sorry

Quico says: Previous post withdrawn due to devastating criticism.

Shocker of the day: Politician plays by the rules

Juan Cristobal says: - The fight to be the sole opposition candidate for Mayor of Maracaibo has been a tawdry affair. Primero Justicia's Juan Pablo Guanipa, a council-member and strong opponent of current chavista mayor Giancarlo Di Martino, seemed like the front-runner early on. But then, the current governor of Zulia, former Presidential candidate and former two-time mayor of Maracaibo Manuel Rosales decided to go from the Governorship ... back to City Hall.

The campaign threatened to get ugly fast. Until yesterday that is.

Initially, Guanipa and the entire PJ group did not take Rosales' bid very well. Accusations of Rosales' missuse of public funds began to fly, something we documented in this blog a while ago. It was interpreted as though Rosales was unwilling to pave the way for future generations and open up to other opposition groups gaining ground on what he considers his own turf. Rosales was portrayed as playing rough with the opposition unity pact signed last January, threatening its very existence.

Well, Guanipa announced yesterday he was stepping down. He stated that the unity pact called for a decision on a single candidacy to be made in early July, and that it had to be based on opinion polls. He hired Datanálisis, Rosales hired Seijas, and they both concur: Rosales is the more popular candidate. So in the spirit of unity, he announced his decision in an uncommonly graceful speech.

This gesture may seem like no big deal. After all, candidates decline and endorse rivals all the time in normal democracies.

Yet this is Venezuela, where people who lose in primaries either "pass to their party's reserve", leave their party, decide to run anyway or question the method through which the other guy (or gal) was selected. I fully expect more than one político to announce in the coming weeks that this or that polling firm was "bought" by his rival or had some other flaw.

So Guanipa's gesture should be celebrated. With little fuss, he is stepping aside in favor of unity. He played by the rules, and he accepts the verdict - end of story.

So far, the opposition has been talking a lot about unity. Now is the time for them to start putting their egos where their mouth is. Let's hope more of them begin imitating people like Guanipa (or Armando Briquet, who is reportedly stepping aside today in Baruta) and start putting the interests of the opposition before their own.

The fjords of Macuro

Juan Cristobal says: - The most developed nation on Earth. The most peaceful country on Earth. Insanely high life expectancy. The second-highest GDP per capita in the world. A near-absence of poverty and income inequality. These are some of the honors bestowed on a little country, with just over 4.4 million people, perched on a bunch of cliffs in the top of the world: Norway.

Thinking through Venezuela's problems is depressing enough, so holding ourselves up to a place like that would only add to our misery. The urge to find a role model to copy is understandable. But, surely, Norway can't be that benchmark. There are no fjords in Macuro. As much as he may like to think otherwise, the guy in Miraflores is no king, just a fat man surrounded by yes-men. And while we have plenty of blondes, let's just say they're not quite Scandinavian.

But face it: we're hard up for a good benchmark. Comparisons with Latin American countries border on useless. Venezuela has more in common with Iran, Algeria and Nigeria than with Guatemala, Peru or Uruguay. Thing is, instead of offering hope, the experiences of our fellow oil exporters serve up a deep well of despair.

It’s no wonder that people resort to near-apocalyptic terms to describe our economy. Some talk about "the devil’s excrement." A Google Academic count on “resource curse” came up with a whopping 36,900 articles. Many of them mention Venezuela.

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Thinking through this stuff, it's easy to end up mired in a self-flagellatory funk over our screwed-up national psyche. The conclusion seems inexorable: easy oil money has a lot to answer for. Successive petrobooms have only served up our society to one predatory, authoritarian regime after another, from Gómez to Pérez Jiménez to CAP to Chávez.

But is it is really that simple? Aren't we forgetting that many modern economies, such as Canada, Australia, and Norway, have been built on the back of natural resources? Isn't there something lazy about this blanket denunciation of the petrostate, as though we could just pass the buck to the black stuff under our feet and turn the page?

Oil wealth isn't necessarily a curse. Norway, in particular, is an example of a petrostate that works.

Norway is the world’s third-largest oil exporter, a bigger exporter than Venezuela. It is also the world’s third-largest gas exporter. In spite of this, Norway’s “curse” is nearing its end: its oil and gas reserves are very small compared to other countries, and production is expected to decrease dramatically in the coming years.

So Norwegians, in spite of having lots of oil, have managed to make a nice little country for themselves. What has worked?

A lot of things come to mind: their European mindset, their weather, their history. Yet while some of this may have played a role, it would be a mistake to believe a country's development path is so deterministic. After all, few people fifty years ago would have looked at the mindset, weather and history of Singapore and predicted it was going to become the powerhouse that it is today. It's not all in the genes, under-development is not an inescapable trap.

What has made the difference in Norway, the reason it’s no Nigeria, is that it Norwegians have not fallen into the traps of petrostates. Thanks to mechanisms put in place to isolate the country from sudden oil windfalls, the country is an exporter of diverse goods and services. Contrary to expectations, Norwegians managed to avoid the disease that plagued their Dutch neighbors and was so pervasive that it created its own little economic malaise.

How did Norway do it? One explanation frequently espoused has to do with timing. In particular, countries in which a boom in commodity exporting coincided with the formation of the modern state now exhibit bloated bureaucracies and an inefficient state apparatus, one that makes ad-hoc, arbitrary decisions on economic policy and usually gets it wrong. Norway was the opposite.

Norway discovered its oil in 1962, relatively late in its development. By then, it was an established monarchical democracy. This, however, did not prevent Norwegian politicians from spending the dough.

As documented by Stanford political scientist Terry Lynn Karl in her magnum opus, The Paradox of Plenty, public expenditure in Norway rose just as fast as income from oil exports. Norwegians went on a spending spree in the late 70s and early 80s that rivaled that of the Venezuelan ta’baratos.

Inevitably, the Norwegian economy hit the wall, just like that of other oil exporters. However, that is where the similarities end. As Karl puts it,

“Unlike all other exporters, it (the Norwegian state) established substantial control over petroleum policy on the basis of consensus, protected against the worst excesses of petrolization, and permitted voluntary and relatively rapid adjustment. In effect, its highly institutionalized state structures provided a type of “creative resistance” to the overwhelming impact of the bonanza that was simply unavailable to the developing countries.

The contrast to other exporters from the point of departure – that is, from the discovery of oil on the North Sea shelf – is telling. The structures that “received” Norway’s boom could hardly have been more different from those of the developing countries. Oil companies, especially eager to exploit resources outside OPEC’s dominion, did not encounter a poor country, a weak state, undeveloped social forces, or a predatory, authoritarian ruler… The state in Norway was, in Olsen’s words, a “typical civil servants’ state,” which came remarkably close to what Weber labeled an ideal bureaucracy operating under rational legal authority.”

Karl lists several key features of the Norwegian state structure that allowed it to absorb the oil shock in a sane, rational manner. Recruitment was based solely by merit. Civil servants were unusually insulated from and impervious to influence peddling. Advancement depended on nominations from other (higher-ranking) civil servants. The attempts by political parties and interest organizations to influence the State were frowned upon. Corruption is virtually nonexistent. As Karl depressingly puts it, “this “civil-service state” was the complete antithesis of Venezuela and the other politicized states examined previously.”

In other petrostates, the beginning of oil booms found oil companies negotiating with a rapacious, unequipped, underdeveloped bureaucracy, whose main goal was to establish a tax base. Norway’s bureaucracy had no interest in this. Their emphasis was on regulating the industry correctly, using sophisticated financial planning techniques and tools that maximized collective welfare.

One of these tools is Norway’s Petroleum Fund. This Fund is a mechanism ruled by clear guidelines through which the Norwegian state saves the money coming from extraordinary oil funds for the pensions of future generations. Very literally, it is a way for current generations to use their extraordinary good luck in order to free future ones from the burden of trying to support them.

