The Phantom Menace

Quico says: The more I think about the 26 Phantom Decree-laws Chávez "enacted" (but didn't publish) on Thursday, the angrier I get. Think about it. These people had a year and a half to publish these decrees...and they still didn't manage to turn them in on time!

It's totally nuts. And it leaves these decrees in a bizarre legal limbo. A law can't come into force until it's been published. That's Law 101 stuff, and it stands to reason, because the whole notion of a "secret law" is a contradiction in terms. How would you even know if you were breaking it?!

No matter what the government says, these 26 decrees do not have the rank and force of law right now. Publishing the title just doesn't cut it. The decrees can't be in force before the government gets around to publishing their full texts, which will presumably happen on Monday. El detalle is that Chávez's special powers to legislate by decree expired last Thursday: he simply has no legal basis to decree a law on Monday!

¿Y entonces?

Stop and think about how idiotically unnecessary this controversy is. Eighteen months. That's how long the government had to draft and publish these decrees. Five hundred and forty days utterly unencumbered by such nuisances as public scrutiny and open debate. A leisurely, uncontested, uncontestable year and a half to write whatever they damn well wanted...and they still blew the deadline!

Coño vale sometimes I get the feeling that the most objectionable aspect of chavismo isn't the authoritarianism, or the ego worship, or the sectarianism or the extremism or the sheer volume of paja-fueled utopian nonsense. It's the utter bumbling amateurishness of the whole operation: that's what'll drive you insane.

Oops, I did it again

Quico says: Guess what? Turns out yesterday was the last day of Chávez's powers to legislate by decree and - would you believe it? - today's gaceta oficial is about the size of a phone book. 26 new laws. No debate. No consultation. No friggin' idea what's in there.

It's probably nothing to worry about...it's not like it caused any trouble the last time he pulled a stunt like this.

(On the plus side, it was 49 decree-laws in 2001, just 26 today. Chávez is arguably 46.94% less authoritarian than he was.)

Update: I had it wrong. Apparently, today's gaceta wasn't all that bulky because, in another kafkaesque twist, the government didn't actually publish the new decree-laws, just their titles. Which means that, at the moment, the new laws are technically in force, but only the government knows what they say.

My advice? Have a very quiet weekend. Don't go out. Just don't do anything. Until these things get published, anything you do may turn out to have been illegal.

You like him, you really like him!

Juan Cristobal says: - Yon Goicoechea is the political leader you rate most favorably. What can we make of this? Why doesn’t it sit right with me?

For the past 24 hours I've been trying to put my finger on why I find it hard to simply drink the Kool-Aid and jump on the bandwagon. It has to do with the fact that, before yesterday, I hadn't really listened to Goicoechea closely. So I decided to spend some quality time with Yon, courtesy of YouTube.

I declare myself unimpressed.

Let me start with the positives. He has the gift of gab, no question. He's personable, young, untainted, brave and appears to be a smart guy. All that is great. All that is what made me rate him "somewhat favorable" in my own poll (I went back and checked).

So what’s the problem?

Well, lets start with his speech at the Cato Institute, on receiving that Milton Friedman Award.

This was probably the highest-profile speech Yon had ever given, and he winged it. He spoke off the cuff in an unrehearsed speech. His performance was all over the place, ranging from awkwardly sappy (0'20"-0'40") to over-the-top (2'05") to talking like a beauty queen (5'16") to bits of far-right rhetoric (6'40"). It was so scattered, it almost gave me whiplash.

Don't get me wrong, it's OK for someone giving a speech to splash it with whimsy, sugar-coat his intro and spray it with a dash of humanity in the course of six or seven minutes. But it's tricky. It takes special talent and lots of practice. Only a speaker who knows who she is and has a clear idea of what she wants to say can pull something like that off. To do so, you need a core message that's so solid, that you're so comfortable with, you can dabble with sudden changes in tone without making the package jarring.

This was not the case with Yon. This was the biggest speech of his life, an acceptance speech for an award for $500,000, in front of influential members of the international community, a black-tie event at the Waldorf Astoria... and he blew it. He came across as an affable lightweight, as a kid who is running for student President, as a 23-year old undergrad with big dreams who doesn't yet know his place in the world.

In other words, he came across as himself. But he did not come across as the leader of a generation, as the factor that made the difference in December's Referendum.

But why should I care? Why is it an issue, aside from the fact that my readers really like this guy?

Well, because in a way, he was there representing me, you, and everyone who worked hard for that 2D result. All of us: those who stood in line, those who marched, those who got tear-gassed, those who got beaten up, and yes, those who blogged constantly - we all helped. But he's the one being annointed with the award, an award he would not have received had we all not won on December 2nd. He was up there receiving it not only on behalf of the student movement he so bravely helped lead, but of all Venezuelans who fought against the Constitutional Reform.

So, I dunno, he could have written a speech, y'know? Instead he came across as someone who had just unexpectedly won an Oscar. I kept expecting an orchestra to interrupt him...

Before you say anything, I accept the possibility that, yes, perhaps I'm being petty. After all, this boils down to form, right? What about the substance? Has he really thought about the issues?

I'm sorry, but I don't see any evidence of that either, and what little I see I'm not liking too much either.

In previous comments I characterized Goicoechea as "right-wing," and some of you took issue with that label. That's understandable. Those of you who rate him "Very favorably" or "My favorite" tend to be either moderates or center-left, as this cross-section of our poll suggests.

In spite of your own views, you feel tremendously excited about a guy whose main message (at least on this stage) was that poor people "don't have to be cared by the government but that they have to be left alone by the government."

Think about it, the guy’s main policy idea is that the government has to leave poor people alone. This would be an extreme position anywhere…except, perhaps, at the Cato Institute. Do you think this will play in Parapara? Is this guy even electable?

Maybe he doesn't really believe that. Maybe it's just an off-the-cuff thing he said. But when you're in a position of leadership like he is, your words will be scrutinized, which is precisely what I've been trying to do. And the sincerity of his stream-of-consciousness speech at the Cato makes me conclude that this view represents one of his core beliefs.

Many of you, then, are really into this guy even though your views clash with his. It probably has to do with the fact that you haven't listened carefully enough. Perhaps you've only listened to his more famous quotes and nodded because, yes, you totally agree.

Like on December 2nd, when he got up in front of a microphone and said “today we close a chapter of Venezuelan history and begin a new era. December 2 will be remembered as the day on which Venezuelans took back our country from the brink of dictatorship, reaffirming our democratic values, our right to freedom, and our desire to live in peace.”

Or, at El Nacional, as he told you that “the future is not negotiable, we must not give up, the future isn’t for sale, it’s not negotiable, we cannot get worn out now, we have to fight and if I had to fight for ten years more, I would do so too! So long as there’s one dignified Venezuelan, one democratic Venezuelan, one Venezuelan who wants to live in democracy in Bolívar’s homeland, we must not let our guard down!”

Sure, when Yon is saying it, it sounds good. It takes transcribing it to realize that it’s basically indistinguishable from the kind of platitudinous, largely content-free stuff we hear from politicians in the opposition all the time. In fact, it sounds remarkably like stuff Hollywood was penning way back in the 30s and 40s, only not as good.

