[These selected passages are translated from El Laberinto de los Tres Minotauros by J.M. Briceño Guerrero, available at the better Caracas bookstores.]
The Labyrinth of the Three Minotaurs
Prologue:
Three great, underlying discourses govern Latin American thinking. This can be seen in the history of ideas, the observation of political events, and the examination of artistic creativity.
First there is the European rationalist discourse, imported at the end of the eighteenth century, structured by instrumental reason and its outcomes in science and technology, driven by the possibility of deliberate and planned social change tending to realize universal human rights, expressed in the texts of constitutions as well the platforms of political parties and in the scientific conceptions of humanity and their consequent collective manipulation, and invigorated verbally by the theoretical boom of the various positivisms, technocracies, and of socialism, with its doctrinaire rousing of civil or military or paramilitary movements of revolutionary intent. Its key words in the nineteenth century were modernity and progress. Its key word in our time is development. This discourse acts as a screen onto which the aspirations of large sectors of the population, as well as the collective psyche, are projected - but also as an ideological vehicle for the intervention of the great foreign powers in the region and is, in part, a result of that intervention; only in part, however, because it is also, powerfully, a function of Latin American identification with rationalist Europe.
In parallel, there is the Christian-hispanic discourse, or mantuano discourse, inherited from imperial Spain, in its Latin American version, typical of the criollos (white elite) and the Spanish colonial system. This discourse affirms, in the spiritual dimension, the transcendence of man, his partial belonging to a world of metacosmic values, his communion with the divine through the Holy Mother Church, his ambiguous struggle between transient interests and eternal salvation, between his precarious terrestrial citadel and the firm palace of multiple celestial mansions. But, in material matters, it is linked to a social system of inherited nobility, hierarchy and privilege that found its theoretical justification in Latin America as paideia (the dissemination of western culture to the Americas) while, in practice, it left as the only route for socioeconomic improvement the remote and arduous path of race whitening and cultural westernization through miscegenation and education, exasperatingly slow twin paths, strewn with legal obstacles and incremental prejudices. But, while access to equality with the criollo class was in practice closed off to the majority, the discourse entrenched itself over centuries of colonialism and persists with silent strength in the republican period up and into our time, structuring aspirations and ambitions around the personal and familial (or clan-based) striving for privilege, noble idleness through kinship rather than merit, built on relationships of seigniorial loyalty and protection, grace rather than function and territory rather than official service, even on the fringes of power. The mantuano ethos survives in a thousand new forms and extends through the entire population.
Finally, there is the savage discourse, executor of the wound produced in the pre-European cultures of the Americas by their defeat at the hands of the conquerors, and in African cultures by their passive transfer to the Americas under slavery, executor also of the resentments produced in the pardos (mixed bloods) by the indefinite postponement of their aspirations. It is a vehicle for the nostalgia for non-European, non-Western ways of life, a refuge for cultural horizons apparently closed off by the imposition of Europe on Latin America. To this discourse, both the rationalist European and the hispanic-colonial discourses are foreign and strange, strata of oppression, representatives of an alterity that cannot be assimilated and cannot rid itself of the savage's apparent submission, occasional rebelliousness, permanent mischievousness and dark nostalgia.
These three great underlying discourses are present in every Latin American, though with intensities that vary according to social class, place, psychic level, age, and the time of day.
The European Rationalist discourse predominantly governs official declarations, thoughts and words that express views on the universe and society, the governing projects of officials and parties, and the doctrines and programs of revolutionaries.
The mantuano discourse predominantly governs individual conduct and interpersonal relationships, as well as the sense of dignity, honor, grandeur and happiness.
The savage discourse is lodged in the most intimate corners of emotion, and relativizes the other two, manifesting itself in humor, in drunkenness, and in a kind of secret loathing for all that is thought, said, and done, to the point that the most authentic friendships are not based on shared ideals or interests, but in a complicity of shame, felt as inherent to the condition of being Latin American.
It's easy to see that these three discourses penetrate one another, feeding as parasites on each other, encumbering one another in a tragic combat where no victory is possible, and that they produce for Latin America two lamentable consequences.
The first is practical: none of the three discourses manages to impose itself over public life to the point of tilting it towards coherent and successful forms of organization, but each is strong enough to frustrate the other two, and the three are mutually incompatible and irreconcilable. While international circumstances reinforce the European Rationalist discourse and magnify the clamor for accelerated development towards a rational order based on science and technology, the mantuano discourse hides behind the European Rationalist discourse and negotiates its continuity with the interests of the foreign powers that benefit from the status quo, while the savage discourse corrodes all projects as it moans contentedly.
The other consequence is theoretical: the three-way contradiction makes it impossible to create permanent spaces for thought, knowledge and reflection. The researchers and thinkers of Latin America either identify with European rationalism, turning their work into a subsidiary of powerful interests located outside the region, or they consume themselves in political activities governed by the mantuano discourse, or they yield to the verbalist political impulse of the savage discourse. The scientific efforts of universities collapse into mantuano intrigues, anachronistic mantuano scheming can find no contact with reality beyond what's needed to survive, a kind of chaos-generating nihilism makes it impossible to bring continuity to effort, and the entire situation takes the Latin American ever farther from reaching a complete consciousness of himself, of his social reality, of his place in the world, let alone genuinely confronting the problems that the universe in general, the human condition in general, pose to the woken man.
Faced with this panorama of discourses at war, with no victory in sight, one is left only, from a current perspective, with the cathartic esthetic frisson of contemplating a tragedy, and, facing the future, with technocratic genocide or the hope for a planetary catastrophe that may allows us to start the ancient game anew.
Note: The book proceeds in three parts: the first two explore the European rationalist and the mantuano discourses, their logic and history, and their role in shaping Latin American culture. Both are fascinating, but I will skip to the last section, what he calls The Savage Discourse. The reason is simple - most of my readers have a pretty good handle on rationalist and mantuano values, behaviors, and ideas. We are western, after all. It's the savage discourse that baffles us, confuses us, it's the non-western strand of our culture we tend to repress, and therefore can't formulate explicitly or understand. So this is the section that struck me as most surprising, lucid, iconoclastic and valuable. As in the other two sections of the book, the style morphs gradually as the essay progresses: what begins as an academic treatise on the nature of Latin American identity has dissolved, by the end, into a poetic, first person defense of the discourse. This gradual, initially barely perceptible, but by the end complete, shift in the narrator's standpoint is, I think, what makes the work so thrilling.
The Savage Discourse
1.
Identity and Discontent
Before starting to observe ourselves, to recognize ourselves and know who we are, before we were old enough to be curious about our identity and the means of formulating it, before that interrogative longing, the answer was given to us: we are western.
When we were a colony, we were a European colony, a geographical expansion of the European cultural orbit. When we constituted ourselves into republics, we did so for European reasons, with European methods, based on European values. Our liberators wielded swords made in Europe and spoke European words carrying European concepts, feelings, impulses, ideals and fires.
Currently, our countries are a part of the great western family. Our language and dress, our schools and cemeteries are testimony to our lineage. Our political institutions, scientific activities and individual aspirations openly proclaim our heritage. Particularly our writing - that level of humanity where one's degree of self-knowledge becomes verb - unequivocally points to our familial belonging.
Our dependence and backwardness do not cast doubt on our cultural kinship. A poor relative is still a relative. What's more, we all decided long ago that the fundamental task of our generation is development and our plans and projects in this regard conform strictly to the western style. The development gap will be bridged within the family.
Europe is our essence and our end.
Amen.
And yet...no. No "and yets." The answer, previous to any question about our identity, is not up for debate: we are western.
It's just that the answer - and this is not meant to cast doubt on it - comes hand in hand with a lament that rings like the disharmony of a musical note. A gripe, a discontent when it comes to "these people" (esta gente, este pueblo.) So, you hear people say, for instance, "party, party, (bochinche, bochinche) all these people know how to do is party." "You can't get anything serious done here because these people don't have any discipline." "They're scared of work and water: they're lazy and dirty." "Without a strong government, you get corruption, anarchy and chaos." "We will have to change the entire socioeconomic and political structure and create a new man, because these people are corrupted." "The crooks are the least stupid ones." Etc.
The discontent about "these people" ("esta gente, este pueblo") seems to point towards the absence of virtues that characterize western culture. An absence only? Or could it be also the presence of non-western factors, elements and powers?
Sometimes the blame contained in this complaint is externalized, projected on foreign countries, neocolonial powers, responsible for a certain - though unconfessed - diminished potency of westernness; the externalization of blame is carried out either through manichean arguments or with an analysis borrowed from political economy.
Or else the gripe is explained by reference to our history, to ethnic superstitions, or through vestiges of geographical determinism.
When we note this disharmony in the affirmation "we are western" we do not deny the statement. It could well be, quite honorably, that ours is a identity in combat. But then we would have to ask, "against what? against whom?"
So our early and agile answer about our identity is spared: we are western. But it is still worth questioning the tacit subject: we. We are western. Who says so? Who says "we"? "We" is a pronoun: what noun does it refer to?
It is the same voice that says "we are western" that issues the complaint about "these people." Yet it is those same people we are identifying as western.
At the same time that they are identified as western, they are reproached for not being western.
It's as though we were speaking rather in the imperative: "be western" - layered over an unspoken "it would be unbearable not to be so", all to conceal the strongly repressed sense that "horror, we aren't!", which only bolsters the imperative: "become western right now!" which again becomes indicative, but is now rendered superstitious, magical: "we are western."
Is it that our consciousness of being western is under siege by extraneous forces? Or is it that the will to be western is countered by a barbarous resistance, unravelled by an actively different strain of human reality?
4.
Tribulation of the European in America
A European visiting our America finds western style republics, purveying western culture - he also finds backward aspects and areas, but aspects and areas of western backwardness, backward manifestations of his own western culture; at worst, a sense of marginality or colonialism, not of exteriority. If the visitor stays to live in our America, he begins to see and feel something strange, unexpected, undefinable, incalculable in the behavior and the aims of these people, something foreign to his cultural horizon. His friends, whose thoughts, emotions and goals are clear in ordinary western communication, friends who socialized with confidence and assuredness, even his closest friends can suddenly turn opaque, enigmatic, impenetrable, totally other - only to later recover their "normality." There's no kind of explanation for those unpredictable changes. "What is that? Who is that?" asks the befuddled foreigner, staggered like someone who has just caught a peak, through the evanescent parting of a curtain, into an unsuspected landscape, faced with the friend who is now once again smiling, welcoming, inspiring his trust.
At the same time, the European of America, responsible for public order, for making political decisions, for implementing plans, for managing businesses, or the church, finds always a mischievous resistance from those delegated to carry out any task. They find, in these people, an undercover opposition to order, to discipline, to study, to work, to responsibility, to punctuality, to truth, to morality, to any commitment, an indefatigable, opportunist, stalking, treacherous opposition, as though the effort needed to maintain civilization seemed oppressive to them.
The European of America, whether he runs a guerrilla column or an army barrack, a whorehouse or a convent, a band of robbers or a business, parliament or the horse racing workers' union, a cabinet meeting or a seminar on political economy, the noble European of America, buttress of the culture of these people, confronted incessantly with that deaf, cowardly, unnegotiable, hypocritical, surreptitious opposition, the virtuous European of America says to himself during his sleepless nights "we've got to hold this place together moment by moment, without a break...otherwise, it comes apart at the seams, it dissolves" and he wonders "what do these people want? It isn't the end of civilization, because they never push quite hard enough to destroy it. Could it be that they want to hold it to a minimum, and no more? but why?" But he doesn't question himself far beyond that, or not seriously. Ultimately, he doesn't much care about the cause of that opposition, it's enough for him to know how to crush it, it's enough to know his duty and carry it out.
6.
The situation seen from the other side.
Let us question farther.
We are western, no doubt about it, but we have to accept the presence of a non-western resistance in Latin America. The majestic sweep of Western discourses in the institutions and the history of Latin America has found interference, here and there, has at times been encumbered and even disfigured, though never truly interrupted, by what seem to be discourses of a barbarous nature.
What does this situation look like from the other side?
A great defeat, now sunk almost entirely out of memory, has left us with the oppression we now suffer. We know the whip of the victor, and continually we recognize his superiority, tried and tested every single day.
It's not difficult to shake off this or that official, this or that policeman, but long ago we realized that they represent a larger power. When they die, others come to take their places, and in larger numbers, if need be. Behind them lie armies, headquarters, barracks, fortresses, the firepower of armored divisions, splendidly decked out halls where chiefs make decisions. The cop on the beat is only the farthest sensor of an acute nervous system, the last reach of a robust musculature. I bow my head when I see him, or I walk down a different street. Even if I've done nothing wrong, I carry an original fault that justifies any aggression at any time: the fault of having defeated ancestors.
