Revolutionary justice

So, Carlos Fernández got arrested – what’s the big problem? Listening to his speeches during the General Strike, it’s hard to argue he didn’t break some laws. In particular, when he urged people not to pay their taxes, isn’t it obvious that that’s incitement? And it’s not like Chávez went and arrested him personally: a court ordered his arrest. Isn’t that what courts are for?

It’s an argument you might find compelling, but only if you know nothing about the Venezuelan justice system. The story of Venezuela’s courts in the last four years is the story of a systematic, thorough political purge. By now, the vast majority of Venezuela’s judges have been handpicked by presidential cronies – a good number are clearly presidential cronies themselves. Take, for instance, the judge who initially heard the Fernández case. He’s a long-time chavista activist with a murder conviction on his police rap-sheet who, just a couple of months ago, was serving as defense council for one of the chavista gunmen videotaped emptying his gun into an opposition crowd back in April. He’s far from the exception.

It all started in 1999. It’s hard to believe now, but just four years ago Hugo Chávez had 80% approval ratings and the political capital to do just about anything he pleased. As part of his pledge to reinvent the state from the ground up, Chávez launched a so-called “Judicial Restructuring Committee” charged with overhauling the court system. It was a popular decision back then, and understandably so: years of old regime cronyism had left the courts riddled with political picks who took their marching orders from their respective party patrons. The courts were badly in need of a shake-up, and after years of railing against the political subordination of the judiciary, Chávez seemed like just the man for the job.

But the exercise went wrong from the start. Daunted by the prospect of having to investigate each and every judge one by one, the Judicial Restructuring Committee adopted a highly dubious expedient. They decided to just suspend all judges who had eight or more corruption complaints pending against them. Obviously, it was a quick-and-dirty shorthand. Just as obviously, it demonstrated appalling contempt for the procedural rights of the judges involved. While the move certainly cleared away many of the worst cases of judicial abuse, it doubtlessly also included all kinds of “false-positive” – honest judges who’d accumulated several spurious complaints against them and found themselves booted from the bench with no chance to defend themselves. Indeed, some 80% of Venezuelan judges had that many complaints pending against them, and it’s hard to believe that all of them really were corrupt.

The Restructuring Committee had the power to replace the suspended judges with “provisionally appointed judges.” To keep the purge from bringing the court system to a halt altogether, these provisional judges were hired after a superexpedited selection process. And that’s where the trouble started. In typical form, Chávez had named only personal supporters to the Restructuring Committee. Not surprisingly, they selected only chavistas as provisional judges. The result was a mass swap of politically motivated magistrates: out went the adecos, in went the chavistas.

But the abuse went further than that. A normal Venezuelan judge, under the old system, was terribly hard to get rid of. This created some problems – bad apples were hard to dump – but solved others – honest judges were hard to pressure. Though many judges clearly supplemented their income with bribes, and many answered faithfully to their political patrons, at least they didn’t have to worry that they’d lose their jobs if they handed down a decision that displeased their higher ups.

Provisional judges are different: they have no special labor protections. In fact, they can be removed just as quickly and easily as they were appointed by the same people who initially chose them. So by the end of 1999, not only were the vast majority of Venezuelan judges chavistas, but they were chavistas who knew their job security was totally dependent on their willingness to follow the orders handed down by their political masters.

The president and his cronies soon developed a taste for this new brand of judiciary, chuck-full as it was of defenseless provisional judges. The system made it much easier to keep judges on the straight-and-narrow. So provisional appointments – which, as the name suggests, were initially supposed to last only a few months while regular judges could be selected – became, in fact if not in law, permanent. Today, four years after the restructuring drive started, a whopping 84% of the nation’s 1380 judges are provisional appointments.

Keep this in mind the next time you read a story about a Venezuelan judge ordering an arrest of a political leader. The scrupulously neutral language of international journalism contributes to the appearance that these decisions are based on at least a minimum of democratic legality. But when it comes down to it, these judges are not any harder for Chávez to appoint or remove than his minister, and just as beholden to him.

The situation is just as bad in the Supreme Tribunal, though there the story is a bit more complex. Chávez continually says it’s absurd for people to charge him with controling the Supreme Tribunal, because the tribunal has ruled against him on a couple of high-profile cases. That, he implies, is living proof that he’s purer than pure and never set out to subjugate the court. The truth is far less flattering than that: he did try, it’s just that he was too clumsy to pull it off.

Following the approval of the new constitution in 1999, the old Supreme Court was fired en masse, and a brand new Supreme Tribunal was selected. The appointments required a two-thirds majority in parliament, which Chávez didn’t have. He had no choice but to cut a deal with some of his opponents in the National Assembly to select a new court. To their eternal shame, Acción Democrática and Proyecto Venezuela decided to play ball.

The parliamentary deal to select a new tribunal was old regime politics at its worst - a stereotypical smoky room deal. Between them, the three parties had the required 2/3rds of parliament needed for the appointments, so they more-or-less divvied up the court the way a butcher might cut up a salami. Since MVR had about 70% of the three-party-coalition’s seats, they claimed 70% of the 20-member court: 14 magistrates. AD had about 20% of the seats, so they got to pick their four magistrates. Proyecto Venezuela, as the junior partner, got to pick two. This is not speculation: I’ve heard AD leaders, who were later excorciated by the opposition for playing along on this, defend themselves publicly by saying that only by cutting a deal could they block Chávez from appointing a 100% court. “At least we have a few magistrates,” they say.

Each of the Supreme Tribunal magistrates selected in this way know precisely which party they owe their appointment to, and which party they have to take orders from. Years of angry chavista denunciations against these sorts of shenanigans were left by the wayside. It was, as one pundit memorably put it – “more of the same, but worse.”

The problem is that Chávez screwed it up. Big time. He outsourced the task of picking “his” magistrates to Luis Miquilena, who was his then right-hand man back then. He thought he could trust him. But Miquilena picked personal buddies for the job, some of whom obviously saw him, and not Chávez, as the real boss. Eventually, as Chávez’s governing style became more erratic and authoritarian, Miquilena jumped ship. And when he did, he dragged some of the Supreme Court justices along with him.

That, in essence, is why Chávez has lost some cases before the court: Miquilena has enough pull over a few of the magistrates to turn them against Chávez on selected occasions. So, in a sense, Chávez is right: he doesn’t totally control the tribunal – not anymore. But that’s hardly because either he or the magistrates underwent some sort of mystical conversion to Montesquieu’s liberal vision. The magistrates are still puppets, it’s just that one of the puppeteers switched sides.

Of course Chávez finds this situation intolerable: the very notion that an important branch of government could fall outside his control runs directly counter to the autocratic spirit that animates his whole government. So he’s had his cronies at the National Assembly hatch a plan to expand the number of magistrates from twenty to thirty, together with expedited new methods for appointing magistrates that would allow him to pick ten new, this time reliable, candidates to solidify his wavering majority in the tribunal. It’s shameless court packing. But then, shame is in short supply in Caracas these days.

The move would also solidify his control of the lower courts. Since the new constitution came into force, the Judicial Restructuring committee was wound down and responsibility for managing the nation’s courts now lies with the Supreme Tribunal, through something called the Executive Directorate of the Magistracy – DEM, after its Spanish acronym. Control of the Supreme Tribunal means control of the DEM, and through it, of all the lower courts. So packing the Supreme Tribunal allows Chávez to strengthen his control of the lower courts, and to continue to pack them with provisionally appointed cronies.

In short, the judicial system has become, like the rest of the Venezuelan state, a presidential plaything. The orders to arrest Carlos Fernández and the PDVSA strike leaders are patently, transparently political decisions, bits extracted whole from presidential speeches. These courts, which act with such frightful celerity when it comes to prosecuting the president’s opponents, slow to a glacial pace when it comes to prosecuting the president’s friends, even when those who have been videotaped shooting into crowds of unarmed civilians. To summarize the government’s judicial philosophy: if you call an opposition march you go to jail, but if you empty your gun into that march, you’re a revolutionary hero, and your lawyer is appointed judge.

Correspondence with a different first world lefty

Foreign philochavistas come in two flavors: the ones who don't know what the hell they're talking about and argue in broad strokes and abstract categories (those damn oligarchs are just angry because finally someone's taking on their privileges!) and the ones who do know what they're talking about - generally because they live here - and argue in good faith. While I have almost no patience for the former, I think it's important to engage the latter. Greg Wilpert, who is decidedly among the latter, writes in about my last post:

------------------

I am wondering if either you are not aware of the threats that prominent government
officials and supporters live under or if you think that such threats are not worth
mentioning. Perhaps you think they are not worth mentioning because you blame
Chavez for creating the atmosphere in which such threats exist?

If you are not aware of the threats, I suggest that you talk to some MVR diputados,
for example. Not too long ago Iris Varela's home was bombed, for example. Shortly
after the brief coup attempt, even an insignificant person such as me received
kidnapping threats via e-mail, for having written the truth about what happened on
April 11 and 12. I've intentionally been keeping a relatively low profile as a result.

The upshot is, I have no doubt that the threats against prominent pro-government
individuals are every bit as common as against anti-government individuals. The
difference perhaps is that the threats against pro-government individuals are
occasionally carried out. Perhaps you don't know about the over fifty campesino
organizers who have been murdered in the past year? There are incidents
happening all of the time, that don't even get mentioned in the government
television, perhaps to encourage the image of a happy Venezuela.

You might think that foreign correspondents should mention the threats against
anti-government politicians; I think they should mention all threats, no matter who is
being targeted - that might at least correct the image of the oh-so holy opposition
and the oh-so evil government. I personally believe that the balance of good and
evil on both sides of the conflict is more or less the same.

Best, Greg
wilpert@cantv.net
----------------

I'll be honest: I wasn't aware of a really broad-based campaign of intimidation against government supporters, though it sounds entirely likely that one exists. I've heard plenty about chavistas being harassed and intimidated when they go to the "wrong" public spaces, and I think that's awful, near-fascist, detestable, and I've argued against it both in private and in public. The overall breakdown of tolerance and civility in society is really one of the worst and most ominous aspects of the crisis.

But I have to admit I find it somewhat hard to believe that the intimidation being metted out to government supporters is anywhere near as systematic and broad as what the opposition is getting. And not because the opposition is good and the government is evil (a view I've argued against repeatedly for months,) but because in order to mount a campaign on the scale of the one opposition leaders are now subject to you really need an organization behind it - you need wiretaps and surveilance capabilities, you need money and manpower and technology and centralized decisionmaking. In other words, you need control of the state.

