E Pluribus Chigüirum

Quico says: El Chigüire Bipolar long ago cemented its position as the place for the most incisive, wicked and hilarious satire in Venezuela today. But their last few posts - especially adapted to the Ley Contra Delitos Mediáticos (CDM) - have been superlative. That friggin' rat has more chispa in its little toe than most of us have in our whole families.

Viva Hillary!

Quico says: Read my little paean to Hillary Clinton for her role in the Honduran crisis over on TNR's mass blog, The Plank.

Want primaries? Join the Facebook group

Juan Cristóbal says: - Remember the idea of opposition primaries? Now there's a Facebook group promoting it. It's never too early to jump on this bandwagon...

The View from Your Window

Dublin, Ireland: 1:53 p.m.

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What God Giveth, Godgiven Taketh Away

Quico says: So, guess who is the first chicharrón to go public with enthusiastic support for Luisa Ortega Díaz's fascist little aberration of a "Media Crimes Law"?

Diosdado Cabello, of course.

It figures. Because, come to think of it, every time I see reports like this one detailing the multiple, well documented corruption allegations facing Diosdado, and then realize that, instead of whiling away his afternoons in a prison the guy is still Infrastructure Minister, in charge of the Telecoms regulations, and, in effect, the second most powerful person in my country, I'm overwhelmed by a powerful "sensation of impunity".

Turns out that, under the new law, writing something that makes me feel that way will land you in jail for two to four years...how very, very convenient!

Pardon me while I retch.

PLOP! Chronicles: Micheletti Asks Arias for Help Reinstating Zelaya

Quico says: And now for something completely different: The New York Times reports that Honduras' de facto president Roberto Micheletti has come around and now favors returning democratically-elected-then-deposed-nutter Mel Zelaya to the presidency, along the lines of the Arias mediation plan. The paper reports Micheletti's biggest problem now is building support for the San José Accords within Honduras's extremely polarized institutions.

Coming just days after Hillary Clinton blindsided the golpista elite by securing a document from the Honduran army ratifying their "unrestricted support" for the Óscar Arias mediated negotiations, Micheletti's U-Turn could constitute one of the most stunning breakthroughs for US foreign policy in the region in a long time.

Of course, putting Zelaya back in office is only half the battle for Honduras's beleagered democracy. Ensuring he can't abuse that office between now and November's elections is, arguably, the trickier half.

Still, we should pause to realize just how much more effective US diplomacy in the region has gotten in the span of just a few months. Without bluster, without threats, without marines or expeditionary forces or provocative gestures, the gringos now seem to be on the verge of squaring the Honduran circle: restoring the democratically elected leader while at the same time safeguarding the nation's constitutional institution from his attacks.

Nobody said it would be easy, and such a settlement still has powerful enemies. But Foggy Bottom is much closer to pulling this off today than seemed imaginable even 24 hours ago.

Protecting the poor, defenseless narcopetrostate from its unspeakably horrid citizens

Juan Cristóbal and Quico say: What would you say is the opposite of human rights? These days, in international usage, the defense of human rights seems to refer largely to measures that protect citizens from abuses of power against them by the state.

If we sign off on that definition, then Prosecutor General Luisa Ortega Díaz's speech to the National Assembly today must count as the diametrical opposite of human rights. Her speech, and the "Special Media Crimes Bill" she introduced, were nothing less than an impassioned plea to defend the poor, defenseless chavista narcopetrostate from abuse at the hand of its feral citizenry.

In effect, Ortega Díaz is calling for citizens who exercise their right to free speech "wrongly" to face long prison terms. That's not even the rabid escaulido twist on what she said, that's just ... what she said!

Nobody has been a harsher critic of the opposition media's many and serious shortcomings than this blog. But we need to keep our wits about us. What Ortega Diaz is proposing is a system certain to fill up Venezuela's jails with journalists, media owners and bloggers who, in one way or another, anger members of the new governing elite.

The brazenness and scope of her speech is chilling. The thoughtcrimes "media crimes" that the esteemed Ortega Diaz wants to make punishable with jail are expressed in terms vague enough to be essentially boundless.

For Ortega Diaz, journalists should be criminally liable not just for what they write, but also for the perceptions that the things they write create in their readers. Anyone who uses the mass media to communicate something that disturbs "social peace," "mental health" or "public morals" can end up in jail. Her bill calls for the incarceration of anyone who, through their use of mass media, "destabilizes the State's institutions." Anyone who broadcasts anything that may cause "hatred and hostility" toward people based on, among other things, their "ideology or political affiliation" will end up in the slammer.

Standards like those are vague enough to be replaceable by a single word: everything. Every single thing a journalist writes is bound to lead someone somewhere to create a perception different from the one Ortega Diaz thinks is right. Every single opinion a blogger writes that may cause someone out there to hate a specific politician will make us criminal in the eyes of this deranged fanatic.

(Woooops...we just called her a "deranged fanatic"...that's two to four years in jail for us!)

In effect, Luisa Ortega Díaz's bill would outlaw free speech in Venezuela, plain and simple. Her proposal constitutes the most brazen authoritarian leap this country has seen since the days of Pedro Estrada.

The View from Your Window

Houston, Texas - 2:45 pm

The View from Your Window

Caracas, Venezuela: 11:32 a.m.

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Bazooka Hugo

Quico says: The Case of the Swedish Bazookas makes it clear that something very odd is happening in the bonkers-at-the-best-of-times world of chavista foreign policy. The Venezuelan government is no longer in the business of providing explanations, half-assed apologies, or even the odd preposterous-but-face-saving denial in the face of incontrovertible evidence of meddling in its neighbors' affairs. More and more, its response is based on simple force: back off!

