If you're looking for insight into Venezuela’s seemingly neverending political crisis, section 301.81 of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would be an excellent place to start. The entry reads eerily like a brief character sketch of Venezuela's embattled president, Hugo Chavez: "Has a grandiose sense of self-importance; is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance; requires excessive admiration; has unreasonable expectations of automatic compliance with his expectations; shows arrogant behaviors or attitudes, etc." Actually, it's the DSM-IV's diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD.)
Venezuelan psychiatrists long ago pegged Chavez as a textbook example of NPD. According to the DSM-IV, a patient has NPD if he meets five of the nine diagnostic criteria. But Dr. Alvaro Requena, a respected Venezuelan psychiatrist, says Chavez "meets all nine of the diagnostic criteria." Dr. Arturo Rodriguez Milliet, a colleague, finds "a striking consensus on that diagnosis" among Caracas psychiatrists. Not that it really takes an expert: you only need to watch Chavez's constant cadena broadcasts, where the president blusters, badgers, sings, reports, lectures, recalls and issues orders live on every TV channel and every radio station in the country, carrying presidential speeches that can last anywhere from 5 minutes to 4 hours – one never knows ahead of time.
Of course, lots of politicians have some narcissistic traits - Washington, D.C. is notorious for the size of its egos. NPD, however, is what happens when those traits run amok, impairing sufferer’s ability to interact with the world in a normal way. People with NPD are so intimately convinced of the crushing weight of their historical significance that they lose the ability to interact with the world in anything like a way that most people would recognize as normal.
Narcissism and political power make an explosive combination. As Dr. Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited, puts it, "the narcissist's grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience are exacerbated by real life authority." President Chavez has amassed more real life authority than anyone in Venezuela's contemporary history. When his considerable charisma and oratory ability are added to this mix, the already volatile cocktail described above becomes positively explosive.
Because in the mind of a pathological narcissist, grandiose self-delusion often masking deep insecurities and a fragile sense of ultimate self-worth. The two tendencies co-exist in a sort of uneasy truce. As Dr. Vaknin writes, "the narcissist's personality is so precariously balanced that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism and disagreement."
In Venezuela, over the last five years, Chavez’s narcissism has led to a systematic winnowing of the his pool of truly trusted advisors and confidants (other than Fidel Castro, the one voice Chavez does seem to listen to.) People with views that differ even slightly from the comandante’s fall out of favor quickly, often brutally.
At worst, those who come to disagree openly with the president are openly demonized, humiliated and threatened in cadenas in full view of the whole country. Coming from a man with several paramilitary groups at his command, these must be taken as serious threats.
Total loyalty to the cult of personality is demanded, and total loyalty to the cult of personality is obtained. More than evidently, only rank sycophants and yes-men can survive in an inner circle where such dynamics are at work. Also, clearly, no real policy debate can take place: politicies will not be the result of a process of genuine give and take. Instead, they will consist in a series of military style orders that are mutually incoherent, and very often wildly impracticable.
Thus, at different times, we’ve been promised at least three mutually inconsistent futures for the camastron (the 70s era Boeing 737 Chavez inherited and promptly, man of the people that he is, replaced with a much larger $86 million dollar airbus.) According to which side of the bed the president woke up on this morning, the plane will either ferry poor venezuelans so they can visit the natural wonders of the Canaima flat-top mountains, or it will be the first in a fleet of planes for a future Vene-Caribean airline that will eventually penetrate foreign markets, or it will be used to ferry Venezuelan patients to cuba for various operation, or none of these, or all of these at the same time. None of these plans appears financially viable for a state that is broke, but in combination, they present a kind of burlesque of presidential narcissism at work.
What’s most perverse about Chavez’s narcissism is that some people close to him have clearly learned to manipulate it for their personal purposes. Once you’ve caught on that feeding the president’s narcissism is the way to get ahead in palace politics, what’s the reasonable response? Feeding the president’s narcissism, of course.
Over a period of years, this dynamic has left Chavez worryingly isolated. It’s probably been months or years now since the president has been brought face to face with ideas different than his own, with versions of reality that don’t conform to his own sense of grandeur, (except for when he is conversing with foreign leaders, of course.)