And this, to my mind, is the key difference, as well as the root of so much of the instability in this country: when a Chávez supporter is threatened, he can call on the state for protection. When an opposition leader is threatened, it's probably the state doing it. Or, at least, someone with the aid, or at the very least the quiescent complicity, of the state. It's the principle of equal protection under the law turned on its head.

If you want to know why Venezuela is so unstable, here's an excellent place to start. The notion that the state ought to protect all its citizens equally, regardless of their political views, seems to me like a minimal requirement for stable democratic coexistence. But President Chávez has never made a secret of his contempt for the idea. From the word go he made it clear, again and again, that he intended to govern for one part of society only, and against the other. For a long time he tried to sell the idea that he would govern for the poor and against the rich. But as anyone with open eyes here knows by now, the real dividing line is purely political: he governs in favor of those who support him acritically and unconditionally and against everyone else.

It seems entirely predictable to me that those who suddenly saw the might of the state turned against them would react with virulent rage. You threaten people, they respond. There's no mystery there. Some of those reactions have gone really way too far, and they've only made the original problem worse, yes. But the original problem hasn't changed, and it won't go away until those who have hijacked the state for their own personal purposes cease and desist.

As Teodoro Petkoff has argued many times, it's entirely specious to say that the government and the opposition are equally responsible for the crisis. Enforcing the law equally, without arbitrary distinctions, is one of the core duties of a democratic state. When a government flouts that duty as comprehensibly as this one has - when it systematically uses state money, state facilities and state power to intimidate critics, all the while giving its supporters carte blanche to do anything they want any time they want, then the minimal basis for stable democratic coexistence are compromised, and the entire edifice of a free society teeters.

And with the edifice we're in teetering, it's obviously crucial not to do anything at all to exacerbate the problem. So yes, you're right, my original post was wrong. At times like these it's very imortant to avoid mindlessly partisan postures. That's what this blog is supposed to be all about, and I was wrong not to bring up the detestable threats made against government supporters in my last post.

But I reject, strenuously, the notion that that means that we can just split the blame down the middle and leave it at that. The Venezuelan state belongs to all Venezuelans equally - all Venezuelans have a right to demand its protection regardless of their political views. It just so happens that the Venezuelan state is momentarily led by someone who vigorously disagrees with that view, someone who's launched a sort of personal crusade against the principle of equal treatment under the law, who sees of the state as a personal plaything, as a political sledgehammer he can use to pound his enemies and a petty cash box he can use to bankroll his friends. So long as we're led by someone who thinks that way, Venezuela will never be both stable and democratic again.

I’ve been thinking more and more about these little stories, these stories that are rarely seen as important enough to get reported abroad, but that underlie the climate of tension in Venezuela. It’s hard for people abroad to quite understand the feel of the crisis here, in large part because stories like these just fly under the radar screen of the foreign press. But they’re important, so I’m going to write about them.

Pressure

It’s 3 am. You hear some strange noises outside your house. Half asleep, you crack the blinds open. You see a man, standing in the middle of the street right in front of your house. He’s looking straight at you. He has a gun in his hand. He points it up into the air. Suddenly you’re very much awake. He’s staring straight at your window. He shoots once into the air, then again, then four more times, quickly. Once he’s emptied his gun he climbs onto a motorcycle and speeds away.

That’s the worst of it, but only part of a broader pattern. Every day you get death threats on the phone. On email as well. And by fax. They know everything about you. They know where you live. They know where you work. They know your wife’s name, and your kids’. They’re following you. When you park somewhere unusual – a restaurant you don’t usually go to, say – you find notes on your windshield. “We’re following you.” This happens again and again.

Fiction? Not fiction. Just a peek into the daily life of a high-profile opposition activist in Venezuela. (I won’t reveal his identity for obvious reasons.) It’s not an isolated case.

The Chávez government has always hung its claim to respect human rights on the fact that no opposition figures have been murdered or imprisoned in Venezuela. The latter claim collapsed with Carlos Fernández’ arrest last week. The former, thankfully, still stands. But what these claims – and too much foreign reporting – gloss over is the systematic campaign of threats, intimidation and harassment government supporters have launched against all sorts of opposition figures.

The campaign is extraordinarily broad – most opposition politicians and pundits are under threat. Many journalists as well, and almost all private media owners. The threats are sustained, personal, delivered in a variety of ways. They target opposition moderates and radicals equally. Few have so far been carried out, but it’s hard to overstate the way this drip-drip-drip of intimidation poisons the political atmosphere here.

It’s important to keep this in mind when analyzing the private media’s behavior in the crisis. Media owners feel under threat. Personally. It’s not that their ideals are on the line, or their livelihoods. It’s their skin they’re worried about. Together with the high-stress nature of their jobs, the intimidation seem to be pushing some of them over the edge.

“I love my boss,” a friend of mine who works for a major media outlet tells me, “he’s a standup guy who’s taught me a lot. The problem is, he’s out of his mind.” He describes the way the mixture of the president’s threats to move against his company, together with the anonymous threats he keeps getting, have created this kind of siege mentality at the company. “He’s worked his whole life to get to the point where he can run a company like this,” my friend says “and he’s convinced that Chávez is going to take it away from him. He might be right, but the thing is that the pressure’s gotten to him. He’s just not thinking straight anymore.”

That doesn’t excuse the absence of balance in a lot of the media here, but it does help to explain it. They don’t call it psychological warfare for nothing. The unending personal threats, together with sporadic attacks against opposition newspapers and TV stations, are actually driving these people crazy. A lot of media people here have lost their ability to examine the situation in a cool, rational, detached way. The way they see it, it’s not just their livelihoods that are on the line. It’s their lives.

The threats, the torrent of well-orchestrated threats, can’t possibly be a matter of a few rogue chavistas striking out on their own to spook their political enemies. The campaign is too broad for that, too carefully run. If the government had any problem with it, it clearly could have cracked down long ago. Many here are convinced that the state security apparatus is behind it. And as the political violence escalates around the country, most are convinced it’s only a matter of time until these threats start turning into real attacks.

Blurting it out

For a second, I worried it had been a one-off. But reading this AP story I’m more and more convinced that the foreign media’s coverage of the crisis is now shifting very significantly.

Up until a few weeks ago, incidents like last night’s shootout outside PDVSA (two blocks from where I live, incidentally!) were covered in a scrupulously agnostic way – especially by the agencies. You kept running into phrases like “a shootout ensued,” or “each side blamed the other for starting the violence,” or “after an armed confrontation, X people lay wounded” – formulations specifically designed not to place the blame on one side or the other. And last night’s shootout was, at least as I saw it, murky enough that it could, imaginably, have been the work of agents provocateurs. It’s not likely, of course: as per usual, all the circumstantial evidence suggests that it was yet another unprovoked chavista attack, but it’s not entirely impossible that some shady right-wing group could have done it to raise trouble – absent footage of known chavistas shooting, how can you be sure?

In the past, that level of doubt would have been enough to elicit the wishy-washy, non-committal language described above. It drove opposition minded Venezuelans crazy reading stuff like that, because many times the weight of evidence against the government seemed so crushing that refusing to assign blame sometimes bordered on complicity with government-sponsored violence. There were some very unfortunate episodes where chavistas were demonstrably, evidently to blame for serious attacks - more than a couple of incidents were even photographed and videotaped and really left no room for doubt - and yet the foreign papers were just not willing to come out and say it clearly.

That’s one problem we don’t have in the post-Fernández-arrest era. The AP write-up is astonishingly unambiguous in assigning blame over last night’s shootout:

"Gunmen loyal to Chavez ambushed a group of policemen overnight, killing one officer and wounding five others, said Miguel Pinto, chief of the police motorcycle brigade. The officers were attacked Saturday night as they returned from the funeral for a slain colleague and passed near the headquarters of the state oil monopoly, which has been staked out by Chavez supporters since December. After a series of attacks on Caracas police by pro-Chavez gunmen, Police Chief Henry Vivas ordered officers to avoid oil company headquarters. But the funeral home is located nearby.

'We never thought it would come to this,' Pinto said.

Chavez's government has seized thousands of weapons from city police on the pretext that Vivas has lost control of the 9,000-member department. Critics allege Chavez is disarming police while secretly arming pro-government radicals."

Now, the journalists reading this know how the sausage is made. This is not the way you write a story if you mean to leave any doubt in your readers' minds about who's responsible for the killing. It’s a gutsy way to write, really - and refreshing to see in the typically bland AP. It just goes to bolster my theory that Chávez screwed up big time with Carlos Fernández – the speed with which the benefit of the doubt has vanished is amazing. He can expect to get raked over the coals abroad for every little slip up now. Once the media start treating you this way, it’s a matter of time until you end up with full-on pariah status. This shift has been a long time in the making. Now, it’s happening.

The Full Mugabe

There’s one positive side to this whole Carlos Fernández incarceration hubbub: the foreign press is finally taking the gloves off. After months of not quite knowing how to deal with the crisis, of not being entirely sure whether to treat Chávez like a normal democratic president or an autocrat, the Fernández episode seems to have tipped the scales. It’s the Mugabization of Hugo Chávez in the court of world public opinion. It’s still far from complete, but now it’s definitely on the way.

Consider this remarkable story by Scott Wilson in the Washington Post. I’ve been friends with Scott for a long time and consider him one of the best journalists around – he’s not the kind of observer you can snow under with propaganda, much less recruit him to peddle yours. For a long time, I’ve had the feeling he understands, at a gut level, how dangerous Chávez is. But – and this is really difficult for opposition-minded Venezuelans to understand - Scott doesn’t draw a paycheck to tell the world how his gut is feeling. As a reporter, his code of ethics dictates that he can’t go any further than the facts allow. And for a long time, with Chávez going to lengths to maintain a fiction of democratic legality, the facts remained just too murky to report in Mugabian terms.

But in jailing an important opposition leader, Chávez crossed a kind of red-line, transgressing the first commandment of third world leaders hoping for sympathetic treatment in the foreign papers – thou shalt not indulge in behavior stereotypical of a dictator. And now he’s paying the price. His treatment in the Post is absolutely brutal. I’ve never seen the government take it this hard in a reputable foreign news story before. I think a lot of foreign journalists were, in a sense, waiting for a big stink-up to pounce – and now the stink-up is here, the government's heavy autocratic character is in plain for all to see, and the pouncing has started.

Good.

Reuter's is just as harsh as the Post - they played that papaya quote for all its worth - and AP is just scathing – I can’t think of a lead anywhere near as biting as this one in any AP story I've ever read out of Venezuela. In, the Wall Street Journal Marc Lifsher writes of “death-squad-style killings.” The NYT had been behind the curve on this one, but they put out a quite strong editorial condemning the arrest, and they’re flying in David González tonight, and while I only know him superficially, he’s a fantastically talented reporter and can be expected to write some good stuff.

