Keller's snapshot

Katy says: Alfredo Keller has made public the results of his April study, which seem to confirm that:

• 8 months before the election, Chávez has a commanding lead in the polls (no surprise there);

• getting out the vote will be key for both camps; and

• people like the idea of an opposition primary.

Inmature Maduro

Katy says: One of the bad things about having a candidate with a history in the IVth Republic is that the campaign can quickly center on the past and not on Venezuelans' current ills.

Case in point: Nicolás Maduro, president of the National Assembly, speaking today at a pro-government May Day rally, criticized Teodoro Petkoff because the Caldera government allegedly "stole" workers' compensation benefits. It's never too late to retread issues that may have been relevant 8 or 9 years ago, and in all fairness, Maduro should have added: "... and the Chávez government let them get away with it!" After all, nobody is in jail for this alleged swindle.

Perhaps Venezuelan scientists should find a way to create politicians whose head is not so full of gas.

PS.- The pic is from Daniel Duquenal's blog, originally from Descifrado.

WTO Posts

When I'm not rambling about Chavez, I'm preparing a doctoral dissertation about the World Trade Organization. Here are a few posts on that entirely unrelated topic.

First off, there's my attempt to syntethize, in non-technical language, why it is the current round of WTO negotiations is hopelessly deadlocked:

Primer on the WTO's Triangular Deadlock

Second is this short write-up on the way the deadlock is concentrated on just a handful of products:

Arroz con leche, te quiero proteger...

Next, a note on how the WTO's monstrously convoluted Agricultural Subsidy classification system came into being:

Creative Diplo-bureacrats and their Little Boxes

Then, a write-up summing up the outcome of the December 2005 WTO Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong:

Taking Stock of Hong Kong

My post from Day 4 of the Hong Kong ministerial, explaining the European Union's oddly inflexible position:

Mandelson's Straightjacket

My post from Day 3 of the Hong Kong ministerial, noting the developing world's increased engagement with the negotiations:

The WTO Turned on its Head

This post from Day 2 of Hong Kong is an early attempt to deconstruct some of the more baffling aspects of WTO Diplo-bureaucratic jargon - particularly that most slipperly of formulations - "a balanced agreement."

Beginners' Guide to WTOese: "A Balanced Agreement"

Unconstitutional decisions #4,931,674 and #4,931,675

It's a detail, but telling: three of the "substitute National Electoral Council members" elected by the National Assembly are party hacks: Freddy Díaz, who worked on Chavez's campaign steering committee in 1998, Luis Salamanca - who was a Causa R adviser, and Pedro Díaz Blum who was actually a Proyecto Venezuela assemblymember until a few months ago!

Substantively, it doesn't much matter: substitute CNE members are mostly ornamental figures. Still, article 296 of the best-constitution-on-earth is explicit: CNE appointees must be "people not linked to organizations with political ends."

Which brings me back to an old theme: chavistas violate the constitution just for sport.

I mean, think about it: two of the three aforementioned party hacks are opposition people. Maduro & Co. are not even violating the constitution for petty political advantage here. They just do it from this weird mix of insouciancee and scorn. From a kind of deeply ingrained disdain for written rules that's unrelated to any particular political calculus. They have the assembly to themselves, the nominations committee virtually to themselves, they have no reason at all to violate the constitution just to toss the opposition some token CNE subs. But still, they do. They do.

Addendum from my inbox: The smart money says Diaz Blum is not there just because the chavistas enjoy violating the constitution. In fact he is a 'ficha' of MVR heavyweight (and onetime power-broker) Francisco Ameliach.

I'm not sure at which point he switched sides, but it would be interesting to learn a little more about his fellow 'opposition' suplente, to see if a small, but perfectly-formed pattern should emerge.

Curiously, though, it seems as if Ameliach is losing power within the chavista hierarchy. He appears to be out of the CTN, and indeed, the fact that the best his cne manoeuvrings could produce was one miserable suplente suggests his star is waning.

Sovereignty is in the eye of the beholder...

Is it just me, or have Chavez's lunatic outbursts been getting exponentially weirder? Yesterday, Chávez ripped brutally into Peruvian presidential candidate Alan García - calling him corrupt, a thief, and vowing to break diplomatic relations with Peru if he wins the election.

Showing for the Nth time that he doesn't grasp the fact that "Hugo Chavez" and "the Venezuelan State" are not synonyms, he said "if García wins, I will withdraw my ambassador" (not Venezuela's ambassador, mind you, or our ambassador, no: my ambassador.)

He capped off his unhinged little rant with a stirring "¡Viva Humala!"

(Of course, between you and me, there's no question that Alan Garcia is a derranged charlatan. Hey, that's ok for me to say, and for you to say, and for a drunk at a bar to say, but not for a damn foreign head of state to say!)

In the last seven days, then, Chavez has decided it's his job to tell the Colombians how to run their trade policy and the Peruvians who they should elect president. Charming!

This is all enormously fresh from the guy who blows a gasket any time anyone anywhere makes any comment that could even obliquely be seen as in some way impinging on Venezuelan sovereignty. Meddling, I suppose, only violates sovereignty when the bad guys do it: when Chavez does it, it's revolutionary solidarity.

By their fruits ye shall know them...

Well, we finally have a new CNE. How does it look? At first sight, not great:

1. Tibisay Lucena: Only re-appointed CNE member, has always voted faithfully alongside Jorge Rodriguez. Government cadre.
   
2. Sandra Oblitas: Until now head of CNE's Caracas office, she signed to ask for the recall of opposition Assembly-members and has contributed to pro-Chavez newspaper Proceso. Government cadre.
   
3. German Yepez Contreras: UCV history prof, current subsitute CNE member, Aporrea poster, nominated by the "Moral Branch." Government cadre.
   
4. Janeth Hernandez: Maracucha political science prof, some of her academic writing makes her seem sensible. Hard to pin down.
   
5. Vicente Diaz Silva: Sociologist, Noticiero Digital poster. Token opposition guy. The new Solbella Mejias.

So, that's the score...three chavistas, one opposition, one not-immediately-peggable-downable.

How will this fearsome fivesome act? We'll have to see. The widely rumored choice of Lucena as chairwoman is not a good sign. But I'd say to watch the voting pattern: if you start seeing a lot of 3-to-2 decisions, that's bad. If they start holding meetings without letting Diaz Silva know (like they were doing with Solbella) - that's bad.

(Incidentally, Noticiero Digital had great fun noting that pro-Chavez daily Panorama scooped the National Assembly on its own vote!)

Jurassic Trade Policy

You can always count on Maria Cristina Iglesias to come up with aggressively ill-conceived policies. While her boss promises to further the cause of Latin American integration by threatening to break up the Andean Community unless Peru and Colombia do what he wants, the Minister of Light Industries and Trade delivers the coup de grace: a not-particularly-veiled threat to resort to massive protectionism, perhaps going as far as banning imports of all products currently produced in Venezuela.

There's so much wrong with this idea it's hard to know where to start to pick it apart. Lets try...

Under WTO-rules (GATT article XIX), Venezuela is only allowed to break its tariff-lowering commitments temporarily and surgically, as a response to an import surge in a specific product that "causes or threatens serious injury to domestic producers" of the same product. That's called a "safeguard measure" and it's perfectly WTO-legal.

But Iglesias doesn't seem to be talking about targetted, temporary safeguards for specific products facing import surges: she's talking about across the board protection for all Venezuelan industries. (As far as I know, no development economist has ever advocated such a thing - not even List.) If Maria Cristina wants Venezuela to break its WTO commitments on this scale, she's calling for Venezuela to violate its international treaty obligations on trade. (Nevermind that under the best-constitution-in-the-world's article 23, Venezuela's international treaty obligations are constitutionally binding.) If Venezuela does that, all its trade partners have the right, under GATT article XXIII, to retaliate by withdrawing their own tariff concessions to an extent equivalent to Venezuela's violation.

Iglesias may be banking that no one is going to slap punitive duties on oil - and she's probably right about that. But all other Venezuelan export products would likely face serious market-access difficulties abroad. The result, if it plays out this way, would be to further deepen Venezuela's already highly disruptive reliance on a single, volatile commodity for export revenues...turning us from a country that exports almost nothing but oil into a country that exports nothing but oil.

