Real appreciation for dummies

Quico says: Economists are constantly going on about the bolivar's "overvaluation," about the horrors of "real appreciation," and the way it "erodes competitiveness in the manufacturing sector." This stuff is important, but I imagine it sounds like total gibberish to non-economists.

With Katy newly exercised about Mision Cadivi and Dutch Disease, I thought this was a good time to try to demystify this whole knot of issues. Here's, in the simplest possible terms, is what we're so worked up about:

("widget" is just a non-sense word economists like to use for their examples)












This is what all those rants about "the overvalued bolivar" are about: an overvalued currency is one that has more purchasing power when you trade it for foreign currency than it does in the domestic economy. When a currency is overvalued, rational businessmen will choose to import more and to produce at home less. "Real appreciation" is what happens when domestic inflation goes faster than currency depreciation - the process that makes a currency overvalued. And in a country where inflation is 20% but the rate of currency depreciation - due to exchange controls - is zero, well, it's not exactly hard to figure out that the currency will get overvalued.

Think about it this way: these days, the only thing that isn't getting more expensive in Venezuela is the dollar. Potatoes are getting more expansive, shampoo is getting more expensive, cars are getting more expensive, everything is getting more expensive...but the price of dollars, magically, stays the same! What does that tell you? That Cadivi is subsidizing the people it sells dollars to, and the group that benefits the most from that policy is the group that buys the most dollars: importers.

Ultimately, this is just the Nth twist on a story line economists love: it doesn't matter how high-minded your intentions are, when you start messing around with the market mechanism you create distortions, weirdly warped incentive-structures you probably didn't foresee, and that usually run counter to your policy goals.

Calling yourself a socialist doesn't change that one bit: Cadivi's architects may think they're reining in the savage free market, but in fact what they're doing is reshuffling incentives in a way that depresses employment in Venezuelan factories and fills the pockets of importers.

(Though there's also the possibility that crushing Venezuelan capitalists by making their products uncompetitive with imports was exactly Chávez's game plan all along.)

One last thing: notice that this mechanism only works if Cadivi actually sells you the dollars you need to import goods and then lets you repatriate your profits at the official rate. Now, ask yourself this: what kind of businessman is more likely to have his Cadivi requests approved, one who goes along and gets along with the revolution, or one who expresses dissent? The Cisneros of the world or the Graniers of the world?

Enforced consent, thine homes are many...

Hey Hugo, spare a thought for this kid

Katy says: Blogging is an interesting hobby. Sometimes it's hard to get worked about about anything in particular, but other times, some new development causes such indignation that posts just burst out of you like a geyser. This post is a geyser.

During the course of my day-job, I have worked on the issue of the ongoing humanitarian crises in Sudan. For years, the government there has used its oil wealth to carry out genocide against its own people. The oligarchs in Khartoum, moved by a sick distortion of Islam, are waging Jihad against their African & Christian country-men and -women, carrying out mass displacements and massacring hundreds of thousands in Southern Sudan and, more recently, in Darfour. These atrocities have been documented in human rights reports from reputed organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

While the international community shuns the government in Sudan and desperately finds a way to put a stop to the series of war crimes being committed in Darfour, our government puts out a press release announcing the visit of Sudan's Minister of Energy as part of a move to increase ties with that nation.

The tone of the press release makes it sound like we're talking about a member of Iceland's cabinet instead of a war criminal. For those of you who don't speak Spanish, it says the visit is to increase relations related to energy, and that the minister is scheduled to meet the President of PDVSA, among other high-ranking government officials. The "distinguished visitor" will also give a talk titled "The Republic of Sudan and its participation in the international system", sponsored by one of Chavez's under-secretaries of foreign affairs, Mr. Abdelbassit Badawi Ali El- Sanosi (I kid you not, that is his name).

The last paragraph is a keeper. It says that since diplomatic relations were established in 2005, ties between Venezuela and Sudan have been "cordial" and "friendly," and that this led to both countries coinciding on many opinions in international forums in 2006. I suspect those opinions had something to do with the alleged "sovereign" rights of states to do whatever they please inside their borders.

While I envision this madman parading around my country as a "distinguished visitor," the memories of the dozens of refugees I have met in my work come to mind. I think of the ones who told me of their villages being indiscriminately bombed by their government. I think of the ones who fled to the jungle, surviving for weeks on water lillies and praying not to be eaten by leopards at night. I think of the maimed, the orphaned and the widowed, and I think of the Chinese, Canadian, Malaysian, Indian and now, Venezuelan oil companies that made - or stand to make - a buck out of all this mayhem.

The boy in the picture accompanying this post is one of the thousands of children whose lives have been devastated by the genocidal acts of this government that Chávez is so willing to engage. I wish I didn't have to show this picture, but we spend way too much time hiding the ugly side-effects of what passes as normal diplomacy. So here's hoping that somewhere, someone within the Chávez administration develops a moral compass, and asks the distinguished Minister what they plan to do about the children of Darfour.

XXIst Century Dutch disease

Katy says: The latest GDP growth figures from the Venezuelan Central Bank are out , and they seem to confirm what is quickly becoming the conventional wisdom on the Venezuelan economy: the current economic boom in Venezuela is based on the government spending cash like there's no tomorrow, and it can't last.

Economists have a term for the distortions this causes: Dutch disease.

This "malady" occurs in countries where there is a significant boom in a sector, usually linked to a sudden increase in the price of a natural resource. The country becomes awash in cash, and this causes an appreciation of the currency - in other words, dollars become very cheap (see Venezuela's official exchange rate).

The easy cash and cheap dollars stimulate both imports and the consumption of non-tradeable goods. In other words, people use their available cash to spend on non-tradeables such as housing, cars, services and the like. Ultimately, it is called a "disease" because this phenomenon undermines the manufacturing and export sector ("tradeables") that are the basis of future growth and push modern economies to become more productive and wealthy (see, e.g., Taiwan).

What are the signs that Venezuela is now suffering from Dutch disease? The sectors that grew the most in the last quarter were commerce, transportation, communications, construction and financial intermediation. In other words, Venezuelans are using all their cash to go shopping, buy more houses, take more bus trips, make more phone calls and increase their credit card debt. They are also spending more on importing stuff: imports grew an astonishing 46.9% in the last year.

Not surprisingly, the Balance of Payments (the difference between the dollars coming into the economy and the dollars going out of it) is running a deficit of US$5.1 billion, shocking for a country undergoing an export boom.

What about manufacturing? Well, it's up, but not by much, and its rate of increase is lower than the average for the economy. In other words, Venezuelans are not using its current boom to import capital, develop technology or become competitive in other sectors. They are using it to buy consumption goods and services and purchase dollars for safekeeping overseas.

These figures only reinforce the idea that the current trend is unsustainable, and that the economy's landing is going to be a hard one.

Schemelfreude

Quico says: According to the latest Hinterlaces poll, two out of three Venezuelans disagree with the proposal for indefinite re-election, and four out of five (including a majority of chavistas) don't want oppo broadcaster RCTV shut down.

"The president's case for socialism doesn't receive the backing of the majority," Hinterlaces big cheese Oscar Schemel says, "instead, the term is associated with social programs and solidarity, rather than a new social and economic order."

Chávez's positive job performance rating is now on 40% - down 9 points since November. An eye-popping 3 out of 10 of the people who voted for him last December wish they hadn't.

"More than a socialist citizens, what we see arising is a liberal citizen."

Listen to Schemel's spiel on my spiffy new podcast player:

Getting out while you can

Katy says: "I think what everyone is hoping is that they'll get expropriated." Manuel's words surprised me, to say the least.

"Why would you say that?" I ask.

