I wasn't that excited about this week's VenEconomy editorial, but my boss insists that primaries are absolutely crucial and that we have to start writing about them now.

Primaries, please

Monday, November 4 was a historic day for Venezuela. For the first time, the chavista rhetoric about “participative democracy” where the people are the protagonists took tangible shape – though in a way very far removed from what chavismo had envisioned. Handing in over 2 million signatures to demand a consultative referendum, the opposition made a decisive show of how far it has come since the inchoate days of April – polishing its credentials with irreproachably democratic actions. As Juan Manuel Raffali said, Monday’s actions will divide the history of the opposition movement into “before” and “after.”

The country was hardly surprised by the reception received at the hands of the government’s most militant supporters. It barely seems strange any longer that activists bearing citizens’ signatures to demand a referendum were branded “fascists” by their opponents. It’s hardly even newsworthy that some of the government’s backers fired guns into the opposition crowd, wounding at least nine, including a reporter whose life was saved only by the bullet-proof vest that has become standard equipment for journalists. These acts of barbarism have been seen so often that they’re almost commonplace by now. Yet they continue to shine a spotlight on the government’s dwindling democratic legitimacy, and on its growing embrace of violence as a way to hang on to power. On the whole, it was yet another public relations disaster for the president’s incongruous campaign to maintain a patina of democratic civility.

Yet the hard part is only starting for the opposition. As the momentum builds towards a referendum, the once seemingly distant prospect of a presidential election looks more and more likely within a relatively short period of time – six months, say. With the collapse of the chavista regime accelerating, the prospect of power has already started to poison the cooperative relationship within the Coordinadora Democrática. To the extent that the Coordinadora’s members begin to see each other less as partners in a common struggle and more as soon-to-be electoral competitors, the cooperative spirit that has marked the last few weeks could start to fray.

So, paradoxically, this present time marks both the peak of the Coordinadora’s prestige and its most dangerous juncture yet. As elections loom ever closer, it’s crucial that its members continue to reaffirm their commitment to work collaboratively, eschewing the temptation to grandstand for electoral advantage. It won’t be easy: grandstanding is, one sometimes feels, hardwired into the way many Venezuelan politicians conceive of their jobs. But at this juncture, the cost of division is simply too high to bear; dividing the opposition is the president’s last remaining hope for remaining in office.

In a nightmare scenario, three or four opposition candidates, including at least two heavy-hitters, would run for election against Chávez, splitting the vote enough to allow him back into office. Of course, the president could conceivably try to increase the chances of that happening by finding some way to call a new election very soon, leaving the opposition no time to choose a single candidate. This might contradict everything Chávez has been saying for several months now, but it would not be the first such radical turnabout for him. Certainly, from a rational choice point of view, it’s probably his best option. Yet even in an abrupt-election scenario it’s conceivable that opposition voters would flock to whichever candidate looks to have the greatest chance of defeating Chávez – conceivable, but by no means a foregone conclusion.

The only way to really ensure that the president is defeated cleanly at what now looks like an inevitable presidential election a few months down the road is for the opposition to agree on a single candidate. It’s crucial that the choice be fully democratic, legitimate and binding on the entire Coordinadora. And the only way to achieve that is for the single candidate to be selected through a primary election, preferably in two rounds.

This would certainly be a radical innovation for Venezuela, but in the present climate of heightened democratic sensibilities, and given renewed revulsion with old-style backroom political deal-making, the Venezuelan opposition looks ready for such bold proposals. Spurred on by the growing urgency of making sure President Chávez leaves office, the proposal might just catch on. This will, in any case, be the next great debate within the Coordinadora.

Some might think it too early to be speculating on such topics. After all, it’s not even clear that a consultative referendum will be held at this point, much less that Chávez will face his opponents head-to-head at the ballot box any time soon. But given his vested interest in splitting the opposition by holding elections sooner rather than later, an ounce of prevention will be better than a pound of cure. If the Coordinadora doesn’t launch a serious debate now on the method for selecting a single candidate, it could be caught out by a chavista power-play; after all, even if elections were called for next April, that would leave a fairly short window in which to organize a primary and hold a serious public debate. So it’s not at all too early to start talking about primaries. It will soon be too late.

Incitement = Violence

It keeps happening. Time and again we think we've hit bottom, that the political scene can't possibly sink any lower into this goopy mishmash of the ridiculous and the grotesque. And then it does.

The latest low came Monday afternoon, when the reactionary and fascist forces of the squalid opposition tried to perpetrate yet another fraud against the constitution in their quest to destroy democracy. Now, read that last sentence again. Admittedly, I've compressed, but I haven't made anything up - each of those insults was actually hurled at the opposition yesterday, and by high ranking government officials too. And what was the outrage these fascists committed? Why, they went around, clipboard in hand, asking people to sign a petition to hold a referendum on whether or not to ask Chavez to resign voluntarily. Just like the black shirts! And then, then, they had the gall to try to march peacefully to the National Elections Council to hand in the two million + signatures they'd gathered! Straight out of Mussolini's playbook...

All of which would be funny if it wasn't for one pesky little detail: some of Chavez' more simple-minded followers actually buy the rhetoric. The incitement that pours out of every government official every time s/he gets near a microphone has real consequences. Yesterday, those consequences came in the form of (at least) 9 people hospitalized with gunshot wounds. One TV cameraman was shot in the chest, saved only by the bullet-proof vest he was wearing. Other cameramen got clear pictures of at least one guy in a ski mask unloading an automatic gun into the opposition march. In one especially hair-raising episode, Alfredo Peña relates that a tear gas canister was tossed into an ambulance as it attempted to carry away three wounded opposition protesters.

Lina Ron - who's still not in jail - was on hand, of course, to lead the glorious revolutionary counteroffensive against the fascists. Eventually the National Guard and the Metropolitan Police had to step in and dissolve the crowd with teargas. It took the opposition march over 3 hours to cover the final three blocks to CNE, while PM and GN troops tried to deal with the chavista countermarch.The sad thing is that, at this point, this kind of barbarity barely even shocks people anymore...it's at least the seventh time it's happened since April. It's basically becoming routine for chavistas to shoot live ammo into opposition crowds.

Needless to say, the government finds none of this objectionable. VP Rangel actually went on TV to congratulate the civilized attitude of both the opposition AND the government crowds. Maybe Chavez's psychiatric problems are contagious: downtown was a chaos of bullets and teargas as he was making that statement. Why would he object, though? As Teodoro Petkoff points out in TalCual today, Chavez already crossed that rubicon by branding the Llaguno Bridge gunmen from April 11th as "heroes" for "defending the revolution." What's changed? Nothing's changed.

The scary thing about the government's whacked out rhetoric is that it creates a climate where chavista hotheads feel fully justified unloading their guns onto their political opponents, where they're led to believe they're on the side of goodness and history and right when they battle the forces of reactionary evil with anything they can get their hands on. Their revered leader singles out people who act that way for praise. So, needless to say, they're in no doubt that, so long as the comandante is in power, they'll never be held accountable for what they're doing.

At least the signatures are in now. They're probably the hottest political hot potato Venezuela has ever seen. The Elections Council is in a dreadful state, but it's just going to have to deal with it: the constitution is very clear in giving it just 30 days to either call a referendum or invalidate the request, and a new CNE can't be named that quickly. They'll probably approve it, and the government will certainly challenge it in court...and that...that's when the sparks are gonna fly...

There's no stopping the referendum...

One of the perils of journalism is that you end up writing stories now and then that, though perfectly reasonable at the time of writing, wind up being left behind by developments by the time they've hit print. It's not very pleasent. No sooner had I scoffed at the thought of president Chávez starting an earnest negotiation with the opposition than Miraflores issued a fairly remarkable statements vowing to establish just such a dialogue, "without taboos or exclusions" and explicitly including the possibility of bringing forth some kind of referendum. Ooops. Well, we've gotten burned so many times by seemingly broad-minded chavista pledges to engage in dialogue that peeter out into nothingness within hours that we're obviously justified to be a little skeptical about this last pledge. Narcissist personality disorder doesn't just go away one day, and from a single statement to a real good-faith negotiation there's a long distance. We'll see.

What's for certain is that the whole early-referendum proposal is now right where the moderate wing of the opposition has wanted it for months: front and center. As I write this, out of the four main headlines on Union Radio's website, three are about Early Elections. That's a sure barometer of what the political mood is like here, a rising realization that there's just no other solution. With any luck, we'll get to vote within a few months. The polls seem to indicate that Chávez is doomed if it comes to the ballot box, but he's a formidable campaigner, so we'll have to see. But, at the very least, this suffocating sense of a crisis with no possible solution is starting to lift. There's a light at the end of the tunnel. Chávez's grudging acceptance of this course of action suggests that he may be willing to accept a referendum result after all, especially if it's an overwhelming defeat. Or his supporters have finally realized that the situation is so dire he has no other option.

Still, the atmosphere here is so thoroughly poisoned it's hard to really believe they're earnest about this. Hidden agendas abound here, and not just on the opposition side. Another tactical retreat paving the way for some off-script attack? Who can tell?

Wednesday, it must be time for a VenEconomy editorial...

Negotiating with a Narcissist

Much of what’s happened in Venezuelan politics over the last three years has been unprecedented, but the spectacle in Plaza Altamira over the last week has finally made the leap into the truly surreal. Urged on by a never-ending stream of protestors who are treating the whole affair like a street party, the dissident military officers have launched a sort of anticoup – a military rebuke to the government that specifically rejects violent confrontation. It’s the Gandhi solution: an uprising without arms.

