The problem with the hero theory

Quico says: I do realize there's one fairly basic problem with the "hero" theory of Venezuelan redemption: it relies, ultimately, on power's sense of shame. Ghandi's campaign, in India, had power because London could be shamed into changing its actions. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. relied on northerners' sense of shame about what was happening down south. Mandela succeeded by shaming even the apartheid regime in the eyes of the world. But what can a hero do against a government that is, in quite literal terms, sinvergüenza?

Not a lot, I'm afraid...

Heroes

Quico says: Juan Forero's report for the Washington Post on the growing crackdown against the opposition paints a dismal picture of the extremes to which the government's strategy to criminalize opposition is going. It's worth a read, in part, to get a feel for the way the tone of US coverage on Venezuela is shifting these days, even from reporters who have long gone through great lengths to give the government a fair shake.

Personally, I find it hard to suppress a rather naughty thought about all this. Given that the Opposition establishment has proven unable to renew itself, to build the institutional mechanisms it takes to discard failed leaderships and serve as a conveyor belt for new leaders to emerge, isn't the government, in a really twisted way, doing us a favor here?

For years I've been dismayed by the realization the opposition doesn't seem up to the task of ridding itself of its deadwood. It might just take an assist from Chávez to, for instance, break the Blanca Ibañez-appointed Barboza-Rosales axis's deathgrip over Zulia politics.

It's the kind of thing you're not supposed to say in polite company, I realize, but hell, we all know this here ain't polite company.

Luis Vicente Leon, the Datanalisis pollster and Pundit of Pundits, caused a bit of a stir recently saying a leadership like Chávez's calls for a "hero" to face it down: some truly extraordinary personality willing to act with complete disregard for his or her own safety to challenge the regime in a symbolically loaded way.

I can't help but think that the new batch of leaders that will come up to take the places of those now being exiled or jailed are much more likely to play that kind of role. They'll be people coming into it fully aware of the risks, and fully cognizant that opposition, from here on out, is likely to be a semi-clandestine affair. For my money, if Venezuela is to find its hero, it's much more likely to come from the ranks of the up-and-comers, to be someone whose name you've never heard, than one of the established oppo figures.

Email delivery news

Quico says: I've just realized for the last who-knows-how-long, the little sign-up form on the right for Email delivery hadn't been working. It's now fixed.

If you want to get each day's new posts delivered to your inbox, just enter your email address and follow the confirmation instructions.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

[Hat tip: Charlie.]

Corruption? What corruption?

Quico says: How can it be that the government only prosecutes corruption cases when the accused are Chávez opponents? It drives me batty. Nothing chavismo does makes my blood boil like the partisan use of anti-corruption legislation. Considering ours is a government virtually specialized in coming up with innovative ways of making my blood boil, that's quite a claim.

Thing is, for political scientists, the determinants of corruption aren't much of a mystery. The profession is pretty unified on the idea that people in the public sector respond to the incentives they face, pretty much like people in the private sector do. They weigh the expected benefits and expected costs of actions and, if the former outweigh the latter, they go for it.

In the case of corruption, in particular, the calculus isn't especially hard to make. It goes something like:

There are, of course, variations on this theme. But the basic view of bureaucrats as calculating agents responding to incentives basically holds. Give officials more discretion over regulatory decisions worth important sums of money and, ceteris paribus, you'll get more corruption. Alternatively, cut back on official oversight, or make it more difficult for regular citizens to see what's actually going on in an administrative setting, and you can certainly expect more corruption.

It's when you've grasped this that the Chavez regime's deliriously partisan application of anti-corruption laws comes into sharpest relief.

We all know that, in Venezuela today, the vast majority of public sector jobs are in the hands of chavistas while the vast majority of anti-corruption probes target the tiny spaces regime opponents have carved out through state and local elections. But even that realization doesn't come close to giving a full picture of the regime's manipulation of anti-corruption statutes.

Go back to that equation. It's not just that chavistas hold more offices than anti-chavistas, it's that, from a racketeering point of view, they hold all the good offices. Controlling the entire national bureaucracy, they hold all the key posts with discretional power over regulatory decisions that make or break businesses. Controlling the vast bulk of the state's oil revenues, they rule over disproportionate amounts of the money the state has to play with.

By comparison, the rump opposition is utterly dependent on central government transfers, transfers they do or don't get depending on the central government's - wait for it - discretion.

But it's not only that. It's that the rump opposition-run public sector faces far, far greater scrutiny than the chavista controlled bits of the state, with the comptroller's office devoted nearly exclusively to picking over the minutiae of their transactions. And the Chávez-controlled public sector is not just an oversight-free zone, but a transparency-free zone as well, with public accounts barely audited and key financial reports simply not filed for months and months after their deadlines are reached.

The government's claim, in effect, is that the opposition is more corrupt than the government, even though it has more to lose from corruption, and less to gain from it. Opposition supporters, for whom trouble in the event of even minor indiscretions is nearly guaranteed, nevertheless choose to steal, while government supporters, who are nearly guaranteed to get away with it no matter how brazen their graft, choose not to.

How can that be?

The only way to sustain a belief in this storyline is to posit that chavistas and anti-chavistas are fundamentally different kinds of human beings.

They're not both rational decision-makers responding to the balance of expected costs and benefits they face, they're fundamentally different forms of humanity. Chavistas are, deep down, good people, who won't steal even when they can get away with it. Whereas we are so immanently, deeply, incorrigibly crooked we'll steal even in the full knowledge of what's coming.

For chavismo, it's not even that we're stupid. It's that we're evil. And here we get to the essentialist nub of the Chávez era, a style of engaging opponents that refuses recognize in them even the rudiments of rationality, seeing our behavior as ruled by a deep well of sheer horribleness that no rational calculus could deter or curb.

It's this essentialist nub of chavismo's engagement with the world that's really alarming. Because so long as I believe that my opponents are merely cynical, or wrong, or stupid I can imagine coming to some sort of accommodation with them. But from the moment I convince myself - and my followers - that my enemies are fundamentally evil, it's only a minuscule step to advocating their physical elimination.

Es dramática la vaina...

Ledezma Making Sense

Quico says: No, I can't believe I'm writing this either, but we need to face up: Caracas's embattled mayor, Antonio Ledezma is turning out to be a far smarter, saner, and far, far more effective opposition politician than many of us ever dared to dream.

Ledezma en Aló Ciudadano
by noticias24

Ledezma's concept of "neo-dictatorship" is pretty much the same as what I've been calling "autocracy". The specific word used to describe it doesn't matter to me as much as the realization that what Chávez does is conceptually distinct from dictatorship as traditionally understood. In the academic leadership, this kind of state system seems to go by the name "competitive authoritarianism" more and more. Coined by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, the system seems to be gaining more and more currency:

Competitive authoritarianism must be distinguished from democracy on the one hand and full-scale authoritarianism on the other. Modern democratic regimes all meet four minimum criteria: 1) Executives and legislatures are chosen through elections that are open, free, and fair; 2) virtually all adults possess the right to vote; 3) political rights and civil liberties, including freedom of the press, freedom of association, and freedom to criticize the government without reprisal, are broadly protected; and 4) elected authorities possess real authority to govern, in that they are not subject to the tutelary control of military or clerical leaders. Although even fully democratic regimes may at times violate one or more of these criteria, such violations are not broad or systematic enough to seriously impede democratic challenges to incumbent governments. In other words, they do not fundamentally alter the playing field between government and opposition.