Under those circumstances, anyone’s sense of reality would suffer. But if you’ve started out with narcissistic tendencies, that level of isolation is liable to push you over the edge altogether. With no critical thinkers around anymore, no one willing to sit him down and tell him the awful truth, there are no checks left on his pathological relationship with reality.
To a pathological narcissist, reality is little more than a hindrance. This is the heart of the chavista mania for calling what is real virtual and what is virtual real. As Dr. Rodriguez Milliet points out, "Chavez’s discourse might be dissonant with reality, but internally it’s scrupulously coherent." Chavez's only concern is to preserve his romantic vision of himself as a fearless leader of the downtrodden in their fight against an evil oligarchy. If the facts don't happen to fit that narrative structure, then that's too bad for the facts.
So it’s not that Chavez lies, per se. It’s that he’s locked up within a small, tight circle of confidants that feed an aberrant relationship with reality. To lie is to knowingly deceive. Chavez doesn’t lie.
He invents the truth.
Obviously, there are more than a few inconveniences to having a pathological narcissist as president. For instance, it’s almost impossible for narcissists to admit to past mistakes and make amends. The narcissist’s chief, overriding psychological goal is to preserve his grandiose self-image, his sense of being a larger-than-life world historical force for good and justice. Honestly admitting any mistake, no matter how banal, requires a level of self-awareness and a sense for one’s own limitations that runs directly counter to the forces that drive a narcissist’s personality. Chavez cannot, never has, and never will sincerely accept his own fallibility. It’s just beyond him. And it's impossible for the movement he's created to question him.
Once you have a basic understanding of how their pathological personality structures drive the behavior of people with NPD, Hugo Chavez is an open book. Lots of little puzzles about the way the president behaves are suddenly cleared up.
For instance, you start to understand why Chavez sees no adversaries around him, only enemies. It makes sense: the more he becomes preoccupied with“fantasies of unlimited success, power and brilliance” the harder it is for him to accept that anyone might have an honest disagreement with him. Chavez is a man in rebellion against his own fallibility. "As far as he can see," explains Dr. Requena, "if anyone disagrees with him, that can only be because they are wrong, and maliciously wrong."
People with NPD are strongly sensitive to what psychiatrists call “narcissist injury” – the psychic discombobulation that comes from any input that undermines or negates the fantasies that dominate their mindscape. Chavez clearly experiences disagreement and dissent as narcissist injury, and as any psychiatrist can tell you, an injured narcissist is liable to lash out with virulent rage.
This pattern fits Chavez to a frightening t, if only on the rhetorical level. 95% of his political reasoning is made up of ad hominem attacks on those who dare questioning, along with the paranoid preocupation with plots all around him, a kind of conspiracy mentality the fringier parts of the first world left eat up with relish.
So I wonder. If only. If only those first world sympathizers could sit own and hear him talk, and hear him, and hear him like we Venezuelans have heard him, and heard him, and heard him for hundreds of hours of cadenas spanning back 5 years. If they could know the character like we know the character, after hundreds of hours of forced intimacy through the cadena system. Often, his slurs and insults are almost comically overstated. He insists on describing Venezuela's huge, diverse, and mostly democratic opposition movement as a "conspiracy" led by a tiny cabal of "coup-plotters, saboteurs and terrorists." These attacks not only demonstrate the tragic extent of his disconnect with reality, they have also thoroughly poisoned the political atmosphere in Caracas, creating what's been described as a "cold civil war."
If only they could hear him the way we've heard him...how many of them would earnestly consider someone like Chavez fit to rule their own countries? 3%? More? How many pro-autocracy lefties are there left in Europe?
But we, we have heard him. We've been forced to hear him, we've been obligated to participate in the cult of personality through our state funded TV station and those hundreds of hours of Cadenas. So yes, in Venezuela we know the character well by now.
This is precisely his problem: too many of us know too much about him, about the way he thinks and the way he leads to accept his brand of leadership silently.
