Correspondence with a California Lefty...
> Francisco,
>
> Read your latest pieces, and I've got more questions for you (no doubt a bit naive to you, perhaps) but
> bear with me!
Paul,
I'd have to write a book to answer your email fully (which I intend to, some day!) but for now I'll answer in broad strokes.
> First, what about all those Chavistas, all those people who came out to support him during the "not-a-
> coup"? Is it true they are getting much-needed and reform from him?
I'll tell you one thing, Paul, I was outside the main military fort in Caracas with a camera crew on April 13th during the coup - it's ok to call it that, I mean, lets get real. What I saw was a highly emotional crowd of maybe 2,000 people there. I have the footage to prove it. This was supposed to be one of the main hotspots of the massive "people's uprising" that, according to chavista lore, brought out SEVEN MILLION people to demand his return. Sure, there was a small crowd there, and they were very brave to go, given the circumstances. And I heard there were a few more people outside the presidential palace, maybe 4 blocks full, no more than 20,000-30,000 people or so. That's significant, but, like so much else you've been reading about Venezuela in the lefty press up north, the supposed mass-scale uprising with millions of people on the streets demanding his return is a myth, a figment of the narcissistic mind.
But beyond that, one thing that must be extraordinarily hard for foreign lefties to quite grasp is just to what extent the chavista revolution exists only in words, in rhetoric. From a first-world idealist's point of view, the guy's talk is so pleasing, so on message, that it must seem inconceivable to you all that it could be entirely hollow, just totally unhinged from the facts.
But it is.
I think it's great that you bring up land reform, a subject I've tracked over the last couple of years, because it really illustrates the point. Chávez has been talking up his land reform plans in near apocalyptic terms for years now, using incredibly incendiary language that has raised tensions in the countryside to levels we hadn't seen since the 1940s, if not the 1840s (when we had our last major civil war, and precisely on this issue.) Chavez has scared the hell out of commercial farmers by threatening them with Mugabe-style tactics while raising the expectations of landpoor and landless peasants to incredible heights. His rhetoric has spread the cold-civil-war atmosphere to dangerous levels in the countryside.
OK, that was not nice of him, but at least he distributed some land to people who need it, right?
At last count, out of the several hundred thousand landless or landpoor families in the country, the government has adjudicated new farmland to about 700. That number could have risen somewhat since I checked, but can't be more than a couple of thousand now. The government doesn't have the administrative resources to manage mass-scale redistribution, and doesn't have the financial resources to expropriate all the land it wants to. It's a tragedy, because land distribution is a serious problem. A serious problem in need of a serious solution. But the narcissist isn't interested in serious solutions. He's interested in talk, high sounding talk that bolsters his self-image as an avenging crusader of the poor. Thing is, that kind of talk often makes things worse. That kind of talk stirs up fear and conflict where mediation and conflict-resolution are needed.
Because there is plenty of farmland to go around in this country. Venezuela is not El Salvador, this is a big, mostly urban country, with a relatively underpopulated countryside. Plenty of land remains in government hands, a holdover from an earlier, never-completed land redistribution drive in the 60s, just waiting to be distributed. Put in a bit of irrigation and some roads and lots of land that now sits idle could be farmed. All it would take is a bit of pragmatism. A pragmatist could have helped those hundreds of thousands of families that Chávez has no answer for without increasing the tensions between them and the comercial farmers - who would have to become their partners, suppliers and/or purchasers in any serious land redistribution scheme, and who the new farmers therefore have an interest in keeping more or less good relations with.
All it would’ve taken is a few itinerant teams of local mediators to work out detailed agreements in the various regions that balanced off the needs of the landless with the interests of commercial farmers. That kind of approach wouldn't have been quick or flashy, but it probably would work. That, however, is obviously too unglamorous, tedious and pedestrian for a pathological narcissist.
All that Chávez' incendiary rhetoric has done is to further poison relations in the countryside without bringing any real solutions to the problems poor rural people here have. Their lives are worse because of it, not better.
I could rattle off similar stories on 10 other subjects, urban housing, education, etc. etc.
Teodoro Petkoff - a real old-time leftist, 60s guerrilla leader, with 50 X more social reformer cred than the narcissist - quips that with his rhetoric, Chávez has achieved something thought impossible until now: he's created a counterrevolution in a country where there is no revolution. The revolution is all talk. The fear it inspires in the people it targets for abuse is real. So you have a middle class that's increasingly paranoid, mobilized, alarmed, radicalized and militant - a classic counterrevolution - despite the fact that you haven't actually done anything to alter the fundamental structures of power in the country.
The 30-35% of Venezuelans who still support Chávez have been - there's no other word for this - swindled, swindled into supporting a set of delirious promises that have much more to do with Chávez's fantasy mindscape than with any serious plan to remake the country. Chávez is a powerful orator, for sure, and his rhetoric can still mobilize a lot of people in this country – just under half of poor Venezuelans still back him. But the other half, not to mention almost all of the middle class (a good portion of which voted for him in 98) have learned to understand the catastrophic scale of the gap between the talk and the walk, the danger he poses to a pluralist, democratic system of governance, and they want him out, insist that he gets out. Now.
> Second, does the oil company really keep most of its profits and distribute them amongst
> its own managersand workers? And wouldn't privatizing it further, as I've read in the NYT
> (I think it was) that the managers want to do, prevent the state from having more of the profits.
There's a huge amount of disinformation about this out there - much of it willfully planted by the government. A superficial look will tell you that PDVSA, the state oil company, does indeed make less money per barrel than it did in 1976 when it was nationalized. But there are sound technical reasons for that - largely having to do with the fact that, as oil wells age and reserves deplete, it becomes ever more technically challenging and costly to get the remaining oil out of them, you need to drill harder and deeper and invest more and more to keep well pressure adequate and all of that costs money. In the last 25 years, many of Venezuela’s most profitable wells have become more and more depleted – most of the “easy oil” is gone, and the “hard oil” is much more expensive to get at.
So the 76 vs. now comparison is willfully misleading. The government has used it maliciously again and again to make the current PDVSA look bad. People who go through the numbers in good faith usually conclude that, while PDVSA could clearly make some improvements in the way it does business, that it's still one of the most efficient oil companies in the world - more than competitive with the Shells and BPs and ExxonMobil's of the world, to say nothing of the Pemexes and the SaudiAramcos. Hell, the government doesn't get half its budget out of them for nothing.
There is a very sound financial argument to be made that the state would make much more money if there was more private participation in the oil industry here, particularly if they relied more on foreign companies to expand production capacity and operate old, expensive-to-keep-in-production fields. Nobody wants to privatize PDVSA's existing prime capacity, aside from a few isolated far-right kooks. The line about how the old managers just want willy-nilly privatization is, I'm afraid, another chavista lie.
It's important to understand the terms of the relationship between Venezuela and the foreign oil companies, because a lot of lefties in the first world still operate under this notion of foreign oil as a neocolonialist front that sucks the country dry. That was mostly true in Venezuela in 1938 or in Iran in 1966, but a very silly distortion for Venezuela today.
When a foreign oil company wants to operate here, they have to do so under the rules of the game laid down by Venezuelan law. The basics are that they have to pay a 33% royalty rate on the oil they pump out (that's on gross sales, not net,) plus a 50% corporate profit tax. Those are huge numbers. I mean, work it out: if they sell a barrel for $36, a third of that automatically goes to the government, $12. Of the other $24, about $10 or so will be production costs, profits will be about $14. They have to split those $14 down the middle with the government. So on top of the $12 in royalties, they get $7 in taxes. All in, the government pockets $19. The company walks away with $7, and the rest is costs.
(It's an even better deal for Venezuela than that suggests, because a big chunk of the $10 in costs will stay in the local economy in the form of wages to Venezuelan workers, service contracts with Venezuelan companies, payments to Venezuelan suppliers, etc.)
Most importantly though, the foreign firms have access to capital on a scale and on terms that Venezuela doesn't have. Any dollar Venezuela invests in expanding oil production is a dollar it can't use to pay a teacher's salary, or a hospital's construction costs. While any dollar Shell invests here is a dollar that otherwise would've ended up in Texas, or Norway, or Saudi Arabia. Shell has a AAA credit rating, Venezuela a CC+, so Shell can raise the capital much more cheaply. Shell has technology we don't have, which we can force them to share with us in the investment contract.
Overall, foreign-led expansion is an incredible bargain for the Venezuelan tax payer. It's not just the tax structure and the fact that they put in all the capital, it's that they bear ALL the risk. What they get, usually, are usually rights to “explore at their own risk." That means that they get adjudicated a bunch of land or some off-shore area, and they have to go out and look for the oil. They finance it. They carry out all the seismic and geological studies, put out the rigs and pay for the exploration. If it doesn't pan out, Venezuela don't lose a penny for it. But if it does pan out and they find profitable deposits, we get a third of the gross and half the net. It's an incredible deal!
But there's more, the bloody foreigners actually pay us a nice fat fee for the privilege of risking their money on our lousy little tinpot republic, in the form of tender auction fees at the start of the process, when they're trying to get the exploration rights.
Does this look like neocolonialism to you?...the terms of these deals are so ridiculously tilted in favor of the republic that the only real puzzle is that the foreign companies still want in.
So the financial arithmetic for using foreign companies to expand the Venezuelan oil industry is straightforward. Chávez isn't interested in financial arithmetic. He's interested in oil as power, oil as nationalist symbol. If you see oil as a means to an end, with the end being to expand the state's revenue as quickly as possible, then the case for foreign led expansion is almost self-evident. If you're interested in oil as a nationalist symbol, then no amount of financial arithmetic will sway you.
> Third, if any country in the world had a private media that was so anti-Government as the
> private media inVenezuela seems to be, don't you think legal and (in some cases) extra-
> legal methods would be found toshut it down? NPR in the USA used to allow a fair amount
> of liberal to left comment, and then theRepublicans in Congress in about 1994 threatened to
> shut off all funding unless it became "morebalanced". NPR has changed dramatically since
> then! CNN was told it was no longer going to be allowed to broadcast in Israel because it was
> too "pro-Palestinian". I think - though I'm not sure about this - they fired their correspondent there,
> but I'm pretty sure they've changed their coverage since. (Robert Fisk, the British Independent
> newspaper commentator wrote about this). And yet Chavez has tolerated this, it seems. As you
> say, the private TV stations have used their power to run anti-government propaganda for
> years. I think that either speaks well of the government's tolerance or of their inefficiency!
Well, I've been very strong in criticizing the Venezuelan press in the past, and I won't rehash that here. But I'll just add that for all their evident, inexcusable bias, in a situation where every part of the state has been hijacked by the government, they are our last means of defense, our final bulwark against an autocratically oriented government that accepts no oversight from anyone. I shudder to think what Chávez might do if the independent media was shut down. I'd much rather have a flawed, biased spotlight on the government's authoritarian excess than no spotlight at all.
...and that's without even getting into 1st ammendment type considerations, which are also relevant here...
> And, finally, I've got to go back to your characterization of Chavez as somehow clinically
> incapable of being in office because of his Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Really, Thatcher
> in the UK had many of those traits, and no doubt still does. She made no secret of comparing
> herself to Churchill, for instance. Reagan was in a total dream world. I remember talking once
> to the Time reporter who followed Reagan for the 1980 election, and he says in interviews it
> was clear that Reagan didn't know reality from fiction. On one occassion, to highlight his
> sympathy for Veterans, he recounted an episode he said he'd seen of a flyer trying to get out
> of his crashing plane over the Pacific in World War 2... but he was actually recounting
> an episode from a film he'd been in So, what IF Chavez is narcissitic?
I would just point out that having a kooky leader in a country with more or less mature, more or less stable institutions is far less dangerous than having a kooky leader in a country with a disastrously weak institutional structure, where nearly every institution in the state is in the hands of active supporters of the narcissist's cult of personality. Chávez, on his own, would merely be a bad president. But Chávez in autocratic control of the courts, the legislature, the AG's office, the Comptroller's office, the military, the Ombudsman's office, etc., that's a disaster, a clear and present threat to democracy as we know it.
> Okay, one final question. How do you know that the situation Venezuela is in isn't less
> like Czechoslovakia in 1989 but more like Chile in 1973? I think that's why a lot of
> leftists, liberals and plain centrist folks up here find it hard to believe what's going on
> is that it's strikingly similar (in their eyes). Okay, I know that Allende was no Chavez,
> but was a comparitively quiet spoken intellectual, but the strikes, the destabilization,
> the anti-government media, etc. are all very similar.
This is something I worry about a lot, and I won't deny the obvious, that parts of the opposition are creepy and authoritarian and just plain nasty. Most of it, though, is made up of people with genuine democratic ideals, worried about inclusion, worried about well-functioning institutions, the separation of powers, etc. etc. (I think it’s “most” of it, anyway.) By and large our tactics are the protest march and the signature-gathering drive, such softie tactics that the rightwing loonies sometimes deride us as "comeflores" - Flower-Eaters!
I can't guarantee that the creepy side of the opposition won't come out on top, though I work hard every day to try to prevent it. I can tell you one thing, though: every time an opposition march gets shot up and the perpetrators get away scotch free, every time the government shits all over the separation of powers, every time Chávez threatens us, calls us fascists for gathering signatures, and threatens to shut down a TV channel because it dares question him, every time something like that happens the comeflor position is made to look pathetic, silly, weak, out of place, naïve, too naïve to deal with a threat as acute as Chávez's. Every time the government turns its authoritarianism up a notch, those of us who believe in negotiations and elections as the way out of the crisis see our position undermined. It’s very worrying. But again, (and I hate to sound like a broken record, but it’s true) the primary responsibility for this is Chávez’s.
> And I've certainly heard the view, no doubt appalling to your ears, that many of the shootings could
> have been carried out by conspiratorial opposition figures (I think I read that in the UK press
> somewhere).
No, not appalling at all, it actually serves to make an important point. I don't discount that opposition provocateurs could have taken part in the shootings here. Like I said, there are definitely some pretty unsavoury characters mixed in with the decent folk in the opposition. It seems unlikely to me that they would go as far as to set up random murders just to make the government look bad, but hell, I dunno. I don't have powers of omniscience. So, y'know, it could be.
Thankfully, though, we have reams of video and photographic evidence, which is already in the public sphere, that makes several of the gunmen easily identifiable. If they are opposition activists then that's all the more incentive for the government to go and nab them. It's an open and shut case, legally speaking. It’s not even that you have a “smoking gun,” you actually have video of the guns being shot. So go and grab them, man, it's straightforward as straightforward can be, in terms of police work.
