Red Rag Chronicles

Quico says: In the last few weeks, Venezuelans have faced a paradox. A government that, by and large, has never allowed itself to be hemmed in by written laws has, nonetheless, pushed a wide legislative offensive, approving any number of new laws that expand its scope to punish private actors.

The result is disorienting, contradictory, baffling. Take the issue of property rights. Within a few days, the government both greatly simplified the legal procedure for taking over privately owned businesses and demonstrated that it doesn't actually care about those procedures by ignoring all due process and sending actual tanks to take over the nation's largest cement manufacturer.

This pattern, where the government approves punitive new laws and, in the next breath, gleefully ignores them, has been one of the defining characteristics of chavismo's onslaught against rule-based governance; a practice that badly undermines of the entire cognitive and cultural apparatus that supports idea of a state bound by laws.

How to interpret all this? Why does a government that clearly doesn't give a rat's ass about laws spend so much time and energy changing them?

For me, the key is to wise-up to the political role these new laws play, to understand them not as enshrining substantive new powers but rather as signals, messages within a signaling game.

What is alarming about the new Telecoms Bill, for instance, isn't actually the specific new powers it would grant the presidency. To realize that, it's enough to witness chavismo's move against two opposition radio stations in Guarico state last week. The stations, whose broadcasting licenses were not in order, were shut down in a delirious show of strength, by hundreds of armed soldiers that went on to seize their broadcasting equipment outside any due process mechanism whatsoever. Even the new Telecoms Bill, however punitive and authoritarian it may be, wouldn't empower the government to randomly seize stations' equipment like that...and that bill isn't even law yet!

Episodes like the one in Guarico show that the government's M.O. for screwing us doesn't consist of tightening the law, it consists of just ignoring laws with impunity whenever it feels like it. In that context, the question becomes: what's the point of tightening laws at all, of making them much more punitive than they were, but still less punitive than the government's real-world actions?

The answer, I think, is that these new laws aren't laws, they're messages. Signalling mechanisms. Language. They're the way Chávez communicates with his own bureaucrats, to indicate to them of which sectors are now "fair game". And it's the way he communicates with specific sectors to let them know that they've been marked out.

If you are, say, a tour operator, you're right to be alarmed by the new Tourism Decree Law - but not fundamentally due to the dozens of arbitrary new permits and authorizations you're now supposed to obtain just to do business, or to the heavy punishments you face for breaking any of them. After all, if the government had wanted to shut you down or bankrupt you, it certainly could've done so de facto, with or without the new law.

The reason you should be alarmed is that the Decree Law itself acts as a statement of intent, a none-too-subtle sign that, for whatever reason, your business is in the bureaucracy's cross hairs. That the people singled out for newly punitive treatment should react with alarm isn't at all surprising.

What's shocking is the breadth of new targets the latest batch of chavista laws take on: everyone from real estate developers and food processors to media companies and retail businesses. Marking them all out at once, Chávez waves a huge red rag in front of their faces. He invites them to charge, as though it was the red-rag that was threatening them.

But it isn't the red rag that threatens them. It's the sword concealed just behind it. Of course, he had that sword long before he started waving the red rag. All the red rag is meant to do is to lure us into a panicked charge, a hopeless attack launched without a plan that merely leaves us all the more exposed to the real threat we face.

There is no doubt that a bull has very good reason to be alarmed if he sees a red rag waved in front of his face at a bullfight. That rag signals an intent that he can only find alarming. But it's just as clear that, if the bull mistakes the signal for the threat itself, he'll only help the torero move in for the final blow.

Trust me, I know. After all, I'm a Toro.

Buckshot Provocation

Quico says: Reading back on what I wrote yesterday, it strikes me that I'm just now grasping the actual mechanics of chavista provocation. All at once, I realized that the reason the new Telecoms Law struck me as especially alarming isn't so much that it's worse than any of the other new laws, it's that I'm me!

Chávez knows that different sectors will react to different outrages differently. A punitive new law on Food Security may strike me as relatively unremarkable, but it'll freak the hell out of food distributors. A crazy new Armed Forces Law may be no skin off your back if you make a living distributing food, but it'll set all kinds of alarms ringing if you're an old-school military officer. The theft-cum-expropriation of Cemex may not keep military officers up at night, but it'll scare the hell out of foreign investors big and small. And a new Telecoms Law that sets up a Sword of Damocles over all electronic telecommunications may not bother foreign investors that much, but it'll freak the hell out of media types like me.

What Chávez is doing is buckshot provocation, scattering his fire widely enough to make sure he hits all kinds of different targets. The latest onslaught has something for everyone to hate: tour operators, real estate developers, farmers, kidnapees, oppo politicians, even bloggers. Things never go well when Chávez starts to go down this route.

Pushing it

Quico says: What would it take to get me really, seriously alarmed about the latest uptick in chavista autocracy? This is a question many of you have been asking, as I dismiss each of Chávez's latest provocative moves in turn as "grave, but not serious." As far as I could see, nothing in the latest legislative onslaught counted as a qualitatively new attack on the fundamental freedoms we have left, the ones that still keep me from labeling chavismo a proper dictatorship. But with this Telecommunications Bill now going through the National Assembly ... well, now Chávez is playing with fire.

The bill would grant the president the authority to suspend all electronic communications, for as long as he wants, to preserve "public order" and "national security". And when I say all, I mean all: not just TV and radio broadcasts, but also cable and satellite TV, the Internet, the phones, SMS text messaging and even - explicitly - any other comparable media that may be invented in the future.

The criteria are vague; the powers open-ended. The chances for meaningful judicial review are nil.

Now, it's true that having bought CANTV, the government is already in a position to shut down 90% of the country's telecommunications de facto, just by flicking a switch. But alternative, non-state telecom channels - the kind you'd want to turn to for independent information in case of trouble, everything from Movistar to Radio Fe y Alegría - do exist, and they're exactly the ones threatened by these proposals.

