Annals of Suggestive Headline Writing

ABN: Venezuela and Cuba Exchange Animals.

¿Qué?!

Quico says: One nice thing about living in Holland is that I'm close enough to England to pick up the BBC's radio and TV broadcasts.

It's a balm. With its fixation on high production values, its fanatical refusal to take any BS from politicians, ever, its parallel dedication to very silly comedy and devil-make-care-if-this-comes-across-as-elitist cultural programing and (of course), David Attenborough, the BBC really is a kind of shining beacon on a hill, a day-by-day demonstration of what can be done with public sector broadcasting when professional standards are continuously tended to and political independence jealously guarded.

These days, as the crazy US presidential race lures me back to more and more US-American news sites, the contrast between the two broadcasting cultures has hit me upside the head all over again. Seriously, a few years of dedicated beeb listening left me totally unprepared for the tsunami of nattering idiocy that passes for political coverage in the US.

(Not, of course, that the BBC doesn't step on its own testicle every now-and-then, witness this furious row-cum-editorial pogrom over some deliriously bad-taste prank calls to Andrew Sachs (a.k.a., Manuel from Fawlty Towers) about his granddaughter's pulchritude...but I digress...)

The reason I bring up the BBC is that yesterday, in one of its signature we-don't-actually-care-if-this-is-too-high-fallutin'-for-you radio programs, the beeb ran a forty minute crash course on Simón Bolívar on its History of Ideas series, In our Time. Like most things on Radio 4, it's well worth a listen.

I've long had this feeling that the Real Bolívar is oddly inaccessible for present day Venezuelans. Mythologized and re-mythologized and then mythologized s'more by 178 years' worth of hucksters, dictators and wannabes of the left-right-and-center, the actual flesh and blood man behind the avenida, the plaza, the bank note, the bank and, hell, the name of the damn country, has more or less vanished.

Sucked dry by the legitimacy-vampirism of Guzmán Blanco, of Gómez, of Betancourt and of él que te conté, Bolívar-the-man has entered a weird kind of cultural netherspace. We know nothing about the person they're meant to all agree personifies our nation. The average Venezuelan probably hears the word "Bolívar" (or its derivatives - Bolivia, bolivarian, bolibourgeois, etc.) fifty times a day - often enough for the referent to fade entirely out of sight.

In Venezuela, Bolívar is the ultimate Empty Signifier.

When the historical Bolívar is acknowledged, it is almost always in vague, reverential (if not deifying) tones. Critical appraisal is limited to a broad acknowledgement of the inhumanity of his War onto Death decree and the execution of Piar, themselves highly ritualized as "safe" territory for Bolívar criticism. It is criticism within the cult; criticism divorced from insight.

Which is why, paradoxically, in order to gain some sense of the man behind the myth, you're almost forced to go outside Venezuela, and why this BBC show is so valuable. How often have you heard it acknowledged that Bolívar stayed in his room sulking rather than actually attending Napoleon's coronation? How often have you heard the Monte Sacro Vow placed in the strategic context of great power competition around Spain's ongoing war with England? Or that some of the British volunteers in the Campaña Admirable were so disgusted with his leadership they preferred indentured servitude in the Caribbean to continuing to fight for him? As Manuel himself might say...¿Qué!?

These facts fall outside the heroic arc of the official Bolívar narrative, they've been written out of the myth. They do not feature in our consciousness of the man, and couldn't. Paradoxically, it takes escaping to a foreign source, an English-language source, for these things to become sayable. Which is why this In Our Time show is worth listening to.

(Hat tip: Paul)

Get a grip!

Quico says: The government could barely contain its collective orgasm today over the launch of "the first Venezuelan satellite."

Venezuelan?! Se fumaron una lumpia...Chinese design, Chinese engineering, Chinese manufacturing, Chinese testing, Chinese software, Chinese rocket, Chinese launch control...the only thing that's Venezuelan about Venesat-1 is the money that paid for it.

If the electrons oppose us, we shall fight against them and force them to obey us

Quico says: The revolution's Woody Allenesque extremes of paranoia reached a weird zenith last week with this story about the three Edelca engineers who took the rap for the last Sunday's massive blackout and ended up in jail on vague charges of sabotage.

In the event, the three were released fairly quickly, as there was no evidence whatsoever to pin the blame on them for the problems of a grid that's been groaning for years under the strain of under-investment and neglect.

Still, that didn't stop chavismo from spreading intelligence operatives throughout Edelca and Cadafe facilities to try to flush out the imperialist saboteurs they see lurking at every corner.

Some deeply cynical part of me can't stop laughing at the thought of these goons, rifles slung over their shoulders, hanging around menacingly around Cadafe, sporadically lurking uncomprehendingly over the shoulders of these highly trained technical personnel, implicitly threatening to throttle the first guy they see if anything goes wrong. Must do wonders for employee morale, that one!

The part I really can't figure out is, if you're just an regular Disip/DIM Joe, how would you even know if the electrical engineer directly in front of you has just sabotaged the grid? I mean, short of them taking a sledgehammer to some Lost-in-Space looking control panel - all flashing lights and beeping beeps - surely all you'd see was a guy pushing some combination of buttons and then the grid going down.

The whole electrification through the barrel of a gun thing would be really really funny, if it wasn't because Honny Vásquez, Rodolfo Ortega and Adán Ramos are real people with real families and real careers to worry about, who've now been forever branded as unreliable elements by the revolution's commisars. What future could those three have?

Not much of one, is my guess, at least not inside Venezuela. Cuz finding solutions is hard...but finding scapegoats? Dead easy...

58%

Quico says: That's the proportion of Venezuelan voters who still like Hugo Chávez. Datanalisis dixit. Granted, just 35% have confidence he can help solve the country's problems. But 58% still like him.

Ten years out, riding on a discourse that's equal parts Monty Python and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, this is simply an astonishing figure. The kind of reality check that'll send me scrambling for the nearest whiskey bottle.

But it is what it is. No use trying to wish it away.

Known unknowns

"There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns."

-Guru Rumsfeld

Quico says: It was interesting reading through the comments to Juan's latest post. Everyone seems to think Chávez will announce a currency devaluation sooner rather than later - sometime between November 24th and the February 2009 seems to be the consensus.

I find it bizarre that the range of guesses was so compact. People seem to be recklessly ignoring the wisdom of Guru Rumsfeld here. When it comes to forecasting the next devaluation, we're mired in known-unknowns land.

Personally, my sense is that Chavez'll do the Lusinchi thing and draaaaaaw things out as long as he possibly can. How long is that? Well, that depends on two things: how much money oil brings in next year and how much money the government has on hand for a rainy day.

Thing is, we don't know either of those numbers!

What we know for sure is that the Central Bank is holding $39 billion in currency reserves (about 10 months' worth of imports) and that the central government keeps $800 million in a rainy-fund FIEM account at BCV. Those totals we can be reasonably sure about of because they're reported daily.

Trouble is, the rest of the government's rainy day cash stashes - Bandes, Fonden and PDVSA's cash and accounts-payable (plus, imaginably, other kitties we don't even know about) - report bi-annually, if at all.

Which means that whenever you see an "independent analyst" putting a date to a devaluation or an oil-price threshold to the government's fiscal viability, these people are working off of data that's almost 5 months old, un-audited, impossible to verify and incomplete.