Chavez's brand of intellectual intolerance has turned the Venezuelan state into the most autocratic in the Americas short of the one led by his hero, Fidel Castro. It's no coincidence. In Dr. Milliet's view, "narcissism leads directly to an autocratic approach to power." Access to state jobs - a key source of livelihood for millions of Venezuelans - is now openly dependent on civil servant's acceptance of political blackmail. The regime no longer even hides it. Anything is fair when it comes to protecting the narcissist-in-chief's self-image.
The other facts are well known, but they are worth re-hashing one-more time for readers who don't follow all the ins and outs of the democratic process here like we do.
President Chavez has systematically placed diehard loyalists in key posts throughout the state apparatus. When you come to understand his behavior in terms of NPD, that’s not at all surprising: someone who understands the world as a struggle between people who agree with everything he says and does vs. evil will obviously do everything in his power to place unconditional allies in every position of power.
The case of the Attorney General is especially worrying. With nothing like a special counsel statute and no state criminal jurisdiction, the A.G. must approve every single criminal investigation and prosecution in Venezuela. Control this post, and you have total veto power over the entire penal system. For this reason, the A.G. is not a cabinet position in Venezuela like it is in the US. Because of its key role in fighting corruption and keeping watch over the legality of the government’s actions, the A.G. is set up as a fully independent, apolitical office in the Venezuelan constitution. But that clearly wouldn’t do for Chavez. For this most sensitive of offices, Chavez tapped perhaps his most unconditional ally, a doggedly loyal chavista fresh from a stint as vicepresident of the republic. It's like having Karl Rove as attorney general, and no independent council statute!
Not surprisingly, not a single pro-Chavez official has been convicted of anything, ever, despite numerous and well-documented allegations of serious corruption, and a mountain of evidence to suggest the government has organized its civilian supporters into armed militias. The bargain is simple: in return for unrestricted political support, the government remunerates the corrupt and the criminal with total immunity from criminal prosecution. It's quite that simple. The only real requisite for admission into the protection afforded by their control of the state is total submission to the leader's cult of personality. Not surprisingly, many take the bargain.
This dynamic can rise to almost incredible heights. Recently, a former student activist with a murky criminal history and credibly linked with no other than Iraq's Ba'ath Party, for God's sake, was recently named to head an important office at the National Identification Directorate! Can you imagine that? If this is the "model of democracy" Chavez has in mind, he will doubtlessly win the referendum with 100% of the vote and 100% turnout!
And indeed, today, every nominally independent watchdog institution in the state, from the Supreme Court to the Auditor General's office, is run by a presidential crony. With the National Assembly operating like a branch office of the presidential palace, the formal checks-and-balances written into the constitution have become a farce.
Only CNE retains a measure of independent credibility from both sides. Nothing will be possible unless both sides solemnly pledge to accept CNEs eventual decision. They should do this right now.
The reality is that CNE has become a beacon of hope in Venezuelan society. On the verge of the presidential recall, CNE stands as the sole exception, the sole entity of the state that Hugo Chavez cannot control at his pleasure, and my feeling is that, despite, must we recall, it's roughly 3-2 nominal chavista majority, a genuinely independent CNE is the biggest problem in Hugo Chavez's immediate future. All five members of CNE must be uniformly lauded for putting legality ahead of party loyalty so far - a precedent that could serve as the seed for a true democratic awakening in the post-Chavez period.
Some may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one
The goal of a new, more dynamic, more participative and much, much more inclusive Venezuela is now within striking distance. The country need not be dominated by a pathological narcissist much longer.
December 3, 2003
From: Phil Gunson
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 3:22 PM
To: caracaschronicles@fastmail.fm
Subject Re: Caracas Chronicles: Come and get it!
tks frank. just one comment: (and you can use this if you want on yr blog) i think you`re wrong about the 1.2m public sector workers. haven`t you forgotten that a lot of them work for the opposition (alfredo pena or enrique mendoza or the salas family etc)? so there aren`t 1.2m public sector workers under threat, but a smaller figure. obviously central govt has the lion's share (esp. in the health and education sectors, i guess, plus the armed forces and pdvsa), but it`s not the whole 1.2m.
cheers//phil
---------
Phil,
Right you are. I'll look up the actual figure.
