Bring Back the Maisto Doctrine!

Quico says: So, wondering why posting’s been so light recently? Here’s the deal: I spent the last three weeks in Caracas. Elementary paranoia kept me from disclosing as much before coming back, but now that I am safely ensconced in a forgotten little bit of the Dutch countryside I will, of course, be posting at length about the trip.

Now, I’d love to tell you I went back to immerse myself in the politics of a renascent opposition, or the travails of my nearest barrio, or the wonders of our natural heritage. Alas, my motives weren’t so pure: basically, it was Misión Cadivi that brought me back. As a Europe-based Venezuelan student, I qualify for a
irresistible cupo of $1,800 each and every month, payable at a scrumptious, nibbliscious Bs.2,150/$.

Hell, I’m just a grad student: I’m in no position to pass up that much free cash.

Filthy lucre, yes, how very counterrevolutionary of me…or, is it?

On the one hand, I realize it’s a bit problematic to get on my high horse and denounce the systematic ransacking of the nation’s oil wealth as I sign on enthusiastically on the side of the ransacketeers.

On the other hand, what I’m doing is scrupulously (if counterintuitively) legal: I really am Venezuelan, really do study in Europe, and ultimately am just taking advantage of a policy that wouldn’t even exist if the revolution hadn’t put it there. As far as petro-state plunder goes, it doesn’t get much more zanahoria than my case: I’m not even scamming the system! Hell, it's almost unvenezuelan to do it this way...

Still, the irony is hard to get over: I, great escualido cyber-scourge of the revolution, just about doubled my income on the revoluion’s dime just by filing a few forms.

In Caracas, I found that I was far from alone. In the appallingly sifrino circles I tend to inhabit when I’m down there, Cadivi has become a kind of universal obsession: everybody I met had either just finished asking for their dollars, was fighting the Cadivi website for their cupo, had an aunt who’d just come back from Miami to cash out her’s, or some cognate of these stories.

At my sister’s house, where I was staying, even the maid was in the loop: the bureaucratic nightmare she was facing trying to send family remittances back to her folks in Colombia was easily the most hairraising of the bunch.

My second day in town (first day I was getting my cédula, so here's lookin' at ya, syd) I went down to my bank in Sabana Grande to explain my situation to them. I was told that, on top of my student cupo, I could qualify for a $5,000 traveller cupo as well.

To do so, I would need to take out one of their credit cards…for which processing times had risen to TWO MONTHS because, these days, everybody and his cousin's cat is desperately trying to get a credit card, precisely so they can get those 5,000 insanely subsidized dollars.

It’s a policy I found especially telling. To get the travellers’ cupo, you have to have a credit card, and to get a credit card you basically have to be middle class. My sister’s maid, as you can guess, can’t get one: she has neither a credit history nor a high enough salary for any sane bank to give her one. So, in practice, the revolutionary socialist state systematically discriminates against her (and everyone else who is poor) in one of the most expensive and systematic wealth ridistribution policies it runs.

This is no detail. Because, trust me, you’d have to add up a lot of misión scholarships to match the implicit subsidy in the 5,000 official-rate-dollars handout that only credit card-holders can even apply for.

It’s a realization that brought me back to a point Katy made a long time ago, but whose deeper truth only really sank in during my trip: if you revisit the Maisto Doctrine and judge chavismo by what it does rather than what it says, you have to conclude what we have in Venezuela is something like a right wing dictatorship.

All revolutionary/discursive paja aside, the government lets nothing stand in its way in its drive to redistribute oil income up the income scale. The mountains of bullshit that come out of Chávez mouth have tended to obscure this reality, yes, but have never altered it.

For those with the courage to revisit Maisto's supposedly (but only superficially) discredited theory, it’s really no surprise that the Central Bank finds income inequality is rising in Venezuela: the socialist revolutionary government’s two weightiest macroeconomic policies uniformly shift income up to the privileged.

A staggering seven percent of GDP is spent on a deliriously regressive gasoline subsidy, while untold billions of oil dollars are spent subsidizing the imported toys the rich amuse themselves with.

Needless to say, Maisto and his doctrine aren’t particularly fondly remembered in opposition circles these days. To my mind, though, the man was a visionary, a misunderstood genius. He was the first to intuit a truth that grows harder to ignore every day in Venezuela: that government discourse and government reality aren’t just “in tension” with one another, or “not always easy to reconcile” or even “sporadically contradictory", but rather run in completely opposite directions, and do so systematically, on the most salient policy fronts, and have done for a long time.

Seriously, take it from me: a Mantuano-descended reactionary and incorregible government critic just back from a Cadivi-funded junket that doubled his income.

The foreign correspondent's POV

Katy says: Posting will be light in the next few days. Quico is traveling and I'm full of work and family duties. But friend and all-too-infrequent poster Lucía sends us a link of yet another foreigner's impression of the full Venezuelan treatment.

The traffic, the wait in the hospital, the milk shortages, the panaderías, the lushness of the Ávila - it's all there in the diary of The Economist correspondent's life in our maddening capital city.

Chávez for Spaniards

Quico says: Julio Rivas Pita, the man-on-the-ground here for Spain's El Mundo, is running extracts from his upcoming book, Chávez para Españoles, in a new blog. His latest piece is on the backstory to the operation that got Raul Reyes. Worth a look...

English court OKs partial privatization of PDVSA

Quico says: So, it turns out English courts have no jurisdiction over the PDVSA/ExxonMobil pissing match. They've just lifted the preliminary asset freeze on PDVSA, handing chavismo a massive propaganda win and a chance to sell anything and everything PDVSA owns abroad. Effectively, it took an English judge to authorize the privatization of a big chunk of PDVSA.

My guess is that that's what we're about to see. Cuz, remember, the whole point of freezing PDVSA assets abroad was so that, in case the international arbitration case over the Faja contracts went ExxonMobil's way, they'd have some way to collect damages. Of course, that arbitration is ongoing at the International Chamber of Commerce in New York, but it isn't expected to reach a decision for another 3 years or more. Plenty of time for PDVSA to get rid of any asset Exxon might want to move on in case (hypothetically) they got awarded something at arbitration.

For now, the whole case looks like a big miscalculation on Exxon's part: its current status is no chivo, no mecate. And for a Venezuelan government finding it increasingly hard to meet its import bill, the chance to raise a few billion bucks by privatizing PDVSA's foreign holdings is excellent news.

Such a sale would add a few more months of viability to the macroeconomics of populism, and would put off the thoroughly inevitable adjustment that little bit longer...at the cost, bien sur, of decapitalizing the state that little bit more.

Calls for a bit of marginal analysis, this one: on the margin, what is the impact of one additional stripe on a tiger?

Hello, fat man!

Katy says: Every Monday I get in my inbox the abridged transcript from the previous day's political reality show, "Hello, Mr. President!" While I wouldn't be caught dead watching this show, I always make it a point to read the summary just to see what the Fat Man in the Palace emphasized and what his mood seems to be.

One thing seems clear after yesterday's show: Chávez was not in a good mood.

First off, he kept talking about health policy, no doubt worried about the jump in health care as one of the population's top concerns, according to Alfredo Keller. He went on and on about how they needed to integrate new clinics to the current Misiones, no doubt realizing that the Misiones are slowly collapsing.

The other big topic of the day was communication policy. The President is still reeling from the fact that the death of Raúl Reyes put a hamper on the liberation of six of the FARC's hostages. He also scolded the Education Minister (his older brother) for not reacting to recent news reports that said that the rate of student enrollment has fallen dramatically in recent years, according to the Education Ministry's own statistics.

The Minister, who was immortalized thanks to this hilarious YouTube video, replied that these were all lies of the opposition, that this was all a conspiracy and that they were "manipulating the numbers to confuse the population." He said they would hold a press conference on Tuesday to explain what is going on. He also put out a press release that is full of lies and confusing statistics that do not address the crux of the issue raised by the news reports.