He sighs. "Katy, the way things are going here, it's really the best thing that can happen to your business," he says. "When they expropriate you, the government pays for your company in hard cash, and at a price that is probably higher than anything you'll be able to get a year or two from now, when the economy is fully socialized."

Manuel is a close friend of mine from college. After graduating, he took his hard-earned Venezuelan degree and got into an elite MBA program in the US. He went back home a few years ago and now manages a mid-sized company that manufactures health-care products.

To talk to him these days is to stare into a deep well of frustration. After all those years studying strategy, finance, marketing and things of the sort, he realizes his job is not so much to manage the company as to implement the decisions the government makes.

"The government decides at what price I can sell my products, who competes with me, how much my raw materials cost," he explained. "I can only buy raw materials when they say, at the price they say. They decide how many people I can have working on my factory floor, and what I can pay them. And all of this is done at their whim, you don't even get to have any input into their decisions."

He sounds like he's at his wit's end.

"Actually," he goes on, "if you don't get expropriated your second best option is to move all your production overseas and just import finished goods. After all, the government lets you import stuff at the official exchange rate, and once you import, inflation means the stuff you sell fetches a higher price each month. Then, at the end of the year, the government lets you repatriate your earnings at the same exchange rate you used to import. So if you're an importer, they basically subsidize your profits! It's a steal."

He pauses.

"It's just too frustrating to work like this."

In his words, you can gauge the immediate dangers facing the Venezuelan economy. Nobody can deny that the past few years, Venezuela has been growing at a frenetic pace. But can it last?

Not if the mood around the private sector mirrors Manuel's. And all signs show that, like him, the business community is casting around frantically for ways to salvage some capital as they get out.

The economy is awash in petro-dollars, but the parallel exchange rate has shot up and foreign reserves have begun to dwindle. Just today, the International Energy Agency is reporting that oil production fell once again. And oil prices don't seem to be going up anytime soon.

What does that tell you? That Chavez's drive for full nationalization of the economy has the business community beyond jittery, and that's starting to show in the national accounts. Businesses are operating at full capacity, but with the threat of nationalization hanging over them and all those heavy-handed controls, few are willing to invest to expand. In fact, Venezuela was one of the few Latin American countries to have had negative foreign direct investment last year, according to ECLAC.

All the signs point to capital flight. Until relatively recently, businesses seemed happy to use their subsidized dollars to buy imported goods or raw materials to satisfy swelling demand. But now, as inflation eats away the margins for price-controlled products, demand is not being satisfied - scarcity is rampant, with basic food stuffs like grain, beef, chicken, eggs, black beans and cooking oil missing from the shelves. This is not limited to East-side Caracas grocery stores - a friend of mine tells me that Mercal's market share has fallen dramatically and is now at the level it was in 2003.

That tells you that, even with the enormous inflow of petro-dollars, the government just doesn't have enough to import all the goods people want to buy and buy up private industry and supply the demand caused by capital flight. Which suggests we will see a devaluation of the currency soon, possibly before the year is done. Unless the Gods of the oil market smile on Chávez again, the government is going to have no choice but to turn the same number of dollars into more bolivars just to make ends meet on its own budget.

This will inevitably cause prices to go up even more quickly (inflation is already flirting with the 20% mark, and rising, in spite of price controls). Depending on what happens to the price of oil - and we know how unpredictable that is - it's not far-fetched to think that a year from now, Venezuela could be on the brink of recession.

As another friend of mine put it yesterday, the nub of it is that "it's not enough for oil prices to stabilize, Chavez needs constantly growing oil revenues just to make ends meet." And if oil prices fall, well, let's just say it won't take a big drop for the bottom to fall out. After all, when we had our first capital-flight-induced devaluation back on Black Friday, back in 1983, the price of oil was a comfortably high $30 per barrel.

Let's just hope all the Manuels out there get safely expropriated before the government runs out of cash.

The Comments Section Diaspora

Quico says: So y'all still occasionally give me shit about shutting down the comments section here. It's a decision I struggled with for years (no, literally, years), and I think it made the blog better. People obviously disagree, though: my hit count is down 40% from its commentin' days.

There were lots of reasons I did it: the deteriorating signal-to-noise ratio, the ineluctable law of internet discourse that makes cranks more willing to comment than sane readers, the draining effort it took to keep the discussions polite, but also - and more importantly, really - this vague sense of not being able to hear myself think over the hubbub. I wanted to step back and write broader, more reflective pieces this year, and the comments kept distracting me away from that style.

One unintended consequence of the shutdown is that some of the more prolific contributors had to go out and start blogs of their own.

Most notably, DBC - whose hyper acid tongue was the highlight of every comments thread he touched - started Little Venice, and has been plying his inimitable trade more and more often over there. There's always something fun to look at on Microvenice: DBC's especially good at picking out YouTube clips, and he had a particular bit of fun going through Marx's writings on Bolívar. He is the master of the tangentially-topical rant: urbane, piercing, funny, ever so slightly unhinged, and always entertaining. Formatting, though, is not DBC's strong-suit: man, you need to give the crazy colors a rest!

The other comments' section diaspora site I ran into - totally by accident - the other day is Calvin Tucker's (a.k.a. Democratic Deficit's) 21st Century Socialism. Calvin got himself some SWANK web design there - I'm totally jealous - but, erm, well...that's the nicest thing you can say about the place. It's PSFery run totally amok, of course. The thing that struck me - beyond the super-slick template - is something I'd sort of suspected but never quite fully grasped about the guy: just how much of an old Soviet Block nostalgic he is. We get "aw shucks now really the Stasi wasn't so bad" pieces (complete with fawning appraisal of the "deepest complexity of Lenin's character"), we get detailed retrospective apologetics for the Soviet economic model, and of course we get lots and lots of drooling over Fidel. Man, to think the hours I wasted trying to argue with this guy.

Anyway, those are the two comments diaspora sites I'm aware of - am I missing any others? (Sorry, Feathers, yours doesn't count cuz you started it long before I closed down the comments section...)

The Stockholm Syndrome of the 21st Century

or:
An open letter to Julia Buxton...

Dear Julia,

I read your piece on OpenDemocracy.net and felt I should respond. I didn't agree with much of what you had to say, but I do think you're really on to something when you note that the major fault-line between chavistas and their critics is all about whether "democracy [can be] judged through reference to the procedural mechanics of liberal democracy."

I think that's an elegant, concise formulation. Too often, chavistas and their critics talk past one another simply because the first lot are talking about outcomes and the second lot are talking about procedures, and neither side seems quite wise to this dynamic. So kudos for calling that particular agricultural productivity enhancement implement a spade: there'd be a lot less muddle in this debate if everyone was as clear on this as you are.

The funny thing is that this didn't use to be a problem. Time was when socialists were perfectly forthright in dismissing our petty-bourgeois procedural hangups (y'know, checks and balances, an independent judiciary, human rights and the rest of it) as the cultural detritus of the capitalist suprastructure, epiphenomena in a larger system of exploitation to be swept away by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marxism had explicit, worked out position on these matters, which prevented much of the confusion we see in the Chávez debate.

Now, such impolitic talk may not be a part of the 21st century socialist's rhetorical arsenal, but anyone with open eyes can see they still think that way. We remember the sight of our Supreme Tribunal magistrates, decked out in their robes inside the TSJ main chamber, on their feet, clapping their hands and chanting pro-Chavez slogans for the cameras. We remember the time when an opposition National Assembly member (back when there was such a thing) asked the government bench - rhetorically - whether what they wanted was a society with just one TV channel, one political party, one approved way of thinking and they replied, in unison, "¡Síííííííííííííí!"