Is it the Full Mugabe yet? Not quite. But the treatment Chávez is getting now is far, far closer to it. My fear is that he’ll use the international media blackout that will come with the start of the war on Iraq for cover – people will be very nervous here the day the war starts. Specifically, it’s easy to foresee that he’ll move against the private TV stations within minutes of the start of the war. Under normal circumstances – and the stories of the last few days bear this out – he’d be pilloried abroad for a stunt like that. But with the green lights streaking over the skies of Baghdad on CNN, who can tell?

The price of dissent

What do you call a political leader jailed for his political views? A political prisoner, right?

Just wanted to settle that up front – President Chávez’s endlessly repeated claim that there are no political prisoners in this country is now dead. Last night, the government “arrested” Carlos Fernández, one of the most visible opposition leaders, in a secret police operation that looked more like a kidnapping – a dozen heavily armed men suddenly jumped on him and commandeered his car, as he was leaving a restaurant. There was no district attorney present (as required by Venezuelan law), these guys showed no arrest warrant, they are keeping him incommunicado and they won’t even confirm his whereabouts. So where, exactly, is the borderline between an arrest and a state-sponsored kidnapping?

Carlos Fernández is far from my favorite opposition leader – he’s crass, often radical without a purpose, he’s a terrible public speaker and he played a major role in leading the opposition up the garden path known as the General Strike – a fantastically dumb adventure that did nothing but consolidate Chávez in power. Yet seeing him arrested in this way seems to back up everything he always said about the government: that they haven’t the slightest clue what democracy is all about, that they’ll stop at nothing to consolidate themselves in power, and that they treat the constitution the way your cat treats his litter box.

Watch for the foreign lefties to start justifying his arrest on the grounds that, christ, he’s the leader of the business association, he must be some sort of evil blood-sucking plutocrat, and it’s ok if they go to jail, right? Don’t laugh, it’s the precise corollary to Naomi Klein’s argument on the press in The Guardian the other day.

But beyond that, Fernández is a genuine self-made man, a postwar immigrant from Spain who was penniless on arrival, built up a trucking firm from a single truck into a fairly large company, and rose through the ranks to preside the major business federation here, Fedecamaras. It’s the Venezuelan dream, the dream of tolerance and social mobility Chávez can’t stand because it lays bare the bankruptcy of his vision of Venezuela as an ossified, near-colonial society.

For decades, Venezuela had been well past the political cultural of responding to dissent with jail. Under Chávez, we seem to be regressing.

NO CLUE

We interrupt this essay series to attack Naomi Klein, of NO LOGO fame, who in a remarkably ill-considered piece in The Guardian supports the Contents Law and obliquely calls for Venezuela’s private broadcasters to be shut down. I’m amazed at the way parts of the antiglobaloization crowd have abandoned what I’d always thought of as baseline liberal values, like freedom of the press.

The facts in her essay are – and as a Venezuelan journalist, I’m ashamed to admit it – mostly right, but the conclusions she draws from them strike me as demential. Her lionization of Andrés Izarra, that insufferably self-pitying chavista martyr, is enough to work up anyone who knows anything about him into a fit of rage. More importantly, though, Klein glosses over a series of key fact in her piece, like the president’s outrageous and repeated attacks on the media, the systematic harassment of Venezuelan journalists, the threats too many of my colleagues keep getting simply for doing their jobs. Reading it, you’d never known about the government’s campaign of constant incitement to violence against anyone who dares question Chávez in the press. If you didn’t know anything else about the situation here – which is doubtlessly the case for most of Klein’s readers in The Guardian – you’d think Venezuela’s media moguls just sort of woke up one day and said “golly gee, it’s so much harder to exploit the working class with this guy in power, let’s topple him!”

It’s shameful.

The petrostate that was and the petrostate that is

Too many foreign observers write about the Chávez era in a historical vacuum. But you can't understand chavismo without a feel for the political economy of the petrostate.

The Petrostate that was and the Petrostate that is:
I: The Accion Democratica Model

Back in 1996, I did some field work in Cabimas, a dusty little oil city in on the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo, for my thesis on the Venezuelan labor movement. One day, I saw a bunch of guys playing basketball at a municipal court and thought I'd hang out with them for a while - not that I'm any good at basketball, but I thought they might offer a different perspective.

Later, when I told my labor movement buddies what I'd been up to, they were horrified. "What!? You were hanging out with those adeco basketball players? Oh Jesus, did you give them any information?!"

I was shocked. Adeco basketball players? I'd often read about how deeply political parties had penetrated the fiber of everyday life in Venezuela, but the notion that even the guys shooting hoops down the street had a party affiliation struck me as deeply weird.

Undaunted, I went back and asked them about it.

"So, you guys are from AD?"

They kind of smiled awkwardly and one of them said, "well, we needed a court and..."

He went on to tell me the story about how they'd always wanted a proper court to play on, and they'd never had enough money for shoes, balls, uniforms, coaching...all the stuff you need to join a youth league. The mayor of Cabimas was an Accion Democratica politician and one of the guys mentioned his uncle was an AD member, so they asked him for help.

The uncle pointed them to their neighborhood AD party organizer. They went and asked him if the city would built them a basketball court. The organizer said he would be happy to press their case with the mayor, but told them the mayor would be, cough-cough, much more likely to agree to it if they'd sign up to become party members.

The bargain was simple - a chunk of the municipal recreation budget in return for becoming AD members and helping out with election campaigns and get-out-the-vote drives. That didn't strike the guys as such a bad deal. So they signed up, and after a year or so they'd gotten their court and some gear...with the slight inconvenience that the whole town started to think of them as "those adeco basketball players."

And there you have it: at its core, that is the Venezuelan petrostate.

The petrostate is a mechanism that turns oil money into political power - or, more precisely, control of the state’s oil money into control of the state - in a self-perpetuating cycle.

The way you do that is by building a huge patronage network. Tammany Hall politics on a national basis.

Those kids shooting hoops in Cabimas had never heard of Terry Lynn Karl, but they instinctively grasped how the system worked. And so did their neighborhood party organizer: he was able to use his influence over a tiny share of the state’s oil revenue – just enough to get a basketball court built - to fund a miniature local patronage network. His clients - the guys - would return the favor on election day, not due to any sort of ideological affinity, but simply to keep their access to his influence over funds. And he would use his influence over them - his ability to mobilize them for political purposes - to bolster his position as client to the next patron up the line: the mayor.

That basic, pyramidal structure was replicated all throughout the country, in every imaginable sphere of life, from multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects to things as petty as a neighborhood basketball court.

The mayor of Cabimas - who was patron vis-à-vis the neighborhood organizer - was in turn client to the next patron up the line: the governor of Zulia state. And the governor played client to his higher up, perhaps a politician or a faction in AD's all powerful National Executive Committee. And that patron in turn played client to the party secretary general or to the President of the Republic...one neat string of patron-client relationships running all the way from the dusty backstreets of Cabimas up to the presidential palace in Caracas.

Copei, the second party, ran a parallel (if somewhat smaller) patronage pyramid, and MAS, the nominal left-wing party, ran a much smaller and weaker one.

This, basically, was the system Chavez was elected to dismantle. By the time the 1998 elections came around people resented it acutely. But before launching into a (by now redundant) critique of the system, it bears stopping to notice a few of its features.

For one thing, it's important to realize that the system was not totally paralyzed - the basketball court did get built. No doubt the funds that built it were mercilessly stripped at every step from presidential palace to dusty backstreet as successive layers of patrons took their cut, but the court did eventually get built.

So while it was inefficient, bloated, antidemocratic, and everything else, the system was not totally useless - and in its own amoral way, the corruption served as a rough-and-ready way to spread the oil money around, to make sure it reached many hands, not just a few. The recipients of the final product - the basketball players - were the end-point of a sprawling corruption scheme: it's just that they got paid off for their services in courts and basketball gear rather than cash.

The Petrostate is a State of Mind
It’s important to note that the Petrostate is not simply a system of social relations - a huge pyramid linking everone who's on the take - it's also a cultural system, an interlocking set of beliefs, a state of mind.

In a typical developing country, the overriding political problem is the problem of production: how to generate enough wealth to pull the nation out of poverty. But in a petrostate, production is not seen as particularly problematic: wealth is just there, all you have to do is pump it out of the ground. In a petrostate, the basic political problem is the problem of distribution: how best to spread around wealth whose existence you take for granted. Success in life depends not on work, not on your capacity to produce wealth, but on connections, on your ability to get your hands on a piece of the resource pie.

This outlook comes to dominate people's relationship with the state. The state comes to be seen as an inexhaustible source of money. People come to believe that whatever problem they have, they state can and should solve it.

Those guys in Cabimas had no doubt that if they wanted a basketball court, it was the state's job to build them one - after all, wasn't the country awash in oil money? Insofar as the petrostate has a culture, that's its central conceit - the idea that the government has so much oil money that it can, and should, bankroll the needs and desires of the entire society.

Within the petrostate mental model that's what the state is for, and governments are to be judged by how well they deliver on that promise.

That's not just me saying it - polls consistently find that over 90% of Venezuelans think this is a rich country, with over 80% calling it - incongruously - "the richest country on earth."

Those beliefs didn't just appear in the popular imagination by accident. The petrostate's founding myth was at the center of the AD political program from the 1920s onward. AD's founding father, Rómulo Betancourt, wrote a number of books on the subject.

In his influential book, The Magical State, Fernando Coronil argues that this petrostate mentality extends backwards in time all the way to the presidency of López Contreras in the late 1930s, and is centered on the expectation that the state can magically bring about modernity.

For a while, that redistributive vision worked. So long as the population was relatively small, the state relatively efficient, and the oil revenue stream relatively steady, a simple redistributive strategy went a long way.

Throughout the 40s, 50s, 60s and into the mid 70s, the petrostate model yielded a huge improvement in Venezuelans' standards of living. Infrastructure got built, people got jobs, and each generation could reasonably expect to live better than the one before. The country got universal schooling, free universities, hospitals, public housing, sewers, phones, roads, highways, ports, airports, and all kinds of markers of modernity decades before other Latin American countries had them.

Less tangibly, but just perhaps even more importantly, the petrostate bankrolled institutions ranging from paid maternity leave and severance pay, to old age pensions and statutory vacation pay, all the way back in the 1960s.

By creating sprawling patron-client networks, the political parties became strong enough to make a limited form of democracy viable. The web of social relationships was quite useful in the early decades of democratization. Patronage webs ensured that enough people were socially and economically attached to democratic institutions to have a personal stake in the political system. This loyalty was the key to keeping the country stable and democratic at a time when most of Latin America was not.