The Fund’s shadow over Norway’s economy looms large. In 2006, Norway had a budget surplus of a whopping 25.9 percent of GPD. Venezuela, on the contrary, ran a budget deficit that year. That same year, the net assets of the general government were 1.5 times the size of the entire Norwegian economy. To put this number in context, it would equivalent to the Venezuelan government having savings worth $270 billion instead of the roughly $40 billion it has.

The rules of the Fund are simple. Most of the revenue from oil goes into the Fund, which invests the money abroad. The key rule sets the non-oil structural budget deficit of the central government to the fund’s long-term real return, 4 percent.

In other words, it sets spending limits on the government by setting a maximum amount that the government can withdraw from the fund each year, capping them to the “interest” that the Fund earns, so that the long-term value of the fund is preserved. Money goes in the Fund only when the oil market is doing well.

Although it may be tempting to simply copy and paste, it's important to keep in mind that the particular form that these rules adopt is not what is key. Some rules are designed so that the long-term value of the Fund is maximized while short-term cash disbursements are sacrificed. Other rules are more flexible as to the amount of windfall you can spend in the short run. And the rules in Norway are not always complied with to their fullest.

The important thing is that Norway’s fund, like the ones in Alaska or in Chile, is borne out of a consensus among the political classes and civil society as to the economy's medium- and long-term goals and prospects. Countries that successfully cope with resource windfalls (or shortfalls) are those with stable rules that meet some minimum requirements. It’s important to keep this in mind and to understand that consensus and stability are more important than the rules themselves.

The Norwegian example shows us that sudden oil wealth is not the root cause of a country's problems. Oil is not a curse, it's a blessing - it’s what we as a society choose to do with it that makes a difference. And much of this boils down to a series of institutional arrangements and political consensus that should be the main goal of any political party.

Norwegians are not a special race. They live in a remote country that is inaccessible in many places and, while rich in natural resources, is poor in population. Yet through clever institutional design and a little bit of luck, they have managed to do right for themselves. There’s no reason why Norway can’t serve as a guideline to future policy decisions.

So before giving up hope, thinking that we will never be like Norway and that there will never be fjords in Macuro, let's think about what is within our grasp. We would be well served to use the Norwegian benchmark and try and adapt to our own country the principles and setups that have worked for theirs.

Using Norway as a benchmark may sound crazy, but it's better than our current role-model. While the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to success is usually built on plans that may appear to some as impossible pipe dreams.

Let's face it - we can't do much worse than we've already done, so what have we got to lose?

Not that there's anything wrong with that

Quico says: I've been feeling particularly ineffective when it comes to blogging November's state and local elections. Aside from the fact that the opposition hasn't decided who it's going to back where, it sure seems like there are a lot of crazy races developing.

For once, distance really is a big handicap in trying to figure out what's happening where. But frankly, I doubt I'd do much better if I was in Caracas. There's just no substitute for micro-local knowledge when it comes to writing about the micro-líos of micro-level politics, and the Caracas press does a horrible job at covering the country outside the valley.

We all know the provinces are chavista strongholds, and the more provincial, the stronger the hold. We've discussed how important it is for the opposition to win key areas such as Guárico in order to prove they can continue broadening their base. Chavismo, on the other hand, feels safe in Guárico, so much so that a cat-fight loud enough to make out across the Atlantic has broken out there. It's the chavista mirror-image of the opposition squabble over the Chacao Municipal nomination: safe seat = lots of wannabes.

The three-way chavista feud pits the state's first lady and the secretary general of a party allied to Chávez against the government's official candidate, Willian Lara. Yup, you read that right...Chávez decided to turf Willian Lara, his former Minister of Information, out to San Juan de los Morros!

Now, um, how to put this delicately? Say you had patiquín-ish tendencies...a bit of a lisp...a fondness for the urban life...a penchant for expensive suits...a punctiliousness about diction. Say you, erm, (well, no use sugar coating it), say you flamed a lot (hey now - I'm not saying he is or he isn't cuz I have no way of knowing.) But say this was your profile. Would you want to be a candidate in Guarico?!

Is this Chávez's idea of a joke? Does he hate the guy? It's a bit like making Barney Frank run for governor of Utah.

I mean, a guy like Lara would have a hard time anywhere - and not just because of his easy-to-wonder-about sexual identity. Venezuelan society in general isn't exactly open-minded about that sort of thing, but there are certain spaces for tolerance in big cities that you don't begin to find in the countryside.

Willian Lara, Governor of Guarico. The mind boggles. And he might just win!

Extra! Extra! Nickname Felon Starts Making Sense!

Quico says: It pains me to say it - and not just because the bastard usurped my nickname and, worse yet, misspells it - but Kico Bautista's latest column makes more sense to me than 99% of what's written about Venezuelan political parties these days. Bautista notes that the November elections are not going to be like the Referendum, where all you had to do was campaign for a No: state and local elections call for organization, shrewd decision-making and political intelligence - in other words, they call for leadership.

If we had proper leadership, we would realize we're facing a Target-Rich environment, with Chávez's popularity in the dog house and chavismo in deep disarray in half a dozen states, giving us a realistic chance to make symbolically loaded gains in places like Anzoategui, Guarico, even Barinas. But the early signs are, to his mind, not encouraging.

I sometimes get the sense that Bautista's oafish, deeply annoying TV persona masks a guy of uncommon political sense. I'm too busy to translate the whole thing, but I did especially enjoy this bit:

[Opposition] politics is limited to interpreting survey results. There's no imagination, no inventiveness. In terms of organization, there's nothing new either. No new consultation formulas or mechanisms to allow citizens to participate in ways that break with tradition. With all the new digital technologies out there, Venezuela doesn't have a single channel on offer to incorporate people horizontally into the work of politics .

Ten years after MoveOn.org demonstrated the way you can use the net to mobilize people who feel strongly about politics, we still haven't caught on. Hell, the closest we've come is the clinically insane ramblings that blight the NoticieroDigital bulletin boards.

The crying game

Quico says: What follows is cut-and-pasted from a recent Skype chat:

Katy 6:25 PM: ¿estas?

Quico 6:25 PM: epa, sí, recien regresado

Katy 6:26 PM: ¿donde estabas?

Quico 6:27 PM: in what, I now realize, was The Most Boring Conference in the History of Trade Policy Conferences...

(en Bélgica)

tú, ¿qué tal?

Katy 6:30 PM: sorry to hear that.

Yo bien, era para saber si ibas a postear en los proximos dias

Quico 6:31 PM: Ummmm...doubtful...with the football and all...

Katy 6:31 PM: jeje... actually, I was wondering what the best way of changing my name is...

Quico 6:31 PM: changing your name?

Katy 6:31 PM: I guess the whole "Katy" thing, it's kind of silly at this point

Quico 6:31 PM: Ah, your blog name...I thought you wanted to become Abu-Ismael Hamza Al-Katy

Katy 6:31 PM: je je

I don't want to make a big deal about it, but I also dont want to simply start posting as Juan

And I think I owe it to the readers to start using my real name

Quico 6:31 PM: Hmmmm

Juan Cristobal 6:31 PM: maybe my initials? Or just Juan Cristobal?

Quico 6:32 PM: I think that would confuse people

Juan Cristobal 6:32 PM: Thats my name but I never, ever use the Cristobal

Quico 6:32 PM: I think what you should do is post a video of yourself but continue to sign Katy

Juan Cristobal 6:33 PM: hmm...

no, I think that would be very weird

How about you say that Katy died?

Quico 6:33 PM: WHAT?!

Juan Cristobal 6:33 PM: and that in her place, you've hired a new blogger, named Juan

Quico 6:34 PM: Is this some kind of Who Killed J.R. thing?!