I could multiply the examples ad infinitum - Chavismo hasn't been particularly subtle in its disdain for even the mildest checks on executive power - but there's no point. After all, you are explicit in saying that, in principle, such incidents are just not relevant: democracy is only about what happens in the barrio, not at all about what happens in the institutions of state. Which is a smart move on your part - by dismissing all of the liberal procedural stuff in one bold declarative sentence, you exempt yourself from having to actually think through and justify each and every outrage against constitutional norms chavismo has perpetrated in the last eight years; a dismal, punishing task that has been known to make perfectly good apologists insane.

If I follow you correctly, you think it's Chávez's mass appeal and his followers' empowerment that make the revolution democratic, and elites just can't grasp that. For instance, while we elite procedural fetishists see his special powers to rule by decree on practically all important matters as a sign of "authoritarianism," (such a queer interpretation!) you explain that, since regular Venezuelans are perfectly happy with it, there's simply no case to answer. "Put simply, many Venezuelans think they are getting more and better democracy through '21st-century socialism', not less."

And so vox populi, vox dei...and, if I may mix my latinazos, Q.E.D to boot! Because that really seems to be the end of it as far as you're concerned. In terms of versatility, that argument sure is a winner: da para todo.

But lets take you at your word. First off, we ought to reappraise the story of those four tragically misunderstood Swedish bank clerks from Norrmalmstorg Square. You know the ones: back in 1973, after they were kidnapped by robbers for four days, the police were shocked to find they were perfectly happy with their captors, protective even, and deeply emotionally bound up with them.

As you'd expect, the machinery of capitalist domination wasn't about to take that sitting down. Fundamentally hostile to the clerks' liberation, the eggheads went to work, labeling their empowerment "Stockholm Syndrome", treating it like some kind of disease.

And on what basis? After all, those big city intellectuals hadn't been in that bank with them, they hadn't lived through it. But that didn't stop the Stockholm Establishment from performing that act of deepest epistemological violence: labeling their liberation a syndrome.

OK, so yes, I'm having a bit of fun with some reductio ad absurdum tomfoolery here. I'm sure you think it's a totally senseless comparison. The question, though, is why? What exactly is it that makes it senseless?

Well, obviously those bank clerks found themselves in exceptional circumstances. Their very survival was at stake, they were under extreme psychological pressure. In short, the pre-conditions for their consent to be meaningful didn't obtain. In such circumstances, the fact that a majority of them sided with the robbers is not really the point, is it? The point is that even if their support was heartfelt, it was not free.

You can see where I'm going with this. Obviously, not all majorities are created equal. Majority opinion attains democratic legitimacy only when certain conditions are met. To obviate this point is to advocate crude majoritarianism, not democracy. And while I hate to confirm Godwin's Law, I suppose the standard reference to Hitler's unquestionable majority support after 1933 is apt here.

(Actually, this whole line of argument is one of the oldest in political philosophy, so I feel a bit strange "teaching" a professor of political science about it, but there you go.)

My point, Julia, is that sooner or later serious people have to wrestle with the question of what it is that makes some majorities democratically legitimate and others not. And providing a coherent set of answers to that question is what the procedural mechanics of liberal democracy are all about.

Now, given the direction chavismo has taken lately, it's not exactly surprising that y'all would prefer to avoid a forthright discussion about these issues. But ultimately you can't assess Chávez's democratic legitimacy without serious consideration of his active hostility to the procedural mechanics of liberal democracy any more than you can assess the Norrmalmstorg Square incident without serious consideration of the procedural mechanics of a bank robbery.

Because the element of coercion is clearly - indeed explicitly - there. As RCTV has found out, refusing to toe the government's line can cost you your broadcast license. As military unit commanders are finding out, ordering your soldiers to shout partisan slogans isn't something you really have a choice about: you either do it, or your career is over. And these kinds of mechanisms of enforced ideological consent are proliferating throughout society, precisely because the state institutions set out in the constitution to hold such abuses of power in check have been progressively gutted.

So, in a country where millions of poor people depend for their livelihood on access to state money that is only guaranteed if they remain politically docile, and where no part of the state will stick up for them if they dare to dissent, the question for me is what can we really take away from Chávez's popularity? What does it tell us for sure?

It might tell us that, as you believe, Chávez has radically empowered the poor, or it might tell us that he's merely paid off and/or cowed enough people into quiescence to solidify his hold on power. But the point is that we can't tell for sure, because having dismantled the procedural mechanisms of liberal democracy, Chávez has ensured their choice is made under coercion.

The thing, Julia, is that in such circumstances even if the majority's support is heartfelt, it is not free.

You dig?

ft

How many damn horsemen are there in this apocalypse, anyway?

Quico says: Here's a crushingly obvious but seldom made observation about chavismo's decision to shut down RCTV: the claim that the move is about the station's coupsterism in April 2002 rather than about its current editorial line is patently - almost self-parodically - bogus.

It's not just that this is really a confession masquerading as a justification: little more than Chávez saying "hey, I didn't like the political content they broadcast five years ago, so I'm shutting them down" - as though that was, somehow, less of an affront to freedom of speech than saying "hey, I didn't like the political content they broadcast five minutes ago, so I'm shutting them down."

It's that even this white flag is patently false, if you stop to think it through for a second. Because RCTV was hardly the only mass market TV network that aggressively took sides in April 2002. Venevisión and Televen took pretty much the same line back then. As did Globovisión. The four colluded in the April 13th news blackout. The private TV stations had collective ownership of the coup.

Remember that stuff about the four horsemen of the apocalypse? Slowly, imperceptibly, they dwindled down to just one, all the easier to isolate and pick off.

Now, Globovisión can be safely ignored since only a bunch of middle-class obsessives watch it. And the other two? Well, Televen has drastically toned down its criticism of the government, while Venevisión more or less openly parrots the government line these days. Their newfound loyalty cleanses the sins of April 2002, while RCTV's pigheaded editorial independence deepens its share of blame.

Out of the channels normal people watch, only RCTV couldn't be cowed. But chavismo is no longer willing to allow dissident messages on mass-market media - so RCTV had to be silenced. More and more, our media landscape looks like Russia's, with the mass market tightly - if indirectly - controlled and dissent ghettoized into a outlets only a small, politically marginal demographic consumes.

RCTV as Information Shortcut

Quico says: One thing is clear: RCTV's impending closure has been a public relations Waterloo for Chávez, an unmitigated disaster. The move has undone years of carefully spun ambiguity about his government's democratic credential. It finally puts some meat on the bones of our charge of authortarianism, it substantiates it in a way institutions like the ICHR and the Chilean Senate can't ignore and Chávez can't bullshit his way out of.

The decision to shut down RCTV hands the opposition a crushing information shortcut. Because your average international newspaper reader has limited time to devote to Venezuela, and even more limited interest. He will not make judgments based on anything close to complete information - he'll rely instead on shortcuts, on a few symbolic markers to help him skip a lot of the dreary, time-consuming work of gathering information about a subject he doesn't care that much about in the first place.

Now, until this year, the Chávez regime has been a masterful manipulator of this situation. In the era of American hyperpower, ranting against George Bush is the ultimate information shortcut: it allows people to place you in their universe of likes and dislikes immediately, viscerally, costlessly. For a startling number of people abroad, the fact that Chávez hates Bush and takes the piss out of him in public is all they know and all they feel they need to know about the Bolivarian Revolution. Chavismo has garnered a shocking amount of international good will through this trick alone.

For all our abstract ranting about dawning authoritarianism, those of us who oppose Chávez hadn't had a similarly effective informational shortcut at our disposal...until Chávez handed us this one.