That priest, those old nuns who watch over me tirelessly - I can't say to them "I will do what I find good and just, I will do what gives me pleasure, what wells up in me spontaneously, I will do what the joy of life dictates." No, they represent official morality based on a catechism I never quite learned, and they have the means to impose it. Plus, they have God on their side, the undisputed source of eternal punishment. All pleasure is banned, hidden, underground - its home is the night. I confess, repent, and even so I'm always dirty, blameworthy. When the priest dies, another priest will come, when the nuns die, other nuns will come. Behind them lie the bishops, the archbishops, the cardinals, the pope, the celestial throne, the hordes of angels and an invisible sword that secretly wounds the organs of my body to distribute the various forms of death. When I see the priest, I kneel, "bless me, father", when I see the nuns, I bow my head, "yes, doña María, yes doñita." Their benevolence can alleviate the disgrace of being who I am, it can make my condition less intolerable.
Penetrating in his domination more than all the others is the school teacher, because he oppresses from within, he reaches into the intimacy of my consciousness to sweep away and reconstruct according to the interests of the victor.
His most efficient weapon is the alphabet, when he teaches me to read and write he opens a breach in the soul that allows the lords of logos, the subtlest spirits of conquest, to invade and take over: science, literature, philosophy. Spirits that don't live out in the open air of the spoken word, but in an artificial sphere constructed by writing, a monstrous expansion of memory. All that lives, all that has been lived, turns spectral through the alphabet. It accumulates, it builds up in layers over centuries and it interposes itself with growing density between man and life, between man and man, between man and his acts.
The rain comes and goes in cycles, the tides ebb and flow, the ardor of passions wanes like the full moon and is appeased, but the growth of the written word knows no limits, the avenue of what is registered has no end, the hypertrophy of mechanized memory will require, in time, city-sized libraries, country-sized libraries, planetary libraries.
From those registers flow norms, trials, technologies, progress and the words of wisdom and poetry that say beautifully, for me, everything I would want to say, even if I say it I can only say it badly, even if I can't say it completely and it ends up half stammered.
From those files emanates an exhaustive array of possibilities concerning every problem, the end of all suspense, the solution to captivating enigmas, an ancient fount of millenarian experience that knows all ways and end-points; but I want to play the game of life without cheating, I want to lose my way and wander, I want to fight my struggles with no rear guard and no caution, I want to die my death rather than live another's life, a life run by others.
Science, literature, philosophy: three unextinguishable intruders entering the soul through the breach opened by the school teacher, ripping us apart wantonly, with malicious intent, with his alphabet, exploiting the vulnerability of childhood. But it would do no good to kill him, the reproductive organ of the subtler spirits of the empire reproduces itself continually and has the ever-renewed backing of academic texts and testicles, of research, explorers, map-makers, computers.
The teacher is strong, his blow astute. He turns my world into a screen, he turns my life into string of concepts, my songs into notation systems, he trades my innocence for the possibility of survival. Those who have not suffered his violence barely manage to survive within the conditions created by the empire.
And I, when I see his abominable face, sheepishly say "yes, teacher. Yes, professor. Yes, master. Yes, doctor. Yes, poet!" as I stalk him. Sunk in the shame of my defeat, smeared by mental sperm, broken and bowed, I gaze at him, I stalk him over time, even if all I can do for the moment is put thumb-tacks on his chair and water in his ink bottle.
---
The hills, the forests, the fields, the animals and the plants have masters, they have owners. I walk on someone else's land, where I am tolerated as a servant; and there is no place I can call my own. With my work I barely manage to pay for the things I consume and the rent of the ones I use. I use and consume the worst there is, and even so I barely survive. All things are exchanged for money; my work as well. But the amount of money I get isn't enough to buy the things I need. I walk around in rags and I raise sickly children fated to sell their blood.
Sometimes the masters have the faces of landowners, or bosses. I say to them "yes, master, yes boss, whatever you say, chief, right away Don Ra-amón." But more and more often they have no face and they're called corporation, ministry, institute, central committee, transnational corporation - I deal only with foremen or officials. It does me no good to kill the masters because their heirs come to take possession; it does me no good to kill any foremen or officials because they immediately appoint others, who could be worse; to say nothing of the punishments and reprisals.
I know my presence is repugnant to them, that I disgust them, that if they could do without my work (replacing me with machines, for instance) they would eliminate me physically, they'd exterminate me like a rat.
I walk shrunken, with my head bowed, reverent, as though I must apologize for existing on the land where my ancestors walked proud and breathd in deep the air of their world in the comfort of their homeland; but there was a combat, and they were defeated. They fought and they lost; we inherited the shame of their defeat just as they, the others, the ones from on high, those at whose mercy we serve, inherited the privileges of victory. Can we set the stage for another combat, to get our own back, an open battle, horns and all, on a brilliant day of flags and shining metal, or shall we persevere in this sordid resentment, this sabotage, this duplicity, this repressed hatred, this envy, this charade?
What we are, what we were, what we can be is not found in the memory and the hands of God, but rather in files; there must be a file on God himself. IDs, contracts, property titles, diplomas, protocols, mortgages, appointments, wills, dismissals, permissions, receipts, bills, decrees, resolutions, authorizations, sentences, letters, safe-conducts, credentials, resumes, work records, court briefs, payment rolls, black lists, bank cards, credit cards, military cards, hanging folders, memos, forms, applications, notices, citations, agreements, bulletin boards, orders (of payment, arrest, eviction) certificates (of birth, marriage, death.)
Our destiny has a face of paper, a tint of registry, a smell of drawers, the voice of a bureaucrat; its threads are ink, it flies with pens, walks with printing press feet; its house is the bureaucratic labyrinth. Can I light a fire and burn it?
---
I want that fire now. Violent revolution. Spilled blood. The destruction of that entire order. Break down the chains. Victory or death.
But this ardent desire makes me the victim of a new form of oppression and exploitation which adds itself cruelly to the others as it promises to suppress them: the revolutionary struggle.
To understand the mechanism of the revolutionary trap, let's take a bird's eye view of our society. It's made up, first of all, of the lords, the powerful, the ones on high, the masters; let us call them whites. Second, there are those who, even if they are not masters, have varying stakes in society's well-being, they're the foremen, managers, teachers and professors, small businessmen, policemen, professionals: let us call them pardos. They can rise within their category, and some can even leave it to reach the ranks of the whites. Third, there's us, that is, "the indians and the blacks", those below and outside.
Quite often, fights break out between whites - fights between lords. Then they use us, they organize us politically or militarilly with a revolutionary ideology, with revolutionary plans, with promises of radical changes. They make us fight and when they've achieved their goals, when they've settled their white men's scores, they get rid of us little by little through delays, deferrals, intrigues, divisions, partial rewards and, sometimes, with the help of their now reconciled adversaries.
Also quite often, ambitious pardos want to quicken their ascent within their category, they want to reach the upper echelons through extraordinary means. Then they use us, they organize us politically or militarilly with a revolutionary ideology, with revolutionary plans, with promises of radical changes. They make us fight and, when they manage to reach important positions where they can be comfortable, they distance themselves from us or keep us organized in the lower levels of reformist political parties, as clients and shock troops.
In the effort I make on behalf of this struggle I commit myself more fully than in my work in the fields, domestic service, construction or the factories; I give myself over completely, I risk everything. My wages are the illusion of triumph, that fleeting exaltation, the catharsis of the momentary assaults and its cries. But I can't realize my longing. On the contrary, my rebelliousness is co-opted by the dynamism of the system of oppression, it serves and strengthens it. The danger I embody is only diminished and retarded by that periodic masturbation.
But they, they manage to reach their goals; not only do they keep me under control, but they channel my torrent towards their mills, they use me like a stepladder.
Revolutionary leaders mint my fury to buy themselves power. They stuff their pockets with the surplus value from that business known as the revolutionary struggle, where I exhaust my combat strength, my capacity for sacrifice, my agony. Revolutionary surplus value.
Haven't you noticed how the revolutionary leaders are always whites or pardos? Black and indian revolutionary caudillos have always been "antelopes working for alligators."
I've also seen - and I wish I hadn't - that the revolution, when it's carried out seriously and succeeds, brings forms of injustice and oppression even more abominable than the current ones. I've seen those new forms of injustice and oppression in the eyes and the words of the most sincere, hardest working, most loyal revolutionary leaders. They feel themselves messianic saviors, avatars of history; they think they know my interests, my wishes, my needs, better than I do; they don't consult me or listen to me; they've struck off on their own as my representatives, as vanguards in my struggle; they are paternalist tutors; they pre-configure today that future olympus where they will make all decisions for my well-being and my progress; they'll make the decisions and they'll impose them on me in my name, through fire and blood in my name. I bow my head saying "yes, comrade, yes, compañero, that's what we must do, you're right, viva." I play along so they don't strike me and so they don't get discouraged: they can produce those moments of disorder, of chaos, when the vigilance of the gendarmes slackens, when the foundations of order shake, when I can unload my rancor, my repressed fury, my hatred without punishment; after all, that sporadic relief makes up the meager wages I get from the revolutionary tumult, as I await worse days - the days of revolutionary triumph.
---
13.
Nostalgia for barbarism and catastrophe
The thing is that there's a nostalgia for the pre-western past, a nostalgia that allies itself with the nostalgia for childhood and for paradise lost, a nostalgia - I want to return, return, return - that grows as the difficulties of today and the uncertainties about tomorrow grow.
Together with that nostalgia for the pre-western past, there is a longing for catastrophe formulated in the story that the west will end, whether through atomic war, or any other armageddon, or ecological chaos, or massive earthquakes or astronomical accidents; expressed in the expectation of total desertion, of the irresistible aversion of westerners towards their own culture, and in the trivial observation that in the long term the west will end because everything comes to an end. Some with impatience, others with very much patience, the hopeful nostalgics sit by the door of their pained souls expecting to see the corpse of the west and to dream for a new beginning, for the game of history to start from scratch.
They are right, in part. Evolution and progress are high-risk pursuits. The west is not shielded from some exogenous catastrophe, nor can it guarantee that its momentum will not run out. Moreover, one can be sure it will continue to transform itself, it will change, its current form will perish just as pre-western cultures have perished.
But today's embittered rebels fantasize like unjustly grounded children. The hated father can be run over by a train, murdered by criminals, die in a fatal duel, commit suicide; it is also true that even if no such tragedy befalls him, one day he will die and we will remain alone with the mother. But in the meantime, it is he who holds the scepter of power, the keys to its origin, the mother's bed, and it is grand and beautiful and intensely loved.
The apocalyptic fantasy secreted by nostalgia works as evasion and consolation, but it can't change the real situation or diminish its horror: the real isolation of a culture is, today, impossible; the west has interlinked all the regions of the planet; the food depots of big business and the cargo of heavy industry have penetrated all cultures; all cultures want to consume western products and allow themselves to be consumed by the west. The destiny of the earth dissolves into the destiny of the west; the destruction of the west would mean the destruction of humanity.
---
24.
Western progress as domination
The development plans, projects, programs and policies are expressions of the will of the west, e pluribus unum, panta hen. We recognize them right away. They can't understand why we won't collaborate with them, seeing how they're meant for our benefit, they pretend not to understand our resistance. They are their plans, projects, programs and policies. We are forced laborers; since we don't like the enterprise, we don't take care of it, instead we sabotage it, as much as our condition of domination allows.
Dominated. Faced with the superior strength of the west, our defeated ancestors had to choose between slavery and death. Many died fighting. Others accepted servitude, they bowed, knee to the ground, they lowered their gaze to survive. It is from they that we descend, it is from they that we inherited that disgraceful love of life, greater than our love of liberty and honor. We don't understand heroic values, we can't comprehend how anything can be more important than life. To live on your knees is still to live, and while there's life there's hope. We inherited the cowardly rejection of death, but also the mischievousness, the astuteness, the long term resistance masquerading as servitude, the careful aggressiveness always ready for a coup de grace or a retreat. Dominated, but existing. We conserve our identity. We are us. Other, different from them, the dominators; such that they haven't truly dominated us, they haven't assimilated us, they haven't integrated us into their being. They oppress us, repress us, compress us, depress us and squeeze us, but ultimately they can't impress themselves upon us or suppress us. And there's a light at the end of the tunnel. We can dream of the splendorous day when the roofs of the greenhouses will cave in and the zoo cages will burst open; the plants and animals will escape their taxonomies; all machines will start their long, slow return to their home in mother earth and through the broken fragments of conceptual buildings we will see the growth of myth and song liberated.
---
30.
The fourfold path (rebellion-submission-astuteness-return to the home country) and the way of walking
My rejection of the west has followed a fourfold path
First: open rebelion. As a "black", "indian", and "zambo" I've recurred, throughout the history of Latin America, to risings, to armed revolt, assault, confrontation on an open battlefield with no rear guard and no caution. I've been decimated and defeated. In some regions I've been physically exterminated. But this path is and will always be open. Those who propose our death and organize expeditions to destroy us act lucidly: so long as we exist there'll be the threat of violent rising.
Second: submission. By accepting a lord and master one affirms one's existence, one's difference through servitude, guaranteeing one's cultural identity and safeguarding the channels of creativity. Hegel missed this harmonic variant in his master/slave dialectic, even though history is strewn with examples of it.
