A Policy Memo on Venezuela for President-Elect Obama

Memo

To: President-elect Barack Obama
From: Francisco Toro and Juan Cristobal Nagel
Date: November 7th, 2008
Subject: How to prudently engage Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez

Over the next four years, managing relations with Venezuela is likely to be the greatest challenge you will face in the Western Hemisphere. While Venezuela certainly does not present a geo-strategic challenge on a scale comparable to Russia, the Middle East or Afghanistan, your success in handling relations with Venezuela will have strong spill-over effects in the rest of the region.

US influence over Venezuelan affairs is limited. The United States cannot, and should not try to, fix what ails our country. It must, however, heed Galen's old maxim: "first, do no harm." Regrettably, over the last eight years, US policy in Venezuela has failed to clear even this bar. Again and again, the Bush administration had played into President Chávez's hands, not only boosting his hemispheric stature but unwittingly helping to entrench his autocratic control over Venezuelan society.

Your campaign pledge to negotiate directly with leaders such as President Chávez has already laid the groundwork for a departure from the failed Bush approach. In recent days President Chávez has also signaled his willingness to explore a rapprochement with the US. A significant opportunity is at hand, one that calls for a subtle and imaginative diplomatic approach.

In this memo, I'll lay out a brief assessment of the situation in Venezuela today, and propose some broad guides to a policy of prudent engagement able to overcome the shortcomings of the existing approach and serve US interests in the region. The memo proceeds in four parts:

1. The Nature of the Chávez Regime
2. US Policy Towards Venezuela: the Change we Need
3. Prudent Engagement and US Strategic Interests
4. The Risks of Prudent Engagement

1. The Nature of the Chávez Regime
The first thing to understand about Venezuela is that overheated political rhetoric is in the process of overtaking crude oil as our number one export. Egged on by President Chávez's incendiary rhetoric, both the left and the right have seriously overstated the regime's virtues and its vices.

The urge to stuff the Chávez experiment into a mold made understandable by history has been intense and too seldom resisted. But Chávez's Venezuela is not Castro's Cuba. It isn't Arbenz's Guatemala or Allende's Chile, and it is certainly not Social Democratic Sweden. Venezuela today is a hybrid regime: far from a fully functioning democracy, farther still from totalitarian dictatorship.

In essence, Venezuela today remains what it has been for more than seven decades: a populist petrostate. Venezuelans conceive of politics as a competition between political actors for control of the nation's oil wealth, which is under state control. As in other petrostates, political actors in Venezuela use populist rhetoric to gain control of the state. Once they've secured it, they seek to maintain it through oil-funded patronage, all the while appropriating ever greater shares of it for themselves and their cronies both in the public sector and in the rump, state-dependent private sector. This appropriation comes to be resented by excluded constituencies. In time, a new populist challenger emerges, plays on disgust with the existing elite's corruption, and wrests power for itself on the back of a renewed populist discourse.

This cycle has played out, with minor differences, no less than five times in the years since oil came to dominate Venezuela's economy (1936, 1945, 1948, 1958, 1998). It has brought to power governments of the left, right and center. The Chávez Government is best understood as the latest iteration of this cycle, not as a radical departure from it.

Between 1958 and 1998, the governing elite managed to put something of a democratic façade on the basic political economy of petrostate populism, helping create a middle class, and enabling the (very partial) beginnings of the division of powers and of a sense of state accountability to its citizens. Since President Chávez's rise to power in 1999, that tentative advance towards democratic institutionalization has been almost entirely reversed, replaced with an autocratic populism that barely pays lip service to constitutional norms.

Chavismo amounts to an autocratic re-interpretation of petrostate populism. The name of the game is still to allow a new governing elite to appropriate oil rents while relying on populist spending to keep the masses quiescent. The difference is that this is now being done without any meaningful checks on executive power, by a leader who has grown progressively bolder in his willingness to abuse state power to maintain his power. The resulting system is extremely top heavy, with all important (and many not-so-important) decisions being made by an emotional, inconsistent leader facing no significant checks on his power.

Along the way, Venezuela's democratic institutions have been almost completely gutted. But what has replaced them is no traditional dictatorship. In sustaining its grip on power, the Chávez government has relied much more often on mobilizing the state's economic dominance to systematically buy the allegiance of key constituencies than on the use of its repressive capabilities. Sporadic violence and selective harassment of dissident voices is a clear and growing feature of the Chávez state system, yet political ideas still circulate quite freely throughout the country, both through the media and in the face-to-face political discussions that have become something of a national pastime. While the state has found ways to disqualify selected opponents from running for public office, thousands of Venezuelan politicians still compete openly against chavismo at all levels in elections that are, if not truly free and fair, not openly rigged either.

Chavista authoritarianism is both real and partial. Its primary means for dealing with dissent is to ignore it and smear those who voice it as imperialist stooges, rather than to jail or murder them. It relies much more on intimidation than on state violence, much more on the abuse of state funds for partisan gains than on systematic repression. In short, the government President Chávez leads always seems happiest operating in that muddled space between outright tyranny and proper democracy. That is Venezuela as it is.

Venezuela as President Chávez talks about it is something else altogether. In official rhetoric, Venezuela is in the midst of a top-to-bottom socialist revolution stalked at every turn by a wide-ranging US conspiracy to destabilize it and, eventually, overthrow it. President Chávez's rhetorical strategy has relied heavily on strident "us vs. them" rhetoric that identifies American Imperialism with capital-e Evil and blames all problems, large and small, on the meddling of an imperial White House terrified by the prospect that his socialist revolution might spread throughout the hemisphere.

There's an unmistakable air of unreality to President Chávez's discourse. It stems from its anachronistic application of cold war categories to a vastly changed geopolitical scene. Needless to say, Venezuela will not be the "first domino". Its petro-dependent political economy simply cannot be replicated in countries that lack Venezuela's seemingly endless stream of natural resource rents. Chavista discourse must not be mistaken for a description of hemispheric politics as they actually are. Instead, it must be grasped clearly for what it is: a source of legitimacy for autocratic policies aimed at internal control.

Anti-US rhetoric has long been President Chávez's preferred means for marginalizing and de-legitimizing expressions of dissent within Venezuela. While, as I'm sure the CIA will tell you in detail when they brief you, US involvement in the Venezuelan political process has been marginal over the last ten years, the threat - real or imagined - of US meddling has proven invaluable to President Chávez in justifying the dismantling of the fledgling democratic institutions the country had built in the years before he came to power.

The most important contribution you could have made to blunting the impact of this rhetorical strategy is the one you've already made: simply by being elected, you have already defused much of the prima facie credibility of President Chávez's anti-US posturing. Anti-imperialist histrionics cannot pass the snicker test in the context of an Obama administration.

In the coming months, President Chávez will have a choice to make. Either he will seek to apply to you the kind of incendiary rhetoric he has long reserved for President Bush, or he will seek to engage you. On the eve of your election, as well as on election night itself, he made public statements suggesting he is now leaning towards engagement. Encouragingly, he appears to be aware that any attempt to run the anti-imperialist playbook against you would simply lack credibility. This presents an opportunity for you to re-define US-Venezuela relations along more cooperative and productive lines by prudently engaging the Chávez government.

The risks of such a strategy should not be understated. Pursuing a rapprochement with the United States would deprive President Chávez of one of his most important legitimizing discourses, and one of his most fruitful rhetorical strategies for justifying autocratic policies at home. In important ways, President Chávez needs the space for autocratic rule that anti-imperialist rhetoric has secured for him.

A key goal of prudent engagement, therefore, will be to raise the costs to him of continuing to rely on anti-US rhetoric as a legitimizing discourse for autocratic governance, while lowering the costs to him of engaging with your administration.

