The audacity of ignorance

Juan Cristobal says: The Chávez's administration has a long and distinguished record of pulling the most obscure ñángaras from the gutters of academia and putting them in positions where they can do some real harm. However, the current Minister of Planning, Haiman El Troudi, is in a class of his own.

I've written about Mr. El Troudi's "exotic" policy prescriptions before. And if you're into masochism, you can read more of them in his own blog.

His latest? An earnest call for Venezuelans to respond to the financial crisis by repatriating their dollar holdings. "They're much safer here than in those speculative banks up north."

Once you stop laughing, pause to realize that this is the President's top economic policy architect.

Forget for a second that US bank deposits are insured up to $250,000 by the FDIC, regardless of citizenship. Put aside the fact that nothing "private" is ever safe in Venezuela. Is El Troudi seriously suggesting that investors "flee to Venezuelan quality" by buying up bolivars ... at BsF 2.15 per $?!

Think about it. Suppose you're a chavista bigwig, say, Ambassador to Argentina, and you have a nice hefty bank account in Florida's Commercebank. If you did what El Troudi said, you would change, say $1 million at the official rate and get BsF 2.15 million. The street value of your dollars, though, is close to BsF 4.5 million (last time I checked).

So by bringing your money back to a "safe" country such as Venezuela, you'd be taking a hit of BsF 2.35 million for the privilege of keeping it in a petrostate at the start of an oil slump. Faster than you can say "yanquis de mierda", your bank would be nationalized and the information from your bank accounts would be on a CD, for sale for BsF 1.50 from the friendly street vendors of the Plaza Caracas, readily available to any kidnapper looking for a bargain. Genius!

But, hey, what's left of your money would be safe.

I don't know if El Troudi's suggestion is a desperate plea for capital or a desperate plea for ideas. Probably both.

(ps.- hat tip to Omar for the title)

50 Ways to Imprison Your Opponents Without Convicting Them

Quico says: This is one of those tidbits that just beggars all belief: the trial of one-time Caracas security officials Lazaro Forero, Ivan Simonovis and Henry Vivas has now been delayed fifty times since it started 31 months ago, making it the longest trial in Venezuelan history.

The amazing thing is that the trial - where the three are accused of plotting the mass murder of Chávez supporters on that crazy pre-coup afternoon of April 11th, 2002 - is basically over, but the prosecution has gone through every delaying tactic in the book to forestall a final decision. The defense has had to wait six months just for a chance to put forward its final arguments. The prosecution has blown through every permissible time-lag in COPP, they have no legal standing whatsoever to keep the defendants behind bars anymore. But they do. Could this have something to do with the fact that the prosecutor in charge of the case is the Interior Minister's sister?

This thing has mistrial written all over it...but Forero, Simonovis and Vivas are still rotting away in jail.

Hey, it's hardly the Gulag Archipelago, but make no mistake about it: these guys are political prisoners.

My country went Marxist and all I got was this lousy fiscal planning system

Quico says: I'll tell you what gets me about Chávez's reaction to the Great Financial Freakout of 2008. As the world faces a protracted recession, our supposedly Marxist government got caught totally unprepared, holding just 10 months worth of imports in foreign currency reserves and far fewer rainy-day funds than it'll need to smooth out spending if the crisis lasts more than a year or so.

Now, there's a lot of trash to be talked about Marxism, a doctrine that gets much more wrong than it gets right. One thing you cannot fault Marxism for, though, is ignoring recessions. Just the opposite: Marx focused almost obsessively on the cyclical nature of capitalism. Das Kapital is, in important ways, an extended meditation on the business cycle, with capitalism portrayed as lurching inevitably from one crisis to the next, a pattern Marx thought would ultimately doom it. Chávez himself is, on some level, aware of this central bit of Marxist doctrine, which is why you've barely been able to wipe the shit-eating grin from his face for the last few weeks.

...but, if Chavez understood a crisis was looming, if he knew all along that capitalism, like Windox XP, just sort of seizes up every so often and needs a reboot, if he grasped that oil bust inevitably follows oil boom, then why the heck didn't he do anything to bolster the country's resilience to these inevitable shocks?

I mean, c'mon! A Marxist who gets caught off guard by a recession is like a Jehova's Witness who gets caught off guard by the rapture!

Lets review the score here. Venezuela is a dependent monoexporter, getting 94.6% of its foreign currency earnings from oil exports. The price of oil has already fallen 46% from its high, and is now hovering around Chávez's budget-sustainability point of about $80/bbl.

There is, of course, no way to really forecast the oil market, but if the generalized craziness in the credit markets sets off a prolonged recession in North America and Europe - which is looking pretty likely these days - we could easily be looking at several years of depressed global demand for oil. OPEC will do what it can to blunt the impact, but it's easy to see oil prices hovering somewhere in the $35-75/bbl range over the next several years. Even at the higher part of that range, the government's spending plans become chimeric...and the chances of continuing to bankroll society by continually increasing spending are pretty well nil.

Wait, don't we have reserves for cases like this? Well, the foreign reserves kitty is not quite empty - at $39 billion, it looks healthy at first glance. Trouble is that at the furious rate we've been importing over the last few years, that'll only cover about 10 months of imports!

Plus, note, those are currency reserves: money that's there to back the currency, not for the government to spend. So how about, rainy day funds? Money the government can actually use to pay teachers and nurses and such?

All we've got left over from that furious oil bonanza we've been living through is $15 billion or so - a sum that ODH Group's Abelardo Daza estimates might tide us over for a bit over year, maybe. Care to bet the global recession won't last longer than that?

Actually, Chávez did worse than merely not preparing for a bust: he actually dismantled the risk-management mechanisms that were in place when he got there!

And this is the worst part, the most mind-bendingly maddening aspect of this whole situation: we actually had a mechanism to smooth out the oil cycle! It was called FIEM, and it was carefully designed to set aside part the windfall during high-oil years so it could be spent when oil prices dropped. The Chávez regime first ignored and later chronically starved FIEM of funds. Today, there's less than a billion bucks in there - well under a week's worth of public spending - instead of the tens of billions we should've saved when oil was at $145/bbl.

Instead of saving, Chávez went nuts buying submarines for the navy and cool lookin' planes for the air force and oil for Fidel and oil refineries for Correa and houses made of oil for Daniel Ortega: an orgy of non-productive spending that means we're now heading into an oil price slump with more debt than we had when the boom started!

The scale of the irresponsibility in the way our public finances have been managed is simply staggering. I mean, seriously, it defeats me: I don't know how to find the words.

It's, of course, kind of crass to look at the political opportunities that will be created by the social tragedy we're now heading toward. Still, the one ray of hope in all this is that Chávez's political vision will probably be as much a victim of this crash as Lehman Brothers was.

Our economy is more dependent on oil today than it was ahead of Viernes Negro in 1982. We are, once again, going to have to borrow to cover the shortfall caused by an oil slump, except this time we'll have to borrow either from very badly battered international credit markets or from geopolitical allies that are getting hit by the oil slump just as hard as we are (Iran, Russia).

We've seen this movie before - we know what it does to the prestige of those who govern while it's playing.

The first act will be devaluation. The second act will be the end of Chávez's Rico McPato shtick, both at home and abroad. There's no way chavismo will be able to sustain a situation where only one of its customers pays full price for its oil. In fact, much of the petropatronage-supported influence Chavez has bought himself up and down the continent will start to dissipate...and that will happen at the same time as a charismatic, popular new leader pledged to double US foreign aid spending takes power in Washington.

Inside the country, the same dynamic holds. Chávez will try to blame the deep, painful spending cuts and the runaway inflation that will follow devaluation on the Empire, except the face of empire is about to change rather drastically. With his popularity already tanking enough to lose a referendum even a year before oil prices had even dropped, it's hard to see Chávez's remaining "soft" supporters staying onside through, say, the National Assembly elections in 2010.

Personally, I've always been very skeptical of claims that Chávez's "best days are behind him." Alberto Franceschi's been recycling that line in OpEds for the last 8 years and, as they say, con ese cuento me dormían a mi.

But this time it's different. It's been clear for a long time that nothing short of a sudden, sharp, systemic crisis in world capitalism causing a sustained fall in oil prices could slam the breaks on the chavista petrostate.

