Email volley with a lefty on a night of heady optimism in Caracas

> > People who display the
> > slightest whiff, the merest suggestion of disagreement with Chavez,or
> > even those who choose a nuanced version of agreement, are rapidly and
> > reliably expelled from the chavista sect. Its autocratic verticalism is
> > the polar opposite of democratic pluralism, of pluralistic
> > decision-making. And that is what many of us in the opposition cannot,
> > will not, and ought not to swallow, Paul. And, we won't.
>
> While I actually tend to agree with this description of many Chavistas,
> this also sounds like your own description of the opposition. So, in the
> end, what makes the opposition, to which you seem to count yourself, any
> better than the Chavistas?

Greg,

If this is the impression I give of the opposition, I did not make myself clear. My point is precisely the opposite. The chavistas and the opposition are fundamentally different. The government's political vision is, at bottom, sectarian and exclusive, committed to a single acceptable line of thought consisting largely of whatever chavez said in his latest speech. In stark contrast, the opposition is impossibly, maddeningly diverse. There is a multitude of voices, positions, and points of view, a dizzying number of formal organizations, a spectrum of ideological currents, and - crucially - vibrant debate between them. Chavismo and the opposition have about as much in common as an order and a conversation.

Of course, the government normally attacks on the opposite flank, making fun of the opposition's fractiousness, its seeming ungovernability, its multiplicity, and contrasting it with the "strength" they think they derive from their unified, clear chain of command - which runs through a single vector from Chavez to everyone else.

The observation is correct, but their interpretation is backwards. The opposition thrives on diversity; Chavez cannot tolerate it. He is terrified of dissent, unable on a psychological level to deal with an opinion different from his own, patently unable to withstand any sort of criticism. Chavez, like any pathological narcissist, is deaf to the world around him. The opposition has to listen, because it is not monolithic, its positions are not predetermined. Instead, they have to be agreed through dialogue and debate between many different groups on a case by case basis. This is a source of strength, not weakness.

The opposition's diversity is real, both socially and ideologically. If you are right wing and middle or upper class, there are several parties for you to choose from, from COPEI to Primero Justicia to Proyecto Venezuela, but if you're more working class and more centrist you also have a certain number of options, from AD and Alianza Bravo Pueblo on the conservative end of the spectrum to Causa R, Solidaridad and Union on the left. And if you are a proper trotskyite marxist and you want to oppose Chavez, well there is ALSO a place for you in the Coordinadora democr?tica - as the kids from Bandera Roja have found out. And if you think there is not enough balance in the media, there's even an NGO for you! The opposition is just as broad and varied as Venezuela is!

Necessarily this means they don't all agree on everything all the time. But what they do all agree on is one basic principle: that they will respect those who disagree with them, remain open to dialogue towards them and work towards building minimal agreements with them. They understand the need to work for consensus across ideological lines. This, in my view, is the fundamental difference between the two sides: the opposition has the unruliness of real democracy about it. The opposition understands compromise and consensus building as healthy democratic activities. By contrast, chavismo is a straightjacket that rigidly binds millions of people to parrot the views of a pathological narcissist from day to day.

It's hardly surprising. How much intelligence and coherence is it really reasonable to expect from a cult of personality built around a man of faltering psychiatric stability? I mean, really.

The structure of chavismo is very badly suited to developing the habits mind and patterns of citizen interaction likely to yield a vibrant democracy. I cannot have a frank, horizontal, equal-to-equal, citizen-to-citizen debate with you if I'm pledged to blind obedience to a political line I have no part in formulating! Only open democratic debate predicated on a basis of equality and respect for differences can foster the kinds of social interaction that sustain democracy in the long run. Formal recognition of the other, of the other's right to dissent, and the willingness to reach principled compromises with the other are central features of any vibrant democracy. The opposition understands this. The government - that is, Chavez - fundamentally does not.

(and don't bother writing in to point out George W. Bush doesn't understand this either - doubtlessly true, but entirely beside the point here!)

So Greg, to me, there is a world of difference between the opposition and Chavez. Not because the opposition is perfect and wonderful and blameless, no! The venezuelan opposition is just as much filled with human folly and error as any other enterprise this absurd species of ours might choose to pursue. But it is also far bigger than that, sustained ultimately by ideals that are much more noble than that and will, in due time, lead to the restoration of pluralistic decision-making and democratic normalcy to Venezuela. And this, I know for certain, cannot happen if Chavez stays in power.

I realize that there is no guarantee that the end of the Chavez era will lead to the end the era of mass impoverishment in Venezuela. The country has been getting poorer for 25 years now, and Chavez is only to answer for the final 5 of those. But it is near-certain that keeping Chavez would mean ongoing impoverishment. People can sense that on the streets, Greg, and this is why they're lining up to sign for the recall.

Watching the coverage of the weekend's action on globovision over the internet was instructive. For one thing, it's clear that the station has toned down its content very dramatically. The endless anti-government commercial sprees are gone. Rough equality in air time is ensured between pro and anti-government spokesmen. It is true that the the pro-chavez interviewees inevitably have a rougher ride than their counterparts - a phenomenon due largely, I think, to the more-than-justified anger of the individual interviewers at standard chavista obfuscation tactics and flat out lies. It's only a shame they're not as tough on the opposition interviewees, not that they're so tough on the chavistas. But the days of the totally one sided opposition media are, for the moment at least, not quite true.

For another thing, following on my exchange with Paul, I watched the lines of people waiting to sign paying close attention to people's skin color. What I realized is what I knew all along - there were huge numbers of brown and black people signing against the government this weekend alongside many whites. Black and brown faces regularly spoke on behalf of the opposition coalition, as well as for the government.

In fact, it occurs to me that if you went up to anyone standing in those effortlessly racially mixed lines waiting to sign all over the country and you tried to explain to those people that there are two leftwing irish film makers who think the struggle against the president is one of white vs. black, the idea would seem little more than absurd to the vast majority of them. Not so much right or wrong as just incomprehensible, non-sensical...it would not compute. I understand that race is deeply politicized in the US and Europe, it is hard for me to understand why my American and European friends refuse to believe me when I tell them it is not similarly politicized in Venezuela!

(but this, doubtlessly, is a subject for a separate entry.)

Overall, the race-struggle theory of Venezuelan politics is about as credible as Jose Vicente Rangel's obscene suggestion that the TV images of long lines all over the city waiting to sign were staged, fake, computer generated, "virtual" was his word. Sickening.

My favorite moment on Globovision today was the shots of people waiting in line to sign, who were holding little hand-drawn signs reading simply "No soy virtual." I am not virtual. To me, that little sign, that little retort to Rangel, encapsulates so much of the opposition's deep and justified exasperation. They are not really asking for that much, not really. All that sign says, ultimately, is I am a real person. I want to be taken into consideration as a citizen. I want to be recognized. I want those in power to accept I exist.

(Remember when all this started? December 10th, 2001? Remember that day, Greg? All that the opposition was really asking even back then was to be recognized, to be consulted on the changing of the 49 decree-laws handed down through the enabling law! (God, seems like eons ago! But it's been just two years ago!) The funny thing is that the government's reaction back then was the same as it is now: the ostrich with its head in the sand. Back then they mocked us, they called us escualidos, they refused to accept we exist. Nothing has changed! And the same cycle of anger and frustration at non-recognition followed by increased militancy followed by renewed determination on the part of the government NEVER to recognize the opposition that has built up the pressure-cooker of anger and frustrations that poured out onto the streets to sign today, with their little 'no soy virtual' handbills...)

The other thing that seems to have escaped most commentators about this remarkable weekend in Venezuela is the sheer irony of it. For 3 years between 1998 and 2001 we heard NOTHING out of Chavez but paeans for citizens participation, for direct democracy, for the idea that the people owned the country, and should therefore run it. It was the whole reason for electing him!

Today, that kind of rhetoric has disappeared completely from the president's rhetorical repertoire. Oddly, just as Chavez shut up about it, it started to happen, on the streets. And why? Because the message has been totally co-opted by the opposition, that's why! Swallowed and digested whole!

This may be the single positive aspect of Chavez's legacy: while his own government was a shocking failure, the ideology of radical people power that first propelled him to miraflores is becoming a part of our political culture, it seems to be geting integrated into the nation's shared common sense, into its civic DNA. Chavez really has made us more democratic, but not in anything like the way he imagined!

But look out in the streets, Greg! Wasn't this what the revolution was supposed to be about in the first place? La revolucion participativa y protagonica? Remember that? Has chavismo really grown so far from its original idealistic roots that it cannot even begin to understand that its vision has become a reality, only on the other side of the political divide? Can it really not see that all the opposition is doing is fleshing out the ideological vision that Chavez originally conceived? Strange twists, my friend, strange twists takes the path of politics in a place like Venezuela. La revolucion bonita indeed!

Chavismo is today the victim of nothing so much as Chavez the man. As the leader's narcissistic delirium deepened, he carried his movement down with him. The end result was the strange kind of collective paranoid delusion that is chavismo today. Pledged to follow blindly the whims of a leader who has lost his marbles, the political movement itself is suffering from a kind of collective insanity. This is what happens to personality cults right before they implode!

Honestly, Greg, have an honest look at the chavismo that exists today, on November 30, 2003, and tell me the heavy air of historic failure and confusion doesn't hang around the proyecto's neck like a ball-and-chain? Just look at the way they behave! Look at the constant conspiracy theorizing on channel eight, look at the obsession with counter-revolutionaries, spies and enemies that is such a sadly predictable feature of autocratic political systems. (To my mind there are shades of Stalin and Trujillo here, in terms of the psychological mechanism of pervasive suspicion, finger-pointing and betrayal, if thankfully not in terms of the level of violence applied to counter it.)