(still, the opposition only needs to peel off a few of them)
ft
ps: What are the Ba'ath Party of Venezuela estimates for the reafirmazo? didn't they have a satellite operation, like AD?
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 3:22 PM
To: caracaschronicles@fastmail.fm
Subject Re: Caracas Chronicles: Come and get it!
tks frank. just one comment: (and you can use this if you want on yr blog) i think you`re wrong about the 1.2m public sector workers. haven`t you forgotten that a lot of them work for the opposition (alfredo pena or enrique mendoza or the salas family etc)? so there aren`t 1.2m public sector workers under threat, but a smaller figure. obviously central govt has the lion's share (esp. in the health and education sectors, i guess, plus the armed forces and pdvsa), but it`s not the whole 1.2m.
cheers//phil
---------
Phil,
Right you are. I'll look up the actual figure.
(still, the opposition only needs to peel off a few of them)
ft
ps: What are the Ba'ath Party of Venezuela estimates for the reafirmazo? didn't they have a satellite operation, like AD?
December 2, 2003
Fruitless speculation
i-Instant spin:
(or, how to put a brave face on a situation that actually isn't that bad.)
The Coordinadora Democratica's latest statement does throw some cold water, a bit, on those of us who were holding out for 4 million signatures.
3.6 million is the total, according to the opposition coalition.
The opposition failed to turn out as many people to sign as it will need to turn out to vote when a recall referendum does take place. (When, not if.) In fact, the referendum now looks likely to be agonizingly close.
[Embarassingly the CD's arithmetic appears to be slightly off - if you add up their state by state numbers you get 3,612,411 votes...not the 3,602,051 they're trumpeting as a headline figure! It's the kind of snafu we expect from chavismo, but from you guys?! Come on! Aren't you all supposed to be engineers?]
Up next: an arduous and hard-fought verification process, again with the Carter Center and the OAS acting as observers.
If chavismo manages to peel off, say, 10% of the signatures for one reason or another (e.g. mis-signed forms, double signings, and forms maliciously mis-signed by chavistas to give rise to fraud claims down the line) you might really looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of about 3.2 million valid signatures. More than enough for the object at hand legally speaking, (legally, 2.4 million sigs is what they needed) but visibly not enough to recall Chavez.
Now, this will dampen spirits in the opposition, but only to a certain extent. Even a 3.2 million figure would signal the failure of the government's extensive campaign to scare people into not signing. This is an important and well documented reality, and one the government hasn't even bothered to conceal, really.
Now, I understand the notion of a government holding hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs hostage for its own petty political reasons may strange to first world readers. Again, this is the sort of thing we're getting at when we say Chavez is destroying Venezuelan democracy.
Check out this pretty picture, taken in Paraguana Peninsula, and marvel at its subtlety. The sign is posted just outside the world's largest oil refining complex, Amuay-Cardon, which employs thousands of public sector oil industry workers:
[Thanks to Devil's Poop for the photo.]
Translation: Your vote is secret, your signature isn't.
Signs like this one were posted in many parts of the country.
This was the simple, obscene slogan adopted by the regime in the weeks leading up to the signature gathering drive. "If you sign, we'll know about it, and we'll fire your ass." Lovely! Such revolutionary fervor, such earnest idealism! Wouldn't you just like to read a column by Mark Weisbrot or Ignacio Ramonet explaining the philosophical/ideological import of this heart warming new revolutionary doctrine? It'd be great fun! Doing the memory of Salvador Allende proud with these shenanigans, aren't we?
(Flight of Fancy: Just imagine the gasket Allende would have blown if he heard of such tactics being used on his behalf! There, in a nutshell, is the difference between integrity and no integrity.)
This kind of intimidation was, by all reports, widespread. Notice the crudely painted PDVSA logo and the acronym on the sign - PCP. No, it's not the drug this particular fanatic was taking when devising the slongan and painting the sign. It's Prevencion y Control de Perdidas, PDVSA's internal security force - a kind of corporate police force. It does not take a genius to put two and two together and understand what is at stake here. (In many cases I've heard of anecdotally, the threats were verbal, direct, and explicit.)