To this day, I'm not really clear if the official Venezuelan line is that the Venezuelan-owned Saab Bofors AT4s found in the hands of the FARC got to Colombia before Chávez came into office, or that they got to Colombia after Chávez took office but it was all the deed of some rogue officer and had nothing to do with government policy, or that it's all a big lie and the FARC never had Venezuelan bazookas and this whole story is all just a Colombo-Swedish conspiracy set up in Langley, or that Aliens from the planet Opsidion 5 telepathically transported the AT4s out of a Venezuelan armory and into the Colombian jungle as part of some intergalactic practical joke.

Each of those might be considered an account of what happened. Not all of them, needless to say, can be considered equally convincing. But each, in its own way, could be taken as an explanation.

The problem isn't that we never got a good explanation, it's that we never got an explanation at all.

They can't even say they were blindsided by the revelation. Yesterday, Casa de Nariño - Colombia's Miraflores - announced that, as long as 8 weeks ago, they had disclosed to the Venezuelan government that Venezuelan AT4 rocket launchers had been found in FARC's posession. That means that Jane's public disclosure of the find could not have caught Venezuelan diplomats unaware.

So, if I'm getting this right, Casa Amarilla - Venezuela's foreign office - had two months to think up some excuse, some sort of justification, any kind of marginally-coherent discourse about the find, but they just sort of never got around to it. Which kind of reminds me of that old afroman song...

I was gonna justify those AT4s, but then I got high
I could've lied and patched things up with Colombia, but I got high
Now I'm recalling ambassadors, and I know why
Because I got high
Because I got high
Because I got high

Nowhere in the Venezuelan response have I seen any direct mention of the AT4s themselves, which is odd considering they're at the center of the crisis.

The closest we've gotten is Chávez's oblique suggestion that anyone could stamp any serial number on the side of any gun. Leaving aside the fact that the Swedish government is not likely to be drawn into this controversy if indeed the serial numbers were fake - something that could easily be verified - if the weapons found in Colombia have adulterated serial numbers, the Venezuelan military should have no trouble producing the original weapons with the serial numbers matching those the Colombians reported to Saab Bofors. Logically, if the weapons found in Colombia aren't really Venezuelan, the original AT4s should still be under Venezuelan control, right?

Show me the bazookas!

In the event, Chávez won't get pressed into that discussion cuz he knows he got caught. Which is why his response is basically a tsunami of bile, a rapid fire succession of threats and insults that manage to escalate the crisis without ever offering any kind of account - sane or otherwise - for how it is that high-tech Venezuelan military hardware ended up in the hands of a terrorist organization.

It's genuinely baffling. Once you get over the shock, though, you have to surmise that the very explanation-less-ness carries a message here. It's an implicit admission rolled into a contempt-filled refusal to be held accountable all snugly tied up in the threat to cause a major diplomatic/economic crisis in Colombia if such delicate accusations are ever aired again.

It makes for a worryingly Kim Jong Il-ish diplomatic crouch. Chávez appears ready to simply start cranking up the crazy as a way of getting his opponents to back off.

This time, the threats were strictly economic. Next time?

Hat tip: Lorenzo Albano. You saw it first, man.

The View from Your Window

Madrid, Spain - a few months ago.

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What's missing in this press note?

Juan Cristóbal says: - The Governor of Lara, Henry Falcón (PSUV), went out onto the streets of Barquisimeto the other day, got on a steam-roller and proceeded to turn more than 400 confiscated firearms into pancakes. The accompanying press note carried the news, with Falcón stating that the public destruction of weapons is part of a plan to disarm the civilian population and decrease the crime rate. The curious thing? The note says nothing about socialism nor Chávez.

Falcón is a model for how a chavista Governor should behave. He is apparently pragmatic, talks about the issues and thinks about public policies that make sense instead of advancing an abstract ideological agenda only to get on the government's good side. By tacking on to the center and presenting the more human face of chavismo, he managed to get 73% of the vote, by far the best result of any governor elected last November, from either side.

Listen to him talk after being elected and he is crystal clear. Chavismo should "take stock of itself" and stop basing its campaigns on "discrediting other people." He suggested Chávez should focus on tackling crime, more effective social policy and work on infrastructure.

Sure, he's chavista, although for a while last year the government was so mad at him they briefly expelled him from the party. Like a good soldier, he dutifully worked for the Constitutional Amendment.

And yet - I have to respect his autonomy, his willingness to break the mold and follow his own insight. It's a refreshing sight: a chavista who cares about outcomes, speaks his mind, is not afraid of criticizing his own party, and somehow manages to get away with it.

The View from Your Window

Oslo, Norway - 8:30 p.m.

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Coming Out FARC

Quico says: Last week's revelation that high tech Swedish anti-tank missiles have been seeping across the border from the Venezuelan military into FARC's hands reminded me of nothing so much as Ellen's much hyped-up coming out in 1997: it's not that it was actually a surprise, it's not as though we didn't all know. It's just that, now, it's official: Venezuela arms FARC.

We have the serial numbers.

The rocket-launchers' Swedish manufacturer confirms the match. We have the emails detailing the entire handover process culled from Raul Reyes's laptop - y'know, the one I'm talking about: the one that Marulanda, in Mono Jojoy's voice, certified as real. We even - deliciously - have Venezuelan General Clíver Alcalá pushing FARC to grab more bazookas than they'd originally agreed.

Maduro's bizarre non-sequitur of an undenial - "these stories are part of a brutal campaign against Venezuela" - smack of the utter loss for words of someone just plain caught with pants in ankle position. No seas comemierda, Nicolás. We have the serial numbers.

Update: Actually, Bill Cosby cracked Madurothink years ago... "I was gettin' a bazooka for you!"

