A good long one (blatantly ripped off from the not-yet-published December issue of VenEconomy:)

The December Crisis
The National Work Stoppage called for December 2nd has grown into the most dangerous crisis the Chávez administration has faced since April. Can the government ride this one out?

Eight months ago, an oil-sector strike escalated into a general work stoppage that brought the Chávez regime to its knees. This time, it's been the other way around, with a general work stoppage escalating into an oil strike, but the results look to be the same. As this issue goes to press, the Chávez administration appears as wobbly as it did in the second week of April, stuck in its rhetoric of unending escalation, and autistically unable to acknowledge the facts that surround it.

But if the similarities are obvious, the differences are even more relevant. In April, Chávez faced a scattershot opposition, a hodgepodge of parties, movements, unions and businessmen with little effective coordination and a multiplicity of ends. Today, the opposition has come together remarkably, congealing in the Coordinadora Democrática. It has had months to learn to work together, to work out its differences through talks, to reach decisions via consensus, and, most importantly, to air out differences in private but preserve a solid unity when dealing with the government. The fractures between moderates and radicals appear ever less relevant, with both sides committed to presenting a common front.

That unity has been aided tremendously by the amazing clumsiness with which the government has handled the crisis. And while that can't be said to be a change from April, what is new is the government's propensity to use violence to reach its goals. On April 11th, the regime's willingness to turn guns on its opponents shocked the nation and the world - it had never happened before. But by now, shooting has become standard procedure for government backers. Government followers have used guns at political events at least seven times since August: starting with the anti-PM ambush on August 12, then during the rioting in front of the Supreme Tribunal two days later, then the ambush at two roads into Caracas hours before the march on October 10th, the march to hand in the signatures to demand a nonbinding referendum on November 4th, then the riots outside the Metropolitan City Hall the following week, and culminating with the appalling massacre at Plaza Altamira on December 6th.

This new propensity to violence goes a long ways towards explaining the opposition's newfound unity. Faced with an aggressive regime, the moderates have been pushed into increasingly hard-line positions. At the same time, radicals have come to understand the need for negotiation in dealing with such a dangerous situation. Overall, the sense of common struggle against a radicalized enemy has generated a remarkable esprit de corps in the coordinadora, and the distance between moderates like Elias Santana and radicals like Andrés Velásquez has never been less.

Saving the paro
In fact, it was the excesive use of force by the government that's saved the fledgling general strike called for Dicember 2nd from what might have been a devastatingly embarrassing failure. On the first day of the strike, the opposition had plenty of reason to worry. While most shops in the East-side of Caracas were shut, vast stretches of the west-side, and the rest of the country, enjoyed an almost normal day. And Tuesday morning was even worse, with more shops opening and more traffic on the roads. What's more, the National Elections Council voted again on the call to a nonbinding referendum for February 2nd, this time by the requisite 4-to-1 margin, a decision that seemed to remove much of the reason for the stoppage. At that point PDVSA's workers were hesitant to give decisive backing to the action, fearing they would lose their careers over a lost cause.

Some organizers worried privately that the entire strike innitiative had been misconceived; that the CNE's decision would cause a fatal rift in the Coordinadora. Though the government had refused to install the OAS-mediated negotiating table formally, informal talks were on their way to swap the end of the strike for an end of the government's takeover of the Metropolitan Police. At noontime Tuesday, sources close to the talks considered it a done deal. But then, around lunch-time, the government stepped in to save the strike.

What happened is that a small band of opposition activists, angry at the seeming failure of the strike, started roaming the Francisco de Miranda avenue in Los Ruices forcing open shops to shut down. Their attitude was certainly aggressive, but not violent. But the government's response was heavy handed by any measure, sending a National Guard unit to repress them using copious amount of tear gas and rubber pellets.

Meanwhile, a small number of people had gathered outside PDVSA Chuao to speak to the press about the pressure some PDVSA managers had been put under, and to reject the arrest of Gualberto Bello, the pro-stoppage head of human resources at the El Palito refinery. Within minutes, National Guard units showed up in large numbers to repress the completely peaceful gathering in a similarly heavy handed way, shocking TV viewers all over the country. What came next, however, would save the fledgling strike.

While tear gas had been useful for dispersing the PDVSA managers in Chuao, it had done nothing to disperse the media crews on the scene, since almost all of them were wearing gas masks. But the guardsmen insisted on clearing the space, swinging batons and shooting rubber pellets indiscriminately, at close range, into the assembled journalists, as their cameras carried the images live to the rest of the nation. In the space of less than an hour, this senseless show of force antagonized and radicalized the two constituencies that are most dangerous to the government: PDVSA's managers, and the news media.

The Nuclear Option
By Wednesday, dissident managers decided to cross the rubicon, shutting down the Oil Industry entirely for the first time in its history. It's the proverbial "nuclear option" in Venezuelan politics.

And it worked. Absenteeism spread throughout PDVSA's facilities quickly. As refineries implemented safe-stop procedures, docks shut down, gas pipeline pressures decreased and storage tanks filled up, the entire production chain ground to a halt. That night, the crew of the oil tanker Pilín León joined the action, quickly becoming the symbollic center of the stoppage. President Chávez, as usual, made things worse by giving a belligerent speech slamming the strikers as criminals and saboteurs and the Pilín Leon's crew as "pirates." The result? By Thursday morning seven other tankers had joined the strike, and by week's end all but two of PDVSA's tankers were anchored and on strike.