Depending on who's doing the counting, the government's rainy-day funds might come to anything from $12 to $75 billion. (That's not including foreign currency reserves which, as I keep stressing, are made up, by definition, of dollars the government has already spent and are, therefore, not "government savings" in any meaningful sense)

$12-75 billion. That is a wide range. A ridiculously wide range, actually. A range wide enough, in fact, to make a mockery out of any attempt to forecast what's going to happen.

If oil stays north of $70/barrel and the real rainy-day funds figure is in the upper part of the range, it could be years before Chávez devalues. If oil drops to $50 or less and the state's reserves are towards the bottom end of the range, we could well be looking at devaluation within 3 months.

Everyone in the opposition seems to be taking it for granted that we're heading into the second scenario, rather than the first. People point to PDVSA's aggressive borrowing in the last two years as a sure indication that the company must not have big piles of hundred dollar bills laying around somewhere waiting to be spent. Certainly, it would be senseless, irrational and bizarre for PDVSA to be paying steep interest rates to borrow money to finance its investments while, at the same time, holding big hoards of cash.

El detalle is that "senseless, irrational and bizarre" might as well be chavismo's fiscal management motto. These days, mere senselessness is weak grounds for excluding something as a possibility.

If we're honest, we should aggressively hedge any forecast. Fact is, the government's financial reporting is so deliriously opaque, we can't really speak with confidence about the key variables at play.

We might be on the edge of a precipice, or we might be a comfortable distance away from it. One way or another, when the time comes, count on Chávez to take that step forward.

Putting the fun in devaluation

Juan Cristobal says: - Let's play psychic.

With oil tanking and the world veering on recession, things are not looking good for Venezuela, no matter what Chávez says. Specifically, it's looking like the government will be forced to devaluate some time in the future just to keep afloat.

Now, obviously, things could change and oil could surge. The government may put off devaluation altogether, but that's looking increasingly unlikely.

So, I'd like to run a simple poll on when you think the government will be forced to announce an increase of the official, Misión Cadivi-subsidized rate of BsF 2.15.

The person who gets closer to the actual date without going over wins a blog post praising his or her judgment and character.

My guess? February 1st.

Some nuggets are worth keeping

Juan Cristobal says: - The President talks a lot of bunk, but sometimes, the stuff he says is really meaningful. Like yesterday, when he said:

"We have managed to detach ourselves from the capitalist economy, and we have created our own, solid economic system..."

"If the price of oil receded to what it was in 2006, when it averaged $55 a barrel, you can be sure that Venezuela will not be affected by the world's crisis... be sure that we will continue growing, both in social and in economic terms..."

There it is, you heard it. The crisis won't affect us because we are safeguarded against it.

Ergo, we are not taking any extra precaution.

Ergo, when the feces hits the ventilator, you'll know it's his fault.

His and his alone, for not taking the necessary precautions. His and his alone, for misreading the effect of the crisis on Venezuela.

His and his alone, for maintaining a warped foreign exchange control that subsidizes imports and for increasing the size of the State beyond any reasonable measure.

His and his alone, for "creating" an "economic system" that wasn't totally new nor totally detached from global crises.

You can just link back to this post when it happens.

PS.- Quico is travelling and I'm in the middle of a complicated move, so posting will be light in the next few days. Our apologies.

The chats of others

Quico says: A few nights ago I was blown away by Florian von Donnersmarck's brilliant 2006 film, The Lives of Others. In a quiet, methodical way, the film profiles the East German secret police's system of internal espionage and repression, yielding a chilling, sobering portrait of the mechanics of totalitarian control.

It's the kind of movie you can't get out of your head for days after you've seen it; my new favorite film.

As a thriller, it's damn good entertainment, but it's the detailed observation of the nuts and bolts of totalitarianism, and the portrayal of the atmosphere of sheer, throat-clenching Fear it inspires, that set the film apart.

The very first sequence in the film will give you a sense of what I mean:



At first, what we witness is an act of injustice: a coercive interrogation premised not on physical blows but on sleep deprivation. The scene is brutal. As an insomniac myself, I'm especially tuned in to how much not being able to sleep messes with your mind.

Though it's certainly well executed, the Nasty Interrogation Scene is nothing new. Hollywood has inured us to this sort of thing. If they'd thrown in a Good Cop, you'd call it boilerplate.

But then, we get something we're not used to seeing. Just after the two minute mark, von Donnersmarck pulls back. Suddenly we're in a classroom, and we see that this interrogation has been, as it were, recorded for training purposes. It's being used to teach new Stasi recruits how to conduct their own interrogations.

Suddenly, we're made aware that we were not witnessing an individual injustice. What we're seeing is a system at work. We realize the Stasi was about more than just interrogating suspects and recruiting informants. It was about creating and preserving the institutional capabilities you need to sustain a system of pervasive surveillance. In this, the film is unique. Time and again, von Donnersmarck invites us to witness not just the Stasi's operations but also the institutional infrastructure that supports them.

What strikes you about the film is how methodical, how detail oriented how...well, how German they were about it. The Stasi we're shown doles out its brutality in scientifically calculated portions. To this end, it had its own research arm, carrying out the kind of sober, detail-oriented investigation it takes to really beef up an organization's capabilities.

The point is brought home in a chilling scene, where an elated Stasi middle-manager hands his colleague a thick stack of papers and says:

I have to show you something: "Prison Conditions for Subversive Artists: Based on Character Profile". Pretty scientific, eh? And look at this: "Dissertation Supervisor, A. Grubitz". That's great, isn't it? I only gave him a B. They shouldn't think getting a doctorate with me is easy. But his is first-class.

Did you know that there are just five types of artists? Your guy, Dreyman, is a Type 4, a "hysterical anthropocentrist." Can't bear being alone, always talking, needing friends. That type should never be brought to trial. They thrive on that. Temporary detention is the best way to deal with them. Complete isolation and no set release date. No human contact the whole time, not even with the guards. Good treatment, no harassment, no abuse, no scandals, nothing they could write about later. After 10 months, we release. Suddenly, that guy won't cause us any more trouble.

Know what the best part is? Most type 4s we've processed in this way never write anything again. Or paint anything, or whatever artists do. And that without any use of force. Just like that. Kind of like a present.

In scenes like this one, Von Donnersmarck shows the Stasi as, first and foremost, a rational bureaucracy, complete with its own standard operating procedures, training programs, career-advancement paths, petty office politics and institutionalized absurdities. The violence it perpetrated was never the random brutality of a goon, it was always strategically calculated, meted out with the fastidiousness of an accountant.

Its task was to interpose state power between one person and the next, to lodge the state into the most intimate crevices of personal life as a way of ensuring that nothing East Germans said or did would ever catch the state unaware. To these ends, it had almost unlimited resources, and was constrained by no institutional counterweight.

The result is something Hannah Arendt considered the cornerstone of totalitarianism: the criminalization of intimacy. In a society where there is no privacy, where a careless bit of pillow-talk can land you in jail, where the state can do with you pretty much what it wants, in such a society intimacy becomes an unattainable luxury.

To have a friend, to confide in someone, is to place not just yourself but also your friend in danger. Elementary caution dictates that people will keep their own thoughts hidden. Even more corrosive, it compels them to go to great lengths to avoid knowing their friends' and neighbors' intimacies as well. When intimacy is complicity, the only way to protect yourself is to isolate yourself.