So far, the officers have managed to keep a not-always-easy peace with the civilian leadership of the opposition. Clearly, the more moderate agenda of groups like Primero Justicia and the Alianza Cívica is somewhat at odds with the radicalism of officers like General Medina Gómez or General González González. The former stress the need for a referendum, which would at least allow President Chávez to campaign to remain in office, while the latter put the stress on demanding his “immediate resignation.” Thankfully, so far, the officers and civilians have managed to avoid an open rift, and both have repeatedly and loudly rejected the notion of a violent solution to the crisis.
Many have noted that it’s not exactly clear how the takeover of Plaza Altamira gets the country any closer to the end of the Chávez government. Certainly, street pressure can do little to move a government that remains locked in a private reality. As VenEconomy has reported several times, President Chávez fits the clinical description for Narcissist Personality Disorder with disconcerting exactness. Narcissists have an especially difficult time confronting any kind of criticism, which they see as proof that nefarious forces are arrayed against them. Pathologically unable to handle any view that contradicts his understanding of reality, the president has systematically surrounded himself with yes-men, cutting himself off from contact with anyone who might provide an assessment of the political reality around him that in any way contradicts his increasingly warped mental universe.

For obvious reasons, it’s exceedingly difficult to negotiate with a narcissist. OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria was reportedly shocked at Chávez’ furious refusal to even discuss the possibility of an electoral solution to the crisis. For anyone who has seen the president confronted by a hostile journalistic line of questioning, it’s easy to imagine the debacle that the meeting with Gaviria apparently turned into. Watching Chávez’ face contort at the mention of a topic that makes him so deeply uncomfortable, Gaviria understood right away that it would be impossible to draw the president into frank negotiations with the opposition.

The Coordinadora Democrática might be disappointed by the failure of the secretary-general’s mission, but it couldn’t have been surprised by it. A peaceful, civilized solution to the crisis must and will be found, whether or not the president agrees. Through his pathological inability to engage with views other than his own, the president is merely marginalizing himself from the substantive negotiations on the nation’s political future.

The civilian opposition has reached a consensus that the only democratic, inclusive and peaceful solution to the crisis is to hold a non-binding referendum on Chávez’ continuation in power. Opposition groups have already collected close to enough signatures to force such a referendum. Through the efforts of Súmate, an opposition NGO, the antichavista movement is putting together a signature-gathering drive of unprecedented sophistication. Súmate’s small army of Internet-based volunteers are digitizing and checking every signature against the CNE’s electoral rolls, discarding those of people who signed more than ones, and consolidating all the information in a centralized database held in an offshore computer. This setup will allow Súmate to have an exact, pre-audited count of the valid signatures the opposition has gathered. They will be handed to the CNE in numbered, ordered and bound volumes, along with the digital database.

It’s an unprecedented effort, which will make it exceedingly difficult for CNE to delay a referendum on a technicality. In any event, snubbing such a massive and carefully organized show of force would put the government in a politically untenable position, leaving it well beyond the hemisphere’s democratic pale.

Significantly, key parts of Chávez’ congressional coalition have reached the same conclusion. Statements by two Lara state chavista Assembly members, along with those of several Podemos (former MAS-Más) assemblymen, make it clear that there is now a legislative majority to call a referendum. And while Rafael Simón Jiménez (of Podemos) is reluctant to take the plunge unless a large majority is guaranteed for the proposal, the street pressure (and the Súmate pressure) for a solution is becoming unbearable. With any luck, the Assembly’s chavista majority will read the writing on the wall, buck the pressures coming out of Miraflores, and back some kind of referendum by a unanimous (or near-unanimous) vote. If it refuses to do so, it will merely follow the president into total irrelevance.

Aggression! Violence! Fascism!

It was really heart rending hearing J.V. Rangel’s speech yesterday. The passion in his words, the anger in his eyes, the humanist zeal! In a tone of high moral righteousness, the Vicepresident complained bitterly about the abhorrent treatment meted out to General Eugenio Gutiérrez, the chavista head of the National Guard, on his Sunday night outing to the Lee Hamilton Steak House, that bastion of the east-side bourgeoisie. It appears that Gutiérrez was hanging out peaceably eating his steak when, the fascist shock troops from Plaza Altamira somehow heard he was there and showed up armed to the teeth to intimidate him. The aggression! The violation of basic human rights! And these people call themselves democrats!

Of course, Rangel had to obviate a few inconvenient details for this account. He had to skip over, for instance, the fact that the fascist shock troops were basically middle class housewives and the arms were just pots and pans. Sure, they were angry, and sure they beat their pots mightily, and granted, they were joined by some fairly scary, belligerent men who would love to beat the bejeezis out of Gutiérrez, but they were never allowed in the restaurant, so none of them even got close to Gutiérrez. Was he stranded there for three hours? Well, yes. Is this the end of the world? You tell me.

Now, obviating the question of what the hell this dude is thinking going to a casual dinner at the Lee Hamilton, not three blocks from the permaprotest, and ignoring the burning question of where the hell J.V. Rangel gets the idea that eating meat in silence is a basic constitutional right, there’s the fact that he was eventually bailed out by the opposition mayor of Chacao, Leopoldo López, who showed up past midnight and urged the crowd to let the guy out. Which they did. No one laid a finger on Gutiérrez. Still. Fasicsm! Aggression! Violence! The rhetoric Rangel used to describe the incident suggests a blood bath…when what we saw was a mildly quirky political protest. Hell, López bailed him out! When was the last time we saw Freddy Bernal lift a damn finger to bail out an opposition member on Puente Llaguno?

The thing that really riles you up about this is the blatant double standard. Ten days ago, when chavistas shot their guns into Metropolitan Police lines we heard nary a peep out of the VP. When two sets of chavista thugs ambushed two different groups of opposition demonstrators heading for Caracas on October 10th, the government not only didn’t move against him: every indication is that the National Guard actually protected the gunmen, at least on the Central Regional highway. In August, when chavista thugs started shooting against the PM in Catia, the government blamed the PM!

We’re talking guns, real bullets, plomo as they say here. Six people (including three Carabobo state police officers) took gunshot wounds in the Central Highway, a bystander was killed in Guárico. Several PMs were hit in August. This, apparently, is perfectly acceptable to the government. Didn’t merit even a press release. But a loyalist army general forced to hear the sounds of pots and pans being struck with ladels over dinner?! Fascism!

How do you negotiate with people who think this way? Honestly…

“This is the protest that never ends…

…it just goes on and on like this…”

What to even say about the last 150 hours on Plaza Altamira? What started as a postmodern military antirebellion has slowly transmogrified into a strange new breed of political expression: the neverending-political-protest-cum-party. At this point we’re on the sixth day of around-the-clock protesting. The crowds wax and wane, but never disappear completely. A small group of hard-core outdoor types pitched their tents in the Plaza and have been spending their nights there. At 6 o’clock each morning an old lady takes the microphone and prays the rosary with a small band of early morning protesters/churchgoers. The crowds build throughout the day, but especially after 5 or 6 pm as people get out of work and stream to the plaza. At least 15,000 or 20,000 people go there every night to blow whistles, wave flags, listen to speeches, sing the national anthem, display banners, or just dance. I finally got to spend some quality time there last night and was struck by the huge numbers of high school and college kids who are treating this basically as a large, politically tinged outdoor party. It’s not just kids out having fun, of course, there are plenty of middle-aged people and older folks and lots of whole families out for a protest stroll. But the 16-22 year old demographic definitely was the largest. Kids beating drums. Dancing. Waving huge flags. Watching street performers. Lots of dancing.

One interesting fact is that this is far from the middle-class-only protest Chávez has tried to portray. The full social/racial spectrum was there, sharing the space with a minimum of class tension, dancing and playing together in a way you really rarely see here. As far as I can tell, the protest can just go on indefinitely…certainly there was no sign of people getting tired of it last night. Why would they stop? There’s a really good vibe to the place: it’s a huge, free street party that never ends. People are having a great old time there. Why would they stop?

I don’t know what the government is going to do about this. I don’t know what it can do. As Maria Isabel Párraga writes in her El Universal column today, “How can you repress something as radically innocuous as a fiesta?” Chávez’s line in Aló, presidente yesterday, that everyone in that plaza is a fascist, is so fantastically far removed from reality it’s hard to know what to even say about it. Except that, unless we’ve been seriously misled, fascists were never particularly notable for their disposition to dance exuberantly, joyfully, passionately way late into the night. In fact, it’s difficult for me to think of any political action further removed from the spirit of fascism than the scene on Plaza Altamira last night. It's pretty great.

Sensitive New Age Coup

It wasn't hard to guess that sooner or later General Enrique Medina Gomez would eventually try to piece together some kind of antigovernment action, but who could've guessed it would be this? The man called a press conference yesterday with a who's who of the April coup leaders standing behind him in two neat rows in full uniform. He recited the usual litany of grievances but then stunned everyone: just when you thought he was about to order the troops to storm the palace, he stopped, and instead asked other army officers to join him in protest by going to Plaza Altamira, in the foofie east-side, and hold a vigil until Chavez resigns or calls fresh elections.

So that's exactly what they did. 30 hours ago. They're still there. Looks like a particularly excitable core of about 5 or 10,000 people are willing to really tough it out down there. More and more officers have trickled to the scene, giving the typical little speeches, waving, etc. It's quite an extraordinary demonstration, really. These big tough army guys have basically settled for a line saying "damn you Chavez! We're so angry at you that if you don't resign, we're gonna, we're gonna...make speeches! Yeah, and keep making them until you give up! There!" Very odd.

The nice thing is that their attitude, once again, pulls the rug from under the government's line. Of course, predictably, the government went into conniptions of rage over this new outbreak of "golpismo" - coupsterism - their favorite all purpose political slur. But if one thing is obvious is that a coup, at least a normal, traditional coup, is about as far from these guys intentions as could be. One does not stage a coup with flags, pots and pans from Plaza Altamira...that's just absurd. If anything, this is a sort of anticoup, a specific rejection of traditional heavy-handed military intervention, an impassioned demonstration that even the most radical antichavistas in the military reject a violent outcome.

(Cynics will of course point out that since these guys loyalty to chavez had been under a cloud for months, they'd been relieved from direct command posts months ago and couldn't have led a coup even if they wanted to. That's probably true. Still, their very visible rejection of the use of force strikes me as significant and vaguely inspiring.)

Of course, from the government's point of view, the protest is also a strange kind of godsend...they don't even have to purge these guys from the ranks, they've purged themselves. And the longer the protest goes on, the longer the incredible self-purging army has time to do its thing.