The last two hundred years, marked by ideologies and wars of "liberation", have obscured the fact that the master-slave relationship is not always and necessarily disgraceful. The good master and the good slave have been forgotten. The good slave accepts his lot without rancor and without any sense of sacrifice or injustice; he longs not for the advantages of the master, he wouldn't know what to do with them, he has other tastes. The good master respects the slave's culture, his idiosyncrasy, his creativity, he recognizes him as other, he doesn't butt into his private life and he doesn't mistreat him.
The master-slave relationship, and the consequent stratification of society, may be in the future - it already has been in the past at various times and places - the most adequate solution to the problem of coexistence in society. These days the clamor of the ideologists and propagandists of equality, the agitation for democracy, hides the virtues of slavery; but he who wants to truly know the reality of this world must dare to look beyond the prejudices of his century. In pre-columbine America, in Africa, Asia, in Europe itself there were successful and satisfactory forms of servitude, far superior as a form of coexistence to the gulag or the worker-owner relationship, whether the owner comes in the guise of a private business or a socialist state.
I must recognize, however, that our good slaves often have not found the good masters needed to build a successful system of servitude on a society-wide level. But they doggedly seek him and at times they find him, at least as an individual solution. There's nothing exceptional about the loyal maid, who's like part of the family; the noble farm-hand, who you can depend on always, onto death, even without if you don't pay him; the devoted and efficient secretary, who remains a celibate spinster through love of her boss, willing to give him her savings and even help him with his erotic adventures; the volunteer body-guard, loyal and sleepless watch-dog, untouchable, undoubting. Isn't there something profoundly human, moving, beautiful in all of this?
The good slave is anti-western because he rejects the work-salary nexus. The good master is anti-western because he prefers the loyalty-protection nexus, but these terms are poor, insufficient to sketch out the relationship. The good master is like a good shepherd, the good shepherd looks lovingly over his sheep; he will gives his life for them.
In our violent uprisings, one of the motivations is the longing, the painful nostalgia for the good master, the absence of that hard, soothing, paternal shelter, of that trusted destination that the western world has only limpid and inefficient substitutes for, cancerous placebos called political leader, revolutionary leader, manager, commissary, dean, congressman...
We are not impressed by the mean-spirited western slander against slavery; we understand that the path of submission to a good master is not sterile but bountiful for our survival and actualization, so we seek it with indefatigable tenacity.
It was necessary to write at length on this much-maligned path. These days anyone can understand rebelliousness, because it's fashionable. Only a chosen few understand submission. Believing themselves free and rebellious, most assiduously serve unworthy masters.
Third: Rise within the ranks and false assimilation. A poor animist, lost in a strange society and subjected to its laws, its dynamics, its mechanisms, I've decided to appropriate it for myself, to take it from the inside.
As a pardo, accepting whitening and transculturation, in fact actively seeking it, I slowly penetrate the entire structure of that society, I rise little by little through all its strata.
And I've achieved noteworthy results. At the top, more than a few blond heads of hair have been curled by me. My hands, long and flexible, very flexible (I can bend my joints over backwards) sign decrees in the centers of power. From the depths of blue eyes I inspect (I inspect, note it carefully, I inspect) important public works. I've definitively imposed my very own hip and shoulder movements throughout the dance floors. I set the agenda for a thousand meetings, and I make sure they aren't followed in nine hundred and eighty two. I set stains and double over figures in the works of painters. I enthusiastically embrace the ideas of the Europeans, I bring them so close to my heart, I make them so mine that they can't recognize them when they see them again. In the poems the poets write you find my rhythms, my cadences. I inhabit the literary forms of the west as lord and master, I turn them into latrines. I sneak also into the labs - look at me in my white coat - and I make scientific discoveries, inventions, I the animist appropriating the society where I am lost, from the inside, all the while remaining myself, without allowing myself to be assimilated. I imprint a new sense on that culture, on that society, without destroying it. I imprint my sense on that enormous, alien machinery that imprisoned me in a trap and can now become a vehicle for my soul. I, son of the traitor, son of the slave, son of a whore, loosening the shackles, changing around the measures, redistributing the materials, until I manage to turn my straightjacket into a suit, a suit suitable to the freedom of my movement, to my natural elegance.
Brother of all or nothing, humble brother, pure brother, do not judge harshly that transitory contamination. It is a form of appropriation. The house I conquer is also for you.
Fourth: Return to the home country. I want to return to my origins. I want to return, return, return. I undertake my return riding on songs, scientific studies, on board secret magical rituals handed down to me by my ancestors, pushing forth political projects. In the house of the father, work and bread, even when bitter, are sweet because they are ours. Enough exile. Let us abandon that metallic womb to these foreign cities. Let us part.
Towards the east. The home country where the sun rises. Hence we were brought over by force. May we now complete, voluntarily, the return journey, enriched by several centuries worth of experience. Let us bring stories and exotic gifts to the elephants and gazelles. Let us bring weapons to the old gods. Crystal balls for the dawn.
Towards the west. The home country where the sun sets. Hence we came in multicolored canoes. Let us return with the sun, to scatter among the islands and the coral reefs until night brings us the rest of depth.
Downward. From every point in the compass, countering winds and currents our voyage is towards the earth, hence we came, from which we are made up. Village. Hamlet. Cattle. Field. Home country. The jungles, the prairies; the coasts, the mountains; the rivers big and small. Maize and yuca. Tapir and llama. The jaguar. Towards the clay and the place we were kneaded, towards the home and the hearth where the vessel of our soul was forever shaped.
Backwards. Towards the past. Let us sail against the current of time, or invert it. Each year, each generation, has taken us farther from the source. The home country is located back before the bayonet. Towards the islands of primordial reality that history has not dragged and corrupted, towards the unblemished relatives. I will say to them, "we have returned. We are your brothers. May the ties that bound us to illusions and lies burn. We return naked. Welcome us."
Upwards. The home country shines beyond the clouds, in the Presence. Hence we fell. Hence came the instructors. Hence shall come our succor. Hence come the gods when we invoke them. Let us prepare our return: all that is not light is a burden. Let us concentrate our longing and our will so we do not backslide or lose our way among the clouds.
Forward. The home country lies in the future. We have no homeland, we are not yet born. The home country is a burning desire and a project, not a memory. We exist as potential, we seek our arrival. Radically foreign, foreign in all worlds, we must engender our world. What is the womb, when is the birth? Everything is foreign, nothing belongs to us. We are not heirs, but we are and we must give being. To future. Let us future the home country. Let us world. Let us ancestor.
---
The fourfold path is the sphere of my rejection and my assertion. Rebelliousness, submission, astuteness and nostalgia are its four dimensions and they guarantee its availability. And so, my way of walking is not pathetic except in extreme situations, and only for a short while; in general, it's a joyful strut, a festive, humorous, playful walk. A profound seriousness based in the radical, mortal seriousness of my situation which makes everything else lose seriousness and then that radical, mortal seriousness itself becomes funny. I'm left only with symbolic objects. I can shuffle, switch, bewitch. I am the master of formlessness. My ultimate weapon, perhaps my only real weapon, is laughter, so boisterous at times that it can soften the ire of destiny, so understated at times that you see it only as a small thunder in the depths of my eyes.
---
31.
Seismic doubt and its antidote
There is, however, a seismic doubt, a doubt that shakes me sometimes, that blunts my laughter, that darkens the depths of my eyes: the possibility that the west may be, if not the end-point of humanity, at least a necessary stage in human development, necessary if transitory; the possibility that the west may be the necessary stage of human development in our times, that we shall all have to westernize to go forward, that today the choice given us is between westernness and stagnation, or perhaps between westernness and chaos.
But when I'm shaken by this doubt I pull myself together telling myself that, if that's the case, I would choose stagnation and chaos. I feel myself whole again and sharpen my laughter again thinking of heterodox or banned currents and coherences. Then, once again, lightning zigzags through my eyes.
---
32.
Residences
As far as residences go, I'm proud to have many. I live not only in the "indians" and the "blacks" and the pardos of every skin tone, but also the mantuanos and the rationalist whites and, most particularly, those who hate me and persecute me in others because they cannot extricate me from their own hearts.
I don't want to exercise power continuously. I'm content to take it by storm, suddenly, paralyze some actions, introduce some perturbances, dazzle with flashing revelations, and then retreat to my stalking grounds, where I revel in my visceral existence, digest my venom and lick my wounds.
---
33.
Final screed
The non-western in Latin America feels closer to the lizards and the rocks than to European rationalism. It is unstable, rough, omnipresent. It claims unjustifiable license with the language to make plays on words that are not just innecessary but ugly and incorrect. It happily contradicts itself. Are we facing another mask? Couldn't all of this hide something more terrible and flammable than a defense of cultural identity, something deeper than cultural differences? Doesn't it express with symbolic ambiguity something less respectable and more dangerous than the rebelliousness of the oppressed? May not those strings be pulled by some unnamed, frightful will?
Perhaps.
But we would then enter, if not into the ineffable, at least into the unwritable.
There are secrets that can only be revealed in the integral communion of two friends during some form of drunkenness, but such experiences leave only imprecise memories. Or between two enemies in the lucidity of hand-to-hand combat onto death or orgasm.
Beyond that abyss, however, we can say without ambages: we are western, cómo no.
January 7, 2005
January 1, 2005
CiF Draft
For the second time in 15 months, Venezuelans head to the polls on Sunday to vote on ending presidential term limits, potentially allowing Hugo Chávez to remain in power for life. The idea was already defeated in 2007, but El Comandante is graciously giving the people a second chance to get the answer right.
The outcome is anybody's guess. Just two months ago, polls showed large majorities opposed the proposal, but that gap has vanished in the wake of a brazenly illegal campaign that has enlisted all the resources of the Venezuelan petrostate on the side of the government.
The litany of abuses is long: "Vote Si" propaganda decorates public spaces ranging from schools, hospitals and state government offices to Venezuela's tax-collecting agency, the national worker re-training institute, the State-owned steel maker, and the seat of the National Assembly itself. Nearly every government website sports a "Si" banner ad. State-owned electric utility crews are tasked with putting up Si signs. Civil servants are strong-armed into "volunteering" and into raising funds for the Si campaign. The eleven state owned TV channels and the literally hundreds of pro-government radio stations broadcast "Si" propaganda round the clock.
Nothing is off-limits. "Si" messages get piped into the Caracas Metro, over the tannoy. The government even sees the referendum question itself as an appropriate setting for a spot of campaigning: the rambling, 77-word question echoes Si campaign themes with language about "broadening people's political rights", but never mentions term limits at all.
Perhaps most worrying is that PDVSA, Venezuela's state-owned oil giant, is now in on the game. In January, a massive convoy of PDVSA tanker-trucks paraded through the streets of Caracas, decked out in "Si" propaganda. Cars parked at PDVSA parking lots have their windows decorated with "Si"s, in big white letters, whether the driver likes it or not. Reuters reports that, on a recent visit to the Energy Ministry, one oil industry executive found the building nearly empty: the civil servants had been "voluntarily" marched off to a "Si" rally.
And those are just the abuses I could find links to document!
In effect, Chávez has turned the Venezuelan state itself into an appendage of the Si campaign.
The use of state resources for party political purposes is both illegal and unconstitutional in Venezuela. But with die-hard Chávez loyalists installed in every key post in the state - and, notably, throughout the court system - no institution is able to check these abuses. The collapse of the separation of powers leaves the government with a free hand to flout legal and constitutional norms that, ironically, chavistas themselves drafted less than a decade ago.
The government campaign is centered on a simple message: Voting "Si" does not mean making Chávez president for life. It means giving the people the chance to re-elect him as many times as they want. The proposal would expand people's political rights, they say, by removing an arbitrary restriction on their choice of candidates. Voters will always get the final say, through free and fair elections.
It's an argument that refutes itself. The massive abuse of state resources we've already seen tells us all we need to know about how fair those future elections would be. In addition to the natural advantages of incumbency, Chávez's perpetual re-election bids would be able to leverage all the resources at the disposal of the overwhelmingly dominant power-center in Venezuelan society today: the petrostate itself.
Where there are no checks on the abuse of state resources for partisan advantage, elections can't be fair. And where elections are not fair, their results can't be democratic.
The outcome is anybody's guess. Just two months ago, polls showed large majorities opposed the proposal, but that gap has vanished in the wake of a brazenly illegal campaign that has enlisted all the resources of the Venezuelan petrostate on the side of the government.
The litany of abuses is long: "Vote Si" propaganda decorates public spaces ranging from schools, hospitals and state government offices to Venezuela's tax-collecting agency, the national worker re-training institute, the State-owned steel maker, and the seat of the National Assembly itself. Nearly every government website sports a "Si" banner ad. State-owned electric utility crews are tasked with putting up Si signs. Civil servants are strong-armed into "volunteering" and into raising funds for the Si campaign. The eleven state owned TV channels and the literally hundreds of pro-government radio stations broadcast "Si" propaganda round the clock.
Nothing is off-limits. "Si" messages get piped into the Caracas Metro, over the tannoy. The government even sees the referendum question itself as an appropriate setting for a spot of campaigning: the rambling, 77-word question echoes Si campaign themes with language about "broadening people's political rights", but never mentions term limits at all.