The man being interrogated in the clip above, notice, hasn't actually done anything wrong. His mistake was merely to know. In this case, to know the name of the man helping his friend escape to the West. If he became an enemy of the state - and make no mistake about it, he now is an enemy of the state - it's because he allowed himself to be confided in.

It's this criminalization of intimacy that makes totalitarianism unique, that sets it apart from "normal" dictatorship. A totalitarian state is one that atomizes individuals, isolates them by raising the cost of intimacy to the point where any personal bond stronger than one's bond to the state becomes dangerous, a luxury normal people are unwise to indulge.

Once implemented, such a system hardly needs to call attention to itself. It exists. Everybody knows it exists, and it is pervasive. In East Germany, "Stasi" became almost taboo, a word one whispered, as though merely saying it out loud was dangerous in itself. Certainly, the Stasi had no reason to bluster, to make a big show of its power. Its bite was infinitely worse than its barely perceptible bark.

It was with these kinds of thoughts buzzing around my head that I sat down behind my computer, clicked on Noticias24, and found this startling exemplar of our own, criollized internal spying operation.

(I can't seem to embed the clip - but it shows Alberto Nolia on VTV exposing a wire-tapped conversation between Teodoro Petkoff and Luis Miquilena, where they discuss how they might pressure politicos in Barinas State to agree a unity candidacy.)

Fresh from watching The Lives of Others, stumbling upon this clip left me at a loss for words.

My first impression, as I listened to it with my Venezuelan-pundit hat on, is that there's a huge, jarring disconnect between the fairly innocuous stuff on the wire-taps and the utterly unhinged rambling Nolia sandwiches the clips with. The formula seems to be something like:

1. Nolia says he's about to show us something unimaginably shocking, something that lays bare the fascist opposition at its most conspiratorially horrid.
2. We hear a wire-tap clip of Luis Miquilena and/or Teodoro Petkoff having a perfectly vanilla political conversation in private that more or less reflects what they say in public all the time.
3. Nolia comes back on and asks if we can friggin' believe how horrible these people are.

But perhaps we should back up a bit. The truly bizarre thing about these recordings isn't so much what's on them, it's that they're on TV! State TV, to be precise.

And that, right there, tells you as much as you need to know about the real different between real Stasi-style totalitarianism and the banana republicized, made-for-TV knock-off we get nightly on channel 8.

I have to wonder what your average Stasi interrogator would make of Los Papeles de Mandinga. My guess is, they wouldn't be able to make heads or tails from it.

Chavismo doesn't seem to get it: you don't need VTV and a wire tap to find out that, these days, Teodoro Petkoff's is all about knocking opposition heads together to ensure we get unity candidates in November. You can just go down to your local kiosk, buy a copy of Tal Cual, and read it for yourself. The wire tap tells us nothing we don't already know.

But then, what's the point really? The Stasi spied on people to make sure they followed the party line in private as well as in public; if they didn't, they got thrown in jail. Chavismo, on the other hand, spies on people, finds out that what they say in private matches what they say in public, and then sensationalizes the non-findings by throwing them up on VTV.

What are they looking to accomplish with this? Where are the consequences to these self-described blatant acts of destabilization?

The real gap here is, I think, about professional ethics. Stasi agents took their jobs seriously. The organization carefully built up the institutional expertise needed to monitor all of East German society quietly, invisibly, but omnipresently. It had a vision, a mission and a goal.

Contrast that with the chavista Disip, which is content to put taps on a handful of high profile politicos' phones and sporadically throws some of the stuff they record on the air, seeking to intimidate them but succeeding only in humiliating themselves.

As we watch Nolia rant, it's easy to grasp that chavismo doesn't take its own domestic spying operation terribly seriously. It's impossible to imagine somebody in the Disip trying to advance his career prospects by writing a thick, scholarly dissertation. In fact, in Venezuela you're more likely to hear the word "Disip" as the punchline to a joke than as a terrified whisper.

It's history repeating itself as farce.

Instead of Fear - capital F fear - all the Chávez government's spying really provokes is a kind of bemused revulsion. Forced to listen in on the private conversations of politicians doing their jobs, we are only disgusted at the rampant mediocrity of the people who govern us.

Nolia's obscene flaunting of the impunity that chavistas enjoy tells us much more about him and the regime than it does about Petkoff, Miquilena or the many more whose conversations have recently been aired publicly. It shows a regime that is dimly aware that surveillance can be used as a mechanism of control, but hasn't the slightest clue exactly how to pull off the trick because it disdains the professional ethos that it would take to achieve this, or any other, substantial task.

It's something that bears keeping in mind before we go around blithely describing chavismo as "totalitarian" - eso es una falta de respeto...¡con los totalitarios!

For all its rank disregard for the rule of law, chavismo doesn't have the wherewithall to criminalize intimacy in Venezuela. In revealing innocuous private conversations with no strategic objective in sight, all it does is reinforce the sense that the revolution abhors anything that even resembles rigor and discipline.

The Bolivarian Republic of East Germany we are not.

The unity fetish

Juan Cristobal says: Sometimes, when I’m bored, I like to indulge in a bit of political S&M and lurk in the opposition comment boards on Noticiero Digital and Noticias 24. You know, just so I can say I have my finger on the pulse of the opposition’s lunatic fringe.

Because, let’s not beat around the bush here, those places are scary. The clichés, the insults, the bad grammar and the SHOUTY ALL CAPS POSTS!!! come at you thick and fast. Going by what you see there, you couldn’t be faulted for thinking that the opposition consists of people who are either insane or stupid or both.

One of the more baffling rants that I keep running into has to do with the campaign for mayor of Chacao.

As you probably know, UNT, the party of the very popular incumbent mayor Leopoldo López, decided to nominate Liliana Hernández. López, prevented by term limits from running again, had a fit and sided with his hand-picked dauphin, city councilman Emilio Graterón. When UNT threatened to sanction Graterón for breaking party discipline, he fled the coop and is now running as an independent. Primero Justicia, meanwhile, launched the telegenic Ramón Muchacho. Muchacho argued that if UNT couldn't get its act together, he would not withdraw.

So we're running three solid candidates. And the natives are getting restless.

The anger has to do with the fact that none of the three candidates seem all that enthusiastic about stepping aside for someone else. There are several proposals for unity out there, but none have stuck. The latest one is a primary that only one candidate appears to be willing to take part in. So by all accounts, it’s looking like we will be running with not one, not two, but three strong, viable opposition candidates in Chacao.

Well, the good folks on the comments boards have made this a casus belli. They don't seem to care that the opposition has achieved unity in an overwhelming majority of states and municipalities, including most of the genuinely competitive ones. The Chacao experience is enough for them to conclude that oppo politicians are simply a lost cause.

In fact, some of them sound like they're parroting the chavista party line. The government, in another example of the outrageous use of public resources for partisan purposes, put out a press release commenting on the state of "opposition disunity in Chacao," noting in the end that the PSUV supposedly selected its candidates in a primary - brushing over the fact that internal fights within chavismo are reminiscent of Jerry Springer.

Chacao is much more important than its nominal value would suggest. With barely 72,000 residents crammed together into a tiny 13 square kilometers, it is, by any measure, tiny. Hell, the Chavez clan has farms that are bigger than that!