Slowly but surely, the fact that Chávez is the kind of ruler who'll shut down a TV station to silence dissent is seeping into international public opinion. And just as our protests about hypocrisy, about the way Chávez was still doing tens of billions of dollars worth of business with the US even as he denounced gringo imperialism, could not blunt the effectiveness of his anti-Bush rant, no amount of gab is likely to stanch the damage Chávez has done himself by deciding to shut down RCTV. It's a fight he can't win.

Locked in their Hummers

Quico says: When we hear stories about corrupt chavista officials, our usual response is moral outrage, a sneering disgust at the hypocrisy of self-styled socialist revolutionaries going around in Hummers. Which is perfectly understandable, of course. But it's important not to get stuck in outrage mode, because if we do, we miss the subtler dynamic at work here: the structural role corruption plays in sustaining Chávez's power.

Corruption acts not only as a lure (as people realize "hey! we could make a lot of money if we cozy up to the Big Guy!") but also - even more effectively - as a trap (since once people are doing it, they realize "oh geez, the Big Guy probably knows about it, so now we have to keep supporting him - otherwise we're in jail!")

We shouldn't lose sight of this. Once you've started stealing, the only thing standing between your life of luxury and a stint in a ghastly jail is the president's protection. And as Chávez has demonstrated again and again, your protection will last only as long as your unquestioning loyalty does. For corrupt officials, licking Chávez's boots is a matter of self-preservation.

Once you appreciate the undercurrent of racketeering in all of this, once you grasp that Jesse Chacón can't break with Chávez for the same reason Paulie can't break with Tony Soprano, you understand corruption for what it is: a mechanism of personal control. You realize that, to a large extent, Chávez's power is unassailable not just due to "weakened institutions of representation" in some abstract sense, but due to the very specific fact that he's placed an unconditional ally in charge of all criminal prosecutions, such that it only takes a phone call from Miraflores to the Fiscalía to turn his officials from bulwarks of the revolution into defendants in unwinnable salvaguarda trials.

Corruption "works" for Chávez. It dramatically re-arranges the incentive structures facing office holders, making the benefits of cooperation lavish and the cost of defection prohibitive. It keeps people in line; it bolsters his unchecked power. That's why corruption blossoms in the Chávez era.

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Quico says: Nope, which is why you can read the Two Constitutions spiel on Noticiero Digital.

Reader's Guide Reloaded

Quico says: Every few months, I take some time to update my "Greatest Hits" compilation - that Reader's Guide I've set up as the first link you see on the right hand column.

It's really meant as homework for the curious but clueless - people who stumble onto the blog for the first time, usually via Google.

This weekend, after adding that essay by Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold I spent some time updating it, cleaning up the formatting, and checking the links.

Jon Lee Anderson's 2001 Chavez profile seems to have gone AWOL from the internet - which is a shame - and some of the links are now for subscribers' only. I tried to make up with a different New Yorker article and I added links to some reports from Human Rights Watch, ICHR and the Committee to Protect Journalists, as well as that long post about Bourdieu I wrote a couple of months back and Phil Gunson's little polemic in Open Democracy last month.

I think it's gotten pretty good over time. Don't you think?

Why a Reader's Guide?

For the casual observer, it can be surprisingly tough to find real insight into Venezuela online. It's not surprising; Chavez provokes such strong emotions that both his supporters and his critics tend to check their common sense at the door. As a reader, it's important to be aware that most of what you'll find about him on the web is little more than propaganda.

This guide is meant to bring together the exceptions: smart, stylish, sophisticated writing about Venezuela by genuine heavyweights in academia, journalism and the human rights community.

Obviously, I'm a Chávez opponent, so the articles I've put together here tend to be rather critical. What they're not, though, is partisan pablum or unhinged polemic: lord knows, there's too much of that around already.

Contents

1. Best Overall Introductions
2. Journalistic Pieces
3. Human Rights Reports
4. From the Archives
5. Critical Theory of Chavismo

1. Best overall introductions

This academic article by political scientists Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold is the first thing you should read, and carefully. Corrales and Penfold focus on the way power operates in Venezuela in the Chávez era. Published in the April 2007 issue of the Journal of Democracy, this real gem will put everything else you read about the country into much sharper perspective.

• Venezuela: Crowding out the opposition
  

If you're looking for a much shorter introduction to the evidence on Chávez's growing authoritarianism, check out this marvel-of-concision in Open Democracy by government-scourge Phil Gunson:

• Hugo Chávez: yo, el supremo

Back to the Top

2. Journalistic Pieces

To get a journalistic feel for Venezuela in the Chávez era, be sure to check out these two articles by Alma Guillermoprieto, which appeared in The New York Review of Books in late 2005. They're stylish, carefully researched, and scrupulously fair. Unfortunately, they're also subscription-only.

• Don't cry for me, Venezuela


• The Gambler

In January 2007, Wesleyan University's Francisco Rodríguez, a one-time Chávez official, wrote these two pieces on the Chávez-helps-the-poor myth:

• Why Chávez Wins (in Foreign Policy)


• Should Egalitarians Support Chávez? (in The Guardian)

In May 2006, this lucid feature on Chavez by The New Republic's Editor Franklin Foer appeared in The Atlantic. The focus here is more on what Chávez means to US foreign policy, but the overall reportage is excellent as well:

• The Talented Mr. Chavez

Jon Lee Anderson wrote the best character profile of Chávez I've read. It was published on the September 10, 2001 issue of The New Yorker. Unfortunately, it's no longer up on their website, so you have to go to a library and dig up a paper copy.

In January 2007, The New Yorker published this piece by James Surowiecki about Chávez's contradictory relationship with global capitalism:

• Synergy with the Devil

An excellent, feature detailing Chavez's takeover of the Venezuelan State and its implications appeared in the January/February 2006 issue of Foreign Policy. Written by Amherst political scientist Javier Corrales, it argues that Chavez is inventing a new form of authoritarianism for the democratic age. Sadly, subscription only:

• Hugo Boss

Just after the December 2005 parliamentary elections, Italian journalist Guido Rampoldi wrote this piercing piece for Rome daily La Repubblica. I like his style!

• That Useless Election for the Red Caudillo

In this May 2006 Sunday Times opinion piece, Ian Buruma nails Chavez in one of the most clear-headed, digestable-to-foreigners anti-Chavez polemics I've seen in print.

• Thank you, my foolish friends in the West

Back to the Top

3. Human Rights Reports

In this 2004 report, Human Rights Watch documents the way Venezuela's Supreme Court was politicized and stripped of its autonomy.

• Rigging the Rule of Law: Judicial Independence Under Siege in Venezuela

The Interamerican Commission on Human Rights - an official, intergovernmental body under the Organization of American States - has carefully documented the government's Human Rights' record. Its 2005 and 2006 reports - though admittedly written in the worst sort of plodding, lawyerly bureaucratese - provide a systematic dissection of the a number of troubling tendencies:

• ICHR 2005 Annual Report: Chapter on Venezuela (selected passages)
• ICHR 2006 Annual Report: Chapter on Venezuela (whole)
  

In this April, 2007 report, the Committee to Protect Journalists published this report on the government's decision to shut down opposition TV-network RCTV:

• Static in Venezuela

Back to the Top

4. From the archives

At this point, my archive contains well over a thousand posts stretching back to late 2002. Here are just a few posts I think might be useful to someone coming to the crisis without much prior knowledge.