The fact that the ONLY shooter in jail right now was grabbed by an opposition municipal cop, that the central government hasn't moved on ANY of the other shooters is suspicious to say the least. The fact that they're now shifting cops to the provinces in retaliation for them going off message and trying to do some actual police work and make some actual arrests on these cases, that stinks to high heaven in my book. (A journalist friend of mine who covers the Judicial Police says this latest case is anything but isolated, that most of her better sources inside the Judicial Police have ended up getting sent to hardship posts in the middle of nowhere for similar reasons.)
Are the gunmen opposition provocateurs? I doubt it, but maybe. But whoever they are, they ought to be in jail, there's no excuse for them not to be in jail, and the government really places itself well beyond the pale when it goes out of its way to make sure they're not held accountable.
I don't know if you can quite wrap your mind around what a corrosive effect shit like that has on people's faith in their institutions here, on people's sense that they're living in something like a rule-of-law based country. The feeling we have, and this is very widespread in the opposition, is that we live in a mobocracy, an outlaw state where people who support the government have carte blanche to do anything they feel like at all up to and including murder, and we have no institutional means to restrain them at all.
It's really intolerable, Paul. You wouldn't tolerate it for a second if it happened in San Francisco. You’d be out marching too.
> Okay, I'm done! Keep up the reporting. Hope you're safe!
Thanks man.
OK, enough for now...I need to go to work!
ft
January 28, 2003
[The OpEd I would have liked to write for the Wall Street Journal – and would’ve written, if I’d had a more pliable editor and 1800 words to play with.]
Venezuela's Narcissist-in-Chief
If you're looking for insight into Venezuela’s political crisis, section 301.81 of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is an excellent place to start. The entry reads eerily like a brief character sketch of Venezuela's embattled president, Hugo Chávez: "Has a grandiose sense of self-importance; is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance; requires excessive admiration; has unreasonable expectations of automatic compliance with his expectations; shows arrogant behaviors or attitudes, etc." Actually, it's the DSM-IV's diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD.)
Venezuelan psychiatrists long ago pegged Chávez as a textbook example of NPD. According to the DSM-IV, a patient has NPD if he meets five of the nine diagnostic criteria. But Dr. Álvaro Requena, a respected Venezuelan psychiatrist, says Chávez "meets all nine of the diagnostic criteria." Dr. Arturo Rodríguez Milliet, a colleague, finds "a striking consensus on that diagnosis" among Caracas psychiatrists. Not that it really takes an expert: you only need to watch Chávez's weekly five-hour talk-show on state television once to understand the extent of his narcissism.
Of course, lots of politicians have some narcissistic traits - Washington, D.C. is notorious for the size of its egos. NPD, however, is what happens when those traits run amok. People with NPD are so intimately convinced of the crushing weight of their historical significance that they lose the ability to interact with the world in anything like a reasonable way.
Narcissism and political power make an explosive combination. As Dr. Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited, puts it, "the narcissist's grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience are exacerbated by real life authority." And President Chávez has amassed more real life authority than anyone in Venezuela's contemporary history.
But those grandiose self-delusions co-exist with a fragile sense of self-worth, often masking deep insecurities. As Dr. Vaknin writes, "the narcissist's personality is so precariously balanced that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism and disagreement."
In Venezuela, over the last four years, this has led to a systematic winnowing of the president's pool of confidants, as people with views that differ even slightly from the comandante’s have fallen out of favor. Only sycophants and yes-men survive in Chávez's inner circle. What’s perverse about that mechanism is that some people close to him have clearly learned to manipulate his narcissism for their personal purposes. Once you’ve caught on that feeding the president’s narcissism is the way to get ahead in palace politics, what’s the reasonable response? Feeding the president’s narcissism, of course.
Overtime, this has left Chávez worryingly isolated. It’s probably been months since the president has been brought face to face with ideas different than his own, with versions of reality that don’t conform to his own sense of grandeur. Under those circumstances, anyone’s sense of reality would suffer. But if you’ve started out with narcissistic tendencies, that level of isolation is liable to push you over the edge altogether. With no critical thinkers around anymore, no one willing to sit him down and tell him the awful truth, there are no checks left on his pathological relationship with reality.
It's important to bear this in mind as you read the news coming out of Venezuela these days. Last week, for instance, the president repeated again and again that there is no strike in Venezuela's key oil industry, just a conspiracy by a few privileged executives who have sabotaged its installations. Exuding confidence, he assured Venezuelans that production had risen to about 1.5 million barrels per day and said the industry would return to normal soon. The remarks were picked up by the world's journalists more or less at face value. An unsuspecting reader would probably have believed him.
Meanwhile, back in reality, Venezuelans faced lines over 24 hours long to pump gas, and more and more households reverted to cooking with firewood for absence of kitchen butane. Independent experts estimated production at 450,000 b/d at best, and the nation was refining 90% less oil than usual. Nine out of every ten oil workers were off the job, and the nation faced its gravest fiscal crisis in a century.
To a narcissist, though, none of that matters. As Dr. Milliet points out, "his discourse might be dissonant with reality, but it's internally coherent." Chávez's only concern is to preserve his romantic vision of himself as a fearless leader of the downtrodden in their fight against an evil oligarchy. If the facts don't happen to fit that narrative structure, then that's too bad for the facts. So it’s not that Chávez lies, per se, it’s that he’s locked up within a small, tight circle of confidants that feed an aberrant relationship with reality. To lie is to knowingly deceive. Chávez doesn’t lie. He just makes up the truth.
Obviously, there are more than a few inconveniences to having a pathological narcissist as president. For instance, it’s almost impossible for narcissists to admit to past mistakes and make amends. The narcissist’s chief, overriding psychological goal is to preserve his grandiose self-image, his sense of being a larger-than-life world historical force for good and justice. Honestly admitting any mistake, no matter how banal, requires a level of self-awareness and a sense for one’s own limitations, that runs directly counter to the forces that drive a narcissist’s personality. So for all the crocodile tears on April 14th, Chávez cannot, never has, and never will sincerely make amends. It’s just beyond him.
Once you have a basic understanding of how their pathological personality structures drive the behavior of people with NPD, Hugo Chávez is an open book. Lots of little puzzles about the way the president behaves are suddenly cleared up. For instance, you start to understand why Chávez sees no adversaries around him, only enemies. It makes sense: the more he becomes convinced of his “with fantasies of unlimited success, power and brilliance” the harder it is for him to accept that anyone might have an honest disagreement with him. Chávez is a man in rebellion against his own fallibility. "As far as he can see," explains Dr. Requena, "if anyone disagrees with him, that can only be because they are wrong, and maliciously wrong."
People with NPD are strongly sensitive to what psychiatrists call “narcissist injury” – the psychic discombobulation that comes from any input that undermines or negates the fantasies that dominate their mindscape. Chávez clearly experiences disagreement and dissent as narcissist injury, and as any psychiatrist can tell you, an injured narcissist is liable to lash out with virulent rage. Often, his slurs are almost comically overstated. He insists on describing Venezuela's huge, diverse, and mostly democratic opposition movement as a "conspiracy" led by a tiny cabal of "coup-plotters, saboteurs and terrorists." These attacks not only demonstrate the tragic extent of his disconnect with reality, they have also thoroughly poisoned the political atmosphere in Caracas, creating what's been described as a "cold civil war."
But it's not just a matter of some overly sensitive folk taking offense at some rude remarks. Chávez's brand of intolerance has turned the Venezuelan state into the most autocratic in the Americas short of the one led by his hero, Fidel Castro. It's no coincidence. In Dr. Milliet's view, "narcissism leads directly to an autocratic approach to power."
President Chávez has systematically placed diehard loyalists in key posts throughout the state apparatus. When you come to understand his behavior in terms of NPD, that’s not at all surprising: someone who understands the world as a struggle between people who agree with everything he says and does vs. evil will obviously do everything in his power to place unconditional allies in every position of power. And indeed, today, every nominally independent watchdog institution in Venezuela, from the Supreme Court to the Auditor General's office, is run by a presidential crony. With the National Assembly operating like a branch office of the presidential palace, the formal checks-and-balances written into the constitution have become a farce.
The case of the Attorney General is especially worrying. With nothing like a special counsel statute and no state criminal jurisdiction, the A.G. must approve every single criminal investigation and prosecution in Venezuela. Control this post, and you have total veto power over the entire penal system. For this reason, the A.G. is not a cabinet position in Venezuela like it is in the US. Because of its key role in fighting corruption and keeping watch over the legality of the government’s actions, the A.G. is set up as a fully independent, apolitical office in the Venezuelan constitution. But that clearly wouldn’t do for Chávez. For this most sensitive of offices, Chávez tapped perhaps his most unconditional ally, a doggedly loyal chavista fresh from a stint as vicepresident.
Not surprisingly, not a single pro-Chávez official has been convicted of anything, ever, despite numerous and well-documented allegations of serious corruption, and a mountain of evidence to suggest the government has organized its civilian supporters into armed militias. Chávez loyalists realize they're beyond the reach of the law, and behave accordingly. A growing list of armed attacks on opposition attests to the fact that the president's shock troops act under a kind of tacit blanket amnesty: several times the attackers have been fully identified by amateur video footage, but the government has never made the slightest attempt to arrest any of them.
[Last minute digression: In fact, it goes out of its way to make sure its activists enjoy total impunity. If you don't believe me, ask Marcos Vivas, the Judicial Police investigator for the Valles del Tuy region who was hurriedly taken off his post yesterday, apparently because he started to [gasp!] seriously investigate the Charallave shootings. They're now talking about re-deploying this poor guy to the damn Amazon jungle...a none too subtle hint to other would-be crusading cops who haven't been purged yet somehow...]
Once Chávez had every branch of government safely under his thumb, he set out to control society as a whole. On that score, he's been far less successful. An early attempt to grab the labor movement backfired disastrously when union members elected his most ardent critic to head the country's main labor federation. The independent news media has responded to four years of presidential threats, and insults by becoming strident, singleminded opponents of his government. Even the discredited old political parties that Chávez once thrived on vilifying have made something of a comeback.
In short, Venezuelans have wised up to the dangers of having a narcissist president, and they're now fully mobilized against him. Credible independent polls suggest some 60-65% of the voters want the president to resign. Most importantly, a remarkable proportion of those who oppose Chávez do so vehemently, actively, on the streets.
Venezuelans will not surrender their freedom to a narcissist-autocrat. The massive opposition movement has made the country impossible to govern, leaving only two options: a presidential transition or ongoing chaos. Many here worry that as his hold on power slips, Chávez could lash out, deploying the kind of widespread, indiscriminate violence he has so far shunned. The United States must make it clear that it will not tolerate such actions - not to the narcissist-in-chief, who is beyond reasoning with, but to his associates.
Venezuela's Narcissist-in-Chief
If you're looking for insight into Venezuela’s political crisis, section 301.81 of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is an excellent place to start. The entry reads eerily like a brief character sketch of Venezuela's embattled president, Hugo Chávez: "Has a grandiose sense of self-importance; is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance; requires excessive admiration; has unreasonable expectations of automatic compliance with his expectations; shows arrogant behaviors or attitudes, etc." Actually, it's the DSM-IV's diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD.)
Venezuelan psychiatrists long ago pegged Chávez as a textbook example of NPD. According to the DSM-IV, a patient has NPD if he meets five of the nine diagnostic criteria. But Dr. Álvaro Requena, a respected Venezuelan psychiatrist, says Chávez "meets all nine of the diagnostic criteria." Dr. Arturo Rodríguez Milliet, a colleague, finds "a striking consensus on that diagnosis" among Caracas psychiatrists. Not that it really takes an expert: you only need to watch Chávez's weekly five-hour talk-show on state television once to understand the extent of his narcissism.
Of course, lots of politicians have some narcissistic traits - Washington, D.C. is notorious for the size of its egos. NPD, however, is what happens when those traits run amok. People with NPD are so intimately convinced of the crushing weight of their historical significance that they lose the ability to interact with the world in anything like a reasonable way.
Narcissism and political power make an explosive combination. As Dr. Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited, puts it, "the narcissist's grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience are exacerbated by real life authority." And President Chávez has amassed more real life authority than anyone in Venezuela's contemporary history.
But those grandiose self-delusions co-exist with a fragile sense of self-worth, often masking deep insecurities. As Dr. Vaknin writes, "the narcissist's personality is so precariously balanced that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism and disagreement."
In Venezuela, over the last four years, this has led to a systematic winnowing of the president's pool of confidants, as people with views that differ even slightly from the comandante’s have fallen out of favor. Only sycophants and yes-men survive in Chávez's inner circle. What’s perverse about that mechanism is that some people close to him have clearly learned to manipulate his narcissism for their personal purposes. Once you’ve caught on that feeding the president’s narcissism is the way to get ahead in palace politics, what’s the reasonable response? Feeding the president’s narcissism, of course.
Overtime, this has left Chávez worryingly isolated. It’s probably been months since the president has been brought face to face with ideas different than his own, with versions of reality that don’t conform to his own sense of grandeur. Under those circumstances, anyone’s sense of reality would suffer. But if you’ve started out with narcissistic tendencies, that level of isolation is liable to push you over the edge altogether. With no critical thinkers around anymore, no one willing to sit him down and tell him the awful truth, there are no checks left on his pathological relationship with reality.
It's important to bear this in mind as you read the news coming out of Venezuela these days. Last week, for instance, the president repeated again and again that there is no strike in Venezuela's key oil industry, just a conspiracy by a few privileged executives who have sabotaged its installations. Exuding confidence, he assured Venezuelans that production had risen to about 1.5 million barrels per day and said the industry would return to normal soon. The remarks were picked up by the world's journalists more or less at face value. An unsuspecting reader would probably have believed him.
Meanwhile, back in reality, Venezuelans faced lines over 24 hours long to pump gas, and more and more households reverted to cooking with firewood for absence of kitchen butane. Independent experts estimated production at 450,000 b/d at best, and the nation was refining 90% less oil than usual. Nine out of every ten oil workers were off the job, and the nation faced its gravest fiscal crisis in a century.
To a narcissist, though, none of that matters. As Dr. Milliet points out, "his discourse might be dissonant with reality, but it's internally coherent." Chávez's only concern is to preserve his romantic vision of himself as a fearless leader of the downtrodden in their fight against an evil oligarchy. If the facts don't happen to fit that narrative structure, then that's too bad for the facts. So it’s not that Chávez lies, per se, it’s that he’s locked up within a small, tight circle of confidants that feed an aberrant relationship with reality. To lie is to knowingly deceive. Chávez doesn’t lie. He just makes up the truth.