However, Chacao’s budget is the envy of many a mayor. With the heart of Venezuela’s business community and some of Caracas’s poshest neighborhoods within its boundaries, the budget constraint for Chacao is not binding, at least not relative to the rest of the country’s municipalities.

Chacao is also important for a symbolic reason: the place is a crossroad for anyone criss-crossing Caracas. Whether you are taking a bus from Petare to Capitolio, going to work as a maid in Altamira or taking your kids for a weekend stroll at the Sambil, you gotta go to, or at least through, Chacao.

Its budget and its location give Chacao disproportionate strategic importance. Chacao is the place where the opposition can show the country’s less well-off how it can govern when given the chance and a hefty budget. It is no coincidence that Chacao’s last two elected mayors have become prominent national political figures.

So, is the opposition in danger of losing the crucial Chacao election because of disunity? Hardly. According to the polls I've seen, Chavez’s candidate, the hapless, unknown Wolfgang Torres, is polling at around 2%. In some polls, his name doesn't even show up.

There is a strong case to be made against primaries in Chacao. For one, they are expensive. For another, they artificially stifle competition between opposition programs and ideas. Because, if we're honest, the only reason “unity” has become such a buzzword is because we fear that without it, we'll lose all kinds of races against chavismo.

But in Chacao, we just aren't vulnerable. It’s not even close. There's really no compelling reason to compel a unified slate there. And yet, the hounds of opposition unity are after the three main candidates, and they're hungry for blood. It's like there's an eagerness, a need, to jump all over opposition politicos and slam them almost as virulently as we slam chavismo.

This makes no sense. The good people of Chacao will have their primary: it will be on November 23rd. Bring your cédula laminada, aún vencida.

(Disclosure: I went to high school with both Muchacho and Graterón.)

Brent < $68/barrel

Quico says: Y ahora, ¿quién podrá defendernos?

Extra! Extra! New York Review of Books in bed with the CIA!

Quico says: When even a bastion of the Upper West Side intelligentsia such as The New York Review of Books decides to run with the Human Rights Watch expulsion story, you just know that whatever credibility chavismo may once have had with the respectable northern left has been put through a blender, mushified, then nuked, dynamited and buried in a deep sea pit.

Vivanco and Wilkinson's piece is meticulously, understatedly brutal in a way that's far more damaging to the government's image than any amount of Colominesque hyperventilatory ranting could ever be. It's great fun to read. I'll cite just one particularly effective graf:

Human Rights Watch does not and has never accepted funding from the US or any government, directly or indirectly. But we are accustomed to such false accusations, especially coming from authoritarian governments. Venezuelan officials have repeatedly denounced us as CIA stooges, right-wing partisans, and, more commonly, "mercenaries of the empire." (By contrast, in neighboring Colombia, officials have repeatedly sought to discredit us with labels like Communist, guerrilla sympathizer, and even terrorist.) Once, after releasing another report in Caracas, one of us was publicly and falsely accused by Chávez's vice-president of having collaborated with former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. This time, a close Chávez ally in the legislature suggested on national TV that the two of us had been sharing a single hotel room where we were indulging our "weaknesses."

Ouch.

¡Viva Edo!

Quico says: For a country where the standard of political commentary is, erm, not always what one might hope for, Venezuela sure produces a freakish number of really brilliant editorial cartoonists.

Starting with the Grand Old Man of Venezuelan pictorial satire, Pedro Leon Zapata, the country's cartoonists have occupied a strange cultural netherspace somewhere between low- and high-art.

In Venezuela it's perfectly normal for the guy who scribbles the newspaper funnies to get commissioned for a vast roadside mural and sell his more "serious" work in super fancy galleries, where art collectors compete for signed originals of their more celebrated strips. It's the editorial cartoonist as public intellectual, in the sense Edward Said envisioned,

According to Said, an intellectual's mission in life is to advance human freedom and knowledge. This mission often means standing outside of society and its institutions and actively disturbing the status quo. At the same time, Said's intellectual is a part of society and should address his concerns to as wide a public as possible. Thus Said's intellectual is constantly balancing the private and the public. His or her private, personal commitment to an ideal provides necessary force. Yet, the ideal must have relevance for society.

There's something refreshingly original, distinctly Venezuelan, in elevating our editorial cartoonists to occupy this cultural space. It's a role pictorial satirists haven't played in the first world since the days of Hogarth.


Zapata may be our most famous editorial cartoonist but, for a long time, I considered Roberto Weil the undisputed master of the art. His style is equal parts Matisse and Gary Larson, his sense of humor halfway between Laureano Márquez and Monty Python. There's just a crazy vitality to his work I've always found infectious.

Here's a taste:


Weil will always be my first cartooning love. But there's no way around it: there's a new kid in town.

El Mundo's cartoonist, Eduardo Sanabria (nom de toon: Edo), has been drawing some of the most wildly imaginative, pitch-perfect editorial cartoons you're ever likely to see.

His signature depictions - the jurassic bolibourgeois, that angular Chávez and his red-berret wearing sheep-followers - are becoming as instantly recognizable as Weil's Comandante Boot-Head and Zapata's mecate-tugging toads. And his take on the Chavez-PPT/PCV spat the other day? It was just perfect.

Here're a few more:







It's well worth your time to go through his web-site. Great stuff.

What part of "wiped off the map" don't you understand?

Quico says: When the historians of the future come to write the history of the Chávez era, no part of the whole dadaist zarzuela will strike them as quite so bizarre as the government's relationship with PPT and the Communist Party.

The whole thing is psychiatric: Chávez has made it painfully, abundantly, explicitly, scatologically clear that he wants no part of PPT and PCV's support...but they insist on backing him!

Over the weekend, Chávez went off on his nominal "allies" again...this time calling them lyin', disloyal and manipulative and pledging to "wipe them off the political map for good."

PPT's answer? "We will patiently wait for the president to think again. We believe all forces are needed for the election."

The commies'? "We've stood side by side with the revolutionary process for a decade, and we will keep at it, because this doesn't depend on the president's will, it depends on our members' will."

Is there no way to get these people to take a hint?!



I dunno about you, but I adore that cartoon!

Jujitsuing the Populist Binge

Quico says: Primero Justicia's candidate in Petare, Carlos Ocariz, has finally put a snappy tag on a thought all of us have had at one point or another: faced with a pre-election barrage of handouts by the incumbent, why don't people just grab the freebies and vote for the other guy anyway?

Misión Agarre (Mission Grab It) is what he's calling it. Noting that the president and PSUV are planning to disburse some BsF.300,000 to local community councils in the coming days, he said:

Our message is clear: have no fear, grab that money, invest it in public works to benefit everyone in the community, but lets make the urge for change felt by voting for unity and democracy.

A few weeks ago, the people of Petare, with their heads held high, launched Misión Grab It 1. The neighbors accepted the home appliances that government supporters handed out in different communities, but they didn't sell their votes. And our organized groups will do the same thing, by grabbing the cash that's being offered to them in the vain hope of buying their votes and their consciences.

So starting this weekend, Petare's community councils commit themselves to Misión Grab It 2 with no fear, and with their heads held high, so that those resources can be invested, put to work on specific projects to improve public services and the quality of life for each citizen. But, of course, on November 23rd, we're still going to come out and vote for change and unity.

It's great to hear this sentiment expressed so crisply, even if you couldn't really call it new...