And here's the wonder: for a long time, it actually worked. There were elections every five years, AD and COPEI routinely and peacefully alternated in power, Venezuela was an island of democracy and stability in a continent torn apart by Marxist insurgents and coup-plotting generals.

Breakdown
But it didn't last. There are many reasons why the relatively benign clientelism of the 50s and 60s atrophied into the kleptocratic lunacy of the 80s and 90s. Corruption is the typical reason cited, but the truth is both more complex and less morally satisfying than that. The underlying reason for the system's breakdown, in my view, has everything to do with the increasing volatility of the world oil market, together with appalling mismanagement and good old demographics.

Until 1973, oil had traded in a relatively narrow price range, making Venezuela's revenues more or less predictable from one year to the next. But starting with the oil embargo in 73 - remembered as the "oil crisis" in importing countries but as the "oil bonanza" here - oil prices started to gyrate wildly, making it impossible to forecast state revenues with any degree of certainty. With each new boom, huge torrents of petrodollars would pour into the Venezuelan economy, only to be followed by busts that were just as marked and unexpected.


This boom and bust cycle was destructive on a number of counts. From a merely macroeconomic point of view, it's clear that economies don't do well under that sort of instability.

More destructive than the cycle itself, though, was the state's chronic mismanagement of the cycle. With each boom, the politicos seemed to think that high prices would last forever, and so they would take out huge new debts even as money poured in at record rates. When prices fell, the boom-time excess would only fuel increasingly acute recessions, made all the worse by the new debt burden that had to be financed. This is the famous debt-overhand hypothesis that some observers blame for the onset of Venezuela's economic decline in the 1980s.

But I would argue that the most destructive effects of the late petrostate were cultural rather than economic. The massive influx of oil dollars in the 70s shifted public morals in this country. Amidst the abundance of oil dollars, graft became accepted in a way it had never been before. The perception was that only a pendejo, a simpleton, would miss out on the opportunities for easy riches that proliferated in those days for the well-connected. A culture of easy-going racketeering, of matter-of-fact robbery, penetrated deep into the Venezuelan psyche. We've never managed to shake it.

At the same time, population growth gradually diluted the oil wealth among a bigger and bigger pool of recipients, making the principle of petrodollar-funded prosperity for all ever less feasible. Even if the state redistributed all its oil rents in cash equally to everyone, most Venezuelans would not stop being poor.

By the late 1980s, the petrostate model had broken down irretrievably. Even if the politicians of the day had been a gaggle of angels gifted with Prussian administrative efficiency, there just wasn't enough oil money to go around.

Alas, the politicians we had then were the polar opposite of Prussians and anything but angels.

Patrons' reliance on their clientelist networks made the entire system exceedingly difficult to reform, and particularly deaf to calls for change from the outside. Never particularly suited to ideological debate, the petrostate became ossified completely: power itself became its only ideology. The drive to amass more of it, to climb higher and higher in the pyramid, to gain access to ever more lucrative sources of patronage, came to dominate the political system entirely. As the system became more and more dysfunctional, people's resentment of the corruption at the heart of the system grew ever stronger, though very few within the state recognized this.

So the late 1980s were a critical moment in the country's history. Venezuela needed massive reform. It needed to reinvent itself, to leave behind a model of governance that was well past its sell-by date and find a way to integrate itself into the world economy, shedding its reliance on oil, not just as a source of money, but as lynchpin of its socio-political and cultural systems. Venezuela needed to ditch clientelism, reinvent social relations at every level, pry apart the patronage networks that had defined its social relations for so long. We needed to ditch the notion that the state could bankroll everyone's way of life just by distributing the oil money.

We needed to invent a whole new idea of the state, nothing short of a total rethink of society, the state, and the relationship between the two.

And we failed.

That failure is the reason Hugo Chavez is in power today. His political success is the inevitable outcome of our inability to cast off the petrostate model.

II: Our botched attempt at reform
Back in 1989, all you had to do to realize how badly Venezuela needed reform was pick up a phone. On a bad day it could take half an hour or more to get a dial-tone. You’d unhook the phone, go make yourself a sandwich, check for a dial town, eat the sandwich, check for a dial tone again, wash your dishes and put away the mayonnaise, come back and check for a dial tone again…it was pretty ridiculous.

But once you’d managed to place the call, your troubles had only started: more often than not you’d have to go through the delightful ritual of the llamada ligada - the “linked call.” This was a queer little phenomenon where two entirely unrelated conversations would become entwined in the circuitry somehow, and you’d end up sharing your conversation with two complete strangers. Sometimes, these absurd little four-way interchanges would develop, as each set of callers tried to convince the other set to hang up and try their call again: of course, you didn’t want to be the one to hang up, because then you’d have to wait who-knows-how-long for a new dial tone.

Ah, the days of the nationalized phone company. Working with 40 year old equipment, CANTV (as the company’s called) was far, far behind the technological and service curves. Waiting times for a new phone line could extend into months or years. Predictably, the delays spawned their own little hotbed of corruption: if you needed a new phone line, you had to pay off somebody inside CANTV to bump you to the front of the line.

Phone lines were such a scarce luxury that they carried a premium on the real-estate market: in the classified ads, people selling their apartments would advertise not just location and size, but, proudly, “con teléfono” – an item that would add a good 5% to the price of an apartment. Having a second phone line became the ultimate status-symbol, the height of conspicuous consumption.

State-owned CANTV was prey to all the vices of clientelism run amok. Shielded from competition, the company could get away with bloody murder. As a consumer, you were powerless: a supplicant in the grip of a system that existed more to extract bribes than to provide phone service.

The CANTV-style attitude of total contempt for the user/citizen pervaded the state. Trying to get anything out of the bureaucracy was a nightmare. Registering your car or trying to get a passport or a cédula (a national ID card) became an exercise in frustration-control. Notoriously, even paying your taxes became a problem. Tax officials knew that you needed that little shard of official paper they controlled (the certificate that you’d paid your taxes) for a number of reasons – you couldn’t sell real estate without it, for instance - so you ended up in the incredible position of having to bribe an official for the privilege of paying your taxes! That’s how entrenched the culture of corruption was.

But the rot wasn’t confined to the micro-level: macroeconomically, the country was also in serious trouble. The Central Bank was more or less out of foreign reserves. Protected by years of tariff barriers and subsidies, both private and state-owned enterprises were inefficient, rent-seeking leeches cranking out substandard goods at inflated prices. Business had been thoroughly assimilated into the pyramid: trading political support for subsidies and tariffs in exactly the same way those kids in Cabimas traded political support for basketball gear.

Thirty years of petrostate clientelism had turned the government into albatross around the nation’s neck. The public sector payroll was impossibly bloated. The petrostate had slowly morphed into a full-employment scheme for governing party clients. In 1988, Venezuela had more public employees than Japan, but as the dark joke at the time went, “of course, in Japan they don’t get quality public services like we do here.” Lots of public sector jobs were "no show jobs," where clients showed up just twice a month to collect their paychecks, but didn't actually work. Many other officials treated their salaries as a sort of retainer, but everyone understood that the real money was elsewhere – in the kickbacks, commissions and bribes that state jobs gave them access to.

A sprawling state-owned sector of the economy was made up of a single profit-making firm (the oil giant, PDVSA) bankrolling dozens of parasitic, loss-making firms. Money that might have gone to build schools and hospitals went instead to prop up a thousand and one money-holes: state sugar-refineries, banks, mining companies, airlines, even, famously, a fast-food joint in Caracas called "La Sifrina" (que tiempos aquellos!)

People were sick of it, and understandably so. But – and this is a crucial “but” – they didn’t see the need for root and branch reform. What they wanted was to see the petrostate fixed, not replaced. Venezuelans longed for the bonanza days of the 70s, when windfall oil revenues financed a huge and rapid expansion in consumer spending. If they were angry at politicians, it was because they thought politicians had failed to deliver on their basic mission to meet everyone’s needs by distributing the oil money fairly and generously. Do that, they figured, and the country could return to the good old days of the 70s.

Here we get back to the mental model that underpins the Venezuelan petrostate, and its founding myth that Venezuela is a fantastically rich country so all the state has to do is distribute the oil rents for everyone to live comfortably.

If you genuinely believe that, as 90% of Venezuelans still do, but you personally live in poverty, then the obvious inference is that the reason you’re poor is that somebody stole your fair share. Those adeco bastards!

Let me be clear about this: corruption really was a huge problem back then (still is.) But Venezuelans had wildly unrealistic notions how much their lives could improve if corruption was stamped out. Few grasped that even without corruption, the petrostate model was unworkable. The complicated structural and demographic reasons that made it fundamentally non-viable were not a part of the national debate. They were understood only partially even in academic and technocratic circles. So the perception that corruption was the whole of the problem in fact impeded a deeper examination of the real reasons the state had stopped working.

El Gocho pal '88
Lo and behold, the 1988 presidential election featured a candidate uniquely positioned to play into people’s anger at the state of the state: Carlos Andrés Pérez, who had actually been president once already, from 1974 to 1979, when the first big spike in petrodollars reached the country. CAP, as everyone called him, ran as an old style populist, promising to turn back the clock and govern just as he had the first time around. Venezuelans wanted a revamped petrostate, and he offered a revamped petrostate. Not surprisingly, he won by a landslide.

Now, what on earth CAP was thinking when he ran his campaign that way is still a subject of debate in Venezuela today. Looking back, it’s clear that the state was in no financial position to bankroll the whole of society anymore, and CAP must have known that. Some people think it was all a carefully calculated ploy from the start, that he knew he needed to talk the talk to get elected, but was aware all along that he couldn’t walk the walk.

Not everyone agrees. As one delicious anecdote would have it, CAP was certain that he could revamp the petrostate because he had already worked out a preliminary deal with the incoming US administration. The soon-to-be secretary of the treasury was fully on board for a financial rescue package that would allow the Venezuelan government to keep doing business more or less as usual…and that incoming administration would be run by President Dukakis. Oops.

Well, CAP won with a record number of votes, but of course Dukakis went down in flames. Literally weeks after being elected, CAP found himself at the head of a barely functioning, bankrupt state. He had little choice but to renege on pretty much everything he’d stood for during the campaign.

Instead, he announced a program of massive, IMF-sponsored structural reforms – lifting tariff barriers, dropping subsidies, privatizing state assets…a straightforward neoliberal, Washington Consensus type program.