Obviously, there are more than a few inconveniences to having a pathological narcissist as president. For instance, it’s almost impossible for narcissists to admit to past mistakes and make amends. The narcissist’s chief, overriding psychological goal is to preserve his grandiose self-image, his sense of being a larger-than-life world historical force for good and justice. Honestly admitting any mistake, no matter how banal, requires a level of self-awareness and a sense for one’s own limitations, that runs directly counter to the forces that drive a narcissist’s personality. So for all the crocodile tears on April 14th, Chávez cannot, never has, and never will sincerely make amends. It’s just beyond him.
Once you have a basic understanding of how their pathological personality structures drive the behavior of people with NPD, Hugo Chávez is an open book. Lots of little puzzles about the way the president behaves are suddenly cleared up. For instance, you start to understand why Chávez sees no adversaries around him, only enemies. It makes sense: the more he becomes convinced of his “with fantasies of unlimited success, power and brilliance” the harder it is for him to accept that anyone might have an honest disagreement with him. Chávez is a man in rebellion against his own fallibility. "As far as he can see," explains Dr. Requena, "if anyone disagrees with him, that can only be because they are wrong, and maliciously wrong."
People with NPD are strongly sensitive to what psychiatrists call “narcissist injury” – the psychic discombobulation that comes from any input that undermines or negates the fantasies that dominate their mindscape. Chávez clearly experiences disagreement and dissent as narcissist injury, and as any psychiatrist can tell you, an injured narcissist is liable to lash out with virulent rage. Often, his slurs are almost comically overstated. He insists on describing Venezuela's huge, diverse, and mostly democratic opposition movement as a "conspiracy" led by a tiny cabal of "coup-plotters, saboteurs and terrorists." These attacks not only demonstrate the tragic extent of his disconnect with reality, they have also thoroughly poisoned the political atmosphere in Caracas, creating what's been described as a "cold civil war."
But it's not just a matter of some overly sensitive folk taking offense at some rude remarks. Chávez's brand of intolerance has turned the Venezuelan state into the most autocratic in the Americas short of the one led by his hero, Fidel Castro. It's no coincidence. In Dr. Milliet's view, "narcissism leads directly to an autocratic approach to power."
President Chávez has systematically placed diehard loyalists in key posts throughout the state apparatus. When you come to understand his behavior in terms of NPD, that’s not at all surprising: someone who understands the world as a struggle between people who agree with everything he says and does vs. evil will obviously do everything in his power to place unconditional allies in every position of power. And indeed, today, every nominally independent watchdog institution in Venezuela, from the Supreme Court to the Auditor General's office, is run by a presidential crony. With the National Assembly operating like a branch office of the presidential palace, the formal checks-and-balances written into the constitution have become a farce.
The case of the Attorney General is especially worrying. With nothing like a special counsel statute and no state criminal jurisdiction, the A.G. must approve every single criminal investigation and prosecution in Venezuela. Control this post, and you have total veto power over the entire penal system. For this reason, the A.G. is not a cabinet position in Venezuela like it is in the US. Because of its key role in fighting corruption and keeping watch over the legality of the government’s actions, the A.G. is set up as a fully independent, apolitical office in the Venezuelan constitution. But that clearly wouldn’t do for Chávez. For this most sensitive of offices, Chávez tapped perhaps his most unconditional ally, a doggedly loyal chavista fresh from a stint as vicepresident.
Not surprisingly, not a single pro-Chávez official has been convicted of anything, ever, despite numerous and well-documented allegations of serious corruption, and a mountain of evidence to suggest the government has organized its civilian supporters into armed militias. Chávez loyalists realize they're beyond the reach of the law, and behave accordingly. A growing list of armed attacks on opposition attests to the fact that the president's shock troops act under a kind of tacit blanket amnesty: several times the attackers have been fully identified by amateur video footage, but the government has never made the slightest attempt to arrest any of them.
[Last minute digression: In fact, it goes out of its way to make sure its activists enjoy total impunity. If you don't believe me, ask Marcos Vivas, the Judicial Police investigator for the Valles del Tuy region who was hurriedly taken off his post yesterday, apparently because he started to [gasp!] seriously investigate the Charallave shootings. They're now talking about re-deploying this poor guy to the damn Amazon jungle...a none too subtle hint to other would-be crusading cops who haven't been purged yet somehow...]
Once Chávez had every branch of government safely under his thumb, he set out to control society as a whole. On that score, he's been far less successful. An early attempt to grab the labor movement backfired disastrously when union members elected his most ardent critic to head the country's main labor federation. The independent news media has responded to four years of presidential threats, and insults by becoming strident, singleminded opponents of his government. Even the discredited old political parties that Chávez once thrived on vilifying have made something of a comeback.
In short, Venezuelans have wised up to the dangers of having a narcissist president, and they're now fully mobilized against him. Credible independent polls suggest some 60-65% of the voters want the president to resign. Most importantly, a remarkable proportion of those who oppose Chávez do so vehemently, actively, on the streets.
Venezuelans will not surrender their freedom to a narcissist-autocrat. The massive opposition movement has made the country impossible to govern, leaving only two options: a presidential transition or ongoing chaos. Many here worry that as his hold on power slips, Chávez could lash out, deploying the kind of widespread, indiscriminate violence he has so far shunned. The United States must make it clear that it will not tolerate such actions - not to the narcissist-in-chief, who is beyond reasoning with, but to his associates.
January 25, 2003
The opposite of freedom
It sounds a bit melodramatic, I know, but in Spanish the post of Human Rights Ombudsman is translated as Defensor del Pueblo - literally "defender of the people." Switch just a couple of letters around and you end up with Defensor del Puesto – Defender of his Post. Sure, it’s a silly pun, but still, it gets some smiles. Mostly it's fun because "Defensor del Puesto" is a far more accurate description of what our Human Rights Ombudsman, Germán Mundaraín, actually does, given his craven toadying towards the president and his obvious fear of doing anything that might anger him and undermine his position.
And you want to hear what's alarming?
Pretty soon, using that pun on the radio or on television is going to be against the law here.
Say "defensor del puesto" in front of a microphone and you'll face fines worth tens of thousands of dollars. The station you're on will risk losing its broadcast license. The pun is clearly disrespectful to our honorable Ombudsman, and under Chávez’s soon-to-be-approved Media Contents Law you’re just not allowed to say such things on the air.
Now, another thing that hasn’t made me any friends is my criticism of Venezuela’s private media – which long ago decided that political activism is much more fun than, y’know, actually reporting. Of course, I decided that too, but when I did, I realized the only honest course of action was to stop working as a reporter. The Venezuelan TV networks, on the other hand, continue to pretend to produce journalism even though it's clear that what they're all about is putting out as much material damaging to the government as they can.
Of course, the government has become so thuggish that making it look bad on TV is not particularly challenging. The proliferation of amateur videos showing chavista activists attacking opposition gatherings, often shooting guns into opposition crowds, is the most striking example. Those videos are for real, as are the reams of self-destructive presidential statements, the burping generals, the footage of soldiers beating on opposition activsts, or any of the long list of moronic own-goals the government has been scoring in plain view of the TV cameras. You don't need some sort of sophisticated media dirty tricks lab to make the government look thuggish on TV, as the chavistas would have it. No, you just have to put a camera in front of them and hit record.
Obviously the constant negative coverage is a problem for the government, and they've decided enough is enough. The government’s moving against the TV and radio stations in characteristically brutish style, with a a Media Content Law that looks like something straight out of the 1930s.
The bill bans broadcasting contents that “promote, condone or incite disrespect for the legitimate authorities and institutions, such as: members of the National Assembly, President of the Republic, Vicepresident, ministers, Supreme Tribunal Magistrates, Attorney General, Ombudsman, Comptroller General, CNE and Military authorities.”
Zo-wee! They sure didn’t leave anyone out, did they?!
It kills me that some first-world lefties still defend the Chávez government. Wake up, people: these people want to make it illegal for anyone to criticize them on the air! That's now characterized as a “very grave infraction” within the Contents' Law. Other new infractions include promoting, condoning or inciting either war, altering public order, committing crimes or doing anything against the "security of the nation." No doubt they'll gift us a friendly board of military men to decide just what does and what does not imperil the security of the nation, or what constitutes promoting disrespect against the Comptroller General, or what counts as incietement to public disorder. And they'll call the people on that board anything you can think of other than "censors," but that's exactly what they'll be.
How is it that Americans and Europeans who would have a triple-conniption at any initiative back home that was one fiftieth as dangerous to freedom of speech as this still sympathize with Chávez?
Under the bill, violating any of these new rules will justify a punitive 48 hour shutdown of the TV or radio station involved. Two such closures within 3 years are grounds for the final suspension of the broadcaster’s concession, effectively shutting them down for good. How long could it take until that starts happening?
It’s perfectly obvious that Chávez doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the ethics of journalism – you only have to spend 10 minutes watching state TV to understand that. What he wants is complete impunity, he wants to be able to give his underlings any orders at all without the whole world hearing about it. He can't do that while there's an independent media out there covering him, much less if that media is committed to shining a spotlight on every little abuse of power he perpetrates.
In other words, the days of Authoritarianism Lite are at an end. Any debate on the fine points of journalistic ethics and deontology wither into indifference in the face of this autocratic onslaught. The government wants the private broadcasters shut down not because of how often they lie, but because of how often they tell the truth.
The international community must issue an emphatic rejection to this authoritarian lunacy. They're really going too far now.
January 21, 2003
How to slide from political crisis to civil war without really trying
...or...
How the chavistas learned to love their guns
It's a tricky subject to write about, mostly because the opposition has been so irresponsible in talking about it. Listen to the strike leaders speak, and you'd think we're in Argentina in 1977, if not in Russia circa 1951. One of Carlos Ortega's favorite ways to start a sentence is "this totalitarian regime has..." That's absurd. Actually, it's worse than absurd: it's an unconscionable insult against the tens of millions of people who have been imprisoned, tortured and killed under real totalitarian regimes in the last hundred years. And that's something I refuse to do.
However, no matter how irresponsible strike leaders have been in characterizing the Chávez government, No matter how grotesquely exagerated their claims may be, that doesn't make it any less true that violence is on the rise in Venezuela. And fast, alarmingly fast.
Anyone who's followed my writing knows I'm pretty well covered against charges of alarmism here. The most puzzling thing about the first few years of the Chávez administration was not how much violence it employed, but how little. I've made that point again and again, both in print and informally, and it sure hasn't made me any friends. I've been attacked as a "cryptochavista" for saying so, doubtlessly it's landed me on opposition radicals' lists of the not-fully-reliable.
That, in itself, is a clear illustration of the infernal levels of intolerance that have gripped this country. As far as many people in the opposition are concerned, saying anything that might in any way reflect favorably on the government is close to heresy. And opposition radicals could always rebut my claim with all kinds of stories of intimidation, harrassment, baton beatings, rubber pelleting, tear gassing and even sporadic shooting to try to paint Chávez's as a kind of mobster regime.
Of course, I don't dispute that violence of that sort took place, and indeed it continues to take place. Some of my friends have been among the targets. What I mean when is that the mass-scale, indiscriminate, use of murderous violence to achieve political ends remained oddly absent from the mix.
I say "oddly" because everything else we knew about the regime suggested it should have had no compunctions about using violence - the theatrical militarism, the cult-of-personality, the autocratic intolerance, the use of threats in place of arguments, the endless chatter about revolutionary this and revolutionary that, the demonization of opponents, the entire ideological structure of chavismo seemed like a complex web of justifications for violence. Yet when the rubber hit the road, when the time came to actually act on that ideological combo-pack, chavistas seemed weirdly bashful.
What's alarming, though, is that little by little they're getting over it.
You can see it happening in Venezuela these days. The process is gradual, yes, it doesn't happen all at once. But you can actually see it happening in front of your eyes now, on your TV screen. It's unmistakable. And it's spooky as hell.
When chavistas first turned their guns on opposition protesters, back on April 11th, the country was so uniformly stunned that Chávez was actually toppled for 48 hours there in response. It was just inconceivable to us back then that one Venezuelan could shoot another over something so fleeting and banal as a political disagreement. These days, it's become almost routine. It barely elicits outrage anymore, just a grim shake of the head and a knot in the pit of your stomach.
And how could we be surprised at this point? Ever since since August 14th, when the Supreme Tribunal ruled that there had been no military rebellion on April 11th, groups of chavistas have been using guns on us more and more often. Especially since the start of 2003, the uptick in chavista violence is unmistakable. Attacks have happened all over the country, from Margarita to Punto Fijo, from big cities like Caracas and Valencia to tiny little villages like Socopó, in Barinas State, Carayaca and forgotten little hamlets in Guayana. This cannot be a coincidence; it's absurd to think that chavistas all over the country suddenly all decided to start attacking opposition gatherings at the same time. This is part of a plan.
(And I know I sound like a crazed opposition radical when I write that, and I hate to sound like those people, but the evidence is no longer ambiguous here.)
The gunmen have been fully identified several times now by stunningly brave amateur cameramen. The private TV stations - you know, the ones Chávez wants shut down (I wonder why?) - play the videos again and again. But the government never acts against these people. The only gunman now in detention is Joao de Gouveia, who wound up in jail merely because he broke the 11th commandment of the chavista shooter: if you're shooting in an opposition-controlled area, then for chrissake don't get caught be a municipal cop.
Yet even by the standards of this gradual routinization of violence, yesterday's shooting spree against the opposition in Charallave was especially troubling. On several levels. First off, because the opposition wasn't even ambushed, as in so many other occassions, by government supporters waiting at the end of their march path. No, this time, the gunmen were literally delivered to the march's starting point, opening fire from the roofs of speeding jeeps as a huge crowd of all ages and genders was getting ready to start marching. (Again, one very gutsy home video enthusiast has the footage to prove it.)
So there was no question of "clashing crowds" here, or "policemen trying to keep the groups apart" or any of the standard repertoir of obfuscation and smoke-screening the government usually employs to keep their denials plausible. None of that. Just a large crowd of people "armed only with flags and whistles" as the cliché goes, suddenly and randomly attacked for no reason at all other than being opposed to the autocrat.
When you peel away all of the nonsense and the visceral outrage and you just stare that situation straight in the face, what word comes to mind? And I am mindful of the way the term has been abused for political gain over the last 17 months, but when I look at what happened in Charallave yesterday I can think of only one word to describe it: terrorism.
And state terrorism, at that.
It's not just the incredible cowardice of the attack, its openness, its shamelessness. Perhaps even worse is the way the chavista mayor of Charallave more or less claimed responsibility for the attacks, in a statement that can't be that far off from what Hezbollah issues after shooting up some Israeli settlers. After proudly announcing that Charallave is | chavista territory,| mayor Marisela Mendoza said she hoped "it won't even occur to the opposition to try to march here again," apparently not fully aware that she was coming perilously close to confessing to being an accessory to murder. Because, oh yes, did I forget to mention that? Among the dozens of wounded there was one guy who never made it out of that march.