Even for a government that has made an amateur sport of thumbing its nose at the Constitution, the sheer chutzpah of the constitutional violation involved is staggering. Article 337 unambiguously says the government may not suspend core human rights even in case of emergency and explicitly lists the right to information as one of those rights.

Now, I'm the first to argue that, when it comes down to it, some constitutional rights are more equal than others. With a Constitution littered with good intentions masquerading as rights, it's clear that some rights are "hard" and some are "soft". Nobody is going to call chavismo a dictatorship because it doesn't really guarantee everyone's right to decent housing (Art. 82), say, or vacation pay (Art. 90).

But negative rights are another matter altogether, lying much closer to the "hard constitution" than some pajeric positive right no court could really enforce. And no right is harder than free speech: a constitutive element of the dividing line that separates the kind of postmodern autocratic bananarepublicanism we've had so far from out-and-out dictatorship.

Until now, chavismo has made a routine out of violating the soft constitution but, in the grand scheme of things, has stayed on this side of the yellow line with regard to the hard stuff. But grant Chávez the legal power to shut down any broadcast (or, for that matter, any narrowcast) whenever he wants, for whatever reason he wants, for as long as he wants, and suddenly the case for resisting the D-word starts to wear desperately thin.

There's no question about it, Chávez is really pushing it now. The decision to pick and choose which opponents are allowed to stand in November's local elections. The 26 decree-laws, enacting many of the reforms voters rejected last December. The embrace of Russia's occupation of Georgia. The theft - lets face it, "expropriation" is a euphemism - of Cemex. The closure of two opposition radio stations in Guarico. The crazy-ass kidnapping law. The changes to the Armed Forces Law. And now this openly dictatorial proposal. A drip, drip, drip of outrages and humiliations, each more willfully provocative than the last, each guaranteed to raise the temperature, and the latest of which is so dangerous it'll tip even a die-hard moderate like me into a spasm of alarm.

There are people in Venezuela who have been trained to think it's their responsibility to save the country from tyranny. If you didn't know better, you'd think the guy was trying provoke an extreme response from them.

Who moves the markets?

We move the markets!

[hat tip: Omar]

Does Cemex matter?

Juan Cristobal says: - The government is confiscating Venezuela’s largest cement company. Our readers are incensed. Some are wondering when we are going to write about this latest outrage. So here it is: it’s not that important.

Tonight, the Chávez government will take over the Venezuelan subsidiary of Mexican cement giant Cemex without paying a penny in compensation. Cemex was understandably reluctant to accept the imposition of unfair business terms and become minority shareholders in a joint venture with the unreliable Chávez administration. In this high-stakes gamble, Chávez has decided to take over the entire operation, and the Mexicans have probably lost big-time.

In any other country, this would turn on alarm bells. But in Venezuela, alarm bells have laryngitis.

There is nothing in this operation that we didn’t already know. Is it illegal? Yes, it is. Is it unprecedented? No, it is not. Was in unexpected? Nope. Does it signal a shift in the Chávez government’s war on private property? No, it confirms a trend, one that has been publicly announced by the President over and over again.

Cemex was once the mighty Vencemos, the brainchild of legendary Venezuelan businessman Eugenio Mendoza. In a country with very little private industry, Vencemos was the trailblazer that built an empire, a symbol of what Venezuelan entrepreneurs could accomplish.

But that was long ago – the Mexicans bought it out in the 90s and most of the romance of the old company is simply gone. Up until today, it had been transformed from a national champion to the well-managed local branch of a huge multinational. Its symbolic value is muted at best.

The question, then, is whether this is actually good policy. The easy answer here is that no, it is not. The government’s dismal failure in home-building cannot be attributed to fictional cement shortages – the cement has always been there for the taking, and the government has always been able to buy it. In fact, buying it would have been much cheaper than buying entire cement companies, which is what the government is doing with Cemex rivals Lafarge and Holcim.

It's not lack of cement that's holding the government back. Stealing cement companies is not going to make 200,000 low-income homes build themselves.

Instead of investing in roads, access to water and sanitation services, the government decides to invest in companies it will surely trash. The first thing it will probably do is rename Cemex something like Cebol. Pretty soon we’ll begin hearing Cebol’s board asking for public funds to keep the company going. Shortages will appear and the company will march to its inevitable demise.

Some people think that Cemex and the other cement companies are part of a ploy to keep the opposition guessing and distracted. If it is, it’s surely an expensive one. Not only will these moves cost the government some money: think of the time it takes to negotiate with the companies, the workers, to name a board. Just today we had public statements from both the Vice-president and the Oil Minister. Don't they have other things to worry about?

It’s a distraction alright … a distraction for the government.

There is one piece of the puzzle that is blurry. Years ago, Chavez announced a joint venture with Iran that included building a cement factory. Needless to say, nothing came of it.

And yet just this past week we learn that Chávez wants to set up another cement joint venture, this time with Bolivia and Iran. Never mind that it makes absolutely no sense to export cement from Venezuela to Bolivia or Iran – could these imaginary cement factories be a cover-up for something else? Could Cemex (Cebol) and the other companies be covers for the traffic of illicit material? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, we are left with the takeover of Cemex. What does it boil down to? Another boneheaded decision by the government, one that will surely cripple the industry, cost Venezuelan taxpayers millions, scare away foreign investment, damage Venezuela’s reputation abroad and confirm that we are governed by a bunch of thugs.

So as troubling as it is, it’s just business as usual in the Bolivarian Revolution. There’s nothing in these news that we didn’t already know, no fear that hadn’t already been confirmed long ago. It sucks for the Mexicans, and it’s probably going to suck for the workers. For the rest of us, it’s been sucking for years now. Ho-hum.

Qué rayón

Juan Cristobal says: - Don't miss the latest outburst from chavista congresswoman Desireé Santos Amaral in the front steps of the Mercosur Parliament, where Leopoldo López was about to explain the case of his ban from public office...