The President scoffed, saying it was silly to hold a press conference on Holy Tuesday and that, if this is false, the Ministry should have come out and said so immediately after the item was published. Chávez also stated that the problem is that the Annual Reports from the ministries are weak and are not "well-grounded" from a mathematical point of view, whatever that means. At one point he seemed so pissed, he said that all PSUV meetings had to be approved by him.

All of the government's media was focused yesterday on the President and his pet topics. Yet this little event went unmentioned in all of them. For chavista news outlets, it never happened.

The French Dieterich

Quico says: I'm starting to think of Bernard Henri-Lévy as the French Heinz Dieterich: a writer who combines deep insights with flashes of baffling idiocy in seemingly random proportions. His latest piece, on the death of Iván Ríos, (whom Henri-Lévy actually interviewed a few years back) has lots of the former and not that much of the latter.

Keller says

Quico says: Keller's first quarter poll slides are making the rounds, and I took the liberty of translating the most interesting one below. (Click to enlarge:)


In other results, Keller finds that scarcity has jumped up into the top four problems cited by poll respondents: 13% now say it's their biggest problem, compared to just 6% in the last quarter of '07.

Scarcity is now mentioned by one percent more people than "unemployment" which has traditionally slugged it out with "crime" for the top spot in Venezuelans' worry list, but is now down to fourth. These days, Crime is clearly top dog with 34% of first mentions, double the 16% who cited the "cost of living" - which is poll-code for inflation.

Finally, Keller now classes 37% of respondents as broadly chavista, 41% as broadly opposition minded, and the remaining 22% as "neutrals": though, of course, those numbers are highly sensitive to polling methodology and your definition of where exactly the line between "neutrals" and partisans lie.

Dato mata paja

Quico says: So, Minister Rodríguez Chacín, care to guess which is the only large economy in the region that has deepened its dependence on the US market since 1998?

Dear Enemy, here's your $80 million...lets do this again tomorrow.

Quico says: More and more, I think the defining trait of chavismo is its penchant for deforming language; the capacity of words to transmit meanings that correspond to anything at all in the real world.

Almost any look at the day's newspapers or any ten minutes watching VTV brings heaps and mounds of examples, but today Interior Minister Ramón Rodríguez Chacín brings us a particularly delirious case: his contention that Venezuela's #1 trade partner, a country that sends down $80+ million to the Revolutionary Government each and every day in return for oil (and is therefore, in effect, its main financier) has a de facto "blockade" against the revolution as part of some "declared war."

Crazy overstatement is, of course, no longer news when it comes out of chavista mouths. But what strikes me is that more and more official announcements aren't "in tension with" the truth, or "not fully reconcilable with" the record, but in fact diametrically opposed to it.

Day is night. Black is white. Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.

Orwell called it doublethink, but what's fascinating is that, in chavismo, doublethink takes place on the level of discourse only. For Orwell, and for observers of totalitarianism in general, doublethink had definite implications in terms of state violence, of repression, of the willingness of the powerful to impose their version of reality on society by force.

In chavismo, the visible gap between official discursive reality and "real reality" is allowed to endure, allowed to be made plain, instead of being systematically closed down through violence, like in any totalitarianism that respects itself.

It's as though discourse and reality operate on parallel plains: never really permeating one another, in a state of ongoing estrangement that's increasingly accepted as "normal."

It's not normal. It's far, far from normal.

I say six

Katy says: The Catholic Church has announced a list of seven "social" sins, to add to its list of seven Cardinal sins. They are:

1. ``Bioethical' violations such as birth control

2. ``Morally dubious'' experiments such as stem cell research

3. Drug abuse

4. Polluting the environment

5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor

6. Excessive wealth

7. Creating poverty

Since I am busy with work I pose a question: how many of these do you think Hugo Chávez has committed? Discuss.

PS.- On a slightly more serious note, Misión Cadivi, Chavez's flagship social program for the wealthy, has made it to the New York Times. This article is not to be missed. Check out the last paragraph in the article, it sums up the scam that is Cadivi pretty neatly.

The SSOT scenario

Katy says: Last week's bizarre diplomatic/military crisis left many uncovered manholes. One of the biggest comes from the information supposedly contained in Raul Reyes' computer, showing the deep links - political, military and financial - between the Chávez government and Colombia's FARC.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. State Department is looking into the possibility of including Venezuela in its list of State sponsors of terrorism, a list that is currently composed of international pariahs Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. Venezuela is currently the only country listed as "not fully cooperating" in the fight against terrorism that is not in that list.

I think Venezuela's inclusion in the SSOT list is still a longshot, and the "announcement" of the "possibility" of "looking into" its inclusion sounds more like a threat than a decision that has been made. Still, the possibility exists, and we should start working through what the consequences would be.

There is no recipe for the type of sanctions placed on SSOTs, as they vary from country to country. However, the State department webpage says sanctions typically include:

1. A ban on arms-related exports and sales.

2. Controls over exports of dual-use items.

3. Prohibitions on economic assistance.

4. Imposition of miscellaneous financial and other restrictions, including opposition to loans by the World Bank and other international financial institutions; lifting diplomatic immunity to allow families of terrorist victims to file civil lawsuits in U.S. courts; denying tax credits for income earned in terrorist-listed countries; denial of duty-free treatment of goods exported to the United States; authority to prohibit U.S. citizens from engaging in financial transaction with a terrorist-list government; and prohibition of Defense Department contracts with companies controlled by terrorist-list states.

The likely effects of Venezuela's inclusion are the following:

1. Our oil would be cheaper in the U.S. and harder to sell. Undoubtedly, one of the main effects of this move would be that Venezuelan oil would be more difficult to sell in the U.S. The price of our oil would suffer, since U.S. companies would have to incorporate both the extra cost of doing business with PDVSA and the risk of being sanctioned by the government. A likely tax on Venezuelan oil would be that much easier, since our oil would lose its duty-free status. The amount of oil we sell to the U.S. would also suffer because companies would undoubtedly substitute away from PDVSA. This would mean having to place our oil in markets that are further away, increasing our transport costs and hurting our bottom line. Finally, U.S. companies would be less inclined to engage in joint ventures in the Venezuelan oil, gas or mining sectors, paving the way for oil companies from France, Russia, Brazil and other countries.

2. Families of terror victims could sue in the U.S., potentially hurting our assets there. Think of the following scenario: American or Colombian-American relatives of people killed or kidnapped by the FARC sue the Venezuelan government for damages in U.S. courts. The courts decide in favor of the relatives, and they award the families billions of dollars. Citgo and other assets the Venezuelan government holds in the U.S. (including bank accounts of people linked to the government) are seized to pay for damages. Right now this is not possible, but our inclusion in the SSOT list makes it entirely plausible and, in my view, highly likely.

3. Deepening military links to Russia and China. Venezuela's defense policy has traditionally been supported by U.S. technology. The Chávez government has been shifting away from U.S. technology, preferring Spanish, Brazilian, Russian and Chinese military weaponry instead. If SSOT sanctions were to be put in place, this trend would accelerate.

4. Increased visa restrictions for everyone. A lot of people think that our inclusion would mean shutting down the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. This is not necessarily the case since the U.S. has, for example, an embassy in Syria. However, visa restrictions would increase and it would be much tougher to get a visa to fly or go live in the U.S. The increased restrictions vary from country to country, but the visa page on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Damascus gives you a taste.

That rubber stamp at the head of this post will be showing up more and more on Venezuelans' visa applications. Venezuelans will have to forego some of their trips to Disney World and try more exotic locales like Havanna, Damascus, Teheran or Khartoum. Pyongyang, for instance, is lovely this time of the year.

5. No loans from the World Bank or the IMF. Right now, as Venezuela is awash in petro-dollars, so this seems like a harmless sanction. Venezuela does not really have any IMF loans, and I believe its World Bank loans portfolio is very limited. However, if oil prices were to fall, Venezuela would be hurt by these sanctions. Not only would it wipe out the possibility of getting loans from these institutions, it would make it much more expensive to get financing from private international financial institutions.