But in the short term, the Coordinadora Democratica has played this whole thing beautifully, nailing down the protest as a pristinely pure, democratic affair, again isolating the extremists, and using it to further undermine the government's position. One is inclined to say that the Coordinadora is learning how to do its thing, and learning fast. It's exciting.

I'm obviously hopping mad about the government's incredible, howling, flashing, bold-faced lying about yesterday's "paro." Thus, this week's VenEc editorial is about...

Getting rid of Chávez well

On Monday, Venezuela once again spoke loud and clear, and the government once again refused to listen. The message was, in essence, the same as on Dec. 10th, Jan. 23rd, April 11th, July 11th, and Oct. 10th. At bottom, all that opposition minded Venezuelans are trying to say, have been trying to say for close to a year now, is “we exist. Stop ignoring us. Acknowledge us.” And the government – incredibly, absurdly – simply refuses to do so.

Taken at face value, the official denial that a mass opposition movement even exists smacks of psychopathology. Faced with a discomfiting reality, the government’s line is simple denial – denial in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, denial that runs directly counter to what everyone in Venezuela saw with his or her own eyes on Monday. It makes the government come across as disturbingly autistic – locked in a private reality, radically unable to interact with the real world on reasonable terms.
But, of course, this maddeningly obtuse public posture is just that – a posture. It’s clear that, in its heart of hearts, the government understands that most of the country came to a standstill on Monday. (At least one hopes it understand this - the alternative hypothesis, that the government is run by people who actually believe its demented P.R. line, is just too frightening to consider.) In all likelihood, though, the government know its position is a farce, but has calculated that it’s to its advantage to maintain it. The question, then, is why?

In part, chavismo seems to have calculated that, to remain in power, it absolutely has to maintain the support of the 20% of Venezuelans that still follow the president with passion. To keep that fifth of the population mobilized and committed, it’s important that they continue to believe in the political viability of “the project.” Admitting the current strength of the opposition movement could be devastating to their morale.

What’s more important, though, is that if the government acknowledged the evident, the president would be forced to let go of his long-term vision of turning Venezuela into a neomarxist state. Once the government accepted that millions of common Venezuelans oppose Chávez’s ideological model, it would have little choice but to find an accommodation with them. And such an accommodation would certainly entail abandoning the president’s long-term ideological vision. This, in essence, is why María Cristina Iglesias had to go on television at lunchtime on Monday to tell Venezuelans that what they could see happening all around them was not, in fact, happening.

Faced with chavismo’s deeply dishonest obstinacy, the opposition has decided to keep pressing for early elections or for a referendum through a major signature gathering drive. Leaders such as Leonardo Pizani have even taken the significant step of publicly explaining that fair elections cannot be held until the nation’s voting system has been overhauled, and that such an overhaul will take time. Emboldened by the certainty that chavismo is only weakened and further marginalized with each passing day, the opposition seems newly prepared to show the patience and exercise the restraint necessary to reach a constitutional solution to the impasse.

Ultimately, though, democratically-minded Venezuelans have reason to feel confident. The government’s contention that the opposition movement is a fabrication of the media and “four little nutters,” in the president’s words, was a spectacular P.R. debacle. The opposition, meanwhile, is growing not only in size but also in ethical and intellectual stature. The Coordinadora Democrática now seems firmly in the hands of the moderate wing of the movement, led by forward looking, reform minded organizations like Queremos Elegir and Primero Justicia that understand the importance of removing Chávez with ballots rather than bullets. The more radical, immediatist parts of the opposition – including notably Acción Democrática – seem to have finally grasped the importance of keeping the Coordinadora united, avoiding on-the-spot announcements that escalate the potential for violence, and committing to an electoral path towards regime change, even if that means waiting a few months. That shift, in itself, was one of the most significant and positive outcomes of Monday’s protest.

Slowly but surely, the opposition is coming to understand that getting rid of Chávez will not, in and of itself, solve the nation’s problems. It will merely be the first step in the difficult road of reform. If that first step is carried out in a way that divides the country further, it could end up impeding rather than aiding the reform agenda the country so badly needs to implement. Thankfully, the opposition is starting to understand that its job is not just to get rid of Chávez. It’s to get rid of Chávez well.

Newsflash: AD toes the line!

I think I just saw the most significant event of the whole strike, and I bet most people missed it. Rafael Marin, Secretary General of Accion Democratica, gave a press conference. At one point, a journalist asked him if the strike would be extended beyond 12 hours, or if other protests could be added. He refused to answer, saying AD had made a commitment inside the Coordinadora Democratica - the opposition's umbrella group - to refrain from making any statement on such questions until agreement could be reached with the whole opposition.

Now, this is significant for a number of reasons. Accion Democratica has consistently been the most strident, radical party in the opposition. The bigger of the old, traditional, hypercorrupt political parties, AD sadly retains a large membership, a well-oiled party machine, and over 400,000 party activists committed enough to vote in its internal elections. For the first few months that the Coordinadora was in existence, AD managed to dominate it and impose its line, which was an immature, immediatist Chavez out NOW line. But for about the last six weeks, the more moderate voices in the Coordinadora have taken center stage. There was a lot of concern that the adecos would just walk away from the Coordinadora if they felt they could no longer dominate it. People feared they'd strike off on their own, walking away with a major opposition constituency, rather than follow the more moderate parties' line. We've had some bad experiences with radicals in the opposition pulling this kind of stunt before, and it makes the opposition look disunited, shambollic, and generally hopeless. Avoiding on-the-spot announcements for new protest actions has been a priority for the Coordinadora, and Marin's refusal-to-answer strongly suggests that AD has finally been made to understand that this is important.

Marin's statement seems to me like a pretty extraordinary event. AD, in a moment of high tension, publicly shuts up specifically on the grounds that it has pledged to do so at the Coordinadora. I've never seen AD act this way before, and I think it's a real sign of just how strong the moderates are getting inside the coordinadora. It strikes me that the time for stridency in opposition is passing, that AD finds itself more and more isolated in its Chavez-Must-Be-Toppled-Anytime-Anyway-Anyhow line. Not only are they outnumbered in the coordinadora, but they realize this and they accept it. It's a very un-AD-like way to behave, that's for sure. And it's very good news indeed.

Strike update...

Well, it looks like a pretty good general strike. Not a great strike. We've had better ones. December 10th was bigger, but this one's bigger than April 9th. Most shops shut in the east side, about half I'd say in the west side, varying numbers in the rest of the country. Far from unanimous, but pretty good.

Of course, neither side is sane enough to put it that way. As far as CTV is concerned, almost no one went to work today. Which is silly. "Exito total!" they say. Ummm....uhh...no. But the government's line is, as per usual, even stupider. There was no stoppage, was the Labor Minister's line. Just idiotic.

Basically, the streets look like it's a Sunday. Most stuff is shut, some stuff is open, and the hysterical political rhetoric or one side or the other is just...well...a sign of the times.

My country has become a scare tactic...

How embarrassing. In the final few days before the Brazilian presidential election, the doomed right-wing candidate has started likening Lula, the lefty front-runner, with Chavez, all in a final desperate ploy to win some last minute votes. "Elect this lunatic and we'll end up as screwed up as Venezuela is," seems to be the crux of Serra's campaign these days. Sad...Venezuela has become a scare tactic in foreign elections.

What's really telling, though, is Lula's reaction. An old-time lefty with two decades of experience in politics and four presidential elections behind him, Lula's seasoned enough to realize how lethal the association is and has decided to run full speed in the opposite direction. He called Serra's statement "electoral terrorism"...yikes! And to think chavistas of all sorts had been licking their lips over a supposed Fidel-Chavez-Lula axis. Doesn't look likely, does it?

Of course, it's just an international iteration of a trend that's been evident here for a long time. Serious Venezuelan left-wingers have been horrified by Chavez for years. Responsible people of the left are alarmed by the way Chavez is blackening the progressive movement's name here. We're talking people with unimpeachable credentials as social activists, people who risked their lives as guerrillas in the 60s, who've been working for radical reform since Chavez was at his mother's teat...we're talking Americo Martin, the old Revolutionary Left Movement leader, we're talking Teodoro Petkoff, who spent years in jail after organizing an incredibly daring raid for the Communist Party's guerrilla movement. We're talking Pompeyo Marquez and Douglas Bravo and Luis Manuel Esculpi and Pablo Medina and Andres Velasquez and even Jorge Olavarria; leaders who've devoted their lives to actually improving the lives of the poor, rather than talking crap about it. These people realize that, in the long-term, Chavez is doing incredible damage to the movement by convincing the middle-class that leftists really are the deranged lunatics they'd always feared they might be. The irony is that with this grotesque charade of a people's government, Chavez is actually making it harder and harder for any serious leftist to be taken seriously in the future. It's pretty sad. Ask Lula.

This riot is brought to you by...your government!

It's hard to contain the seething anger I feel when watching the TV footage from yesterday's riot downtown. I've written again and again about the need to de-escalate the crisis here, to chill out, to negotiate, to take chavistas seriously, to take their hopes and fears into account, to include them in a democratic solution. But then I watch the Lina Ron sponsored little affair downtown yesterday, I can't help but fall into despair. How, how is it possible to de-escalate a confrontation with a government that condones this shit? How is it possible to trust a government whose supporters have tacit permission to shoot guns at their political opponents in the streets?

Takes two to tango. Takes two to de-escalate. And yesterday made it, once again, totally obvious that the government has no interest at all in de-escalating.

It depresses me to no end that Lina Ron now sets the national agenda in this country. A full time provocateur, professional riot-organizer who coined the hideous phrase "a shut shop is a looted shop" to intimidate shop-keepers into staying open next monday, she's the incarnation of the basest, the vilest in the chavista regime. In any halfway serious country she would've been locked away months ago: she's been captured on camera inciting her underlings to violence so often it's become a journalistic cliché here. How can we be sure her little acts are government-backed? It's not just her evident immunity from prosecution, her constant hyper-heated pro-government rhetoric. It's that she's so assured of the official backing she enjoys that yesterday she even took a short break from the riot to pop over next door into the National Assembly to consult strategy with the government's congressional delegation. All in full view of the cameras. So how do you trust a government that operates this way enough to negotiate with it? How do you de-escalate with people that are this deeply committed to violence?

