Everything you ever wanted to know about April 11th and weren't afraid to ask

Quico says: Following our Skype Interview last month, Aprileleventhologist extraordinaire Brian Nelson kindly agreed to answer some of your questions about his six years of research into the 2002 April coup.

Brian's very-soon-to-be-published book The Silence and The Scorpion, is the most comprehensive account of the April Crisis written to date.

[If you haven't had a chance yet, listen to our original "Skypecast" here and here. Both are MP3 files.]

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Brian Nelson writes: Thank you for taking the time to respond to and debate my interview. As the comments showed, April 11-14th is still a very controversial and emotional topic and I don’t think anyone feels like justice has been done.

Many of your questions or comments were about my analysis of the violence on April 11th—what is my opinion on who started shooting? what is my opinion on who is responsible?

As I mentioned in the interview, adding my opinion was in many ways contrary to the spirit of the book; rather my goal was to give the perspectives of the people who were actually there (both pro- and anti-Chávez) and let the reader figure it all out. In other words, I tried to convey the experiences of people like Omar as well as people like Carlos. Therefore, if you come to the book with a set position on Venezuela, then you will find many chapters that follow characters that support your viewpoint; but you will also find many chapters that go against it.

I intentionally avoided using my own voice in 90 percent of the book, only stepping in when I felt it necessary to avoid confusion. The timing of events on Baralt Avenue was one of those few instances when I felt I had to stop and explain to the reader what I believe really happened. If I had not done this, it would have been too confusing for English readers who are not familiar with the events.

It should be noted that even when I did use my own voice, I still let characters contradict me. If their testimony belied what I said, I did not simply edit it out, I left it in. This, I hope served as an indication to the reader that these events were disputed.

Timing of violence on Baralt Avenue—Part I
“LaLucca” wrote: How does Nelson's book compare and contrast with Wilpert's version of events? ….if I remember correctly the whole of Wilpert theory was based on a very late timing for Tortoza's killing ….Wilpert puts it at 4.20pm and then develops this whole business with the CNN journo Otto Neusttad, the generals announcing the killings before they took place, etc,etc…

Greg Wilpert has done some very good work on the coup. In fact, his blow-by-blow of events is remarkably similar to mine and many of our conclusions (including the extent of U.S. involvement) are very similar, too.

I do, however, differ on the timing of the violence, which ends up being very important. As you mentioned, Greg Wilpert wrote that Jorge Tortoza was shot and killed at 4:20 pm. (This was the timing given in the documentary La Cadena.) My research shows that he was actually shot and killed right around 2:30 pm. Jesús Arellano was shot a few minutes before Tortoza (shots of the dying Arellano are the last pictures on Tortoza’s camera), and undercover DISIP officer Tony Velásquez (the first gunshot victim on Baralt) was shot even earlier than that, farther up the street.

I am confident that my timing is correct because it was confirmed by six eyewitnesses I interviewed — four opposition marchers, a journalist, a police officer and one Chávez supporter. They all saw Tortoza, they were all interviewed separately, and they all agreed on the time.

Other bits of information also support this earlier timing:

1. Responding to reports of shots fired on Baralt Avenue, the metropolitan police that were blocking the march on 8th Street moved to Baralt. This happened at just about 2:30 too.
2. In his testimony before the National Assembly, General Eugenio Guitiérrez, who was in charge of the National Guard troops that day and was on the back patio of Miraflores, said that by 3:00 pm he saw wounded coming from Baralt Avenue.
3. Two pro-Chávez gunshot victims on Baralt that I interviewed told me they were shot at about 3:00 p.m. The bullet that struck them was at street level—likely fired by police.
4. Doctors at nearby hospitals also confirmed that the wounded began to arrive around 3 p.m. or earlier. The plastic surgeon who did the reconstructive surgery on Malvina Pesate said he got the call to come to the hospital at 3:30. In other words, Pesate was shot (moments after Tortoza), was taken on a motorcycle out of El Silencio, was put on a truck and taken to the Red Cross center, then driven to Hospital de Clínicas Caracas, given preliminary first aid and X-rays, and then someone contacted the plastic surgeon—all by 3:30 pm.
5. At 3:30 Carlos Ortega called General Rosendo to say that there were six dead.