Wednesday also saw the spread of antigovernment rallies all over the country, with some becoming quite violent. Several people were hurt in Barquisimeto and San Cristóbal, where pro-Chávez state governors ordered heavy-handed police responses to the protests. Tense confrontations were reported in cities throughout the country. Late night on Wednesday even witnessed the plainly surreal sight of a street riot in Prados del Este, a sleepy, upper class neighborhood in the East side of Caracas, after neighbors launched a pot-banging protest outside the house of General Eugenio Gutiérrez, head of the National Guard.

As dawn broke on Thursday, the media reported that PDVSA's headquarters in La Campiña had been surrounded by a group of perhaps 2000 chavistas, headed by Mayor Freddy Bernal. Bernal quickly denied he had been there, until an amateur video arrived in Globovisión showing the mayor clearly leading a group of heavily armed civilians. The video also showed a face recognized by few and remarked on by none at first: Joao Gouveia's.

The opposition, which had been planning to march from PDVSA's Chuao offices to its La Campiña seat, cancelled the march, calling the chavista gathering an ambush. Instead, attention focused again on the oil industry and the tanker fleet. After four days of dwindling operations, the first fuel shortages were starting to be felt, most strongly in Valencia and Maracay, cities supplied from the Yagua tanker-truck filling station, which had been hard hit. Caracas, which is supplied via a different route, remained well stocked.

Throughout the crisis, the government had refused to return to the OAS brokered negotiating table, demanding that the strike be lifted first. But by Thursday evening, the crisis had become dire enough for the government to offer to return, though the pledge came only at the end of another combative speech, this time from Education Minister Aristóbulo Istúriz. But as Friday wore on, the opposition was kept waiting for a government's delegation that never arrived.

Massacre
Then, at about 7 in the evening, everything changed. Shots were heard at Plaza Altamira. The crowd gathered there dived to the ground in panic, as TV cameras carried the scenes live to millions of anguished households. Once the panic lifted, three people had died and 28 had been injured, several seriously. Within minutes, seven people had been arrested, including one Joao Gouveia, a Portuguese citizen caught on video 48 hours earlier at the chavista rally in La Campiña, just inches from Freddy Bernal. He claimed he had been trying to hit the Globovisión crew on the scene. Additionally, an amateur audio recording was published, apparently between military officers at Fuerte Tiuna who seemed to have advanced knowledge of what would happen.

The shootings galvanized the anger of the opposition, which pointed the finger at the government from the start. Wasting a valuable opportunity to remain quiet, President Chávez went on the air to say that Gouveia's confession was not sufficient proof that he was guilty. Presumably the dozens of eye-witnesses and the physical evidence will also be dismissed as insufficient, even while the government holds that Otto Neustadtl's sole off-the-cuff statement on the April 11th shootings is definitive proof of the opposition's guilt.

The opposition stiffened its demands, riding a wave of intense anger over the shootings, and now asked for the president's resignation and immediate elections, rather than the mere nonbinding referendum they'd called for just hours earlier. But the government stayed away from the negotiating table, now alledging that the furious cacerolazo outside the Meliá was too great a security risk and asking for the talks to be moved to the Military Circle, a request that was plainly unacceptable to the opposition. As this article is written - Saturday afternoon - the Negotiating Table has still not been installed. However, breaking the diplomatic silence over the crisis, the government of Peru did take the initiative to call a special meeting of the OAS Permanent Council to discuss the crisis. The opposition will send a delegation to speak at the meeting.

All through the night from Friday to Saturday, the crew of the Pilín León reported it had been approached by Navy units carrying a judge and a public prosecutor who were seeking to board the ship, but would not allow the crew's lawyers to board. Finally, at noontime Saturday the ship was boarded by an elite Navy unit, the crewmemebers were stripped of their cellphones and left incommunicado, while a replacement crew was brought on board. There are reports of similar operations in an oil tanker off the Puerto La Cruz port. The decision prompted the port crews at La Guaira and Puerto Cabello to join the strike, shutting down much of the country's port infrastructre. The government continues to bluster, but it looks increasingly unable to stem the protests.

Looking ahead
The opposition is clearly on the driver's seat of the Venezuelan crisis, riding a wave of popular revulsion at the violence of December 6th that's not to be underestimated. To its credit, even faced with the incredible provocation of the Plaza Altamira, the opposition has stuck to the course of negotiations, elections, and constitutional change. Even in the heat of the minutes immediately following the massacre, for instance, congressman Julio Borges had the presence of mind to remind the crowd of Gandhi's maxim - "An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind." Most coordinadora leaders, though incensed by yesterday's violence, are bringing competent and responsible leadership to what is now the overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan people.

Which is not to say that the president's supporters have abandoned him. On Saturday, a pro-government marched filled the streets of downtown Caracas, gathering as many as 100,000 people, though many were bussed in from the provinces. The private media gave almost no coverage to the march, repeating one of the most unfortunate errors of last April. It is worth noting that even in this most embattled juncture, a significant number of people still support Chávez vehemently, and are still willing to march for him. As it approaches what looks for all the world like a final confrontation with his regime, the opposition must keep that in mind to refrain from the kind of catastrophic miscalculations of April 12th.

Now we're cooking without gas!

Well, I've been really delinquent about blogging, but for the love of christ this country has gone completely ape, and I've had about 18 hours of work a day, and it's all very very complicated. To make a long story short, the strike totally failed...and it's a great success!

On the one hand, not that many shops, offices and factories joined, even on the first day. By the second day, even fewer shops had joined, and days 3 and 4 have been basically normal shopping and work days in Caracas, with scattered exceptions. In fact, if the government weren't so dismally stupid, the whole thing might have dissipated into nothingness...