Blog The Plank

Quico says: A version of my rant from this morning is now over on The New Republic's mass blog, The Plank.

Check it out.

The View from Your Window

Austin, Texas - 7:50 pm

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The Tenth Anniversary of a Slap in the Face

Quico says: It was hard, this weekend, seeing those images of Hugo Chávez celebrating the tenth anniversary of the 1999 Constituent Assembly. Presidential saches and speeches; pomp and (what passes for) circumstance (in the bolivarian republic.) All this public splendor to celebrate the drafting of a constitution that, as Teodoro Petkoff's bon mot hazs it, reads more and more like a subversive pamphlet, so far removed are its norms from the day-to-day reality of the way power is exercised in Venezuela.

Those of us who like to write about the way the constitution is nullified, day-by-day, in Venezuela have something of a long-tail problem: a relatively small number of flashy, highly visible violations (you know the list: the right to private property, the separation of powers, the apolitical nature of the military) grab all the attention, while a much larger constellation of less spectacular outrages barely merit a mention. Call them the B-List Violations: a long list of also-rans in the unconstitutionality stakes.

My own impotent outrage typically centers on the almost-entirely-forgotten Article 23. It's an article of staggering ambition that, for some reason, you almost never hear anything about. Article 23 actually makes international human rights treaties constitutionally binding within Venezuela, as well as directly applicable by all Venezuelan courts.

That means that, in theory, you should be able to go up to a Venezuelan judge and cite your rights in, for instance, article 13 of the American Convention on Human Rights (to wit: the right to free expression may not be restricted via indirect means, such as the abuse of official controls on newsprint, on radio frequencies, or of inputs and goods used to broadcast information, in order to impede the free communication of ideas) and that norm is supposed to have constitutional status, superseding any and all Venezuelan legislation on the matter. Taken seriously, Article 23 would revolutionize Venezuelan justice.

Somehow, though, TSJ never got the memo. Nor did anyone else. It's just weird: nobody seems to know about Article 23. You never hear Marta Colomina all huffed up and horrified at its total desuetude. And Prof. Colomina very rarely passes up the chance to get all huffed up and horrified.

But it's there. Article 23 is. Not because aliens from the planet Zorgon put it there. Not because the CIA conspired to sneak it in. It's there because the 94%-chavista constituent assembly put it there in 1999. You know the one I'm talking about, right? The one Chávez went to commemorate this weekend? That one!

Today in TalCual, Miranda State Education Director Juan Maragall focuses on another of these also-rans. Everybody knows that the Constitution says that tenured judges have to earn their seats through "public competitions" - concursos públicos de oposición - where political criteria cannot be taken into consideration. But did you know that, according to article 104, the same thing applies to schoolteachers? Few outside the profession know that...nor should they, as article 104 has become another serial dust-gatherers.

In practice the main qualification you need to get a nice, steady job warping the minds of small children is a PSUV membership card.

Of course, if you're accepted into the profession without a concurso you don't get tenure. You can only be taken on as a substitute or interim teacher, meaning you can be fired by the Education Ministry at any time and for any reason, or no reason at all. Totally exposed, you end up becoming a kind of lower-court-judge-of-the-classroom: at all times, you are one-insufficiently-chavista-remark away from seeing your livelihood vanish.

In Maragall's phrase, the practice of appointing most teachers as interim or substitutes has started to spawn its own juridical framework: recent Education Ministry resolutions make it a prerequisite to have entered the profession as a sub, or as an interim teacher - that is, discretionally - before you can even go to concurso. So, the status quo is that you can now only opt for tenure if you've been picked discresionally, a dedo, without your credentials ever having been evaluated in open competition.

That's how easy it is to upend the Venezuelan constitution. No need to bother with referendums or amendments or reforms or any of that jazz. An education ministry resolution does the job.

It'd be an interesting, if somewhat morbid, exercise to go through all 350 articles of the 1999 constitution and try to figure out precisely how many have been subverted like this, sotto voce, without anyone much talking about it or acknowledging it out loud or even quite realizing that it's happened.

And amid all this, VTV forces us to watch Chávez celebrating the tenth anniversary of...of what, exactly? It's never been clear to me. Over time, I've come to see the 1999 Assembly as one of the most bizarrely nonsensical public spectacles in these ten years of intensely bizarre public spectacle.

The best way I can make sense of it is that for Chávez, the constitution is a fetish. Not in the contemporary, sexual sense of the term, but in the older anthropological one: a kind of amulet, a magical thing whose powers are embodied in its physicality, in its life as object, and are quite independent of anything actually written inside. It's the little book itself that interests Chávez, the physical embodiment of his claim to legitimacy. But his claim, ultimately, is mystical rather than legal - based on a metaphysical consubstantiation of leader and pueblo that cannot be mediated through anything so humdrum as a set of formal legal rules.

And so the little blue book came to be used as a kind of magic charm, waved around in inverse proportion to how often it was actually read, much less interpreted or - heaven forbid - applied.

In the end, reading the constitution - taking it seriously as text - is a profoundly counterrevolutionary thing to do. It can only lead to the kind of apostasy you keep finding in this blog - hell, earlier in this post, even - where an interpretative discourse is developed to compare the legal standard set out in the text to the reality instantiated day-to-day by those who wield power in Venezuela.

Discourses like those are inherently destabilizing to a regime like Chávez's. They insert human intelligence where it is least wanted, least tolerable, most dangerous. When you take the constitution seriously as text, when you set out to interpret it rationally, you interpose yourself between the caudillo and the masses, limiting and qualifying his claim to authority over them.