Concerning Otto Neustaldt’s Account
Now that we know the shooting started earlier, Otto Neustaldt’s story that Admiral Hector Ramírez Pérez knew about deaths before they occurred becomes problematic. Recall that Meza and La Fuente report in “El Acertijo de Abril” that the supposed first taping of the Admiral’s announcement came right around the beginning of Chávez’s special broadcast, which we know started at 3:45 pm—about 75 minutes after the first deaths (Tortoza and Arellano). That’s plenty of time for the officers to learn of the killings. Meza and La Fuente also reported that someone called out Tortoza’s name as one of the dead before the taping began.

I am not saying this to exonerate Admiral Héctor Ramírez Pérez of wrong doing. On the contrary, my research showed that he had been conspiring against Chávez for many months—he did want to have a coup. What I am not convinced of is that he said people had been killed before they were—something that would imply that he had a hand in those killings.

I tried to reach Otto Neustaldt a couple of times to clarify exactly what happened, but received no response. Since I could not confirm the story, I decided not to include it in my book. And, as I mentioned above, I had shown in one of my first chapters that Admiral Héctor Ramírez Pérez was indeed conspiring against Chávez, so it became something of a moot point.

Timing of Violence- Part II – To address Berto and Carlos’s questions
Carlos is right about a few things here. I agree with him that many of the opposition victims were not shot by the Puente Llaguno gunmen. One of the things I quickly realized from talking to the people who were there was that what happened on Baralt Avenue spanned more than three hours (a lot can happen in 3 hours of shooting) and during that time the different groups (Chávez supporters, marchers, and police) were all moving around quite a bit.

I’m afraid that too many people want to match the videos of the shooting of Arellano, Tortoza and Pesate with the video of the Puente Llaguno gunmen. But these events took place two hours apart. The gunmen were not shooting from Puente Llaguno until about 4:30 (and were 3 blocks away), while Arellano, Tortoza and Pesate were shot at about 2:30.

My research shows this sequence of events:

The first round of casualties was suffered by the opposition at about 2:30 p.m. near the Pedrera intersection. These people (Arellano, Tortoza, Pesate, et al.) were shot by gunmen on the street (not by snipers and not from Puente Llaguno and not by the National Guard). They were shot by gunmen who were very close to marchers, perhaps as close as 20 meters, shooting Southward. Arellano—shot in the chest while looking North; Tortoza—shot behind the left ear while jogging East; Pesate—shot though the cheek while facing North.

All three of these killings were captured on video and in each one we can see that the victims are facing northward (with the slight exception of Arellano who comes back on camera the second after he is hit—his right hand coming up reflexively to the wound in his chest). These videos also show how close the marchers are to the Chávez supporters—fluctuating between about 20 and 50 meters apart as they throw rocks at each other.

In response to this first round of casualties, the Metropolitan Police—who were concentrated a block away on Eighth Street—came and tried to separate the two groups. However, the pro-Chávez crowd perceived this separation as an attack by the police; they thought the police were helping the march get through to the palace, so they turned their weapons increasingly on the police.

Over the next hour and a half or so the distance between the march and the pro-Chávez crowd steadily increased to about 3 city blocks with the police in the middle. There was still a lot of firing, but the number of casualties was smaller. Still, more and more Chávez supporters were being shot as the police returned fire on the gunmen (and hit unarmed people, too).

A bit after 4:30 the gunfight between the police and pro-Chávez gunmen reached its apex and Luis Fernandez captured one side of it in his (in)famous video.

You might ask how I know it was 4:30. In the original Luis Fernandez video we can hear Chávez’s special broadcast over the loudspeakers outside of Miraflores in the background. Because we know what time the broadcast began and ended [and because Chávez occasionally mentions the time], the video becomes a kind of clock.