In competitive authoritarian regimes, by contrast, violations of these criteria are both frequent enough and serious enough to create an uneven playing field between government and opposition. Although elections are regularly held and are generally free of massive fraud, incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, and in some cases manipulate electoral results. Journalists, opposition politicians, and other government critics may be spied on, threatened, harassed, or arrested. Members of the opposition may be jailed, exiled, or—less frequently—even assaulted or murdered. Regimes characterized by such abuses cannot be called democratic.

Competitive authoritarianism must therefore be distinguished from unstable, ineffective, or otherwise flawed types of regimes that nevertheless meet basic standards of democracy, and this includes what Guillermo O'Donnell has called "delegative democracies." According to O'Donnell, delegative democracies are characterized by low levels of horizontal accountability (checks and balances) and therefore exhibit powerful, plebiscitarian, and occasionally abusive executives. Yet such regimes meet minimum standards for democracy. Delegative democracy thus applies to such cases as Argentina and Brazil in the early 1990s, but not to Peru after Fujimori's 1992 presidential self-coup.

Yet if competitive authoritarian regimes fall short of democracy, they also fall short of full-scale authoritarianism. Although incumbents in competitive authoritarian regimes may routinely manipulate formal democratic rules, they are unable to eliminate them or reduce them to a mere façade. Rather than openly violating democratic rules (for example, by banning or repressing the opposition and the media), incumbents are more likely to use bribery, co-optation, and more subtle forms of persecution, such as the use of tax authorities, compliant judiciaries, and other state agencies to "legally" harass, persecute, or extort cooperative behavior from critics. Yet even if the cards are stacked in favor of autocratic incumbents, the persistence of meaningful democratic institutions creates arenas through which opposition forces may—and frequently do—pose significant challenges. As a result, even though democratic institutions may be badly flawed, both authoritarian incumbents and their opponents must take them seriously.

Nobody would confuse him for the academic type, but Ledezma gets it. In the clip above, he summarizes the distinctions Levitsky and Way make with uncanny precision. I have to take my hat off to him grasping what he's up against as clearly as he has. Endlessly demonized, stripped of his powers, aggressively harassed, Ledezma nonetheless keeps his cool and restrains himself from lobbing shrill "ESTE RRRRRRRREGIMEN TOTALITARIO!!!!" rhetorical grenades at the government. The guy has his ojo pelao...eyes wide open, man, eyes wide open.

Ledezma...whodathunk, huh?

Even the liberal New Republic...

Quico says: ...wants to know what Venezuelans thought of The Handshake.

Christopher Toothaker, or the problem with mainstream media

Juan Cristobal says: - This weekend's rapprochement between the U.S. and Venezuela is, without a doubt, good news. We have long argued on this blog that isolating Chavez is impossible and that fueling his anti-U.S. rhetoric only helps Chavez and actually hurts the opposition, including our political prisoners.

But don't expect to read this opinion in the mainstream media.

Case in point: this dispatch from Christopher Toothaker, of the Associated Press. Toothaker tried to find out what the opposition thinks of this new detente between the two countries. He paints the portrait of a wary opposition, concluding that we want Obama to press Chavez on his increasing authoritarianism.

His only source? Milos Alcalay.

I have no problem with former Ambassador Alcalay. In fact, I may even agree with most of what he's saying.

My problem is with this reporter claiming that Alcalay actually speaks for the opposition. As a former diplomat who has never held elective office and who served as Chavez's Ambassador a full two years after the April 2002 massacre, Mr. Alcalay is not the spokesperson we really need, nor is he a representative voice of any significant portion of the opposition.

Was it too much to ask Mr. Toothaker to get other opinions? For example, the opinion of the leaders of our political parties, or of Caracas' embattled Mayor? Last I heard, those were the guys actually getting the votes.

You may be tempted to conclude that this is their fault. Partly, it is, given how I can't find a single quote from a significant opposition voice talking about the Obama-Chavez meeting. Seriously, people, is it too hard to put out a press release?

But it's clear Mr. Toothaker didn't seek to talk to other sources. Had he done that, he would have added the usual disclaimer of how he tried to reach other people but did not hear back. This omission hints that his only source was Alcalay and, poof, a note about Venezuela's wary "opposition" makes its way to hundreds of newspapers and media outlets across the globe.

A while back, we concluded that our opposition leadership needed to make way for fresh faces and new ideas. So it goes with mainstream media. Their laziness and the callous way in which they do their job does a disservice to Venezuela's opposition and to the public in general.

It's time for them to go as well. Luckily, they're on their way out.

Chokin' on my cornflakes...

Quico says: Yes, it's the course of action I explicitly recommended a few months ago.

Yes, my brain knows this is the smart thing.

Still, I couldn't help but blanch when I saw it:

A comprehensive theory of ChávezTime

Quico says: Chavismo, as the saying goes, is "more-of-the-same, only worse".

It's one my favorite tropes on the Chávez era. What I like best about that reduction is the way it focuses attention on the too-often overlooked continuities between puntofijismo and chavismo.

The trouble, I think, is with the last bit. How much worse, exactly? Is it possible to quantify such a thing?

After an exhaustive review of political science doctrine, I think I've come up with an answer.

Chavismo is exactly 2.5 times worse than puntofijismo.

Or, to be even more precise, chavismo's rate of decay from bright new democratic hope to universally acknowledged, widely despised failure is 2.5 times faster than puntofijismo's.

How does that work exactly?

It's useful to think about this government in terms of ChávezYears. Everyone knows that one human year is equivalent to 7 dog years, right? Well, the rate of exchange between PuntofijoYears and ChávezYears is about 2.5-to-1.

Think about it. Puntofijismo's first years in power were dominated by a no-holds barred confrontation with a committed ideological opponent that refused to acknowledge its legitimacy and was determined to overthrow it by force. Puntofijismo's struggle with the far left guerrillas lasted, in one for or another, over 12 years - from 1958 until the defeat of the insurgents and Caldera's peace initiatives in 1971.

Chavismo's first few years in power were dominated by a similarly bitter (if less Bang-Bang) confrontation with irreconcilable ideological foes. However, Chavismo got through it two and a half times as fast, in just the 5 years between 1999 and 2004, rather than the 12+ puntofijismo needed.

Puntofijismo segued directly from victory over the insurgents to a heady oil boom that brought with it a massive sense of social contentment, huge new fortunes for the politically connected, a sharp uptick in corruption, and the first clear signs that the social mission of the regime would end up taking a backseat to the personal aspirations of the new governing elite. Chavismo did the same, except Puntofijismo's oil bonanza lasted a good eight years, from 1973 to 1981, about two and a half times as long as chavismo's 2005-2008 bonanza.

