Brother, can you spare $49,665,810,000?

Quico says: According to people idle enough to actually keep track of these things, in the first half of the year the Chávez government announced plans to spend at least $49.7 billion dollars on projects abroad.

I write "at least" because the figure doesn't include the many, many foreign spending promises made "loosely," without announcing a specific price tag.

49 billion verdes is about one and a half times the government's total (oil and non-oil) revenue over that same period: these guys are literally pledging the country's money away faster than it comes in.

It's hard to get a gut level feel for exactly how much money $49.7 billion dollars is.

To give you a sense, here's what $206 million (mostly in $100 bills) looks like.



[This fearsome stash was confiscated from a drug cartel in México just recently.]

Now, the government has, on average, been pledging to spend this amount of money abroad every 21 hours. Indeed, between January and June, the Chávez government pledged to spend this amount of money 240 times over on projects abroad.

So, actually, $49.7 billion would look more like:


















































































Nice, huh?

Actually, I propose the Mexican Drug Cash Pile (MDCP) as the standard unit of account for Bolivarian Foreign Spending.

The conversion rate would be 206,000,000 $ : 1 MDCP.

Bolivia got pledges for 6.4 MDCPs worth of new spending (mostly for energy exploration,) China 9.7 MDCPs (new refineries), Argentina - 15 MDCPs (for bonds), Cuba 21.9 MDCPs (for all kinds of stuff) , Russia 22.3 MDCPs (weapons), Nicaragua 23 MDCPs (refinery), and Iran gets a scrumptious 43 MDCPs (for super secret stuff).

But it's Ecuador that tops the bill with a whopping 46 Mexican Drug Cash Piles worth of new spending: some 9.5 billion of your and my dollars to build a shiny new refinery at Manabí.

Now, does anyone actually follow up on these pledges? Do they ever get audited? How many of these projects will actually get built?

And, erm, how many "commissions" can you pay with 49 billion bucks?

Chavez vs. The Grassroots

Quico says: Teodoro Petkoff has this little riff about how Venezuela's democratic roots just run too deep for an authoritarian model to really take hold. The relatively liberal habits of mind developed before Chávez came to power have "stuck", he says, and are now too deeply embedded in our collective psyche to just wither away and die.

I've often worried that that's just wishful thinking on Teo's part. But then you see things like this, and you see his point:

"Sr. Presidente, a Ud. lo están engañando"
Uploaded by lbracci

Beyond satire

Quico says: I wanted to make fun of this little rant, but on second thought, the thing satirizes itself:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has vowed to expel foreigners who publicly criticise him or his government.

"No foreigner can come here to attack us. Anyone who does must be removed from this country," he said during his weekly TV and radio programme.

Mr Chavez also ordered officials to monitor statements made by international figures in Venezuela.

"How long are we going to allow a person - from any country in the world - to come to our own house to say there's a dictatorship here, that the president is a tyrant, and nobody does anything about it?" Mr Chavez said.

"It cannot be allowed - it is a question of national dignity," he said.

Role confusion

Quico says: So within the last 48 hours, we've found out that

• Four years on, PDVSA still can't figure out a way to hire enough drills to keep oil output from falling,
  

and

• Chávez thinks this is a great time for PDVSA to start growing beans and making shoes and stuff

Watch this space for more announcements from the super secret Sixth Motor of the Revolution. Next week, they'll tell us the Agriculture Ministry gets to run monetary policy and the Central Bank is going to be in charge of the army, after that the Defense Ministry will take over the schools while the Education Ministry organizes elections and CNE runs TVES.

Oh, and who'll pump out the oil? Avepane, of course...hey, you gotta have some continuity.

Verily I marvel at their strategic vision, at this fiendishly clever plan to confuse the hell out of the Marines when they invade. When the gringos go to snatch PDVSA, all they'll find is people making sneakers. When they storm into the National Assembly, they'll find a massive Vertical Chicken Coop instead. And when they try to take over the Supreme Tribunal they'll find it turned into a sprawling whorehouse.

Think I'm kidding? Think again: those last two bits are already in place...

The Petroleum Tax Credit

Quico says: Over the last two posts (here and here), I've explained why I think the Venezuelan state should distribute all of its oil income (yes, all of it) to the population and finance itself like any normal government would: through tax.

(This is an idea that reader Torres first put in my mind, but I'm going to stop calling it the Torres plan, because I don't think he would agree with the ideas in this post.)

The big question is: how could you make an oil rent distribution system progressive, efficient and fiscally feasible?

Simple: by making the payouts in the form of a tax credit.

The pitch is pretty straightforward. Citizenship is about rights, but it's also about responsibilities. All citizens have the right to an equal share of the nation's oil revenue, but they also have a responsibility to pay their taxes: this plan works by marrying that basic right with that basic responsibility.

As I envision it, the form you would use to declare your taxes is the same form that would entitle you to receive the Petroleum Tax Credit. If you don't file, you get nothing. And why should you? You've failed to hold up your end of the bargain.

So how does the system work, precisely?

Lets say Person A is unemployed and earns nothing at all. She still has to go down to her local Seniat office and sign a tax form that says "last year, I earned nothing at all." For her trouble, she gets her Petroleum Tax Credit: lets say Bs.50. (Remember, from next year the bolivar will be "fuerte!")

Person B is a buhonero earning Bs.100. To claim his tax credit, he has to pay tax on the money he's earned. Lets say the tax rate is 25%. He keeps the Bs.50 Petroleum Tax Credit, plus Bs.75 out of the Bs.100 he's earned. His after-tax income is Bs.125. As a result of the plan, he ends up Bs.25 better off: effectively, the plan works as a wage subsidy for people on low-incomes. (In practice, half of his Tax Credit would be withheld.)

How about Person C, a clerk who earns Bs.200? Just like anyone else, she gets the Bs.50 Petroleum Tax Credit, but she also has to pay Bs.50 in tax. So Person C is at the break even point - her after tax income is the same as her pre-tax income.

Person D is a lawyer, and he's doing great: he earns Bs.1,000. Even though he's relatively well off, he still gets his Bs.50 Petroleum Tax Credit: everyone does. But he has to pay a 25% tax on his earnings. That's Bs.250. So his net contribution to the state is Bs.200 - in his case, the entire Tax Credit has been "clawed back," and then some...

Not progressive enough for you? Lets add some higher income tax brackets.

Person E is a fat cat banker earning Bs.2000. But after the first Bs.1000 in income, the marginal tax rate jumps to 50%. Because he is a citizen of this country, Person E still gets his Petroleum Tax Credit. But he has to pay 25% tax on the first Bs.1,000 he's earned, (Bs.250) and 50% on the second Bs.1000 (Bs.500.) So he gets Bs.50, but pays Bs.750 in tax. His contribution is Bs.700.

Graphically, the system would look like this:
So, what's good about this plan?

1. It's progressive: the richer you are the more you pay.
2. It codifies the state's relationship with the individual. No more political manipulation of oil handouts. The money you get is a right, not a favor.
   
3. It formalizes the informal economy. It gives poor people a powerful incentive to "go formal" and start declaring tax.
   
4. It fights poverty. The basic Petroleum Tax Credit acts as a minimum income guarantee for everyone. Low wage earners get their wages boosted.
5. It makes waste and corruption more politically visible: since the government has no alternative source of income, people realize that the money the government spends is money they gave it.
   

And what are the challenges?

1. Tax administration: everyone has to be assessed. Seniat would need to step up its game immensely, and that will be expensive.
   
2. Attempts at tax evasion are certain: People would have an incentive to file their taxes (to get the tax credit) but also to under report their income in the declaration. Seniat will have to develop its investigative capabilities substantially.
   