If you've been watching channel 8 for the last couple of days, you must have some sense of the way the chavista leadership has followed the president, lemming-like, over the psychiatric cliff-edge and into a state of generalized paranoia. It's a serious issue, man, I really don't mean to render it glib. They believed their own propaganda to the bitter end, and it brought them to the current impasse. In a few days, CNE will announce more than 3.8 million signatures have been collected for a referendum that only requires 3.78 million votes to toss the guy out, and chavismo has never developed any kind of discourse to prepare its followers to hear that news, to assimilate it and accept it and live with it. So...now what? How will they react? How will they reconcile that announcement with the narcissitic fantasy that has been so carefully built around Chavez?

One can only hope common sense wins out in the end and nobody tries to do anything rash that could lead to violence. At the moment, I am very optimistic. But ultimately, the country cannot accept a situation where a paranoid sect controls every nook and corner of the state. It's just not a sustainable situation, Greg: surely, on some level, you must realize this is so...

OK, again, this email/post is too long. Durn. Concision: not my strong point! But I feel this odd need to write about Venezuela these days...it's hard to explain, it's just very exciting to follow the news of the reafirmazo over the internet...it just seems like there's this air of heady optimism down there, and I'm really bummed I'm not there to experience it first hand. And, of course, I love the email from readers/friends/sisters, so bring it on!

[The email address is caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, by the way, NOT dot com...]

Rejoinder to this post from, hands down, my favorite US lefty...

In response to your last, er, relapse, I'm not sure that the fact that W can't conceive of a "loyal opposition" is all that beside the point. In fact, the Bushies' sneaky and radical revision of American rules of play has some eerie parallels with Chavez's. Not quite as egregious, better spun, not as bold-faced, but I think that drawing parallels with Bush is an excellent way to make the point for your lefty U.S. readers. (Speaking of a rapidly polarizing citizenry, check out the poll graphs at http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101031201/story.html#)

I'm in the middle of reading Krugman's latest tome ("The Great Unraveling" - if these "anger lit" titles get any cheesier they're going to have to start serving wine at the readings.) He quotes Henry Kissinger's doctoral dissertation, of all things:

"Back to Kissinger. His description of the baffled response of established powers in the face of a revolutionary challenge works equally well as an account of how the American political and media establishment has responded to the radicalism of the Bush administration over the past two years:

'Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent, they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework. The defenders of the status quo therefore tend to begin by treating the revolutionary power as if its protestations were merely tactical; as if it really accepted the existing legitimacy but overstated its case for bargaining purposes; as if it were motivated by specific grievances to be assuaged by limited concessions. Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane.... But it is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusions.'

As I said, this passage sends chills down my spine, because it explains so well the otherwise baffling process by which the administration has been able to push radical policies through, with remarkably little scrutiny or effective opposition."

Of course, Chavez has always billed his regime change as a revolution, and thus an attack on the "existing legitimacy." The problem is that the social order people thought they were voting to overturn - clientelism, the "petrostate" as you put it, general political indifference toward the plight of the poor - was far different from the social order the chavistas actually want to overturn - basically, the entire framework of due process and democratic accountability. And when the bait and switch became evident, people got seriously pissed off.

Much the same with the Bushies - tax cuts for the superrich packaged as tax relief for the middle class, a pre-emptive war packaged as a response to an imminent threat, a basic strategy of responding to criticism with outright denial of the facts, or refusal to answer the question. It's so clear, so obvious, to your average North American lefty, that Bush's noble, homespun rhetoric has absolutely no connection to what he's
actually doing in office. It's clear, too, that the few social-welfare projects Bush claims to be interested in (AIDS efforts in Africa, for instance) are actually run by well-intentioned grassroots people who, whether they realize it or not, have priorities very different from his - and will probably end up getting half the funding they were promised during the initial photo-op.

And yet, the equivalent situation in Venezuela is not at all clear and obvious - U.S. lefties fall for the noble, homespun rhetoric and social-welfare photo ops all the time. Now I know my country's politics bore you, but I do think hammering home the similarities between our respective leadership's baits and switches is the best way to discredit the chavista rhetoric. "George W. Bush" is a code for "propaganda" that
we understand.

Erica
ericastephan@fastmail.fm

Rejoinder to the rejoinder
It's not that US politics bore me, it's just that they baffle me, and upset me...

Correspondence with a reader who liked The Revolution will not be televised:

...along with a review, of sorts, of that wretched movie,
and explanation of why I haven't been blogging for the last few months...

Email #1

On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 17:56:01 -0800, "Paul Cheney" said:

> I have done a lot of reading about Venezuela, its traditions, culture, political
> history, etc., and I've checked out web sites and news organizations, both
> "Against" Chavez and "For" him. I've really enjoyed learning all this
> stuff, and I have you to thank for this.

Great!

> I think you're
> really mistaken about Chavez, and after seeing the movie The Revolution
> will not be televised (which I was prepared to view as totally biased) I
> think I came to realize how RACIST the opposition to Chavez is, and
> perhaps how racist you might be.

Hmmm...well, I suppose these days, if you're talking about Venezuela with a gringo, you can't help but talk about The revolution will not be televised. It's a convincing movie, that's for sure. It's very well made, very persuasive. Of course, that's what they said about The Triumph of the Will.

Top notch propaganda always is.

You're a Political Science professor, if I recall correctly, no? I would just urge you not to shut off your critical mind as you sit down to watch a movie like this. When you think about it for a third of a second, you could make a hatchet film of this sort about anything. If I'm a palestinian, and I'm DETERMINED to sway viewers opinions and get them on my side, what could be easier than splicing together 90 minutes of tape that shows Arafat as ONLY good and noble while the Israelis are shown as ONLY evil and mean? The movie practically makes itself: but what does it really add to our collective understanding? What's the point of making it?

Of course, if I'm an Israeli trying to do the same, it's not any more difficult! There are plenty enough crazy extremists on both sides that you can tar everyone on that side by implication, if you just paint with a broad enough stroke. It's really not difficult. I'm sure Chechen fighters could make a movie to make the Russian army look really ghastly, and themselves as heroic, but the Russian army could do the opposite just as easily.

In almost any deep human conflict, if you decide to be completely one-sided and propagandistic, you can make one of the sides look wonderful, the other horrendous! It's so easy to do, the exercise seems just barren...it barely seems worth doing!

So yeah, I won't go into the details of the many, many innacuracies and manipulations in Revolution will not be televised, inaccuracies that got them thrown out of the Amnesty Film Fest and that have put their Banff award under review, innacuracies that have been extensively documented by people with more time an effort on their hands than I do. I'll just point out one bit that especially incensed me: remember the bit where they're talking about how the coup was coming together and then they show the tanks rolling up the streets towards the Presidential Palace? The little shard of "information" they just blithely leave out is that, as Chavez himself recognized and as audio recordings of military radio frequencies show conclusively, it was Chavez who ordered them there! He called them out, to disperse the opposition crowds and protect the palace! The movie gives the precisely opposite impression.

Why?

Cuz the richness and complication that suffuses real life is anathema to propaganda producers. Because moral ambiguity, uncertainty, shades of gray, ruin a good agit-prop film. Because ethical simplification, the dumbing down of a situation to its Disney-esque components, is the stock and trade of propaganda producers. Because they need good guys who are completely good, bad guys who are completely bad, and nothing in between. Because, reality ruins a good story.

So I would just urge you not to turn off your critical mind, EVER, not even (especially not when) watching a movie like Revolution will not be televised. But, in general, it's quite simple really: when you see a representation of Venezuelan reality where one side is all good and the other is all bad, then take a step back, breathe, and realize you're being exposed to propaganda, which is no less loathsome when it comes from the right than when it comes from the left, that's for sure.

On the other hand, I really don't care that much anymore. These days I draw a stipend to figure out the behavior of dynamic models of economic development under the influence of technological innovation, which is a much dryer thing to obsess about, but probably has fewer harmful effects for my blood pressure and such and such. One thing that's really become clear to me since coming to Europe is how little people outside Venezuela really know about what's going on there, and how little it matters. Ultimately, only Venezuelans can work out the country's political crisis, and all people on the outside (including me) can do is hope and pray that common sense somehow, heroically, makes a come-from-behind recovery and wins out in the end - sorting the mess out without resorting to guns. Last weekend's signature gathering drive was a major step in that direction, next weekend's second drive (the one for the presidency) will be even more important.

Anyway, it's good to hear from you, and I am glad I've gotten you to research this stuff. If you keep at it, maybe travel to Vzla some time, I'm pretty confident you'll eventually come around and see that it's puerile extremism that's the problem, not the government as such or the opposition as such.

ft

> ps: what's happened to your chronicles? Since I last
> communicated with you (when you seem to have mistaken a satirical web site, The Onion,
> for some real news reporting - about Syria if I remember correctly)

Hmmm, lets see: what happened to my blog? I emigrated, that's what happened! The stress of it all got to me...the unending deadlines, the anonymous threats, the crappy pay...usual set of complaints, I imagine. So I ran off and started work on a Ph.D. at a United Nations University institute in The Netherlands (www.intech.unu.edu). If all goes to plan, I should have a doctorate safely in hand by 2007 or so, which, hey, is just after the next elections in Venezuela.

(Oh, and I realize the Onion is not a serious site - just sent that piece on Syria because it struck me as class-a satire!)

ps for you: Do you mind if I publish this little back and forth in the blog, minus your last name, if you'd prefer it that way? People sporadically ask me why the blog has stopped, or about the movie, and this would clear it up for them.

Email #2

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 14:07:06 -0800, "Paul Cheney"
said:
> Hi Francisco! Congrats on entering the PhD program at the UN school! Now
> I know you're responding to email and want to publish this little back and
> forth, I'll send you a more extensive letter - maybe just some quick points
> now... Glad you DID get the satirical nature of The Onion - your response
> was kind of ambiguous, something like "your country is under attack and
> you laugh!" MANY people here in the USA do think their country is under
> attack and have no tolerance for satire any more - glad you're not one of them!