I remember it like it was yesterday, the first time I got involved in Venezuelan politics, as a 21 year old, back in 1996. Groovy leftie thing that I was back then, I was volunteering for Victor Moreno, a trade unionist and Causa R's candidate in a special election for governor in Bolívar State.

In barrio after barrio we heard the same story: the AD incumbent, Governor Jorge Carvajal, was going around handing out bags of groceries on his recorridos. In hindsight, from the perspective of chavismo's freebie washing machines, it seems almost quaint now that a bag of groceries is all the adecos used to hand out. In 1996, though, those shopping bags were a major challenge for the Causa R campaign.

Time and again, Moreno would plead with folks to grab the groceries and vote for him anyway.

They grabbed the groceries. And voted for Carvajal.

Will they do the same this time around? Two recent polls (here and here) suggests Ocariz will have better luck.

Stay tuned.

Social Bookmarking comes to Caracas Chronicles!

Quico says: So I've just set up AddThis: a one-button gateway to any number of social bookmarking services. I'm impressed! This thing makes sharing something you read on Caracas Chronicles about as easy as catching Chávez contradicting himself.

Digg one of our posts? Find it del.icio.us? Wanna email it to a friend? StumbleUpon it? Facebook it, Propel it, MySpace it, Furl it or even just add it to your browser's Favorites menu?

Just mouse-over the "Bookmark" button after each post. It's dead easy.

(Still confused? watch this...)

The audacity of ignorance

Juan Cristobal says: The Chávez's administration has a long and distinguished record of pulling the most obscure ñángaras from the gutters of academia and putting them in positions where they can do some real harm. However, the current Minister of Planning, Haiman El Troudi, is in a class of his own.

I've written about Mr. El Troudi's "exotic" policy prescriptions before. And if you're into masochism, you can read more of them in his own blog.

His latest? An earnest call for Venezuelans to respond to the financial crisis by repatriating their dollar holdings. "They're much safer here than in those speculative banks up north."

Once you stop laughing, pause to realize that this is the President's top economic policy architect.

Forget for a second that US bank deposits are insured up to $250,000 by the FDIC, regardless of citizenship. Put aside the fact that nothing "private" is ever safe in Venezuela. Is El Troudi seriously suggesting that investors "flee to Venezuelan quality" by buying up bolivars ... at BsF 2.15 per $?!

Think about it. Suppose you're a chavista bigwig, say, Ambassador to Argentina, and you have a nice hefty bank account in Florida's Commercebank. If you did what El Troudi said, you would change, say $1 million at the official rate and get BsF 2.15 million. The street value of your dollars, though, is close to BsF 4.5 million (last time I checked).

So by bringing your money back to a "safe" country such as Venezuela, you'd be taking a hit of BsF 2.35 million for the privilege of keeping it in a petrostate at the start of an oil slump. Faster than you can say "yanquis de mierda", your bank would be nationalized and the information from your bank accounts would be on a CD, for sale for BsF 1.50 from the friendly street vendors of the Plaza Caracas, readily available to any kidnapper looking for a bargain. Genius!

But, hey, what's left of your money would be safe.

I don't know if El Troudi's suggestion is a desperate plea for capital or a desperate plea for ideas. Probably both.

(ps.- hat tip to Omar for the title)

50 Ways to Imprison Your Opponents Without Convicting Them

Quico says: This is one of those tidbits that just beggars all belief: the trial of one-time Caracas security officials Lazaro Forero, Ivan Simonovis and Henry Vivas has now been delayed fifty times since it started 31 months ago, making it the longest trial in Venezuelan history.

The amazing thing is that the trial - where the three are accused of plotting the mass murder of Chávez supporters on that crazy pre-coup afternoon of April 11th, 2002 - is basically over, but the prosecution has gone through every delaying tactic in the book to forestall a final decision. The defense has had to wait six months just for a chance to put forward its final arguments. The prosecution has blown through every permissible time-lag in COPP, they have no legal standing whatsoever to keep the defendants behind bars anymore. But they do. Could this have something to do with the fact that the prosecutor in charge of the case is the Interior Minister's sister?

This thing has mistrial written all over it...but Forero, Simonovis and Vivas are still rotting away in jail.

Hey, it's hardly the Gulag Archipelago, but make no mistake about it: these guys are political prisoners.

My country went Marxist and all I got was this lousy fiscal planning system

Quico says: I'll tell you what gets me about Chávez's reaction to the Great Financial Freakout of 2008. As the world faces a protracted recession, our supposedly Marxist government got caught totally unprepared, holding just 10 months worth of imports in foreign currency reserves and far fewer rainy-day funds than it'll need to smooth out spending if the crisis lasts more than a year or so.

Now, there's a lot of trash to be talked about Marxism, a doctrine that gets much more wrong than it gets right. One thing you cannot fault Marxism for, though, is ignoring recessions. Just the opposite: Marx focused almost obsessively on the cyclical nature of capitalism. Das Kapital is, in important ways, an extended meditation on the business cycle, with capitalism portrayed as lurching inevitably from one crisis to the next, a pattern Marx thought would ultimately doom it. Chávez himself is, on some level, aware of this central bit of Marxist doctrine, which is why you've barely been able to wipe the shit-eating grin from his face for the last few weeks.

...but, if Chavez understood a crisis was looming, if he knew all along that capitalism, like Windox XP, just sort of seizes up every so often and needs a reboot, if he grasped that oil bust inevitably follows oil boom, then why the heck didn't he do anything to bolster the country's resilience to these inevitable shocks?

I mean, c'mon! A Marxist who gets caught off guard by a recession is like a Jehova's Witness who gets caught off guard by the rapture!

Lets review the score here. Venezuela is a dependent monoexporter, getting 94.6% of its foreign currency earnings from oil exports. The price of oil has already fallen 46% from its high, and is now hovering around Chávez's budget-sustainability point of about $80/bbl.

There is, of course, no way to really forecast the oil market, but if the generalized craziness in the credit markets sets off a prolonged recession in North America and Europe - which is looking pretty likely these days - we could easily be looking at several years of depressed global demand for oil. OPEC will do what it can to blunt the impact, but it's easy to see oil prices hovering somewhere in the $35-75/bbl range over the next several years. Even at the higher part of that range, the government's spending plans become chimeric...and the chances of continuing to bankroll society by continually increasing spending are pretty well nil.

Wait, don't we have reserves for cases like this? Well, the foreign reserves kitty is not quite empty - at $39 billion, it looks healthy at first glance. Trouble is that at the furious rate we've been importing over the last few years, that'll only cover about 10 months of imports!

Plus, note, those are currency reserves: money that's there to back the currency, not for the government to spend. So how about, rainy day funds? Money the government can actually use to pay teachers and nurses and such?

All we've got left over from that furious oil bonanza we've been living through is $15 billion or so - a sum that ODH Group's Abelardo Daza estimates might tide us over for a bit over year, maybe. Care to bet the global recession won't last longer than that?

Actually, Chávez did worse than merely not preparing for a bust: he actually dismantled the risk-management mechanisms that were in place when he got there!

And this is the worst part, the most mind-bendingly maddening aspect of this whole situation: we actually had a mechanism to smooth out the oil cycle! It was called FIEM, and it was carefully designed to set aside part the windfall during high-oil years so it could be spent when oil prices dropped. The Chávez regime first ignored and later chronically starved FIEM of funds. Today, there's less than a billion bucks in there - well under a week's worth of public spending - instead of the tens of billions we should've saved when oil was at $145/bbl.