Now, it's easy to rant against the IMF, but context is key here. Given the scale of the mess that state finances were in, and the role petrodollar-funded patronage played in undermining state finances, there's a good case to be made that radical reform was badly needed with or without the IMF. Which, in general, is my critique of the standard critique of the IMF: put forward in a context-vacuum, it fails to take note of the entirely Venezuelan reasons why reform was necessary to overcome the bottlenecks generated by petrostate clientelism.

Be that as it may, it's also true that CAP's reforms were a bald-faced betrayal of everything he’d stood for just weeks before he announced.

Venezuelans thought they’d elected CAP to fix the petrostate, instead, he immediately moved to dismantle it. It barely made a difference that the petrostate was badly in need of dismantling: anyone needing a phone-line in those days should have been able to see that. Consensus on the need for reform was confined to technocratic circles - the public sphere just was not on board.

CAP didn’t seem to think he had to make the case for dismantling the petrostate. He thought he could just do it, steamroll over all opposition and present the country with a fait accompli. His thinking, apparently, was that the economic benefits of reform would be so evident within a couple of years that the critics of reform would be marginalized.

Alas, he miscalculated badly. First off, CAP was elected on an AD ticket, as the candidate of the party that benefited the most from the petrostate model. In fact, arguably the main source of resistance to CAP’s reform push was his own party. CAP might have had a road-to-Damascus moment sometime after the Dukakis campaign imploded, but the rest of AD was still very much wedded to petrostate clientelism. And CAP’s reforms were plainly incompatible with their vision of the state.

Take CANTV. Sure, it was a nightmare for consumers, but who cares about consumers? For the AD patrons who ran it, the phone company was a cherished power-base. Not only could they exploit their control over a scarce commodity – phone lines – to demand any number of bribes, enriching themselves and feeding their personal patronage networks, they could also use the company to listen in on their opponent’s phone conversations, to distribute CANTV jobs to clients, and, of course, to install multiple phone lines in their own homes. If you privatized the company, the phone system might start working, but the whole patron-client network it sustained would come crashing down.

A similar dynamic was in play in dozens of state institutions CAP wanted to sell off, streamline, or reform. Every ministry and university, every state owned enterprise and autonomous institute, every piece of the petrostate had a powerful set of AD caciques dead set against reform.

CAP's reform package would drive a dagger through the heart of the party’s whole racket - not surprisingly the caciques mobilized furiously against the president they’d just helped to elect.

Soon, CAP found himself engulfed in a rising tide of unmanageable protest and dissent. Every scrap of reform met strong resistance in congress, where the caciques still had a majority. AD patrons exploited people's strong adherence to the petrostate cultural model to fuel resistance to reforms that would undermine their power bases. The IMF was predictably demonized, as was CAP for caving in to its demands.

Many Venezuelans were genuinely outraged at what they saw as an unacceptable onslaught on their petrostate perks. In the end, too many people were too dependent on the cash that flowed through the patron-client networks for reform to be viable – and those who stood to lose the most were particularly easy to mobilize politically, precisely because they were part of a pyramid that made political loyalty to your patron rule #1.

From 27F to 4F
The straw that broke the camel’s back came when the government cut back its fuel subsidies at the end February 1989. Public transport operators responded to a 10% increase in gas prices by doubling fares, and the shit hit the fan.

On February 27th, 1989, a group of far-left agitators in Guarenas, a Caracas suburb, staged a protest over the fare hikes that soon escalated into a riot. The riot spread incredibly quickly, first to Caracas itself and then throughout the country. For three days Venezuela went through an unprecedented spasm of rioting, arson, and very widespread looting. The police was helpless in the face of this sudden outburst of anarchy. Eventually, the government called out army troops with orders to shoot looters on sight. At least 600 people were shot dead in the next two days, by some estimates the real toll was over a thousand. The bodies were dumped into mass graves - a practice Venezuela had not witnessed in many decades.


It was the end of Venezuela’s age of innocence.

The effect the 1989 riots had on Venezuela's public life was in some ways analogous to 9/11 in the US, an event so deeply traumatizing it could be summoned just by its date: 27F. Until then, Venezuelans had seen themselves as different, more civilized, more democratic, better than their Latin American neighbors. 31 years of unbroken, stable, petrostate-funded democracy had made us terribly cocky. In a sense, the riots marked Venezuela’s re-entry into Latin America. The country was no longer exceptional: just another hard-up Latin American country struggling to put its democracy on a stable footing.

CAP’s reform program was seriously hobbled by the riots, but it continued, at half-steam, for another 4 years. Economically, it was a relative success – after a serious recession in 1989 that saw the economy contract by 10.9%, Venezuela experienced real economic growth for the first time since the 70s. Real per capita income was expanding steadily: 3.9% in 1990, 7.1% in ‘91, 3.6% in ‘92 - though, again this was helped by the spike in oil prices following Irak's invasion of Kuwait. From a narrowly economic point of view, it seemed to be working.

But none of that mattered to the old-style patrons, the 10,000 little caciques heading up administrative fiefdoms large and small throughout the state. What they cared about was power, and CAP’s program constituted too big a threat to their habitual way of getting it. From their perches in AD’s National Executive Committee, in congress, in the courts, the nationalized companies and the labor movement, they were extraordinarily well placed to wreck the reform drive.

It was during the third year of this CAP vs. AD psychodrama that a certain army lieutenant colonel first entered the public scene…and with a bang. On February 4th, 1992, a group of junior officers launched a bloody coup attempt against the elected government. The crazy adventure – the first time someone had tried to overthrow a Venezuelan government by force of arms since the 60s – left about a hundred dead, and earned its own instantly recognizable date-moniker: 4F.

The coup attempt failed, but it turned its leader into a kind of folk hero – the valiant paratrooper willing to put his life on the line to stop CAP’s outrageous drive to dismantle the cherished petrostate, and a rare Venezuelan public figure willing to forthrightly accept responsibility for failure.


The coup-plotting lieutenant colonel went to jail, where he whiled away two years reading (but not understanding) Rousseau, Bolivar and Walt Whitman. In those two years, the government faced a second, even bloodier coup attempt by officers loosely associated with the first. Eventually, CAP was impeached by his fellow AD party members on flimsy charges, and after a brief interim government, the presidency passed to yet another petrostate dinosaur – Rafael Caldera, who had also been president already, but even further back than CAP, in 1969-1974.

Like CAP, Caldera ran as an old style populist. Unlike CAP, Caldera governed like one.

The Return of the Mummy

By the time he reached power for the second time, Rafael Caldera was over 80 years old. He’d spent 58 of those years in front-line politics. Frail, some would say decrepit, his voice tremulous and often barely audible, he wasn’t exactly the kind of leader you’d turn to for bold new ideas. Caldera tried to patch up the old petrostate system – the only one he understood – as best he could.

Predictably, he failed. Corruption continued unabated, cronyism as well, and much of the banking sector collapsed in 1994, wiping out the lifetime savings of thousands. The economy languished, and the nation’s collective impoverishment continued afoot. Eventually, Caldera was persuaded of the need for some reform, including an important overhaul of the criminal system and of social security. But he didn’t understand, much less share, the notion that the basic model of the state he had spent a lifetime championing needed a total overhaul.

If the petrostate was well past its sell-by date in 1989, by the end of Caldera's term in 1998 it was putrefact. Nobody doubted that the country needed a serious shake-up, a massive jolt to move beyond the stagnation and decay of the last 20 years.

Indeed, all three of the politicians who ever looked to have a serious shot at power that year were anti-establishment figures, people who’d built political careers outside the traditional party system.

The country faced a choice between a one-time Miss Universe turned centrist mayor of a wealthy district of Caracas (Irene Saez) a Yale graduate and reformist governor from Carabobo State (Henrique Salas) and the aforementioned leftist Lieutenant Colonel (who’d been pardoned by Caldera and released from prison in the meantime.)

Disenchantment with the old party structures ran so deep that Copei didn’t even bother to try to run a party insider as candidate. Instead, they tried to co-opt the beauty queen, who collapsed in the polls the second she accepted their nomination. As always, AD was the last to get the message: they nominated Luis Alfaro Ucero, a semi-literate 80 year-old cacique, a sort of capo di tutti i capi sitting at the pinnacle of the party’s patronage structure. The guy never got beyond 7% in the polls. The vaunted adeco electoral machine had sputtered to a halt. Soon enough, it was all down to the governor and the coupster, and it was clear that the election would go to the one who best voiced the people’s virulent rage at the ongoing failure of the petrostate.

And if that’s the game you’re playing, nobody but nobody beats Hugo Chavez.

III: From institutional clientelism to the Chavista cult of personality

The scene went down in the middle of one of his infamous, never-ending televised speeches in 2004. President Chavez had barely hit his stride when something caught his eye. His tone changed. Concerned, he looked up at the scaffolding above the stage he was using, where the lights for his speech hung.

"Hey, come down from there," he said in a soft, fatherly tone, "no, don't climb to the front, it's hot there because of the lights...that's right, climb down towards the back. Don't worry, you'll get to talk to me. I want to hear your problem. I saw you crying earlier, just, just come down from the scaffolding and come up here."

Soon, a 15 year old kid has climbed down from the scaffolding and is walking towards the stage. He's crying. Chavez calls him up to the podium. With the camera's running, millions of people watching, Chavez takes him, hugs him hard and holds him for, oh, 45 seconds or a minute, while he the kid tells him, in between sobs, how his father recently died and his mother is sick and he can't afford the medicines to make her better...Chavez listens at length, pets his hair, assures him that he's going to help him.

The crowd is ecstatic, chanting "that, that, that's the way to govern!"

Welcome to the new era of chavista postinstitutional clientelism. This sort of thing is typical of Chavez's governing style. The president works hard to make the entire audience feel how much he wants to help them all, personally, one by one. And he has succeeded brilliantly at selling the image of a president deeply, passionately, personally concerned with the problems of his supporters.

Obviously, this brand of clientelism is quite a different animal from the old adeco version. Just as obviously, it's still clientelism.

Chavez's peculiar contribution to the concept has been to cut out the middlemen. In the old system, each client's relationship was with the patron immediately above him. But the chavista patronage system only has two levels: the president and everyone else. These days, the relationships that underpin the system happen are televised, they are mediated rather than personal - the charismatic leader's bond with each of his followers individually.

Chavistas are, in a sense, imagined clients.

Though Chavez has spent billions of dollars on emergency social programs that effectively re-distribute petrodollars to his political supporters (the famous misiones) I'd argue that his success has almost as much to do with raw sentiment, with primary identifications. Many chavistas feel deeply, personally, almost mystically wedded to the president - the intensity of their emotions towards him are hard to overstate.