Well, I'll make no pretense to understand anything about U.S. politics - a conceptual black hole for me. All I know is that the notion of the CIA discovering that 95% of the people in Syria are arabs and being horridly scared of this all of a sudden struck me as hysterically funny. There are a lot of Syrians in Venezuela, by the way - second and third generation descendents of guys who came over right after decolonization. (Hence some of the rumor-mongering about a Chavez-Damascus axis...silly.) It strikes me as very odd but very cool that most Venezuelans are more likely to understand the joke-nature of that Onion piece than most Americans!

(There's another page to add to your file on Venezuelan racism - a highly integrated muslim-arab community of tens of thousands of members, living really with no communal problems whatsoever with the native Venezuelans!)

> As for The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - sure, I was aware of
> propaganda, and aware of the film-makers' biases - particularly around the
> character of Chavez himself (his stuff about his Grandfather - was
> he/wasn't he a murderer? He was a murderer!). Chavez clearly has an ego,
> loves to hear himself talk, etc. But what really surprised me was the
> arrogance of the "opposition" - I'd never seen the non-government media
> before, never heard how they planned the coup - I really had thought the
> opposition demo was "spontaneous".

Well, I think if you read back through my blog you'll find more than a few angry tirades against the pathetic propagandism of the Venezuelan private media as well. I was an active member of an NGO founded to FIGHT that kind of distortion (a membership which, ironically enough, ended up getting me tarred as an anti-government extremist by Al Giordano and not a few other blogscape denizens...)

Hell, I even got into a public argument on live nationwide television (virtual cadena broadcast, it was carried live on every channel except channel 8, the gov't station) where I accused the Assembled owners of the private TV broadcasters of applying psychological warfare tactics to scare people into opposing the government. I charged them in public with gross abuses of basic standards of journalistic ethics. I was even quoted by Chavez on an Alo, presidente, his Sunday TV talkathon!

That may have been the lowest point in my career, when I saw Chavez twist my words to shore up his banana republic autocracy. It made me literally sick to my stomach to see my words twisted in that way.

So believe me Paul, I know all about what it's like to be aggressively and maliciously misinterpreted. It became the story of my career!

To the right in Venezuela I was a closet chavista - hell, the comandante was even quoting me to make its points. To the left I was an evident stooge of imperialism, cuz I worked for the NYTimes, refused to suck up to the prez and write sycophantically about him, as they would demand, and because I was clearly an upper class toff. I was virulently attacked by both sides, repeatedly, and threatened by one of them (the government, need I add.)

And why? All for refusing to have a simplistic position, refusing to simply swallow the political fantasies of either side hook line and sinker. So I know how hard it is to be in the middle, to try to arrive at a principled independent judgement at a  time when there are enormous social, economic, and even family pressures to simply fold into one side of the propaganda war. I understand how much easier it is to play the part of advocate - to suspend all disbelief in the total, unlimited righteousness of one's side simply because it is one's side.

So it does make me angry to see the easy success the Irish movie got simply on the basis of being openly, militantly one-sided, and flouting the same standards of professional ethics, balance and integrity that they claimed to be reivindicating, and the same principles I had worked so hard to try to attain in my own work. Of course, FoxNews will always have more viewers than PBS, Disney more than Murakami, simplicity is always easier to sell than complexity. Personally, I refused to play along, and ended up here, studying in Holland instead.

> Now, the film was biased, but I don't think it made any pretense to be
> anything else. You know that we are ALL biased, and plenty of films at that
> festival were "biased". That the tanks were called by Chavez ? - I don't
> think that was, Francisco, a MAJOR "lie" in the movie.

It's not a major lie, it's just a taste for the kind of shoddy ethics that pervades the movie. Subtle silences that give wrong impressions, strategic omissions that distort the entire picture, half truths, exagerations, near-fabrications, etc.

What most irked me about the film was the crass caricaturing of the opposition position, of its leadership, of its ethical vision. Of our ethical vision. They essentially created a disney-style bad guy and tarred us as that. They took months and years of earnest organizing effort, of self-less idealism on the part of hundreds of thousands of people who refuse to allow their nation to slouch into autocracy, and they turned it into a Cruella DeVille caricature. Those of us who risked everything to raise a voice of protest against the continuing autocratic encroachment of the government can only consider it a slur - a deeply damaging slur at that.

Because, as my blog was always clear to admit, the very nasty side to the opposition you saw in the movie is real. It exists. It's there. It's a problem. Too many rich people in my country have always treated to many poor people in my country as second class citizens. Yes the reactionary upper class women firing their servants in case they might be chavistas are no lie. I know that's true. I have some in my family. And yes they meet. And yes this is a problem. And yes this has to change. All of this is true.

But to suggest that those people are the whole of the opposition is like saying that suicide bombers is ALL there is to the Palestinian resistance to Israel...a profoundly dishonest, nasty, ugly, unfair and mean-spirited falsification of reality - which is a lot to peg on a movie that sells itself as an angry tirade against media manipulation! Does no one else see the irony of this?

There are also thousands upon thousands, probably millions of earnest middle class venezuelans - middle class educationally (university trained), though poor in economic terms - with deep democratic ideals and a real love for their country who see Hugo Chavez's delirious ranting on TV and get earnestly freaked out, and angry, very angry. Not because of what the private media tells them, but simply because they posses ears and eyes, and they've been subjected to hours upon hours of the incredible string of incendiary, meant-to-inflame statements that constantly pour out from Chavez's lips during his hours and hours long cadenas, or forced national broadcast speeches.

(Anthropological side-note: these Cadenas are broadcasts that, by law, have to go out on ALL the TV channels and ALL the radio stations AT THE SAME TIME whenever Chavez wants, for as long as Chavez wants. This notion, as I've found, is not easy for first world people to quite wrap their minds around - imagine getting home, turning on the tube, and seeing George W. Bush speaking, live, on every single channel you have access to and every single radio station, for hours on end! You can't escape, unless you are middle class and have cable, or choose to turn off all electronic media and play chess for the evening. These happen all the time in Venezuela, several times a week even now - in fact, even my African colleagues here at the United Nations University are astounded by the scale of abuse of power implied by the president's discretionary use of the cadena system!)

The Cadenas are the reason a million people turned out to protest the government on april 11th, not the opposition leaders, not the media, not the oligarchs. It was the incredible, seething anger millions of people felt as they had their tv and radio programming interrupted up to 30 times EVERY DAY for government propaganda messages. I remember April 9th, it was incredible...there was a cadena at least once ever 20 minutes! It really really angered people to be treated this way, because they could see the nature of the abuse of power the government was undertaking, a near nationalization of the airwaves and a confiscation of the national media's right to broadcast for completely political purposes, for propaganda purposes, for matters of no interest to the state at all, simply as political tools.

This created a kind of media warfare, as the media lords - bunch of bastards - retaliated by running more and more hyper-shrill anti-government propaganda during the few minutes when their signals were not taken over by the government.

[Aside: I'm a big fan of nature documentaries, they really helped me relax in a place as tense as Venezuela in the Chavez era. I had no cable at home, but, happily, in Caracas, I had channel 5, a catholic church owned channel that shows only foreign made documentaries and nature programs all day, with no commercials. It was truly surreal to try to watch a documentary in those days. Just as you were getting curious about the mating habit of the platypus, you'd be interrupted for a propaganda message from the government that could last anything from 5 minutes to 4 hours. You could never tell. I never did find out how a platypus mates!]

But I digress. The point is that there was a propaganda war on the airwaves, and both sides were shooting. The documentary makes it look like Chavez never abused his power to take over the airwaves, which is transparently false. It glosses over a  long and dark history of repeated autocratic abuses by the government, of repeated flaunting of the rule of law on a wide variety of issues, and of government sponsored threats, intimidation and harassment against opponents that would make any Amnesty International supporter blush, if he had the guts to look into the cases carefully. Again, I speak from first hand experience here...this is not speculation.

Any way you slice it, if you take the time to look at it, there is NO WAY you can describe the Chavez government as fully democratic. Its autocratic control of every branch of the state is so well documented it barely seems worth hashing over again. His government's repeated, public flouting of certain symbolically charged laws, like the prohibition agaisnt using military facilities for political purposes ENSHRINED IN THE CONSTITUTION Chavez HIMSELF WROTE, are a constant reminder that the government is above the law, untouchable, owning the public prosecutors and therefore perfectly able to stop ANY investigation into ANYTHING the president does. Just imagine the symbolism of it: what would happen if the US if President Bush ordered the US Army to make a large army base on the outskirts of DC available to put up tens of thousands of Republican activists for the night so they could rest up for a pro-Bush march in Washington the next day? The climate of impunity and fear this creates is intolerable...bad enough to cause me to emigrate. (Walk a mile in my shoes here!)

Let me illustrate with an annecdote: I had a reporter friend in Caracas who worked for Globovision. He was a very good, very conscientious journalist working at a very bad, propagandistic news station. Jorge (we'll call him, to protect the innocent) refuses at all costs to compromise his professional integrity, and reports as evenly as is possible from the locations he's sent. Even though he never incites violence against anyone, goes out of his way to report both points of view, and is in general a top-notch TV journalist, his face was indelibly linked with the Globovision logo.

As a result, trying to schedule a time and place to go get a drink with Jorge is something of a nightmare. Whole areas of the city are simply no-go areas for him: he might be recognized by groups of chavistas, who have been incited again and again through the cadena broadcasts to consider opposition media as the enemy. So Jorge cannot not just nip down on foot to his local grocery to get a can of soda, like any normal mortal - he might literally be killed, or at the very least harrassed. It's happened before, and he's not taking any more risks. He has about 6 bars around the city where he knows the owners and feels safe enough to show his face. Otherwise, he avoids going out in public. He cannot go to a mall, or a sports stadium, or a gym, or not without running a certain level of risk. His life is effectively confined to a handful of spaces where he can go and know he'll be safe. (Walk a mile in Jorge's shoes here!)