I mean, my God, at this point we've just gotten used to the phrase "disturbances generated by backers of the government" as a standard journalistic phrase...it doesn't even strike us as odd anymore, it's just...routine...

If moderate chavistas (are there any left?) had any sense at all - or any power at all - they'd realize that it's precisely this kind of crap that's pushing this country towards violence. The grotesque scenes last night marginalize doves like me, making us look like fools for calling for an accomodation with these people. It incites the non-chavistas in the army, who have it rubbed in their faces one more time that government-supporters can do anything they want downtown and the law just doesn't apply to them. It raises tensions across the whole society, pushes it towards a coup, towards a confrontation, towards a war. It's insane...

In the end, it was just Lina and a few dozen hot-heads making trouble downtown. The hotheads are not the problem. The problem, what's totally unacceptable about these episodes, is their evident coziness with the government, the obvious fact that nobody in power is willing to move against them, that they're protected. Whatever it takes, the government must be made to understand that this is not an acceptable way to do politics, not to 90% of Venezuelans. We can't accept it.

Anatomy of (yet another) downtown riot …
(sigh…these are getting predictable…)

At first, people weren’t sure what to make of the protests at the Metropolitan Police. A pretty good number of PMs (as the cops are known) started protesting about back-pay, which seemed reasonable. The Greater Caracas Mayor answered that he sympathized, but that the money to pay them had not been handed down to him by the National Government, where all of the Mayor’s money originates. That seemed reasonable too. But as the protests got more drawn out and militant, people started to get suspicious. There was a definite whiff of the political about this protest – the Metropolitan Mayor is a fierce Chávez critic, after all, and the Metropolitan Police has been a key to the big anti-government protests over the last 10-months. Without a big PM presence, a lot of opposition activists would’ve been too scared to protest in public. So the idea that the protest was a ploy to undermine, maybe even destroy the PM began to take shape. And those suspicions were born out when Channel 8, the doctrinally chavista State-run channel, started devoting more and more air time to the protests.

So today, when the dispute finally got out of hand, when the dissident cops tried to set fire to the Metropolitan Mayor’s Offices, when other PMs had to disperse them with tear gas, when groups of masked trouble-makers joined them and fired gunshots at the PM lines, and when no one in the National Government lifted a finger to stop the whole sorry exercise in Avenida Urdaneta, we weren’t surprised. We’ve come to expect this madness from the government. Time and time again they've shown that this is how they deal with opponents: round up some street thugs, set them on your enemies. Preserves plausible deniability.

Frankly, we're scared. We're scared that when they manage to provoke an incident that gives the government an excuse to take over the Metropolitan Police our right to protest in the streets will be truly in peril. Without a well-armed PM presence standing guard, marching would just be too scary. And these days, marching is one of the last means of protest we have left.

[it occurs to me that, especially for non-Venezuelans, the column above might not make that much sense without an…]

Explicative note on how this crazy city is organized

The municipal structure of Caracas is a daunting tangle. When my grandmother was born 90 years ago, Caracas was a town of maybe 200,000 confined to what is now known as el centro, downtown, over on the west side of the valley, in what was known as the Distrito Federal – a DC type federal entity. With the advent of oil and modernity, it grew incredibly quickly, like many third world capitals, to its current 4 million inhabittants. In the process, it spilled out of the central core, growing eastward along the valley into areas that laid outside the D.F., in Miranda State. Many towns that for centuries had been quite separate from the city were swallowed up in the sprawl – Chacao, Petare, El Hatillo. But each of those had their own municipal governments. By the 1990s, these had become neighborhoods of Caracas rather than towns of their own, leaving the broader city without a unified municipal government.

When the Constituent Assembly was convened in 1999, many proposals surfaced to bring chaos to the madness by consolidating these into a single administrative entity. But the Miranda State government didn’t like the idea one bit: the wealthy East-side Caracas neighborhoods held a huge proportion of its population and its tax base, and the governor realized it would be a disaster for the state if those were taken out of its jurisdiction. So the proposals faced serious resistance, and a compromise was eventually reached: a new Metropolitan Mayorship would be created, encompassing the East-side neighborhoods, but without dismembering Miranda State. Each of the East-side neighborhoods would retain its own municipal government, which would coexist with a Greater Caracas mayorship. The result was a municipal structure even more complicated than before: the city now has both a Metropolitan Mayor with jurisdiction over both the East and West-sides of the city, stradling both the D.F. (which, just to make things even more convoluted, had its name changed – it’s now the Distrito Capital, D.C.) and parts of Miranda State AND five local mayors. In the Eastern Districts, there are three levels of regional government: the municipal, the greater-caracas municipal, and then the state governor, whereas the Distrito Capital has no governor, so in that part, the metropolitan mayor acts as de facto governor. Confused? So’s everyone else.

The point is that whenever you hear someone say “the mayor of Caracas” you have to ask “which one?”

The thing is that unlike normal municipal governments, the Greater Caracas mayorship has no autonomous tax-raising powers at all. It relies completely on the National Government for its funding. And the Greater Caracas mayor, Alfredo Peña, is now an ardent antichavista (though, once upon a time, he sat on Chávez’ cabinet,) and has become a major bete noire for Chávez’s followers. So, not surprisingly, the National Government nickel-and-dimes Peña’s bureaucracy to no end. The municipal workers get paid verrry irregularly, if at all, and that includes Peña’s Metropolitan Police officers.

Yes, yes, I've been delinquent about posting. In my defense, I've been battling a dreadful cold and sinking under a pile of work. And really, it's been an eventful few days. The government held a big counter-march on Sunday, 3 days after ours, and the scene soon descended into an infantile "mine was bigger - no, no, mine was bigger" affair. I think the numbers game is quite silly, frankly, but more or less unavoidable.

Then, yesterday, OAS finally noticed that the country is about to implode. Peru's president Toledo, bless his heart, called for a meeting of Andean-region foreign ministers to at least talk about it, within the framework of OAS's Democratic Charter. This is significant because it suggests that Toledo now thinks that the government might be in violation of the charter - though he hasn't quite said that, yet. The government threw a hissy-fit: until Toledo's speech, its attempts to throw up a facade of "absolute normalcy" - at least in international circles - had held. Yesterday, it started to crack. Not that OAS can really do much about our problems here, but it's just nice that the outside world has finally picked up on the idea that all is not sweetness'n'light here.

And into this already complicated stew you throw in the threat of a General Work Stoppage starting next Monday. Oh dear...

OK, below, VenEc's weekly editorial, penned by me.

Risky business

From the government’s point of view, it was a propaganda triumph. Through fair means or foul, Sunday’s pro-government march managed to create the appearance of roughly equaling Thursday’s opposition march. As usual, Hugo Chávez insulted common sense by claiming no less than three million people were in attendance, when in fact 100,000 might have been closer to the mark. Presidential hyperbole aside, though, the government turned out enough people to manipulate the resulting TV images into a media triumph.

In fact, there’s little doubt that the opposition march from last week was substantially larger. Experts speculate the ratio might have been anywhere from 4:1 to 12:1, though getting an accurate count of the opposition marchers was much more difficult, since they tended to dissipate upon arrival at their Avenida Bolívar endpoint, unlike the government marchers, who stayed to wait for the president’s speech there. The two marches bear out what pollsters have been saying for months: that the opposition now enjoys the support of a clear majority of Venezuelans – some two-thirds, according to most polls. But that hardly means that the government has been left in the lurch: it retains the impassioned support of a significant minority of the population, perhaps as much as a third of the Venezuelan public.

This overall breakdown has remained substantially unchanged since the second half of last year. What makes the situation so volatile is the fact that both sides insist on acting as though they enjoy near-unanimous popular support. The government stubbornly refuses to accept the drastic drop in its popularity, continuing to govern as though four-fifths of the electorate still supported it, as in March 1999. Angered by the government’s pigheaded refusal to accept the obvious, the opposition has fallen into an equally dangerous trap: acting as though support for the government had collapsed entirely, which is also a gross misrepresentation of reality. With each side unwilling to concede that the other has significant support, with neither side accepting the need to play by rules that are seen as acceptable by the other, and with each side overestimating its strength, the stage for miscalculation and violence is set.

It’s against this backdrop that the opposition has called for a 12-hour “general stoppage” to demand the president either resign or call early elections. This is a high-risk operation, one that faces many pitfalls. For one, the government has implemented a fierce campaign of intimidation to cow business owners into staying open. Companies that depend on the public sector for contracts are especially easy targets, but given Venezuela’s business climate, almost every company can be pressured one way or another – bureaucratic permits can be withheld, tax inspectors can become suddenly much more conscientious, labor disputes can tilt the way of the workers, etc. As though all of that were not enough, the government has recently published a draft of its much-feared “co-management” amendments to the Labor Law’s regulations, and government spokesmen have issued repeated threats to use those amendments to summarily take over any private companies that join a strike. In such circumstances, it will take real courage to buck the intimidation and join the stoppage.

So Carlos Ortega certainly has his work cut out for him. At this stage, it’s impossible to say whether such key sectors as the oil industry and Caracas’ transport workers will join the action. The CTV is taking a big risk on this mobilization, and it’s not yet possible to say whether it will pay off.

Overall, though, two points are obvious: as far as the government is concerned, its broad, Marxist vision for Venezuela’s future is not up for debate, and that vision is simply unacceptable to a broad majority of Venezuelans. The only resource the opposition has left is sustained, ongoing street pressure. Even if results are not immediately evident, even if individual actions do not lead to a same-day solution, democratically-minded Venezuelans have a historic duty to register their revulsion at the government’s plans at every possible juncture.

At the same time, it bears remembering that even if the Chávez regime were to collapse next week, the 20-33% of Venezuelans who believe passionately in the president’s message would still be there the next day. The real challenge for any transition government will be to incorporate those people into the post-chavista political process, reassuring them that their concerns are taken seriously and overcoming the urge towards facile triumphalism. Failure to do so would imperil the nation’s stability for years to come.