Who in their right mind could disagree with that stuff? Or does the rhetorical dearth in our opposition run so deep that someone pointing out the obvious in a clear, lucid way comes across as some kind of prophet?

Perhaps that's it. Perhaps he wins by comparison. Perhaps, as in so many other occassions, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man rules.

Or perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps Yon will grow into a mature political leader, and his ideas will ferment to match his already impressive oratorical skills. Perhaps sooner, rather than later, Yon will become that leader many say he will become and I will have to eat my words and vote for him.

Or perhaps... perhaps... we’re being played. Again.

Perhaps Yon is being used by the oppo powers-that-be. Perhaps they see him as the next big thing, as someone they can manipulate. Perhaps the guys who love to play king-makers have just found themselves a new king.

You don’t have to read much between the lines to wonder.

Check out the introduction he gets in this video (notice the choice of words from the anchorwoman in the first few seconds) from our friends at Globovisión. Watch him taking center stage at El Nacional, of all places, lecturing people who really should know better than to sit there enthralled. Spare a critical thought for the way Nitu Perez Osuna introduces fellow student Stalin González in this video and the drool-soaked follow-up question by Carla Angola.

Yon plays well on TV. Yon gets a lot of play on TV. Hmmmmm…

What do you stand for? (II)

Quico says: Back to our Survey. We asked readers a couple of very broad questions about development strategy and PDVSA ownership. Moderation remained the order of the day. Caracas Chronicles reader's instincts are not favorable to the kind of free market economic fundamentalism chavismo usually caricatures us as favoring:

Click to enlarge

On the perennial question of oil sector ownership - a kind of Rorscach Test of Venezuelan attitudes towards the state - we also find a lot more support for gradual than for radical reform:


I bet if you'd survey the kind of people who read this blog 15, 10 or even 5 years ago, there would've been a lot more hard right answers.

A better states map

Quico says:

The Municipios Map

Quico says: Turns out somebody on Wikipedia also thought of mapping the 2007 referendum results, but at the municipal level. (Hat tip: Kepler.) This map makes the opposition's problem with rural voters even more stark.

(Click to enlarge - Yellow = Sí on Block A, No on Block B)

By my count, the government won 224 municipios, the opposition 108, and 2 went down the middle. And you have to wonder what the hell is going in Anzoátegui: the only eastern state where rural municipalities voted No in numbers.

Speaking of Anzoátegui, spare a thought, if you will, to the 14,347 residents of Municipio José Gregorio Monagas (capital: San Diego de la Cabrutica). CNE simply didn't count any of their votes!

Los desaparecieron a toítos!

Update: Juan Cristobal helped expand the table of key "municipios" to include the 45 municipios that make up Venezuela's 30 largest cities. At the time of the 2001 Census, 56.2% of Venezuelans lived in these 45 municipios. Do click to enlarge:

States to Watch Out For

Quico says: So, what would count as a "good" result for the opposition in the State and Local elections on November 23rd? How many states can we expect to win? What's the baseline here?

One somewhat crude but handy way to approach that is to look at the results of the Constitutional Reform Referendum held in December last year. Broken down by states, the Dec. 2nd Map turned out like this:

(click to enlarge - numbers ="Sí" votes in 2007.)

The government won in 14 States while the opposition won in 8, plus the Distrito Capital. Falcón was split right down the middle (actually, Block A of the reform proposal got just over 50% in Falcón, Block B just under.)

The urban/rural split is very conspicuous in this map. The opposition won all four of the most populous entities in the country and seven out of the most populous ten: Zulia, Miranda, Carabobo, Distrito Capital, Anzoátegui, Lara and Táchira. The government won three of the ten most populous entities - Aragua, Bolívar and Sucre - but swept every one of the rural states.

Interestingly, the nine entities where the opposition won account for 62% of Venezuela's population. Just 35% of the population lives in the 14 states the government won. The final result was close only because the government piled up big margins in rural states.

Municipios to watch out for

Quico says: When it comes to local races, it's even harder to know where to look. 335 mayors are going to be elected on November 23rd, way more than anyone sane could keep track of. So where should we be focusing on?

This little table shows the 27 key urban municipios in Venezuela, together with the results of the 2007 referendum in each of them. Together, they account for the country's 16 biggest cities (since several metropolitan areas are spread between more than one municipio.) Because - annoyingly - Venezuelan municipalities often have official names that don't match the usual names given to the places where they are, I've listed both side by side:

(Click to Enlarge)

Basically, the table includes all municipios with over 200,000 population in the 2001 census, alongside some high profile hotspots of opposition in Caracas (Chacao, El Hatillo) and in Valencia (San Diego and Naguanagua). If you spot a key municipio missing here, do let me know.

As of 2001, 46.8% of all Venezuelans were living in these 27 municipalities.

As we know, this urban electorate has been trending more and more against Chávez: the "Sí" got just 44% of the big city vote last December, compared to 49% nationally.

In the Valley of Caracas municipalities (Libertador + Chacao + Baruta + Sucre + El Hatillo) the Sí got a crushing 59.3% of the vote, a lead of 234,000 votes in an election that, nationwide, we won by just 125,000 votes.

Ciudad Guayana, Maturín, Punto Fijo, Barinas, Guarenas and La Guaira were the only big municipalities where the Sí won.

The appeal of big city municipios is pretty clear for the opposition. These are high profile offices where we stand a good chance of winning. Unfortunately, so far, the opposition has been able to agree on single candidacies for just 3 of these 27 municipios: Manuel Rosales in Maracaibo, Ocariz in Petare and Enzo Scarano in San Diego (Northeast of Valencia).

Update: Naguanagua municipality has now been included. Let me know if I'm missing another.

What do you stand for? (I)

Juan Cristobal says: - Well, the results from the second survey of Caracas Chronicles' readers is out. This one, as you will recall, focused on your political views. So let's begin talking about you and your ideas.

You tend to self-identify as moderate, with the center-left/centrist/center-right spectrum taking up 76% of the answers. You tend to lean a bit more to the left than to the right.

(click the images to enlarge.)

Some of the answers in the "It's complicated" portion were complicated indeed. Here is a taste:

"Kind of a red-neck hippie from the Southwest (think Edward Abbey)...I guess I am more of a Libertarian than anything...but a registered Democrat."

"Socially left, economically pragmatic, anti-imperialist, anti-authoritarian"

"Libertarian"

"Sorry, pero no puedo especificarlo en este espacio... cualquier cosa que escriba se quedara corta."

"Libertarian except for immigration policy; but vote Republican because I could never quite accept the Lib. "wasted vote" rationale. Strong supporter of President Bush. I will miss him."

"I'm a little bit country I'm a little bit Rock n' Roll"

"very lefty in social terms, very righty in economic ones, except I am very pro a rational regulatory environment (the stock exchange is way too loose for my taste)"

"lets call it enviromental capitalism with a touch of socialism and definetively anti anything radical, especially violence"

"Liberal (European sense)"

"Liberal in the Canadian sense, not in the US sense"

You are, unsurprisingly, pro-opposition, although 5 of you declared yourselves strongly chavista. Thank you PSFs, for taking the time.

Those of you who are complicated were even more numerous this time around. Many of you were simply opposition, but highly critical of opposition leadership and highly wary of being identified as opposition. In other words, you're Ni-nis, you just don't know it yet.