3. Work disincentives: low wage earners would get to keep only 75% of what they earn, instead of 100% as is the case in the informal economy. They'll still file, for the credit, but their marginal propensity to work may fall.
   

Now, this is just a brief conceptual sketch. It would take substantial, detailed work to arrive at a full proposal that sets the tax credit, the marginal tax rates and the tax bracket thresholds at fiscally sensible levels.

And much qualification and refinement could be added: do children get part of their tax-credit in the form of education vouchers? Do you force adults to save part of it in pensions accounts? Lots and lots of detail would have to be worked out. It's a task I'm in no way qualified to undertake. But the system, at heart, would look something like this.

Torres for dummies

Quico says: Yesterday's post was probably too long and convoluted, so today I'll make it as simple as I can. Everybody loves a PowerPoint, right?

Here, in barest outline, is how distributing natural resource rents directly to people would change the way money and power flows through Venezuelan society.

(Solid arrows represent money flows:)




Petrostate clientelism works by reversing the dependence relationship between the state and the individual. Instead of the state depending on people for its livelihood, people depend on the state for theirs. This is a structural feature of the Venezuelan state, driven by the incentives inherent to state control over vast mineral wealth.

How can I be sure it's structural? Because, in a variety of guises, petrostate clientelism has survived all kinds of political shocks over the last 90 years. Rulers of vastly differing ideology, personality and personal probity have all wound up replicating it. Gómez may have had nothing in common with Caldera, CAP may have been the polar opposite of Pérez Jiménez, Chávez is as different as one could be from López Contreras. Yet the incentives for petrostate clientelism proved so strong that all of them ended up reproducing some version of it.

The only way to end petrostate clientelism is to get the state's hands out of the oil revenue cookie-jar. That is what's at stake here.

Torres in Bethlehem

Quico says: Everybody knows Jesus of Nazareth wasn't from Nazareth at all: he was born in a barn in Bethlehem. But what on earth was Mary doing gallivanting around Galilee nine-months pregnant? Luke's gospel explains the Romans had ordered everyone back to their hometown for a census, so Joseph had to go back to Bethlehem to register.

It's a detail I've always found extraordinary: a census in the ancient world? Can you imagine the logistical challenge? Why on earth would they go to all that trouble?

The answer, when you think about it, is not at all surprising: for tax, of course!

The Roman empire ran on tax. The Romans understood that if you're going to tax people, you need to know who lives where and how much money you can take from whom. There was no way to keep track of all that information without writing it all down. So the ancient census was really more like a huge tax assesment drive - a technological solution to a pressing political and administrative problem.

And it wasn't just Rome: all over the ancient world, empires came to realize that if they were going to levy taxes, they would need records of people and their property. The Persians held a tax census as far back as 500 BC, the ancient Indians starting from 288 BC, and the Chinese from at least 140 AD. Japan had its first tax census in 670 AD; England's Norman conquerors set about raising a census almost as soon as they'd defeated the natives in 1066. I guess it seemed obvious that if you're going to call yourself a conqueror, this is one of the first things you have to do.

The tax census was, in that sense, one of the fundamental institutions of civilization.

Through the census, relationships of subjection and tribute that had always lived "out in the open air of the spoken word" came to be embodied in paper, set down formally for the first time. In this way the written word came to mediate that most basic sphere of the individual's relationship with the state: his monetary obligation to it.

If you accept the image of state making as organized crime - the idea that the mafia don is the best contemporary analogy for the earliest stages of state building - then the tax census marks a step-change in the nature of the State. Because writing down a tax obligation, implicitly or explicitly, builds a safeguard into the individual's relationship with authority. Once Joseph's property had been registered in Bethlehem, once he'd "done his taxes," it became much harder to come back and try to charge him more arbitrarily. His obligations had, after all, been set down, affixed for posterity through writing, that artificial expansion of memory.

Census taking, though designed to extract money from people, had deeply subversive implications for the way a state and its subjects would henceforth interact. The tax census ensnared the state and the individual in ties of mutual obligation that couldn't have existed in an earlier era stage, when tribute was set by people rather than paper, and looked more like protection money than tax.

That citizen-state relationship would come to be dominated more and more thoroughly by the written word, the odd embodiment of authority in shards of dried tree pulp. As Briceño Guerrero puts it, that relationship would grow exponentionally, coming to envelop more and more aspects of each citizen's life until, by the twentieth century, it had metastasized into a tangle of:

ID cards, contracts, property titles, diplomas, protocols, mortgages, appointments, wills, dismissals, permissions, receipts, bills, decrees, resolutions, authorizations, sentences, letters, safe-conducts, credentials, resumes, work records, court briefs, payrolls, black lists, bank cards, credit cards, military cards, hanging folders, memos, forms, applications, notices, citations, agreements, bulletin boards, orders (of payment, arrest, eviction) certificates (of birth, marriage, death.)

At the root of it all, though, was the tax nexus: that primordial point of contact between power and the individual, as codified in the tax census: that original blueprint for all subsequent mechanisms of routinized bureaucratic control.

---

Nothing fascinates and mystifies me more than the gaping chasm we see in Venezuela between the laws as written and the society they are supposed to regulate. My documentary, Law of the Land was really an extended meditation on the subject, as is much of what I've written over the years.

It's a feeling that's both hard to explain and impossible to miss if you spend any length of time in the country. We have layers and layers of laws and regulation, and then we have reality - never the twain shall meet. I've been asking myself why that is for a long long time.

More and more, I think it has to do with the tax nexus. Or, rather, with the way oil distorts it, and along with it, the whole principle of authority-embodied-in-text.

See, for the ancient Romans and Indians, for the Chinese and the Normans, making written authority work was a necessity. They didn't make a census out of sociological curiosity: they saw it as a pragmatic solution to a pressing problem. They had to do it if their empires were to operate at all - that's where the money came from!

The written word had to have authority - not on some abstract level, but in the nitty-gritty business of regulating each individual's obligation to the state. It wasn't enough for power to flow through paper notionally - making the system work was a fiscal necessity.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years to Venezuela's contemporary history and you realize that making sure power flows through paper has never been a necessity here. Not counting the rump statelet we had in the 19th century (which was rarely able to extend authority effectively beyond Caracas itself) the rise of the Venezuelan state coincides quite precisely with the onset of massive oil revenue. When we talk about the petrostate in the Venezuelan context, we're not talking about the transformation of a pre-existing state: we're really talking about the only state we've ever had.

For the last 90 years or so, for as long as we've had a state worthy of the name, we've had a state that didn't really have to tax us to sustain itself. Making authority flow through paper has never been a matter of state survival, codifying authority's relationship with individuals has always been an ideal fondly to be wished for, never a need. When politically expedient, the Venezuelan state has always been quite comfortable letting laws and realities drift happily apart.

Now, in a sense, there's nothing new about this argument: Terry Lynn Karl has spent a distinguished career discussing the way oil pries apart the taxation nexus in rentier economies and de-links the state from society. But I'm trying to get at something slightly different here. While Karl focuses on the macro-social, high-politics of the petrostate's alienation from society, what grips me is the microlevel, the way the petrostate patterns each Venezuelan's individual relationship with authority.

In a normal country, citizens are keenly aware that the wealth the state spends is wealth they created. The hackneyed gringo letter-to-the-editor writer's catchphrase, "as a tax-payer, I..." captures it nicely. Citizens feel they own the state for the same reason they feel they own their toothbrush: they paid for it.

The petrostate turns this symbolic nexus on its head. The state doesn't depend on the citizen for money; the citizen depends on the state for money. The state has no prod, no pressing need to formalize and codify its relationship with citizens: why go to all that trouble, when you can just pump cash out of the ground?