This is the time when the pro-Chávez side suffered most of its casualties. Indeed, my research shows that during this last 45 minutes of the violence the pro-Chávez side suffered all of their fatalities.

It is clear that the Metropolitan Police shot many of them—by this time the police had called in SWAT-type units with high caliber rifles to “neutralize” the gunmen. They likely shot several of the armed gunmen like Erasmo Sánchez—a man who can be seen in one of the videos firing at police moments before he was shot in the head. Others were possibly hit by misses by the police and there is a good possibility that others might have been hit by friendly fire from the Chávez supporters’ haphazard shooting. It was very chaotic.

In the book, I often let characters contradict the things I said or other characters said so that the reader would know that things were disputed. This is one of those cases. I let several characters say that the Metropolitan Police started the violence, even though my research doesn’t support this, because this perception has become (a) part of the reality of the coup.

About the Title and Cover
“Firepig” very eloquently asked about the origins of the title and cover. Actually, the original title of the manuscript was simply “The Silence,” but my agent and the marketing department at Nation Books were afraid that this would not work as a title because American readers would not know that it referenced the area in Caracas where the violence and the coup began. So I went back to the manuscript and began looking for alternatives. “The Silence and the Scorpion” won out, in part because my editor and I both really wanted to keep “The Silence” in the title.

But why Scorpion? Near the end of the book, I recount my first interview with General Usón in 2003 (before he was arrested and imprisoned). In that interview he described Chávez as a scorpion—someone who might have good intentions, but who is, by his nature, militant.

The story of the cover is similar. I initially wanted a cover that showed the split television screen that many people saw on April 11th. This depicted Chávez’s special broadcast on one side and the violence on the other. (I thought that made a nice metaphor: A split screen for a split nation. It would also have suggested the book’s balancing of perspectives.) However, it was difficult to find actual images of the split screen and these were often of poor quality. In the end we had to scrap the idea.

Luckily, Brent Wilcox at Nation Books was able to create the final cover from one of the archival photos. My editor, agent, and I all loved it so we went with it. I like this cover because it is somewhat ambiguous—it is not clear if the man holding the flag is for or against Hugo Chávez. It is only clear that he is patriotic.

Snipers
Responding to Santiago Garcia’s question about snipers. The appendix of my book is called “The Sniper Riddle,” and in it I try to make sense out of all of the reports of snipers. I must admit, I was only partially successful in clarifying this.

There were three “zones of violence” where the presence of snipers was alleged:

1. Baralt Avenue from The National Building to Hotel Eden
2. Between El Silencio Metro and El Calvario
3. Urdaneta Avenue from Miraflores to the Central Bank.

In the appendix I take a look at each zone individually.

Here’s a quick summary

Zone 1 —Baralt Avenue

Contrary to accepted wisdom, I actually don’t believe there were snipers in this zone. Instead I think that the confusion of the situation, low visibility and echoes in the streets gave people the impression that there were snipers. Imagine for a moment standing in a crowd and suddenly seeing people collapse from bullet wounds, this would likely make you think there were snipers. However, the forensics and photographic evidence suggest that those who were shot in this zone were shot by other people on the street with low caliber handguns. For example, Malvina Pesáte, Jorge Tortoza, and Jesús Arellano were all shot at street level. The Chávez supporters injured or killed in this zone appear to have all been shot by police or friendly fire and/or ricochets.

Zone 2 — El Silencio Metro to El Calvario

It is likely that in this zone there were National Guardsmen and members of Chávez’s Honor Guard working as snipers to support the Guard’s effort to turn back the march. One witness saw the barrel of a FAL sticking out from the Miraflores parking garage and believed that this was the weapon that killed Jhonnie Palencia, an opposition marcher. Another saw a man dressed in black with a FAL shoot a man sitting on the steps of El Calvario. It is important to remember that for the National Guard and the other security forces around Miraflores, Plan Avila was in effect—these soldiers had been given orders to hold back the march and maintain the security perimeter around the palace. (This is also the zone where a National Guardsman was videotaped firing his pistol at the march.)