Well, here's your sudden, sharp, systemic crisis. Whatchoogonna do now, punk?

Chavez versus the people

Juan Cristobal says: - In the movie The War of the Roses, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner play a succesful, picture-perfect couple. The years go by, the tensions in the marriage start to mount, and the irritating quirks they find in each other start growing to the point of becoming unbearable. By the time they realize they can't stand the sight of the other, what should have been a civilized breakup turns into all-out war. Turner drives her SUV over Douglas's tiny Morgan, Douglas kills Turner's cat. When the movie ends, they have both destroyed their house, and they lie on the floor, lifeless, on the shattered remains of the chandelier that presided over their foyer.

I couldn't get this movie out of my mind as I analyzed Chávez's words and actions the past few days while the world witnesses an apocalyptic financial meltdown.

It is hard to overstate the seriousness of the current mess. Stock markets the world over are tanking and banks are failing left and right. Governments, central banks and multilateral institutions, normally the voices of reason, use incredibly dire language to describe the situation. The IMF talks of a "major downturn", the Federal Reserve Chairman talks of a "grave threat" and the US President warns the entire US economy "is in danger." Billions upon billions of dollars are being used to rescue the ailing financial system, and nobody knows whether this will even work.

The implications for Venezuela are dramatic. Oil is tanking, and according to Miguel's calculations, we are already below the minimum price needed to pay for our imports. The black-market rate for the dollar is now 4.5 BsF, more than double the official rate of 2.15. Venezuela's country risk has shot up to 1205 base points, liquidity problems in our banks have raised interest rates, and the cost of food increased 53.3% in the past year. It seems like the perfect storm we discussed about a few months ago has indeed formed.

And Chávez? Well, he's as happy as a little girl.

See, Chávez has framed this as the final defeat of capitalism and the coup-de-grace of George Bush's presidency. Faster than you can say "I told you so", Chávez has been mouthing off left and right, going so far today to say that this crisis is "necessary" in order to "demolish" the capitalist system "that has caused so much harm to the world."

In Chávez's mind, a crisis of global proportions is good for him because it proves him right. He's called on the big-bad-wolf of Latin American leftists, the IMF, to "kill itself." Instead of warning people that changes may be necessary, he has promised to maintain currency exchange controls until 2020, blissfully ignorant that reality may force him to eat his words much, much sooner than that. In no uncertain terms, he has blamed this crisis on Bush, imperialism, the IMF, capitalism, greed and neoliberalism, going so far today to hint this vindicates Marx, Engels and Gramsci.

Now, we can't blame the President for this hardly-contained bout of schadenfreude. These days, anachronistic ideological battles such as this are the only things that get his heart-rate going, and in part he is right, something is rotten in the system. But is it too much to ask for a little bit of glauckenstück?

Ideological warfare is entertaining and all, but this crisis is going to inflict serious harm on Venezuela. Much as he has tried the past few years to move the country to some alternative economic reality, the truth is that he hasn't done a very good job of that.

Venezuela is still very integrated with the rest of the world. Our economy is more dependent on foreign markets than before, and there is some concern that Venezuela's foreign reserves may be at risk. Moreover, basic economic intuition suggests that when the price of the one thing we have to offer to the world tanks, that is a problem. It doesn't take a genius to realize that when the people who are actually your customers are being clusterfucked to the poorhouse, that is a problem.

Chávez is Nero, fiddling while Rome burns. The crisis has underscored just how deeply detached the President is from the day-to-day problems of ordinary Venezuelans. Instead of coming up with an insightful analysis of the crisis and its consequences for our country, he uses his bully pulpit to "nah-nah" the rest of the world. Instead of providing a solution, he gets busy travelling to obscure places, linking up with genocidal governments and shopping for weapons on borrowed money.

That is why recent polls show his candidates are trailing badly. Venezuelans don't care about imperialism, capitalism and alternative economic systems. They care about bread-and-butter issues: inflation, personal safety, garbage collection, traffic and jobs. While most opposition candidates are doing a decent job in staying on message and talking about those things, Chávez is busy rejoicing in another Great Depression and travelling from Summit to useless Summit.

Chavez isn't at war with the US, and he isn't at war with George Bush - he feels like he won those already. Chávez is at war with his own people. While he fights imperialism and capitalism, he is doing nothing to prevent the fire from his battles from lighting up his own house. Like the Roses, he is so intent on destroying the other guy, the other idea, he doesn't realize he is destroying himself, and us, in the process.

And for now, all we can do is watch in horror. As we watch our irresponsible, reckless President rejoice in the fall of capitalism, we realize we are all along for the ride.

I know it's true because I read it in the newspaper...

Quico says: Hey, it turns out this blog shows "both a political balance that can be refreshing in these polarized times and a mischievous, evidently Venezuelan sense of humor." Who knew?!

[click image to enarge.]

Devious Injuns

Quico says: In today's NYTimes, Simón Romero goes to the Amazon and finds the stereotype of the lazy, devious indian alive and well at the heart of chavista officialdom.

Faced with Yanomami anger at the shoddy health care program - think of it as Selva Adentro - they've been forced to rely on since gringo missionaries were kicked out three years ago, a senior official with the government research institute that focuses on tropical diseases tut-tuts him...

"One cannot forget that the Yanomami and other indigenous groups have learned how to exert pressure on the government in order to receive food or other benefits,” he said. “This does not mean there aren’t challenges in providing them with health care, but caution is necessary with claims like these.”

Charming.

For their part, Yanomami leaders point to what they consider to be a broad pattern of neglect and condescension from public officials. “They put pictures of Yanomami everywhere, on tourist brochures, in airport lobbies, even on ambulances here in Puerto Ayacucho,” said Andrés González, 38, a Yanomami leader.

“That’s where they want us, in pictures, not positions of power,” he said.

As they say, read the whole thing.

When sovereignty dissolves with a whimper, not a bang

Quico says: Walter Lippmann once said that "there is no greater necessity for men who live in communities than that they be governed, self-governed if possible, well-governed if they are fortunate, but in any event, governed."

From that point of view, and from no other, the good burghers of El Nula, Apure State (pop. 10,893) can consider themselves lucky. [hat tip: Bristow.]

ps: Sorry if posting's been light. We have a bunch of ideas and projects cooking in the background; I guess you could say that, at the moment, our ambition is running well ahead of our available time. Do keep checking, though...good stuff is on its way.

The Suicidal Dream of Becoming an Immense Parasite that Feeds off of our Oil

Esta gran proporción de riqueza de origen destructivo crecerá sin duda alguna el día en que los impuestos mineros se hagan más justos y remunerativos, hasta acercarse al sueño suicida de algunos ingenuos que ven como el ideal de la hacienda venezolana llegar a pagar la totalidad del Presupuesto con la sola renta de minas, lo que habría de traducir más simplemente así: llegar a hacer de Venezuela un país improductivo y ocioso, un inmenso parásito del petróleo, nadando en una abundancia momentánea y corruptora.

-Arturo Uslar Pietri, 1936

Quico says: Sembrar el petróleo - "sowing our oil" - is the central cliché of Venezuelan public life. Used, misused and abused by governments of the left, right and center virtually since the day it was penned, the phrase has been progressively drained of its content, slowly coming to mean pretty much the opposite of what Uslar Pietri had in mind in those heady days right after Gómez's death.

It takes going back and reading the chillingly prophetic essay the phrase originally came from - an exercise all Venezuelan public figures should be required by law to undertake at least once a year - to quite grasp that "sembrar el petróleo" is more a statement about morals than economics!

For Uslar Pietri, the real issue wasn't what oil dependence would do to our wallets; it was what it would do to our souls. Diversifying our economy was a means to the end of inoculating our society's moral fiber against the fecklessness and depravity that comes from unhinging consumption from hard work.

The great portion of our wealth of non-renewable origins shall doubtlessly grow once our mining taxes become fairer, and bring us closer to the suicidal dream of some ingenues who hope one day to pay for the whole of the national budget with mining rents alone, which we could restate more or less as: to one day make Venezuela an idle and unproductive country, an immense parasite feeding off of our oil, swimming in a momentary and corrupting abundance.