When Pres. Chávez announced Venezuela's decision to withdraw from the IMF and the World Bank, he immediately backtracked and the move never materialized. Venezuela's presence in these institutions provides some guarantees that help maintain a minimum flow of foreign direct investment. Financial sanctions would decidedly hurt our chances of receiving FDI. I guess the Banco del Sur would not seem like such a crazy idea at that point.

Finally, I don't believe the sanctions would include freezing of assets held by Venezuelan citizens in the U.S. Most of the wealth of Venezuela's wealthier citizens - estimates I have seen range from $50 billion to $100 billion - is in the U.S., so a move like this would be dramatic to say the least.

A lot of people think that these sanctions would mean the freeze of bank accounts and the impediment to sell or buy property or stock in the U.S., but I think that's unlikely. I believe the U.S. understands that its government is one thing and its citizens are another.

All in all, not a pretty picture, but it may be coming. Are we ready?

Things that make you go plop

Quico says: From the Wall Street Journal's perdida-less exposé on Franklin Duran, of Venoco and Maletazo fame:

Mr. [Guido] Antonini even drove a Porsche Boxster with a bumper sticker that extolled Mr. Chávez's socialist revolution. "Venezuela is now for everyone," it said.

Caption Competition, Rio Group Style

Quico says: Is it just me, or did that meeting today make no sense at all? After a half-day summit where they called one another everything from green-belly on up, this! I thought I was hallucinating!


It's made to order for a Caption Competition, this one...

La Vanguardia deconstructs Chávez's Mechanized Reality Show

Quico says: Have you noticed yet? I love good journalism. There isn't much that gives me a bigger thrill than finding a perfectly crafted bit of reporting. Like, for instance, this piece by La Vanguardia's Joaquím Ibarz deconstructing the Venezuelan military im-mobilization in La Guajira. Gorgeous. For the record, I've never met the guy, but wish I had.

(Por ahora, it's available in Spanish only.)

Gay marriage in Venezuela

Katy says: In a little noted decision, the Supreme Tribunal of Venezuela recently rejected the possibility of legalizing gay marriage in Venezuela. The majority opinion by Justice Pedro Rondón Haaz was hardly surprising: Article 77 of the Constitution explicitly says that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that it is to be protected under the law. The dissenting minority, however, seemed befuddled by the court's restraint, highlighting a court culture where any and every issue is seen as fair game for judicial action.

The case arose because, though the constitution's article 77 is pretty clear, it exists alongside Article 21, which bans discrimination based on sexual orientation. However, the court ruled that Article 77 excludes gay people's inability to get married from the list of factors that amount to illegal discrimination.

Of course, gay marriage is a famously emotive and divisive issue. Whether you're for it or against it, you can't help but notice that in the societies where it has become politicized, the debate has always come at the tail end of a long process of social and political change, shifting attitudes, and growing tolerance for gays and lesbians in the public sphere. Venezuela is very far from such a point.

A move like legalizing gay marriage should be the result of a serious, open democratic debate, where society comes to an agreement with itself about the best course moving forward. That's the province of politics, not court rooms, so any such reform needs to be taken through either Executive or Legislative action.

Supreme Tribunal justices are not held accountable to society: Mayors, Governors, Presidents and Congressmen are... por ahora. Sensitive topics such as this one should ideally be brought forward by accountable members of the State, so that its pros and cons are weighed, society can have an informed debate, and attitudes have the chance to change organically. Democracy assures that those processes can take place: when those who want change realize they have to answer to the voters, they will realize that for change to stick, the people have to be convinced.

These are not arguments our very red Supreme Tribunal is much aware of. The one dissenting opinion, by Justice Carmen Zuleta de Merchán, highlights a judicial culture where judges think they can do it all, as though they could change not just the law, but also the most intimate feelings and prejudices of the people through a court order.

Justice Zuleta regrets that the majority opinion,

"...decided not to solve legislative black holes, such as matters related to what happens when a gay union is dissolved by separation or death, the legal obligation to mutually help each other, guardianship by a permanent companion, the right to constitute a home, the issue of social security benefits for same-sex couples, the right to protection from saying anything against a permanent companion, the constitutional clause that prohibits friends or relatives from occupying similar posts, the possibility of a permanent companion to acquire citizenship, the right to adopt and protection against intra-family violence."

Clearly debatable topics, and important ones at that. In fact, they are so important, it makes them hardly suitable for a simple judgement on something the Constitution is very clear about.

Justice Zuleta seems to be advocating for judges who are not only activists, but who legislate from the bench on sensitive topics and related issues. What she envisions is not a ruling on whether the Constitution allows for same-sex marriage or not, but basically a ruling that reads like an entire section of the Civil Code. That is a strange position to have in today's Venezuela.

Chavistas have complete control of the National Assembly. The President has an Enabling Law that allows him to dictate whatever law he pleases by simple decree. Chavistas appoint all of the country's judges at whim. And yet chavista judges lament that they don't have enough power, that they don't go far enough.

In a country such as the U.S., with its layers upon layers of checks and balances, it is understandable for some to want to see a role for judges wishing to shape legislation. Legislative work is made slow by the many parties involved, the numerous interest groups and the incredible differences between, say, local, regional and federal legislative bodies, and between the two equally powerful groups that share power in each of those instances.

This is not Venezuela's case. All the power in the country - judicial, economic, executive and legislative - is concentrated in one man. Zuleta's plea for judges to do more does not mesh with the fact that the group in power is the same group that appointed her and, basically, writes her paycheck. This is a group that does not believe in consensus and does not believe in finding common ground with the other side because there is no other side. It's a group that believes reality changes automatically when laws change, that society will do what it's told because it is told to do so.

Chavez's Venezuela is a country where the laws are changed at a whim. Don't like the Constitution? Call an Assembly and change it. Don't like a law? Pass one in thirty days. Thirty days is not enough? Ask for an Enabling Law and write it yourself. The dizzying rate at which new legislation and regulations are passed in Venezuela makes it hard for the ordinary citizen, businessman or judge to keep up.

And yet some people think this is not enough. Perhaps Justice Zuleta can ask at the next PSUV meeting why chavistas haven't simply steam-rolled this law through the Assembly, or why Chávez hasn't decreed gay marriage to be legal on Aló, presidente.

Her beef should not be with her fellow justices nor with the conservatism of society. Her beef should be with the guy on top.

Movimiento 1,373

Quico says: Colombia has taken a justified pounding over the way it flouted International Law in attacking Raul Reyes's Ecuadorean jungle hideout. The states brandishing the sanctity of International Law in that case, however, appear far less inclined to cite UN Security Council Resolution 1,373 - through which the security council:

1. Decides that all States shall:

(a) Prevent and suppress the financing of terrorist acts;

(b) Criminalize the wilful provision or collection, by any means, directly or indirectly, of funds by their nationals or in their territories with the intention that the funds should be used, or in the knowledge that they are to be used, in order to carry out terrorist acts;

(c) Freeze without delay funds and other financial assets or economic resources of persons who commit, or attempt to commit, terrorist acts ...

...

2. Decides also that all States shall:
(a) Refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts, including by suppressing recruitment of members of terrorist groups and eliminating the supply of weapons to terrorists;

(b) Take the necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist acts, including by provision of early warning to other States by exchange of information;

(c) Deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts, or provide safe havens;

(d) Prevent those who finance, plan, facilitate or commit terrorist acts from using their respective territories for those purposes against other States or their citizens;

...

(f) Afford one another the greatest measure of assistance in connection with criminal investigations or criminal proceedings relating to the financing or support of terrorist acts, including assistance in obtaining evidence in their possession necessary for the proceedings;

(g) Prevent the movement of terrorists or terrorist groups by effective border controls and controls on issuance of identity papers and travel documents, and through measures for preventing counterfeiting, forgery or fraudulent use of identity papers and travel documents...

Resolution 1,373 was approved under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, and is therefore legally binding for all UN member states, much like the principle of territorial integrity.

Of course, chavismo argues the resolution is irrelevant, because planting bombs, kidnapping people, using indiscriminate weapons such as landmines, etc. do not constitute "terrorist acts." Trouble is, a later UN Security Council resolution (1,566) defined terrorism as:

...criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.