I think this fact explains much of the mystery of the gap between the world of "papel sellado" and real life in Venezuela. The citizen is perpetually placed in the role of supplicant, continually conscious that he needs the state much more than it needs him. Seen in this light, it's not at all surprising that the state comes to see written authority as superfluous. Why bother?

---

The question, then, is what can be done about it? And here is where having extremely persistent commenters comes in really handy: those of you who read the comments section know that Torres has been pushing the solution to this morass for ages.

His idea is disarmingly simple: Take all the oil revenue, divide it by 26 million, and hand it out to people. That's it. Torres sees this as a poverty-alleviation scheme, and there's no doubt that many, many Venezuelans would be lifted out of poverty if his idea was implemented.

Now the main objection to Torres's plan is also pretty straightforward: you can't just deprive the state of all that oil revenue because the state needs that money to pay teachers, and road builders, and everything else the state does. The fiscal hole you would create would be far too dire for any politician to seriously entertain the idea. Indeed, when Manuel Rosales proposed a version of the plan, he didn't dare promise to distribute more than 20% of our oil revenue. I mean, you'd have to be crazy to go any higher than that, right?

It seems like a knock-out blow, at first - but like most good ideas, the apparent simplicity of Torres's plan conceals layers of possibility.

Certainly, if his idea was implemented, the state would find itself seriously short of cash in the short run. One way or another, the state would have to make up the shortfall simply to guarantee the minimal level of service its constituents have grown used to: people wouldn't stand for mass hospital closures and the like.

But where could the state possibly find the money to make up a shortfall on that scale?

In the same place every normal state in the world finds it: in its citizens' pockets!

This, I think, is the concealed genius of Torres' idea.

Yes, the state would need to claw back much of the oil money it gives out in the form of new taxes. But that, to my mind, is not a drawback: just the opposite, it's the idea's biggest selling point.

Distributing the nation's oil money and then clawing back a portion of it in tax would completely reverse the direction of dependence in the state-individual relationship. It would turn Venezuela into a normal country.

Suddenly, you would see tax become what it has never been in Venezuela - a major political issue. People would become keenly aware that the money that funds the state is money that comes out of their pocket. In one fell swoop, individuals would be transformed from supplicants into citizens. Demands for accountability would soar. The idea would drive a wooden stake through the heart of the petrostate model.

In time, the proposal could help mend the traditional chasm between the world of official paper and real life that has marred Venezuelan public life for so long. Forced to get serious about codifying its relationship with its citizens once and for all, the cavalier attitude of the state elite towards the authority of the written word would have to yield.

I don't think the process would be fast or dramatic - cultural change never is - but within two or three generations the habits of mind of petrostate dependency could be substantially weakened and something like the rule of law could start to take hold for the first time ever in our country.

I sat on the fence on Torres's idea for a long time, but I can't really think of another way of achieving these kinds of results. No amount of speechifying, no system of education, no volume of grassroots activism could achieve a fundamental shift in the individual's attitude to the state (and the state's attitude to the individual) so long as money and power in our society continues to flow in pretty much the same pattern as they did in the Gómez era. The template for state-individual relationships needs a violent shake-up. And Torres's idea, well, it would certainly do that.

Caracas: De Informele Stad

Quico says: It's great to run into a film about Venezuela that sets the politics to one side and focuses on the way the society actually works.

Caracas: De informele stad (Caracas: The informal city) was made by VPRO, the Dutch public broadcasting corporation. It chronicles architects Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner as they show Caracas's slums, how they operate, and what might be done about them. Here's a little taster - like the film, it's mostly in English and Spanish with Dutch subtitles:



I think it's really worth watching the whole thing. To do so, click here.

Gone fishing

Quico says: Katy and I are both out of town for the rest of the week. See y'all Monday.

Breakdown

Katy says: It's a beautiful Saturday in Caracas, and I'm standing on the shoulder of the Cota Mil, because the cab I was riding in just broke down. I begin to panic, sure I'm about to get kidnapped, expecting my driver's accomplices to jump up from the hill at any moment. I think about hailing another cab, but there's no way to do that in the middle of the highway, and there's nowhere to walk to.

Lucky for me, the guy had a fairly simple breakdown, and we were on our way again soon.

My trip to Venezuela was marred by things breaking down. It happened all the time. At one point, I had no running water, no phone and no Internet access. My cel phone worked intermittently, and the power at the offices where I spent part of my time went down twice in a week.

The Aeropostal plane that was supposed to fly me to Maracaibo stalled and died when we taxied off the gate - lucky for me this didn't happen in mid-air. I had to wait for four hours until I was booked on Aserca, the wait made all the more pleasant by the fact that Caracas' airport had no running water, due to "recurrent shortages in Vargas state", as the lady in the airport's speaker system reminded us every ten minutes or so. Funny, I thought, the lush, blooming trees that adorn the Vargas side of the Avila don't seem to have a problem finding water.

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

Life for the Venezuelan exile can be tough sometimes. Former Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Burelli once famously chastised the Venezuelan exile community in New York for not living in their country, saying they were going to die like Pedro Estrada, "looking for an arepera in every corner of Paris."

As obnoxious as it may sound, Burelli was part right: all the Venezuelans I know who live abroad (me included) have an unshakable and somewhat unhealthy nostalgia for the homeland. One of the reasons for this is that we tend to forget how these obnoxious little breakdowns, mostly caused by market failures, are part of the daily routine back home.

Take traffic. As much as people had warned me, it was still pretty shocking to find that Caracas traffic is two, three or four times worse than ten years ago. There are no new roads, and demand for cars has soared. Granted, a few train lines have popped up, but at least in the Eastern sections of the city, they don't make much of a difference. A simple trip from point A to point B six kilometers away usually takes more than an hour, any time, all the time.

The solution should be obvious - make it expensive for people to drive. You can do this either by taxing cars on the road more heavily (congestion taxes like those implemented in many of the world's cities, or even fuel taxes) or, to be more democratic, by keeping cars off the road during certain moments of the week. You can then use the proceeds to finance public transportation.

Another solution is opening up the building and maintenance of roads to the private sector. Santiago de Chile, for example, has recently been transformed by hundreds of kilometers of highways, all built by the private sector. Trouble is, for this "market" to work, you need to have clear property rights - the builder of a highway must be certain that she won't be "expropriated" or "nationalized" once she opens up her highway, something that is virtually impossible to ensure in today's Venezuela.

The inability of the government to find a solution to this particular market failure results in a much lower quality of life for ordinary caraqueños. The faces of the people caught in traffic reflect a lack of sleep and a general uneasiness that lowers people's productivity at work, diminishes their ability to be effective parents and, in general, makes them really unhappy.

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

The health-care industry, the most recent target of the government's attacks on all things private, also reflects a bucket-load of market failures.

While I was in Caracas, my mother had surgery at La Floresta Clinic, a somewhat upscale private health-care center in the Altamira sector of town. Given the prices we were quoted, I was expecting a modern facility with specialized care.

Instead, I found a small clinic last remodeled some twenty years ago. The hallways were noisy and crowded, the waiting rooms were uncomfortable, and the complete unavailability of a parking space was legendary.

When my mother's surgery was finished, we were told there were no rooms and were placed in a 25 square-foot cubicle in the top floor, separated from other surgical patients by three walls and a curtain. At least in a common room you would have a bit more elbow room, I thought. This was claustrophobic.

Luckily, the anesthesiologist was the son of an old fried from Maracaibo, and he pulled some strings and got my mother a private room, which was a bit larger and had a private bath. It was more comfortable, but still not up to the standards I felt we deserved after what we were paying for.