But then, on Tuesday, they inexplicably sent a National Guard platoon to disperse a small, peaceful march in front of PDVSA's Chuao offices. The guardsmen were ridiculously belligerent, spraying tear gas, rubber pellets and baton swings like it's going out of style. The excess really riled up the oil managers, who saw their colleagues roughed up for no discernible reason at all. That, along with another couple of totally moronic instances of military thuggishness, was enough to breathe new life into a strike that looked fairly doomed on Tuesday morning.

Don't get me wrong, the shops and offices and factories still opened, it's just that they antagonized PDVSA's workers into a shutdown. And that, well, that's the Nuclear Option in Venezuelan politics. Oil, of course, is the lifeblood of the nation, and the source of half the government's income, so you can imagine the impact of literally shutting off the industry. Now, shutting down a giant refinery is not exactly a matter of flicking a switch...it's a complicated, multi-day process, and if you screw it up you damage the equipment and you can't restart it again. But that's precisely what they're doing these days...winding down the refineries, shutting down the docks, blocking the shipping channels with tankers, and forcing the oil wells further upstream to shut down to, since they have no place to ship their oil. At this point, the three major shipment points for Venezuelan oil and refined products have all shut down, including the Paraguana Refining Complex, the biggest refinery on earth, which will cease production altogether tomorrow.

Now, this is totally unprecedented. This has just never even come close to happening in Venezuela, we're in uncharted waters here. There's panic buying of gasoline all over the country, and some cities (Maracay, Maracaibo, parts of Valencia, parts of Ciudad Guayana) have already run out. You need gas to run this country. And the valves are shut off.

At the same time, while business continues, there are more and more street protests, all over the damn countryy. These are no longer confined to Caracas, they're everywhere, they're militant, and they're angry. The National Guard seems to have realized how unhelpful their earlier attitude was, and are showing a bit more restraint now. But it seems like the street protests have kind of reached a point of no return, that they're now emotional and widespread enough that they can't really be stopped, not even by opposition leaders anymore.

The government still has its head buried in the sand, still claims they don't have a gas problem, still attacks the opposition as terrorists and fascists and electoral coupsters. Nothing new there. But tonight they finally decided to go back to the OAS-mediated Negotiating Table, and that's very good news indeed. Their back is really really up against the wall now. This PDVSA protest is quickly reaching the point where it just can't be papered over or spun away with clever rhetoric. People will notice when the gas runs out. People will notice when their lights go out. You can't talk them out of thinking it's happening, so the government really doesn't have any choice but to negotiate at this point, and that they'll do holding a very weak hand.

Watch this space...

(or watch Devil's Excrement...that guy updates much more often than me!)

Anglophone escuálido bloggers of the world, unite!

...you have only your crappy low hit-counts to lose...

My friend Tony Guzmán Blanco brought two new sources for news and views on the telenovela that is life under Chávez to my attention recently. They seem pretty good. Better yet, they're in English.

vcrisis.com is a pretty thorough, though openly partisan (who isn't, these days?) website run by some folks in the UK, I think. Good collection of stories pulled from reputable English-language news outlets, from The Economist to CNN and the BBC...fun pictures of Chávez sucking up to Saddam Hussein.

The Devil's Excrement is a blog written, it looks like, by a Venezuelan expat in the US. It's more focused on news and latest events, but seems like a pretty good source for that.

I'm adding them both to my list of English links on the page-template, so you can always find them.

Did I mention they're both in English?

We’re all radicals now

Yeah, yeah, so four days ago I wrote a long, rambling blog entry explaining why the general strike was going to fail. But, cripes, it’s Venezuela! Four days are an eternity here. In the meantime, the National Electoral Council called a referendum for Feb. 2nd that the government described as an electoral coup, and the very next day the Supreme Tribunal turned around and quashed the referendum on a technicality. It’s the mother of all provocations.

The Washington Post ran a dire editorial today pleading with Washington, Bogotá and Brasilia to help defuse the crisis. I wish I could say it was exaggerated, but it isn’t. We’re reaching a point of no-return here.

My boss quips that it seems like the government was concerned that the strike wouldn’t be successful enough, that they’re acting like they’ve decided to galvanize the opposition, uniting it into pro-strike monolith. It’s true: if the Supreme Tribunal had just held off on that ruling for a week or so, that would’ve been enough to split the opposition. There were plenty of people in the opposition who were either lukewarm or, like me, against the strike. It didn’t make any sense to us to launch such an extreme measure while our referendum request was still in the cards.

But now that the Tribunal has gone ahead and killed it, now that they’ve spited the spirit of democratic idealism and the thousands of hours of work it took us to gather and systematize over 2 million signatures, now that the government has made it clear they’re more than willing to shit all over our movement, to mock us openly, that they’ve made such a public show of contempt for the constitution they themselves drafted, well, there’s not much room for division anymore, is there? The government is willing to do anything to stay in power, it’s just a lie that they’ll ever accept a vote they’re not sure they can win. The clipboard and roses path seems hopelessly naïve, hopelessly out-of-touch, in the face of their brand of authoritarianism.

Yesterday’s ruling erases the divisions between opposition moderates and radicals. That tension, which could’ve hobbled or killed a strike, is now gone. We’re all radicals now, the government has made us all into radicals. For months they’ve pushed and prodded, provoked and mocked, until they got their wish: they made moderation moot. For a long time I’ve feared violence is inevitable. For the first time, I’ve started to consider the notion that it might be necessary. Chávez is just not going to go down without a fight.

