Making believers out of us...

Quico says: The Latinbarómetro Poll, published by The Economist, always has an eyebrow-raising stat or two to offer. This year's study, for instance, asks the age old question: in which large country in the region do people have the strongest faith in the market economy's ability to help the country as a whole?

...cálatelo!

Read the whole thing...

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Technoutopian Chronicles

Quico says: If citizens' ability to reason together on issues of common concern in the public sphere is the cornerstone of real democracy, Venezuela is in more trouble than we know. These days, in Venezuela, the public sphere looks like this.

If we're going to start the long, slow process of rehabilitating our public sphere, reclaiming it as a place for sane interaction between responsible adults, we're going to need mechanisms that allow us to tamp down on pure vitriol and outright ad hominem attacks, to make space for a more reasoned kind of discussion. Caracas Chronicles 2.0 is mi granito de arena: a way to empower an online community to defend itself from the total mayhem on sites like N24.

I've been working on it for a few months, and I really think this software could do the trick - even in Spanish. The system is designed to be self-correcting, marginalizing nutters and empowering people with something to say by using the input of the entire community.

I've thought long and hard about how to make a software platform that's easy enough to use even for the casual, once-in-a-while commenter but that allows people who want to spend more time on a forum to get much more out of it as well. We'll see if it happens.

For now, here's that FAQ.

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What is Community Powered Comments?

Community Powered Comments is a new way of moderating the comments section that puts the reader community in charge.

Instead of relying on one or two moderators to decide which comments are good enough to publish and which should be deleted, it asks the entire community to help identify the comments that really drive debate forward. It then makes sure those comments stand out in every comment thread, while it lowers the visibility of comments that add less to debate.

Think of it as the community’s vaccine against gallinerization, a way of protecting Caracas Chronicles as a space for serious debate.

In 2010, we’re going to roll out this system in Spanish, to try to launch a platform for political debate about Venezuela that doesn’t immediately degenerate into the kind of thing we see on Noticiero Digital.

So how does it work?

At the end of each comment, registered users are asked to answer two questions about it:

Do you agree with this comment?

and

Does this comment add value to the discussion?

All you have to do is answer those two questions fairly and honestly: the software does the rest.

First off, it highlights the comments that add most value to the debate, making them easy to spot in a thread. At the same time, it makes comments that contribute less to the discussion a little harder to read, by displaying them in gray text over a white background. The very lowest ranking comments – plain old trolls – get hidden.

Notice: nothing is ever censored in Community Powered Comments! No comment gets erased outright. Even if everybody hates a comment, you can still click on it and read it.

The goal here is to make trolling relatively unrewarding, by depriving trolls of visibility.

What’s the point of asking people to rate each comment twice?

Sometimes, the comments that do most to sharpen your understanding of an issue are comments that you totally disagree with! So we want you to keep the question of whether you personally agree with a comment separate from the question of how useful it is to the debate.

The point here is to avoid Groupthink: the situation that develops when people just rate up comments they agree with willy nilly. Groupthink bumps off dissenting views merely because they’re unpopular, even when they’re valuable to a debate. Community Powered Comments is designed to avoid that pitfall.

Of course, this will only work if the community really makes an effort to vote fairly on each issue separately. The site asks a lot of you, and gives a lot back.

Do I need to open an account and log in to post a comment?

You don’t: anyone can post a comment, with or without an account. To post without an account, you just have to convince the system you’re a human being by answering one of those captcha word puzzles.

So what’s the advantage of opening an account and logging in?

First, you need to log in to rate other people’s comments. Anonymous cowards don’t get a say on how visible others’ comments will be.

Second, if you don’t log in, the system gives your comments a pretty low visibility setting by default – if you write a good comment and people vote it up, it will become more visible, but to begin with, its visibility won’t be great.

Also, by logging on, you get to decide how choosy you want to be in filtering out comments the community doesn’t like very much. This can range from not choosy at all (“Show me every comment”) to highly choosy (“Show me only the best comments”).

Logged in users get to decide how choosy they want to be.

If you’re not logged in, the system assumes you’re “medium choosy” – showing you most comments but hiding the lowest rated ones (pure trolls).

Finally, you need to log in for the system to be able to track your Reputation Score, which allows it to recognize your contributions to the community in the past and rewards users who add the most value to the community.

What’s my Reputation Score?

Your reputation score is a summary measure of your overall contribution to the community over time. Every time a comment you write is rated by another user, your Reputation Score ticks up or down accordingly.

Write a lot of smart, substantive, interesting comments that drive debate forward and your reputation score will rise over time. Write lot of silly, inflamatory or uninteresting comments that don’t add value to the discussion, and your reputation score will suffer.

Why should I care about my Reputation Score?

The better your reputation, the more influence your ratings have over the way other people’s comments are displayed. The worse your reputation in the community, the less influence you have over others within it.

That’s another reason to really try to write comments that drive debate forward: if you don’t, your reputation score suffers, and if you have a bad reputation score, the system doesn’t take your opinions as seriously as it takes the opinions of your better reputed peers.

There are other reasons, too. If you have a high reputation score, any new comment you write will be highly visible by default. If your reputation in the community is not so good, your new comments will be less visible to start with.

Community Powered Comments sets out to replicates the way these things are (or should be) in the real world. The better your repuation is, the more seriously your opinions are taken. That’s how it is in the real world, and that’s how it is on this site.

How do I improve my Reputation Score?

It’s simple: by writing smart, substantive comments that other community members recognize add value to the debate, and by rating others’ comments fairly, whether or not you agree with them.

Where can I see my Reputation Score?

You can’t, and for a reason. We don’t want people to fixate on an arbitrary number, or to treat reputation building as a game. We want you to focus on contributing as much as possible to the community by writing quality comments and rating others’ comments fairly

What are Trusted Users?

Trusted users are the 10% of users who got the highest reputation score over the previous seven days. The list changes every week, so the universe of trusted users is always changing.

This is all done automatically: every Sunday night, the site analyzes the previous week’s worth of commenting activity to identify the top 10% of contributors to the community over the last seven days. It then automatically contacts them to let them know they’ve been chosen as “Trusted Users” for the next seven days.

Because the set of trusted users changes every week, even if you had a terrible time of it last week, you can still be a trusted user next week if you work hard to contribute to the community. Community Powered Comments believes in giving people second chances.

What are the perks associated with being a Trusted User?

As a Trusted User, the system gives you more say over the way the community operates for the next seven days. Specifically, you’ll get a limited number of “tokens” you can use to promote or demote a given comment.

Think the community is being too harsh on a given comment? You can use one of your tokens to Promote a comment, making it much more visible. Think the community is voting up a really stupid comment? Then go ahead and spend one of your tokens sinking its visibility.

As a trusted user, you have the last word: once you’ve promoted a comment, all voting on it ceases.

And there’s more. As a trusted user, any comment you make on the site will come with a “Trusted User” seal of approval and receive high visibility setting by default. Trusted users are allowed to put images into their comments, and they’re allowed to edit their comments after they’ve posted them.

Can I become a permanent Trusted User?

You can’t. Every Monday morning the system starts compiling data on the following week’s trusted users from scratch.

I have a great idea for improving the system, where can I send it?

Community Powered Comments is very much a work in progress, and we expect it to generate lots of debate – and not a few hiccups.

If you want to contribute an idea or – better yet – code a fix in PHP, we’d love to have it!=

Contact us on caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm

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Caracas Chronicles 2.0: Sneak Preview

Quico and Juan Cristóbal say: The new software platform for Caracas Chronicles is finally here! After several months of intense work, the site is now presentable enough for everyone to look at.

Check it out!

For now, the new site is at EsferaPublica.com, which we hope will be the URL of the new, Spanish version of Caracas Chronicles. Over the next few weeks, we'll be posting in parallel here and in the new site. Early next year - once we've brought over the archive - we're going to put this old blogger site to sleep.