(In one of these weird twists of international law, turns out this definition is not binding on the international community...but still...)

The Eudomarian Republic of Venezuela

"Como vaya viniendo, vamos viendo..."

Eudomar Santos, character in the legendary 1990s soap opera Por Estas Calles

Katy says: Venezuelan President Chávez recently announced that he was deploying thousands of soldiers to the border after Colombia bombed a FARC base in Ecuadorian territory. His government also announced the land border would be closed to all traffic, and expelled all Colombian Embassy officials while it announced it was bringing home all personnel from the Venezuelan Embassy in Colombia.

It remains to be seen whether all these announcements are part of an actual policy and consistent with some established policy goal. It's not clear what objectives Venezuela is pursuing with this unilateral action, or how long all this is going to last. The reason given so far, "to ward off a possible Colombian attack," has little to do with what has actually transpired, which differs from what has been announced.

Take the military mobilizations. Reports abound in Caracas that this is all a bluff. General Baduel said yesterday that it was all part of a "reality show" and a "media event." Stories from Caracas and the Pentagon hint that troop movement has been minimal, and that the little there is was put on just for show since, the story goes, the Venezuelan army does not have the plan, the logistics nor the operational capacity to mobilize thousands of soldiers to its border in three days.

In the meantime, Interior Minister Rodríguez Chacín blasts local media for reporting the troop movements, threatening to charge them with treason. Apparently the Minister thinks that the media should shut up about the movement of tanks in heavily populated areas during broad daylight.

Perhaps the Minister should ask himself why Chávez announced the troop mobilizations on national TV if they were, in fact, supposed to be secret. Perhaps they should have declared some sort of media blackout to prevent this sort of thing from getting out. Perhaps they should ask themselves if it's reasonable to allege the Colombian army, an institution with the technology to identify guerrilla camps inside Ecuador and pinpoint an attack, an institution aided by the technology of the US government, is relying on Globovisión to know where Venezuelan troops are headed.

But it's all just a show.

There is an undeniable whiff of improvisation in everything the government is doing. The Foreign Ministry, for example, is acting like a teenage child, making up responses on the hoof to the Colombian government's serious allegations like, well, like a country that doesn't need diplomacy and brains because it has oil.

One of MinPop Maduro's most embarassing responses was his claim that $300 million was simply too much money, suggesting it would take four rooms the size of the National Assembly to store that amount of cash. Maduro thinks this shows that the Colombian allegation of Chávez's financing of the FARC was a lie. Apparently the Minister thinks the whole world operates in cash.

Sounds like the kind of reasoning you overhear on a bus. "En la parada por favor!"

The Agriculture Minister announces the borders have shut down, which is akin to the Environment Minister announcing troop deployments (come to think of it, we may live to see the day). Meanwhile, people in the border say that, while traffic has slowed, it has not closed completely. Today, Chavez's burly Defense Minister said that he has received no orders to close the border.

No policy details are offered, no clear goals are set out, no end date is provided, no two spokespeople can agree. It's all dependent on Chávez's next whim. It's all improvised, it's all a show, unless... well, unless things change.

Como vaya viniendo, vamos viendo.

PS.- The legendary Zapata hits a homerun with his latest cartoon. Thanks to loyal reader Juantxon for pointing it out to us.

The kind of war we're going to have...

Quico says: As we all take to hyperventilating about the looming war with Colombia, it's worth pausing to ponder the kind of war footing the country is really on.

Two days ago, President Chávez ordered 10 mechanized batallions to the border in preparation for who-knows-what...but the mobilizations from Caracas ended up getting delayed yesterday because taxi drivers in La Victoria blocked the strategically critical Central Regional Highway for seven hours as they protested the crime wave that grips their town.

Now we're cooking without gas

Quico says: One thing I always struggle to convey is the nearly complete divorce between revolutionary discourse and practice, the yawning, widening gap not just between what is said and what is done, but also, more and more, between the staples of the chavista discursive diet and the kinds of issues that actually concern normal people in their day-to-day lives here.

Long the province of the hysterized opposition media, this divorce between media-reality and real-reality has become pervasive in the official media, to the point where serious social problems are basically blacked out (and I use that term advisedly) by a state media focused like a laser-beam on Chávez's highly abstract and mystifying ideological agenda.

A shocking case in point is the deepening supply crisis surrounding cooking gas canisters. Now, unless you live in a third world shantytown, you probably associate portable gas canisters with camping. Not so for the Venezuelan poor. While legally constructed housing gets its cooking gas delivered through a pipe, just like households in rich countries, Venezuelans who live in self-made housing have to buy their cooking gas in heavy metal canisters that they have to wheel into shanties.

Except, due to price controls, they can't. There's a serious cooking gas canister shortage. Reports from some barrios all around Caracas say cooking gas trucks haven't been up there in weeks. The government has pledged to set up Canister filling stations in downtown Caracas, but that's no solution: you're not allowed to take bombonas onto public transport (for obvious safety reasons) and for people living high up on hillside barrios, lugging a heavy canister up the cerro to their houses is never easy and sometimes not really possible. (Think of the elderly.)

Without trucks, there's no gas, and without gas, you can't cook: that's pretty much the situation thousands upon thousands of poor households face today in the Western Hemisphere's premiere energy exporter.

When you think about it, this is really a disaster for poor people: if rice is in short supply, you can always switch to pasta or cornflour, if milk is in short supply you can more or less do without, but if you can't get gas, you can't cook anything. People are having to resort to fire-wood, which they have no safe way of burning and no easy way of obtaining. This is a major problem for people already living in precarious circumstances, the kind of thing that can turn your life pretty much upside down...and, guess what? You won't hear anything about it on state TV beyond generic assurances that don't pan out and never get followed up.

It's not hard to understand why...if VTV, or Vive, or ANTV, TVeS or any of the growing constellation of chavista mouthpieces on the tube were to touch the subject, the people involved would find themselves out of a job pretty fast. The shortage brings up too many questions: not the least of which is why this is happening just after PDVSA spent $125 million to take over Vengas and Tropigas, the leading private sector gas canister distribution companies, precisely to "forestall speculation and hoarding" of gas canisters. (The respective purges apparently have not paid off.)

This morning, thousands of poor urban families in Venezuela woke up to mull the irony: now that, finally, the government has managed to get some staples back on store shelves, they can't cook them. Having milk, which has reappeared on the market, is nice and all. But the iconic "café con leche" you can forget about: there's no way to make coffee without cooking fuel.

But what, I imagine, will piss them off the most is that when they turn on their TV channels, the ones their taxes pay for, the ones that bill themselves constantly as belonging to all Venezuelans, they'll hear obsessive, wall-to-wall coverage of a shootout in some jungle hideout a thousand miles away that bears no relation whatsoever with their ability to fry an empanada.

Quiarrechera, mi hermano.

Chavez raises the stakes

Katy says: Hugo Chávez is playing a dangerous game with Colombia, and indirectly, with the US. Today he announced that he was shutting down Venezuela's Embassy in Bogotá, unilaterally plunging diplomatic relations to its worst level since the Gran Colombia split in 1830. He also announced a large buildup of troops alongside the border, and insulted Pres. Uribe for the n-th time, calling him a "criminal" and the head of a "narco-government."

The only reason for this is the murder of the FARC's No. 2, Raúl Reyes in what is apparently Ecuadorean territory. Not even Ecuador has reacted this way.

This is serious stuff. Neither Venezuela nor her interests have been attacked, and they are not at risk of being attacked, and yet the President is acting as if they were. No Venezuelan in their right mind should support this unjustified unilateral rush to war.

Let's hope cool heads prevail and that the Colombian government continues to ignore Chávez. If there is a war, the losers will be the Venezuelan people, specially those who live close to the border, whose day-to-day problems once again take the backseat to Chávez's obsession to see the FARC triumph in Colombia.

The opposition's identity problem

Katy says: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is not my favorite. Still, I make it a point to read her since a lot of people do. Sometimes, when she's good, she taps into what many people are thinking but haven't really said before.