But then, in Venezuela, that barely counts as news these days.
The fear, the very widespread fear, is that we're only starting to see the top few inches of the tip of a distant iceberg here. I don't think there's any doubt anymore that the government has armed many, many of its civilian supporters, trained them, and is now working on getting them used to shooting at us when the order comes without thinking twice. That charming Mayor Mendoza there makes it achingly clear that some of them no longer feel the need to go through the motions of covering up their tracks. It's a fantastically dangerous situation.
It's just a fantastically dangerous situation.
...or...
How the chavistas learned to love their guns
It's a tricky subject to write about, mostly because the opposition has been so irresponsible in talking about it. Listen to the strike leaders speak, and you'd think we're in Argentina in 1977, if not in Russia circa 1951. One of Carlos Ortega's favorite ways to start a sentence is "this totalitarian regime has..." That's absurd. Actually, it's worse than absurd: it's an unconscionable insult against the tens of millions of people who have been imprisoned, tortured and killed under real totalitarian regimes in the last hundred years. And that's something I refuse to do.
However, no matter how irresponsible strike leaders have been in characterizing the Chávez government, No matter how grotesquely exagerated their claims may be, that doesn't make it any less true that violence is on the rise in Venezuela. And fast, alarmingly fast.
Anyone who's followed my writing knows I'm pretty well covered against charges of alarmism here. The most puzzling thing about the first few years of the Chávez administration was not how much violence it employed, but how little. I've made that point again and again, both in print and informally, and it sure hasn't made me any friends. I've been attacked as a "cryptochavista" for saying so, doubtlessly it's landed me on opposition radicals' lists of the not-fully-reliable.
That, in itself, is a clear illustration of the infernal levels of intolerance that have gripped this country. As far as many people in the opposition are concerned, saying anything that might in any way reflect favorably on the government is close to heresy. And opposition radicals could always rebut my claim with all kinds of stories of intimidation, harrassment, baton beatings, rubber pelleting, tear gassing and even sporadic shooting to try to paint Chávez's as a kind of mobster regime.
Of course, I don't dispute that violence of that sort took place, and indeed it continues to take place. Some of my friends have been among the targets. What I mean when is that the mass-scale, indiscriminate, use of murderous violence to achieve political ends remained oddly absent from the mix.
I say "oddly" because everything else we knew about the regime suggested it should have had no compunctions about using violence - the theatrical militarism, the cult-of-personality, the autocratic intolerance, the use of threats in place of arguments, the endless chatter about revolutionary this and revolutionary that, the demonization of opponents, the entire ideological structure of chavismo seemed like a complex web of justifications for violence. Yet when the rubber hit the road, when the time came to actually act on that ideological combo-pack, chavistas seemed weirdly bashful.
What's alarming, though, is that little by little they're getting over it.
You can see it happening in Venezuela these days. The process is gradual, yes, it doesn't happen all at once. But you can actually see it happening in front of your eyes now, on your TV screen. It's unmistakable. And it's spooky as hell.
When chavistas first turned their guns on opposition protesters, back on April 11th, the country was so uniformly stunned that Chávez was actually toppled for 48 hours there in response. It was just inconceivable to us back then that one Venezuelan could shoot another over something so fleeting and banal as a political disagreement. These days, it's become almost routine. It barely elicits outrage anymore, just a grim shake of the head and a knot in the pit of your stomach.
And how could we be surprised at this point? Ever since since August 14th, when the Supreme Tribunal ruled that there had been no military rebellion on April 11th, groups of chavistas have been using guns on us more and more often. Especially since the start of 2003, the uptick in chavista violence is unmistakable. Attacks have happened all over the country, from Margarita to Punto Fijo, from big cities like Caracas and Valencia to tiny little villages like Socopó, in Barinas State, Carayaca and forgotten little hamlets in Guayana. This cannot be a coincidence; it's absurd to think that chavistas all over the country suddenly all decided to start attacking opposition gatherings at the same time. This is part of a plan.
(And I know I sound like a crazed opposition radical when I write that, and I hate to sound like those people, but the evidence is no longer ambiguous here.)
The gunmen have been fully identified several times now by stunningly brave amateur cameramen. The private TV stations - you know, the ones Chávez wants shut down (I wonder why?) - play the videos again and again. But the government never acts against these people. The only gunman now in detention is Joao de Gouveia, who wound up in jail merely because he broke the 11th commandment of the chavista shooter: if you're shooting in an opposition-controlled area, then for chrissake don't get caught be a municipal cop.
Yet even by the standards of this gradual routinization of violence, yesterday's shooting spree against the opposition in Charallave was especially troubling. On several levels. First off, because the opposition wasn't even ambushed, as in so many other occassions, by government supporters waiting at the end of their march path. No, this time, the gunmen were literally delivered to the march's starting point, opening fire from the roofs of speeding jeeps as a huge crowd of all ages and genders was getting ready to start marching. (Again, one very gutsy home video enthusiast has the footage to prove it.)
So there was no question of "clashing crowds" here, or "policemen trying to keep the groups apart" or any of the standard repertoir of obfuscation and smoke-screening the government usually employs to keep their denials plausible. None of that. Just a large crowd of people "armed only with flags and whistles" as the cliché goes, suddenly and randomly attacked for no reason at all other than being opposed to the autocrat.
When you peel away all of the nonsense and the visceral outrage and you just stare that situation straight in the face, what word comes to mind? And I am mindful of the way the term has been abused for political gain over the last 17 months, but when I look at what happened in Charallave yesterday I can think of only one word to describe it: terrorism.
And state terrorism, at that.
It's not just the incredible cowardice of the attack, its openness, its shamelessness. Perhaps even worse is the way the chavista mayor of Charallave more or less claimed responsibility for the attacks, in a statement that can't be that far off from what Hezbollah issues after shooting up some Israeli settlers. After proudly announcing that Charallave is | chavista territory,| mayor Marisela Mendoza said she hoped "it won't even occur to the opposition to try to march here again," apparently not fully aware that she was coming perilously close to confessing to being an accessory to murder. Because, oh yes, did I forget to mention that? Among the dozens of wounded there was one guy who never made it out of that march.
But then, in Venezuela, that barely counts as news these days.
The fear, the very widespread fear, is that we're only starting to see the top few inches of the tip of a distant iceberg here. I don't think there's any doubt anymore that the government has armed many, many of its civilian supporters, trained them, and is now working on getting them used to shooting at us when the order comes without thinking twice. That charming Mayor Mendoza there makes it achingly clear that some of them no longer feel the need to go through the motions of covering up their tracks. It's a fantastically dangerous situation.
It's just a fantastically dangerous situation.
January 18, 2003
Revolutionary priorities
My friend Erica was telling me the other day about an essay by Gabriel García Márquez she read. In it, he explains that the only reason people think his books have all these fantastic, supernatural elements is that they've never been to Latin America. Around here, that stuff's not fantastic at all, it's just...life! From a Latin American perspective, most of 100 Years of Solitude is pretty much, you know, beat reporting...
It's certainly the feeling you got watching the news here yesterday. The government, determined to break a terrorists strike that's threatening the health of the nation, decided to finally take action. Military platoons fanned out to Aragua and Carabobo States to crack down on the evil oligarchs' striking companies. And which plants did they takeover first? Well, the breweries and the coke bottling plant, of course!
If you turned on the TV in Venezuela yesterday around noonish, what you saw was General Acosta Carles, the man in charge of liberating coke, greedily gulping down a soda in a gesture of revolutionary defiance. Just to punctuate his zeal, he then turned to the camera and belched "loud and long," as the LA Times (registration required) put it, before going on to more or less taunt the reporters there for about 20 minutes, in a bizarre show of thuggery mixed with just plain bad taste. General Acosta Carles first became notorious as the dude who randomly beats up on women demonstrators for very little reason. From yesterday on, he'll be remembered as General Belch.
The whole thing was surreal...soldiers pouring out by the dozen to "liberate" the nation's beer and coke. The heavily armed shocktroops of a leftist revolution safeguarding every Venezuelan's right to drink CocaCola. Just strange as hell, really. I mean, they could've gone to a food plant, they could've forced a hospital to reopen or something like that. Oh, but no.
The revolution has its priorities straight.
Beer comes first.
Everything else can wait.
My friend Erica was telling me the other day about an essay by Gabriel García Márquez she read. In it, he explains that the only reason people think his books have all these fantastic, supernatural elements is that they've never been to Latin America. Around here, that stuff's not fantastic at all, it's just...life! From a Latin American perspective, most of 100 Years of Solitude is pretty much, you know, beat reporting...
It's certainly the feeling you got watching the news here yesterday. The government, determined to break a terrorists strike that's threatening the health of the nation, decided to finally take action. Military platoons fanned out to Aragua and Carabobo States to crack down on the evil oligarchs' striking companies. And which plants did they takeover first? Well, the breweries and the coke bottling plant, of course!
If you turned on the TV in Venezuela yesterday around noonish, what you saw was General Acosta Carles, the man in charge of liberating coke, greedily gulping down a soda in a gesture of revolutionary defiance. Just to punctuate his zeal, he then turned to the camera and belched "loud and long," as the LA Times (registration required) put it, before going on to more or less taunt the reporters there for about 20 minutes, in a bizarre show of thuggery mixed with just plain bad taste. General Acosta Carles first became notorious as the dude who randomly beats up on women demonstrators for very little reason. From yesterday on, he'll be remembered as General Belch.
The whole thing was surreal...soldiers pouring out by the dozen to "liberate" the nation's beer and coke. The heavily armed shocktroops of a leftist revolution safeguarding every Venezuelan's right to drink CocaCola. Just strange as hell, really. I mean, they could've gone to a food plant, they could've forced a hospital to reopen or something like that. Oh, but no.
The revolution has its priorities straight.
Beer comes first.
Everything else can wait.
January 15, 2003
Blocking the exits
Most opposition supporters have been looking forward to Feb. 2nd with some anxiety, seeing that day's referendum on whether Chávez should resign as our last best hope, short of an (impossible) negotiated agreement, to settle the crisis peacefully. But today's papers bring bad news. They're full of reports today that the Supreme Tribunal is about to cancel the vote on what could kindly be described as a technicality. The decision hasn’t been made yet, but it looks like the fix is in. With this latest, shameful act, the Tribunal shuts the door on one of the few peaceful, scrupulously democratic exits available to the crisis. It’s hard to imagine how the political climate here could sour any more than it already has, but this might be just the ticket.
The proposed “consultative referendum” scheduled for Feb. 2nd is an experiment unprecedented in Venezuela’s contemporary history. For the first time ever, a referendum was called by popular initiative. More than 1.5 million voters signed a petition to demand the right to vote on whether the president should be asked to resign. That’s 300,000 more signatures than the 10% of voters required to call such a referendum under article 71 of the constitution. The signature gathering drive, conducted by thousands of unpaid volunteers, was a real first for this country: a real grassroots movement driven by citizens looking to solve the country’s problems directly, whether or not their political “leaders” like it. And the idea could not have better, more inclusive and democratic credentials. Voting is the only way to guarantee that EVERY Venezuelan – rich or poor, black or white, chavista or anti – gets a say on the overarching question facing the country today: should Hugo Chávez remain in power, or not?
Predictably, the government mobilized en masse to scuttle the vote. High ranking officials labeled us fascists and coupsters for the horrible crimes of hitting the streets, clipboards in hand, to collect signatures. This must be the only country on earth where citizens who demand the right to vote are vilified as fascists by those who, from their comfortable perches in the corridors of power, are doing everything they possibly can to keep them away from a ballot box. Then, on November 4th, Chávez supporters attacked us with stones, bottles, and even guns when about 50,000 of us marched to the National Elections Council to turn in our signatures. Several people were wounded, some seriously.
Chávez and his cronies are understandably terrified by the prospect of a referendum. And it’s little wonder, polls have consistently showed 60-65% of Venezuelan voters would ask Chávez to resign. These, incidentally, are methodologically sound polls, conducted in people’s homes, weighted for socioeconomic variables, and using large sample sizes – polls conducted by the same companies and in the same way as those that accurately predicted Chávez’s landslide victory in 1998.
Even if it’s not binding, a 62-38 referendum result, say, would be politically devastating to a president who’s always held on to the fiction that the only ones who oppose him are just a tiny cabal of conspiracy-minded plutocrats, a sort of secret society of hyperprivileged whiners. It would expose the president’s ideological cornerstone – his claim to represent the will of most Venezuelans – as the grotesque farce it is.
The president himself, in a unconscionable show of his growing contempt for what anybody else thinks, vowed that he would not step down “even if 90% voted yes.” Gone is the exalted talk about popular sovereignty we heard 4 years ago, gone is the rhetoric about how “the people are the owners of this country, their will is above anything the laws or the constitution might say, bla bla bla bla bla…” Chávez has tossed the entire ideological foundation for his “revolution” to the pyre in his panicky effort to stop the referendum. Suddenly, convoluted legal maneuvers are a-OK so long as they help stop the vote.
What’s worse, though, what’s most angering, is the Supreme Tribunal’s rampant irresponsibility in playing along with this idiocy. We knew these guys were picked for their political loyalties from day one, of course they were. But we never knew they were fanatical enough to toss the country over a cliff-edge in order to protect their boss. By shutting down even this scrupulously inclusive, spotlessly democratic proposal, by refusing to let the voters have a say on the crisis, they all but guarantee that the confrontation will become even more radicalized, even more mindlessly destructive.
As they toss the last shards of the rule-of-law into the chavista bonfire, these people are messing with forces they barely understand. So far, what’s most remarkable about the crisis here is that it hasn’t been more violent, that the deaths can be numbered in the dozens rather than hundreds or thousands. But if the Feb. 2nd vote is stopped – and everything suggests it will be – the Supreme Tribunal will really be courting civil war. Venezuela hasn’t experienced anything like a real civil war in over 150 years. And these magistrates will have to live with their consciences in the knowledge that they had it in their power to open the door to a democratic way of settling the impasse, and they blocked it.
Somebody, at some point, somehow needs to step forward and start the thankless task of de-escalating this crisis. But in the atmosphere of out-of-control polarization and mindless partisanship that reigns unchallenged over this town, nobody seems willing to take that kind of political risk. Chávez doesn’t know how to de-escalate, his cronies are too scared to antagonize him by bucking his line, and his opponents are too scared of losing face by looking “soft on Chávez” in any way. So escalation, mindless escalation, is all we’re getting. And nobody seems willing to stop, take a deep breath, take stock of the situation, and realize what an incredibly dangerous game we’re playing.