At the heart of the new site is an innovative system for managing the comments section that, we hope, can solve the age old problem of ceaseless flame-wars in Venezuela's political cyberspace.

The idea, basically, is that Juan and Quico don't get to decide which comments get top billing and which comments get hidden; you do.

With this new system, the community collectively gets to decide which comments get top billing by voting.

The system asks you to vote not just on whether you agree with a given comment, but also on whether it helps drive debate forward. Read all the details in the new system's FAQ.

Remember, you don't have to create an account to comment on the new site, but we strongly encourage you to do so anyway. It's free, and it only takes a minute or two.

By logging on, you allow the system to track your reputation within the community, and the better your reputation is, the more impact you'll have on the way the forum works, the more visible your comments will be, and the more weight the system will place on your opinions. And if you're among the top 10% of commentators in any given week, the system gives you a whole set of additional goodies regular users don't get.

Early next year, we'll be launching Caracas Chronicles 2.0 in full, which will include a Spanish version. This will open up CC to a whole new cast of characters, but hopefully the new software will steer the conversation away from the troll wasteland you find in places like Aporrea or Noticias24.

We look forward to your feedback, but not here.

As of today, the old comments platform on this site will be disabled.

Please comment on the new site.

Mental Health View From Quico's Window

Northeasternnnnn!!!


(Taken 10 a.m. I'm actually a recent-enough immigrant to Quebec to get excited by this kind of thing...)

Subverting Chavismo's Discursive Standard

Quico says: Judging from the reaction, rather a lot of you misinterpreted my last post as some kind of woolly call to hold a nice, reasonable debate with chavismo.

I want to be quite clear about my position here: no critical engagement with chavismo is possible. And, actually, that's the crux of my problem with the regime.

It's easy to mistake that for a rather shrill, impetuous stance; a kind of misplaced haughtiness masquerading as high principle. But lets be clear about this: it's not that I reject a debate with the people I oppose. It's that I oppose people who reject debate.

Obviously, a lot hinges on how you understand chavismo, how you interpret its discursive essence. Some people see Chávez's tendency to respond to any and every criticism with an ad hominem attack as a kind of curiosity, one trait in a broader political philosophy. Over the years, though, I've come to see it as the lynchpin of the intellectual edifice that is chavismo: a defining trait and organizing principle at the center of a strategy for crafting a totalizing worldview.

For Chávez, and for the cult-like political movement he has created around himself, the world is neatly divided between two sides. The good and the bad. The key thing to grasp - and I think there's a nearly limitless documentary evidence to illustrate this - is that for chavismo, the things that bad people believe are bad by virtue of the identity of the person believing them. Escualidos are not evil because they're wrong; they're wrong because they're evil.

Take, to choose one example out of a zillion simply because the clip is conveniently in English, this interaction between Chávez and a FoxNews journalist at this year's UN General Assembly meeting:



Notice what happens here. Chávez is asked a question that, through its own content, suggests that the questioner does not share his views. The question, in Chávez's hands, becomes merely a mechanism for identifying the questioner as a dissenter. That Chavez will not in engage with its substance goes almost without saying. Instead, the journalist expression of dissent serves as a springboard for an attack on him, on his motives and his affiliations, all by way of explaining - apparently self-evident to Chávez - that his identity as a journalist for a conservative provides all the evidence anybody could need of the evil that lurks in his heart, and exempts Chávez from any duty to account for his actions.

You don't have to be a fan of FoxNews to grasp the dire consequences of extending this mode of reasoning to every single interaction with a dissenting view a leader engages in.

The dirty little secret is that, within the ideology Chávez has stamped on his movement, the sorting mechanism that allows you to determine whether any thought, book, argument, documentary, bank, mural, film, newspaper, foreign leader, TV channel, multilateral institution or person is good or bad is, conveniently enough, whether he will submit to Chávez with unquestioning loyalty. In fact, from the totalizing standpoint chavista discursive standards creates, failing to snap unthinkingly into line is prima facie evidence that you belong to the Evil camp, and immediately voids your right to hold Chávez to critical scrutiny.

To take chavismo's worldview seriously is to see dissent itself as intrinsically evil. How evil? Evil enough to imperil the possibility of life on this planet. That evil.

This absolute sorting of the world into good and evil according to the single, totalizing criterion of loyalty to the boss seems to me both irreducibly authoritarian and absolutely central to the chavista system for organizing reality and making sense of the world. Manicheanism is not "an aspect of" chavismo; it is chavismo.

That there is no serious possibility of a frank and open exchange of views with people who hold on to such an ideology seems to me perfectly self-evident.

It's definitional, actually, because within the worldview chavismo espouses, the willingness to treat an idea that Chávez personally rejects as potentially valid is wholly incompatible with revolutionary principle. But real debate, genuine, free and open debate, can't accept such arbitrary exclusions. If you begin by sectioning off whole provinces of reality and declaring them out of bounds before you've critically engage them, what you are doing is not debating. It may look and feel like a debate, but it's not.

The hopelessly flattened discursive standards chavismo espouses - Chavista = good, dissident = evil - is not one we could engage through the practice of public reasoning, even if we were minded to. Instead, the habits of mind chavista ideology is built on are precisely that which we need to subvert through the practice of public reasoning.

When we hold the government to account, when we point out the absurdities of its exchange rate regime, when we rail against the injustice of its repressive actions, when we demand a justification of its spending priorities, we are doing it not to engage chavismo but to subvert it, because when you are facing a totalizing ideology, demanding an explanation is in itself a subversive act.

When we cultivate the habits of mind that allow people to think critically about the actions of those in power, to question them and demand they account for their decisions, we're keeping alive the possibility of democracy for future generations, because we're keeping alive the modes of interaction that we will need to sustain a discursive democracy at some point down the line.

The question, for me, is how we can exploit the particular characteristics of the internet to carry out this kind of subversive work. I think there's a ton to be done in this regard. And, personally, I intend to do it.

Dictatorship means never having to say "the reason is..."

Quico says: One thing all critics of the Chávez regime seem to agree on is that democracy in Venezuela is pretty much dead. But what exactly do we mean by that?

When we talk about democracy we're usually talking about two separate but related ideas.

On the one hand, you have the institutions of democracy. We mean parliaments and banking regulations; election day rules and procedures; habeas corpus and constitutional principles of due process; decentralization, and all that. When we say that Venezuelan democracy has died, we mean that none of these institutional mechanisms is operating the way the constitution says they ought to. This, alarming as it is, is not all there is.

There's another level where democracy has been dying, a much more intimate level that manifests itself in the ways we communicate when political matters are at stake. I call it the "discursive level" in that it concerns itself with the kinds of arguments people in the political sphere find compelling at any given time. It's about the habits of thought of our political actors.

This distinction is not trivial.

One thing is the National Assembly and another is the quality and style of the debates that are held within its chambers. The question, from a discursive point of view, is what constitutes a "powerful reason to act" in the eyes of its members? Alongside any abstract principle and any formal institution there are the tacit rules actual people use to apply them the world.

Political systems are democratic to the extent that they maintain possibility of holding reasoned debates in the public sphere that tend to generate consensual understandings. On the contrary, they are authoritarian to the degree that appeals to straight-out authority - jefe es jefe - are enough to secure compliance from political decision-makers.

Venezuelan intellectuals tend not to distinguish clearly enough between these two levels, the institutional and the discursive. We tend to be much clearer, more explicit, and more eloquent talking about what has gone wrong institutionally than what has gone wrong discursively.

But if our institutional democracy has died it's because the discursive habits of mind that support it have been hunted to extinction. Chavista discourse was dictatorial long before chavista government.