It's in this passage that it comes through most clearly, but the entire piece is only superficially about economics. Dig down just a bit and you see that Uslar's real game is to use economic categories to illuminate questions of morality. (Indeed, he turned out to be far more competent as a moralist than as an economist: the relevant metric for petro-dependence turned out to be oil's share of exports, not of government revenue.)

Uslar's essay stands as a stark warning about the corrosive influence of the petrostate: a buzzword that hadn't yet been coined for a condition we hadn't yet experienced, but that Uslar Pietri could see clearly just over the horizon.

It's interesting to speculate what might have been if "el sueño suicida de convertirnos en un inmenso parasito del petróleo" had become the take-away cliché from that piece, instead of that other one.

Because for much of the following 72 years, Venezuelan governments have taken turns missing Uslar's central point. One after the other, they've interpreted the call to sow the oil as a justification for dumping oil money into a succession of boondoggles requiring a never-ending infusion of petrodollars to stay afloat, a practice that entrenches the corrupting petro-dependence Uslar wanted to protect us from.

The results were clear from the start: a society where values like thrift, industry, and prudence come to seem quaintly out-of-place, the schoolmarmish admonitions of prudes who haven't the faintest clue how the copper is really beaten around here.

What's sad is how the grand old man's bon mot ended up being turned in against itself, used to give a patina of respectability precisely to the kinds of parasitic accommodations he was so keen to forestall. The irony is that now we have realized the suicidal dream of becoming an enormous parasite that feeds off of our oil, and we've done it under the banner of sowing the oil.

For eight decades, we've done little but plumb the depths of Uslar Pietri's greatest fear: not that oil would make us poorer, but that it would make us worse.

Taking judicial activism to a whole new level

Juan Cristobal says: - President Chávez today inaugurated a meeting of Presidents of Supreme Courts of South American nations. In his address, he urged justices, not to do their job and apply laws, mind you, but to be warriors in some imaginary struggle against capitalism.

"It is important in the world today," Chávez said, "to go to the deep roots of justice and the law ... to achieve our liberation and stop the expansion of capitalism that is destroying the world."

Funny - I thought the job of judges was to apply the law. In fact, I think even the most liberal thinkers out there, those who view judges as social activists, would find it troubling for a judge to be at the forefront of the struggle to change economic systems. But that, nakedly put, is how Chávez views the judiciary - as just another tool in achieving political goals.

Chávez continued his string of gaffes, saying that "laws and institutions must generate social and political equality," apparently unaware that he was speaking to members of the judicial power, not the legislative power. He also likened the financial meltdown in the US to "an elephant drowning in a pool," unaware perhaps that elephants make pretty good swimmers and that, given its size and the fact it has a trunk it can breathe through, an elephant would probably not drown in a pool.

One Simple Thesis on the Theme of Magnicide

Quico says: Juan Manuel Santos, Marta Colomina, Leopoldo Castillo, Heinz Sontagg, Miguel Henrique Otero, Nelson Mezerhane, Marcel Granier, Alberto Federico Ravell, even Cesar Miguel Rondón (!!)...have you noticed how pretty much everyone Chávez accuses of plotting to kill him is a household name in Venezuela? (Well, ok: as long as the household in question is top heavy with politics junkies...)

Does this really raise no eyebrows within chavismo? I mean, ¡que casualidad! - only famous people want to bump the guy.

Lets be clear: I have no way of knowing if someone is plotting to assassinate the president, though I can understand why Chávez is worried. Be that as it may, the government's story - that Mario Silva has proof of an active conspiratorial cabal made up entirely of celebrities - is beyond ridiculous...it's insulting.

In that spirit, here's a simple thesis to try on for size:

If Chávez is assassinated, he'll be assassinated by someone you've never ever heard of before.

If you think about it, that's obvious...it's never going to be the high-profile, obsessively-spied-upon TV-talking-head demographic that's going to be in a position to pull off something like this. If it goes down, it'll be a Maiónica-type who'll set it up: some low key, well-connected, under-the-radar operator with the modicum of common sense it takes to realize that lunging for every microphone within a ten-mile radius, fronting every organization you get involved in and media-whorery in general are not exactly conducive to successful plotting.

After all, how many morning talk shows and Ateneo de Caracas events did you see Hugo Chávez speaking at in the months ahead of February 4th, 1992?

Someone needs to get a grip

Juan Cristobal says: - Quico and I were talking today about running a "whatever happened to?" You know, as in whatever happened to Alfredo Peña, Juan Fernández, Carlos Fernández, Carlos Ortega, Ibéyise Pacheco, Efraín Vásquez Velasco, Manuel Antonio Rosendo... where are these people?

Just by chance, Miami-bound muckraker and opposition comecandela extraordinaire Patricia Poleo has a column today about Carlos Fernández, who was head of Fedecámaras during the wild and crazy days of the general strike of 2002/03.

Now, before I go on a rant, I have to say I don't really have a strong opinion on Patricia Poleo. She's the type of journalist who takes no prisoners and elicits outsized passions on either side of the spectrum. Personally, I've been reading Venezuelan news long enough to take whatever she (or anyone else) says with a huge dollop of salt. True, she's been persecuted for political reasons, and she did nail l'affaire Montesinos, but it's not like she hasn't spent years cultivating enemies left and right. She generally shoots before she asks questions, and that can have consequences.

But her latest column, well, that's just offensive. Not on a political level, mind you, but on a literary one.

Poleo goes way, way over the top trying to elicit sympathy for Fernández, laying on the violins as she explains the horrible hardships of his squalid existence in Miami,

"From the deep pain caused by the injustice of leading you to jail or exile, what weighs the heaviest is the injustice within injustice."

O... kay...

She gripes about how Carlos Férnandez went from being someone who risked everything in the 2003 strike to an anonymous life in Miami. She complains that poor Mr. Fernández spends his days caring for his kids, getting up at

"... 5 in the morning, fixing breakfast for the kids before they go to school."

Never mind that one of them is in college, apparently on a "soccer" scholarship paid for... by the US government! Who knew the US government paid for soccer scholarships? Who knew "soccer" was the Spanish term for ... "soccer"! Who knew fixing breakfast could take up to two hours? What is he making them, pabellón con baranda from scratch?

His wife apparently cannot get an L1 visa - Poleo doesn't say if she can travel as a tourist, and it seems like they haven't explored the possibility of meeting in a third country where no visa is required. Still, in between fixing breakfast for his college-age kids and missing his wife, he mopes. Mr. Fernández's horrible existence is filled by his attempts to "try and sell houses in a country where nobody wants to buy houses." In other words, Fernández has a job in real estate.

Well, Poleo think this is just awful, and she vainly attempts to pin the blame on all us ingrates who didn't show Mr. Fernández his dues for the disastrous strategy he pursued back when he was in charge of Fedecámaras. And she lays it on thick. The sob-story is laced with phrases like,

"... Fernández lives his days avoiding sadness, loneliness, counting one by one the days without his partner and without her support (sic) and struggling to put his family back together."

"He still thinks Venezuela is worth the suffering of all those who struggle to live in freedom, in Democracy (sic). Nothing makes him desist from his longed-for return, when he shall be able to reunite his family, whatever is left of it, to reunite with his friends (sic) if they still remember him and with a country that will be very different to the one we left, but that still smells like no other country: Own, Fatherland, Ours." (sic ... sic ... sic ... lordalmighty that's just sick!)

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not that much of a sourpuss. I'm sure it sucks for Mr. Fernandez, being separated from his wife and all. But do we really have compassion to spare for him? Is this really one of the world's great injustices? Afghan office boys caught up in Guantanamo Bay, Aung San Suu Kyi under House Arrest, Mumia Abu-Jamal on Death Row and...Carlos Fernández, Single Parent in Suburban Exile?!

Couldn't he fix breakfast for his kids the night before? Couldn't they make their own damn bagels? And sure, the housing market in Florida is pretty crummy right now, but how many of the people the guy left jobless in Caracas wouldn't kill for a Real Estate franchise in the States these days?

Come to think of it, I'd rather not know what all these people are up to. This story took up all of my yearly allowance of maple syrup - I don't think I could take any more.