Dallas online?!

Juan Cristobal 6:34 PM: and we sort of leave it at that?

Quico 6:34 PM: no, no, no, people are emotionally attached to Katy...

Juan Cristobal 6:34 PM: really?!

Quico 6:34 PM: you can't kill her - what about all the broken hearts?

Juan Cristobal 6:34 PM: see, that's what tangles me up...

Why have people formed this image of Katy?

One that has no relation to the real Katy, btw, who couldn't be LESS interested in politics.

She's right here, by the way, she says hi!

[Quico's note: In real life, Katy is Juan Cristobal's very pregnant wife...which is why, long ago, he picked that as his nom de blogue.]

Quico 6:35 PM: right

Juan Cristobal 6:35 PM: ok, I need ideas here

The video thing I don't like

Quico 6:35 PM: Hmmmm...

Juan Cristobal 6:35 PM: But I dont want to post something saying "I used to post as Katy, now Im going to use Juan... "

Quico 6:35 PM: Well, do you just want BlogYou to switch genders?

or do you want BlogYou to merge with RealYou?

Juan Cristobal 6:36 PM: Oh, these are deep metaphysical questions

Quico 6:36 PM: sin vaina!

Juan Cristobal 6:36 PM: maybe we should just post this chat

Quico 6:36 PM: lol...

Juan Cristobal 6:36 PM: maybe that would be the most non-chalant way of doing it

Quico 6:36 PM: Hey, I'm up for that...

Quico 6:36 PM: Hmmmm...

Juan C...

Juan Cristobal...

I like Cristobal better than Juan C.

or J. Cristobal

Juan C. is just a bit...

Juan Cristobal 6:38 PM: Juan Carlos-y

Quico 6:38 PM: right

I always assumed that C. was Carlos

Juan Cristobal 6:38 PM: everybody who reads Juan C. immediately assumes I'm a Juan Carlos, which I most certainly am not

Quico 6:38 PM: huff-huff

Juan Cristobal 6:38 PM: Juan Cristobal is good

I never use it, now would be a good place to start.

Quico 6:38 PM: I'm a cuttin' and a-pastin' as you type...

There it is, folks. You always suspected. Now you know...

Oil Economics 101

Katy says: - In today's class, we will discuss current events in oil markets.

- China raised fuel taxes by as much as 18 percent. Markets interpreted this as a serious move toward cooling China's ever-growing energy demand, and fuel prices duly began falling. This came on the same week that Honda unveiled the world's first commercially available hydrogen fuel cell car.

- Iraq awarded important oil contracts to US and European firms in order to ramp up production. The Iraqi government expects to increase production by 500,000 barrels per day in the next six months. Improved security in Iraq's oil fields and pipelines has Big Oil grinning.

- Saudi Arabia - the only member of OPEC with any capacity to spare and, not coincidentally, the largest and most powerful member of the cartel - announces it, too, is ramping up oil production to respond to the insanely high price of oil. They expect to increase production by 500,000 barrels per day in the next month, all this on the heels of a visit by US Pres. Bush in which he asked the Saudis to increase production. The Saudis rebuffed the President, but have seemingly changed their mind. They have also called a meeting of oil producers and consumers to discuss ways of cooling down oil markets.

- Venezuelan oil minister Ramírez, in a telling sign of the increasing strains in the cartel, announced our country will boycott the Saudi meeting. Among the stated reasons is a visit by the President of Brazil, whom he seemingly meets twice a month. A funny excuse when you consider that Ramírez's Brazilian counterpart will be ... in Saudi Arabia.

So, children, a little bit of homework. Solve the following equation:

Slowing demand + increased supply + breakdown of cartel discipline = ??

a. A perfect storm; prices will plummet.
b. A minor blip in the unstoppable march to $200 per barrel.
c. Who knows what's happening with oil markets?
d. All of the above.

Class dismissed.

Blunder of the week

Katy says: - Interior Minister Ramón Rodríguez Chacín committed one of the biggest blunders I have seen recently, when he said that most murders in Venezuela were murders between gang members that did not affect the overall safety of citizens.

We all know that crime is the top concern in the minds of Venezuelans and that it has soared to unprecedented levels during the Chávez years. We also know that the government has been paying a little more attention to this issue, aware that it is really hurting them in public opinion.

So if I were a politician and heard Rodríguez Chacín, I would play this to the tilt. I would make his video the centerpiece of my campaign, and I would accompany it by something like this:

"The Minister isn't worried about murders between gang members.

But Yubiri from La Vega, a single mother who lives in a gang-infested part of the neighborhood, who waits for her kids to come home from school in the dark - she worries.

Anselmo, the father in Mariches who knows his son has fallen in the hands of a gang and is trying to get him off drugs and clean up his life - he worries.

Maritza, the grandmother in El Valle who ended up in the hospital after a stray bullet hit her while she was in her living room - she worries.

The government doesn't worry - unless the murders happen to the rich.

The government doesn't worry - as long as they can control crime in the East of Caracas.

The government doesn't worry - because they have thousands of bodyguards keeping them safe.

Minister Rodríguez Chacín is wrong. Every murder in Venezuela is important, because human life deserves respect and protection no matter what.

This November you have a choice. You can elect people who don't worry about the safety of all citizens. Or you can elect someone who will not rest until every Venezuelan, no matter where they live, no matter what they do, feels safe.

That is the choice you have."

Se las puso de bombita pues - so any of you candidates out there reading CC, you're welcome.

What Primero Justicia wants, Part II: The justice system

Katy says: - This is the second post in a series on the proposals of Venezuela’s opposition political parties. The first part (on oil policy) is here.

The translated summary that follows is an exclusive excerpt of Primero Justicia's platform. These proposals were approved last October in the party’s Ideological Congress, but the final version has not yet been made public. The original version is available from me, via email.

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The diagnosis.-

Venezuela’s Constitution says that everyone is the same in the eyes of the law. One of our inalienable rights is to have a justice system that works quickly and fairly. But to most Venezuelans these are just words on a piece of paper, nothing more.

People don’t trust the justice system, and there are many reasons why this is so.

First off, the justice system does not work well because it is poorly funded. Venezuela has fewer judges and prosecutors per capita than many other Latin American countries. Public funding for the justice system is lower than in neighboring countries in spite of record-high oil prices, and in spite of having been a major recipient of aid in recent years from multilateral organization, earmarked for improving our justice system.

It’s no surprise that people see the courts as inaccessible. The number of legal complaints filed in court as a percentage of the population is lower than in other, less violent Latin American countries. Trials tend to last forever – civil trials last on average 783 days; investigating a crime takes on average 286 days and sentencing takes a further 754 days. These figures are many times higher than the maximum length allowed by law.

The justice system is perceived as something to avoid instead of a tool to help make our lives better. Part of the reason is that most judges are susceptible to influence peddling and corruption. In 2005, 84% of our judges held temporary positions, as did 90% of the public prosecutors in the country. While these numbers have gone down in recent years, more than 50% of the remaining judges are still temporary. The few permanent positions being filled have not been open to contests, as mandated by law.

The lack of justice means that most crimes in our country go unsolved and unpunished. According to the Central University of Venezuela, only 7 out of every 100 murders in Venezuela end in sentencing. These numbers are even more out of whack when it comes to extra-judicial killings by the hands of the police or the military – only 1.4% of those servicemen accused of murder are ever convicted.

Not surprisingly, the only people who use the justice system are the rich, the powerful and the well connected. Every part of the judicial process comes with an illegal fee attached to it, which only exacerbates the exclusion of poor people from formal means of justice.

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The proposals.-

Primero Justicia’s proposals for our justice system are, as the party's name would suggest, the first topic in their platform.