It turns out all private hospitals are the same in Venezuela. The government's infusion of cash, combined with their threats to nationalize everything has produced a curious mix: a large increase in demand that fails to generate its own supply. Middle-class folk now have more access to private health-care than they did, say, four years ago, but nobody invests in improving, expanding or modernizing facilities. It's government-induced gridlock, and it will only get worse if private health-care is eliminated as the government is announcing.

The same could be said of the airline industry. Venezuelan airlines are in dire straits because the government has a) increased cash in people's hands; b) prevented airlines from raising prices, the natural consequence to an increase in demand; c) inhibited the creation of more supply with their constant threats to private property, so that airlines do not invest; and d) competed unfairly with private airlines by starting their own state-owned, subsidized airline. The end result? Gridlock in the nation's airports and shabby service.

Education is another victim of these insane policies. Private schools find themselves in the curious situation of being in really bad financial shape while, at the same time, they have fewer spaces available than ever. The government's war on private schools (forbidding them from raising their fees to match inflation) is putting most of them at a high risk of having to close.

As usual with market failures, the middlemen always get their booty. For example, the hoops you have to go through to buy a car are memorable. My brother told me how he went to buy a car and was told there was a six-month waiting list, and that to get on the list they needed the information of the bank where they got their loans from. My brother informed the salesman that he wasn't working with any bank, that he had the money for the car in cash. The salesman told him that cash sales were not even eligible for the waiting list and that he could not help him.

It turns out that this particular market failure means car salesmen have hooked up with loan officers of the banks of their choice, so that in order to get a car from that particular salesman you need to go through his bank of choice, and the salesman gets a share of the bank's commission from the loan. Buying a car, as most everything in Venezuela, has become an exercise in "Who do you know and can they help me out?" Having the money to buy something makes no difference.

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

The country is in the midst of a consumption binge, and when the Marxist Revolution finally takes hold, people will not take it sitting down - or will they? While I wondered how people put up with all these inefficiencies, I found myself simply shrugging them off as the only way to maintain sanity and not have a fit every two hours or so when the next market failure hit me.

After fixing the malfunction, I talked to my cab driver about why he had such an old cab. He told me it was in great shape and he had just bought this car a few months ago, that he couldn't go through the paperwork of getting a loan to buy a new car, and that in any case, his cab was much newer than most of the other cabs circulating in Caracas' streets. I agreed.

So instead of getting angry at the guy for providing shabby service that could have endangered my life, I took a deep breath, shrugged off the experience, and gave him his customary tip. This is a lot of what life in Venezuela is like, and there's not much I can do about it in a ten-day visit.

The politics of fiscal retrenchment

Quico says: So, Finance Minister Rodrigo Cabezas finally figured out that if you prime the pump long enough, the thing just breaks. In a rare outbreak of economic common sense, he announced that the government plans to fight inflation by slowing public spending and mopping up $2.8 billion worth of liquidity. Even then, he knows he won't be able to bring inflation in at its 12% target, but hopes for 14%.

All that talk of fiscal discipline sounded possitively Friedmanesque. It was weird.

But the questions won't take long to crop up. What's going to happen on the next Aló, Presidente when Chávez has a marvelous new idea, turns to his money guy and says, "Rodrigo, be sure to set aside $450 million for this one"? Can we seriously picture him shooting back, "I'd like to, presidente, but remember, fiscal discipline!" ? And even if he did, could he also control PDVSA's autonomous spending? How about Fonden's? When Carlos Lanz calls Chávez and tells him ALCASA needs an emergency cash injection to continue operations, is Chávez going to let that veritable worker's paradise collapse just because Cabezas wants to shave half a point off the inflation number?

There are two interlocking problems here: the longstanding impossibility for any minister to make a credible commitment on Chávez's behalf, and the increasing fragmentation of the institutional mechanisms for exercising fiscal policy, which now include at least three parallel state budgets - PDVSA's, Fonden's and the normal budget - with no meaningful oversight over any of them.

Of course, it could be that Cabezas' announcement is driven more by income shortfalls than by a newfound commitment to fiscal discipline. Oil prices may not have fallen much, but oil production continues to tick down, and the operational problems in PDVSA have only grown over the last few years. So the revenue stream may be flattening out, but the expectation of continually improving standards of living financed by continually increasing state spending certainly hasn't.

Fiscal retrenchment is good policy but bad politics here: Chávez's performance legitimacy now rests on the state's ability to continually improve people's standards of living. His ideological legitimacy does as well, since he's emphasized so much that the private sector can't make everyone better off. So if the state can't deliver on people's economic aspirations, Chávez will face mounting social unrest: not, this time, from the opposition, but from his one-time supporters, whose expectations he won't be able to meet.

So far, under Chávez, poor people's incomes have risen faster than inflation, all on the back of extraordinarily fast growing oil revenues. But Cabezas' announcement is an implicit acknowledgement that that era is coming to an end. Public spending has now reached the point where it feeds directly into price rises rather than into increased aggregate demand. Cabezas, at least, seems to grasp that even if oil revenue did continue to rise, there would be little point in continuing to feed inflation by jacking up spending (but does Chávez?)

The exhaustion of the keynesian phase of chavista economic management will profoundly transform the politics of the Chávez era. Because there is a long, established tradition of social protest in Venezuela: and unrest always intensifies when the state runs short of the funds it needs to bankroll the needs of society. It's a cycle we've seen played out many times before.

How is Chávez going to deal with it? Is he going to call the protesters CIA stooges and throw them in jail? Or is he going to lecture them on the true socialist's stoic contempt for consumption - that lefty equivalent of the old right-wing paeans about the moral virtue of austerity?

And what will a fiscal retrenchment mean for people's perceptions of the new Hummered Elite? Things could get really tricky for chavismo on this score. Venezuelans' attitudes towards corruption have always tracked the oil cycle. People didn't much begrudge the AD elite's graft in the 70s because there was more than enough bread to go around back then, but they ressented corruption acutely in the 90s, when the lifestyles of the well-connected contrasted so starkly with their own.

For similar reasons, Chávez hasn't really paid a political price for his cronies' corruption on the up-side of the current oil cycle, but that luck is not likely to stay with him on the down-side. The revolution seems to be condenscing a process of popular disenchantment that took AD 30 years to accomplish in just a decade: a three-fold increase in efficiency!

Marcos the Apure Fisherman knows all about this sort of thing. As we enter the new era of chavista fiscal retrenchment, let us make, 2, 3, many Marcos the Fishermen!

The bomb in my editor's car

Quico says: I don't know what's more dismaying: the RSF note reporting that Roger Santodomingo's car blew up outside his house last night, or the fact that none of the local media covered it.

The Law as Talisman

Quico says: Megan, my co-everything on Law of the Land, and the person who really put the film together, promised to send in a post discussing her experience on the project. But I wanted to write one more thing about it before I hand off to her. If you haven't seen the documentary yet, have a look:



When we went out to Barinas, in December 2001, our goal was to document the impact of a new law on regular people's lives. Chávez had approved the new Ley de Tierras by decree, as part of his package of 47 decree-laws in November 2001, just days before we got there. I wanted to show how a leftist government could take the procedural mechanisms of bourgeois democracy and turn them on their head: using laws to overturn elite property rights rather than to uphold them.

Nothing could really have prepared me for the situation we found. Government officials talked about the new law all the time. Street hawkers were selling the little book all over Barinas City. It was the hot topic on local radio, and in everyone's conversation. But the more we looked for it, the more evanescent the new law became, the harder to pin down.

The two farm takeovers we show in the film flesh that out.

In the first farm, Campo Alegre, the initial land occupation happened before Chávez was even elected, and long before the Ley de Tierras had been conceived. Land reform here was happening "spontaneously," backed by the government's influence but not by any kind of legal sanction.