Here were some of the complicated answers you gave us:

"pro opposition, but they are idiots. My wife is Venezuelan and is a former Chavez supporter (never voted for him though), but now rabid opposition support...I didn't do anything! I swear!"

"strongly anti chavista but critical of many oppo. Pro Teodoro will describe it better"

"i like some of the professed goals, but i'm an anti-institutional anarchist, so you can imagine..."

"I think the opposition is the lesser evil..."

"Strongly anti-chavista but not finding much solace in the viable opposition"

"Sympathetic towards the opposition but knowing things are never so bad they can't be made worse"

"mi rechazo a mico mandate se podria calificar de fundametalista, pero eso no significa que apoye a la pandilla de mangantes que se llaman "oposicion"."

"Strongly against Chavez, however aware that an awakwening towards how the lower classes were marginalized in the past was necessary. Chavez brought this awakening but not the solution. Therefore strongly against Chavez, however The opposition doesn´t show signs of having a solution or even caring about making this change a reality, it seems like they are still after their own self interests (as usual)."

"I love the country, i can not side with this patetic oppo movement either."

"I'm not against the stated goals of Chavez, but think that he is failing to achieve them miserably. I really believe his intentions are far from what he says they are, which is part of why they fail. Also, I am very sympathetic towards the majority of Chavez supporters, just not the ones in positions of influence."

"I think Chavez is tapping into a reality of serious problems that existed under the ancien regime. I do not believe the current opposition would do a good job of addressing those very serious issues. It would be fantastic to see someone with both a real committment to democracy and also helping the poor."

Then we started discussing the opposition. First up, their institutions:

Podemos, UNT and Primero Justicia are the only political parties getting any love from you. But not surprisingly, it's the students that have the best image in the opposition, with Primero Justicia a distant second. 40% of you view the student movement in "very favorable" terms, and 23% label them "My favorite."

In fact, if you add "My favorite", "Very favorable" and "Somewhat favorable", the students get a whopping 83.6%. Primero Justicia gets a less enthusiastic 71.6%, while none of the others gets more than 50%.

After that, it was on to specific opposition personalities.

Clearly, the best rated opposition politician is... Jon Goicoechea! Yes, by a wide margin, the most visible leader of the student movement, UCAB undergrad Goicoechea wins. I guess it's too bad that because of his age he would have to wait until 2018 to even be allowed to run for President. Leopoldo López comes in a close second, followed by Gerardo Blyde, Francisco Rodríguez, Roberto Smith, Liliana Hernández and Andrés Velásquez.

The most disliked person on the list was a surprise to me: Raúl Baduel. We don't save a lot of love for military turncoats at Caracas Chronicles!

When asked to write the name of the opposition personality you trust the most, most of you simply confirmed that Goicoechea was your favorite. Among the people not listed above, many of you named Teodoro Petkoff. Some of ranted about how you don't trust any of them, while a few of the lunatics among you kindly put Quico, Miguel, Daniel and I in the list of people you trust.

Next we asked for your views on the government's institutions:

Not surprisingly, they all rank dismally low. But the one that beats them all, the headquarters of horrors, if you will, is the Comptroller's Office. I wonder if this would have been your response a year ago. It even beats the National Assembly and the PSUV!

Now, to me, the real horror in your responses is that, of the government institutions listed, you rate the Armed Forces the least unfavorably. Perhaps you need reminding which institution harbored, educated, nurtured most of chavismo's key figures. Perhaps you need to reflect on who is cashing in the most from this Robolution.

Then we asked you to rate people inside the government. The bottom of the barrel is crowded indeed.

Surprisingly, Hugo Chávez is not the most hated man on this blog - Chavista henchmen Mario Silva and cheerful rabble rouser extraordinaire Lina Ron manage to out-Chávez the Fat Man in the Palace.

The two figures you dislike the least are former taxman José Vielma Mora and current Minister of Finance Alí Rodríguez, but their ratings are nothing to brag home about. Vielma Mora may be the least-hated chavista around, but he's still ranked lower than Raúl Baduel, the worse of the lot in the opposition (see above).

Then we asked about the media. First up, an open question on the media outlets you trust the most. This was a hodge-podge, with anything from Caracas Chronicles to Yahoo News to Noticiero Digital showing up. When asked to rank using a closed list, here is what you answered:

The Economist was the best-regarded media outlet in the list, followed by El Chigüire Bipolar (!) and El Universal. I guess, after all these years, we still haven't lost our sense of humor. The least appreciated, not surprisingly, was VTV, followed by the largely unknown Canal i and by Noticiero Digital.

As for media personalities, here are the results:

Eleazar Díaz Rangel is ranked the lowest, closely followed by New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson who, in all justice, is a great writer but perhaps a bit too sympathetic toward Chávez for your tastes. Juan Forero and Patricia Poleo don't get much love from you, but Chuo Torrealba, Teodoro Petkoff and Manuel Caballero do.

We also asked for your views on foreign leaders. Here were your responses:

Alvaro Uribe tops the list, followed by Lula, Michelle Bachelet (guácala) and Ingrid Betancourt. Surprisingly, this is one of the few rankings where George W. Bush does not figure at the bottom, which means you are either highly intelligent, very right-wing, or you really, really dislike Daniel Ortega, Rafael Correa, Piedad Córdoba and Cristina Kirchner.

Oh, and on this survey, Obama beats McCain, but not by a whole lot.

Then we asked for your views on historical figures.

The highest-ranked figure was towering intellectual Arturo Uslar Pietri, closely followed by Francisco de Miranda (huh? You'll have to explain that one in the comments section). The bottom is reserved for Caldera, CAP and Marcos Pérez Jiménez, but it's Caldera where most of you place the blame. Clearly no love for the chiripero amongst you.

Also worth pointing out that so many years of permanent Bolívar cult have left you feeling a bit ho-hum about the man.

We also asked about specific periods in history and historical institutions:

The old PDVSA tops the list. 53% of you ranked it either "My favorite" or "Very favorably". The Pacto de Punto Fijo came remarkably in second place, which was a total surprise to me given how you don't hold much fondness for AD and Copei, the two parties that actually implemented the Pact. But the loser in this list was the Guerrilla Movement, not surprisingly.

Since the survey was interminably long, we'll continue digesting the results on specific policy issues in Part II of this post...

Capitol Hill Chronicles

Juan Cristobal says: - Today we have something really special for you.

Dorothy is an American economist who has spent considerable time in Venezuela. Her insightful reports on various issues related to our country have appeared in print and on the web.

Now based in Washington, DC, she has succumbed to our begging and agreed to write for us once in a while - volunteer writing, of course, this being a revolution and all.

Her inaugural post is an account of the latest Congressional hearings on all things Hugo. Please help me welcome Dorothy to Caracas Chronicles!

Dorothy says - As a born-and-bred norteamericana just returned from a year-long sojourn in Caracas, I'd like to think that the US can do better by Venezuela than the government's cringeworthy post-coup comments, the hard-right Otto Reich ridiculousness or the recent parade of PSF celebrities.