Discusión a las puertas del Mercosur
by noticias24

I was reminded of my grandmother, who always said that no matter what problems we had in the family, we should "wash dirty rags at home." How sad that we've lost even that, that discussions one would expect to have in a normal democracy have to take place in front of foreign reporters and in international forums because, well, we are no longer a normal democracy.

I can only imagine what those Uruguayans must be thinking... and these are the people we want to admit to Mercosur? Don't we have enough problems already?

As usual, chavista aggression works against them, as López comes out of this looking like the victim of a political lynching and chavistas come across as fire-breathing hoodlums.

Plantain chronicles

Juan Cristobal says: - Don't miss Alberto Barrera's amusing riff on Venezuela's new barter law. In Spanish only.

My Piedad Córdoba Shame

Quico says: OK, OK, I admit it!

I funnel Venezuelan government money to Piedad Córdoba!

Boy, I never saw that one coming!

Quico says: Guess who Chávez blames for the South Ossetian war? You have three guesses. First two don't count.

Kidnapped Twice

Quico says: Want something new to be alarmed by? Check out the newly enacted anti-kidnapping law - something I'd written about before - which mandates the Prosecutor General's office to freeze all financial assets belonging to kidnap victim's families to prevent them paying ransom.

The rules extend to the second-degree of consanguinity and force banks to disclose any loans made to the family during the freeze. Which means if your second cousin gets kidnapped just before you submit a mortgage or business loan application, you're shit out of luck. The law even empowers a Ministerio Público official to set a kind of "allowance" for you - deciding how much of your salary you're allowed to keep to make sure there isn't a medio left over at the end of the month to pay ransom with.

It may be one of the most shockingly hamfisted policies I've heard in recent years. As though the kidnapping of a relative wasn't traumatic enough, the new law means once that happens, your assets get kidnapped too.

But what if your relative is killed and the body isn't found? Do your assets stay "frozen" indefinitely?

Would you report a kidnapping, knowing what the government would do to your stuff? And, if nobody reports, guess what happens to the kidnapping statistics?

Ten reasons why November matters

Juan Cristobal says: In some opposition circles, wanting to get elected to office amid the swirl of inhabilitaciones and decree-laws almost amounts to treason. The conventional wisdom seems to be that only someone completely absorbed by his or her own personal ambition could fail to see this. "It's an outrage! Running for office...at a time like this!"

It's a compelling argument, that one. On the face of it, it's true that the Mayorship of Naguanagua is peanuts next to the advancements of Chávez's "frog-in-the-water" brand of authoritarianism. But taken as part of a medium-term strategy to end this madness, the coming elections are indeed important. When you think about it, we should be glad cool heads in the opposition are focused on November and are not getting overly distracted by the rojo, rojito rags Chávez is waving in our faces.

The way I see it, our current goal should be to do everything we can to tackle the myth that Chávez has a lock on Venezuelans' hearts and minds.

So why are November's elections important? Let me count the ways.

1. We have a shot at winning more votes than chavismo: Before December, Chávez loved to boast about how he beat us eight or nine times in a row. It helped create a notion in the minds of the electorate that he was invincible at the ballot box. The Revolution could not be turned back, or so we were led to believe. "Whine all you want, but this government is backed by an overwhelming majority of Venezuelans," goes the story.

Have you noticed how he doesn't do that anymore? Have you noticed we've stopped being referred to as "the squalid ones" every two days?

While last December's narrow defeat shattered Chávez's unbeaten record, it didn't exactly do in the chavista election machine. We need to work on a streak here...2D, the regions this year, the Assembly in two years' time, you complete the sequence...

Winning in November could be a major step in cementing the view that the opposition is a viable political force. It could also do wonders for the belief in ourselves and for our shaky morale

But winning could also help bring in swing voters. After all, there's a reason Venezuelans support Brazil in the World Cup - we love a winner, we hate losing. Winning in December may create the idea that if you back the opposition, you're playing the winner card.

2. Local governments provide a platform for opposition ideas: I agree with most of the opposition curmudgeons that our politicians have failed to deliver a clear narrative on their aspirations for our country. Part of the reason is because only a handful of them have any ideas at all. But it's also true that the few who do have them don't really have a platform to talk about them, much less implement them.

Holding an elected position gives you a platform, a podium from which you can talk about ideas and actually implement them. And with the chance to put ideas into practice comes visibility.

Think of it this way: if you conduct a political opinion program, who would you rather showcase: the under-secretary general of an opposition political party, or an elected opposition governor? If you're a reporter, what do you choose to cover first: a speech by an opposition politician in a political party's headquarter, or a speech by the mayor of a big city?

3. Local governments keep the party base motivated and employed: We can argue until we turn blue, but all of us agree that our political parties are not what we want them to be. Having strong political parties is a pre-condition for having a viable democracy. And in order to have strong parties, we need to have good people working for them.

As I've met party activists and volunteers, I've always been impressed by how passionate most of them are about public service. While I share some skepticism toward the bigwigs, I'm a believer in the rank-and-file, the folk who organize the smaller groups who march, distribute flyers, paint walls and devote a lot of time to party activities. Rendered invisible by the cogollo-centered media, these people's energy and idealism perseveres even in the face of the incredibly hostile medium of the broader anti-politics opposition.

But it's hard to keep them motivated and energized when they have to work 9-to-5 and then organize in their off time. And it's really hard to have a functioning political party without a motivated grass-roots organization.

Let's grow up a bit. It's neither the lust for power nor the chance to fill their pockets that's driving some of these people to run for municipal council in Guatire or for State Assembly in Yaracuy. It's their desire to conjugate their love for their country and their faith in the possibility of political action with the need to get a paycheck on 15 y último.

Winning lots of seats in municipal councils and state legislatures for people who have earned it will only make our parties stronger. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to see the morale of the chavista base plummet after lots of them lose the jobs they won in 2004.

4. Local activists can help us reach distant communities: We've talked about it before, but it's worth repeating: nothing beats local knowledge when trying to reach rural bastions of chavismo. Too often, we can't compete in the countryside for a simple reason: we have nobody in any position of influence there at all.

