Chávez names his price

Juan Cristóbal says: - This buried little nugget in state-owned wire service ABN is startling in its honesty.

In it, Under-Secretary Francisco Arias Cárdenas very clearly declares what Chávez wants in exchange for returning relations with Colombia to a semblance of normalcy: a face-to-face meeting with Barack Obama.

According to Arias, the region's diplomats should not waste their time organizing summits with Uribe. The OAS, Lula and the rest are all barking up the wrong tree, Arias says, because Chávez's beef is no longer with Uribe but with Obama. Only Obama, he claims, can give Venezuela the guarantees it needs regarding the military agreement between Colombia and the U.S.

In criollo, "yo no vengo a hablar con los payasos, vengo a hablar con el dueño del circo."

After much huffing and puffing, after declaring wars and announcing troop movements on national TV, after $4 billion+ in weapons purchases, we now know it was all the price we needed to pay to get Chávez his much-desired photo-op in the Oval Office.

Remarkable, ain't it?

Not red enough for VTV: Squalid media and revolutionary discontent

Juan Cristóbal says: Many of Venezuela's public servants are mad. They, the red-wearing base of the Revolution, are mad because they don't get paid, because their places of work are under-equipped and they don't have benefits. Mostly, they're mad because they've been promised collective bargaining that never materializes and because their dignity is being trampled on.

But if you didn't watch Globovisión, you probably wouldn't know this.

The list of ironies and internal contradictions of the Bolivarian Revolution is long. One of the more notable recent additions is the fact that Globovisión, one of chavismo's most overused scapegoats, has become the outlet of choice for rank-and-file chavistas with an itch to bitch against the government.

A brief scan of what's been in the news lately could give you a flavor of massive dollop of irony involved.

Here we see a video of the very angry employees of the government-run Hotel Alba Caracas (what used to be the Caracas Hilton before Chávez ... never mind). The employees, more than 400 of them, are incandescent because they haven't been paid and are being harassed by management. They complain about their appalling working conditions - chefs decry the lack of butter, laundry attendants fret over washing machines that don't work. And Globovisión is the only channel there, listening and reporting.



Government oil workers in Anzoátegui State, in eastern Venezuela, are also causing a ruckus. They denounce the government for not signing a new collective bargaining agreement. Union leaders are quick to point out that they will defend their rights just like they "defended the industry during the oil strike of 2002-2003." Globovisión is there to air their frustration.



The government's postal service is also in upheaval. Workers carp that their rights are being trampled upon, saying that "socialism is not being applied here." Unions are being harassed and so they are sending a message to "Comrade Hugo Chávez" ... in case he's watching Globovisión. The union leader interviewed rues that all media has been invited, but only Globovisión came, bitterly singling out a State media that won't air their views.



Apparently, chavismo has not grasped just how dangerous a disgruntled postal worker can be.

Workers from the El Algodonal hospital, west of Caracas, also criticized the government recently for their terrible working conditions. They talk about the crime spree inside the hospital, the lack of doctors and the scarcity of supplies. The person interviewed alerts us that the hospital's Emergency Room has been shut for a year. Another group of workers says they haven't been paid in more than two months, that there's no water, and that sewers run openly next to the hospital.



Retired National Assembly workers also aired their beef in downtown Caracas recently. More than a thousand former workers made a fuss because their pensions haven't been paid. Again, Globovisión carried it prominently.



Even in far-off Portuguesa state, Health Ministry workers use Globovisión as a vehicle to air their grievances about the capacity of their manager and their working conditions. At least these workers managed to get the attention of a chavista Assembly-woman.



And this is just a flavor from the past few days.

But scan VTV's web page and there is no mention of the hotel maids, the oil workers, the El Algodonal ladies, or any of the other government employees who are up in arms. Off-script revolutionaries are strictly verboten on "the channel of all Venezuelans".

The workers' gripes stick to a well-defined script. Worker says she is "with the process", a necessary qualifying statement in order to keep her job. Worker then pledges allegiance to Comrade Chávez and to socialism. Worker goes on to complain that the government is a mess and demands a piece of the petro-pie. Worker reminds the viewer that she and her compañeros are with the process - just in case it wasn't clear. Worker hands it off to fellow worker with a different gripe. And so on...

Once in a while, the worker on the screen will express their surprise and disappointment at the fact that Globovisión is the only channel willing to listen. In a way, Globovisión has become the de facto voice of the proletariat. One would hope the proletariat would ask themselves where they will take their grievances if their beloved "comrade" fulfills his pledge to shut down the only TV channel willing to take them seriously.

This bizarre pattern underscores the vital role that independent media plays in a well-functioning society. On VTV, revolutionaries are useful as props, as abstract tokens of support for the whim of the leader. The second those revolutionaries transcend that role and acquire any depth, any complexity, any individuality, they become dangerous provocateurs to be silenced rather than citizens to be served.

We've been very critical of Globovisión's harsh, strident anti-Chávez content on this blog. But when the channel does what it should - report the news and tell the stories nobody else is telling - it plays a pivotal role in the preservation of what little democratic space we have left.

Villa del Tukiti

Quico says: Don't miss Mac Margolis's epic mauling of Villa del Cine, Hugo's vanity movie studio, in the current issue Newsweek. To wit:

Just inside the studio gates, a man-made canal leads to an artificial stream and lakebed—but there was no water in them when I visited recently. Indoors, the corridors and edit bays are vacant except for one or two stray techies in jeans and tennis shoes. Rows of sewing machines lie idle under dust covers in the costume atelier. An electrical fire earlier this year knocked out most of the studio's work-stations, forcing producers, editors, seamstresses, carpenters, and engineers to relocate. "Here is Studio 1. Six to eight different film sets can fit in here," a perky Cinemaville PR aide chirps, opening the door to an empty warehouse.

The entire thing is couched in this kind of hyper-acerbic tone. Just brutal. Great fun.

[Hat tip: EC]

The Universal Yawn

Quico says: The really remarkable thing about the reaction to Chávez's latest obscene little warriorist hissy fit against Colombia is the sheer universality of the disinterest it elicited. You'd think that when the head of state of a country that's just come out of a five year weapons buying orgy openly announces imminent war on his neighbor people would worry, at least a little bit. What's bizarre and, in a way, heartening, is the extent to which that didn't happen following Sunday's loon-a-thon.

With the exception of this alarmist little rant from no-less-discredited-a-figure than former president Carlos Andrés Pérez (still, remarkably enough, alive and kickin'...his foot into his mouth) reaction to the war that-exists-only-in-Chávez's-head has been remarkably clear-eyed: the equivalent of a national roll-of-the-eyes, swiftly followed by speculation that the guy must be really hurtin' for a way to rally the faithful if we've entered the Rhetorical Galtieri phase already.