Nicolas Orta, the landowner, was especially flustered by this: he'd taken his case through the courts, and he'd won! He had a court ruling - a sentencia firme - ordering the police and the national guard to give him back his land. But he had no way of enforcing it. The pro-Chavez authorities would just laugh at him if he showed up with a piece of paper and told them they had to do what it said.

At the same time, the new Land Law really had no provisions aimed at regularizing the situation of the squatters who'd taken over his land. They could count on de facto support from the pro-Chavez authorities, but they had no way of getting a legal claim to the land they were farming. Juridically, they were in limbo. Only power kept them where they were.

But the more striking case is in the second half of the film. Santa Rita farm was exactly the kind of property the Land Law was supposed to target: large, devoted to ranching rather than farming, generating few jobs, and surrounded by landless and land-poor campesinos. If ever there was a chance to showcase the Ley de Tierras in action, this was it.

And yet, that's not how the government went about it. The takeover of Santa Rita farm was carried out entirely outside the procedures set out by the new law. Rogelio Peña tells us that the first indication he had that his farm was being targeted came when a bunch of soldiers showed up one day and seized it. It's not that the government cut corners on the due process clauses carefully set out in the new law, it's that they skipped the process altogether.

Rogelio knew that going to the courts to seek redress was a waste of time: all that courts can issue is an order, a piece of paper. And, in Barinas, the authorities reserved the same contempt for official papers as Gallegos's Doña Bárbara, a sort of outraged revulsion at the idea that "este papel, este pedazo de papel que yo puedo arrugar y volver trizas con mis manos" could overrule her will. The authorities in Barinas could not be compelled by tree pulp any more than Doña Bárbara could.

And here we come to the irony at the heart of the film: what really hurt opposition land owners, in the end, was not the Land Law itself, but rather its systematic violation by the government. What really greased the mechanism of land distribution was not the law that had been created expressly for that purpose, but rather the power to ignore it whenever it proved inconvenient.

In that light, the title Megan chose for the film is deeply ambivalent. What was the Law of this land? Certainly, there was one. There were norms in Obispos that everyone understood and nobody could break. But those norms were diffuse, tacit, evanescent. They resided in the will of the people with the uniforms and the guns, not in the little pamphlet you could buy for Bs.300 on the streets of Barinas.

And here we stare down a deep cultural chasm between the two sides, a kind of discursive abyss that divides them at the most fundamental level. For chavismo, authority never resides on paper. The whole notion of written law, of rules that are set down in the realm of official paper ("el mundo del papel sellado" in Teodoro Petkoff's evocative phrase) yet which have the power to constrain powerful men's actions, is abhorrent, deeply alien, simply Other.

The government understands power differently, as something that emanates from the barrel of a gun, from the loyalty of underlings, from diffuse norms of discipline or political kinship or primary identification that bind Chávez's supporters to their leader. Power, for chavismo, lives out in the open air of the spoken word, not in an artificial sphere constructed by writing.

The opposition, socialized in an entirely different worldview, had real trouble grasping this. Nicolas Orta, though dimly aware of the futility of it all, kept trudging down to the official institutions' offices in Barinas city, documents in tow, hanging on to the evanescent hope that rights set down in documents could be actualized. On Santa Rita farm, we see José Luis Betancourt pleading with an army officer clutching a stack of documents about the farm's legal status. Useless, of course, but revealing: something deep in the opposition psyche refuses to accept that the locus of power has shifted inexorably away from the written page.

The real mystery is that, despite all that, chavismo keeps on writing laws and constitutions and decrees and regulations, pushing them out in batches so large we barely have time to read them before they start ignoring them. This is a dynamic that has always mystified me. Even now I can't really say I quite grasp it. But if I'm forced to hazard a guess, it would go something like this:

What chavismo understands by law is radically detached from anything you might learn in law school. They don't see laws as compendia of binding rules; they see them as magical objects, able to bring about politically-desired outcomes independently of what they actually say.

In a sense, what interests them is the physicality of law, its incarnation in an object, a tiny little book that can be waved around, shown to the cameras, invoked rhetorically without ever needing to be opened or read, much less interpreted by an impartial judge. The law, in this mindset, is a talisman.

It bears stopping to consider the kind of language Chávez uses to speak about the constitution - or used to use, back when he carried it in his shirt pocket. "La bicha," "el librito azul," are tags that refer specifically to the constitution as thing, to the little book, to law as object, rather than to its content. It's the constitution's existence in the realm of things that chavismo constantly refers back to, never to its content.

Understood in that way, "law" isn't really law at all. Unenforceable, actualized only through the political leanings of the powerful and therefore endlessly malleable, the concept off law is deeply disfigured. It becomes an entelechy, a magical justification for the arbitrary exercise of state power rather than a safeguard against it.

Under Chávez, law has become its opposite.

Don't mess with my nuggets!

Katy says: "Our first speaker today is Dr. Eva Golinger, who will lecture us about the ills of neoliberalism."

Imagine being in a conference room and hearing those words.

Listening to a talk by "the bride of the revolution", the unabashedly fanatical Chavista apologist Golinger, was going to be a serious test of my tolerance. Luckily, Eva's presence did not materialize, but it did not make my experience any less painful.

See, I spent much of Monday sitting in a well-lit, air conditioned conference room overlooking the Caracas valley, surrounded by video screens and state-of-the-art sound equipment, watching the Gulfstreams of the revolution's kleptocrats land in the middle of this traffic-congested city. The purpose? I wanted to get a first-hand experience of the revolution's indoctrination and the effect it is causing. Yet painful as it was, what I learned was surprising and I was happy Quico practically forced me to go.

.....

The story began the previous week with an email from my old friend Roger. Roger works for a government institute affiliated with the Venezuelan Navy. After finishing his studies abroad, Roger applied for this job and got it by virtue of his excellent qualifications and, most of all, because he never signed any petition against President Chavez.

Roger asked me last week if I wanted to tag along to this event. It was called "The Third Engine of the Revolution: Morals and Enlightenment," (in Spanish, "Moral y Luces", part of a famous quote of Simon Bolivar's, identifying them as the country's primary necessities). It consisted of a seminar on socialist indoctrination held by the government - at taxpayer expense, of course.

Attendance was mandatory for the entire office. Roger's bosses made sure the building where they work was locked up, lest anyone think of going to the office for work instead. Not knowing what to expect, I decided to tag along.

The event was held at UEFA, formerly PDVSA of Chuao. UEFA stands for the Experimental University of the Armed Forces, and by the look of it, it is a regular university with regular civilian students, only here all students have to wear a uniform with the seal of the university. Thankfully the uniform is white and blue, not red, but I was still impressed with the sui generis ways of chavista universities. Can you imagine the reaction of US students at, say, Berkeley, if they were forced to wear a uniform to class?

The crowd included hundreds of employees from Roger's office, from the maintenance staff to uniformed naval officers. The head captains of each and every Venezuelan port were seated in the first few rows, having flown to Caracas especially for the occasion - I had to wonder who was minding our ports if all the port captains were here.

The first talk was from a man named Haiman El-Troudi. As I later found out, Mr. El-Troudi is an old communist workhorse from Barinas, the President's home state, which has surely helped him rise high in the rankings of chavista "intellectual" nomenklatur. The talk was basically a retread of old Marxist principles I heard many times during my studies in public universities, where the nefarious "IVth Republic" gave these Marxists plenty of freedom to spread their ideas. But a few things sounded new to me.