In Venezuela, a return to democracy will entail much more than a return to institutional democracy. It will mean focusing on the discursive realm as well, on re-establishing a certain set of unwritten rules and expectations about what is "normal" behavior in the public sphere. These rules, which Habermas calls "discursive standards," are the criteria people use to decide if an argument is persuasive or not. When the rules of engagement in the public sphere are democratic, what you get is what Amartya Sen calls "government by discussion."

Discursive democracy is what you get when the main question asked of a given political argument is: "does that position make sense?" Discursive authoritarianism is what you get when the main question asked of a given political argument is: "who put that argument forward?"

An escualido?! Booooo! A chaburro?! Hisssss!!!

Democracy in Venezuela has collapsed in the face of a full frontal attack not just at the institutional level, but also in that deeper, discursive sphere. So subverting chavista hegemony requires liquidating the discursive standards that sustain its power.

Bringing discursive democracy back to life means putting in place policies hashed out in real debates, where ideas are grappled with, confronted and crafted into consensual roads forward by people more interested in the content of a position than the identity of the one expressing it.

This is not an easy thing to do. Building a discursive democracy runs counter to some very old habits. Throw yourself into a genuine discussion and, suddenly, you've made yourself vulnerable. In a genuine discussion, you go in without any guarantee that you'll come out on the winning side. Discussion requires humility, flexibility, a willingness to learn and an acceptance that you may be called on to alter your positions in the light of what the other side says. This may be one of the reasons true architects of democracy have, to some degree, possessed a healthy dose of greatness.

Dictators will not subject themselves to genuine debate, because genuine debate is risky, unpredictable, dangerous. A dictator will join no communicative interaction in which he (and it's usually a he, isn't it?) is not guaranteed the upper hand from the start. This is why Chávez simply refuses to be questioned by journalists who will throw anything but the softest of soft balls at him.

The sad fact is that unless the opposition shows it's better than Chávez at engaging with ideas, doing away with Hugo Chávez will do almost nothing to re-establish democracy in this deeper sense. If we fail to enshrine genuinely democratic discursive standards, the return to institutional democracy will be as shallow, fleeting, and incomplete as the system we had until 1998.

More than an adherence to constitutional standards, more than respect for the forms of the democratic game, what Venezuela's democratic movement needs to develop is the frame of mind needed to engage with an opponent (even chavista ones) in genuine debate, in the understanding that the power of the strongest argument will carry the day.

That's the habit of mind that creates the social underpinning of democratic government. Without that attitudinal bedrock, that basic predisposition to accept discussion as the arena where decisions are made, there is no possibility of democracy.

Faced with a government that experiences debate as a threat, merely creating spaces for genuine debate constitutes a subversive act. As long as Venezuelans sustain spaces where matters of public policy are subjected to free and open debate, chavista autocracy will never be complete and will never be secure.

The internet offers tremendous possibilities for this kind of subversion, possibilities that are not yet being fully exploited. The democratic movement needs to step up its game in this regard, creating spaces where genuine debate can take place. Who's up for it?

The three-legged stool

Juan Cristóbal says: Lately, this story about the 1988 Referendum that ended the Pinochet dictatorship keeps coming to mind.

(Translated from Spanish Wikipedia):

"At 12:18 AM on October 6th (the night after the Referendum, when results were trickling in), Pinochet meets his cabinet and informs them: "Gentlemen, the referendum has been lost. I want your immediate resignations. That is all."

An hour later, he finally meets the other members of the Military Junta. On his way up the steps of La Moneda Palace, Chile's Commander of the Air Force, General Fernando Matthei, tells journalists: "It's pretty clear the (opposition) No has won, but we are calm." General Matthei's statement was transmitted by Radio Cooperativa at 1:03 AM on October 6th.

In the meeting, [Interior] Minister Sergio Fernandez recognized the government's defeat and expressed the high percentage obtained was, in any event, a source of pride, to which General Matthei ironically replied: "Why don't we bring in some champagne to celebrate?"

According to Matthei's memoirs ("Matthei, my testimony"), Pinochet then handed the members of the Junta a decree through which he assumed all the country's powers and disavowed the results of the Referendum. This threw the Junta's members, specially Matthei, into a rage, and Matthei himself ripped the decree with his own hands.

"After that," Matthei recalls, "and without insisting on the decree, the President informed us that he would leave Santiago for a few days to get some rest, and the meeting was adjourned."

Right at that moment, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suffered a heart attack, presumably caused by the heated confrontation among military leaders. After the meeting, Pinochet accepted the situation and ordered the release of the third electoral bulletin."

Someone once said that Hugo Chávez's support is like a three-legged stool. Those legs are

1. Popular support
2. Oil money
3. The military

Our goal, to obtain power and reinstate democracy, can only be met once all three pillars of support have worn away.

One out of three, two out of three - those don't seem to cut it anymore.

Chavismo has engineered a state system where alternation is tantamount to regime change. Under those circumstances, consolidating a majority and winning an election are not going to be enough. Popular support is just one of the legs of the stool. Our recent history confirms this.

In April of 2002, Chávez's popularity was waning and his oil income was shaky. With PDVSA momentarily paralysed, the military tried to overthrow him, and for a second it looked like all three legs had gone.

It turned out that his popularity was not as low as all that and, in fact, reaction to the coup quickly raised it. The popular support pillar still had some life in it.

Then it also turned out that the military leg was not broken either - the military's unity cracked, as we all know, and a good chunk of the Armed Forces backed the President. And so, ultimately, the stool regained its balance.

Later that year, the opposition led an (ill-advised) Oil Strike. The subversive act of shutting down PDVSA entirely chopped off one of the legs for a good six or seven weeks. But by that point, the Misiones were starting to work and Chávez's popularity was on the rise. More importantly, the military did not support the strike, and the people turned against the oil workers. A few weeks after the strike began, oil income began to recover and PDVSA was operational again.

The assault on one of the legs was over.

Fast-forward to Chávez's shock electoral defeat December of 2007. We showed, at the ballot box, that dissent could be more popular than the chavista status quo even amidst a dizzying oil boom. Unlike in normal democracies, that reality was a subversive act - a "golpe electoral", as José Vicente Rangel would say - surprisingly spearheaded by a group of students.

Did it work? Partially. It took considerable military pressure, spearheaded by jailbird Baduel, for Chávez to accept defeat, and then only for about two seconds. But a few days later, he appeared - not coincidentally - in front of the military high command, and practically announced to the country the referendum results did not mean anything. Two years out, most of the things he'd been denied the power to do at referendum have become law.

Why? Because after an initial wobble, military support of the regime resumed, the dissidents were purged, and the oil boom kept going for another few months.

Fast-forward to next year.

Imagine that Chávez becomes really unpopular and, by some act of God, the opposition gets its act together and manages to win a majority of seats in the AN, fair and square.

Will the CNE accept the results? Will our friend Socorro stand by and validate an opposition-controlled National Assembly, with all that entails? Maybe, maybe not.

And even if that miracle panned out, can't you just see the AN, through an act of its outgoing majority, stripping itself of most of its powers? Do we have any doubt the almighty, reverential Constitutional Chamber of the TSJ would rubber-stamp such a monstrosity in the blink of an eye?

Some last minute re-think is not entirely impossible, but it's looking increasingly foolhardy to gamble the country's future on the democratic scruples of the chavista State.

Hanging on to power without regard to the majority's rejection is the distinguishing trait of authoritarianism. Chavismo is an authoritarian regime.

And that, in the end, is what it means to come to grips with chavismo's inherent authoritarianism: for our side, majority support is not enough.

Necessary? Yes. Sufficient? Not by a long shot.

At some point, all of this makes us very uncomfortable. We are democrats, and part of the normal game of a democracy is that you don't tip stools over or smash them with an axe. You work with the stool you're given and do what you can to adjust it. And certainly, the chavista Venezuelan military nomenklatur is so disgusting to some of us that the thought of accepting and even embracing them as political players is mighty unappealing.

