Just short...

Well, according to the Coordinadora Democratica, the Reafirmazo amply fulfilled its legal purpose, but fell just short politically. It's a bit of a disappointment for the opposition side, but if anything, it makes the coming dynamic all the more interesting.

I made the following little chart comparing the coordinadora's claimed signature tally, with the vote totals Chavez received on July 30, 2000. In many ways this is apples and oranges, because as everyone knows, tu voto es secreto, tu firma no. (Your vote is secret, your signature isn't, as the hateful slogan of chavista intidation goes.) More on this soon.

[For reasons incomprehensible to my HTML-novice hands, blogger leaves a huge empty space below before the table. Simply scroll down a few screens to see it. Sorry about this. $%(*$)*! bogger!]

Votes vs. Signatures	Chavez 2000	Opp. 2003	% swing	vote Swing
Central Caracas	387,360	359,206	-7.3%	-28,154
Amazonas	14,450	11,533	-20.2%	-2,917
Anzoategui	189,613	187,428	-1.2%	-2,185
Apure	53,527	50,174	-6.3%	-3,353
Aragua	292,915	176,513	-39.7%	-116,402
Barinas	105,207	76,625	-27.2%	-28,582
Bol?var	188,949	123,029	-34.9%	-65,920
Carabobo	303,701	309,682	2.0%	5,981
Cojedes	47,409	38,816	-18.1%	-8,593
Delta Amacuro	25,157	10,005	-60.2%	-15,152
Falc?n	131,304	129,403	-1.4%	-1,901
Gu?rico	98,481	71,210	-27.7%	-27,271
Lara	237,238	238,361	0.5%	1,123
Mérida	127,362	123,098	-3.3%	-4,264
Miranda	346,003	470,608	36.0%	124,605
Monagas	113,464	126,614	11.6%	13,150
Nueva Esparta	70,805	76,648	8.3%	5,843
Portuguesa	146,628	83,788	-42.9%	-62,840
Sucre	145,219	104,018	-28.4%	-41,201
T?chira	160,194	159,924	-0.2%	-270
Trujillo	116,568	83,031	-28.8%	-33,537
Vargas	58,958	42,821	-27.4%	-16,137
Yaracuy	82,836	93,466	12.8%	10,630
Zulia	312,415	466,410	49.3%	153,995
Total	3,757,773	3,602,051	-4.1%	-155,722
Firmazo source: Coordinadora estimate (www.eud.com)
2000 Election source: CNE (www.cne.gov.ve)

Ode to Francisco Diez
and the style of diplomacy he represents

You know something is seriously twisted in this cosmos when the news you read in serious newspapers start to echo the flip comments you'd read on this site a few hours earlier.

Not 12 hours ago I was guffawing about Chavez's impossible predicament now that the Organization of American States has said they see no reason to suspect fraud over the weekend. What's Chavez gonna do now, argue the oligarchs paid off Cesar Gaviria?!!?

Erm...uh...eeeh...actually, yeah! According to Reuter's, that's precisely what he's gonna do!

"Dr. Gaviria said he saw nothing abnormal. ... I think you overstepped the mark, Dr Gaviria," said Chavez, who also complained that the OAS Secretary General failed to seek a meeting with him during his stay.

Chavez, who has ruled the world's No. 5 oil exporter since 1998, questioned the OAS chief's impartiality, commenting that he "spent a lot of time with the opposition."

Now, several of you have written in to say this is all a giant sprawling conspiracy by the government to stop the referendum. Chavez won't change because Chavez is psychiatrically unable to change...he will never give up, yaddi yaddi yadda.

Now, I don't doubt that you're right, in the narrow sense that Chavez is crazy enough that any rhetorical line is imaginable coming out of him, even one as silly and hare-brained as questioning the integrity of perhaps the best respected diplomat in Western Hemispheric affairs. But it's perfectly clear to me that his room for maneuver is closing down dramatically and quickly. What Chavez intends to do is more and more beside the point.

The contribution the Carter Center and the OAS have made to this state of affairs is hard to overstate. (Yes, I'll admit, I was once quite skeptical myself...mea culpa!) Yet, I know from your emails a lot of you passionately detest the brand of international engagement symbolized by Jimmy Carter and followed closely by Gaviria and OAS. But just think how far we've come by following their comeflor path, think how screwed the government is now, and realize how important Carter/Gaviria style softly-softly diplomacy has been in getting us this far.