A recent hearing before the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs ("Venezuela: Looking Forward") gave me a glimmer of hope. In three hours of testimony and discussion, there was a respectable amount of level-headed common sense about how the next administration can improve bilateral relations: make clear that we have no intent to engineer regime change in Venezuela, focus on our commercial (oil) relationship, and, above all, avoid doing anything stupid like designating Venezuela a state sponsor of terrorism.

That's not to say there wasn't plenty of stupidity--this remains, after all, the Bush administration. Early in the session, long-time NY Democratic representative Eliot Engel (who is the committee chair) congratulated Miss Venezuela on winning the Miss Universe pageant, prompting Republican Dan Burton to blurt out, "Is she here?!"

Engel said that no, she wasn't here, but that if she were, they would surely have invited her to testify first. Shannon (Thomas Shannon, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere) looked uncomfortable.

Raging Chavez-hater Connie Mack took the prize for the dumbest comment of the session. The four academic experts who testified (Javier Corrales, David Myers, Norman Bailey, and Jennifer McCoy) concurred that it would be unwise for the US to designate Venezuela a state sponsor of terrorism. Thankfully, Shannon seemed to agree -- he couldn't say so outright, but he repeated several times that the administration is acutely aware of the potential political consequences of such a move. Needless to say, this did not go over well with Connie, who said that while "this time it was laptops with information about Chavez's relationship with the FARC," next time it might be laptops with information about an "increasing relationship" with Ahmadinejad ... as if talking to Iran were grounds on which to designate a country a state sponsor of terrorism!

If that were the case, we'd have to add ourselves to the list!

He also pronounced Ahmadinejad "AK-madinejad." Maybe he should take note of Katie Couric's trick: say "I'm a dinner jacket" very quickly. But even that's not right.

Anyway, here's hoping some of the positive lessons from this hearing get through to the Obama administration. If the comments on his website are any indicator, at least a few Venezuelans are optimistic: a note from someone calling himself the "World Director Venezolanos con Obama" in Los Teques says,

"I'm from Venezuela,i love my country,i'm proud of that,but we are passing for a very hard time in here,i don't like anything from President Chavez,i never support him,i hope the you be the next President of U.S.A.and not only help your country,i hope the you help my country. I'm really proud of you Sir,because when the people pass for bad time in there lives,we need a person the can move the deep of our soul & make us feel alive again. I'm sorry for my English. Thank you so much."

The Edo Era

Quico says: The other day somebody who doesn't usually comment (I'm guessing norteamericano) asked me about the relationship between Chávez and the minority parties that support him. I told him that was more a subject for a treatise in psychopathology than a blog. As it turns out, though, Edo - editorial cartoonist for El Mundo - managed to convey it in a single comic strip panel.

New Comments Software

Quico says: As some of you know, I've had a long-running hate-hate relationship with Haloscan, the outfit that desiugned the comments software I've been using for the last five and a half years. Last night, in a bout of insomnia, I found out there's are far more powerful commenting tools out there these days, so I switched.

My new provider is called Intense Debate. I'm all into it. Intense Debate is to Haloscan what a Porsche 911 is to a donkey cart.

The killer app here is comment rating, which allows you to have your say on which comments you find most valuable. In effect, this spreads the burden of moderating the comments section: rather than Juan Cristobal and I having to do it all, everybody - even lurkers - can help out with very little effort. It only takes a second to rate good comments Up and lousy ones Down. Over time, people who reliably contribute valuable comments accumulate reputation points, which are shown each time you post. You can even choose to sort posts from the highest to the lowest rated, which will make it easy to cut through to the best comments and give the trolls a miss.

Do let me know how it works on your machine. Initial reviews are somewhat dodgy. If too many of you hate it, I might consider switching to the other competitor in this race: Disqus.

Frankly, I've been so sick of Haloscan for so long, I'm just glad to have some choices here.

Yes we can!

Juan Cristobal says: - They say politics makes strange bedfellows. But in the history of bedfellows, has there ever been an odder couple than the two in the picture?

I'm talking, of course, of Maria Corina Machado and Ismael García.

She is the dashing leader of electoral NGO Súmate. He is an Assembly member for Podemos, a center-left party formerly allied with Chávez whose acronym literally means "Yes we can."

She stood accused of having signed Carmona's decree before being granted amnesty earlier this year. He is a former Chávez ally who once tried to put her in jail but is now labeled as a traitor to Chávez.

She worked tirelessly to collect the necessary signatures to revoke Chávez's mandate. He worked tirelessly to show these signatures were fraudulent.

She comes from one of Venezuela's most traditional families, a graduate of Caracas' poshest school. He is a former handyman for pharmaceutical company Farvenca, a Falcón boy who made it up the ranks of his union, went into politics under the wing of the socialist MAS party and was elected mayor of La Victoria and, later, Assembly member.

And here they are, both opposing Chávez. Yesterday she helped organize the primary in which his candidate won the right to run as sole opposition candidate for governor of Aragua, one of Venezuela's most populous states.

I guess they had something in common all along. After all, neither of them has a problem hanging out with psychos.

So if these two can learn to put aside their differences and work together, can the rest of us ever learn to do the same?

Hugo Chávez, Union Buster

Quico says: You gotta hand it to Chávez. We're almost a decade into this whole mess and somehow he still manages to surprise, to amaze even.

Yesterday's little outburst on the perverse power of State TV unions was one for the ages. The whole thing will have your jaw firmly pinned to the floor, but I especially enjoyed the bit 2:45 minutes into the clip:

Chávez (talking about VTV cameramen, in high outrage mode): "Check it out, they get eight hours' pay for each overtime hour worked! And if you want to change that, they raise a stink! Some of them make threats! That means, for every hour they work on a Sunday they get paid for eight! Because that's signed into what they call the...whatchamacallit?" (sp: lo que llaman...¿cómo es?)

Voice off-camera: "Collective bargaining agreement."

Chávez: "The collective bargaining agreement...on the government's dime!"

The whatchamacallit? The whatchamacallit?!?!?!

As I watched the clip, I got this heady sense of having struck a deep, rich vein of rant-fodder. It's just so richly textured, this one. It reveals so much. There are so many levels of fucked-upedness crammed in so compactly into this tirade. It's so, so meta.

To begin with, there's something almost oedipal about it. Here we have Chávez. Ranting. Against. VTV cameramen!!!

There is probably nobody else in the country Chávez owes more to than VTV cameramen. These are the people most conspicuously, most immediately responsible for making possible his whole government-via-cathode-ray shtick. In fact, when you watch the video, you're only able to watch it because one of the targets of the rant was still pointing a camera at the guy. There's something psychoanalytically radioactive about singling them out for an utterly weird tongue -lashing: he should be washing their feet!

Then there's the sheer narcissism. It's hard to shake the feeling that what really bugs Chávez is that people should demand to get paid extra to point a camera at him. He seems to think that's a privilege, not a job, that people should be lining up to offer to do that for free.

The whole tone of the tirade treats collective bargaining as a kind of ruse, a cheap trick, an unlikely excuse that those crafty cameramen had up their sleeve to bamboozle the poor, golden-hearted Marxist revolutionary government out of some cash. But wasn't the revolution supposed to be about improving working people's lives!? What the hell kind of communist is he!?