But, in fact, the WTO-angle is not even the worst of it. The truly damaging part is what such a policy would do to Venezuela's political economy. By limiting imports on this scale, we would be sliding back 30 years in terms of industrial policy - all the way back to the halcyon days of CAP I, when high import barriers produced a pampered class of rent-seeking local industrialists growing ever richer while producing sub-par, over-priced products that didn't have any prospect of ever becoming internationally competitive and survived only because Venezuelan consumers had no choice but to buy them. The massive waste of resources such a policy entails not only makes the poor poorer, but it tends to established a new industrial elite that depends on state favors to survive: blanket protectionism breeds blanket corruption.

This is a film we've seen before, and frankly it doesn't deserve a sequel. The more the bolivarianos heaps scorn on the 4th republic, the more their policies recreate its worst aspects.

A CNE prediction

Katy says: Venezuela's National Assembly (AN) will elect a new Electoral Council today. The board will be elected from a list of 126 candidates filtered by a Committee mostly made up of government representatives. While this may be a routine appointment in normal democracies, it is hard to over-estimate how key this decision is for the future course of political developments in Venezuela.

The 100% chavista AN has been showing a bit more openness than expected the past few days. It has even gone so far to meet with teams from the current opposition presidential pre-candidates. Tomorrow, Borges, Rosales and Petkoff are due to meet the AN representatives.

If this spirit of cooperation prevails, we may get a CNE that is accepted by all parties and the ghosts of massive abstention will be held down - for now. However, if the AN decides to appoint people perceived to be blatantly pro-government to the board - such as current CNE board members Oscar Battaglini, Tibisay Lucena, Oscar León or even current CNE attorney Andrés Brito - it is not hard to foresee what the reaction from the opposition camp will be.

In this scenario, the pressure from the radical wing of the opposition on the pre-candidates will be enormous. Opposition primaries may be dealt a death-blow, and all bets would be off.

As Quico has pointed out before, mistrust in the CNE has been the root cause of an almost total demobilization of opposition political forces in the past few years. Many in the non-chavista camp see this as a deliberate effort on the part of the government - to create enough mistrust to demobilize opponents, but maintain international standards so that foreign observers can still validate your work.

Tomorrow's decision, if it comes, will give us an indication of whether the government wants to continue playing this game or not.

Judging from the track record of AN appointments, this guest-blogger thinks any combination of the four mentioned above will make it to the final board, hence seriously damaging its credibility from the get-go. Let's hope this doomsayer is proven wrong.

(With apologies to Quico, who is not terribly fond of CNE discussions lately)

You've heard of fat-free...

...now, a USB team has developed fart free beans.

The outlines of a three horse race...

The three main opposition pre-candidates to challenge Hugo Chavez in December's election held a press conference today and vowed that only one of them will be on the ballot against Chavez. They did not say how they intend to decide which of them gets to challenge Chavez, leaving open the possibility of a primary or a backroom deal.

It was a slightly strange situation, given that Rosales hasn't officially announced his bid yet, but it sure looks like the race for the oppo nomination is turning into a three-way race between these guys. Their pledge that only one of them will face Chavez in December must count as a rare instance of grown-up behavior in the Opposition leadership, and their pragmatism about methods also strikes me as uncommonly far-sighted.

All of this is good news, but before striking off in some hyperventilatory spree of misplaced euphoria, it's important to keep the fundamentals in context:

The challenges an eventual candidate will have to face are formidable. Chavez will enjoy an obscene funding advantage - not just in terms of paying for the actual campaign, but also through his ability to manipulate the flow of petrodollars to his political clientele for political impact. An asymetrical campaign, is what Teodoro calls it.

Plus Chavez is still personally popular, and GQR reports that 43% of poll respondents think the country is on the right track against just 29% who think it's on the wrong track. And that's without even mentioning everyone's favorite hope-crushing three-letter acronym...

Decisive Deadline Dropped: Doha Deal Deemed Deader Dan Dodo

Breaking news for the one or two of you who give a rat's ass about trade negotiations: with a week to spare, trade ministers have already given up on the April 30th deadline for a new WTO agreement.

With his archetypically French flair for the eyebrow-raising quip, WTO Director General Pascal Lamy told reporters “we may have missed the deadline but we are not in deadlock.” Of course, it's his job to put the best face possible on setbacks big and small; everybody knows that missing this deadline makes it virtually certain that no WTO agreement will be signed before 2009, and possibly for much longer.

Trade ministers have already shifted their attention to a Byzantine debate about whether it would even be helpful to set a new deadline at this point. Of course, a good number of them have surrendered to the by-now-traditional pleasures of the post-missed-deadline round of bitter recriminations (read that last link with an eye out for how incredibly annoyed the Americans are getting at Mandelson's famously smarmy brand of public relations.)

The local angle...

This one's fun: The Sofia News Agency is covering Teo's campaign launch under the headline Son of Bulgarian Emigrant Runs for Venezuela President. Way to do them proud in the old country!

The publicity effect of primaries

Katy says: Gerardo Blyde is a keen analyst and one of the finest minds in Venezuelan politics. In an article published in today's El Universal, Blyde makes the case for primaries, among other things he touches upon. In it, he says that primaries "with a simple, manual voting procedure and a transparent count of all the ballots, will be a clear signal to the world of just how democratic the Venezuelan opposition is, and that when it trusts the referee and the rules are clear and applied to all, it is capable of mobilizing and voting."

A neat idea: primaries to gain legitimacy, so that if and when push comes to shove and we have to take a more radical position, the image of the non-chavista camp voting in a clear election is still fresh on people's minds. Whether you are an abstentionist or not, it is hard to argue that it is better for the world to have this image of what the opposition is about than this other one.

Teodoro Petkoff, presidential candidate

Katy says: Quico is off on vacation, but I'm sure if he were online he would have translated Petkoff's entire speech tonight announcing his run for the Presidency. So being the good baby-sitter that I am, and in spite of being pro-Borges, I am translating it: (besides, it helps turn the page on the awful comments thread from the previous post - you should all be ashamed of yourselves)

"Cordial greetings. My name is Teodoro Petkoff and I will only take a minute of your time. I have decided to run for President. This cannot go on. The anguish, the division and the fear cannot go on. We cannot go on living in a permanent state of conflict. We cannot have progress and move forward if part of our population is discriminated against thanks to the Tascón and Maisanta lists. Who gave them the right to deny people their work and their bread, solely for political reasons? In spite of the loads of money the government spends, people are not moving up, jobs are not being created and no one is safe, whether it be in the streets or in their own homes.

I invite you to help build a country where we can all live in peace, personal safety and with good jobs. Where our differences are solved without violence. I demand clean elections, so they can give us an honest and capable government that represents everyone, including those who oppose it. We Venezuelans deserve to live better. I invite you to help me build a Venezuela that knows no fear. Thank you very much."

Goodbye Cúcuta, Hello Boa Vista

Katy says: If this breaking news is true, Chávez has just announced that Venezuela is leaving the Andean Community, a reversal of a decades-long policy of the Venezuelan state. No word yet on what private companies think, specially those with heavy investments in Colombia. They are probably as surprised by this move as everyone else.

One is left wondering whether the flourishing drug trade between Chávez's Venezuela and Colombia's Farc will be affected.

Lies my newspaper told me: preference erosion

One thing I've discovered is that it's useless trying to get a handle on the WTO negotiations from what you read in the press. The subject is too technical, the journalists too harried and clueless, and so the inaccurate cliches flow thick and fast. It's not surprising that the quality of public debate on trade is so low: the media really fall down when it comes to covering this stuff.

One particularly pervasive and pernicious lazy-journalist ruse is the tendency to portray the negotiations - and especially the agricultural negotiations as a contest between rich and poor countries. The story-line goes something like this: the poorest farmers in poorest countries get systematically screwed by rich-country agricultural policies. The EU and the US spend tens of billions of dollars subsidizing their fat-cat food industries, unfairly pricing African farmers out of the market. The WTO agriculture negotiations are basically about getting the rich countries to give up unfair farm subsidies so that the poorest countries can compete.