It didn't work. They really thought if they could take out those 1.2 million state workers (and their spouses, children, parents, anyone who could be linked with them and threatened in a subsidiary way), they could keep the opposition from reaching 2.4 million signatures at all. The strategy just didn't pan out at all.
Think about that sign, think about the attitude reveals, as you read your newspaper stories on the opposition's 3.6 million signatures. "The state is our play thing," is the message. As a government that really does consider itself revolutionary, chavismo can conceive on no separation between State and Government. If they can control it, they'll leverage it for political advantage. How, I ask you, can democratic and pluralistic co-existence take place in this kind of environment? It can't!
So, ask yourself how many state workers will have wanted to sign, but did not dare, because they realized that their signatures would be public domain. In some ways, the headline should actually read "the opposition received 3.6 million signatures, despite the fact that 1.2 million of its key constituents were under explicit threat of serious personal hardship if they signed."
Not surprisingly, anger within the civil administration at these sorts of shenanigans has been in crescendo for a long time. To add insult to injury, many state workers have been going unpaid for months at a time due to government cash-flow problems even at a time of particularly high oil prices, when the state should be flush with cash. Many now find themselves in the somewhat surreal position of being threatened with dismissal from their very demanding jobs, even though those jobs often come with no regular pay checks attached to them or anything like that. This, this will do wonders for worker morale!
It's easy to be flip about it, but quite wrong. It's a really dreadful situation these people are in. Talk to the obstetricians or the nurses at the Concepcion Palacios maternity hospital for details on the life of the unpaid Venezuelan state worker.
Let's be clear about one thing: this "your vote is secret but your signature isn't" bidness is a two-edged sword. When the referendum actually is held, state workers' votes actually will be secret. How many state sector workers who were too scared to sign this time will turn out to vote the rascal out of office when his downfall looks imminent? 300,000? Out of 1.2 million state workers? That may be all we need.
(I won't go into the chavista allegations of opposition fraud because by and large, they're plainly laughable. While some of the complaints might be valid, the main rhetorical lines coming from Comando Ayacucho are so transparently illogical it would be a waste of my (admittedly not very limited, these days) time to debunk them.)
ii-Political dynamics going forward
(or, trying to forecast what Chavez will do: the ultimate mutt's game!)
How this will play out more broadly is always hard to forecast, if for no other reason than that Hugo Chavez is famously unpredictable. So, sure, it's fruitless speculation, but that's never stopped me before! Here goes...
Sure, my corazoncito escualido is disappointed that we did not to reach those 4M signatures. However, from the point of view of stability, this is a good thing, not a bad thing. As my sister Cristina perceptively notes, if there were 4M signatures, the opposition extremists would already be out calling for massive street demonstrations to demand Chavez's immediate resignation, which would be a disaster for stability.
Now that the opposition looks to be several hundred thousand votes short of the magic number (3,757,773 votes), Chavez will not feel so cornered. He could well argue that the opposition still has never recorded the level of support the revolution has recorded. Technically, he's right.
In those circumstances, he might even accept a referendum and work to win it, rather than working to maliciously torpedo it as was his initial reaction. If he plays his hand well, he could conceivably win, and be safely anchored in power until 2007 at least.
On the other hand, the consequences of refusing to play at all would be so grave, and so unpredictable, that Chavez might well calculate he has a better chance to remain in power if he faces the voters.
This would be tremendously healthy for Venezuelan democracy, or what is left of it. Of course Chavez in the middle of an election campaign is never an edifying spectacle, but it would certainly be preferable to have him within the democratic tent pissing out than the proverbial inverse. Certainly, a campaign of all out obstructionism on the part of the government could prove tremendously damaging. With Chavez, you can never tell.
iii-The recall in numbers
(or, how to waste time with excel)
One interpretation of all of this is that Juan Forero was right all along (durn, I hate to admit that - obnoxiously, it's not the first time.) The referendum will be no cakewalk for the opposition. Turnout will be the key - and the government's decision on whether to campaign for a no vote or for people to abstain will be of key importance.
If you can handle just a little more math, I'll illustrate the turnout connundrum.