This week Dowd picked on one of the reasons why Hillary Clinton's campaign seems to be floundering. She claims that Clinton seems desperate to reinvent herself all the time, conveying to the voters in the process that either they don't know her that well or, worse, that she doesn't know who she is or who she wants to be.

For example, she says,

"The fact that Obama is exceptionally easy in his skin has made Hillary almost jump out of hers. She can’t turn on her own charm and wit because she can’t get beyond what she sees as the deep injustice of Obama not waiting his turn. Her sunshine-colored jackets on the trail hardly disguise the fact that she’s pea-green with envy.

After saying she found her “voice” in New Hampshire, she has turned into Sybil. We’ve had Experienced Hillary, Soft Hillary, Hard Hillary, Misty Hillary, Sarcastic Hillary, Joined-at-the-Hip-to-Bill Hillary, Her-Own-Person-Who-Just-Happens-to-Be-Married-to- a-Former-President Hillary, It’s-My-Turn Hillary, Cuddly Hillary, Let’s-Get-Down-in-the-Dirt-and-Fight-Like-Dogs Hillary.

Just as in the White House, when her cascading images and hairstyles became dizzying and unsettling, suggesting that the first lady woke up every day struggling to create a persona, now she seems to think there is a political solution to her problem. If she can only change this or that about her persona, or tear down this or that about Obama’s. But the whirlwind of changes and charges gets wearing."

Time and again, our own opposition politicians judge themselves against the bar of Hugo Chávez. If they are not as charismatic as Chávez, they think that is a problem. If they are not as populist as Chávez, they think that is a problem. If they are not as vulgar as Chávez, they try and make up for it. It's as if they have internalized that Chávez changed the political landscape only in terms of what kind of wrapping makes a candidate electable. They've forgotten how important it is to just be who you are, with no apologies.

Take Manuel Rosales, for example. I think one of the key mistakes that Rosales made (and continues to make) is that he wants to copy some of the things Chávez does in ways that appear non-sincere.

One day he is signing the Carmona decree, the next day he is launching Mi Negra. One day he is denoncing populism, the next day he is handing out bags of food. And while we can quibble about the theoretical pros and cons of a scheme like Mi Negra, two things are clear:
a) it was a half-baked idea; and
b) the voters didn't buy it at all.

It was perceived as an insincere pledge, like Rosales was pandering.

The issue of the use of public funds for personal promotion is a good example of how opposition politicians confuse the voters. This has long been a pet-peeve of mine, and it should be yours as well. It is an egregious show of corruption, one that says "look what I can get away with, in your face!"

Chávez and his minions have long used this tool. But the reason it doesn't backfire on them is that they are completely unapologetic about it.

When Rafael Ramírez, the PDVSA President, was caught in a clandestine video telling state workers that they all had to vote for the President, Chávez didn't apologize. He basically said "that is who I am, deal with it." Attempts to turn this episode against him backfired. In hindsight, this bold-faced strategy was brilliant.

Maracaibo is one of the places where these low-level political tactics are mostly used. Street signs are enormous and they all have some political figure's face painted on them. As you drive through the city, brightly colored red buses pass you by, painted with the faces of the mayor and the President lest you forget who you need to thank at the ballot box for that comfortable ride to work.

I was writing a post in my head railing against this when I realized I couldn't, in all honesty, blast Chávez for this particular offense without bringing to task Manuel Rosales for doing the same thing. True, Rosales' ads are not as pervasive, and his picture is not used as much as his name. Yet that may be more a reflection of the State government's budget constraints than his philosophical respect for institutions.

This is illegal, wasteful, counterproductive and devoid of content. After all, what does "the true strength of the people" actually mean? That Rosales is a strong leader? That he is backed by the people? That bus makes me want to vote less for Rosales, not more.

What this reflects is an identity problem. If Rosales believes that this is an acceptable way of doing politics, then he is not as different from Chávez as he claims to be. If he doesn't believe in it but thinks he has to do it because Chávez does it, then he doesn't really know who he is. Either way, it conveys weakness and insecurity, two traits you don't want in a leader.

Think about that the next time you fly out of Maracaibo. Think about why it is that right there, in the stub for the airport tax you just paid, there is a message from Manuel Rosales wishing you a merry journey.

Think about how long it's been since we had a national politician in the opposition who was truly comfortable in his or her own skin.

Leashing the unhinged can be hard work

Katy says: Yesterday, celebrity terrorist and chavista fanatic Lina Ron forced her way into the offices of the Archbishop of Caracas.

There, she demanded that the government cease harrassing chavista subversive groups in the "23 de Enero" projects. She also announced that Globovisión was "a target of the Revolution" - in case you didn't know - and promtply declared that the late Héctor Serrano, a government spy who blew himself up last Sunday as he was innocently setting up a bomb outside the main building of business umbrella-group Fedecámaras, was "a martyr of the Revolution."

I was not surprised by Ms. Ron's latest travails into the public arena. The grande-dame of chavista nomenklatur is so unbalanced, I would have to see her applying for US citizenship or auditioning for Venezuelan Extreme Makeover to be surprised.

The crazyness ensued when Chávez himself phoned his pet TV show "La Hojilla" and promptly denounced Ms. Ron for displaying "revolutionary indiscipline," as if "indiscipline" was a noun in need of a revolutionary adjective. (If all revolutionary things are good, shouldn't "revolutionary indiscipline" be a good thing?)

Chávez also scolded former PSUV congressman Luis Tascón, of Tascón List fame, for denouncing corruption schemes without any evidence of malfeasance. And to top it all off, he publicly berated Bolivarian Circles camped outside opposition TV station Globovisión as being "anarchic" groups that do not respond to anyone, leaving out the fact that he created them in the first place.

Ms. Ron, Mr. Tascón and the Bolivarian Circles are all part of Chávez's inner circle. They have, until now, enjoyed the trust of the President and, more importantly, served as his first line of attack in harrassing everyone from the church to political parties to students. His attempts to put distance himself from them are laughable, and Chávez knows it.

We are used to Chavez's Orwellian-talk being directed at our side, the opposition. But now, in an interesting twist, Chávez appears to be directing the crazy at some of his most loyal followers. He seems to be trying to convince the public that he is reining in his loonies. If only they would obey.

This is a dangerous game, one the public is not going to buy easily. The rift between the moderates (led by Miranda Governor Diosdado Cabello) and the extremists (Ron, Tascón and the Bolivarian circles) in the government seems severe and its consequences unpredictable. Insulting the ladies of Altamira may get you some pots banged in Eastern Caracas, but insulting the Tupamaros or the Franken-bride of the Revolution may well get you shot. This is not the position you want your party to be in when the election you have once again labelled as "crucial" is only a few months away.

But then again, it's all possible in Chávez's Venezuela. The President lamely trying to play the wolf in sheep's clothing is not new, but his belief that it's going to work this time is simply nuts.

Logic 101

Katy says: Leopoldo López is the brilliant, popular, telegenic Mayor of Chacao and one of the opposition's most promising politicians. We haven't talked about him in quite some time, but we should, because he is apparently the overwhelming favorite in the race for Caracas Mayor.

Leopoldo is also in a heap of trouble. As it turns out, Clodosbaldo Russián, Chavez's Comptroller General, decided a few years ago that due to some alleged shenanigans that Leopoldo was supposedly involved in - charges for which he was never tried, never sentenced and from which he was never able to defend himself in court - he is not eligible to run for any office until 2012.

Regardless of the merits of the case, the way it has proceeded has been grossly unfair. No individual bureaucrat should be entitled to strip any Venezuelan of their political rights without the issue being vented in a court of law, and the allegedly illegal acts that are motivating this measure have not been proven either.

And yet, the defense strategy outlined yesterday is troubling. His main argument seems to be based on Article 65 of the Constituion. According to López, Article 65 says that "people cannot be elected to public service if they have been sentenced by a court of law." He goes on to say that since he has not been sentenced by a court of law, he can run, and any artificial impediment to prevent him from doing so is unconstitutional.