Let me add here that Jorge is black, and gay. Neither has impeded his rise through the ranks of Venezuelan journalism, nor has his overt refusal to participate in the production of propaganda. There is some room for excellence  in the opposition, for tolerance and open-mindedness. I asked Jorge once if he had ever felt discriminated against because of his skin color at Globovision, and he just laughed at me. "What country do you come from?" he asked in broken English, before adding in Spanish "esa vaina sencillamente no se da aca" - it just doesn't happen here. I believe him.

I remember I was at a Los Del Medio meeting (that pro-media balance NGO) in a meeting right after the very  WHITE foreign minister Roy Chaderton accused the opposition media of being motivated largely by racism, of being institutionally racist. I was sitting in a room full of Opposition-owned media journalists, about 25 of us, and easily two thirds of us were on the toastier side of the white-black continuum, with a few white people, a couple of dark black guys, and the whole gamut of the color range in between, including a half-chinese girl, thrown into the mix as well. Some of us looked a bit more Indian, others definitely more African, a few more white, but virtually all of us were mixed in some way - which is the premise of that very good book I recommended, Cafe con Leche, which I would urge everyone interested to read - written in the pre-Chavez era, mercifully.

[A few days after the infamous Chaderton speech, deliciously, the incomparable Teodoro Petkoff sent a friend of mine who works for him at Tal Cual, the afternoon daily newspaper he runs, to investigate the racial make up of all ambassadors and top level diplomats that Chaderton had appointed as Foreign Minister - she found a miniscule number of darker skinned appointees! Many fewer, that's for sure, than those visible every day on the private news broadcasts! Where would we be without Teodoro?]

The point of this story is that racism means very little in a society like ours, a society where almost everyone is of mixed ancestry and all of us talk and eat and dance and pray and read and think and act more or less alike, whatever the exact tonality of our skin. In this sense, if in no other, Venezuela really is a model society: skin color differences really are pretty irrelevant to most people's day to day life. While it is true that lighter skin people, in general, tend to be better off than darker skinned people, that generalization is riddled with very large numbers of exceptions - a situation quite radically unlike what you see in truly rigid social systems, like Colombia's or El Salvador's. If the irish film didn't represent that, then it might as well be made in another galaxy, it's not a social distinction most venezuelans would regard as particularly salient, or even important at all.

The real social fault line in Venezuela is all to do with money, very little to do with skin color. There's even an oligarchical little joke to that effect.

A: Did you hear they will no longer allow black people to become members of the Caracas Country Club?
B: Really?
A: That's right...
B: But what is their definition of a "negro"
A: A "negro" is anyone who does not have $1 million in the bank.

It's a horrendous joke, full of oligarchical conceit. But in its own twisted way, it shows how deep open mindedness about skin color really is. Even the foofiest of the elite understands that ultimately, skin color is not what matters in my country. Sadly, too often, money is. (And yes, that has to change!)

So, being as honest as I know how, and mindful of the way real racists will always vehemently deny such charges, I can tell you seriously that Roy Chadderton is full of shit. He simply is.

One more anecdote to make the point:

I have a sister-in-law whose last name is, somewhat incongruously Aleman. I say incongruously because she is anything but German, which is what Aleman means in Spanish. In fact, her father, Mr. Aleman, is quite dark skinned - Condi Rice color, about. For this reason, his friends, wife, and family have nicknamed him "El Negro", as a term of endearment. It's so much part of his social persona that he introduces himself as el Negro to friends of friends! His skin-color is so much a normal thing he 's totally owned it through his nickname, and it's a completely unremarkable part of his personality by now - a sign of affection and familiarity, nothing more.

The funny part being that since so many darker skinned people nickname themselves Negros, it is sometimes necessary to distinguish them by last name. "El negro is coming to dinner," you might say, and someone might respond, "which negro, el negro Suarez or el negro Arteaga?" But in my sister in law's dad's case, this turns him into "el negro Aleman" - or, literally, "the German black". I could never really figure that one out, but that's his name.

Another one for your racist opposition files.

> Anyway, back to the film. What imressed me was the treatment of the coup
> leaders! I'd assumed they were all in jail, or had been beaten to death!
> But, according to Amnesty International, it was the OPPOSITION that had
> resorted to "draconian decrees, including the closure of the National
> Assembly, and the summary dismissal of the Supreme Court, the Attorney
> General and the Human Rights Ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo). Police
> carried out raids on a number of homes of supporters of President Chavez.
> Amongst those arbitrarily detained were a Minister and a National Assembly
> deputy. There was widespread condemnation of the unconstitutional and
> summary removal of President Chavez, the illegal detention of his
> supporters, and the arbitrary powers assumed by the de facto government."

But this is the whole point! There WAS widespread condemnation...from within the opposition! The film didn't choose to tell you the story of how Teodoro Petkoff, the venerable old man of the Venezuelan antichavista left, spent April 12th going from one jail to another demanding that the
human rights of detainees be scrupulously observed! It didn't show the way opposition majors in Caracas personally turned up to ensure that angry mobs did not harm detainees! It did not show the deep current of discontent that was already riling the opposition by the morning of April 13th, which helped as much to restore Chavez as the relatively small and much overhyped little gathering outside Miraflores later that same day. Yes, the coup leaders went way too far, but within the opposition there was enough intellectual space to rein them in, because there is a deep vein of democratic idealism and pluralism running through the opposition, along side some creepy authoritarian impulses (which, still, cannot be compared to Chavez's raging personalism.)

If the film-makers did not see that, they chose not to see, but more importantly they chose not to show  to pretend it didn't exist. And in so doing, they deeply misrepresent my country's political reality.

I wish people could understand that.

> THAT was what the film brought out. The idolization of Chavez - sure,
> that's what all film makers do!
>
> One more thing before I go - and I'll send you something more detailed
> later - you said:
>
> "Cuz the richness and complication that suffuses real life is anathema to
> propaganda producers. Because moral ambiguity, uncertainty, shades of
> gray, ruin a good agit-prop film. Because ethical simplification, the
> dumbing down of a situation to its Disney-esque components, is the stock
> and trade of propaganda producers. Because they need good guys who are
> completely good, bad guys who are completely bad, and nothing in between.
> Because, reality ruins a good story."
>
> I think you might be a bit guilty of this yourself! You seem to leave out a
> lot of unhappy history in your Chronicles - the sort of unhappy history
> that has produced a lot of people who see Chavez as their first hope for
> change. There is an awful lot of blood on the hands of the old political
> parties, and most of the "opposition" seem to be rather implicated in
> that unhappy history!

Well, as I wrote above I think I shoved more than enough shit the opposition's way in my time, gotten in trouble for it too. But I also don't accept the overall implication.

OK, last anecdote to make last point:

My first experience in Venezuelan politics was in the summer of 1996. I was about to become a Senior at Reed College in Oregon and needed a thesis topic. I decided to spend the summer shadowing a Venezuelan opposition politician, and writing about the experience. The politician
was Andrés Velasquez, a trade unionist and a leftist who had campaigned his entire adult life - or, actually, longer, his first political speech he gave in high school, at age 15! - against the old system. Andrés lists his profession as electrician, and that's what his job was: he was an industrial electrician at the giant Sidor steel plant, from a Lula-style trade-union based party. At 5'4", he makes up in girth what he lacks in height. His face, and his heritage, are almost purely indian, with a bit of white sprinkled in several generations back. He is a deeply charismatic leader, a man of the people, really, and many people believe he actually WON the 1993 election, the one before Chavez, but was robbed by a left-right stitch up to put Caldera back in Miraflores. I don't know if that's true or not.

The point is that I know Andres, I've travelled with him closely. He had spent twenty five years of his life in a determined fight against the corrupt old regime - more than half the regime's total lifetime! - organizing workers, working his ass off, being harrassed, persecuted and intimidated again and again by the adecos, raising an independent voice for workers that could not be well represented by big party-affiliated labor unions, which were in bed with the boss, which was the state in this case.

NOBODY can accuse Andres of selling out - on the contrary, his political history shows an almost fanatical determination to stay commited to certain democratic principles taught to him from youth by leftist intellectuals from the moderate branch of the communist party of the 60s and 70s. Andres is that most fearsome opponent: the committed life-long activist. And in his own, quiet way, he probably did much more to upset the two party grip on power as Chavez did - until 1998, anyway.

Yet, today, Andres is part of the opposition, because his democratic principles do not allow him to back a government that is as openly spiteful of the rule of law as Chavez's is. And, worse of all, the government insinuate darkly that he has been bought off by the oligarchs, impugning his integrity because they have no leg to stand on when it comes to impugning the worth of his arguments. To see Chavez virulently attack Andres on television, on cadenas, in more than one occasion, is something I found deeply revolting. For Chavez, only he and his sect ever could or ever will do anything for the poor in my country. They are rigidly, ideologically blind to the contribution of anyone but themselves. In their exceedingly simplisticly mannichean view of the world, those who are not with them are against them, enemies, demons to be fought and destroyed.

Worst still, this applies not only to the rich, not only to the powerful, not only to the radical shrill critics, or the openly reactionary, but against EVERYONE, including people like Jorge and Andres, who does not slavishly pay homage and swear to follow each and every single deranged idea the president might choose to express. People who display the slightest whiff, the merest suggestion of disagreement with Chavez, or even those who choose a nuanced version of agreement, are rapidly and reliably expelled from the chavista sect. Its autocratic verticalism is the polar opposite of democratic pluralism, of pluralistic decision-making. And that is what many of us in the opposition cannot, will not, and ought not to swallow, Paul. And, we won't.