It's impossible to understand the Chavez era without a minimum of historical context. Most foreigners, for perfectly understandable reasons, just don't have it. This essay is meant to fill in the more important gaps:

• The Petrostate that was and the petrostate that is

One of the most confusing and misunderstood chapters of the Chavez saga is the brief coup that saw him kicked out of office for 48 hours in April 2002. The vast majority of the material available on the internet about the 2002 coup/countercoup is aggressively propagandistic and often plain wrong. In this essay, which I spent months researching, I try to summarize the baffling, fascinating story without airbrushing out inconvenient facts:

• The Untold Story of Venezuela's 2002 April Crisis

In this short essay, I set out to explain why Chavez's vision of revolution is incompatible with democracy as usually understood:

• The "democratic revolution" is a contradiction in terms

These two posts are an attempt to tease out some of the unspoken assumptions about the power, society and politics that make it impossible for chavistas and their opponents to understand one another.

• On political common sense, part 1
• On political common sense, part 2

Back to the Top

5. Critical Theory of Chavismo

In trying to understand some of the stranger aspects of what's happened in Venezuela over the last seven years, I ran accross the writings of Jose Manuel Briceño Guerrero, a Venezuelan philosopher/critical theorist/poet who wrote this fascinating essay, way back in 1980, about some aspects of Venezuelan culture. Briceño Guerrero is, erm, not exactly light reading, but I still think this essay in particular is one of the most useful texts out there for understanding the Chavez phenomenon:

• The Savage Discourse

Later, I tried to write an essay specifying how Briceño Guerrero's writing can inform an understanding of the Chavez era. It's part effort to bring Briceño Guerrero up to date, part effort to place chavismo in cultural and historical context...I'm not really so happy with the finished product, but other people have found it helpful:

• Towards a critical theory of chavismo

That's a lot of reading, I realize, but work through this list and you're pretty much a Chávez expert.

Putting the Atom back together again

Quico says: I've just realized those daily emails haven't been going out to those of you who've subscribed. Turns out my Atom site feed has been broken for ages, and I just hadn't noticed. My apologies.

The good news: the site feed is fixed now, so the email subscriptions should be working again.

And if you use a news aggregator, you can get Caracas Chronicles on it again.

(No idea what that means? This page explains site feeds in straightforward language, this one deals with news aggregators.)

And another thing. Have you discovered netvibes yet? It must be the best designed web-portal / news-aggregator / random-net-junk discovery gizmo out there: really really cool. And now, you can read CC that way as well:

Nice, huh?

One for the Reader's Guide

Quico says: Talk about making my blog superfluous. This article by Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold in the April issue of the Journal of Democracy condenses material that's taken me hundreds of posts to cover into a single, clear, stylish and theoretically-cohesive gem of an academic article.

I tried trolling it for a few "key paragraphs," but you can't really do that: the thing is too tightly written to pick apart without losing the overall sense. Definitely one for The Reader's Guide.

Maistoian in outlook, Corrales and Penfold focus on what the government does, without getting bogged down in an analysis of Chávez's discourse. You could call that a flaw, until you realize the way it allows them to discuss the realities of power in the Chávez era. The move frees them up to chronicle chavismo's toxic mix of plentiful oil revenue, polarization, clien­telism, opportunities to engage in corruption with impunity, and discrimination in favor of supporters when filling government-con­trolled jobs without getting distracted by the mountains of rhetorical BS the government shovels out day after day.

Overall, a deeply insightful article you should definitely read.

---

Addendum: When I edit the Reader's Guide, I usually take a few minutes to check that all the links still work, and to re-read some of the outstanding material there. Check out this devastatingly prophetic shard from Guido Rampoldi's bulldozer of an article for Italian daily La Repubblica in December 2005:

Made public by a pro-government web site, the list of the 3 and a half million Venezuelans who signed the petitions for a referendum against Chavez has become a tool of political discriminition in the hands of the public administration. Through new laws, they've tamed the fury of the private TV stations, which until two years ago were arguably even worse than state TV, but are now either circumspect or indifferent (because they risk hyperbolic fines and shut downs.) They've also aimed straight at the journalists: they risk 30 month jail sentences if they criticize too strongly even a National Assembly member or a general, up to five years if they publish news that "disturb public order." In the new Penal Code, blocking a street can land you in jail from 4 to 8 years, and according to the Supreme Tribunal there is nothing illegal about prior censorship.

Until now, the government has resorted these pointed weapons only rarely.

But when the time comes, they'll be ready. In October, the Bush administration added Venezuela to the list of five enemies of the United States, even if it's on the third tier. In response, Chavez ordered his armed forces to prepare for "asymetrical warfare", to be taken to the enemy through "non-conventional tactics, such as guerrillas and terrorism." Whether or not he really believes in the prospect of a power play by Washington, trumpeting the possibility is extremely useful as a way to keep his country underfoot, and, in a few years time, to launch a more explicit authoritarianism: if the nation is under attack, who could protest if the president arrests the traitors, crushing the enemy's fifth column?

...sin vaina...

Venezuela's two constitutions

Quico says: Anonymous sources inside the Presidential Committee for Constitutional Reform say their proposals are almost ready, and await only Chávez's final go-ahead before being presented to the nation. The centerpiece? The government's long anticipated plan to abolish term limits on the presidency, paving the way for Chávez's indefinite re-election. The rest? It doesn't make a difference.

Why? Because of something everyone in Venezuela knows, even though no one ever quite says it out loud: in fact, we have two constitutions.

First, we have the Hard Constitution, which sets out the legitimate ways of becoming President of the Republic. This is what's called the hilo constitucional in Spanish - you'll find it in articles 227, 228, 230, 233 and 234 of the 1999 text. Then there's the Soft Constitution, the litany of pious intentions and solemn hypocrisies that pads out the other 345 articles.

In practice, the Hard Constitution is mandatory; the Soft Constitution isn't.

To be fair, this situation isn't really new: the 1961 constitution was treated pretty much the same way. And the one before that too, and the one before that, and, well, pretty much all of the 26 constitutions we've had since 1811. There's very little reason to think the 27th will be any different. The gaping chasm separating constitutional norms and the practice of power is part of our political DNA.

The exception is the handful of constitutional articles setting out the hilo constitucional. That's Hard Constitution stuff, and that stuff is serious.

So February 4th, and November 27th, 1992 as well as April 12th, 2002 are considered coup attempts not because they violated the constitution, but because they violated the constitutions Presidential succession clauses. But nobody calls any of the hundreds upon hundreds of violations of the Soft Constitution dating back to 1811 "coup attempts" because, implicitly, everybody understands that some articles are more equal than others.

Our current Soft Constitution outlines a kind of Alpine utopia that has almost nothing in common with the country as it actually is; a chimeric wunderland where everybody gets due process, all state services can be accessed equally in indigenous languages or Spanish, the government never spends a bolivar without the authorization of the National Assembly, everyone has the right to a nice house, a decent job, vacation pay and maternity leave, civil servants can't be fired for their political opinions, military officers have nothing to do with politics other than the right to vote, the Prosecutor General is entirely above the political fray and on and on and on.

Sounds like a great place to live, don't you think? Entirely unlike Venezuela, granted, but splendid nonetheless...

The point is that in practice, if not in juridical theory, the constitutional articles guaranteeing vacation pay are just not like the ones on presidential succession. The Soft Constitution's role has always been to chronicle our collective aspirations more than to serve as a binding legal framework.

Nobody really believes Chávez needs to alter the Soft Constitution to achieve this or that social, economic or political goal - and for good reason. Many of the things the reform will "constitutionalize" are things Chávez is doing already - bossing the Central Bank around, ignoring the FIEM law - with or without constitutional change. And why shouldn't he? That's Soft Constitution stuff, so it's fair game.

In the end, there's just one thing Chávez wants to do but can't do without reform: stay in power forever. Everyone in Venezuela intuits that. Which is why indefinite re-election is the only part of the proposed reforms anyone cares about. We've been around the block a few times, you know? Long enough to understand that reforms to the Hard Constitution are serious business, and changes to the Soft Constitution are fluff.