2. US Policy Towards Venezuela: The Change We Need
Since the abortive 47 hour coup against President Chávez in April 2002, the Bush administration has pursued a three-pronged policy towards Venezuela.

First, it has tried to disengage from the Venezuelan government, avoiding becoming embroiled in the wars-of-words President Chávez has tried to provoke over the years, while seeking (mostly unsuccessfully) to maintain low-level cooperation on selected issues such as drug trafficking.

Secondly, it has sought to isolate Venezuela internationally, maneuvering (successfully) to keep Venezuela off the UN Security Council and (unsuccessfully at times) urging other countries in the hemisphere to keep their distance from Chávez.

Finally, it has sought to support Venezuelan civil society, providing direct support to opposition-minded pro-democracy and good-governance organizations through the National Endowment for Democracy and the Office for Transition Initiatives.

This policy mix has failed on all three counts. Efforts to disengage from the Venezuelan government have not prevented Chávez from making a leitmotif of anti-US rhetoric, and counter-narcotics cooperation has broken down completely. Efforts to isolate Chávez regionally have failed because the US has quite simply been outspent, with Venezuela's petro-fueled regional aid initiatives dwarfing the US aid budget for the Latin America by a wide margin.

But the most damaging aspect of the Bush approach has been the final one: its effort to fund Venezuelan civil society groups has backfired catastrophically, boosting the credibility of President Chávez's claims that American Imperialism is out to topple him and undermining the effectiveness of the pro-democracy civil society groups targeted for support.

I urge you to reverse the Bush approach through a policy that engages the Venezuelan leadership directly (in keeping with your campaign promise of tough direct diplomacy), goes head-to-head with Venezuela in the "hemispheric aid race", and discontinues direct support for opposition-minded civil society groups.

i. Engaging the Venezuelan Leadership
The first element in a policy of prudent engagement would be to repair the tattered high-level links between our two countries.

This will require some deft diplomacy. As we Venezuelans have had abundant chance to realize over the last ten years, the president simply will not accept any overture from those who continue criticize him explicitly. President Chávez exhibits clear signs of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and can be expected to respond to any perceived slight or criticism, however mild, with a torrent of abuse. Finding the right mix of words to explain the policy of prudent engagement to the American people without undermining the process by setting off President Chávez's narcissist rage will be one of the key challenges you will face in prudently engaging him. The "entry price" of a policy of prudent engagement will therefore be distasteful but necessary: a moratorium on your part on public criticism of him or his government.

While Chávez is famously intolerant of criticism, he is just as enamored of grand symbolic gestures. Prudent engagement must be cognizant of both of these realities. In symbolically turning the page, you should consider giving a high-profile speech that cites Simón Bolívar, forthrightly disavows any tacit or active US support for the April 2002 coup and stresses the common ground between the US and Venezuelan constitutions. You should pledge to discontinue direct support for Venezuelan civil society groups that the government perceives as subversive, as this may be needed to convince President Chávez of your bona fides. (As we will see, such a move would be advisable for other reasons as well)

To engage the Venezuelan leadership, you will need to reassure President Chávez of your intention to respect Venezuelan sovereignty and conduct a rapprochement on the basis of your personal respect towards him and of our two countries' constitutions and of international law. Through lower-level contacts, you should urge Chávez to reciprocate such gestures by, for instance, re-instating full cooperation with US counternarcotics operations, welcoming a US military attaché to Venezuela's main army base at Fuerte Tiuna, and allowing the FAA access to Venezuela's international airports to conduct safety checks. Such moves could defuse much of the tension that has accumulated in US-Venezuela relations over the last several years.

It bears noting here that the single most powerful symbolic move the US could make in reengaging the Venezuelan leadership has nothing to do with Venezuela itself: lifting or substantially weakening the embargo against Cuba. An assessment of the profound impact such a move would have on Cuba and on the region as a whole, not to mention its implications for the United States itself, is well beyond the scope of this note. Within Venezuela, however, it would be greeted as a dramatic demonstration that your administration is absolutely serious about re-engaging the region.

ii. Taking Venezuela on in the Hemispheric Aid Race
Venezuela's growing influence in the Americas over the last six years has been built on the twin pillars of the Bush administration's overall disinterest in the region and Venezuela's petro-funded largesse. Latin American leaders hard-pressed to balance their budgets can hardly be faulted for accepting the substantial sums in aid and easy credit that President Chávez has spread around the hemisphere, and have not failed to note the contrast between Venezuelan largesse and US thrift.

At less than $1 billion per year, US AID's development aid budget for the region has been a mere fraction of the $30 billion that, by some estimates, Venezuela has pledged to support friendly governments since 2002. Venezuelan aid has meant not just big money, but easy money as well. It comes with no strings attached, no demands for oversight or accountability, and is extended discretionally, on the president's orders, bypassing the usual bureaucratic holdups implied by parliamentary control over public spending. Venezuelan aid is highly attractive in part because it carries minimal hassle for recipients and offers handsome opportunities for corruption by the officials charged with handling it.

Honduras' president Zelaya's decision to join Chávez's "Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas" scheme earlier this year underlines the failure of the US to keep even moderate governments on side in the face of the chavista spending spree. The road to leadership in the hemisphere passes through its leaders pocketbooks, and the US has been AWOL from this competition over the last several years.

A substantial increase in development aid to the hemisphere would quietly underline the reality that Venezuela does not have the monopoly on cocern over the region's development prospects. Coming at a time when falling oil prices will pinch Venezuela's own foreign spending, your administration could find it relatively inexpensive to match Venezuela in the Hemispheric Aid Race.

iii. Disengaging from Venezuelan Civil Society
The final plank of a policy of prudent engagement would reinvigorate Venezuela's pro-democracy movement as well as serving as a powerful symbol to sustain its first plank: ending support for groups that the Venezuelan government views (fairly or unfairly - mostly unfairly) as subversive.

The policy of funding opposition-minded civil society groups through the NED and the OTI has been worse than ineffective, it has been deeply damaging. The meme that such funding is part of an imperialist conspiracy to destabilize the Chávez government is now deeply entrenched among the president's followers. The government has whipped up and exploited this interpretation as a way to delegitimize and marginalize not only those organizations that in fact receive US taxpayer money, but every organization that dares criticize President Chávez, on the theory that publicly reported NED and OTI funding must be the tip of the CIA destabilization iceberg.

In short, the policy has allowed President Chávez to attack as treasonous any and every expression of dissent, from bus drivers' unions striking over rampant crime to neighborhood groups protesting for better access to drinking water. The strategic use of anti-yanqui paranoia to justify the government's failures has been stretched to truly belief beggaring extremes, such as the recent statement by Venezuelan public health officials that an outbreak of dengue fever in rural Zulia State may have been part of a CIA biological warfare plan. Such accusations may strike you as far-fetched - and indeed they are - but within Venezuela they gain some measure of verisimilitude from the fact that the United States truly has supported civil society groups that are alligned with the domestic opposition.

The State Department is well aware of the problems that NED and OTI funding have caused for recipient organizations, so much so that the US Embassy in Caracas has gone to some lengths in recent years to downplay its own role in funding civil society groups. It now habitually advises aid recipients to solicit at least small donations from a wide range of other developed country aid organizations as well, to protect recipients from the perception that they amount to Imperialist fronts. These efforts have met with very limited success in deflecting the government's delegitimizing discourse.

The downside of the current NED-OTI approach is plain, but the upside hard to pinpoint. The trickle of funding that has in fact been made available to Venezuelan civil society groups has come nowhere near bridging the massive funding gap between pro-government organizations - which are on the receiving end of literally billions of petrodollars - and opposition-minded civil society groups receiving a tiny fraction of those sums.