It's a mistake to think this ranking is merely a response to the party's name. The party sees the transformation of the justice system as the key element in the fight against poverty and exclusion, as the cornerstone of social and economic policy. They believe there can be no peace and no progress in our country unless we embark on a thorough transformation of our justice system.

Their main goal is to make the justice system accessible to people. One of the ways they plan on doing this is through the “Casas de la Justicia.”

The goal of these centers is to bring the knowledge and the tools of the justice system into communities around the country. The idea is for these centers to help spread information on formal and informal ways of solving conflict and provide free legal assistance.

These centers would also offer mediation services, as well as provide legal assistance on matters related to children and teenagers and judicial support to Justices of the Peace, among others. The party has already opened several dozens of these centers all across the country, and the experience so far has been positive.

Another way of making justice accessible is by widening the range of tools available to people for solving conflicts.

One way of doing this is by promoting university-sponsored legal clinics and making it mandatory for graduating attorneys to provide community legal services. The party also proposes legislation to include the possibility of mediation and conciliation in all legal processes, as well as expanding legislation and funding for Justices of the Peace. The goal is to ease the burden on the courts and make litigation cheaper by promoting alternative mechanisms for dispute resolution, decreasing in the process the incentives for corruption in our courts.

The party pledges to jumpstart the review and modification of current legislation in order to suppress useless formalisms. They propose expanding the use of oral procedures in different stages of the legal process, as well as the application of immediacy and concentration principles to facilitate the presentation of proof and speed the course of trials.

As far as the number of judges is concerned, the party promises to increase them by 2,000 in the first five years after being elected, with their accompanying administrative staff. They also propose expanding the number of prosecutors by 1,000, with a focus on fundamental rights and criminal law.

They pledge to increase the number of courts and redistribute their scope, as well as open double-blind contests so temporary judges can become permanent. They also pledge to find ways to incorporate civil society into the process of selecting judges.

One of the failures of our justice system is that there is no clear set of rules that anyone wishing to become a judge has to comply with. Likewise, the rules for promoting judges and other people working in the courts are not clear.

Primero Justicia wants to address this. They also propose increasing the number of criminal judges on call on nights, weekends and holidays.

As for the distribution of judicial causes, the party proposes auditing the cause assignment system. They will bring legislation forward to eliminate coordinating judges and substitute them for an office of judicial assignments that is on call, 24 hours a day.

Primero Justicia proposes the elimination of the Judicial Commission of the Supreme Tribunal. The party believes that in order to weed out good judges from bad ones, their academic and professional credentials must be made public. They propose redesigning the professional profile for judicial employees and bailiffs, and a quarterly evaluation mechanism for judges using an instrument especially designed for this.

Our courts need to become professional, accountable bodies. In order to achieve this, Primero Justicia wants to establish mandatory programs for professional improvement for those who work there. They also propose establishing efficient management models in all courts, along with social accountability programs to improve transparency. The proposals include a pledge to establish a national test as a requisite for getting a law degree

Primero Justicia is vague about the types of laws that will need to be modified. They emphasize that a new legal framework will be needed to make the law compatible with these and other policies they want to implement.

However, one of the concrete things they propose doing is reducing the number of crimes typified in the law, from 1,000 to 500. They explicitly mention the need to to update the Civil Code, the Commercial Code, the Criminal Code and the Organic Laws of the different bodies in the Moral Power.

The party proposes reviewing legislation contained in the Organic Criminal Procedures Code regarding the length of judicial proceedings, mandatory sentencing and measures intended to substitute jail time. They are explicit in saying that the goal of these changes will be to provide support for victims and their families, with harsher penalties and fewer loopholes.

With regards to the Prosecutor’s office, the party comes out in favor of purging politics out of this important institution.

One of the first things they mention is the need to make the caseload assignment independent of outside influences. They propose an objective, semi-random system for allocating cases to prosecutors. They also propose eliminating the power of the Prosecutor General to assign prosecutors to special cases, and creating special Prosecutor’s Offices for things such as organized crime, corruption and crimes against private property.

Primero Justicia proposes increasing the number of Prosecutor General’s offices and staffing them not only with lawyers but with psychologists, paramedics and social workers. They propose increasing the number of people on call tending to the public in 24-hour shifts. They include proposals for training staff on treating victims of crime and providing orientation. The party proposes incorporating a customer service hotline for the Prosecutor General’s office, in order to get first-hand anonymous accounts from the communities on how each office is doing its job.

Other measures include guaranteeing the autonomy of prosecutors and shielding them from specific instructions on how to act emanating from the Prosecutor General and others in the justice system. They also propose raising the salaries of prosecutors and implementing a system of rewards based on performance and background.

The party pledges to raise the allocation of funds for Prosecutor’s offices, define the desired profile for Prosecutors and opening public contests to fill vacant positions. Finally, they promise to invest in improving the physical infrastructure of Prosecutor’s offices.

The tired revolution

Katy says: - Lucía sends me this link to the latest New Yorker piece on Chávez, written by the legendary Jon Lee Anderson. What a disappointing read.

The article is lazy and redundant. It contains no new information, nothing we haven't heard or read before. The people he interviews - Teodoro Petkoff, Nicolás Maduro, Bill Richardson, Piedad Córdoba, Chávez himself - say little that is particularly interesting. Even the new bits he includes - such as his insider's peek at Chávez's plane, or his first-hand account of the Santo Domingo summit - manage to come across as only mildly interesting.

When a great writer with a ton of access and significant time on his hands can't write a fresh, well-written article on someone like Hugo Chávez, I can only conclude that what Anderson saw was a tired revolution. It's as if he couldn't muster up enough inspiration, he couldn't find an interesting angle to latch on to, and this can only mean that the revolution itself has stopped being interesting.

Like an old magician trying the same old tricks, the Fat Man in the Palace is out of magic, and the article reflects it.

The Secret Parliament

Quico says: I'm sorry to stay stuck on the Intelligence Decree-Law fiasco, but the more I think about it the more I see it as the embodiment of everything that's fucked up about the hopelessly fucked up way we're governed. (Click here for background.)

The episode was absurd from the very start. It never really made sense for Chávez to request special powers to legislate by decree from a legislature where he enjoyed a 165 to 0 majority. Enabling laws make some (not much) sense in the context of competitive parliaments where certain key pieces of legislation need to be enacted in great haste to confront some looming crisis. In such cases, the normal process of legislative scrutiny - the thrust and parry of parliamentary debate - threaten to do lasting damage by slowing down state action when time is of the essence. (That, incidentally, is why the 1961 constitution limited enabling powers to financial matters.)

The Venezuelan situation in early 2007 could not have been more different. All that Enabling powers did was to render the legislative process entirely opaque: withdrawing it from a forum where 165 sycophants would follow Chávez's every whim slavishly and in public to a forum where an indeterminate number of sycophants would follow his every whim slavishly but behind closed doors.

The Intelligence Decree-Law fracas underscores that even from the point of view of the government's narrow political interests, this was idiotic. Had this text been debated in public, the outcry that's followed it would've taken place before the law came into force, allowing chavismo the time to "fix it" as part of the normal legislative process. That would've preserved some kind of plausible deniability for Miraflores, and avoided the clownish spectacle of the president effectively vetoing his own decree.

As it is, Chávez isn't even reading the decrees that he's signing into law, leaving himself wide open to the kind of own-goal his flunkies scored over the Intelligence Decree-Law.

Constitutionally, there isn't the slightest smidgen of doubt about where responsibility for this fiasco falls. But because it's politically impossible to blame the Fat Man in the Palace for anything that goes wrong (even when his name is - very literally - written all over it), chavistas are left in the hallucinogenic position of having to blame Miraflores staff for the SNAFU!