In 1998-2000 turnout in Venezuela hovered around 55-60%. But as recently as the late 80s it was over 90%. Given the historical weight of this election, it is hard to imagine turnout being anything but high. Meanwhile, since the middle of 2001, opinion polls conducted by a wide variety of Venezuelan and foreign firms have thrown up a quite stable pattern - "If a referendum was held tomorrow would you vote to recall president Chavez?" has been garnering 60-66% yes responses for two years now.
So what are some scenarios?
In Venezuela, we have precisely 12,012,118 voters. Lets look at both the low and high ranges of the polling spectrum.
On the conservative side, if the opposition can get just a 50% turnout for the referendum - that is just over 6 million voters - and 60% of those who turnout give them their support, this would give them 3.6 million votes - the total they got this weekend.
The math is actually very simple:
[ 12,012,118 * 0.5 * 0.6 = 3,603,600 ]
But if they manage to just nudge up turnout to 55% of the electorate, and they could remain at that 60% level of support they would have 3.96 million votes in the bag:
[ 12,012,118 * 0.55 * 0.6 = 3,963,960 ]
If things go well, and they can go towards the top end of their polling range (66%) and can mobilize above the odds turnout (63%), we would be looking at just about five million recall votes - a crushing number.
[ 12,012,118 * 0.63 * 0.66 = 4,994,590 ]
Finally, as a thought exercise, try this:
If the opposition matches both Chavez's level of support from 2000 (59.8 %) and the turnout from that election (56.3%), then we would be looking at 4.04 million votes, because:
[ 12,012,118 * 0.598 * 0.563 = 4,044,128 ]
(It may seem odd that by matching both the turnout and support Chavez had 2 years ago, the opposition gets move votes than Chavez did then. The reason is twofold: the electoral roll is about 300,000 voters larger this time around, due to newly registered voters. Secondly, spoiled ballots are much less likely in a simply Yes/No referendum than in a complex presidential vote. In 2000, incidentally, an alarming 5.3% of ballots were spoiled - almost 350,000 of them - which sparked many suspicions of fraud back then. But just think, a mere 160,000 of those spoiled ballots would put the opposition over the top of the magic number!)
Punchline: if the opposition manages to maintain its 2-year support trend (60-66%,) and can match or exceed the 2000 turnout (which was historically low for Venezuela) there will be enough votes to revoke Chavez.
Everything hangs on the turnout. And the turnout will hang on a combination of citizen bravery in the face of government intimidation, and the opposition's ability to put out a possitive, inclusive message that motivates people who feel excluded to come forward and participate in the democratic process. It really could go either way.
i-Instant spin:
(or, how to put a brave face on a situation that actually isn't that bad.)
The Coordinadora Democratica's latest statement does throw some cold water, a bit, on those of us who were holding out for 4 million signatures.
3.6 million is the total, according to the opposition coalition.
The opposition failed to turn out as many people to sign as it will need to turn out to vote when a recall referendum does take place. (When, not if.) In fact, the referendum now looks likely to be agonizingly close.
[Embarassingly the CD's arithmetic appears to be slightly off - if you add up their state by state numbers you get 3,612,411 votes...not the 3,602,051 they're trumpeting as a headline figure! It's the kind of snafu we expect from chavismo, but from you guys?! Come on! Aren't you all supposed to be engineers?]
Up next: an arduous and hard-fought verification process, again with the Carter Center and the OAS acting as observers.
If chavismo manages to peel off, say, 10% of the signatures for one reason or another (e.g. mis-signed forms, double signings, and forms maliciously mis-signed by chavistas to give rise to fraud claims down the line) you might really looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of about 3.2 million valid signatures. More than enough for the object at hand legally speaking, (legally, 2.4 million sigs is what they needed) but visibly not enough to recall Chavez.
Now, this will dampen spirits in the opposition, but only to a certain extent. Even a 3.2 million figure would signal the failure of the government's extensive campaign to scare people into not signing. This is an important and well documented reality, and one the government hasn't even bothered to conceal, really.
Now, I understand the notion of a government holding hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs hostage for its own petty political reasons may strange to first world readers. Again, this is the sort of thing we're getting at when we say Chavez is destroying Venezuelan democracy.