This is certainly Teodoro's reading, and the main vibe I get from scanning oppo responses. Nobody seems to be in any doubt that this is a smoke-curtain: what passes for an official response to the overlapping water/electricity/crime crises now buffeting the country.

The whole narrative about a virtual US occupation of Colombia and the imminent threat of gringo-prodded invasion is too weird, too unhinged to take at face value. This may, indeed, come to be remembered as one of the most catastrophic misreadings of a declared presidential intention in the Chávez era, but I really don't think so.

Instead, what I'd say to my Colombian friends is this: Hugo Chávez has decided to cast you in the role of villain.

He's been pushed into it for lack of a better alternative: Barack Obama doesn't really make a credible bogeyman, and the Venezuelan opposition is too disjointed and threadbare to really work in that role anymore. That's a real problem for Chavismo. By its nature, chavismo needs an enemy: an external threat it can vilify and rail against and use to justify any and every authoritarian excess at home. (How long until protesting students are arrested on suspicions of working for DAS?)

Chavismo's internal logic demands an enemy: a totally evil other to put flesh on the bones of the little Manichaean melodrama inside Huguito's head. And now, you're it.

It's not a pleasant fact, but it's a fact.

For Chávez, it's not important that an enemy be real, or recognize itself as an enemy, or even be much interested in what happens in Venezuela at all. The only thing really required of you in this role is that you be - that you exist long enough and semi-plausibly enough to play Dr. Moriarty to his Sherlock Holmes...at least in his supporters' eyes.

As we in the Venezuelan opposition can certainly tell you, it's not a nice role to be cast in. And yet, it's a role. He can't force you to really inhabit it, and the only way you can lose is if you take the bait. So try to grasp the dynamic at work here, and take a deep breath. A very deep breath. In fact, for your own sake, my advice is to join us...in the universal yawn.

The view from your window: Parque Central

Caracas, Venezuela. 11 am.

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War games

Juan Cristóbal says: - Once in a while, Quico and I get emails from readers in Colombia asking about Hugo Chávez’s latest antics vis-a-vis their government. Since yesterday Mr. Chávez decided to up-the-ante on the war talk and spent several minutes saying everyone should get ready for war, I assume Colombians' anxiety over their neighbor to the East is on the rise. The question that begs asking is where this is headed. Are we going to war with Colombia?

The short answer is no.

It's easy to talk about war when you don't bother explaining the specifics of how that war is supposedly going to take place.

In the modern world, there are many ways you can wage war. You can wage a war the old-fashioned way like Saddam did in the early '90s, or the modern way, a-la Donald Rumsfeld. You can do what the VietCong did, or what Al-Qaeda is doing now. But whether by air, by land, by sea, by the Internet or by an army of renegade militants willing to blow themselves up, there is one thing all these tactics require: a plausible course of action.

As it stands, it's hard to conjure up a plausible scenario where all these winds of war translate into an actual, palpable guerre between the two sister countries. Because, what exactly is it that Chávez is telling us to prepare for? And after we're ready, what next?

An air war? Really? Venezuela doesn't have the air power to make a serious dent in Colombia's military infrastructure, and if it did, Colombia has the US covering its back. Starting an air war with Colombia would be suicidal.

A ground war? Most Venezuelan generals have a hard time summoning the strength to stir a glass of 25-year old Scotch with their pinky. The Colombian army is much larger and better equipped than the Venezuelan army.

A guerrilla war? Yeah, like that's gonna work. The Colombian army has been waging a guerrilla war for almost fifty years now. They triple us in experience. As the saying goes, cuando tú vas, yo vengo.

Militant war? Check. Technological war? Check.

The only plausible reason to take the President seriously is if the government expected Colombia to invade Venezuela. But really, does anyone outside the Kool-Aid drinking left believe Colombia (and the US) are going to invade Venezuela any time soon?

Think of the headlines - Nobel Peace Prize-winning US President launches invasion of Venezuela. Makes perfect sense, right?

The only question that remains is why The Fat Warmonger in the Palace would be talking about this.

Easy - the more you talk about war, the more you get the Evos and Lulas of the world to worry about you. Cheap talk of war keeps the talking noggins at Globovisión busy for a couple of days and provides a welcome respite from all the talk about flashlights and buckets. Firing up the guns of war gives you insight into the barracks, and may ultimately provide clues as to who is with you and who is not.

It's understandable that Chávez's words cause discomfort in Bogotá's political circles. Cachacos are, after all, a cultured lot, genetically programmed to be repulsed by the ordinary antics of Veneco power players. But you shouldn't let your prejudices guide your perception of what is real and what isn't.

So my message to my Colombian friends is this: ignore him. It's not about you. When un certain bouffon starts talking crazy about war, the only war that should concern you is the shouting match between the voices in his head.

Chávez is part crazy, part astute political animal. So while the crazy voice may be asking for a war, the rational one knows that would be his doom, just like it was for Videla and Galtieri. That's the voice that is likely to prevail, the only one you really need to pay attention to.

The view from your window: Chicago

Chicago, Illinois, USA. 4 pm.

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The expected begins to happen

Juan Cristóbal says: - Courageous Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez was briefly kidnapped from the streets of Havana by unidentified thugs and beaten. Her harrowing account is here, in Spanish.

PS.- Alek Boyd has met the woman and has a unique take on this.

Owning up to one's bad calls

Juan Cristóbal says: - Barely a week after we were declaring the Honduras crisis all but over, we get news the agreement has collapsed.

Not only that, a US Senator and leading Micheletti supporter is claiming the US will recognize the outcome of the election, with or without Zelaya.

This takes a ton of pressure off of Micheletti's shoulders and severely diminishes US bargaining power. It also hurts the notion that the US is playing a new ball game in the region.

Somebody pass me a towel.

Game Over

Quico says: Over on BoingBoing, loyal reader and one-time avid gamer Guido Nuñez Mujica has this lovely, meaty rant on the government's just approved ban on video games it deems violent.