It's impossible to exaggerate how fucked up this blame-the-flunkies strategy is. The flunkies aren't elected. The flunkies have no authority of their own. The flunkies aren't accountable. Hell, we don't even know who the flunkies are: they act in secret!

But, under the chavista interpretation of enabling powers, they, in effect, run the country.

But lets concede the point. Let us give in to the rising tide of insanity and accept that Miraflores staff is responsible for the decrees their boss signs. Lets accept that this shadowy cabal of executive-branch lawmakers own some decisions that violated the constitution, that injured fundamental human rights, that undermined the revolution's credibility...where does the buck stop? Who gets fired? Or demoted? Or reprimanded?

Nobody!

As an opposition, we don't even know whose head to ask for, because we don't even know the actual names of the people we're told are responsible!

Chavismo has sprouted a secret parliament: the perfect complement to the shadowy, constitutionally non-existent Finance Ministry that now runs a multi-billion dollar parallel budget out of PDVSA. It's an insane way to run a country.

In the end, the Intelligence Decree-Law Affair underscores a terrifying reality. The Venezuelan state is gradually turning itself into a clandestine organization; eating itself from the inside out.

A big pile o' nothin'

Katy says: - The past week saw a heavily-promoted presidential address that was supposed to contain the details of a stimulous package to attack slowing growth and soaring inflation.

All radio and TV stations carried the sad spectacle, with the nation's top businessmen sitting in the audience, laughing and occasionally clapping, as Hugo Chávez gave them his usual combination of scorn and goodies. Yet lost in the shuffle were the announcements themselves, which, to paraphrase Rick Blaine, didn't amount to a hill beans in this crazy country of ours.

There is a growing consensus that the problems in the Venezuelan economy stem from a lack of investment. Because neither the private nor the public sector invest enough, the supply of goods and services in the economy is not growing at the same pace as demand, which mainly comes from soaring oil prices.

The measures announced were supposed to stimulate investment. However, the government revealed that it does not really understand the reasons why the private sector invests in the first place.

Investment usually depends on the comparison of two things. Roughly, if the projected return from an investment exceeds your internal discount rate - for example, the return you would get from an alternative investment with similar risk - then you invest. Usually, you put the projected return on the left-hand side and the discount rate on the right-hand side, and compare the two.

The first important announcement was the elimination of the Financial Transactions Tax, a 1.5% levy on all financial transactions. On the surface, this tax was progressive, in that big businesses and the wealthy carried the biggest burden. It follows that its elimination amounts to a tax cut for Venezuela's middle and upper classes, and a boon to the country's banking system.

Normally, tax cuts would help investment. Lowering taxes helps raise the left-hand side of the equation (the return on the investment), so in theory some investments that would not have taken place before all of the sudden might seem attractive.

Yet this tax is not what is keeping the left-hand side of the equation low. The tax may be gone, but the expected return is still low because of the enormous costs and risks an investor faces in our country. Security risks, the threat of expropriation and the risk of not getting currency to import raw material are huge, and risks cost businesses money.

The second measure was a promise to speed up the approval of dollars at the controlled rate for machinery and equipment. On the suface, this measure too would seem to help investment. Yet the measure was announced as a temporary thing, subject to the whims of Chávez himself. Furthermore, there is no point in speeding up the flow of cheap dollars for machinery when there is no assurance you will get cheap dollars to buy raw material for your production process or to bring your dividends back to your country.

Ultimately, the exchange control remains intact, as does the risk of not getting your dollars in the future. You may now face less paperwork, but you are still at the mercy of Chávez and his boli-klepto-bureaucrats.

The last measure was a promise to shell out $1 billion in funds for investment projects. In theory this would help the left-hand side of the equation by lowering the cost of financing investment projects.

Again, on paper this would seem like a good move. But we all know what will happen: the well-connected will get their "projects" approved while good investment projects are left by the wayside, and the money will end up in the Cayman Islands with little to show for it. Even if the $1 billion were truly invested, this would only be a fraction of what Venezuela needs to invest each year in order to keep its economy running.

The irony of Wednesday is that Chávez feels he has to reach out to the very oligarchs he denounces on a daily basis, and yet he does so in an ineffective way. Time will probably show he got nothing in return yesterday.

Say what you will, but Fidel Castro would have never begged businessmen to invest. And if he was ever forced to, he certainly would have come up with a better plan than this. In proposing these half-baked measures, Chávez didn't sell his socialist soul. He gave it away for free.

Great Moments in Implausible Deniability

Quico says: So National Assembly deputy Pedro Ortega thinks (and I use the word "think" loosely here) that responsibility for the Intelligence Decree-Law fiasco belongs not, as you might think, to the guy with the sole constitutional and legal authority to promulgate a Decree-Law, but rather on the faceless, authorityless, unelected, constitutionally non-existent Miraflores flunkies who drafted the thing.

It's a curious new juridical precept that, I think, brings a whole new level of lexical accuracy to a now familiar charge:

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irresponsible |ˌiriˈspänsəbəl|

adjective
1. (of a person, attitude, or action) not showing a proper sense of being accountable or to blame for something : [with infinitive ] it's irresponsible to just drive on after causing an accident.

noun
2. an irresponsible person : there will always be irresponsibles who take a risk.
3. Hugo Chávez

---

I tell you, the fun never ends with this one...

The Making of the New Elite

Quico says: What does it take to 'make it big' in this society? What do the most ambitious people here feel they need to do to 'make it to the top'? How do you join the upper echelons of money, status and privilege?

Answer those questions and you'll understand much about what makes any society tick. Where the quest for success pushes the most driven people to act in ways that benefit everyone, society flourishes. Where the ambitious find they need to act destructively to "make it big", society flounders.

In an aristocratic order, the main thing you need to do to "make it big" is to choose the right set of parents. In a well-regulated capitalist order, your "ticket to the top" is success in business. In a petrostate, the ambitious are drawn to state power like moths to an open flame.

This, at any rate, was what was going to my mind as I watched Banesco's Juan Carlos Escotet (pictured above), Oswaldo Cisneros, Polar's Lorenzo Mendoza and Televen's Omar Camero palling it up with Hugo Chávez during Wednesday's extraordinary New Economic Plan Aló Presidente thingy.

The reason for their presence there wasn't much of a mystery. During his speech, Chávez pledged $1 billion over two years for "downstream development" in petrochemicals and other industrial sectors. He assured that the terms would be "soft" - a nudge-nudge-wink-wink way of guaranteeing that projects will not be subjected to rigorous viability studies, will face only "soft budget constraints" and are likely to continue to be supported long after it's become clear that they are hopeless money holes.

(La Gran Venezuela, anyone?)

If you know of any businessman who would decline a deal on those turns, send me his name: I want to put his name forward for beatification. In the real world, nobody's going to pass up a manguangua of such monumental proportions.

The problem goes well beyond the free cash. The reality that the petrostate creates is that businessmen can't "make it big" - or even make it at all - unless they become cronies. If you're in business in Venezuela, you need to be able to pick up a phone and get a sympathetic minister or vice-minister on the other end when the consumer protection agency comes knocking at your door, or when the tax guys come to do an audit, or when you apply for exchange-controlled dollars, or for building permits, or when you need capital, or a regulatory green light for any of a thousand of micro-level decisions the petrostate insists on regulating. In Venezuela, a businessman without government contacts is an orphan - helpless, weakly, and at the mercy of the government-connected competitors all around him.

What interests me is the way that last paragraph applies with equal strength to business-government relations in the Chávez era, the Punto Fijo era, the Perez Jiménez era, the Trienio, and the Andean caudillos era. For the last 94 years, ever since Zumaque I started spewing out all that black gunk all those years ago, that basic outline really hasn't changed.