So while NED and OTI funding has suited chavismo quite nicely, it has served neither the US interest, nor the interests of Venezuelan civil society. Instead, it has created a cohort of aid-dependent NGOs that are increasingly decoupled from their "natural" sources of funding in Venezuelan civil society itself.

There is no reason why Venezuelans could not fund our civil society groups ourselves. Venezuelan capital fled the country en masse in the immediate aftermath of President Chávez's rise to the presidency in 1999, and today sits in brokerage accounts controlled by displaced members of the former elite in US and offshore accounts. It is this resource pool that should be funding the activities of opposition-minded NGOs. The easy availability of foreign funding has left Venezuelan civil society groups with relatively little reason to exploit such funding possibilities. If these groups do not command the respect it would take for Venezuelans ourselves to invest in them, it is not at all clear why US taxpayers should be left to pick up the tab.

Change will come in Venezuela when Venezuelans ourselves learn ways to fund and sustain a vibrant pro-democracy movement able to mount a robust challenge to autocratic petrostate populism. No amount of US money can substitute for that process, and instead, may well short circuit it.

In short, direct US support for Venezuelan civil society is a failed policy. Prudent engagement with the Venezuelan leadership demands that such funding be discontinued, and be seen to be discontinued.

3. Prudent Engagement and US Strategic Interests
There are four reasons for the US to be concerned about what happens in Venezuela: energy, Colombia, the US's standing in the hemisphere, and support for Venezuelan democratization. Prudent engagement would further US interests in all four areas:

i. Energy.
First the good news: Venezuela is virtually certain to continue to supply oil to the world market, even in the most extreme circumstances. Threats to suspend shipments of oil to the US ring hollow: with 94% of the country's export earnings coming directly from oil sales, Venezuela has no viable alternative. The question for the US is whether Venezuela will supply increasing quantities of oil to the world market, and how much of the new production will be carried out by US firms.

The Chávez government has already announced it will auction off rights worth up to 30% of a series of ventures in the Orinoco Tar Belt holding some 62 billion barrels. Prudent engagement could help ensure US firms obtain at least some of those partnerships, which are absolutely vital to expanding Venezuela's production capacity over the next 10 years. Securing increased participation by US firms in the Venezuelan oil sector could be both an outcome of prudent engagement, and a guarantee against chavista backsliding from it. But even if prudent engagement fails, it is very likely that other firms - most likely state owned enterprises from nations politically aligned with President Chávez - will take up the slack, ensuring those additional barrels reach world markets anyway. In terms of energy, then, there is relatively little for the US either to gain or to lose from a policy of prudent engagement.

ii. Colombia
Sharing a long and porous border with Colombia, what happens in Venezuela has a direct impact on US interests in that country, including fighting FARC guerrillas and narcotics trafficking, and supporting Human Rights in Colombia.

Encouragingly, the FARC appears to be on the verge of collapse, unable to adapt to the new techniques employed by the US aided Colombian counter-insurgency effort. However, it will remain almost impossible for the Colombian government to finally end the FARC's four-decade long insurgency so long as the rebels are able to melt back across the Venezuelan border for training, supplies, narcotic export routes, R&R, racketeering and kidnapping revenues, and to escape military pursuit. Venezuelan support is FARC's last remaining lifeline, and it will be impossible to secure Venezuelan cooperation in the fight against FARC so long as Colombia is perceived as a US pawn, and the US is perceived as a hostile power.

Prudent engagement with the Venezuelan leadership could help alter this dynamic, by leading to sustained Venezuelan cooperation in both the fight against FARC and against drug trafficking more generally. In this regard, it helps that President Chávez's relationships with a weakened FARC appear to be strained at the moment, after the disastrous failure of his attempt to mediate to free FARC hostages earlier this year. Like many outsiders before him, President Chávez has found dealing with FARC an exercise in frustration, and the Colombian intelligence community's substantial advances in infiltrating FARC, disrupting its internal communications, provoking mass defections and killing or capturing its top leaders has left President Chávez leery of "backing the wrong horse" in Colombia.

Prudent engagement could provide the political cover President Chávez needs to cooperate earnestly with Colombia's counterinsurgency efforts, a pre-requisite to finally defeating FARC. Moreover, the final defeat of FARC could have major implications for the dire human rights situation in Colombia, where Human Rights abuses have typically been a byproduct of the military's frustration at its inability to finally defeat the rebels.

On narcotics more generally, the potential payoffs from prudent engagement are dimmed by reports of involvement by Venezuelan military personnel at the highest level in trafficking operations. The DEA will certainly be able to brief you on this aspect in much more detail than I am able to. Nonetheless, prudent engagement could lead to a loss of "official cover" for Venezuelan military personnel currently engaged in drug trafficking, and could help reduce the flow of narcotics along increasingly active Colombia-Venezuela-Caribbean-US trafficking routes.

iii. US leadership in the Americas
As an incoming US president, you will inevitably inherit over a century's worth of resentments and old historical grudges accumulated throughout the long and inglorious history of the Monroe Doctrine, particularly in the aggressive form it took during the Cold War. In the wake of the almost universal distaste with which your predecessor has been viewed throughout the region, your election to the presidency has already significantly changed the atmospherics of Latin America's relationship with the United States. Your administration will have a unique, even historic, opportunity to rehabilitate the US's image and renew its leadership in the hemisphere. Needless to say, however, your image alone will not be enough to close these old wounds.

Prudent engagement with the Venezuelan leadership will help defuse the us vs. them, anti-US mindset long peddled by Castro's Cuba, and more recently by Chávez's Venezuela. This vision, pitting north vs. south, remains one of the dominant frames through which Latin Americans interpret their historical experience. The sight of a working relationship between the hemispheric hegemon and its erstwhile number one scourge would go a long ways towards defusing the influence of that frame. Together with a new commitment to development aid and a symbolic break with the US's interventionist past in the region, prudent engagement with the Venezuelan leadership could greatly enhance the US's standing and influence in the region.

iv. Supporting Venezuelan democracy
As a Venezuelan, this is the aspect that matters most to me personally. Prudent engagement would blunt the effectiveness of the Chávez government's preferred battering ram against Venezuela's constitutional democracy and its champions. By lifting the generalized veil of suspicion with which chavismo now views any and every expression of dissent, disengaging from Venezuelan civil society could help bolster the credibility and effectiveness of Venezuelan civil society organizations.

By taking the "pawn of empire" card out of the government's rhetorical repertoire, it could allow for a gradual recovery of the Venezuelan public sphere, de-escalating the destructively polarized atmosphere that has come to dominate Venezuelan public life. If relations improve sufficiently, the US could gain enough leverage by 2012 to exert meaningful pressure for President Chávez not to seek to amend the constitution to seek a third term, helping nudge the country back towards some version of democratic normality. And by bolstering the US leadership role in the hemisphere, relative to chavismo's, it could diminish the chances that other Latin American people will have to live through the trauma of seeing their democracies trashed at the hands of a populist autocrat.

4. The Risks of Prudent Engagement
While the Chávez government has recently expressed some openness to dialogue and engagement with your incoming administration, his governing style remains highly volatile, emotionally driven and erratic. There is a significant chance of policy reversals on his part. Anti-US rhetoric has become a central meme for Chavismo, and it is not immediately clear whether the president will be prepared to give it up, or able to maintain control over society if he does.

Venezuela faces a serious fiscal squeeze over the next several years, as falling oil prices hit public sector revenues directly. In the past, the "bust" part of the oil commodity cycle has typically been associated with sharp rises in social conflict in Venezuela, as various constituency jockey to maintain their share of a shrinking resource pie. President Chávez could find it hard to manage this rising tide of social conflict without recourse to his old habit of delegitimating dissent by pegging it to US destabilization plots. It will require considerable diplomatic skill to talk President Chávez off the ledge when old habits reassert themselves, and there is a real possibility that he will finally reject any engagement overtures, most likely by manufacturing a reason to histrionically storm out of an engagement process.