It's not exactly surprising that this story line has taken hold. It's a clear, compelling narrative, and do-gooder NGOs (as well as negotiators themselves) often portray the negotiations in these terms. Trouble is, it's deeply misleading...to the point of mischaracterizing the fundamental dynamic at play.

This lazy-journalist-version leaves out two closely-related facts that undermine it fatally:

1. Subsidies as such account for only a small part of rich country farmers' effective protection - the bulk of their policy-generated edge (as much as 90% according to some studies) comes from high tariffs on farm imports, and
   
2. Most of the very poorest countries already have preferential, tariff-free access to rich country markets, through things like the European Everything-but-Arms agreement (EBA) and the US African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA).

In fact, the poorest countries not only get a pass on the biggest trade barrier protecting rich country markets (tariffs), but once their products reach rich country markets, they sell at the higher, articially inflated prices produced by those high tariffs.

Effectively shut out of this deal are poor (but not very-poor) country farmers, who don't get preferential access. The reality is that doing away with rich country subsidies and tariffs would tend to hurt the poorest countries by eroding the value of their trade preferences. The more overall tariff levels fall, the less things like EBA and AGOA are worth to the poorest countries. The main beneficiaries from liberalization would be still-poor-but-not-quite-destitute countries which would see their farm exports suddenly becoming competitive. In other words, this is not about Mali vs. France; this is about Mali vs. Brazil.

This problem, known as "preference erosion," is now at the center of the talks.

Obviously, this story line is wayyyy too complicated (and morally unappealing) for lazy journos to pick up, so you'll struggle to find it in the press. But the main fault line in the WTO's agricultural negotiations is not poor countries vs. rich countries. It's a coalition of the poorest countries' farmers and the richest countries' farmers against a coalition of somewhat-less-poor countries' farmers and rich country consumers!

The upside-down of WTO negotiations...

The WTO is one of those things that only get weirder the more you learn about them. One baffling fact - the one my dissertation is centered on - is that the negotiating positions are backwards: the countries pushing hardest for an agreement are the ones that, on the whole, stand to lose the most from an agreement. The countries resisting a deal, meanwhile, are the ones that would benefit most from one.

That Carnegie Endowment paper is pretty explicit on this point: it's the EU and Japan that stand to gain most from a Doha Agreement. Thing is, those are the negotiating partners pushing hardest to stop a deal. Even more strange is the fact that, against conventional wisdom, developed countries would be big winners from an agriculture agreement, while developing countries would lose, in the aggregate, from a farm deal.


Welcome to the upside-down world of WTO negotiations!

The reason this happens is that what's good for the EU on aggregate is not what's good for politically influential constituencies in the EU.

In fact, the main source of gains for the EU from an aggricultural deal comes not from gaining access to foreign markets, but merely from being freed from the deadweight of the wasteful tariffs and subsidies to farmers that now weigh down the EU budget. The EU's $90 billion a year common agricultural policy and high tariffs on imported food hurts, first and foremost, EU citizens, who end up paying more in taxes (to pay for subsidies) and more on food (which sells at inflated prices.) By agreeing to withdraw those tariffs and subsidies, the EU could lessen its tax burden, make food cheaper for consumers, and improve the prospects of agricultural exporters in the rest of the world. Everybody wins, right?

Well, no. Not quite. EU farmers definitely lose in such a scenario, and lose big, since they currently get almost half of their revenue from Brussels handouts. It's those farmers who are mobilized against a deal. They're 2% of the EU's population, but they're organized, mobilized, savvy, and have the best lobbyists money can buy. At this point, they more or less own Brussels' trade policy - and they've worked hard to make sure the European Commission adopts a negotiating stance so rigid that no agreement is really possible in the next two weeks. (The same story, more or less, goes for farmers in Japan, South Korea, Norway and Switzerland.)

The other point is that the main gains to be had from a WTO deal are nothing to do with trade negotiations, as such. The developed countries could achieve most of these gains on their own, without having to negotiate with anyone, by just dropping their counterproductive tariffs and subsidies on their own.

Is this screwed up? Well, from an economic point of view, it certainly is. From a political point of view, though, it's perfectly understandable.

Trade reform spreads gains and losses unevenly. If the EU cuts farm tariffs and subsidies, the benefits are evenly spread out between 400 million consumer. But the costs are concentrated among just 8 million farmers. Numerically, the gains to the 400 million consumer are far larger than the losses to the 8 million farmers. But for any individual European consumer the gains are too small to really make a dent, whereas for any individual European farmer the losses are large enough to put them out of business.

Is it surprising that European farmers organize and lobby hard to prevent reform? Not really. Is it really surprising that European consumers can't be bothered? Not really.

Still, the end result is this bizarre state of affairs where EU negotiator work feverishly to stop a deal that would benefit the EU the most, and developing country ministers maneouver feverishly to clinch an agreement that would, on the whole, hurt them.

A WTO Update

You can always tell when I'm spending less time obsessing about Venezuela and more time working on my dissertation by the volume of posts here. I'm preparing for a conference next months so I've been more or less immersed in WTO land...so this may be as good a time as any to vent on my other topic...

A better time, in fact, since the latest self-imposed WTO deadline is just two weeks away. April 30th is the latest, no joking, this-time-we-mean-it "deadline" to agree a detailed outline for a Doha Round deal. Of course, you could fill a barrel with no joking, this-time-we-mean-it deadlines the WTO has set itself and then missed - but there are good reasons to think the April 30th deadline is more real than most.

President Bush's "fast-track authority" is set to expire in June 2007 and there's no prospect of renewal. The conventional wisdom is that if the April 30th deadline slips, there will be no time to work out a complete deal by summer 2007, which would send the whole negotiating round into a kind of limbo until less protectionist winds start blowing in Washington.

At the moment, there's no sign of a last minute breakthrough...which suits me just fine, last thing I need is these jokesters throwing my research into chaos by signing a deal while I'm spell-checking my final draft.

This latest deadlock is not particularly new. The last round of negotiations went through two near-death experiences very much like this one (one in 1989, then again in 1991) before finally emerging in 1994 - nine years after negotiations had been launched. The current round, which was launched in 2001, looks to take at least as long, if not longer.

It's an odd place to hang out, WTO land. The thing that really strikes me, as I go about my research, is the huge gap between how important people generally assume the WTO to be and how important it actually is. Frankly, if I chose to do a dissertation about it it's because I also figured the WTO was a big deal, but the deeper you get into the numbers, the more you wonder what the immense fuss is about.

Exhibit A is this increasingly infamous paper by Berkeley economist Andrew Rose. The guy ran an immense trade data set through a standard Gravity Model and found, to the embarrassment of trade diplomats near and far, that the WTO and its predecessor, the GATT, have made no difference at all in expanding trade. Published in the most prestigious Economics journal there is - the American Economic Review - and therefore checked, re-checked, peer-reviewed, and re-peer-reviewed to within an inch of its life - it can hardly be dismissed as shoddy scholarship.

Actually, a bit of a cottage industry seems to be springing up around Rose's paper, as economists try to poke holes in it and salvage the notion that, y'know, the WTO isn't just a colossal waste of everyone's time. As far as I know, Rose's findings have yet to be disproved.

Exhibit B is this report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and more broadly, the family of Applied General Equilibrium (AGE) models economists use to simulate the likely impact of a trade agreement. These are, basically, fantastically complicated systems of equations meant to approximate the operation of the world economy based on standard, neoclassical assumptions of perfect competition and constant returns to scale. The Carnegie research suggests that a successful Doha Round deal would expand worldwide economic welfare by $40 to $60 billion per year.

That sounds like a lot of money, but when you figure it in relative terms, you realize we're talking about 0.15-0.20% of world income. That's a fifth of a penny on the dollar! Even in the (totally unrealistic) scenario of full trade liberalization (i.e. zero tariffs and quotas for all products in all markets) we're still talking about just a 0.53% boost in world GDP. The World Bank's model, which seeks to capture dynamic efficiency gains as well as static gains, puts the income boost from full liberalization at just under 1% of world GDP, and gains from a plausible Doha deal at about 0.35%. However you tweak the model, these are not large numbers.