I especially like the use of the passive voice in the phrase "eso está firmado" ("that is signed") - a construction that handily draws attention away from the fact that the contract didn't just magically sign itself, that if it's signed it's because there are signatories, that a collective bargaining agreement is exactly that, an agreement between two parts, both of whose signatures are needed before it can go into effect.

Who signed the current VTV contract on behalf of the state? Hell if I know, but after 10 years in power, the chances are very high it was someone acting under Chávez's authority and on his behalf. What he's accusing the cameramen of, the degeneracy he slams them for, consists of expecting him to keep his word!

Probably the thing that winds me up most here is just the sniveling, cowardly choice of targets. Chávez might have taken this up with the union, with his minister, with whomever negotiated the contract, with the people who are actually responsible. But he doesn't. Instead, he prefers to humiliate the couple of flunkies who happened to be on the job that day, innocent bystanders in a verbal drive-by shooting. What a pathetic, bullying thing to do.

And then, it's impossible to miss the weird selectiveness of Chávez's concern for the wellbeing of the national treasury, as though it's overtime pay at VTV that's stretching the revolution's finances.

Is Chávez going to drive a similarly hard bargain with the Russians to ensure that the guys who build his tanks and submarines don't end up drawing lots of overtime pay on Venezuela's dime? Does he bully Raúl Castro when he sits down to negotiate those oil supply deals to try to get a better deal for the Venezuelan treasury? How about the workers building the Manabí refinery in Ecuador, will he insist they work for no pay so that costs don't become "unsustainable"?

How many of Cilia Flores's relatives on the National Assembly payroll is he going to buttonhole to get them to give up their overtime? When is he going to demand that Wilmer Ruperti volunteer his time as he ships PDVSA's oil? Or that Victor Vargas trade government bonds on a not-for-profit basis?

It's stomach turning, honestly. I hope this gets some play in the press. The SNTP (National Press Workers Union) needs to step up to the plate here, take a stand for itself and for its members. And oppo políticos should realize what a blunder Chávez's new pet cause - volunteer overtime - really is, and capitalize on it, politically speaking.

Last year, Nicolas Sarkozy got elected president of France on a promise to allow people to "work more so you can earn more." In France, the pitch came across as politically courageous: imagine, asking voters to work harder!

But Chávez has one-upped him, his new vision is "work more so you can earn less". Anything else he calls degenerate and pledges to fight.

It's a testament to just how out of touch the Fat Man in the Palace has gotten. Only someone very, very far removed from the day-to-day struggle to make ends meet that most Venezuelan families face could ever think this would play in Parapara. Normal Venezuelans want a government that honors their economic aspirations and works to help them realize them, not a government that randomly abuses them for wanting a better life.

This is some low-hanging fruit we're talking about here, people.

Primaries and the Oppo Brand

Quico says: Tomorrow, the Venezuelan opposition is going to do something we have never done before: choose a gubernatorial candidate through a primary election.

As it turns out, Aragua's pioneering experiment, which is being organized by a re-invigorated Súmate, isn't exactly a cliff-hanger: absolutely everybody seems to take it for granted that Podemos's candidate, Henry Rosales will win comfortably. After all, the guy has Didalco Bolívar's machine behind him. And it sure helps that his only viable competitor, UNT's Hiram Gaviria, is not participating.

Amusingly, Jurassic specimen AD head honcho Henry Ramos Allup, during his vicious little press conference yesterday, said his party is supporting Rosales...even though AD has its own candidate on the ballot! You gotta feel for José Trujillo: rumors that his wife is gonna vote for Rosales too could not be confirmed.

Rosales's only other institutionally backed candidate was put up by the Comando friggin' Nacional de la friggin' Resistencia - apparently now morphed into a full-fledged political party - so no, the outcome isn't really in doubt.

In fact, the Aragua experiment is more a logistical demonstration than a political decision-making mechanism. Aragua became a kind of lab where oppo Election-Obsessive types got to run their own Fantasy CNE, one that says Yes to every item in their election wishlist, from see-through ballot boxes to hand counts to a circular ballot that won't give the candidate listed first an unfair advantage. Certainly, María Corina Machado isn't shy about pitching it that way (starting on 6:04):




(the rest of the interview is worth watching too, btw, for different reasons.)

Personally, I've been on the fence about Primaries for a long time. It's not that I'm against them, it's that I worry that people project their fantasies of a well-functioning, united opposition onto them. As MCM herself notes, every method for selecting candidates has advantages and disadvantages. But, to many in the opposition, the idea of primaries has become a kind of fetish, a magical solution allowing them to sidestep the painstaking institutional reforms we need if we want to become organizationally cohesive and effective.

We need to keep our wits about us. Gaviria's decision not to participate in Sunday's vote illustrates the limits of primaries in coordinating the aspirations of politicians when institutions are weak. Primaries work - when they work - because they are embedded in a set of institutional practices, both formal and informal, that even Súmate can't impose. In their absence, primaries can't even guarantee unity. Ask Hiram, he'll tell you.

The question, though, is whether it's possible to do worse than we're doing now. I think that would be hard. Fairly or unfairly, the survey-augmented backroom deal method the opposition settled on to choose our candidates, and particularly the very public bickering it generates, are making us look horrible.

To my mind, much of the criticism is unfair and immature. A lot of the time, aspiring oppo politicos are getting crucified simply for wanting to get elected to office, as though aspiring to elected office wasn't the dictionary definition of a politician's job. But whether it's fair or unfair isn't really the point, the point is that tremendous damage is being done to our ability to get our people elected to office.

An electorate weary of personal ambition, primed to think the worst of anyone who would step up to the plate and try to run for something, is being treated to an unending display of the kind of political behavior it hates most. How does this help us, again?

The thing to latch on to in that last passage is the pronouns: the bickering is making us look horrible, it's hurting our chances in November.

One thing I've noticed more and more is that opposition supporters almost never speak this way. People who swear up and down that they hate Chávez, people who would do anything to kick out the chavista tool running their states and municipalities, bizarrely switch to the third person when they start to discuss the people who should replace them: it's always they who look ridiculous with all their bickering and shortsighted personal ambition. Reductio'd to its absurdum, the view verges on a kind of hazy, semi-conscious anarchism, where what people really want is for states and cities to run, without anybody specific running them.

This unwillingness to identifywith the people who must run the country if we don't want it to be run by chavistas stands in sharp contrast with what happens in the US. Up north, even after an enormously bruising primary campaign, democrats were still under extreme pressure to think of the party as "us". Refusing to do so came to identify you as a raving crank.

¡Que envidia!

The depth of anti-chavistas' resistance to identifying with the opposition came through very clearly in my latest survey. Asked about your views on Venezuelan politics, a staggering number of readers who detest chavismo simply refuse to identify with in any way as "pro-opposition":


Looking through those "it's complicated" answers, it's clear that y'all are basically anti-Chavista NiNis. Some typical comments:

Strongly anti-chavista but not finding much solace in the viable opposition

Not necessarily pro-opposition, but strongly anti-Chavez

Sympathetic towards the opposition but knowing things are never so bad they can't be made worse.

While the opposition is better than the government, it’s appalling

Pro Venezuela, which chavismo is not but opposition is not doing much better either

As far as I can tell, these kinds of views are very widespread. The opposition "brand" is pretty much in the dumpster, widely reviled even by - especially by - its natural base.