Continue with this exercise, and we get a PuntofijoTime to ChávezTime equivalency scale that's something like:

PFT : CT
1958 : 1999
1961 : 2000
1963 : 2001
1966 : 2002
1968 : 2003
1970 : 2004
1973 : 2005
1975 : 2006
1978 : 2007
1980 : 2008
1983 : 2009
1985 : 2010
1988 : 2011
1990 : 2012
1993 : 2013
1995 : 2014
1998 : 2015

We all know what happened after each oil bust. As the oil money dried up in the early 80s, puntofijismo dithered, playing with various short-term patches that failed to address the fact that a state designed for boom times just looked out of place in the middle of a bust.

A serious retrenchment was unavoidable by the time the Lusinchi era rolled in, only there was still a bit of money in the kitty, so the governing elite found it much easier to put off the painful choices as long as possible. In the five years that followed, they drew down international reserves, badly undermined the country's credit worthiness, and turned what might have been a traumatic but manageable reform package in 1983 into the catastrophic drama of 1989, when reform was carried out not so much out of choice but simply impelled by the fact that the nation had no more foreign reserves to speak of.

By this reckoning, Chavismo's 2009 corresponds to Puntofijismo's 1983, the start of a period of reckless time-wasting that puts off the arithmetically inevitable reckoning to come. Just as in 1983, the oil boom is now well and truly over, but its effects are still far from worked through the system.

Looking in my crystal ball, I foresee the eventual day of reckoning - the time when dithering becomes unsustainable and a serious retrenchment imposes itself of necessity - should come sometime in 2011 or 2012. This will be followed by a period of renewed instability, when many of the one-time pillars of the state's legitimacy turn on it, setting off a topsy-turvy period of acute ingovernability leading, a few years down the line, to the system's wholesale rejection by pretty much everyone, in particular, in response to the catastrophic collapse of the banking system due some time around 2013-2014.

And, of course, we can look forward to the end of the whole insane experiment circa 2015. (Hey, no lo digo yo, son los números!)

It may seem absolutely unreal, simply impossible, to imagine Mario Silva, Eleazar Diaz Rangel and Vanessa Davies out campaigning for a vote to revoke Chávez's next mandate circa 2015. But then, in 1983, nobody could've believed that Venevisión, El Nacional, and the El Mundo would be out campaigning for a guy who was vowing to get rid of the 1961 constitution and "refound the republic." Nobody would've believed you if you'd said the puntofijo regime would collapse not under the pressure of Douglas Bravo, Causa R, or the rest of its usual-suspect critics, but rather under pressure from people and institutions that formed its own key sources of legitimacy.

In 1983, that was crazy talk. But in 1998, that's exactly what happened. Puntofijismo rotted from the inside out, eating away at its own legitimacy until the time was ripe and the whole edifice crumbled all at once in the face of a charismatic challenge.

And I'm convinced: chavismo is more of the same, but worse. So, for me, it's a mathematical certainty. This rollercoaster will run through 2015, and the instability hasn't even started yet.

Escríbanlo.

Chavez as Annie Wilkes

Juan Cristobal says: - First came Columbus. Now ... Gallegos!

El Universal is reporting that the bust of Rómulo Gallegos, first Venezuelan in the modern era to be elected president by popular vote, is no more.

Gallegos' bust has been banished from the grounds of Miraflores Palace and has been replaced by the bust of a certain Cipriano Castro.

I don't know what Gallegos ever did to Chávez, what with the bust-whacking and the book burning. I grew up revering Gallegos as our greatest novelist, the founder of AD and teacher to the generation of Venezuelans who first brought democracy into the country.

Perhaps that's it. Perhaps it's the fact that he was, first and foremost, a civilized civilian who won the ire of the military, so much so that he was deposed after only 11 months in office.

Eighty years ago, Gallegos envisioned the barbaric conundrum we find ourselves in. Perhaps his sin was his ending, and his bust would still be there if "Doña Bárbara" had ended with the Doña winning and Santos Luzardo floating boca abajo in the Arauca.

With that ending, Chávez would have declared himself Gallegos' "number 1 fan"...

Our Constitution up in flames

Juan Cristobal says: Freedom of expression. The right to elect officials. The right to a fair trial. Freedom of religion.

Those all sound swell, don't they? They are but a few of the rights constitutionally guaranteed to the lucky citizens of...North Korea.

One characteristic of dictatorships is that the rights enshrined in their Constitutions are not worth the paper they're printed on. If you take these documents at word value, the citizens of Cuba are guaranteed "freedom of speech" (article 53) and "the right to assembly" (article 54), just like their comrades from the extinct USSR.

It's all a sham, of course, a game of sophisticated political wordsmithing, like some perverse version of diplo-Scrabble. When the law has no meaning, it costs you nothing to put all kinds of pretty things in it. If anything, having a ton of Bambi-sounding rights in your Constitution gives you a pretty inexpensive propaganda tool for your shameless foreign cheerleaders to use: the constitution as cheap talk.

Which brings me to Venezuela. I guess it should be no surprise at this point, but the latest hackery coming out of the CNE just baffles the mind.

The story begins in my home town of Maracaibo, where the Zulia State legislature, for the first time in its existence, actually did something useful.

It turns out that the government passed a new law stripping state and local governments of many of their resources and faculties. Of course, after the opposition won key governorships and city halls, the government was keen on curbing their power or even stripping it altogether, with no one able to put up a fight. So far, no surprises.

The surprise came when the Zulia State legislature decided to exercise their rights under article 71 and call for a "Referendo Consultivo", a non-binding referendum on the Reform.

Article 71 states:

"Parish-level, municipal or State-wide matters of special importance can be subject to a non-binding Consulting Referendum. The initiative must come from the Parish Board, the Municipal Council or the state's Legislative Council and must be approved by two-thirds of its members; by the Mayor or the Governor; or by at least 10 percent of the voters in the corresponding electoral precinct."

Zulia's legislature passed the measure and sent the request to the Chavez-controlled electoral body, the CNE. The CNE's only possible position in this situation was to approve the request and set a timetable for the Referendum.

Today, they said no.

Their reason? The recent law is national in scope, and therefore cannot be subjected to Article 71. In other words, the government takes away the resources of the zulianos, but since they're also taking the money from tachirenses, carabobeños, mirandinos and neoespartanos ... well, no procede, ciudadano. Never mind that there are fewer things that have more "special importance" for the state of Zulia than having its budget and the faculties of its Governor taken away.

We've long been critical of Tibisay Lucena and the CNE on this blog, but we have stopped short of accusing her of the über-obstructionist horseshit that her predecessors, Jorge Rodríguez and Francisco Carrasquero, took such glee in meting out. After all, under her supervision, we managed to win a national referendum and a few key state elections.