Surely, it's possible to pick nits with these models - which don't consider service liberalization or intra-industry trade arising from imperfect competition and increasing returns to scale. But then, nobody can figure out a way to put numbers to those things. For all their faults, the AGE models are the best models we have, and together with Rose's historical research they tell a fairly convincing and consistent story: you can credit the WTO for preventing the sort of cataclysmic collapse in world trade flows we saw in the 1930s, you can credit it for bringing a measure of institutional predictability to world trade, but you can't argue it has made (or is likely to make) a big difference in the world economy, whether for better or for worse.

Which, of course, brings us back to the start of the post...if a Doha Round agreement is likely to make little if any difference to the world economy, why do soooo many people get so fantastically hot-under-the-collar about the WTO? I think the answer hinges on two facts: first, while on aggregate the WTO doesn't make much difference, for a few specific people working in a few specific industries in a few specific countries it does make a big difference, and second, those people have strong incentives to try to persuade the rest of us that the sky will cave in if the WTO does (or doesn't) reach a new agreement.

At the same time, the WTO's grandiloquent title tends to make it sound far weightier than it really is - would there really be massive street protests if the organization had been named more descriptively? Would Seattle had been trashed to protest a meeting of the International Standing Committee for the Partial Harmonization of Tariffs and Other Trade Practices? I doubt it.

(But then, would I have chosen to write a dissertation on such a body??...hmmmm...better not go there...)

Propagandizing the Chavista Party/Government/State/Nation

I hadn't seen this when I wrote yesterday's post, but this photo-rant (in Oil Wars, of all places) nicely illustrates the collapse of the distinctions between party, government, state and nation (and leader) I was criticizing...

Novelties

I've updated the links column with some deliciously incriminating Chavez-hugs-a-tyrant pics, and added a link in the Reader's Guide to this very lucid piece on Chavez in the May 2006 issue of The Atlantic. I also added a link to yesterday's post - since everyone seemed to like it, and I did as well.

III. The "democratic revolution" is a contradiction in terms

Democracy implies a clear delineation of the conceptual boundaries between "party," "government," "state," and "nation."

Democracy conceives of the state as the institutional incarnation of the nation, something larger and more permanent than the government. The state is led but not owned by the government. The government is led but not owned by the party in power.

Democracy conceives of politics as the realm of legitimate competition between parties for temporary control of the government. In a democracy, governments come and go but the state is permanent, because it transcends partisan differences - understood as normal and healthy - and accomodates the periodic changes in control of the government that naturally result from elections.

Revolution, as Chavez understands it, is a refutation of this understanding. It starts from a rejection of the conceptual differentiation between party, government, state and nation. It express itself in the drive to establish permanent control over the government, the state and the nation while flattening the conceptual boundaries between the them. This process takes place both on a symbolic and a substantive level.

Symbolically, Chavez has mixed partisan with national symbols from the start. By adopting the Libertador's name, his original political vehicle - the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement - broke the long established norm that lifted Bolivar, the primary symbol of a unitary national identity, above the partisan fray.

Once in power, the co-optation of Bolivar's name for partisan purposes reached undreamed of new heights, from the subtle process that has made the word "bolivariano" basically synonymous with "chavista" to the decision to stick the now hyper-politicized word in the country's official title.

"Bolivarianism" - for 150 years the glue that held together our national identity - has morphed into a locus of official partisan identification, while remaining a locus of national identity. This process tends to meld partisan loyalty with patriotism, undermining the possibility of a non-partisan national identification. Dissenters are left without even a country they can call their own - literally, since the politization of bolivarianism turned "Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela" more into a provocation than a description.

Later, the revolution moved to strip away the neutrality of even the most basic symbols of national allegiance, politicizing the nation's flag and its coat of arms. (Can the National Anthem be far behind?) Time and time again, loci of identification that had served to bind the nation together have been turned into symbolic wedges, into instruments for the delegitimation of dissent and the marginalization of dissenters. Hand in hand with this process, the revolution works to transform the unquestioning acceptance of Chavez's every utterance from a free expression of opinion into a litmus test of patriotic allegiance.

So the cries of "traitor" and "vendepatria" increasingly launched against those who dissent are in no way coincidental: they're the logical outcome of the conceptual flattening at the center of the revolution. In the chavista imagination, party, government, state and nation have been melded into a single undifferentiated soup. Having erased those distinctions, chavistas have lost sight the notion, fundamental to democracy, that citizens can oppose the government without opposing the state, or object to the party without betraying the nation. It is not surprising that, swimming in the undifferentiated conceptual stew that is the revolutionary party/government/state/nation nexus, chavistas cannot recognize the distinction between disagreement and treason.

On the substantive level the revolution also seeks to stamp its mark permanently on the instruments of state power in ways that further flatten the conceptual distinctions that sustain democracy. State resources are used openly and systematically for partisan purposes. Courts come to serve the revolution rather than the state - a political rather than a national project. PDVSA is turned into an appendage of Chavez's political program. The Armed Forces morph slowly but surely into a pretorian guard, where loyalty to the party becomes indistinguishable, to participants, from loyalty to the nation.

On both the symbolic and the substantive level, these revolutionary moves are in direct contradiction with the conceptual apparatus that sustains democracy. They are intended to negate the possibility of alternance. They do so by erasing the conceptual distinctions that give meaning to the democratic process, to the process of partisan competition for control over the government within the context of a permanent, transcendent state conceived as the institutional expression of the unity of the nation. As such, revolutionary values strike at the heart of democratic system. Flattening the distinction between party, government, state and nation, they leave any future government in the position of having to lead an explicitly chavista state, of commanding an Armed Force that conceives of itself as the protector of the revolution, of governing through a personalized bureaucracy, under a flag and coat-of-arms willfully manipulated into symbols of chavista hegemony.

II. The "democratic revolution" is a contradiction in terms

The essence of a revolutionary regime is permanence. The essence of a democratic regime is alternance. "No volverán" is the essential revolutionary slogan - the ideological rejection of the possibility of alternance. A regime founded on the promise of "no volverán" incubates skepticism about its commitment to democracy.

The prominence of "no volverán" as a chavista slogan explains much of the opposition's basic unwillingness to believe in this or any other chavista appointed elections authority. "After all," their thinking goes "they have already announced it clearly - no volveremos." Seen in this light, any and every CNE concession is a sop to international opinion. The radical opposition sees the revolution as purely revolutionary, the "democratic" part as little more than window-dressing.

I think that's a mistake. The tension encapsulated in the oxymoron is the defining characteristic of chavismo. The government long ago decided that its ultimate goals can only be met if Chavez can retain some minimally plausible claim to democratic legitimacy. Without the strategic ambiguity embodied in the phrase, chavismo would not be chavismo.

The opposition, by withdrawing from the vote, has tried to force the government's hand, to push it into resolving the tension between democracy and revolution by becoming frankly and exclusively revolutionary (and thereby, anti-democratic.) That is a trap the government has not and will not fall into.

The balancing act the government is pushed to attempt is necessarily precarious - although that's momentarily obscured by the oil bonanza. Absent the petrowindfall, the tensions inherent in chavismo's foundational oxymoron will become harder and harder to manage. The only question is whether the opposition will be in any way able to capitalize on those difficulties when the time comes.

I. The "democratic revolution" is a contradiction in terms

At the center of the Chávez Revolution we have a contradiction in terms. In democracies dissent is healthy, alternance the norm. In revolutions dissent is treason, alternance impossible. You can be democratic or you can be revolutionary. You can't be both.

The strategic ambiguity inherent to this oxymoron is unsustainable. Chavez has been particularly successful at maintaining the fiction that the two concepts can co-exist within a single political project. They can't.

20 points for Borges

Katy says: A few weeks ago, Quico asked me to post my thoughts on why I think Julio Borges is the best of the current group of non-Chavista pretenders. At the time, I hand’t really thought of Borges as superior to the other contenders (Petkoff, Rosales and Smith) because I believe any one of these four would do a better job than our friend Hugo. I did think, though, that Borges was being underestimated by non-Chavista talking heads. As I thought about this post, I concluded that Borges, like recent polls are showing, is indeed the leader of the non-chavista pack. What follows are 20 reasons why I believe this to be true.

