparently nonsensical as "you talked in public about something literally everyone in Caracas had felt minutes earlier", and you make it perfectly that, no matter how vanilla the channel's reporting gets, you're still going to go after them...just cuz you can.

Crafting a Chavista Court

Quico says: Five years ago today, the court-packing Organic Statute of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice came into effect. As I've recently discussed, I think that event should be recognized as the moment when Venezuela ceased to be a constitutional democracy in any recognizable sense.

To continue our commemoration of the event that made our justice Simply Red and our democracy Simply Dead, I've asked a Venezuelan legal scholar - who comments here as Capablanca - to contribute his thoughts on the state of Venezuela's legal system.

Capablanca says: On January 26, 2006, in the opening act of the Judicial Branch’s activities for that year, Venezuelan Chief Justice Omar Mora Diaz, speaking in front of Chávez and other prominent political figures, proudly stated that the Venezuelan judiciary was, at last, free from external political interference. The AD & COPEI era of judicial submissiveness was gone, and a new time of true judicial power had arrived. Shortly afterwards, several judges started spontaneously singing “Uh, ah! Chávez no se va!” showing everybody what judicial independence meant in Chavista jargon.

We know our judiciary –especially the Supreme Court – has always been weak compared with other political actors, especially the cogollos of the AD & COPEI era and their acolytes in the Judicial Council (Consejo de la Judicatura). But we have reached new lows in the current regime: the old tribes at least had the minimum sense not to chant political slogans in their robes. How did it come to this?

It would be too easy to just blame Chávez. In public, he has never showed too much deference to Dos Pilitas. From the (in)famous letter sent to the Supreme Court justices back in 1999, to his public use of expletives to refer to decisions that didn’t go his way, Chávez frequently showed contempt for the idea of leaving justices alone to do their job and interpret the law as they see fit (or to freely express their policy preferences, as judges arguably do in established democracies). These open interventions can only psych-out judges, usually threatening and constraining them from reaching any decision that would not match the regime’s (a.k.a. Chávez’s) preferred outcome.

However, Chávez’s public Court bashing probably is not all – or even most – of what this is about. Chavismo uses other tools to manipulate the courts. Like everywhere else, the most important mechanism is the appointment of sympathetic judges. In a democracy, this takes place following institutional rules that allow for the meaningful participation of a variety of actors, and respecting the rules of judicial tenure, probably the most important guarantee of judicial independence. Conversely, in non-democracies or dysfunctional democratic regimes, these rules are changed or completely bypassed: Judges are dismissed, forced to resign, or the court’s size and composition is changed to reflect the rulers’ wishes (a.k.a. court-packing).

Under Chávez, the Supreme Court has been reshuffled three times - late-1999, late-2000 and 2004 - and all three episodes have aimed to create Chavista majorities. But some majorities have been more Chavista than others. After the first two tries, the Chavista majority crumbled as soon as the ruling coalition responsible for its appointment broke apart.

Take, for example, the late-2000 appointees. Many of those justices people used to call "Chavista!" were really Miquilenista judges who understood that they owed their appointment not to Chávez but to their political boss, former Interior Minister and Chávez-mentor turned opposition Luis Miquilena. As a result, as soon as Miquilena flipped on Chávez, the justices did the same and, coupled with the very few judges who had connections with other parties, formed a solid 10-judge group strongly committed to the opposition cause. This group went far as stating, in a majority decision of the Court's entire roster, that the events of April 11-14, 2002 were not a coup. The feeble Chavista majority in the Constitutional Chamber was barely able to overcome this deadlock through their controversial use of that chamber’s alleged pre-eminence over other Chambers in the Court and over the Court in its entirety, reliably voting 3 against 2 in favor of the government in every major decision, including those that paved the way to the 2004 recall referendum.

To (re)create a majority, the 2004 Chavista majority in the National Assembly decided to expand and pack the Court, using the excuse of needing to pass the pending Organic Statute of the Venezuelan Supreme Court (LOTSJ). At the time, this proposal gained even more steam, since there was some fear among Chavistas about the prospects of losing the recall referendum against Chávez or achieving a narrow victory. Basically, they needed the Court as insurance in case of trouble.

The main culprit in this second packing-plan is clear: Luis Velásquez Alvaray. Velásquez had an agenda of his own - to reach the Supreme Court and, specifically, the Comisión Judicial, a body in charge of appointing Venezuela’s judges, to create a new judicial network or tribe that responded to his will.