Now, Paul Cheney, write to me and write to me honestly: would you stand by and allow this kind of hysteria to grip your society without making a peep, without trying to do something to curb it, to reverse it, to regain the basis for a sane citizen dialogue? Can you accept a society where any form of dissent gets you branded an "enemy of the people, of bolivar, and of the motherland" (Chavez's words, not mine) I want to believe that if something like this, difficult as it is to imagine, ever started to happen in San Francisco, you would not stand for it for ten minutes. And neither should you.

Again, urging you to think fairly about this, and looking forward to continuing this little correspondence, if you have the time.

ft

Another email volley...
...somewhat calmer this one...

On Thu, 26 Jun 2003 06:08:36 -0700 (PDT), "Anton" said:
> Second, I have to respond to your response to the
> letter from 'Paul', your token US lefty. I've been
> pondering this for a few days now, and well, I think
> your position is nearly as wrong as his.
>
> Given the state of the world today, I don't think you
> can simply ignore the US in the analysis of any
> country's political situation, especially in this
> hemisphere. The US government may not have the
> influence in Venezuela that it does in, say, Columbia,
> but to dismiss it's influence as "marginal" would seem
> to me to be a mistake nearly as great as casting the
> CIA as South America's puppet masters. The failed coup
> that installed Carmona for a few hours demonstrated
> this -- we can argue about the extent of US
> involvement, but that they were involved should be
> unquestioned.

You know, I really disagree with this. The US did fund organizations that
later got involved in the coup. It also met with a bunch of leaders who
later ended up mixed up in it. That funding was not secret, and neither
were the meetings - both got written about amply in the Venezuelan press.
In the months leading up to the coup, as it became clearer and clearer
that democracy here was going to shit, any number of Venezuelan
political, trade union and business leaders travelled to washington to
talk not just with the gov?t, but also with NGOs, intellectuals,
academics, media, latino organizations, anyone who would listen,
basically. It became such a trend that the government eventually decided
they needed a counterstrategy and started sending delegations of their
own to counter what they perceived as a campaign of disinformation...and
so the chavistas met with the same damn people as the opposition, really
... but you don?t see anyone claiming that that amounts to US support of
the gov't...

What happened is that all those meetings, which were public and numerous,
and which happened with any number of organization, including but
definitely not limited to those who ended up in the coup, then got
reinterpreted after the fact as a conspiracy. But I've never seen any
particularly convincing evidence to that effect - a lot of innuendo and
supposition, yes, but no convincing connecting lines.

The fact is that the internal political dynamic in Venezuela in April
2002 was so white hot, had such a massive charge of endogenous anger and
mobilization and polarization and outrage, that April 11th was going to
happen regardless. I was there, I was at that march, I was on Avenida
Baralt 5 minutes before the shootout started with a camera crew in tow.
NOBODY that day was thinking about Washington. We, all 800,000 of us
marching that day, were rather more concerned with the mounting
authoritarianism we saw in Ch?vez and our imminent fear for the future of
our country if somebody didn't stop him.

And you know what, looking back, we weren't wrong to demand he leave
office immediately - the country really couldn't take it anymore. Today,
due to his mismanagement and narcissistic excess, millions - literally
millions - of Venezuelans who were barely hanging on to a poor but not
destitute existence in April 2002 now find themselves without enough to
eat. It's a massive tragedy - and that's without going into the costs in
terms of the utter fraying of our democratic institutions, which 15
months on are so deeply screwed up they're arguably beyond repair, at
least in the short run.

But I digress. It's easy for you to abstract from such questions though.
You don't live here. I live here. I have to live with the social and
institutional rot this man will leave behind . . . and this is exactly
what lies behind my exasperation with "Paul" - that the ongoing obsession
with the US, the fixation with US power and US conspiracies, mutes the
debate on, frankly, something that's far more important, interesting, and
worth considering as far as I'm concerned: a society that's slowly but
definitly going down the crapper.

> Personally I see the US, when it comes to Latin
> American politics, as more opportunists and jackals
> than anything -- they'll exploit a situation to their
> advantage, and maybe even stir the pot to try and
> create a situation they can exploit (which is what
> seems to have happened in Chile -- the CIA certainly
> chipped in to help create that "psychology of rampant
> fear that took over the Chilean middle class" you
> mentioned) but they're reluctant to get their hands
> dirty. I'd classify that presence, even if it's not an
> active presence, as something more than marginal.

This is another thing that's hard to explain to people outside the
country - the assumption that the US has a single, organized coherent
policy on Venezuela just doesn't seem to hold. There are evident splits
between various factions in the US foreign policy establishment on what
to do about Ch?vez, with warring leak campaigns between the Otto Reich
hardliners and the softly-softly camp John Maisto leads from the Nat.
Security Council. These splits are open and publicly discussed here, and
the resulting "policy" often ends up being schizophrenic - with part of
the US government wanting to find a modus vivendi with Chavez and another
part of it looking for any chance to confront him they can find. This is
all clearly number 27,392 in Colin Powell's list of things to worry
about, and neither side really seems powerful enough to impose its view
on the other. But if the US can't get its shit together on its Venezuela
policy, if it can't even decide what its Venezuela policy is, then how
the hell are they suppose to have some Rasputinian stranglehold on
anything important that happens here?

> Let me put it this way. If the opposition to Chavez
> hadn't known they could count on some support from the
> US, do you think the April coup -- without the full
> support of the military, and with a divided populace
> -- would have even happened?

Definitely.

ft

Your favorite feature is back...
Mail from a US lefty!

Dear Francisco

When I began reading about the recent upheavals in Venezuela I was struck by the parallel between the US involvement in  Allende's Chile and the possibility of the same in Venezuela, both economically and politically.  There are more world-wide examples of course, many of them of them in the Americas, but I'm interested in your knowledge of the US involved in the Venezuelan oppostion.  

As You know the US involvement in Chile was not just with the military, but also with  trade unions, the church, the press (El Mercurio),  and various multinationals with vested interests.

You must have felt the US has had a hand in the current opposition not only given the history of the US in the region, but it's immediate endorsement of the recent coup.

I would be very interested in your response.

Paul

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

Oh Paul, Paul, Paul...you've inadvertently stumbled into one of my big pet peeves. I've heard this question many, many times from many, many US readers, and I find it deeply annoying and, well, borderline offensive. I've thought about it a lot, and I guess what annoys me is that it betrays this deep navel-gazing strand in American lefty thought, this unwillingness or inability to take Latin American societies in their own terms, to grapple with their complexities, to understand the dynamics that drive them internally. All of that is so boring, though, isn't it, and so detached from the one and only subject American lefties seem to be able to get interested in - US power, US influence, the evil of US power, the evil of US influence, US this, US that, U - S - A ! U - S - A !

The only people I ever run into who seem to think that the US is an important player in Venezuelan politics today are US lefties. I suppose through some NED and USAID grants and a bit of behind the scenes haggling the embassy hacks are doing their bit to bolster organizations they see as belonging to the moderate end of the opposition. Their influence is marginal. The ambassador and the undersecretary of state for hemispheric affairs can't seem to agree on what their venezuela policy is, and nobody, here or there, seems to care that much. Almost everyone in Venezuela, whether chavista or anti, recognizes that both in direct logistical terms and indirect ideological terms, Cuba has a far stronger impact on Venezuelan politics than the US does. Can you deal with that?

My point being...get over yourselves already! Not everything that happens in Latin America is the result of some plot hatched in a smoky room at the State Dept., y'know? Learn to deal: there was going to be a coup in Chile anyway - because whatever the CIA might have been up to, a huge swathe of Chilean society and almost all of the military supported it. CIA connnivance sure didn't hurt, but for the love of christ, what kind of catatonically self-involved view of the world puts a little CIA logistical and financial help at the center of the analysis, while showing no interest at all in the psychology of rampant fear that took over the Chilean middle class, its order and progress ideology, its deep catholic roots, and its cultural ascendancy over the military? Is it really that difficult, or boring, for you to stop thinking about your own damn country for five minutes and consider the internal dynamics of the societies you're purportedly interested in? Because, you see, these kinds of questions strongly suggest that you're not actually interested in Latin America at all! You're just using Latin America as a screen on which to project your little ideological anti-US-imperialism circle jerk. Enough!

Sorry about that,
ft

Chávez, Totalitarianism, and the fecklessness of the opposition

These days, it seems to happen alarmingly often. And it makes me shudder each time. Antichavista talking heads keep describing the Chávez government as a "totalitarian regime." Like nazism or Stalinism, or Pol Pot's Cambodia.

But do they stop to think about what that actually means?

It takes a bit of a re-read of Hannah Arendt to realize afresh the scale of the historical travesty perpetrated when Venezuelans liken our half-baked autocracy to actual totalitarianism. As a jew who lived through the holocaust, Arendt knew a thing or two about what real totalitarianism is like, of the scale of human suffering it inflicts. Reserving the term mostly for the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, she dissected it with clinical precision.

The first thing to understand about "totalitarianism" is that the term has a precise meaning. It's not just some loose synonym for dictatorship, autocracy, and authoritarianism. For Arendt, it's a unique form of state power, a conceptual category all its own.

Totalitarianism isn't about losing any inhibition in the use mass-scale violence to stay in power: mere dictatorships reach that level all the time. Totalitarianism of the brand pioneered in Germany and Russia in the 1930s goes much further than that. Its aim is not just to silence all sources of political dissent. Its goal is to dominate the totality of each and every thought and activity of each and every citizen each and every day.

As Arendt explains in The Origins of Totalitarianism, this form of political organization is not to be confused with dictatorship, which is much more common historically. Dictatorial violence is politically motivated, politically-rational violence. It's violence that "makes sense" if your main goal is to hang on to power.

Totalitarianism isn't like that. The Stalinist purges could not be explained in those terms. Stalin was willing to put Soviet society through immense dislocation, not just in human but in economic and military terms, even though as Arendt puts it,

None of these immense sacrifices in human life was motivated by a raison d'état in the old sense of the term. None of the liquidated social strata was hostile to the regime or likely to become hostile to the regime. Active organized opposition had ceased to exist by 1930.