1. Borges is, at heart, a philosopher. Chávez is a military man. Two disciplines cannot be more different.
2. Borges’s father was a prominent Valencian neurologist, and his mother a Catalan immigrant and a well-respected bioanalyst. Julio, the youngest of five siblings, was educated at Don Bosco and San Ignacio schools in Caracas – quite a distance from Chavez’s rural upbringing in Sabaneta de Barinas. Although some might construe his upper middle-class upbringing as a handicap in reaching out to poorer voters, Borges is working hard to prove them wrong.
3. Unlike Chávez and many of the people governing with him, Borges attended university. Borges went on to study law at UCAB, philosophy at UCV and Boston University, and public policy at Oxford.
4. Whereas Chavez’s character was shaped in the halls of the Military Academy and in the remnants of defunct guerrilla movements during Venezuela’s most prosperous and corrupt period, Borges’s character was formed in the student movements that propped up during the disastrous years of the end of the 1980s. His distaste for what the military did in 1989 and 1992 helped make him a firm believer in civilian control of the Armed Forces.
5. Among the field of candidates, Borges is the sole representative of the post-Black Friday generation, one that, in his words, “was born in a crisis, grew up hearing about the crisis and now lives and raises its children in the midst of a crisis.” Borges has been trying to frame Venezuela’s current woes as the failure of an entire generation, Chávez included. He has a point.
6. While some highbrow analysts derided the TV Show that made him famous, Justicia Para Todos, the show actually won international awards, and people in the barrios still remember him for it. In fact, lower-class voters participating in focus groups have identified Borges as having a strong character, in part because they recall Borges’s alter ego in Radio Rochela, where the fake judge would throw his hammer in anger at the people in the court. And yet the show was not meant to be a vehicle for Borges’s personality; it was meant to be a way to bring, through the use of mass media, the idea of justices of the peace to people that have never had access to justice. It seems to have served its purpose well.
   
7. In recent focus groups, lower-middle class voters have been asked to describe Borges, and the word that keeps coming up is “arrecho”, a Venezuelan slang-word meaning "daring" or "with a strong character". They have also described him as fair and decisive.
8. One of the factors that distinguishes Borges’s candidacy from the others is that it is rooted in a process to form a political party out of the ashes of the IVth Republic. Primero Justicia understand the links between the decline of Venezuelan democracy and the decline of political parties: traditional parties fell prey to rent seeking and corruption and ceased being agents for change and progress. However, it sees the demise of all political parties as a step backward for our democracy. Instead of the chavista phenomenon, that sees in a populistic, caudillesque and military “movement” the solution, Primero Justicia is a civilian political party, with multiple leaders, tendencies and yes, even infights. Right now, it is perhaps the only relevant political party in Venezuela. (Side note: inside sources from within the party tell me the rift between Borges’s group and the Leopoldo López/Liliana Hernández faction is serious, although getting better).
9. Because of his background and personality, Borges can be portrayed as aloof, elitist and a bit snobbish. While none of this is true, Borges understands that as long as his enemies from either side of the spectrum are the ones portraying him on the media, he doesn’t stand a chance. This realization, along with the need to differentiate Primero Justicia from the rest of the opposition pack, has led him to take to the streets and start meeting people face-to-face, bringing his message of "Popular Progress" and his persona to let voters form their own opinion about him.
10. Borges’ proposals are rooted in sensible economic and social policy. Although the campaign is young and government programs have not been made public, we already have some information on Borges’s proposals for the country.
11. The cornerstone of Primero Justicia’s program is a deep reform of the justice system, with an increase in the number of judges, an expansion in the number of justices of the peace, and transparent mechanisms for naming and overseeing judges. The cornerstone of the chavista justice project is politicized judges few in number and in temporary positions. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch have warned of the dangers of the chavista stranglehold of the judiciary. Primero Justicia understands that the first step towards creating a civilized society that can provide progress for all, is having an accesible and impartial justice system.
12. Borges’s program will focus on improving current “Misiones” so that they do not exclude people on the basis of their political beliefs. Surprisingly, polls by Greenberg Research, among others, have found this to be the issue most likely to appeal to swing voters.
13. Borges is the only major candidate proposing a radical reform of oil production and the way it benefits people. Borges favors increasing Venezuela’s oil production under the sensible notion that the only way the country will develop is by producing more of what we do best. In theory, Chávez also favors increasing production, as witnessed by several PDVSA expansion plans he has announced over the years but so far failed to implement.
14. Borges is the only candidate currently proposing direct cash layouts to all Venezuelans from excess oil profits. Borges believes that these funds could be used to set up a working national pensions system. They could also be used to fund youth training and universal health care. As the Constitution says, oil belongs to the people, not the State, and Borges believes it’s time to start taking this seriously.
15. For several years now, Primero Justicia has been proposing legislation to tackle the high unemployment levels of the past seven years, including incentives to hire young people and women. This also includes an emphasis on favoring labor-intensive sectors such as construction and tourism. Chavista congressmen have duly shelved PJ’s legal initiatives, and the result has been double-digit unemployment for more than five years now.
16. Borges favors massive title holding for barrio dwellers, as well as giving away or selling highly valued government land to those who need it most. One of Primero Justicia’s main criticisms of the government (and in this they have been almost unique) is that the “deeds” or “titles” it occasionally gives out to slum-dwellers are not really transfers of property rights, but rather a primitive form of leasing. In part based on the influential work of people like Hernando de Soto, Primero Justicia believes that unless we are able to bring the enormous capital of our informal sector into formal society, underpriviledged classes will never find their way up.
17. Borges has been the only candidate so far to embrace the idea of primaries for opposition candidates. He believes in unity, but he also believes this unity should come from the people, not from backroom dealings between political parties with self-appointed bargaining power and no voters.
18. Borges’s role in the opposition has been marked by complicated decisions. In a move that probably halted the rise of his party, Borges and company decided to join forces with Fourth Republic dinosaurs like Pompeyo Márquez, Henry Ramos Allup and Enrique Mendoza in the now extinct Coordinadora Democrática. In spite of Primero Justicia representing a break both from chavismo and from parties such as AD and Copei, PJ was instrumental in forging unified candidates for the National Assembly. In spite of their uneasiness with old-style politicians, they have always been willing to play the unity card. This gives them ample room to be able to forge alliances in the future, an essential condition for post-Chávez governability.
19. Borges does not believe that arguing with the CNE should be the main focus of non-Chavista candidates. He knows that any negotiation with the current or future CNE is useless unless one has real popular support. In that sense, his current strategy of forging ahead with his campaign while at the same time embracing Sumate’s conditions for electoral transparency is the correct one.
20. Borges in understated and unassuming. When I met him during our mutual years at UCAB, he seemed to be driven, intellectual and somewhat shy. He was not given to petty small talk, nor is he one who likes to hear the drone of his own voice for hours. It is hard to imagine him conducting a six-hour edition of Aló, Presidente.
    

La Lista's Phantom Translation...

Well, in defense of Ciudadania Activa, it turns out that the mistranslated English version of La Lista I linked to is nothing to do with them. Actually, they don't know who did this "traduction" - which was put out without their permission, or even awareness. It's a bit of a mystery, actually...but maybe here's a chance for a bit of cooperative journalism. Anyone know the story behind this?

Political discrimination? What political discrimination?

A shortened version of The List, Ciudadanía Activa's documentary on the Chávez government's systematic use of IT to discriminate against dissidents, is now available for download in a not-very-well-translated English version. (Note: It's a 16 meg download, and it's zipped.)

The video goes over a lot of painful memories from the Recall Referendum saga. It's hard to watch, at points.

On the up side, it will be an eye-opener to foreigners who stumble upon it. Liberally sprinkled with incredibly intolerant chavista spokesmen making borderline fascist statements - don't miss Lina Ron vowing to kill anyone who signs against Chavez - it shows the nasty, thuggish side of the regime our sandalista buddies so steadfastly refuse to acknowledge. When all is said and done, chavismo equates dissent with treason - that's the brutal reality La Lista keeps hammering home.

On the down side, crappy Spanish-to-English translation is a major pet peeve of mine and I'm just astounded that they couldn't do a better job here. At one point they render "arrepentido" as "neglected"...what's up with that? Even the title got mangled - morphing from "The List: A People Under Suspicion" to "A People Under Siege." Do these guys have no concept of proof reading?