We remember well how far Velásquez Alvaray and his buddies were willing to go to get the new Statute passed - they ended up modifying the National Assembly’s Rules of Order to get the Statute approved, steamrolling all opposition, even if that involved turning the statute into the messiest, most inarticulate piece of legislation in Venezuela’s contemporary history. Possibly even more than the crude political hatchet job it represents, it’s the amazing amateurishness of the LOTSJ’s drafting that makes serious lawyers cringe.

The Law passed and the new justices were appointed, Velásquez Alvaray among them. Ironically, Velásquez would last just a short time in the Court. Picking a fight with the wrong people and being blatantly corrupt at the same time was probably too much a stretch for someone with such little juridical credentials!

Now, what did they achieve with the last wave of court-packing? This time, the court apparently turned more Chavista than ever before, right?

That’s one plausible interpretation - especially since every magistrate is now absolutely clear that the only boss around is Chávez. Only a handful of justices with ties to the opposition dare to vote against the government line - among them, former Miquilenistas like Rondon Haaz at the Constitutional Chamber. Moreover, since the new justices arrived in the Court, the judiciary as a whole has been more willing than ever to stretch or trespass the boundaries of acceptable legal interpretation to favor the regime, tearing down a minimal image of legitimacy that is necessary to perform its role. Just think about the Supreme Court’s endorsement of the closing of RCTV last year, the use of criminal prosecution against political opponents, and a very long “etc.”

On the other hand, some things have not changed. Beyond the evident commitment that most Supreme Court justices have to Chávez’s cause lies an ever-divided court. Justices still compete, sometimes bitterly, for business, favors and to secure judicial appointments for allies in the lower courts. More importantly, since the 2004 law, many of them became tokens of prominent legislators in the National Assembly. Additionally, despite a decline in the court’s willingness to protect plaintiffs’ rights against the government – a phenomenon that several Venezuelan legal scholars have already highlighted – the opposition still goes to the courts.

This might sound puzzling, but it is also reasonable: the courts, especially the Supreme Court, are a highly visible venue for opposition politicians to keep showing that they are fighting for their constituency – in our case, that they are challenging the tyrant and his servants by all possible means, even if this is otherwise absolutely useless, even when their claims are constitutionally plausible.

So, on the one hand, the Court fails to control both the President and the Legislature, ceasing to do what is most important in a liberal democracy. That is probably fine with Chavismo, since they are already clear that their regime is not liberal-democratic. But many things have not changed. As in the past, networks of justices, judges, politicians and lawyers work to exploit the court for rent-seeking and personal benefit. In the legal world in Venezuela, everybody knows that several judges (not all of them) are willing to sell decisions to the highest bidder, and even guarantee that the decision will not be overturned on appeal by sharing the profits with their superiors. Everyone knows that many attorneys work as ruling-brokers, and not as legal practitioners; this used to be the case before Chavez and it essentially remains the same. And everyone knows that justices of the Court and politicians struggle to get judges appointed who then pledge loyalty to them – just like they once did with their old-regime designators.

In fact, the judiciary changed for the worse without addressing any of the underlying problems. Judges without tenure or a sense of it are less secure than ever that they will be in the bench tomorrow. Every time you see a discussion about ‘improving the courts’ and whatnot in the National Assembly, bear in mind that what we are really witnessing is a fight between different factions to control the judicial goldmine. So, in addition to being politically dependent, and sing songs to praise Chávez their noble leader, many of them know that even this is not enough, because the day somebody else is powerful in the legislature or the court, their post is at greater risk than ever. Making money while you are in the court all of the sudden starts making a lot of sense..

That is Chavista justice in a nutshell - a judiciary that remains politically dependent, not only on Chávez, but on rapacious politicians inside and outside the Venezuelan court system. But not everything is bleak. As in the past, there are a few real heroes that work as justices, judges, lawyers and public defenders with the goal of building the rule of law in Venezuela. Quietly, they believe that wearing red T-shirts, going to demonstrations or singing Chavista songs in the court is inappropriate for honorable public servants. And they are worthy of our utmost respect, and at least a bit of hope.

Así, así, así es que se gobierna...

Quico says: So you want to know how a minimally responsible petrostate elite might manage the oil industry's boom-and-bust cycle?

Go ask the Norwegians.

Facing a worldwide slump that has seen energy prices tumble dramatically, the government has just announced a big boost in public spending. And how will they pay for it, you ask? Are they going zillions of kroners into debt to finance it all? Not a chance. They're spending just a fraction of the billions upon billions they saved up during the oil boom.