Zone 3 —Urdaneta Avenue from Miraflores to the Central Bank

This is where things get particularly complicated and where there is a great deal of conflicting evidence. I am able to reach some interesting hypothesis in my book, but in the end I cannot conclusively say who these alleged snipers were or who they were aligned with.

About funding/allegiences
Given all of the spin surrounding April 11th and that many of the facts have been distorted and manipulated for political ends, it is important to ask about the origins of any article, book, or movie about the coup. I was aware of all of the spin and polarization from the beginning, so one of my primary tasks was to depict the events independently and without outside influences.

As the original interview explained, I unilaterally changed the idea for my book from a novel to literary journalism. Then I researched it on my own, I conducted the interviews on my own, and I wrote it on my own. I was very adamant about being independent, which is why it took six and a half years to finish (my grant only covered a portion of the initial research; all subsequent research and writing, including another trip to Venezuela, I paid for myself).

More important, however, is who is actually printing and distributing the book. As I mentioned earlier, my publisher is Nation Books, which is the book division of The Nation Magazine—the largest leftist weekly in the United States. Current releases by Nation Books include “Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army;” “Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians;” and “Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O’Reilly.” In other words, it is hardly a mouthpiece of the U.S. State Department and neither am I.

Unfortunately, Venezuela has become so polarized that any book written about it will be criticized as being biased in some way, whether it be towards the opposition, the government, the military, the media, the Church, or the United States. While I know that some will surely disagree with my conclusions, I have allowed every side to give its perspective on the events.

In The Silence and the Scorpion government supporters say they were attacked by police on Baralt Avenue, while opposition members say that they were ambushed by Bolivarian Circles. The book tells the stories of journalists being harassed and assaulted as well as the stories of how the media manipulated and failed to cover Chávez’s return. It shows how Chávez’s advisers feared the president would be handed over to the United States (à la Manuel Noriega) as well as the White House reaction to the coup. It shows human rights violations but it also shows Venezuelans helping other Venezuelans in need, even when they knew that the person was in the “enemy” camp.

All these perspectives are part of April 11-14th and all of them show another facet of the truth that we are all looking for.

Thank you again for your questions and comments.

Brian Nelson

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Click here to order the book from Amazon.

The number cruncher

Juan Cristobal says: - In recent days, Hugo Chavez named former Finance Minister Nelson Merentes to head Venezuela's Central Bank. The move would not be chavista if it wasn't controversial, as there was no public hearing on Mr. Merentes' nomination.

Most of the criticism stems from the fact that Merentes is not an economist - he is a mathematician. To me, this seems curiously off-base, specially considering how economics and mathematics have a lot in common, more so each day.

It's not the training he lacks that is the problem, it's what he's willing to do with what he has.

The real danger comes from the fact that Merentes is not only a yes-man but a particularly clever one. As Daniel chronicles, his rise to fame came from devising a voter cheat-sheet that ensured that chavismo, with 60% of the votes, got 97% of the seats in Venezuela's Constitutional Assembly. He was also allegedly involved in numerous shady dealings while at the head of our Treasury.

Merentes left the government to start a "polling firm" that was so closely linked to chavismo, he named it "Grupo de Investigacion Siglo XXI," which practically mirrors the government's pledge to take us to "Socialismo del Siglo XXI."

The polling firm's track record was pretty bad. For example, Merentes predicted the opposition would win two states in last year's regional elections, when in fact they won 5 plus the race for the now-defunct Caracas Mayor's position. He also predicted Chavez's candidates would win Libertador by 37 points (they won it by 12); Petare by 7 points (they lost by 12), and Miranda by 19 points (they lost by 7 points).

Yet in spite of his spotty track record, Merentes gained a reputation as a loyal number cruncher. You would think a number cruncher would be a good fit for the Central Bank, right? Think again.

It's common knowledge that most of what the government publishes is not to be believed. At the same time, BCV figures are, for the most part, still relied upon by economists in Venezuela and abroad. This will probably change.