7 kilometers, packed solid...

I'm just about to step outside and go march, but one last update: it's huge. My boss just called me...he's at the end of Avenida Libertador, about 7 km. out from the starting point. Says there's asolid crowd there. The TV images show that there's a solid crowd stretching all the way back to the Parque del Este starting point: the people at the back haven't been able to even start walking, and those . That's 7 solid kilometers of wide streets packed solid with marchers (that's 4.4 miles, for the metrically impaired.)

As of 12:15 pm, the march remains fully peaceful. Fingers crossed.

ft

World Mental-Health Day

An inside story in El Nacional tells us it's World Mental-Health Day today. How apropos. Mental health is not particularly on-show out there today, though...not in Venezuela, anyway.

In the early morning, two separate convoys of busses carrying protesters to the march in Caracas were basically ambushed: the roads were blocked, either with hijacked 18-wheeler trucks or burning tires, and then someone started shooting into the buses. One guy was killed in one of the ambushes, apparently an innocent by-stander, in Guarico state. The other ambush was on the main east-west highway, on the border between Aragua and Carabobo States, and left six people wounded with gunshots, three of them Carabobo State police officers. Once again, the events were carried live on the radio, as people on the scene got on their cell-phones and called news radio stations. It was eerie: you could hear the shooting in the background.

Significantly, the second raid happened just outside a highway tunnel, directly in front of a National Guard outpost. Some reports from the scene were adamant that the National Guardsmen did the shooting. Certainly, they stood by and did nothing for over four hours while the access to the tunel remained blocked in both directions by trucks. At about 9:30, they finally lifted the blockage and let people through.

I'm just now hearing there was a similar blocked-road incident in Sucre State also.

Three ambushes, miles and miles apart, with people shooting guns on busloads of opposition supporters, all at the same time. This just couldn't have happened without coordination. Ugly, ugly stuff.

Anyway, the TV images are quite eloquent. The march looks huge. Arial shots taken from a high-rise on Francisco de Miranda Avenue show the entire area from the Parque del Este metro stop to the Plaza Altamira packed solid. I don't know how many people that is, but it's a lot. Once again, it's obvious: the bungled "repression" from the last few days only provoked people more. After the Rosendo/Medina Gomez circus last night, nobody but nobody is intimidated.

The Revolt of Los Palos Grandes

Last night was a circus. First, Rosendo Struck Again. Major General Manuel Rosendo, in full military uniform, gave a fire-breathing press conference where, among other things he,

-Accused the president of war crimes, saying that on their final phone call on April 11th, after he refused to implement Plan Avila for the first time, the president told him he was "wearing his uniform with his rifle in hand and he was going to fight for this revolution that had cost him so much."

-Reminded the defense minister of 1991, when Rosendo was a student of the current minister, and Prieto taught him a course on the importance of countering urban guerrillas early-on rather than waiting for them to become full blown wars: "we have urban guerrillas now, Mr. Minister, what are you going to do about it? Why do you do nothing?"

-Warned that the president might issue the same orders today he'd issued on April 11th, but that this time all the military officers around him were unconditionals and would not dare defy him. He reminded the army's troop commanders of their responsibility under the Statute of Rome and reminded them that "following orders" is not an admissible defense in a case of crimes against humanity.

-Decried the hideous treatment of dissident army officers at the hand of their leaders, pointing out that while those who agreed to April's violence had been rewarded with plum ambassadorships, those who refused to shoot on the people were facing trial.

-Sprinkled various other harsh criticisms on the Vice President, the Attorney General, General Belisario Landis, and half a dozen others I can't remember right now.

Rosendo definitely missed his calling: he should've been a politician. He's good at it! Much of the reason his testimony is so damaging is that, until April 10th, he was a chavista loyalist, the head of the Unified Command of the Armed Forces, and as such was privy to a lot of high-level, very compromising discussions in those days. e's a turncoat, basically, and knows way too much. He's also a terrific public speaker.

But his statement was only the beginning. Just an hour or so after the press conference, a DISIP patrol tried to arrest him. The idiots tried to do it on the Third Avenue of Los Palos Grandes, the antichavista heartland of East-side Caracas, during rush hour. As they tried to nab him, an old lady who was driving next to Rosendo's car recognized him, got out of her car, and started shouting "It's Rosendo! It's General Rosendo!! They're trying to arrest Rosendo!" As more and more people in the traffic jam realized what was going on, they started pouring out of their cars, shouting "Leave Rosendo alone!" and "Rosendo! Rosendo! Aqui yo te defiendo!" (a clever on-the-spot rhyme: "Rosendo, Rosendo, I'll defend you here!") With traffic stopped, and a quickly gathering mob surrounding them, these DISIP agents saw which way the wind was blowing and high-tailed it out of there, barely on time. Meanwhile, neighbors were coming down from their apartment buildings in droves, March-Kits (TM) in hand, for another - but this time, much bigger - Insta-Protest. There must have been four blocks full of ecstatic people shouting anti-government slogans and cheering Rosendo. Eventually, somebody took the guy into one of the neighboring apartments to shelter him, while several thousand people stood guard outside, singing the national anthem and such. It was quite a scene.

[Venezuelan readers will be amused to know that, for about the first 20 minutes of this whole thing, the only reporter anyone could get close to the General was Valentina Quintero, who apparently lives nearby. It was hysterical! She kept trying to act all serious and reporter-like, but couldn't quite carry it off and kept digressing on how nice Rosendo looked out of military uniform...very funny. [Valentina Quintero writes a fun, but very vapid, tourism column in El Nacional, and is about as far-removed from a hard-knuckled political journalist as you can possibly imagine.]]

That was the evening for Rosendo. Meanwhile, General Medina Gomez had a somewhat similar experience. He decided to start giving a round of TV interviews, starting in Globovision where he told Norberto Mazza of Grado 33 that he more or less advocates a coup (not in those words, of course.) Then he drove off to Televen for a chat with Cesar Miguel Rondon. DIM finally caught up with him as he was leaving Televen, but in no time at all the neighbors from around Televen caught un, grabbed their March-Kits (TM), and surrounded the TV station, copying the scene in Los Palos Grandes. That siege went on most of the night. Result, they couldn't arrest either Rosendo or Medina Gomez.

Ineffectual authoritarianism…

What a farce! The TV images from the joint Secret Police/Military Intelligence raid of Colonel Antonio Guevara (suspected coupster) looked like something out of TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. Something like thirty heavily armed intelligence officers, many wearing ski masks, poured into the apartment at 5 in the morning, blocking traffic around the neighborhood. Within minutes of their arrival, the colonel’s wife has managed to sneak out of the apartment and call several radio and TV stations to tell them what’s going on. As a result, when my radio alarm wakes me up I’m treated to the very surreal experience of a Secret Police raid being brought to me live, blow-by-blow, on the radio, as described by the raidee’s wife.

Eventually, the raiders realice that they’re on the air and go find the lady, but by then everyone in Caracas knows what’s going on. By six in the morning, the neighbors had started a huge cacerolazo, the very folkloric Venezuelan practice of protesting by banging pots and pans with wooden ladles outside your window. It was a huge cacerolazo, showing the people there weren’t the least bit intimidated by the DISIP/DIM presence. Significantly, the neighborhood (La Rosaleda in San Antonio de los Altos) is a military community where 9 out of 10 apartments is occupied by a military family. But then, it got even more farcical: angry at the raid, all these women from the nearby apartment buildings got out their protest “kits” (flags, pots, pans, whistles and such which they’d been doubtlessly preparing for tomorrow’s march) and put together an impromptu little street protest in the access road to the neighborhood. They got some cars out and blocked the access road, leaving the intelligence officers stuck there: once the raid was over, they couldn’t get out. The officers marched down to the streets and tried to scare the ladies into letting them through, but the remarkable thing was how totally unimpressed these housewives were…all the TV showed was a string of forty and fifty year old middleclass ladies shouting their heads off and jeering at these dressed-to-impress, heavily armed military dudes. It was really surreal.

Finally, showing just how misplaced the word “intelligence” is in these people’s job titles, they decided to disperse the mini-protest with tear gas. This was incredibly dumb, cuz tear gas will disperse the jeering women but not the cars parked right on your way. So it just made the marchers angrier without getting the officers unstuck. They looked so pathetic with their little machine guns slung over their shoulders standing there as these housewives gave them hell. It made for great TV footage, that’s for sure.

Eventually, at about noon, the opposition mayor of that area showed up, talked the protesters down, and negotiated an end to the "siege.”

That was two nights ago. Last night’s raids were, if anything, even more ridiculously bungled. First, they turned up at this apartment on a tip that this one colonel had been plotting a coup only to find out that the colonel in question had moved out of there six years earlier…yup, you read that right, Military “Intelligence” information on some of the nation’s most wanted conspirators is six years out of date. Christ! A different colonel was living there, and so they went around on this wild-goose chase looking for the fascist coupster’s current address.

Worse than that, they tried to raid the house of General Efraín Vásquez Velásquez, who was the top commander in the army during the April coup. Another swing, another miss: Vásquez Velásquez’ neighbors ringed his house in another little mini-protest and the DIM/DISIP teams couldn’t get anywhere near the place.

The message here is that nobody takes the government seriously here anymore. They’ve lost all respect, even fear of Chávez. They send these thugs out to prove how tough they are and just end up looking ridiculous, faced down by the fearsome fascist shocktroops known as housewives. They have 6 year old addresses for supposed conspirators. It’s really, really pathetic.

It’s obvious that the raids are meant to intimidate, it’s even more obvious that they aren’t working. If they were really police raids, you’d think they’d have done them all at the same time, no? Imagining for just a second that there really was a conspiracy afoot, what sense would it make to raid the conspirators one at a time, on successive nights? Isn’t it blindingly obvious that if you’re a member of a conspiracy and you see your co-conspirators being raided one after the other on successive nights you’re going to either move, burn, shred, hide or eat any compromising documents you have before it’s your turn? As a policing strategy, the successive raids are totally absurd, as an intimidation strategy, they’re totally ineffectual.