As a non-gamer myself, it's easy to overlook how sensitive the gaming-ban is for some people, so I especially liked Guido's passionate description of the way gaming burrows its way into people's identities. It made me realize that gaming may not matter to me, but it definitely matters:

This situation is painful to behold. Even if I barely game at all these days, I am a gamer at neocortex. I spent countless hours solving puzzles, riddles and fighting monsters in dungeons. I rescued Toadstool many times, only to be told that thanks, but my Princess was in another castle, later I joined Link and rescued Zelda from Agahnim and Ganon, using the Master Sword and the Silver Arrows. I got the Zantetsu sword and cut metal, I summoned Ifrit, Odeen and Behemoth. From Dragoon, I became a Paladin. I sneaked on Big Boss' fortress in Zanzibar and stopped doomsday with Solid Snake. I fought along a Double Dragon trapped on a Final Fight, using my Killer Instinct in a Mortal Kombat in which only the greatest Street Fighter would come alive. I was Linked to the Past by a Chrono Trigger, my Soul Blazing, as I lived my Final Fantasies, Wandering from Ys, arriving to a Lagoon, to learn about the Secret of Mana, and finally understood that there is Ever More to life.

These games are a cherished part of my life, they helped to shape my young mind, they gave me challenges and vastly improved my English, opening the door to a whole new world of literature, music and people from all around the world. What I have achieved, all my research, how I have been able to travel even though I'm always broke, the hard work I've done to convince people to fund a start up for cheap biotech for developing countries and regular folks, none of that would have been possible hadn't I learned English through video games.

Now, thanks to the tiny horizons of the cast of morons who govern me, thanks to the stupidity and ham-fisted authoritarianism of the local authorities, so beloved of so many liberals, my 7 year old brother's chances to do the same could be greatly impacted.

Killer fact: in Venezuela, giving a child a toy gun is now more heavily punished than giving a child a real gun.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

The view from your window: Asunción

Asunción, Paraguay. 1 pm.

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Loser boasts of taking from winner

Juan Cristóbal says: - This video, secretly taped, shows the loser in last year's election for Caracas Metropolitan Mayor, chavista Aristóbulo Istúriz, explaining the raison d'etre and the modus operandi through which they simply took the winner's budget, and reassigned it to chavistas.

In other words, it's as if John McCain took away most of Barack Obama's budget and gushed about it.

(Hat tip: Pelao)

The view from your window: Addis Ababa

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 2:30 PM.

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The Huffington Post ...

Juan Cristóbal says: - ... discusses harassment of gays and lesbians at the hands of Venezuelan government goons. Check it out - I wonder what Sean Penn thinks about this.

BCVSA and The Exchange Rate that Must Not Be Named

Quico says: Two and a half years ago, when Chávez announced PDVSA would start manufacturing shoes and selling beans and I wrote this snarky little post about the acute outbreak of role confusion in Venezuela's institutions, I could not have imagined that the trend would reach the extremes it has. As the decade comes to a close, Venezuela faces a macroeconomic reality that is bizarre on so many levels that it seems almost normal that our oil company is now, effectively, our Central Bank.

It all goes back to this blog's favorite hobby horse: the dual foreign currency market.

Your economics textbook will tell you that a country's Central Bank is the public entity charged with issuing the nation's currency and preserving its value. Operationally, that usually translates into a mandate to fight inflation by keeping the money supply from growing too much, too quickly.

But in a port economy like Venezuela's, where the vast bulk of consumption goods are imported, inflation is driven as much by the price of foreign exchange as by the absolute amount of money in circulation. The reason is easy to grasp intuitively: if you eat a lot of imported rice at $1 per kilo, and the price of that dollar rises from Bs.2 to Bs.4, you've just imported 100% rice inflation via the exchange rate.

Which is why, in import-dependent economies like ours, managing the foreign exchange market is one of the Central Bank's main tools as it seeks to control inflation. After all, if you want to control the price of dollar-denominated goods, you would be well advised to control the price of the dollar.

Enter Venezuela's Alice-in-Wonderland exchange-rate system, where the gap between government-speak and reality gets wider every passing year. While the Central Bank controls the official exchange rate, this rate is increasingly irrelevant to the Venezuelan economy. Everybody knows that in Venezuela, the price of imported goods tracks the Voldemort Exchange Rate - you know, the one that must not be named.

Which makes the Central Bank an ever more marginal player in the management of the Venezuelan economy: its control extends only to the de mentirita exchange rate, not to the real one.

Over time, even the nullities that govern us were forced to come to grips with the obvious: that prices in Venezuela are highly sensitive to an exchange rate that's not supposed to exist. The policy of wishing it away was not sustainable. The catch is that there wasn't an evident way to intervene the other market without acknowledging its existence.

To come to grips with the no-kidding exchange market, the authorities needed to find some highly opaque, politically docile institution with lots and lots of dollars on hand that it could spend off-budget and off-adult-supervision and with an upper management greedy enough to jump at the chance to manage the Voldemort market...and, well, in Venezuela that brief describes just one entity.

For months now, PDVSA has been more or less openly intervening the parallel dollar market, sporadically stepping in to keep the Voldemort Rate from climbing too high. But...that kind of macroeconomic management is supposed to be the Central Bank's job...ergo, PDVSA is, in all but name, the new Central Bank: BCVSA.

What we have in Venezuela is an all-but acknowledged dirty float, a system where the government accepts that the currency's fluctuations are beyond its control but nonetheless steps in now and then to manipulate the exchange rate.

The problem with this - aside from the whole "illegal", "unconstitutional," yada yada boring counter-revolutionary stuff people like me always write - is that it's insanely, incredibly opaque. Billions of dollars are at stake in a market that the government actively fosters and periodically intervenes, but whose existence it can't acknowledge.

Maybe a "self-loathing float" is a better description: what we have here is a heavily meddled with float that the government refuses to even talk about, subject to interventions it sure as hell won't let anybody audit. The truly remarkable thing would be if such an extraordinarily cash flush, deliriously opaque arrangement didn't breed a mass of corrupt practices.

Take a moment here to think through the possibilities. If you have the inside information to accurately time the fluctuations of the Voldemort Market, you suddenly put yourself in a position to make genuinely obscene amounts of money off of that information. Say you know that BCVSA plans to intervene tomorrow, selling $200 million to operators to take 20 cents off of the Voldemort rate. You just go to your bank, borrow some dollars, use them to buy bolivars, sit tight, and sell the bolivars tomorrow, when each of them is 20 cents more valuable. Then you pay back your bank and you pocket the difference. Money for nothing and chicks for free, no risk involved.

Sure, 20 cents may not sound like much, but do this kind of thing on a big enough scale and you can make millions and millions of dollars. Which is why I'm convinced that every time the secret dollar ticks up or down 20 cents, another batch of Bolivarian millionaires is made.

Now, imagine you're working in BCVSA and you're in a position to directly decide when you're going to step in to inject dollars into the Voldemort market. In that situation you're not just able to profit for yourself handsomely, but you're also in a position to make or break fortunes all around you.