This paycheck will self-destruct in 30 seconds

Quico says: Never is the Chávez regime on shakier footing than when it's talking about money. Never is its thinking more muddled, simplistic, contradictory and counterproductive.

In the last few weeks, the regime has proposed not one, not two, but three new currencies. These proposals, of varying degrees of lunacy and incompatibility with one another, illustrate better than any other the staggering collapse of economic common sense among the people who rule us.

The first of them, the plan to zap three zeros off the bolivar, is the more innocuous of the three - though, in its mangled presentation, it already flags the scale of the government's monetary illiteracy.

The "bolivar fuerte" is also, one should note, in direct contradiction with the second proposal, a call for a common, Latin American currency modeled on the Euro. This one, I admit, might actually do the country some good. It would remove control over monetary policy from Chávez's bumbling cronies and pawn it off to some hemispheric moneycrat, presumably in Brazil. It has, alas, no chance of being implemented, since it could only succeed if states surrendered sovereignty over fiscal policy and financial, product and labor markets on a scale that nobody in Latin America - and least of all Chávez - would seriously consider.

But it's the third proposal - Chávez's pet call for "local barter vouchers" to extract part of the economy from the cold grip of capitalism - that best illustrates the dizzying extent of Chávez's pecuniary delirium:



I can't think of a clip that better captures the tragedy that Chávez's sophomoric utopianism is preconfiguring. The plan here is to "pay" people with barter vouchers that can be used only to buy things from other local producers and within a specified period of time.

These vouchers, the video announces proudly, "rust." Their value declines over time, so you're better off spending them right away. Of course, we already have a word for that: inflation. Most people think of it as a bad thing. Chávez, though, trumpets it as the next Big Thing in development economics. You'd think it's a joke, a bit of mischievous opposition agit prop, a reductio ad absurdum send-up...but no, they're actually doing it.

The goal here is to introduce a form of money that can't be accumulated so it can't be saved, and it can't be invested. It has a nasty, cold, capitalist overtone, that word "investment," so it's not surprising the government would dream up plans to prevent poor people from doing it. But when you unpack it, what does it really mean?

All it means is choosing to consume a little bit less today so you can consume a little bit more in the future. When you invest, you reshuffle your consumption preferences over time. You trade less now for more later.

Now, can you think of a clearer definition of poverty alleviation than being able to consume more in the future than you can consume today? In some fundamental, definitional sense, poverty can only be overcome through investment.

A farmer setting aside part of his harvest for seed. A buhonero foregoing a beer today so he can save to fix up his house. A parent walking to work instead of taking the bus so he can afford schoolbooks for his kids. That's the popular face of investment in Venezuela today.

Such behavior, Chávez informs us, is counter-revolutionary, infected with the germ of selfishness and individualism that lies at the root of capitalism. What you earn today you have to consume today, or within the few months before your barter voucher expires. Accumulation is banned, working for a future better than today is treason.

As the big man says: "¿Saben cómo se llama eso? Socialismo."

Three blimps, and Barreto makes four

Katy says: What's in my inbox? First up: Caracas Mayor Juan Barreto's purchase of three blimps equipped with security cameras to monitor criminal activity (read the BBC's take on this here).

Now, I won't bother you with an explanation of why this is a silly publicity stunt more than anything else - the revolution is long past the point where reasoning counts for anything. Suffice to say that it's going to take more than three blimps to tackle Caracas' murder rate.

Let's instead have fun discussing the irony of the massive Barreto buying hot-air balloons. Or perhaps we can wonder how long it will be before Yoldan-hoodlums with time on their hands use the balloons for target practice, and the things come crashing down on the unsuspecting citizens of our fair city.

I'm also left wondering what use it will be to record, say, a mugging or a murder if the recording is to be made from so far above that the perpetrator will hardly be recognized. Certainly the police won't show up for hours, and we know the court system is useless in a country where 97% of the tens of thousands of murders that happen each year go unpunished.

To top it all off, the balloons are apparently covered in government propaganda saying something like "we are watching you." I wonder if the balloons' cameras recorded the councilmembers receiving the zepellin-sized kickbacks they obviously got for approving this purchase.

Oh well. At least the blimps got Barreto some publicity in both the BBC and this blog.

Another reader sends me links to Manny Lopez's columns from Venezuela. Lopez, a columnist for the Detroit News, holds nothing back when writing about his impressions of Chavez's Venezuela. Here's an interview with Lopez; here he talks about prohibition and scarcity; here he riffs on Barbara Walters; here he discusses oil-for-propaganda and Joe Kennedy. He also discusses crime, the RCTV case; Venezuelan cuisine and talking-head-for-hire Eva Gollinger.

It's nice to see a major US media outlet doing such a thorough job of covering Venezuela.

It's a tough choice, but I guess I'll take "patria"

Quico says: Don't miss this important Open Letter to Chávez from Teodoro Petkoff, now playing on Miguel's blog. Money grafs:

In a recent speech at Fuerte Tiuna you expressed the following concepts: “The so-called institutionality of the Armed Forces was a way of hiding, of taking a position opposed to that of the Government (…) All unit commanders are obligated to repeat it from the bottom of their soul, to raise the flag with the slogan: “Fatherland, socialism or death,” without ambiguities (…) If someone feels uncomfortable with this, it's better that they request a discharge.”

Those phrases happen to be a grave violation to the Constitution of the Republic, which in its Article 328 establishes that the Armed Forces are “an essentially professional institution, without political membership, organized by the State to guarantee its independence as a Nation and insuring the integrity of the geographical space via military defense, cooperation in maintaining internal order and active participation in national development”. Similarly, Article 330, which gives the military the right to vote, but forbids them from “participating in acts of political propaganda, membership or proselytism.”

When you affirm that the Armed Forces as an institution is “roja, rojita” (red, very red) and when you ask its commanders to voice the slogans of a political party, you place yourself outside constitutional norms and, as if that wasn't enough, you demand that active military officers do so as well.

So what do you call it when a political leader uses the armed forces to cement his grip on power in violation of the constitution? Isn't that what we used to call a coup d'etat?

[Hat tip to Feathers for that lovely image.]

Ah, well, if they say so...

Quico says: Couldn't resist posting this screenshot:


For the headscratchers out there - Prensa Latina is Fidel Castro's propaganda mill-cum-news agency. As their own "About Us" page inimitably puts it:


Indeed...

New toy

Quico says: Over the last 24 hours, this blog has gotten hits from:


(And no, it's not dynamic...it's just a screenshot, so don't take it personally if you're not on it. Actually, it's not that snazzy a toy.)

Chávez vs. Putin - ¿Quién es más peligroso?

Quico says: Here's one that's been keeping me up at night: who's more dangerous to his country's freedom, Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chávez?

The question occurred to me as I read this genuinely bizarre story about Putin's latest move to control the Russian media: a twisted uno-por-uno scheme where radio stations will be forced to run one "positive" news item for each "negative" item they put on the air. And how do you know if an item is "positive"?

“When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive,” said one editor at the station who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. “If the stock market is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive.”

There you have it, enforced good cheer!

When it comes to taming the media, Putin is way ahead of Chavez. He already controls all the TV networks, which ignore the opposition and never criticize him. With the new "50% rule" he guts news radio, leaving only the newspapers to scrutinize him. Worse, critical journos get whacked at an alarming rate in Russia these days.

By just about any standard, today's Russia is more authoritarian than Venezuela. Putin's oil kitty is bigger than Chávez's, and he controls it just as discretionally and secretively. Small-scale protests are brutally crushed by the police in Russia and their leaders jailed, while in Venezuela the authorities grumble but they still let us march. Russian opposition groups are shut out of the electoral process in ways that would make Jorge Rodríguez blush.