We may not win the governorship of Guárico, we may not win the mayorship of Municipio Juan Germán Roscio, but win a few seats in the municipal council and, little by little, you go from being totally absent from large chunks of the country to having, at least, a beachhead. A concejal's power is, to be sure, very limited, but he can nonetheless serve as a spokesman for micro-level complaints that, today, find no voice whatsoever, a champion for rural people who have, so far, had simply no one "important" at all to support them in the face of chavista excess.

The people who manage to win there, if they do their job right, could deliver that Municipality in the future. Little by little, they can help us eat away at the massive chavista advantage in the countryside that remain the opposition's biggest obstacle to winning nationally.

5. Local governments still get significant funding: We face a behemoth of a financial machine in chavismo, one that constantly bends the rules to not give regions their fair share. Recent moves by Chávez will probably mean state and local governments will face diminishing powers.

And yet...

The Constitution says that state and local government will receive up to 20% of each year's budget (the so-called situado). To shortchange local governments, Chávez has typically passed budget laws that assume oil prices will be much, much lower than the market price. That way, large chunk of oil income do not go through the normal budgetary procedures, and therefore, state and local governments don't get their fair share.

Still, while the assumed price of oil is low, it's still the case that it has been growing year after year, and with it, the funds available to state and local governments.

It's true that the recent decree-law allowing Chávez to name special regional envoys diminishes the power of state and local governments. But Chávez has yet to place a complete stranglehold on their budgets. If he does, and if things in November go well for us, he will have to deal with an army of very committed, very squalid, very pissed-off governors who have the legitimacy his Miraflores-appointed flunkies will never have: the legitimacy that comes from popular election.

6. It gives democratic legitimacy to key opposition figures: It's always surprised me how chavismo has gotten an incredibly easy ride in international public opinion considering the amount of crap it's pulled. To a large extent, the reason is that Chávez has successfully sold the view of his opponents as a cabal of coup-plotting extremists who hold no appeal to the grass-roots. "He might be bad," international public opinon thinks, "but we can't be seen to back another Pinochet."

Winning local elections in places outside the Sifrino Enclaves will put a stake through the heart of this particular canard. Imagine Carlos Ocariz standing in front of the European Parliament, say, or the Brazilian Senate and introducing himself as the elected mayor of the biggest shantytown in Venezuela and the third biggest in Latin America before ripping into chavista authoritarianism. That's rather different than Marcel Granier doing so, don't you think?

One time, I was in a meeting with a bunch of Chilean senators opposed to Chávez. When we asked them what they knew about the opposition, they told me they were fully aware of the opposition because they had met with Henrique Salas Römer a few times.

Did I mention the year was 2005?

Needless to say, Salas Römer was not a factor in 2005, and he is not much of a factor now. But the fact is that by virtue of his (dismal) performance in the elections of 1998, this was the face of the opposition to them.

Foreign political circles can be of help: they can open doors to foreign media outlets, they can put Venezuelan issues on the forefront and they can put pressure on their own governments to moderate their enthusiasm for Chávez. So while foreigners will not come and save us, they can sure be of help.

After all, the group of senators I met ended up being instrumental in putting pressure on the Chilean government so they would not support Venezuela's bid to the UN Security Council.

7. It forces the government to work with us, or at least, through us: Have you noticed how Chávez doesn't usually broadcast his Alo, Presidente show from Zulia or Nueva Esparta? If he does, he usually does it in the confines of a chavista municipality.

Has there ever been an Aló Presidente from Chacao or Baruta? This show requires logistics, an advance team that takes care of security, that sort of thing. Chávez generaly shies away from having to negotiate these and any other aspects with people from the opposition.

The same can be said of infrastructure projects and social programs. If he can avoid having to deal with unsympathetic authorities (and up until now, this was easy to do), he will do it. But if we win half the country, if 65% of the people end up being governed by local authorities sympathetic to our cause, this will force him to acknowledge us as authorities, at least on a basic level.

8. It is one more step in putting together a coalition: We're all pissed about the Inhabilitados, about the constant abuse of power by chavismo. One thing we can do is try to win back the National Assembly in 2010.

Think about what it would mean. Everything, from the passing of Referenda on controversial laws to the replacement of key figures in the TSJ, to the naming of a new Comptroller to convening a Constitutional Assembly - it would all be on the table. After November, winning the Assembly should be our number one goal.

But... in order to do so, we need to build a strong coalition. November will be a crucial test on whether or not our politicians are up to the task.

9. It is crucial in turning out the vote in future elections: This is related to the previous point, but also to any Referenda coming our way, as well as the Legislative elections of 2010 and the Presidential election of 2012.

Last December, our dismal performance in the areas outside major metropolitan areas cast a shadow over our victory. In order to address this, we need to improve voter turnout in these key areas.

There is no doubt that regional and local governments can assist in this. Anything from providing transportation to information to canvassing neighborhoods with activists can be accomplished better if the local government is on your side and not harrassing us, like they usually are. And in a close election, this type of "trabajo de hormiguita" makes all the difference.

10. It would grab the headlines abroad: Last December, Chávez's aura of invincibility was shattered, and international headlines took notice. From that point on, references to Chávez past electoral wins usually carry the tagline that he was "narrowly defeated" in a Constitutional referendum.

That "narrowly" hints at the feeling that Chávez almost won the Referendum, that he is still very popular. Another loss in another election - deemed as crucial by Chávez himself - will work to shatter any remaining doubts about Chávez's hold on popular consciousness.

The Smoking Gun That Went on Nicorettes

Quico says: Here's a question to ponder: what really changed in Venezuela when the 26 laws of the Gacetazo were decreed into effect? We've heard a lot of woolly thinking in the opposition about this, a lot of emotional posturing, and a huge amount of red-rag charging. But if you put your spleen on hold and think with your head for a second, can you tell me what specifically changed when the new laws came into effect?

The standard rap is that the decrees are unconstitutional, and anyway they were rejected in the December 2nd referendum. The logic here seems to be that in order to change, say, the mechanisms for expropriating a farm, you need a constitutional amendment.