Electoral coup

There’s nonsense, there’s hard-core nonsense, and then there’s chavista nonsense. The government’s public statements over the last few days have reached such amazing levels of internal contradiction it’s hard to know what to even say about them anymore. The ultimate outrage – the worst I can remember – is their reaction to the National Electoral Council’s decision to call a non-binding referendum on whether Chávez should resign for February 2nd, 2003. Faced with the decision, J.V. Rangel railed furiously against the decision, calling it an “electoral coup.”

Now, stop to think about that last phrase for a second.

Electoral coup.

Swirl it around your head a few times. What, exactly, does it mean? Rangel is really starting to sound like a parody of himself – his P.R. strategy of labeling anything and everything the opposition does as a coupsterie coup-plotting coupetie coup coup coup has driven him right up to a reductio ad absurdum cliff-edge, and he's just kept on driving, Thelma & Louise style, into the logical chasm.

Electoral coup.

Isn’t the whole point of a coup that it’s an end-run around democratic decision-making, supplanting a given group’s political views for the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box? Isn’t an election the specific polar opposite of a coup? Can anyone think of a more perverse, a more intellectual bankrupt two-word combination than “electoral coup”?

My sister thought it the ultimate oxymoron, but it seems to me an altogether deeper, more pernicious specimen than that. The phrase is a final surrender to the forces of nonsense, of propagandistic gobbledygook. It’s a declaration of war against common sense, a unilateral surrender to contradiction, contradiction no longer merely as a P.R. tactic, but as a code of ethics, a life principle.

Electoral coup.

It reminds me of the fascist slogans during the Spanish Civil War. Long live death! Death to intelligence! Electoral coup!

It is, and I don’t make this statement lightly, the single stupidest phrase anybody in the Chávez administration has uttered in the last four years.

Chávez himself isn't far behind. His rhetoric has reached a kind of fevered pitch of rampant self-contradiction unhindered by any kind of reflection. During his speech on Wednesday – which he broadcast, like in the old days, on a cadena nacional, hijacking the signals of every TV and radio station to ramble for a few hours – he switched blithely within a few minutes from a stirring homage to the “redemptors of the republic” who staged an actual, shoot-shoot-bang-bang coup-attempt on November 27th, 1992 (precisely 10 years earlier), to a furious denunciation of today’s clipboard-and-ballot-box electoral coupsters.

The contradiction was so blatant it makes any kind of reasoned rebuke seem superfluous. The guys 10 years ago are heroes, even though they used tanks and F-16s to try to bomb the presidential palace, even though they left dozens of innocent bystanders dead as they stormed, guns blazing, into the Channel 8 studios, in a bid to oust a democratically elected government. Why? Because they were chavistas. But the people going around these days gathering signatures to ask for a referendum so every citizen can have a say on the nation's future are fascists; terrorists staging an “electoral coup.” Why? Because they’re antichavistas. It’s a simple, straightforward calculus, based on a belief-system armored-plated against critical reasoning, where chavistas are good no matter what they do, simply because they’re chavistas, and antichavistas are bad no matter what they do, because they dare to question him.

Simple, huh?

Like Elizabeth Fuentes said last week, “it’s shit like this that makes my capacity for tolerance follow the nation’s economic statistics, i.e., into a nose-dive.”

This strike doesn’t have a chance…

The big news these days is that, last week, the coordinadora democrática (the big umbrella group that speaks for maybe 95% of the opposition) called a General Strike for next Monday, December 2nd. It’s all anyone talks about around here, especially since they didn’t specify how long the strike will go on for – and they’ve let it be known it could drag on indefinitely. Now, I think up until now the coordinadora has done a pretty good job of representing the opposition responsibly and within the spirit of democracy. But this time, I really think they’ve gone off the deep end.

Why? Well, first and foremost because the strike will fail. It’s totally nuts to call an indefinite strike in the middle of the holiday shopping season: too many retailers and industrialists rely on December sales to balance their books for the year – especially after a disaster of a year like 2002 has been. Asking them to give up a week’s worth of holiday sales seems totally crazy to me: they won’t go along, couldn’t go along, will go bankrupt if they go along…it’s asking them to jump into some sort of sacrificial pyre for the sake for very uncertain results.

The strike’s only hope for success is if the opposition can shut down the oil-industry. And while many executives and managers at PDVSA seem ripe for protest, it’s very doubtful whether the blue-collar workforce, fresh from signing a very lucrative collective bargaining agreement, will go along. Can you run a giant oil company for a week without any managers? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I bet the it’s something along the lines of “not very well, but kind of.”

The coordinadora leaders claim they’re just following their followers: to hear them tell it, the grass-roots pressure for some kind of radical move against Chávez is just too strong to ignore. I hear that and I just have to shake my head: I have no doubt that among a very small, highly radicalized, militantly antichavista slice of the business class, there are probably some very loud voices calling for a strike. And credible polls do show that most people support a strike in the abstract. But from that to saying that there’s a deafening national roar for a strike there’s a big gap, and I suspect what’s really going on here is that most coordinadora members only talk to other coordinadora members, setting up a little resonance chamber where radical antichavismo is taken as the only sane way of thinking. Locked up inside this circle, the coordinadora’s leadership has managed to convince itself that its views are a reflection of a huge popular groundswell. I don’t buy it.