But the reality of the chavista dictatorship is that, in the unlikely event the CNE recognized our victory in an election, we would find it all but impossible to work with the stool we're given. By now, it's Chávez's stool: made to order and able to accommodate only his fat ass. The kind of 2009 Antonio Ledezma has had is living proof of that.

The upshot is that we need a three-legged strategy.

One of the legs - oil income - is pretty much beyond our control, especially after the PDVSA purge. But, despite the fantasists' fondest daydreams, the global oil market is beyond Chávez's control, too. Still, it wouldn't hurt to have a strategy for countering the vast difference in disposable income between them and us. For the moment it's enough to note that, even with oil prices well above $70/bbl, Chávez can't raise enough cash to finance the level of public spending it would take to keep GDP growing.

What's clear is that any serious attempt to subvert the Chávez dictatorship will require concerted action on the two other legs.

Yes, we need an effective political strategy. There's no way out of this without people's hearts and minds.

But given the conditions chavismo has created, there's just no way out of this hole without a military strategy, too.

Before chavistas out there go postal and begin crying "golpista," we should clarify. That doesn't mean having a strategy for rebellion. A mad idea like that would only lead to a bloodbath. It means having a strategy to challenge the unconditional support the military gives Chávez, in very much the same way as the Chilean democracy movement's rising clout created the key cracks needed at the right time to force Pinochet's hand.

The Chilean democrats of 1988 had a political strategy that led them to a convincing electoral victory. But without a military strategy resulting in Matthei & friends willing to subvert the Pinochet regime, the Chilean stool would have been left in place.

We should be crystal clear about this: a military strategy is not a para-military strategy, and it's not a call to golpismo. It means making sure that, when the chips are down, the military support for the dictatorship is not unconditional. It means having the guts to remind the military that the loyalty they swear is to a Constitution, not an autocrat, and that that constitution's article 333 creates clear obligations they, sooner or later, will be held accountable for.

The Chilean democrats, Corazón Aquino, Boris Yeltsin. In key moments, they all had military strategies in place that helped propel their movements to subvert dictatorial regimes. In all three cases, the military played a fundamental role in knocking down the status quo forces.

Without it, popular support is easily mocked. The Burmese monks did not have a military strategy. They now rot in jail. Back in 1928, Venezuela's students didn't have one either, so they spent the next eight years in La Rotunda.

This is how it goes, folks. It sucks, but it's how it goes.

Mental health break for the weekend

Juan Cristóbal says: - It's easy to forget, but before we were oligarchs, squalid ones and betrayers of the homeland, we were simply - his invisible friends.

I can't think of a better tonic to Hugo Chávez's vulgarity than the warm lessons of Arturo Uslar Pietri.

See you all Monday.

Rules for Subversives

Quico says: "Opposition" has become an obsolete concept in Venezuelan politics. Opposition is what you do to governments capable of being opposed: those that see the practice of periodically alternating in power with their critics as normal.

Chavismo has denormalized alternation, crafting a state system where the practice would imperil regime stability. Chavismo can't be "opposed" in the normal sense of the word, because it doesn't conceive of itself as a temporary occupant of executive branch. Instead, it claims ownership of the state as a whole.

What can you do if you dissent from a government that is not opposable in the normal democratic sense? A government that has repeatedly stressed that it does not conceive of alternation in power as a normal feature of the system, and explicitly vows never to allow it to happen?

There's only one thing you can do if you don't wish to submit to a government like that: subvert it.

I think Chávez himself grasped this long before those of us who disagree with him did. Maybe his obsession with plots and conspiracies all around him speak not so much of paranoïa as of a dirty conscience. A kind of "if they knew what I know, they'd be trying to subvert me."

Me, I never set out to become a subversive. Never chose that. Doesn't really fit my personality in any way. But like everybody else who opposes the vision of state power chavismo represents, I have now been made, effectively, into a subversive.

There is a long, deeply unsettling set of consequences that flow out of this realization. A set of consequences Venezuela's anti-chavista establishment really hasn't quite processed yet. It's hard to see our movement having any success until we come to grips with our new condition, a condition that is no less ours because we never chose it.

Subversion is the game the entire anti-chavista country is now engaged in, whether consciously or unconsciously.

To dissent from the hyperleader is to subvert the state system he has crafted, a system based on mindless obedience, complicit sycophancy, and an essentially limitless willingness to lie to the public for political benefit. It's a system you won't find described in any official document, certainly not in the 1999 constitution. It is the state of The State in fact, not in law.

And article 333 of that same document tells you all you need to know about your duties in such an eventuality.

Subversion is not a road we've chosen, it's a road that's been chosen for us. The only question now is whether we can subvert the chavista state creatively, effectively and constructively, in a way that helps us lay out the basis for something better down the road.

I think subversion of the current regime will need to take place along many axes. Some overt, some covert. Obviously, as bloggers, we can't do much about the latter, other than hope for their success. But we can, in our small way, contribute to the former.

Because subverting the chavista state is also about subverting the habits of mind that sustain it: the endless willingness to subjugate reality to political convenience, the mindless cult of personality that raises a single man's will above the law. It means challenging the cognitive cornerstone of the entire chavista system: the out and out refusal to submit the leader's dictates to critical scrutiny, to hold them up against the measuring bar of reason.

Call it cognitive subversion. That's the business this blog is in. Time we faced up to it.

Chavez throws hissy fit, your savings lose 15% of their value

Quico says: Reuters is reporting that the parallel bolivar plunged as low as Bs.6.2 to the dollar today in response to Chávez's bank nationalization histrionics. Funny to think how just a few weeks ago Nelson Merentes was pledging the Voldemort rate would climb to Bs.3.45:$ by the beginning of December (i.e., now.)

You almost have to pity the guy...the bureaucratic equivalent of a hired shopkeeper in a china shop owned by a wildebeest.

Intervention!

Juan Cristóbal says: - A reader in Caracas told us yesterday that he was disappointed in Caracas Chronicles. He usually came to CC to find information and solace, but lately, there's been no solace.

He got that right.

Quico and I have always tried to find the proverbial silver lining in current events. But lately, that's been hard to find. I blame it on El Niño.

So, bloggerfam, this is a cry for help. We demand an intervention!

Is there any hope? And if so, where do you find it? 'Cause the light at the end of the tunnel seems to have flickered out with the latest blackout.

I think of my friend Rafa, who years ago told me something that has stuck in my mind: "Este país es una mierda, pero como se goza!"

Maybe he's right. I should give him a call.

PS.- Quico read the previous version of this post and hated it. He asked me for a re-write, demanding I make it short and funny. Short I can do, but it's hard to make a post about how depressing everything is ... funny!

Picking up on new memes

Juan Cristóbal says: - Way back in the early days of 2005, Hugo Chávez declared himself a socialist.

These were the lazy, hazy days of the post-Recall Referendum. The government had consolidated power, and was fresh off a sweeping victory in the 2004 Regional Elections. In the words of then-Vice President José Vicente Rangel, chavismo had the highway "all to themselves."

That was the moment Hugo Chávez decided to amp up the rhetoric.

It's easy to forget, but Chávez didn't say he was a socialist prior to then. His rhetoric was wrapped in a vague, nationalistic, state-centered, pseudo-Bolivarian, militaristic shtick that was hard to define. Only in 2005 did he reveal himself to be a socialist.

We all know what came afterward.

I started thinking about this when, today, Chávez reiterated something he has been saying a lot lately: his Revolution is about "class struggle," about "poor versus rich."

It seems clear this is chavismo's new meme. This is how they will frame the next phase.

Perhaps this is the reason why they are moving against the kleptocrats within their own ranks. Perhaps this explains why Chávez has his sights set on the nations' banks, who have, so far, escaped the wrath of the autocrat and have played silent partners to his policies.