Instead of saving, Chávez went nuts buying submarines for the navy and cool lookin' planes for the air force and oil for Fidel and oil refineries for Correa and houses made of oil for Daniel Ortega: an orgy of non-productive spending that means we're now heading into an oil price slump with more debt than we had when the boom started!

The scale of the irresponsibility in the way our public finances have been managed is simply staggering. I mean, seriously, it defeats me: I don't know how to find the words.

It's, of course, kind of crass to look at the political opportunities that will be created by the social tragedy we're now heading toward. Still, the one ray of hope in all this is that Chávez's political vision will probably be as much a victim of this crash as Lehman Brothers was.

Our economy is more dependent on oil today than it was ahead of Viernes Negro in 1982. We are, once again, going to have to borrow to cover the shortfall caused by an oil slump, except this time we'll have to borrow either from very badly battered international credit markets or from geopolitical allies that are getting hit by the oil slump just as hard as we are (Iran, Russia).

We've seen this movie before - we know what it does to the prestige of those who govern while it's playing.

The first act will be devaluation. The second act will be the end of Chávez's Rico McPato shtick, both at home and abroad. There's no way chavismo will be able to sustain a situation where only one of its customers pays full price for its oil. In fact, much of the petropatronage-supported influence Chavez has bought himself up and down the continent will start to dissipate...and that will happen at the same time as a charismatic, popular new leader pledged to double US foreign aid spending takes power in Washington.

Inside the country, the same dynamic holds. Chávez will try to blame the deep, painful spending cuts and the runaway inflation that will follow devaluation on the Empire, except the face of empire is about to change rather drastically. With his popularity already tanking enough to lose a referendum even a year before oil prices had even dropped, it's hard to see Chávez's remaining "soft" supporters staying onside through, say, the National Assembly elections in 2010.

Personally, I've always been very skeptical of claims that Chávez's "best days are behind him." Alberto Franceschi's been recycling that line in OpEds for the last 8 years and, as they say, con ese cuento me dormían a mi.

But this time it's different. It's been clear for a long time that nothing short of a sudden, sharp, systemic crisis in world capitalism causing a sustained fall in oil prices could slam the breaks on the chavista petrostate.

Well, here's your sudden, sharp, systemic crisis. Whatchoogonna do now, punk?

Chavez versus the people

Juan Cristobal says: - In the movie The War of the Roses, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner play a succesful, picture-perfect couple. The years go by, the tensions in the marriage start to mount, and the irritating quirks they find in each other start growing to the point of becoming unbearable. By the time they realize they can't stand the sight of the other, what should have been a civilized breakup turns into all-out war. Turner drives her SUV over Douglas's tiny Morgan, Douglas kills Turner's cat. When the movie ends, they have both destroyed their house, and they lie on the floor, lifeless, on the shattered remains of the chandelier that presided over their foyer.

I couldn't get this movie out of my mind as I analyzed Chávez's words and actions the past few days while the world witnesses an apocalyptic financial meltdown.

It is hard to overstate the seriousness of the current mess. Stock markets the world over are tanking and banks are failing left and right. Governments, central banks and multilateral institutions, normally the voices of reason, use incredibly dire language to describe the situation. The IMF talks of a "major downturn", the Federal Reserve Chairman talks of a "grave threat" and the US President warns the entire US economy "is in danger." Billions upon billions of dollars are being used to rescue the ailing financial system, and nobody knows whether this will even work.

The implications for Venezuela are dramatic. Oil is tanking, and according to Miguel's calculations, we are already below the minimum price needed to pay for our imports. The black-market rate for the dollar is now 4.5 BsF, more than double the official rate of 2.15. Venezuela's country risk has shot up to 1205 base points, liquidity problems in our banks have raised interest rates, and the cost of food increased 53.3% in the past year. It seems like the perfect storm we discussed about a few months ago has indeed formed.

And Chávez? Well, he's as happy as a little girl.

See, Chávez has framed this as the final defeat of capitalism and the coup-de-grace of George Bush's presidency. Faster than you can say "I told you so", Chávez has been mouthing off left and right, going so far today to say that this crisis is "necessary" in order to "demolish" the capitalist system "that has caused so much harm to the world."

In Chávez's mind, a crisis of global proportions is good for him because it proves him right. He's called on the big-bad-wolf of Latin American leftists, the IMF, to "kill itself." Instead of warning people that changes may be necessary, he has promised to maintain currency exchange controls until 2020, blissfully ignorant that reality may force him to eat his words much, much sooner than that. In no uncertain terms, he has blamed this crisis on Bush, imperialism, the IMF, capitalism, greed and neoliberalism, going so far today to hint this vindicates Marx, Engels and Gramsci.

Now, we can't blame the President for this hardly-contained bout of schadenfreude. These days, anachronistic ideological battles such as this are the only things that get his heart-rate going, and in part he is right, something is rotten in the system. But is it too much to ask for a little bit of glauckenstück?

Ideological warfare is entertaining and all, but this crisis is going to inflict serious harm on Venezuela. Much as he has tried the past few years to move the country to some alternative economic reality, the truth is that he hasn't done a very good job of that.

Venezuela is still very integrated with the rest of the world. Our economy is more dependent on foreign markets than before, and there is some concern that Venezuela's foreign reserves may be at risk. Moreover, basic economic intuition suggests that when the price of the one thing we have to offer to the world tanks, that is a problem. It doesn't take a genius to realize that when the people who are actually your customers are being clusterfucked to the poorhouse, that is a problem.

Chávez is Nero, fiddling while Rome burns. The crisis has underscored just how deeply detached the President is from the day-to-day problems of ordinary Venezuelans. Instead of coming up with an insightful analysis of the crisis and its consequences for our country, he uses his bully pulpit to "nah-nah" the rest of the world. Instead of providing a solution, he gets busy travelling to obscure places, linking up with genocidal governments and shopping for weapons on borrowed money.

That is why recent polls show his candidates are trailing badly. Venezuelans don't care about imperialism, capitalism and alternative economic systems. They care about bread-and-butter issues: inflation, personal safety, garbage collection, traffic and jobs. While most opposition candidates are doing a decent job in staying on message and talking about those things, Chávez is busy rejoicing in another Great Depression and travelling from Summit to useless Summit.

Chavez isn't at war with the US, and he isn't at war with George Bush - he feels like he won those already. Chávez is at war with his own people. While he fights imperialism and capitalism, he is doing nothing to prevent the fire from his battles from lighting up his own house. Like the Roses, he is so intent on destroying the other guy, the other idea, he doesn't realize he is destroying himself, and us, in the process.

And for now, all we can do is watch in horror. As we watch our irresponsible, reckless President rejoice in the fall of capitalism, we realize we are all along for the ride.

I know it's true because I read it in the newspaper...

Quico says: Hey, it turns out this blog shows "both a political balance that can be refreshing in these polarized times and a mischievous, evidently Venezuelan sense of humor." Who knew?!

[click image to enarge.]

Devious Injuns

Quico says: In today's NYTimes, Simón Romero goes to the Amazon and finds the stereotype of the lazy, devious indian alive and well at the heart of chavista officialdom.