Perhaps most worrying is that PDVSA, Venezuela's state-owned oil giant, is now in on the game. In January, a massive convoy of PDVSA tanker-trucks paraded through the streets of Caracas, decked out in "Si" propaganda. Cars parked at PDVSA parking lots have their windows decorated with "Si"s, in big white letters, whether the driver likes it or not. Reuters reports that, on a recent visit to the Energy Ministry, one oil industry executive found the building nearly empty: the civil servants had been "voluntarily" marched off to a "Si" rally.
And those are just the abuses I could find links to document!
In effect, Chávez has turned the Venezuelan state itself into an appendage of the Si campaign.
The use of state resources for party political purposes is both illegal and unconstitutional in Venezuela. But with die-hard Chávez loyalists installed in every key post in the state - and, notably, throughout the court system - no institution is able to check these abuses. The collapse of the separation of powers leaves the government with a free hand to flout legal and constitutional norms that, ironically, chavistas themselves drafted less than a decade ago.
The government campaign is centered on a simple message: Voting "Si" does not mean making Chávez president for life. It means giving the people the chance to re-elect him as many times as they want. The proposal would expand people's political rights, they say, by removing an arbitrary restriction on their choice of candidates. Voters will always get the final say, through free and fair elections.
It's an argument that refutes itself. The massive abuse of state resources we've already seen tells us all we need to know about how fair those future elections would be. In addition to the natural advantages of incumbency, Chávez's perpetual re-election bids would be able to leverage all the resources at the disposal of the overwhelmingly dominant power-center in Venezuelan society today: the petrostate itself.
Where there are no checks on the abuse of state resources for partisan advantage, elections can't be fair. And where elections are not fair, their results can't be democratic.
November 23, 2004
If only Enrique Mendoza was more like Viktor Yuschenko
Creatively stolen from The Independent
Venezuelans throng streets to protest against election 'fix'
By Askold Krushelnycky in Caracas
23 November 2004
Tens of thousands of Venezuelans thronged the streets of the country's capital, Caracas, and other major cities yesterday to denounce alleged fraud in the presidential recall.
Venezuela was perilously close to civil conflict last night after the democratic opposition refused to recognise the regime as the victor in a referendum that will determine whether the country deepens its fragile democracy and tilts towards the West, or heads down the autocratic route.
Anger greeted the Venezuelan Elections Commission's announcement that the president's No, was ahead of the opposition Yes, opposition leader Enrique Mendoza told supporters to stage a civil disobedience campaign. The cities of Caracas and Barquisimeto obliged. They refused to recognise Mr Chavez's victory.
The EU has called on Venezuela to review Sunday's election. The opposition and western election monitors accused the government of dirty tricks before the poll to tip the victory to Mr Chavez by 20 per cent. In many polling stations where Mr Chavez gained most votes, more than 100 per cent of voters apparently turned out.
As night fell in Caracas, demonstrators jammed the city's main avenue for several blocks. Busloads of special forces have also been brought into the city. Some demonstrators waved Georgian flags, echoing the protests a year ago that drove Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgia's ex-president, from office after a fraudulent parliamentary election. But three other cities announced they would recognise the opposition as the winner.
With more than 99 per cent of precincts counted, the government had a lead. Yet several exit polls had found the opposition was the winner, one by a margin of 11 per cent.
"The abuse of state resources in favour of the president has continued," Bruce George, the observer mission leader, said.
Alas, I knew Victor Yuschenko, I worked with Viktor Yuschenko, and you, sir, are no Viktor Yuschenko...
Venezuelans throng streets to protest against election 'fix'
By Askold Krushelnycky in Caracas
23 November 2004
Tens of thousands of Venezuelans thronged the streets of the country's capital, Caracas, and other major cities yesterday to denounce alleged fraud in the presidential recall.
Venezuela was perilously close to civil conflict last night after the democratic opposition refused to recognise the regime as the victor in a referendum that will determine whether the country deepens its fragile democracy and tilts towards the West, or heads down the autocratic route.
Anger greeted the Venezuelan Elections Commission's announcement that the president's No, was ahead of the opposition Yes, opposition leader Enrique Mendoza told supporters to stage a civil disobedience campaign. The cities of Caracas and Barquisimeto obliged. They refused to recognise Mr Chavez's victory.
The EU has called on Venezuela to review Sunday's election. The opposition and western election monitors accused the government of dirty tricks before the poll to tip the victory to Mr Chavez by 20 per cent. In many polling stations where Mr Chavez gained most votes, more than 100 per cent of voters apparently turned out.
As night fell in Caracas, demonstrators jammed the city's main avenue for several blocks. Busloads of special forces have also been brought into the city. Some demonstrators waved Georgian flags, echoing the protests a year ago that drove Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgia's ex-president, from office after a fraudulent parliamentary election. But three other cities announced they would recognise the opposition as the winner.
With more than 99 per cent of precincts counted, the government had a lead. Yet several exit polls had found the opposition was the winner, one by a margin of 11 per cent.
"The abuse of state resources in favour of the president has continued," Bruce George, the observer mission leader, said.
Alas, I knew Victor Yuschenko, I worked with Viktor Yuschenko, and you, sir, are no Viktor Yuschenko...
November 8, 2004
Our August, Their November
Couldn't resist coming back to post just this one bit, which strikes me as bizarrely reminiscent. Feel the burn, baby, feel the burn...
It's okay to use the "F" word
Black Box Voting has taken the position that fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines. We base this on hard evidence, documents obtained in public records requests, inside information, and other data indicative of manipulation of electronic voting systems. What we do not know is the specific scope of the fraud. We are working now to compile the proof, based not on soft evidence -- red flags, exit polls -- but core documents obtained by Black Box Voting in the most massive Freedom of Information action in history.
From BlackBoxVoting.org
It's okay to use the "F" word
Black Box Voting has taken the position that fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines. We base this on hard evidence, documents obtained in public records requests, inside information, and other data indicative of manipulation of electronic voting systems. What we do not know is the specific scope of the fraud. We are working now to compile the proof, based not on soft evidence -- red flags, exit polls -- but core documents obtained by Black Box Voting in the most massive Freedom of Information action in history.
From BlackBoxVoting.org
October 4, 2004
Five Hundred Posts of Solitude
It's a historic day. Of sorts. Blogger informs me that this is post number 500 on Caracas Chronicles - a tidy number, in just 25 months!
It's funny: I've wanted to write a book since I was 10 years old, and in a weird kind of way, I have! Sure, it would take a massive editing effort to whip up these 500 rants into some sort of publishable book - it would also, more relevantly, require an actual publisher, one suicidal enough to take a risk on a cantankerous expat's denunciations of Latin America's most popular, glamourous and groovy-lefty government...so, realistically, it's not likely you'll be seeing Caracas Chronicles in book form any time soon. But still, 500 posts! I've never printed the whole thing, but it can't be less than 800 pages or so...there's definitely a book hiding in there somewhere...
So, for me, it's a time to look back. To tell the truth, I'm pretty happy with the blog. I like the idea that bright, curious, time-rich but clueless northerners who develop an interest in Venezuela are bound to stumble on it sooner or later. I'm pretty sure they'll find a vision of the country's crisis that, well, I don't think they'll find anywhere else.
There's no doubt they'll be reading a partial and opinionated view of the crisis, but then that's what I love about the format: nobody reads a blog expecting anything other than a partial and opinionated view. At the very least, I hope all but lefty ideological hardliners will come to realize you don't have to be a crazy reactionary to oppose Chavez. With any luck, they'll come to see that the story of Venezuela in the Chavez era is vastly more complex and nuanced than the 800-word stories in their morning newspapers might lead them to believe.
Of course, I didn't get everything right. For the bulk of these 25 months I took it as a given that the government would lose any vote the opposition might force - and through fair means or foul, the government managed to win the August recall.
Still, as I think about it, it's pretty clear to me that even if the government really did get 59% of the vote in August, it's not the end of the world for the kind of analysis I've tried to develop here. Just because most people like Chavez's brand of sectarian autocracy enough to vote against recall doesn't mean the government isn't sectarian and autocratic - it just means that most Venezuelans don't mind sectarian autocracy. As a matter of fact, a lot of them seem to like it. That, in itself, presents a whole set of new and troubling questions about the country's political culture - but it sure doesn't make sectarian autocracy okay.
I think the strongest criticism of the blog, though, is that it's often been just plain naïve. Too often, I've fallen prey to the alluring (but nonsensical) notion that the opposition always plays fair. Deep down, I know perfectly well this isn't the case. I've also, though less often, let the government off the hook on some incredible howlers. I'm quite aware of the criticism, and I've tried to fight the tendency, but it's hard for me: thinking the worst of people just doesn't come naturally to me.
[In fact, that's one of the reasons I decided to leave journalism: a sort of ingrained cynicism seems to be one of the distinguishing characteristics of really great journos, and I just don't have it.]
For the moment, I think post 500 is as good a time as any to take an extended break from blogging. It may have dawned on some of you that I really enjoy blogging - but others will also have guessed that it takes up way too much of my time...time I need to start devoting to my poor, neglected dissertation.
To be honest, though, that's not the only reason to stop now. The reality is that Venezuela after the RR is a fundamentally different place than Venezuela before the RR - and frankly, I don't really think it's possible to write about it meaningfully from several thousand kilometers away. What readers need now is reporting, much more than analysis. And there's really no way I can do that from here.
So, this is a goodbye, and a thank-you to all the readers who've taken the time to write in, to argue it out in the forum, to participate. Your feedback, your involvement really made the site. Venezuela has a lot of problems, but so long as it also has people willing to engage one another, to talk things through, to work through the issues that face the country, surely there's hope.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
September 29, 2004
The Paper Trail as Entelechy
Last night, I listened to the BBC World Service's report on Jimmy Carter's concerns on voting in Florida. Lyse Doucet, the legendary BBC journo, laid into the Florida official she was interviewing like only she can,
"It seems quite remarkable, then, that Florida's elections are set to go forward using electronic voting without a verifiable paper trail...after all, in the recent referendum in Venezuela the Carter Center made it quite clear that a paper trail was the one safeguard that positively had to be in place to go forward..."
Sigh.
The Venezuelan referendum has become a byword for "well-run election" in the international media. It's despiriting, both because it's clear that Ms. Doucet doesn't really understand what happened in Venezuela and because it underlines, yet again, how effective CNE was in selling its version of events.
The paper trail has acquired a strange status in Venezuela. On the one hand, it's presented as the key safeguard vouching for the correctness of the election. On the other hand, we're not allowed to look at it. Well, not at 99% of it anyway. Apparently, we're supposed to be reassured by its existence rather than by its content. When we ask to look through it more thoroughly, CNE honcho Jorge Rodriguez accuses us of blackmail!
Paper ballots (papeletas) from 1% of the voting centers were audited on the August 18th cold audit - a cold audit that, as readers will know, has been questioned as un-random. CNE steadfastly refused to open any boxes beyond that 1% - both before and after the initial cold audit.
As mathematicians and physicists studying the referendum results zero in on a subset of tables that appear to show anomalous results, CNE affirms once more that CNE and CNE alone gets to decide which parts of the paper trail get looked at, and repeats that no further boxes will be opened. If we complain and say that that isn't a very transparent way to run an election, the answer writes itself: "Whaddayamean it wasn't transparent!? There was even a printed paper trail, that's how transparent it was!"
Follow me so far?
The paper trail has become a perfect entelechy, a kind of metaphysical imponderable. If a tree falls in the woods but no one is around, does it make a sound? If a voting safeguard is instituted, but no one is allowed to see it, does it actually safeguard anything?
Amidst all the strange comings and goings, the amazing transmogriphying REP, the illegal shifts in people's assigned voting centers, the last minute voting center personel transfers, the bidirectional communications of the voting machines, the aborted hot-audits, the anomalous exit poll results, the dodgy "randomness" of the cold-audit, the non-binomial distribution of the vote in some states, the Benford Law anomalies, etc. CNE has a soothing retort to any question we could throw at it: "trust us, the vote had to be fair. After all, there was a paper trail...everybody knows that's the most important safeguard, even Lyse Doucet knows that..."
Join a moderated debate on this post.
"It seems quite remarkable, then, that Florida's elections are set to go forward using electronic voting without a verifiable paper trail...after all, in the recent referendum in Venezuela the Carter Center made it quite clear that a paper trail was the one safeguard that positively had to be in place to go forward..."
Sigh.
The Venezuelan referendum has become a byword for "well-run election" in the international media. It's despiriting, both because it's clear that Ms. Doucet doesn't really understand what happened in Venezuela and because it underlines, yet again, how effective CNE was in selling its version of events.
The paper trail has acquired a strange status in Venezuela. On the one hand, it's presented as the key safeguard vouching for the correctness of the election. On the other hand, we're not allowed to look at it. Well, not at 99% of it anyway. Apparently, we're supposed to be reassured by its existence rather than by its content. When we ask to look through it more thoroughly, CNE honcho Jorge Rodriguez accuses us of blackmail!