There are two problems with that. The first is that in the weeks and months ahead of the Constitutional Reform Referendum, we argued that most of the changes proposed didn't require a constitutional amendment! We protested loudly, saying the government could achieve the same thing by changing the laws and that most of the changes were "cover" for the one real change that did require changing the constitution: removing presidential term limits.

For my money, we had it right the first time: most of the proposed reforms didn't require changing the constitution, they just required changing the laws, which is exactly what the government is doing.

Does this mean the policies in the new laws are good? Hell no! Or wise? Far from! But, unconstitutional? That just doesn't follow.

A lot of the confusion seems to come from a sloppy tendency to just use the words "bad" and "unconstitutional" as rough synonyms. That's childish. Bad ≠ Unconstitutional.

The second problem is the whole sense of irreality as we discuss, in grave terms, the expansion of the government's legal powers to regulate and sanction private actors. But Chávez has never paid any attention to what the laws say in terms of what he can and can't do vis-à-vis society, and it's been years since he's faced any significant institutional counterweights. We speak in horrified tones about how easy it'll be to expropriate farms from now on, but seven years ago I was making films about guys in Barinas who had their farms confiscated with zero notification, zero due process, and no recourse to the courts!

The violations of the constitution these laws allow are nothing new. Take the latest LOFAN (or, erm, LOFANB, as I guess we'll have to call it now) - which blatantly tramples the constitution by creating a praetorianish Militia within the Armed Forces. The semantic trick they use to slip this one in amounts to the barest coating of vaseline: the constitution says the Armed Forces are "integrated by" four components (Army, Navy, Air Force, National Guard) whereas article 5 of LOFANB says the Armed Forces are "organized by" a bunch of bodies that don't show up in the constitution, including the militia. That's some thin gruel, but no doubt the TSJ will drink it up with relish.

Clearly unconstitutional, yes, but does it change anything? Is the constitution more violate today than it was two weeks ago? Not really, because the 2005 version of LOFAN also invented new military components out of thin air. All the LOFANB does is rename the Guardia Territorial and the reserva, calling them the Militia.

In practice, the Gacetazo doesn't really make Venezuela more autocratic than it was before. It doesn't violate the constitution any more than has become sadly usual. That's, of course, cold comfort: the country was already alarmingly autocratic before the new decrees, and the constitution has long been a stomping ground for chavista whims.

The point, though, is that the Gacetazo doesn't appreciably add to the already desperate state of our state. That there's nothing in the gacetazo that substantially alters our situation. They have, indeed, jiggled around some old laws that they were blatantly breaking, and thought up some novel ways to violate constitutional principles they've been violating for years. But if you didn't think an Article 350 adventure was warranted this time last month, there's nothing in the gacetazo to make you think it is now.

From the Art. 350 User's Manual.
Step 1: patronize your way to power.

Adopt a Race

Quico says: As November 23rd draws near, Juan Cristobal and I face a special challenge: how to provide meaningful coverage of 24 state and 335 municipal races with no staff, no office, no budget, and from very far away. The only way it's going to happen is if you, the reader community, step up and share your local knowledge.

So today we're rolling out the Adopt a Race Program, where we ask you to be Caracas Chronicles' eyes and ears in places we just can't reach. In practice, we want you to commit to track a particular race that you happen to know a lot about, keeping in touch every couple of weeks with updates. Easy!

We are especially interested in hearing from people who live in, come from, have family in, work in, have slept with somebody from, or otherwise have particular local knowledge about, the municipios on the Oppo Target list.

They are:

• Mérida
• Maracaibo
• Petare
• El Tigre
• Coro
• Puerto La Cruz
• Barquisimeto
• Barcelona
• Maracay
• Cumaná
• Los Teques
• Guacara
• Ciudad Bolívar

If you know more than the average joe about one of these places, or if you know someone else who does, please send me an email - quicotoro at gmail dot com - to find out more about adopting a race.

Caracas Chronicles...CENSORED!

A reader sends in this screenshot...

That's sooooo 2002, Miguel Henrique!

Quico says: So, did you hear the one about the abstentionist leader who morphed seamlessly into a spokesman for a movement named after an election?

No, it's not a bad joke, it only sounds like one.

Watching Movimiento 2D's solemn declaration of dictatorship at that press conference yesterday, I couldn't shake the feeling I'd stepped through a gash in the space-time continuum and been dropped straight back into the bad old days of unhinged, reactionary elite driven oppo maximalism.

The national emergency tone, the pitch aimed straight at the NDRoots, the sheer self-importance...it was all there. And of course, no podía faltar the bow towards the altar of Article 350. Which was a dead giveaway: it's an Iron Law of Venezuelan Politics that whenever an opposition leader utters the words "tres cientos cincuenta", what follows is a torrent of onanistic bullshit.

And another thing: what sense does it make for a newspaper owner to co-sign a comuniqué? Newsflash, Miguel Henrique: signing comuniqués is the sort of thing we mortals have to do so people like you take notice and publish our stuff. If you were so determined to inflict this cretinous tirade on us, all you had to do was send your jefe de redacción an email.

But I digress. What grates is his whole preening demeanor, this prima donnaish pose where you stand in front of some microphones and ponderously declare that, ahora sí, we're in a dictatorship. And expect that to have some kind of effect. ¡A estas alturas del partido!

The guy needs Laureano Márquez to set him straight:

The country isn't headed towards a collision; we've been picking up bits of broken glass and spreading ointment on the black and blues from the blows received for ages already, to say nothing of the blows to come. The collision already happened. The blows are coming from the other car's driver - he hits us with a wrench wrapped in judicial velvet, to avoid leaving a trace. The country isn't slipping out of our grasp, it's been beyond our reach for ages.

(Whodda thunk, a few years ago, that advice penned for General Baduel would come to fit like a glove when re-encauchated for M.H.Otero's benefit?)