Here is my translation of what the article says:

"Article 65.- People who have been found guilty of crimes comitted during public service and of other crimes that affect public property, cannot be candidates for positions selected by popular vote for the period of time specified by law, starting from the moment the person begins serving his or her sentence and in accordance with the gravity of the matter."

I'm no lawyer, but to me the article says that if you have been found guilty you cannot run. It doesn't say this is the only way somebody can be stripped of their political rights, which seems to be Leopoldo's argument here.

It's Logic 101 folks. "All whales are mammals. I am not a whale, therefore I am not a mammal."

Leopoldo's strategy makes no sense. Someone needs to point this out to him.

PS.- Teodoro Petkoff suggests a more coherent legal strategy here.

Sinamaica Chronicles

Katy says: "That one over there, that's my mother's house. The house next to it also belongs to my mother, but she's loaned it to make a Barrio Adentro module. That's where the Cuban doctors work and live."

With these words, Rolando, our boat driver in the Sinamaica lagoon, hinted that he was a hardcore chavista. He's an Añú, one of the several indigenous groups from the Guajira peninsula shared by Venezuela and Colombia.

I took a deep breath and asked Rolando how he had voted on the December 2nd referendum. He said that, after thinking about it, he'd voted "No". While President Chavez had done a lot for his community, he felt what they needed now were jobs, a hospital and better security. He thought the reform would not help accomplish these goals.

I didn't believe him. I was sure he was saying what I wanted to hear. Yes, Zulia tends to lean against Chávez: it has one of two opposition governors in the country and the "No" won in the state by a large margin. But Chávez has an inmense lead in rural areas, especially indigenous ones. I knew I was in red country.

--------

Sinamaica is a unique place. Right in the middle of the Limón river delta's mangrove lagoon, you find a town of 5,000, mostly living in huts built on stilts in the water. The town is poor and jobs are hard to come by, but the mystique of the place remains: it was these houses that Américo Vespucci was looking at when he first blurted out "little Venice!", or, in Genoese dialect, "Venezuela"!

I was visiting relatives in Maracaibo last week, along with a Chilean friend. When I told them we were planning to take our friend to Sinamaica, they warned against it. They said we'd get kidnapped, that the lagoon was dry, that the boats couldn't navigate and that there was a dengue fever epidemic. My relatives hadn't ventured to Sinamaica in quite some time, so their warnings were based on hearsay. With a wee bit of hesitation, we decided to go and headed North.

The day was as cool and crisp as Zulia can get - picture a mild summer day in the North. The boats were there just like they had been the last time I visited this place, twenty years ago. They all had life-vests and a rustic yet functional canvas canopy to shield us from the searing midday sun.

We set off upriver and the beauty of the place started to sink in. While some things had barely changed, others were noticeably different. There is a new hostel in town, next to a brand new school that, according to Rolando, is teaching the Añú about their heritage and their language. The huts have had electricity for as long as I can remember, but now some have Direct TV satellite dishes too.

While a few of the huts had "No" scribbled in graffitti on their walls, I saw a lot of "Si - con Chávez" signs. And while I managed to see a couple of health-care facilities run by the state government, Chávez's presence was overwhelming.

"See," I thought to myself, "this is Chávez territory."

--------

When I got home, though, I was surprised. The place is more complicated than I'd thought. Turns out that the No won in Sinamaica last December, 52 to 48, a larger ratio than in the nation as a whole. Maybe Rolando was telling the truth.

Twenty years had passed since my last visit and the place now looked better, not worse. Schools, doctors, Añú language classes...surely the good burghers of Sinamaica were grateful to the President for all that, right?

Yet there were many signs that suggested something wasn't right. Take, for instance, the road trip. On our way there we passed at least ten military checkpoints. I thought this was usual, but for the people of Sinamaica that has to be uncomfortable.

Not only does the military drive away the tourists, they also hamper the lucrative smuggling business that some of these communities have long thrived on. The National Guard is notorious in Venezuela for muscling in on the trade, so rather than stemming the flow of cheap gasoline across the border, they divert some of the funds away from the community and into their own pockets.

At the same time, the region is notorious for its FARC presence. Some of the people here are large cattle and goat-herders, and small fortunes have been made from this trade. Yet the military presence has done precious little to turn the tide on the many problems safety poses for legitimate businesses such as these.

On our drive up there, we noticed dozens of brand new cars parked along the road with serial numbers painted on their windshields. We didn't know what this all meant, but it made us uneasy. I thought it could be some sort method whereby stolen cars held for ransom are returned to their owners.

Not to be. This is what is called "tripletear", a common way to make money out of the thousands of inefficiencies in Chavez's Venezuela.

Due to foreign exchange controls, it now takes about six months on a waiting list to buy a new car in Venezuela. Some people in the Guajira who manage to score one have figured out a way to cash in on the distortion. They raffle the new car away by posting serial numbers on the windshield on the side of the road. The numbers are a subset of the possible winning numbers of that week's state lottery - if you buy a ticket from the car's owner and the lottery draws that number, you win the car.

When the only local industry that is booming is a makeshift pyramid scheme, people won't be happy. Guajiros want jobs and security just like anyone else, and the Barrio Adentro module is old news.

Rural Venezuela is more complex than I'd assumed, plus it's changing. The government is still very strong, but in the eyes of many, Chávez has turned a corner. And while first impressions can make you think that, yes, things are better now, the few improvements you see are things the locals see as either old news or just unfinished.

It all brings me back to the importance of November's state and local elections. A lot of Chávez's votes from rural areas come because the opposition simply has no presence in these out of the way places. Some towns have probably not seen an opposition politician in years, and it's hard to make credible promises when you've been shut out of local government for decades. In light of the positive impact an opposition local government can have, it seems clear to me that boycotting the regional elections four years ago was a huge mistake. It's a view all but the most extreme slivers of the opposition now seem to share.

----------

When we were getting off the boat, I asked Rolando how to say "thank you" in the Añú language. He was embarrassed to say he didn't know, but added that they're trying to recover their language and their culture with the government's help.

"At least that is what the government has been saying all these years," he said.

He couldn't say "thank you" in his ancestor's tongue, but the disappointment in his tone said enough.

More from that Francisco Rodríguez piece

Quico says: ...which is now available online here.

Indeed, Cháveznomics is far from unprecedented: the gross contours of this story follow the disastrous experiences of many Latin American countries during the 1970s and 1980s. The economists Rudiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards have characterized such policies as "the macroeconomics of populism." Drawing on the economic experiences of administrations as politically diverse as Juan Perón's in Argentina, Salvador Allende's in Chile, and Alan García's in Peru, they found stark similarities in economic policies and in the resulting economic evolution. Populist macroeconomics is invariably characterized by the use of expansionary fiscal and economic policies and an overvalued currency with the intention of accelerating growth and redistribution. These policies are commonly implemented in the context of a disregard for fiscal and foreign exchange constraints and are accompanied by attempts to control inflationary pressures through price and exchange controls. The result is by now well known to Latin American economists: the emergence of production bottlenecks, the accumulation of severe fiscal and balance-of-payments problems, galloping inflation, and plummeting real wages.

Chávez's behavior is typical of such populist economic experiments. The initial successes tend to embolden policymakers, who increasingly believe that they were right in dismissing the recommendations of most economists. Rational policy formulation becomes increasingly difficult, as leaders become convinced that conventional economic constraints do not apply to them. Corrective measures only start to be taken when the economy has veered out of control. But by then it is far too late.

Read it. No, seriously, read it.

The Theory and Practice of Revolutionary Metabullshit

Quico says: Hats off to Tibisay Lucena. The head of the National Elections Council is more ambitious than she seems. First, she pulled off a feat that seemed virtually impossible: she managed to announce that Chávez had lost a popular vote without increasing the CNE's credibility in the eyes of the opposition. Considering that the whole reason the opposition didn't trust CNE in the first place was that we doubted that they would ever accept a Chávez defeat, that took talent.

How did she do it? Her formula is simple: galloping opacity barely covered up with blatant lying and seasoned with undisguised contempt for those who question her.

