Caracas Chronicles

Tomorrow, March 18th, I'll be participating in the BBC's SuperPower Nation conference, live online, all day long. It'll be really cool: there will be bloggers from all over the world there, some of whom you may even have heard of. To set things up for the conference, I thought I'd give new readers a quick run-down on where we're at in Venezuela these days. (BTW, on Twitter, you can follow the conference on #superpowernation.)

So here's my very abbreviated introduction to Venezuela in 2010:

Recently, a lot has been written about "Authoritarian Drift" in our country. The Chávez government, though certainly legitimately elected and (for a time, at least) genuinely popular, has been drifting ever more decisively towards authoritarian ways of governing for over a year now. 

And it's getting worse. To my mind, these days, the word "drift" is misleading. What was once a gentle "drift" is turning more and more into a kind of Dictatorial PowerSlide, as the government steps up its assault on democratic institutions and civil liberties more and more.

By now, in Venezuela, all the tell-tale signs of dictatorship are in place: an expanding cast of political prisoners, a fully controlled court system, a paranoid governing style, an over-the-top cult of personality, deepening ties to other dictators, the shut down of dissident TV and radio stations, and now, the thing that hits closest to home: an unmistakable government plan to censor the internet, including a project to set up an Iranian-style government controlled "single gateway" for internet traffic in and out of the country. For a nation that, just 10 years ago, was considered Latin America's longest-standing democracy, it's a lot to swallow. 

Hugo Chávez has turned out to be a master of gradualism: a politician consumately skilled at slowly, very slowly, using the legitimacy that democratic election granted him into a weapon against the institutional mechanisms that give democracy its staying power. Just last week, he ordered his followers to read up on Marx's Communist Manifesto ahead of elections to the National Assembly. The message he's telegraphing to them (and to us) is clear enough: the future Chávez envisions for Venezuela is a Communist dictatorship. 

It's a grim scene, and one that makes alternative media more and more urgent, but also more and more under threat. With the traditional media increasingly censored (or self-censored under the threat of shut-down, which amounts to the same thing) - Venezuelans are turning more and more to the internet to find out what is happening in their own country. The last six months have witnessed an amazing explosion in the popularity of Twitter, which is now an absolutely vital tool for politically active Venezuelans.

Online activists like us are fighting a rear-guard battle against a government that treats all dissent as treason, and that scarcely bothers to hide anymore its determination to shut us down sooner rather than later. As this blog is written from outside Venezuela, we're still able to write with relative safety and freedom - but every day we ask ourselves how much longer this kind of free exchange of information is going to be allowed in our country.

Venezuela faces a very difficult future right now, and those of us determined to stand up for the civil rights and freedoms of Venezuelan citizens online are feeling more and more besieged. Having moved on its critics in the traditional media, we know for sure we're the next target on the government list. We're going to hang on as long as we can, telling the stories that comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable for as long that's possible. But the threat grows day by day - and we're under no illusions.

Just a couple of days after Spanish newspaper ABC noted that a second high profile ETA sympathizer, José Antonio Egido Sigüenza, is also on the Venezuelan government's payroll, a Spanish government spokesman reaffirms Spain's "full confidence" that Venezuela will cooperate in the fight against ETA.

Egido Sigüenza - whose day job is as a paleomarxist academic at the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry's Institute of Higher Diplomatic Studies - was one of 40 Batasuna members accused by Spain's Public Prosecution service in 2008 of "subordination to ETA," after a police investigation that lasted almost six years. He was barred from participating in local elections in the Basque Country last year due to his documented ties with ETA. (Which, obviously, hasn't barred him from getting invites to TeleSUR.)

So lets review the bidding: Spain has "full confidence" that a government which won't even stop paying terrorists and their sympathizers a salary every month is going to collaborate fully in the fight against them. The Moratinos Doctrine never looked more schizophrenic. 

For much of the last eleven years, one of the hardest-to-miss themes in the Chávez era has been the incongruence between the residual bits of liberal democracy in our political life and Chávez's obvious, fawning admiration for every tin-pot dictator who came his way, from Ahmadinejad and the drug-addict who runs Lybia, to the child molester who runs Nicaragua, the various bits of post-authoritarian detritus hanging on for dear life in what was once the Soviet block, most notably, of course, the Brothers Grim in Havana. 