To do so is to meddle in the mystical link between them. And chavismo cannot put up with such an affront: it needs to silence it. Because, in the end, to read the constitution with fresh eyes is as close to apostasy as you can come in the secular religion that is chavismo.

Ten things we learned this week

Quico and Juan Cristóbal say: As we cross the proverbial finish line by posting our 100th post of the week, here are a few things we learned along the way.

1. Blogging this much is really, really hard. No, really.

2. It's actually not that hard to find topics to blog about. The half-baked ideas and general nuttiness coming out of Caracas, Tegucigalpa and anywhere chavismo's tentacles dare to reach simply boggles the mind. It's figuring out what to say about this stuff that's hard.

3. One US dollar will buy you about 18 lempiras.

4. While the comments section suffered a bit, we felt the quality of the comments was much higher.

5. Juan Cristóbal does better with high frequency blogging than Quico. Juan had a ball this week, Quico almost went bald...

6. In Honduras, the money is called "Lempiras".

7. Our readers are the best. Quico's inbox is bursting with views from y'all's windows. (We'll get to them little by little!) We were afraid we might lose readers due to the overwhelming pace, but readership is up 18% this week. Thanks!

8. The quality of the posts was somewhat lower, for obvious reasons. But we also felt weirdly liberated. All that pressure to post ends up leading to cathartically devil-may-care writing!

9. That girl in the bikini is smokin'.

10. It's just like Mel Zelaya to finally set foot back inside Honduras right as we finish the marathon...prick!

Have a good weekend everyone. It's less to a saner schedule for us from Monday.

Post 100 of 100. And they said it couldn't be done!

Bolívar = Stalin, and other pearls of wisdom from the sick minds still tending the rump Noticiero Digital

Quico says: Anybody remember Noticiero Digital? In its time, it was genuinely pathbreaking: the first site that made Venezuelans stop and realize they could get their news faster online than on traditional media. Then Frank de Prada sold the thing, made a bundle, ran off to do Noticias24 and all the traffic soon followed him, while Noticiero Digital slowly degenerated into, well, basically a space for this kind of lunatic rant:Yup. Those guys are convinced Chávez is subtly trying to persuade us Bolívar is just like Stalin. Totally insane? You betcha...but kind of entertaining too.

(I am unable to confirm, btw, rumors to the effect that the current owner of Noticiero Digital is married to one Miguel Henrique Otero.)

Post 99 out of 100. Dizzy!

Chávez accuses Barack Obama of planning to invade Venezuela

Juan Cristóbal says: - Here you have it, in his own words. A preposterous idea if I've ever heard one, but one Chávez used to justify a huge military buildup.

Post 98 of 100 ... finish line is ever closer.

Mental Health Break - El Saladillo Chronicles

Juan Cristóbal says: -

Post 97 of 100 ... this makes me all verklempt...

The Original and The Best

Quico says: Credit where credit is due: in the overcrowded field of snivelling pro-Chávez sycophants and propagandists, nobody does it better than Mark Weisbrot. His LA Times OpEd today finds Herr Whitebread in fine form, with one of those finely-honed, long-rehearsed, the-media-and-the-establishment-are-lying-to-you rants certain to make respectable white West Coast liberals rally to his cause. Not for Weisbrot the maximalist polemical style of, say, Green Left Weekly: I'm sure that's how he thinks, but he's too savvy, too aware of the way traditional leftist discourses would turn off his target audience to go down such an rhetorical dead end. By the time you're through reading this stuff, you'll swear Mel Zelaya is a monaguillo, Hillary Clinton is Rumsfeld in drag, and we have always been at war with East Asia...he's just that good.

Post 95 of 100. Panblanco Chronicles.

A girl in a bikini

Quico says: This is a girl in a bikini. I could come up with some kind of justification for what she's doing on my blog, but that would be so un-N24...

Post 95 of 100. Just couldn't help myself.

Our unbearable military fetish

Juan Cristóbal says: - Ever notice how every single freakin' holiday in Venezuela is an excuse for a military parade? Simón Bolívar’s birthday, the 5 de Julio, the 19 de Abril. Even for Christmas the President goes around military bases presenting his "saludo navideño." Mind you, this didn't start with Chávez. Some genius before him came up with the idea of turning the commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the Fifth of July - a civic act if I ever saw one - into the God-forsaken "Día del Ejército." So how about starting a holiday like the "Día sin Militares" - kind of like the "Día de Parada," only we go around pretending the Armed Forces don't even exist.

Juan Montalvo had it right. Colombia es un colegio, Ecuador es un convento, y Venezuela es un cuartel. Sad, really.

Post 94 of 100 ... and I'm ready for this to end...

PSF bandwagon welcomes new member?

Juan Cristóbal says: - Spike Lee is in Caracas today, speaking at the Cinemateca Nacional. Wonder what he'll have to say...

Post 93 of 100 ... largando la chicha...

CC and the MSM

Juan Cristóbal says: - As we close our final day of the Sullivan challenge, one of the interesting things this experience has brought home for me is how dependent blogging is on the information provided by the mainstream media (MSM). Our "business model" goes somewhat like this: we try and find out what's going on via Noticias 24, or Tal Cual, or El Universal or Globovision, and then we comment on it, and you people pitch in with additional insights. Once in a while we talk about things nobody is talking about, or write more deeply-felt, cerebral stuff. So while we rightly bemoan the status of the MSM, we must acknowledge our parasitic relationship with it. In fact, if the MSM goes away, I dunno what we would end up writing about. You can go ahead and call us hypocrites.

Newspapers all over the world are going bankrupt. Just yesterday, for example, my local newspaper printed its last edition after 174 years in circulation. So is too soon to start imagining a Venezuela without El Nacional or El Universal?