The two official referendum results announcements Lucena has made so far (one on the night of the vote, the second a few days later) are not just incomplete, they're patently incompatible with one another. That hasn't escaped the attention of oppo activists, whose calls for clarification she has consistently met with sneering dismissal.

Now, Lucena's kicking it up a notch: not just lying about the referendum results, but lying about her previous lies about the referendum results.

In an interview on VTV, she admitted CNE would never release the complete results of December's vote, claiming this was "normal" because a few votes go unreported "in every election." How few is "a few"? Tibisay said just 3% of tables remain outstanding, so we're talking about more than a quarter of a million votes: the population of Punto Fijo, give or take.

There's something frankly stomach turning about the whole question of precisely how many votes it's OK not to count. But now that the principle's been established, lets haggle over the price: it's a lie that only 3% of voting tables are still outstanding. CNE's second bulletin covered just 94% of voting tables, not 97% as she's now claiming. So we'd be talking more about a Puerto Ordaz than a Punto Fijo, in terms of how many people it's "normal" to disenfranchise.

But it gets worse, because that second bulletin wasn't broken down geographically, and implied an improbable 98%+ abstention rate in some areas. In fact, we lack verifiable referendum results for 13.6% of voting tables. That's over a million votes: more like the population of Valencia.

So what we have here is no mere lie. It's a lie about a lie about a lie.

Think of it as higher-order mendacity: Tibisay's seminal contribution to the theory and practice of revolutionary metabullshit.

Caption competition:
What is she saying here?

Coming soon in Foreign Affairs

Quico says: It's great fun to watch Francisco Rodríguez run an analytical bulldozer through a mountain of chavista bullshit. Choice bit:

One would expect [the consensus abroad that chavismo has been good for the poor] to be backed up by an impressive array of evidence. But in fact, there is remarkably little data supporting the claim that the Chávez administration has acted any diffrently from previous Venezuelan governments—or, for that matter, from those of other developing and Latin American nations—in redistributing the gains from economic growth to the poor.

One oft-cited statistic is the decline in poverty from a peak of 54 percent at the height of the national strike in 2003 to 27.5 percent in the first half of 2007. Although this decline may appear impressive, it is also known that poverty reduction is strongly associated with economic growth and that Venezuela’s per capita GDP grew by nearly 50 percent during the same time period — thanks in great part to a tripling of oil prices. The real question is thus not whether poverty has fallen but whether the Chávez government has been particularly effective at converting this period of economic growth into poverty reduction.

One way to evaluate this is by calculating the reduction in poverty for every percentage point increase in per capita income — in economists’ lingo, the income elasticity of poverty reduction. This calculation shows an average reduction of one percentage point in poverty for every percentage point in per capita GDP growth during this recovery, a ratio that compares unfavorably with those of many other developing countries, for which studies tend to put the figure at around two percentage points.

Similarly, one would expect pro-poor growth to be accompanied by a marked decrease in income inequality. But according to the Venezuelan Central Bank, inequality has actually increased during the Chávez administration, with the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality, with zero indicating perfect equality and one indicating perfect inequality) increasing from 0.44 to 0.48 between 2000 and 2005.

Poverty and inequality statistics, of course, tell only part of the story. There are many aspects of the well-being of the poor not captured by measures of money income, and this is where Chávez’s supporters claim that the government has made the most progress—through its misiones, which have concentrated on the direct provision of health, education, and other basic public services to poor communities.

But again, social statistics show no signs of a substantial improvement in the well-being of ordinary Venezuelans, and in many cases there have been worrying deteriorations. The percentage of underweight babies, for example, increased from 8.4 percent to 9.1 percent between 1999 and 2006. During the same period, the percentage of households without access to running water rose from 7.2 percent to 9.4 percent, and the percentage of families living in dwellings with earthen floors multiplied almost threefold, from 2.5 percent to 6.8 percent.

In Venezuela, one can see the misiones everywhere: in government posters lining the streets of Caracas, in the ubiquitous red shirts issued to program participants and worn by government supporters at Chávez rallies, in the bloated government budget allocations. The only place where one will be hard-pressed to find them is in the human development statistics.

On the whole, the piece is pretty devastating. Look for it in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs.

Update: Calvin wants to know if I really don't agree that the misiones have had a startling impact on barrio life, thus giving me an entry point into this rant:

Listen, I have no doubt that for some people and some communities some of the time, the misiones have made a huge difference. The question is, looking at the big picture, how many people and how many communities?

I suppose you've been to Venezuela, observed some of those people and places, filtered them through those thick ideological spectacles of yours, and come away certain that what you (thought you) saw was the norm across the country.

But how can you be sure? How can you tell whether you were witnessing the exception or the norm? If you're honest with yourself, what can make you so sure that what you saw wasn't a Potemkin Mission?

There's only one way to be sure, Calvin, and that's to look at the data. There's really no choice, because for every bit of anecdotal evidence you find of a misión going well, I can find one of a misión going poorly. We can play that game all day, but it won't get us any closer to a resolution.

So, on aggregate, the question is whether the government has relieved poverty above and beyond what any petrostate could've done facing a massive oil boom.

Thing is, these days it's hard to find any petrostate that isn't going through a consumption boom. From Russia to the gulf states to Sudan, oil is pouring out, money is pouring in and people are buying stuff. That makes people feel good about the nature of the times, and when people feel good about the nature of the times, governments are popular. That's true whether they have a left wing government, a right wing government, a monarchy, or, hell, even a genocidal regime.

In Venezuela the consumption boom was accompanied by a massive propaganda campaign geared very specifically at getting people to attribute the feel good factor to government actions via the misiones. Until the economic distortions started to build up to intolerable levels, that gambit paid off quite handsomely.

Why? Because the Intentions Heuristic took hold: people in general tend to attribute to governments outcomes that they perceive to be aligned with their intentions. Chávez was widely perceived as very concerned for the poor, the misiones were highly visible, and poverty was falling fast. The inference that poverty was falling because of the misiones and the misiones were happening because of Chavez's intentions is both perfectly natural and just plain wrong.

Or, to put it differently, if you want to say that the misiones' popularity ipso facto demonstrates that they have made a substantial improvement to the lives of the Venezuelan poor, you'd have to accept that the popularity of Putin's government automatically means it has been even better for Russia's poor. After all, Putin wins elections by huge margins. As far as petrostates go, losing an election with oil at $90 a pop is a feat only Chavez has managed to pull off.

In the end, though, what I say isn't interesting. What the data say is interesting. If you have a good explanation for why the income elasticity of poverty reduction has been lower in Venezuela than in the rest of the region, lets have it. Otherwise, all we're doing is contributing to global warming via massive emissions of hot air. Cuz we can sit here and talk out of our bums all day and all night about who feels how about what, but basically all that does is ventilate pre existing prejudices. At some point you have to choose: your anecdotal experience of a handful of misiones filtered through a mountain of propaganda, or the data. Which are you going to believe?

Anyway, Francisco Rodríguez's article is really very good, but way too long to post more than a snippet of it here. Look for it in the magazine, it's well worth a read.

Fidel Castro resigns!

Quico says: Newsrooms rush to tweak his obituary!

Empire of Doublethink

Quico says: I'm a bit late to this story, but I don't want to let it go without comment. The way Chávez justified his decision to raise milk prices last month really was something else. Here (edited for clarity) is what he said on Aló back on January 20th:

I know and I'm aware that the price of milk at Bs.1,100 has fallen short, and I'm willing to raise it a bit to benefit the primary producers, although of course we have to think of the consuming public so the price doesn't keep rising. I'm willing, and I announce it to the milk producers of the country, [to raise the price of] farm gate milk from Bs.1,100 to Bs.1,500, and I hope all the producers will respond as we need, instead of just making cheeses or taking it out to Colombia, which I consider treason - they are betraying their own pueblo. Milk must first of all be for Venezuelans...so we are revising the price of milk...because we know production costs have risen.

Did you catch it? It goes by so fast it's easy to miss but, within a single soundbite, the guy both accepted that price controls lead to shortages and blamed shortages on producers' treachery.