If it's macroeconomic coordination you want, they got that too. Their Central Bank is aggressively cutting interest rates to boost aggregate demand and head off a slump. And, guess what? They can do that without worrying too much because they face an inflation rate under 3%. Why? Because they were careful not to overheat the economy by overspending when oil prices were high. And how did they manage that? By saving up a bunch of the excedent . . . you know, the part they're spending now, when they actually need it.

Which, to be fair, doesn't mean Norway will manage to avoid a recession altogether...just that the recession they're having will be incomparably shorter, shallower and less traumatic for Norwegian families than the one they would've had if they hadn't taken all those precautions.

None of this is rocket science, people. It really isn't.

Government eats itself

Juan Cristobal says: - The Chávez administration has been gobbling up everything in sight at such a pace, it's actually nationalizing itself now!

The Banco Industrial de Venezuela (BIV) was Venezuela's original state-owned bank: one of the few holdovers of the puntofijista Import Substitution Industrialization strategies of the 1960s and 70s to remain in state hands through the 90s. The BIV has a long, dysfunctional track record. It hasn't made a profit since the Welsers were around.

So in the latest display of chavista coprophagia, the government has decided to "intervene" it, which basically means taking control of the BIV.

What's not really clear is why the government has to go through this whole convoluted rigamarole to intervene a bank it already owns.

In fact, whatever ails the bank is the government's own fault. So it's not clear what this "intervention" is really after, other than the latest round of chavista musical chairs, quítate tú pa’ ponerme yo.

It can't be the BIV's losses and its severe under-capitalization that prompted this. If making a loss was the kind of thing to trigger an "intervention", every state owned company in the coiuntry would be "intervened." Besides, this profit-and-loss stuff is so unrevolutionary to begin with

There has to be something else at play here. Perhaps the government is setting the stage to merge the BIV with the Banco de Venezuela, once Chávez gets his fat, dirty paws on it. Perhaps this is the first step to justify a massive nationalization of the banking sector. Or perhaps somebody in the BIV wasn't giving loans to the right people and this is a way to send a strong signal.

Whatever it is, it makes no sense in the real world. But this is the Chávez government we're talking about, so it makes perfect sense.

Periodization

Quico says: My guess now is that when the historians of the future come to periodize the Chávez era, they'll settle on something like:

December 1998 - November 2001: Ascendent Chavismo
January 2002 - August 2004: Acute Polarization
August 2004 - February 2009: Competitive Authoritarianism
from March 2009 : The Chávez Dictatorship

Comments worth reading

Quico says: One of the great joys of blogging is when a post sets off a really good debate. The comments thread following my previous post was one of those: substantive, serious, and by turns heartfelt and piercingly insightful. Thanks to all who've been taking part.

The Barrage

There are missiles coming from every direction. In just a few weeks, it was the comisarios, the ports and airports, Rosales, Ledezma, the Miranda clinics, the oil service companies, farm expropiations, laws challenging private property, el Ateneo, Globovision and the list goes on. After the February referendum they suddenly went into over drive, with the government shooting in every direction. It's impossible to have a proper response to any particular attack. Sitting abroad you are left stunned every time you venture into the Venezuelan news-sites. And, I imagine, if you are inside the country you'd be exhausted even before you wake up. That is Chavez's tactic, to stun you into submission.

Quico says: That thought by LaLucca in the comments section struck me as especially apt. The reality is that, when I sit down to blog, my standard operating procedure is to look through the news sites for an especially revealing item of news and then try to write some not-too-cliched comment about it. But that methodology has its own drawbacks, and they're especially visible in the current climate.

The one-topic-at-a-time approach misses what's felt most distinctive about the Venezuelan political scene since the February referendum: the barrage. Not this attack or that attack, but the whole heady mix of 'em; the sense that, by the time you've worked through the implications of any one of the things they're doing, they've run off and done three more, each more alarming than the last.

What we've seen these last few months is Chavez on full attack mode on all fronts. Newly reassured that he can keep on seeking re-election indefinitely, the audacity, speed and scope of the government's authoritarian offensive is just unprecedented.

The guy's doing it all at once, taking on the challenge of creating a country safe for his lifelong rule with a gusto and determination that leaves any attempt to resist simply gasping for air.

What we have now is the worst case scenario. Even a couple of months back, I really couldn't believe that the descent into traditional dictatorship could unfold at the pace we're now seeing.

Denying Plausible Deniability

Quico says: What I find most significant about Chavez's announcement that he has decided to shut down Globovision is, precisely, that he announced it.