The opposition just doesn't offer an emotional "hook" we can hang a first-person pronoun on. There's nothing about it you could feel good identifying with. As Juan Cristobal knows only too well, declaring your enthusiastic support for an opposition party in Venezuela is sort of like declaring yourself a Nudist at a polite cocktail party: there's something off about it. It's just not something normal people do, certainly not something normal people do proudly. Worse yet, our leaders seem not to grasp that, not to have any sense that this is a problem that demands their attention.

We shouldn't think of primaries as a magic wand able to lift the Oppo brand out of the dismal slump it's in. But they could be a start: one step in a much longer road to repairing the relationship between anti-chavistas and the people who represent us.

For this year it's too late, but in a couple of years, we face National Assembly elections. When that time comes, we can't afford to keep pissing on our own brand by shutting our voters out of the process for choosing our candidates. And agreeing to be chosen through primaries could play an important signaling role on the part of our leaders, sending a clear message that the opposition has turned a decisive corner.

So here's hoping that the Aragua primary goes off without a hitch tomorrow, and definitely establishes the method's viability down the road. It's no magic bullet. It can't replace the arduous task of rebuilding the opposition's image. But it's not nothing.

Poverty beyond the spin

Juan Cristobal says: - If you didn't know anything about Venezuela and you stumbled upon this AP story, you would think Hugo Chávez's management of the economy was producing quasi-miraculous results. In it, the President of the National Statistical Institute Elías Eljuri says that poverty in Venezuela is decreasing dramatically. But it turns out this is a case of Lying with the Reference Period because, while overall poverty did decrease between 1998 and 2007, the INE's own figures show the trend starting to reverse.

Abelardo Daza, an economist at ODH Grupo Consultor (a firm that I'm also associated with) has been sifting through the data. The numbers confirm the government's story: there was a sharp drop in poverty in the last four years.

This is not all that surprising. Poverty has been falling in every petrostate in the last four years. What's surprising is that, as the graph above shows, the trend started to reverse in the second quarter of 2007, with the poverty rate climbing even as the price of oil reached unprecedented new highs. That's the real story here.

The story of poverty abatement through the latest oil boom is really not that controversial. You can grasp the gist of it looking at a single graph:


In the midst of a dizzying oil boom, the government opened up the fiscal spout, flooding the streets with cash and boosting aggregate demand and overall economic activity. Between 2002 and 2006, Central Government spending more than quintupled in nominal terms, going from Bs.22 trillion to Bs.115 trillion - and that's without even counting Fonden, PDVSA Social Spending, and Chávez-only-knows how many other parallel budgets the government is running.

Through social programs such as the Misiones, as well as subsidies and other schemes, the government has indeed channeled more resources directly to poor families, who have seen their purchasing power rise. With that much money around, and considering the severe economic problems we had prior to 2003, it was never really controversial that poverty would fall.

The government measures poverty by counting the number of households whose income is less than twice the cost of the "typical food basket," and dividing it by the number of households. The ratio you get is your poverty rate. Figured this way, it's true that by the end of 2007 the percentage of households below the poverty line was 28.5%. The same data indicate poverty was 43.9% in 1998, (curiously, still lower than the eye-popping 80% often quoted by Chávez way back when he was thin, and lower than the 55.1% we had after four years of Chávez)

But hold the blue ribbons. As Quico once put it, Chávez's not-so-secret recipe for poverty abatement consists of discovering enormous deposits of stuff everyone desperately wants, pumping it out of the ground and selling it at ever-increasing prices.

The question isn't whether poverty is lower in Venezuela at the peak of the oil cycle than it was at the bottom of the cycle: that's just obvious. The real question we should be asking is how efficient the government has been at leveraging the oil windfall as a poverty-fighting instrument. In other words, how much poverty-reduction bang we're getting for the petro-buck.

As it turns out, economists have a technique for measuring just that: the "income elasticity of poverty reduction."

To non-economists, "elasticity" sounds like what you're doing when you're trying to sttttrrrreeeetch your paycheck to get you through to the end of the month. But the income elasticity of poverty reduction is just a measure of the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction. Each time GDP goes up 1%, how much does poverty fall? That's the basic intuition (though, of course, the technical detail is a bit hairier.)

Francisco Rodríguez has looked into this in detail. His conclusion? "However one calculates it, Venezuela’s income elasticity of poverty reduction is below typical values for developing countries." In other words, gifted the kind of frenzied petro-boom we've been having, the typical developing country would've reduced poverty more than we have. It's not that we're doing worse than the Norways of the world in reducing poverty - we're doing worse than the Dominican Republics of the world.

That's bad enough, but what the INE's updated figures show is that we may have stopped reducing poverty altogether. The economy is still growing (albeit more slowly), but poverty has begun rising again. This is no CIA plot, this comes from the government's own statistics.

The reason is quite simple: inflation - a problem that's also eroding earlier gains in other petrostates. The growth of people's income has not kept up with the fast rise in the cost of food, so households are actually falling below the poverty line in the midst of an oil boom.

To highlight this point, Daza has looked into how many "food baskets" the minimum wage buys. While in May of 2007 a minimum wage bought you 1.24 baskets, the minimum wage in June of 2008 would buy you 1.05 baskets.

And that's after accounting for the mandatory increase in the minimum wage...

So the poverty statistics are not good for the government. They keep saying that, compared to 1998, we have far less poverty, but that's a bit like bragging that your driveway has 95% fewer dead leaves on it today than it did just nine months ago - when it was Fall - without noting it has a few more dead leaves now than it did last week.

This kind of top-of-the-cycle vs. bottom-of-the-cycle comparison is alright for spinning reporters, but close to meaningless from an economic point of view. Worse, it's politically irrelevant: when voters step into the voting booth in November, it'll be how they're doing compared to a month or a year ago that'll matter, not how they're doing compared to a decade ago.

The problem for the government is that the economy is cooling, inflation shows no sign of abating and the conveyor belt that once linked rising oil prices to falling poverty rates is breaking down. If this pattern keeps up, come November the government may find itself on the receiving end of another dose of electoral whoop-ass.

Who loves ya?!

Quico says: Here's an innovative take on the budding Chávez-Medvedev lovematch:

Neither Medvedev nor Chavez were being very direct about why they are deepenig the relationship, and I find myself in disagreement with other analysts who say that it is only about the business deals.

[snip]

According to some lawyer colleagues I have spoken with in Venezuela, government officials have paid close attention to how Russia acted to protect Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe following a democratic collapse, and it is believed that by extending such favorable energy deals to another state (rather than another private company) that Venezuela is purchasing future political insurance and potential veto in the United Nations.

Russia is not just exporting tanks, jets, and kalashnikovs to Venezuela, it is exporting legitimacy.

And don't miss Chávez's latest implausible Media Conspiracy Theory, this time blamed for maliciously spreading false reports that he had agreed to host Russian military bases in Venezuela. (In fact, he merely said he'd welcome Russian navy ships to Venezuelan ports with flags and drums and songs, so you can see how that's all different.)