In the Soviet Union, dictatorial terror (which is distinguished from totalitarian terror insofar as it threatens only authentic opponents, not harmless citizens without political views,) had been grim enough to suffocate all political life, open or clandestine, even before Lenin's death.

But totalitarianism is not content with that. Going beyond the bounds of the political sphere as traditionally understood, Stalin's totalitarian violence was about gaining total power over everything anyone in Russia did or thought.

In a chilling passage, Arendt explains what this means:

If totalitarianism takes its own claim seriously, it must finish once and for all with 'the neutrality of chess,' that is, with the autonomous existence of any activity whatsoever. The lovers of 'chess for the sake of chess,' are not absolutely atomized elements in a mass society whose completely heterogenous uniformity is one of the primary conditions for totalitarianism. From the point of view of totalitarian rulers, a society devoted to chess for the sake of chess is only in degree different and less dangerous than a class of farmers for the sake of farming.

This is what the "total" in "totalitarian" means - a system of government that will use any amount of violence it takes to control literally everything that happens in that society - even something as seemingly harmless as a citizen's relationship towards chess. Authoritarianism might be contented merely with absolute control over the political sphere. Totalitarianism is about total control over everything - about eradicating any basis for social organization not dominated by a central authority.

To achieve this level of control, the state must destroy any alternative links that could imaginably call into question any citizen's loyalty - it must "atomize" its citizens, destroying any alternative objects of identification or repositories of loyalty they might have. This it does through fear:

Mass atomization in Soviet society was achieved by the skillful use of repeated purges which invariably precede actual group liquidation. In order to destroy all social and family ties, the purges are conducted in such a way as to threaten with the same fate the defendant and all his ordinary relations, from mere acquaintances up to his closest friends and relatives.

The consequence of the simple and ingenious device of guilt by association is that as soon as a man is accused, his former friends are transformed immediately into his bitterest enemies; in order to save their own skins, they volunteer information and rush in with denunciations to corroborate the nonexistent evidence against him; this obviously is the only way to prove their own trustworthiness. Retrospectively, they will try to prove that their acquaintance or friendship with the accused was only a pretext for spying on him and revealing him as a saboteur, a Trotskyite, a foreign spy, or a Fascist. Merit being gauged by the number of your denunciations of your closest comrades, it is obvious that the most elementary caution demands that one avoid all intimate contacts, if possible - not in order to prevent discovery of one's own secret thoughts , but rather to eliminate, in the almost certain case of future trouble, all persons who might have not only an ordinary interest in your denunciation but an irresistible need to bring about your ruin simply because they are in danger of their own lives.

In the last analysis, it has been through the development of this device to its farthest and most fantastic extremes that Bolshevik rulers have succeeded in creating an atomized and individualized society the like of which we have never seen before.

Take a minute to think about that passage, about the extent of domination, terror and violence it reveals, the next time you hear Antonio Ledezma describe the Chávez government as totalitarian.

"Totalitarian governments," Arendt concludes,

are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional and unalterable loyalty of the individual member. Such loyalty can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party. Totalitarian domination is something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can achieve, namely, the permanent domination of each single individual in each and every sphere of life.

In other words, make no mistake about it: if the Chávez regime was "totalitarian", I would be dead, and so would you.

The tendency to call the Chávez government "totalitarian" lays bare, to my mind, a worrying contempt for history, a kind of idiotized indifference towards the past. The comparison is so shrill, so obviously detached from any kind of serious consideration, that it suggests to me a deeply worrying contempt for the meaning of the words used in the public sphere.

Yet the charge is so commonplace it's become almost a cliche, constantly hurled through the media by opposition leaders who've clearly never stopped to consider that if they lived in anything even approaching the kind of regime they claim to be oppose, making such a statement in public would certainly cost them their lives.

Back, for now

Well, the site has been off-line for a while now, obviously. The reason, in short, is that blogger.com decided to do me wrong: some incomprehensible technical glitch kept me from posting for a long time.

For what is worth, Weisbrot did write a response to my criticism, which you can read here. After reading it, and going through a bit of a back-and-forth with him, I started to feel bad about some of what I'd written earlier, because I accused him of bad faith and intellectual dishonesty, and those are very serious charges. After our back and forth, though, I've come around to the view that there's more ignorance than ill intention to his propagandizing: again and again in our mails he kept making arguments that made it clear he's not familiar with basic facts about the Venezuelan economy that any serious writer on the subject really ought to know about.

But that's neither here nor there, I suppose.

What happened to "What happened to profits?" ?

Update: The offending briefing paper by Mark Weisbrot seems to have been taken down from the CEPR.net website. The link to the paper is gone from the CEPR site's main page, and the old URL (http://www.cepr.net/what_happened_to_profits.htm) is yielding a 404 ("file not found") error now.

Why? I don't know.

In personal email to me, Weisbrot promised a rebuttal. Oughta be good.

Note to Mark Weisbrot:
Kindly remove head from ass.

José Bové is coming, as well as Ignacio Ramonet of Le Monde diplomatique, and Danielle Mitterand…a virtual who’s who of the most clueless strata of the anti-globalization movement. The occasion is the chavista commemoration of the glorious events of April 11th-14th, and the government sponsored festivity can be expected to dissolve into three days of feverish hero-worship for President Chávez.

Among the lesser known, but perhaps most dangerous, of the featured speakers is one Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the grandiloquently named Center for Economic and Policy Research. A member in good standing of the DC lefty think-tank community, Weisbrot strikes me as the most dangerous kind of chavista apologist, because the propaganda he publishes out of CEPR comes cloaked in the stylistic conventions of academia, and that makes it look to the uninitiated like more or less credible independent analysis. If you’ve followed the issues he covers, though, you can recognize his writing as more or less unadulterated government propaganda. In a sense, what’s most remarkable about his analysis is its failure to go an inch beyond tired old chavista arguments founded on misrepresentation that enjoy near-zero credibility among anyone who knows anything about the issues at hand.

Through What happened to profits?, his latest CEPR Briefing Paper, Weisbrot joins the chavista campaign to sling mud at Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, and specifically at the way it used to be run in the pre-Chávez era. This he does with all the intellectual honesty of, well, a chavista.

At the center of his critique is the claim that PDVSA’s fiscal contributions to the Venezuelan state are significantly lower now than they were immediately following nationalization in 1976, or when compared to other state-owned oil companies in the region. Thus, he concludes, PDVSA’s performance has been very poor and the company was in serious need of a massive overhaul.

Weisbrot is careful not to lie outright, but almost all his arguments are deeply misleading. Take, for instance, this jewel of a sentence: “In fiscal year 2001,” he writes, “the state-owned oil company in Mexico, PEMEX, had sales of $46.5 billion and contributed $28.8 billion to the government budget. By contrast, in 2000 PDVSA took in $53.2 billion and paid only $11.6 billion to the government of Venezuela.” What he’s saying is, strictly speaking, true. It’s also wildly misleading. It’s worth taking a few paragraph to unpack just how many tricks and misrepresentations are packed into this one, harmless-seeming sentence.

To start with terminally silly to compare PDVSA to PEMEX in this way, because the two companies are structured radically differently. While PEMEX produces 3.7 million barrels a day and sells almost exclusively oil produced in Mexico, PDVSA produces (or used to produce) about 2.3 million b/d and, more importantly, sells oil from all over the world. PDVSA is a major player in the intermediation business, meaning that much of what it does is buy oil from third-party producers (Ecuador, say, or Nigeria) and use its huge marketing and distribution network to sell it on in international markets. Indeed, in 2001, over half the oil PDVSA sold ($22 billion out of $43 billion in total sales abroad) was not produced in Venezuela.

Of course, intermediation and production are vastly different businesses, and not surprisingly production is vastly more profitable. Weisbrot and Baribeau’s trick is to conflate the two: they report PDVSA’s combined profit margin for both intermediation and production and then compare that number with a company that’s all production and no intermediation. Apples and oranges. Had Weisbrot excluded the third-party produced oil PDVSA sells from the equation, he would have found that in 2000 PDVSA exported $26.7 billion worth of Venezuelan produced oil and contributed $12.7 billion to the government. That’s 48% of its Venezuelan sales going to the state, and that’s not that far off from PEMEX’s reported 62%.

So that’s trick number one, and it sets the tone of appalling intellectual dishonesty that permeates the briefing paper. However, you could argue that PEMEX still contributes 14 percentage points of its domestic sales more to the state than PDVSA. This, again, is true but misleading.

The reason is two-fold. In the first place, notice that while Weisbrot entitles his paper “What happened to profits?” what he’s actually talking about is not profits but fiscal contributions. PEMEX surely gave the Mexican government a lot of money in 2001, but it also yielded a $3 billion after-tax loss. This suggests strongly that its hefty contribution to the Mexican state was not a function of sterling management or world-beating profitability, but rather it was a function of getting milked by the Mexican government far beyond what is wise. (An appreciation that accords with PEMEX’s reputation as one of the worst managed state oil companies around.) PDVSA, meanwhile, reported a modest after tax profit in 2000.

You won’t learn that from reading Weisbrot and Baribeau’s piece, though.

The second little bait-and-switch is tucked away in a footnote to the paper. Comparing the number of dollars the Venezuelan, Mexican and Brazilian governments perceive per barrel of oil produced, the paper reveals an anomaly. In 1999 and 2000, PEMEX’s fiscal-contribution-per barrel produced was actually higher than the market value of those barrels. A footnote handily explains that this is due to “revenue from downstream operations.” Elsewhere in the paper, Weisbrot and Baribeau slam PDVSA for the disastrous performance of its domestic downstream operations, noting that PDVSA’s losses in that business “have climbed from $75 million in 1998 to $1.35 billion in 2001.”

What’s this about? What are those mysterious “domestic downstream operations?”

From what I can make out, what he’s talking about is basically internal sales, especially gasoline sales. Once you make that connection, then those climbing losses are pretty easy to understand. Gas is absurdly cheap in Venezuela – about 21 cents a gallon (figuring it at the official exchange rate.) Just a couple of days ago, I filled up my old beater, which has a 19-gallon gas tank, for less than 4 bucks. In Mexico, you still get relatively cheap gas, but they at least charge you enough for PEMEX to recoup costs and even make a bit of profit. When you go through the two companies’ statements to the SEC, you find out that PDVSA was selling gasoline domestically at $7/barrel in 2001, while PEMEX was selling it at $35/barrel. The simple fact is that 7 bucks a barrel is far below the cost of production – there’s a huge implied subsidy here, and somebody has to pay for it. In this case, it’s PDVSA.

Now, it’s a bit fresh to blame PDVSA for this situation – it is, after all, the government that sets retail gasoline prices in the Venezuelan market. It’s especially fresh to use a 1998-2001 comparison period since it’s hard not to notice that this was a time when Hugo Chávez was in power. So lets see what’s happening here: Chávez takes power. Chávez refuses to index up the cost of gasoline even in bolívar terms, - the price of gas today is the same Bs.90 per liter as it was in 1998, even though the exchange rate has climbed from Bs.483:$ to Bs.1600:$. So Chávez forces PDVSA to sell gasoline at far, far below its cost of production, making PDVSA to absorb a billion-dollar loss on domestic gas sales. Follow me so far? Good, because here’s where it gets weird: Seeing this situation, philochavista first world economists pounce, but not on the government for subsidizing the ecocidal overuse of fossil fuels, but rather on PDVSA! You read dark mutterings about poor performance, and they wonder how on earth the company could possibly lose all this money on “downstream domestic operations.”

This is just absurd.

In fact, if you factor out the gasoline subsidy forced on PDVSA by the government, the company’s fiscal contribution rises to 53% of Venezuelan barrels exported. And if you factor out PEMEX’s multibillion dollar after-tax loss from its fiscal contribution, (as a way of getting at what PEMEX could actually afford to contribute and still break even) you find that a rationally run PEMEX might have contributed 54% of its domestic oil sales to the government. Funny, huh? When you actually go through the numbers, you realize that the seemingly huge disparity between the two companies’ fiscal contributions are explained almost totally by bad fiscal policymaking in Mexico, an absurd gas subsidy in Venezuela, and, more than anything else, by Mark Weisbrot’s rampant will to deceive.

So just taking apart that one sentence you start to get a feel for the guy’s modus operandi, for his blithe disregard for the basic standards of intellectual honesty one ought to be able to expect from a serious academic.

I have to say I’m especially galled by his cowardly pussyfooting on the gas subsidy: this is, after all, an anti-globalization activist, someone you might reasonably expect to see standing up against a policy as criminally stupid as subsidizing global warming. If he really feels that these domestic market losses are unacceptable, then he should come right out and say so. He should say, straight out, that there are far better ways of spending $1.3 billion a year than subsidizing gas. Who could possibly argue with him if he did?

Hugo Chávez, that’s who!

Advocating gas-price hikes is the ultimate political no-no here. Ever since a gas-price increase set off mass looting throughout the country on February 27th, 1989, the issue has been a kind of third-rail in Venezuelan politics - especially in irresponsible lefty/populist circles. So arguing against the gas subsidy openly would put Weisbrot and Baribeau at odds with the idiotic Chávez administration policy of wasting billions of dollars in scarce resources to subsidize a toxic chemical that benefits middle-class car drivers disproportionately. They couldn’t do that, clearly! The solution? Hide behind a sterile sounding euphemism - “downstream operations in Venezuela” – and blame it on PDVSA, to boot!

But there’s more. Weisbrot devotes half the paper to a searing critique of the pre-Chávez drive to open up the Venezuelan oil industry to foreign capital, alleging that the higher operating costs and lower tax rates on these deals has taken a major bite out of PDVSA’s profitability. Again, his critique is so bizarrely warped, it’s impossible to understand it aside from an ulterior political motive.

First, you need a bit of background. In 1996, PDVSA found itself with a dilemma. While the country had gigantic oil reserves, most of the yet-to-be-exploited oil here was extra-heavy crude in the east of the country. This is not commercially attractive oil. Basically, it’s gunk, a semi-solid black sludge rather than the flowing syrupy black liquid you probably picture when you picture crude petroleum. Eastern crudes here are so thick and laden with impurities, geologists don’t even call it oil but rather “bitumen” – not-quite-oil.

Meanwhile, much of the “good oil” in the country comes from wells in the West of the country that have been in operation, in some cases, since the 1930s. These are the highly depleted deposits known as “marginal fields,” or “squeezed-out oranges” as an oil exec once put it to me. The wells still have some exploitable oil in them, but not very much. Understandably, it takes far more effort, expertise, technology and investment to get oil out of these marginal fields than out of a brand spanking new oil field.

In 1996, PDVSA decided that it wanted to expand its production, to boost it all the way to 6.7 million b/d by 2007. Had the plan been carried out, Venezuela would have become the world’s second leading exporter after Saudi Arabia, and PDVSA would have been able to take advantage of the huge marketing and distribution networks it’s currently using to market third-party crudes. (In fact, much of the reason those extensive marketing and distribution networks were set-up in the first place was the expectation that, in time, Venezuelan production would expand enough that they could be devoted to selling high-margin Venezuelan oil rather than low-margin third-party oil.) However, without much in the way of fresh deposits of light or medium crudes to exploit, PDVSA had to expand domestic production through marginal fields, and through Eastern bitumen. That’s just the geological hand the country was dealt.

But PDVSA had neither the technology, the expertise, nor the financing needed to put these expensive-to-start-up projects into operation. The Eastern bitumen projects required building “upgrading facilities,” a new(ish) technology that amounts to pre-refining bitumen from a semi-solid gunk to something closer to standard crude oil (which receives the somewhat paradoxical name of “synthetic crude.”) PDVSA didn’t have the money or the technology to do this, but the foreign majors did, so PDVSA asked the big foreign companies to come in and build the upgraders. The cost of a barrel of synthetic crude would be significantly higher than that of nice, naturally light crude, but at around $9-10 a barrel it was still a pretty good deal.

However, these upgrader facilities would cost billions of dollars to build. The capital costs were so large that the pre-Chávez government realized it would need to sweeten the deal for the foreign companies to attract them. And the way they chose to do this was by dropping the royalty rate on these projects from the usual 16.67% to just 1%.

This decision comes in for particular scorn in Weisbrot’s piece, which seems to have no idea why the royalty rate was cut in the first place. He produces a handy chart showing how much more money PDVSA would have gotten had it taxed these projects at the previous rate, or at the Petrobras or Pemex rates. It’s a fun bit of mental-masturbation, but meaningless – these projects wouldn’t have been built if the government hadn’t dropped the royalty rates, because they would not be profitable at that higher rate. There would have been nothing to tax.

Pushing absurdity and intellectual bad faith to the limit, the paper then turns around and slams PDVSA for its rising capital costs during that period – precisely the time when the costly high-tech upgrader facilities were being built. “Capital expenditures on domestic downstream operations soared to $2.517 billion in 2001,” they argue, adding that “rom the viewpoint of standard financial accounting these investments do not make sense if they produce a low return for the shareholders.”

Now, perhaps Weisbrot and Baribeau aren’t quite clear on the concept of investment, but the word usually denotes a one-time expenditure meant to generate profits over a long period of time – some 30 years, for these projects. So looked at in context, their argument dissolves into utter meaninglessness, something like: it costs a lot of money to build expensive things meant to pay off in the long run. Gotcha…why is that bad again?

(Weisbrot and Baribeau also criticize a tax-reform effort carried out in 1992 that’s too boring to go into here, but on that score too their critique is highly misleading.)

The authors then segue into a critique of the marginal field operating contracts, where foreign companies were hired to squeeze out the last few remaining drops from old, worn out fields. Here, as far as I can tell, their argument boils down to an impassioned denunciation of the fact that more-expensive-to-operate oil fields are less profitable than less-expensive-to-operate oil fields. It’s a “well, duh!” moment, though that doesn’t stop them from regaling us with all kinds of facts, figures and charts detailing the scale of this outrage.

The argument is so silly, even Weisbrot seems to realize it, admitting that these marginal fields are still profitable, but arguing that “it is questionable if it is worth it for PDVSA to produce such high-cost oil, since it presumably counts as part of the country’s OPEC quota and displaces other oil that could be produced at much lower cost.” But this rejoinder only makes sense if a-you think staying within OPEC makes any sense (which I don’t) and b-you have some kind of spare capacity in low-cost, high-margin fields which you could substitute for the marginal field production, which Venezuela doesn’t. And why doesn’t it? Due to under-investment and dropping capacity figures in the Chávez era, as a result of Chávez’s policy from squeezing every last dollar from PDVSA until the company could not afford to even maintain production capacity at previous levels.

Weisbrot and Baribeau then complain about the rise in overall production costs – saying from 1997 to 2001 the cost of producing a barrel of oil or equivalent increased by 35.6%, from $2.33 to $3.16. This is the one part of his argument that is not total bunk: PDVSA’s costs have indeed been rising way too fast, and part of this is due to PDVSA mismanagement, particularly to the company’s bloated payroll.

However, even when they get it right, they get it wrong – this time by omitting key parts of the reason for this cost-increase. They casually paper over “details” like the fact that the Chávez administration’s mismanagement of collective bargaining negotiations with oil sector workers in 2001 is a major contributor to PDVSA’s rising cost structure over the past few years, as a Fedepetrol strike backed the government into having to offer a much higher than usual pay rise and setting the industry minimum wage at over three times the legal minimum wage (but that’s Chávez’s fault, not PDVSA management’s, so shhhhh!)