Most striking is Putin's willingness to shed his citizens' blood for partisan advantage: probably over 100,000 Chechens died during his PR exercise cum brutal war against separatists in their province, including the near total destruction of Grozny. There's no parallel in Venezuela's contemporary history. I mean, however much you may loathe him, you can't accuse Chávez of firebombing Maracaibo.

So it's an open-and-shut case: Putin is far more authoritarian than Chávez's, right?

Well sure, but that's not the question we started with. We were talking about which of the two is more dangerous to his nation's freedom. And here, the situation is more complex.

The first thing I notice is that you never hear people described as "Putinists." There's no Russian equivalent "bolivarianismo," no parallel to "socialism of the 21st century." Putin has no time for outsized ideological fantasies, his sense of the ridiculous precludes him from vowing to save humanity. No one in the Kremlin wants to export the Russian model. Putin's ideology, if you can call it that, is modest: a kind of national security state aimed at providing stability as a basis for prosperity.

As a result, Putin hasn't developed a real cult of personality. Polls show he's very popular, but you don't see his photo on billboards all over Russia. His aphorisms are not rammed down the throats of schoolkids and factory workers. He has rebuffed calls to amend the constitution to stay in power after next year, which he easily could do.

What I'm getting at is that where Chávez's authoritarianism is ideological, Putin's is functional: he'll use as much power as he needs to meet his political goals, no more. His is the mafia don's authoritarianism: it's never personal with Putin, it's business. Chávez dreams of utopia in his lifetime; Putin never dreams at all.

Why does this matter? Because his instrumental view of power places a kind of "cap" on the danger Putin represents for the future. He takes an expansive view of raison d'état, for sure, but not an unlimited one. He has limited goals and he doesn't want more power than he needs to achieve them.

Chávez's goals, by contrast, are basically unlimited. Venezuela is just the start: he wants to redeem humankind. He wants as much power as it takes to achieve this. But since the aim itself is unlimited, there's no evident cap to the amount of power he'll accumulate to achieve it.

It's Chávez's messianic streak that ultimately makes him so dangerous. The history of self-appointed messiahs gone horribly wrong is too long, too well documented. Over the last two-hundred years, every single calamity of world-historical proportions has come at the hands of people so suffused with good intentions they could see no nobler goal than to accumulate as much power as possible so they can impose them on the world. As Adam Gopnik put it, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions because the people doing the paving think they've found a shortcut straight to heaven."

Combined with his rampant statism, Chávez's messiah complex makes his movement tend towards totalitarianism. Because nothing in his conception of power, nothing in his understanding of his role in history could make him curb his quest to amass still more power. And that makes all the difference. Putin's regime, by contrast, doesn't tend towards anything: it is what it is.

As we approach the era of indefinite re-election, the gap between Chávez's regime as it is and the regime as its habits of thought and conception of power will tend to make it becomes ever more alarming. If anything, the real puzzle in Venezuela these days is Chávez's excess of tolerance - the way his actions still lag behind the autocratic logic of his discourse.

So yes, Putin has been worse, far worse. Nonetheless, Chávez is more dangerous.

YouTube: Broadcast your crooks

Quico says: Well, we may not have a freedom of information act, or any kind of working oversight institutions...but, thank God, we do have YouTube.



For the non-Spanish speakers, the clip relays a recorded phone conversation between Carlos Romero Anselmi - CEO of the relentlessly propagandistic State TV network, Venezolana de Televisión - and Carlos Bardasano - CEO of private TV network Venevisión. Owned by Venezuela's richest man and erstwhile capo di tutti i oligarchi Gustavo Cisneros, Venevisión mysteriously "switched" its editorial line from hard-core anti-Chávez to increasingly pro-Chávez in 2004.

Since then, we've all assumed there is some kind of implicit understanding between Cisneros and Chavismo, but this clip demonstrates that their collusion goes way beyond "tacit."

In the clip, we hear Venevisión's Bardasano excitedly relaying to VTV's Romero Anselmi the excellent ratings the two networks received during their joint "special operation " (operativo) on election day last December. Romero Anselmi sounds thrilled, and tells Bardasano that "all of my guys are saying that the alliance with Venevisión was fundamental." A bit later, Romero Anselmi asks Bardasano if he got that nice new "red, very red" car he sent to his office. Bardasano confirms and thanks him for the gesture. He then brags about all the flack he's gotten over a glowing profile of Chávez that Venevisión ran on election night, and revels in how much it ticked off the opposition.

All of which adds a bit of context to Chávez's decision to shut down Venevisión's main competitor - RCTV. As well as silencing a key medium for dissent, getting rid of RCTV will bring Venevisión lots of new viewers - and, of course, the advertising revenues that come with them. Two for one, then!

Stomach churning stuff. I wonder if these guys will even bother to deny it...

Good reading...

Quico says: There are lots of blogs and websites that bring together news content about Venezuela, but today I want to point you to my favorite: Venezuela Real.

I don't actually know who edits it, but I love it: they have a great eye out for the best journalism in and about Venezuela, eye-opening stories that too often fall through the cracks. Unlike Noticiero Digital and most such sites, the focus is on news rather than comment - though they also include some particularly good opinion pieces.

Mostly what they do is pick out a story and post a few paragraphs and a link. The design is admirably minimalist - no graphics, no BS - which is great if you have a slow net connection. The point is that you get to read all the little gems stuck away in the inside pages of the papers that you would probably miss otherwise.

If you only have a few minutes a day to catch up on Venezuela news, and you can read Spanish, do yourself a favor and bookmark Venezuela Real.

(Also, don't miss Weil's all new, super-snazzy website...the guy is a genius.)

The government's red, very red measles problem

Katy says: The following is an excerpt from an article by my friend, health policy expert and USB professor Marino González. I thought it was worth translating - it provides a simple benchmark with which to judge Chavez's under-performing health policies. My apologies for not providing a link - it was published in Tal Cual and it's subscription only.

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

From "The government's red, very red measles problem"

In his last address on the State of the Union to the National Assembly, President Chávez said, "today we can say that Venezuela has what it had always lacked: an integral public health system..." Previously, he had stated, "in Barrio Adentro I, we reached 56.9 million medical consultations..." To top it all off, he said, "we have expanded the hospital system, now we are moving to Barrio Adentro IV, Barrio Adentro continues to advance..."

...

There is a simple way to verify the above. If we had the best health care system we wouldn't have any cases of measles in Venezuela. However, we have the most reported cases in the entire Western hemisphere, according to reports from the Ministry of Health and the Weekly Measles Report published by the Panamerican Health Organization.

The incidence of measles is an excellent indicator of a health system's quality and penetration. Measles is a disease that can be completely erradicated: it is caused by a virus and can be avoided through immunization. The vaccine is affordable and has proven to be effective. Through adequate planning, it is possible to reach the entirety of the population at risk.

Latin America's Ministers of Health set the goal in 1994 to erradicate measles by the year 2000. Many countries in the region have been succesful in this area: the last case reported in Nicaragua was in 1994, in Honduras it was in 1997, in Guatemala in 1998. In Colombia, the last reported case happened in 2000, and in Peru in 2002.

In the red, very red years of the current administration, Venezuela has become an island of measles. In 2002 alone we had 2,392 cases. After no cases between 2003 and 2005, measles made a comeback in 2006 with 92 cases. This was the highest number in Latin America, higher than Brazil's 14 cases or Mexico's 23 cases. No other country in Latin America reported cases of measles.

We have had cases of measles all over the country: in Zulia, Carabobo, Guárico, Amazonas, the Metropolitan District, Miranda and Nueva Esparta. In 2007, there have already been 23 cases reported, four times as many cases as in the United States. No other country in Latin America has reported measles cases in 2007.

