The forgotten trailblazer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Survey!

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

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

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

Click here to take the Readers' Views Survey.

81% of you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sweet Tooth for Punishment

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

Photo of the Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compare and Contrast, Macroeconomics Edition

Quico says: How a professional economist understands inflation:


How a chavista minister understands inflation:

"If we all start to haggle, speculators are going to start feeling the pressure. If millions of consumers exercise that kind of pressure, to insist that prices drop and for some supply to remain, imagine what could happen!"

UPDATE: Watch Jaua's outburst morph from isolated inanity into government policy.

Reading the Readers

Quico says: A hearty thanks to all 280 of you who took the time to fill out the Readers' Survey over the last few days. There's some eye-popping stuff in there, so lets dig right in.

First, the ugly. I sort of figured that there would be more men than women reading this stuff, but a 4-to-1 split?!


That's crazy stuff. Gals, if you have any handy tips on how to make Caracas Chronicles more appealing to the XX Chromosome set, do let me know.

The age breakdown is less surprising:


Nor were there that many surprises about where people live:


The nationality question threw up some interesting results, though. I really wasn't expecting so many readers with dual citizenship:


As for ideology, you can see "center-left" takes it by a substantial plurality. I was heartened, though, by the preponderance of relative moderation - 70% of you describe yourselves a "center-something" - and by the popularity of "it's complicated", cuz of course we all know that trying to sum up one's political views in three words is an absurd exercise:


One that really surprised me was the "how-well-can-you-read-Spanish?" question. I'd always figured a relatively large proportion of you couldn't read much Spanish...why else, after all, would you spend your time on an English language blog about Venezuela?

Turns out that's not at all right: just 5% of you can't read Spanish, and more than 80% can read Spanish "very" or "quite" well:


The next question also gave fairly surprising results. I wanted to get a feel for how large the blog looms in readers' information gathering routines. I always thought of it as a kind of supplementary thing, a source you'd turn to for comment on news you'd already heard about elsewhere, rather than a source in itself. But that's not how a lot of you see it:

(Note to the 6.1% of you who use this blog as your main source of information about Venezuela: get your heads examined.)

More surprises came in the Types-of-Posts question. While most of you like most of the posts (I guess that's why you come), it turns out that posts on the Economy are the most popular of the bunch. Who knew? I guess we'll have to write more of them:


I did a simple Word Frequency Analysis on the open-ended question on what you like most and least about the blog. The most frequently used words in describing what you liked the most about Caracas Chronicles were Analysis, Well Written/Good Writing, Style, Perspective, Comments, Smart/Intelligent, Honest and Insight. Here's a taste for what they were like:

How it digs beyond the headlines - e.g., the disconnect of the discourse vs the reality.

Gives me news I might not otherwise find.

The analysis, not just reporting, of events.

Multi-theme, high caliber, English language.

Contemporaneous and genuine debate about the issues that matter most to Venezuelans abroad.

Good, thoughtful writing, good analysis and often interesting comment streams, helps me keep up with things I would miss elsewhere.

Seriousness, thoroughness, historical perspective.

Katy, before she became a man.

The quality of the writing, the intelligence of the posters and the lively comments section.

Sublimation of frustration into humor.

How Venezuelan news is viewed with a us format yet with a venezuelan perspective

The words that came up most often in describing what you liked least about the blog were Comments, Long, PSF, Spanish and Arrogance. A selection of responses:

Few spanish, but I understand it reaches more people in english... in spanish it could affect voting

Hair-splitting.

The Chavista nutters who hang around the comments

Its randomness.

Lack of an educated Chavez supporter who uses intelligent and logical conversation to prove points.

Would like more posts but realize you have a life.

Can float off into theoretical wonkland.

Very long comments in comments section.

The sycophants in the comment section and the alleged superior intellectuality of its creator. Otro hijo de vecino and all that...

the language conundrum -- is this read by the same 10 folks who can dance between criollo spanish and perfect english (like myself)?

Sometimes the blog gets stuck on one single topic.

Katy is actually a hairy dude

Sometimes it's too Chavez centered as if he was the only responsible for what we have now

Comments section - too heavily moderated.

Its arrogance.

That there is no spanish version. There should be one!!! And you know it.

Not too consistent, sometimes there is nothing interesting for several days.

Finally we come to the Comments section. Here, the results were especially eye-catching.

As I'd long suspected, the people who tend to dominate the comments threads are a very small slice of the readership. In fact, 3 out of 4 survey respondents seldom or never post comments:


What's interesting is that the chart is reversed when I asked y'all how often you read the comments section:


It turns out we have a huge proportion of lurkers here: folks who come in, read the blog, read the comments, but don't join the fray. In fact, 35% of the readers who never comment still say they read the comments section "often."

I thought that was pretty interesting, and I'd love it if some of you lurkers broke the habit and piped in at least to say hello in this post's comments thread.

Overall, most people seem to appreciate the Comments Section, with a substantial minority seeing it as "a big reason to come to the blog". Again, it's interesting that while just 6.5% of you comment "often," a quarter see comments as a major reason to keep coming back:

I was also gratified that not many of you think this whole comments thing is a waste of time, though I admit that's how I feel sometimes having to moderate it!

And on that topic - comment moderation - it was nice to know that a very large majority thinks Juan Cristobal and I are in Goldilocks Territory on the issue of deleting obnoxious comments:


Thanks so much, once again, for taking a the time to answer the survey. In the coming weeks, we'll be unveiling a second, much more detailed questionnaire dealing with readers' political opinions and attitudes. Hell, I gave that surveymonkey 19 of my hard earned CADIVI dollars, I will get my money's worth!

Creative Use of the Imperialism Card #12,294,833

Quico says: "The problem," my friend told me, "is that the National Guardsmen don't really control the jail. I mean, they control the door, yes, but once inside, the prisoners are pretty much on their own."