One call to your friend with that tip and you've turned him into an instant millionaire. The same call, recorded by spies in Miraflores, earns the Executive Power the unwavering loyalty of the civil service reaping the benefits of the Revolution's discretion.

That's the stuff power is made of in the Chávez era.

There is simply no way a system that works on such levels of secrecy and opacity and that handles the kinds of sums BCVSA handles is anything less than writhing, heaving cesspool of corruption. The benefits from diving in are too strong, and the disincentives are practically non-existent.

Reproduced Verbatim

The North Korean State (what other kind is there?) News Agency says:

National Seminar on Juche Idea Held in Venezuela

Pyongyang, November 1 (KCNA) -- A national seminar on the Juche idea and the Songun politics took place in Venezuela on October 17 on the occasion of the 64th birthday of the Workers' Party of Korea.

Omar Lopez, chairman of the Venezuelan National Society for the Study of the Juche Idea, explained the essence of the Juche idea founded by President Kim Il Sung, saying that the idea is fully displaying its vitality in the Venezuelan people's efforts for building socialism.

Diego Antonio Rivero, chairman of the Venezuela-Korea Friendship and Solidarity Association, said that Kim Il Sung was the great leader of the Korean people and the world people as he led the socialist revolution and construction in Korea to victory and devoted himself to the cause of global independence. That is why the progressive people are still highly praising his immortal exploits, he added.

A professor of Bolivar University stressed that all the achievements made by the Korean people are a brilliant fruition of the Songun politics pursued by General Secretary Kim Jong Il. The cause of the Korean people facing down imperialism gives strength and courage to the world revolutionary peoples including the Venezuelan people and it has become a model of anti-imperialist struggle, he stressed.

A message of greetings to Kim Jong Il was adopted at the seminar.

Hat tip: SG

Update: In the comments section, GTAC adds:

This is not really a fringe group, even if they are small in numbers.

The Venezuelan far left splintered during the Guerrilla experience in the 60's-70's because of many tactical and strategic disagreements. The monolithic PCV, which was pro-USSR (a country which did not support guerrilla warfare by the late 60s), was then divided in a number of factions: pro-PRC, pro-Albania, pro-Cuba, Eurocommunist, School of Frankfurt types, and so forth.

Of course, there had to be a pro-Juche idea faction. This group was led by, among others, former guerrilla and philosophy professor Jose Rafael Nuñez Tenorio, who in 1969 published a book called “Bolivar y la Guerra revolucionaria”, basically creating the final blend of the Bolivar-as-antiimperialist-guerrilla-leader trope (already stated by Cuba and Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic), stating that liberal democracy was in fact a dictatorship which had to be violently toppled, just as the Spanish Colonial power needed to be defeated. As the guerrilla failed, he was among the advocates of an alliance between civilians and ideologically oriented leftist members of the military.

This could mean nothing, unless you take into account that Núñez was founder of the Vth Republic Movement, a member of its National Tactical Command, and one of the men inside the board of the Chávez’ 1998 presidential campaign: he gave an interview with Duno and Mieres to El Nacional’s revista PRIMICIA, which exposed the mid-to-long term plans of a potential Chávez presidency: the dismantling of congress and the Judicial power through the constituyente; the penetration and eventual dissolution of the Armed Forces, Central Bank, and the de-technocratization of PDVSA.

As member of the MVR, he was posthumously elected as Senator for Caracas in 1998, unable to serve as a congressman because of his death in October. During his funeral, which I attended as a curious UCV student and which was held at the Patio Cubierto del Rectorado, the late professor Núñez’ coffin was draped with… a North Korean flag!

What's happening in Táchira?

Juan Cristóbal says: - The border is closed.

Two National Guardsmen were murdered.

Nine Colombians were murdered last week.

What's going on? Is this related to the government's crackdown on the illegal smuggling of gasoline?

If you're on the ground or have relatives in the Land of Presidents, tell us what you know.

The view from your window: Montreal

Montreal, QC, Canada. 31 October 2009, 5:00 pm.

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Is Iberdrola scamming Venezuelan taxpayers?

Juan Cristóbal says: Why does it cost 39% more than average for a Spanish company to build a power plant in Cumaná than anywhere else in the world? Why does it cost 12% more than its next most expensive project anywhere in the world? And what does it take these days to get anyone in Venezuela to take a hard look at these numbers?

These are just some of the questions arising from the deals now being struck between the Spanish government, Spanish multinationals and the Chávez administration. Using estimates from the International Energy Agency, I've argued there is no way the 1,000 MegaWatt (MW) combined-cycle electric plant being built in Cumaná for 1.4 billion Euros is being purchased at market rates. The multi-million dollar overcharge is out in the open.

Of course, whether or not you believe you're being overcharged depends entirely on how reliable you think the benchmark is. If you believe the IEA is a questionable benchmark, then on the face of it, there is no way of knowing whether the Iberdrola project is based on real costs or whether something far more sinister is at hand.

As it turns out, there is another set of benchmarks available: Iberdrola's combined-cycle projects in other parts of the world.

As we said in the previous post, Iberdrola's project costs Venezuelan taxpayers 1,400 Euros per KiloWatt (kW) of installed capacity. To get that number, simply divide 1.45 billion Euros by the 1 million kW capacity the plant will have (1 MW is 1,000 kW, so 1,000 MW is 1 million kW).

The question that begs asking is: what were the costs of Iberdrola's other combined-cycle projects? Let's see.

- In Lithuania, it is building a 440 MW plant for 330 million Euros. The cost of the Lithuanian plant is 750 Euros per kW.

- In Algeria, it is building a 1,200 MW plant for 1.47 billion Euros. The cost of the Algerian plant is 1,225 Euros per kW.

- In Russia, it is building a 403 MW plant for 311 million Euros. The cost of the Russian plant is 771 Euros per kW.

- In Qatar, it is building a massive 2,000 MW plant for 1.63 billion Euros. The cost of the Qatari plant is 815 Euros per kW.

- In Latvia, it is building a 420 MW facility for 300 million Euros. The cost of the Latvian plant is 714 Euros per kW.

The numbers don't lie. The Cumaná project is, by far, the most expensive combined-cycle power plant in Iberdrola's investment portfolio.

There may just be a perfectly valid reason for all of this, but I doubt it. What possible explanation, other than corruption, can there be for such a difference? Are Iberdrola's stockholders aware that, because they list their ADRs in the New York Stock Exchange, Iberdrola would fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? What does European legislation say about this? Why aren't European MPs looking into this?

And why are Venezuelan journalists simply ignoring this issue?