The Gacetazo: 10% tyranny, 90% paja

Quico says: Reading through some of the 26 Decree-"Laws" that are collectively coming to be known as the Gacetazo, the thing that pops out at me is that most of what's in there isn't really tyrannical, or unconstitutional or Marxist or whatever. Most of it's just paja. Airy nonsense. Kilometrically wordy, groovy-leftie BS: noble-hearted statements of intent, platitudinous definitions, utterly inconsequential lists of principles, and sundry other bits of filler apparently included just so Monedero & Co. over at Centro Miranda can justify their billing hours.

Take article 39 of the new Food Security Law...

Monetary and non-monetary exchange alternatives, such as the equivalence economy, barter, or any other mechanisms of comparative valuation that may result from a trade, are valid for the fair exchange of food, products, inputs, knowledge and agricultural services, as regulated by the judicial order.

Well, it's a good thing that's written into law now. I'm sure campesinos up and down the land will breathe a sigh of relief and start bartering stuff now that it's allowed. Gracias, Juan Carlos, we never would've thought of it without you!

Sure, alongside the reams and reams of that kind of thing, there's a hard nub of hyper-regulatory, massively papeleo generating, patently unconstitutional and creepily punitive measures.

But the bread and butter of the gacetazo? A tsunami of paja.

What do you stand for? (III)

Juan Cristobal says: - We've been sitting on our reader poll results long enough, so here goes the rest of it. First up, law and order.

Our surveyed readers came out strongly against the death penalty, and expressed widespread fear of the police. Many of you strongly agree that the focus should be on ending poverty and exclusion. You also think that bringing life imprisonment and cracking down on drugs is part of the puzzle. (click on images to enlarge)

We tried to see how many of you respond more to heavy-handed policing versus those of you who see this as nothing more than a quick fix. A large majority of you (more than 60%) think that heavy-handed policing is not the solution it can appear to be. We also asked whether you were also inclined to simply throw up your arms and see crime as a problem with no solution, and the answer was a resounding No. You rightly blame the government for not doing enough about this.

We also asked about foreign policy.

An overwhelming majority of you is against having any contact with the FARC and against conflicts with Colombia and the US. Fewer of you (though still a majority) think Venezuela should not subsidize the oil purchasers of its neighbors, although many agree with using oil money as a diplomatic tool, to a certain degree.

An overwhelming majority think the Venezuelan government exaggerates US efforts to destabilize it, while most of you are weary of the power Cubans have over our country.

Most of you agree that this government is a record-breaker when it comes to corruption, while many of you recognize that corruption is embedded in our culture. On whether a petro-state such as ours can ever solve corruption, you are split down the middle. When asked whether you would pocket public funds if given the chance, seems like 80% of you lied...

Sadly, it seems like a slim majority of you thinks that corruption has now become part of our culture.
We then went back to asking about Hugo Chávez. 61% of you think he will leave office in 2013 or sooner - 41%, think it will be when his term ends in 2013, and 20% think it will be before then (we should have asked how!).

A good 20% of you are resigned to the idea that Chávez will die as President, although technically he could die before 2013, so. I guess this question could have used some better wording...

We then asked about Chávez and violence. Most of you feel that Chávez would resort to violence if he needed to, but curiously, most of you also thought that many in the Armed Forces would resist this strategy. When asked whether Chávez is calculating or crazy, a slim majority of you lean toward "crazy" as the appropriate adjective.

We then asked about the opposition and their actions in the last 5-10 years. Remarkably, although a good 40% believe the CNE stole the Recall Referendum that the opposition had won, a large majority of you (80%) think that boycotting the Legislative Elections was a mistake.

Most of you also regret Chávez did not get a one-way ticket to Cuba on April 11th, 2002, and you agree that the opposition has still not learned the right lessons from the past 10 years. Most of you (76%) also think that we would have been better off if cooler heads had prevailed in the opposition leadership between 2001 and 2005.

Your feelings toward the opposition's leadership are complicated. On the one hand, you disagree with the notion that the opposition is in bed with Chávez and with the idea that they should all merge into a single, unified party. On the other hand, you think the opposition has not grapsed that Chávez will not leave power voluntarily, and therefore that they should rally behind a single leader. Sadly, you feel that leader is not up to the task yet.


Not surprisingly, a majority of you (60%) think the opposition deserves all the criticism they get and then some. Finally, your expectations on the coming elections are that we will win between 9 and 10 governorships and 139 mayor's office.

Thanks again to everyone who participated!

Got data?

Quico says: So Juan Cristobal and I have been working on a bit of a research project ahead of the November elections - nothing too fancy. We have, however, found it tremendously frustrating tracking down good, usable, disaggregated data, so we've decided to ask for help.

INE's useless. Its website looks like it was designed by trained monkeys: a national disgrace. They give out a reasonable amount of information disaggregated by state, but almost nothing at the municipio or parroquia level.

We figured somebody in the reader community must have data like this, or know how to get it, so why not ask?

What we're specifically looking for is:

• Household income data at the parish-level (or, if that doesn't exist, municipal-level)
• Data on poverty, however defined, at the parish-level (or, if that can't be had, municipal-level)
• Average years of schooling per adult, disaggregated to the parish level (en su defecto, municipal)
• The land area of each parish - so we can calculate population density. (Amazingly, INE simply doesn't just publish this, and Google isn't finding it either.)
  

That's our wish list, but basically we'll settle for any data on social conditions that's disaggregated to the parish (or, second best, municipal) level. Anything we can use as a proxy for poverty or rurality will make us very happy. Dengue infection rates? Percent of households without proper plumbing? We're pretty stumped here, so we're not picky.

Consider this a cry for help. If you have it, or you know someone who has access to it, or you know someone who knows someone...please write in.

The Long View

Quico says: After a (too-long) hiatus, Lucia decided to write us a post. Hurrah!

Lucia says: Expressing optimism about Venezuela’s political opposition can be a lonely proposition. But we’ve finally reached a point where a little hope may be justified – perhaps for the first time since Chávez was elected. And it was the victory of the No! vote in December 2007 that made this moment possible.