Of course many many Venezuelans are very very angry at Chávez. But 9 out of 10 Venezuelan households live on less than the $750/month it takes to purchase the Basic Consumption Basket – the government’s estimates of the basic goods and services you need for an adequate middle-class life. With that many people struggling that hard to make ends meet, and so many who just don’t earn enough to even feed themselves and their families properly, an open ended general strike seems like lunacy. For the upper class and upper-middle class people who lead the coordinadora , calling a strike will not mean going hungry, but for millions of the people they claim to lead it does. And it’s precisely that tone-deafness towards the needs and conditions of the poor that made the poor angry enough at them to elect Chávez in the first place. I dunno, I just think that by calling a strike the coordinadora shows just how out of touch it is with the material conditions that most Venezuelans live under, and does nothing at all to reassure the poor that a coordinadora-led government would be even a little bit concerned about their needs.

Still, the strike need not happen. The coordinadora has made it quite clear that if the Elections Authorities call a national referendum on Chávez’s rule before Monday, they’ll call off the strike. I’m praying CNE plays along, thus saving the coordinadora from itself. At that point, the strike can be kept in reserve, as a threat against the government should it even think to do anything to block a vote. If the government did block a vote, a strike – while still far more socially painful than the coordinadora leaders seem to realize – would at least be somewhat more defensible. And while it’s easy to sympathize with the seething anger people feel when they see Chávez openly mock the two-million+ signatures gathered to back up the request for a consultative referendum, I don’t see how the way to confront that is applying a tactic that condemns millions of people to real hardship…instead, it seems like a sure-fire strategy for alienating the people we should be trying to win over.

The juiciest scandal nobody is writing about…

Ask people in Caracas what or where Las Cristinas is, and mostly you’ll get blank stares back. It’s a specialist concern, this Las Cristinas thing, with most Venezuelans totally unaware that one of the four or five biggest gold-mines on earth is right here in Southern Bolívar state. Much less have they heard about the titanic 16-year legal saga over control of the mine, or the incredible tales of corruption that emerge when you even scratch the surface on this story.

It really bothers me that the Caracas press doesn’t pay more attention to this issue. It’s kind of understandable, though: After 16 years full of legal battles that have seen just about every player in the saga sue just about every other player at one point or another, the story amounts to a dauntingly complicated, headache inducing web of emnities peppered with incomprehensible technical disputes. So most journalists don’t have the time/energy/concentration/legal know-how/geological know-how to get into it. It doesn’t help that global mining companies are largely perceived as a bunch of aggressively predatory outlaws – the fight between Minca and Crystallex Corporation over the mine was described to me once as “a fight between Al Capone and Don Corleone.” Yowza.

Still, the story itself is delicious, full of weird twist and turns, sworn-political enemies quietely slipping into bed with each other to share the spoils of the deal, every sort of outrageous financial trick and illegal maneuver, tape recordings of Venezuelan politicianss haggling over the price of their support over the phone, American PR firms hired by one partner of the joint-venture to fling mud at the other partner, and people becoming millionaires on the strength of their willingness to play dirtier than the other side. The fun thing is that the information isn’t even hard to get at: a couple of phone calls will produce copious evidence for just about everything in this paragraph.

The extremely stripped down version is that Crystallex Corporation – a small Canadian gold mining company that very much fits the Al Capone school of corporate strategizing – has for years been using an extremely dubious claim to hold legal rights over the mine to pump up their stock prize at the Toronto stock exchange. But while their claim to the mine had been seen as basically laughable by most people who follow the saga, it suddenly became much more serious a couple of months back when the Venezuelan government suddenly decided to unilaterally ended the contract it had signed with a company called Minca (which is actually a partnership between a larger Canadian mining company called Vannessa Ventures and Venezuela’s State-owned regional development corporation, CVG) without even going through the International Arbitration procedures demanded in the contract. Though the procedure to strip Minca of its concession was a juridical travesty, within a couple of months the government had mysteriously turned around and granted the contract to Crystallex, a company that still had open litigation against the government for this very same track of land.

Ever since, Minca has been suing and suing and suing just about everyone involved in the issue ever since, but Crystallex appears to have deep pockets and many friends in high places. A lot of people certainly perceive Minca’s crusade to get the mine back as slightly quixotic and pretty much doomed. Of course, it’s news to no one that Venezuelan government decisions are for sale, and Crystallex is certainly in the business of buying. The contract granted to them after the government inexplicably rescinded Minca’s contract was an incredible give away. Crystallex paid just $15 million for $172 million worth of mining equipment that Minca had built. It’s plainly obvious that Crystallex is too small a company, and too shady, to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars in project financing that it would take to actually develop the mine, so the government’s claim that they’re acting in the interest of getting the mine intor production as soon as possible are an evident sham. Moreover, the government granted that contract while Minca’s claims to the mine were still pending – with three separate suits awaiting judgement at the Supreme Tribunal. Don’t be surprised if you see the magistrates involved start driving shiny new $80,000 Mercs soon.

Still, given the pending arbitration, the $15 million price-tag is probably too much, not too little – it’s hard to see how any serious mining company would have paid any money at all for a mine contract so deeply mired in legal disputes. Still, it’s easy to see that Crystallex is far from interested in actually developing the mine – the game appears to be to use the favorable press-coverage from the new contract to pump up the company’s stock price in Toronto even higher, allowing the well-connected to cash-in bigtime on their Crystallex stock options. A lot of shady Canadians (and Venezuelans) are getting obscenely rich out of this whole thing…including, incredibly, one of President Chávez’s most hated political foes.