In the same breath, he both concedes the utility maximization model of producer behavior - that cornerstone of mainstream microeconomics with its upward-sloping supply curves and its producers who rationally respond to price hikes by expanding production - and he rejects it in favor of a normative explanation. So when producers respond to high prices by increasing supply they're acting rationally, but when they respond to low prices by decreasing supply they're betraying the people.

This makes no sense. And I mean that in the strictly formal sense. If something is true, it cannot simultaneusly be not-true. Either the supply curve slopes upward or it doesn't.

The rest is doublethink. That's what Orwell called it. As usual, he had this stuff pegged decades ahead of the game. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he wrote about:

...the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved using doublethink.

Orwell's prescience is scary. I mean, that passage reads like it came straight out of Andrés Izarra's manual...just straightforward chavista S.O.P.

What's terrifying is the way doublethink has become routinized in the Chávez era. Nobody bats an eyelash anymore. Chávez's inner circle long ago understood that taking the boss to task over this kind of thing is an excellent way to cut short your political career. The oppo commentariat gave up, understandably exhausted. Doublethink became "normal."

You know things have come to a head when it becomes a dangerous, counter-revolutionary thing to say, but I'll say it anyway:

if X is true, not-X cannot also be true

There. That's a weight off my shoulders.

I'll expect my CIA check in the mail any time now.

Are we having fun yet?

The Onion says:

How low can you go?

Quico says: More than a movement, more than an ideology or a revolution or even a government, chavismo-in-power is turning into a kind of gruesome experiment. How debased can a group's discoursive standards get before it falls apart altogether? Having surrendered the tools it takes to process their differences in a minimally sane way, how long can they keep it together?

These are the questions that went through my mind as I read the genuinely weird story of Luis Tascón's final expulsion from the ranks of chavismo.

You remember Tascón, don't you? He's the National Assembly guy who pioneered Chavismo's use of IT to discriminate against millions of Venezuelan dissidents. That guy!

Turns out he's CIA. Or Microsoft. Same difference.

Tascón's now been tossed out of Chávez's budding Socialist Party. It's safe to say now that he will not be Mayor of Libertador like he'd wanted.

His crime? He put forward evidence of corruption (think of it as "El Caso de los Jeeps del Siglo 21") on the part of José David Cabello, the new Tax Superintendent who, by sheer coincidence, happens to be the brother of Miranda Governor Diosdado Cabello, a favorite Chávez protegé and revolutionary untouchable.

El Universal's writeup on this story beggars belief from start to finish. Cilia Flores, the Assembly Chairwoman, called for an overhaul of the National Assembly's corruption investigations arm, the Comptrollership Committee, over its excessive willingness to, um, investigate corruption...just one of the sorts of "details" that gets buried deep inside the story because the headline stuff is so deliriously over the top.

I mean, Diosdado thinks Tascón was conspiring directly with Bill Gates and muses that, while he was in Redmond, "maybe they injected a chip into his blood"...no bureaucratic shakeup in the Assembly can compete with that!

How did our public sphere get this far gone?

Faced with all this craziness, it's tough to organize your thoughts. But Habermas uses a concept I think is quite helpful in this context: "discursive standards".

A discursive standard is a taken-for-granted set of rules a group uses to judge whether an argument is persuasive or not. Discursive standards vary from one setting to another: what constitutes a "good argument" in a courtroom doesn't necessarily hold water in a school playground, or a Globovision studio, or a PETA meeting. In each of these settings, a different set of unspoken rules underpins the group's shared sense of what's reasonable, what's persuasive, and what's appropriate: it's those rules Habermas wants to get at when he talks about discursive standards.

The question, for me, is how chavismo's discursive standards got so freakishly warped.

Simple. The basic ingredient is just a supersized dose of Manichaeism. Reality, in this view, is a constant struggle between absolute evil and absolute good, with nothing in between. Chavista Manichaeism assigns absolute evil one label ("the US") and absolute good another ("Chávez").

Chavismo has crafted a discursive standard out of its iron-willed commitment to this worldview. Its discursive standard forces every single political, moral, diplomatic, personal, or judicial matter into that dualistic scheme. Within chavismo, arguments become "persuasive" only to the extent that they identify what's good with Chávez and what's evil with the US.

Taken to its logical extreme, this resolves into the view that nothing can be good unless Chávez did it, and nothing - not even Bolívar's death - can be bad unless the US did it. No case is exempt.

That's all there is to it, really. For chavismo, every debate must be conducted under these discursive rules. Straying is not allowed. A willingness to stray from the standard suggests the kind of disloyalty that, from the perspective of the standard itself, can only be interpreted as treasonous.

Luis Tascón, of all people, should've realized all this. But he fucked up. He said something bad had happened without saying the US was somehow responsible. Not allowed. So he got CIAed. Cabello Clan 1, Tascón 0.

Reading up on Tascón's defenestration, I couldn't help but think of Orwell's take on Stalin's trotskyite purges, and the inability of the PSFs of his age to get their minds around what was happening:

To get the full sense of our ignorance as to what is really happening in the USSR, it would be worth trying to translate the most sensational Russian event of the past two years, the Trotskyist trials, into English terms. Make the necessary adjustments, let Left be Right and Right be Left, and you get something like this:

Mr. Winston Churchill [i.e. Trotsky], now in exile in Portugal, is plotting to overthrow the British Empire and establish Communism in England. By the use of unlimited Russian money he has succeeded in building up a huge Churchillite organisation which includes members of Parliament, factory managers, Roman Catholic bishops and practically the whole of the Primrose League. Almost every day some dastardly act of sabotage is laid bare - sometimes a plot to blow up the House of Lords, sometimes and outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the Royal racing-stables. Eighty per cent of the Beefeaters at the Tower are discovered to be agents of the Communist International. A high level official at the Post Office admits brazenly to having embezzled postal orders to the tune of 5,000,000 pounds, and also to having committed lese majeste by drawing moustaches on postage stamps. Lord Nuffield ["the English Henry Ford"], after a 7-hour interrogation by Mr. Norman Birkett [who would become a lawyer at Nuremberg 7 years later], confesses that ever since 1920 he has been fomenting strikes in his own factories. Casual half-inch paras in every issue of the newspapers announce that fifty more Churchillite sheep-stealers have been shot in Westmoreland. And meanwhile the Churchillites never cease from proclaiming that it is they who are the real defenders of Capitalism and that it is the government that is no more than a set of Bolsheviks in disguise.'

Anyone who has followed the Russian trials knows that this is scarcely a parody. From our point of view, the whole thing is not merely incredible as a genuine conspiracy, it is next door to incredible as a frame-up. It is simply a dark mystery, of which the only seizable fact - sinister enough in its way - is that Communists over here regard it as a good advertisement for Communism.

Faced with Tascón's expulsion, what would Orwell think? In terms of violence, chavismo is surely far from the blood-soaked extremes of Stalinist paranoia. But in discursive terms, it's really not that far.

Every week seems to bring a new low in the Bolivarian republic, yet the govering clique limps along somehow. Each week's lunacy serves only to set a kind of "personal best" - a challenge to be out-lunaticked the following week. The discursive standards of the chavista governing elite get more and more detached from reality but, so far, the group's managed not to implode.

I'm amazed, awed even, by its neverending capacity to plumb new depths, to outdo itself for shrill craziness again and again, to keep surprising us even this late on in the game.

I sense that this can't go on much longer...but then, I've sensed at for a long time, and they keep proving me wrong.

Update: One of my better connected readers puts this befuddling possibility in my email. It may or may not be true: if anyone knows more, please share.

Here's a weird 'fact' (insofar as anything that comes via indirect sources can be regarded as a 'fact'): Jose David Cabello is not part of the Cabello clan ... apparently the two brothers, whose kleptomania and physical resemblance - not to mention their close family ties - suggest that they are as alike as peas in a pod, belong to a different power group. In fact, Jose David's recent appointment to replace Jose G Vielma Mora is the reverse of what most of us had thought ... because it's Vielma not Cabello who belongs to Diosdado's group. And this may be one reason for his mysterious ouster. All very strange.