Over the weekend, Carter Center and OAS were at their understated best. If you read the Venezuelan press reports closely, for instance, you'll see that Francisco Diez, the Carter Center's main guy for Venezuela, was everywhere, going from one minor flashpoint to another, all day, putting out tiny little fires before they could spread. His intervention was crucial, especially in the nervy first few hours of the drive.

On Friday, when the chavista and the opposition witnesses at the signature gathering center in Parque Central started to beat each other up, Diez was there literally within minutes to do a bit of impromptu mediation and calm nerves down. Later, when a small mob of chavistas attacked Juan Fernandez as he tried to sign in the Carapita Metro station, Diez again was there within minutes to snuff out the violence before it could escalate. Either of these incidents, or any of a number of others (like the idiotic airport shutdown) could have escalated into a major crisis threatening to derail the entire recall process if no one had been there to deal with them in an efficient and professional way.

So add me to Francisco Diez's fan club. Sure, he didn't give any high sounding speeches to the cameras. In fact, if you weren't paying particular attention, it would have been easy to overlook his contribution altogether. He studiously shies away from cameras, as a diplomat should - if you don't believe me, try finding a picture of him on google.

In his own quiet way, Francisco Diez rendered a huge, indeed heroic, service to Venezuela this weekend. The nation will really owe a debt of gratitude to him and his colleagues. Of course it was not only Diez - though one has the feeling his fireman-for-a-weekend assignment was the toughest of the lot. It's also Gaviria himself, and Congressman Ballanger and Congresswoman Watson and Jennifer McCoy and Fernando Jaramillo, and the hundreds on unsung heroes from the OAS/Carter Center observation mission...the quiet people who saved us from our own worst tendencies.

To my mind, when this is all said and done, we're going to have to re-name a couple of prominent Caracas avenues. Avenida Presidente Carter and Avenida Presidente Gaviria - he'd be the first Colombian prez to get his own avenue in Caracas, if I am not mistaken. I like the ring of it already.

About email

I love hearing from readers, and the big bag of mail the blog has been generating these last few days has been really really exciting. Argue with me, agree with me, yell at me, recall my mother, send me a gossip tidbit...it's all great fun.

One thing, though: Please let me know if I am allowed to post your email to the site. I'm enjoying posting lots of your feedback, but the process is much slower if I have to write back to ask permission to post each time. If you don't want your name and/or email address used, just tell me. If you don't want your email posted at all, please make that clear as well.

And keep 'em coming! Once more, I'm at caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm (written the silly way to avoid generating spam.)

Good night

But before you go to bed tonight, put this in your pipe and smoke it. Andy lets it all hang out in the FT.

Foreign observers, including the Organisation of American States and the Carter Center, the pro-democracy foundation, praised the signature drive as generally clean and a model of democratic participation.

"This is democracy in action," said César Gaviria, secretary-general of the OAS. "Ninety per cent of the observers consider the process good, and the rest considered it reasonable."

Great fun. So now, if he wants to block the referendum, Chavez will have to convince the world that Cesar Gaviria and the nobel prize toting Jimmy Carter have both somehow been brainwashed or bought off by the Venezuelan oligarchy...really, great fun...can't wait to see that cadena!

You have mail from: Peter T. Bepler, II

Welcome back!  Were it not for a nod in The Devil's Excrement to your return, I would have missed your postings of the last few days.  I am genuinely excited for Venezuela.  As you pointed out over the weekend, the very process of dealing with Chavismo in all its aspects- the sneaky legalisms that rejected the signatures of the Spring campaign, the daily more ludicrous promulgation of obstructive regulations by the Electoral Commission, and now- the Reafirmazo is done!  And how very much has been learned, how many new leaders have emerged, how many new associations and organizations been formed- in Burke's words, the "little platoons" which are the locus of true democracy- thanks to the very strictures which the Chavistas thought would stifle and defeat the voice of democracy!  Amazing.

My fervent hope is that this remains, through its conclusion, a revolution of the "velvet" type- violence the province only of the paranoid rejectees- that if the Georgians- the Georgians!- can achieve what they did a week ago, the Serbians two years ago, the Czechs ten years ago- then so can Venezuela.  Let that be the guiding vision, and no defeat is possible.  Again, nice to know you are around and engaged, from wherever, as the wheel turns again. 

-------

Thanks for writing in - and add the peruvians to your list as well! I do enjoy these email exchanges from readers, and like I said, I am on break now so I have plenty of time to devote to it.