Putting Merentes at the top of the BCV can only mean the BCV Statistics Office, which has so far escaped relatively unscathed from day-to-day politics, will become the statistical arm of the government.

The implication is that we can kiss the days of reliable economic indicators goodbye. Just like in Cuba, where government statistics make the claim that its GDP per capita puts its population's purchasing power somewhere between that of Brazil and Colombia, so too will we begin to see Kirchnerian number fudging.

Inflation is a problem? Merentes will take care of it. Recession? He'll wipe that off too. International reserves dwindling down? Just add a couple of zeros.

I hope I'm wrong, but I'm probably not. As Hurricane Feces makes its way to our shores, the number cruncher will be there to convince us that everything is "excessively normal."

Thoughts on the Eve of the Fifth Anniversary of 1M

Now also on Huffo.

Quico says: Some events are so momentous, so history shaking, all you need to refer to them is a date. 911 is, I suppose, the grand-daddy of them all, not to mention the main reference point American readers will have for the whole idea of the History Changing Date.

In Venezuela, we have a bunch of them. Our convention, though, is to name them by the day of the month, followed by its initial letter.

So say "27F" and everyone knows you're talking about February 27th, 1989, the day violent rioting swept through the country in response to a fuel price hike. "4F" is February 4th, 1992, the day Chávez attempted to violently overthrow the elected government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, while "11A" is its mirror image: the date of the coup attempt against Chávez 10 years later, on April 11th.

A number and a letter is all you need to conjure up these events because they're the turning points of our national narrative, key junctures when Venezuela's historical trajectory shifted in ways that are still hotly disputed today.

But not every turning point gets the number-and-a-letter treatment. A date like "1M", for instance, means nothing at all to Venezuelans. Which is ironic, because it was on May 1st, 2004 that Venezuelan democracy died, only to be replaced by one of the new breed of "Competitive Authoritarianisms" - regimes where electoral competition coexists with the openly autocratic use of state power.

On Friday, it will be five years since Venezuela's National Assembly voted narrowly to approve a new Framework Law of the Supreme Tribunal. The law expanded the number of sitting magistrates from 20 to 32 and, in direct contravention of the constitution, enabled the National Assembly to both appoint and remove magistrates by a simple majority vote, effectively ensuring a permanent chavista majority.

The twist is that, in Venezuela, the Supreme Tribunal is more than a court of final appeal: it's also the ruling body over the entire court system. The procedures for appointing all first instance and appeal court judges are defined and implemented by a Supreme Tribunal committee - the so-called Dirección Ejecutiva de la Magistratura - which also controls the process for removing judges. Which means that, in Venezuela, controlling the Supreme Tribunal means controlling not just the highest court in the land, but all lower ranking courts as well.

Thing is, 1M wasn't much of a media event. Just a bunch of parliamentarians parliamentating. It didn't yield an image, never produced the kind of footage TV stations could show again and again. It never made it onto the front pages of foreign newspapers...hell, it barely made it onto the front pages back home!

Within days, it was overshadowed by flashier news that seemed more alarming at the time but would soon fade. The whole episode got filed away under the category of "outrageous things chavismo does that we can't do anything about" and forgotten; but its importance would not fade. On the contrary.

Now more than ever, we live under the shadow of 1M. It was then that chavismo put an end to the pretense that any part of the state could curb the president's power. The move heralded the era of the robed magistrate chanting pro-Chávez slogans inside the Tribunal chamber and of Supreme Tribunal chairmen openly declaring that the justice they were there to implement was "revolutionary justice" - openly partisan justice unabashedly dedicated to furthering the political needs of the leader.

The 2004 Supreme Tribunal Law did away, at a single stroke, with society's most important means for protecting itself from the authoritarian inclinations of its rulers, ensuring a subservient justice system that would never again dare to act as a check on the power of the powerful.

1M was the day when all the credibility drained out of our judicial system, the day any possibility that citizens could again use the law to seek redress against the abuses of the powerful was closed for good.

So as we approach its 5th anniversary, lets take a moment to reflect on the grim legacy of the day democracy died.

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.