You know that's coming. Sources say that circulation for El Nacional is at a paltry 20,000 editions daily. El Universal, with its higher-brow attitude, can't be doing much better. As the demographics change and Internet penetration goes up, people are getting more and more of their news online and from the TV.

Not all of this is Chávez’s fault. In fact, I venture to say most of it isn't. This is a worldwide phenomenon that has its roots on the way technology is changing and on the emergence of sites such as Craigslist or eBay that provide low-cost competition to those pesky ads newspapers get their revenues from.

But it also has to do with how Venezuelan newspapers have decided to suck their way to the grave. Sometimes, reading Venezuelan newspapers makes me so angry with their lack of quality, I can't wait for them to close shop and finally get what they had coming to them.

And yet, here we are, free-riding on their work. It's a scary new world we are entering, one fraught with opportunity but also with significant perils. Because once the only reporters are those working for VEA and Panorama (you know those guys won't go out of business), where will we get the truth from?

Post 92 of 100 ... be careful what you wish for ...

Freedom to sell your car

Juan Cristóbal says: - One of the most frustrating aspects of watching the (in)action of the Venezuelan opposition is that nobody seems to make an eloquent case for freedom. Ultimately, what the government's policies boil down to is a complete and utter takeover of the freedom of Venezuelans, freedoms one Simón Bolívar, born 226 years ago today, gave his life to secure. Can there be anything less Bolivarian than stripping Venezuelans of their basic rights? Case in point: the current discussion regarding the proposed Law for the Car Sector.

In case you haven't heard, the government is now discussing a law whereby it will regulate (and I mean really, really regulate) the prices and profits that car dealers can make. Currently, getting a car in Venezuela takes months of waiting and bribing. Typically, you don't have a choice on the type of car, the features, or the color - once your number is up, you buy what you can get.

Hell, there is even a scam going on between dealers and banks. If you don't work through the bank the salesman gets a commission from, you're essentially placed at the bottom of the list. This happened to my brother, who wanted to pay for his car in cash and had the door slammed in his face.

All this is the product of heavy regulation. From the import permits to get the parts to the dollars needed to buy them, from the wages your workers make to the gas that goes into the car - every single step of the process of buying and owning a car is regulated. And the auto sector is in crisis. Coincidence?

Well, the government's response to the crisis is, unsurprisingly, more regulation. With this new law, the government will set dealers' margins at 15% of the wholesale price (this in a country with rampant inflation). It will also ban the resale of a car within two years of having bought it, and if you get caught, you will have to pay a huge tax.

Gas, meet fire. Any eight-year old can understand this creates a whole series of perverse incentives. The likely product of these policies ranges from a black market of car registration to an increase in car theft.

And yet all these arguments against this policy fall somewhat short because they miss the basic point: this is an unacceptable takeover of the basic rights of Venezuelans. Because when the government forbids you to sell something that is rightfully yours, we are all less free, and we are all poorer.

Post 91 of 100 ... this challenge is affecting my marriage, Katy está cuaimatizada

Happy 226th Birthday, Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad!

Quico says: On big B's birthday, I'll share this bit from page 50 of John Lynch's biography, where he describes Bolívar's trip to London as, essentially, ambassador for the First Republic in the summer of 1810:

On occasions, from his rooms in Duke Street, Bolívar made his own way around London. He was thrown out of a brothel when one of the girls mistook him for a homosexual demanding services that were not on offer. When he tried to calm her with banknotes she threw them into the fire and raised the rest of the house: 'Imagine the scene, I spoke no English and the prostitute no Spanish. She seemed to think that I was some Greek pederast and created a scandal that made me leave faster than I had entered.'

Is there another historical character who we've heard more about and know less about?

Post 90 of 100. What exactly did he ask that girl to do?!

The View from Your Window

Singapore - 12:55 p.m.

Post 89 of 100. Don't want to lean on the VFYW thing too heavily, but...

Horseshoes and Handgrenades

Quico says: As far as pro-Micheletti agi-prop goes, this video puts the golpista case as well as such a thing can be put:Trouble is, close only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades. It does you exactly no good to go through all the various ways what you did was legal and then gloss over the big, bad, stinking illegality at the center of it all: putting Zelaya on a plane in his pajamas.

In fact, all this video does is beg the question: if you had such a compelling legal case for arresting the president and putting him on trial, why did you have to muddle your message with such a visible illegality?

Oh, and you don't exactly cover yourself in glory when you fire journalists who use the word "coup" to describe your "coup" either, y'know?

Sorry UCD, but no cigar.

Post 88 of 100. Fools to the right of me, jokers to the left...

ROFLMAO - FARC Style

FARC says: "From the rebel mountains of Colombia we add our voices to the chorus that rejects the military coup against the government of president Zelaya in Honduras," says a FARC communiqué, before going on to condemn the Colombian government's "double standards." I swear to fucking God.

Post 87 of 100. We don't have a hemisphere, we have a farce.

A Sprawling Cultural Desert

Quico says: So in my desperate scramble to rustle up enough material for 100 posts in five days, I've started reading stuff I don't usually read, including El Universal's OpEd pages. It's a soul crushing exercise. You can read one opinion piece in El Universal after another all morning without ever encountering a fresh thought, an original insight, any hint at all of a human imagination alive and awake behind the keyboard.

Today, Alberto Jordán wisely opines that it is an insult to Francisco de Miranda to put him on a big mural alongside Che Guevara. Alvaro Benavides breaks the news that Venezuelans have gotten used to things that used to be totally unacceptable. Argelia Ríos breaks new ground saying "everything is going from bad to worse." Clodovaldo Hernández burnishes his enfant terrible credentials by daring to suggests some priests may - gasp - not actually be celibate! Eduardo Sapene not only surrenders to the most boilerplatish of boilerplate with an "emperor-has-no-clothes" rant but actually pads out his column, which was only 300 words to begin with, by summing up the original story!