Venezuelan taxpayers deserve an answer.

Headline of the Year

Quico says: I dare you to click on this and not laugh.

Go on, click.

You laughed, didn't you?

Oh sure, a second later you caught yourself. You realized this isn't actually funny at all. You felt vaguely guilty that you couldn't contain that chuckle. The man is dead, for god's sake. It's no joke.

But admit it, before all that, you chuckled.

[Hat tip: CL.]

The Real Winner in Honduras

A longer version of this post appears on The New Republic's blog, The Plank.

Juan Cristóbal and Quico say: The Honduran tragicomedy that has consumed the hemisphere's diplomats for months is at an end (read the details here). Barring the unforeseeable - which is always an iffy thing to do in Honduras - Micheletti is out, Zelaya is in (pending a face-saving vote by Congress and the Supreme Court), and an election to replace him will be held on November 29, as planned.

In light of all this, who was the winner in the Honduran crisis?

Certainly not Zelaya. He's back in power, but is significantly weakened. He will not be allowed to push for the Constitutional Reform that precipitated the crisis in the first place. He'll be forced to head a "unity government" (a.k.a., an "amarren-al-loco government") and he'll have to find himself another job in January.

Certainly not Micheletti. By giving up power to Zelaya, he loses a massive amount of face and may face criminal charges down the road. In spite of having stopped the illegal referendum Zelaya was pushing for, his fate is up in the air.

Certainly not Chávez, who can say goodbye (for now) to his main objective: ensuring Zelaya remained in power through indefinite re-election and permanently adding Honduras as an ALBA satellite. His intervention in the crisis, which went from ridiculing Micheletti to threatening to ignite civil war, was as hyperbolic as it was ineffectual; it left him sounding like a clown. Count on Chávez to ignore reality and call this a heroic, historic, glorious triumph of the Revolution, though.

Certainly not the OAS. In a futile attempt to compete with Chávez's maximalist rhetoric, the regional body let its presumed power get ahead of its actual leverage, effectively sidelining itself from the negotiations that eventually brought the crisis to an end. The hypocrisy of the organization's scorn toward the Honduran Supreme Court became overwhelming when Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua pushed an illegal, clearly unconstitutional Supreme Court ruling giving him the power to be re-elected indefinitely and the OAS erupted in silence. The region's heavyweights (a.k.a., Brazil) showed that, without US influence, they have little to no leverage.

No. The real winner in this drama is the power broker, the top diplomat for the key power who quietly, patiently pushed for this settlement all along.

If this deal leads Honduras away from crisis and toward a legitimate Presidential election, if it leads Zelaya and Micheletti to the dustbin of history - I think we have the lady in the picture to thank.

The view from your window: Reading

Reading, Pennsylvania, USA. 10 AM.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

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Iberdrola and Elecnor supply the electricity to cook the books

Juan Cristóbal says: - Venezuela is in the grips of an unprecedented electricity crisis, and much of it has to do with festering corruption and boundless incompetence.

Since Hugo Chávez nationalized the electricity sector, blackouts have become the norm in much of the country, and the President has gone so far as to threaten shopping malls and love motels - Miraflores not included - with cutting their power. Our Commander-in-Chief is now our Conserje-in-chief, quite literally looking to pull the plug on the undeserving.

The corruption that seeps through all levels of the chavista administration and its international allies is a big part of the problem here.

Take the deal, announced last July, by Spanish companies Elecnor and Iberdrola (IBE in the Madrid Stock Exchange). The companies said they had signed an agreement with the Venezuelan government to build a power plant in Cumaná, in eastern Venezuela. The plant, which is being built for PDVSA and will use combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT), wasn't tendered. As has become usual, the contract was just assigned, a dedo, on a presidential whim.

(We'll leave it to far more cynical minds than ours to wonder whether the Spanish government's longstanding reticence to criticize any aspect of chavista governance had anything to do with the fact that this deal went to Spanish firms...)

So what do we know about the particulars of the deal? Sadly, little, and mostly what the companies themselves - rather than the government - has chosen to make public.

Funny detail, Elecnor's press release curiously left out a key component of this deal: the plant's capacity. They only disclose the plant will cost 1.4 billion Euros, roughly $2 billion at current exchange rates.

However, Iberdrola's press release goes all chatty Cathy. It proudly pegs the plant's capacity at 1000 MW. It also goes into great detail, boasting about who was in on the deal. The agreement was signed in Miraflores Palace by high management of both Elecnor and Iberdrola, and by the President of PDVSA Gas, Mr. Ricardo Coronado. Present in the signing ceremony: Spanish Foreign Minister Moratinos and Hugo Chávez himself.

So far, so kosher, right? Not so fast.

It turns out that the 2008 World Energy Outlook, an annual publication put out by the International Energy Agency, says that the typical construction cost for a CCGT plant in Latin America is on the order of $750 per kW. It's right there, in Table 2.

In other words, the estimated cost of a 1000 MW CCGT plant in Latin America should be in the order of $750 million, not $2 billion.

Now, some may say that the World Energy Outlook estimate is an average, that there is a lot of variation between Latin American countries. Others might argue that the contract may include other things, such as maintenance or the actual operation.

Baloney. The gap between $750 million and $2 billion is too large to reconcile. Any of these considerations should have, and would have, been made public. They haven't been. Google the cost per kW of building a CCGT plant and the figures vary, as they should. Nowhere do they reach the astonishing figure of $2,000 per kW the Venezuelan government is paying.

Assuming $750 million is the true cost, can anyone doubt that if the government had run a proper public tender, we would collectively be $1.25 billion richer than we are? At what point do the crimes against public coffers reach the tipping point when people realize their country is being pillaged from the inside out?

Of course, Chávez has a few madre patria enablers in this deal. And while it is impossible to claim they are in on it, they are hardly innocent bystanders.

The irony reaches pitch level when you find out Iberdrola is listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, scoring highly on, among other things, "social responsibility." One has to wonder: are Iberdrola's and Elecnor's shareholders aware of these shenanigans?

What do episodes like this one say about Chávez's priorities? If the Venezuelan government was worried about the electricity sector, it would spend more time thinking of ways to increase investment in this vital industry, and doing so in an efficient manner. Instead, it spends its energies currying favor with foreign governments by paying their firms for an electric plant three times the going price.

It's not about the people. It's all about staying in power and keeping the cronies happy.

Dear Editor

Quico says: I was about to send this as an email to an editor who asked me to write something about Chávez's hypertrophied presidential office budget. But as the rant took shape, I found myself thinking... "hmmmm, did I just write a post without meaning to?"