Certainly the weirdest part of the whole story, the part I’d love to develop into a nice juicy scandal, is that frikkin’ Enrique Tejera-Paris, the former AD diplomat whose house got raided by the Secret Police a couple of months back, the octogenarian accused by Chávez of leading a fascist conspiracy to topple his government, is knee-deep in the whole affair. As of a month ago, he was still on Crystallex’s board of frikkin’ directors. He apparently got $20 million worth of business for his law firm out of Crystallex, and eight million stock options. There’s a dark story going around that he (or his son, who has the same name) was sent to Bolívar state to physically tamper with the civil registry showing the mine’s ownership. And given the spike in Crystallex’s stock price after the government gave it the new contract, he’s probably pocketed millions of dollars more from the whole putrid deal since.

Which strikes me as a remarkable, almost unbelievable story. The man accussed by Chávez of the most egregious reactionary coupsterism turns out to be in bed with his government on a multi-million dollar corruption scandal! Why oh why is the fucking Caracas press not picking up on this? It drives me slightly batty. I have a sinking suspicion, though this I can’t prove, that Crystallex pays off well-connected newspaper editors here for favorable press coverage. It’s painfully obvious that they pay off at least one newsweekly – Quinto Día – which has been giving them outrageously favorable coverage for days. Rumor has it that Quinto Día actually approached Minca to say, pretty much, that their editorial line could change…for a price. My guess is that that’s part of the explanation, but there’s more to it. The press silence is probably the outcome of a series of interlocking issues: the story is too complicated and/or they see Minca as a lost cause and/or they have this kind of defeatist attitude that treats corruption as a kind of force of nature, unstoppable and therefore not worth fighting, and/or they’re on the take from Crystallex. One way or another, it’s a delicious, juicy scandal that no one’s really going after – I’d love to go after it myself, except nobody reads the damn magazine I write for – and this blog…well, it’s almost as much a “specialist interest” as the Las Cristinas saga is…

Powergrab

What a difference seven days make. A week ago, the political scene was dominated by talk of parliamentary procedures, after the government attempted a questionable move to rewrite the new Elections Law. Now, after the partial militarization of the city last week, the takeover of the Metropolitan Police on Saturday, the firebombing of Globovisión on Sunrday morning, the running street battles between opposition activists and National Guardsmen near Altamira on Monday and an opposition march that ended in a cloud of tear gas and confusion yesterday, such concerns look oddly parochial. The question exercising the nation now is rather more immediate: has the country been put, de facto, under a state of exception?

This new constitutional euphemism for what used to be known as a “state of emergency” and its concomitant suspension of constitutional rights has been worrying opposition activists for months. There’s a good case to be made that, rather than making a formal – and legal – announcement, the government has decided to implement the State of Exception de facto. Certainly, much of what’s gone on in the last few days is incomprehensible in any other terms. The presence of troops, including army units, on the streets is clearly exceptional, as are the military checkpoints set up on the roads into the city. With day-to-day security in the city now openly in the hands of the military, much of the effect of a state of exception is simply already in place. And as the government displays greater and greater contempt for legal formalities, it becomes ever more plausible that a full state of exception could be implemented without ever having been declared.

As for the government takeover of the Metropolitan Police (known here as the PM), it’s not so much exceptional as just plain illegal, not to mention its being a gross provocation that has escalated political tensions in the capital to heights unseen since April. In appointing a Freddy Bernal loyalist with well-known ties to the Bolivarian Circles to head the PM, the government has made it clear it’s not so much interested in taking over the police as in dismantling it. There was never a chance that its rank-and-file officers would accept orders from the leader of the street gangs they’ve been fighting for nearly a year. So aware was Mr. Sánchez Delgado that the officers would not accept his authority that throughout his first 48 hours as police chief he didn’t even bother to call around to the various precincts – the government instead sent military units to guard them, with machine-gun turrets turned toward the police stations’ doors. Sánchez Delgado did eventually get around to visiting the various precincts – flanked by Freddy Bernal and a number of Bolivarian Circle activists.

What’s clear is that such reckless provocations have once again put opposition moderates (there no longer seems to be any such thing as “chavista moderates”) in an awkward position. Ultimately, a civilized “electoral outcome” is just not in the government’s interests. Recent polls show clearly that two out of three voters would ask for Chávez’ resignation, a proportion so large that the opposition now stands a good chance of exceeding the 3.7 million votes that would be needed to turn out the president in a formal revocatory referendum.

The government must prevent a vote – and raising political tensions as high as possible seems to be the route they’ve chosen to do so. Under such circumstances, opposition moderates’ calls for dialogue, negotiations, and ballot boxes look more and more out of step. Radical voices, from General Medina Gómez to Copei’s Sergio Omar Calderón, start to seem like a compendium of common sense. And while the Coordinadora Democrática has not left César Gaviria’s negotiating table, expectations for that exercise – which were low to begin with – are withering into nothingness.

The next move in this three-dimensional chess game is up to the Supreme Tribunal, which will have to rule on the constitutionality of the government’s takeover of the PM. Magistrate Hadded Moustafa Paolini has been assigned the task of drafting a ruling. He is said to be one of Proyecto Venezuela’s men on the Tribunal, making it seem likely he’ll side with the opposition. The question, then, will be whether his fellow magistrates back him and, if they do, whether President Chávez will heed the ruling. Failure to do so would represent the government’s clearest, starkest snub to the rule of law yet. But heeding the Tribunal would be a striking humiliation for a government that has staked so much on the PM powergrab. One way or another, the nation’s political future now hangs on this decision, and on the president’s reaction to it.