Residual memories

Quico says: I'm a bit late to this story, but didn't want to let it pass without a comment. About a week ago, Luisa Ortega Díaz, Chávez's prosecutor general, told reporters that no laws were broken in the summary expulsion of Human Rights Watch's team from Venezuela.

As they say in England, "well, she would say that, wouldn't she?"

These kinds of ritual declarations of lawfulness hold a weird sort of fascination for me. Of course, like most of them, this one was entirely bogus: articles 39 through 46 of Venezuela's Aliens and Migration Law set out in intricate detail the procedure the authorities must follow to expel a foreigner from the country. According to the law (which, incidentally, was drafted by chavistas less than five years ago), aliens slated for expulsion are entitled to be notified of the government's intentions ahead of time, to retain counsel, to prepare a defense, to present their arguments orally at an administrative hearing, and to appeal any decision to the courts.

On the day he was seized by fifteen or twenty heavily armed members of the security forces, Vivanco wasn't even allowed to make a phone call, let alone an appeal.

All of which adds yet another layer of irony to the episode. Because, bear in mind, Vivanco was expelled for presenting a report that praised the extensive human rights guarantees enshrined in Venezuelan law but also criticized the government for failing to honor those guarantees in practice.

By now, the impudent relish with which chavismo breaks its own laws can no longer shock or surprise: the novelty wore off a long time ago. What gets me is that Ortega Díaz still felt the need to come out and argue that the government's actions were legal.

Maybe "argue" is the wrong word here: no one who has even glanced at the Immigration Law's Article 43 could really argue that Vivanco's expulsion was lawful without her brain turning into mush and oozing out of her left ear. Still, the Prosecutor General felt the need to at least assert the legality of Vivanco's expulsion. This far into the game, she still didn't feel like she could just say, "suck it up: it's, raison d'état...so we expelled him ¿y qué?"

To me, that's a thing of wonder.

It's as though somewhere hidden deep inside her reptilian brain, a couple of neurons are still firing away, irrepressibly saying "laws have to be followed!"; as though somehow this sense that "written rules ought not to be ignored" can't be completely extricated from our political psyche. Trampled, debased, battered, humiliated and serially ignored? Yes...but not completely extricated, not even from the most abject apparatchik's mind.

There's a tiny smidgen of hope locked in there somewhere. A realization that the residual memory of the value of the rule of law is incredibly resilient in Venezuela, that the sense for the legal is as much a part of our national identity as is our outsized capacity to ignore it. That, despite how it may feel sometimes, we are not Mbutu's Zaire or Gomez's Venezuela, places where the category of the "legal" had not even established a conceptual foothold into the vocabulary of power. Ramshackle and partial as it was, some aspects of our long, 20th century flirtation with the democratic rule of law left lasting imprints on our collective psyche.

Think of it this way: after the fall of the Berlin Wall, even countries that had been incredibly brutalized by communist tyranny were able to regain the path of democracy in less than two decades...so long as they had a history of real democracy before becoming Soviet satellites to refer to. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic...their democratic DNA had laid dormant for 45 years, but it had not been extirpated. It was the countries with no real history of democracy to fall back on - Russia foremost among them - that just couldn't manage the transition to democracy.

All I'm saying is that when this whole long nightmare is over, Venezuela will look a lot more like the Czech Republic than like Russia.

The emerald city

Juan Cristobal says: - One of the biggest challenges in writing this blog is bridging the disconnect between our perception of Venezuelan politics and the day-to-day reality on the ground. While I firmly believe that distance isn't an impediment to staying well informed (in fact, it's a huge plus), I realize it tends to deaden our feel for the ironies and contradictions of life in revolutionary times.

Sure, distance allows us to provide a different perspective, but what if we end up becoming a bunch of curmudgeons? What if the Revolution is, deep down, just another cague de risa? What if our focus on the trees that are the day-to-day outrages prevents us from seeing the farcical forest that is Chavez's Venezuela?

A few weeks ago I was in Caracas for the wedding of a college buddy of mine. The wedding was held at La Esmeralda, the flagship of the prestigious Agencia Mar, Venezuela's top provider of quality, conspicuous, over-the-top, unabashedly in-your-face-expensive entertainment. La Esmeralda had long been the premium spot for Caracas social life and a fixture in big events for the past twenty years, but I somehow assumed it was past its prime.

I remember my first wedding at La Esmeralda. It was back in 1989, in the weeks following El Caracazo. You could sense the country was changing, but here I was, a college sophomore, fresh out of Maracaibo, with my date, in a lavish ballroom, being treated like a king. The canapés were succulent, and they just kept coming. The Scotch was 12-year-old Black Label, of course, and the champagne was French, obviously. The live orchestra was on fire, and I remember we danced til 5 in the morning. It was, for lack of a better word, memorable.

But there was also an eerie feel to the proceedings, as if we were waltzing in the Titanic oblivious to the icebergs all around us. I wasn't aware of it then, but I can't help recalling those days without a certain sense of dread. It's as if 37-year-old me wanted to go back in time and warn 18-year-old me about how fake it all was, how it was all going to go up in smoke.

I didn't know what to expect this time around. I hadn't been to La Esmeralda in years. In the interim, fortunes have been made and lost (and remade and relost) and the Revolution plows through, taking no prisoners. I was expecting it to be the decadent reminder of better times, a lonely ballroom waiting to be nationalized.

Silly me, I found myself in the middle of a swank party unlike any I'd ever seen: a bonche worthy of the dizzying petroboom we're having.

There was champagne like the last time, only it kept flowing until 5 in the morning. The band was on fire as well, only it, too, played until the wee hours. There was a sushi bar, a Chinese chef, and a dessert bar to kill for, with thousands of individual chocolate-and-cream concoctions I don't even have names for. I left at close to 6 in the morning, and there was enough food left over to feed a small orphanage for days.

As I was soaking it all in, having a great time, I suddenly remembered: wait, wasn't this supposed to be a Revolution? Don't these people read the newspapers? In which chapter of Das Kapital is the bit about the sushi bars? I haven't had this much fun in years!

The dissonance, she is strong. Somehow, nine years into the Cuban revolution, I don't think Fidel's opponents were throwing bashes where the towels in the bathroom were monogrammed with the initials of the bride and groom. And I just have a strong feeling that, by 1927, anti-bolsheviks in Russia were not getting married in mansions that gave away baskets upon baskets of cosmetics, sewing kits, hair accessories and glossy magazines in the ladies' room.

I told my friends how impressed I was with the lavish attention and how cool the party was, but also how weird it felt to be there when this was supposed to be a socialist revolution. They smiled back at me, saying that I hadn't seen nothin': one time they went to a boliburgués wedding in La Esmeralda where the bride's mother had demanded furniture be flown in from France to enhance the art-deco motif they were gunning for.

The more things change, the better they get. Chávez may throw out the American Ambassador, milk may be hard to come by, crime may reach unheard-of heights and war with Colombia may be imminent..."pero como se goza...!"

As long as the gush of petrodollars keeps swamping the country, a good time can be had by...a few.


PS.- As I was writing this, I got this gotta-see-it-to-believe-it video showcasing the wedding of chavista ideologue William Izarra (Information Minister Andrés Izarra's dad) and his very young, very pregnant wife. Chavistas, like the rest of us, enjoy a good bonche, [UPDATE: Ooops, turns out the wedding was held not in Quinta Anauco, as I'd first thought, but in the Casona Anauco Arriba, a related property that doesn't house a museum.] except they have permission to hold it in Caracas' historic Quinta Anauco, a 400-year old architectural gem that houses the nation's Colonial Art Museum.

(I wonder if they bothered to move the museum collection out before the big bash, or if they just partied with the Marqués del Toro's stuff.)

I don't know if, like Freddy Bernal says, it's the first wedding to be held there in 400 years, but I sure hope it's the last.

Chávez : Bush :: Peas : Pod

Quico says: Oh Hugo, if only you knew how right you have it.

[hat tip: dorothy]

Plato and the paranoia of power

Quico says: In a previous post, I started citing great big chunks of Plato's republic. Strange as it seems, it isn't just some gratuitous outburst of pretentiousness (though, of course, there's a bit of that). What grabbed me was the way Plato treats the concept of tyrannicide.