Faced with Yanomami anger at the shoddy health care program - think of it as Selva Adentro - they've been forced to rely on since gringo missionaries were kicked out three years ago, a senior official with the government research institute that focuses on tropical diseases tut-tuts him...

"One cannot forget that the Yanomami and other indigenous groups have learned how to exert pressure on the government in order to receive food or other benefits,” he said. “This does not mean there aren’t challenges in providing them with health care, but caution is necessary with claims like these.”

Charming.

For their part, Yanomami leaders point to what they consider to be a broad pattern of neglect and condescension from public officials. “They put pictures of Yanomami everywhere, on tourist brochures, in airport lobbies, even on ambulances here in Puerto Ayacucho,” said Andrés González, 38, a Yanomami leader.

“That’s where they want us, in pictures, not positions of power,” he said.

As they say, read the whole thing.

When sovereignty dissolves with a whimper, not a bang

Quico says: Walter Lippmann once said that "there is no greater necessity for men who live in communities than that they be governed, self-governed if possible, well-governed if they are fortunate, but in any event, governed."

From that point of view, and from no other, the good burghers of El Nula, Apure State (pop. 10,893) can consider themselves lucky. [hat tip: Bristow.]

ps: Sorry if posting's been light. We have a bunch of ideas and projects cooking in the background; I guess you could say that, at the moment, our ambition is running well ahead of our available time. Do keep checking, though...good stuff is on its way.

The Suicidal Dream of Becoming an Immense Parasite that Feeds off of our Oil

Esta gran proporción de riqueza de origen destructivo crecerá sin duda alguna el día en que los impuestos mineros se hagan más justos y remunerativos, hasta acercarse al sueño suicida de algunos ingenuos que ven como el ideal de la hacienda venezolana llegar a pagar la totalidad del Presupuesto con la sola renta de minas, lo que habría de traducir más simplemente así: llegar a hacer de Venezuela un país improductivo y ocioso, un inmenso parásito del petróleo, nadando en una abundancia momentánea y corruptora.

-Arturo Uslar Pietri, 1936

Quico says: Sembrar el petróleo - "sowing our oil" - is the central cliché of Venezuelan public life. Used, misused and abused by governments of the left, right and center virtually since the day it was penned, the phrase has been progressively drained of its content, slowly coming to mean pretty much the opposite of what Uslar Pietri had in mind in those heady days right after Gómez's death.

It takes going back and reading the chillingly prophetic essay the phrase originally came from - an exercise all Venezuelan public figures should be required by law to undertake at least once a year - to quite grasp that "sembrar el petróleo" is more a statement about morals than economics!

For Uslar Pietri, the real issue wasn't what oil dependence would do to our wallets; it was what it would do to our souls. Diversifying our economy was a means to the end of inoculating our society's moral fiber against the fecklessness and depravity that comes from unhinging consumption from hard work.

The great portion of our wealth of non-renewable origins shall doubtlessly grow once our mining taxes become fairer, and bring us closer to the suicidal dream of some ingenues who hope one day to pay for the whole of the national budget with mining rents alone, which we could restate more or less as: to one day make Venezuela an idle and unproductive country, an immense parasite feeding off of our oil, swimming in a momentary and corrupting abundance.

It's in this passage that it comes through most clearly, but the entire piece is only superficially about economics. Dig down just a bit and you see that Uslar's real game is to use economic categories to illuminate questions of morality. (Indeed, he turned out to be far more competent as a moralist than as an economist: the relevant metric for petro-dependence turned out to be oil's share of exports, not of government revenue.)

Uslar's essay stands as a stark warning about the corrosive influence of the petrostate: a buzzword that hadn't yet been coined for a condition we hadn't yet experienced, but that Uslar Pietri could see clearly just over the horizon.

It's interesting to speculate what might have been if "el sueño suicida de convertirnos en un inmenso parasito del petróleo" had become the take-away cliché from that piece, instead of that other one.

Because for much of the following 72 years, Venezuelan governments have taken turns missing Uslar's central point. One after the other, they've interpreted the call to sow the oil as a justification for dumping oil money into a succession of boondoggles requiring a never-ending infusion of petrodollars to stay afloat, a practice that entrenches the corrupting petro-dependence Uslar wanted to protect us from.

The results were clear from the start: a society where values like thrift, industry, and prudence come to seem quaintly out-of-place, the schoolmarmish admonitions of prudes who haven't the faintest clue how the copper is really beaten around here.

What's sad is how the grand old man's bon mot ended up being turned in against itself, used to give a patina of respectability precisely to the kinds of parasitic accommodations he was so keen to forestall. The irony is that now we have realized the suicidal dream of becoming an enormous parasite that feeds off of our oil, and we've done it under the banner of sowing the oil.

For eight decades, we've done little but plumb the depths of Uslar Pietri's greatest fear: not that oil would make us poorer, but that it would make us worse.

Taking judicial activism to a whole new level

Juan Cristobal says: - President Chávez today inaugurated a meeting of Presidents of Supreme Courts of South American nations. In his address, he urged justices, not to do their job and apply laws, mind you, but to be warriors in some imaginary struggle against capitalism.

"It is important in the world today," Chávez said, "to go to the deep roots of justice and the law ... to achieve our liberation and stop the expansion of capitalism that is destroying the world."

Funny - I thought the job of judges was to apply the law. In fact, I think even the most liberal thinkers out there, those who view judges as social activists, would find it troubling for a judge to be at the forefront of the struggle to change economic systems. But that, nakedly put, is how Chávez views the judiciary - as just another tool in achieving political goals.

Chávez continued his string of gaffes, saying that "laws and institutions must generate social and political equality," apparently unaware that he was speaking to members of the judicial power, not the legislative power. He also likened the financial meltdown in the US to "an elephant drowning in a pool," unaware perhaps that elephants make pretty good swimmers and that, given its size and the fact it has a trunk it can breathe through, an elephant would probably not drown in a pool.

One Simple Thesis on the Theme of Magnicide

Quico says: Juan Manuel Santos, Marta Colomina, Leopoldo Castillo, Heinz Sontagg, Miguel Henrique Otero, Nelson Mezerhane, Marcel Granier, Alberto Federico Ravell, even Cesar Miguel Rondón (!!)...have you noticed how pretty much everyone Chávez accuses of plotting to kill him is a household name in Venezuela? (Well, ok: as long as the household in question is top heavy with politics junkies...)

Does this really raise no eyebrows within chavismo? I mean, ¡que casualidad! - only famous people want to bump the guy.

Lets be clear: I have no way of knowing if someone is plotting to assassinate the president, though I can understand why Chávez is worried. Be that as it may, the government's story - that Mario Silva has proof of an active conspiratorial cabal made up entirely of celebrities - is beyond ridiculous...it's insulting.

In that spirit, here's a simple thesis to try on for size:

If Chávez is assassinated, he'll be assassinated by someone you've never ever heard of before.

If you think about it, that's obvious...it's never going to be the high-profile, obsessively-spied-upon TV-talking-head demographic that's going to be in a position to pull off something like this. If it goes down, it'll be a Maiónica-type who'll set it up: some low key, well-connected, under-the-radar operator with the modicum of common sense it takes to realize that lunging for every microphone within a ten-mile radius, fronting every organization you get involved in and media-whorery in general are not exactly conducive to successful plotting.