But things have changed. As Chavismo continues its unstoppable march toward out-and-out dictatorship, the CNE is signalling its willingness to play along. Maybe Lucena is just keen to preserve her own viability for the kinds of high-visibility, high-salary, high-graft-potential government jobs her two predecessors have gone on to enjoy after their absolutely subservient stints at CNE. We can't be sure. One thing we can be sure of is that there are tough times are ahead.

As yet another article of our Constitution goes up in smoke, we are left wondering: are we already governed by a work of fiction? Have our fundamental rights been so diluted that, already, our Constitution reads funnier than the Sunday Comics?

After all, Cuban dissidents don't go to the Supreme Court to demand the rights enshrined in their Constitution be upheld. It's simply not worth it.

April 12th: Putting it all together

Quico says: Click here for the Second Part of my interview with Brian Nelson, author of The Silence and The Scorpion: The Coup Against Chávez and the Making of Modern Venezuela. (The First Part of the interview is here.)

April 11th: Putting it all together

Listen to my interview with Brian Nelson, author of The Silence and The Scorpion, here.

Quico says: Seven years on, the events of April 11, 2002, haunt Venezuela as much as they ever did. The drive to mythologize the April Crisis began as soon as it ended, and the more time passes, the less we seem to know about what really happened. A government heavily - indeed, literally - invested in reinventing the coup as an epic struggle against imperialist aggression has enveloped the events of April in layer after layer of systematic forgetting, a carefully orchestrated campaign of deception that has been, in the grand scheme of things, brilliantly executed and shockingly effective.

Brian Nelson's remarkable new book, The Silence and The Scorpion: The Coup Against Chávez and the Making of Modern Venezuela (Nation Books, available for pre-order now, shipping from Amazon on May 4th) is the antidote to this corrosive form of engineered Alzheimer's. Easily the most complete version of the April Crisis available in print, The Silence and The Scorpion is a minutely (one is tempted to say "obsessively") researched account that brings together the stories of the coup's main movers and a number of its bit players as well.

Basically, Brian spent six years watching every bit of footage of the coup, examining every available photograph, going through every scrap of written testimony and interviewing as many key players as possible. Then he wrote it all up.

He shouldn't have had to. This ought to have been the Fiscalía's job, and the Defensoría's. But the chavista state's oversight bodies have steadfastly denied the country a reality-based account of what really happened that weekend. The organs of official memory have been turned into state rohypnol. Somebody had to fill the gap. And now, someone has.

The result is an enthralling read. Pitched at a general audience, the book is shot through with vivid details and strewn with telling and yet all-but-forgotten pieces of the April Puzzle.

This week, Brian was kind enough to answer some of my questions about his book. We talked about Luis Fernández - the Venevisión cameraman who got the key footage of the Llaguno Overpass gunmen - about the sequence of deaths on Avenida Baralt, about Lucas Rincon's role that evening and late night, about the use of lipstick as face-paint, and much else besides.

You can listen to the first half of our Skype-interview here:

You can also download the MP3 file (25 Megabyte) here. It's 36 minutes long.

The second half of this broad-ranging interview will be available tomorrow.

Petro-dictatorship chronicles

Juan Cristobal says: - The autocratic ruler of a petro-state has just been re-elected President for an unprecedented third term after Parliament removed term limits from the Constitution.

He won with 90% of the vote. The opposition has denounced the vote as "a charade."

Chavez makes a power grab

Juan Cristobal says: - That headline is ridiculous, isn't it?

Chavez is perhaps the most powerful man in the history of our nation, more powerful than Simon Bolivar in his prime and certainly more powerful than Juan Vicente Gomez. He controls the courts. He controls the considerable purse strings. He controls everything from who you hire to who you can fire, from what you pay for a dollar to what you pay for gas.

And yet, there is one thing he doesn't control: Caracas city hall.

Well, not any more. In an egregiously un-democratic move even for chavistas, Venezuela's National Assembly approved a new law that basically dismembers the Metropolitan Mayor's office they created and voters approved when the new Constitution passed in 1999. As of now, the Metropolitan Mayor's Office will mostly be a ceremonial post, a "coordinator" between the mayors of Caracas' five municipalities and with only a fraction of its resources.

Not that there's much to coordinate anyway - four of the five municipalities are run by the opposition, but the sole chavista mayor refuses to attend "coordinating" meetings and is unwilling to deal with any of his colleagues.

In its place, the National Assembly created legislation for a "Capital District," whose boundaries are exactly the same as those of the "Libertador" municipality that chavista Jorge Rodriguez presides over. In essence, the Capital District will have a Chavez-appointed "governor" and a chavista mayor, both working in the same jurisdiction.

(This is nothing new for chavistas - Vargas state "functions" in the exact same way: one mayor, one governor, same area)

Now, we've known for years this "Metropolitan Mayor" figure made little sense, that Caracas was a monstrosity, a dysfunctional city where local governments barely functioned. Even opposition people far more knowledgeable than me acknowledge the status quo was problematic, to say the least.

But this new law has nothing to do with that. Instead of dealing with these issues, it only exacerbates them by effectively killing the lone supra-municipal authority there was. Instead of sitting down with all parties (including the governors of Miranda and Vargas) and devising a workable proposal and timetable, it decides to reverse the outcome of an election.

In the past few weeks, the government has stepped up the persecution of opposition figureheads. It has gone to great lengths to ignore the will of the people by stripping many of the local governments they elected in November of their funding and their attributions. It has done so with no regard for the law and with nobody - least of all Venezuela's compliant courts - being able to stop it.

The government ignores the will of the people and submits the courts to its will. Remind me again ... why doesn't that qualify as a dictatorship?

Because, to me, we've crossed that threshold.

kombat karive

Juan Cristobal says: - The BBC has a video on indigenous Venezuelan martial arts. They don't mention the government, but surely this is something they have their hand on, although the academy's website says nothing of it.

So, is this ridiculous? Or is it a positive thing?

The Chavez administration has screwed up, neglected or made worse a lot of Venezuela's problems. Its policies have squandered a historic opportunity for development.

But its vindication of indigenous rights - although exaggerated, what with the "blessing of the chicha" and the knocking down of statues - is one of the few bright spots. Would you agree?

The "dictatorship" canard

Quico says: I'm always amazed by the kinds of debates that ensue when somebody in the anti-Chavez camp strays from oppo groupthink and declares something that, in the end, is only obvious: that chavismo does not meet many of the most salient defining features of dictatorship. The reaction is immediate, heartfelt, and insane...an adamant, MariaAlejandraLopezesque indignation that soon morphs into a way-beyond-the-need-for-evidence assertion that Chávez is obviously a dictator.

On few topics is writing from a distance, from outside the oppo resonance chamber, a bigger asset. In oppo circles inside Venezuela, the Chavez-is-a-dictator trope is so entrenched, it's somehow become beyond debate, its truth too evident to any longer call for evidence or argument to support it.