Plato doesn't beat around the bush. Writing at a time when power politics was out in the open and there was less need to blush about such things, he came straight out and said it: as the tyrant consolidates his power, his enemies plot to assassinate him.

The fear of slavery will push them to it, and the tyrant will realize this. He will start to think more and more about his own safety and less and less about his people's, surrounding himself with thicker and thicker layers of security and plundering his country to finance it.

I don't know if anyone is actively plotting to kill Chávez. It's easy to dismiss the whole thing as an unseemly crying wolf shtick, just a desperate ploy for attention that's now running into a serious problem of diminishing returns. Certainly, the melodramatic, media-centered hissy fit we've seen this and the Umpteen previous times an imminent magnicide has been announced should give us room for pause. At least this time around, some people have actually been detained.

And yet I get the sense Chávez is honestly convinced that somebody is trying to kill him, that his dread is real. Whether the people around him are ginning up his fears for their particular ends or whether Chávez's jitters need no ginning up isn't clear to me, but neither is it especially relevant. The regime's paranoia is right there on the surface, and even approaching this subject can cause any blogger a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.

The government's jitters are plain, and they illuminate a deep well of fear and loathing, a heavily burdened conscience, an awareness that he's pushing society to an extreme where an attempt on his life would in no way be surprising. Chávez knows he's turning into a tyrant, and he knows what happens to tyrants.

Tyrants are terrified of assassination, and for that reason they surround themselves in byzantine layers of security.

Think of Ghadaffi, too scared to even sleep in a concrete building, carrying crowds of super hot, heavily-armed young girls to guard him wherever he goes, out of pure fear. Think of Saddam Hussein, of PolPot, of Idi Amin, of Castro, of García Márquez's automnal patriarch - each of them all-powerful within his domain but at the same time permanently terrified, withdrawn, convinced that death could come at any time.

This is the unique fate of tyrants.

Of course, democrats also get assassinated now and then, but the fear of a violent death rarely dominates a democrat's entire experience of power like it does for tyrants. History shows that, for the most part, democrats get assassinated by madmen. The sane have little reason to kill them. Democratic governments come and go: if you oppose one, you can challenge it, and if your challenge fails, you can just wait it out.

But a tyrant's fear of assassination is different in that it's structural. Tyrants are typically assassinated not by the deranged, but by people who've done their sums, who've added up the pros on one side of the ledger, the cons on the other and calculated they're better off acting than not acting. What Plato saw so clearly is that tyranny makes assassination rational.

Chávez may never have read Plato's Republic, but he understands this in his bones. From his point of view, the fear of assassination makes eminent sense.

Chávez is determined to shut down the legal means of challenging him. He understands that the strategy he's pursuing whittles down his opponents' options, cornering them little by little, until the only choices they have left are slavery, exile or tyrannicide. And while most will choose the first two, it's hard to believe that nobody at all will be tempted by the third.

And while Chávez is not yet a full-throttle tyrant, he is headed that way. As he keeps shutting doors and eliminating options for the opposition, he knows the probability of engendering his own demise increases. The paradox is that the more unassailable his power becomes, the more justified his fear seem to become.

Not, of course, that it takes the mind of a Plato to put two and two together. During his long lunch with Antonini last November (which, recall, took place just two days before the Constitutional Reform Referendum), that great Venezuelan philosopher Moises Maiónica reconstituted Plato's train of thought with some precision.

"We're with the government," he tells Antonini, "and we're doing great." But if we want this government to stay in power and remain stable, the best we can hope for is for the "No" side to win:

Maiónica: Es más, yo no se cómo Chavez no se la piensa. Si yo tuviera aspiraciones políticas, sí? Dentro del gobierno de Chávez, si yo fuera un Diosdado Cabello, lo mejor que me puede pasar es que gane el "Sí". Y la unica manera de que salga Chavez es matándolo. Yo no se como el no identifica ese peo. O sea, le está poniendo una firma al contrato de sicariato.

Maiónica: In fact, I don't see how Chávez fails to put it together. If I had political aspirations, within the government, if I was a Diosdado Cabello, the best thing that could happen to me is for the "Sí" to win. Then the only way to get rid of Chávez is to kill him. I don't see how Chávez has failed to notice that. I mean, he's putting his signature on his own hitman's contract.

The math is not hard here. Even an intensely mediocre mind like Maiónica's has no trouble at all grasping it...and grasping that the danger, for a tyrannical Chávez, comes as much from his putative friends as from his declared enemies.

Which is why we have good reason to worry every time Chávez resurrects the magnicide-paranoia shtick. Because what he says is "they're trying to kill me", but what he means is "if I was in their shoes and I knew what I know, I'd be trying to kill me too."

Chavismo Foretold

Quico says: We tend to think of chavismo as shiny and new: all 21st Century and postmodern. But the basic mechanism whereby democracy gradually morphs into tyranny? Plato foresaw it 2400 years ago.

Substitute "adecos" for "drones" and "Chávez" for "protector" and, well...

There is a law of contraries; the excess of freedom passes into the excess of slavery, and the greater the freedom the greater the slavery.

You will remember that in the oligarchy we found two classes—rogues and paupers, whom we compared to drones with and without stings. Now in a democracy, too, there are drones.And there is another class in democratic States, of respectable, thriving individuals, who can be squeezed when the drones have need of their possessions; there is moreover a third class, who are the labourers and the artisans, and they make up the mass of the people.

When the people meet, they are omnipotent, but they cannot be brought together unless they are attracted by a little honey; and the rich are made to supply the honey, of which the demagogues keep the greater part themselves, giving a taste only to the mob.

Their victims attempt to resist; they are driven mad by the stings of the drones, and so become downright oligarchs in self-defence. Then follow informations and convictions for treason.

The people have some protector whom they nurse into greatness, and from this root the tree of tyranny springs.

The protector, who tastes blood, and slays some and drones others with or without law, who hints at abolition of debts and division of lands, must either perish or become a wolf—that is, a tyrant.

Perhaps he is driven out, but he soon comes back from exile; and then if his enemies cannot get rid of him by lawful means, they plot his assassination.

Thereupon the friend of the people makes his well-known request to them for a body-guard, which they readily grant, thinking only of his danger and not of their own.

Now let the rich man make to himself wings, for he will never run away again if he does not do so then. And the Great Protector, having crushed all his rivals, stands proudly erect in the chariot of State, a full-blown tyrant: Let us enquire into the nature of his happiness.

In the early days of his tyranny he smiles and beams upon everybody; he is not a 'slave master,' no, not he: he has only come to put an end to debt and the monopoly of land.

Having got rid of foreign enemies, he makes himself necessary to the State by always going to war. He is thus enabled to depress the poor by heavy taxes, and so keep them at work; and he can get rid of bolder spirits by handing them over to the enemy.

Then comes unpopularity; some of his old associates have the courage to oppose him. The consequence is, that he has to purge the State; but, unlike the physician who purges away the bad, he must get rid of the high-spirited, the wise and the wealthy; for he has no choice between death and a life of shame and dishonour.

And the more hated he is, the more he will require trusty guards; but how will he obtain them? 'They will come flocking like birds—for pay.' How will he support that rare army of his?

First, by robbing the temples of their treasures, which will enable him to lighten the taxes; then he will take all his father's property, and spend it on his companions, male or female.

Now his father is the people, and if the people gets angry, and says that a great hulking son ought not to be a burden on his parents, and bids him and his riotous crew begone, then will the parent know what a monster he has been nurturing, and that the son whom he would fain expel is too strong for him.

'You do not mean to say that he will beat his father?'

Yes, he will, after having taken away his arms.

'Then he is a parricide and a cruel, unnatural son.' And the people have jumped from the fear of slavery into slavery, out of the smoke into the fire.

Thus liberty, when out of all order and reason, passes into the worst form of servitude...

Gustavo MarWHO?!

Quico says: State-level polls are likely to be thin on the ground over the next few weeks, and published polls even thinner. So I'll jump on whatever I can get, even if I can't really vouch for the identity of the pollster (caveat lector).