After all, how many morning talk shows and Ateneo de Caracas events did you see Hugo Chávez speaking at in the months ahead of February 4th, 1992?

Someone needs to get a grip

Juan Cristobal says: - Quico and I were talking today about running a "whatever happened to?" You know, as in whatever happened to Alfredo Peña, Juan Fernández, Carlos Fernández, Carlos Ortega, Ibéyise Pacheco, Efraín Vásquez Velasco, Manuel Antonio Rosendo... where are these people?

Just by chance, Miami-bound muckraker and opposition comecandela extraordinaire Patricia Poleo has a column today about Carlos Fernández, who was head of Fedecámaras during the wild and crazy days of the general strike of 2002/03.

Now, before I go on a rant, I have to say I don't really have a strong opinion on Patricia Poleo. She's the type of journalist who takes no prisoners and elicits outsized passions on either side of the spectrum. Personally, I've been reading Venezuelan news long enough to take whatever she (or anyone else) says with a huge dollop of salt. True, she's been persecuted for political reasons, and she did nail l'affaire Montesinos, but it's not like she hasn't spent years cultivating enemies left and right. She generally shoots before she asks questions, and that can have consequences.

But her latest column, well, that's just offensive. Not on a political level, mind you, but on a literary one.

Poleo goes way, way over the top trying to elicit sympathy for Fernández, laying on the violins as she explains the horrible hardships of his squalid existence in Miami,

"From the deep pain caused by the injustice of leading you to jail or exile, what weighs the heaviest is the injustice within injustice."

O... kay...

She gripes about how Carlos Férnandez went from being someone who risked everything in the 2003 strike to an anonymous life in Miami. She complains that poor Mr. Fernández spends his days caring for his kids, getting up at

"... 5 in the morning, fixing breakfast for the kids before they go to school."

Never mind that one of them is in college, apparently on a "soccer" scholarship paid for... by the US government! Who knew the US government paid for soccer scholarships? Who knew "soccer" was the Spanish term for ... "soccer"! Who knew fixing breakfast could take up to two hours? What is he making them, pabellón con baranda from scratch?

His wife apparently cannot get an L1 visa - Poleo doesn't say if she can travel as a tourist, and it seems like they haven't explored the possibility of meeting in a third country where no visa is required. Still, in between fixing breakfast for his college-age kids and missing his wife, he mopes. Mr. Fernández's horrible existence is filled by his attempts to "try and sell houses in a country where nobody wants to buy houses." In other words, Fernández has a job in real estate.

Well, Poleo think this is just awful, and she vainly attempts to pin the blame on all us ingrates who didn't show Mr. Fernández his dues for the disastrous strategy he pursued back when he was in charge of Fedecámaras. And she lays it on thick. The sob-story is laced with phrases like,

"... Fernández lives his days avoiding sadness, loneliness, counting one by one the days without his partner and without her support (sic) and struggling to put his family back together."

"He still thinks Venezuela is worth the suffering of all those who struggle to live in freedom, in Democracy (sic). Nothing makes him desist from his longed-for return, when he shall be able to reunite his family, whatever is left of it, to reunite with his friends (sic) if they still remember him and with a country that will be very different to the one we left, but that still smells like no other country: Own, Fatherland, Ours." (sic ... sic ... sic ... lordalmighty that's just sick!)

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not that much of a sourpuss. I'm sure it sucks for Mr. Fernandez, being separated from his wife and all. But do we really have compassion to spare for him? Is this really one of the world's great injustices? Afghan office boys caught up in Guantanamo Bay, Aung San Suu Kyi under House Arrest, Mumia Abu-Jamal on Death Row and...Carlos Fernández, Single Parent in Suburban Exile?!

Couldn't he fix breakfast for his kids the night before? Couldn't they make their own damn bagels? And sure, the housing market in Florida is pretty crummy right now, but how many of the people the guy left jobless in Caracas wouldn't kill for a Real Estate franchise in the States these days?

Come to think of it, I'd rather not know what all these people are up to. This story took up all of my yearly allowance of maple syrup - I don't think I could take any more.

Residual memories

Quico says: I'm a bit late to this story, but didn't want to let it pass without a comment. About a week ago, Luisa Ortega Díaz, Chávez's prosecutor general, told reporters that no laws were broken in the summary expulsion of Human Rights Watch's team from Venezuela.

As they say in England, "well, she would say that, wouldn't she?"

These kinds of ritual declarations of lawfulness hold a weird sort of fascination for me. Of course, like most of them, this one was entirely bogus: articles 39 through 46 of Venezuela's Aliens and Migration Law set out in intricate detail the procedure the authorities must follow to expel a foreigner from the country. According to the law (which, incidentally, was drafted by chavistas less than five years ago), aliens slated for expulsion are entitled to be notified of the government's intentions ahead of time, to retain counsel, to prepare a defense, to present their arguments orally at an administrative hearing, and to appeal any decision to the courts.

On the day he was seized by fifteen or twenty heavily armed members of the security forces, Vivanco wasn't even allowed to make a phone call, let alone an appeal.

All of which adds yet another layer of irony to the episode. Because, bear in mind, Vivanco was expelled for presenting a report that praised the extensive human rights guarantees enshrined in Venezuelan law but also criticized the government for failing to honor those guarantees in practice.

By now, the impudent relish with which chavismo breaks its own laws can no longer shock or surprise: the novelty wore off a long time ago. What gets me is that Ortega Díaz still felt the need to come out and argue that the government's actions were legal.

Maybe "argue" is the wrong word here: no one who has even glanced at the Immigration Law's Article 43 could really argue that Vivanco's expulsion was lawful without her brain turning into mush and oozing out of her left ear. Still, the Prosecutor General felt the need to at least assert the legality of Vivanco's expulsion. This far into the game, she still didn't feel like she could just say, "suck it up: it's, raison d'état...so we expelled him ¿y qué?"

To me, that's a thing of wonder.

It's as though somewhere hidden deep inside her reptilian brain, a couple of neurons are still firing away, irrepressibly saying "laws have to be followed!"; as though somehow this sense that "written rules ought not to be ignored" can't be completely extricated from our political psyche. Trampled, debased, battered, humiliated and serially ignored? Yes...but not completely extricated, not even from the most abject apparatchik's mind.

There's a tiny smidgen of hope locked in there somewhere. A realization that the residual memory of the value of the rule of law is incredibly resilient in Venezuela, that the sense for the legal is as much a part of our national identity as is our outsized capacity to ignore it. That, despite how it may feel sometimes, we are not Mbutu's Zaire or Gomez's Venezuela, places where the category of the "legal" had not even established a conceptual foothold into the vocabulary of power. Ramshackle and partial as it was, some aspects of our long, 20th century flirtation with the democratic rule of law left lasting imprints on our collective psyche.

Think of it this way: after the fall of the Berlin Wall, even countries that had been incredibly brutalized by communist tyranny were able to regain the path of democracy in less than two decades...so long as they had a history of real democracy before becoming Soviet satellites to refer to. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic...their democratic DNA had laid dormant for 45 years, but it had not been extirpated. It was the countries with no real history of democracy to fall back on - Russia foremost among them - that just couldn't manage the transition to democracy.

All I'm saying is that when this whole long nightmare is over, Venezuela will look a lot more like the Czech Republic than like Russia.