Dear [Name withheld],

Thanks for getting in touch. It's always a bit funny getting to realize which kinds of stories about Venezuela pique a foreign editor's interests: if you'd asked me a week ago, I wouldn't have guessed that a largely bureaucratic story about the Presidential Office's budget allocation would get so many papers abroad interested, though in retrospect I guess I can sort of see why it's a resonant theme. My blog partner, Juan Nagel, sure got into it.

I don't think I can write it, though, for two reasons. The first is a bit technical and has to do with the way the budget process works in Venezuela, or rather, doesn't work. The second goes more to the heart of the issue...

First, the technical bit: Venezuelans who follow these things all know that the official budget the Finance Minister presents to our National Assembly each year is more like an opening gambit than a finalized statement of what the state expects to spend in the following fiscal year. For as long as anyone can remember, Venezuelan law has allowed the government to go back to parliament in the course of the fiscal year and ask them to top up whichever accounts have run dry earlier than expected, a handy little procedure known as an "additional credit" ("crédito adicional").

On some abstract plane, I guess having some mechanism in place to make sure the budget is flexible enough to adjust to changing realities is a good idea. But as with most good ideas in Venezuela's political system, this one has been abused out of any semblance of good sense over the years.

I'm not blaming Chávez here, this is one of those old-regime vices the revolution just sort of forgot to revolutionize. But the long and the short of it is that initial budget figures are an extremely misleading thermometer of how much a given government office in Venezuela will spend at any given time, because actual spending is often many multiples of the original figure, thanks to "additional credits."

In this case, in particular, the amount the government is budgeting for Chávez's office in 2010 is several multiples what they had budgeted for 2009, but I doubt very much it's what they actually spent this year: take the time to go through the additional credits and I bet the rise looks a lot less scandalous.

So it seems likely that what we have here is a kind of accounting mirage: the government deciding to ask for more of what Chávez will spend up front rather than returning to the parliamentary teat again and again over the course of next year. If you were so minded, you could even see this as an advance in terms of monetary transparency. (Though, of course, to make Venezuelan budgets genuinely useful as analytical and planning tools they would need much tighter controls over the "additional credit" mechanism overall, and the government sure isn't about to consider such a thing.)

I tried to think of a pithy way to explain all that in 3 sentences in a way that would make sense and wouldn't put your readers to sleep, but couldn't really think of one.

But beyond the accounting angle, there's this thing that's been gnawing away at me about the way the presidential budget is being reported abroad: when you're talking about a political system like the one we have, the whole notion of a "presidential office" budget that's somehow separate from the rest of the budget seems quaintly out of place. In Venezuela, every ministry and every agency's budget is at the president's unrestricted discretion...that's what petrostate autocracy boils down to!

You could multiply the examples here. I could tell you about Chávez's explicit threat to private shopping mall owners last week to get their own power generators or face power cuts from the public utility companies: a guy who micromanages the operations of even parastatal agencies like the utilities like that doesn't need a ringfenced private budget to spend as much as he wants on whatever he wants, he can just pick up a phone, call any agency head, issue a direct order and get his way, pre-existing budget commitments be damned.

I could go into the details of Fonden, the government's hyper-opaque "national development fund" which hasn't presented a balance sheet in public in over a year, whose actual holdings are a matter of simple-conjecture, but which by most accounts has at least several billion dollars and, according to some government spokesmen earlier this year, as many as $50 billion at its disposal: all money that's spent at Chávez's discretion, with simply no oversight, no previous budgeting, no form of outside accountability or control whatsoever.

I could go into the way the New PDVSA's management also spends money discretionally, on Chávez's orders, before handing that money over into the finance ministry's budgeting stream, such that that nearly endless money-stream is also, in effect, part of Chávez's no-oversight, no-controls budget.

When you think through the realities of the way money gets spent in a country like ours, where no public institution is ever able to put a check or a balance on the president's whim, getting upset over a $341,000 allocation for the president's clothing seems grotesquely out of place. I mean, what we're focusing on here is the fig leaf, the part they had the decency to declare, the equivalent of the profits Vito Corleone reported through Genco Olive Oil.

It's the millions upon millions of dollars they're spending off the books, to fund FARC or Iranian uranium exploration in Bolívar state, or extremist groupies' presidential campaigns in the rest of the hemisphere that I'm worried about. It's the unbudgeted, unreported, unaccounted for and officially non-existent billions flowing from PDVSA through various financial intermediaries and into the accounts of Ricardo Fernández Barrueco and Pedro Torres Ciliberto and Arné Chacón that I'm concerned about. It's the whole black underbelly of the parallel, off-the-book Chavista Second (and Third, and Fourth) Budget that we need to focus on, not the vanilla $1.4 billion they had the modesty to own up to!

In conditions like these, writing a story about the presidential office's official budget allocation is, in itself misleading. A first world reader looking into is bound to read the story and think, "so...they have budget debates, we have budget debates, they have controversies about particular budget items, we have controversies about particular budget items, they have venal politicians who make a grab for the sweet life while in office, and so do we!...hey, Venezuela seems like a pretty normal country!"

But it's not like that, my friend...it's just not like that at all...

cheers,
ft

Tell me how you budget and I'll tell you who you are

Juan Cristóbal says: - Hugo Chávez's administration introduced a draft 2010 budget a few days ago. The project promises a whopping $84 billion in spending that somehow manages to disappoint. It is lower than the 2009 budget in real terms, and assumes an optimistic 0.5% GDP growth and a frankly fantastical 22% inflation, in itself nothing to shout home about. But a few hidden gems are raising significant eyebrows.

The main one: Spain's El Pais, through the inimitable pen of Maye Primera, is reporting that Chávez's discretionary spending will rise by 638% in 2010, to an astonishing $1.5 billion. This is twice as high as the entire budget of the Energy and Oil Ministry, higher than the budgets of the Agriculture, Mining or Foreign Affairs Ministries.

Nevertheless, the more egregious comparison is with the funds assigned to our embattled judicial system. Chávez's personal budget is on par with the $1.7 billion allocated to all the country's courts, and several times larger than the miserly $474 million that go to Prosecutors. Both amounts are 16 and 9% lower, respectively, in nominal terms than they were in 2009.

But it's just as well. The budget instructs the "justice" "system" to work in advancing the government's socialist agenda. If the courts are ordered to defend a political project instead of the rule of law, then there must be some sort of silver lining in them getting the axe, right?