It infuriates me because this is an important video, one that should be shown abroad again and again - but its impact can only be blunted by the rookie translation job. Ugh!

Behind the scenes on the LVA scandal

It's too long and involved to translate, but those of you interested in the inside story on the LVA-Jesse pissing match should look at this Juan Carlos Zapata story in Descifrado.

The gist? Whoever started the operation against LVA underestimated his willingness to fling mud at his accusers...and Arné Chacón is more influential than you think...

Cepalismo for the 21st Century

This scholarly paper by Pablo Villatoro, published in the CEPAL Review, analyses the "conditional cash transfer programs" that have been implemented in Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia and Mexico in the last few years. These programs give poor families cash in exchange for sending their kids to school, in order to decrease child labor and increase school participation. Their goal is to "break the intergenerational cycle of poverty."

[Or, if you prefer, the Spanish version of the article está aquí.]

A pretty substantial body of research is now available on these programs. Villatoro summarizes the findings, showing that the programs are effective at increasing school enrollment for at-risk groups, but their overall impact on child labor is still not clear (some kids on these programs still work after school, and spend less time playing.) Though far from "fun reading," the article provides a valuable guide to the successes and failures the programs have met in those four countries.

More than the ins-and-outs of Conditional Cash Transfers as such, though, I'm interested in the approach to social policy formulation they reveal and the nature of the state-individual nexus they assume. The contrast with what happens in Venezuela is pretty stark:

• Conditional cash transfer programs are carefully designed by social scientists.
  
• Beneficiaries are chosen according to explicit, objective criteria - they benefit as citizens.
  
• Effectiveness is carefully monitored on an ongoing basis - in fact, evaluation mechanisms are built into the programs from the start. Impact assesment data are made public for anyone to scrutinize.
  
• Studies are carried to compare the outcomes in "intervention groups" participating in the programs with outcomes in "control groups" that do not participate - allowing policy-makers to determine a cost-benefit matrix precisely.
  
• Program designers seek to learn-by-doing, taking on the lessons drawn from evaluation studies and tweaking the programs over time to decrease their costs and increase their impact.
  
• The overall approach is rigorous, professional and evidence-led as well as transparent.
  

By contrast...

• Bolivarian misiones are thought up by Chávez on the set of Aló, presidente or in a pétit comité of chavista hacks.
  
• Beneficiaries are chosen on political grounds, after making sure they did not support Chávez's recall, and their participation is noted as a sign of political allegiance in the Maisanta Software - they benefit as political clients.
  
• Monitoring and evaluation, if carried out at all, is not published. Nobody can tell you for sure whether the misiones are meeting their social goals or, if they are, at what cost.
  
• Learning-by-doing is impossible, not only because the programs are not permanent and because the absence of evaluation mechanisms leaves policy-makers in the dark about what's working and what isn't, but also - and more perniciously - because admitting mistakes becomes extremely awkward in a highly politicized atmosphere where the misiones are associated with Chavez personally, and Chavez is idolized as a demigod.
  
• The overall approach is ad hoc, amateurish, and politically-motivated, as well as opaque.
  

Without the massive windfalls Venezuela has enjoyed, countries throughout Latin America are experimenting with embryonic welfare state institutions that strengthen citizenship rights while abating poverty. The oceans of paja notwithstanding, Chávez has merely improvised populist gimmicks that keep poor people in the role of political clients.

A tale of two scandals

Compare and contrast.



In Brazil, this video showing a Post Office official receiving a $1,000 bribe sets off a massive scandal which dominates the media for months, brings the government to crisis, and genuinely shocks the nation. Two thorough investigations are launched in parallel - one in congress, the other at the Prosecutor General's Office. Names are named. Two dozen high-ranking party and government officials lose their jobs. Charges are brought. Once powerful people face jail time.

In Venezuela, the Interior Minister says the Supreme Tribunal Magistrate in charge of keeping the courts free of corruption stole $4 million from the state. The Magistrate hits back saying the minister and his brother are also stealing from the state, as are many others, and that the Caracas area court system is run by a network of midget judges payed off by drug traffickers. Both the minister and the magistrate say they have tapes that can incriminate the other, but neither makes them public. The media yawns it off - it's a one day story. No discernible investigation is launched. The minister and the magistrate keep their jobs. Jail time? Ya, right...

How could it come to this? How can we explain the abysmal difference between the way the PT Votes-for-Cash scandal played out and the way the Luis Velasquez Alvaray scandal is going? It's clear to me that, in some objective sense, the allegations surrounding LVA are far more seriously than anything that got pegged on the PT. But it simply has no consequences. The conveyor belt linking crime and punishment is irretrievably screwed up in Venezuela. Our institutional fabric is so frayed that the most fantastic allegations come and go without ever quite making contact with reality.

The quiet sense that obviously this sort of thing is happening and obviously nobody will pay for it and obviously the full story won't come out and obviously Jesse and LVA are just playing out some gangland dominance/submission ritual corrodes our collective moral fabric. The wall of resignation and indifference that has met the LVA affair point to a catastrophic collapse in our collective morality.

That may sound melodramatic, but I don't think it's an overstatement: how can a country keep any sense of morality when anti-corruption posturing becomes the corrupt elite's favored tool for settling scores? Because, notice, both Jesse and LVA position themselves as palladins of bolivarian morality, both portray their accusations as a function of their deep commitment to fighting corruption.

What's tragic is that Venezuelan society has no way to defend itself from the violence the bolikleptocracy is doing to it. The institutional mechanisms that Brazil managed to muster to bring PT wrongdoers to account long since stopped operating. Like a starving child too weak to swat away the flies that land on his face, our society is too morally emaciated to do anything about the LVA affair, and the dozen others like it doubtlessly brewing just beneath the threshhold of public awareness. It's a sad, sad thing...

Educational collapse

Katy says: This article shocked me; read it and weep. The author is a friend of mine, and he may be visiting the comments section. He gave me permission to translate it.

Educational collapse

By Marino González, Universidad Simón Bolívar professor

Tal Cual

It's not just bridges that collapse in the Chávez administration. The collapse of Viaduct No. 1 is shocking because it was easy for all to see, and because we witnessed the fall of one of the masterpieces of global engineering. However, another dramatic collapse is happening, one that is close to us but not so easily perceived by our eyes, and one that could undermine the viability of Venezuelan society in this century of knowledge.

The future of a country’s education system figures in more or less every government’s agenda. Many governments implement substantive reforms to increase the coverage of education, but many also try to improve its quality. History shows that guaranteeing universal coverage is not enough. Classrooms need to be full of students, but they also need to be full of students who want to learn, students who can participate actively and create their own education, without distinctions. Moreover, one of the prime concerns of a democratic government should be that poorer children seek and find in public schools the tools to lessen or eliminate the differences and socioeconomic disadvantages inherited from their parents. In other words, public education is the antidote par excellence against poverty and lack of opportunity.

Obviously, improving quality requires an instrument to measure it, a yardstick to hold up to policy to help correct its flaws, as well as to provide education administrators with the information they need to improve the performance of students, teachers and schools.

This idea was implemented in Venezuela through the National System for Measurement and Evaluation of Learning, or Sinea (after its Spanish acronym.) The first run of Sinea was done in 1998. The results showed that 36% of all third-graders were below the minimum standards in language-related tasks. The share below the minimum for ninth-graders was 40%. Only 9% of ninth-graders reached a fully satisfactory score.

In math, performance seemed even worse. 54% of ninth-graders did not meet minimum standards in that area. Only 2.9% reached a satisfactory score. Among sixth-graders, the percentage failing to reach the minimum was 34.7%.

It seemed evident that an education system with performance levels like these was clearly lagging. It was also clear that improving the quality of education should have been a key goal of the current administration.

As in many spheres of public policy, the results in this area are not known. Looking through the Ministry of Education and Sports' web site, you find lots of rhetoric and no data. We're told that Sinea provides “timely, valid, serial and trustworthy” information, but nowhere do they list percentages or data on achievement. There is lots about the benefits of Sinea, but these are merely words.

We know that the second set of Sinea tests were carried in 2003. Its results are probably the best-kept secret in the Chávez administration; nobody has seen them. Regrettably, without this kind of information, it is simply not possible to evaluate the performance of our students, teachers and schools. We are undoubtedly left with an educational system set adrift in a sea of missed opportunities and wasted resources.