The trouble with the conspiracy-theory view of this little fracas is that it wasn't some bastion of imperialist media that got this particular ball rolling, it was Interfax, a Russian news agency with deep ties to the Kremlin.

How do you get around that one? Easy: instead of blaming the organization responsible for producing and circulating the story, you rail against those who saw it on the news wire and - shockingly - thought it was news.

Personally, I'm still puzzling through how you can pick up a wire story "hasta con saña."

The forgotten trailblazer

Juan Cristobal says: Take a look at this picture. Quick: can you tell me who this man is?

If you can't - and I bet you can't - stop to ponder the fact that you've failed to identify Venezuela's first popularly elected president, Manuel Felipe de Tovar.

No reason to feel bad. I had no idea who he was either until pretty recently, when I picked up a copy of Rafael Arráiz Lucca's "Venezuela: 1830 a nuestros días." The book is a compendium of the major historical events of our history as a free nation, almost by necessity broad in scope and yet shallow in the treatment of most topics. It was perfect for me.

I picked it up half embarrassed, realizing the last time I put any sustained effort into learning Venezuelan history, I was a stonewashed Maracaibo teenager. Reading the book, it was remarkable how some things seemed as familiar as daylight. But I also stumbled on a few surprises.

Case in point, the man in the picture. Manuel Felipe de Tovar was the true precursor of Venezuelan democracy, but he's now almost completely forgotten. Here's what Arráiz has to say about him:

"In accordance with the Constitution passed in 1858, elections were held in April of 1860, and the winner was Manuel Felipe de Tovar, with 35,010 votes, for the 1860-1864 constitutional period. No immediate reelection was allowed. Pedro Gual was elected Vice-president for two years, with 26,269 votes... For the first time, Venezuelans directly elected their leaders, and they did so in the midst of a cruel war that had already cost thousands of lives and was sowing the country with misery and desolation."

It's strange. Somehow my brain had assimilated the notion that we had to wait until 1948 to elect a President for the first time, a certain Rómulo Gallegos. Could I have been wrong all along? Was I simply the victim of my own ignorance, or was this all an adeco fairy-tale, further proof of their penchant for rewriting history? Could it be that Arráiz got it wrong?

No, it's true, Tovar was the first. Sure, he was elected on the basis of a limited franchise, but then, so was Jefferson. Even the Chávez government acknowledges he was the first, which is strange since Tovar was elected as a Paecista, and we know how much Chávez loathes José Antonio Páez. (Recent reports suggest the government even desecrated Paez's grave.)

I wonder how Tovar's achievement was received in Venezuela's mid-XIXth Century political circles. Being an elected, civilian President in Venezuela in those days had to be quite a handful, calling for equal measures of luck, naiveté and chutzpah. Tovar must have been a dreamer of gargantuan proportions to think he could pull it off.

Elected in the middle of a notoriously cruel civil war, Tovar faced serious military and economic challenges from day one. The government was bankrupt, so he instituted our first income tax. He freed up imports of scarce agricultural products and froze the salaries of government employees. He pardoned some political prisoners while waging war against guerrilla-style militias determined to overthrow him. The complaints about the civilian Constitution not being strong enough to deal with the rising insurgency grew louder by the day, and they eventually paved the way for the subsequent Páez dictatorship that ended Tovar's stint after only 13 months in power.

I'm no expert on Venezuelan history, I'm just a guy who read a book. But in the midst of the turbulence of the country's early years, I found a lot that's familiar.

To understand Venezuela's beginnings as a country, it's important to ponder the nature of those in charge at the time. The War of Independence was a traumatic military event. Contrary to popular myth, it was not won by a unified army with a clear line of command. Instead, it was waged and won by a semi-coordinated bunch of militias composed mostly of illiterate peasants, each led by its own caudillo. With rare exceptions, when I say "caudillo" I mean warlord.

Immediately following the war, the caudillos and their followers found they had to submit to a government in faraway Bogotá headed by an unelected President-for-life. Naturally, they pushed to break away from Colombia. After all, they'd had to cross the Andes to go free Colombians, Peruvians and the like; it's not surprising they felt they were getting the short end of the stick having to bow to a bunch of snobs like the Santanders and Nariños of the world.

In spite of their disparate interests and personalities, they joined together and fought the common cause of secession. One of the movements they started was called "La Cosiata", a derisive neologism for a group not unlike the recent Coordinadora Democrática.

Emboldened by their hard-won military victories, and drunk from the success in achieving secession from "Gran Colombia", it's no wonder chaos ensued. During the first thirty years of our existence, Venezuela endured one failed government after another. Constitutions came and went, as did the military coups. The only intermittent periods of relative calm came when Páez reluctantly made himself dictator and managed to quiet things down a bit. When circumstances allowed, he would retreat to either his farms in the Llanos or to New York, where he eventually died.

So the nation was built by a hodgepodge of ambitious latifundists-turned-generals looking to get rich quick, men who felt entitled to the spoils of war, perhaps understandably after risking their lives and their lands for the patriotic cause. Against that backdrop, it's not surprising that the few attempts to establish civilian rule, institutions and a functioning state were utter failures. But they did exist.

The early history of the republic is dominated by all things military, while the exceptions such as the civil-minded Tovar or José María Vargas lie half-forgotten in the dustbin of history. It's no surprise that Tovar himself was buried in a random Paris cementery instead of in our National Pantheon, and that instead of celebrating him in plazas or streets, we are quickly running out of boondoggles to name after psychopath-murderers-cum-half-failed caudillos.

But are we doomed to keep repeating that history again and again? Will bloggers 60 years from now be surprised to dust off a history book that informs them that Hugo Chávez was not the first popularly elected president, like their schoolteachers said?

Not at all. Because the remarkable thing about men like Vargas and Tovar is not that they failed, but that they ever had a shot. They saw disorder, yet they were bold enough to dream of a different country. That's as much a part of our heritage as the caudillo strain.

Fast-forward 180 years and picture yourself in 2013. Suppose for a minute that Chávez leaves power.

After wiping the smile off your face, think of all the people, all the groups that are going to feel entitled to the spoils of victory: businessmen, students, politicians, unions, ex-PDVSA folk, the Plaza Altamira gang. Think of the effort it's going to take to keep everyone's interests at bay and put the nation's interests first.

It would be easy to picture this and conclude, as many swing voters do, that while Chávez may be bad, the opposition is worse. It's only natural for our fears to be confirmed by the intense tussling the opposition is currently embarked on. Is it any wonder, then, that Chávez plays on this fear with slogans like "No volverán"?

But the apparent anarchy in the opposition is not always real, nor does it necessarily imply that we are doomed to fail. Against Chavismo's ambition to "get Bolivar's dream right", maybe we should oppose a decidedly more modest goal: vindicating Tovar. The civilianist current he pioneered is just as Venezuelan as caudillismo, and much, much more relevant in today's world. We are Doña Bárbara, but we are also Santos Luzardo.

It's useful to keep this in mind next time we see the opposition behaving like a sack of cats with no clear goals in sight. It takes a lot of effort to be organized when bochinche is embedded in our DNA. The thing to remember is that it's not just bochinche that's in there: the determination to do away with caudillos and bring the country together behind an elected civilian on the basis of the law is just as embedded in us, just as Venezuelan. Which is why we should celebrate whenever civilians manage to talk out their differences and bring us closer to realizing that vision.