However, President Chávez will be aware that such an approach risks an outcome that 6 years of diplomatic maneuvering by the Bush administration failed to secure: international isolation. Inartfully done, rebuffing a good faith overture from a popular new democratic president could fatally undermine his own credibility within the country and throughout the region, putting an end to his longstanding ambition for hemispheric leadership. A key goal the policy of prudent engagement, therefore, is to ensure that its failure would be more costly to President Chávez than to yourself.

In closing, I urge you to be aware of the very real limits of US influence over Venezuela. The US cannot, and should not try to, influence Venezuelan internal affairs directly. Your administration can, however, adopt policies that raises the costs to President Chávez of casting the US in the role of all-purpose villain and cause of all of the nation's ills. If successful, it would deprive President Chávez of a key source of political legitimacy and his chief rationalization for autocratic policies, easing the way to Venezuela's return to democracy while helping realize the US's strategic goals in the energy sector, in Colombia, and in the hemisphere as a whole.

Simon Romero's Petare Election Night

Quico says: From the New York Times' politics blog:

CARACAS, Venezuela | By Simon Romero The sputtering bus inched its way up the streets of Petare, this city’s largest slum, delivering its passengers in front of Vecinito, Enrique Cisneros’s corner store. Salsa blared from loudspeakers perched nearby on the stoops of cinderblock hovels.

“Pull up a seat, we’re celebrating tonight,” said Mr. Cisneros, 37, opening a bottle of Blender’s Pride whiskey. He poured the spirit into plastic cups, mixed in some orange juice, and declared to his guests, “The United States is choosing a black man as its president. Maybe we can share a bit in this happiness.”

His guests Tuesday night included a schoolteacher, a shoe factory worker, an accountant’s assistant, a telephone operator and a couple of foreign journalists. They sipped Mr. Cisneros’s concoction or nursed Polar Ice beers and engaged in Venezuela’s top pastime: political debate.

“This is the first American election I can remember in my lifetime that I was eager to witness,” said Armando Díaz, 24, who works at Movistar, a cellphone company here.

“Before, we’d just switch the channel to baseball,” said Mr. Díaz, gazing at a television announcer on Globovisión and wrapping Venezuelan rapid-fire Spanish around the names of states like Connecticut and Rhode Island. “It’s kind of nice to feel good about the United States again.”

As they do in almost any gathering here in which people examine the toxicity of Venezuelan political life, in this instance through the lens of the election of Barack Obama as president, jokes ensued.

Sitting under a poster of a playful painting by Carlos Cruz-Díez, a kinetic artist, most of those present proudly identified themselves as “pitiyanquis,” or petite yanquis, thus appropriating a vitriolic insult used with increasing frequency by President Hugo Chávez to describe his opponents.

“I wonder if Chávez can stop referring to the United States with such hatred, if only for a few days,” said Lucy Martínez, 44, a teacher at a primary school in Petare. “It would be nice to get a break from that.”

As if on cue, Globovisión shifted its broadcast to focus on a political cartoon from Tuesday’s newspapers here, showing an image of Mr. Chávez and the headline “Anti-Imperial Discourse,” under a smaller photo of Mr. Obama next to the words, “Expiration Date, 11/4.”

In other words, the bugaboo that the Bush administration has been for Mr. Chávez may be fading.

As night engulfed the streets outside Vecinito, revelers rejoiced. As slums go, this area of Petare, called La Montañita, was not so bad, they claimed. Many of its residents were working class or middle class, struggling to rise in life. They all agreed their most pressing concern was with violent crime.

“Sometimes the police don’t arrive for an entire day to pick up the body after someone is shot dead on the street,” said Yamile Contreras, 30, a telephone operator with hair dyed about a shade lighter than Marilyn Monroe’s. “Is it true New York was once this violent?”

Then they turned the tables on their journalist guests, peppering them with more questions about American oddities like its electoral college. (Is that democratic?) They asked when America’s distant wars would come to an end. They asked whether America was in a recession or a depression.

Bidding farewell after an evening filled with awe over the events unfolding in the United States, those gathered at Vecinito embraced each other and piled their visitors and Mr. Cisneros, the owner of the corner store, into a bandit taxi parked outside.

Ear-splitting salsa blared again from the speakers of the car, an astonishingly large 1982 Chevrolet Malibu without seat belts. “I love American cars,” the taxi driver said as he drove on Petare’s maze of streets, which were still buzzing with pedestrian activity past midnight. Motorcycles whizzed by in the Caribbean night.

“A few hours ago,” said Mr. Cisneros, “the world felt like a different place.”

A historic day for the people of the United States

Quico says: November 4th, 2008, will forever be remembered as a turning point in the history of the United States of America. For on this day, after a journey of thousands of miles and many many tribulations, Juan Cristobal Nagel, Katy, and the girls move to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Congratulations, Immigrant Elect Nagel!

Annals of Counterproductive Propaganda

Quico says: It has come to this. Apparently, the latest good gone AWOL from Venezuelan store shelves is...wait for it...coffee! Scarcity hasn't been this ironic since the Great Newcastle Coal Drought of 1872.

When you do find it, I'm told, it's in tiny increments, sold in plain paper bags from behind the counter, in hushed tones and at exorbitant black market prices. Like cocaine, only black.

It's funny how different shortages hit different people in different ways. Personally, I couldn't get worked up about the milk shortage earlier this year: I have no kids, take my coffee black, and I don't really bake. But...but coffee?! How can society even function without it?

Which is why, when I saw this Ministry of Information press release headlined "Un cafecito con el pueblo", I figured I was in for a bit of propaganda push back, where Minci would demand we believe what they have to say about coffee availability rather than believing the imperialist, coup-plotting media or, y'know, our lyin' eyes.

But not even. Turns out it was just a straight up and down Chávez-Man-of-the-People fluff piece about el comandante turning up unannounced at a Caracas city center cafeteria and sharing a cup of joe with the star struck regulars as they "chatted about their experiences and aspiration within the socialist society that is currently being built."

Ermmmm...how out of touch are these people!? Couldn't they have talked him into doing "una empanadita con el pueblo"? Did they have to construct their little dithyramb around the one product you have to sweat blood to find in Venezuela these days? Honestly, what possible advantage do they think they get from rubbing it in?

Guilty

Quico says: Franklin Durán, see ya in 15 years...

Killer fact

Quico says: Between the first half of 2003 and the first half of this year, Venezuelan imports rose 322%!


Over that period, imports grew nearly twice as fast as aggregate demand (39%/year vs. 21%/year.)

...and Chávez still managed to lose a referendum at the very peak of the import boom!

Source: ODH Grupo Consultor.

Bizarro World: Petroleum Sovereignty Edition

Quico says: That's it. I officially no longer understand anything that happens in Venezuela anymore.

This week, Chávez moved to nationalize Helvesa, a company that makes pipes for the oil sector, on grounds of "full petroleum sovereignty," while at the same time starting the process to auction off rights over fields holding 62 billion barrels of extra heavy crude to foreign oil companies: a kind of "stealth apertura" with participants including BP, Chevron, ENI, Mitsui, Shell, StatoilHydro, Total, and Vinccler.

For chavistas, the pipelines are strategic. The oil they carry? Not so much...

And another thing: bizarre as the government's actions are, the foreign oil companies baffle me even more. Some reaction from the Petroleumworld write-up:

After the presentation of the project, Petroleumworld talked to various CEOs of the local operations of the majors oil companies and they all were impressed with the project.

Wes Lohec, president of Chevron's Venezuela told Petroleumworld "I think it looks to be very successful.''