Only Prof. Agustín Blanco Muñoz breaks the dreariness with a kind-of-interesting, somewhat-iconoclastic piece on the historical roots of Venezuelan caudillismo. Aside from his bit, there isn't a single opinion in the whole paper you couldn't get for free by listening in to the conversation in any arepera anywhere in the country.

Seriously, who picks these columnists? As it stands, El Universal's opinion pages amount to little more than a senseless ecocide: the wanton destruction of countless trees used to print opinions barely worth the electricity it takes to show them as pixels on a screen.

Post 86 of 100. Snob-o-rama, I know, I know...

Visit Beautiful Honduras!

Quico says: As of noon today, the 72 hour deadline set by the de facto government for Venezuela's diplomatic mission to leave Honduras will expire, and our guys in Tegucigalpa revert to the status of, I guess, tourists.

There are sooooo many ways this BS could escalate, it's scary.

Post 85 of 100. Lets Go Honduras!

Teach us more about democratic legitimacy, Sensei!

Quico says: This week, Fidel Castro attacked Óscar Arias for failing to ensure that Honduras returns to democratically elected government fast enough. No, no, seriously: This week, Fidel Castro attacked Óscar Arias for failing to ensure that Honduras returns to democratically elected government fast enough!

Post 84 of 100. We're through the looking glass here, people!

Profeteering from the mentally ill is not nice!

Quico says: Ever notice how, every time Chávez has one of his "episodes", some dog of war in Russia winds up several billion dollars richer? In my book, profiteering from the mentally ill is really beyond the pale. You'd almost think people strategically placed to charge commissions deals like these are talking up the episodes.

"Comandante, the empire stalks us at every turn...this Colombian deal is a pre-invation maneuver...we must protect the fatherland..."

...ka-CHING!

Post 83 of 100. Gotta love what Google Images returns for "Dog of War".

The View from Your Window

Ann Arbor, Michigan - 2:47 p.m.

Feel like sharing the view from your window? Send a snapshot along to caracaschronicles@fastmail.fm

Post 82 of 100. Apparently Juan Cristobal works right across the street from a massonic temple...hmmmmm...

Chavismo's Deep Roots

Quico says: This video speaks so powerfully to the roots of the Chávez phenomenon, it really should be required viewing to people who think chavismo just sort of happened, out of nowhere. We see a 60s-era Caldera talking about the housing problem in Caracas. The guy seems well-intentioned enough - but then you see his constituents, and you feel just how desperately out of touch he was. Talking in turgid, bureaucratic gobbledygood about "topographic circumstances" and "habitability conditions" and "sanitary installations" while people's ranchos fall about around them, Caldera was from Mars, the voters were from Venus.

What's great about this video - well, at least the first few minutes, before it goes all conceptual and incomprehensible - is how strongly the sense of social distance comes across, how clearly that comes through. It's almost tribal. Caldera belongs to one tribe. His constituents belonged to another. He seems genuinely interested in doing something for their tribe...just as long as that "something" isn't understand them. Or - heavens - empathize with their problems. Couldn't have that.

Even now, so much of Chávez's popularity is, in the end, about tribe. About who he is rather than what he does.

Post 81 of 100. Gotta love YouTube.

The ten years of the Constitutional Assembly

Juan Cristóbal says: - This July 25th will mark the tenth anniversary of the election where we picked the members of the Constitutional Assembly - an anniversary not exempt from controversy. As you may know, an overwhelming majority of the members were chavista due to the government's ability to turn a 55% vote into 90% of the members. So in commemoration of this anniversary, I went through the list of members of the Assembly just to see how much things had changed.

Some of the loyal chavistas were there: Iris Varela, Adán, Tarek, Aristóbulo, García Ponce. Others have since fallen out of favor with chavismo, sometimes dramatically: Miquilena, Olavarría, Hermann Escarrá, Alfredo Peña, Angela Zago, Ricardo Combellas. The token representatives of the opposition were also there: Claudio Fermín, Alberto Francheschi, Virgilio Ávila Vivas (?), Julio Borges (although he wasn't part of any of the "Comisiones", was he shunned?). And some others were there as "coleados": Eliecer Otaiza? Marisabel de Chávez? Henry Falcón? Mirna Vies (who?)?

Pura joyita, pueh...

Post 80 of 100 ... glancing through that list, it's a wonder we got a semi-coherent Constitution out of it. I wish it were still valid.

Eavesdropping Druglord Spook Put In Charge of the Phone Company...

Quico says: So much bizarre shit happens in Venezuela on any given day that absolute belief-beggaring insanity has the easiest time just sort of slipping between the cracks. (Unofficial) reports suggests General Henry Rangel Silva, a man who has been publicly fingered as, basically, a major drug trafficker by the US Treasury Dept, who is known to have been the point-man ordered to hush up Chávez's illegal funding of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's election campaign in Argentina (c.f., Maletagate), who ran the Venezuelan spy agency DISIP as more and more illegal recordings of private conversations made their way to state TV, some of them with cartoon sound effects layered on top...that boyscout will now run...wait for it...THE COMPANY CONTROLLING ALL TELECOMMUNICATIONS IN THE COUNTRY!

Post 79 of 100. Hyperventilating now...

Will Maduro be driving the bus?

Juan Cristóbal says: - Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega will apparently be accompanying Manuel Zelaya by land on his trip back to Honduras. I assume this is done to leave the doors open to diplomacy and to prevent situations that the Micheletti government might interpret as a provocation...

Post 78 of 100 ... here's hoping they're all placed in the same cell...