Shit + Fan = Right now

Well, I'd been forecasting it for weeks, but still I was a little shocked when it happened. The government has moved on the Metropolitan Police. It was obvious that they wouldn't tolerate a large, armed group in the capital to remain in the hands of the opposition for long. There are National Guard and army units all over town right now, and it's definitely the most tense the city has been since April. Most police commanders seem to be siding with Mayor Alfredo Peña and against the government at the moment, but the situation is incredibly volatile.

It's barely a big surprise how badly the government is bungling this one. Realizing that if they tried to appoint a chavista loyalist to head the PM they'd have no credibility at all, they at first tried to appoint a relatively independent new Chief of Police, Commissar Delgado. He went around all the different police stations yesterday, quickly realized that the move had no support at all, and resigned less than 12 hours into the job. So next up they appointed a chavista loyalist, named Gonzalo Sánchez, who is being identified by CNN as "the former right-hand man of Libertador Mayor Freddy Bernal." He appears to have strong ties to the Bolivarian Circles, and is obviously totally unacceptable to the opposition and most of the PM. Bernal, of course, is one of the most militant and dangerous supporters of the government, and is widely seen as the key organizer for the Caracas area Bolivarian Circles.

This entire move is plainly illegal, way, way, way out of line, and escalates tensions in the capital alarmingly. Anything could happen here. It’s clear that most PM field commanders are not going to recognize Sánchez, they’re still only recognizing Peña’s police chief, Henry Vivas, as their commander. It’s a very, very fluid situation, with many heavily armed men on either side, and it’s incredibly dangerous. There are army tanks parked outside every PM station.

The short-term result of this idiocy is to totally marginalize the moderates on each side. It's very hard for me to see how OAS brokered negotiations can go forward in this climate. It's just too serious a provocation on the part of the government.

Stay tuned.

They keep getting caught…

It happened again yesterday. For the Nth time. A small but bellicose pro-government mob showed up at the Metropolitan City Hall (Alfredo Peña’s office) to block the last open entrance, leaving the Mayor and a bunch of opposition leaders he was meeting with stranded for hours. Then the Metropolitan Police showed up to clear them out. From there on end, it was the usual…tear gas and rubber bullets from the police, real bullets from the chavista crowd. What wasn’t usual, what makes my blood boil, is that one guy – apparently a bystander – was killed. Deaths don’t get any more pointless than his, or any more angering.

The chavista line was the predictable same old. To hear Desiré Santos Amaral (the chavista National Assembly member) tell the story, all that happened is that some dissident (chavista) PM officers decided to go protest peacefully outside Peña’s office when suddenly, for no apparent reason, the rest of the Policia Metropolitana decided to brutally repress them using violence. Desiré is adamant that it was Peña’s cops who did the shooting. The crowd can hardly be blamed for throwing a few rocks back at them faced with this fascist onslaught, could they? All the chavistas are towing this line…they don't seem at all inconvenienced that it’s a demonstrable lie.

Why demonstrable? Because once again, they got caught. On camera. Doing what they accuse their opponents of doing. This time, it was a Channel 10 (Televen) cameraman who got “lucky,” getting footage of one of the dissident (chavista) PM officers using a cloud of tear gas as cover to unload his gun into Peña’s guys. (Note to chavista gunmen: Is it really so hard to refrain from shooting your guns when there are cameramen just feet away?! How stupid are you?) So the government’s line is, one more time, a sham. We should’ve gotten used to it by now. This time, the gunman wasn’t even wearing a ski-mask: his face was very clearly visible in the Channel 10 footage. But I’ll bet you anything he won’t be held accountable for this, bet you anything he won’t spend 5 minutes in jail for it. Not so long as el Comandante runs the country…

The riot went on for most of the afternoon and into the evening. 15 people took gunshots. One of Peña’s cops took a bullet to the stomach. A Channel 2 cameraman was shot (that’s the second time a Channel 2 cameraman has been shot by rioting chavistas in the last three months – high risk job! – but neither was seriously hurt.) Perhaps the most disturbing incident came at around 8 pm, when Peña went to the Lidice Hospital to visit the wounded and give his condolences to the family of the dead. A small crowd of Chavistas was there and they assaulted him, screaming “Fascist!” “Assassin!” and “Kill him!” as they tried to beat the crap out of the mayor. At one point he fell to the floor and the crowd literally tried to lynch him, kicking him in the face until three of his bodyguards managed to get him out of it. Worst of all, several of the people leading the crowd were National Assembly members – Iris Varela and Darío Vivas are clearly visible in the footage from the hospital. This whole atmosphere is terrifying – but what’s scariest is to think that someone like Iris Varela, someone who is now literally on the record trying to incite a crowd into lynching the Mayor of Caracas, that someone like her is part of the ruling clique here, that she sits in on high-level government meetings, that she has the president’s ear and plays a part in setting policy. It’s…it’s…deeply, deeply wrong.

The Half-assed Totalitarian

I’m reading Christopher Hitchins’ new book on George Orwell at the moment, and enjoying it immensely. As I read about Orwell’s horror at Stalin’s tactics, it’s hard not to relate it to events here, which are at once so similar and so vastly different to 1930s Russia. What Orwell makes clear, what he made his reputation writing about, is the way that the systematic denial of the truth is the cognitive cornerstone to totalitarianism. Mangling reality wasn’t just something Stalin did accidentally: it was at the center of his control of society. And while there are many, obvious differences between the two, Hitchens’ book shows up some terrifying parallelisms between Chávez and Stalin, at least in terms of their attitudes to reality.