"An outstanding project, we are looking to evaluating the data," Luis Prado, president of Shell Venezuela told Petroleumworld.

Erm, ummm, Wes, Luis...how to put this delicately?...are you out of your fucking minds?!?

You're going to sink a bunch of money into these projects and then you're going to get expropriated...again!

It's not even subtle what they're doing.

Annals of Suggestive Headline Writing

ABN: Venezuela and Cuba Exchange Animals.

¿Qué?!

Quico says: One nice thing about living in Holland is that I'm close enough to England to pick up the BBC's radio and TV broadcasts.

It's a balm. With its fixation on high production values, its fanatical refusal to take any BS from politicians, ever, its parallel dedication to very silly comedy and devil-make-care-if-this-comes-across-as-elitist cultural programing and (of course), David Attenborough, the BBC really is a kind of shining beacon on a hill, a day-by-day demonstration of what can be done with public sector broadcasting when professional standards are continuously tended to and political independence jealously guarded.

These days, as the crazy US presidential race lures me back to more and more US-American news sites, the contrast between the two broadcasting cultures has hit me upside the head all over again. Seriously, a few years of dedicated beeb listening left me totally unprepared for the tsunami of nattering idiocy that passes for political coverage in the US.

(Not, of course, that the BBC doesn't step on its own testicle every now-and-then, witness this furious row-cum-editorial pogrom over some deliriously bad-taste prank calls to Andrew Sachs (a.k.a., Manuel from Fawlty Towers) about his granddaughter's pulchritude...but I digress...)

The reason I bring up the BBC is that yesterday, in one of its signature we-don't-actually-care-if-this-is-too-high-fallutin'-for-you radio programs, the beeb ran a forty minute crash course on Simón Bolívar on its History of Ideas series, In our Time. Like most things on Radio 4, it's well worth a listen.

I've long had this feeling that the Real Bolívar is oddly inaccessible for present day Venezuelans. Mythologized and re-mythologized and then mythologized s'more by 178 years' worth of hucksters, dictators and wannabes of the left-right-and-center, the actual flesh and blood man behind the avenida, the plaza, the bank note, the bank and, hell, the name of the damn country, has more or less vanished.

Sucked dry by the legitimacy-vampirism of Guzmán Blanco, of Gómez, of Betancourt and of él que te conté, Bolívar-the-man has entered a weird kind of cultural netherspace. We know nothing about the person they're meant to all agree personifies our nation. The average Venezuelan probably hears the word "Bolívar" (or its derivatives - Bolivia, bolivarian, bolibourgeois, etc.) fifty times a day - often enough for the referent to fade entirely out of sight.

In Venezuela, Bolívar is the ultimate Empty Signifier.

When the historical Bolívar is acknowledged, it is almost always in vague, reverential (if not deifying) tones. Critical appraisal is limited to a broad acknowledgement of the inhumanity of his War onto Death decree and the execution of Piar, themselves highly ritualized as "safe" territory for Bolívar criticism. It is criticism within the cult; criticism divorced from insight.

Which is why, paradoxically, in order to gain some sense of the man behind the myth, you're almost forced to go outside Venezuela, and why this BBC show is so valuable. How often have you heard it acknowledged that Bolívar stayed in his room sulking rather than actually attending Napoleon's coronation? How often have you heard the Monte Sacro Vow placed in the strategic context of great power competition around Spain's ongoing war with England? Or that some of the British volunteers in the Campaña Admirable were so disgusted with his leadership they preferred indentured servitude in the Caribbean to continuing to fight for him? As Manuel himself might say...¿Qué!?

These facts fall outside the heroic arc of the official Bolívar narrative, they've been written out of the myth. They do not feature in our consciousness of the man, and couldn't. Paradoxically, it takes escaping to a foreign source, an English-language source, for these things to become sayable. Which is why this In Our Time show is worth listening to.

(Hat tip: Paul)

Get a grip!

Quico says: The government could barely contain its collective orgasm today over the launch of "the first Venezuelan satellite."

Venezuelan?! Se fumaron una lumpia...Chinese design, Chinese engineering, Chinese manufacturing, Chinese testing, Chinese software, Chinese rocket, Chinese launch control...the only thing that's Venezuelan about Venesat-1 is the money that paid for it.

If the electrons oppose us, we shall fight against them and force them to obey us

Quico says: The revolution's Woody Allenesque extremes of paranoia reached a weird zenith last week with this story about the three Edelca engineers who took the rap for the last Sunday's massive blackout and ended up in jail on vague charges of sabotage.

In the event, the three were released fairly quickly, as there was no evidence whatsoever to pin the blame on them for the problems of a grid that's been groaning for years under the strain of under-investment and neglect.

Still, that didn't stop chavismo from spreading intelligence operatives throughout Edelca and Cadafe facilities to try to flush out the imperialist saboteurs they see lurking at every corner.

Some deeply cynical part of me can't stop laughing at the thought of these goons, rifles slung over their shoulders, hanging around menacingly around Cadafe, sporadically lurking uncomprehendingly over the shoulders of these highly trained technical personnel, implicitly threatening to throttle the first guy they see if anything goes wrong. Must do wonders for employee morale, that one!

The part I really can't figure out is, if you're just an regular Disip/DIM Joe, how would you even know if the electrical engineer directly in front of you has just sabotaged the grid? I mean, short of them taking a sledgehammer to some Lost-in-Space looking control panel - all flashing lights and beeping beeps - surely all you'd see was a guy pushing some combination of buttons and then the grid going down.

The whole electrification through the barrel of a gun thing would be really really funny, if it wasn't because Honny Vásquez, Rodolfo Ortega and Adán Ramos are real people with real families and real careers to worry about, who've now been forever branded as unreliable elements by the revolution's commisars. What future could those three have?

Not much of one, is my guess, at least not inside Venezuela. Cuz finding solutions is hard...but finding scapegoats? Dead easy...

58%

Quico says: That's the proportion of Venezuelan voters who still like Hugo Chávez. Datanalisis dixit. Granted, just 35% have confidence he can help solve the country's problems. But 58% still like him.

Ten years out, riding on a discourse that's equal parts Monty Python and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, this is simply an astonishing figure. The kind of reality check that'll send me scrambling for the nearest whiskey bottle.

But it is what it is. No use trying to wish it away.

Known unknowns

"There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns."

-Guru Rumsfeld

Quico says: It was interesting reading through the comments to Juan's latest post. Everyone seems to think Chávez will announce a currency devaluation sooner rather than later - sometime between November 24th and the February 2009 seems to be the consensus.

I find it bizarre that the range of guesses was so compact. People seem to be recklessly ignoring the wisdom of Guru Rumsfeld here. When it comes to forecasting the next devaluation, we're mired in known-unknowns land.

Personally, my sense is that Chavez'll do the Lusinchi thing and draaaaaaw things out as long as he possibly can. How long is that? Well, that depends on two things: how much money oil brings in next year and how much money the government has on hand for a rainy day.

Thing is, we don't know either of those numbers!

What we know for sure is that the Central Bank is holding $39 billion in currency reserves (about 10 months' worth of imports) and that the central government keeps $800 million in a rainy-fund FIEM account at BCV. Those totals we can be reasonably sure about of because they're reported daily.

Trouble is, the rest of the government's rainy day cash stashes - Bandes, Fonden and PDVSA's cash and accounts-payable (plus, imaginably, other kitties we don't even know about) - report bi-annually, if at all.

Which means that whenever you see an "independent analyst" putting a date to a devaluation or an oil-price threshold to the government's fiscal viability, these people are working off of data that's almost 5 months old, un-audited, impossible to verify and incomplete.