The revolution eating its has-beens

Juan Cristóbal says: - The Bolivarian Revolution has been making some strange moves regarding corruption as of late. A few weeks ago, we learned that former Finance Minister Tobías Nóbrega (sort of like a chavista Bernie Madoff) had been indicted for corruption. Today we learned that retired general Victor Cruz Weffer, a loyal chavista pawn in the early days of the Revolution (remember the Plan Bolívar 2000?) had also been indicted.

What can we make of this? To the untrained eye, it would appear as though chavismo is trying to get its act together by going after corruption within its own ranks. But that is a shallow reading of these cases, since both men have been separated from the inner workings of the government for years now.

When reading these kinds of news, one has to weigh them against the other evidence, which points to chavismo's propensity to actually promote some of its most notorious crooks. After all, today we learned that Diosdado Cabello actually heads 31 different state offices, with my buddy Armando Briquet calling him a "latifundista gubernamental." Henry Rangel Silva, former Intelligence chief and a man heavily involved in Maletagate, was recently promoted to *gulp* president of CANTV, the state-owned telecom conglomerate. And Rafael Ramírez and his family appear to be consolidating more and more power by the day.

So while chavismo goes after its has-beens, crooks with actual power on their hands appear to be doing just fine, thank you.

Post 77 of 100 ... and that painting of Cronos grosses me out every time I see it ...

The Venezuelan People Have Fallen in Love Twice: 1945 and 1998

Post 76 of 100. My YouTube tastes are a bit more high brow than Juan's...

The other Samán

Juan Cristóbal says: - Anyone who has followed chavismo through the years knows that the guy has practically run out of new people to promote. Whenever he shuffles the cabinet, he really shuffles it - Rodríguez Chacín goes from A to B to C, Diosdado goes from E to F to G, and so on. So the meteoric rise of Eduardo Samán to the upper echelons of chavismo has sparked my curiosity. Who is the man behind the beard?

Samán, as you may recall, has gone from superintendent of intellectual property, to head of consumer protection agency Indecu (now Indepabis), to (currently) Minister of Commerce. A notorious media whore, his main merit appears to be an unwavering loyalty to Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. Most of all, he also is apparently a hard-core Marxist ideologue.

I asked around and people who have dealt with him call him an honest person but a real fruitcake, someone who thinks the fall of the Berlin Wall was just a blip in the world's unshakeable march to socialist utopia. During his time in the intellectual property office, he was famous for saying that, basically, intellectual property was a misnomer, that anything intellectual had to belong to the collective. And that was the guy in charge of guarding your patents!

As you may recall, Samán was the one who came up with the idea of the "areperas bolivarianas" which, thankfully, have yet to come to fruition. Watch for Samán to continue making news - the guy has the confidence of the President, is committed to the process, does not seem to have a corrupt streak, and is pretty much certifiably insane.

Post 75 of 100 ... any Samán stories you wish to share? This guy is going to be VP one of these days.

Sue me, but I got a laugh out of this one.

Juan Cristóbal says: -

Post 74 of 100 ... desperate to reach 80 before the day is done.

The View from Your Window

Sao Paolo, Brazil - 2:10 pm

Post 73 of 100. Expect many of these tomorrow...I'm off to bed and nowhere near 100 yet.

How Native Has Zelaya Gone?

Quico says: So native the guy is prattling on about assassination plots now! Weak, weak, WEAK!

Post 72 of 100. I'll say it one more time: WEAK!

The Dog that Didn't FARC

Quico says: Simón Romero's take in today's New York Times on the gasket Chávez blew when he heard about the new US-Colombia military agreement gets a "could do better" from this blog. The article mentions FARC all of once, in the context of Uribe bombing their camp in Ecuador last year. But nothing in the strategic ménage-à-quatre that is the Venezuela-Colombia-FARC-US relationship makes any sense if you leave out little details like the fact that Tirofijo quite literally went to his grave a-referring to Huguito as "el amigo Chávez" and b-acknowledging the Colombian government - and, by implication, the US - knew all the detail about FARC's relationship with Venezuela.

And sure, I know all about the terrors of an absurd word-limit. But c'mon...



Post 71 of 100. Picky, picky, picky.

Chigüwin!

Chigüi says: "PDVSA Anaco workers protest for their rights, but in favor of Chávez, but against the government, but with the revolution!"

Krauze's book, incidentally, has a brilliant dissection of Latin Americans' propensity to protest against the government in the name of the king/caudillo. Think Fuenteovejuna, people!

Post 70 of 100. Chigüi te amo!

How you can be 100% sure chavismo is a dead end...

Quico says: This story, culled from Newsweek, shows more than just about anything else why chavismo is destined to be remembered as a historical dead end. It calculates that there are now 1.5 Venezuelan scientists working in the US for every one working in Venezuela: in the wake of a massive, decade-long brain drain, the nation's science and research establishment has whittled away into nothingness. More than the tinpot dictator shtick, more than the crackpot economic theories, it's the revolution's almost complete indifference towards research that shows up its underlying lack of seriousness. After all, the Soviets understood that if you were going to get rid of the profit motive as a spur to research and innovation, the State had to step into the breach, supplying the resources it would take for socialism to remain competitive in the knowledge race that underpins great power competition. It turned out that Soviet Science - for all its notable achievements - couldn't sustain competition with the west. But the Soviets knew socialism couldn't be a credible alternative to capitalism if it just ceded his terrain to the other side. So sure, they lost...but they put up a fight.

Chavismo doesn't even know there's a fight on, won't even put up a show of joining the fray. It wears its petrodependence on its sleeve, and prefers scientists stateside, where they can't cause any trouble. It's only sad, really.