So next time you feel a vein is about to burst at the sight of Saady Bijani, spare a thought for Manuel Felipe de Tovar, a man who, irony of ironies, took the oath of office one April the 12th. And if you dare to dream that yes, we can overcome our history, take comfort in the fact that greater Venezuelans have harbored the same dream when facing even longer odds than us.

New Survey!

Quico says: Following on from that very enlightening Reader's Survey last week, Juan Cristobal, Lucia and I put together a second, much more detailed survey of readers' political views.

Here's your chance to spout off on everything from what to do about crime to Hugo Chávez's mental state.

Realistically, this one will be of interest strictly to Venezuelan politics junkies, but good fun nonetheless.

Click here to take the Readers' Views Survey.

81% of you

Quico says: So if my Readers' Survey is to be trusted, 81% of you won't mind if I post a link to a piece in Spanish. This one y'all really need to read. On it Chuo Torrealba shows himself as not just an uncommonly lucid political strategist, but also an uncommonly talented writer and rapporteur. The story will make your heart shrink. Don't miss it.

Extra! Extra! Opposition Fails to Shoot Self In Foot!

Quico says: The opposition political class is held in dismally low esteem by most of our readers, but sometimes this has its advantages. For one, it makes it extremely easy to exceed expectations. Any time an oppo politician does something marginally altruistic - or even just not patently self-destructive - we're thrilled and amazed.

Take this presser by notorious microphone-whore William Ojeda. I almost choked on my corn flakes this morning when I heard the longstanding Petare mayor wannabe (and shortstanding UNT member) would bow out of the race in favor of Primero Justicia's better-placed Carlos Ocariz.

This is a big deal. Petare is, by some counts, one of the three largest shatytowns in South America. The area shocked everyone by voting 62% "No" in December's referendum. Getting an oppo mayor elected there, of all places, would make a very strong symbolic statement...one which Ojeda's decision makes likely.

Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles...these sporadic outbreaks of oppo sanity are getting more and more common! What's next, a coherent message?!

The Caracas-Tehran Axis, but not as you know it

Quico says: The World Mayor project has just released the shortlist of 11 finalists for its 2008 award. Among them is Leopoldo López alongside Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, mayor of Tehran.

Sweet Tooth for Punishment

Quico says: After eight years (four over schedule), half a billion dollars, one corruption scandal after another after another, and still not a lump of sugar produced, would you show your face around CAAEZ, pledging still more money and urging campesinos to volunteer their time for your boondoggle?!!

Photo of the Day

[The accompanying article, btw, shows pretty clearly that it's not just the opposition that's having trouble agreeing a single slate of candidates. It's just that the government has mechanisms for punishing dissent and for signaling to voters who its "real" candidate is, which prevent its vote from splitting too much between competing aspirants. Que envidia.]

After All These Years, Dan Burnett Still Doesn't Get It

Quico says: Here's a riddle for you: when is a post-chavista awakening not a post-chavista awakening? When it's formulated as though failed policies had nothing to do with autocratic politics...in other words, when it's Dan Burnett's post-chavista awakening.

Burnett - a.k.a. "ow" - and I go back a ways. Time was, back in 2003-2004, when Dan used to while away his afternoons on my comments section fighting the good fight against the bolivarian revolution's detractors. Calmer and more thoughtful than your average foaming-at-the-mouth foreign based PSF, he nonetheless went to considerable lengths to defend aspects of chavismo I considered plainly indefensible.

In time, Dan got tired of the torrent of abuse he was getting in my blog and set up camp on his own, starting OilWars, nominally a blog about Venezuela and Iraq, but in practice mostly about Venezuela. For me, it was a case of good riddance, though I did sporadically check in to read what he was writing.

Long story short, after a long, unrequited infatuation, Burnett's come down with a heavy case of the repentant chavista blues. For the last few weeks, his blog has turned into one long gripe about the revolution's economic policies, its idiot defense of an absurdly over-valued currency, the general insouciance of its spokesmen and the utter absence of anything that could be considered a long-term development and diversification strategy. He sums up his new position saying,

A different government, WITH ITS HEART IN EXACTLY THE SAME PLACE, but with its feet planted firmly on the ground could do much, much better both for Venezuelans and the Left internationally. [emphasis his.]

You'd think I'd be happy about all this, and certainly I can't hide a certain schadenfreudish frisson at his belated jolt of sanity.

But as I read his recent posts more closely, I can't shake the feeling that, deep down, Burnett still doesn't get it. His impassioned critique of chavista economic bumbling comes in a political void, divorced from any kind of critical evaluation of the way the politics of the Chávez era made it not just entirely predictable but ultimately inevitable.

As far as I can tell, Dan doesn't write much about politics, preferring to concentrate on what he sees as the more consequential matters of longer term development strategy. Any acknowledgment of Chávez cult of personality is thin on the ground over at OilWars. When, rarely, they do come, they come heavily hedged with ritual bowing toward the leader's great charisma, determination and dynamism. For Burnett, the economic gríngo-la is well and truly off; the political one is still firmly in place.

Hugo Chávez equates dissent with treason. He has made promotion within the Bolivarian political establishment wholly dependent on continual shows of unconditional obedience. He's instituted a militaristic leadership style where all collaborators, ministers included, are expected merely to implement his orders without question.

Catch him on one of his good days, and Burnett's even capable of accepting that. It's the link between that leadership style and the government's dysfunctional economic policies that seems to elude him.

And yet, it's clear. The one setting where Freedom of Expression and openness to debate have been most badly eroded in the Chávez era is around the cabinet table. Under Chávez, policies are dictated to ministers, Aló Presidente style, rather than discussed with them. Add to this leadership style the guy's delirious, near-comical economic illiteracy and the result isn't really a surprise: misguided, contradictory, short-sighted policies with vague evaluation criteria, little follow up, multiple opportunities for rent-seeking, no long-term coherence and major incentives for ministerial dissembling.

Burnett takes out his frustration over all the silly policy on Chávez's hapless cabinet ministers, but in doing so he puts on display his legendary abilities for seeing-and-not-seeing, completely missing the point that anybody who shows the independence of mind it would take to tell Chávez his policies make no sense got weeded out of the upper echelons of the chavista establishment long ago.

So it's absurd to see the government's economic haplessness as a kind of historical contingency, an accident unrelated to the deep structures of its policy-making practices. When you fully grasp the implications of Chávez's criteria for promoting people to cabinet level, you realize it couldn't have gone any other way. Chavista ministers make senseless policies because, under Chávez, only senseless people stand a chance of becoming ministers.

This thought is a bridge too far for Burnett, por ahora.

The guy says he's burnt out, so he's taking some time off of blogging. Which, of course, is a sentiment I've shared now and then in the past. Sometimes, it takes some time away from the day-to-day to come to grips with painful realizations, with thoughts too long resisted that can no longer be ignored. Maybe, during his break, Dan will put two and two together and start grasping that a leader who demands blind obedience from his collaborators systematically cuts himself off from the mechanisms he would need to correct the mistakes he makes. Maybe, in time, even OW will come to see that under Narcissism Leninism, wrongheaded policies are no accident: they're an inevitability.