Depending on who's doing the counting, the government's rainy-day funds might come to anything from $12 to $75 billion. (That's not including foreign currency reserves which, as I keep stressing, are made up, by definition, of dollars the government has already spent and are, therefore, not "government savings" in any meaningful sense)

$12-75 billion. That is a wide range. A ridiculously wide range, actually. A range wide enough, in fact, to make a mockery out of any attempt to forecast what's going to happen.

If oil stays north of $70/barrel and the real rainy-day funds figure is in the upper part of the range, it could be years before Chávez devalues. If oil drops to $50 or less and the state's reserves are towards the bottom end of the range, we could well be looking at devaluation within 3 months.

Everyone in the opposition seems to be taking it for granted that we're heading into the second scenario, rather than the first. People point to PDVSA's aggressive borrowing in the last two years as a sure indication that the company must not have big piles of hundred dollar bills laying around somewhere waiting to be spent. Certainly, it would be senseless, irrational and bizarre for PDVSA to be paying steep interest rates to borrow money to finance its investments while, at the same time, holding big hoards of cash.

El detalle is that "senseless, irrational and bizarre" might as well be chavismo's fiscal management motto. These days, mere senselessness is weak grounds for excluding something as a possibility.

If we're honest, we should aggressively hedge any forecast. Fact is, the government's financial reporting is so deliriously opaque, we can't really speak with confidence about the key variables at play.

We might be on the edge of a precipice, or we might be a comfortable distance away from it. One way or another, when the time comes, count on Chávez to take that step forward.

Putting the fun in devaluation

Juan Cristobal says: - Let's play psychic.

With oil tanking and the world veering on recession, things are not looking good for Venezuela, no matter what Chávez says. Specifically, it's looking like the government will be forced to devaluate some time in the future just to keep afloat.

Now, obviously, things could change and oil could surge. The government may put off devaluation altogether, but that's looking increasingly unlikely.

So, I'd like to run a simple poll on when you think the government will be forced to announce an increase of the official, Misión Cadivi-subsidized rate of BsF 2.15.

The person who gets closer to the actual date without going over wins a blog post praising his or her judgment and character.

My guess? February 1st.

Some nuggets are worth keeping

Juan Cristobal says: - The President talks a lot of bunk, but sometimes, the stuff he says is really meaningful. Like yesterday, when he said:

"We have managed to detach ourselves from the capitalist economy, and we have created our own, solid economic system..."

"If the price of oil receded to what it was in 2006, when it averaged $55 a barrel, you can be sure that Venezuela will not be affected by the world's crisis... be sure that we will continue growing, both in social and in economic terms..."

There it is, you heard it. The crisis won't affect us because we are safeguarded against it.

Ergo, we are not taking any extra precaution.

Ergo, when the feces hits the ventilator, you'll know it's his fault.

His and his alone, for not taking the necessary precautions. His and his alone, for misreading the effect of the crisis on Venezuela.

His and his alone, for maintaining a warped foreign exchange control that subsidizes imports and for increasing the size of the State beyond any reasonable measure.

His and his alone, for "creating" an "economic system" that wasn't totally new nor totally detached from global crises.

You can just link back to this post when it happens.

PS.- Quico is travelling and I'm in the middle of a complicated move, so posting will be light in the next few days. Our apologies.

The chats of others

Quico says: A few nights ago I was blown away by Florian von Donnersmarck's brilliant 2006 film, The Lives of Others. In a quiet, methodical way, the film profiles the East German secret police's system of internal espionage and repression, yielding a chilling, sobering portrait of the mechanics of totalitarian control.

It's the kind of movie you can't get out of your head for days after you've seen it; my new favorite film.

As a thriller, it's damn good entertainment, but it's the detailed observation of the nuts and bolts of totalitarianism, and the portrayal of the atmosphere of sheer, throat-clenching Fear it inspires, that set the film apart.

The very first sequence in the film will give you a sense of what I mean:



At first, what we witness is an act of injustice: a coercive interrogation premised not on physical blows but on sleep deprivation. The scene is brutal. As an insomniac myself, I'm especially tuned in to how much not being able to sleep messes with your mind.

Though it's certainly well executed, the Nasty Interrogation Scene is nothing new. Hollywood has inured us to this sort of thing. If they'd thrown in a Good Cop, you'd call it boilerplate.

But then, we get something we're not used to seeing. Just after the two minute mark, von Donnersmarck pulls back. Suddenly we're in a classroom, and we see that this interrogation has been, as it were, recorded for training purposes. It's being used to teach new Stasi recruits how to conduct their own interrogations.

Suddenly, we're made aware that we were not witnessing an individual injustice. What we're seeing is a system at work. We realize the Stasi was about more than just interrogating suspects and recruiting informants. It was about creating and preserving the institutional capabilities you need to sustain a system of pervasive surveillance. In this, the film is unique. Time and again, von Donnersmarck invites us to witness not just the Stasi's operations but also the institutional infrastructure that supports them.

What strikes you about the film is how methodical, how detail oriented how...well, how German they were about it. The Stasi we're shown doles out its brutality in scientifically calculated portions. To this end, it had its own research arm, carrying out the kind of sober, detail-oriented investigation it takes to really beef up an organization's capabilities.

The point is brought home in a chilling scene, where an elated Stasi middle-manager hands his colleague a thick stack of papers and says:

I have to show you something: "Prison Conditions for Subversive Artists: Based on Character Profile". Pretty scientific, eh? And look at this: "Dissertation Supervisor, A. Grubitz". That's great, isn't it? I only gave him a B. They shouldn't think getting a doctorate with me is easy. But his is first-class.

Did you know that there are just five types of artists? Your guy, Dreyman, is a Type 4, a "hysterical anthropocentrist." Can't bear being alone, always talking, needing friends. That type should never be brought to trial. They thrive on that. Temporary detention is the best way to deal with them. Complete isolation and no set release date. No human contact the whole time, not even with the guards. Good treatment, no harassment, no abuse, no scandals, nothing they could write about later. After 10 months, we release. Suddenly, that guy won't cause us any more trouble.

Know what the best part is? Most type 4s we've processed in this way never write anything again. Or paint anything, or whatever artists do. And that without any use of force. Just like that. Kind of like a present.

In scenes like this one, Von Donnersmarck shows the Stasi as, first and foremost, a rational bureaucracy, complete with its own standard operating procedures, training programs, career-advancement paths, petty office politics and institutionalized absurdities. The violence it perpetrated was never the random brutality of a goon, it was always strategically calculated, meted out with the fastidiousness of an accountant.

Its task was to interpose state power between one person and the next, to lodge the state into the most intimate crevices of personal life as a way of ensuring that nothing East Germans said or did would ever catch the state unaware. To these ends, it had almost unlimited resources, and was constrained by no institutional counterweight.

The result is something Hannah Arendt considered the cornerstone of totalitarianism: the criminalization of intimacy. In a society where there is no privacy, where a careless bit of pillow-talk can land you in jail, where the state can do with you pretty much what it wants, in such a society intimacy becomes an unattainable luxury.

To have a friend, to confide in someone, is to place not just yourself but also your friend in danger. Elementary caution dictates that people will keep their own thoughts hidden. Even more corrosive, it compels them to go to great lengths to avoid knowing their friends' and neighbors' intimacies as well. When intimacy is complicity, the only way to protect yourself is to isolate yourself.

The man being interrogated in the clip above, notice, hasn't actually done anything wrong. His mistake was merely to know. In this case, to know the name of the man helping his friend escape to the West. If he became an enemy of the state - and make no mistake about it, he now is an enemy of the state - it's because he allowed himself to be confided in.

It's this criminalization of intimacy that makes totalitarianism unique, that sets it apart from "normal" dictatorship. A totalitarian state is one that atomizes individuals, isolates them by raising the cost of intimacy to the point where any personal bond stronger than one's bond to the state becomes dangerous, a luxury normal people are unwise to indulge.