Post 69 of 100. Oostalgic.

However silly a Chávez parody may be, real chavismo will match it

Quico says: From El Universal's analysis of a National Assembly document entitled "Debate about the social relations of production, in Reference to the wholesale reform of the Framework Labor Law":

In addition to the end of private property, the ideas highlight the need to "displace the market as an organizational mechanism and subsitute it by the life of human beings taken care of via conscious planning for the fulfilment of their needs." President Hugo Chávez has already noted that strategic goods such as food, must not be treated as commodities, and so the law of supply and demand must not apply in this country.

Next up: repealing the Law of Gravity.

Post 68 of 100. We stalled a bit here, people, but we're coming back...

An overlooked milestone

Juan Cristóbal says: - Yesterday, the good people of Curiepe staged a protest against the government for its heavy-handed actions in taking over the local police station last week. In traditional Curiepe style, the protest was accompanied by the beating of African drums that characterize this region. But the thing that made me a double-take was that the protest was held ... in front of Miraflores Palace!

Not only were they allowed to protest, but Chavez's Minister Reyes Reyes actually came out and talked to them.

Could it be that the days of "no protesting in front of Miraflores" and "government security zones" are finally over? Or will this prompt the government to double up on the barricades surrounding government facilities?

Either way, good for them. Let's hope the drums beat louder and more frequently.

Post 67 of 100 ... that picture is not from the protest but from the celebrations of the feast of Saint John the Baptist, the traditional holiday where the drum beating is at its apex.

Jaime Bayly: October, 2008

Quico says: South America's premiere acid tongued, fire-throwing pundit let Zelaya have it back in October last year, when he signed onto the ALBA pact. Though entertaining - he is, after all, an entertainer - we should make clear that Bayly's shtick is far over the top. Still, if we'd paid more attention to clips like this before last month, we would've been less blindsided by all that's been happening.

Post 66 of 100. Bayly's On Ice.

A controversial finding on poverty

Juan Cristóbal says: - UCAB Sociologist Luis Pedro España knows about poverty. Having spent years thinking about the topic, he is one of the rare researchers in Venezuela that not only uses official data but goes further and collects his own. His latest looks like an eye-popper.

Although I've yet to read the paper (I can't find a copy online), the article from El Universal suggests it's worth taking a look. His main point is that most of the improvement in poverty comes in the "D" sector, the second-to-last rung in the classification of income levels. Incomes in the "E" sector have barely nudged.

Some of the money quotes:

"Ten years ago, 9% of the families in the E sector lived in housing with dirt floors; now that proportion is 22%. At the same time, the proportion of homes without running water went up from 40 to 60%"

"10 years ago, only 25% of the households in the B class lived in a barrio. Today, it's 57%. Now you can find families in Antímano or San Agustín who make 5 or 6 times the amount needed to cover the basic food basket, with relatives who are college graduates. The lack of housing means they cant move."

"The government's claims to the contrary, 73% of the income in the E sector does not come from the government. Public transfers are not focused and are not as important as commonly thought."

Interesting stuff.

Post 65 of 100 ... this one really piqued my interest.

How Honduras-crazy has the Venezuelan Media gone?

Quico says: So Honduras-crazy that they have their own top-level menu on El Nacional's website now...and it's actually ahead the National news tab!

Post 64 of 100. Silly.

Too Hot for VTV: The Cedice Ad The Government Won't Let You see

Quico says: Yes, it's pretty hard-hitting. But doesn't the government grasp that it loses more by giving it the notoriety that comes from having been censored than they would if they just rolled with the punches?

Post 63 of 100. Cedice "Censura".

The View from Your Window

Caracas, Venezuela - 6:30 a.m.

Post 62 of 100. Barrio adentro.

Noticias24 Knock-off Watch: Informe21

Quico says: And yet another one. Informe21 adds an extra twist to the morass of laziness and unimaginative mediocrity that is the Noticias24-knockoff web: not-particularly-nice, 1999-vintage web design. The boilerplate, culled-from-GoogleNews stories, the bucketloads of zero-comment posts, the absolute lack of anything suggesting an original voice, or an attitude, or a sense of wonder, or a pulse...all the hallmarks of the lazy, lets-jump-on-the-N24-bandwagon-and-make-a-quick-buck mentality are here. Sad. Just sad.

Post 61 of 100. Despiriting.

We leave you with Gustavo Dudamel...

Juan Cristóbal says: - ... just because. If you're in the area, do not miss his free debut with the LA Philarmonic October 3rd, at the Hollywood Bowl. Check out the accompanying musicians...

Post 60 of 100 ... schüss!

Here I come! (I think)

Juan Cristóbal says: - Manuel Zelaya today announced the take-it-or-leave-it agreement proposed by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias was "practically dead." Surprisingly, this appears to leave Zelaya, not Micheletti, in a bit of a jam.

For weeks now, Zelaya has been threatening to go to Honduras and fight for his job. Following an aborted landing that looked fake to begin with, Zelaya vowed that he would return if negotiations failed.

Well, guess what? They've failed.

Deep down, Zelaya looks like a man who doesn't want to go through all the trouble. I've been around too many coddled maracucho ganaderos to be fooled by his groomed moustache and his expensive cowboy hat. Returning to Honduras would mean going to prison. Not surprisingly, he is desperately looking for alternatives, almost regretting the vow he made to return no matter what. Will he do it?

The Micheletti government has signalled it is willing to jail him regardless of what the international community thinks. If Zelaya lands and is placed in prison, chances are the Honduran "street" will shrug it off. But if he doesn't go, he will have lost a ton of credibility. Unless something dramatic happens, it looks like the opera buffa that is Honduras is likely to continue.

Post 59.5 out of 100 ...