Check out this pretty picture, taken in Paraguana Peninsula, and marvel at its subtlety. The sign is posted just outside the world's largest oil refining complex, Amuay-Cardon, which employs thousands of public sector oil industry workers:
[Thanks to Devil's Poop for the photo.]
Translation: Your vote is secret, your signature isn't.
Signs like this one were posted in many parts of the country.
This was the simple, obscene slogan adopted by the regime in the weeks leading up to the signature gathering drive. "If you sign, we'll know about it, and we'll fire your ass." Lovely! Such revolutionary fervor, such earnest idealism! Wouldn't you just like to read a column by Mark Weisbrot or Ignacio Ramonet explaining the philosophical/ideological import of this heart warming new revolutionary doctrine? It'd be great fun! Doing the memory of Salvador Allende proud with these shenanigans, aren't we?
(Flight of Fancy: Just imagine the gasket Allende would have blown if he heard of such tactics being used on his behalf! There, in a nutshell, is the difference between integrity and no integrity.)
This kind of intimidation was, by all reports, widespread. Notice the crudely painted PDVSA logo and the acronym on the sign - PCP. No, it's not the drug this particular fanatic was taking when devising the slongan and painting the sign. It's Prevencion y Control de Perdidas, PDVSA's internal security force - a kind of corporate police force. It does not take a genius to put two and two together and understand what is at stake here. (In many cases I've heard of anecdotally, the threats were verbal, direct, and explicit.)
It didn't work. They really thought if they could take out those 1.2 million state workers (and their spouses, children, parents, anyone who could be linked with them and threatened in a subsidiary way), they could keep the opposition from reaching 2.4 million signatures at all. The strategy just didn't pan out at all.
Think about that sign, think about the attitude reveals, as you read your newspaper stories on the opposition's 3.6 million signatures. "The state is our play thing," is the message. As a government that really does consider itself revolutionary, chavismo can conceive on no separation between State and Government. If they can control it, they'll leverage it for political advantage. How, I ask you, can democratic and pluralistic co-existence take place in this kind of environment? It can't!
So, ask yourself how many state workers will have wanted to sign, but did not dare, because they realized that their signatures would be public domain. In some ways, the headline should actually read "the opposition received 3.6 million signatures, despite the fact that 1.2 million of its key constituents were under explicit threat of serious personal hardship if they signed."
Not surprisingly, anger within the civil administration at these sorts of shenanigans has been in crescendo for a long time. To add insult to injury, many state workers have been going unpaid for months at a time due to government cash-flow problems even at a time of particularly high oil prices, when the state should be flush with cash. Many now find themselves in the somewhat surreal position of being threatened with dismissal from their very demanding jobs, even though those jobs often come with no regular pay checks attached to them or anything like that. This, this will do wonders for worker morale!
It's easy to be flip about it, but quite wrong. It's a really dreadful situation these people are in. Talk to the obstetricians or the nurses at the Concepcion Palacios maternity hospital for details on the life of the unpaid Venezuelan state worker.
Let's be clear about one thing: this "your vote is secret but your signature isn't" bidness is a two-edged sword. When the referendum actually is held, state workers' votes actually will be secret. How many state sector workers who were too scared to sign this time will turn out to vote the rascal out of office when his downfall looks imminent? 300,000? Out of 1.2 million state workers? That may be all we need.
(I won't go into the chavista allegations of opposition fraud because by and large, they're plainly laughable. While some of the complaints might be valid, the main rhetorical lines coming from Comando Ayacucho are so transparently illogical it would be a waste of my (admittedly not very limited, these days) time to debunk them.)
ii-Political dynamics going forward
(or, trying to forecast what Chavez will do: the ultimate mutt's game!)
How this will play out more broadly is always hard to forecast, if for no other reason than that Hugo Chavez is famously unpredictable. So, sure, it's fruitless speculation, but that's never stopped me before! Here goes...
Sure, my corazoncito escualido is disappointed that we did not to reach those 4M signatures. However, from the point of view of stability, this is a good thing, not a bad thing. As my sister Cristina perceptively notes, if there were 4M signatures, the opposition extremists would already be out calling for massive street demonstrations to demand Chavez's immediate resignation, which would be a disaster for stability.