Once implemented, such a system hardly needs to call attention to itself. It exists. Everybody knows it exists, and it is pervasive. In East Germany, "Stasi" became almost taboo, a word one whispered, as though merely saying it out loud was dangerous in itself. Certainly, the Stasi had no reason to bluster, to make a big show of its power. Its bite was infinitely worse than its barely perceptible bark.

It was with these kinds of thoughts buzzing around my head that I sat down behind my computer, clicked on Noticias24, and found this startling exemplar of our own, criollized internal spying operation.

(I can't seem to embed the clip - but it shows Alberto Nolia on VTV exposing a wire-tapped conversation between Teodoro Petkoff and Luis Miquilena, where they discuss how they might pressure politicos in Barinas State to agree a unity candidacy.)

Fresh from watching The Lives of Others, stumbling upon this clip left me at a loss for words.

My first impression, as I listened to it with my Venezuelan-pundit hat on, is that there's a huge, jarring disconnect between the fairly innocuous stuff on the wire-taps and the utterly unhinged rambling Nolia sandwiches the clips with. The formula seems to be something like:

1. Nolia says he's about to show us something unimaginably shocking, something that lays bare the fascist opposition at its most conspiratorially horrid.
2. We hear a wire-tap clip of Luis Miquilena and/or Teodoro Petkoff having a perfectly vanilla political conversation in private that more or less reflects what they say in public all the time.
3. Nolia comes back on and asks if we can friggin' believe how horrible these people are.

But perhaps we should back up a bit. The truly bizarre thing about these recordings isn't so much what's on them, it's that they're on TV! State TV, to be precise.

And that, right there, tells you as much as you need to know about the real different between real Stasi-style totalitarianism and the banana republicized, made-for-TV knock-off we get nightly on channel 8.

I have to wonder what your average Stasi interrogator would make of Los Papeles de Mandinga. My guess is, they wouldn't be able to make heads or tails from it.

Chavismo doesn't seem to get it: you don't need VTV and a wire tap to find out that, these days, Teodoro Petkoff's is all about knocking opposition heads together to ensure we get unity candidates in November. You can just go down to your local kiosk, buy a copy of Tal Cual, and read it for yourself. The wire tap tells us nothing we don't already know.

But then, what's the point really? The Stasi spied on people to make sure they followed the party line in private as well as in public; if they didn't, they got thrown in jail. Chavismo, on the other hand, spies on people, finds out that what they say in private matches what they say in public, and then sensationalizes the non-findings by throwing them up on VTV.

What are they looking to accomplish with this? Where are the consequences to these self-described blatant acts of destabilization?

The real gap here is, I think, about professional ethics. Stasi agents took their jobs seriously. The organization carefully built up the institutional expertise needed to monitor all of East German society quietly, invisibly, but omnipresently. It had a vision, a mission and a goal.

Contrast that with the chavista Disip, which is content to put taps on a handful of high profile politicos' phones and sporadically throws some of the stuff they record on the air, seeking to intimidate them but succeeding only in humiliating themselves.

As we watch Nolia rant, it's easy to grasp that chavismo doesn't take its own domestic spying operation terribly seriously. It's impossible to imagine somebody in the Disip trying to advance his career prospects by writing a thick, scholarly dissertation. In fact, in Venezuela you're more likely to hear the word "Disip" as the punchline to a joke than as a terrified whisper.

It's history repeating itself as farce.

Instead of Fear - capital F fear - all the Chávez government's spying really provokes is a kind of bemused revulsion. Forced to listen in on the private conversations of politicians doing their jobs, we are only disgusted at the rampant mediocrity of the people who govern us.

Nolia's obscene flaunting of the impunity that chavistas enjoy tells us much more about him and the regime than it does about Petkoff, Miquilena or the many more whose conversations have recently been aired publicly. It shows a regime that is dimly aware that surveillance can be used as a mechanism of control, but hasn't the slightest clue exactly how to pull off the trick because it disdains the professional ethos that it would take to achieve this, or any other, substantial task.

It's something that bears keeping in mind before we go around blithely describing chavismo as "totalitarian" - eso es una falta de respeto...¡con los totalitarios!

For all its rank disregard for the rule of law, chavismo doesn't have the wherewithall to criminalize intimacy in Venezuela. In revealing innocuous private conversations with no strategic objective in sight, all it does is reinforce the sense that the revolution abhors anything that even resembles rigor and discipline.

The Bolivarian Republic of East Germany we are not.

The unity fetish

Juan Cristobal says: Sometimes, when I’m bored, I like to indulge in a bit of political S&M and lurk in the opposition comment boards on Noticiero Digital and Noticias 24. You know, just so I can say I have my finger on the pulse of the opposition’s lunatic fringe.

Because, let’s not beat around the bush here, those places are scary. The clichés, the insults, the bad grammar and the SHOUTY ALL CAPS POSTS!!! come at you thick and fast. Going by what you see there, you couldn’t be faulted for thinking that the opposition consists of people who are either insane or stupid or both.

One of the more baffling rants that I keep running into has to do with the campaign for mayor of Chacao.

As you probably know, UNT, the party of the very popular incumbent mayor Leopoldo López, decided to nominate Liliana Hernández. López, prevented by term limits from running again, had a fit and sided with his hand-picked dauphin, city councilman Emilio Graterón. When UNT threatened to sanction Graterón for breaking party discipline, he fled the coop and is now running as an independent. Primero Justicia, meanwhile, launched the telegenic Ramón Muchacho. Muchacho argued that if UNT couldn't get its act together, he would not withdraw.

So we're running three solid candidates. And the natives are getting restless.

The anger has to do with the fact that none of the three candidates seem all that enthusiastic about stepping aside for someone else. There are several proposals for unity out there, but none have stuck. The latest one is a primary that only one candidate appears to be willing to take part in. So by all accounts, it’s looking like we will be running with not one, not two, but three strong, viable opposition candidates in Chacao.

Well, the good folks on the comments boards have made this a casus belli. They don't seem to care that the opposition has achieved unity in an overwhelming majority of states and municipalities, including most of the genuinely competitive ones. The Chacao experience is enough for them to conclude that oppo politicians are simply a lost cause.

In fact, some of them sound like they're parroting the chavista party line. The government, in another example of the outrageous use of public resources for partisan purposes, put out a press release commenting on the state of "opposition disunity in Chacao," noting in the end that the PSUV supposedly selected its candidates in a primary - brushing over the fact that internal fights within chavismo are reminiscent of Jerry Springer.

Chacao is much more important than its nominal value would suggest. With barely 72,000 residents crammed together into a tiny 13 square kilometers, it is, by any measure, tiny. Hell, the Chavez clan has farms that are bigger than that!

However, Chacao’s budget is the envy of many a mayor. With the heart of Venezuela’s business community and some of Caracas’s poshest neighborhoods within its boundaries, the budget constraint for Chacao is not binding, at least not relative to the rest of the country’s municipalities.

Chacao is also important for a symbolic reason: the place is a crossroad for anyone criss-crossing Caracas. Whether you are taking a bus from Petare to Capitolio, going to work as a maid in Altamira or taking your kids for a weekend stroll at the Sambil, you gotta go to, or at least through, Chacao.

Its budget and its location give Chacao disproportionate strategic importance. Chacao is the place where the opposition can show the country’s less well-off how it can govern when given the chance and a hefty budget. It is no coincidence that Chacao’s last two elected mayors have become prominent national political figures.

So, is the opposition in danger of losing the crucial Chacao election because of disunity? Hardly. According to the polls I've seen, Chavez’s candidate, the hapless, unknown Wolfgang Torres, is polling at around 2%. In some polls, his name doesn't even show up.