Since beggars can't be choosers, here're the results of an Anzoátegui state poll conducted Sept. 5th through the 10th (sample size = 1000).

The headline figure? Chavista governor Tarek William Saab is ahead of the Primero Justicia Mayor of Lecherías, Gustavo Marcano, by 31% to 22%.

The punchline? A staggering 38% are undecided on the open question.

Meanwhile, 6% want to vote for El Conde del Guacharo Benjamin Rausseo - is he really running?

In the closed question, with just Tarek and Marcano's names given as options, Tarek is ahead 46% to 43%.

The real problem is that just 31% of Anzoategui voters polled were able to identify Marcano as the oppo unity candidate. 65% answered that they "don't know" who the unity candidate is. This is discouraging, but not surprising: the oppo unity guy was supposed to be the dinosaurish Antonio Barreto Sira, who ended up getting disqualified by the Comptroller General. Marcano is Plan B man: he has to run twice as hard.

You could call that a glass-half-full (it's never good for an incumbent if he can't reach 50%) or a glass-half-empty (less than three months out, the oppo candidate is still an unknown). Either way, it's clear Marcano has a lot of work to do on name recognition... but will he have the resources and the access to the airwaves it takes to catch up?

Note: The poll is conducted by a firm called Varianzas that I'd never ever heard of before, and published by Globo, so do douse liberally with salt before consumption. A quick Google search shows that these guys have been around - all low-profile like - for a few years, and apparently did the field work for Evans/McDonough back in 2004 - so it's not a total fly-by-night operation.

It's official

Quico says: Hugo Chávez is now fodder for Republican attack ads...


[Have yer damn hat tip, JayDee...]

Quod erat demonstrandum

Juan Cristobal and Quico say: Sometimes, chavismo takes all the fun out of parody by, in effect, parodying itself. Case in point: Human Rights Watch has just published a detailed indictment of the Human Rights situation in Venezuela during the Chávez years. The whole document is worth a read. It's all there: the court-packing, the media, the discrimination, Maisanta, Tascón...and, of course, this bit:

The Chávez government has repeatedly denounced and sought to discredit the work of human rights advocates by making unfounded accusations that they are funded by and doing the bidding of foreign governments.

Right on cue, the government accused HRW director José Miguel Vivanco of doing the bidding of foreign governments and threw him out of the country. They actually had Vivanco and his companion detained by the security forces and forcibly escorted them to Maiquetía to put them on the first plane out of there.

Guy had it coming...spouting off about harassment of Human Rights activists like that! The nerve some people have...

The apple that fell a couple of time zones over from the tree

Quico says: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait! The kid who runs El Chigüire Bipolar is Alberto Federico Ravell's son?! HUH?!

Northern populist

Juan Cristobal says: - A scenery-chewing political reformer. A bible-thumping banner of books. A pitbull with lipstick. The political heiress to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. A hack.

Sarah Palin has been called a lot of things in the past two weeks, but of all the names, one characterization has stuck with me: right-wing populist.

Webster's defines populism as "antiestablishment or anti-intellectual political movements or philosophies that offer unorthodox solutions or policies and appeal to the common person rather than according with traditional party or partisan ideologies." It goes on to say that populism is a "representation or extolling of the common person, the working class, the underdog..."

Palin fits this definition like few Republicans do. Her folksy demeanor and her Marge Gunderson-accent are an integral part of her charm and appeal as a politician. She routinely touts her small-town, hockey-mom credentials as a way of telling the voters "I'm one of you... only I hunt bears."

But her populist strain is more than superficial. It resides in a deeper place, one rooted in the energy agenda she has carved in Alaska. Looked at more closely, Palin's relationship with Big Oil and the Alaska politicians they were used to commanding is actually kind of interesting.

It wouldn't be a stretch to say it is eerily reminiscent of Hugo Chávez’s banana-republic populism, albeit with some stark differences.

Before going into the details, it is worth noting that Alaska is like a sophisticated, moose-populated version of a petro-state. A portion of oil revenues are distributed to the population according to the rules of the Alaska Permanent Fund, much like it is done in places such as Norway. And while, unlike Venezuela, Iran and the like, the state is not a basket case, the vices of the petro-state pop up from time to time.

Palin’s first foray into statewide politics began in 2002, when she was appointed to chair the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. This body is in charge of coordinating, along with oil companies, the rational exploitation of the state's oil and natural gas reserves.

Palin resigned from that job raising all sorts of hell. She claimed fellow Republican members had conflicts of interest and were in bed with the oil companies they were supposed to regulate. Her grandstanding won her wide notoriety, and resulted in the resignation of her fellow members, one of whom was subsequently fined.

Like Palin, Hugo Chávez was elected on an anti-corruption platform. Anti-corruption is a typical populist stance, although it usually helps if you follow tough stances with actions, something Chávez has so far failed to do. In fact, the last few days have provided us with engrossing details of just how corrupt the chavista regime is.

Partly thanks to her tough stance on this issue, Palin was elected Governor of Alaska in 2006. One of her first measures was to slap oil companies with a huge , quasi-confiscatory tax hike. In fact, Palin increased the oil tax from a 10 percent gross revenue tax to a 25 percent profits tax, with the tax rate rising 0.2% for each dollar the price of oil exceeds $52 per barrel.

The result was a massive influx of cash to state coffers, and Palin gleefully distributed part of it among Alaska's residents. In typical populist fashion, Palin coined her plan "Alaska's Clear and Equitable Share."

The oil companies were being milked, and they were not happy. According to the New Republic, BP, for example, saw its state taxes increase by 480 percent. The company announced the move would "weaken investment" and that they would be "reviewing planned activities." Royal Dutch Shell also fretted, although most were keen to continue participating in Alaska's oil biz.

Hugo Chávez also has a record of raising taxes and royalties on oil companies. However, Chávez's heavy-handed approach has gone further than Palin's. While BP and Shell remain in Alaska in spite of the tax increase, these and other multinationals have diminished their Venezuelan exposure or left the country altogether for friendlier territory. Venezuela relies more and more on state oil companies from friendly countries that have not been expropriated... yet.

Another difference is that part of Palin’s tax increase went directly into the pockets of the citizens of Alaska. Chávez's tax increase has gone to lots of places. Some of it has made its way to Venezuelans’ income (some more than others), but a lot of it has fled the country in the form of imports, subsidies to political allies and even suitcases.

Like Chávez, Palin came into office with grand infrastructure visions. Alaskans had long wanted to build a natural gas pipeline so that its vast reserves could feed into the existing North American pipeline infrastructure. The problem was that oil companies had a differing set of incentives.

The state's long-standing approach had been to encourage oil companies to build the pipeline by offering incentives. But the companies did not want to build a pipeline that was too large, because that would diminish their power to negotiate vis-a-vis the state and their competitors. The prospect of a BP- or Exxon-owned pipeline discouraged gas exploration because smaller companies did not want to have to ship their product through their competitor's pipeline.

Instead, Alaskans decided a series of "must-haves" for the pipeline, one that specified low tariffs and large volume capacity. In the end, Trans-Canada won the right to build the pipeline, in what is being touted as the largest private infrastructure project in North America.

Like Palin, Chávez dreams of pipelines spanning the continent. Yet again, the similarities with Chávez stop soon. Chávez’s pipe dreams make little economic sense and, by excluding the private sector, are incredibly costly to the taxpayer. It's no wonder that most of his proposals end up being shelved.

The comparison between Chávez's and Palin's energy agendas yields remarkable similarities, but also stark differences. While both are guided by populist, anti-big business instincts, Palin's populism remains rooted in the rule of law and in economic rationale.

During my stay in the U.S. in the past few weeks, she was all people were talking about. Experts began laughing at the choice, circling the McCain candidacy like coroners with their pens on their toe-tags, only to see the press begin talking about the "Palin surge." Scorn turned quickly into worry. In a surprising turn of events, feminists began wondering if she was fit to be both a mother and a Vice-president, while Obama began playing the experience card Hillary Clinton unsuccesfully used on him in the primary. To top it all off, Republicans find themselves enthralled by a neo-populist with an anti-big-business agenda.

Whatever you think about Palin, you have to hand it to McCain. That crazy old fart has made an already entertaining election 10 times more entertaining.