(Still waiting to hear back from Mark Weisbrot!)

I agree that if the Georgians can do it, Venezuelans can certainly do it, and we will. But I don't agree, and strongly caution against, any kind of cynicism or flip condemnation of the Elections Council, CNE. CNE is the only life-raft that can take Venezuelan Democracy off of the sinking ship that is chavismo and into the safe harbor of fresh elections. I would caution against saying ANYTHING that can undermine its ability to carry out the crucial task at hand. It really is important now. We have to grow up as a country, we cannot keep questioning every institution that we cannot control - that's Chavez's trick, not ours.

ft

They're at it again in Boston...

It's sad that the most important news story in my country in probably two years gets so little space in rich world news stations. We get covered so little, it seems almost impolite to criticize what little reporting is actually done. But that sort of thing is sort of the founding reason for this blog, so that's you're about to get:

I think I more or less understand why so little is written about (and, more to the point, read) about Venezuela in the rich countries. It's only partially the obsessive concern of North Americans with Michael Jackson's extracurricular passtimes and the Bush/Iraq axis that's to blame. It's only partly that Venezuela is fighting the wrong world-historical battle - if chavistas were extremist muslims, boy would things be different! It's true, that's there, but I think there's more.

A big part of the problem is that the political crisis in Venezuela can be a dauntingly complex story and American and European audiences have, by and large, alarmingly little background knowledge to build on. Some of the readers who email this blog blithely admit that they could not quite remember if Venezuela was in Central or South America (hint, it's South!) Given those realities, I understand you won't really have the chance to say anything much profound or detailed in a 4 or 5 minute radio segment, no matter how good are reporter you are. There's just too much you have to explain to go at all deep.

I understand that. Still, I think Juan Forero (full disclosure: my former boss) could've done much better on this Here and Now interview about the firmazo. (from KBUR, the Boston NPR affiliate, I believe - the clip plays on Real Audio.)

Not for the first time Juan just kind of ignores the arithmetic inescapability of the fact that in a country that is 80-90% poor, and 60-65% against the president, it is not mathematically possible for the majority of those who are against the president to be non-poor. (Get an envelope, turn it on its back, and work it out!) It's hard for me to understand why Juan finds it so hard to say this out loud, or write it in the newspaper.

The fact that the opposition is made up, in its majority, of poor people, is not some debatable point, some flight of rhetorical fancy on the part of an opposition spinmeister. It's a fact, easily demonstrable. In Venezuela, 9 out of every 10 households earn less than the about Bs.1 million per month (about $300) it takes to cover basic expenses - food, rent, clothes, doctors, etc. for a family of five, which is the Labor Movement's traditional definition of the poverty line.

Said differently, about 2,500,000 people live in non-poor households. If the national trend hold, half of them are minors, the other half will be voters. That's about 1.3 million non-poor voters in the country - total. Assuming, unrealistically, that ALL of them signed to recall Chavez, they still would account for no more than a third of the 4 million or so signatures the opposition is hoping for.

In my view, it's crucially important for readers to be very clear on this. Cuz yes, there is an awful lot of ignorance about the government out there, but there is even more ignorance about the opposition.

So poor people outnumber rich people in the opposition by 2-to-1. Meanwhile, people who oppose the government outnumber people who support the government also by about 2-to-1.

If a first world news audience doesn't have these things explained, it will be very difficult for them to understand the central dynamic at play in Venezuela today, the basic vector that makes sense for all the others: today, the two thirds of Venezuela's citizens who reject autocracy are making a valliant effort to wrest control of the state from that one third of the citizens who do support an autocratic vision of the country's future. That, basically, is what's at stake here.

This, of course, is all way too messy and confusing for your average gringo newspaper reader, who demands stories fed to him in an easily digestible format where moral ambiguity and complexity is kept to a minimum.

The thing is that these realities are irreducibly complex - they simply don't fit very well into the neat little good-guy/bad-guy story about Venezuela that liberal Americans have been sold so powerfully in propaganda vehicles like The revolution will not be televised - a film that, one shudders to think, will be the only pre-existing frame of reference many listeners to Juan's report will have had on the country. It is therefore tempting to simply leave such complications out of reporting on the opposition movement. Otherwise, it is easy to overwhelm an audience with material that it does not necessarily have the ability to interpret.