Long gone are the days when chavismo would say there was space in his Revolution for the middle class, when he would try and forge an alliance with the business elite that was willing to work within the bounds of socialism. Will we soon long for the days when he would kid around with Juan Carlos Escotet? There is no space for these shenanigans in class warfare.

The questions Juan Carlos Zapata and others asked ourselves back in 2006 - well worth revisiting here and here - stemmed from the contradiction between the "socialist" rhetoric and the cozy government/business clique operating on the ground.

Perhaps this new meme signals chavismo's willingness to purge this alliance.

If so, a lot of people should be shaking in their Ermenegildos.

Annals of the Vulture Meat Guardianship Corporation

Juan Cristóbal says: -

"I will be in any corner the fatherland demands me to be in, fulfilling my duty, fighting from my trench, backing the President and his political process. I will join in battle, whether from the most humble place or from the most decisive one. We all know we are of value to the Revolution, to the country, to the transformation of society and to the chances of saving the planet. Because I believe that without socialism, life will not be possible."

Socorro Hernández, former Minister of Telecommunications, former head of CANTV, chavista sycophant. May 15th, 2009.

Yesterday, Ms. Hernández was named as one of the five members of the board of the CNE, Venezuela's supposedly impartial elections arbiter.

This is the person in charge of counting our votes.

Socorro!

A useful illusion?

Quico says: Watching this video, I can't decide if Ciudadanía Activa is performing a valuable civic service by keeping alive the pretense of constitutional government or if this is the discursive equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight.

What do you think?

Edo-what?

Juan Cristóbal says: - It's not every day that you learn something about your own country from the New York Times. So do yourself a favor and don't miss Simón Romero's article about the people of the upper Caura river in Bolívar state. It's a tour-de-force.

The article focuses on the daily lives and current struggles of the native Ye'kuana and Sanema peoples, centered in a tiny hamlet called Edowinña. Anyone venture to guess how you pronounce that correctly?

It's also about conservation efforts, the clash of civilizations and how these people are caught in the middle. While you're there, don't miss the accompanying audio slide show.

One of the many surprising passages is this one:

More recently, the Ye’kuana and Sanema fought a brutal war in the 1930s, apparently over Sanema raids for metal and women, forcing the Sanema into a subservient role in some Ye’kuana villages.

Personally, I knew nothing about these people, this region or even this war, so a big thank you to Romero.

PS.- Along these lines, Kepler pointed me to a great blog written by a capuchin friar working in the Gran Sabana. It's worth a read (in Spanish).

Hondurans go rogue

Juan Cristóbal says: - I should know better than to post about Honduras given how badly it went the last time, but here goes: by electing a President yesterday in imperfect but legitimate elections, the Honduran people have decided their fate, rest of the world be damned.

Good for them.

President-elect Porfirio Lobo has been recognized by the US, Peru, Panama, Colombia and Japan. Spain has announced it will soon re-visit its tough stance.

Brazil is leading the guys with the pitchforks, a group that includes our very own Hugo Chávez, Cristina Kirchner, Michelle Bachelet and the OAS. That Brazil's Lula da Silva has refused to recognize this election when, just last week, he embraced the illegitimate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks volumes about his idea of democracy.

Lula's stance toward Lobo is even more hypocritical given how quick he has been to rubber-stamp Hugo Chávez's elections. Tainted elections are OK, as long as the Left wins, nao é verdade companheiro?

Tancredo Neves must be rolling in his grave.

As for Chávez, it has been quite the sight to see his diplomats grasp for straws, questioning the legitimacy of this election because of supposedly high abstention. 2005, anyone?

Regardless of Brazil's claims to leadership in the region, they really have zero leverage when it comes to Central America. The Honduran people couldn't care less what Lula, Cristina, Insulza and the rest of the gang think of their elected leader. With the US and its allies on their side, they are fine.

So much for Brazil being the region's giant. The Emperor has no clothes.

Come to think of it, the Lobo administration should not even try to get in the good graces of this gang. If the region's left-leaning governments refuse to recognize their democratically-elected President, so be it. Honduras is probably better off not being in the empty shell that is the OAS anyway. Good riddance!

Fun with Skype

Juan Cristóbal says: - Ta-da-dun... ta-dun...

I'm sitting in my ofice. It's Friday afternoon. I'm waiting to finish a report, and the familiar Skype bell interrupts me.

Damn, bad timing. Should I take it?

It's Rafa, my best friend from college, godfather to my oldest daughter. We haven't spoken in a few months. In between my schedule and his newborn twins, we haven't found the time.

"Hermano!"

We talk a little bit about everything. Family stuff, mostly. Then, as it must, the conversation veers toward ... la situación.

Rafa is in Caracas, and he's doing really well. The son of a "pick-myself-up-by-my-bootstraps" Cuban immigrant, he's the local manager of a multinational, living in an Altamira condo, as well as it's possible to live in one of the most dangerous, politically unstable cities in the world. Sure, in the last few years he's had to adapt to the situation. He had his car armor-plated for security and he hired a bodyguard. But all in all, he's doing fine.

"You know what? Sometimes, I understand ninis. It's just so damn difficult to like the opposition!" he says.

I ask him to elaborate.

"Well, take the Chacao municipality. You know how our offices are in Altamira, in one of the swankiest buildings in the city? Well, it took us five years to get the paperwork from the Chacao municipality cleared up. Their reason for holding up our permits was that an internal door was, according to them, not where it should be."

I tell him that speaks well of them, that they are taking their job professionally.

"No, you don't understand, they were wrong," he explains with more than a tad of frustration. "Chacao firemen came to the office and verified everything was correct. That meant nothing to City Hall. One day, municipal workers showed up at my doorstep to shut down my offices. All because a door communicating a couple of offices was in the wrong place! I swore to them if they didn't back off and let us do our work, I would go down to VTV immediately and denounce their abuse of power."

"As it happened, they were wrong about the door. It took them five years to figure that one out, fess up and give us our permits. No apology was provided."

"Here comes the annoying part: they were on the brink of shutting me down, but our office building is where Trios, one of Caracas' poshest whorehouses, does its business."

Huh? I ask him to explain.

"Yes, it's right there where Le Club used to be. This is not a love motel, mind you, it's a burdel. You don't bring your date, you pick your date. Actually, you pick two or more - hence the name of the joint. It's the most exclusive place in the city - and they have all their permits! In fact, all of the city's poshest brothels - D'angelo, Divas - they're all in Chacao, they all have their permits, granted by our very own opposition. All of them are prominently advertised all over the city. And yet companies like mine doing legitimate business - we are the ones that have to stand City Hall breathing down our neck."

"Is it any wonder people are fed up?"

--------------------------

I hang up with Rafa a bit disheveled, trying to concentrate on my report that centers on how competition favors consumers and fosters innovation. The Skype ring interrupts me again.

"Primo!"

It's Patricia, my second cousin. Last year, Patricia graduated from high school and came to live with us a few months to learn English and help us with the girls. A few weeks ago, she went back home, unsure about her future.

When Patricia came to the States, she did not know what she wanted to study or where. Her parents are not wealthy, and certainly could not afford the private universities all of Patricia's girlfriends were going to. They, and the rest of the family, were strongly steering her toward Maracaibo's public university, LUZ.

Patricia had convinced us that she was going to go to URBE, an expensive private university in Maracaibo that acts as a magnet for kids looking for an easy, uncomplicated BA. The place is the epicenter of the MMC (mientras me caso) crowd that many of Patricia's friends belong to.

We could understand her not wanting to push herself too much - she's no brain surgeon, and has the grades to prove it. Still, LUZ seemed like the only choice available to her.

Patricia would have none of it. With the unbridled confidence of a teenager who thinks she knows everything, she announced she would get a scholarship and go to URBE.

"How?" we all asked. "You don't have the grades, you are unsure of what you want to study, and neither you nor we have any connections."