What we're seeing today boils down to a rehash of a very old dynamic of mutual accommodation that has defined the Petrostate all along. The basic bargain (political support - or, at least, political quiescence - in return for the chance to make a ton of money) really hasn't changed at all.

What's most remarkable about this setup is the way new petrostate governing elites of every ideological stripe end up finding an accomodation with parts of the previous commercial elite, no matter how sordid its past.

Nothing new there: the Capriles and Bloque de Armas media conglomerates may have played a key part in sustaining the Perez Jiménez regime, but that didn't stop the new AD-Copei governing class from pacting with them once they took power, going as far as to get their respective patriarchs elected to congress in the 1960s and 70s. And now the pattern is replicated, bit by bit, in the Cisneros's stunning conversion from fascist conspirators to government pals within the last six years.

Of course, not all private groups are willing to pact, but they hardly represent a systemic problem: the state has any number of ways to ensure they wither into insignificance (c.f., 1BC). And certainly, new top level cronies arise exploiting their early access to the new state elite (c.f., Wilmer Ruperti.)

The new elite is an amalgam of new cronies and newly chastised old cronies, tempered through the exemplary the exclusion of the recalcitrant. Little by little, the competitive edge that access to state largesse affords ensures that cronies grow ever richer, all the while fully realizing that their wealth is entirely dependent on maintaining their good standing with the governing elite.

Over time, this process leads to the formation not just of a new, politically pliant economic elite, but also of a politically dependent middle-class. In some of the most provocative economic research I've seen on Venezuela in the Chávez era, a team led by Francisco Rodríguez has documented the way not just firms but also regular individuals' economic prospects are systematically enhanced if they support the Chávez government and depressed if they oppose it.

The underlying message here is that the petrostate makes its own elite. Within just one decade of chavismo, we've already seen the way the regime's stability is bolstered by the fact that those who have something to lose, those who have property, or influence or money or status at stake, have become, de facto, a conservative force in society, a constituency with a vested interest in keeping chavismo in power because its own privileges stem from and depend on chavismo's continuation in power.

Nihil novi sub sole.

Charm offensive, cash in hand

Quico says: Time was when he'd look genuinely upset that he'd lost his cool and raised his hand against you. He'd show up all sheepish like, flowers in hand, asking for your forgiveness. And he'd seem so, so nice at those times that, well, you couldn't help but forgive him.

Yes, you knew his faults, but you also knew how sweet he could be, and even as he was hitting you, you were sure that, deep down inside, he loved you.

In the early years, these little charm offensives used to come along every few months...as time goes by, you see them less and less. It's been ages since the guy wrote you a proper love letter. Almost two years, actually. The act's worn thin. He knows it, you know it.

These days, schmaltz won't cut it any more. Oh no. We're all too cynical for that.

If he wants to get back into your graces, he better put up some cold hard cash up front.

Is that really what your romance has come to? So sad...

A white rose by any other name

Katy says: - Venezuela's "Moral Power" asked today for two Supreme Court Justices to be impeached and fired from the Court. The move comes as a surprise since the Court has long been a chavista stronghold, but it serves to remind us of the extremes to which chavismo is willing to go in order to quash dissent.

The first case involves Justice Carlos Oberto, the husband of chavista congresswoman (and Native Venezuelan representative) Noelí Pocaterra. Justice Oberto apparently intervened in the long-standing inheritance feud between two branches of the powerful Capriles family (publishers of the popular pro-chavista tabloid Ultimas Noticias), and this did not please chavismo's upper-echelons. One can only assume that this is retribution.

The other case involves the ridiculously named Justice Blanca Rosa Mármol de León - literally, White Rose Lion's Marble. Justice Mármol was one of the few remaining voices of dissent in the Chavista Supreme Court, a role she seemed to reluctantly play but which nevertheless earned her a marginal spot on the Court. The alleged fault has to do with something she did four years ago - when, in a sham trial against opposition NGO Súmate, Justice Mármol decided to reserve the case to herself and her part of the Court.

Lest you think this move by Justice Mármol had any effect on the trial, her decision was quickly overturned by the Constitutional Hall of the Supreme Court, and the red wheels of "justice" continued their march unencumbered. So it is somewhat curious that a marginal opposition voice in a very loyal Court is now being impeached for something she did four years ago, a move she was entitled to make and that had little to no legal effect.

Probably Justice Mármol's recent branding of the new Intelligence Law as "unconstitutional", "horrendous" and "repressive" had something to do with this latest move. Probably the fact that the current Prosecutor General, and a member of the "Moral Power", Luisa Ortega, was also the prosecutor in the Súmate case, which must mean she carries a grudge against Justice Mármol. Which of these factors came into play is anyone's guess.

My first instinct is to feel sympathy for Justice Mármol. And yet ... what was she doing in the Supreme Court anyway? Everyone knows that place lost any semblance of being a functional institution a long time ago. Still, I guess it was a good thing she remained in the Court for a while and was able to shed light on some of the travesties of justice it was responsible for.

Justice Mármol seems like a nice, respectable lady, but she seemed curiously out of place in that wolves' den that is the Supreme Court. With mobsters as colleagues, she must have anticipated she would end up sleeping with the fishes. The last shred of dissent in the court is now gone, and while this has no real effect, its symbolic meaning is not lost.

What Primero Justicia Wants, Part I: Oil and energy

Katy says: This is the first of a series of wonkish posts on the specific proposals of Venezuela's opposition political parties.

We start off with Caracas Chronicles' exclusive excerpt of Primero Justicia's platform. These proposals were approved last October in an Ideological Congress, but the final version has not yet been made public.

These posts are translated summaries of the original document. The original version is available from me, via email.

Full disclosure, for those of you who don't know: I'm a member of Primero Justicia and I helped edit the platform document. However, my goal in writing these posts is not to advocate this or any party. Rather, it is a way of adding something to an ongoing debate regarding opposition political parties.

---

The diagnosis.-

Any analysis of Venezuela's problems, any solution put forward, should probably begin with oil. Oil is not only the source of our wealth, it is also one of the reasons the country is so ... Venezuelan. Oil has shaped our culture, our cities, our government and our way of life in ways ordinary Venezuelans do not yet fully grasp.

The current model is just a rehash of the one that reached its nadir in the 1970s. It sees oil as the source of needed rents and not much more. People at the top use oil as a tool to advance their personal interests, and matters of the State boil down to a struggle for oil rents.

Primero Justicia's proposal seeks to change the way society relates to oil wealth by limiting the State's discretion in the distribution of oil rents. The main basis of their philosophy is that as oil belongs more and more to the State, it belongs to Venezuelans less and less.

Their platform recognizes that Venezuelans, ever since Gómez, have been living under a collective illusion that oil resources are "public" when, in fact, they have always been "state-owned." The two are quite different. Since their main proposals (and, in fact, the party's name) deal with justice, they view increased involvement by the public in the oil industry as a matter of justice, of exercising a Constitutional right.

The platform regrets that the country is not taking advantage of all its oil-producing potential. It laments our decreased production capacity, where the lack of investment in our industry means we lose markets to our competitors. It expresses outrage at the continued involvement of politicians in making technical decisions within PDVSA, and the blurring of the line between the State's regulatory and productive functions.

This translates into the oil industry's transformation from a source of wealth for the country into a tool in a complicated political game. The constant giveaways to friendly foreign countries means the industry is used as a diplomatic sledgehammer instead of a source of wealth for Venezuelans.

Due to Chávez's new legal framework, public and private investment have dried up. The industry is now smaller, less safe, more damaging to the environment and, in general, in much worse shape than it should be.

---

The proposals.-

Primero Justicia's proposals for the oil industry can be summed up in a single sentence: making oil a source of prosperity for current and future generations.