Think about it: if the guy was at all concerned to maintain even a minimal kind of legal window dressing in place, he easily could have. Nothing was stopping Chavez from preserving at least a bare-bones plausibility to the inevitable subsequent claims that the decision to close down the station had nothing to do with him. He could've just given the order to Conatel, or the Supreme Tribunal, or whatever, then claimed the decision had been theirs all along.

Granted, nobody with the slightest sense for the way power flows through Venezuelan society these days would've bought it. Still, doing it that way would've shown that Chavez remains minimally aware that he is, at least theoretically, supposed to be the constitutional leader of a legally constituted republic rather than the owner of an hacienda.

No such luck. Just as with the RCTV shutdown and the decision to throw the book at Manuel Rosales, Chavez wasn't content merely to piss all over the rule of law...instead, he made a point of putting himself on theatrical display, exuberantly pissing all over the rule of law under neon lights, live on national TV...just to make extra-special sure nobody is left in any doubt about who has this particular chupetin by the palito.

Which strikes me as being as much the story here as the actual decision to shut down of a key dissident opinion outlet: not just the illegality of it all, the rampant intolerance of it all, the blatant authoritarian meanness of it all - that stuff is periodico de ayer - but the sheer, morbid refusal even to pay lip service to the notion that the 1999 constitution is ontologically distinct from toilet paper.

Apocalypse Now

Quico says: Gah! I really don't have time to blog about it properly right now. But Chavez's move to seize the oil sector's private contractors is a catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions. The contractors have been undergoing death-by-a-thousand-cuts for some time now, but the consequences of this final kamikaze move are hard to overstate.

Some kind of economic incompetence rubicon is being crossed here. Watch and shudder.

Les Misérables

Juan Cristobal says: - This from the Annals of Dadaist Dictatorship Chronicles:

Two bakers in the city of Guanare, in central Venezuela, were arraigned today. Their crime? Selling bread for a price higher than the regulated price.

Noticias 24 reports that Lucitano Da Conceicao Pereira and Wu Guang Quan were caught selling loaves of sandwich bread at BsF 6 (US$0.92 at market rates) when the maximum legal price, arbitrarily set by the government, is BsF 5.30 (US$0.81).

They are being charged with speculating, a crime described in the Law for Defending People's Access to Goods and Services.

Going to jail for a loaf of bread - where do chavistas get this stuff?

The fictional 2.15

Juan Cristobal says: - The government likes to boast about how it has kept the exchange rate fixed at Bs.F. 2.15 for a number of years. They make it sound like this is some smart revolutionary achievement, a sign of the robustness of our economy and our immunity from the growing economic crisis circling the globe.

It's all posturing. As we know too well, framing and spinning are about the only thing they do well.

Fact is, the government has already devalued the bolivar. It just hasn't admitted it.

Let's review the facts.

Yes, it is true: Cadivi still claims to sell dollars at the official rate of 2.15. However, there are fewer dollars available to travel overseas, and the rules change frequently. Even when you jump through all the hoops to get your travel dollars and manage to use them overseas, Cadivi refuses to hand the dollars over to the banks that are actually paying the merchants where you shop.

The result is that more and more banks are announcing that their credit cards will no longer be usable outside of our borders.

Dollars for imports are equally scarce. Just this week, Toyota announced it was close to shutting down its operations because of a lack of dollars to import parts. I guess that's payback for Chavez coming back from Japan empty-handed.

So, on the heels of the government's announcement that there will no longer be dollars available to import vehicles, we have a policy whereby domestic producers can't get cars made. So much for the government boasting about Venezuela's car boom.

The stories on the tightness are a dime a dozen. When it isn't the government imposing new rules and regulations, it's the customs agents at Puerto Cabello. Restrictions sprout up so quickly, there is now a blog trying to keep track of it all.

The end result? Everyone is going to the black market, where dollars trade at about Bs.F. 6.50 and climbing.

In fact, the main supplier of dollars in the black market is probably PDVSA. The government has very few savings and it needs more and more bolivars to finance its ever-increasing spending. But its dollar flows are but a fraction of what they were. The temptation to go to the black market is simply too big for the government to ignore, and everyone knows that is what they are doing. Not that PDVSA would ever admit to it.

So whenever you hear the government boasting about how it's not going to touch the official exchange rate, remember that 2.15 is a mere bureaucratic decision that has less and less meaning each day. The government has already devalued.

Official news about how the rock-solid 2.15 isn't going anywhere have about as much relevance as them saying they will start issuing speeding tickets to mermaids. It's all an illusion.