One final thing that surprised me was how polarized the US has become in recent months. It is extremely difficult to have an impartial conversation about the election with anyone. Both sides play games with the truth and the important issues are left by the wayside. Palin's selection only heightened the volume of the debate.

Just like in Venezuela... Palin los tiene locos.

My Dinner with Guido

Quico says: So, much as I'd vowed to avoid it, I find myself getting inexorably sucked into the Maletagate Maelstrom. Too much good stuff is coming out of Miami not to have a peek. The latest is this leaked, very long transcript of a 4 hour lunch Guido Antonini and Moises Maiónica had in a Miami restaurant last November the 30th, just two days before the constitutional reform referendum.

First, some brutally abridged background just to bring newbies up to speed. On August 4th, 2007, Venezuelan-American businessman Guido Alejandro Antonini got busted trying to sneak $790,000 in cash into Argentina on a flight from Caracas. Antonini ran off to Miami where he soon began collaborating with the FBI. He told the feds straight away that the money came from Venezuela's state oil company, PDVSA, and was basically an illegal contribution to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's campaign for the Argentine presidency. As Antonini was talking to the feds, senior Venezuelan officials, facing the mother of all tri-national scandals, dispatched a gaggle of operatives to Miami to try to buy his silence. It is one of those operatives, Franklin Durán, who ended up as the focus of the FBI's investigation and, if convicted, faces 15 years in jail for conspiracy and acting as an unregistered foreign agent in the US. (The other guys, including Maiónica, eventually copped pleas with the feds and are now testifying against Durán.)

Throughout their attempts to arrange the bribe, Antonini was wearing an FBI wire. The conversations he picked up shed all sorts of new light into the actual mechanics of chavista corruption, filling in the details on shenanigans we all "know" go down but virtually never get to hear specifics about for the simple reason that the authorities in Venezuela never investigate this sort of thing.

On this particular occassion, Antonini had the fried calamari, the cotoletta alla parmigiana and the chocolate chocolate cake for dessert. To drink? A diet coke. With lime. Maiónica shared the calamari starter, then went for the Veal Marsala and finished off with the key lime pie, washing it all down with the obligatory, who-do-ya-think-yer-kidding diet coke. With lime.

The transcript shows clearly that, by November 30th, Antonini's hush money has already been approved in Caracas, but it has not yet been delivered to him in Miami. In fact, the delivery seems to be taking a long time and Antonini makes a big show of his desperation over the delay, saying he's broke, at the end of his tether, and seriously considering just telling his whole story to the press.

Maiónica tries to mollify him, telling him it's just a matter of fine-tuning the final details before the money can be delivered. He warns him not to do anything stupid, telling him that that would be like "finding out your wife is cheating on you and cutting off your own balls to get back at her."

The chat is brimming with juicy detail. For one, it really leaves no doubt that the order to "deal with Antonini" came from Chávez himself, and more than once. Originally, PDVSA boss Rafael Ramírez was put in charge of keeping the whole situation under control, which makes sense since the original delivery-run to Buenos Aires was a PDVSA operation. When it became clear Ramírez was not up to it Chávez flew off the handle, chewing him out and and handing over responsibility for the affair to Disip (secret police) chief Henry Rangel Silva (of bank-accounts-frozen-by-the-treasury-department fame).

Maiónica: Chávez sabe que tú te le escapaste de las manos a Ramírez. Lo sabe. Cuando Chávez llama a Rangel es porque Ramírez te sacó la mano. Y le dijo a Ramírez delante de Rangel, "El que se va a encargar de este peo es él". Antonini: Le dijo. Maiónica: Entiendes? Entonces todas la consecuencias negativas que significaste pa' Rafael, ya las sufrió. Y por eso es la arrechera que tiene, adicionalmente, me imagino con Franklin [Durán] y con y con Carlos [Kauffman].

Maiónica: Chávez knows that you slipped through Ramírez' hands. He knows it. When Chávez calls Rangel it's because Ramírez showed your hand. And he told Ramírez, in front of Rangel, "He's gonna take charge of this situation." Antonini: He told him. Maiónica: Do you understand? So, all of the negative consequences that you represented for Rafael, he's already been through them. And that's why he's pissed about this in addition to, I think, with Franklin [Durán] and with and with Carlos [Kauffman].

So Rangel Silva was left in charge of getting the $2 million to Antonini in a way that could not be traced back to PDVSA, but at the same time would ensure Antonini effectively got the money and kept suitably mum. DISIP was, apparently, having a lot of trouble figuring out how to pull off the trick, and much of the conversation is a drawn out lament about how useless Venezuelan intelligence is.

When they're not complaining about DISIP, they're talking through the specific mechanics of how to pull off a payment with reasonable deniability. The transcript isn't quite definitive on this - bank details do get exchanged at one point, though it's not exactly clear what for. The overall impression I'm left with is that, at that point at least, they had ruled out using any kind of electronic means to wire the money from PDVSA to Antonini. It was too traceable.

Maiónica: Marico, es que, oyeme, no tienen como. Ellos no tienen como pagarte a ti. La unica ... manera en que Venezuela puede pagar algo con una cuenta de afuera es una transferencia abierta. Y PDVSA no te va a transferir a ti, huevon, eso es, esta clarito. Ni a ti ni a ninguna instruccion que tu des. Antonini: Claro. Maiónica: Y eso lo tienes que entender. Porque está de calle.

Maiónica: Dude, it's just that, listen, they don't have the means to do so. They have no way of paying you. The only way Venezuela can pay something with an outside account would be with is an open transfer. And PDVSA isn't going to transfer to you, dude, that's, it's clear ... for you or for any instructions you may give. Antonini: Of course. Maiónica: And you have to understand that. Because it's obvious.

Instead, Maiónica talks repeatedly about having a certain "Cristian" in Caracas go fetch Antonini's money. And later, he makes it clear that the "secret fund" the payment will come from is a cash stash:

Maiónica: Pero [funcionar en efectivo] es la unica ... estructura que ellos conocen y, y...ahora que hay miles, si, que tu y yo le pudierarnos dar una clase y enseñarles como, de pinga. Pero es que, no llego a ese nivel de confianza y ademas que, ¿qué hizo el Presidente? Le dijo a Rangel [Silva], "Tú te encargas de este pe'o y tú le pagas". Entonces Rangel tiene una partida secreta, su partida secreta es en dólares en efectivo y va a pagar. Eso es lo que va a hacer.

Maiónica: But [dealing in cash] is the only structure they know and, and... sure there are thousands [of things] that you and I could give them a class on, teach them how [to go about doing things]. Thing is, I'm not on that level of trust with them...plus, what did the president do? He told Rangel [Silva] "You take charge of this mess and you pay him." And Rangel has a secret fund, and his secret fund is in dollars in cash and he's going to pay. That's what he's going to do.

Which, when you put two-and-two together, sure makes it sound like chavismo's brilliant plan for keeping Maletagate quiet was to send a flunky to Miami with a suitcase full of 100 dollar bills to pay off Antonini!

It's the stuff of comedy this, and I could be misreading it...but it sure seems like this is what they were up to.

To be fair, both Antonini and Maiónica come across somewhat as outsiders to the Bolibourgeoisie...connected, yes, but far from the inner circle. The two talk about the government in the third person. Antonini portrays himself as an innocent bystander, wrongly done in for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and even suggests at one point that he didn't know the original plane to Argentina was carrying large amounts of cash when he got on it. This was a "vaina" (raw deal) David Uzcátegui had shoved off on him.

Maiónica doesn't dispute that characterization. He tells Antonini that, in his other life he's a corporate lawyer, dealing with mergers and acquisitions, corporate law, that kind of thing. Hell, the guy even says he's Alberto Vollmer's lawyer!

It's just that he happened to have a government contact. He was friends with a low-level PPT político, Juan Bracamontes, whom he got close to after - this is the kind of thing you just couldn't make up - Bracamontes stole a student election from Maiónica back in their college days. "We had a fight, which later turned into a friendship...now I'm Godfather to two of his children."