The key proposal is the separation of the State's regulatory and productive functions. Under this vision, the State would set volumes of production according to different criteria (OPEC quotas, market realities, etc.), while PDVSA would simply be one of the State's companies in charge of implementing these measures, a company that generates rents in the most efficient way possible in order to maximize the value of the company for the shareholders - which would now include all Venezuelans. They believe the people making the political decisions should not be the ones carrying them out.

In order for this to work, they want to create a separate regulatory office. This would be a technical, semi-autonomous body in charge of making sure that the State's decisions regarding oil are carried out by PDVSA and all other oil companies in the country in the most efficient way possible. By separating the policy-making, regulatory and productive functions of the State, the party believes the incentives in the industry will be brought into line with what most benefits Venezuelans and help us make significant progress in preventing the further encroachment of corruption.

In order to change the way Venezuelans relate to the State, Primero Justicia proposes that part of the State's oil income go directly to individual health funds, retirement funds and workers' compensation funds (it is not clear in what proportion, nor what strings would be attached). The idea is that by limiting the State's role as an "intermediary" between the goose that lays the golden eggs and the goose's rightful owners, the perverse incentives that breed corruption will diminish. The party proposes using the oil development funds of Alaska and Norway as blueprints for these individualized accounts.

As part of this reorganization scheme, Primero Justicia also proposes that Venezuelans be given shares of PDVSA and all other state-owned oil companies. This, by the way, does not mean the State would relinquish its role as majority shareholder, but it would imply that citizens not only have a direct stake in the company's financial well-being, but that oil companies would be required to meet national and international rules regarding transparency and accountability. TO my knowledge, it is the first political party of significance in Venezuela advocating such a scheme.

In order to carry out these proposals, the party advocates changing existing legislation thoroughly, although it also highlights the importance of consensus wherever feasible. Flexible business models should be allowed, under the strict supervision of the State, in order to take advantage of the market's changing conditions.

The party believe that laws should increasingly allow private companies - both foreign and domestic - to participate in the business. They propose changing articles 9 and 22 of the country's Organic Hydrocarbons Law. They favor flexible royalties to be used for the development of less profitable areas of the oil business.

The party comes out in favor of a significant increase in production, a proposal that should not be controversial given how PDVSA's own expansion plans promise a significant expansion as well. It is also firmly against giving oil to our neighbors in conditions more favorable than the market suggests.

The party adopts a somewhat skeptical stance regarding OPEC, which is seen as both a tool for development as well as a potential harm to our sovereignty. While they advocate staying in the cartel because it serves Venezuela's interests, they believe we should adopt a more aggressive position within the cartel. They believe our policy toward OPEC should reflect the need to develop our industry, increase our capacity and open new markets for Venezuela's oil, considering our country's unique geographical position and the average quality of Venezuelan oil.

They also favor fair prices that compensate the necessary investment in the industry but also preserve our oil's value in the medium- and long-run. In other words, PJ is concerned that when prices are too high they hurt us in the long run, because they damage the economies of the people buying our oil and increase the incentive to develop alternative sources of energy.

Other proposals include strengthening PDVSA's research and development capacity, investing in technology and increasing research associations between the industry and universities. They favor policies that help create a significant private oil sector in Venezuela, by favoring domestic contract firms and creating oil-based clusters where knowledge and technology can flow more freely.

Moreover, they favor policies for the development of the natural gas and electricity industries. These involve recognizing the need for investment and the opening up of these sectors to private capital.

Finally, PJ emphatically favors changing the way our internal energy markets work. In other words, they don't believe Venezuelans should get cheap gas regardless of their income level. They believe that the current system is regressive, because it subsidizes the consumption of energy by rich Venezuelans. The solution they propose is the elimination of subsidies to rich Venezuelans and a gradual shift to a system of progressive, sustainable and explicit subsidies to poor Venezuelans.

Quadruple U-Turn. With two backflips. And a watermelon on top.

Quico says: It's a measure of the lunacy that saturates Venezuelan public life that a totally vanilla headline like "Leader urges hostages' unconditional release" is seen as man-bites-dog stuff: "a surprising turnaround" that generates a ton of coverage and calls for heaps of commentary. But that's exactly where we find ourselves now that Hugo Chávez has dropped his softly-softly approach to FARC and called for the guerrillas to release all their "prisoners" in exchange for nothing and then disband.

[Brief tangent on (some highly charged) terminology. While most sane commentators have always described the people FARC holds as "hostages" ("secuestrados"), the Venezuelan government and FARC have gone far out of their way always to refer to them as "retained" ("retenidos") - just one of many symbolically important ways Chávez has been careful to align himself rhetorically with FARC. Yesterday, though, he described them as "prisoners" ("prisioneros") - staking out a kind of lexical middle-ground that, nonetheless, serves very visibly to distance his government from FARC rhetoric.]

What's it all mean? As usual, it's ambiguous, but I see three possibilities.

1-Chávez is cutting his losses. Realizing FARC is a-losing the war, b-a P.R. albatross around his neck and c-not listening to him anyway, Chávez decided to throw them under the proverbial bus, severing rhetorical ties and delinking himself from whatever abuses may follow.

2-This whole thing was agreed with new FARC leader Alfonso Cano ahead of time. It's just possible that FARC has just about had it with getting its ass kicked by the Colombian government and had been planning a move like this anyway, once Marulanda was out of the way. Having Chávez publicly call on them to release all hostages and demobilize could save face on both sides: FARC could argue that, without Venezuelan patronage, the "struggle" is not sustainable while Chávez could then take credit for demobilizing them.

3-The whole thing is a massive exercise in Goebbelsian doublespeak, and Venezuela's new policy will be to clandestinely arm, fund and aid FARC while Chávez publicly condemns them. The capture, just a few days ago, of a Venezuelan National Guard officer on a gun-running mission to Colombia suggests Chávez has decided to have his cake and eat it too.

If we see mass hostage releases in the coming weeks, we'll know it was 2-. If we don't, we can assume it was 1-. And if we notice Chávez bitching louder and louder while FARC gets stronger and stronger, it was probably 3-.

Chávez Decree-Law Too Chavista for Chávez (but not for chavista hacks)

Quico says: One of the little pleasures of life in revolutionary times is watching the utter discombobulation of chavista hackdom whenever Fearless Leader pulls off one of his legendary U-Turns.

Today, fate provided one of those delicious little moments, as Hugo Chávez effectively vetoed his own Intelligence Decree-Law. In one of the more bizarre moments of his decidedly dadaist presidency, the guy declared that a piece of legislation he unilaterally drafted behind closed doors, with no public discussion whatsoever, and that became law exclusively on his say so, without a parliamentary vote, invoking the special powers to legislate by decree the National Assembly had granted solely to him, was "indefensible."

Spare a thought for poor old Stephen Lendman, who'd just penned a delirious, breathless rant explaining how utterly and completely baseless all criticism of the decree-law was, and how every last bit of it was a product of an imperialist media plot to destabilize the government.

There's no fooling Lendman. He knew there was one reason and one reason only why the decree-law was being criticized:

CIA, NED, IRI, USAID and other US elements infest the country and are more active than ever. Subversion is their strategy, and it shows up everywhere.

(It's worse than you thought, Stevy-lad...looks like CIANEDIRIUSAID got to old man Chávez himself.)

The furious backsliding over at Venezuelanalysis will be marginally amusing to witness, and we can all be glad that Chávez has chosen to revise at least the most prominently insane bit of the decree: apparently even he realizes that threatening regular folks with six years in jail if they refuse to rat out their neighbors is pretty vile. (Lendman, presumably, will conclude the guy's gone soft.)

Not up for "reappraisal", however, is the article requiring "all Justice System officials" to cooperate fully in spying operations. That's closer to Chávez's understanding of "defensible", apparently.

Triple Patriot Act. With a backflip. And a cherry on top.