But let’s start earlier, with Chávez’s ascent to power, which burnt the existing political system to the ground. Even for those horrified by Chávez, it was hard to weep for AD and COPEI. The clichés -- rotten, out-of-touch, selfish -- were well-earned.

Yet think for a moment about other countries with two-party systems: if those two parties were destroyed after decades of dominance, how long would it take for effective new political parties to rise from the ashes? Could forces (new and old) with long histories of antipathy create a coalition in the face of a common threat? Would that process look pretty?

Well, it certainly hasn’t been pretty in Venezuela. The process by which new parties have emerged, and reached tentative accommodations with older powers, has been painful and riddled with mistakes.

After the 1998 tsunami, the immediate power vacuum in opposition land was filled by those who had long sat at the table anyway – the media, the money, and the anti-Chávez unions – some of whom had noble intentions, none of whom wanted their comfy status quo threatened. And as young, new political actors and the remnants of the old order struggled to counter the power of Chavismo, there was no question that the people with access to the airwaves and the cash were in charge.

But most of these folks were unwilling to understand the new world in which they were operating. They wanted to use rhetoric and strategies that appealed to their base, ignored the strength of Chávez’s support, and – perhaps most crucially – left out the center, those who were wary of Chávez but just as wary of radical tactics, or of anyone/anything that reeked of the past.

This new opposition tried non-electoral strategies first, which conveniently did not require broad political consensus. Then, reluctantly, they turned back to the ballot box in the Recall Referendum. But still, they were ill-equipped to deal with a changed electorate – the opposition was unwilling to support the new and (at the time) very popular Misiones, but also unwilling to offer attractive alternatives. Unfortunately, no lessons were learned from this failure to court the Ni-Ni’s, because cries of fraud replaced the soul-searching that normally follows an electoral beating.

Years in the wilderness followed, with opposition elites either ambivalent about or downright hostile to further participation in elections. And when you don’t have elections, why, you don’t need the voters, do you? In this distorted universe, Marta Colomina and Alberto Federico Ravell mattered more than the millions of non-polarized voters out there looking for a fresh alternative.

For many long years, and especially as it pursued non-electoral strategies, the opposition has been captive to its most radical elements. They couldn’t even acknowledge the need to win new supporters -- for a long time, and for many opposition elites, just admitting that the opposition did not have already have majority support was tantamount to treason. Those opposition leaders who did understand reality, and accordingly wanted to court the center, were taunted as “comeflores” and considered too “weak” to lead. Those who tried both red meat for the elites and the activists along with the occasional focus on reconciliation or issues for the Ni-Ni’s found themselves with support from neither.

But the December victory changed everything. The opposition was (typically) divided about participating, if you recall – with the reactionaries (Súmate among them, sadly) making noises that sounded an awful lot like the pre-Asamblea elections withdrawal. The passionate students played a crucial role here, shaming them into taking part.

And then, lo and behold, victory.

A strange one, true, and it’s hard to claim that the CNE behaved honorably, but nonetheless, a victory – for Venezuela, and for those who always believed that even when the terrain for elections is lopsided and fraught with difficulty, it’s better to participate than to abstain.

Especially if, you know, you consider yourself a democrat.

Things have changed. Time was when it was an article of faith that accurate polling and contestable elections are impossible in Venezuela. Remember the fear factor? Now, opposition elites are relying on polls to select their own candidates! No longer can actual Venezuelan voters be left out of the equation.

For many of the candidates this year -- at least those who are running outside of opposition bastions -- this should prove to be a moderating influence. Freed from the energy-zapping abstention/participation debate, they can finally talk about the things voters care about. One hopes that, as the painful, lengthy, self-centered process of choosing unity candidates draws to a close, they will move quickly to do just that – new and growing discontent with the regime certainly provides plenty of fodder, and plenty of issues everyone except hard-core Chavistas can rally around.

So, the next time you’re engaging in the popular, lazy sport of opposition-bashing, spare a thought for the difficulties opposition politicians have faced. Not only have many of them started from scratch, not only are they politicians in a country with especial disdain for those in public life, not only do they face false charges and persecution, not only are they opposed by an unscrupulous, charismatic incumbent awash in oil profits – they’ve also had to ask, all too often: do we cater to those calling for blood, or to those who want unity and reconciliation? Do we appeal to voters and get demoted by the powers-that-be, or do we appeal to the opposition activists and alienate the Venezuelan middle?

It seems more and more that these questions are out of date. Finally, finally, the radicals have lost some of their power. And whatever happens come November, this can only be good.

Diosdado at Delphi

Quico says: This from my inbox:

I had one of those "Quico moments" when listening to Diosdado on the radio (was it today? probably...). Let me see if I've got it straight: Diosdado says that there are no "inamovibles" among the government candidates for 23N. anyone whose campaign fails to take off will be ditched in favour of whoever looks like the favourite.

Let's leave aside the minor detail that there's only a week to go before the inscripciones close, so if they're going to do that, they really should do it pretty soon...

What about the fact that these are the same people who boasted how democratic their primaries were, how el pueblo got to call the shots, how the opposition was so undemocratic and unconstitutional that they relied on POLLS (shock!!) to determine who their candidates would be.

How is Diosdado going to decide whose campaign has taken off, I wonder? Is he going to read entrails? Is he going to consult the Oracle of Delphi? Will he seek divine inspiration? Because I'm positive he's not going to rely on POLLS to decide who's in the lead.

Puzzled in Caracas

Nickname cheat nails it again

Quico says: For the second time this year I find myself compelled to translate one of Kico Bautista's columns. The guy is good.

In a way, Kico is the anti-Yon Goicoechea. Whereas Yon comes across as substantive, brave and clearheaded when he speaks, but totally empty in print, with Kico it's the exact opposite. Today, he puts into emotional words the kinds of theories political scientists only know how to communicate in jargon:

The Sanction
by Kico Bautista

Public opinion needs to come up with a way to sanction those opposition politicos who, despite being behind in the polls and breaking their word, think they can go on to the bitter end. I don't mean burning them at the stake, electro-shocking them or taking them to the firing squad. I just mean we need to find a way to put them in their place, rap them over the knuckles and see if we can get the message through to them.