Apparently through Bracamontes, he later struck up a relationship with then vice-president Jorge Rodríguez, did a major bit of business with him, and that, in his telling, is the only reason he ended up getting roped in to intermediating in this whole mess with Antonini.

What's interesting is that the two really don't seem to have a very high opinion of the bolivarian government folk they're dealing with. There's a huge deal of mutual distrust. Much of the conversation revolves around the fact that Caracas wants Antonini to sign some kind of receipt for his bribe (!!!) and Antonini smells a rat. Maiónica says maybe he himself (Maiónica) can sign a sort of receipt on Antonini's behalf, so that Antonini doesn't have to incriminate himself, but this doesn't quite assuage Antonini's concerns:

Antonini: Pero fíjate tu, tú me dices que no tengo que firmar nada. Tú. Pero tú te pones a ver, o sea, tu amigo, o...o, alguien, el, el mastermind de todo esto, algo quería hacer con una firma mía...o sea, joderme. Maionica: No te iban a hacer nada. No, pana, estás equivocado. Lo que ellos no quieren es que yo me agarre un millón doscientos mil dolares y te entregue ochocientos. Eso es lo que ellos no quieren, huevón. Pero ese es el peo. Qué y con qué son ellos. Cada quien juzga por su condición. ¿Me entiendes? Y no digo Rangel Silva, Rangel es un gocho A-1. Pero es que si no [se firma un recibo] alguien va a pensar que el que se lo cogió fue Rangel. ¿Estás entendiéndome?

Antonini: But check it out, you tell me that I don't have to sign anything. You tell me that. But when you think about it, your buddy, or...or somebody, the the mastermind behind all this, wanted my signature for a reason...in other words, to screw me. Maiónica: They weren't going to do anything to you. No, buddy, you've got it all wrong. What they don't want is for me to pocket $1.2 million and hand over $800,000 to you. That's what they want to avoid, dude. And that's the rub: who they are and who they mix with. It takes one to know one, understand? And I don't mean Rangel Silva, Rangel is a top notch guy. Thing is that otherwise [without a receipt] somebody will end up thinking it was Rangel who grabbed the cash, are you following me?

This, I think, it's the single most jaw-dropping bit of the whole 4 hour transcript: Maiónica is shocked, shocked at the level of corruption in the Venezuelan government! It's so bad that you can't even serve as the go-between on a simple bribe without people assuming you'll do the normal thing and try to pocket the lion's share...it's comedic gold!

Nonetheless, they seem relieved to be dealing with Rangel rather than with Rafael Ramírez, whom both pour all kinds of scorn on. One of the lovely things about the transcript is that they are, after all, having lunch, so it still includes all kinds of table talk. At one point, as they're sharing an appetizer of fried calamari and talking about their frustrations with PDVSA, we get this gem:

Maionica: Yo lo que creo es que son unos imbéciles. De verdad de verdad. ¿Quieres limón? Antonini: um hm... Maiónica: Unos imbéciles, o sea, Rafael sobre todo... Antonini: No, estoy seguro que son es banana republic...

Maiónica: What I think is that they're a bunch of imbeciles. Really, really. You want some lemon? Antonini: uh huh... Maiónica: A bunch of imbeciles, I mean, especially Rafael... Antonini: Nah, I'm sure they're just banana republic...

Which, when you think about it, is pretty remarkable...even their criminal co-conspirators think the guys running PDVSA are useless!

I could go on. There are 155 pages of transcript, so these are just a few highlights. Some key bits are unfortunately unintelligible or inaudible, and through long stretches Antonini seems so agitated it's hard to make heads or tails of what he's saying. The two agree profusely that the one Venezuelan bureaucrat they can respect is Angel Morales, who runs PDVSA Sur (its Argentina + Uruguay subsidiary), and whom they call on the mobile at one point, speaking in a hysterically transparent medical code because they figure Morales's phone is tapped. (The 'prescription' means the receipt, the 'medicine' is the money, and Antonini is 'our sick cousin.')

Parts of it are startlingly personal. The two bond over their shared, humble Italian roots (Maiónica is a first generation Italo-venezolano - his dad is from Trieste - Antonini's third generation - greatgrandpa was a Florentine). They talk about Antonini's relationship with Franklin Durán (he says that, when they first met, Durán was too poor to date respectable La Victoria girls), about their favorite shops, their new watches, their iPhones and Blackberries and Porsches and Mercedeses, about the strain the whole situation is placing on Antonini's family life, how his little daughter is pissed at him because he couldn't go see her school play, about the reporters camped out on his front lawn and Andrés Oppenheimer's repeated, in-person attempts to get him to give a tell-all interview.

In other words, there's way more material here than I can cover...and this is just one out of over 200 recordings the FBI made!

It reads, at times, like the script for a thriller, at others like the kind of conversation you have day in and day out with friends and associates, interrupted now and again by a bumbling waiter. By the end, it all seems so very natural, you get so drawn into the text, you almost forget what's really going on...until Maiónica gets up to have a pee and Antonini breaks the illussion by talking straight into his wire, addressing the FBI guy who's recording the whole thing from a van outside.

Ahhhh, maletagate! It's the gift that keeps on giving!

Chavismo: Guaranteeing total impunity since 1999

Quico says: It seems like ages ago (and it was), but I remember it vividly. Back in those first few months of '99, I genuinely was on the fence about Chávez. I was never a supporter, really, but it did seem to me that flying straight into opposition would be a mistake: too many hopes had been invested, too much energy had been amassed. And absolutely everybody could see the country was in dire need of a shakeup. It made no sense to nay-say from the start.

Chávez had run, basically, on an anti-corruption ticket, and this struck me as a source of real hope. Too many old regime figures had stolen too much money with too much impunity, and it seemed to me that there was no way forward until that rancid history was faced squarely and dealt with punitively.

In speech after speech, the young president vehemently echoed this sentiment. So I sat and waited for the trials to begin. I scoured the papers for news of investigations, fantasizing of turning on the news and seeing Carmelo Lauría doing a perp-walk, or footage of David Morales Bello's house raided by PTJ. It seemed obvious to me that these kinds of images were bound to come sooner rather than later. Chávez kept slamming hard the "40 years of corruption", and I took it for granted the reality was bound to catch up with the discourse sooner or later. Right?

It was 1999. I was young. There was a lot I didn't understand. I couldn't start to wrap my mind around what was really happening, around the possibility that the government could make the gap between discourse and reality permanent, seeing it as an asset rather than a liability.

The investigations never came, of course. And neither did the trials. Some of the perps scurried off to Miami and San José to spend more time with their loot, others were quietly assimilated into the new governing elite.

Towards the end of 1999 it all clicked for me. I grasped clearly for the first time that there would be no trials, that there would be no honest coming-to-terms with the past, because these things were not in the government's interest. That anti-corruption would remain what it has always been, under Chávez and those who came before him: a slogan, a rhetorical strategy divorced from any serious intent to act and, worse, deployed cynically to cover up one's own pattern of graft.

Nine years on, the Maletagate Trial in Miami is giving us a detailed look at the absurdum that Chávez's anti-corruption rhetoric has been reductio'd to. The revolution slowly morphed into a criminal conspiracy, a place where an absolute nullity like Franklin Durán can make a few million dollars on sweetheart deals with the Finance Ministry, buy a major petrochemical firm, become one of the country's leading industrialists, but continue to make the bulk of his money off of bribes and kickbacks for state contracts, in plain view, and with absolute impunity - until he made the rookie mistake of going to Miami, where his higher-ups can't protect him. A country where reams upon reams of evidence can build up showing that the head of the state-owned oil company is illegally siphoning off public money to illegally fund foreign election campaigns, all in plain view, without anyone seriously expecting the official to resign, or even to betray any hint of being aware that he's busted, much less get investigated, prosecuted and thrown in jail where he belongs.

The seeds of today's debauchery were sown a long time ago. When, in defiance of his own wildly popular rhetoric, Hugo Chávez let the old elite get away with decades of plunder without a single high-profile trial, he not so subtly signalled to his supporters his own lack of seriousness on corruption.

After all, if Chávez wouldn't go after his political enemies, against people he made a sport of demonizing, who could seriously believe he would go after his allies? Nobody.

And not, certainly, Franklin Durán.