Paper ballots (papeletas) from 1% of the voting centers were audited on the August 18th cold audit - a cold audit that, as readers will know, has been questioned as un-random. CNE steadfastly refused to open any boxes beyond that 1% - both before and after the initial cold audit.
As mathematicians and physicists studying the referendum results zero in on a subset of tables that appear to show anomalous results, CNE affirms once more that CNE and CNE alone gets to decide which parts of the paper trail get looked at, and repeats that no further boxes will be opened. If we complain and say that that isn't a very transparent way to run an election, the answer writes itself: "Whaddayamean it wasn't transparent!? There was even a printed paper trail, that's how transparent it was!"
Follow me so far?
The paper trail has become a perfect entelechy, a kind of metaphysical imponderable. If a tree falls in the woods but no one is around, does it make a sound? If a voting safeguard is instituted, but no one is allowed to see it, does it actually safeguard anything?
Amidst all the strange comings and goings, the amazing transmogriphying REP, the illegal shifts in people's assigned voting centers, the last minute voting center personel transfers, the bidirectional communications of the voting machines, the aborted hot-audits, the anomalous exit poll results, the dodgy "randomness" of the cold-audit, the non-binomial distribution of the vote in some states, the Benford Law anomalies, etc. CNE has a soothing retort to any question we could throw at it: "trust us, the vote had to be fair. After all, there was a paper trail...everybody knows that's the most important safeguard, even Lyse Doucet knows that..."
Join a moderated debate on this post.
September 27, 2004
Carter nos saca la lengua
I suppose Jimmy Carter didn't stop to consider how his opinion piece in today's Washinton Post might strike an opposition-minded Venezuelans - why should he? - but from our point of view, it's hard to shake the feeling he's mocking us. The very least one can say is that his standard for what is ok in Tallahasee is not precisely his standard for what is ok in Plaza Caracas. But what's really remarkable about this deeply upsetting bit of gringocentric punditry is how similar his complaints are, in content and tone, to what the Coordinadora Democrática has been saying about CNE for over a year now...
Still Seeking a Fair Florida Vote
By Jimmy Carter
Monday, September 27, 2004; Page A19
After the debacle in Florida four years ago, former president Gerald Ford and I were asked to lead a blue-ribbon commission to recommend changes in the American electoral process. After months of concerted effort by a dedicated and bipartisan group of experts, we presented unanimous recommendations to the president and Congress. The government responded with the Help America Vote Act of October 2002. Unfortunately, however, many of the act's key provisions have not been implemented because of inadequate funding or political disputes.
The Carter Center has monitored more than 50 elections, all of them held under contentious, troubled or dangerous conditions. When I describe these activities, either in the United States or in foreign forums, the almost inevitable questions are: "Why don't you observe the election in Florida?" and "How do you explain the serious problems with elections there?"
The answer to the first question is that we can monitor only about five elections each year, and meeting crucial needs in other nations is our top priority. (Our most recent ones were in Venezuela and Indonesia, and the next will be in Mozambique.) A partial answer to the other question is that some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida.
The most significant of these requirements are:
- A nonpartisan electoral commission or a trusted and nonpartisan official who will be responsible for organizing and conducting the electoral process before, during and after the actual voting takes place. Although rarely perfect in their objectivity, such top administrators are at least subject to public scrutiny and responsible for the integrity of their decisions. Florida voting officials have proved to be highly partisan, brazenly violating a basic need for an unbiased and universally trusted authority to manage all elements of the electoral process.
Read the rest of the Opinion piece...
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Still Seeking a Fair Florida Vote
By Jimmy Carter
Monday, September 27, 2004; Page A19
After the debacle in Florida four years ago, former president Gerald Ford and I were asked to lead a blue-ribbon commission to recommend changes in the American electoral process. After months of concerted effort by a dedicated and bipartisan group of experts, we presented unanimous recommendations to the president and Congress. The government responded with the Help America Vote Act of October 2002. Unfortunately, however, many of the act's key provisions have not been implemented because of inadequate funding or political disputes.
The Carter Center has monitored more than 50 elections, all of them held under contentious, troubled or dangerous conditions. When I describe these activities, either in the United States or in foreign forums, the almost inevitable questions are: "Why don't you observe the election in Florida?" and "How do you explain the serious problems with elections there?"
The answer to the first question is that we can monitor only about five elections each year, and meeting crucial needs in other nations is our top priority. (Our most recent ones were in Venezuela and Indonesia, and the next will be in Mozambique.) A partial answer to the other question is that some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida.
The most significant of these requirements are:
- A nonpartisan electoral commission or a trusted and nonpartisan official who will be responsible for organizing and conducting the electoral process before, during and after the actual voting takes place. Although rarely perfect in their objectivity, such top administrators are at least subject to public scrutiny and responsible for the integrity of their decisions. Florida voting officials have proved to be highly partisan, brazenly violating a basic need for an unbiased and universally trusted authority to manage all elements of the electoral process.
Read the rest of the Opinion piece...
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September 24, 2004
The law, damn it, the law!
This photo shows a crime being committed.
It may seem minor, but it's an issue of serious symbolic imporance in Venezuela. Retired military officers are barred from wearing their uniforms except in a highly circumscribed set of circumstances - weddings, funerals, military events and the like. It is against the law for retired military officers like Hugo Chavez to wear the uniform outside those circumstances. The picture you see above, therefore, is evidence of a crime.
Hugo Chavez couldn't care less.
After April 11th, and until yesterday, he had restrained from this particularly blatant bit of flagrancy, from openly breaking his oath of office, from pissing all over the laws, rubbing our faces in it in this most open and public of ways. Yesterday, on the border, he once again showed that at the center of his ideology is the notion that he is above the law.
Talking about this sort of thing with Calvin on the forum, he wrote something that, well, I can't really argue with: "Victors don't hold post mortems, and their supporters don't demand them. That's the loser's job."
Politically, this is true. But Calvin, I have to ask you, does an electoral majority entitle Chavez to flout the law? Does it give him permission to just run roughshod over the legislation he solemnly swore to uphold when he was sworn in? Is he a president or an emperor? Does the law apply to everyone equally, or to some more equally than others? What purpose could imaginably be served by wearing his uniform illegally other than rubbing our faces in it? Showing he can do it, nobody can stop him, and if you don't like it then tough?
With this symbolically loaded stunt Chavez demonstrates, in the most public way possible, a deep contempt for the law, for the notion that everyone is equal before the law. No electoral majority on earth can change that. Chavez insists on making a show, an arrogant display of the fact that he is above the law, that he owns all the institutions in charge of enforcing the law and he is therefore untouchable. He can get away with anything he likes. He can go out and have journalists take pictures of him breaking the law and then splash that evidence all over the front pages of a newspaper and nothing happens!
Message: It's my country and I'll do whatever I damn well please in it.
It reminds me all over again of what is so unacceptable about Chavez - an unacceptability that is not mitigated by his popularity, because it's based on contempt for the most basic institutions of democratic, republican governance. If you don't believe that the law applies to everyone equally - you included - you're simply not a democrat, no matter how many people vote for you.
Those who wish to side with Chavez really owe it to themselves and to the country to face up to the symbolic weight of Chavez's insistence on using his military uniform illegally. Either you believe in the rule of law, in the supremacy of the law and its applicability to everyone, or you don't. If you believe in the rule of law, you need to face up to Chavez's contempt for it. If you don't, you should come straight out and say it. Defend your position! Explain to us why the rule of law is an outmoded or unnecessary or retrograde force in society. What you cannot continue to do, if you have any desire to be taken seriously, is keep waving the little blue book around while your leader makes a mockery of it.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
It may seem minor, but it's an issue of serious symbolic imporance in Venezuela. Retired military officers are barred from wearing their uniforms except in a highly circumscribed set of circumstances - weddings, funerals, military events and the like. It is against the law for retired military officers like Hugo Chavez to wear the uniform outside those circumstances. The picture you see above, therefore, is evidence of a crime.
Hugo Chavez couldn't care less.
After April 11th, and until yesterday, he had restrained from this particularly blatant bit of flagrancy, from openly breaking his oath of office, from pissing all over the laws, rubbing our faces in it in this most open and public of ways. Yesterday, on the border, he once again showed that at the center of his ideology is the notion that he is above the law.
Talking about this sort of thing with Calvin on the forum, he wrote something that, well, I can't really argue with: "Victors don't hold post mortems, and their supporters don't demand them. That's the loser's job."
Politically, this is true. But Calvin, I have to ask you, does an electoral majority entitle Chavez to flout the law? Does it give him permission to just run roughshod over the legislation he solemnly swore to uphold when he was sworn in? Is he a president or an emperor? Does the law apply to everyone equally, or to some more equally than others? What purpose could imaginably be served by wearing his uniform illegally other than rubbing our faces in it? Showing he can do it, nobody can stop him, and if you don't like it then tough?
With this symbolically loaded stunt Chavez demonstrates, in the most public way possible, a deep contempt for the law, for the notion that everyone is equal before the law. No electoral majority on earth can change that. Chavez insists on making a show, an arrogant display of the fact that he is above the law, that he owns all the institutions in charge of enforcing the law and he is therefore untouchable. He can get away with anything he likes. He can go out and have journalists take pictures of him breaking the law and then splash that evidence all over the front pages of a newspaper and nothing happens!
Message: It's my country and I'll do whatever I damn well please in it.
It reminds me all over again of what is so unacceptable about Chavez - an unacceptability that is not mitigated by his popularity, because it's based on contempt for the most basic institutions of democratic, republican governance. If you don't believe that the law applies to everyone equally - you included - you're simply not a democrat, no matter how many people vote for you.
Those who wish to side with Chavez really owe it to themselves and to the country to face up to the symbolic weight of Chavez's insistence on using his military uniform illegally. Either you believe in the rule of law, in the supremacy of the law and its applicability to everyone, or you don't. If you believe in the rule of law, you need to face up to Chavez's contempt for it. If you don't, you should come straight out and say it. Defend your position! Explain to us why the rule of law is an outmoded or unnecessary or retrograde force in society. What you cannot continue to do, if you have any desire to be taken seriously, is keep waving the little blue book around while your leader makes a mockery of it.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
September 23, 2004
Snippet of Hausmann and Rigobon's Answer to the Carter Center
This appears to be Hausmann and Rigobon's reply to Dan's Really Obvious Objection. Personally, I find it hard to follow.
How does the Carter Center answer our claim? They make three propositions:
1. They check whether the mean of the votes in the two samples are similar
[...]
With respect to the first point, the question that the Carte Center asks is whether the unconditional means of the two samples are similar. By unconditional we mean that they do not control for the fact that precincts are different in the four dimensions we include in our equation or in any other dimension.
To see the importance of conditioning, let us imagine that there is fraud and let us suppose that the fraud is carried out in a large number of precincts but not in all of them. The question is: is it possible to choose an audit sample of non-tampered centers that has the same mean as the universe of tampered and un-tampered precincts? The answer is obviously yes. Let us give an example using a population with a varying level of income, say from US$ 4,000 per year to several million. Assume that half of them have been taxed 20 percent of their income while the other half has not. Is it possible to construct an audit sample of non-taxed individuals whose average income is similar to that of those that have been taxed? Obviously the answer is yes. However, if one controls for the level of education, the years of work experience and the positions they hold in the companies they work in, it should be possible to find that the audited individuals actually a higher net income than the non-audited group. That is the essence of what we do.
Now, lets go back to the case in point. Precincts vary from those where the Yes got more than 90 percent of the vote and those where it got less than 10 percent. This is a very large variation relative to the potential size of the fraud, say 10 or 20 percent. It is perfectly feasible to choose a sample that has the same mean as the rest of the universe.
However, the non-random nature of the sample would be revealed if we compare the means but controlling for the fact that each precinct is different. That is what we do and this is the randomness test that the audited sample failed.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
How does the Carter Center answer our claim? They make three propositions:
1. They check whether the mean of the votes in the two samples are similar
[...]
With respect to the first point, the question that the Carte Center asks is whether the unconditional means of the two samples are similar. By unconditional we mean that they do not control for the fact that precincts are different in the four dimensions we include in our equation or in any other dimension.
To see the importance of conditioning, let us imagine that there is fraud and let us suppose that the fraud is carried out in a large number of precincts but not in all of them. The question is: is it possible to choose an audit sample of non-tampered centers that has the same mean as the universe of tampered and un-tampered precincts? The answer is obviously yes. Let us give an example using a population with a varying level of income, say from US$ 4,000 per year to several million. Assume that half of them have been taxed 20 percent of their income while the other half has not. Is it possible to construct an audit sample of non-taxed individuals whose average income is similar to that of those that have been taxed? Obviously the answer is yes. However, if one controls for the level of education, the years of work experience and the positions they hold in the companies they work in, it should be possible to find that the audited individuals actually a higher net income than the non-audited group. That is the essence of what we do.
Now, lets go back to the case in point. Precincts vary from those where the Yes got more than 90 percent of the vote and those where it got less than 10 percent. This is a very large variation relative to the potential size of the fraud, say 10 or 20 percent. It is perfectly feasible to choose a sample that has the same mean as the rest of the universe.