Quico says: In some quarters it's gotten trendy to compare Chávez's new Intelligence Decree-Law to the Patriot Act. But as this Economist piece rightly notes, the Chávez decree goes far, far, far beyond what the Patriot Act would allow:

The decree authorises police raids without warrant, the use of anonymous witnesses and secret evidence. Judges are obliged to collaborate with the intelligence services. Anyone caught investigating sensitive matters faces jail. The law contains no provision for any kind of oversight. It blurs the distinction between external threats and internal political dissent. It requires all citizens, foreigners and organisations to act in support of the intelligence system whenever required—or face jail terms of up to six years.

The US election as though Venezuela mattered

Quico says:

Dear U.S. Voter,

Now that you have a clear choice between just two candidates in November, many of you will be asking, "yeah, ok, Iraq, yaddi-yadda, health care, blah-blah, CUT TO THE CHASE! Which one is better for Venezuela?!" Right?

No?

...dang...

Silliness aside, I do realize that, come November, the politics of the Chávez era are likely to rank pretty low on your list of criteria. But people vote for all kinds of idiosyncratic reasons, and if you're reading this there's just a chance that you're among a small, hardy breed that will actually think through the elections' effects on Venezuela before you cast your ballot. If so, hear me out.

The first thing to grasp is that, no, US policy towards Venezuela is not likely to be very different no matter who wins. The strategic realities underlying the Caracas - Washington relationship's weird brand of sotto voce co-dependence transcends the politics of the moment. The US under John McCain will buy just as much Venezuelan oil as the US under Barack Obama...or under any other imaginable president. And if there's one thing we know for a fact by now is that Venezuela would continue selling oil to the US even if some half-deranged marxist strongman with a huge id and a stunted superego took control of the country.

To put it differently, the name on the White House lease really has no bearing on the eagerness of US drivers to bankroll Hugo Chávez's revolution, or on Hugo Chávez's eagerness to keep taking all y'all's money.

Nor would either of the major US candidates be more likely than the other one to launch some kind of military adventure in Venezuela. Again, the reasons are strategic rather than ideological. Trudging through a chronic recruitment crisis that has forced it to offer up to $40,000 in sign-up bonuses just to keep force levels steady, the US military is barely able to maintain the military commitments it already has.

And even if, somehow, the Pentagon could manage to recruit more soldiers, it's clear that the US has geostrategically far bigger fish to fry than Chávez, with Iran, North Korea, Syria and even a failed-state like Somalia presenting far bigger danger to US national security than Chávez even when he's off his meds.

(This, by the way, is one key reason Chávez can actually bash the US safely: even as he rails against an imminent invasion he knows full well that the US isn't really in a position to launch one.)

So the, lets say, material underpinnings of the US-Venezuela relationship just don't hinge on what happens on November 8th. Oil and invective will continue to flow north while money and opprobium continue to flow south. As far as Venezuela goes, the differences between an Obama presidency and a McCain presidency will play themselves out on a different, more symbolic level. They could, nonetheless, be profound.

Before getting into all that, though, I feel there's something we need to clear up. You've read, I'm sure, at least some newspaper reports about Hugo Chávez's heavy-duty penchant for Bush-whacking. You have, depending on your own stance, either shaken your head in disgust or felt a little thrill of approval at it. Either way, you've probably, at least implicitly, drawn the conclusion that Hugo Chávez really hates George W. Bush and, by implication, that US foreign policy is frightfully important to the fate of the Chávez regime.

On this point, the Chávez and Bush governments actually agree. In fact, whatever their ideological stance, my feeling is that most people in the US are deeply wedded to the idea that what their country does really matters to the rest of the world. For the right, that influence is a force for good in the world, while, for the left, it's often a force for evil - but everyone agrees, it's a force.

This is another aspect of the oedipal mating ritual of scorn-filled co-dependence between Washington and Caracas: Washington needs to feel influential, and with its constant stream invective, Caracas flatters it, convincing them that yes, they really are as influential as they want to believe.

So it usually comes as a surprise to people - or at least as a kind of bad-boy provocation - when I tell them that, in an oddly counterintuitive way, Chávez's anti-americanism really has nothing to do with the US, or even with George Bush. Instead - and if you really grasp this next sentence, you'll understand more about chavismo than 99.9% of your compatriots - Chávez uses anti-US rhetoric as a mechanism of social control inside Venezuela.

How does that work? Simple: whenever something - anything - goes wrong in Venezuela, Chávez blames the US. This extends from serious issues where there are legitimate questions about the extent of US involvement - like the 2002 coup attempt against him - down to matters as mundane as a bus driver's strike.

Milk is in short supply in Caracas stores? The CIA did it! Dengue fever breaks out in the South of the Country? Blame the gringos! Civil liberty groups are concerned about the latest spying legislation? The State Department put them up to it!

The US serves as a kind of all-purpose foil for Chávez, a universal receptacle for every buck that's in need of passing. But that's not all, because when everything bad that happens to you is the fault of a foreigner, then anyone who opposes you must be a traitor.

For years now Chávez has been attacking any and every sort of internal opposition in Venezuela by labeling it as part of a CIA orchestrated plot against him. This allows him to delegitimize all dissent while casting doubt on the patriotism of anyone who dares to question his judgment.

So anti-US rhetoric solves a huge variety of domestic problems for Chávez. It marginalizes dissent, it provides cover for government SNAFUs, and it helps turn "chavista" and "patriotic Venezuelan" into rough synonyms.

Now, having cleared that up, we can get back to the US election. In order to work as an instrument of internal control, anti-US rhetoric has to have a credible target inside the US. Over the last eight years, George W. Bush has been perfect for these purposes: bellicose, aloof, given to flights of neo-imperialist rhetoric and, lest we forget, willing to launch crazy military adventures against authoritarian regimes that happen to control a lot of oil. Bush made it almost too easy for Chávez.

Now, from a Venezuelan perspective, the main difference between Barack Obama and John McCain isn't what they are likely to do, but rather how they're likely to play into Chávez's strategy of internal-control-through-US-bashing. With his military background, tough-guy image, testosterone fueled rhetoric and penchant for humming tunes about bombing Iran, it's easy to see how Chávez's rhetoric could transition smoothly from Bush-whackery to McCainicide. Wouldn't miss a beat.

But what if a black guy who opposed the Iraq War from the start and pledged to talk directly to him took office? Now things get interesting. An Obama presidency stands to completely scramble Chávez's key strategy for internal control.

An Obama victory leaves Chávez with only bad options. He could try to apply the anti-Bush stencil to an Obama White House, blaming him personally everytime something goes wrong in Venezuela. But caricaturing Obama as some kind of racist/imperialist war monger in the Bush mold just wouldn't pass the snigger test, even within Chávez's tightly controlled circle of collaborators and sycophants. It's hard to demonize the guy who's gone out of his way - and paid a political price - to pledge to negotiate with you.

Alternatively, he could tone down the rhetoric and abandon the demonize-Washington strategy, but then all of his government's internal failures would be laid bare for all to see and all of his internal opponents would suddenly become legitimate adversaries rather than traitors.

To my mind, there's no doubt that Chávez would prefer a McCain victory. Only a McCain victory would keep him within his US-bashing comfort zone. Only with McCain in the White House could he continue the strategy of domestic control that has paid off so handsomely for him in the past.

Lets be clear: Venezuelan democracy in 2008 is far, far up a creek without a paddle in sight. An Obama victory would not suddenly revive it. But it would give Venezuelan democrats some very welcome breathing space, the chance to come out from under the veil of suspicion that association with George W. Bush has put us under.

And that, I think, is worth something.

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Note: I actually wrote this as a script for LinkTV's "Dear American Voter" project. I'm better at writing than at talking into a camera, but for what it's worth, here's the Vid: