Primaries and the Oppo Brand

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

¡Que envidia!

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


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

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

Not necessarily pro-opposition, but strongly anti-Chavez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poverty beyond the spin

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who loves ya?!

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

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

[snip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

The forgotten trailblazer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Survey!

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

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

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

Click here to take the Readers' Views Survey.

81% of you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sweet Tooth for Punishment

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

Photo of the Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.