President Chávez's government has not passed the measles test. We have a health system that is impotent when faced with simple problems, some of which have been solved in poorer countries. If the National Assembly were truly worried about people's well-being, they would have already launched an investigation. Is the vaccine ineffective? Does it not pass quality controls? Why does the government say the vaccine's coverage is high, and yet we still have cases? Is something similar happening with other vaccines? What is happening with vaccinations in Barrio Adentro? Why is the government not informing about this? There's no doubt about it: the red, very red government's incompetence is behind the surge in measles.

You may be through with the myth, but the myth isn't through with you

Quico says: Today, it's part three of my exchange with Greg Wilpert, of Venezuelanalysis fame, about the April 2002 coup.

His original essay on the coup is here.
My open letter to him is here.
His reply is here.

Today, my reply to his reply...

---

Dear Greg,

Well, I'll start by noting the part of your letter I agree with. Obviously, the opposition is not free from the urge to mythologize the April Crisis. All the old canards about a "vacuum-of-power", about how it was "too dangerous to send out reporters on April 13th", are still floating around out there. They are no more credible and only slightly less fantastical than the stories about 13 million people demonstrating for Chávez's return. If I had the power to set the opposition line that Chávez has to set the government's, I can assure you they would've been buried long ago.

In the absence of a credible investigation, though, it was always likely to be so. Exactly five years ago today - just one week after the 11A massacre - Teodoro Petkoff could already see this dynamic taking hold:

What we had feared has started to happen. The sad events of April 11th have already been turned into projectiles tossed back and forth between the various political parties, who accuse each other of responsibility for the deaths. Instead of waiting for the result of an investigation from a Truth Commission, in Parliament each side went straight for "its" videos and "its" photos to sustain "its" truth. This road is totally barren and, from the start, demonstrates an unwillingness to get to the truth. Each side seems to want to keep the affair in a cloud of uncertainty, seeking to keep the events confusing enough to use as a political argument in future debates. This would be a calamity for the country.

And a calamity it has been.

Looking back, I think the central legacy of the April Crisis has been the way all the parallel mythologizing cemented the fracture of society. The failure to produce a shared understanding of what happened became a festering wound, just as Teodoro predicted. It underpinned all of the stupid confrontation that came afterwards and deepened the extremism on both sides. It confirmed the opposition's sense that Chávez had to go by any means available, as well as the government's sense that no holds are barred when it comes to protecting itself against "people like that."

And that's why my own write-up on the crisis stresses so heavily the fact that no credible investigation was carried out in the weeks and months after the coup. Because we could sit here and argue all day and all night about what Plan Avila was or what Otto Neutsaldt did or didn't say about what when. But the reality is that we'd be basically guessing, because the Truth Commission was never set up, the conflicting testimonies were never systematically confronted and the evidence was never rigorously weighed by a credible, independent body. That's why a single version of events never arose.

Definitely, yes, both sides have mythologized, but the moral equivalence between the government's mythologizing and the opposition's only takes you so far. Because only the government could've organized the kind of investigation that might have been able to prevent these parallel mythologies from becoming entrenched. Globovisión doesn't have subpoena powers; Primero Justicia can't put people under oath. Only the state has the power to do that; only the state has the responsibility to do that.

From the start, though, it was clear that chavismo was much more interested in imposing its own version of events than in creating a shared history. Neutsaldt's account was used not as the basis for an impartial investigation, but as fodder for propaganda videos repeated incessantly on State TV for openly partisan purposes. The official criminal inquest was pawned off to an openly partisan prosecutor who used it to extort money from the people he was investigating, and who ended up being murdered in circumstances the state also failed to investigate credibly and that, in a macabre twist, itself became grist to the mill of partisan mythologizing.

Under those circumstances, it's no wonder that the actual story got buried so deep under a mountain of obfuscation: when the state abdicates its obligation to flesh out the facts, the myth-makers have the field all to themselves. Who needs a truth commission when you have The Revolution Will Not be Televised?

For me, the question of why the April Crisis was never credibly investigated is as important, as revealing, as the crisis itself. I think there was no credible investigation because everyone in the ruling clique realized that uncovering facts that ran counter to the Official Version could be a career-ending offense. Worse still, the official version keeps shifting: there's no guarantee that today's ideologically correct account will not become tomorrow's heresy. Nobody (other than you) has been willing to take that risk.

Chávez wanted his own Bay of Pigs, Greg. He needed to win a defining battle for the soul of the people against the gringos to flesh out the epic arc of the revolution. And if the evidence out there fit that narrative arc rather awkwardly, too bad for the evidence: he sure as hell wasn't going to take the risk of setting up an investigation he couldn't control, and that might end up contradicting his version. As early as April 18th, 2002, that drive to seize symbolic control of the crisis had already trumped the petty concerns of people like you and me who care about what actually happened. Up against Chávez's steadfast commitment to subordinating reality to ideology, the "evidence" never stood a chance.

Had there been any official institution with the autonomy to hold this drive in check, something like a shared understanding might still have arisen. But there wasn't, because even back then chavismo treated "state," "government," "nation," and "Chávez" as synonyms. The ruling ideology flattens the distinctions between these concepts, making it impossible for those in positions of authority to imagine that something that's in Chávez's interests may not be in the National Interest.

So it's not surprising that those called on to investigate quickly fell into line: an ideology that can't tell the difference between the National Interest and factional interests and that interprets every call for impartiality as a subterfuge to empower the class enemy can't see the value in institutional independence, whether it's in order to investigate the April Crisis or for any other purpose.

When it comes down to it, it was Chávez's authoritarianism that made it impossible to generate a shared understanding of what happened in April 2002. And here, I mean more than just his run-of-the-mill political authoritarianism. I mean a deeper, more sinister drive to dictate the official understanding of the past, a kind of epistemological authoritarianism that dismisses "dissident historical facts" with the same virulence chavismo has always shown to dissident political figures.

From the start, Chávez intuited the need to assimilate the April Crisis into the revolution's storyline, to turn April 13th into a symbolic milestone along its historical path, just like February 27th, 1989 and February 4th, 1992. Dates suffused with such symbolic resonance they can be summoned with just a number-letter combination (27F > 4F > 13A ), the three were threaded together into a compelling narrative of national redemption, with Chávez himself cast in the indispensable role of redeemer. When that's the game you're playing, facts are just a nuisance.

In the end, Chávez won the power struggle his symbolic hijacking of the April Crisis helped configure. His myth won. This might be a "non-issue" for you, but the fact remains that it's his mythologized version - with its gaping omissions, delirious exaggerations and outright falsifications - that kids will learn in school. It's the one that will enter the popular consciousness.

And it's this power over our collective memory-making process that ultimately alarms me. By taking on enabling powers to re-write history, Chávez exerts ultimate control over our collective identity: the control over what we think we know about the past that Orwell understood so clearly as the key to sustaining power permanently.

You may not see that as your problem now but, in time, it will be. As Chávez's power continues to grow, he will silence more and more dissenters and he will imposes stricter and stricter loyalty tests on his followers. The scope and depth of his epistemological authoritarianism can only grow, Greg, because there's nothing in the structure of his ideology to limit its growth.

And while we're not there yet, the day will come when an account of the coup like the one you wrote will mark you out for suspicion. It might seem far fetched to you now, but we're approaching the era of indefinite re-election, so you have to adjust your time horizon: the future lasts a long time, you know?

If there was anything in Chávez's conception of power that could lead him to think, at some stage, "this much power is enough power, this much control is enough control" then you might have some room for comfort. But that's just the thing, Greg,...there isn't.

cheers,
ft