Trouble is that, when they hear the word "dictatorship", the vast majority of people around the world understands something that's very far removed from the way Chávez exercises power. Say "dictator", and the vast bulk of international public opinion has a clear idea of what you mean: an unelected leader who systematically uses state violence to crack down on any attempt to organize politically against him.

Say "dictatorship", and people hear "systematic censorship", they hear "comprehensive attempt to shut down all dissident media outlets", and "concerted attempts to jail, exile or murder every journalist and intellectual who produces an anti-government tract", and "widespread informant network that wreaks havoc on the lives of those who express dissent even in private". Dictatorship is what Fidel, Pérez Jiménez, Idi Amin, Pinochet and Trujillo did, what Kim Jong Il and Hu Jintao and the Burmese junta continue to do.

These understandings are not really controversial outside Venezuela. Everybody knows that's what the word implies. A dictatorship is a place where people need to go to extraordinary lengths to hide heterogenous thoughts because all those who dissent can reasonably expect to pay a heavy price. Nobody abroad is really confused about this. It's really pretty straightforward.

It's only a slice of Venezuelan public opinion that tangles itself up in knots over this stuff. The Globo-watching opposition ends up backing itself into plainly indefensible territory, forcing itself to stand by the notion that Venezuela is a dictatorship where opposition political parties are legal, active and above ground, where opposition media is legal, active, and above ground, where middle class people openly, vociferously and adamantly oppose the government without really fearing they'll suffer retribution because their friends and associates might inform on them, where some of those same people host blogs written in their own names to express these opinions and others host TV shows and newspaper columns, and where the "dictatorial government" knows exactly who those opinion leaders are and where they live and where it could go capture them, but doesn't somehow...but that, nonetheless, that's a dictatorship.

I'm sorry but...nobody's buying that!

It just doesn't pass the most rudimentary of smell tests. And when you start passionately defending arguments that catastrophically fail the most rudimentary of smell tests, you only make yourself look ridiculous, not the people you're railing against.

The opposition's "dictator" charge is another of those Conventional Absurdities, a claim that is at once self-evidently false and is treated as self-evidently true.

What makes it most self-defeating is that it is, in fact, a self-refuting absurdity: if Marta Colomina were right and chavismo truly was a dictatorship, Marta Colomina would certainly be prevented from asserting it. Which makes the assertion itself its own best refutation, and drains the people who make it of all their credibility.

To me, the "dictatorship" accusations do nothing beyond demonstrating a galloping, frankly cringe-inducing lack of historical awareness on the part of people who really ought to know better. If you've lived through a real dictatorship, you couldn't possibly mistake Chávez's half-baked brand of tropical autocracy for it.

The whole subject sends into paroxisms of despair. The opposition really needs to grow up on this issue: if we cannot even see the way our adherence to such a conventional absurdity makes a mockery of our claim to represent "responsible opinion" on Venezuela, how can we claim to lead a country we plainly doesn't understand?

It's only pathetic.

A step towards dictatorship

Quico says: If you read this blog regularly, you know how the loose use of terms like "totalitarian", "dictator", "fascist", etc. drives me up a wall. After 10 years of overwrought denunciations, Venezuela has come down with a serious case of Superlative Fatigue: we've been throwing so many epithets at the government for so long, we've lost the ability to make distinctions between things that are different.

Superlative Fatigue makes it difficult to get a grip on real movement along the spectrum of authoritarian control, robbing us of the words we need to describe escalations when they do occur. And so this week, when the Chávez government took a series of real steps along the road from mere autocracy to dictatorship, commentators were left scrambling for words to describe what had happened without sounding like the little boy who cried wolf. (I'm lookin' right atcha, Miguel Octavio.)

Lets try for some definitional precision. To me, there's a clear difference between regimes that use violence selectively to repress dissent and those that try for comprehensive repression.

Regimes in the first group, which I call autocratic, generally allow dissent, while semi-randomly selecting a smattering of dissidents for harassment, persecution and violence. Autocratic regimes in this mold rely on intimidation: since dissidents have no way of knowing, a priori, if they'll be in the group selected for intimidation or not, they have compelling reasons to feel insecure, to fear the consequences from stepping over some invisible, indeed permanently changing, lines. Selective intimidation is designed to provoke self-censorship, and it works. Chavismo, until now, has been a classic autocratic regime.

Dictatorship is something different. Dictatorship is not about picking off a few dissidents now and again pour encourager les autres. Dictatorships set out to make repression comprehensive, to go after everyone who challenges the ruling elite's power. While autocracy whispers in your ear "if you dissent, you might end up being targetted for repression", dictatorship shouts out "if you dissent, you will end up a target for repression."

Autocracy is content to keep political dissent suppressed, enfeebled and marginalized. Dictatorship seeks to wipe it out altogether.

Even today, chavismo is very far from being a dictatorship - as people who lived through the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship know only too well. If you're reading this in Venezuela, and you haven't taken elaborate precautions to log on to Caracas Chronicles through a proxy server to conceal your tracks from Disip, you're living demonstration that chavismo is not a dictatorship: real dictatorships set out to punish not just those who write seditious material (like me) but also those who read them (like you).

What the last week has witnessed in Venezuela, however, is a move towards comprehensiveness. The state actions against Rosales, Baduel, the accusations against Teodoro and the stepping up of intimidation against Globovisión certainly suggest a move away from a strategy of selective intimidation and towards taking out all the leaders of the opposition in one go. These moves represent a clear step-change from the kind of selective repression we've seen until now.

The next few weeks will do much to clarify exactly where on the authoritarian control continuum Chávez wants to park his regime. If we see charges brought against the remaining high profile oppo leaders - Borges, Ledezma, Ocariz, Salas Feo, Pérez Vivas - we'll know for sure we've entered a new stage in Chávez's willingness to use his power to control the political life of the nation. If we see prosecution start to reach down systematically from those top leaders down towards the second tier of political activists who oppose the regime, we'll be able to talk about out and out dictatorship.

We're not there yet. But this week has certainly brought us closer.

How squeaky clean is Teodoro Petkoff?

Quico says: So squeaky clean that, after what was doubtlessly a detailed investigation into anything and everything the guy's been up to over a half century of public life, the best they could come up with to frame him was a 35 year old inherittance tax dispute!

I mean, Jesus! These charges are older than I am!

Criminalizing dissent

Quico says: Nobody could be surprised by Chávez's decision to jail the man who, more than any other, saved his skin in the 2002 coup. The arrest of retired general Raul Baduel marks just one more signpost along the road to the criminalization of dissent. Venezuelans now live under a government that, while it has not quite made it illegal to oppose it yet, is plainly determined to show that trying to lead the opposition to it is liable to land you in jail.

With Baduel behind bars and Rosales enconchao, would you want to be the next to stick out your neck and say "yes, I'll lead the movement against this nonsense"? Would you?!

Yeah...me neither...

Green with envy yet, Hugo?

Juan Cristobal says: - Check out who Barack Obama thinks is the "most popular politician on the planet." Hint: it's not Hugo Chavez.