Most opposition supporters have been looking forward to Feb. 2nd with some anxiety, seeing that day's referendum on whether Chávez should resign as our last best hope, short of an (impossible) negotiated agreement, to settle the crisis peacefully. But today's papers bring bad news. They're full of reports today that the Supreme Tribunal is about to cancel the vote on what could kindly be described as a technicality. The decision hasn’t been made yet, but it looks like the fix is in. With this latest, shameful act, the Tribunal shuts the door on one of the few peaceful, scrupulously democratic exits available to the crisis. It’s hard to imagine how the political climate here could sour any more than it already has, but this might be just the ticket.
The proposed “consultative referendum” scheduled for Feb. 2nd is an experiment unprecedented in Venezuela’s contemporary history. For the first time ever, a referendum was called by popular initiative. More than 1.5 million voters signed a petition to demand the right to vote on whether the president should be asked to resign. That’s 300,000 more signatures than the 10% of voters required to call such a referendum under article 71 of the constitution. The signature gathering drive, conducted by thousands of unpaid volunteers, was a real first for this country: a real grassroots movement driven by citizens looking to solve the country’s problems directly, whether or not their political “leaders” like it. And the idea could not have better, more inclusive and democratic credentials. Voting is the only way to guarantee that EVERY Venezuelan – rich or poor, black or white, chavista or anti – gets a say on the overarching question facing the country today: should Hugo Chávez remain in power, or not?
Predictably, the government mobilized en masse to scuttle the vote. High ranking officials labeled us fascists and coupsters for the horrible crimes of hitting the streets, clipboards in hand, to collect signatures. This must be the only country on earth where citizens who demand the right to vote are vilified as fascists by those who, from their comfortable perches in the corridors of power, are doing everything they possibly can to keep them away from a ballot box. Then, on November 4th, Chávez supporters attacked us with stones, bottles, and even guns when about 50,000 of us marched to the National Elections Council to turn in our signatures. Several people were wounded, some seriously.
Chávez and his cronies are understandably terrified by the prospect of a referendum. And it’s little wonder, polls have consistently showed 60-65% of Venezuelan voters would ask Chávez to resign. These, incidentally, are methodologically sound polls, conducted in people’s homes, weighted for socioeconomic variables, and using large sample sizes – polls conducted by the same companies and in the same way as those that accurately predicted Chávez’s landslide victory in 1998.
Even if it’s not binding, a 62-38 referendum result, say, would be politically devastating to a president who’s always held on to the fiction that the only ones who oppose him are just a tiny cabal of conspiracy-minded plutocrats, a sort of secret society of hyperprivileged whiners. It would expose the president’s ideological cornerstone – his claim to represent the will of most Venezuelans – as the grotesque farce it is.
The president himself, in a unconscionable show of his growing contempt for what anybody else thinks, vowed that he would not step down “even if 90% voted yes.” Gone is the exalted talk about popular sovereignty we heard 4 years ago, gone is the rhetoric about how “the people are the owners of this country, their will is above anything the laws or the constitution might say, bla bla bla bla bla…” Chávez has tossed the entire ideological foundation for his “revolution” to the pyre in his panicky effort to stop the referendum. Suddenly, convoluted legal maneuvers are a-OK so long as they help stop the vote.
What’s worse, though, what’s most angering, is the Supreme Tribunal’s rampant irresponsibility in playing along with this idiocy. We knew these guys were picked for their political loyalties from day one, of course they were. But we never knew they were fanatical enough to toss the country over a cliff-edge in order to protect their boss. By shutting down even this scrupulously inclusive, spotlessly democratic proposal, by refusing to let the voters have a say on the crisis, they all but guarantee that the confrontation will become even more radicalized, even more mindlessly destructive.
As they toss the last shards of the rule-of-law into the chavista bonfire, these people are messing with forces they barely understand. So far, what’s most remarkable about the crisis here is that it hasn’t been more violent, that the deaths can be numbered in the dozens rather than hundreds or thousands. But if the Feb. 2nd vote is stopped – and everything suggests it will be – the Supreme Tribunal will really be courting civil war. Venezuela hasn’t experienced anything like a real civil war in over 150 years. And these magistrates will have to live with their consciences in the knowledge that they had it in their power to open the door to a democratic way of settling the impasse, and they blocked it.
Somebody, at some point, somehow needs to step forward and start the thankless task of de-escalating this crisis. But in the atmosphere of out-of-control polarization and mindless partisanship that reigns unchallenged over this town, nobody seems willing to take that kind of political risk. Chávez doesn’t know how to de-escalate, his cronies are too scared to antagonize him by bucking his line, and his opponents are too scared of losing face by looking “soft on Chávez” in any way. So escalation, mindless escalation, is all we’re getting. And nobody seems willing to stop, take a deep breath, take stock of the situation, and realize what an incredibly dangerous game we’re playing.
January 13, 2003
So how come Caracas Chronicles suddenly isn't password protected anymore?
From "Francisco Toro"
Date Mon, 13 Jan 2003 5:57 PM
To "Patrick J. Lyons"
Subject
--------------------------------------------------
Dear Pat,
After much careful consideration, I’ve decided I can’t continue reporting for the New York Times. As I examine the problem, I realize it would take much more than just pulling down my blog to address your conflict of interests concerns. Too much of my lifestyle is bound up with opposition activism at the moment, from participating in several NGOs, to organizing events and attending protest marches. But even if I gave all of that up, I don’t think I could muster the level of emotional detachment from the story that the New York Times demands. For better or for worse, my country’s democracy is in peril now, and I can’t possibly be neutral about that.
I appreciate your understanding throughout this difficult time, and I hope in the future, conditions will allow for me to contribute with the World Business page again.
Sincerely,
Francisco Toro
--------------------------------------------------
[Part of me is certain I'll live to regret having sent that email, but the rest of me is just relieved. -ft]
From "Francisco Toro"
Date Mon, 13 Jan 2003 5:57 PM
To "Patrick J. Lyons"
Subject
--------------------------------------------------
Dear Pat,
After much careful consideration, I’ve decided I can’t continue reporting for the New York Times. As I examine the problem, I realize it would take much more than just pulling down my blog to address your conflict of interests concerns. Too much of my lifestyle is bound up with opposition activism at the moment, from participating in several NGOs, to organizing events and attending protest marches. But even if I gave all of that up, I don’t think I could muster the level of emotional detachment from the story that the New York Times demands. For better or for worse, my country’s democracy is in peril now, and I can’t possibly be neutral about that.
I appreciate your understanding throughout this difficult time, and I hope in the future, conditions will allow for me to contribute with the World Business page again.
Sincerely,
Francisco Toro
--------------------------------------------------
[Part of me is certain I'll live to regret having sent that email, but the rest of me is just relieved. -ft]
January 11, 2003
The case for despondency
Today I came closer than ever to succumbing to complete despondency, just absolute hopelessness. The impasse is total right now, and it's very difficult for me to visualize any way out of the crisis. On the one hand, as Gaviria keeps saying, the only possible solution is through negotiations, through give-and-take. On the other hand, Hugo Chávez will not, cannot, doesn't know how and wouldn't want to negotiate. Everyone can see that escalation is mad at this point, just mindlessly destructive and stupid. But escalation is all we seem to get.
Gaviria's speech two nights ago was powerful and wise. He said Venezuela might find an "outcome" that's not negotiated. The government could crush the opposition outright, or the opposition might overthrow the government against its will. But those wouldn't be solutions, they would be outcomes. They wouldn't address the underlying causes of the crisis, and they could leave the country unstable for years to come.
The opposition may not be able to stop the country cold, but they can disrupt life enough to send the economy into chaos and make the country ungovernable. And if Chávez is shoved out of power in a way his supporters don't accept as legitimate, they could set the country alight. So outcomes are cheap, there are lots of possible outcomes. But a solution to the crisis, a solution that leaves the country peaceful and democratic and minimally functional...that's something else entirely. Only bona fide negotiations can bring about a solution.
Now, it's sad but true that not everyone in the opposition wants a negotiated solution. There's a fringe that would clearly prefer a right wing coup. But I think there's a critical mass of opposition opinion that would support a negotiated agreement, if one was on offer. Moderate voices would probably reach a deal if they could. The opposition crazies could be marginalized through debate.
The problem is that, on the goverment's side, there's no comparable debate where extremists might be isolated, because there is no comparable variety of views. There's no such thing as "a critical mass of government opinion" because "government opinion" is exactly the same thing as Hugo Chávez's opinion. And you can't marginalize their crazies because the government is run by the crazy-in-chief.
The autocratic, cult-of-personality underpinnings of the chavista movement are so marked that only the president's opinion matters. And his views are like the antidote to negotiation. Hugo Chávez has made a political career out of equating negotiation with selling out, compromise with treason, and accomodation with surrender. Every time he speaks, he makes a mockery of the hopes of those who think it might be possible to work out an agreement with him.
It's hard to know how to write about Chávez's style of oratory. For those of you who've heard him, any description is superfluous; for those of you who haven't, any description is insufficient. Picture the most charismatic southern preacher you've ever seen, then square it. Behind a podium, Hugo Chávez is a man possessed. He doesn't speak, he shouts into a microphone in a kind of ecstatic fit. He can keep it up for hours and hours at a stretch. In four years he's fine-tuned his fire-breathing style of oratory. As his face contorts and the bombastic nonsense spews out in thicker and thicker densities, it's impossible not to wonder about the man's mental health. And as his ecstatic supporters get worked up into a hero-worshipping frenzy, it's impossible not to wonder about theirs.
The soundbytes that make it into the following day's newspapers vary, though usually they focus on the most over-the-top remark of the speech. Picking it out is not always easy; there are so many candidates. Real jewels get relegated to the inside pages by truly grotesque nuggets of megalomanic gobbledygook. For instance, yesterday he described Venezuela's four major private TV channels as "the four horsemen of the apocalypse." But the remark - incredibly incendiary though it was - was upstaged by his even more sinister threats to order a military take-over of Venezuela's entire food industry.
On the other hand, some of the most destructive stuff he says doesn't even make the news anymore simply because he's repeated it so often. Nobody cares that he labelled the oil industry's managers a cabal of coup-plotting terrorist saboteurs again yesterday: it's the Nth time he's said it this week. There's a strong element of pathos to the nonsense marathons: nobody really takes him that seriously. After all, if he literally thought the PDVSA managers are really terrorists, wouldn't you think he might have put at least some of them in jail? So it's empty bluster, and people recognize it as empty bluster, but it still rankles. Today it was a threat to takeover all the nation's private schools and jail their principals to break the strike, tomorrow it will be some other fantastically unworkable bit of neomarxist intellectual onanism. The specifics don't really matter that much, because none of these mad schemes are even remotely practicable. Nobody really takes them that seriously.
Now, it's an open question whether the president intentionally sets out to inflame the crisis with statements like those or whether they're just an accidental byproduct of the self-hypnotic trance that the presence of TV cameras seems to send him into. What nobody can question, though, is the way this kind of talk poisons the nation's political atmosphere. Columnists here have said it a million times in a million different ways: the torrent of bile that pours out of the president's mouth everytime he gets near a microphone could be the single biggest obstacle to a negotiated solution in Venezuela today.
So you can understand the reasons my despondency. It's a simple, ineluctable syllogism, really:
Premise 1: Negotiating an agreement is the only way to find a peaceful, democratic solution to the crisis.
Premise 2: One of the parties to the conflict is working as hard as he can every single day to make sure negotiations can't succeed.
Ergo: There cannot be a peaceful, democratic solution to this crisis.
A dire, dark, depressing realization, no? The deadlock continues indeffinitely into the future while more and more businesses fail, more and more people lose their jobs, and the nation continues its steady, seemingly irreversible descent into total chaos. It's grim, it's really grim.
January 10, 2003
Friendly nations? Friendly to whom?
PDVSA’s strikers probably never set out to internationalize the Venezuelan conflict, but it looks like that’s exactly what they’ve done. The Washington Post reports today that the U.S. is about to launch a major diplomatic initiative to try to break the political deadlock here. The subtext is none-too-subtle here: there’s a war scheduled for next month, and the US can’t have major disruptions to its oil supply during a middle east conflict. So results, quick results, are of the essence.
As reported in the Post, the proposal is sneaky as hell, taking a Chávez proposal and transforming it subtly but decisively into the polar opposite of what he’d envisioned. Ten days ago, at Lula’s inauguration in Brazil, Chávez called for the creation of a “group of friendly nations” to help Venezuela overcome the crisis. Given Chávez’s psychopathological inability to differentiate between “Venezuela” and “me”, the proposal amounted to a plea issued at other left-wing or anti-U.S. governments to help Chávez break the oil strike. The “friendly nations” he had in mind were Cuba, Brazil, and soon-to-be-ruled-by-a-lefty Ecuador, along with Iran and Algeria – countries with some ideological affinities and some of the know-how needed to help get the oil industry crackin’ again.
At the same time, the proposal was meant to undermine the negotiations now being brokered by César Gaviria, who heads the Organization of American States. The Gaviria talks, centered as they are in seeking an “electoral solution” that Chávez looks highly unlikely to survive, have become a huge albatross around the president’s neck. His negotiators have been stalling and blocking negotiations for months now, while every government in the region throws its weight behind the initiative. Part of the idea, then, was to shift the focus of debate from the OAS to a group of “friendly (to Chávez) nations.”
Governments around the region were immediately suspicious of the plan – even Lula seemed cautious about it. Earlier this week Mexico’s foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda – who moonlights as one of my favorite writers – made a first statement about it, urging caution about taking steps that might be interpreted as hostile by the Venezuelan opposition. Very few hemispheric leaders wanted to be seen as taking sides with a leader as tone-deaf on democracy as Chávez
But then Washington seems to have devised an altogether better plan – rather than poo-pooing the Friendly Nations proposal, why not co-opt it? After all, where does it say that Hugo Chávez gets to decide which countries are friendly to Venezuela, and how those countries should behave? Riding this wave of inspiration, the U.S. will couch its diplomatic initiative in the language of Friendly Nations, except those nations will now include the U.S., Mexico, Chile and Spain, instead of Cuba and Iran. What’s more, rather than an alternative to the OAS talks, US diplomats are talking about it as “trying to put a little more ooomph behind what Gaviria is doing.”