This situation is certainly not the international norm. For example, Chile’s Ministry of Education website shows that, on average, eighth-grade students increased their performance in math by three points and language by six points between 2000 and 2004.

While others move ahead, we don't even know where we are. This is especially serious when the ones getting left behind are our kids and young people. It is a manifestation of incompetence at the highest level.

The Viaducto According to Quino

OK, it's not so topical anymore, but looking at this picture:


really reminded me of this Quino strip:

[Yes, it's true, we ran out of money again, but you can't deny that getting this far is a breeze now...]

How to demolish the revolution in 12 minutes flat...

Britain's Channel 4 put together this remarkable news spot on Venezuela, which has pulled off the ultimate coup: it impressed both me and Alek.

The report, really a mini-documentary, makes Chavez look ridiculous merely by playing some of his more outrageous outbursts on Alo, presidente. It covers a lot of ground in a limited amount of time with real finesse. Really it's pretty devastating.

I don't think it's possible to do a better job than this in 12 minutes.

Mismanaging the Looting

I like Juan Carlos Zapata's style...

The decay of the powerful seems unstoppable
Since there are no parties, there are cliques, and within the cliques some subcliques dominate. With the subcliques the situation is just about uncontrollable. There are no bosses able to make deals. No leaders to sustain agreements. The lack of leadership becomes a problem, it's hard to control the cliques to the point that you see them starting to use mafia methods.

[snip]

We used to have parties and so power could always find ways to solve problems by talking. Today, there are no parties, not even in the government. The fight is between cliques, and cliques fighting over loot. That's what the struggle inside the governments boils down to. There is no ideological struggle. There is no political struggle. There isn't even a struggle for control of the party machine. There's a struggle over deals. Over booty.

[snip]

It used to be that the money men, the people who make deals placing government deposits in private banks, were known entities, few in number, and playing by recognized rules of the game. Today there are any number, answering to different interests and each applies his own methods that can go from breaking their word to blackmail and police or judicial threats. Not long ago a bank had to hire a police expert to get rid of not one but several cliques threatening its stability. Those cliques have offices in Caracas luxury buildings.

Since the government is like an incompetence tournament, those in powerful positions hurry the pace to divvy up contracts, to grab funds, to help their families, their friends, to open up bank accounts abroad. Of course, in public each speaks vehemently about the moral health of the nation, to make sure people keep buying this story about a revolution. And yet, the contractors, the money men, the experts on how to do business from abroad develop links with people from the world of intelligence gathering, of the police, elements whose culture is one of pressure, blackmail and even crime. And that's how they come to form networks, "midget tribes", run by a "donna" or by a civilian or military bigwig. The party becomes a second thought. The government a third thought. The country their last thought.

And so the internal fight is onto death. What few leaders there are can't control the dynamics of corruption or the methods that come to be used in the scramble for loot. The actors themselves can't sleep at night. They feel they're being recorded. They're being followed. That there are conspiracies afoot to displace them from a governorship, a mayor's office, a ministry, a deal. When paranoia reaches such heights, controls whither and cliques rise up. Then the game takes on a new hue. And so, fear runs rampant. Nobody, in power, can sleep easy at night.

The chavista solution to barrio violence...more guns!

Finally, the Bolivarian government is starting to react to the epidemic of violence in Venezuela's slums. And what oh what is Caracas Mayor Juan Barreto planning to do about this terrible scourge? He wants to flood the barrios with decommissioned police guns!

No, really, I'm serious, that's his plan: take the old .38 caliber revolvers being decommissioned as the Metropolitan Police upgrades to 9 millimeter Glocks and distribute the older guns to reliably chavista barrio vigilante committees.

Hmmmm...have they really thought this one through? Guns aren't exactly hard to get in Caracas as it is. And it's not hard to guess that a good number of these .38s are going to end on the black market. If you boost supply like that, the price falls, making guns even easier for the bad guys to get.

How many Glock-toting cops are going to get shot with their old .38s by the time this little experiment is through?

Dutch Parliament Scared of Chavez

Nobody in Venezuela seems to have noticed, but in The Hague they think they're having a diplomatic crisis with Venezuela. It all started a few weeks ago, when Chavez said he feared the US would use Curacao - which is a self-governing part of the Dutch Kingdom just 40 km. from Venezuela's coasts - as a forward base to invade Venezuela. This right-royally spooked the Dutch, who worry Venezuela could freak out and invade the Antilles pre-emptively.

Yesterday, members representing a majority in the upper house of the Dutch parliament called on the defense and foreign affairs ministers to get on top of the Chavez threat. Citing Chavez's recent arms purchases, Liberal (in euro-speak, right-wing) member of parliament Zsolt Szabo called Dutch defenses on the island a "swiss cheese" and urged the government to take control of defending the islands.

Two weeks ago, the defense minister, Kamp, called Chavez an unreconstructed populist with a lot of money "who casts big eyes on the scraps by the coast of Venezuela which form part of the Netherlands Kingdom," but then backtracked somewhat, telling parliament that there is no chance of a Venezuelan invasion of Curacao.

My super-secret Dutch source think this is more about domestic political posturing in Holland than about any real threat to Curacao. But it's still interest to see Chavez playing the role of bogeyman in Dutch political wranglings...

Calgary, Edo. Monagas

Katy says: This NY Times article on the current oil boom in Alberta, Canada is worth a look. (Free registration required.)

As has been reported before, the high price of oil is encouraging the development of alternative sources of energy that were previously considered too expensive. Alberta is now growing at a rapid pace thanks to heavy investment in its oil tar belt, which has now become profitable.

Canadians seem to have decided that:

a) they want to produce as much oil as they can;
b) they want private companies to provide technology, capital and skilled labor; and
c) they will position themselves as a long-run, risk-free source of energy to the US.

The result is that Alberta and its neighboring provinces are booming, and incomes in those places are rising.

The Orinoco Tar Belt holds a similar, if not better, promise. Now, why can't Maturín be more like Calgary and less like Calcutta? Could it be that in Venezuela, a), b) and c) are anathema to the Bolivarian revolution?

The kind of journalism Venezuela needs, and isn't getting...

Lost amid the polemics on media bias and government intimidation in Venezuela is a fundamental observation about our journalism: it sucks.

Chavista or anti, Venezuelan journalists do shockingly little beyond stenography - just copying down what one politico or another has said.

What's worse, we don't even notice. Consumed with questions about who's intimidating whom, who's more biased, who's gutsier, we hardly stop to wonder why Venezuelan newspapers hardly ever produce actual reportage, proper descriptive writing meant simply to expose us to realities we aren't familiar with.

Think of it this way: for all the buckets of ink spent on polemics about Chavez's new Territorial Guard and Reserve, how many of us have a feel for what those new institutions look and feel like from the inside? Aside from participants, very few, simply because the Venezuelan media just doesn't produce that kind of story.

In fact, it took a Colombian paper, Vanguardia Liberal to produce this remarkable reportage about how the Territorial Guard and the Reserve train.

Vividly written, description-led, suffused with the feel of the reality it reports, this story showcases the kind of journalism Venezuela needs and isn't getting. And it shows how sterile, how far off track, the debate on the Venezuelan media is. Because independence is important, yes, but competence matters more.

LVA's incriminate-a-thon and the perils of rocking the boat

The scandal developing around not-yet-quite-ex-Supreme Tribunal Magistrate Luis Velásquez Alvaray (LVA) speaks a ton and a half about the dynamics of corruption-busting posturing in the Chavez regime. While the inside-story is undoubtedly much meatier than what's been made public so far, even the shards that are now in the public domain are highly revealing.

The first thing to note about LVA's barrage of counter charges is the timing. A month ago, before Interior Minister Jesse Chacón accused him of corruption, LVA was a model of revolutionary circumspection. Suddenly, finding himself on the back foot, he "discovers" not just that Chacón's banker brother is a crook, but also that there are any number of high level narco-corrupt dealings in the court system...which is ever so interesting because, lest we forget, this whole telenovela started when LVA was dismissed from his post as head of DEM, the Executive Directorate of the Magistrature.