Now that the opposition looks to be several hundred thousand votes short of the magic number (3,757,773 votes), Chavez will not feel so cornered. He could well argue that the opposition still has never recorded the level of support the revolution has recorded. Technically, he's right.
In those circumstances, he might even accept a referendum and work to win it, rather than working to maliciously torpedo it as was his initial reaction. If he plays his hand well, he could conceivably win, and be safely anchored in power until 2007 at least.
On the other hand, the consequences of refusing to play at all would be so grave, and so unpredictable, that Chavez might well calculate he has a better chance to remain in power if he faces the voters.
This would be tremendously healthy for Venezuelan democracy, or what is left of it. Of course Chavez in the middle of an election campaign is never an edifying spectacle, but it would certainly be preferable to have him within the democratic tent pissing out than the proverbial inverse. Certainly, a campaign of all out obstructionism on the part of the government could prove tremendously damaging. With Chavez, you can never tell.
iii-The recall in numbers
(or, how to waste time with excel)
One interpretation of all of this is that Juan Forero was right all along (durn, I hate to admit that - obnoxiously, it's not the first time.) The referendum will be no cakewalk for the opposition. Turnout will be the key - and the government's decision on whether to campaign for a no vote or for people to abstain will be of key importance.
If you can handle just a little more math, I'll illustrate the turnout connundrum.
In 1998-2000 turnout in Venezuela hovered around 55-60%. But as recently as the late 80s it was over 90%. Given the historical weight of this election, it is hard to imagine turnout being anything but high. Meanwhile, since the middle of 2001, opinion polls conducted by a wide variety of Venezuelan and foreign firms have thrown up a quite stable pattern - "If a referendum was held tomorrow would you vote to recall president Chavez?" has been garnering 60-66% yes responses for two years now.
So what are some scenarios?
In Venezuela, we have precisely 12,012,118 voters. Lets look at both the low and high ranges of the polling spectrum.
On the conservative side, if the opposition can get just a 50% turnout for the referendum - that is just over 6 million voters - and 60% of those who turnout give them their support, this would give them 3.6 million votes - the total they got this weekend.
The math is actually very simple:
[ 12,012,118 * 0.5 * 0.6 = 3,603,600 ]
But if they manage to just nudge up turnout to 55% of the electorate, and they could remain at that 60% level of support they would have 3.96 million votes in the bag:
[ 12,012,118 * 0.55 * 0.6 = 3,963,960 ]
If things go well, and they can go towards the top end of their polling range (66%) and can mobilize above the odds turnout (63%), we would be looking at just about five million recall votes - a crushing number.
[ 12,012,118 * 0.63 * 0.66 = 4,994,590 ]
Finally, as a thought exercise, try this:
If the opposition matches both Chavez's level of support from 2000 (59.8 %) and the turnout from that election (56.3%), then we would be looking at 4.04 million votes, because:
[ 12,012,118 * 0.598 * 0.563 = 4,044,128 ]
(It may seem odd that by matching both the turnout and support Chavez had 2 years ago, the opposition gets move votes than Chavez did then. The reason is twofold: the electoral roll is about 300,000 voters larger this time around, due to newly registered voters. Secondly, spoiled ballots are much less likely in a simply Yes/No referendum than in a complex presidential vote. In 2000, incidentally, an alarming 5.3% of ballots were spoiled - almost 350,000 of them - which sparked many suspicions of fraud back then. But just think, a mere 160,000 of those spoiled ballots would put the opposition over the top of the magic number!)
Punchline: if the opposition manages to maintain its 2-year support trend (60-66%,) and can match or exceed the 2000 turnout (which was historically low for Venezuela) there will be enough votes to revoke Chavez.
Everything hangs on the turnout. And the turnout will hang on a combination of citizen bravery in the face of government intimidation, and the opposition's ability to put out a possitive, inclusive message that motivates people who feel excluded to come forward and participate in the democratic process. It really could go either way.
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!]
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!
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.
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.)
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.)
December 1, 2003
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.
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!
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
November 30, 2003
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...
> > 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...
November 25, 2003
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
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