That's a departure from what we'd seen before. In the old system, the relationship between patrons and clients was basically a quid-pro-quo, a matter of mutual interest. Insofar as feelings played into it at all, they didn't go beyond a certain deference born of respect and fear of the boss. With Chavez, the bond comes from the heart. He is so charismatic, his rhetoric is so powerful, that he makes people want to see him as a saviour: they want to cry on his shoulders, they want to redeem themselves through him.

In other words, Chavez's bright idea for moving beyond the outdated system of vertical interpersonal relations is to replace it with a cult of personality.

It's bad news.

In the old system, the state had two fully independent institutions: AD and Copei. It's true, it's regrettable that there were only two real institutions around, that the courts and the elections authorities and the nationalized companies and every other part of the state was subjugated to one party or the other. But at least there were two of them!

To a certain extent, AD and Copei served to balance each other off. No truly transcendent decision could be made without at least a tacit agreement between the two.

Moreover, each of the two big parties was a complex institution in its own right. Their National Executive Committees were composed of factions that had to deliberate with one another to set the party's position on any given issue. Each faction would press the interests of a given constituency - the pro-business faction would haggle with the labor bureau to agree on the party's minimum wage policy and the peasant representatives would hash out the party's position on agricultural imports in talks with the technocrat wing. Each party had its own internal deliberative process. It was hardly a model of tocquevilian pluralism, granted, but at least some deliberation and interest-aggregation took place.

In the chavista state, there is only one institution: Hugo Chavez. Note that I'm not talking about an abstraction - about "the presidency of the republic" - I'm talking about a man. When an important policy decision has to be made, the only deliberations that matter take place between his ears.

All loyalties are directed at him personally. Supporters direct gratitude for the misiones not at the state in some abstract sense, or to a patron they know personally, but at Chávez personally. With the president locked in a circle circle of relentlessly sycophantic collaborators, all dissent is equated with treason. So the one man who makes every relevant decision personally is never confronted with a view of the world that differs one iota from his own.

The postinstitutional petrostates flattens the distinctions between state, government, party, presidency and president. The result is an accelerated decay in the state's institutional structure, to the point where no part of the state can act independently of Hugo Chavez personally. Venezuela today is an exercise in turbocharged personalism.

Clearly, some aspects of the petrostate model have changed - everyone recognizes this. What I'd like to highlight, though, are the elements of continuity - elements that are often underestimated in commentary about Chavez. If the basic petrostate trick is to turn control of the state's oil dollars into control of the state, Chavez has merely brought the system up to date, yielding a petrostate for the 21st century.

Of course, Chavez thinks of himself as the pre-eminent critic of the post-1958 state. But his critique is based on ideas that have been at the heart of the petrostate's cultural model all along. Chavez certainly thinks he's rebuilding Venezuela's political and social structures from the ground up. But like so many self-described revolutionaries before him, he's blind to how much his vision has in common with the old regime.

The central conceit of the petrostate cultural model is the idea that the state can and should use its oil wealth to bankroll society. Rather than a critique of the petrostate as such, what Chavez provides is a critique of the way it went astray in the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly of "neoliberalism," understood here as CAP's attempts to dismantle it.

Chavez doesn't realize it it, but that outlook places him squarely in the intellectual tradition pioneered by Romulo Betancourt more than 50 years ago. Ultimately, Chavez is just peddling a very old petrostate line - the old longing to fix the petrostate, to reform the unreformable.

That longing has been the key to his political success. In beating the old petrostate drum, Chavez taps into a rich vein of Venezuelan culture. In the end, breaking the petrostate as social system is child's play compared to the monumental task of breaking the petrostate as an idea, as a collective understanding of what the state is for. And Chavez never challenged the dominant understanding on that score, he merely leveraged it to his own advantage.

The sharp spike in world oil prices since 2004 has given the petrostate a reprieve, but not a pardon. In a virtual re-run of the 1970s, a huge consumption boom is being financed with the extra money, along with a sharp spike in public sector debt. As the good times roll, Venezuelans have come to believe that Chavez made good on his promise. But it's a reprieve that will last only as long as oil prices hold. And if there's one thing we should've learned a long time ago it's that gambling your entire strategy on the hope that oil prices will never fall is a deeply foolish thing to do.

Civil disobedience, the media, and you
...or...
The remarkable case of the AK-47 toting building inspector

You couldn't have scripted a moment quite like it if you'd tried; it would've seemed too contrived, too caricaturesque by half.

The National Assembly was in the middle of an all-night debate on the government's unconscionable new Contents Bill (you know, the one that bans saying nasty things about the government) when Carlos Tablante, an opposition assembly member, takes the floor to give an impassioned speech against the bill. He closes by asking, rhetorically, "You keep talking about China and Cuba...in those countries there's only one leader, there's only one party, there's only one ideology, there's only one newspaper, there's only one radio station, there's only one TV station. Is that what you want here?" Well, he thought it was a rhetorical question...but the response from the chavista side of the aisle was a resounding chant of "¡Siiiiiii!"

Subtle, huh?

Sometimes, as you watch the aggressive antichavez bias on the TV here, you can almost understand the anger and frustration chavistas must feel. But any sympathy goes up in smoke at moments like that. Obviously, their problem is not with the newspapers and TV-stations we have, their problem is with the concept of a free and independent news media at all.

This afternoon witnessed a perfect demonstration of why a flawed private media is far preferable to no independent media at all. At about 6:00 pm, a municipal building inspector showed up at the offices of Súmate, the NGO that organized last weekend's massive signature-gathering drive. Their offices are located in Sucre Municipality, a section of Eastern Caracas run by a pro-Chávez mayor. Any notion that this was a normal building inspection was discarded when you had a look at her entourage: at least a dozen municipal cops, who were soon reinforced by a contingent of 20 or more assault-rifle toting, camouflage-wearing special operations cops, all decked out in bullet-proof vests and such. They claimed, incongruously, to be there just to make sure the building was up to code.

Now, say what you will, but I refuse to believe that Sucre municipal building inspectors routinely get that kind of escort when they go to check out buildings. It's a preposterous notion...which is not surprising, given that it's also the government's line. The Mayor of Sucre - who happens to be the vicepresident's son - claimed they had no idea those were Súmate's offices, that inspectors always go out with police escort. Ummm...that's just silly: if every municipal inspector needed 30+ cops every time they go out to do their rounds, there wouldn't be any cops left over to do anything else!

Súmate's folks were understandably alarmed by the visit - there were millions of signatures sitting in hundreds of thousands of forms at that site. It wasn't particularly hard to guess what the real target of the "inspection" was. Their first reaction was to hit the phones. Within minutes, every news station in town was carrying live news from the site. And within a few minutes of that, hundreds of people had poured out onto the streets around the site to face down the cops. Within an hour or so, the street in front of Súmate was a sea of people, an insta-march of at least 10,000 flag-waving, whistle-blowing protesters physically blocking access to the building.

That, dear reader, is civil disobedience in action.

The municipal cops wisely high-tailed it out of there empty handed. It was the only reasonable course of action - the crowd would've lynched them if they'd tried to walk away with any signatures.

So now you know why the government wants the private media shut down - and why even those of us who think they're doing an awful job have to defend them. With every state institutions under Chávez's control, people have no choice but to fight back against the government's autocratic excesses on their own, face-to-face, on the streets. And as we saw tonight, the media is the lynchpin of that strategy - people were able to mobilize en masse, within minutes, to defend their signatures only because they got the heads-up on TV and the radio. If we were living in the wondrous one-station state chavistas long for, the 4 million + signatures Súmate collected last weekend would probably be a smoldering pile of ashes by now.

Weil again

He's only 22, but he's already Venezuela's best editorial cartoonist. Tal Cual's Weil is an evil genius.

Speech bubble: "Gentlemen: I think the situation in Venezuela is perfect...who agrees?"



Caption: The production team for Mad Max IV chooses the location for the shoot.

Toilet papers

The most insidious aspect of media bias in Venezuela is not how much the private broadcasters and newspapers attack the government. No, the real scandal is how much they suck up to the opposition. The constant Chávez-bashing is somewhat over the top, for sure, but it’s hard to condemn it too strenuously. The president goes so far out of his way to say and do crazy things all the time that whatever criticism he gets, he had it coming. The real bias, what’s really warping the national debate, is the sniveling, acritical support the papers give to an opposition leadership that doesn’t know it’s ass from its backside.

It’s not subtle. Back in December, when the opposition launched the general strike, every paper in town ran screaming six column headlines about it. Last week, when that paro was called off, it was reported in a box on page 17.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize the paro was a near-total fiasco – wrecking the oil industry, destroying thousands of jobs, bankrupting any number of companies and doing little, precious little to bring real pressure to bear on the government. In the end, the strategy amounted to mass-scale masochism, an action of the middle class that hurt no one so much as the middle class. Did it achieve anything? Well, I suppose now there's a group of "Friends of Venezuela" that sends its deputy foreign ministers for a nice stay at the Meliá once a month...that's an accomplishment. Was it worth the tens or hundreds of thousands of lost jobs and ruined lives it cost? Well, you be the judge.

By day 45, it was clear that the paro was a failure, a calamity for tens of thousands of families, a political disaster that was only strengthening Chávez politically while chipping away at the opposition’s ability to resist his disastrous misgovernment. Yet, even then, the paro dragged on for another 17 long days. Why?

Part of the reason, a worryingly large part of the reason, is that the people who designed and implemented the debacle never faced public scrutiny for it. The Venezuelan press operates under a self-imposed gag rule against criticizing them. Even when they screw up big time, they're beyond reproach. Criticizing them, the thinking seems to go, might give “the enemy” some sort of tactical advantage, and you certainly wouldn’t want to do that. So the papers won't print it. The newscasts won’t put it on the air. It’s banned, basically.

This is not a matter of conjecture, I’ve heard reporters at some of the country’s main papers describe the mechanism. Stories that are even mildly critical of key opposition leaders don’t make it past the editorial filter…they’re either cut or killed outright. Journalists who write too many of those soon find themselves getting less and less attractive assignments. Some have even been known to end up in the dreaded sports page. The message is straightforward.

The result is equally clear. The opposition's leadership always gets away with it, no matter how catastrophically irresponsibile, shortsighted, and just plain stupid their tactics are. They never face hostile questioning from reporters, never face critical scrutiny. In a sense, they’re locked in a little bubble just like the one the state media have created around Chávez. They never meet dissent face-to-face, it’s little wonder they’ve barely noticed how badly they're screwing things up.

You can’t say it in print, so I might as well say it here. The opposition’s umbrella group, the Coordinadora Democrática, is a total mess – a forum for the pettiest of politicking, backstabing, meaningless squabbling, dirty tricks, end-runs against pluralistic decision-making mechanisms...a litany of the worst old-regime politics has to offer. The group is top-heavy with old style politicos who learned exactly nothing from the huge groundswell of disgust against them that first propelled Chávez to power. Cynical, self-serving machine politicians who simply don’t understand why the country once came to hate them, and still haven’t figured out that even people who hate Chávez are terrified at the prospect of putting them back in power.