Take, for instance, Orwell’s satirical take of the rhetoric coming out of Moscow during the dark years of the pre-war purges:

“To get the full sence of our ignorance as to what is really happening in the USSR,” he writes, sometime in the mid 1930s, “it’s worth trying to translate the most sensational Russian event of the past two years, the Trotskyist trials, into English terms. Make the necessary adjustments, let Left be Right and Right be Left, and Trotsky be Churchill, and you get something like this:”

“Mr. Winston Churchill, now in exile in Portugal, is plotting to overthrow the British Empire and establish Communism in England. By the use of unlimited Russian money he has succeeded in building up a huge Churchillite organization which includes members of Parliament, factory managers, Roman Catholic bishops and practically the whole of the Primrose League. Almost every day some dastardly act of sabotage is laid bare – sometimes a plot to blow up the House of Lords, sometimes an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the Royal racing-stables. 80% of the Beefeaters at the Tower of London are discovered to be agents of the plot. A high official at the Post Office admits brazenly to having embezzled 5 million pounds and also to having committed lese majesté by drawing moustaches on postage stamps. Lord Nuffield, after a 7-hour interrogation, confesses that ever since 1920 he has been fomenting strikes in his own factories. And meanwhile the Churchillites never cease from proclaiming that it is they who are the real defenders of Capitalism…

“Anyone who has followed the Russian trials,” Orwell comments, “knows that this is scarcely a parody. From our point of view the whole thing is not merely incredible as a genuine conspiracy, it is next door to incredible as a frame-up. It is simply a dark mystery, of which the only seizable fact – sinister enough in its way – is that communists over here regard it as a good advertisement for Communism.”

Now, think about this, and think about Chávez’ Venezuela in terms of this. When we hear MVR congressman Raul Esté telling us that on November 4th the gunshots were fired by undercover Chacao policemen who had infiltrated the chavista protest but forgotten to change their boots, when we’re told on State TV (channel 8) that the Plaza Altamira protest is a satanist/neonazi plot spearheaded by Alejandro Peña Esclusa, when we’re told that the Metropolitan Police routinely drops tear gas canisters on perfectly peaceful chavista demonstrators for no good reason, when Pedro Carreño tells us that Henrique Salas Feo’s Operación Alegría street-sweepers are a highly trained corps of provocateurs who sneak into chavista marches, when Chávez tells us that an offhand comment by a CNN correspondent proves that the opposition planned and organized the April 11th massacre…when we hear things like that, isn’t there a more than evident streak of totalitarian truth-twisting to the rhetoric? Isn’t there an obvious and alarming parallelism between the way these statements mangle the truth beyond all recognition for partisan gain? Aren’t each of these items “next door to incredible as frame-ups”?

Yet, the differences are just as telling. What made Stalin Stalin is that state-lies held a monopoly of the information available to common people in Russia. His aggressive convolution of reality was paired with a willingness to use as much violence as it took to crush anyone who questioned the state line. Stalinism wasn’t just about routinely making up impossibly far-fetched lies, it was about making it compulsory to believe them. It was about routinely using impossible lies lies as the justification for putting bullets in people's heads, or sending them for long sojourns in Siberia.

Chávez won't go all the way, which explains why the Chávez era has been one-part-tragedy, two-parts-farce. Without total control over people’s access to information, twisted state lies are laid bare before the end of the day, becoming a farcical joke rather than a source of deep terror. Not only is it not compulsory to believe the crap the government peddles, but making fun of various chavista lies has become a kind of passtime for the middle classes. To make a proper totalitarian leader, you have to balance off your willingness to mangle the truth with an equal dose of cruelty and violence – Chávez just can’t strike that balance, because he’s just not comfortable enough using violence to achieve political ends. Thank God. And people are realizing that Chávez isn't really willing to use massive, indiscriminate violence to stay in power. Think about it: this is a country where military intelligence raids are foiled by pissed-off, pot-banging housewives who block the access roads with their cars and laugh at the heavily-armed, ski-masked intelligence officers when they demand to be let through. Think that’s a problem that Stalin had?

Referendum or bust

The game now is quite clear. The latest polls suggest the government would lose the consultative referendum 60-40 at best, as much as 71-29 by some measures…a political disaster for Chávez. So the government has to go all out to obstruct the referendum, and the opposition needs to do whatever it takes to press for it. That’s the game we’re playing now, and while the political momentum is clearly with the opposition, nothing is improbable here.

The first skirmish went to the opposition, when the Supreme Tribunal refused to rule on a strange petition by Chávez to suspend all the members of the National Elections Council (CNE), which would have made it impossible to hold any kind of vote. It’s really not clear why the Tribunal sided against the prez, and there’s all kinds of speculation about, though the government is taking it as proof that they don’t really own the Supreme Tribunal, like the opposition says. Right.

It’s pretty clear that the government will keep obstructing the vote. PPT has already filed another injunction at the tribunal saying that the proposed question is unconstitutional. The Tribunal’s decision on that case is of utmost importance. The opposition is quite clear that they won’t negotiate away the will of the 2 million people who signed a petition for a vote, and if the government does manage to block it, all bets are off.

The coordinadora democrática is committed to calling an open-ended General Strike if a vote is blocked. In a sense, it’s win-win for the opposition on this score: if there is a vote, Chávez is toast. If he blocks a vote on a technicality, he’ll lose the last shard of democratic legitimacy he might still retain.

There is still the question of the shambolic CNE, universally agreed to be a mess of nepotism and incompetence. Gambling the nation’s future on a referendum means putting ourselves in the hands of these no-hopers. It’s not the best of all possible worlds, but it’s the one we've got.

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.