However, the non-random nature of the sample would be revealed if we compare the means but controlling for the fact that each precinct is different. That is what we do and this is the randomness test that the audited sample failed.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
September 22, 2004
Unified Field Theory of Non-Fraud
or...Who exactly is Jorge Rodríguez?
I. Suspending disbelief
I want to address, first, my many readers who are sure there was fraud in the recall referendum last month. And I want to ask you to do something hard: I want you to consider, just for a moment, the possibility that there was no fraud. How could that be? What story can we tell ourselves, what narrative do we need to weave, to make sense of the no-fraud hypothesis?
I think it's possible to construct such a story, and even to find some quite strong evidence to back it, but only if we first unlearn much of what we thought we knew about the National Electoral Council - CNE - and especially, about its key member: Jorge Rodríguez.
II. Rethinking the CNE Board Appointments
First, we need to go back to September 2003 and the appointment of the current CNE board members. As Venezuelans will remember, the current members were named under a constitutionally exceptional situation. In normal circumstances, the National Assembly is supposed to select the five members of the board via a two-thirds vote. But since the Assembly is split 85-80, neither side could muster the 110 votes needed. Not surprisingly, compromise proved impossible and the selection process deadlocked.
The impasse was cleared by the Constitutional Chamber Supreme Tribunal - TSJ - on the basis of Article 336, paragraph 7 of the 1999 constitution, which empowers the Constitutional Chamber to declare unconstitutional an omission on the part of the National Assembly, and to "determine the guidelines for its correction." In this case, the Constitutional Chamber of the TSJ ruled that by omitting the decision on a new CNE board the Assembly had violated a constitutional mandate.
Instead of determining the guidelines to correct this omission, however, the Constitutional Chamber just went ahead and appointed a new CNE board unilaterally. And here is where the problems started.
The call at the time, both from the opposition and the dictates of common sense, had been to try to appoint a balanced CNE - in practice, one with two pro-government members, two pro-opposition members and a neutral or apolitical chairman. If the National Assembly had deadlocked it was precisely because the government insisted on retaining a 3-2 majority.
In the event, throwing the matter to the TSJ's Consitutional Chamber did not seem like much of an advance to the opposition. The five-member Constitutional Chamber itself has a built-in 3-2 chavista majority, and a long and sorry history of highly questionable or "juridically creative" rulings in favor of the government. Chief Magistrate Iván Rincón together with Magistrates Jesús Eduardo Cabrera and José Delgado Ocando have always been reliable chavistas - and for me, the biggest problem with believing the Unified Field Theory of Non-Fraud is that it requires you to believe that these people selected a CNE board that would not cheat.
Why is this so hard to swallow?
III. A short digression
Sectarianism has long been a distinguishing characteristic of the chavista experiment. Some weeks ago, TalCual ran a chilling piece on the purge of Venezuela's foremost (in fact, only) expert on the preservation of rare historic books. He was fired from his long-held job as head of the National Library's rare books division for, surprise surprise, signing in favor of the presidential recall referendum. A similar fate befell the Biblioteca Nacional's longtime head of historic cartography. Both were replaced by reliable chavistas with no specialist training for the highly specialized jobs they were asked to perform.
Now, that's only one story out of a very long list to show that Chavistas systematically demand diehard loyalty from every one of their appointees, even when quite minor positions are at stake. But if they will not trust a non-loyalist even to look after the nation's collection of historic books, or maps, what sense could it possibly make that they would appoint a genuine non-loyalist to a post as sensitive as the key position within the one agency that could eject Chavez from power? Personally, I cannot make sense of that - and it remains the single biggest obstacle to my belief in the theory I'm about to put forward.
IV. Not as advertised
The CNE board appointed by Rincon, Cabrera and Delgado Ocando was a peculiar one. The way it was presented to the public was straightforward: the government would get two members (Jorge Rodríguez and Oscar Battaglini) the opposition would get two members (Ezequiel Zamora and Solbella Mejias), while the head of the council, Francisco Carrasquero, would remain neutral. Very quickly, though, it became apparent that Carrasquero was in no sense neutral - his statements and votes systematically sided with the government. The natural reaction in the opposition was to assume we'd been screwed, and had ended up with a 3-2 pro-Chavez council. Certainly, most key votes were decided along those lines, with Carrasquero, Rodríguez and Battaglini voting as a block, and always in favor of the government.
However, CNE watchers also started to notice another reality - while Carrasquero was the nominal head of the council, it was clear that day-to-day decision-making was not in his hands. Instead, it was Jorge Rodríguez who was calling the shots from his perch as head of the Junta National Electoral - the National Electoral Board - which could be described as the executive arm in charge of the day-to-day management of CNE.
The question of Jorge Rodríguez's integrity soon became the burning issue in opposition circles, though it was not much disputed, to be sure. Almost everyone in the opposition just assumed he was a doctrinaire chavista paying lip-service to his independent status just to cover appearances. However, well placed sources close to the CNE (who would assassinate me if I named them) never bought this. Instead, they put forward an alternative interpretation of the CNE appointments that radically recast what the TSJ's Constitutional Chamber had been up to.
V. The Padgett Hypothesis
The most complete retelling of this view in print came in this Time Magazine article by Tim Padgett. Tim is a tough reporter, skeptical and careful, and with enough distance from the Venezuelan situation to look at it with more objectivity than most of us can muster. His views, and those of the unnamed diplomats he cites, are so far removed to opposition Conventional Wisdom, that our immediate impulse is to assume he just doesn't know what he's talking about. I want to encourage my antichavista readers, though, to make the effort to suspend their disbelief - at least provisionally - to understand the implications of this interpretation. After all, we don't own the truth - no one does.
According to the Padgett Hypothesis, CNE really was a 2-1-2 council. The reason most of us failed to see this is that the independent in the middle was not Carrasquero, as advertised, but instead Rodríguez. In this interpretation, Rodríguez was perhaps closer to the old IVth Republic model of an "independiente pro" - that is, someone with broad ideological sympathy for one side, but not actively controlled by it. Moreover, given that day-to-day managerial control of CNE was in the hands of the JNE, it made far more sense to have the one independent member as head of JNE rather than as chairman of CNE.
This, again, puts a different spin on the preponderance of 3-2 decisions in the council. From this new point of view, Rodríguez had enough ascendancy over Battaglini and Carrasquero to bring them on board on most decisions. But if Battaglini and Carrasquero were merely going along with decisions cooked up by a non-chavista JNE, then one starts to understand why the characterization of CNE as a fully-owned subsidiary of Miraflores might not hold water.
VI. Rethinking the Reparos
I'm sure my antichavista readers are banging their heads against their desks at this point, but there's at least some evidence to lead us to believe that this interpretation could be the right one. Consider the decision to send about 1 million signatures to "reparos" all the way back in February.
At the time, the opposition saw this as a clear case of a pro-Chavez CNE conniving to stop the referendum. However, Padgett's piece makes it clear that the "reparos" were not the chavistas' preferred alternative. Instead, Battaglini and Carrasquero wanted to invalidate outright the 1,000,000 signatures they'd pegged as "planas" - which would have stopped the referendum process cold.
The reparos, which caused such unmitigated outrage in the opposition, seem to have been a compromise, hatched by Jorge Rodríguez, to keep the referendum process moving forward but with added checks. This is Padgett's view, and sources inside CNE back it.
If the idea of Rincon/Cabrera/Delgado Ocando picking a true independent is the non-fraud theory's single weakest point, then this is its strongest point: if, as claimed, CNE was merely an appendage of Miraflores, the referendum process would not have gotten past February - it simply would have died as the planas were declared invalid. The fact that CNE not only moved forward at that point but eventually agreed to a viable reparos process shows quite convincingly that Rodríguez was not simply devoted to derailing the referendum, as the opposition claimed. Instead, in a strange and roundabout way, CNE seemed to be doing what the opposition had always hoped it would - balancing the demands of both sides thanks to the leadership of someone that was controlled by neither.
In fact, it seems the closer people got to Rodríguez, the harder it was for them to dismiss him as a chavista stooge. While diplomats like Cesar Gaviria criticized the pattern of 3-2 decisions at CNE, after a year of close and difficult interactions with him they do not subscribe to a vision of Jorge Rodríguez as a cheat - as evidenced by their unambiguous acceptance of CNE's results. Even Alberto Quirós Corradi, one of the CD's two negotiators with CNE, accepted that Rodríguez had created conditions for tough but respectful negotiations, conditions he hints would not have been possible without him.
VII. Closer to Teo than to Marta
Quirós Corradi still sees Rodríguez as biased towards the government, but in a different way than Carrasquero and Battaglini. In this view, Jorge Rodríguez occupied a moderate position in the pro-government camp roughly analogous to Teodoro Petkoff's in the opposition, while Battaglini and Carrasquero were closer to Marta Colomina's extreme and uncompromising stance.
This is important because the decision on voting systems for the referendum was made more or less unilaterally by Jorge Rodríguez. As is well known, there was no public bidding process, and the SBC consortium was put together by JNE on its own. In the opposition's standard frame of mind, where Rodríguez was just as much of a chavista extremist as Carrasquero and Battaglini, his decision on the voting system looks rotten indeed. But if Tim Padgett's narrative is mostly right, Rodríguez's choice of voting software can be seen in a quite different light: as a play to adopt a technology that makes fraud essentially impossible, in an environment were attempts to commit fraud seemed likely and claims of fraud would be almost inevitable from the losing side.
The debate over Jorge Rodríguez's probity is important because if there was fraud, there can be little doubt that it had to have been orchestrated by Jorge Rodríguez himself. Similarly, if there was no fraud, it had to have been prevented by him. What you think about fraud will be determined largely by how you judge him.
If you think Rodríguez was just an undercover diehard chavista who committed a massive electronic fraud, you need to explain why it was that Rodríguez didn't just stop the recall process back in February, when he clearly had the chance to, and, moreover, was under pressure from the government to do so. Conversely, if you think there was no fraud, then you have to explain how it is that the TSJ Constitutional Chamber's diehard chavista majority suddenly, on this most sensitive of decisions, took a break from its systematic partisanship and appointed a real independent to be the de facto head of CNE.
There's much that's left out of this brief sketch. But it seems to me this kind of re-thinking of what happened over the last year will be necessary to make sense of the recall saga. The theory would have to be extended to cover the last-minute shifts in the electoral registry and the voting center staffing (who knows? perhaps there's a perfectly innocent explanation for all that) as well as quite a number of other such puzzling episodes, from the failure of the hot audit to the refusal to open up contested ballot boxes. But experience has taught me that decisions that seem incomprehensible from one point of view can turn out to have quite straightforward explanations when looked at from another - so it's very hard to be sure.
VIII. Final possibility
There is one final possibility, which I think is worth considering seriously: Jorge Rodríguez could be a psychopath, specifically a compensated psychopath. Perhaps the man is, like many with a psychopathic personality structure, just particularly shrewd, extraordinarily adept at lying, shorn of a normal sense of morality or a conscience, and possessed of a kind of special charisma that elicits uncommon loyalty. Compensated psychopaths can take almost anyone in - and those closest to them more than any others. At times, watching his press conferences, I had the distinct sense that I was listening to a psychopath. Unfortunately, I'm not a psychiatrist (he is!) so I'm in no position to judge this.
Yet, even as I write that, it's hard for me to quite believe it. To this litany of extraordinary character traits, we'd have to add one more: Rodríguez would have to be superhumanly competent. One month out, and after every statistician in the country has poured over the data, the opposition has still been unable to prove fraud decisively. If there was fraud, it was as close to a Perfect Fraud as one could imagine. And pulling off a Perfect Fraud, wel...it's not impossible...but close.
Me? I can't really believe that you can steal an election in a way that's impossible to demonstrate - so I have to swallow hard and accept, try to accept, that the Constitutional Chamber appointed a JNE head they could not control, and that the opposition has been wrong about him since the word go. It's not a story that makes much sense to me, but for a long time attempts to come to an understanding of what happened on August 15th have come down to a judgement between the unlikely and the unlikelier. A perfect fraud seems like the least likely possibility out there. Sadly, a perfect fraud is what the opposition alleges.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
I. Suspending disbelief
I want to address, first, my many readers who are sure there was fraud in the recall referendum last month. And I want to ask you to do something hard: I want you to consider, just for a moment, the possibility that there was no fraud. How could that be? What story can we tell ourselves, what narrative do we need to weave, to make sense of the no-fraud hypothesis?
I think it's possible to construct such a story, and even to find some quite strong evidence to back it, but only if we first unlearn much of what we thought we knew about the National Electoral Council - CNE - and especially, about its key member: Jorge Rodríguez.
II. Rethinking the CNE Board Appointments
First, we need to go back to September 2003 and the appointment of the current CNE board members. As Venezuelans will remember, the current members were named under a constitutionally exceptional situation. In normal circumstances, the National Assembly is supposed to select the five members of the board via a two-thirds vote. But since the Assembly is split 85-80, neither side could muster the 110 votes needed. Not surprisingly, compromise proved impossible and the selection process deadlocked.