"That's what you think," she would say. "I'll have you know one of my best friends is dating one of Manuel Rosales' kids."

As it happens, the Zulia state government has a scholarship program called "Programa de Becas Jesús Enrique Lossada," established under the leadership of former governor Manuel Rosales as a smaller, supposedly better-run version of Chávez's Misiones. The scholarships pay your tuition in the university of your choice. Rosales spoke a lot about this program during his brief run for President back in 2006, and I was not surprised to find out it was still working under the new Pablo Pérez administration.

While the state government claims all scholarships are given out randomly, it turns out there is a back door. And it was through that back door that Patricia got in, which was why she was calling me.

"They gave me the scholarship!" she beamed. "I'm going to URBE for Media Studies. I begin in January!"

In a matter of three weeks, Patricia managed to talk herself into an expensive government scholarship, covering the tuition on her fluff-choice of a career in a less-than-serious institution. And this is supposed to showcase the opposition's approach to public policy?

I speak to my cousin, Patricia's mom, and ask her if she thinks it's right for Patricia to accept that scholarship. "Of course it is," she says. "We couldn't pay her tuition if she didn't have the scholarship. She deserves it."

I ponder that while I remember her yearly Cadivi-subsidized trips to visit us.

--------------------------

I go back to my report on competition, wondering if we will ever have true competition between our opposition political parties.

Because of this consensus that favors "consensus" over all else, opposition voters are shielded from a healthy competition between our parties. All our darts are directed at Chávez, so we end up being duped into accepting the Chacao municipality's pimping and the Zulia scholarship program as sensible public policy, forced to look the other way.

Opposition primaries would have been the perfect time to highlight those shortcomings among our own, but that idea turned out to be a non-starter. UNT is not about to let pesky voters foray into their domain in Zulia, and whichever party Leopoldo López is in this week will protect its Chacao turf. Suggest that a bit of competitive pressure might just do those areas some good and you're seen as some kind of wild-eyed radical.

Just like in business, lack of competition between parties engenders lazy institutions full of petty bureaucratic vices. The result is that instead of being the repository of the nation's moral fiber, we end up giving permits to high-end brothels and handing out scholarships to friends of our friends.

Rafa is right. Some days, it's easy to understand ninis.

The view from your window: The big apple

New York City, New York, USA. 10:00 AM.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

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Q-atharsis

Quico says: In case you haven't noticed, I have been struggling with writer's block for months. Ever since I came back from Venezuela and witnessed the deterioration in the conditions on the ground, the urge to write has been swallowed by a profound sense of pessimism and futility.

In trying to make sense of my block, I realized it was useful to think of it as an actual physical block. My block is located at the intersection of the two latest posts in the blog: Juan Cristobal's on the opposition primary accord and mine on Chávez and blood.

Venezuela's opposition is doing pretty much conventional democratic politics. Our politicians are sitting around a table, hashing out agreements, being careful where they place their commas and building their little empires. Outside, we witness the development of a political system that makes such conventional politics irrelevant.

In fact, thinking about conventional politics in this environment strikes me as vaguely grotesque. The deep despondency in that mismatch is the source of an anguish that has made it extremely difficult for me to write.

Four years ago, this blog made a sadistic little sport out of making fun of people like Hermann Escarrá and Antonio Ledezma, for striking out a ludicrously theatrical pose in their little "Comité Nacional de la Resistencia."

That resistance-fighter pose was easy to mock because, at the time, there was plenty of space for independent political action in the country, in the form of largely unimpeded media access for dissident voices, strong safeguards against electoral fraud, reasonable guarantees that going to a protest march wouldn't land you in jail, and a state that moved to repress dissent only very sporadically.

In those conditions, calling yourself a "resistance movement" was vaguely laughable, as illustrated vividly by the CNR's hilariously self-parodying habit of going back again and again to file injunctions, motions and petitions with the very same authorities they claimed to be resisting.

Fast forward to the end of 2009 and the vast bulk of those spaces have closed. Opposition voices now have extremely limited access to radio and TV, all meaningful guarantees against numerical fraud at election time have been stripped out of the latest electoral law (as the project currently stands), and protesting the government now routinely lands people in jail. The spaces for "conventional democratic politics" are desperately narrower now than they were back in 2005.

In these circumstances, what do Ledezma, Ramos Allup, and the rest of the 2005-abstention crowd do?

They hurl themselves at the train of conventional politics, getting sucked into an orgy of horse-trading over parliamentary candidacies in a way that would be unseemly but imaginably necessary in a normal country, but is vulgarly out of place in 2009 Venezuela.

And that's the real irony today. Venezuela really is getting to the point where the government has to be resisted more than it has to be opposed. But now that a daring, innovative, outside-the-box resistance movement is starting to look like the only viable option to fight an all-powerful petro-crat with a still plentiful wallet, the opposition has gone into a time warp.

They're haggling like it's 1999.

The kinds of arguments that were trotted out in favor of abstaining from electoral politics in 2005 were bogus then, but they cut mighty close to the bone now. Of course, by now, the opposition has shot its abstention wad - there is simply no way it can credibly play that card again next year after the exceedingly traumatic experience of 2005.

But when you go through the reasons people like Ledezma gave for not participating in the elections in 2005 - lack of credible guarantees that votes will be counted fairly, the suspicion that the government will do whatever it takes to win, the feeling that it's nonsensical to participate in a democratic election against an undemocratic government - each of them is much closer to the reality of 2009 than to the reality of 2005.

So the opposition is stuck. Unable to abstain from an election that it has plenty of reason to boycott, it simply has to take the lemons it's being given and make some lemonade, to turn the 2010 National Assembly vote into a "teachable moment," a time when it dramatizes its own transformation into the nation's only hope for democratic renewal. If there was ever a time to showcase its capacity for self-sacrifice, patriotism, and putting nation over personal interest, this is it.

Instead, the opposition is taking those lemons and shoving them up its own ass, leveraging the need to select candidates for a probably about-to-be-rigged vote into an opportunity to show itself at its petty, self-serving, cuarta-republick-esque worst.

The opposition needs to forget about turning itself into an alternative and take seriously the need to turn itself into a real resistance movement, a repository of the nation's moral fiber, an entity able to inspire the kinds of admiration and sacrifice a nation has to make to face down its dictatorial demons. It needs to find its own "fierce urgency of now."

Chavismo's authoritarian escalation this year has dramatically raised the bar in terms of what will be needed from a movement committed to unseating him. The opposition does not, to put it charitably, appear to be rising to the occasion.

And where's the fun in writing about that?

Chávez's achievement

Quico says: It's a question people seem to ask me a lot outside Venezuela, and it came up again the other night, in a conversation with an old and dear friend of mine:

"Now, I know you hate the guy, and probably for good reason...but if you had to pick out one achievement, one virtue in Hugo Chávez, what would it be?"

I've known my friend too long and respect him too much to fall back on the old, Teodoresque bromide about how Chávez put poverty at the top of the political agenda, yada yada yada. I'm sure there's something to that, but it feels like a cop-out at this oint. The mood was more reflexive than that, so I tried a more real riff.

"Chávez's real achievement," I said, draining the last of that bottle of wine, "the thing that sets him apart from any other charismatic leftie autocrat I can think of, is that he's put himself in the position he's in today without the massive use of state violence. It really is unprecedented, when you take the long view. Countries just don't get to where Venezuela is today without mass graves ...but we did."

"Think it through: Venezuela today is a society controlled from top to bottom, with practically no spaces left for meaningful independent political action, with a hyper-ideologized army and public administration responding unflinchingly to the orders of one man. The media? Neutered. The priests? Irrelevant. The bourgeoisie? Either cowed, fled or co-opted. The state's power? Virtually unchecked. And all this in a country that was a warts-and-all democracy as recently as a decade ago."