The scarcity of scarcity

Juan Cristobal says: - Today's edition of El Universal carries an interview with Planning Minister Jorge Giordani, Chavez's economic pater-familias. Giordani is usually a bland, boring guy, but I found this interview fascinating because it showcases, in a nuthsell, the contradictions, twisted logic and reverse priorities of the chavista vision.

Giordani starts off by saying that the problem for the government is that "socialism has never been built on abundance, but rather on scarcity." He hints at the dilemma this poses for the government - on the one hand, its populist nature demands that it increase oil wealth at an ever-expanding pace, but on the other hand, reaching its ideological objectives hinges on the economy crashing, on feeding people's despair.

Giordani can't seem to make up his mind on whether the government actually wants prosperity or poverty.

He seems to believe that only by subjecting the population to hardship and limiting their consumption will you be able to build the socialist state where the new man is born - and the head honchos all have Mercedes Benzes. But the only way to reach that point is by giving a needle to our petro-state junkies and creating a consumption binge that keeps people's minds off of things like marching, human rights and economic freedom. Nobody knows when that point is reached.

Confused yet? Never mind the factions in the chavista movement - I can't keep the factions in Giordani's brain straight.

Not only is the minister confused, he is also wrong about socialism. Socialist experiments have come about from political processes more than economic ones, and they have usually been accompanied by just a dash of force. Scarcity begets revolutions, perhaps, sometimes, but rarely socialist ones. More often than not, socialism is brought about by blood - just ask the Hungarians or the Czechs.

He then opens up about the government's plans to use the commercial banks' reserve requirements, which are kept at BCV, to finance spending. A few weeks ago we talked about this being a real possibility. The parallel swap market agreed.

Giordani basically leaves the door open for that possibility, saying that even though financing is taken care of thanks to our greedy, capitalist banks, the government may come back for more. This puts our banking sector at a real risk of defaulting.

As Quico said before,

"Reserve requirements everywhere act as a source of financial support for the banking system, a backstop against a bank run. Chávez's hint that the revolution might be making a grab for those funds is a sure-fire way to set off a crisis of confidence in the financial system, which may be part of the reason the parallel exchange market is freaking the hell out today, even more than it had been in recent days."

Perhaps Giordani is betting that if the banking sector goes down the toilet, we'll have enough scarcity to make socialism finally viable.

Giordani then talks about how unimportant inflation is. Lucky for him - I figure he wouldn't be sleeping much if he actually cared about it. He says the government cares more about "employment," and in a curious slip of the tongue, he equates "employment" with "social policy." But inflation? Why should that be a problem? If things cost more, you simply print more money and give it to people so they can buy the more expensive stuff.

But employment is trickier. You see, in the mind of the Planning Minister, no private sector employment is worth keeping. Or, to put it in preferred Marxist terms, private sector jobs are bad for society because they put workers' surplus value in the hands of capitalists. Only government jobs are deemed worthwhile because the government is the only one that can ensure that workers are paid the value of the goods they produce. Any surplus value from the fruits of labor goes back to the government who then mercifully distributes it in the form of, you guessed it, social policy.

Funny, these guys disagree with the government being the best employer. So do these guys.

Yet, unlike money, that you can actually print, there is a limit to the number of ghost jobs you can create. The number of government jobs cannot be completely disconnected from the government's financial capabilities.

The inherent contradiction here - there's that pesky word again, contradiction - is that for Giordani to provide employment, he needs oil rents which are, at the moment, scarce. Focusing on increasing the government's payroll is bound to be frustrating for him, since it's really hard to do that in the down part of the oil cycle. Funny how when the government faces scarcity, it's a problem, but when the rest of us do, it's an invitation to revolution.

This disappointing mish-mash of ideas - from our "Planning" Minister of all people - highlights chavismo's lack of coherent vision. Is it any wonder that Venezuela is a country in chaos and turmoil when our government can't decide whether it want prosperity or poverty, employment or unemployment, healthy banks or broken ones?

Perhaps Giordani's cognitive dissonance is just the safety net of a tired old man, the silver lining to the coming failure of his actions. All their policies hinge on an external factor, the price of oil, correcting itself. If it doesn't, whatever they do will surely fail. But hey, in that case, they'll have scarcity and chaos, the perfect breeding ground for socialism.

Then we'll be able to do what we really want to do.

PSF-ari

Juan Cristobal says: - Kudos to Alexander Cuadros of Slate. While in Caracas, he sought out the foreigners who make the Revolution their home to ask them - who are you people? Why are you here? What do you think?

It's a good read. Somewhere, Jane Goodall is smiling.

Danny's Move

Quico says: Now that Hugo Chávez has come out as a personal supporter of Omar Al Bashir, will Darfur genocide activist Danny Glover see fit to raise a peep? Now that his Chávez-financed $18 million dollar erm, black elephant on Toussant L'Ouverture has fallen apart, he has less of a direct financial stake in standing by Chávez...but which way will he break?

I guess it brings up a weirdly fascinating question: what happens when the two cockroaches inside a PSF's head (one labeled "pro-Chávez", the other "anti-DarfurGenocide") start fighting?!

[Hat Tip: You know who you are?]

Hugo and Omar, sitting on a tree...

...K-I-S-S-I-N-G...

Quico says: OK, ok...lets line up our ducks in a row here, Huguito. You got a beef with the politization of the International Criminal Court? You oppose the whole idea of worldwide jurisdiction in war crimes cases? Fine. We could have a debate about that. Non-barking-mad people can certainly disagree about such things.

But when you invite the genocidal nut in Khartoum to come hang out in Caracas? When you go out of your way to personally endorse a man who has mobilized the resources at the disposal of the state he leads for the purpose of physically eliminating a civilian population? That, sir, is when you decisively, unambiguously realign yourself fully with your natural allies: the Barking Mad people.

To deal with your slimy sophism of a rhetorical question directly: why Bashir and not Bush? "Why," in your words, "don't they order the arrest of Bush, who is a genocidal murderer?"

Because, Hugo, intention is a key ingredient in the definitional stew behind the word "genocide".

To illustrate: if I have a gun in my pocket and I punch you in the mouth, you can't very credibly accuse me of trying to kill you. If I intended to kill you, I'd just shoot you. The key here is the mismatch between my capabilities and my actions. On the other hand, if I have no gun in my pocket and I punch you in the face again and again until you're no longer moving, you can certainly sustain a charge of attempted murder.

If George W. Bush had intended to physically eliminate the whole or a portion of the population of Iraq, he had the means at his disposal to do so. If the carpet bombing hadn't worked, he had plenty of nukes in reserve. The glaring gap between what the US did - hamfisted, wrong, and illegal as it was - and what it had the capabilities to do makes the charge of genocide against Bush simple nonsense.