This was a few years back, as my journo friend was telling me of all the craziness she'd witnessed on a reporting visit to a Venezuelan prison.

Venezuelan jails, in her account, are dominated by the day-by-day Hobbesian struggle for survival: places where extreme violence is simply routine, rehabilitation non-existent, and the morale (and morals) of prison guards have collapsed catastrophically.

"Sometimes, on paydays," my friend explained, relating some inmates' statements, "the guards get drunk and taunt the prisoners for fun, waving pieces of fried chicken in front of them after going days without feeding them. They'd eat the chicken and then toss the bones in, letting them scramble over the scraps. We even heard stories that sometimes the guards grab their shotguns and take target practice on them, randomly shooting into the prisoners' area in an alcoholic stupor."

Of course, National Guardsmen are never prosecuted for inmates' deaths - it's enough to say they had to use violence to put down a riot to get them off the hook, any hook.

Food is a major problem for Venezuelan inmates. The prison my friend went to didn't have enough money to feed them every day: meals were served on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The rest of the time, they had to rely on family members bringing stuff in from the outside. But most prisoners are poor, many desperately so, and a good number of them just didn't have anyone they could rely on for deliveries. For them, the choice was simple: steal or starve.

Which is certainly a major reason why extreme violence is so prevalent inside. Prisoners have to join strong, feared prison gangs simply to keep themselves fed.

But getting food inside was just the beginning of the problem. Once there, they still had to cook it, but the areas where inmates live just aren't equipped with kitchens. Electric hotpots are one solution, but when dozens of them get plugged in to a system that's not designed for such loads, the result is predictable: they kept tripping up the circuit breakers, shutting down power for the entire prison.

At that point, inmates would be forced to look for anything that would burn to make a cooking fire, and before too long they'd made their way through all the wood inside the place and had to start stripping out the tar weather-proofing from the jail's roof to use as fuel. Result? Whenever it rained, the prison took in water like a sieve.

Not, of course, that leaky roofs are anywhere near the top of inmate's concern list. Last year, 498 of the nation's 21,000 inmates were murdered in jail, and another 1,023 injured with knives or guns. That's one death for every 42 prisoners each year, and a one in 20 chance of serious injury.

Hearing these stories, I remember thinking that bringing Venezuelan jails up to Gitmo standards would represent a dramatic improvement for inmates' human rights.

Given the conditions inmates face, it's hardly surprising that their families and leading prisoners' rights NGOs are desperate for an improvement. So inmates' families have had to resort to ever more creative, ever more extreme ways of pressing the authorities for improvements.

The most eye-catching is the "self-hostage taking" (autosecuestro), where family members turn up during visiting hours and then refuse to leave the jail until certain conditions are met. That people would voluntarily subject themselves to the insane conditions inside Venezuelan jails speaks, to me, absolute volumes about the sheer scale of their desperation.

You'd think that anyobody half-way sane would come to a similar conclusion. But not, of course, Interior Minister Ramón Rodríguez Chacín who prefers to just blow the whole thing off as an imperialist plot, put on by US lackeys to cover up the revolution's "great strides."

See? It's magic! You just invoke the words "US imperialism" and any intractable social problem just vanishes in a puff of logic! It's no wonder these guys are so into it...

A parable

Quico says: Imagine a baseball team that's not like other baseball teams. This baseball team doesn't have a manager, or a single uniform. Basically, all they have is a roster: 25 guys all dying to go out there and play.

Thing is, only nine of them can play at any given time. So, before each game, all 25 of them have to sit down together and negotiate who's going to be on the starting line-up.

During these line-up negotiations, players cluster into little cliques of friends to rally to one another's support. Coordination failure is rife. Everybody wants to bat clean-up, and the first instinct, for anyone who looks to get stuck on the bench, is to storm off in a huff, or to just head out into the field when he decides it's "his turn" to bat - even if he's not on the agreed upon line-up.

The fans in the stands hate the other team like a Red Sox fan hates the Yankees: they want to win. But they have no direct influence on who'll be in the starting line-up. A few of them might be asked what they think, but there's no guarantee they'll be listened to. They find the whole situation deeply frustrating.

Meanwhile, the players know that no matter how exasperated the fans might get with them, no matter how much they may boo them, how disgusted they may feel with the whole freak show, they're basically stuck with this set of players.

A lot of the fans suspect that it's only for them that winning the game is the main thing, that for most of the players, the real goal is just to play. The brinksmanship that comes to dominate line-up negotiations doesn't do much to dispel that feeling.

For at least some of the players, the perception's probably not wrong. After all, they figure, who knows? Maybe they can elbow their way to the plate ahead of the "agreed-on guy" and hit a home run. By the time this is all over, they could be the heroes!

Would you call a bunch that behaves that way a "baseball team?" Sure...a horribly screwed up team, certainly, but a baseball team nonetheless.

Now, would you call the Venezuelan opposition a "political party"? Sure...but one with very, very deep-seated problems.

I've long thought there's a basic conceptual problem in the way Venezuelans talk about "opposition parties" - like that, in the plural. Entities like Primero Justicia, UNT, AD, MAS and that long etc. may be legally constituted as parties, but their role in the political system is really more like that of the "cliques" in our little parable.

In baseball, the whole point is to win baseball games, and it's 9-player teams that do that, not the cliques of friends they form in the dugout. In electoral politics, it's getting elected to office that's the whole purpose of the activity, and Venezuela's mis-named "parties" long ago realized that the only way they can do that is if they band together and present a unified slate of candidates at election time. But coordinating the ambitions of many contenders into a single slate of candidates is the essence of what a political party is.

In important ways, then, the Venezuelan opposition is a party...it's just a deeply dysfunctional one, one that hasn't figured out an institutionally stable way to settle on a starting line-up and make it stick and therefore can't limit destructive competition between contenders or punish defection from the ranks.

In baseball, that institutionally stable selection mechanism is called "the manager". In politics, there are all kinds of possibilities, from a strong Secretary General figure able to play the manager's role, to asking the fans their opinion (primaries) to district-by-district nominating conventions to local association committee meetings to drawing lots to a thousand other possibilities.

This is not, as you may be fearing, foreplay to a pitch for primaries. For my money, the specific mechanism chosen is less important than the fact that a credible mechanism is chosen. The real question is its level of institutionalization, of perceived legitimacy, of "taken-for-grantedness". After all, even a totally zany, on-its-face absurd selection mechanism - say, a system of region-by-region contests, each following its own rules, costing hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars and stretching out over six months - can "work" so long as everybody takes it for granted that the eventual loser will have to support the winner, through gritted teeth, even though absolutely everybody understands she hates Obama's guts.

What's "institutionalized" about the US primary system is not so much the specific set of formal rules that make it up as the informal, tacit, taken-for-granted set of expectations about what constitutes appropriate behavior on the part of aspiring politicians. Nobody has to write down in a statute book that Hillary has to pretend to be thrilled at the prospect of an Obama presidency, because everybody "already knows" that it's the end of the world if she doesn't. What it means for a norm to be strongly institutionalized is that nobody needs to spell it out.

In Venezuela, we already have a united opposition political party, we just have to start showing it a little lovin'. Thing is, it's a hard to love little bugger we ended up with: it's so weakly institutionalized, it doesn't even recognize itself as a party. Instead, it insists on treating its component factions as though they themselves were parties - they aren't - and causes a huge amount of confusion in the process. It's not surprisingly, when you consider all this, that our party has the hardest time finding an effective mechanism to select candidates and punish defection from the official slate.

It's already clear that we will not get the complete starting line-up that Oposición Democrática had promised us for July 15th. It's also clear that the fans in the stands are increasingly disgusted with the spectacle of their players squabbling like children over who gets to play third base. What's not clear at all is that opposition politicians grasp the need to put an end to the hijinx by working to institutionalize a mechanism for unity. If they don't, our "inevitable victory" in november could turn into a vale of tears.

The Reason Juan Cristobal Hasn't Been Posting Much

Quico says: Meet Lily, apple of Juan C.'s eye.

EXCLUSIVE: Chávez Steps Up Mafia Ties!

Quico says: In the wake of his extraordinary meeting with a notorious Colombian drug-runner and paramilitary chieftain earlier this week, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has stepped up cooperation with the criminal syndicate he leads.

Caracas Chronicles can exclusively report that the Venezuelan leader is now personally advising the Bogotá Don on personnel management and tactics.

Referring to his new criminal co-conspirator as "my friend" for the first time, Chávez advised him to rein in or replace his chief military lieutenant, who hours earlier had breached protocol in celebrating the two men's meeting. The Colombian leader quickly accepted Chávez's advice.

"It certainly represents a step-change in the intensity of collaboration," Caracas Chronicles sources said. "For the first time we see Chávez going beyond broad rhetorical flourishes and involving himself directly in the day-to-day running of this sprawling criminal enterprise across his western border."

"'This goes well beyond the realm of 'personal affinity' between these two men," our source added. "Chávez is now micromanaging the affairs of the most blood-thirsty institution in the most violent country in the continent."

Caracas Chronicles Readers' Survey

Quico says: For years, I've been wondering what kind of people actually read this blog, what y'all like about it, what y'all hate about it, and how y'all think it could be improved.

Now, you can help me find out, by taking a few minutes to fill out this Caracas Chronicles Readers' Survey!

Great Moments in Headline Writing

Britain's No. 1 quality newspaper website says:

EXCLUSIVE: Chávez Mafia Ties Exposed!

Quico says: Caracas Chronicles has obtained exclusive reports of an imminent face-to-face meeting between Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez and the head of one of Colombia's most notorious criminal organizations.

After an exhaustive investigation, Caracas Chronicles can now confirm that the Venezuelan government is ready to hold contacts at the very highest levels with a Colombian criminal who has strong links to paramilitary death squads, leads a major drug trafficking operation and has been linked to neo-Nazi movements in the region.

Our sources in Caracas can confirm that Chávez's new Colombian partner has actively conspired to prevent FARC from releasing hostages in the past. He is, moreover, determined to prevent any further hostage releases in the future because, our source says, he does not want peace in Colombia and lacks all respect for human life.

Our confidential source stressed the dangers of collaborating with such a figure, noting that Chávez is unwittingly building bridges with a man who "makes don Vito Corleone look like a rookie." He added that Chávez must tread carefully in enmeshing himself with figures "better suited to running a mafia."

The decision to move ahead with the talks sparked outrage among Chávez's left-wing allies, where his new negotiating partner and the criminal syndicate he leads are roundly denounced as "cowardly, lying, manipulating provocateurs."

The news surfaced on the heels of troubling new reports that the Venezuelan government has agreed to cooperate with an organization led by the world's number 1 terrorist, a genocidal drunkard and head of the notorious Equus asinus crime family that, according to our source, may actually be Beelzebub, the prince of darkness, himself.

UPDATE: Unable to sustain its blanket denials in the face of massive pressure generated by this Caracas Chronicles exclusive, the Venezuelan government is now acknowledging that President Chávez is due to meet this notorious criminal today.

Last thoughts on Hari

Quico says: So I had a fun time picking apart that appalling piece by Johann Hari the other day, and readers seemed to appreciate it, too.

As I thought more about it, though, it struck me that I gave Hari a pass on the single most ludicrous bit in the whole thing: his off-hand mention of the "whiter-skinned, anti-Chávez province of Zulia".

It sent me straight up a wall, but not, as you may think, for the for the lunatic notion that Zulia is somehow a reduct of Venezuelan Aryan extremists. Actually, it's the fact that he called Zulia State a "province" that set me off.

It may seem like a minor thing to get worked up about, but think about it. Would a British journo ever slip up and write something about the Province of Texas? The County of Ontario? The Department of Queensland? The Prefecture of Scotland? The Borough of Catalonia? Couldn't happen!

It's a SNAFU that telegraphs more than just a lazy unfamiliarity with the subject Hari's pretending to enlighten his audience on. What it shows, really, is a form of contempt for his subject. A taken-for-granted assumption that, c'mon, everybody knows you don't really have to bother yourself trying to understand the folkloric inanities of these third world people. Nobody really cares if you get these details right: they're just South Americans.

Scrupulous attention to detail is something you reserve for, y'know, people like you and me. People who live in proper Western Countries rather than some tropical ghetto to be either pitied for its dire poverty or fetishized for its way cool, vaguely retro revolutionariness.

The laziness, in other words, rests on a soft, feathery bed of unrecognized left-wing cultural imperialism. An attitude that dispenses with any sense that third world people's histories, societies and political cultures matter, that you may need to pay sustained attention to such things before you're able to write intelligently about our countries.

It's a longstanding gripe. When you get down to the nitty-gritty, what actually happens in Venezuela doesn't much matter to people like Hari. In this type of writing, countries like ours only masquerade as the subject. They act as screens needed to project a story onto.

Again and again, our countries are reduced to the status of narrative ploy: the alternatively brutalized and heroically resisting Other needed to frame the story about the only actor these people are actually interested in. Our role in the psychodrama that unfurls daily on The Independent's op-ed page is, in the end, only half-a-step above that of movie extras, mere foils for the real villain-star of the show: Uncle Sam.

Nobody expects you to know much about the lives, loves, histories and aspirations of the people inside the buildings Godzilla's smashing. They're incidental; filler needed to move along the narrative arch of the movie. When it comes down to it, you could shoot the film using an entirely different set of extras and you wouldn't even have to redo the script.

So it doesn't matter if it's Zulia State or Zulia Province or Zulia County or Zulia Refugee Camp. It's an afterthought. The single-minded obsession with US perfidy allows PSF hackdom to exempt itself from the dreary, time-consuming task of educating itself about the particulars of the places they write about.

The point is simple: George Bush is bad and American empire is awful. Once you've grasped that, why would you bother with esoterica about some godforsaken backwater where you couldn't get proper sushi if your life depended on it?

Johann Hari and the Solidarity Journalist's Pose

Quico says: Johann Hari has something to tell you. Something you need to know.

If you are a bit of a lefty, a bit skeptical of mainstream media, the kind of person minded to buy The Independent, I can pretty much guarantee that you'll buy into it. Not so much because of what he'll tell you, but because of how he'll tell it to you.

"Psst, amigo," he'll whisper, "they're lying to you. They're big and powerful and everywhere and they control what you read and they control what you hear on the news and so they control what you think. You can't trust them, you can't trust any of what they say. I'm the one you can trust. I'll give you the real story, the inside scoop that they're desperate to hide from you."

That's the Solidarity Journalist's Pose. There's something seductive about it, no question. Mr. Hari promises to lift you out of the ignorance of the grubby masses, to induct you into a select circle of the unspinnable and the wise. And the stakes are high. "The ability of democracy and freedom to spread to poor countries", he tells you, "may depend on whether we can unscramble these propaganda fictions."

You don't want to be a chump, do you?

You don't want to slow the spread of democracy and freedom to poor countries, do you?

Of course you don't.

So you'll go along, not realizing that the conceit is a kind of intellectual snare. That once you accept his framing, you find it much harder to scrutinize his assertions critically. That he's subtly priming you never to question him on the basis of information you gather elsewhere - lies! That he's trying to get you to pimp out your opinions on Venezuela entirely to him.

It helps him enormously that you grew up far away - in London, say. Or Chicago. Or Sydney. It makes everything much easier that you don't know much about Venezuelan history, or politics, or society - and, to be fair, why should you?

You have no reason to raise an eyebrow when he tells you that the United States installed a dictator in Venezuela in order to control our oil all the way back in 1908. If you were Venezuelan, a statement like that would immediately put you on your guard, make you wonder if the author had the slightest clue about what he was talking about. After all, it's roughly like arguing that foreign agents installed Bill Clinton in power in 1993 in order to control Google.

But, of course, you're not Venezuelan, so Mr. Hari is confident that you won't realize just how bizarre a claim he's making. He understands there's no reason for you to know that oil wasn't produced in Venezuela until 1914. He grasps that his readers have no idea who Cipriano Castro was, much less why he might have needed to get on a boat and go to Paris in 1908 thinking he could trust his second-in-command to run the country while he was away.

He figures he's safe, because you don't know about any of that stuff. So you'll assent.

For the same reason, he's confident that when he tells you that Chávez "increased the share of oil profits taken by the state from a pitiful one per cent to 33 per cent," you won't question him. Just the opposite: you'll shake your head in outrage at the injustice and feel glad that it has now been righted. You won't suspect that he's referring to the royalty rates (i.e., taxes on the gross value of oil lifted, not on company profits) that applied to just a handful of projects in the Faja del Orinoco, but that the normal royalty on the bulk of the oil produced in Venezuela before 2001 was 17%.

And Mr. Hari figures you don't know that even that special, 1% royalty rate for the Faja projects was temporary, designed to offset billions of dollars in capital costs it took to build the massive, high-tech upgraders needed to process the area's extra-heavy, tar-like crude. He's betting you don't realize that while Chávez did raise the normal royalty rate from 17% to 30% in 2001, he simultaneously lowered the oil sector's income tax from 67% to 50%, leaving the overall tax burden on foreign oil companies largely unchanged.

Anybody who follows the Venezuelan oil industry knows that. But Mr. Hari's banking on you not knowing it. And, when you think about it, that's a pretty safe bet.

Mr. Hari knows you want to believe he's one of the good guys, and misleading you for partisan purposes is what bad guys do. So you won't suspect Mr. Hari of using the very tactics he viciously attacks the traditional media for using. Paradoxically, the Solidarity Journalist's Pose doubles back on itself, turning into carte blanche for him to exploit your ignorance to mislead you.

You won't raise an eyebrow when he says Venezuela's media is "uncensored and in total opposition" to Chávez. Because, well, you don't know who Omar Camero is, or who Gustavo Cisneros is, or that Chávez long ago forced their stations to drop their critical coverage with the (in Venezuela, highly credible) threat of refusing to renew their broadcast licenses. He's guessing you don't know that Venezuela's private TV media barons now chum it up with Chávez at Miraflores social events. His claim will strike you as plausible only because you're unaware of the mad proliferation of propagandistic, unquestioningly sycophantic, state funded TV stations Chávez has created. After all, you don't live in Venezuela, there's no reason why acronyms like VTV, ANTV, Vive, Telesur and TVES should mean anything to you.

Mr. Hari will tell you there is no evidence that Chávez ever funded FARC, but he doesn't mention that nobody (at least nobody sane) is alleging that, because what the files on Reyes's computers detailed was an ongoing negotiation over a future loan for $300 million, not a fait accompli. He'll leave you with a strong impression that all this stuff about jungle laptops is an evident farce. Certainly, you won't learn of the Interpol forensic report on Raul Reyes's computer files from Mr. Hari.

In fact, there's a lot that's interesting about Chávez's relationship with FARC that you won't learn from his piece.

You won't learn of Rodríguez Chacín's heartfelt exhortation to FARC to "maintain their strength" (who is this Rodríguez Chacín fellow anyway?) You won't learn that Chávez ascribes to FARC "a bolivarian project that is respected here". Or that Venezuelan National Guardsmen have recently been arrested in Colombia trying to deliver ammo to FARC. Or that FARC maintains what amounts to a diplomatic mission in Caracas, and that its one-time "ambassador" went as far as to get naturalized Venezuelan and even registered to vote in Venezuelan elections. Or that their highest-profile Colombian political supporter essentially lives in a five-star hotel in Caracas, at the Venezuelan government's expense, and is Chávez's point-woman for FARC relations. Or that Venezuelan state media resolutely refuses to refer to FARC's hostages as "hostages", preferring FARC's own bizarre euphemism ("retenidos", or "retained persons") instead.

But since he didn't tell you any of that, you'll be minded to agree with Mr. Hari that this stuff about Chávez supporting FARC is just a crazy lie, a vile slander, another one of those "propaganda fictions" threatening the spread of democracy and freedom to poor countries.

You've been ensnared by the Solidarity Journalist Pose. You will assent. You will dismiss anyone who tries to rebut Mr. Hari's arguments as obviously - transparently - carrying water for the corporate elite.

The next time you go to a party, you will buttonhole anyone who expresses skepticism about Chávez. You'll try to "set them straight." You will explain to them that the US has been trying to get at Venezuela's oil since 1908, and ask them if they were even aware that, before Chávez, taxes on foreign oil companies were just 1%. You'll note, in grave tones, how absurd it is that Chávez is accused of authoritarianism even though all the media are uncensored and deeply hostile to him. And you'll denounce allegations that Chávez has a soft-spot for FARC as an outrageous slur.

You'll launch into this little rant with a furrowed brow. Perhaps you'll raise your voice. Certainly you'll deliver it with the missionary intensity of one sure he's fighting the good fight. If you are exceptionally unlucky, you'll unleash your spiel at a party I'm at. Otherwise, it's likely you'll leave with that warm feeling inside, that certainty that you are on the right side of history and that, in time, the truth - Mr. Hari's truth - is bound to impose itself.

And you'll sleep well.

Forget Ingrid - Gladys has been rescued!

Juan Cristobal says: - These past few days we've all been enthralled by the story of Ingrid Betancourt and her cinematic rescue. But you don't have to go as far as Colombia to find heartrending stories of people overcoming enormous odds and finding freedom after nearly all hope had been lost.

Last Monday night, Gladys Aguilar was walking on the side of the road in rural Zulia state when she fell three meters down into an open manhole. She spent three days down there, with broken bones, getting progressively weaker and shouting for help until, miraculously, someone walking by heard her cries for help and rescued her. Now she's telling her story.

Alcantarillaby noticias24

Notice how the manhole was still open when reporters went back with the camera crew. It wouldn't be Venezuela if it wasn't.

Ingrid Betancourt was held hostage by the FARC and nearly lost her life. Gladys was held hostage by the inefficiency and corruption of the Venezuelan State, and she almost lost hers.

Let's see if this prompts Chávez to announce Misión Saknussemm: a massive drive to cover the country's deathtrap manholes. Don't hold your breath.

López Maya's Parting Shot

Quico says: In 2004, the pro-Chávez National Assembly asked sane-lefty sociologist Margarita López Maya to give a keynote address on the key challenges facing Venezuelan society after Chavez won the Presidential Recall Referendum. This week, ahead of a sabatical that will take her out of the country, Lopez Maya produces a progress report on the 8-point agenda (in Spanish) she identified back then.

Well worth a read.

Chávez's Continental Strategy in Tatters

Quico says: A couple of weeks ago, we had a fun time trashing Jon Lee Anderson's latest Chávez piece in the New Yorker. But lets get real, Jon Lee Anderson could write a shopping list and it'd probably still be better written than 99% of what's out there on Chávez. So trawling back through it, it's no surprise to find some interesting (and ever more relevant) bits:

[After breaking the ice at the Santo Domingo regional summit in March,] Chávez had a surprise: the FARC, he said, had just informed him that it was prepared to release six more hostages. Uribe spoke in urgent whispers with his aides. Chávez asked President Fernández if protocol could be broken to allow the mother of Ingrid Betancourt to come into the hall. After some commotion, Betancourt’s mother, Yolanda Pulecio, an elegant woman in her late sixties (and a former Miss Colombia), entered. With her was Piedad Córdoba, a flamboyant left-wing Colombian senator who has worked with Chávez in negotiations with the FARC, and who was wearing a white turban. Uribe looked furious; Chávez was showing that he, not Uribe, was the one who could save the hostages’ lives.

It's an anecdote that goes a long way towards explaining why - treacly cancillería communiqués notwithstanding - the rescue yesterday of Ingrid Betancourt and the 14 others is such a disaster for Chávez's continental strategy.

Chávez's stint as a hostage mediator was an obvious ploy to leverage their plight for increased regional relevance. From day one, it was easy to see the point wasn't so much to free hostages as it was to turn Chávez into a real player in Colombia, an indispensable go-between. The long-term goal was clear enough: to install an ideological ally in Casa de Nariño, whether through the gun or the ballot box, as a stepping stone to the creation of a regional socialist bloc to challenge the US's strategic dominance of the region.

Chávez has never been shy about his continental aspirations. The very label, "bolivarianismo", broadcasts that. Having a US-ally in power in Bogotá has long been the main obstacle to realizing the dream of re-editing Gran Colombia. And if, as Jon Lee Anderson explains, keeping that dream alive means parting ways with reality, well, that's too bad for reality:

Gustavo Petro is an outspoken leftist Colombian senator who is well known for his opposition to Uribe, but last year he publicly condemned the FARC for its drug trafficking and its human-rights abuses. He attributed Chávez’s position to naïveté. “The FARC has latched on to Chávez and his good will because it is in need of political varnish,” he told me. “It behaves like an occupation force, and has abandoned attempts to win over a base of support among the civilians. It actually kills more indigenous Colombians than any other armed group in the country today. Chávez doesn’t accept any of this. He is a romantic. If he sees people he thinks are ‘revolutionaries,’ Chávez salutes them and says, ‘At your service!’ ”

In official circles in Caracas, I found a near-total disconnect with the mood in Colombia. Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Nicolás Maduro, dismissed the public’s support for Uribe as the product of “a media dictatorship, with the means of communication in the hands of the most rancid, racist, retrograde oligarchy on the continent.”

So Chávez's plan, such as it was, depended on a way-out-there misreading of Colombian reality, one that resolutely refuses to accept that "Democratic Security" is now a national consensus over there, that Uribe's approval rating seldom dips below 80% (and would probably come in well above that if you took a poll this week), and that FARC-and-friends are reviled by virtually everybody.

We need to keep things in perspective: Chávez's continental project was always more desvarío than strategy. Even in its less insane variant, the whole notion that he could somehow get Colombians to elect a FARC-coddling commie like Piedad Córdoba president was about as hare-brained, in the Colombian context, as it would be in our context if Uribe somehow got it into his head that he could position Alejandro Peña Esclusa to win the 2012 election.

So it wasn't much of a plan, but it was a plan - with the emphasis on the past tense here, because the real significace of yesterday's rescue (from a Venezuelan point of view, at least) is that it has now utterly collapsed. Operación Jaque left FARC looking against the ropes, Chávez looking irrelevant and Piedad Córdoba looking more likely to end up in jail than in Casa de Nariño.

For FARC, it may only have been check, but for Chávez's Espada de Bolívar shtick, it's check mate.

An icon is born

Juan Cristobal says: - Amidst the shuffle of news following the release of the 15 hostages in Colombia, the two things that have stayed with me the most are Ingrid Betancourt's brilliant speech last night on the tarmac of CATAM Air Force Base and her words later in the day in Bogotá's Palacio de Nariño (Colombia's Miraflores).

Showing a hostage release is trickier than you might think. The hostages themselves will obviously be elated, as will be their relatives, but handle it wrong and you can send all the wrong signals. At its worst, you end up putting the hostages on a stage, manipulating them for political purposes. The last thing we needed was another "circus", to paraphrase Ingrid.

But yesterday I didn't see any of that. What I saw was an eloquent, smart woman, a survivor, and a political lioness.

Betancourt didn't miss a beat. Once an anti-establishment crusader, she now stands squarely with the Colombian military. While her mother has bad-mouthed the Uribe administration for years, Betancourt was clearly giving Uribe all of the credit for this, and signalling she is still interested in serving Colombia. Long-forgotten are the days when she accused Uribe of "tolerating murder as a way of fighting the guerrillas."

She also hinted at the indignities of her captivity, how she has felt like a pawn in the hands of FARC all of these years. And in a remarkable statement, she asked Pres. Chávez to respect Colombian democracy. She added she was happy that Alvaro Uribe, the man she was running against in 2002 when she was kidnapped, had been elected instead of her.

This was not lost on Uribe's enemies. In an incredibly-timed decision, last night Colombia's Constitutional Court decided they were not going to review the legality of Uribe's 2006 re-election.

Heartfelt, sincere, historic, and incredibly astute - it was Ingrid's "por ahora" moment.

Ingrid! [Updated]

Quico says: Much as I like to play the detached, analytical, curmudgeonly type, I can't deny the wave of relief and joy that swept through my body just now as I learned that Ingrid Betancourt has been rescued by the Colombian army after a seven year ordeal in the jungle.

Thank heaven. After following the news of her kidnapping for all these years, didn't we all feel like we got to know her a little? Who among us didn't feel invested in her case, like a bit of our humanity was being held hostage out in that jungle along with her?

Today, she's free, and we all beathe a little easier for it.

Now, then: that's as much mushy stuff as you'll get out of me all year.

On to my favorite game: Compare and Contrast, headline edition.

El Universal (Caracas): Rescatan a Ingrid Betancourt y a otros 14 rehenes de las FARC

BBC: Betancourt 'rescued in Colombia'

El Mundo (Madrid): Ingrid Betancourt y otros 14 rehenes, rescatados por el Ejército colombiano

Miami Herald: Colombia: 3 Americans, Betancourt rescued

El Tiempo (Bogotá): Rescatada Ingrid Betancourt, los 3 estadounidenses y otros 11 secuestrados de la Fuerza Pública

VTV (Venezuelan State TV): Liberada Ingrid Betancourt y otros 14 retenidos

Spot the difference?

Update: A reader sends this in...

Subject: VTV .. even worse than you think.....

I just watched the early evening news on VTV, and the treatment was, "FARC liberated Ingrid Betancourt and 14 others through a Colombian army operation..."

It didn't get any better. Every other phrase was a dig at Uribe or a snide comment of one kind or another. They clipped Ingrid's comments on Chavez/Correa's mediation being "very important" just before the "but..." that introduced the unequivocal condition that it needed to be done "respecting Colombian democracy" and the frase lapidaria .. "el pueblo colombiano elected Presidente Alvaro Uribe, it didn't elect FARC". (To its credit, ABN reported the full quote.)

...and these are the people that want to give us lessons in journalistic ethics. Even as we speak, Izarrita is telling the non-aligned nations that Telesur should be their voice.

What Primero Justicia wants, Part III: Tackling crime

Juan Cristobal says: - This is the third part in a multi-part post on the main proposals of the opposition’s political parties. The first two parts of this exclusive excerpt on Primero Justicia's platform dealt with oil and the justice system.

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Crime – the biggest problem facing Venezuela. It’s consistently been ranked voters’ top concern for quite some time. It affects everyone, everywhere, in a myriad different ways.

It’s a huge deal.

It’s also really, really difficult to solve. Why has Venezuela turned into such a violent society? It’s hard to say. Explanations are a dime a dozen, and none of them are entirely right. And while politicians may occasionally fret about how crime has soared, many of them haven’t the slightest clue about where to begin.

The following paragraphs lay out Primero Justicia’s proposals for solving the crime problem.

The diagnosis.-

Everyone has a crime story to tell. In the last few decades, we have become a nation under siege. We live behind bars while criminals roam our streets. Instead of having professional cops, we have corrupt, politicized police forces.

Poverty is not the main cause. There are many poor countries in the world that are nowhere near as violent as ours. While it is true that inequality and social exclusion undoubtedly play a role, Primero Justicia believes these simplistic explanations are a cop-out, a way for governments to convince the public that there is no short-term or medium-term solution to the problem. Blaming crime on poverty is what lazy politicians do.

It’s also ironic that poverty is singled out as the main culprit, when in fact the poor are the main victims of crime. Our newspapers are usually filled with horror stories of murder sprees in our barrios. People in poor neighborhoods live in fear, and few dare go out at night. Poor people are usually the victims of such random murders the press likes to call “confrontations between the police and gangs”, but which in fact mask the ugly truth of random human rights violations.

In the last nine years, more than 100,000 Venezuelans have been murdered. There are more than 2 million illegal firearms in our barrios. In 2006, more than 1,000 people died for “resisting the authorities.” That same year, our homicide rate stood at 45 people per 100,000 inhabitants. 200,000 people die in the world each year as a consequence of gunshot violence in non-conflict countries (i.e., countries not at war) – 1 in 17 of them died in ours.

The resulting violence is further fueled by the fact that crimes go unpunished. According to the Central University of Venezuela, only 7% of all murders end in someone being sentenced. There were 5,520 deaths at the hand of military or police personnel between 2000 and 2005, yet only 88 people have been sentenced to jail time for these crimes.

Part of the problem is that there aren’t enough prosecutors. Venezuela has roughly 5 prosecutors for 100,000 people, but other Latin American countries have many more: Costa Rica has 7.1, Colombia has 7.8, the Dominican Republic has 8 and El Salvador has 9.9.

Another part of the problem is that there aren’t enough police officers. According to the government there is a deficit of 36,000 police officers, something they are not doing much about.

The proposals.-

Primero Justicia believes the first thing that needs to be tackled is having a better, larger police force. This is easier said than done – but at least, on this topic, they can point to their hands-on experience in the municipalities they have run.

Some of the things that work at the municipal level and that they propose at the national level include: increasing the police force’s budget, improving mechanisms for selecting and evaluating officers, separating good cops from bad cops, increasing police salaries, giving police officers better preparation by signing agreements with universities and technical institutes, and giving them better equipment. The goal is to increase the number of police officers by 6,000 per year in order to erase the deficit in 6-8 years.

One of the key aspects of their proposal is to turn police corps into preventive rather than reactive forces. In order to accomplish this, they propose increasing the use of technology and assigning more officers to critical crime areas. They also propose a substantial decrease in the number of police officers assigned to serve as bodyguards to politicians. They will emphasize the education of police officers, their salary and the benefits they, and their relatives, are entitled to.

Local police forces should become “community polices.” In order to achieve that, they propose upgrading their technology so that areas where crimes are committed are quickly identified. They also propose creating a fund to distribute among states and municipalities that show the best results in tackling crime.

Primero Justicia does not appear to be dogmatic about the decentralization of police forces. It recognizes the need for an effective national police force, and at the same time, it highlights the importance of strengthening local police forces. The responsibility of the national force should be tackling organized crime, and in coordinating and working with local law enforcement. They come out in favor of civilian police forces, and of reorganizing the DISIP and CICPC so that their main focus is investigating and solving crimes.

The platform discusses the importance of giving the victims of crime better access to information. To that end, they propose a Unified System for Violence and Safety (SUIVI), where victims can follow the course of their cases with the help of law students and other trained personnel. They also propose widening the available network for tips related to criminal activity.

Any proposal for fighting crime would be incomplete if it did not include plans for disarming the population. Primero Justicia proposes decreasing the number of legal and illegal weapons in the hands of civilians with a system of rewards, and modifying legislation to increase penalties for illegally carrying a weapon. The disarmament program must include the public destruction of guns, as well as the creation of a national database to track weapons.

In some areas they are less clear. For example, they propose making it easier to register a gun, but at the same time they propose an increase in the minimum age necessary to be able to carry one. They also propose implementing testing and medical certification procedures for gun permits.

One thing they emphasize is the rescue of public spaces taken over by criminals. This includes increased patrolling in certain areas, such as schools or parks, as well as better lighting of our streets.

The platform includes specific proposals to help spread civic values and create awareness of how communities can help prevent crime. They propose coordinating with community leaders on the best ways to tackle crime and how best to create citizen networks for crime prevention. They also propose integrating communities, churches, NGOs and experts and forming a National Safety Center, to keep track of crime-tackling programs and monitor crime statistics.

A special sub-section in the platform is dedicated to domestic violence. In Caracas alone, for example, a woman dies every 10 days a victim of domestic violence. In spite of the severity of the problem, the Health Ministry and the CICPC have stopped publishing statistics on the issue.

The party’s platform proposes reversing this. Their proposals range from changes in the law to increased penalties for domestic violence. They also discuss helping raise awareness of the issue and supporting citizen networks. The goal is to increase the importance of the problem in citizens’ minds and create the mechanisms for women and children to escape violent situations.

The platform includes proposals for improving the jail system. The goal is to transform Venezuelan jails by promoting the construction of new jails, and the decentralization of their day-to-day management.

The proposals include strengthening the professional capabilities of the staff assigned to our jails, as well as the strengthening of the institutions that help reeducate convicts and ease their reinsertion into society after they have finished their sentence. In order to achieve this, they propose forcing the National Guard out of our jails and creating a special corps that specializes in jail safety.

Finally, they propose increasing mandatory jail time for specific crimes such as kidnapping. They propose a special kidnapping task force, with proper funding and increased international cooperation.

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Any proposal to fight crime has to begin with a huge dose of humility. Nobody has all the answers, because nobody understands the phenomenon comprehensively. It’s not so much a public policy challenge as it is a cultural phenomenon. Like a thousand-headed beast, it’s not something that can be tackled by a single person, by a single organization.

Which isn’t to say that we should do as chavismo does – hide our heads in the sand and simply shrug it off as an unintended consequence of “poverty”, “exclusion” and other populist left-wing gibberish. Because while solving the problem of crime is a Herculean task and requires creative thinking, it is not impossible to solve.

I don't know about you, but my grandparents used to entertain me with stories of how Venezuelans used to be able to sleep with their front doors open, and how nobody had bars on their windows. It's up to us to put the pressure on those in charge so that we may once again become that country.

Gobble gobble

Juan Cristobal says: - After last December's referendum defeat for Hugo Chávez, Venezuelans reached a consensus, something we don't typically do. Whether chavista or not, we all agreed that one of the factors that hurt the government the most was the increased scarcity in basic staples such as milk, chicken and beef.

Conscious of this Achilles' heel, the government took the problem head on. The result is that the last few months have seen scarcity decrease, although sporadic shortages still appear.

One of the first things the government did early in the year was to increase the regulated prices of many basic staples. As most of you know, the Venezuelan government controls the prices of everything from milk to salaries to apartment rents, and it has been gradually announcing price increases on many of these items.

The other thing the government has done is increase the allocation of dollars to import food. According to ODH, a local consultancy, in the first five months of 2008 food imports totaled US$4 billion, a whopping 113% increase on the same period of last year. While a portion of this can be explained by higher international prices for some food staples, most of the increase comes from higher volumes of imports.

According to their estimates, 26% of what Venezuelans spent on food last year was spent on imported food. They expect this percentage to soar to 50% by the end of this year. Needless to say, this leaves Venezuelans much more vulnerable to fluctuations in international food prices, as well as in the price of oil.

So much for "food sovereignty."

Lest you think the government is veering to the right, it is also tightening its grip on food supply. For example, it has created an extended bureaucratic web seeking to exert more control on the distribution of various food staples across the country, based on their estimates of the amounts Venezuelans should be eating. Apparently, it has begun regulating food distribution with a heavy hand, sometimes limiting truck dispatches if they don't concur with their estimates of where each staple should go to.

The government has also created a web of retail outlets called PDVAL, managed by PDVSA. These outlets are apparently causing an impact, although it's hard to tell exactly how much. Yet whatever the effect, it appears as though the growth of PDVAL has little to do with managerial efficiency and a lot to do with the enormous amount of cash the government has.

Case at hand: last year I took a lot of flack for discussing a Maracucha chain of supermarkets called En-ne. I posted a couple of pictures of people waiting in line to buy milk, and our Caraqueño-centric readers found it amusing that Maracuchos had their own chain of stores.

We'll see how long it lasts - the latest rumour in Maracaibo is that PDVAL is buying En-ne.

Increase imports, regulate distribution, raise prices to please local producers, buy supermarkets and open your own. With a government awash in cash and drunk on power, fearful of losing another election, anything goes. Expect more of the same.