There is a strong case to be made against primaries in Chacao. For one, they are expensive. For another, they artificially stifle competition between opposition programs and ideas. Because, if we're honest, the only reason “unity” has become such a buzzword is because we fear that without it, we'll lose all kinds of races against chavismo.

But in Chacao, we just aren't vulnerable. It’s not even close. There's really no compelling reason to compel a unified slate there. And yet, the hounds of opposition unity are after the three main candidates, and they're hungry for blood. It's like there's an eagerness, a need, to jump all over opposition politicos and slam them almost as virulently as we slam chavismo.

This makes no sense. The good people of Chacao will have their primary: it will be on November 23rd. Bring your cédula laminada, aún vencida.

(Disclosure: I went to high school with both Muchacho and Graterón.)

Brent < $68/barrel

Quico says: Y ahora, ¿quién podrá defendernos?

Extra! Extra! New York Review of Books in bed with the CIA!

Quico says: When even a bastion of the Upper West Side intelligentsia such as The New York Review of Books decides to run with the Human Rights Watch expulsion story, you just know that whatever credibility chavismo may once have had with the respectable northern left has been put through a blender, mushified, then nuked, dynamited and buried in a deep sea pit.

Vivanco and Wilkinson's piece is meticulously, understatedly brutal in a way that's far more damaging to the government's image than any amount of Colominesque hyperventilatory ranting could ever be. It's great fun to read. I'll cite just one particularly effective graf:

Human Rights Watch does not and has never accepted funding from the US or any government, directly or indirectly. But we are accustomed to such false accusations, especially coming from authoritarian governments. Venezuelan officials have repeatedly denounced us as CIA stooges, right-wing partisans, and, more commonly, "mercenaries of the empire." (By contrast, in neighboring Colombia, officials have repeatedly sought to discredit us with labels like Communist, guerrilla sympathizer, and even terrorist.) Once, after releasing another report in Caracas, one of us was publicly and falsely accused by Chávez's vice-president of having collaborated with former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. This time, a close Chávez ally in the legislature suggested on national TV that the two of us had been sharing a single hotel room where we were indulging our "weaknesses."

Ouch.

¡Viva Edo!

Quico says: For a country where the standard of political commentary is, erm, not always what one might hope for, Venezuela sure produces a freakish number of really brilliant editorial cartoonists.

Starting with the Grand Old Man of Venezuelan pictorial satire, Pedro Leon Zapata, the country's cartoonists have occupied a strange cultural netherspace somewhere between low- and high-art.

In Venezuela it's perfectly normal for the guy who scribbles the newspaper funnies to get commissioned for a vast roadside mural and sell his more "serious" work in super fancy galleries, where art collectors compete for signed originals of their more celebrated strips. It's the editorial cartoonist as public intellectual, in the sense Edward Said envisioned,

According to Said, an intellectual's mission in life is to advance human freedom and knowledge. This mission often means standing outside of society and its institutions and actively disturbing the status quo. At the same time, Said's intellectual is a part of society and should address his concerns to as wide a public as possible. Thus Said's intellectual is constantly balancing the private and the public. His or her private, personal commitment to an ideal provides necessary force. Yet, the ideal must have relevance for society.

There's something refreshingly original, distinctly Venezuelan, in elevating our editorial cartoonists to occupy this cultural space. It's a role pictorial satirists haven't played in the first world since the days of Hogarth.


Zapata may be our most famous editorial cartoonist but, for a long time, I considered Roberto Weil the undisputed master of the art. His style is equal parts Matisse and Gary Larson, his sense of humor halfway between Laureano Márquez and Monty Python. There's just a crazy vitality to his work I've always found infectious.

Here's a taste:


Weil will always be my first cartooning love. But there's no way around it: there's a new kid in town.

El Mundo's cartoonist, Eduardo Sanabria (nom de toon: Edo), has been drawing some of the most wildly imaginative, pitch-perfect editorial cartoons you're ever likely to see.

His signature depictions - the jurassic bolibourgeois, that angular Chávez and his red-berret wearing sheep-followers - are becoming as instantly recognizable as Weil's Comandante Boot-Head and Zapata's mecate-tugging toads. And his take on the Chavez-PPT/PCV spat the other day? It was just perfect.

Here're a few more:







It's well worth your time to go through his web-site. Great stuff.

What part of "wiped off the map" don't you understand?

Quico says: When the historians of the future come to write the history of the Chávez era, no part of the whole dadaist zarzuela will strike them as quite so bizarre as the government's relationship with PPT and the Communist Party.

The whole thing is psychiatric: Chávez has made it painfully, abundantly, explicitly, scatologically clear that he wants no part of PPT and PCV's support...but they insist on backing him!

Over the weekend, Chávez went off on his nominal "allies" again...this time calling them lyin', disloyal and manipulative and pledging to "wipe them off the political map for good."

PPT's answer? "We will patiently wait for the president to think again. We believe all forces are needed for the election."

The commies'? "We've stood side by side with the revolutionary process for a decade, and we will keep at it, because this doesn't depend on the president's will, it depends on our members' will."

Is there no way to get these people to take a hint?!



I dunno about you, but I adore that cartoon!

Jujitsuing the Populist Binge

Quico says: Primero Justicia's candidate in Petare, Carlos Ocariz, has finally put a snappy tag on a thought all of us have had at one point or another: faced with a pre-election barrage of handouts by the incumbent, why don't people just grab the freebies and vote for the other guy anyway?

Misión Agarre (Mission Grab It) is what he's calling it. Noting that the president and PSUV are planning to disburse some BsF.300,000 to local community councils in the coming days, he said:

Our message is clear: have no fear, grab that money, invest it in public works to benefit everyone in the community, but lets make the urge for change felt by voting for unity and democracy.

A few weeks ago, the people of Petare, with their heads held high, launched Misión Grab It 1. The neighbors accepted the home appliances that government supporters handed out in different communities, but they didn't sell their votes. And our organized groups will do the same thing, by grabbing the cash that's being offered to them in the vain hope of buying their votes and their consciences.

So starting this weekend, Petare's community councils commit themselves to Misión Grab It 2 with no fear, and with their heads held high, so that those resources can be invested, put to work on specific projects to improve public services and the quality of life for each citizen. But, of course, on November 23rd, we're still going to come out and vote for change and unity.

It's great to hear this sentiment expressed so crisply, even if you couldn't really call it new...

I remember it like it was yesterday, the first time I got involved in Venezuelan politics, as a 21 year old, back in 1996. Groovy leftie thing that I was back then, I was volunteering for Victor Moreno, a trade unionist and Causa R's candidate in a special election for governor in Bolívar State.

In barrio after barrio we heard the same story: the AD incumbent, Governor Jorge Carvajal, was going around handing out bags of groceries on his recorridos. In hindsight, from the perspective of chavismo's freebie washing machines, it seems almost quaint now that a bag of groceries is all the adecos used to hand out. In 1996, though, those shopping bags were a major challenge for the Causa R campaign.

Time and again, Moreno would plead with folks to grab the groceries and vote for him anyway.

They grabbed the groceries. And voted for Carvajal.

Will they do the same this time around? Two recent polls (here and here) suggests Ocariz will have better luck.

Stay tuned.

Social Bookmarking comes to Caracas Chronicles!

Quico says: So I've just set up AddThis: a one-button gateway to any number of social bookmarking services. I'm impressed! This thing makes sharing something you read on Caracas Chronicles about as easy as catching Chávez contradicting himself.

Digg one of our posts? Find it del.icio.us? Wanna email it to a friend? StumbleUpon it? Facebook it, Propel it, MySpace it, Furl it or even just add it to your browser's Favorites menu?

Just mouse-over the "Bookmark" button after each post. It's dead easy.

(Still confused? watch this...)

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)