The irony here is that DEM is the body in charge of supervising the court system, with extensive powers to investigate and sanction corrupt judges. Which begs the question...what was LVA doing about all this judicial corruption back when it was his job to stop that sorta thing? Nothing at all...except hoarding incriminating files on regime big-wigs as insurance against any future investigation.

"If I go down," he seems to have calculated, "a whole lot of people go down with me." Well, he's going down now, and he's not going down by himself.

First victim, MariPili Hernández, who will have to give up her job as vice-minister of Foreign Affairs after the Supreme Tribunal "disabled" her yesterday in a ruling penned by...you guessed it, Luis Velásquez Alvaray (cuz that's the other thing, as allegations fly back and forth, LVA is still a working Supreme Tribunal magistrate...por ahora.) Is MariPili guilty of whatever she's been charged with? Who can tell? Is the timing of LVA's ruling coincidental? Not a chance...

What's interesting, from an analytical point of view, is the way the whole culture of corruption inside the revolution makes it perilous to try to pick off individual figures. Too many people know too much. Deciding to crack down on a single baddie is dangerous, because he knows he can take down a dozen others, and he knows you know he can take down a dozen others, and he uses the fact that you know that as a "vaccine" against any probe.

Any number of high officials seem to be caught up in this dynamic, which is only stable if everybody stays quiet. And as corruption extends more and more throughout the upper echelons of the state, Chávez finds the only way to keep the whole apparatus stable is not to rock the boat. Because if you move against one player, one revelation leads to another, which leads to two more, in a metastasizing progression that doesn't have a natural limit.

We already saw something similar, though in a smaller scale, with the CAEEZ scandal, when an initial set of revelations about corruption in the Sabaneta sugar mill led on to revelations about state funding of Chavez's referendum campaign (Comando Maisanta) in Barinas. In that case, the government seems to have been able to limit the damage. But it's a precarious exercise...by nature, corruption investigations tend to grow in unsuspected new directions.

And that's a risk chavismo can hardly afford. The revolution may be able to survive one LVA/CAEEZ-type scandal, or two, or three. But if they start to multiply, eventually you can see how they might reach some critical threshhold where the whole of the upper government is implicated. And that's in no one's interest.

How very regal of him...

I try not to pick silly fights with Venezuelanalysis these days, but this headline is just too much...

Conceptual Precision Chronicles

I think this 1997 Foreign Affairs article (warning: large PDF file) by Fareed Zakaria is a really helpful read for anyone trying to understand chavismo. Stressing the conceptual difference between constitutional liberalism and democracy, The Rise of Illiberal Democracy is a cautionary tale about what happens when you keep the latter but lose the former.

For Zakaria, democracy as such is merely a way of selecting governments (e.g. through elections.)

"Constitutional liberalism, on the other hand, is not about the procedures for selecting government, but rather government's goals. It refers to the tradition, deep in Western history, that seeks to protect an individual's autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever the source - state, church or society. The term marries two closely connected ideas. It is liberal because it draws on the philosophical strain, beginning with the Greeks, that emphasizes individual liberty. It is constitutional because it rests on the tradition, beginning with the Romans, of the rule of law. Constitutional liberalism developed in Western Europe and the United States as a defense of the individual's right to life and property, and freedom of religion and speech. To secure these rights, it emphasized checks on the power of each branch of government, equality under the law, impartial courts and tribunals, and the separation of church and state."

The piece is strewn with provocative little observations. Zakaria notes that all the now-advanced liberal democracies in Western Europe and North America developed constitutional liberalism before they instituted democracy. "The 'Western Model,'" he writes "is best symbolized not by the mass plebiscite but the impartial judge."

Moreover, contrasting the pattern in East Asia, where "liberal autocracies" have gradually given rise to democracy, with the pattern in Africa, where democracies have done little to establish the rule of law, he quips "constitutional liberalism has led to democracy, but democracy does not seem to bring constitutional liberalism."

Really, it's worth reading the whole thing. Or, you can buy the book...

"El nuevorriquismo derrochador y rastacuero desaparecerá de las costumbres oficiales!"

Hat tip to Feathers for pointing me to Viejas Fotos Actuales, a stunning archive of Venezuelan historical sound recordings and film clips. Good for hours of kitsch/nostalgic fun.

Don't miss this (unfortunately too short) fragment of a Romulo Betancourt speech, stuck at the end of some old style adeco Internationale singing and the 1950 Perez Jimenez propaganda clip on the making of the Caracas-La Guaira highway (in corny 50s style English, even)...really amazing stuff.

There's also a very cool, larger archive of historical photos only...

From my inbox: Dissecting the CNE gordian knot

A reader writes: It's important to separate out two quite different strands of this issue, which tend to get confused:

1. Whether or not there is any chance that the Asamblea Nacional will appoint a halfway decent CNE, and
   
   
2. What the opposition's response to the answer to question (1) should be.

Since the government has total political control of the process, the answer to question (1) is that it will do so IF and ONLY IF that is in the interests of the government. The individuals and groups involved have a solid record of placing the interests of the "revolution" above the interests of the nation. Many of them genuinely believe that is the correct thing to do.

If that is the case, the next point in the discussion is whether or not an honest (or partly honest) CNE directorate would be in the government's interest. And the answer seems to be that the government very much wants the new CNE to be perceived as worthy of confidence, because the presentational issues are very important. When the rubber hits the road, some time into Chavez's next government, he wants to be able to point to a 'free and fair' election, with an international seal of approval, as proof of his legitimacy of origin.

But the key word in the last paragraph is "perceived". Remember Carrasquero? Fiel de la balanza? Praised by the opposition? I would put good money on the proposition that the power in the next CNE will be held by individuals that will bow to government instructions.

Why? Because of the parable of the frog and the scorpion. It's in their nature. Even if the government could be certain that it would win a totally free, fair and transparent election, it would not run one. Chavez is not about to surrender control over a key branch of government at this stage in the proceedings.

That leaves question (2) - how should the opposition react? The biggest problem here is the one they've been faced with ever since the RR: how do you fight what's happening in the CNE without leaving your potential voters ever more convinced that it's not worth voting because the process is utterly viciado?

Unfortunately for the opposition, their inability to answer that question is not their biggest problem. Their biggest problem is that they have no leaders worth following and no political programme to offer as an alternative to the current government.

I don't precisely share your view that there are only four ways the chavez government can come to an end (election, heart-attack, coup or invasion.) I think the most plausible scenario is a political implosion of the regime. But to end up as the beneficiary, the opposition has to lay the groundwork, create a movement and find a leader, and -preferably - prove its worth by getting more real votes than Chavez in an election.

None of these conditions yet exists. If they go into december's election with a 'unity' candidate like arias cardenas in 2000 or salas romer in 1998 they will be left in 2007 with nothing, even assuming they get the 'ya tradicional' 40%. Because, as we know, that 40% is an anti-chavez vote, not a pro-opposition vote. If they pull out, not only do they surrender yet more space, they leave themselves in the sub-basement as far as international opinion is concerned.

Revolutionary Spirit Chronicles

Honestly, I can't follow all the ins and outs of Supreme Tribunal Magistrate Luis Velasquez Alvaray's defenestration saga, but some of the crap coming out is really eye-popping.

The Interior Minister tells us the guy who used to be in charge of the entire court system (as head of the Executive Directorate of the Magistrature) was "stewing" (guisando) with some shady construction contracts for new courthouses. Going on the counteroffensive, the guy who used to run the entire court system tells us Military Intelligence is run by drug traffikers (!) backed by Caracas-circuit drug-baron midget judges (I wish I was making this up) protected by Jose Vicente Rangel. He says the Interior Minister's banker brother has been accused again and again of abusing his political connections to land lucrative contracts. He helpfully suggests bombing Caracas's main court building as a means of judicial prophylaxis(!!!!!).

I have no idea who's telling the truth here - though it does look more or less like a fight about integrity between Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone, so it wouldn't precisely shock me if all the allegations are true.

Just one note: if a tenth of the charges flying around Velasquez Alvaray are true, this web of scandals is 10 times worse than the PT bribes scandal in Brazil. But are there any consequences? Is there any sense of crisis? Political fallout? None at all...ah, the joys of autocracy.