The true democrats and idealists – and they’re in there too – often appear politically outgunned by the dinosaurs, and plainly don’t control the group. But more and more, disparate groups within the Coordinadora make decisions on their own, without consulting anyone, and then pass them off as Coordinadora decisions. In short, the CoordinadoraDemocratica is not democratic, and it doesn’t coordinate anything.

But unless you read Teodoro Petkoff’s editorials in Tal Cual or Ibsen Martínez’s columns in El Nacional, you wouldn’t hear that from the Venezuelan press – that beacon of freedom and objectivity, that bulwark against autocracy. It’s pretty sick.

None of this makes Chávez's government any less awful. What's unacceptable is the way the opposition’s leaders have gotten into the habit of using Chávez’s awfulness as a shield to exempt themselves from any criticism. Go to a press conference and ask an opposition leader a hard question and he’s liable to frown at you and dismiss you saying, “damn it, who let this frikkin' chavista in here?” There’s just no space for any critical discourse on the opposition’s failings, which are many and serious.

It’s all very unfortunate, because the opposition’s supporters are, by and large, really cool: energetic, devoted, idealistic, and democratically minded. They deserve far better leadership than the parade of no-hopers they’re getting. They’ve marched their hearts out, again and again and again, sometimes at the risk of their lives. Literally. They’ve thumbed their noses at serious intimidation to go out and sign petitions against the government in chavista areas, they’ve banged their pots all out of shape, they’ve held prayer meetings, citizens’ assemblies, they’ve camped out, sang, danced on the streets, they’ve done everything they’ve been asked to do, willingly, with a smile and a sense of real, no-bullshit patriotism. Again and again their energy has bailed out their leaders, most recently last Sunday when they saved the Coordinadora from the awful embarrassment of admitting the paro had been a colossal fiasco by pouring out on the streets to sign en masse. They deserve better leaders than this, and they deserve much better newspapers they’re getting…newspapers willing to tell them, in plain language, that they have the right to demand better leaders than this.

The inimitable Weil

4,400,000 oligarchs...

It was a day to make saps out of all of us. The depression we'd felt after the Supreme Tribunal's inexcusable decision to scuttle the referendum that should've taken place today was wiped away entirely by what must have been the largest single-day signature gathering drive ever. (Somebody check Guiness.) The preliminary reports from the organizers, leaked to Venevisión, are that 4.4 million people went out to sign petitions today - that's about 700,000 more than voted for Chávez at his high-water mark. No Venezuelan politician has ever gotten this many votes in an election, even Carlos Andrés Pérez old record of 3.9 million votes in '88 was dwarfed by today's drive.

What's exciting is that the entire event was put together in very little time by a small army of volunteers, in the face of heavy intimidation from the government. In the event, the day was relatively peaceful, with only minor disturbances scattered across the country. Once again, despite government bluster, people weren't the slightest bit intimidated and went out to vote...um, sign...in force.

Boy did Chávez get it wrong if he thought he could avoid the embarrassment of getting drubbed in a consultative referendum by ordering his Supreme Tribunal cronies to kill it. In many ways, this is worse, much worse: we proved not just that an unprecedented majority of Venezuelans is against him, but also that we're mobilized enough to organize an act of mass-rejection on our own, without any state money, military oversight, logistics help, entirely by ourselves.

Chávez's oft-repeated lie that the opposition boils down to a small club of rich people has been a visible sham for a long time. But never had the depths of the lie's bankrupcy been exposed as thoroughly as today, when over four million of us thumbed our noses at the threats from his supporters to line up for hours to register our revulsion at his regime openly. Never had Chávez's hysterical denunciations of his opponents as fascists, terrorists and coupsters looked more pathetically out of touch with reality. Maybe I'm missing something, but I never did see Mussolini, clipboard in hand, out collecting signatures to ask for elections to institute a fascist state.

But then, what can you expect from Chávez at this point? Contradiction has become a kind of guiding principle for this guy, the cornerstone of his rhetoric. In today's Aló, presidente he went from furiously condemning the opposition as a giant coup-plotting conspiracy to speaking fondly about the actual coup-attempt he staged 11 years ago, and announcing plans to celebrate the anniversary, which will be this Tuesday, February 4th. A-OK, then! So when people who disagree with you gather signatures, they're fascist coup-plotters, but when you personally lead an armed uprising against a democratically elected government, that makes you what? A freedom fighter, of course! Narcissism, anyone?

But then such criticisms have been levelled so often here, they barely register anymore. Chávez's discourse is so detatched from reality these days it's beside the point: what we're seeing is pure power-politics, a desperate attempt to hang on to power without any regards to principle or the general good. And the only way the government can win that game is by fighting tooth and nail to stop us from voting, not just now or in August, but ever again.

What's clear, is that the government's claim to represent the will of the downtrodden majority of Venezuelans has been dealt a fatal blow today. It's no longer a matter of polls or conjectures, it's now a mathematical certainty: most people in this country are willing to do whatever it takes, within the bounds of what's peaceful, to rid themselves of this crazed government. No regime can hold out against that kind of pressure for long.

Correspondence with a California Lefty...
> Francisco,
>
> Read your latest pieces, and I've got more questions for you (no doubt a bit naive to you, perhaps) but
> bear with me!

Paul,

I'd have to write a book to answer your email fully (which I intend to, some day!) but for now I'll answer in broad strokes.

> First, what about all those Chavistas, all those people who came out to support him during the "not-a-
> coup"? Is it true they are getting much-needed and reform from him?

I'll tell you one thing, Paul, I was outside the main military fort in Caracas with a camera crew on April 13th during the coup - it's ok to call it that, I mean, lets get real. What I saw was a highly emotional crowd of maybe 2,000 people there. I have the footage to prove it. This was supposed to be one of the main hotspots of the massive "people's uprising" that, according to chavista lore, brought out SEVEN MILLION people to demand his return. Sure, there was a small crowd there, and they were very brave to go, given the circumstances. And I heard there were a few more people outside the presidential palace, maybe 4 blocks full, no more than 20,000-30,000 people or so. That's significant, but, like so much else you've been reading about Venezuela in the lefty press up north, the supposed mass-scale uprising with millions of people on the streets demanding his return is a myth, a figment of the narcissistic mind.

But beyond that, one thing that must be extraordinarily hard for foreign lefties to quite grasp is just to what extent the chavista revolution exists only in words, in rhetoric. From a first-world idealist's point of view, the guy's talk is so pleasing, so on message, that it must seem inconceivable to you all that it could be entirely hollow, just totally unhinged from the facts.

But it is.

I think it's great that you bring up land reform, a subject I've tracked over the last couple of years, because it really illustrates the point. Chávez has been talking up his land reform plans in near apocalyptic terms for years now, using incredibly incendiary language that has raised tensions in the countryside to levels we hadn't seen since the 1940s, if not the 1840s (when we had our last major civil war, and precisely on this issue.) Chavez has scared the hell out of commercial farmers by threatening them with Mugabe-style tactics while raising the expectations of landpoor and landless peasants to incredible heights. His rhetoric has spread the cold-civil-war atmosphere to dangerous levels in the countryside.

OK, that was not nice of him, but at least he distributed some land to people who need it, right?

At last count, out of the several hundred thousand landless or landpoor families in the country, the government has adjudicated new farmland to about 700. That number could have risen somewhat since I checked, but can't be more than a couple of thousand now. The government doesn't have the administrative resources to manage mass-scale redistribution, and doesn't have the financial resources to expropriate all the land it wants to. It's a tragedy, because land distribution is a serious problem. A serious problem in need of a serious solution. But the narcissist isn't interested in serious solutions. He's interested in talk, high sounding talk that bolsters his self-image as an avenging crusader of the poor. Thing is, that kind of talk often makes things worse. That kind of talk stirs up fear and conflict where mediation and conflict-resolution are needed.

Because there is plenty of farmland to go around in this country. Venezuela is not El Salvador, this is a big, mostly urban country, with a relatively underpopulated countryside. Plenty of land remains in government hands, a holdover from an earlier, never-completed land redistribution drive in the 60s, just waiting to be distributed. Put in a bit of irrigation and some roads and lots of land that now sits idle could be farmed. All it would take is a bit of pragmatism. A pragmatist could have helped those hundreds of thousands of families that Chávez has no answer for without increasing the tensions between them and the comercial farmers - who would have to become their partners, suppliers and/or purchasers in any serious land redistribution scheme, and who the new farmers therefore have an interest in keeping more or less good relations with.

All it would’ve taken is a few itinerant teams of local mediators to work out detailed agreements in the various regions that balanced off the needs of the landless with the interests of commercial farmers. That kind of approach wouldn't have been quick or flashy, but it probably would work. That, however, is obviously too unglamorous, tedious and pedestrian for a pathological narcissist.

All that Chávez' incendiary rhetoric has done is to further poison relations in the countryside without bringing any real solutions to the problems poor rural people here have. Their lives are worse because of it, not better.

I could rattle off similar stories on 10 other subjects, urban housing, education, etc. etc.

Teodoro Petkoff - a real old-time leftist, 60s guerrilla leader, with 50 X more social reformer cred than the narcissist - quips that with his rhetoric, Chávez has achieved something thought impossible until now: he's created a counterrevolution in a country where there is no revolution. The revolution is all talk. The fear it inspires in the people it targets for abuse is real. So you have a middle class that's increasingly paranoid, mobilized, alarmed, radicalized and militant - a classic counterrevolution - despite the fact that you haven't actually done anything to alter the fundamental structures of power in the country.

The 30-35% of Venezuelans who still support Chávez have been - there's no other word for this - swindled, swindled into supporting a set of delirious promises that have much more to do with Chávez's fantasy mindscape than with any serious plan to remake the country. Chávez is a powerful orator, for sure, and his rhetoric can still mobilize a lot of people in this country – just under half of poor Venezuelans still back him. But the other half, not to mention almost all of the middle class (a good portion of which voted for him in 98) have learned to understand the catastrophic scale of the gap between the talk and the walk, the danger he poses to a pluralist, democratic system of governance, and they want him out, insist that he gets out. Now.

> Second, does the oil company really keep most of its profits and distribute them amongst
> its own managersand workers? And wouldn't privatizing it further, as I've read in the NYT
> (I think it was) that the managers want to do, prevent the state from having more of the profits.