The impasse was cleared by the Constitutional Chamber Supreme Tribunal - TSJ - on the basis of Article 336, paragraph 7 of the 1999 constitution, which empowers the Constitutional Chamber to declare unconstitutional an omission on the part of the National Assembly, and to "determine the guidelines for its correction." In this case, the Constitutional Chamber of the TSJ ruled that by omitting the decision on a new CNE board the Assembly had violated a constitutional mandate.
Instead of determining the guidelines to correct this omission, however, the Constitutional Chamber just went ahead and appointed a new CNE board unilaterally. And here is where the problems started.
The call at the time, both from the opposition and the dictates of common sense, had been to try to appoint a balanced CNE - in practice, one with two pro-government members, two pro-opposition members and a neutral or apolitical chairman. If the National Assembly had deadlocked it was precisely because the government insisted on retaining a 3-2 majority.
In the event, throwing the matter to the TSJ's Consitutional Chamber did not seem like much of an advance to the opposition. The five-member Constitutional Chamber itself has a built-in 3-2 chavista majority, and a long and sorry history of highly questionable or "juridically creative" rulings in favor of the government. Chief Magistrate Iván Rincón together with Magistrates Jesús Eduardo Cabrera and José Delgado Ocando have always been reliable chavistas - and for me, the biggest problem with believing the Unified Field Theory of Non-Fraud is that it requires you to believe that these people selected a CNE board that would not cheat.
Why is this so hard to swallow?
III. A short digression
Sectarianism has long been a distinguishing characteristic of the chavista experiment. Some weeks ago, TalCual ran a chilling piece on the purge of Venezuela's foremost (in fact, only) expert on the preservation of rare historic books. He was fired from his long-held job as head of the National Library's rare books division for, surprise surprise, signing in favor of the presidential recall referendum. A similar fate befell the Biblioteca Nacional's longtime head of historic cartography. Both were replaced by reliable chavistas with no specialist training for the highly specialized jobs they were asked to perform.
Now, that's only one story out of a very long list to show that Chavistas systematically demand diehard loyalty from every one of their appointees, even when quite minor positions are at stake. But if they will not trust a non-loyalist even to look after the nation's collection of historic books, or maps, what sense could it possibly make that they would appoint a genuine non-loyalist to a post as sensitive as the key position within the one agency that could eject Chavez from power? Personally, I cannot make sense of that - and it remains the single biggest obstacle to my belief in the theory I'm about to put forward.
IV. Not as advertised
The CNE board appointed by Rincon, Cabrera and Delgado Ocando was a peculiar one. The way it was presented to the public was straightforward: the government would get two members (Jorge Rodríguez and Oscar Battaglini) the opposition would get two members (Ezequiel Zamora and Solbella Mejias), while the head of the council, Francisco Carrasquero, would remain neutral. Very quickly, though, it became apparent that Carrasquero was in no sense neutral - his statements and votes systematically sided with the government. The natural reaction in the opposition was to assume we'd been screwed, and had ended up with a 3-2 pro-Chavez council. Certainly, most key votes were decided along those lines, with Carrasquero, Rodríguez and Battaglini voting as a block, and always in favor of the government.
However, CNE watchers also started to notice another reality - while Carrasquero was the nominal head of the council, it was clear that day-to-day decision-making was not in his hands. Instead, it was Jorge Rodríguez who was calling the shots from his perch as head of the Junta National Electoral - the National Electoral Board - which could be described as the executive arm in charge of the day-to-day management of CNE.
The question of Jorge Rodríguez's integrity soon became the burning issue in opposition circles, though it was not much disputed, to be sure. Almost everyone in the opposition just assumed he was a doctrinaire chavista paying lip-service to his independent status just to cover appearances. However, well placed sources close to the CNE (who would assassinate me if I named them) never bought this. Instead, they put forward an alternative interpretation of the CNE appointments that radically recast what the TSJ's Constitutional Chamber had been up to.
V. The Padgett Hypothesis
The most complete retelling of this view in print came in this Time Magazine article by Tim Padgett. Tim is a tough reporter, skeptical and careful, and with enough distance from the Venezuelan situation to look at it with more objectivity than most of us can muster. His views, and those of the unnamed diplomats he cites, are so far removed to opposition Conventional Wisdom, that our immediate impulse is to assume he just doesn't know what he's talking about. I want to encourage my antichavista readers, though, to make the effort to suspend their disbelief - at least provisionally - to understand the implications of this interpretation. After all, we don't own the truth - no one does.
According to the Padgett Hypothesis, CNE really was a 2-1-2 council. The reason most of us failed to see this is that the independent in the middle was not Carrasquero, as advertised, but instead Rodríguez. In this interpretation, Rodríguez was perhaps closer to the old IVth Republic model of an "independiente pro" - that is, someone with broad ideological sympathy for one side, but not actively controlled by it. Moreover, given that day-to-day managerial control of CNE was in the hands of the JNE, it made far more sense to have the one independent member as head of JNE rather than as chairman of CNE.
This, again, puts a different spin on the preponderance of 3-2 decisions in the council. From this new point of view, Rodríguez had enough ascendancy over Battaglini and Carrasquero to bring them on board on most decisions. But if Battaglini and Carrasquero were merely going along with decisions cooked up by a non-chavista JNE, then one starts to understand why the characterization of CNE as a fully-owned subsidiary of Miraflores might not hold water.
VI. Rethinking the Reparos
I'm sure my antichavista readers are banging their heads against their desks at this point, but there's at least some evidence to lead us to believe that this interpretation could be the right one. Consider the decision to send about 1 million signatures to "reparos" all the way back in February.
At the time, the opposition saw this as a clear case of a pro-Chavez CNE conniving to stop the referendum. However, Padgett's piece makes it clear that the "reparos" were not the chavistas' preferred alternative. Instead, Battaglini and Carrasquero wanted to invalidate outright the 1,000,000 signatures they'd pegged as "planas" - which would have stopped the referendum process cold.
The reparos, which caused such unmitigated outrage in the opposition, seem to have been a compromise, hatched by Jorge Rodríguez, to keep the referendum process moving forward but with added checks. This is Padgett's view, and sources inside CNE back it.
If the idea of Rincon/Cabrera/Delgado Ocando picking a true independent is the non-fraud theory's single weakest point, then this is its strongest point: if, as claimed, CNE was merely an appendage of Miraflores, the referendum process would not have gotten past February - it simply would have died as the planas were declared invalid. The fact that CNE not only moved forward at that point but eventually agreed to a viable reparos process shows quite convincingly that Rodríguez was not simply devoted to derailing the referendum, as the opposition claimed. Instead, in a strange and roundabout way, CNE seemed to be doing what the opposition had always hoped it would - balancing the demands of both sides thanks to the leadership of someone that was controlled by neither.
In fact, it seems the closer people got to Rodríguez, the harder it was for them to dismiss him as a chavista stooge. While diplomats like Cesar Gaviria criticized the pattern of 3-2 decisions at CNE, after a year of close and difficult interactions with him they do not subscribe to a vision of Jorge Rodríguez as a cheat - as evidenced by their unambiguous acceptance of CNE's results. Even Alberto Quirós Corradi, one of the CD's two negotiators with CNE, accepted that Rodríguez had created conditions for tough but respectful negotiations, conditions he hints would not have been possible without him.
VII. Closer to Teo than to Marta
Quirós Corradi still sees Rodríguez as biased towards the government, but in a different way than Carrasquero and Battaglini. In this view, Jorge Rodríguez occupied a moderate position in the pro-government camp roughly analogous to Teodoro Petkoff's in the opposition, while Battaglini and Carrasquero were closer to Marta Colomina's extreme and uncompromising stance.
This is important because the decision on voting systems for the referendum was made more or less unilaterally by Jorge Rodríguez. As is well known, there was no public bidding process, and the SBC consortium was put together by JNE on its own. In the opposition's standard frame of mind, where Rodríguez was just as much of a chavista extremist as Carrasquero and Battaglini, his decision on the voting system looks rotten indeed. But if Tim Padgett's narrative is mostly right, Rodríguez's choice of voting software can be seen in a quite different light: as a play to adopt a technology that makes fraud essentially impossible, in an environment were attempts to commit fraud seemed likely and claims of fraud would be almost inevitable from the losing side.
The debate over Jorge Rodríguez's probity is important because if there was fraud, there can be little doubt that it had to have been orchestrated by Jorge Rodríguez himself. Similarly, if there was no fraud, it had to have been prevented by him. What you think about fraud will be determined largely by how you judge him.
If you think Rodríguez was just an undercover diehard chavista who committed a massive electronic fraud, you need to explain why it was that Rodríguez didn't just stop the recall process back in February, when he clearly had the chance to, and, moreover, was under pressure from the government to do so. Conversely, if you think there was no fraud, then you have to explain how it is that the TSJ Constitutional Chamber's diehard chavista majority suddenly, on this most sensitive of decisions, took a break from its systematic partisanship and appointed a real independent to be the de facto head of CNE.
There's much that's left out of this brief sketch. But it seems to me this kind of re-thinking of what happened over the last year will be necessary to make sense of the recall saga. The theory would have to be extended to cover the last-minute shifts in the electoral registry and the voting center staffing (who knows? perhaps there's a perfectly innocent explanation for all that) as well as quite a number of other such puzzling episodes, from the failure of the hot audit to the refusal to open up contested ballot boxes. But experience has taught me that decisions that seem incomprehensible from one point of view can turn out to have quite straightforward explanations when looked at from another - so it's very hard to be sure.
VIII. Final possibility
There is one final possibility, which I think is worth considering seriously: Jorge Rodríguez could be a psychopath, specifically a compensated psychopath. Perhaps the man is, like many with a psychopathic personality structure, just particularly shrewd, extraordinarily adept at lying, shorn of a normal sense of morality or a conscience, and possessed of a kind of special charisma that elicits uncommon loyalty. Compensated psychopaths can take almost anyone in - and those closest to them more than any others. At times, watching his press conferences, I had the distinct sense that I was listening to a psychopath. Unfortunately, I'm not a psychiatrist (he is!) so I'm in no position to judge this.
Yet, even as I write that, it's hard for me to quite believe it. To this litany of extraordinary character traits, we'd have to add one more: Rodríguez would have to be superhumanly competent. One month out, and after every statistician in the country has poured over the data, the opposition has still been unable to prove fraud decisively. If there was fraud, it was as close to a Perfect Fraud as one could imagine. And pulling off a Perfect Fraud, wel...it's not impossible...but close.
Me? I can't really believe that you can steal an election in a way that's impossible to demonstrate - so I have to swallow hard and accept, try to accept, that the Constitutional Chamber appointed a JNE head they could not control, and that the opposition has been wrong about him since the word go. It's not a story that makes much sense to me, but for a long time attempts to come to an understanding of what happened on August 15th have come down to a judgement between the unlikely and the unlikelier. A perfect fraud seems like the least likely possibility out there. Sadly, a perfect fraud is what the opposition alleges.
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September 21, 2004
Carter Center, CEPR, and Dan's Really Obvious Objection
The striking thing about the Carter Center's "reply" to Hausmann and Rigobon's original and much ballyhooed claims is that, well, it's not really a reply at all - it's just a reassertion of what they'd said before. The CC's report made no effort to engage with the substance of Hausmann and Rigobon's argument, leaving the back-and-forth to look very much like a dialogue of the deaf.
This is particularly vexing given that Carter Center could have leaned on a massive, gaping hole in Hausmann and Rigobon's argument - call it Dan's Really Obvious Objection. Kudos have to go to Dan Burnett who spotted this almost two weeks ago and wrote about it in the discussion board here: if, as Hausmann and Rigobon argue, the Cold Audit was carried out on a random sample of a random sample of untampered with voting centers, how can its overall results possibly match CNE's supposedly fraudulent results?
Now CEPR - a propagandistic philochavista "think tank" in Washington DC - picks up this argument and uses it as a bludgeon to hammer at the Hausmann and Rigobon paper. Personally, I can't hide my extreme distate for a pseudo-independent outfit like CEPR - which hides an extremist ideological agenda and a clearly partisan stance behind the guise of a properly sanitized DC research center.
But one thing I can tell you: the sky doesn't stop being blue just because an extremist nut says the sky is blue.
In this particular case, Hausmann and Rigobon appear to have pitched CEPR such a juicy bombita that it's hardly surprising they've hit it hard. If the cold audit was carried out on a random sample of "clean" voting centers, CEPR calculates, the chances of the audit yielding results in line with CNE's overall results if the real result was in line with Sumate's exit poll comes out to 1 in 28 billion trillion.
This is just a mathematically retelling of Dan's Really Obvious Objection. What vexes me most is that I know that Rigobon personally had this argument put to him - and rather than giving any kind of reasoned response, flailed his arms a lot saying one could not extrapolate from the audit sample to the entire population. But they knew, they had to know, that Dan's Really Obvious Objection was coming. They don't seem to have had a response for it. If they did, they should've put it in the public domain long ago, before CEPR made the point. If they didn't, then they shouldn't have published their paper at all.