"It took Lenin a pile of bodies from here to Siam to get to this level of political control over Russia. Mugabe had 20,000 Ndebele bodies to bury before he had Zimbabwe by the cojones like Chávez has Venezuela. Tito's secret police had to keep shooting up people on 3 continents for decades to keep Yugoslavia nice and docile for forty years. That's what it takes, normally, to stamp your control over a country in the kind of total way Chávez has."

"But Chávez, what kind of body count does he really have? Juan Carlos Sánchez, from the Danilo Anderson case? Danilo himself? A dozen others, maybe, on the lower end of Avenida Baralt on 11A? And fifty more in jail? A disgrace, certainly, by the standards of a proper democracy...but measured against the kinds of deliriously murderous regimes Chávez loves to praise and lionize, almost embarrassingly little."

"Che Guevara had these many scalps under his belt within a week of the revolution taking Havana. Idi Amin, Khadafi, the Iranian mullahs, the Kims in North Korea these are rulers who pile up body counts and fill up prisons with a speed and efficiency Chávez both clearly admires and absolutely refuses to replicate. So far, anyway."

"And that's the real enigma, because to be sure Chávez's pantheon of leaders-to-be-emulated all have one thing in common: they're on an entirely different plane of murderousness than he is. That's the anomaly, man, the real headscratcher."

"A lot of it, I think, has to do with timing: the revolution's just moved much more slowly, much more gradually than any of the regimes I just mentioned. Classical dictatorships come in by force of arms and keep right on using those arms to maintain their control. Within a year or two, they've spilled all the blood they needed to spill to convince people not to fuck with them. And so people don't fuck with them. That's normal."

"What your normal dictator does in a year Chávez has done in ten. Ten long and miserable years, yes, but also ten years of a bark that far outstrips the bite."

"Maybe our problem is that we keep measuring him up against the standard of the normal democratic regime we'd like, rather than against the bar of the blood-soaked tyrannies he holds himself up against. Chávez has, to his own mind, made a lot of compromises over the last ten years, eaten a lot of shit to get the kind of control over Venezuelan society he has without a spasm of fratricidal violence."

"No other revolutionary that I can think of has been more willing to let opponents stay and grow rich under his watch, so long as they agreed to go-along and get-along. Khadafi had no Gustavo Cisneros, Idi Amin did not rule over a Blackberry boomlet, and Fidel certainly had no Pedro Torres Ciliberto. So the extension of political control here has gone hand in hand with the kind of softly-softly approach to 'class enemies' - in fact, if not in rhetoric - that, while shot through with insecurity, has also seen a huge number of bank accounts bulge very significantly."

"In a way, I think Chávez understands power better than almost any of his historical predecessors. More subtly, more finely. Chávez grasps that you can set up a society where even people who hate your guts get the message that they have no choice but to go along with what you say, and do go along with what you say, without having to shoot up the place until it looks like a Swiss cheese."

"And in that sense, if in no other, I think there really is something to the whole idea of 21st Century Socialism. In the 20th century, all left-wing tyrannies were baptized in rivers of blood. The first 21st century left-wing tyranny has dispensed with all that..."

Por ahora...

The people get shoved under the table

Juan Cristóbal says: - A few days ago, Venezuela's opposition announced with much fanfare it had finally reached an "agreement" on how to select candidates for the looming parliamentary elections. The announcement, praised as a positive development, instead sucked the air out of the room. The agreement amounts to the death knell of a nationwide opposition primary next year.

The text was put together by the opposition parties' quasi-umbrella group, unhappily named the Mesa de Unidad (literally, "Unity Table"...). Careful about its comas and couched in language that could only stir a vogon, the text centered on solving the problems of the opposition political class, not of their voters.

As much as it claims to represent the opposition universe, this "table" lacks a few important things: a webpage, a coherent image, and, more importantly, an important group of civil society groups led by Leopoldo López, among others. So right off the bat, serious players in our opposition fauna are not included, putting a big fat question mark over the table's legitimacy and the impact of anything it does.

What this incomplete assembly has done is approve an unwieldy compromise where some parliamentary candidates will be chosen via smoke-filled room haggling consensus, and those that can't be haggled over successfully will be put to a primary vote next year.

What that means is that the mesa's announcement kills the one truly transformational idea on the table, the one proposal able to not just settle the opposition's unity and organizational problems but to re-brand it as a modern, forward-looking, even daring and innovative force in National politics: a nationwide primary.

Instead of viewing popular participation in decision-making as a matter of principle, the agreement relegates primaries to the status of "last resort", just the thing you do when you've argued yourself hoarse and aren't getting anywhere. Voters like you and me are denied a voice, but parties-in-paper-only such as the MAS get a seat at the table. It's clear primaries are the last thing on the mesa leaders' minds, a mechanism they'll be dragged to kicking and screaming after all else has failed rather than an opportunity they'll seize with any kind of strategic vision.

Primaries are to the table like divorce is to a marriage.

What about the rest of the agreement?

Well, there's nothing there. After weeks of talks, most of the important decisions have been postponed. The rules for the fabled "consensus" have yet to be established, and they're giving themselves 15 days for the fifty (yes, 5-0) political organizations around what must be a truly massive table to agree them.

They claim that, by February, they'll have a clearer picture of where they've reached agreements and where they'll need to go to primaries. The actual primaries would take place in April at the latest, and they vow to have a complete roster of unity candidates by April 30th.

The table seemed rather pleased with itself over this agreement, or at least tried its best to present it as some kind of breakthrough. But they're sadly deluded. They're confusing a timeline with a deadline, establishing no enforcement mechanisms and giving no sign of real commitment by the table's players. They provided no details on progress regarding the rules and no hints as to how the table plans to incorporate those who have so far not participated.

The table's spokespeople asked for our trust, reminding us that in 2005 they reached a unity roster, but then gingerly papering over the fact that the 2005 parliamentary election was a disaster and that, had we not refused to participate, we would have lost by a huge margin. And let's not even touch how those agreements panned out at last year's regional elections, when picking unity candidates was a simpler proposition and much less was at stake.

The hazy deadlines, the blind faith in mechanisms that haven't worked in the past and the little consideration given to the idea of primaries are all hugely disappointing.

Worst yet, they've again failed to show the slightest hint of imagination or daring, the least shred of strategic vision, or any hint that they're aware of the need to drastically rebrand, reposition and relaunch a movement that even Venezuelans who detest Chávez have come to see as sclerotic and almost allergic to the idea of a strategic vision.

The principle-driven primary, where the people themselves take ownership of the movement to re-establish democracy in our country, has been sacrificed for the benefit of the smoke-filled-room-failure primary, where the voters are frog-marched out to clean up the messes their putative leaders leave in various bits of the Venezuelan map.

Así seguro ganamos...

PS.- Reader GTAC tells me Leopoldo López is on board with this, and he actually met with the Table. So maybe their decisions are more legitimate - but they are still not the right ones.

The view from your window: Miami

Miami, FL, USA. 3:13 pm.

Send us the View from Your Window: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm, or nageljuan at gmail dot com.

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Alleged news agency allegedly strips the word "alleged" of any meaning whatsoever, sources allege

Quico says: I almost choked on my breakfast burrito this morning when I read Ian James's write-up for the AP of Chávez's lunatic little dithyramb to Carlos the Jackal the other day:

Hugo Chavez has defended the alleged terrorist mastermind Carlos the Jackal, saying the Venezuelan imprisoned in France was an important "revolutionary fighter" who supported the cause of the Palestinians.

Wait a minute: alleged?! ALLEGED?!!!? Is this some twisted joke?

Calling Carlos the Jackal an "alleged terrorist" is like calling Barack Obama an "alleged US president" and Ian James an "alleged AP hack"!