The numbers underlying Chávez's discretionary spending offer cynics a not inconsiderable serving of red meat. There is a paltry $9 million allocation for Chávez to give out freely to those pesky people asking for help at the front door of Miraflores Palace, while security for the President (presumably to guard him from those very people) gets $16 million. The President's trips overseas (to get away from those people) get another $9.1 million, while his weekly TV show Aló, Presidente (so those people can be entertained while keeping quiet) gets $2.6 million.

Chávez's appearance clearly shall not bear the brunt of budgetary restrictions. The president's clothing gets $361 thousand per year - three times what Sarah Palin scandalously got for the 2008 US Presidential elections. This amount is, according to Chile's La Tercera, the highest in South America, exceeding even Cristina Kirchner's gaudy, unseemly $350 thousand-a-year wardrobe (which, come to think of it, Venezuelan tax-payers also help pay for.)

But as any fashion consultant will tell you, it's not just the clothes, it's how you wear them. That's why dry-cleaning gets $92 thousand, while $84 thousand are earmarked for stocking the President's palaces with "personal care" products. Assuming the President spends three minutes in the shower each day, his grooming costs taxpayers $76 per minute. Quite literally, he is throwing our money down the drain.

As snicker-inducing as these numbers are, they are not the most astonishing part of the Miraflores budget. Chávez is a well-documented narcissist, so these figures fit the bill. Unless you were still under the delusion that Chávez was sincere in his zest for socialism and his constant decrying of consumerism, these numbers are "dog-bites-man."

What these figures point to is Chávez's increased reliance on discretionary spending for his own political survival. As poll numbers for the President go from red to very red, Chávez knows his fate cannot be left to the headless bureaucracy he has fed all these years. As in 2003, he is well aware that the key is to have the cash ready to spend on quick, easy fixes that will somehow dupe the population into thinking he's solving their problems.

So the real headline shouldn't be what Chávez spends on clothes. The real headline is Chávez's strategy to stay politically relevant. In a country with the highest crime rates in the world, where personal safety is by far people's top concern, the President cuts funding for the justice system to increase his own discretionary funding. He clearly believes his own political survival depends not on solving people's problems, but on having the cash to look like he's doing so.

Chávez thinks you suck; you agree

Quico says: As Chávez takes to blaming more and more of the nation's problems on you, the latest Datanalisis poll confirms it: 23.9% of respondents identify "la gente" (the people) as the main culprit for the nation's problems, just beating Chávez (23.2%) for top spot.

You suck, and you know it.

Killing capital

Quico says: Hernando de Soto's conception of "dead capital" is one of the genuinely intriguing ideas spawned by the development literature in recent years. For de Soto, the problem facing the third-world poor is not just that they own too little, but that the things they do own are economically "dead."

In the absence of clear titles, the shanty where you live or the buhonero stall you sell from can't be used as collateral, or rented, or even sold. Because it can't do any of those things, it doesn't earn you an "in" into the formal financial system like the capital of the middle class or the rich. It's yours only in the sense that you can use it, nothing more.

But capital is much more than just the right to use the things that belong to you: it's the right to leverage them as tools for your economic empowerment and advancement.

Dead capital is the capital of the unfree.

What de Soto is getting at is an old idea in economics: that property is about more than just possession. Capitalism can only work when ownership carries with it a set of rights that include your ability to transact what you own, to borrow against it, to rent it or subdivide it or otherwise leverage it into a tool for attaining your goals. A major reason that the poor find themselves trapped in poverty, in this analysis, is that their property rights are partial and tenuous: they exclude many of the key features that turn mere stuff into living, breathing capital.

The debate in Venezuela's public sphere has too often missed this distinction between "property" and "property rights." Earnest chavistas have often pilloried the opposition for scaremongering, putting down their 2007 referendum defeat to a successful opposition scare campaign to convince people that the government was going to literally disposses them: kick them out of their ranchos or move cubans into their apartments.

"Nationalization is about the means of production," they'll argue, "about factories and farms and banks...not about people's houses!"

And while fears of reds knocking down your door may indeed be overblown, what can no longer be doubted is that even if chavismo won't take away your property, it sure is eager to truncate your property rights. They may let you keep your stuff, but your ability to dispose of the things you own in the way you judge most likely to bring your family prosperity is being aggressively fenced in.

This is the real story of Official Gazette No. 39,272. Without having to expropriate anybody outright, the Gazette truncates hundreds of thousands of caraqueños' property rights, eroding their ability to leverage their belongings into tools for their own economic empowerment.

What we have here is a kind of capital massacre: the willy-nilly deadening of a massive store of previously living capital. The second your apartment is designated a "historically protected site" it takes a massive step from the category of capital to mere belonging.

When historic-site status is conferred on entire swathes of Caracas at one go, what we're seeing is the indiscriminate degradation of thousands upon thousands of families' rights to dispose of what belongs to them as they see fit, and all for the most tenuous of public-interest reasons. The government kills capital, apparently, for fun.

"Well, of course they do," you may be tempted to say, "they're communists: railing against capitalism is their whole thing."

But that's not right either. Marxism, for all its faults, at least offers a coherent response to the question of how to generate investment in a post-capitalist order. By socializing the ownership of the means of production, the workers' revolutionary state itself acquires the tools to leverage the society's material base into a (hoped-for) better standard of living for everyone. You don't have to agree that this is a good or even a feasible solution to recognize it as, at least, a solution: a serious, internally consistent stab at explaining how to bring prosperity in the absence of individual property rights.

The problem is that chavismo fails to rise to the threshold of intellectual seriousness Marxism sets out. In Venezuela the state is eroding individual citizens' rights to leverage their property into capital without proposing any coherent alternative.

Rather than nationalizing all industry and accepting responsibility for the management of society's productive processes, the state has created a thicket of stifling regulations instead. Those regulations keep a truncated version of ownership in private hands while at the same time preventing private owners from doing the things capitalists normally do for society's welfare: invest, produce, grow and generate jobs.

They wash not, and yet they refuse to lend out the wash basin.

In Venezuela, capital is not being socialized; it's being hunted for sport.

Our future at fire-sale prices

Juan Cristóbal says: - Not content with issuing debt to finance capital flight, as they did a few weeks ago, the Chávez administration recently announced a new round of debt to finance even more capital flight, this time backed by the third-world thrift store that is PDVSA. One small problem stood in its way: not enough buyers.

Investing in Venezuela is way too risky even if you earn an infinity rate of return.

So what does the government do? Why, sweeten the debt emission deal, of course!

Yesterday, PDVSA said they would not change the conditions. The Central Bank chief parroted that line. But since they have no credibility to save any more, today they did the exact opposite and announced a heavily edulcorated new set of incentives to get people to buy their bonds.