There's a huge amount of disinformation about this out there - much of it willfully planted by the government. A superficial look will tell you that PDVSA, the state oil company, does indeed make less money per barrel than it did in 1976 when it was nationalized. But there are sound technical reasons for that - largely having to do with the fact that, as oil wells age and reserves deplete, it becomes ever more technically challenging and costly to get the remaining oil out of them, you need to drill harder and deeper and invest more and more to keep well pressure adequate and all of that costs money. In the last 25 years, many of Venezuela’s most profitable wells have become more and more depleted – most of the “easy oil” is gone, and the “hard oil” is much more expensive to get at.

So the 76 vs. now comparison is willfully misleading. The government has used it maliciously again and again to make the current PDVSA look bad. People who go through the numbers in good faith usually conclude that, while PDVSA could clearly make some improvements in the way it does business, that it's still one of the most efficient oil companies in the world - more than competitive with the Shells and BPs and ExxonMobil's of the world, to say nothing of the Pemexes and the SaudiAramcos. Hell, the government doesn't get half its budget out of them for nothing.

There is a very sound financial argument to be made that the state would make much more money if there was more private participation in the oil industry here, particularly if they relied more on foreign companies to expand production capacity and operate old, expensive-to-keep-in-production fields. Nobody wants to privatize PDVSA's existing prime capacity, aside from a few isolated far-right kooks. The line about how the old managers just want willy-nilly privatization is, I'm afraid, another chavista lie.

It's important to understand the terms of the relationship between Venezuela and the foreign oil companies, because a lot of lefties in the first world still operate under this notion of foreign oil as a neocolonialist front that sucks the country dry. That was mostly true in Venezuela in 1938 or in Iran in 1966, but a very silly distortion for Venezuela today.

When a foreign oil company wants to operate here, they have to do so under the rules of the game laid down by Venezuelan law. The basics are that they have to pay a 33% royalty rate on the oil they pump out (that's on gross sales, not net,) plus a 50% corporate profit tax. Those are huge numbers. I mean, work it out: if they sell a barrel for $36, a third of that automatically goes to the government, $12. Of the other $24, about $10 or so will be production costs, profits will be about $14. They have to split those $14 down the middle with the government. So on top of the $12 in royalties, they get $7 in taxes. All in, the government pockets $19. The company walks away with $7, and the rest is costs.

(It's an even better deal for Venezuela than that suggests, because a big chunk of the $10 in costs will stay in the local economy in the form of wages to Venezuelan workers, service contracts with Venezuelan companies, payments to Venezuelan suppliers, etc.)

Most importantly though, the foreign firms have access to capital on a scale and on terms that Venezuela doesn't have. Any dollar Venezuela invests in expanding oil production is a dollar it can't use to pay a teacher's salary, or a hospital's construction costs. While any dollar Shell invests here is a dollar that otherwise would've ended up in Texas, or Norway, or Saudi Arabia. Shell has a AAA credit rating, Venezuela a CC+, so Shell can raise the capital much more cheaply. Shell has technology we don't have, which we can force them to share with us in the investment contract.

Overall, foreign-led expansion is an incredible bargain for the Venezuelan tax payer. It's not just the tax structure and the fact that they put in all the capital, it's that they bear ALL the risk. What they get, usually, are usually rights to “explore at their own risk." That means that they get adjudicated a bunch of land or some off-shore area, and they have to go out and look for the oil. They finance it. They carry out all the seismic and geological studies, put out the rigs and pay for the exploration. If it doesn't pan out, Venezuela don't lose a penny for it. But if it does pan out and they find profitable deposits, we get a third of the gross and half the net. It's an incredible deal!

But there's more, the bloody foreigners actually pay us a nice fat fee for the privilege of risking their money on our lousy little tinpot republic, in the form of tender auction fees at the start of the process, when they're trying to get the exploration rights.

Does this look like neocolonialism to you?...the terms of these deals are so ridiculously tilted in favor of the republic that the only real puzzle is that the foreign companies still want in.

So the financial arithmetic for using foreign companies to expand the Venezuelan oil industry is straightforward. Chávez isn't interested in financial arithmetic. He's interested in oil as power, oil as nationalist symbol. If you see oil as a means to an end, with the end being to expand the state's revenue as quickly as possible, then the case for foreign led expansion is almost self-evident. If you're interested in oil as a nationalist symbol, then no amount of financial arithmetic will sway you.

> Third, if any country in the world had a private media that was so anti-Government as the
> private media inVenezuela seems to be, don't you think legal and (in some cases) extra-
> legal methods would be found toshut it down? NPR in the USA used to allow a fair amount
> of liberal to left comment, and then theRepublicans in Congress in about 1994 threatened to
> shut off all funding unless it became "morebalanced". NPR has changed dramatically since
> then! CNN was told it was no longer going to be allowed to broadcast in Israel because it was
> too "pro-Palestinian". I think - though I'm not sure about this - they fired their correspondent there,
> but I'm pretty sure they've changed their coverage since. (Robert Fisk, the British Independent
> newspaper commentator wrote about this). And yet Chavez has tolerated this, it seems. As you
> say, the private TV stations have used their power to run anti-government propaganda for
> years. I think that either speaks well of the government's tolerance or of their inefficiency!

Well, I've been very strong in criticizing the Venezuelan press in the past, and I won't rehash that here. But I'll just add that for all their evident, inexcusable bias, in a situation where every part of the state has been hijacked by the government, they are our last means of defense, our final bulwark against an autocratically oriented government that accepts no oversight from anyone. I shudder to think what Chávez might do if the independent media was shut down. I'd much rather have a flawed, biased spotlight on the government's authoritarian excess than no spotlight at all.

...and that's without even getting into 1st ammendment type considerations, which are also relevant here...

> And, finally, I've got to go back to your characterization of Chavez as somehow clinically
> incapable of being in office because of his Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Really, Thatcher
> in the UK had many of those traits, and no doubt still does. She made no secret of comparing
> herself to Churchill, for instance. Reagan was in a total dream world. I remember talking once
> to the Time reporter who followed Reagan for the 1980 election, and he says in interviews it
> was clear that Reagan didn't know reality from fiction. On one occassion, to highlight his
> sympathy for Veterans, he recounted an episode he said he'd seen of a flyer trying to get out
> of his crashing plane over the Pacific in World War 2... but he was actually recounting
> an episode from a film he'd been in So, what IF Chavez is narcissitic?

I would just point out that having a kooky leader in a country with more or less mature, more or less stable institutions is far less dangerous than having a kooky leader in a country with a disastrously weak institutional structure, where nearly every institution in the state is in the hands of active supporters of the narcissist's cult of personality. Chávez, on his own, would merely be a bad president. But Chávez in autocratic control of the courts, the legislature, the AG's office, the Comptroller's office, the military, the Ombudsman's office, etc., that's a disaster, a clear and present threat to democracy as we know it.

> Okay, one final question. How do you know that the situation Venezuela is in isn't less
> like Czechoslovakia in 1989 but more like Chile in 1973? I think that's why a lot of
> leftists, liberals and plain centrist folks up here find it hard to believe what's going on
> is that it's strikingly similar (in their eyes). Okay, I know that Allende was no Chavez,
> but was a comparitively quiet spoken intellectual, but the strikes, the destabilization,
> the anti-government media, etc. are all very similar.

This is something I worry about a lot, and I won't deny the obvious, that parts of the opposition are creepy and authoritarian and just plain nasty. Most of it, though, is made up of people with genuine democratic ideals, worried about inclusion, worried about well-functioning institutions, the separation of powers, etc. etc. (I think it’s “most” of it, anyway.) By and large our tactics are the protest march and the signature-gathering drive, such softie tactics that the rightwing loonies sometimes deride us as "comeflores" - Flower-Eaters!

I can't guarantee that the creepy side of the opposition won't come out on top, though I work hard every day to try to prevent it. I can tell you one thing, though: every time an opposition march gets shot up and the perpetrators get away scotch free, every time the government shits all over the separation of powers, every time Chávez threatens us, calls us fascists for gathering signatures, and threatens to shut down a TV channel because it dares question him, every time something like that happens the comeflor position is made to look pathetic, silly, weak, out of place, naïve, too naïve to deal with a threat as acute as Chávez's. Every time the government turns its authoritarianism up a notch, those of us who believe in negotiations and elections as the way out of the crisis see our position undermined. It’s very worrying. But again, (and I hate to sound like a broken record, but it’s true) the primary responsibility for this is Chávez’s.

> And I've certainly heard the view, no doubt appalling to your ears, that many of the shootings could
> have been carried out by conspiratorial opposition figures (I think I read that in the UK press
> somewhere).

No, not appalling at all, it actually serves to make an important point. I don't discount that opposition provocateurs could have taken part in the shootings here. Like I said, there are definitely some pretty unsavoury characters mixed in with the decent folk in the opposition. It seems unlikely to me that they would go as far as to set up random murders just to make the government look bad, but hell, I dunno. I don't have powers of omniscience. So, y'know, it could be.

Thankfully, though, we have reams of video and photographic evidence, which is already in the public sphere, that makes several of the gunmen easily identifiable. If they are opposition activists then that's all the more incentive for the government to go and nab them. It's an open and shut case, legally speaking. It’s not even that you have a “smoking gun,” you actually have video of the guns being shot. So go and grab them, man, it's straightforward as straightforward can be, in terms of police work.

The fact that the ONLY shooter in jail right now was grabbed by an opposition municipal cop, that the central government hasn't moved on ANY of the other shooters is suspicious to say the least. The fact that they're now shifting cops to the provinces in retaliation for them going off message and trying to do some actual police work and make some actual arrests on these cases, that stinks to high heaven in my book. (A journalist friend of mine who covers the Judicial Police says this latest case is anything but isolated, that most of her better sources inside the Judicial Police have ended up getting sent to hardship posts in the middle of nowhere for similar reasons.)

Are the gunmen opposition provocateurs? I doubt it, but maybe. But whoever they are, they ought to be in jail, there's no excuse for them not to be in jail, and the government really places itself well beyond the pale when it goes out of its way to make sure they're not held accountable.

I don't know if you can quite wrap your mind around what a corrosive effect shit like that has on people's faith in their institutions here, on people's sense that they're living in something like a rule-of-law based country. The feeling we have, and this is very widespread in the opposition, is that we live in a mobocracy, an outlaw state where people who support the government have carte blanche to do anything they feel like at all up to and including murder, and we have no institutional means to restrain them at all.

It's really intolerable, Paul. You wouldn't tolerate it for a second if it happened in San Francisco. You’d be out marching too.

> Okay, I'm done! Keep up the reporting. Hope you're safe!

Thanks man.

OK, enough for now...I need to go to work!

ft