For example, Mr. El-Troudi outlined why XXIst Century Socialism was different from the XXth Century version, as practiced in the Soviet Union and its satellites. He said Pres. Chavez's project was different because it was:

a) not based on State capitalism;
b) not averse to popular participation and to putting the people in a starring role;
c) not totalitarian, nor a believer in excessive democratic centralism;
d) not populist, not messianic and not paternalistic;
e) not based on building up armament;
f) not atheist;
g) not a single-party system;
h) not a believer in extrapolating or exporting models.

The laundry list of everything the Revolution supposedly "isn't" but so clearly "is" made me chuckle.

He also riffed on the new forms of private property, one being a brand-new "revolutionary" notion they like to call "Social Production Companies." These companies are supposed to function as cooperatives supported by the government, but their design is still hazy because, according to Mr. El-Troudi, the employees participate in the decision-making process and their capitalist values lead them to think they are the owners or that they are the government's partners, which they are clearly not. The speaker said this came up in negotiations with Sidor, a company partly owned by the workers. They are addressing this issue with the President, fine-tuning the system so that workers' capitalist vices cannot find a way of expressing themselves.

An intermission for a "beverage" was animated by a tambora group, which, as Roger explained to me, was typical in Chavista seminars, always including some form of "cultural expression." The dancers were quite skilled, and very provocative. Their movements, their attire - which left little to the imagination - and the beating of their drums reminded me of long-gone weekend nights in Choroní, but as you can imagine it did not seem appropriate for a seminar on political indoctrination in a University. This, however, didn't prevent some of the participants from joining them in the ruckus.

More talk followed, this time about education. The speaker, a mild-mannered professor of Education at Simón Rodríguez Experimental University, bored us to tears with tales of Rodriguez and how the Revolution's educational project resembles his ideals of inclusion and racial diversity in the schools. He mentioned that Rodríguez died in poverty, surrounded by his books, which made me question his concept of poverty since books must have cost a fortune in the XIXth Century.

Although less controversial than the previous talks, the speaker's tone made it perfectly clear that underneath his navy-blue sweater vest beat the heart of a true Marxist. Through it all, he did not bother to speak about increasing educational coverage, or the quality of the nation's teachers, or the infrastructure of our public schools, or the lack of technology, just to mention a few of the pressing issues that make our current educational system a failed one.

.......

We were about to leave when the question-and-answer session began.

Only one person stood up. He identified himself as Marcos, a small-scale fishing entrepeneur from Apure in his late forties, whose European looks had been darkened over the years by the unforgiving sunlight of the Llanos.

Marcos said, in a typical Llanero accent, that he was a follower of the process and a believer in the President. He then proceeded to ask why it is that they were being lectured on giving up wealth and letting go of capitalist ambitions when there were so many important figures in the Revolution buying expensive cars, traveling all over the world and hiding behind tinted-glass windows "so the people won't see them."

The speaker asked Marcos to finish his question, to which he replied that he was forced to sit there for five hours, that his time deserved respect and he was going to say his piece without being rushed. He spoke about how there are many environmental problems in the rivers of Apure, how the only infrastructure for fishermen was built by Carlos Andres Perez and how he thinks that, no, it's not heresy to acknowledge that and throw CAP a bone.

In his straight-forward manner, he said he believed in the process and that he thought we should all let go of the capitalist values that made us, for example, want to go eat at McDonald's or Tropi Burger. At that moment, people started groaning, with one woman behind me saying "con McDonalds no te metas! Ve que me gustan los nuggets" - roughly translated into "don't mess with McDonalds, I like my nuggets!"

Marcos finished his speech asking how a revolutionary like himself can reconcile the need to let go of his goods while the revolution's bigshots enjoy an excess of sudden wealth. Spontaneous applause broke out in the crowd, and my squalid jaw hit the floor.

The speaker's answer was that people succumb to the temptations of luxury goods because they have been programmed by capitalism for too many years - see, it's not the crooks' fault, it's capitalism that made them do it. Ergo, the only way to get rid of corruption is to get rid of capitalism. In the meantime, he said that the only way to counter this is by enforcing "social comptrolling" or "contraloria social", a catch-all phrase of imprecise meaning used by chavistas when they want to convince the people they are empowered in situations where they clearly aren't.

.......

I didn't want to attend this forum. Quite frankly, I was a bit scared to go there, not knowing what I would find or even if I would be allowed in the building. I fully expected to go home in a state of depression and anxiety. With all the friends I have in Caracas, why waste precious time inmersed in revolutionary rhetoric?

Imagine my surprise when I left feeling a renewed sense of optimism. See, the forum convinced me that chavismo's internal contradictions are slowly coming to the surface.

I spoke to other participants. One woman said she liked the talk, but she didn't like the part about education because she didn't want her kids exposed to a single doctrine. Another woman rolled her eyes when I asked her about the seminar, and told me she wouldn't be there if they hadn't forced her to go.

Slowly but surely, chavistas are beginning to resent the manipulation. Being taught to forget about comfort and consumption by people who drive around in Hummers is, quite simply, a farce, and people know it.

The people in the forum were mostly lower-level employees from a particular public office. They may or may not be representative, and while most of them do not have much formal education, they can sense the danger in the government's Marxist rhetoric and values.

They see the hypocrisy in being told about the benefits of letting go of material things by a Navy yes-man who enjoys the many perks of his position (and then some) by virtue of having been the skipper who finally moved the Pilín León tanker. They see the contradiction in being lectured about the ills of capitalism from people taking bribes for the necessary permits to move ships in and out of Venezuelan ports.

Venezuelans from every spectrum like to earn money and enjoy spending it, just like everybody else. They want to work and build a better future for themselves and their kids, just like everybody else. And yes, sometimes they like going out and buying themselves some McNuggets. The time will come when the madness of the Revolution will wake them up from their slumber, and they will realize their lives are changing for the worse and that liberty is worth fighting for.

Who knows, they may even use "Don't mess with my nuggets" as a rallying cry.

Law of the Land: the DVD Commentary, Minus the DVD!

Quico says: In case you missed it, yesterday I posted Law of the Land, a documentary about Chávez's Land Reform I made with Megan Folsom back in 2002 and 2003. It would probably make sense to watch it before you read this commentary. The video is an hour long, most of it is in Spanish with English subtitles.

Why the Law of the Land? Well, the project was born, back in 2001, out of frustration with the way the mainstream media was doing its job in Venezuela. By then, it was clear that the way journalism was being practiced was not really helping the whole society understand what was happening to itself. I had three peeves in particular in mind:

1. Caracas-centricism. All the National Media was based in Caracas, and the journalism they present was overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, about Caracas. Newspapers often read as though Caracas and Venezuela were rough synonyms. Coverage of "the interior" was often confined to the crime blotter, and even then to the crime-blotter from a few other big cities. The countryside didn't exist in the National Press. The regional press, which to some extent picked up the slack, was way underfunded, hackish and seldom worth your time.
2. Elite-centrism. A huge majority of what passed for journalism consisted of shoving microphones in front of important people and recording what they said. Normal people who were affected by national stories were almost never taken into account, and never received sustained attention. TV Studio politics were the order of the day, producing a version of national reality that was closed onto itself, and had weirdly little to say about what was happening in the country as actual people experienced it.
3. Finally there's the more common complaint about editorial bias, the way oppo media never presented the Best Case the government had to make for itself and official media never presented the Best Case the opposition had to make for itself.

So we set out to try to avoid those pitfalls. The idea was to go out to the countryside and talk to normal people about how national events were affecting their everyday lives, and to do so without manipulation, allowing people to speak for themselves, to put their best case forward.