The new rules exempt the interest earned from holding the government's debt from taxes. With this measure, the government ups the ante: not only is it encouraging you to take you capital abroad, it's actually paying you to do so.

The rules also say that holdings of these Boli-delicious, guapo-doble-con-queso bonds will not count toward bank holdings of foreign currency. As you may recall, a few months ago the government decreed to place a limit on the percentage of their capital Venezuelan banks could keep in foreign currencies. This caused a lot of scrambling among bankers who, wouldn't you know, held a lot of foreign currency.

Well, in a reversal, banks can now hold these PDVSA dollar bonds and not have it count. And bankers who buy the bonds will be eligible for a free weekend at the Margarita Hilton ...

Apparently, the constant threat of nationalization wasn't enough to keep them on their toes. Now the government has to sweet-talk the banks into buying their debt.

But that's how it is. We've gone to this proverbial well so many times, nobody wants to lend to us any more. Cuz you know the government's finances are in desperate shape when it has trouble pimping its papers to the Victor Vargases and Arne Chacons of the world.

What El Sistema teaches us about social policy

Juan Cristóbal says: - The well-deserved, near-universal praise heaped on Venezuela's Youth Orchestra Program ("El Sistema") is a source of pride for all Venezuelans. And yet, reading the latest article to sing its praises, this time courtesy of The Toronto Star, I was left wondering: what is it about El Sistema that makes it so succesful?

Simple. It's José Antonio Abreu.

Of course, Abreu is mortal, and we would be selling the program short if we were to place its success on his shoulders, condemning it to oblivion once he is not there anymore. It's the parents, the musicians, the government - they all keep the train humming along.

But through it all, the fact is that Abreu has been persistent, leading the ship since the mid-70s.

It's hard to imagine El Sistema having this kind of impact without someone there, day in and day out, with a vision, navigating the perilous waters of political turmoil, oil-price shocks and a society that is, at times, at war with itself.

Abreu never set out to make this program for political gain. He doesn't appear to have wanted it as publicity, or to gain fame, or to boast in international forums. In his own words, "those of us who have been involved from the start were never really aware of what we were doing."

All he set out to do was create orchestras.

That concentrated focus has, almost miraculously, allowed him to gain the favor of governments left and right. He has sold his foundation as a Venezuelan institution, and has worked to resist being framed by either side in the current political squabbles. He has involved the communities, the parents and the local authorities, making them all have a stake in the outcome.

El Sistema could only work because of what it is not: a government program. Although the government supplies much of the funding, and the current administration has shamelessly tried to appropriate the fruits of their labor, El Sistema is not the product of the State.

It's the product of a single man's vision and the tireless work of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Venezuelans. It is not the fruit of some politician's imagination. It is not a three-headed bureaucracy run by a random army general who is replaced every six months. It's not a cash-distribution scheme concocted on the fly to help win an election.

This isn't to say that government social programs can't work. They can, and do. It's government programs run by the Venezuelan state which have proven to be ineffective and inefficient. They could be made to work, as long as they learn some lessons from successful experiences such as El Sistema.

Think about it:

• clarity of vision,
• persistence and permanence of its leadership,
• resistance to using the program as something it is not intended to be,
• positioning of the program above day-to-day politics,
• minimizing of direct State involvement,
• involvement of the community no matter what their political views.

All those things make El Sistema work. All those things are lacking in Venezuela's Misiones. Is it any wonder The Toronto Star is not raving about Misión Ribas?

With no electricity, nobody can hear your cadenas

Juan Cristóbal says: - The two short videos are fascinating. In a few short minutes, you can see Chávez the deranged (hiring "planes" to bomb the clouds and create rain), Chávez the amusing (telling people three minutes are more than enough for showering, saying that's what he does, "and I don't stink"), Chávez the authoritarian ("why do people need hot water? why do they need jacuzzis?"), and Chávez the loose-tongued, Freudian-slip communist ("what kind of communism are we building here?").

My apologies, but they are in Spanish only.





The stuff about the showers, in particular, is another manifestation of a tendency we don't talk about enough: for Chávez, Venezuela's problems are Venezuelans' fault. They have nothing to do with him.

No food in store shelves? You're all shopping too much. No electricity? You bunch of wasteful pricks. No water? Get out of your jacuzzis! No dollars? Stop drinking Scotch and we might come up with some.

It used to be his Ministers' fault, or the IVth Republic's, or the Empire's. But those scapegoats doesn't seem to be working anymore.

Now, it's all your fault ... yours, and the weather's!

Your apartment is their heritage

Quico says: Chavismo has surely entered its churrigueresque period when the government decrees a gas station as a protected historical site, an irreducible part of the nation's cultural and ethnic heritage. Yet there it is, in the official black and white of Official Gazette No. 39,272.

Mind you, Estación de Servicio Los Caobos is merely one item in a list of over 1,200 buildings, homes, parks, schools, churches, streets, highways and entire neighborhoods that figure in the Culture Ministry's new list of "protected historical sites" in Caracas' Libertador district.

The decree is a classic statement of dadaist tropical despotism. In one fell swoop, the government designates whole swathes of the city as protected heritage sites. El Nacional's headquarters is on the list, as is Banco Mercantil's. Not even the Distribuidor La Araña (pictured here), the crucial highway interchange that links up the Francisco Fajardo Highway with the one that goes to La Guaira, is saved from the mighty sword of cultural protection. Do you feel your ethnic heritage safer already?!

The slight bemusement this piece of bureaucratic protectionism stirs up quickly dissipates when you realize that, as protected heritage sites, all these areas come under a slew of new regulations. Suddenly, if you live anywhere in El Paraiso, Bella Vista, San Bernardino, La Florida or Los Caobos, you live in a protected historical site. Even if you manage to find someone willing to buy it, you can't just up and sell your house whenever you want. You can't even rent it, or get a mortgage loan against it.

No siree. Now, because your dilapidated, 50s-era, never-renovated San Bernardino apartment building is deemed part of the nation's "cultural heritage," you need special permission from MinPoPoCulture to do anything with it.

Another bit of paper, another chavista ideologue looking to screw with your life as long as you don't pony up and get off your mule. One more hoop, and one more layer of political control added to the mix of an already asphyxiated society.

The part that gets me most about this is that these people just don't have the courage of their convictions. If, as is clearly the case, they just plain don't believe in private property rights, why don't they come out and say it? Why all the sniveling, semi-covert, back-door, fine-print nationalizations? Why don't they make an honest woman out of their convictions? If they did, we may just be able to have a serious debate about it.

As things stand, we can at least take some comfort from knowing we can pump our massively subsidized gasoline from historically protected pumps.