They deserve everything but tolerance.

Whether it's on purpose or not, they work for the other side. It would be comforting to see them strapped to a chair and forced to watch Aló Presidente on a neverending loop.

You might call it a kind of torture, an act that violates all human rights, maybe. That's not the issue here, though. The issue is you've got to have some way to badger the thick into line.

It's not my theory. I took it from Colette Capriles, that very smart social psychologist who writes in the papers and shows up on the radio and TV shows to tell us about that brain-twister that is politicians' behavior.

Colette says our country's basic problem has been in trying to consolidate institutions, among other things in response to this weird phenomenon that happens in the opposition and is a constant in Venezuelans' behavior. People don't keep their words, don't follow the law, or even the stop lights, or anything else.

And since the politicians, those who govern, don't keep their campaign promises, society comes to understand that lying is normal, even healthy.

That's why we're in the mess we're in.

On January 23rd a deal was signed that was more than logical: it was necessary. And we have a lot to lose. Nothing guarantees that we will win most of the mayoralties or governorships. It's an issue of discourse, of policy. Right now, our best shot is to pool our strength together: we have none to spare.

We can't afford to give a pass to those who, for whatever reason, put their interests ahead of those of the collectivity. It's true that, little by little, we've managed the hard, painstaking task of building our unity.

We need the confidence of knowing we've managed it. But that's not enough. We need to set a precedent, we have to establish that those who break with the poll results will be made to pay a price by the grassroots, and a high one.

Those gentlemen mustn't get a single vote. We have to leave them out on their own, to make sure they don't get interviewed anywhere, that nobody contributes a cent to their campaigns. We need to get tough and play hardball, just like they do.

It's no little thing that's at stake. Chávez feeds on our mistakes. The guy never loses his bearings, and he wants to finish us off. He took a step back on the Intelligence Law and the school curriculum thing, but now he's on the offensive again. He must have sensed our weakness somehow.

If we don't defeat him roundly on November 23rd, he'll bring back the idea of indefinite re-election.

Chávez knows that his stay in power depends on having his messianic streak ratified. He is the leader, the illuminated. He was sent by God to bring us to that kingdom of happiness he calls Socialism of the 21st Century. It's just the old trick of the egomaniac who makes up some noble cause so he can govern forever.

So? Then? Are we supposed to be all "understanding" for these misunderstood gentlemen who refuse to abide by the outcome of recent surveys. "Oh, I went out on the streets and saw the energy out there"; or "well, I'm behind now, but in two or three...years I'll be ahead"?

I'm sorry if this offends you, but too much of what we've criticized Chávez for is stuff you're carrying around in your heads. There are no excuses. There was enough time for each of you to work out your mise en scene. The time is now. Our slogan is: "not a single vote for those who aren't in the unity camp."

Chávez vs. the Calendar

Quico says: Hugo Chávez has racked up an impressive list of enemies over the years, everyone from José Antonio Paez to Homer Simpson. This time, though, he's really kicking it up a notch, taking on that icon of theocratic oppression: the calendar.

The 26 decree laws published yesterday came out in a Gaceta Oficial Extraordinaria that was dated...four days earlier! July 31st was, conveniently enough, the last days when his powers to legislate by decree were still in force.

Obviously, a true-blooded revolutionary like Chávez was never going to let himself get bossed around by some imperialist contraption like the Gregorian Calendar. As far as we can tell, the guy's still running on the Julian - which runs 11 days behind. In a way, that Gaceta's post-dated by a week.

You just know what his next big reform is going to be now, don't you?

Top Oppo Targets

Quico says: Here's the good news: the opposition stands to make big gains in November's local elections. Why? Because the current crop of incumbent mayors was elected in November 2004, in the depth of the opposition's post Recall Referendum funk, the absolute worst time for us.

Deeply demoralized oppo supporters simply didn't turn out to vote in numbers. Worse yet, the oppo parties failed to hang together, causing a costly split in the oppo vote in a number of important places.

As a result, lots of "natural" oppo territory ended up under chavista management. In fact, just 11 out of the nation's 45 key urban municipios elected oppo mayors in 2004. Those tend to be either smallish "Sifrino Enclave" municipalities (Chacao, San Diego, Lecherías) or in Zulia (Cabimas, San Francisco, Ciudad Ojeda). In fact, the only big city we won in 2004 was Valencia.

Today, oppo mayors run municipios that account for just 2.8 million urban people, while 12.9 million people live in government run urban municipios.

Click to enlarge

The first thing that jumps out at you from that chart is that there's just a lot more oppo blue on the right hand side than on the left. At the municipal level, we have lots of space to grow.

Of particular interest are are the 14 municipios that elected chavista mayors in 2004 but then went against constitutional reform in 2007.

These places are the oppo's best hopes in November, the real races to watch:

Click to enlarge

That, my friends, is what you call a target rich environment. Almost, every big city municipio is on that list: Maracaibo, Petare, Barquisimeto, Barcelona/Puerto La Cruz, Maracay, Caracas, Ciudad Bolívar. Only Ciudad Guayana and Maturín are missing.

Note that under "2004 Oppo" I'm only listing the votes that the top oppo candidate in each race got that year. In many cases, though, the opposition was running two, three or even four candidates in a given race. Which is why, when you add them all together, you get just 471,000 votes: barely more than half what MVR's winning candidates got.

Just three years later, the oppo turned out 1,576,000 people to vote "No" in those same 14 municipios. Which underscores once again the absolute centrality of agreeing a single candidate per municipio.

Provided unity holds, the oppo really should do well. Tomorrow, we'll know how many of these municipios will have those all-important unity candidates. Over the next few months, we'll be keeping an eye on these races.

(Hat tip to Virginia for up-to-date demographic data. Sad how the population is growing faster in chavista areas than oppo areas, huh?)

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: