It's official

Quico says: Hugo Chávez is now fodder for Republican attack ads...


[Have yer damn hat tip, JayDee...]

Quod erat demonstrandum

Juan Cristobal and Quico say: Sometimes, chavismo takes all the fun out of parody by, in effect, parodying itself. Case in point: Human Rights Watch has just published a detailed indictment of the Human Rights situation in Venezuela during the Chávez years. The whole document is worth a read. It's all there: the court-packing, the media, the discrimination, Maisanta, Tascón...and, of course, this bit:

The Chávez government has repeatedly denounced and sought to discredit the work of human rights advocates by making unfounded accusations that they are funded by and doing the bidding of foreign governments.

Right on cue, the government accused HRW director José Miguel Vivanco of doing the bidding of foreign governments and threw him out of the country. They actually had Vivanco and his companion detained by the security forces and forcibly escorted them to Maiquetía to put them on the first plane out of there.

Guy had it coming...spouting off about harassment of Human Rights activists like that! The nerve some people have...

The apple that fell a couple of time zones over from the tree

Quico says: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait! The kid who runs El Chigüire Bipolar is Alberto Federico Ravell's son?! HUH?!

Northern populist

Juan Cristobal says: - A scenery-chewing political reformer. A bible-thumping banner of books. A pitbull with lipstick. The political heiress to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. A hack.

Sarah Palin has been called a lot of things in the past two weeks, but of all the names, one characterization has stuck with me: right-wing populist.

Webster's defines populism as "antiestablishment or anti-intellectual political movements or philosophies that offer unorthodox solutions or policies and appeal to the common person rather than according with traditional party or partisan ideologies." It goes on to say that populism is a "representation or extolling of the common person, the working class, the underdog..."

Palin fits this definition like few Republicans do. Her folksy demeanor and her Marge Gunderson-accent are an integral part of her charm and appeal as a politician. She routinely touts her small-town, hockey-mom credentials as a way of telling the voters "I'm one of you... only I hunt bears."

But her populist strain is more than superficial. It resides in a deeper place, one rooted in the energy agenda she has carved in Alaska. Looked at more closely, Palin's relationship with Big Oil and the Alaska politicians they were used to commanding is actually kind of interesting.

It wouldn't be a stretch to say it is eerily reminiscent of Hugo Chávez’s banana-republic populism, albeit with some stark differences.

Before going into the details, it is worth noting that Alaska is like a sophisticated, moose-populated version of a petro-state. A portion of oil revenues are distributed to the population according to the rules of the Alaska Permanent Fund, much like it is done in places such as Norway. And while, unlike Venezuela, Iran and the like, the state is not a basket case, the vices of the petro-state pop up from time to time.

Palin’s first foray into statewide politics began in 2002, when she was appointed to chair the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. This body is in charge of coordinating, along with oil companies, the rational exploitation of the state's oil and natural gas reserves.

Palin resigned from that job raising all sorts of hell. She claimed fellow Republican members had conflicts of interest and were in bed with the oil companies they were supposed to regulate. Her grandstanding won her wide notoriety, and resulted in the resignation of her fellow members, one of whom was subsequently fined.

Like Palin, Hugo Chávez was elected on an anti-corruption platform. Anti-corruption is a typical populist stance, although it usually helps if you follow tough stances with actions, something Chávez has so far failed to do. In fact, the last few days have provided us with engrossing details of just how corrupt the chavista regime is.

Partly thanks to her tough stance on this issue, Palin was elected Governor of Alaska in 2006. One of her first measures was to slap oil companies with a huge , quasi-confiscatory tax hike. In fact, Palin increased the oil tax from a 10 percent gross revenue tax to a 25 percent profits tax, with the tax rate rising 0.2% for each dollar the price of oil exceeds $52 per barrel.

The result was a massive influx of cash to state coffers, and Palin gleefully distributed part of it among Alaska's residents. In typical populist fashion, Palin coined her plan "Alaska's Clear and Equitable Share."

The oil companies were being milked, and they were not happy. According to the New Republic, BP, for example, saw its state taxes increase by 480 percent. The company announced the move would "weaken investment" and that they would be "reviewing planned activities." Royal Dutch Shell also fretted, although most were keen to continue participating in Alaska's oil biz.

Hugo Chávez also has a record of raising taxes and royalties on oil companies. However, Chávez's heavy-handed approach has gone further than Palin's. While BP and Shell remain in Alaska in spite of the tax increase, these and other multinationals have diminished their Venezuelan exposure or left the country altogether for friendlier territory. Venezuela relies more and more on state oil companies from friendly countries that have not been expropriated... yet.

Another difference is that part of Palin’s tax increase went directly into the pockets of the citizens of Alaska. Chávez's tax increase has gone to lots of places. Some of it has made its way to Venezuelans’ income (some more than others), but a lot of it has fled the country in the form of imports, subsidies to political allies and even suitcases.

Like Chávez, Palin came into office with grand infrastructure visions. Alaskans had long wanted to build a natural gas pipeline so that its vast reserves could feed into the existing North American pipeline infrastructure. The problem was that oil companies had a differing set of incentives.

The state's long-standing approach had been to encourage oil companies to build the pipeline by offering incentives. But the companies did not want to build a pipeline that was too large, because that would diminish their power to negotiate vis-a-vis the state and their competitors. The prospect of a BP- or Exxon-owned pipeline discouraged gas exploration because smaller companies did not want to have to ship their product through their competitor's pipeline.

Instead, Alaskans decided a series of "must-haves" for the pipeline, one that specified low tariffs and large volume capacity. In the end, Trans-Canada won the right to build the pipeline, in what is being touted as the largest private infrastructure project in North America.

Like Palin, Chávez dreams of pipelines spanning the continent. Yet again, the similarities with Chávez stop soon. Chávez’s pipe dreams make little economic sense and, by excluding the private sector, are incredibly costly to the taxpayer. It's no wonder that most of his proposals end up being shelved.

The comparison between Chávez's and Palin's energy agendas yields remarkable similarities, but also stark differences. While both are guided by populist, anti-big business instincts, Palin's populism remains rooted in the rule of law and in economic rationale.

During my stay in the U.S. in the past few weeks, she was all people were talking about. Experts began laughing at the choice, circling the McCain candidacy like coroners with their pens on their toe-tags, only to see the press begin talking about the "Palin surge." Scorn turned quickly into worry. In a surprising turn of events, feminists began wondering if she was fit to be both a mother and a Vice-president, while Obama began playing the experience card Hillary Clinton unsuccesfully used on him in the primary. To top it all off, Republicans find themselves enthralled by a neo-populist with an anti-big-business agenda.

Whatever you think about Palin, you have to hand it to McCain. That crazy old fart has made an already entertaining election 10 times more entertaining.

One final thing that surprised me was how polarized the US has become in recent months. It is extremely difficult to have an impartial conversation about the election with anyone. Both sides play games with the truth and the important issues are left by the wayside. Palin's selection only heightened the volume of the debate.

Just like in Venezuela... Palin los tiene locos.

My Dinner with Guido

Quico says: So, much as I'd vowed to avoid it, I find myself getting inexorably sucked into the Maletagate Maelstrom. Too much good stuff is coming out of Miami not to have a peek. The latest is this leaked, very long transcript of a 4 hour lunch Guido Antonini and Moises Maiónica had in a Miami restaurant last November the 30th, just two days before the constitutional reform referendum.

First, some brutally abridged background just to bring newbies up to speed. On August 4th, 2007, Venezuelan-American businessman Guido Alejandro Antonini got busted trying to sneak $790,000 in cash into Argentina on a flight from Caracas. Antonini ran off to Miami where he soon began collaborating with the FBI. He told the feds straight away that the money came from Venezuela's state oil company, PDVSA, and was basically an illegal contribution to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's campaign for the Argentine presidency. As Antonini was talking to the feds, senior Venezuelan officials, facing the mother of all tri-national scandals, dispatched a gaggle of operatives to Miami to try to buy his silence. It is one of those operatives, Franklin Durán, who ended up as the focus of the FBI's investigation and, if convicted, faces 15 years in jail for conspiracy and acting as an unregistered foreign agent in the US. (The other guys, including Maiónica, eventually copped pleas with the feds and are now testifying against Durán.)

Throughout their attempts to arrange the bribe, Antonini was wearing an FBI wire. The conversations he picked up shed all sorts of new light into the actual mechanics of chavista corruption, filling in the details on shenanigans we all "know" go down but virtually never get to hear specifics about for the simple reason that the authorities in Venezuela never investigate this sort of thing.

On this particular occassion, Antonini had the fried calamari, the cotoletta alla parmigiana and the chocolate chocolate cake for dessert. To drink? A diet coke. With lime. Maiónica shared the calamari starter, then went for the Veal Marsala and finished off with the key lime pie, washing it all down with the obligatory, who-do-ya-think-yer-kidding diet coke. With lime.

The transcript shows clearly that, by November 30th, Antonini's hush money has already been approved in Caracas, but it has not yet been delivered to him in Miami. In fact, the delivery seems to be taking a long time and Antonini makes a big show of his desperation over the delay, saying he's broke, at the end of his tether, and seriously considering just telling his whole story to the press.

Maiónica tries to mollify him, telling him it's just a matter of fine-tuning the final details before the money can be delivered. He warns him not to do anything stupid, telling him that that would be like "finding out your wife is cheating on you and cutting off your own balls to get back at her."

The chat is brimming with juicy detail. For one, it really leaves no doubt that the order to "deal with Antonini" came from Chávez himself, and more than once. Originally, PDVSA boss Rafael Ramírez was put in charge of keeping the whole situation under control, which makes sense since the original delivery-run to Buenos Aires was a PDVSA operation. When it became clear Ramírez was not up to it Chávez flew off the handle, chewing him out and and handing over responsibility for the affair to Disip (secret police) chief Henry Rangel Silva (of bank-accounts-frozen-by-the-treasury-department fame).

Maiónica: Chávez sabe que tú te le escapaste de las manos a Ramírez. Lo sabe. Cuando Chávez llama a Rangel es porque Ramírez te sacó la mano. Y le dijo a Ramírez delante de Rangel, "El que se va a encargar de este peo es él". Antonini: Le dijo. Maiónica: Entiendes? Entonces todas la consecuencias negativas que significaste pa' Rafael, ya las sufrió. Y por eso es la arrechera que tiene, adicionalmente, me imagino con Franklin [Durán] y con y con Carlos [Kauffman].

Maiónica: Chávez knows that you slipped through Ramírez' hands. He knows it. When Chávez calls Rangel it's because Ramírez showed your hand. And he told Ramírez, in front of Rangel, "He's gonna take charge of this situation." Antonini: He told him. Maiónica: Do you understand? So, all of the negative consequences that you represented for Rafael, he's already been through them. And that's why he's pissed about this in addition to, I think, with Franklin [Durán] and with and with Carlos [Kauffman].

So Rangel Silva was left in charge of getting the $2 million to Antonini in a way that could not be traced back to PDVSA, but at the same time would ensure Antonini effectively got the money and kept suitably mum. DISIP was, apparently, having a lot of trouble figuring out how to pull off the trick, and much of the conversation is a drawn out lament about how useless Venezuelan intelligence is.

When they're not complaining about DISIP, they're talking through the specific mechanics of how to pull off a payment with reasonable deniability. The transcript isn't quite definitive on this - bank details do get exchanged at one point, though it's not exactly clear what for. The overall impression I'm left with is that, at that point at least, they had ruled out using any kind of electronic means to wire the money from PDVSA to Antonini. It was too traceable.

Maiónica: Marico, es que, oyeme, no tienen como. Ellos no tienen como pagarte a ti. La unica ... manera en que Venezuela puede pagar algo con una cuenta de afuera es una transferencia abierta. Y PDVSA no te va a transferir a ti, huevon, eso es, esta clarito. Ni a ti ni a ninguna instruccion que tu des. Antonini: Claro. Maiónica: Y eso lo tienes que entender. Porque está de calle.

Maiónica: Dude, it's just that, listen, they don't have the means to do so. They have no way of paying you. The only way Venezuela can pay something with an outside account would be with is an open transfer. And PDVSA isn't going to transfer to you, dude, that's, it's clear ... for you or for any instructions you may give. Antonini: Of course. Maiónica: And you have to understand that. Because it's obvious.

Instead, Maiónica talks repeatedly about having a certain "Cristian" in Caracas go fetch Antonini's money. And later, he makes it clear that the "secret fund" the payment will come from is a cash stash:

Maiónica: Pero [funcionar en efectivo] es la unica ... estructura que ellos conocen y, y...ahora que hay miles, si, que tu y yo le pudierarnos dar una clase y enseñarles como, de pinga. Pero es que, no llego a ese nivel de confianza y ademas que, ¿qué hizo el Presidente? Le dijo a Rangel [Silva], "Tú te encargas de este pe'o y tú le pagas". Entonces Rangel tiene una partida secreta, su partida secreta es en dólares en efectivo y va a pagar. Eso es lo que va a hacer.

Maiónica: But [dealing in cash] is the only structure they know and, and... sure there are thousands [of things] that you and I could give them a class on, teach them how [to go about doing things]. Thing is, I'm not on that level of trust with them...plus, what did the president do? He told Rangel [Silva] "You take charge of this mess and you pay him." And Rangel has a secret fund, and his secret fund is in dollars in cash and he's going to pay. That's what he's going to do.

Which, when you put two-and-two together, sure makes it sound like chavismo's brilliant plan for keeping Maletagate quiet was to send a flunky to Miami with a suitcase full of 100 dollar bills to pay off Antonini!

It's the stuff of comedy this, and I could be misreading it...but it sure seems like this is what they were up to.

To be fair, both Antonini and Maiónica come across somewhat as outsiders to the Bolibourgeoisie...connected, yes, but far from the inner circle. The two talk about the government in the third person. Antonini portrays himself as an innocent bystander, wrongly done in for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and even suggests at one point that he didn't know the original plane to Argentina was carrying large amounts of cash when he got on it. This was a "vaina" (raw deal) David Uzcátegui had shoved off on him.

Maiónica doesn't dispute that characterization. He tells Antonini that, in his other life he's a corporate lawyer, dealing with mergers and acquisitions, corporate law, that kind of thing. Hell, the guy even says he's Alberto Vollmer's lawyer!

It's just that he happened to have a government contact. He was friends with a low-level PPT político, Juan Bracamontes, whom he got close to after - this is the kind of thing you just couldn't make up - Bracamontes stole a student election from Maiónica back in their college days. "We had a fight, which later turned into a friendship...now I'm Godfather to two of his children."

Apparently through Bracamontes, he later struck up a relationship with then vice-president Jorge Rodríguez, did a major bit of business with him, and that, in his telling, is the only reason he ended up getting roped in to intermediating in this whole mess with Antonini.

What's interesting is that the two really don't seem to have a very high opinion of the bolivarian government folk they're dealing with. There's a huge deal of mutual distrust. Much of the conversation revolves around the fact that Caracas wants Antonini to sign some kind of receipt for his bribe (!!!) and Antonini smells a rat. Maiónica says maybe he himself (Maiónica) can sign a sort of receipt on Antonini's behalf, so that Antonini doesn't have to incriminate himself, but this doesn't quite assuage Antonini's concerns:

Antonini: Pero fíjate tu, tú me dices que no tengo que firmar nada. Tú. Pero tú te pones a ver, o sea, tu amigo, o...o, alguien, el, el mastermind de todo esto, algo quería hacer con una firma mía...o sea, joderme. Maionica: No te iban a hacer nada. No, pana, estás equivocado. Lo que ellos no quieren es que yo me agarre un millón doscientos mil dolares y te entregue ochocientos. Eso es lo que ellos no quieren, huevón. Pero ese es el peo. Qué y con qué son ellos. Cada quien juzga por su condición. ¿Me entiendes? Y no digo Rangel Silva, Rangel es un gocho A-1. Pero es que si no [se firma un recibo] alguien va a pensar que el que se lo cogió fue Rangel. ¿Estás entendiéndome?

Antonini: But check it out, you tell me that I don't have to sign anything. You tell me that. But when you think about it, your buddy, or...or somebody, the the mastermind behind all this, wanted my signature for a reason...in other words, to screw me. Maiónica: They weren't going to do anything to you. No, buddy, you've got it all wrong. What they don't want is for me to pocket $1.2 million and hand over $800,000 to you. That's what they want to avoid, dude. And that's the rub: who they are and who they mix with. It takes one to know one, understand? And I don't mean Rangel Silva, Rangel is a top notch guy. Thing is that otherwise [without a receipt] somebody will end up thinking it was Rangel who grabbed the cash, are you following me?

This, I think, it's the single most jaw-dropping bit of the whole 4 hour transcript: Maiónica is shocked, shocked at the level of corruption in the Venezuelan government! It's so bad that you can't even serve as the go-between on a simple bribe without people assuming you'll do the normal thing and try to pocket the lion's share...it's comedic gold!

Nonetheless, they seem relieved to be dealing with Rangel rather than with Rafael Ramírez, whom both pour all kinds of scorn on. One of the lovely things about the transcript is that they are, after all, having lunch, so it still includes all kinds of table talk. At one point, as they're sharing an appetizer of fried calamari and talking about their frustrations with PDVSA, we get this gem:

Maionica: Yo lo que creo es que son unos imbéciles. De verdad de verdad. ¿Quieres limón? Antonini: um hm... Maiónica: Unos imbéciles, o sea, Rafael sobre todo... Antonini: No, estoy seguro que son es banana republic...

Maiónica: What I think is that they're a bunch of imbeciles. Really, really. You want some lemon? Antonini: uh huh... Maiónica: A bunch of imbeciles, I mean, especially Rafael... Antonini: Nah, I'm sure they're just banana republic...

Which, when you think about it, is pretty remarkable...even their criminal co-conspirators think the guys running PDVSA are useless!

I could go on. There are 155 pages of transcript, so these are just a few highlights. Some key bits are unfortunately unintelligible or inaudible, and through long stretches Antonini seems so agitated it's hard to make heads or tails of what he's saying. The two agree profusely that the one Venezuelan bureaucrat they can respect is Angel Morales, who runs PDVSA Sur (its Argentina + Uruguay subsidiary), and whom they call on the mobile at one point, speaking in a hysterically transparent medical code because they figure Morales's phone is tapped. (The 'prescription' means the receipt, the 'medicine' is the money, and Antonini is 'our sick cousin.')

Parts of it are startlingly personal. The two bond over their shared, humble Italian roots (Maiónica is a first generation Italo-venezolano - his dad is from Trieste - Antonini's third generation - greatgrandpa was a Florentine). They talk about Antonini's relationship with Franklin Durán (he says that, when they first met, Durán was too poor to date respectable La Victoria girls), about their favorite shops, their new watches, their iPhones and Blackberries and Porsches and Mercedeses, about the strain the whole situation is placing on Antonini's family life, how his little daughter is pissed at him because he couldn't go see her school play, about the reporters camped out on his front lawn and Andrés Oppenheimer's repeated, in-person attempts to get him to give a tell-all interview.

In other words, there's way more material here than I can cover...and this is just one out of over 200 recordings the FBI made!

It reads, at times, like the script for a thriller, at others like the kind of conversation you have day in and day out with friends and associates, interrupted now and again by a bumbling waiter. By the end, it all seems so very natural, you get so drawn into the text, you almost forget what's really going on...until Maiónica gets up to have a pee and Antonini breaks the illussion by talking straight into his wire, addressing the FBI guy who's recording the whole thing from a van outside.

Ahhhh, maletagate! It's the gift that keeps on giving!

Chavismo: Guaranteeing total impunity since 1999

Quico says: It seems like ages ago (and it was), but I remember it vividly. Back in those first few months of '99, I genuinely was on the fence about Chávez. I was never a supporter, really, but it did seem to me that flying straight into opposition would be a mistake: too many hopes had been invested, too much energy had been amassed. And absolutely everybody could see the country was in dire need of a shakeup. It made no sense to nay-say from the start.

Chávez had run, basically, on an anti-corruption ticket, and this struck me as a source of real hope. Too many old regime figures had stolen too much money with too much impunity, and it seemed to me that there was no way forward until that rancid history was faced squarely and dealt with punitively.

In speech after speech, the young president vehemently echoed this sentiment. So I sat and waited for the trials to begin. I scoured the papers for news of investigations, fantasizing of turning on the news and seeing Carmelo Lauría doing a perp-walk, or footage of David Morales Bello's house raided by PTJ. It seemed obvious to me that these kinds of images were bound to come sooner rather than later. Chávez kept slamming hard the "40 years of corruption", and I took it for granted the reality was bound to catch up with the discourse sooner or later. Right?

It was 1999. I was young. There was a lot I didn't understand. I couldn't start to wrap my mind around what was really happening, around the possibility that the government could make the gap between discourse and reality permanent, seeing it as an asset rather than a liability.

The investigations never came, of course. And neither did the trials. Some of the perps scurried off to Miami and San José to spend more time with their loot, others were quietly assimilated into the new governing elite.

Towards the end of 1999 it all clicked for me. I grasped clearly for the first time that there would be no trials, that there would be no honest coming-to-terms with the past, because these things were not in the government's interest. That anti-corruption would remain what it has always been, under Chávez and those who came before him: a slogan, a rhetorical strategy divorced from any serious intent to act and, worse, deployed cynically to cover up one's own pattern of graft.

Nine years on, the Maletagate Trial in Miami is giving us a detailed look at the absurdum that Chávez's anti-corruption rhetoric has been reductio'd to. The revolution slowly morphed into a criminal conspiracy, a place where an absolute nullity like Franklin Durán can make a few million dollars on sweetheart deals with the Finance Ministry, buy a major petrochemical firm, become one of the country's leading industrialists, but continue to make the bulk of his money off of bribes and kickbacks for state contracts, in plain view, and with absolute impunity - until he made the rookie mistake of going to Miami, where his higher-ups can't protect him. A country where reams upon reams of evidence can build up showing that the head of the state-owned oil company is illegally siphoning off public money to illegally fund foreign election campaigns, all in plain view, without anyone seriously expecting the official to resign, or even to betray any hint of being aware that he's busted, much less get investigated, prosecuted and thrown in jail where he belongs.

The seeds of today's debauchery were sown a long time ago. When, in defiance of his own wildly popular rhetoric, Hugo Chávez let the old elite get away with decades of plunder without a single high-profile trial, he not so subtly signalled to his supporters his own lack of seriousness on corruption.

After all, if Chávez wouldn't go after his political enemies, against people he made a sport of demonizing, who could seriously believe he would go after his allies? Nobody.

And not, certainly, Franklin Durán.

This Peronist presidency is b(r)ought to you by...

Quico says: The Miami Maletagate Trial is the kind of blogging black hole you could get sucked into and spend virtually all of your time covering. I'm mostly letting Miguel Octavio do it, but thought I'd make an exception to link to this explosive report in Argentina's La Nación, reporting that another $4.2 million of PDVSA money flew to Argentina in that same infamous flight that brought Antonini and his $790,000 suitcase.

(La Nación, incidentally, puts the Venezuelan papers to shame when it comes to Maletagate coverage.)

Not a "State Sponsor of Terrorism"...just, y'know, a state run by people who sponsor terrorism

Quico says: In today's WaPo, Juan Forero has the skinny on the Empire's decision to freeze all assets belonging to three top chavista intelligence operatives: the inimitable Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, DISIP head Henry Rangel Silva and the deeply shady Hugo Carvajal, head of military intelligence (pictured), in response to their increasingly documented links to FARC.

Particularly striking is the second half of Forero's piece, where we get pearls like:

The Treasury Department said Venezuela's military intelligence director, Hugo Carvajal, protected FARC drug shipments from seizure by honest Venezuelan authorities, provided weaponry and helped the rebels maintain their stronghold along Colombia's eastern border with Venezuela.

and,

American officials said that in addition to the three Chávez aides who were named Friday, they know of other figures close to the Venezuelan leader who have helped the FARC. Colombian authorities have identified two of them as Gen. Cliver Alcalá and Amilcar Figueroa, who has had a role in organizing Venezuelan civilian militias.

"It's actually a fairly small group of people, but it's larger than three," said the senior American official. "We know who those people are, and we're watching them very closely."

It's worth reading the whole thing.

Taking shit from Chávez

Quico says: True Venezuelan politics junkies don't need reminding to check El Chigüire Bipolar on a daily basis. But on the occassion of Chávez's e/scatological expulsion of US ambassador Patrick Duddy, our prozac-popping rodent friend nailed it so perfectly I just have to give up a link. His take? "Government sets off smoke-screen to cover up the smoke-screen it had set off yesterday."

"We were weighing up whether we should reveal an imminent yankee invasion via Rio Caribe, have a black out in the East Side of Caracas or announce that Miquilena is an alien who sucks out people's souls," said our anonymous source, who took the chance to add what a hard time they're having coming up with suitably absurd ideas ever since Rodríguez Chacín left the cabinet. "That bugger had it in his blood."

Insofar as I can add anything to el chigüire's brilliance here (which, lets face it, isn't very far), I'd just say this. For all of Chávez's rhetorical violence, for all his vulgarity and rant-heavy informality over thousands of hours of air time, the guy virtually never swears. Sure, he's perfected the art of ambling right up to the lexical edge before playfully pulling back ("take your newspapers, roll them up real tight, and shove them in your ...pocket!") but, as far as I can remember, before yesterday, he'd only ever used an out and out tabu word in public once.

Read into that what you will...

Eat our dust, São Tomé and Principe!

Quico says: So, according to the latest World Bank report on the cost of business regulations, guess which is the only one of the ten worst countries to do business that's not in Africa? You got it!

Some of the jurisdictions judged to be easier to do business in than Venezuela these days include Equatorial Guinea, the People's Democratic Republic of Laos, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and East Timor.

And, while Bolivia did fight us to a draw, nobody but nobody has more rigid labor markets than we do. Hurrah!

Tit-for-tat

Quico says: The government's newfound love-in with Interpol makes for the kind of compare-and-contrast post that more or less writes itself.

I mean, it's too easy. A government that, just a few months ago, was assuring us Interpol was "an ever loyal ally of empire" suddenly went into aw-shucks mode yesterday after Interpol publicly praised its capture of a high-profile Colombian Narco. It's a classic bit of Chávez-style conditional approval. Just this spring Interpol's Secretary General, Ronald Noble, was an ignoble, shameless crook, an "international bum" heading up a scheme to infiltrate gringo spies into Venezuela. All of a sudden, he shows up in ABN stories treated as an impeccable source.

So the barrel was full, the fish had nowhere to hide and my gun was loaded. But then I wondered if there isn't more to this than a chance for some well-deserved but impotent snark. The political scientist in me has to wonder whether there isn't some strategic depth to these screeching turnarounds. Because the government sure seems to be playing tit-for-tat. Which, believe it or not, is a technical term in this context.

Tit-for-tat is a way of securing cooperation from agents that may be tempted to do you wrong. The basic idea is that, in the context of an iterated prisoner's dilemma, you're often best off starting out "nice" and then shadowing the other side's moves. If the other side screws you, you screw him right back. But if your opponent starts cooperating, you don't hold a grudge: you relaunch cooperation as soon as he stops acting against your interests.

Academics have long known that equivalent retaliation along these lines is an effective strategy for eliciting cooperation across a range of non-cooperative games. And you can certainly interpret a lot of Chávez's conflict management through this prism: when you hit him, he hits right back; when you play nice, he's often willing to turn on a dime.

Think of the media. So long as Venevisión and Televen ran hard against the government, Chávez retaliated, assaulting them rhetorically and signaling to advertisers to take their business elsewhere. As soon as they stopped broadcasting so critically, the government changed its stance too, dropping talk of taking away their broadcasting licenses and letting them get on with the business of broadcasting appalling shlock to housewives and raking in the advertising cash in the process.

That's tit-for-tat.

Think of Arias Cardenas, who was let back into the fold after going so far as to challenge Chávez for the presidency. That's tit-for-tat. Think of Baduel, aggressively harassed after literally saving the government from a coup, think of the unending on-again, off-again alliance between Chávez and PPT, of Chávez's eventual "break" with a FARC that wasn't listening to him, of the sad fate of the Villegas Brothers. Tit-for-tat, tit-for-tat, tit-for-tat.

From a blogger's point of view, this sort of thing tends to look like naked hypocrisy and makes endless fodder for cheap compare-and-contrast shots. Still, there's a reason he does it: tit-for-tat works.

Chávez's predilection for this kind of behavior may explain, in part, why he finds any sort of criticism so baffling, so unacceptable. When he says he's willing to work with all sectors (so long as they don't seek to destabilize his government), he may well mean it. The guy perceives himself as forgiving, willing to let bygones be bygones and give people a second chance. He can't for the life of him figure out why the price he demands - abject subservience - is so damn hard for so many people to swallow, and ends up interpreting refusals as grounded in essential evil.

"Nobody has to fight me," you can see him reasoning, "they choose to fight me, despite what's in their own interests. I'd be willing to give them a pass, to turn the page, but there's just no reasoning with some people: they're simply bad."

At the same time, his preference for equivalent retaliation means it's hard to definitively burn your bridges with chavismo. Recant and you can always get back into his good graces. We're miles away here from the strategy of a Saddam Hussein, a J.V. Gómez or a Trujillo, men famous for hanging on for grudges tenaciously for decades on end and prosecuting them long after they've ceased to serve any useful role in cementing their power.

Chávez knows better than to indulge such strategically costly appetites. In Hugoslavia, there's always a bit of carrot mixed in with the stick. The president may rant viciously against you, call you all sorts of unspeakable insults, but you always know that you can get back on the gravy train, simply by offering up your unconditional support once again.

It's a situation Ronald Noble's coming to know from the inside, and one I imagine Vladimir Villegas finds himself mulling over today.

i for i-ntimidated

Quico says: One of the few rays of hope I found on my recent trip to Caracas was the rise of Canal i, the most promising of the new batch of all-news channels proliferating on Venezuela's airways. With "equilibrio en la información" as a slogan, Canal i set out to do something shockingly novel (for Venezuela): broadcast news and opinions that aren't wildly partisan. It seemed to good too be true, and it was: last week, Canal i's management pulled the plug on its flagship evening talk show and fired its Broadcasting Director for trying to air a sensitive piece on the Antonini case. The National Journalists' Guild is crying censorship.

There were, to be sure, reasons to be doubtful from the start. Run by PSUV executive committee-member Mari Pili Hernández and funded by the oil-shipping bolibourgeois magnate Wilmer Ruperti, nobody could mistake Canal i for a truly independent channel. Nonetheless, Ruperti had made it clear that he saw the channel basically as a commercial venture, and his business strategy relied on tapping into the badly underserved sick-of-polarization market.

He figured there were advertising bolivars to be made in that space. After all, hardcore chavistas already had a wide and widening set of media choices (from VTV and Vive to ANTV, RNV, and others,) and die-hard antichavistas still had Globovision, alongside as much print media as they could stomach. It was the broad center that was hurting for a source of news, so Ruperti, cunningly enough, thought he'd spotted a gap in the market.

It was, to be sure, one tough balancing act. Canal i couldn't afford to out-and-out alienate a government that Ruperti depends on for most of his cash-flow, but it also couldn't hope to attract an audience if it morphed into a VTV clone. For a while, the channel seemed to pull it off, with newscasts that were broadly sympathetic but not slavishly subservient to the government and opinion shows that made a serious attempt to give both sides of the political divide their say.

The station's flagship program was called Contrapeso - Counterweight - a prime time talk show jointly hosted by one of the more moderate pro-government media figures, Vladimir Villegas, and one of the less polarizing opposition talking heads, Idania Chirinos. Five nights a week, since January, Contrapeso did something that's become shockingly rare in Venezuela: bring together guests with opposing points of view for a heated but insult-free confrontation.

Bizarrely, it seemed to work - largely, I think, because Chirinos and Villegas had real chemistry on the set. They appeared to actually like one another, and had worked out a way to disagree on almost everything but without vitriol. Contrapeso became a kind of oasis in the Caracas media scene, a place where something like a democratic public sphere seemed to be constructed day in and day out.

Here's a taste:

Contrapeso 06/07/2008
by noticias24

It's no surprise that the government would find this kind of TV alarming. Of course, it couldn't last. Last week, the channel announced it was "restructuring" Villegas and Chirinos off the air. What specifically prompted this decision is not at all clear, though speculation is rife that the decision was made in Miraflores. Certainly, it escaped no one that the decision came soon after Villegas ever-so-gingerly criticized Chávez's recent package of 26 decree-laws and, heresy of heresies, called for a public debate about them. Significantly, Villegas isn't denying that retaliation is at play here, and instead has started to talk himself into the rhetorical corner that all "moderate chavistas" seem to end up in sooner or later.

All of which is more sad than surprising. Every night that Contrapeso stayed on the air was a minor miracle, an aberration that everyone could see could not last indefinitely. A government built on polarization, devoted to a sharp division of society into Good Guys and Bad Guys, couldn't be expected to tolerate a space where the two sides talked to each other respectfully for hours on end. The real wonder, for my money, is that Ruperti ever thought the show had a future.

[Hat tip: Eva.]

Off The Rails

Quico says: Sometimes, you have to take your hat off to the sheer audacity of chavista officialdom in full larceny mode. Say what you will about them, but when the time comes to think up corruption-hotbed-moneypit-boondoggles, these guys think big. I mean, really: 5% cuts on public employee insurance contracts are so Fourth Republic.

Even by their standards, though, the latest presidential brain fart raises the bar. Together with his Argentine counterpart, a Venezuelan government spokesmen recently announced plans to spend $9 billion on a 6,200 Km. railway between Caracas and Buenos Aires.

With a straight face.

That's nine zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero dollars; enough to buy every man, woman and child in Venezuela a Nintendo Wii.

Oh and, did I mention? The train can't go through Brazil: Lula's not on board.

Where to even start? Maybe with the patently, almost embarrassingly, obvious: it's never gonna happen. You are never going to board a train in Venezuela and disembark in Argentina.

Think about it. If the (by comparison, dead simple) scheme to run a gas pipeline from the Caribbean through Brazil into Argentina foundered on the shoals its own technical and financial inviablity, this far more complex, far less economically sensible project just doesn't stand a chance.

I mean, lets review the bidding here. We're talking about a government that, in ten years, hasn't even managed to finish the four lane highway covering the couple of hundred kilometers of flat coastal plain between Caracas and Puerto La Cruz, a government from a country with a grand total of 41 kilometers of active passenger railways, somehow getting it together to build and electrify tracks over thousands of kilometers of dense rain forest, zero-rainfall deserts, some of the world's tallest mountains, two imperialist-lackey-run countries and a war zone.

The chasm between capabilities and ambitions here is so psychiatrically off the charts, it feels faintly ridiculous to go through the detail of it.

So what are we really looking at here? What we're looking at here is a form of corruption so audacious, so unencumbered by any sense of restraint, that it simply refuses to make any of the usual concessions in the general direction of keeping up appearances.

Thing is, the bigger the contract, the bigger the cut, and if you're serious about taking your embezzlement to the next level, the only way forward is to pitch bigger and bigger projects with bigger and bigger price tags and less and less concern with verisimilitude.

Your great fortune, however, is that you find yourself pitching these transparently unworkable plans to a guy whose ego long since burst its banks, a guy who loves nothing more than a transparently unworkable project to embody his increasingly unhinged sense of historical import. The kind of guy who hears "$9 billion...6,200 km...six countries... Andes... Atacama... Amazon" and instead of calling in the men in white lab coats to pack you off to an insane asylum thinks "hmmmm, I like it!"

And so another batch of boli-millionaires is created on our dime, another chunk of the oil bonanza is tossed into the pyre, and the obscene parade of revolution ambles forward toward its next bout of narcissistic-lunacy-cum-quotidianity.

Venezuelan Parties Still Don't Get the Internet

Quico says: One thing should be clear by now: Venezuelan party websites pretty much suck. Most of them appear to have been started up by an enthusiastic volunteer or two who didn't really think through the time-commitment needed to keep a website permanently updated and gave up pretty early on. With just a few exceptions (PJ, UNT, PCV), it's easy to see party leaders don't much care what their party's web presence is like. It's telling, for instance, that you never ever see a URL printed on a party political placard in Venezuela.

As far as the opposition goes, it's no surprise. If Venezuela has a mad proliferation of tiny, half-baked, ineffective opposition party websites none of which can seem to reach the critical mass needed to have a real impact, much of that is down to the fact that we have a mad proliferation of tiny, half-baked, ineffective opposition parties none of which can seem to reach the critical mass needed to have a real impact. The dysfunction of the opposition's websites is the dysfunction of the opposition.

Only Primero Justicia takes any kind of stab at using the web for organizing purposes, but even they barely scratch the surface in terms of the way the internet can be used as a tool for grass-roots political organizing. The kinds of techniques for channeling people's political concerns into specific action pioneered by sites like MoveOn.org and MeetUp.com and later adapted by the likes of BarackObama.com and, closer to home, No Más FARC, are just not on the radar screen in Venezuela.

There's a terrible wasted opportunity in all of this. Net access is fast becoming the norm in Venezuela's middle class, and even poor people have at least sporadic access through schools and infocentros. But while Venezuelans have become politicized to an extent that would've seemed unthinkable just a decade ago, that energy can't seem to find the organizational channels it needs to fuel real world political action. Instead of catalyzing mobilization, online politics in Venezuela remains confined to ranting viciously on sites like Noticiero Digital, dominated by a fringe of die-hard anti-politics know-nothings who prefer to wallow in a form of infantile nihilism that dissipates political energy rather than channeling it into action.

It's a damn shame.

Disclaimer

Juan Cristobal and I wish to make clear that, while we realize the recent set of posts have been about as popular as a rabbi at a Hizbollah rally, we're both traveling at the moment and barely online at all most days. Regular posting will resume by Friday.

Stragglers, personal vehicles and a bit of nostalgia

...a shocking number of "parties" have no website to speak of. Podemos, Proyecto Venezuela, Causa R, UPV (Lina Ron's vehicle), Venezuela de Primera, URD, MIN and MAS, have either just a placeholder or nothing at all.

Alianza Bravo Pueblo and Comando Nacional de la Resistencia have Blogs masquerading as party websites. Both look very much like Ledezma vehicles. The CNR blog at least gets updated regularly, ABP's, not even.

Bandera Roja also operates a glorified blog, which is not entirely inactive, but hardly a hotbed of digital activism either.

From there on out, it only gets weirder. Convergencia has a website that's more like a cyber-shrine to Rafael Caldera than a party website. In a weird way, it's still more substantive than many other party websites, as you can download the full texts of a number of Dr. Caldera's books in PDF form.

Good to know for those of us who battle chronic insomnia.

Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) + Tribuna Popular

URL: http://www.pcv-venezuela.org/
or
http://www.tribuna-popular.org/

(PCV shares a website with the party's daily newspaper, Tribuna Popular.)

Updatedness 20 out of 20:
The decision to roll the Tribuna Popular and PCV websites into one really pays off here. Fresh stuff, lots of it, every day.

Interaction possibilities: 2 out of 20
The site allows you to open an account, which is somewhat mystifying, since you can't actually do anything with it. Still, they have almost 1400 users signed up.

Meaningful positions: 20 out of 20
Positions don't come any more explicit than this. (OK, maybe this tops it.) You can fault the commies for a lot of stuff, but being wishy-washy about where they stand is not among them.

Web-Design: 14 out of 20.
I'm of two minds about this. Technically, the site is pretty sophisticated: Joomla-based and comprehensive. There's a ton of content, and it's well organized.

On the other hand, it looks awful: dated, over-busy, and just plain ugly.

Contact information: 1 out of 10
A web form lets you write Tribuna Popular's editors, and that's about it. But then, the party explicitly says it doesn't want dilettantes or part-timers, boasting that it should be hard to be accepted as a party member, so outreach is not exactly a priority.

Local Goodness: 4 out of 10.
The site's dual nature as both party and newspaper website makes this a bit of a hit and miss affair. Local commies are covered often by Tribuna Popular, but if you're looking for a stable website about your friendly neighborhood Reds, you can't necessarily find it.

The Verdict: 61 out of 100.
Active, obviously fussed over and tended to, PCV's is easily the best of the pro-Chávez party sites. It could perfectly well be used as your main source of news, if you're into a hard-left point of view, and is particularly good at integrating web-video. The rhetoric is time-warpy, yes, but the positioning is very clear.

Copei Digital

URL: http://www.partidocopei.org.ve/

Updatedness: 5 out of 20.
"Noticias actuales" from May. A separate "National Blog" is updated about once every 3 days.

Interaction possibilities: 11 out of 20.
You get a way to sign up as a party member or renew your membership, but the website is designed more to harvest information from you than to give you a way to interact with the party.

Meaningful positions: 10 out of 20.
A very abstract "Quienes Somos" page cranks out the obligatory Catholic Social Doctrine noises.

Web-Design: 9 out of 20.
Another glorified blog, but not a very nice looking one, with tons of links that lead you nowhere.

Contact information: 3 out of 10
A form quizzes you extensively but doesn't tell you where your email will end up. On the plus side, Caracas phone numbers are displayed prominently on the home page.

Local Goodness: 3 out of 10
If you live in Anzoátegui, Carabobo or Táchira, you get out-of-date blogs. If you don't, you don't even get that. You do get the names of local party officials, but not a way to get in touch with them.

The Verdict: 42 out of 100.
The site is terribly concerned to nail down Copei's rebranding as "Copei Partido Popular". But, when you get down to it, it's just another website that might not be too bad if somebody, anybody, would just give it a bit of TLC.

Acción Democrática's Turn

URL: http://www.acciondemocratica.org.ve/

Updatedness: 2 out of 20.
"Latest news" are from April, party documents, for the most part, are 1 and 2 years old.

Interaction possibilities: 0 out of 20
There aren't any.

Meaningful positions: 9 out of 20
Lots of teary-eyed looks at the AD glory years, but too many documents are truncated.

La modernización de Venezuela promovida por Acción Democrática, se puede sintetizar con la creación de una sociedad abierta y democrática, fortalecida económica, política y socialmente, en el marco de una economía capitalista con fuerte presencia del Estado en materia social y cultural, con tolerancia, pluralismo y compromiso con la prosperidad y el progreso económico y social, con la creación de espacios para el ejercicio de la ciudadanía y la mejora continua de la calidad de vida de los sectores tradicionalmente excluidos de la sociedad.

La construcción de la modernidad en Venezuela está ligada, además del ejercicio mismo de la democracia representativa, con la labor pedagógica que la práctica democrática implica y con el ejercicio libre de la actividad de los partidos políticos modernos. Acción Democrática ha sido la organización pivote de dicho proceso.

Web-Design: 10 out of 20
A glorified blog, it is nonetheless readable and would make it easy to find information, if there was any information in it to be found

Contact information: 1 out of 10
The "contact" link doesn't work. A map shows regional contact information for some states but not others.

Local Goodness: 1 out of 10
Contact information for a few states.

The Verdict: 23 out of 100
Just another unloved, unused, uncared for party website.

Primero Justicia on the Web

URL: http://www.primerojusticia.org.ve/

Updatedness: 16 out of 20
Near-daily news updates, but too many links still send you to "Under Construction" pages. Also, the activities page is out of date.

Interaction possibilities: 20 out of 20
The "Inscríbete" link is prominent, and allows you to sign up as a party member or sympathizer quickly and easily. Links to the PJ network on Facebook and to its YouTube channel are prominent, as are chances to help out as a volunteer.

Meaningful positions: 13 out of 20
A Doctrine document is far more metaphysically oriented than the norm, and although it doesn't explicitly reference it as such, harks back again and again to mainstays of the Catholic Church's Social Doctrine, emphasizing human dignity and solidarity:

La construcción de la Justicia Social obliga a que la vida social se articule desde
el valor de la solidaridad y el principio de la subsidiariedad para poder atender con
una visión humana la diversidad y pluralidad de nuestra sociedad.

En virtud de la solidaridad, Primero Justicia afirma que todos los ciudadanos y
todos los grupos deben contribuir al bien común de la sociedad. Por otra parte, la
subsidiariedad supone que el Estado no deberá jamás sustituir la iniciativa ni la
responsabilidad de las personas y de los grupos.

En tal sentido, reafirmamos a la familia como institución primaria de la sociedad.
En ella, los seres humanos reciben el don de la vida y la formación que habrá de
capacitarlos para el ejercicio de su libertad y la contribución que harán a la justicia
social.

Specific policies are thinner on the ground, and the party platform is not online.

Web-Design: 19 out of 20
Clean, clearly branded and functional

Contact information: 10 out of 10
Detailed, state by state contact information. Very detailed information on how to get in touch with specific party officials at all levels.

Local Goodness: 3 out of 10
Better at letting you know how to get in touch with the local party than at telling you what it's doing.

The Verdict: 81 out of 100
The only Venezuelan party that really gets Web 2.0. An excellent web-page that, nonetheless, contains some serious gaps.

PPT-sur-Web

URL: http://www.ppt.org.ve/

Updatedness: 3 out of 20.
It looks like the site was pretty scrupulously maintained...until last April!

Interaction possibilities: 0 out of 20.
There aren't any.

Meaningful positions 14 out of 20:
The Quienes Somos link makes a fairly creditable stab at describing PPT's ideology, and explaining both what it is and how it differs from others':

Nosotros queremos un Estado que forme parte consustancial con la sociedad y, por tanto, con la idea de nación, de Patria. Sólo así podrá realizarse el ideal del Estado-Nación que hoy se intenta borrar del mapa mundial, con la avasallante ola económica, política e ideológica que motoriza el plan de globalización o mejor aún, de totalización del dominio mundial por un capital financiero, desalmado, y de una voracidad insaciable. Íntimamente, vinculado a este postulado, está el hecho de que, para poder desplegar una política económica extranjerizante, el neoliberal tiene que acompañarla de una política excluyente, que, al desplazar fracciones importantes del capital nacional que se había formado a lo largo de varias décadas, lanza también a millones de seres a la pobreza. Y aquí no tenemos que apelar a ejemplos ajenos, cuando vivimos la experiencia en carne propia.

Web-Design: 14 out of 20.
Good, functional web design. Clear, readable and easy to find your way around. On the other hand, a bit dull, and badly let down by too little content and too many broken links.

Contact information: 0 out of 10.
They got nothin'!

Local Goodness: 3 out of 10.
A lot of the material included is very local in nature, but useless, because it's months out of date.

The Verdict: 34 out of 100.
A well designed website, slowly dying of neglect.

Cuanto vale el leak?

Quico says: We break from our regularly scheduled set of website reviews to bring you this bizarre, titilating, alarming, and apparently true story:

The secret-spilling site Wikileaks announced this week that it's acquired thousands of e-mails belonging to a top aide to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. But don't look for them online. In a departure from its full-disclosure past, Wikileaks is auctioning off the cache to the highest bidder.

Wikileaks began soliciting bids from media organizations on Tuesday, for what it describes as thousands of e-mails and attachments from 2005 to 2008 that provide insight into Chavez's management, CIA activities in Venezuela and the Bolivarian revolution.

[hat tip: JayDee.]

Un Nuevo Tiempo-am-Web

URL: http://www.unnuevotiempo.org.ve/cms/

Updatedness: 18 out of 20.
Updated almost daily, the site is definitely looked after.

Interaction possibilities: 11 out of 20.
A quick sign-up allows you to register and participate in a Forum, however the forum doesn't seem to be very active. There's no simple way to sign up as a party member, volunteer, or to donate money.

Meaningful positions: 11 out of 20
We get a clear, full throated defense of liberal democracy coupled to a strong rejection of the authoritarianism that hides behind calls for radical democracy.

En Venezuela, la futura democracia política deberá abarcar: una soberanía popular sin interferencias autoritarias, una auténtica tolerancia pluralista, la eliminación de dogmas ideológicos oficiales, la separación y descentralización de los poderes públicos y la independencia de la judicatura, la institucionalidad de la fuerza armada, la garantía de la seguridad personal y publica, la lucha contra la corrupción, como iniciativas imprescindibles para la existencia del Estado de Derecho. Un Estado de Derecho y de Justicia, donde impere la Ley y se respeten los acuerdos y contratos, donde el sistema de administración de justicia sea transparente y eficaz, es además el mejor piso para impulsar nuestro proyecto de desarrollo justo, equitativo y centrado en el ser humano.

On less abstract matters, the document descends into platitudes.

Web-Design: 13 out of 20.
The web design looks expensive, and there's certainly a lot of content, but there's also a hell of a lot of clutter, too many distracting moving graphics, and just too many colors.

Contact information: 7 out of 10
You get a general contact link and a press contact link. UNT gets special kudos for making their internal organization chart available, but loses points for not telling us how to contact the people in it.

Local Goodness: 9 out of 10.
A very cool Regions' Map guides you directly to locally relevant info. A few local politicians host blogs about what they're up to.

The Verdict: 69 out of 100.
A good, strong website, clearly looked after and fuzzed over, that doesn't quite dare to ask its readers to do something for the party or the country.

PSUV-upon-Web - UPDATE

UPDATE/WARNING: The website described below apparently contains some nasty malware. Be sure you have updated anti-virus software before clicking on it.

URL: http://psuv.org.ve/

Fun cybersquatter: http://psuv.org/ (Partnership Society for USA and Venezuela)

Updatedness 0 out of 20: A bunch of PDF files from 2006 and 2007.

Interaction possibilities: 0 out of 20.
The site is totally static.

Meaningful positions: 4 out of 20.
More or less what you'd expect from the Chávez cult-of-personality party. You get jewels such as,

Hemos odo [sic] lamentablemente voceros y no precisamente de la oposicin[sic], diciendo que estn[sic] de acuerdo con el pensamiento nico[sic] y quin ha hablado de eso? Nadi [sic] hablado [sic] del pensamiento nico, [sic] `no! pensamientos de lo ms diverso, flexibilidad, amplitu [sic] visin [sic] holstica [sic] integral, sistmica [sic]; es una nueva conformacin. [sic]

Web-Design: 6 out of 20.
Red, very red. Mismatched fonts. Designed for tiny screens only. Image of Chávez faces the outside of the window.

Contact information: 7 out of 20.
You get a toll free number (0-800-PSUV-000), and a single email that, alarmingly, has the date 2007 slapped on it: salapsuv2007@gmail.com

Local Goodness: 1 out of 10.
A few region-specific documents, but like everything else, they're years out of date.

The Verdict: 18 out of 100.
PSUV's website bears all the hallmarks of a site nobody really thought through, nobody really updates and nobody really uses on a regular basis. Two year old content. No meaningful chances for interaction. About as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle.

How web-savvy is your party?

Quico says: From today, both Juan Cristobal and I will be out travelling: he has a business trip, I'm going to a conference.

To keep the blog active, we've prepared a series of posts reviewing the websites of Venezuela's main political parties. A new review will appear each day.

The Internet is proving to be a powerful weapon in the politics of our time. It seems like tapping the power of the Internet is fast becoming a crucial factor in making or breaking a candidate, a party or a platform. Are Venezuelan politicians (from all sides) paying attention? Have they grasped the importance of the Internet?

We'll be reviewing websites to try and find an answer. Websites will be judged on six criteria:

Updatedness - 20 Points.
You can tell a lot about how much people care about and use a website by how up-to-date it is. And, of course, nothing's more useless than a topical website with 6-month old information. Our first criterion, therefore, is how often the site is updated, how "news-y" it is. We award extra points for use of recent web-video.

Interaction possibilities - 20 Points.
A party web-site should be about more than just pushing information down to passive recipients; it should be about empowering people to use the website as an organizing tool. This criteria tries to capture how much of the whole Web 2.0 ethos has filtered down to Venezuelan party webmasters, and to what extent the website is used as a tool to catalyze off-the-web action.

Meaningful positions - 20 Points.
Every party website has some doctrinal material on it (well, at least they should!). But can an actual ideology be discernible when you are being drowned by a tsunami of clichés?

Web-Design - 20 Points.
How hard is it to find what you're looking for? How attractive are the graphics? Points here go to "clean" web-design that's elegant, balanced and functional, and are deducted from overly loud or cluttered designs.

Contact Information - 10 Points
Is the website helpful in getting in touch with specific people filling specific roles within the party? Or do you just get one or two all-purpose contact points? Is there any contact information at all?

Local Goodness - 10 Points.
With state and local elections coming up, it's especially important to provide locally relevant information. Does the website allow you to find out what the party is doing in your specific location? Or is it as Caraco-centric as the Venezuelan media?

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.