The only problem with this is that the image of the opposition that results is fundamentally distorted. The understanding a news listener takes away from an interview like Juan's probably does nothing but reinforce his preconceived disney-style ethical take on the situation. ( Rich = Bad, Champion of the Poor = Good.) And it's very hard to open a serious conversation on that basis.

Sigh. It's quite frustrating for me. My inbox daily makes it clear how very, very little foreign readers actually understand about Venezuela. It makes me sad, but it emboldens me to write more, to try to make sense of parts of this mess for at least the few hundred people likely to read this blog. They'll go and tell their friends, right?

The numbers game

Some of you have written in to ask where on earth I got that 4 million number. I should own up that, well, in some sense I'm being remiss in even publishing numbers at all, even if very few people actually read this site, cuz CNE told us not to. CNE will have to make the final announcement 30 days after the opposition officially turns in the signatures...until that happens, of course, it's all speculation. So, what follows is (very evidently) not official, and could turn out to be wrong...caveat lector.

But frankly, what follows is also already out in the public domain in Venezuela...almost any marginally politically astute Google user could find it. Even watching TV you can intuit what's going on. Opposition leaders cannot talk about numbers out right, but the huge grins on their faces on TV say it all.

However...

My sister, who is a member of an opposition NGO, said the atmosphere at their headquarters last night was understatedly jubilant. They have been warned to avoid overly exhuberant celebration because they are very mindful that this is NOT the referendum. Triumphalism at this point would send the wrong message. Interestingly, even my sister was not given an unofficial number of signatures gathered so far by her NGO leaders last night, which suggests to me they are taking seriously the prohibition on talking about this in public.

(Not everyone in the opposition is being quite so demure. That idjit, Henry Ramos (the AD party chief) flashed four fingers at the camera on globovision last night, big grin on his face, without saying a word...CNE should censure him for it, they really should.)

My sister said the mood at her NGO was essentially party-like - people laughing and singing and dancing into the wee hours. There's a real sense that the referendum can't be stopped at this point...the point of no return is crossed.

The understanding she got was that the opposition is set to outstrip their tally from Feb. 2nd, 2003, when 3.4 million people went out to sign. How many more? Too early to tell. Descifrado.com guesses 4.2 million sigs total, but we won't know for sure until January 10th, which is when the verification period expires apparently.

[For beginners, I should recall here that there are 12 million registered voters in Venezuela. The opposition needs to collect 2.4 million signatures to call a recall referendum. However, on the referendum itself, they will need 3.76 million votes to actually recall Chavez. The rule is somewhat quirky: to recall an official you need to get more votes against him than that official initially received when s/he ran for office - and 3.76 million is how many votes Chavez got in 2000. The feeling in the opposition is that if the signature tally from this weekend tops the 3.76 million mark, Chavez is the political equivalent of the walking dead. And if it's substantially beyond that - over 4 million, say - his eventual recall is almost certain. That's why 4 million is such a psychologically important mark...and why the opposition, by and large, is celebrating.]

So no, I didn't make up the numbers, but no, I can't be sure.

I've spent the last four days with a giant grin on my face.

It could not have gone better.

The psychologically important four million signature mark looks to be within striking distance. The scale of popular mobilization against Chavez has stunned even the most optimistic opposition leaders. The government's attempts to block the process have been disjointed, weak, and inneffective; the president's contention of massive fraud little more than laughable - as OAS, the Carter Center, and the US Congressional delegation observing the process have gingerly (if diplomatically) pointed out.

This weekend, the radical-chic rhetoric of Greg Palast and Naomi Klein and Mark Weisbrot and The revolution will not be televised and all the hipster rich world lefties who have bolstered the Chavez regime has crumbled like the ideological house of cards it has been all along. The heroic vision of the Chavez regime has been comprehensibly debunked along with the myth of mass working class support for the government.

No more satisfying end to the political crisis could be imagined. Chavez will be ousted in strict accordance with the constitution. His presidency will end not in a smoky backroom deal, or through some sort of military hanky-panky, or anything like that. He will be tossed out of office through the direct, officially-registered revulsion of millions of Venezuelans who refuse to stand by while their democracy dies.

The overwhelming, central, crushing fact of political life in Venezuela today - that two in three Venezuelans reject Chavez's autocratic vision for the nation's future - can no longer be wished away or dismissed as opposition media baron rhetoric.

The signatures are in.

The numbers are conclusive.

The nightmare is almost over.

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.