So we worked hard to get regular, likable, charismatic people to speak for each side, as well as pompous, dislikable, creepy people. For me, the real star of the show is Gilda, the chavista squatter on Campo Alegre farm, who (starting at 17:45 in the video) speaks with such passionate intensity about her life and what Chávez means to her that I almost turn chavista every time I see that clip. But we also hear that snakes-oil salesman of a chavista Cooperative Leader on Santa Rita farm towards the end, stumbling badly as he realizes we know he's lying to us. We see Nicolas Orta, the cartoonishly villainous owner of Campo Alegre brimming with class hatred for the people who took his land, but we also see Rogelio Peña and his campesino neighbors, people so plainly grounded in simple, sturdy values of friendship, hard work and mutual respect you can't help but admire them.

They're all there, and they're all real: neither side has a monopoly on goodness in Venezuela.

We wanted to jolt viewers - all viewers - out of the standard, caricaturish understanding of land conflict as a struggle between the good guys and the bad guys. We reject the standard Hollywoodesque framing of the story, with its easy moral certainties, its rejection of complexity, of the multiplicity of experiences and motivations that makes humans human. We wanted ambiguous characters, and I think we did a pretty good job getting them.

Gilda, probably the most likable character in the whole film, is nonetheless perfectly aware that she lives on stolen land. Rogelio, for all his soft-spoken good sense, however much his poor neighbors praise him, is an incredible fat cat and an AD político to boot. Even the Campo Alegre landowner, Nicolas Orta, can't help to strike a chord with anyone who's been mugged or had a car radio stolen - even while you can't help but hate his guts on-screen.

The point was to make both sides cringe a little, we wanted to confront everyone with an awareness of their own blindspots, as well as with the basic humanity of the other side, so often maligned and demonized.

Megan in particular was struck by the similarities we found between the two sides when we dug just beneath the hyperpolarized surface. When we went to hang out with them, both chavistas and opposition people treated us with the same respect, the same extravagant generosity, the same eagerness to tell their stories, the same underlying wish to just be left alone so they can make a living and the same pride in identifying themselves as agrarian producers, as campesinos. As somebody once said about Northern Ireland, "they are the same, but they are on different sides."

We were especially struck by the hospitality we received from all sides. We found it impossible to go out for a day's shoot without coming back loaded down with gifts: bananas, hallacas (we were shooting in December), oranges, lechozas, beer...whatever people had, they would give us, whether they were very poor or very rich, whether they were for Chávez or against him. I found those gestures deeply affecting, not to mention more than a bit embarrassing: nobody ever taught me what I'm supposed to do when someone who probably doesn't have quite enough to eat offers you food.

So when you peel away the layers of Caracas-centric, Elite-centric, media constructed reality, what you find was a country populated by mostly by perfectly normal, generous folk with perfectly normal concerns, trying to make a living the best way they knew how, and wishing they'd just be allowed to get on with it without interference. Which, when you stop to think about it, is not at all surprising.

Yet we also found, on both sides, people convinced that there is an evil, evil "Other" out there, an Other intent on hindering them, impoverishing them, taking away what is rightfully theirs, hurting their children, an amoral, conniving, thieving other that can't be reasoned with and so has to be subdued. Polarization may have been born in the Caracas TV Studio, but by the time we shot this film it had spread, acquired deep tentacles in society. That part was no longer just hype: polarization had become a real force in everyone's day to day lives.

Which brings us to the vexed question of the government and its role in all this. Now, unless you're a raging reactionary, I don't think there's any way you can deny that land tenure is a serious, real problem for the squatters on Campo Alegre, the first farm in the film. You just have to take one look at their kids, at the amount of work they put into farming land that isn't even theirs, to get a feel for how dire their alternatives must have been. You can quibble with the details - the scale, the importance in the overall scheme of things, etc. etc. - but you can't argue with the basic fact that these grievances are real.

But what we found, again and again, was a government determined to exploit those grievances to advance an ideological agenda and to favor politically loyal constituencies.

On Campo Alegre farm, in the first part of the film, none of the squatters had any intention at all to form a cooperative. But you want to talk about spontaneous participation? They had squatted as a group. They had certainly formed a community: they helped each other out all the time, gossiped about one another, hung out with each other, shared the good times and the bad, etc.

But they were clear that each squatter family had its own plot, and each plot was its "owner's" responsibility. Since they didn't want to form a cooperative, they essentially got no help at all from the government: no credit, no seed, no fertilizer, no tractors, nothing at all beyond a rear-guard action to keep the old landowner from harassing them.

So the conditionality on the government's actual assistance was clear, indeed explicit: adopt our idea about how you should organize production, do it our way, or say good-bye to official funding. They knew from personal experience that participatory democracy meant participating in the government's terms, not theirs. They felt the pressure to do as they were told, not as they themselves thought best. And yet, they were still intensely emotionally attached to the president.

The second farm takeover we covered, on Rogelio Peña's Santa Rita farm, was a contrast on every level. Here the government did impose its cooperative ideal...it's just that this marvel of participatory democracy didn't seem to have any participants! We just couldn't find any evidence at all that the cooperative existed outside the realm of official paper. The tractors were there, and the fertilizer, and the soldiers for protection and lots and lots of good land...the only thing missing was the farmers.

From what we could gather - we couldn't check this directly, simply because we never managed to locate any of these alleged cooperative members - the "landless peasants" who benefited from the official face of land reform were politically connected city people, weekend farmers who turned up for a bit of farm work a few times a year and then collected their share of their cooperative labor in the form of a check. Basically it was just clientelism - branded with a sickle and a hammer, sure, but clientelism all the same. It's hardly surprising that the poor campesinos living immediately around Santa Rita were distinctly non-plussed.

Too often, Chávez critics are seen as simple reactionaries, people determined to deny that the grievances of Venezuela's poor are real. But I don't think anyone could watch the film and deny that the grievances of the poor in Obispos are very real indeed.

Our critique of the government is different. It's a government gives every sign of being more interested in exploiting campesinos' grievances for political benefit than in acting pragmatically to redress them. When the government does act, it acts through a strange melding of Marxist orthodoxy and old-style clientelism that is miles apart from what its constituents need or want or would choose if they were ever consulted, which they aren't.

Well, there's much more I could write about the video - and probably will. After all, we spent months slaving over the thing. But maybe I should leave it here for now.

Law of the Land

Quico says: Loyal readers know that back in 2002 and 2003 I fancied myself a documentary film-maker. Along with my friend Megan, we made this hour-long thing on the Ley de Tierras and the takeover of two farms in Obispos, in Barinas state. Since we weren't able to sell it, we decided to put it online:

It's funny, we edited it in 2004, but it already looks dated. It's ironic now to think that, just three years ago, we felt obliged to clarify that "Chávez says he's not a Marxist..." Heh.

Anyway, here it goes:

Now more than ever

Katy says: It seems like the thing everyone wants to know about is the new Vargas Viaduct. Well, it's fine, a perfectly normal, ordinary piece of engineering that simply replaces something that was there before.

I know chavistas are going to think that I'm being stingy on my praise, but to be honest, I don't see the big deal. Yes, it's a big improvement from the infamous "trocha", and yes, it appears to be well made - not up to the standards these non-engineer eyes observe in the first world, but well made nonetheless.

I guess the thing I have to admire the most is that they finished it on time. I was very skeptical that this was going to be the case, but it seems like the Copa America put some needed extra pressure on the chavistas. Now if only Conmebol could pressure the government to lower inflation, or the crime rate, or improving education, or building more housing, or respecting democracy, or ...

But as with all things chavista, there was a thing or two that reminded me that, even at their best, they are still just not right. The first is that chavistas decided the division of the viaduct (the concrete mounds that divide the inbound lanes from the outbound ones) was the ideal place for a succession of billboards advertising Venezuela's tourism. So instead of admiring the bridge or - gasp - paying attention to the car in front of them, drivers' vision is drawn to the nice pictures of Angel Falls, the Llanos or, erm, the Morros in San Juan (my reaction was the same) passing them in succession to their left.