The rumor mill on overdrive...

Well, Ana and Pedro, if you read this from Rome, I hate to alarm you but Caracas was spooky today. The rumor mill is on overdrive. We heard all kinds of crazy things...the old stand-bys like the State of Exception and the coups and such, but also relatively new ones like a definite deployment of the Batallon Bolivar, which is a heavy tank batallion (not tanquetas) in downtown Caracas. The ongoing little soap opera in Cotiza between the chavista PM officers and the "Peñista" PM officers continued and worsened: at some point someboy pulled out a baseball bat and started swinging and some officers were hurt. Tear gas, too. It's an ugly scene and there's a torrent of speculation about an imminent intervention of the Metropolitan Police. But if the government takes over the PM, who'll guard the march on Thursday? People see it as a ploy to depress march turnout...

Of course, the new rumors might not seem so credible if it wasn't for the new stuff that's not a rumor. Those 18 year old soldiers with giant machine guns standing at every metro stop are certainly not a rumor: everyone saw them. The light tanks outside the GN headquarters are not a rumor. The reports of a large number of soldiers being sent out to Mecedores, where the radio and TV broadcasting towers for Caracas sit, well, those are kind of in a gray area between fact and rumor, but apparently are fact. And it's also a fact that Stratfor cites inside sources saying a coup is hours away - I know, I know, Stratfor's gotten things like these before, but I talked to Jack and he insists he has people on the inside who know what's what.

As though all of that wasn't enough, an email is making the rounds claiming that the big, evil, chavista plan to sabotage the opposition march on Thursday is to infiltrate it with undercover street hawkers, who'll sell the marchers water and ice cream that's been spiked with laxatives, giving 800,000 opposition marchers the runs all at the same time and thereby clearing out the streets...it's crazy, but everyone I know has gotten it, and people are paranoid enough to actually believe it, or if they don't quite totally believe it, to be wary enough that they won't buy from buhoneros at the march. Poor guys, I feel bad for them...they rely on march-days for little spikes in business, and this won't do them any good at all.

So, there it is. A very very jittery city. Very jittery.

Stay tuned, more to come.

Closer and closer to the edge…

Soldiers in the metro, soldiers at the big east-side shopping mall (the Sambil), soldiers downtown. Tank and APV movements around Caracas in the middle of the night over the weekend. A president convinced that a conspiracy is a foot. The mayor of greater Caracas warning that the order to put a tank batallion on the streets has already been handed down. Over the weekend, the Secretary General of the most moderate of the opposition parties (Unión) was picked up off of the streets, roughed up, and dumped back out again, in an episode that’s too reminiscent of the Estrella Castellanos incident, (though unlike Estrella, Esculpi was also robbed, so it may not have been politically motivated.) Raids on opposition figures’ houses, yielding evidence that looks blatantly trumped up. Chávez saying flat out that more raids are coming. More threats against opposition leaders. And to top it all off, a mass-march, called for Thursday, that will probably bring out tens of thousands of people into the streets, into this suffocating nerve-wracking atmosphere…

Things have been tense in Caracas for so long you’d think we’d have gotten used to it by now. But the tension is palpably rising now, reaching suffocating extremes. The big headline in El Universal, one of the big opposition-run dailies, today is “The Armed Forces have an obligation to intervene,” it’s a quote from an interview with Tejera Paris. Meanwhile, General Medina Gómez syas he has a secret bunker that military intelligence hasn’t found yet and that he’s leading the military resistance from there. That, however, is no insider tip: it was quite shamelessly published in El Nacional! The rumors keep on coming, thick and fast. Total militarization is imminent, they say, stoking that old favorite, the fear of a State of Exception (our very own euphemism for a state of emergency, which allows for constitutional guarantees to be temporarily suspended.) The Metropolitan Police is on the cusp of being taken over by the central government. Chávez will declare Thursday’s march illegal and bring soldiers out on the streets to block it. The government has a secret plan in case of a coup, and it’ll be bloody as hell. The rumors keep coming, intermingling with the truth in a complex soup that’s increasingly hard to pick apart.

After reading Ibsen’s Sunday piece, all of the above is freaking me out in a way that I’d never been freaked out before. Until recently I’d found it all vaguely ridiculous, laughable. I was sure it couldn’t last, it was too stupid. But now…

"This can't last: it's too stupid."

Caracas can't be said to have the most vibrant intellectual life in Latin American, but at least we've got Ibsen Martinez. Witty, agoraphobic, shamelessly erudite, misanthropic and totally brilliant, Ibsen really has no peer in the intellectual life of the country. A theoretical mathematician by training, the guy made his name writing soap opera scripts, believe it or not...which says something about the intellectual climate around here, doesn't it - where else could a serious intellectual get his start writing soaps? He proved too unpredictable and prima donnaish to make a proper script-writer - he'd just get sick of them at some point and stop writing, but eventually found his niche in the newspaper and the world of the novel. His weekly screeds in El Nacional have a following, more than a readership, a following I'm proudly part of. Ibsen's writing is really in a class of his own as far as op/ed writing goes in this country: deeper, clearer, wittier, sharper, and more illuminating than anyone else writing in Caracas, and often by a long long ways. He's like our own little Garcia Marquez, but without the international acclaim, or the fidelismo.

His column today is one of the more sobering things I've read in a while: one of his better ones, which is really saying something. It's useless trying to gloss it, since it's so good, so I'm going to take the time to translate the whole thing. It really is that good. [The original in Spanish is here.]

He starts off by citing Camus' The Plague:

"Plagues, in fact, are quite common, but it's hard to believe in them when you see them fall on your head. There have been in the world as many plagues as wars, and yet, plagues and wars always catch people by surprised. When a war starts, people say "this can't last, it's too stupid." And, without a doubt, war is obviously too stupid, but that doesn't keep it from lasting. Stupidity always insists; one would realize that if one were not always thinking of oneself. Our countrymen, in this respect, were like everyone else. They were humanity. They didn't believe in plagues."

"The plague is not made on a human scale, and therefore men always say that the plague is unreal, a bad dream that must pass.

"But it doesn't always pass, and from one bad dream to the next, it's the men who pass, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken precautions.

"Our countrymen were no more guilty than others; they forgot their humility, that's all. And they thought everything was possible for them, which meant that as a matter of course that all plagues were impossible.

"And how could they have thought of the plague, which suppresses the future, their movements and their discussions? They thought themselves free and no one could be free so long as there were plagues.

leaving the quote, Ibsen writes,

On this Saturday, I want to call the reader's attention to a disquieting notion that Camus slides in front of us: that plagues and wars always catch people unaware. Especially civil wars, I'd add.

It bears stopping to reflect on Camus' words, right now, in the wake of a very justified protest work stoppage that some -very few, but very powerful- people would like to twist and stretch until turning it into the pretext for military intervention.

Camus, as is well-known, wasn't precisely the contemplative kind, nor a coward: he did for the French resistence what very few of his own intellectual establishment did, and with such daring and intelligence, during the nazi occupation. So Camus knew what he was talking about when he said that the first reflex you have towards the absurdity that war engenders is to tell yourself that "this can't last, it's too stupid."

"This can't last: it's too stupid," says the father in "The bicycles are for summer," the acclaimed Spanish film by Jaime Chavarri, based on a play by the great Fernando Fernán Gómez, with the whole family gathered at dinnertime, one night in July 1936, commenting on the news that had come over the radio that afternoon: in a remote overseas garrisons an obscure colonel named Francisco Franco had led an uprising against the Spanish Republic.

The head of the family shrugs his shoulders and, next to him, all the characters keep on living their petty bourgeois Madrid lives, neither too rich nor too poor, neither conservative nor leftist enough to feel that what had just started could have anything to do with them, much less that any of its consequences might reach them.

But things don't turn out the way they'd imagined - "how could they have thought of the pest, which suppresses the future, their movements and their discussions? They thought themselves free and no one could be free so long as there were plagues" - and the movie ends when only the viewers know that there will be no other summer with bicycles because that "which couldn't last, because it was too stupid" has become a frightful war that in three indelible years left a million dead and one of the most abhorrent and ignominious dictatorships of the last century.

It just happens that both sides made the same mistake: underestimating the other. The fascists thought it would be enough with a military coup, the republican government calculated that it could put the coup down easily.

It's taken almost sixty years for the philosopher Julián Marías - the father of Javier, the novelist - to come to grips with the decisive event for three generations of Spaniards. He does it in Being Spanish, a book that should be required reading for all of those - chavistas or not - who aspire to act constructively in Venezuela's XXI century politics.

They would then witness Marías elucidating how it was possible to reach war, and saying that, to our discomfort, the primordial cause of the catastrophe was not "the disagreements, or the confrontations, not even the struggle, but rather the will to not get along, the determination to see the 'other' as unacceptable, intolerable, unbearable."

It's inevitable to think of today's Venezuela when Marías carefully recreates as a gift to his reader, the mechanism whereby "groups were formed that would enter the category of the mutually irreconcileable." Or when he points out how that diabolical will to not get along brought about "the successive entry of parts of the social body in what one might call automatic opposition."

Slowly at first, but later on incredibly fast, the entire material and social life of Spain gave in to the primacy of the political, "such that every other aspect was obscured: the only thing you needed to know about a man, a woman, a book, a company, a proposal, was whether it was from 'the right' or 'the left' and your reaction was automatic. Politics eclipsed every other consideration."

These burning pages, written by a Spaniard on his own history, discuss something that many suppose cannot happen in Venezuela "because it's too stupid." What's interesting - and alarming - is that almost every paragraph seems to refer to the current political scene in Venezuela.

The similarities are laid bare when Marías discusses the way the intellectual life and the social production of meaning in Spain went up in smoke, in what he describes as "a collective retreat from intelligence, a frightful narrowing by way of simplification: the infinite variety of reality was, for many, reduced to mere stencils or labels, designed to unleash automatic reflexes, elementary, unnuanced reflexes. This led to a tendency towards abstraction, dehumanization, a necessary condition to generalized violence. And lazyness, especially, when it came to thinking, to looking for intelligent solutions to problems; to imagine the others, to imagine their point of view, to understand their reasons, their fears. And also to carry out with continuity the acts needed to solve or lessen those problems, to put in place an attractive alternative. Magic was easier, the verbal solutions that do away with thought.

"The war was a consequence of frivolity. This seems to me the key word. Spanish politicians, almost without exception, most of the church, a large number of those who thought of themselves as 'intellectuals' (and, of course, of the journalists), most of the economically powerful (bankers, businessmen, large landholders), the union leaders, gave themselves over to playing with the gravest matters, without the least sense of responsibility, without imagining the consequences of what they did, said, or failed to say.

I read Being Spanish on the urging of a friend who had found in it the same parallels with our current situation, which I comment on today. When I closed it, I realized that if we went and asked people like Hugo Chávez, or Carlos Ortega, or Diosdado Cabello or Andrés Velásquez, or Carlos Fernández, or William Lara or Cecilia Sosa or Iris Varela or Marta Colomina if they want a Civil War in Venezuela they would surely answer that of course not, what an idea! who would wish a thing like that?

But one can only consider with infinite sadness the clear-eyed wisdom of Julián Marías, poured into words that read as though composed for us: "They didn't want a civil war, but they wanted what turned out to be a civil war: A) Dividing the country in two bands. B) Identifying the 'other' with evil. C) Not taking them into account, not even as a real danger or an efficient adversary. D) To eliminate them, get them out of the way (politically; physically if necessary.)"

And then: "Stupidity always insists. One would realize it if one didn't always think like oneself." Will we Venezuelans know how to prove Camus wrong, just once? There may be less than a week to go to decide."

"Today, we aborted a coup..."

If Enrique Tejera-Paris is the best the opposition can come up with for a coupster, man, we're all in trouble here. Last night, in a comando raid broadcast live on the State-run TV channel, about 20 intelligence officers swept down on the home of Enrique Tejera-Paris, the octogenarian former foreign minister and slightly kooky intellectual. Slightly bewildered and still wearing his pajamas, Tejera-Paris went on to give a very strange interview to the Channel 8 reporter, who more or less accused him of plotting a coup. The avuncular alleged coupster put on a display of absolutely flawless manners, answering the questions as though he had been invited to a morning talk show, and endearingly referring to his tormentor as "joven."

The Channel 8 guy pointed his camera at a big map of Caracas with the words "Solucion Final" scribbled across the top, which supposedly spelled out the evil plan for staging some riots to serve as an excuse for a putsch. Tejera-Paris said they'd been planted by the DISIP agents. By the afternoon Chavez was giving another grandiloquent speech, boasting about how his intelligence services had aborted yet another fascist conspiracy.

It's hard to know what to make of the whole story. For one thing, Tejera-Paris really is a sort of walking incarnation of all that is most distasteful about the old regime: a kind of amoral insider said to be knee-deep in some very murky business in connection with the Las Cristinas mine development in Bolivar State. (Inside story is he was hired by the Canadian junior miner Crystallex to tamper with some local land registry records to bolster Crystallex's claim to the mine...unconfirmable (but then Crystallex is now in bed with the chavista CVG...it gets complicated).)

That doesn't change the fact that Tejera Paris is old. Very old. Retired. Out of the game. Mayyyyybe he's pulling all sorts of strings behind the scenes. Sounds a little fanciful to me, but it's not impossible.

On the other hand, the entire way the government has dealt with this is just another typical concatenation of abuses of power, violations of due process, and political-propagandeering. The presence of the Channel 8 camera crew stinks to high-heaven...suggesting a complex propaganda ploy rather than a standard law enforcement operation. The whole mess will need to be added to the long list of bizarre events in Venezuela's contemporary history.

"Gaviria Go Home!"

More coup rumors today. My colleague has gotten three different anguished phone calls from friends who've heard the show's gonna go down tonight, but at this point we've learned to discount calls like that. Not that they're not unsettling. It's more that it seems like a matter of commonsense that by the time a coup-plot's made its way to the cellphone circuit, it's pretty well doomed to failure. So it's the days when there are no rumors that I worry. That's when the coup's going to come.

The head of the Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, left town this morning. OAS is one of these organizations that most people in the US barely give a second though to, but which actually carries quite a bit of weight here. Gaviria cooked up a fantastically bland little "declaration of principles" to try to get the government and the opposition to sit down together and, y'know, agree to something. Even then it proved incredibly difficult to get them to agree. It was a motherhood-and-apple-pie affair, the kind of thing no one can really disagree with. But opposition figures dithered...it's too bland, some said, it lets the government off the hook! Others refused to sign on unless Chávez personally signed first, saying that if the VP or the Foreign Minister signed on the government's behalf the declaration would have no credibility because Chávez overrules them all the time. One suspects that what's really going on here is that the idea of co-signing a document with Hugo Chávez just makes the stomachs of too many opposition leaders turn. It would grant him a level of implied legitimacy they're just not willing to concede.

On the government's side it's much the same thing. They said they would sign, but then when it became clear they'd be putting their names to a document also signed by Carlos Ortega, they didn't like that one bit. Ortega, the head of the big Labor Union Federation (CTV), is just as unacceptable to the Chavistas as Chávez is to us: Two years after he was elected by the rank-and-file (in an admittedly horribly murky election) the government still refuses to acknowledge his leadership of the federation. Signing a document along with him would mean implicitly accepting his leadership, and that's a pill the government finds it very very hard to swallow.

My guess was that this declaration of principles was Gaviria's way of testing the waters, to try to get a feel for how likely a broader agreement might be. Signs are not encouraging. So long as the government and the opposition see each other as enemies rather than adversaries, the impetus for violence will still be there.

I don't know what the solution is, but I'm pretty sure mindless intransigence isn't part of it.

Is the glass two-thirds full...

...or one-third empty? As Cesar Miguel Rondón - Venezuela's fat, balding version of Larry King - kept insisting on his Channel 10 show last night, the polling data has been remarkably steady over the last 10 months or so. Two out of three Venezuelans are broadly opposed to the government, one out of three supports it. According to Datanalisis' quarterly polls, the numbers haven't changed much, except for a short-lived "sympathy spike" right after The Restoration on April 14th. Whether you ask people whether they like or dislike Chávez or whether they'd vote to unseat him in a referendum, the two-to-one pattern holds up. Moreover, two-thirds of respondents consistently oppose the institutions that are most widely seen as controlled by Chávez (Congress, the Attorney General's Office, the Ombudsman's Office, etc.), and one-third supports them.

I'm sure most chavistas would dismiss Datanalisis' numbers as part of the giant conspiracy against the revolution, but then they think anything and everything that's the least bit out-of-synch with the guy's latest whim is part of the giant conspiracy against the revolution. Certainly, we heard no complaints from them between December 1998 and November 2001, when Datanalisis' polls had the Comandante in the 60-85% popularity range.

Interestingly, support for the Supreme Tribunal followed that same two-to-one pattern until August 14th, when the magistrates voted 12-8 to exonerate the army officers who'd shoved Chávez out of power in April, unleashing a storm of presidential condemnation. Chávez' could barely contain the bile he poured all over the Tribunal, repeatedly saying the decision had been bought, calling it "a turd" (una plasta) and at one point, ominously, vowing to publish a book with the photographs of the magistrates who'd voted against his wishes "so the people knew who was responsible for this outrage." It should probably worry the president's supporters that the Supreme Tribunal's standing in the polls shot up immediately after this particular tirade, with more and more people saying they see it as a genuinely independent institution, and fewer and fewer people calling for the magistrates' resignation. In fact, the Supreme Tribunal became the first institution to fall out of the two-thirds/one-third pattern. The change happened almost immediately after Chávez' set of bombastic condemnatory speeches. The Supreme Tribunal is now liked by a third and disliked by another third of the electorate, leaving the third third bewildered. I count myself in that third-third: we've heard lots of reports that the August "majority" against Chávez was a one time fluke, and that the magistrates are now falling back in line behind the president. If so, Chávez's attacks could imaginably have been a shrewd maneuver to bolster the tribunal's appearance of independence (and therefore its standing) through a single high-profile decision, only to then bring it back as a meek member of the presidential herd.

The other place where the two-to-one ratio falls apart is in the hypothetical presidential match-ups. When Datanalisis asks the open-ended question, Chávez wins of course. He gets thirtysomething percent, while the opposition vote is fractioned among like 15 challengers. But when Datanalisis limits the question to Chávez vs. this or that hypothetical challenger, his weakness becomes clear. His strongest challengers would be Enrique Salas-Römer and Enrique Mendoza: both would beat him 61%-39%. That's a landslide in my book, even if it's not the two-to-one majority you see in the popularity questions. Salas-Römer is the right-wing former governor of Carabobo State, who lost the '98 election against Chávez by...58-39% (with the remainder going to minor candidates, including the former beauty-queen I voted for.) Mendoza, on the other hand, is a far more moderate centrist who is now governor of Miranda State, which is the state where I live and where the Eastern half of Caracas sits. Other opposition figures also beat Chávez, but by smaller margins. Greater Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peña beats him 54%-46%, former Central Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma barely ekes by 51%-49%. That's too close for comfort, so the opposition would really do well to stick by one of the Enriques.

Yet, even if the opposition doesn't manage to agree on a single candidate, it's not necessarily the end of the world. Even in a worst-case-scenario where both the Enriques chose to run, chances are that the election would tend to get polarized between just one of them and Chávez. Getting an early poll-lead would be the key: once voters saw which way the wind was blowing, they'd almost certainly coalesce around whichever candidate they saw as having the best chance to beat Chávez. The other Enrique would be condemned to the fate of my beauty-queen, who saw her poll-numbers drop literally 60 points between May and December. My feeling then is that if the opposition can just force an election somehow, they take Chávez out. This seems to be Chávez's theory as well: he's doing everything imaginable to avoid one.