Sneaky bastards these gringos…
Now, whether this is all going to fly is still very much open to debate. Washington’s main goal is to get the oil flowing again in the shortest time possible, and there’s no reasonably quick way of doing that other than allowing the striking oil managers to take control of the company again. This would be a catastrophic humiliation to a president who’s been slamming those guys as coup-loving terrorist coup-plotting sabouteur traitor coupsters for weeks now. And it’s not particularly clear why Chávez would back any of the solutions on offer at the OAS talks – solutions he’s been openly disdainful of for months.
Still, the initiative puts the crisis here on an international footing, and the higher priority the crisis has the more the world will scrutinize the government, and the harder it’ll be for the government to get away with any of the tin-pot autocratic delirium that passes for governing here. The more scrutiny we get here, the better.
The opposition must be thrilled about this, who can doubt it? The absence of any sort of movement in the last couple of weeks of the crisis has been driving them crazy – they need some sort of sense that they’re moving forward, that something is happening, that there is some light at the end of the tunnel. And they – no, not they, the country – is desperately in need of some sort of face-saving way to lift this strike, which risks unleashing a fiscal, financial and economic crisis of Argentine proportions.
So yes, God yes, let us have a bit of neo-imperialist gringo meddling here. We desperately need it.
PDVSA’s strikers probably never set out to internationalize the Venezuelan conflict, but it looks like that’s exactly what they’ve done. The Washington Post reports today that the U.S. is about to launch a major diplomatic initiative to try to break the political deadlock here. The subtext is none-too-subtle here: there’s a war scheduled for next month, and the US can’t have major disruptions to its oil supply during a middle east conflict. So results, quick results, are of the essence.
As reported in the Post, the proposal is sneaky as hell, taking a Chávez proposal and transforming it subtly but decisively into the polar opposite of what he’d envisioned. Ten days ago, at Lula’s inauguration in Brazil, Chávez called for the creation of a “group of friendly nations” to help Venezuela overcome the crisis. Given Chávez’s psychopathological inability to differentiate between “Venezuela” and “me”, the proposal amounted to a plea issued at other left-wing or anti-U.S. governments to help Chávez break the oil strike. The “friendly nations” he had in mind were Cuba, Brazil, and soon-to-be-ruled-by-a-lefty Ecuador, along with Iran and Algeria – countries with some ideological affinities and some of the know-how needed to help get the oil industry crackin’ again.
At the same time, the proposal was meant to undermine the negotiations now being brokered by César Gaviria, who heads the Organization of American States. The Gaviria talks, centered as they are in seeking an “electoral solution” that Chávez looks highly unlikely to survive, have become a huge albatross around the president’s neck. His negotiators have been stalling and blocking negotiations for months now, while every government in the region throws its weight behind the initiative. Part of the idea, then, was to shift the focus of debate from the OAS to a group of “friendly (to Chávez) nations.”
Governments around the region were immediately suspicious of the plan – even Lula seemed cautious about it. Earlier this week Mexico’s foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda – who moonlights as one of my favorite writers – made a first statement about it, urging caution about taking steps that might be interpreted as hostile by the Venezuelan opposition. Very few hemispheric leaders wanted to be seen as taking sides with a leader as tone-deaf on democracy as Chávez
But then Washington seems to have devised an altogether better plan – rather than poo-pooing the Friendly Nations proposal, why not co-opt it? After all, where does it say that Hugo Chávez gets to decide which countries are friendly to Venezuela, and how those countries should behave? Riding this wave of inspiration, the U.S. will couch its diplomatic initiative in the language of Friendly Nations, except those nations will now include the U.S., Mexico, Chile and Spain, instead of Cuba and Iran. What’s more, rather than an alternative to the OAS talks, US diplomats are talking about it as “trying to put a little more ooomph behind what Gaviria is doing.”
Sneaky bastards these gringos…
Now, whether this is all going to fly is still very much open to debate. Washington’s main goal is to get the oil flowing again in the shortest time possible, and there’s no reasonably quick way of doing that other than allowing the striking oil managers to take control of the company again. This would be a catastrophic humiliation to a president who’s been slamming those guys as coup-loving terrorist coup-plotting sabouteur traitor coupsters for weeks now. And it’s not particularly clear why Chávez would back any of the solutions on offer at the OAS talks – solutions he’s been openly disdainful of for months.
Still, the initiative puts the crisis here on an international footing, and the higher priority the crisis has the more the world will scrutinize the government, and the harder it’ll be for the government to get away with any of the tin-pot autocratic delirium that passes for governing here. The more scrutiny we get here, the better.
The opposition must be thrilled about this, who can doubt it? The absence of any sort of movement in the last couple of weeks of the crisis has been driving them crazy – they need some sort of sense that they’re moving forward, that something is happening, that there is some light at the end of the tunnel. And they – no, not they, the country – is desperately in need of some sort of face-saving way to lift this strike, which risks unleashing a fiscal, financial and economic crisis of Argentine proportions.
So yes, God yes, let us have a bit of neo-imperialist gringo meddling here. We desperately need it.
January 7, 2003
Dark hours for journalism
It’s tough being a journalist in this country, especially if, like me, you’re trying to juggle roles as a critic in the local press and a beat reporter for a U.S. newspaper. Trying to play both roles – and trying to mediate between the sides – takes its toll. It’s the reason, in any event, for the new and regrettable need to password-protect this blog: one of my US editors was very uncomfortable with having one of his reporters taking such openly political stances on a public website.
The Venezuelan media and the foreign press corps are caught in a spiral of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust. The foreign press is horrified by the openly partisan nature of almost all reporting here, where the private press spends 95% of its time ruthlessly attacking the government and the public media spends 100% of its time defending it. Venezuelan reporters (well, opposition reporters) are just as appalled at the foreign papers’ insistence on treating Chávez as a more-or-less normal president, entitled to a fair hearing and to having the things he says reported at face value, as though they have any sort of connection with reality. Each is convinced the other is presenting a massively distorted story here to its audience. It’s not easy at all to juggle the two roles.
Fact is, neither the Venezuelans nor the gringos are giving their readers what they need to form an accurate picture of reality. Venezuelan readers have been exposed to four years of presidential lunacy; the last thing they need is yet another rant vilifying Chávez. What they could really use, though, is some dispassionately reported information to help them make sense of an increasingly volatile and dangerous situation, and they’re not getting it.
But U.S. readers, most of whom probably couldn’t pick Venezuela apart from Namibia on a map, are not well-served by “neutral” reporting that takes a he-said/she-said approach to covering the government’s disputes with the opposition. U.S. readers don’t have the background knowledge that they need to tell truth apart from falsehood here, and U.S. papers too often report giant, stinking, howling chavista lies without giving their readers the guidance they would need to recognize them as giant, stinking, howling chavista lies.
In general, U.S. papers have two ways of dealing with information from abroad. Normal countries with sane rulers are covered one way, abnormal countries with pathological rulers are treated in another way. Nobody would accuse the U.S. press of bias for basically dismissing statements from a Mohammar Khadafi, or a Robert Mugabe or an Slobodan Milosevic. These people have clearly crossed all sorts of red lines that put them well beyond the pale, so U.S. papers don’t feel the need to observe basic standards of journalistic politesse towards them.
At this point, Chávez is clearly getting sane-ruler treatment in the U.S. press, and that’s driving opposition-minded Venezuelans half mad. The Venezuelan press, including the magazine I write for, long ago decided that Chávez had screwed up so much that they’re allowed to play rough with him. For better or for worse, they’ve concluded that this government is incompatible with ongoing democracy, and that the imperative to fight the enemies of democracy overrides the standard dictates of journalistic ethics. So the private media here barely pay lip service to notions like journalistic balance anymore. Their raison d’etre is to undermine the government. To the extent that informing the public fits in with that, they’ll inform the public. But in cases where it doesn’t, they won’t.
The resulting stream of viscerally antichavista pap on the TV and in the newspapers is far from the kind of journalism I want to practice…even if, substantively, I agree with many of the criticisms levelled. The problem is that what the local press is producing is not really journalism at all, it’s propaganda disguised as journalism. Who knows? Maybe they’re right to act that way. Maybe when faced with a government as dangerous to democracy as this one, one’s duty as a citizen overwhelms one’s duty as a journalist. That’s a philosophical question; I’m not sure what the answer is. Clearly, TV stations are private businesses, and if their owners want to use them as propaganda mills that’s their prerogative.
What bugs me, though, and what I don’t accept, is the way the propaganda-making mascarades as something it’s not, how it uses journalists and the stylistic conventions of journalism to try to lay claim to journalism’s aura of credibility. If Channels 2, 4, 10 and 33 have decided that their sacred duty is to attack a dangerous government rather than to practice journalism, they should take the newscast logos off the screens, send their journalists on vacation and put opposition politicians in front of the cameras 24 hours a day (sad fact is, the content wouldn’t change much.)
Most antichavistas I say that to look at me like I’m smoking crack. They've gotten used to living in an atmosphered suffused with partisan propagandizing and they're seething with visceral (if well-deserved) anger at the government. They can’t for the life of them understand why the foreign press insists on covering the differences between chavistas and antichavistas more or less the way they might cover the differences between Tony Blair and the British Tories. They tend to assume that the foreigners must just be ignorant, that if they really knew what the government gets up to, they’d cover the news differently.
As a result, foreign correspondents here are constantly getting backed into these long, tediously didactic rants by opposition activists. Sometimes they’re not much more than cathartic gripe sessions where chavista outrages are piled one on top of the other for hours on end. Too often, though, they’re models of condescension, treating these fancy WashPost or L.A. Times journalists like they’re more or less mentally retarded. It’s painful to watch.
But, of course, the strategy is silly because, appalling as these journalists might find Chávez’s antics, they don’t rise anywhere near the threshold needed for a good old fashioned campaign of international villification. This is really, really hard for opposition-minded Venezuelans to understand, much less accept. But Milosevic had to start three separate wars before he got the full baddie treatment from the foreign press. Mugabe didn’t get it until he explicitly shifted the entire rationale of his government to racial hatred. Saddam Hussein had to start two wars and nerve gas his own civilians before the western press decided he’d forefeited his claim to journalistic politesse. The rap on Chávez, on the other hand, is that he appointed a bunch of cronies as Attorney General and Supreme Courth magistrates and such, and that there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he probably had something to do with the deaths of 19 people in April. It’s not that those are nice things to do – these are horrible things to do – it’s just that from a foreign editor’s point of view, they doen’t even come close as a rationale for demonizing him.
The problem is that the Chávez experiment amounts to a weird hybrid, a half-authoritarianism. Normally when someone describes a leader as authoritarian, s/he means that he’s both autocratic and repressive. Autocratic meaning that he intends to make every decision by himself, allowing no other person, institution or publication to have any effective say over how the country is governed, and trying to extend his control to every institution in the country, even nominally independent ones like Supreme Courts and labor unions and so on. Repressive meaning that he intends to use however much violence it takes to suppress any person, institution or publication that tries to get in his way.
Your average despot intuitively understands that these things go together, that to govern like an autocrat you need to be ruthless in repressing your critics. But Chávez doesn’t seem to get it. While he’s clearly an autocrat, his attempts at “repression” have been a wet firecracker, a series of half-baked attempts at intimidation that have intimidated no one. There’s so much evidence that the government’s repressive streak is a dud it barely seems worth it to elaborate. Think of the giant marches against the government several times a week in Caracas think of the hours and hours Napoleón Bravo gets to rant on national television every day.
That doesn’t mean that Chávez doesn’t intend to rule as an autocrat: he does. But he’s not willing to use violence on the scale he would have to use it in order to gain total control of the nation’s institutions. What small-scale, circulo bolivariano-led violence he is willing to deploy is pointless, or worse, counterproducting - earning him constant angry denunciations in the press without in any way silencing his critics or demobilizing his opponents. It's the worst of both worlds: the appearance of repression without any of the substantive "benefits" of repression. And it explains why the nation is as unstable as it is. Normally, authoritarian regimes have many, many problems, but stability is not one of them. But half-authoritarianism seems to me like a formula for systematic instability.
Not surprisingly, the foreign papers don’t quite know how to deal with this complex reality…they’re like the first guy who ever tried to eat a lobster, they just have no idea how to go at it. And while it’s probably naïve to expect them to give Chávez the full Mugabe treatment, he’s obviously getting off way too easy at present. Your average International Herald Tribune reader probably thinks Chávez is a pretty clumsy and slightly weird politician, or a fairly exotic species from the exhuberant political zoo that is Latin America, or maybe just a leftist with a taste for overstatement cursed with a particularly stubborn opposition…but no more than that. I don’t think s/he’s been told enough to really understand how serious the threat to democracy has become in Venezuela. And I think the tone of US reporters’ coverage of the crisis is to blame for that.
What’s for sure is that truth is a slippery notion in Venezuela these days, that questions of journalistic ethics that would seem fairly obscure or pedantic in a normal situation acquire particular urgency here, and that it’s very, very hard to find the right balance given the supercharged polarization here.
It’s tough being a journalist in this country, especially if, like me, you’re trying to juggle roles as a critic in the local press and a beat reporter for a U.S. newspaper. Trying to play both roles – and trying to mediate between the sides – takes its toll. It’s the reason, in any event, for the new and regrettable need to password-protect this blog: one of my US editors was very uncomfortable with having one of his reporters taking such openly political stances on a public website.
The Venezuelan media and the foreign press corps are caught in a spiral of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust. The foreign press is horrified by the openly partisan nature of almost all reporting here, where the private press spends 95% of its time ruthlessly attacking the government and the public media spends 100% of its time defending it. Venezuelan reporters (well, opposition reporters) are just as appalled at the foreign papers’ insistence on treating Chávez as a more-or-less normal president, entitled to a fair hearing and to having the things he says reported at face value, as though they have any sort of connection with reality. Each is convinced the other is presenting a massively distorted story here to its audience. It’s not easy at all to juggle the two roles.
Fact is, neither the Venezuelans nor the gringos are giving their readers what they need to form an accurate picture of reality. Venezuelan readers have been exposed to four years of presidential lunacy; the last thing they need is yet another rant vilifying Chávez. What they could really use, though, is some dispassionately reported information to help them make sense of an increasingly volatile and dangerous situation, and they’re not getting it.
But U.S. readers, most of whom probably couldn’t pick Venezuela apart from Namibia on a map, are not well-served by “neutral” reporting that takes a he-said/she-said approach to covering the government’s disputes with the opposition. U.S. readers don’t have the background knowledge that they need to tell truth apart from falsehood here, and U.S. papers too often report giant, stinking, howling chavista lies without giving their readers the guidance they would need to recognize them as giant, stinking, howling chavista lies.