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This is particularly vexing given that Carter Center could have leaned on a massive, gaping hole in Hausmann and Rigobon's argument - call it Dan's Really Obvious Objection. Kudos have to go to Dan Burnett who spotted this almost two weeks ago and wrote about it in the discussion board here: if, as Hausmann and Rigobon argue, the Cold Audit was carried out on a random sample of a random sample of untampered with voting centers, how can its overall results possibly match CNE's supposedly fraudulent results?
Now CEPR - a propagandistic philochavista "think tank" in Washington DC - picks up this argument and uses it as a bludgeon to hammer at the Hausmann and Rigobon paper. Personally, I can't hide my extreme distate for a pseudo-independent outfit like CEPR - which hides an extremist ideological agenda and a clearly partisan stance behind the guise of a properly sanitized DC research center.
But one thing I can tell you: the sky doesn't stop being blue just because an extremist nut says the sky is blue.
In this particular case, Hausmann and Rigobon appear to have pitched CEPR such a juicy bombita that it's hardly surprising they've hit it hard. If the cold audit was carried out on a random sample of "clean" voting centers, CEPR calculates, the chances of the audit yielding results in line with CNE's overall results if the real result was in line with Sumate's exit poll comes out to 1 in 28 billion trillion.
This is just a mathematically retelling of Dan's Really Obvious Objection. What vexes me most is that I know that Rigobon personally had this argument put to him - and rather than giving any kind of reasoned response, flailed his arms a lot saying one could not extrapolate from the audit sample to the entire population. But they knew, they had to know, that Dan's Really Obvious Objection was coming. They don't seem to have had a response for it. If they did, they should've put it in the public domain long ago, before CEPR made the point. If they didn't, then they shouldn't have published their paper at all.
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September 17, 2004
¿Y entonces?
Carter Center Report on an Analysis of the Representativeness of the Second Audit Sample, and the Correlation between Petition Signers and the Yes Vote in the Aug. 15, 2004 Presidential Recall Referendum in Venezuela
This study was conducted by The Carter Center and confirmed by the OAS in response to a written request from Sumate presented to The Carter Center Sept. 7, 2004. Sumate asked that The Carter Center evaluate a study performed by Professors Ricardo Hausmann and Roberto Rigobon.
The Hausmann/Rigobon study states the second audit conducted Aug. 18-20 and observed by The Carter Center and the OAS was based on a sample that was not random and representative of the universe of all voting centers using voting machines in the Aug. 15, 2004, recall referendum. 1 The study further indicates that the correlation coefficient (elasticity) for the correlation between the signers and the YES votes for the sample was 10 percent higher than that for the universe. The Hausmann/Rigobon study came to these conclusions through an analysis of the exit poll data, petition signers data, and electoral results data provided by Sumate.
1 Objectives of the Carter Center Study
1. Determine the correlation between the number of signers of the presidential recall petition and the electoral results of the Aug. 15 recall referendum.
2. Compare the characteristics of the universe of voting machine results with those of the sample for the 2nd audit performed Aug. 18.
3. Determine the universe from which the sample generation program used Aug. 18 was drawn.
[...]
5 Conclusions
The sample drawing program used Aug. 18 to generate the 2nd audit sample generated a random sample from the universe of all mesas (voting stations) with automated voting machines. The sample was not drawn from a group of pre-selected mesas. This sample accurately represents different properties of the universe, including the accuracy of the machines, the total YES and NO votes and the correlation between the YES votes and signer turnout.
There is a high correlation between the number of YES votes per voting center and the number of signers of the presidential recall request per voting center; the places where more signatures were collected also are the places where more YES votes were cast. There is no anomaly in the characteristics of the YES votes when compared to the presumed intention of the signers to recall the president.
The second audit showed a high accuracy of the voting machines with discrepancies of less than 0.1 percent. The sample was analyzed, and it does not have different properties than the universe. The sample generation program was analyzed as part of the 2nd audit process and again in this study. Both studies showed that the sample does not operate on a subset of the universe, thus hiding or masquerading some of the properties of the universe. Consequently the results of the 2nd audit accurately confirm the electoral results of Aug. 15.
Download a PDF of the full report
This study was conducted by The Carter Center and confirmed by the OAS in response to a written request from Sumate presented to The Carter Center Sept. 7, 2004. Sumate asked that The Carter Center evaluate a study performed by Professors Ricardo Hausmann and Roberto Rigobon.
The Hausmann/Rigobon study states the second audit conducted Aug. 18-20 and observed by The Carter Center and the OAS was based on a sample that was not random and representative of the universe of all voting centers using voting machines in the Aug. 15, 2004, recall referendum. 1 The study further indicates that the correlation coefficient (elasticity) for the correlation between the signers and the YES votes for the sample was 10 percent higher than that for the universe. The Hausmann/Rigobon study came to these conclusions through an analysis of the exit poll data, petition signers data, and electoral results data provided by Sumate.
1 Objectives of the Carter Center Study
1. Determine the correlation between the number of signers of the presidential recall petition and the electoral results of the Aug. 15 recall referendum.
2. Compare the characteristics of the universe of voting machine results with those of the sample for the 2nd audit performed Aug. 18.
3. Determine the universe from which the sample generation program used Aug. 18 was drawn.
[...]
5 Conclusions
The sample drawing program used Aug. 18 to generate the 2nd audit sample generated a random sample from the universe of all mesas (voting stations) with automated voting machines. The sample was not drawn from a group of pre-selected mesas. This sample accurately represents different properties of the universe, including the accuracy of the machines, the total YES and NO votes and the correlation between the YES votes and signer turnout.
There is a high correlation between the number of YES votes per voting center and the number of signers of the presidential recall request per voting center; the places where more signatures were collected also are the places where more YES votes were cast. There is no anomaly in the characteristics of the YES votes when compared to the presumed intention of the signers to recall the president.
The second audit showed a high accuracy of the voting machines with discrepancies of less than 0.1 percent. The sample was analyzed, and it does not have different properties than the universe. The sample generation program was analyzed as part of the 2nd audit process and again in this study. Both studies showed that the sample does not operate on a subset of the universe, thus hiding or masquerading some of the properties of the universe. Consequently the results of the 2nd audit accurately confirm the electoral results of Aug. 15.
Download a PDF of the full report
September 14, 2004
Things that make you go "hmmmm"...
From today's Por Mi Madre, the daily political gossip page in TalCual,
Final poll
The final tracking poll for Consultores 21, carried out on August 13th in the nine largest cities in the country [but which could not be published due to CNE restrictions on late poll announcements -ft], showed the NO side leading the SI by 52.9% to 47.1% - a lead of 5.8 points. Official CNE returns for those same nine cities show NO leading by 53.1% vs. 46.9% for the SI. The official NO lead of 6.2% is very close to the Consultores 21 measure, and corroborates how closely matched the sides are in urban centers.
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Final poll
The final tracking poll for Consultores 21, carried out on August 13th in the nine largest cities in the country [but which could not be published due to CNE restrictions on late poll announcements -ft], showed the NO side leading the SI by 52.9% to 47.1% - a lead of 5.8 points. Official CNE returns for those same nine cities show NO leading by 53.1% vs. 46.9% for the SI. The official NO lead of 6.2% is very close to the Consultores 21 measure, and corroborates how closely matched the sides are in urban centers.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Magna Carta and the Subtle Art of Chavista Budgeting
In Spanish the phrase "Carta Magna" is just a synonym for "constitution," so most Venezuelans probably don't know that if you dig a bit into the etymology of the term, you find that it comes from Magna Carta, which was a specific historical document, a kind of XIII century "Pacto de Punto Fijo" between King John and the English aristocracy.
Magna Carta for the first time limited the rights of the monarch, established trial by jury, the beginnings of habeas corpus, and the principle of parliamentary control over state spending - the power of the purse-strings. 600 years ahead of the pack, the brits started to move away from the principle of absolute monarchy, and towards a system where the executive power was accountable to a body other than itself.
Probably the most radical departure in Magna Carta was this idea - revolutionary for medieval Europe - that the King needed to get permission from another body in order to levy taxes and spend state money. By starting the long process it took to shift the "power of the purse strings" from monarch to parliament, Magna Carta radically altered the notion of state power. Kings could no longer spend autonomously - spenditure had to be justified, argued over, haggled over and agreed with an assembly the King could not always control. It was this reform, arguably more than any other, that started the long process of declawing the British monarchy. You can't have absolutism if you don't control your checkbook.
Slowly but surely the principle of parliamentary control over state spending spread throughout the world, first establishing itself in the U.S. constitution, and from there, to the rest of the world. Today, every democracy in the world works on the basis of a State Budget Law, approved like any other law by the legislative branch. The haggling process it takes to approve budget laws is a key check against the accumulation of undue power in a single set of hands.
Alas, 800 years of British common sense and the worldwide trend in its direction are just two of the victims of the chavista revolution. In Venezuela, parliamentary control over state spending is a dead letter - just another of the many articles written into the constitution and swiftly forgotten - and exhibit A in the case for those who argue Chavez is an autocrat.
The political takeover of PDVSA ought to be seen in this light. Under the old system, PDVSA would sell oil, take the earnings and transfer them over to the state through royalties, taxes and dividends. Once that money had come into state coffers, the government would spend them through its usual budgeting procedures - which would allow the formal parliamentary control of state spending. The new system, on the other hand, does an end run around normal budgeting procedures. In fact, standard procedure now is for PDVSA to sell oil, take its earnings and spend it directly, in accordance with the president's instructions, without ever going through state coffers or normal budgeting procedures. There is no chance for the people's elected representatives in the National Assembly to question the discretionary use of these monies. Behind the lofty rhetoric about the revolution's liberation of the oil company hides an assault against one of the most basic principles of democratic coexistence.
As Pompeyo described in the article I posted yesterday, this trend reaches its most grotesque extremes on "Alo Presidente", where Chavez tosses around state money like it's going out of style, without even a pretense, a fig-leaf of parliamentary control. It bears noting that this is openly illegal and unconstitutional - Article 162 of Chavez's beloved little blue book clearly establishes Parliamentary control over spending. Like many other similar, blatant violations of the constitution, this one does not prevent Chavez from using the little blue book propagandistically, as the rhetorical cornerstone of his entire governing project. It's pretty rhetoric, but it's also an unambiguous, bold-faced, zero-shame lie, with a cherry on top.
But do we hear any sign of dissent from the president's fans on this matter? Not a peep!
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Magna Carta for the first time limited the rights of the monarch, established trial by jury, the beginnings of habeas corpus, and the principle of parliamentary control over state spending - the power of the purse-strings. 600 years ahead of the pack, the brits started to move away from the principle of absolute monarchy, and towards a system where the executive power was accountable to a body other than itself.
Probably the most radical departure in Magna Carta was this idea - revolutionary for medieval Europe - that the King needed to get permission from another body in order to levy taxes and spend state money. By starting the long process it took to shift the "power of the purse strings" from monarch to parliament, Magna Carta radically altered the notion of state power. Kings could no longer spend autonomously - spenditure had to be justified, argued over, haggled over and agreed with an assembly the King could not always control. It was this reform, arguably more than any other, that started the long process of declawing the British monarchy. You can't have absolutism if you don't control your checkbook.
Slowly but surely the principle of parliamentary control over state spending spread throughout the world, first establishing itself in the U.S. constitution, and from there, to the rest of the world. Today, every democracy in the world works on the basis of a State Budget Law, approved like any other law by the legislative branch. The haggling process it takes to approve budget laws is a key check against the accumulation of undue power in a single set of hands.
Alas, 800 years of British common sense and the worldwide trend in its direction are just two of the victims of the chavista revolution. In Venezuela, parliamentary control over state spending is a dead letter - just another of the many articles written into the constitution and swiftly forgotten - and exhibit A in the case for those who argue Chavez is an autocrat.
The political takeover of PDVSA ought to be seen in this light. Under the old system, PDVSA would sell oil, take the earnings and transfer them over to the state through royalties, taxes and dividends. Once that money had come into state coffers, the government would spend them through its usual budgeting procedures - which would allow the formal parliamentary control of state spending. The new system, on the other hand, does an end run around normal budgeting procedures. In fact, standard procedure now is for PDVSA to sell oil, take its earnings and spend it directly, in accordance with the president's instructions, without ever going through state coffers or normal budgeting procedures. There is no chance for the people's elected representatives in the National Assembly to question the discretionary use of these monies. Behind the lofty rhetoric about the revolution's liberation of the oil company hides an assault against one of the most basic principles of democratic coexistence.
As Pompeyo described in the article I posted yesterday, this trend reaches its most grotesque extremes on "Alo Presidente", where Chavez tosses around state money like it's going out of style, without even a pretense, a fig-leaf of parliamentary control. It bears noting that this is openly illegal and unconstitutional - Article 162 of Chavez's beloved little blue book clearly establishes Parliamentary control over spending. Like many other similar, blatant violations of the constitution, this one does not prevent Chavez from using the little blue book propagandistically, as the rhetorical cornerstone of his entire governing project. It's pretty rhetoric, but it's also an unambiguous, bold-faced, zero-shame lie, with a cherry on top.
But do we hear any sign of dissent from the president's fans on this matter? Not a peep!
Join a moderated debate on this post.
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