I guess we should be thankful that the ads were non-political, much in the same way one should be thanful for not being killed in one of Caracas' frequent home-jackings. But still - don't chavistas know that you shouldn't place ads in places where they will distract the driver's vision?

The bridge has obviously made traffic to and from Vargas flow more fluidly, which is not something I can say of the rest of this inhuman, insane city that looms so large in our nostalgia. Still, there was no need for the billboard announcing the entrance to the new viaduct: "Vargas, now closer than ever!" No, Hugo, now closer than a year and a half ago, when your negligence caused this mess in the first place. Go lie some place else.

The driver took the Cota Mil to get me to where I'm staying, which landed us in an insane traffic jam, commonplace these days every hour of every day. As I thought about Chavez, about the poverty you still see on the streets and about the crazy economy, I saw a ficus plant, a meter and a half tall, growing from the cracks of the Altamira viaduct in the Cota Mil. Some day, trees will grow from the new Viaduct as well. That plant reminded me that I was home.

Katy does Caracas

Quico says: As I write this, my partner-in-blog Katy is airborne and Caracas-bound, for a few days that should yield some top-grade blogging. Do you have any questions for her? Anything in particular you think she should look into? This comments section is your chance.

Boo for beeb bashing

Quico says: Et tu, Katy? Jumping onto the facile bandwagon of BBC bashing? Ugh. Just because an outlet doesn't sound like Martha Colomina does not make them cryptochavistas. Maybe I'm too much of a beeb habitué to buy it, but c'mon.

You want a real "sheesh, even they've turned" item? Check this out. The Nation, the quasi-official home of gringo fringy leftiedom, is running ranting anti-Chávez pieces. Now that's something.

Damn British imperialists...

Katy says: Something isn't right in the revolution when even the BBC criticizes the government.

The final quote is priceless: "Bureaucracy, inefficiency and corruption are evils that weaken President Chavez's revolution - a revolution that is moving forward faster now than ever before."

Willian Lara wouldn't recognize a public service broadcast if it bit him in the ass

Quico says: Every so often I catch myself almost thinking the government has a point: Venezuela has not been well served by its media culture over the years. How wonderful it would be if we could really reform the media, make it truly serve the public interest, really democratize it! Shouldn't we at least give the government a chance to do things differently?

At times like that, I pull myself together by clicking onto VTV's website, or RNV's. Because all the government's pious intentions dissolve into a deep dark void of meaninglessness within 20 seconds of browsing through the official media. The tone of relentless, open propagandism, the absence of even a pretense of balance, the outright refusal to give the other side its say marks just about every story in the official media - to an extent that's just incommensurable with the way the private media operates.

This is not to say that the private media is actually fair - heavens! - but we are talking apples and oranges here. In the private media, bias comes in mostly in terms of the stories chosen for particular attention. Opposition media seldom cover and never highlight stories that reflect well on the government or badly on its critics. But once a reporter is sent out on the beat, he sees his task mainly as telling you what actually happened. Stories about the government are often reported "straight," without adjectives, and relying largely on official statements. If there's a court case, reporters set out the facts of the case, if there's a march, they'll show you more or less what happened in the march. The level of attention dedicated to events is very often out of proportion to their importance, so the anti-government editorial bias is not really in question. But the stories themselves are usually a reasonable facsimile of journalism.

The official media sees the private media's story-selection bias, and raises it a deliriously partial treatment inside each story. Government talking points pop up again and again inside putatively descriptive stories, more or less verbatim, as do the standard set of insults and disqualifications against opponents. The channel of all Venezuelans spends a disconcerting amount of airtime describing one set of Venezuelans as the enemies of the other set. The dividing line between information and opinion, perilously stretched in private broadcasting, has disappeared altogether in the official media. VTV looks, by now, pretty much like a Middle Eastern dictatorship's propaganda arm, giving top billing to every presidential act no matter how routine or insignificant and conveying the government's political line undiluted.

The notion that the people who brought us VTV are going to "democratize the media," the posture that they're going to give us "public service broadcasting," is just too laughable for words. I know what public service broadcasting is supposed to look like, I understand the duty to make the powerful squirm that a truly independent journalist takes as his basic function, and everything we see in the official media is a more or less direct renunciation of those values.

Check out, for instance, the sort of thing British taxpayers get in return for their TV license fees:



That, my friends, is public service TV. The day we see a Paxman Criollo on VTV, I might take the government's pious promises about democratizing the media a smidgeon more seriously. As it stands, though, the promise is contradicted by daily experience to such an extreme that it counts as just another provocation.

The best on the RCTV closing

Katy says: Alex Beech's post on the RCTV closing represents the clearest debunking of the government's ludicrous position. It's a tour de force.

Lights and shadows

Katy says: The recent awakening of Venezuela's student movement has been hailed in the media and the opposition blogosphere. For good reason: there's lots to like in the students' approach, and the movement's main figures have shown tremendous poise and a fresh approach to dealing with a difficult situation. But as with every development in Venezuela, there is a downside: one that I am afraid is being overlooked.

Analyses of the student movement have fallen prey, in my opinion, to several temptations. The first is the tendency to overstate its importance. University students in Venezuela have always been on the fringe. While their relevance cannot be denied, we must remember they are one of many groups in a society that is increasingly complex.

Let's face it, for every university student in Venezuela there are three, five or ten other young people that were not able to get in because they didn't have access to the economic and academic resources it takes to go. There is a world of difference between, say, an Engineering senior at USB and a Sociology major at LUZ, and between them as a "group" and the thousands of young people that wander aimlessly through the streets of our cities trying to cobble together a living. These differences point to an incoherence and a weakness in the movement that is inherent to its nature and limits its appeal.

The second troubling aspect is that the movement is likely to be short lived. Student leaders are here today, gone tomorrow. University movements are fluid precisely because being a student is in itself merely a step - all these kids will, sooner rather than later, move on, and we are not assured that the ones that come afterwards will be able to pick up their flags.

The important student movements of the past (the "Generación del 28" or the French students of 68, for example) left a mark, but their impact was usually not felt immediately. While the protests themselves shaped general opinion, the true mark of a generation's awakening is made when that initial burst of energy is transformed into sustained participation in public life, through channels established or not. This process takes a commitment on behalf of the group, especially in society that is growing ever more authoritarianism.

Which leads me to the third troubling aspect, the movement's exaltation of "anti-politics." Time and again we hear of student leaders saying, to the sound of the country's applause, that they do not belong to any political party and want nothing to do with them.

This is a mistake. If Venezuela is ever going to get out of this mess, it won't be by embracing the quasi-anarchist positions extolled by all those (chavista or not) who reject political parties in general.

While the anti-political stance is understandable - Lord knows political parties have not done much to deserve the public's trust - it's also dangerous to embrace the notion that parties as such are in the way. While our political parties are far from perfect, it would have been nice for the student leaders to emphasize the need to participate in them and improve them from the inside. Yet so far, all we hear is a rejection of all political parties (old or new), a fruitless repetition of the "anti-political" stance that has been extolled by many since the mid-80s.

Back when I was in college, I was also a student representative who rejected politics and political parties, so I cannot look at the current movement in a cynical fashion but, instead, with a great deal of optimism and nostalgia, just like everyone else. But while I salute them, I try and put them in their right context.

The student movement is not going to get us out of this jam. They may eventually, after these kids have lived a little more, worked hard, kept studying and remained motivated. But when they extoll misguided values or when we give them excessive importance, we lose sight of more immediate and practical solutions, and in that way, the student movement may be hurting us a little.