In general, U.S. papers have two ways of dealing with information from abroad. Normal countries with sane rulers are covered one way, abnormal countries with pathological rulers are treated in another way. Nobody would accuse the U.S. press of bias for basically dismissing statements from a Mohammar Khadafi, or a Robert Mugabe or an Slobodan Milosevic. These people have clearly crossed all sorts of red lines that put them well beyond the pale, so U.S. papers don’t feel the need to observe basic standards of journalistic politesse towards them.
At this point, Chávez is clearly getting sane-ruler treatment in the U.S. press, and that’s driving opposition-minded Venezuelans half mad. The Venezuelan press, including the magazine I write for, long ago decided that Chávez had screwed up so much that they’re allowed to play rough with him. For better or for worse, they’ve concluded that this government is incompatible with ongoing democracy, and that the imperative to fight the enemies of democracy overrides the standard dictates of journalistic ethics. So the private media here barely pay lip service to notions like journalistic balance anymore. Their raison d’etre is to undermine the government. To the extent that informing the public fits in with that, they’ll inform the public. But in cases where it doesn’t, they won’t.
The resulting stream of viscerally antichavista pap on the TV and in the newspapers is far from the kind of journalism I want to practice…even if, substantively, I agree with many of the criticisms levelled. The problem is that what the local press is producing is not really journalism at all, it’s propaganda disguised as journalism. Who knows? Maybe they’re right to act that way. Maybe when faced with a government as dangerous to democracy as this one, one’s duty as a citizen overwhelms one’s duty as a journalist. That’s a philosophical question; I’m not sure what the answer is. Clearly, TV stations are private businesses, and if their owners want to use them as propaganda mills that’s their prerogative.
What bugs me, though, and what I don’t accept, is the way the propaganda-making mascarades as something it’s not, how it uses journalists and the stylistic conventions of journalism to try to lay claim to journalism’s aura of credibility. If Channels 2, 4, 10 and 33 have decided that their sacred duty is to attack a dangerous government rather than to practice journalism, they should take the newscast logos off the screens, send their journalists on vacation and put opposition politicians in front of the cameras 24 hours a day (sad fact is, the content wouldn’t change much.)
Most antichavistas I say that to look at me like I’m smoking crack. They've gotten used to living in an atmosphered suffused with partisan propagandizing and they're seething with visceral (if well-deserved) anger at the government. They can’t for the life of them understand why the foreign press insists on covering the differences between chavistas and antichavistas more or less the way they might cover the differences between Tony Blair and the British Tories. They tend to assume that the foreigners must just be ignorant, that if they really knew what the government gets up to, they’d cover the news differently.
As a result, foreign correspondents here are constantly getting backed into these long, tediously didactic rants by opposition activists. Sometimes they’re not much more than cathartic gripe sessions where chavista outrages are piled one on top of the other for hours on end. Too often, though, they’re models of condescension, treating these fancy WashPost or L.A. Times journalists like they’re more or less mentally retarded. It’s painful to watch.
But, of course, the strategy is silly because, appalling as these journalists might find Chávez’s antics, they don’t rise anywhere near the threshold needed for a good old fashioned campaign of international villification. This is really, really hard for opposition-minded Venezuelans to understand, much less accept. But Milosevic had to start three separate wars before he got the full baddie treatment from the foreign press. Mugabe didn’t get it until he explicitly shifted the entire rationale of his government to racial hatred. Saddam Hussein had to start two wars and nerve gas his own civilians before the western press decided he’d forefeited his claim to journalistic politesse. The rap on Chávez, on the other hand, is that he appointed a bunch of cronies as Attorney General and Supreme Courth magistrates and such, and that there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he probably had something to do with the deaths of 19 people in April. It’s not that those are nice things to do – these are horrible things to do – it’s just that from a foreign editor’s point of view, they doen’t even come close as a rationale for demonizing him.
The problem is that the Chávez experiment amounts to a weird hybrid, a half-authoritarianism. Normally when someone describes a leader as authoritarian, s/he means that he’s both autocratic and repressive. Autocratic meaning that he intends to make every decision by himself, allowing no other person, institution or publication to have any effective say over how the country is governed, and trying to extend his control to every institution in the country, even nominally independent ones like Supreme Courts and labor unions and so on. Repressive meaning that he intends to use however much violence it takes to suppress any person, institution or publication that tries to get in his way.
Your average despot intuitively understands that these things go together, that to govern like an autocrat you need to be ruthless in repressing your critics. But Chávez doesn’t seem to get it. While he’s clearly an autocrat, his attempts at “repression” have been a wet firecracker, a series of half-baked attempts at intimidation that have intimidated no one. There’s so much evidence that the government’s repressive streak is a dud it barely seems worth it to elaborate. Think of the giant marches against the government several times a week in Caracas think of the hours and hours Napoleón Bravo gets to rant on national television every day.
That doesn’t mean that Chávez doesn’t intend to rule as an autocrat: he does. But he’s not willing to use violence on the scale he would have to use it in order to gain total control of the nation’s institutions. What small-scale, circulo bolivariano-led violence he is willing to deploy is pointless, or worse, counterproducting - earning him constant angry denunciations in the press without in any way silencing his critics or demobilizing his opponents. It's the worst of both worlds: the appearance of repression without any of the substantive "benefits" of repression. And it explains why the nation is as unstable as it is. Normally, authoritarian regimes have many, many problems, but stability is not one of them. But half-authoritarianism seems to me like a formula for systematic instability.
Not surprisingly, the foreign papers don’t quite know how to deal with this complex reality…they’re like the first guy who ever tried to eat a lobster, they just have no idea how to go at it. And while it’s probably naïve to expect them to give Chávez the full Mugabe treatment, he’s obviously getting off way too easy at present. Your average International Herald Tribune reader probably thinks Chávez is a pretty clumsy and slightly weird politician, or a fairly exotic species from the exhuberant political zoo that is Latin America, or maybe just a leftist with a taste for overstatement cursed with a particularly stubborn opposition…but no more than that. I don’t think s/he’s been told enough to really understand how serious the threat to democracy has become in Venezuela. And I think the tone of US reporters’ coverage of the crisis is to blame for that.
What’s for sure is that truth is a slippery notion in Venezuela these days, that questions of journalistic ethics that would seem fairly obscure or pedantic in a normal situation acquire particular urgency here, and that it’s very, very hard to find the right balance given the supercharged polarization here.
December 29, 2002
Credibility Gap
...or: the broken record defense
December 5th
Inter-Press Service
In a nationally broadcast message Thursday, Chvez stated emphatically that "I will not allow our leading industry to be brought to a halt."
December 8th
Reuters
"They are not going to break PDVSA, they are not going to stop it," the president said on Sunday, threatening to replace striking staff and use troops to run oil operations
December 11th
EFE (Spanish news agency)
"The dispatch of crude to the world, especially to the United States has resumed," Energy and Mining Minister Rafael Ramirez announced during a news conference at Miraflores presidential palace in downtown Caracas. "We already broke the blockade they forced on us in the east and in the west and we're now dispatching crude to the world," the minister reiterated.
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
"This violent strike is being defeated," Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said. "We are breaking the blockade and are exporting oil to the whole world."
December 12th
El Nacional
Energy Minister Rafael Ramírez assured that the government has "long ago managed to stop the planned sabotage, which has been planned for violence and a coup."
BBC
Venezuela's embattled President Hugo Chavez has declared that oil production and distribution are restarting as a general strike prepared to go into its 11th day. "The most important thing is we are getting out of this crisis," he said. "The situation is progressively impoving. The supply of petrol is flowing."
December 14th
BBC Monitoring
PDVSA president Ali Rodriguez stressed that "we are taking all necessary steps to resume production". When asked about Venezuela's foreign customers, Ali Rodriguez Araque said: "We are in a situation of force majeure", and added, "we are already restoring production and we are already able to meet commitments."
December 16th
El Nacional
Ali Rodriguez said that "difficulties are being overcome", that production has recouperated, and that soon Venezuela will be able to meet its trade obligations.
December 18th
BBC Monitoring
In statements to a radio and television station, Ali Rodriguez Araque, the president of PDVSA said that as from midnight on 17 December, he is taking the necessary measures to regain control of the company and to guarantee the supply of fuel for the country.
December 21st
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
State oil company president Ali Rodrmguez insists the government is working to guarantee gasoline supplies for "many days."
December 23rd
Reuters
"Now we are in the process of returning to normal."
Energy and Mines Minister Rafael Ramírez.
December 25th
Dow Jones Business News
PDVSA president Alí Rodríguez said he expects export operations should be back to normal by Jan. 15. "We've had difficulties, but we are overcoming them," he said.
December 28th
Union Radio
"The situation is excessively normal."
Vicepresident J.V. Rangel
Reuters
"We are over the most critical situation and, today, things are frankly improving."
Hugo Chávez.
...or: the broken record defense
December 5th
Inter-Press Service
In a nationally broadcast message Thursday, Chvez stated emphatically that "I will not allow our leading industry to be brought to a halt."
December 8th
Reuters
"They are not going to break PDVSA, they are not going to stop it," the president said on Sunday, threatening to replace striking staff and use troops to run oil operations
December 11th
EFE (Spanish news agency)
"The dispatch of crude to the world, especially to the United States has resumed," Energy and Mining Minister Rafael Ramirez announced during a news conference at Miraflores presidential palace in downtown Caracas. "We already broke the blockade they forced on us in the east and in the west and we're now dispatching crude to the world," the minister reiterated.
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
"This violent strike is being defeated," Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said. "We are breaking the blockade and are exporting oil to the whole world."
December 12th
El Nacional
Energy Minister Rafael Ramírez assured that the government has "long ago managed to stop the planned sabotage, which has been planned for violence and a coup."
BBC
Venezuela's embattled President Hugo Chavez has declared that oil production and distribution are restarting as a general strike prepared to go into its 11th day. "The most important thing is we are getting out of this crisis," he said. "The situation is progressively impoving. The supply of petrol is flowing."
December 14th
BBC Monitoring
PDVSA president Ali Rodriguez stressed that "we are taking all necessary steps to resume production". When asked about Venezuela's foreign customers, Ali Rodriguez Araque said: "We are in a situation of force majeure", and added, "we are already restoring production and we are already able to meet commitments."
December 16th
El Nacional
Ali Rodriguez said that "difficulties are being overcome", that production has recouperated, and that soon Venezuela will be able to meet its trade obligations.
December 18th
BBC Monitoring
In statements to a radio and television station, Ali Rodriguez Araque, the president of PDVSA said that as from midnight on 17 December, he is taking the necessary measures to regain control of the company and to guarantee the supply of fuel for the country.
December 21st
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
State oil company president Ali Rodrmguez insists the government is working to guarantee gasoline supplies for "many days."
December 23rd
Reuters
"Now we are in the process of returning to normal."
Energy and Mines Minister Rafael Ramírez.
December 25th
Dow Jones Business News
PDVSA president Alí Rodríguez said he expects export operations should be back to normal by Jan. 15. "We've had difficulties, but we are overcoming them," he said.
December 28th
Union Radio
"The situation is excessively normal."
Vicepresident J.V. Rangel
Reuters
"We are over the most critical situation and, today, things are frankly improving."
Hugo Chávez.
December 19, 2002
A plausible defense of the lunatic's legacy...
As I talk about Venezuela with people abroad, some variation on it always comes up sooner or later. "Come on, Chávez can't be all bad...he must have some redeeming qualities, right?" It's usually an awkward moment, cuz I really can't think of any, so I end up coming accross as a total opposition zealot. Sometimes, if I'm pushed, I'll say something like "well, since he came to power people are definitely much more aware of themselves as citizens, as political beings with political rights who can have an impact on society if they just organize and act. When I was growing up, the level of political apathy and cynicism here was alarming - kind of like in the U.S. now. That, thank god, is over." It's not much of a compliment, of course, but it's something.
So I was both surprised and relieved to see that that's the angle at the center of the the article on Venezuela in the current issue of Mother Jones. Surprised because I haven't seen any other foreign journalists tackle the story from this angle before. Relieved because, well, most foreign lefties get Chávez catastrophically wrong, mangling the facts, putting an aggressively tendentious spin on events, and often just buying into the government's twisted PR line hook, line and sinker. And that's a temptation the story wisely avoids.
MJ's Barry Lynn desserves real praise for his piece, which is well researched and pretty fair. He makes a few minor mistakes, and I would certainly argue with much of what he writes. But overall, he's honest, thorough, and sane. He avoids the pitfalls inherent in trying to lionize Hugo Chavez the man by focusing instead in the effects his government has had on how poor Venezuelans relate to politics, and that's a much welcome change in focus. In fact, after four years living through el comandante's rein of error and reading dozens of chavista tracts, Lynn's piece is probably the best defense of chavismo I've ever read.
Of course, he does make some questionable arguments. I think he makes too much of the exclusionary aspects of the old regime, for one thing. Before Chávez Venezuela was a buddy system, for sure, but it was never the closed oligarchy of, say, Colombia. The country was never close to a meritocracy, but there was certainly social mobility - much more than in most of the region. Many of the old regime's big wigs came from poor peasant families. The last two presidential candidates of Acción Democrática, the emblematic political party of the old regime, were both born poor: one of them was black and the other had a fourth grade education. And it was the old regime that brought Venezuela free universal education, and the free state-university system that opened the doors to the middle class to hundreds of thousands of people born into horrible poverty. Not that I would want to defend the old system - heavens no. God knows it was hideously corrupt and founded on a culture of cronyism. But it wasn't El Salvador, y'know.
Most of what irks about Lynn's piece is not so much what's in it as what's left out. You could read it and come away with the impression that the only reason anyone opposes Chávez is that we're a bunch of overprivileged whiners. And, y'know, granted: there's a good number of overprivileged whiners in the opposition, but it goes far beyond that. There's no way to understand the opposition movement here without knowing something about the president's appalling intolerance towards dissent, for instance, or his regime's thoroughgoing contempt for the legal system, or the way he's stacked every nominally independent state institution with cronies, etc., etc. etc. Lynn doesn't tell you about any of that. And it's too bad.
But these are nits, really, and overall Lynn should be praised for a fair, well-researched article that shines a spotlight on positive aspects of chavismo that critics (like myself) too often overlook.
Extra! Extra! Nothing happens!
Today, the streets of Caracas are witnessing a totally unprecedented development: calm. For the first time in the lat 17 days, there are no marches in the streets today. For the first time since the strike started, tens of thousands of people will not march to demand the government's ouster. The strike leaders have called for a day of "reflection with your family" and prayer.
Now that's new...
Today, the streets of Caracas are witnessing a totally unprecedented development: calm. For the first time in the lat 17 days, there are no marches in the streets today. For the first time since the strike started, tens of thousands of people will not march to demand the government's ouster. The strike leaders have called for a day of "reflection with your family" and prayer.