Bashir, while having far fewer resources at his disposal, has systematically deployed them in a way that's fully consistent with the intent to eliminate the entire non-arab population in Darfur. The bombing raids targeted against civilian populations. The systematic use of rape as a military tactic. The premeditated, patient campaign of village burning, each one followed with orders to murder everyone who stays behind. The whole apparatus of state fully mobilized to ensure that only arabs get to live in the region. That, Hugo, is genocide. And that's what you now support.



Enjoy your cafecito with the guy, Hugo...

Dear G20, Please Stop Buying Our Oil...

Quico says: My latest piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free site is now up. (Notice: 500 words, and not one of them is "Chávez"!)

The comments thread they've got going so far is too dreary for me to jump into, but maybe some of you are up for a bit of a rumble.

Also, they said they might translate it to German for Die Zeit's website, so those of you who read German...keep a look-out!

Dear Nobel Prize for Economics Selection Committee: Your Search Ends Here

Quico says: In a feat of unparalleled economic mastery yesterday, Hugo Chávez proposed a new international currency to be backed by underground oil reserves: the Petro. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper immediately countered with his own proposal - the Glacio - while Algeria, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Lybia and Egypt joined forces to promote their preferred alternative: the Sandio. Reports suggest that, at this week's G20 meeting in London, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, too, will propose a currency: the Ego.

A nice demonstration of her skills

Juan Cristobal says: - Everyone knows Venezuelan women are beautiful and win lots of pageants. Like populists and ball players, beauty queens are one of those things that we seem to produce excellent specimens of, our own "non-traditional exports."

However, with the latest news coming out of Cuba, it seems like we're gonna have to recall some of our exports and apologize to the world.

You see, our very own Dayana Mendoza, the lovely Miss Universe 2008, could not find a better use of her time than to drop by Guantánamo Bay military base for a little tour. This, in and of itself, would be a tricky PR-situation and would likely raise some eyebrows. However, it would not have been scandalous were it not for Dayana's blog entry about the trip.

Gitmo is "incredible." They "took a ride around the land" and it was "a looot of fun!" They got to meet the "Military dogs", who did a "very nice demonstration of their skills." Yeah. Them pooches sure are cute.

Apparently, Dayana disagrees with the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and a host of other human rights NGOs. Detainees have, according to Dayana, comfortable facilities, including "showers", and places where they "recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books."

In the end she found the beach so "beautiful," she found Guantánamo "such a relaxing place," she didn't want to leave.

Just call her a Frenemy Combatant and put her in a cell. She'll love it.

Dayana's fanta-bulous Caribbean-vacation-cum-PR-disaster makes you long for the days when the biggest trouble our beauty queens got into was for being filmed while having sex.

PS.- Don't miss the incensed comments from NYT readers. One of them said, "Ought to send these beauty contest winners to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Maybe killing fields in Cambodia as well. They’re sure to have a swell time bs’ing with local security, seeing the sights, swooning over the natural beauty. Think of the swell souvenirs they can bring home after a day of soooo much fun. In fact, they might not want to leave."

PS2- Huffington Post readers have their say too. My favorite comment: "(Huffington Post) has been orchestrating a sleek campaign against Venezuela for some time now. Don't know why. CIA funding, maybe?" No word yet on whether Quico met Dayana in their Langley training sessions.

UPDATE - Dayana's blog entry was deleted. Instead, there is a statement from the Miss Universe Organization. The New York Times has an update.

Ñapa Valley

Quico says: One source that's quickly becoming a must-read for me is Política de Ñapa: Hernán Lugo Galicia's PSUV gossip blog in El Nacional. Lets be clear here: the vast majority of of the gossip about the government in opposition media is woefully thinly sourced. Much of it is, I suspect, just plain made up on the spot. Hernán (better known as "Ñapa" due to his dimminutive stature) may well be the only exception: an actual reporter with actual chavista sources who actually, you know, talks to those sources before putting pen to paper. (Or, em, keystroke to liquid crystal.)

Last week, Ñapa - who you may remember as the guy behind the infamous "report of shit" after the 2D referendum in 2007 - had the skinny on chavismo's decision to go after Manuel Rosales, casting it as both a ploy to divide the opposition and, at the same time, to build up Rosales's stature. In his telling, AD will never fall into line behind Rosales, and Rosales is the oppo leader the government figures would be easiest to beat in the 2012 presidential election. So building up Rosales's street cred with the Maria Alejandra Lópezes of this world by persecuting him is win-win for chavistas. The report's too long to translate, but be sure to check it out.

[HT: Kep]

As an aside, I need to add that while Ñapi's reporting is great, the format El Nacional has chosen for him is Exhibit A for the oppo papers' abject failure to come to terms with New Media. Misnamed a "blog", it's actually just a weekly (Thursdays) column El Nacional decided to run on its website rather than the print edition. With no links, 10 or 12 topics per "post", stuck away in a submenu of a submenu where you would never find it if you weren't specifically looking for it, and with none of the immediacy and continuous updating that makes a blog a blog, El Nacional shows its total naïveté about the format and wastes the chance to host a truly, transcendentally awesome blog in the process.

Newsflash, Miguel Henrique: a "blog" is more than just a sneaky way to save on newsprint! Get a clue! Let Ñapa blog!

Rosemont

Quico says: OK, so here's my idea for a movie pitch: As we fade in, we see the old oil baron on his death bed, a picture of Comandante Chávez hanging sternly from the wall. As Ramirez struggles for breath, we hear him whisper his last word, two syllables that carry with them a lifetime of regret:

"Rosemont"

As he does, we see a snow-globe slip from his grasp and shatter on the floor. Rafael Ramírez is no more.

For the next two and a half hours, through an intricately constructed series of flashbacks, an enterprising reporter works feverishly to piece together the mystery of Ramírez's dying word, talking to everyone who was once close to the old man. What was Rosemont? A favorite Motel on the Panamericana? A brand of whiskey even more decadent than Blue Label? If only he could find out what Rosemont meant, it could be the final piece of the jigsaw, the key that unlocks the meaning of his life.

But every clue he follows is a dead end. In the final scene, after the reporter has given up the search, we see workmen in red, PDVSA overalls following orders to just burn the bitter old coot's every worldly possession. As they mindlessly toss his stuff into the incinerator, we see them throw in a stack of papers. As we zoom into the fire, we see the one on top is marked "Rosemont Corporation - Confidential Information." And beneath that, as the fire eats away at the document, we just manage to read:

Cotización del Dólar: Cliente PDVSA
Para la compra: BsF.2.15
Para la venta: BsF.6.45

Suddenly, it all falls into place. We grasp Rosemont as the lynchpin of the one truly happy period in Ramírez's life: those halcyon days when PDVSA could take one dollar worth of oil revenue, turn it into BsF.6.45 through Rosemont, then take those BsF.6.45 to Cadivi and turn them into $3 at the official rate...$3 that PDVSA could take back to Rosemont to buy BsF.19.35, which they could then go back to Cadivi and magically transmogrify into $9...and then $27...and $81...lather, rinse, repeat.