They also fail to mention the way the government’s broader macroeconomic mismanagement made the bolívar more and more overvalued from 1997 to 2001, making the cost of everything you did in Venezuela increased alarmingly…in dollar terms! (Note to the macroeconomically challenged: that’s what it means for a currency to be overvalued.)

(It’s also fun to note that if you go back to the much vaunted PEMEX - which elsewhere in the paper the authors treat as the model of a highly profitable state oil company – their 2001 per-barrel production costs were $3.34 – 18 cents more than PDVSA’s.)

I could keep going, picking apart other, similarly warped aspects of this dreadful paper, but why bother? It’s very hard for me to believe that anyone as bright as Mark Weisbrot who sets out to analyze PDVSA’s performance in good faith, freed from the drive to blacken the company’s reputation for ideological reasons, could have gotten it so, so wrong. Weisbrot and Baribeau are the very worst sorts of pseudo-intellectuals – using the stylistic conventions of academia to produce political propaganda that has the look-and-feel of a serious, respectable policy-paper.

So if you find the tone of this critique somewhat over the top, all I can say is that people like Weisbrot and Baribeau, who refuse to play by even the most stripped down rules of honest academic discourse, forfeit their claim to civility from those who criticize them. They treat reality with disrespect, and deserve nothing but disrespect in return. They are propaganda-mongers masquerading as analysts, and they have become accomplices in the unbelievably misguided drive to dismantle the one institution in the Venezuelan state that, for all its undeniable faults, used to work more or less properly.

Mirador morning

You turn on the tube, and there he is, giving yet another speech. But after a couple of minutes, you start to realize this isn’t just any old Chávez speech. “I’ve had it, frankly,” he says, “the state redistribution system is just not working here.” Weird. You watch on. “The way we’ve been going about distributing the oil money is all wrong, and the time is ripe for a radical rethinking. From now on, the State is just going to redistribute all of Venezuela’s oil revenue equally to each and every citizen. Just send a check to each person with their share. After all, you can’t possibly do a worse job of administering it than we have, so we’re just going to divvy up the kitty and let each of you decide how to spend your share.”

President Chávez did not, of course, say this, nor will he…but just imagine for a second he did. How much money would each Venezuelan get? Guess. Remember now that this is (or was, until recently), the world’s fourth leading oil producer…and it’s a relatively small country, you’d only be splitting the loot 23 million ways. So how much do you think each person would get?

Pick a number.

The thought exercise is Gerver Torres’s, who has been putting it to audiences all over the country for years now. The answers he gets are a real eye-opener. The average response is about $100,000 per capita, yearly. Often he gets far higher estimates. (How much did you guess?) Very rarely do Venezuelans come even close to the actual figure, and almost always they’re shocked to the point of utter, stammering disbelief when they hear it - about $1/day…the price of a plain arepa.

I heard Gerver give this little spiel this morning, at a forum on corruption and how to fight it put on by Mirador Democrático, a local anti-corruption NGO. Gerver, a one-time communist activist turned World Bank technocrat turned right-wing pundit, makes a powerful case that Venezuelans’ fundamental misunderstanding of the scale of their oil wealth makes it impossible to have a serious debate about corruption in this country. If you live in a miserable shantytown with no running water, but you’re convinced that your fair share of national income is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly, then nothing anyone says has the slightest possibility of convincing you that you’re not being skinned by some shady cabal of corrupt plutocrats. All that money has to be going somewhere, right? And you’re not seeing it. Ergo…

Gerver is at pains to explain that the misconception runs right across Venezuelan society – this is not about very poor, uneducated people having nutty ideas. Running his little mental exercise with audiences from widely differing social backgrounds, he gets more or less the same responses every time. University educated Venezuelans are just as taken with the myth of fantastic oil riches as the destitute.

The point was powerfully driven home just a few minutes later when opposition congressman Conrado Pérez took to the podium. Pérez is the chairman of the National Assembly’s main corruption-busting body, the Comptrollership Committee. According to an old parliamentary tradition here, the biggest opposition party in congress always gets to pick the chair of this committee - in this case, it's Acción Democrática. The Comptrollership chair is perhaps the most influential opposition-controlled post in the National Assembly, so you'd think they'd try to get someone good for the job, someone bright and sophisticated and articulate and willing to learn his shit and make the best out of the job.

Oh, but no. Conrado's speech seemed specifically designed to demonstrate even top-level political decision-makers here haven’t the slightest clue of what they’re talking about in terms of oil wealth, corruption, and the relationship between the two. Top heavy with almost infantile clichés, Pérez’s speech was astonishing in terms of sheer ignorance displayed.

His inability to understand basic concepts about corruption seemed almost staged to prove Gerver’s point. Literally minutes after Gerver had finished delivering his devastating critique, we heard the top congressional anti-corruption official argue that if corruption was stamped out completely, the funds freed up would be enough to pay off the entire National debt (about $45 billion, all in), build 100,000 low-income homes, 5,000 schools, and 300 outpatient clinics, not to mention thousands of kilometers of rural roads, and a monthly $18 “school attendance payment” to encourage low-income families to send their kids to school.

I admit I haven't the slightest idea as to what kind of delusional math got him to those figures, but they are nothing short of laughable. The tirade made it plain that this man simply didn't understand a single word of what Gerver had just said! It was amazing to behold - it's not that the guy's understanding of corruption is spotty, it's that Conrado Pérez knows nothing, understands nothing, and can be expected to contribute nothing to the fight against corruption. Still, when you go to the National Assembly and ask them to investigate a corruption allegation, it’s his desk your request eventually ends up at.

[Later, he managed to keep a straight face as he told the auditorium that while AD had had some problems with corruption in the past (the understatement of the decade), that these days 99.99% of adecos are squeaky clean - a claim so transparently false it actually elicited some audible snickering from the audience. The claim only reinforced my belief that adecos are genetically incapable of a straightforward mea culpa...how can you expect them to do better in future if even today they refuse to own up to even the most blatant of their excesses?]

Good grief…hearing this babbling moron talk this morning depressed me to no end. It struck me that the morning conference captured perfectly Venezuela’s basic problem with development. It’s not that we don’t have bright, articulate, talented, intellectually honest people working on the issues of the day. We have plenty! It’s not just Gerver – who is a national treasure – it’s every single other speaker at that forum. People like Rogelio Pérez Perdomo of Iesa and Albis Muñoz of Fedecámaras and everyone else who spoke. Each set out a sophisticated, realistic, thoughtful contribution to the debate on corruption, each had clear and sensible ideas as to how it works and how it ought to be fought. But all have one other thing in common: they have no political power whatsoever, nor any real prospect at getting some.

Meanwhile, the one guy in an institutional position to do something about corruption is a bona fide imbecile.

It’s shocking, really, and deeply sad. The country has problems. The country has people with clear, serious, pragmatic ideas about how to solve those problems. But the country can’t seem to put the two together at all. For some baffling reason, only the clueless get power, while the clued-in are systematically ghettoized into academia or the private sector.

So forget about the angry tirades in the newspapers. Disregard the neverending, terminally boring ideological cat-fights between chavistas and antichavistas. The country's real problem is a shocking, almost limitless tolerance for mediocrity in the public sector. Somehow the gate-keepers to the key positions of political power and influence have no problem at all putting the likes of Conrado Pérez in leading roles. Doubtlessly, he’s earned his stripes by showing unending, canine obedience to AD party leaders, and they’ve rewarded him with a plum appointment. It makes no difference at all to them that he generates the intellectual wattage of a cucumber – he’s their cucumber.

Meanwhile, the Gerver Torreses of the world are reduced to going door-to-door, university-to-university, NGO-to-NGO desperately seeking someone, anyone who will value and reward their commitment to studying key problems honestly, meticulously, and seriously.

What’s sad is that it’s always been like this. It was like this before Chávez got elected, it’s like this now and, depressingly, it very much looks like it’ll be like this after he’s gone. Ultimately, the government/opposition fault-line conceals a far more relevant divide in Venezuelan politics: the huge chasm between the Mediocrity Party and the Excellence Party. The all-consuming fight between government and opposition boils down to a factional struggle between the right and the left wings of the Mediocrity Party. The real tragedy, though, is that Venezuelan society seems to have developed fail-proof mechanisms to make sure the Excellence Party never reaches power.

Life without Janet

Like everyone who knew her, I was shocked and saddened to hear of Janet Kelly’s passing this morning. Janet was that rarest of public figures in Venezuela – truly democratically-minded, fiercely intellectually honest, allergic to extremism, willing to take uncomfortable positions on principle, and gleefully irreverent. Both sides in the political conflict mistrusted her, because she refused to mortgage her brain - or her principles - to either of them. In this, she was truly extraordinary, and in much more than this.

American-born, Janet had lived here since finishing college in the 70s, and became that most endearing of characters: the thoroughly venezuelanized gringa. Though she could never shed her stereotypical American accent, you only had to spend 10 minutes with her to see that Venezuelanity had seeped into her blood. Janet had options, but she chose to make Venezuela her country, and how can you not love that?

At the same time, Janet was such a wonderfully warm, kind person. Weird as hell, too, sure, but truly other-oriented. Looking back now it’s hard not to think that what we’d seen as quirkiness could have been the outward signs of the disease that ultimately claimed her life, depression. It’s too sad to think about, really, that someone like Janet could have taken her own life. Just terrible.

It’s not just a blow to the country, and to English-language publishing in this town, it’s also a terrible loss for this blog. Janet was my favorite reader – always eager to respond with humor, insight, and real appreciation, critical appreciation, which is the best kind. Re-reading her emails now is wrenching – all of that good will that I only reciprocated with a quick “thanks for writing in,” instead of taking the time to really express how much it meant to me that someone of her stature was taking the time to read, examine and comment on my crappy little web-site.

It’s such a sad day. This country needs more, many more Janet Kellys…instead we’ve lost the only one we had.