And it's critical that Chávez is replaced through an election. Aside from all the valid idealistic reasons for demanding democratic decision-making, the fact is that he does retain the support of a third of the population. Much more relevantly, he maintains the fervent support of about 20% of the electorate, the so-called chavistas duros (hard-core chavistas) who see him more as a mystical figure than a politician. If Chávez is pushed out of office unconstitutionally, by force, these people will never accept the outcome. At best, they'd be a constant thorn on the side of the next government, at worst they could start a civil war. It worries me that the most radicalized opposition figures out there don't seem to realize how much of a problem this is, and continue to push for extra-constitutional means of getting rid of the guy. Making sure that 20% feels included - or at least doesn't feel openly violated - by the transition to the post-chavista era will probably be the most important task of the next government. Let's hope they don't screw it up.

not sure how happy my boss will be if he sees I've posted VenEconomy's subscription-only editorial on this free website, but christ, Caracas Chronicles has like 15 readers at this point...

It’s the deficit, stupid...

How irresponsible is the government’s financial management? Look at it this way: in the first eight months of this year, the public sector’s current income averaged about Bs.1.66 trillion per month. That works out to just under Bs.20 trillion per year. Yet for 2003, the president has just announced that spending will total Bs.40 trillion. That’s twice this year’s current income, at a time when inflation is expected to run no higher than 40%.

Of course, Venezuelan budgets have always been exercises in creative accounting, legal formalities largely removed from reality. But traditionally they’ve erred on the side of understating spending. This time, it’s the opposite. Based on a hopeful 3-3.5% GDP growth projection, even the Onapre (national budget office) admits that current income won’t exceed Bs.28 trillion. That leaves the terrifying sum of Bs.12 trillion to be financed somehow (and that’s if the government’s growth estimate holds up; otherwise, it will be more.) And how is this gap to be bridged? By once again squeezing every last penny out of PDVSA, conjuring up some money out of thin air (they call it “exchange profits”) and then borrowing the rest – per Onapre estimates, a full Bs.10 trillion.

The simple conclusion is that the government just doesn’t learn. Already, the unreasonable chavista demands on PDVSA have caused a 25.5% drop in the corporation’s production capacity – with no money to spend on keeping up production, the country’s capacity has dropped from 3.5 million b/d four years ago to just 2.6 million b/d today (not including Orinoco Belt extra-heavy crudes), according to IEA estimates. This means that for the first time in history, Venezuela finds itself unable to cash in on the upside oil-shock caused by the looming US war in Iraq: there’s just no spare capacity to speak of.

The broader strategy is just as bad. By now, one might expect the chavista ruling clique to have caught on to how badly the public sector’s oversized thirst for borrowed cash has distorted the economy’s performance. By making massive deficit spending the norm irrespective of whether times are good or bad or whether oil prices are high or low, the government has already shut out the private sector from the credit market. The public sector’s snowballing demand for borrowed money keeps interest rates high, private investment rates low, and markets jittery.

As the pressure to raise more and more money increases, the government has opted for more and more unorthodox means of financing itself. First, it instituted the Bank Debit Tax, which might be described as relatively benign even though it undoubtedly generates destructive market distortions. Then, as the pressure for new cash intensified, it adopted more serious self-destructive practices, from the accelerating merry-go-round of increasingly bigger and more expensive short-term bond issues to the frankly perverse tactic of declaring purely fictitious “exchange market” profits to bankroll the government. The results are all around, and plain to see: a virtual investment freeze, rising unemployment, galloping inflation, and an unremittingly bleak outlook for the future.

Of course, much of the excess spending next year is due to higher debt service payments: the chickens of the wrong-headed financing strategies of the past coming home to roost. But rather than trying to tackle this vicious circle, rather than trying to implement a plan to return the nation’s finances to relative health, the government looks set to exacerbate the problem. Its financing plans for 2003 are a paragon of amateurish irresponsibility: on top of massive new borrowing, the government has already announced it will issue Bs.1.5 trillion in printing-press monies. Sadly, there’s just no medium-to-long-term strategy to ever break out of the deficit-spending trap. In fact, there’s no indication that the government even understands it’s in a trap at all. Under such circumstances, the only reasonable forecast is steady, ongoing deterioration.

Four years into its mandate, the Chávez administration hasn’t learned even the bare-bones basics from the mistakes it has made to date. The broad outlines of the budget plans announced so far make it clear that the wild goose chase that is the government’s quest for fresh cash will only intensify next year. The outcome is sadly predictable, and as usual, those who will suffer most will be those the president claims to champion.

“They’d told me what made Venezuela tick was oil…

…but now that I get here, I see that what the country really runs on is rumors.” It was the US ambassador who said that, talking to reporters last week. He’s obviously right: the twin Venezuelan love-affairs with gossip and the cell-phone leave the city awash in speculation. A constant stream of conjecture flashes across my inbox and my phone, and the topic is always the same: the near political future. Caraqueños are obsessed with the government’s overthrow…and it’s not just the opposition who talk about it constantly, even the government won’t shut up about it, denouncing coups and plots at every turn.

So what are the main theories going around these days?

Theory 1: The Crimes Against Humanity charge will do him in…
The lawyers who represent some of the victims of the April 11th shootings (that’s the day of the coup) went to the Supreme Tribunal to ask for the president’s impeachment several months ago. Though the Tribunal Members were originally handpicked by Chávez and his people, a bunch of them have bolted over the last two years as the comandante has gotten crazier and crazier. The tribunal appears to be on a knife edge: last August, for the first time, it handed down a ruling that went against the president’s wishes. That prompted a furious presidential outburst calling them a bunch of corrupt bastards, basically, and threatening to “publish their pictures in a book” so they can be picked out, one presumes.

Back then, Chávez warned that that was just the first step in a process designed to have him impeached and booted out of office, calling it a conspiracy to carry out an “institutional coup.” He said, flat out, that neither he nor the army would pay any attention to the Supreme Tribunal if they started impeachment procedures, (so what’s the point of having a judicial branch, then?)

A lot of opposition members still have their hopes riding on a court ruling on this one case. It’s not that they think that the court can really unseat him. It’s that they think that if the court rules against him and he refuses to abide by the ruling, he would be stepping so far outside the democratic norm that he would give the dissident officers in the armed forces all the cover they need to topple him. From this point of view, the dissident army officers are just itching for Chávez to screw up, so they can take action without eliciting too much international condemnation.

Problem is, it probably won’t happen. Most credible head-counts at the tribunal suggest the dissidents are still two or three votes shy of the majority they’d need to put the whole strategy in motion. Still, a ruling will be handed down in the next few days. The tribunal might just leave me looking silly by ruling against Chávez, and at that point we’d go through the looking glass: a major constitutional crisis is almost guaranteed.

[Those of you wondering about the actual legal merits for impeaching him on these grounds…come on! In this atmosphere every court decision is politically motivated!]

Theory 2: Chávez is trying to provoke a coup attempt.
This theory’s been going around a lot, but it reached its fullest development in an opinion piece written by Argelia Ríos in El Universal. Her point is that Chávez has everything to gain from a coup-attempt against him. It would allow him to finally smoke out and boot out all the dissidents in the armed forces. It would bolster his democratic credentials by painting him as a victim in international opinion. If it was violent, it would wash away the memories of the April 11th deaths. Even if it was succesful, it could play into his hands, turning him into a martyr, a victim, an unrealized promise, a dashed popular dream. A succesful coup might even see him end up taking to the hills and starting a guerrilla resistance, which is what he’s really cut out for.

This, according to Ríos, is the point of the systematic harrasment of dissident military officers (and their wives, and their daughters.) The more incitement there is, the more likely the coup will be rushed, leaked, and infiltrated – so given that a coup was likely, in any event, in the post-April atmosphere, inciting it only makes sense for the government: it multiplies the chances that it will fail. In a sense, though, inciting a coup is a desperate call for help, an acknowledgement on the part of the government that the current situation is unsustainable. Trying to strongarm the country into a post-failed-coup scenario is trying to accelerate a postdemocratic solution to the current stability crisis.

I actually think this is a generally reasonable interpretation, mostly because I think that Chávez really is that crazy, but I could be wrong. I can easily see it as a sort of semi-conscious strategy. I imagine Chávez understands the likely outcome of running roughshod over some of the best respected officers in the armed forces, as a former army officer, I’m sure he understands the intense dissent his decisions are causing within the ranks, and as a former coup-plotter himself I’m sure he understands the way that dissent is bound to lead to a coup attempt. I guess he’s calculated he can survive it and even be strengthened by it. But I also know that Chávez miscalculates all the damn time, and as Medina Gómez says, “nothing is improbable.”

Theory 3: The opposition needs to hold its breath until he goes away
Another seemingly crazy theory that more and more people are going for: this one’s championed by Cecilia Sosa, the far-right wing former chief justice of the Supreme Court. Her theory is that people should just lock themselves at home, “toss the key out the window”, and refuse to leave the house until Chávez gives up and resigns.

It’s that old leftist canard, the insurrectional General Strike, back from the grave and warmed over in a strange right-wing guise. Like the leftist precursors of this strategy, the people who actually think this could work appear to adhere to some sort of alternative system of rationality. In a country where 9 out of every 10 families live hand-to-mouth, this strategy is fairly fantastic: for most Venezuelans, if you don’t work you don’t eat, and it’s fairly hard for me to imagine that enough of them are willing to not eat for long enough to bring the government down.

But even if they were, the actual mechanism whereby a strike obligates the president to resign remains murky and shrouded in mystery. The most likely mechanism is the one we already saw in April: a last minute military push that brings matters to a head. But after the horrid experience of April, that’s something no one wants to go through again. Fact is, these people aren’t thinking: they’re just desperate, and desperation is about the worse adviser imaginable in a situation like this.

What’s worrying is that it’s not some small lunatic fringe that’s pressing for this crazy maximalist strategy. It’s CTV, the million+ member labor union federation. It’s Fedecamaras, the big employers’ federation. It’s Acción Democrática, still the biggest opposition party, which got 400,000 people out to vote in its last primary election. It’s large chunks of the opposition. It’s a testament to how polarized the country is that so many people are really thinking of a general strike as a viable option. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures, as the old saying goes…

That’s just a smattering, but this is a long enough post. More of these to come.