We see that, for Ramírez, Rosemont stood for a frolicking utopia of unlimited free money, when a simple phone call to a friendly broker in South Florida could create more and more dollars, instantly, risk free...and then we peer into his ocean of regret, that damn regret, at realizing it could have gone on forever if only those pesky DEA kids hadn't gone poking around into Rosemont's affairs.

For the viewers, the realizations cascade one after the other. In a flash, the entire previous 150 minutes of movie-making are recast in a different light. All of a sudden, we can see that underneath all the revolutionary rhetoric, the grandiloquent promises, the visions of a New Society for a New Man, all along we were just looking at a little boy trapped inside a man's body, a little boy with the same dreams and aspirations as any little boy in Venezuela: the dream of something for nothing, of having a money-spigot nobody could turn off.

"Mr. Ramírez is a man who had everything he could want, and then lost it," the reporter says. And then adds, "anyway, I doubt that any man's life can be summed up in a single word."

By this point only we, the viewers, realize how wrong he is.

Deep thought

Quico says: Rama Vyasulu is the Gordo Antonini of 2009.

Update: Confused by this whole story? The Wall Street Journal explains it from start to finish.

Así! Así! Así es que se bloguea!

Quico says: You've heard of Bad Hair Days? Well Miguel Octavio had a Good Blog Day yesterday. A very Good Blog Day.

I love it when the blog tail wags the MSM dog. Yesterday was one of those days.

(I could re-hash what he wrote, but what would be the point? Go read it over there.)

Panic in the Swap Market

Quico says: I'll own up, I have no idea what the hell is happening in the bolivar swap market. Some prominent Caracas exchange operators have stopped trading altogether on reports that one or more key accounts in the US have been frozen by court order. We hear reports of an "omnibus" account involved, which carried transactions by as many as 49 separate Venezuelan swap market operators. Rumors are rife, nothing is confirmed as far as I can tell. Reuters seems to be cribbing mostly from Miguel's blog.

If you have any detail - or, hell, at this point, any good rumors - please write in.

No NPR for me...

Quico says: Sorry, false alarm.

Choices, choices, choices...

Quico says: Now that el jefe has announced that there isn't enough money to go around this year, it stands to reason that any spending increase has to be offset by cuts elsewhere. With that in mind, a simple question for Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro: are you planning to take Venezuela's $2 billion contribution to the new Banco del Sur out of school teachers' pay settlements, the aluminum sector bailout, or Barrio Adentro's equipment budget?

The era of "real y medio" is over...has that penny even dropped for them yet?

The devil hates Prada

Juan Cristobal says: - Remember Chávez's prophetic speech about how Cuba and Venezuela were sailing together toward the same "sea of happiness"?

Funny, I doubt Havana Airport's Duty-Free stores are as empty as the ones in Maiquetía (pictured left).

Come to think of it, if the shelves for imported Scotch are as barren as the cosmetics and fancy purse shelves, there's no telling what the angry mobs will do. Caracazo? Maiquetíazo!

What a vision for departing tourists coming to visit our sea of happiness - all three of them.

Electrifying

Quico says: In the current New Republic, Enrique Krauze writes a remarkable essay grounding Chávez's authoritarianism in its historical context. Whether he's covering familiar ground or striking off into what is - to me - entirely new territory, Krauze's narrative always crackles with intelligence and insight. The elegance of his prose and the depth of his analysis are in a league of their own. Read it.

Definitely read it.

Alí, meet Bernie. Bernie, Alí.

Quico says: It's funny. Last year, when Bernie Madoff was caught fabricating reports designed to make it seem like he was still holding $50 billion worth of investors' money even though, in fact, the money had already been spent, he was called the biggest con artist in history. This year, when Venezuelan Finance Minister Alí Rodríguez fabricates stories designed to make it seem like Fonden, the Investment Fund his ministry oversees on behalf of the Venezuelan public, is still holding some $51 billion that have, in fact, already been spent, he's feted as an eminence grise of Socialist economic management.

All this year, Alí has kept repeating a line about how Fonden has accumulated some $57 billion over five years, and he's consistently portrayed those savings as a key safeguard against the global financial crisis. How can we be sure that this claim is a wild misrepresentation, at best, and a flat out lie, at worst? Because the Finance Ministry's own reports say so!

Fonden itself still hasn't published its balance sheet for the second half of 2008, but MinFinanzas's own 2008 Memoria y Cuenta - its yearly comprehensive financial report - has a whole chapter devoted to the fund. It is, as far as I know, the most complete and up-to-date official report on the state of Fonden's finances, and it includes this startling gem on page 171.

As of December 31st, 2008, Fonden's Investment Portfolio reached a sum of US$6.07 billion alongside 280 million euros and 169 million bolivars.

Which means that, unless the government has somehow scrounged up some $51 billion to put into the fund since January, Alí Rodríguez's repeated claim that the government has some $57 billion ferreted away in there is deception on a Madoffesque scale.

In fact, the government's $57 billion claim is based on a bit of book-keeping sleight of hand so clumsy, so crude, you really have to pinch yourself.

The 2008 Memoria y Cuenta shows, on page 170, that the accumulated inflows into Fonden, between 2005 and 2008, totaled some $45 billion. Throw in the $12 millarditos worth of BCV reserves the government dumped into Fonden this year, and the total inflows into Fonden, over its lifetime, have indeed totaled around $57 billion.

Trouble is, money flows out of Fonden as well as flowing in, and the same Memoria y Cuenta shows that out of the $45 billion that flowed into Fonden between 2005 and 2008, $33 billion had already been spent by the end of last year! And a further $6 billion had already been committed to various projects, which means they can't be considered "available" to face up to a new crisis.

What did Fonden's money pay for? In 2006 and 2007, it helped pay for social spending, as well as for those new Sukhoi fighter jets Chávez is into, and for the 100,000 Kalashnikovs he wanted, as well as that Chinese-made satellite. We don't know what the 2008 tranche went towards, exactly, because all the detail got taken out of this year's report.

The point, though, is that the money that bought those planes and those guns and all the other stuff Fonden's bought over the years, all that money keeps turning up in Alí's $57 billion boast, as though it hadn't already been spent!

And it's even worse than that, because part of the $57 billion he's double counting is the $12 billion transfer from BCV Reserves, which were themselves a clear instance of double-counting. So, in fact, some of the notional money in Alí's $57 billion figure has been triple counted! Strip away all the accounting gimmicks and, as best as I can tell, Fonden has maybe $6 billion in real savings - just over a month's worth of public spending.

What gets me is that Alí is not a stupid man. He's obviously aware of all this. If you look at his statements closely, he typically couches his claim in language about how "over five years, Fonden has accumulated some $57 billion." Which is clearly intended to leave you with the impression that that's how much money Fonden has on hand now, without him ever quite having to say so explicitly. And, of course, since he only talks to the grovelling parade of sycophants that pass for journalists on State-owned media, nobody ever presses him on it.

Bernie Madoff, you got nothin' on this guy.

[Hat tip: Miguel Octavio. Big thanks!]