Now that's new...
December 18, 2002
First casualty: everyday life...
Last night, my sister Cristina asked whether I'd go visit her today, relieve some of the tedium of these claustrophobic strike days, and chat about the project the NGO she belongs to is working on. I was a bit weary of using up the carefully hoarded gas in my gas-tank, but thought, what the hell, it'll be fun. I set out at about 10:15 am, but pretty soon I realized it'd be tough going.
The opposition had called a trancazo for the morning, a half day action where people would block streets and highways to protest the government. It's usually just a 10 minute drive to Cristina's apartment, and I thought I could make it, but no go. The street in front of the Mata de Coco mall was blocked...I swung around and tried the Avenida Libertador: blocked as well. I asked a cab driver if the Cota Mil highway was open, no luck. And I knew Francisco de Miranda Avenue was blocked, so I was pretty well stuck...I remembered that old saying from Vermont: "afraid you can't get there from here." Shit.
So I parked my car close to my mom's in Campo Alegre, bitter about the wasted gas, and figured I might as well do something with my morning. Like everyone else, my Christmas shopping is all backed up, so I thought I'd try to find that Discman I promised my mom's maid - who washes my clothes. I spent 45 minutes going through Sabana Grande, one of the main shopping strips in town, and though a lot of clothes shops and bakeries were operating, every electronics shop in site was on strike. Feeling pretty frustrated, I finally found a quincallería, kind of an odds-and-ends store that looked like they stocked some electronics. "You got a discman for me?" I asked the guy behind the counter. "Sorry man, sold the last one this morning...God knows when we'll get another delivery."
Christ. OK. I still had about an hour to kill before my lunch appointment, so I thought I'd walk around for a bit. I left Sabana Grande for El Rosal, where there are fewer shops, and I thought, well, maybe I should get some coffee. If there's one thing you can get in this stinking town is a cup of coffee, right? I asked a guard by one of the shuttered buildings where I could get one. Guy scratches his head. "Um, I think there's a cafetería that's still open two streets down, maybe." He points me, and I walk over. "A large marrón, please." (it's kind of a dark latte) Woman looks at me, "sorry," she says, "black coffee only...we're out of milk."
Last night, my sister Cristina asked whether I'd go visit her today, relieve some of the tedium of these claustrophobic strike days, and chat about the project the NGO she belongs to is working on. I was a bit weary of using up the carefully hoarded gas in my gas-tank, but thought, what the hell, it'll be fun. I set out at about 10:15 am, but pretty soon I realized it'd be tough going.
The opposition had called a trancazo for the morning, a half day action where people would block streets and highways to protest the government. It's usually just a 10 minute drive to Cristina's apartment, and I thought I could make it, but no go. The street in front of the Mata de Coco mall was blocked...I swung around and tried the Avenida Libertador: blocked as well. I asked a cab driver if the Cota Mil highway was open, no luck. And I knew Francisco de Miranda Avenue was blocked, so I was pretty well stuck...I remembered that old saying from Vermont: "afraid you can't get there from here." Shit.
So I parked my car close to my mom's in Campo Alegre, bitter about the wasted gas, and figured I might as well do something with my morning. Like everyone else, my Christmas shopping is all backed up, so I thought I'd try to find that Discman I promised my mom's maid - who washes my clothes. I spent 45 minutes going through Sabana Grande, one of the main shopping strips in town, and though a lot of clothes shops and bakeries were operating, every electronics shop in site was on strike. Feeling pretty frustrated, I finally found a quincallería, kind of an odds-and-ends store that looked like they stocked some electronics. "You got a discman for me?" I asked the guy behind the counter. "Sorry man, sold the last one this morning...God knows when we'll get another delivery."
Christ. OK. I still had about an hour to kill before my lunch appointment, so I thought I'd walk around for a bit. I left Sabana Grande for El Rosal, where there are fewer shops, and I thought, well, maybe I should get some coffee. If there's one thing you can get in this stinking town is a cup of coffee, right? I asked a guard by one of the shuttered buildings where I could get one. Guy scratches his head. "Um, I think there's a cafetería that's still open two streets down, maybe." He points me, and I walk over. "A large marrón, please." (it's kind of a dark latte) Woman looks at me, "sorry," she says, "black coffee only...we're out of milk."
December 16, 2002
The President Must Be Crazy
Last week, VenEconomy outlined three scenarios for the brewing crisis here: the government, it was argued, might end the crisis by negotiating an agreement with the opposition; or it might win the war of attrition and break the strike slowly; or the two sides might radicalize their positions, pushing the country into a kind of train wreck of institutions. Just one week on, it’s already clear which scenario is playing out here. And characteristically for the Chávez era, it’s the worst of the lot.
The signs of radicalization – from both sides – are unmistakable. PDVSA’s managers no longer recognize the government’s right to lead the corporation, declaring themselves in charge of operations and vowing to remain on strike until the president resigns. It’s no longer a question of early elections, of referenda or negotiations for them: their demands are solidly entrenched in the maximalist camp. And emboldened by the growing militancy and strength of the protest actions it has called, the Coordinadora Democrática is in no mood to compromise, either.
The president, meanwhile, has only intensified his campaign of public vilification and of military intimidation and harassment against the strikers. What’s more, in over five hours of his latest Aló, presidente, Chávez failed to even acknowledge the existence of the march by some 1.5 million people to demand his resignation that took place less than 24 hours earlier - likely the largest political demonstration in the entire history of Venezuela. And to cap it all off, he exhorted his military commanders, on National Television, to disobey any court order that contradicts his decrees – placing himself in open defiance of the judicial system.
Whether by design or by default, the president is once more pushing towards a crazy confrontation, a fight he looks unlikely to win, and that’s certain to do untold damage to the country. Like in April, analysts are left to wonder whether the president is acting wholly irrationally or whether there is some sort of method to the madness.
In the view of many, he has calculated that his only chance of survival is to provoke a coup attempt, and then crush it. Certainly, his exhortation to disregard the courts seems custom-designed to goad institutionally-minded officers to defy his authority. And, once again, it’s entirely unclear whether he would, in fact, be able to crush a coup attempt at this point. Already, in April, he pushed his luck entirely too far. Eight months later, the strategy seems nearly suicidal.
The alternative hypothesis, that the president is acting totally irrationally, seems entirely plausible, given the evident distance between reality as president says he sees it and reality as it actually is. On Aló, presidente, for instance, Chávez actually kept a straight face as he told the country that “highly credible pollsters” had determined that 94% of the people of Maracaibo are against the oil strike. He has repeated several times that four tankers carrying two million barrels of oil left port on Friday and Saturday, a report that reliable sources in Puerto La Cruz deny categorically. And he has confidently asserted several times that the oil industry is well on its way back to normality. What’s alarming is not that the president lies, but rather the opposite, that he may actually believe his outrageous howlers. If Chávez is making decisions based on such a wildly distorted assessment of reality, it’s little wonder he miscalculates so often.
One thing is clear, though: the government’s attempts to break the strike have only made things much worse. The ongoing failure to take control of the Pilín León oil tanker, even after multiple armed attempts to replace the crew, have crystallized its total impotence in the face of PDVSA’s determined managers and workers. Governmental bluster about bringing in strike breakers from the Persian Gulf lack all credibility: if they can’t even replace a single tanker crew, how can they replace PDVSA’s 40,000+ specialized workers?
The problem, again, is not so much whether they can or can’t. The problem is that the president has clearly convinced himself that he can. And so long as he’s working from that assumption, he’s bound to continue to make moves that further destabilize the country, edging it closer and closer to a much-feared outbreak of violence and anarchy. In the present circumstances, perceptions count for almost as much as reality. And the president’s psychopathological misreading of the reality around him has become one of the most dangerous elements of the crisis.
December 14, 2002
Cold Civil War
(...or is it Civil Cold War? Which do you think sounds better?)
Another march in Caracas today, a really bloody big one this time. I'm no expert, but it looks like the better part of a million people are out there waving flags and blowing whistles. They cover all 6 lanes of the East-side Highway for about a mile or so at this point, and many more people are joining from every part of town.
This is happening as the country more or less crumbles to bits. Gasoline has run out almost entirely everywhere in the country except for Caracas, where about half the stations have run out and the other half will run out within a day or two. Cab-drivers and bus drivers, who live hand-to-mouth, are getting pretty desperate in some places. The government is now talking about importing gasoline (think of that! That's like an emergency shipment of cameras into Japan!) An assembly of several thousand Caracas-area PDVSA managers have disowned the authority of the National Government and declared themselves in charge of the company. Staple foods are running low all over the place. The crisis is deep, all-encompassing, the situation couldn't really get much more dire. There's no shooting yet, but short of that it's hard to see how things could get worse. Some pundits are calling it a Cold Civil War.
And the president's response in this hour of direst national emergency?
"There is no strike in Venezuela, what we have is an oil-industry conspiracy by managers that have started to sabotage."
That's just one shard from his weird-ass interview with CNN yesterday. He then went on to claim victory over the strikers, because a half full tanker, the Josefa Camejo, managed to sail off to the US two days ago - the only ship that's left a Venezuelan port in a week, a period when we normally would've sent out over 40 tankers.
His insistence that the entire mess boils down to a few sabotage attempts on the part of a handful of hyperprivileged oil executives is really just crazy. I mean that quite literally: if you can't tell how incredibly dire the situation here is, you have a serious psychiatric problem. Even Cesar Gaviria, the international mediator trying to knock some sense into the government's head, is sick of it, calling the denial a main impediment to negotiations.
Chávez's position is so crazy it's becoming ever harder for Chavista spokesmen to tow the official line. So this morning, for instance, if you checked out the Union Radio web-page (required reading for Venezuelan politics junkies) the two top headlines you would have seen were Vicepresident Rangel: "The Situation in the Oil Industry has Improved Notably" and President of PDVSA Recognizes: The oil industry is "mostly paralized."
OK, so which one is it, guys?
So with the president locked in his own private reality, even his top lieutenants having a hard time defending his psychotic PR line, and the country falling to small bits, the future has never been more uncertain.
Thankfully, now that oil shipments to the US have been cut off for almost a week, Washington is finally getting its ass in gear. In a significant departure from previous policy, the White House is now calling for Early Elections as part of a settlement. The government's negotiators are still stalling; Gaviria is having a harder and harder time coming up with creative ways to put a positive spin on negotiations, and the opposition is emboldened by the day. The president is locked in his own private little warped head-world. We've tried everything we can think of to get this guy to reason with us. We've begged for a negotiated settlement, we've whimpered for referenda, we've pleaded for elections, but he continues to talk as though we don't exist.
What next? Who can tell?
December 11, 2002
Crisis? What crisis?
The BBC News write-up is hysterical. José Vicente Rangel's story is, of course, an incredible howler, and this guy knows it. Of course, it's the BBC, so the writer can't quite launch into attack mode like, say, I can. Still, the guy manages to write it in a way that leaves you in no doubt that Rangel is full of shit.
Take a minute to read through it, it's fun.
Of course, this guy has to stay within a certain set of boundries. There are standards of politesse that make it impossible for this dude to write something like "in an amazing bit of wishful (or delusional) thinking, Venezuela's Vicepresident José Vicente Rangel tried to snow under the BBC with one of the most outrageous, absurd, screaming lies this reporter has seen in years." That probably wouldn't make it past the editors in London. But it's clearly what he wanted to say. This dude is obviously angry, personally offended that Rangel's thinks he can put this shit past him.
The write-up showcases what I was trying to get at with my entry on the media a couple of days ago. BBC man (it's too bad there's no byline) is so incensed at the government's blatant mendacity, you can see it's actually made him angry. He feels this overpowering need to show Rangel as a fraud, to write in a way that leaves no doubt in the reader's mind that this guy is an asshole. The thing is, Venezuela's independent journalists have been dealing with that same urge for four years now! It's just been going on much much longer here, and it's gone much much further. On top of that, journalists here are not hamstrung by editors who insist on keeping a veneer of editorial politeness. So they let it rip, again and again, leading to the weird one-sidedness in the Venezuelan media I wrote about a few days back. At heart, though, they're just pissed at a government that lies so so much, and so so artlessly.
As this journalist has figured out, merely reporting Rangel's words at face value would give them a patina of legitimacy they plainly don't desserve. "Balance" in this case would make him an accomplice to a ridiculously obvious dissinformation campaign. And he's not willing to play along. But, guess what? That`s precisely the position most Venezuelan journalists have spent the last four years in. So the piece basically showcases, in embryonic form, the sentiments that have led almost every independent journalist in Venezuela to become an aggressive government critic over the last four years.
It tickled me pink, really.
The BBC News write-up is hysterical. José Vicente Rangel's story is, of course, an incredible howler, and this guy knows it. Of course, it's the BBC, so the writer can't quite launch into attack mode like, say, I can. Still, the guy manages to write it in a way that leaves you in no doubt that Rangel is full of shit.
Take a minute to read through it, it's fun.
Of course, this guy has to stay within a certain set of boundries. There are standards of politesse that make it impossible for this dude to write something like "in an amazing bit of wishful (or delusional) thinking, Venezuela's Vicepresident José Vicente Rangel tried to snow under the BBC with one of the most outrageous, absurd, screaming lies this reporter has seen in years." That probably wouldn't make it past the editors in London. But it's clearly what he wanted to say. This dude is obviously angry, personally offended that Rangel's thinks he can put this shit past him.
The write-up showcases what I was trying to get at with my entry on the media a couple of days ago. BBC man (it's too bad there's no byline) is so incensed at the government's blatant mendacity, you can see it's actually made him angry. He feels this overpowering need to show Rangel as a fraud, to write in a way that leaves no doubt in the reader's mind that this guy is an asshole. The thing is, Venezuela's independent journalists have been dealing with that same urge for four years now! It's just been going on much much longer here, and it's gone much much further. On top of that, journalists here are not hamstrung by editors who insist on keeping a veneer of editorial politeness. So they let it rip, again and again, leading to the weird one-sidedness in the Venezuelan media I wrote about a few days back. At heart, though, they're just pissed at a government that lies so so much, and so so artlessly.
As this journalist has figured out, merely reporting Rangel's words at face value would give them a patina of legitimacy they plainly don't desserve. "Balance" in this case would make him an accomplice to a ridiculously obvious dissinformation campaign. And he's not willing to play along. But, guess what? That`s precisely the position most Venezuelan journalists have spent the last four years in. So the piece basically showcases, in embryonic form, the sentiments that have led almost every independent journalist in Venezuela to become an aggressive government critic over the last four years.
It tickled me pink, really.
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