We're talking about a guy who's not just been convicted in open court of killing two French police officers, but who's publically taken responsability for any number of notorious terrorist acts, including classics like kidnapping eleven OPEC oil minister all at once, and who's publicly defended such acts not only at the time, but also in retrospect, in a prison-cell book that accepts responsibility for and stridently vindicates his multi-decade campaign of threats, murders, kidnappings and bombings; a virtual compendium of terrorist acts.

I'm no ranting critic of the gringo MSM, but this article shows it at its spineless worst. Whatever editorial guideline it is that landed that adjective before that word makes no sense at all. The AP's decision to qualify the only profession Ilich Ramírez has ever known drains the word "alleged" of any meaning whatsoever, and tends to cast a patina of respectability on Hugo Chávez recent, full-throated defense of his brand of terrorist tactics.

Inexcusable, guys. Just inexcusable.

Fernandez Barrueco Busted...but why?

Quico says: On the day after Bolibourgeois operator extraordinaire Ricardo Fernández Barrueco got shuffled off to a prison cell at Disip - Venezuela's secret police - the questions far outnumber the answers. It's easy to guess that Fernández Barrueco - head of such bankruptrrific banks as Banco Confederado, BanPro and Banco Canarias - did something serious to displease his higher ups. Suspicions will fall most heavily on Infrastructure Minister Diosdado Cabello who, as far as we can tell (which isn't very far at all), is very much the man behind the curtain on these matters.

Part of me wants to imagine Fernández Barrueco sharing a Disip cell with his little banking empire's also imprisoned-without-trial former boss, Eligio Cedeño. Seriously, those banks are jinxed...

Yet beyond that broadest of outlines, there's no real way to discern the power politics at play here. Chalk it up to the lethal combination between the regime's opacity, its willingness to silence the media, and the pathetic disinterest that most Venezuelan media have always shown towards investigative journalism in general. Even if somebody in the Venezuelan media had the capacity and the budget you'd need to do justice to the story of Fernández Barrueco's downfall, nobody would dare to.

So no, I don't really know why he went to jail. If you do: dish!

Caracas Chronicles 2.0: Help us Test the Beta

Quico says: So the new software for Caracas Chronicles 2.0, including its custom-coded, state-of-the-art Community Powered Comments system, is now in testing. And we're looking for volunteers to tell us what they like about it, what they hate about it, what needs to improved, and what needs to be flushed altogether.

If you're interested in spending some quality time playing around with the interface and writing us some feedback on it, please send me an email: caracaschronicles at fastmail dot fm

The Collected Wit and Wisdom of Nelson Merentes

Quico says: One day after Venezuela officially went into recession with a harsh 4.5% decline in 3rd quarter GDP amid alarming signs of stagflation, let us pause to reflect on the wisdom of the man in charge of the nation's money, Central Bank chief Nelson Merentes.

January 14, 2009:

"In Venezuela there is no and there shall be no recession because the world financial crisis has had no impact on the Venezuelan economy."

"If the financial crisis lasts some five or six years, Venezuela could be affected and suffer its consequences."

31st August, 2009:

(on third quarter growth) "We won't end up very high up, we'll come in just above zero. Nonetheless, I believe we'll come out in positive territory."

"There was an inflection point, upward, and that means that it's going to be better than in the second quarter, but so far we don't know how far that point will go."

November 12th, 2009:

(on how to spur economic growth) "It's like economic accupuncture, where you have to touch the launching points so as to guarantee lift off."

"...the country is reaching a point of deflation."

Well, lets count our lucky stars we dodged that deflation bullet, at least...

I think a recession on this scale would be a big deal anywhere. But in a normal country, you could just spend your way out of the hole. Run the Keynesian playbook, the way the Americans and Europeans have been doing. You pile up a lot of debt doing that, yes, but it tends to work.

Thing is, the US and the EU could do that because they went into the crisis with their macroeconomic houses more or less in order: low inflation, credible central banks, no massive imbalances lurking just beneath the surface ready to sabotage any attempt to run the Keynesian playbook.

Venezuela, on the other hand, is going into its recession with core inflation running at 36%: i.e., facing a clearly stagflationary scenario. That means that any attempt to run the Keynesian playbook will yield not growth but, instead, more inflation.

In any event, the government doesn't really have that option because even with oil flirting with $80 a barrel they can't find enough money - or enough people crazy enough to lend them money - to try to inflate their way out of the crisis.

So, instead of countercyclical demand management, Chávez's 2010 budget calls for a brutal 33% spending cut in real terms, suggesting that, instead of Keynes's, the playbook they're really looking to run is Paul Volcker's: wringing the inflationary expectations out of the economy through a series of spending cuts, in the middle of a recession!

Just to dwell on the ironies involved here, notice that this means Chavismo is going to get forced to apply precisely the kind of harsh, pro-cyclical fiscal policy that chavistas have spent a decade criticizing the IMF for forcing countries like Argentina to apply!

Pause to take stock of what this means: what we're looking at here is Chávez making a recession deeper, on purpose, to get rid of inflation! And all on his own innitiative, not because some IMF apparatchik forced him to! Fin de mundo!

In fact - and this here is my candidate for least likely sentence ever written in the English language - on one point I do agree with Jorge Giordani, Paul Volcker, Nelson Merentes, Milton Friedman, Alí Rodríguez, Margaret Thatcher, Hugo Chávez and Ronald Reagan: purposefully cutting aggregate demand even though you're in the middle of a recession is the right fiscal response to Stagflation.

"Right", that is, in the same way that amputation is the "right" medical response after you've shot yourself in the foot, dallied for a week trying various voodoo remedies, and allowed gangrene to develop.

[Hat tip: LV]

Chavismo's Crazy New PR Strategy: Telling the Truth

Quico says: OK, people, we're through the looking glass here. Just when we thought chavismo had exhausted all the rhetorical curve-balls it could possibly throw at us, they pitch us the ultimate change-up: the truth.

Late last week, we had Arias Cardenas just come out and say Chávez would pipe down about the Colombia-US military deal if Obama would just give him an oval office audience. At the weekend, Chávez told the truth again, saying the opposition didn't have the balls to run primaries. And now, Alí Rodríguez just about busts the truth-o-meter with this neocortex-scrambling statement, which defends the government's exchange rate policy noting that "the overvalued bolivar is a mechanism for economic redistribution."

Oh wow. Turns out that the government doesn't see keeping an insanely overvalued currency as a problem in need of a solution. Just the opposite: they see it as a key means calculated to bring about a cherished end.

La vaina es a proposito!

Make no mistake about it: Alí is speaking unvarnished truth here. An overvalued currency is a mechanism for economic redistribution. Any econ undergrad could tell you that.

It's just that our esteemed Minister of the People's Power for Finance left out one small detail: redistribution from whom, precisely, and to whom?

An overvalued currency redistributes wealth from people who produce stuff in Venezuela to people who buy the same stuff abroad and then import it. That's the main effect of a policy that, in layman's terms, could be rendered as "making sure a bolivar buys more stuff abroad than at home."

Or, to be a little bit more exact, an overvalued currency means a currency that buys more once it's turned into a foreign currency (at the official rate, bien sur) than it buys internally. After all, what would you rather find when you're rooting around between couch cushions, two bolivars and fifteen cents or four quarters?

If we're going to be precise about it, it's not imports that overvaluation makes cheaper, it's the currency that imports are priced in. So overvaluing a currency is a way of redistributing wealth from people without access to those official-rate-dollars to people with access to them.

Not, of course, that you need a degree in economics to explain that to any of the thousands of poor, connectionless saps banging their heads against a keyboard in frustration that Cadivi won't release their official dollar requests while Chávez's army of Crony Socialists make off with the nation's petrodollars at bargain basement prices.

For the third time this week, we can fault chavismo for many things, but not for dishonesty. Alí Rodríguez got at a core truth here. Keeping the bolivar deliriously overvalued is no mistake; it's a cherished policy goal.

Those Hummers don't come cheap, y'know?