This mismatch never seemed likely to be sustainable: Chávez's undisguised admiration for dictatorial ways of governing only made sense in someone determined to replicate them in his own country sooner or later.

Which is why there's such a sense of the other shoe dropping in Venezuela these days. We always figured this sort of thing had to be what he had in mind. You don't rant on and on ad nauseam about the virtues of a particular way of governing unless you ultimately intend to replicate it. It was obvious all along.

It's just that Chávez grasps the value of gradualism. And so gradualism is what we've gotten...we've become gradually, very gradually stewed frog.

It's been barely two days since Chávez's launched on that rant about "regulating" internet forums the same way he "regulates" dissident radio stations and TV channels (i.e., with a padlock) and already Noticias24 has turned off its comments forum.

(Yes, I know, that forum was populated mostly by the clinically insane, but still...Yikes!)

Is it just me, or is the chavista reassurance-to-onslaught-on-civil-liberties cycle getting quicker?

Barely 48 hours had passed after Franco Silva, who heads the Nationalized telecom giant, CANTV, had calmly reassured us that the company's plans to force all net traffic in Venezuela to go through CANTV by setting up a "single gateway" to the internet was in no way designed to control or censor access to digital content before President Chávez was out furiously vowing to enact new regulations to...control or censor access to digital content.

I'm really glad the New York Times is devoting some real resources to this ETA-Venezuela story: chavismo's willingness to entwine itself with every weirdo fringe group out there, no matter how violent, never ceases to fascinate. But the piece they ran about it today was a disappointment. It never really got around to answering the one question that matters in this whole saga: is the head of ETA's cell in Venezuela drawing a paycheck from the Venezuelan government?

I appreciate that writing about a fundamentally secret organization is fundamentally hard. But the truth is out there, and there's reason to believe Cubillas Fontán's work status isn't such a terrifically well-kept secret after all. For starters Maye Primera, of Tal Cual and Spain's El País, says she confirmed it with two of Cubillas's co-workers at the National Lands Institute (INTI). Not to mention the fact that if you pick up a phone, call INTI and ask for el Sr. Cubillas Fontán, switchboard puts you through to the Security Department.

Now, if Cubillas really is still working for INTI, then the Venezuelan government isn't obliquely "sponsoring" terrorists; it's employing them outright.

I don't understand how that's anything other than a huge story. We're talking zero degrees of separation: the Chávez government hired the leader of a terrorist cell. To do a security job, involving guns. In remote rural areas.

And this turns up, obliquely, in the eighth graf in their story!

Somebody has got to exhume that lede.

Correction: El Nacional sneakily got ahead of me by running a correction for the article I accused them of not correcting, mooting pretty much this whole post. The one bright spot is, I didn't need to change the title!

Sigh...esta semana no pego una...

Bogota's El Tiempo has obtained a leaked copy of the Venezuelan Military Intelligence Directorate (DIM)'s strategy vis-à-vis Colombia's presidential election. The thing is...remarkably sane. Featuring the kind of cool-headed assessment of the situation we so seldom see from the public face of the Chávez government, the document shows a DIM that's well aware there's little they can do in the short-term to affect Colombia's leadership.

Instead, it seems grimly resigned to a future Santos government, and expresses concern that Santos may strike a considerably more aggressive posture than Uribe - a concern I share. It seems to include some vague hints about a longer term strategy to gain political clout in Colombia, but it's very very far from a smoking gun. 

According to El Nacional, over the last 11 years, prices have gone up 733%, while remunerations have risen just 571%. Ergo, since 733-571 is 162...purchasing power has fallen 162% since Chávez came to power! 

Somebody pleaaase save these people from themselves!

It's now been a month and a bit since the first and - AFAIK - the last broadcast of "Suddenly...Chávez", the "new" Chávez radio show launched with such fanfare ("as part of the artillery of thought") in early February. When you think about it, it's pretty amazing: the show was aired once before everyone forgot all about it never to speak of it again. Can the path from shiny new announcement to dustbin of collective Alzheimers really be that short? Really?!

Maybe it's not so surprising. The concept was, by all accounts, a monument to redundancy: There's nothing new about "Suddenly...Chávez" - that might as well be the motto of the last eleven years. You're listening to some music on the radio on your commute to work and suddenly...Chávez decides to have a Cadena for the next three hours. You're supporting your family with a jewellery store in downtown Caracas and suddenly...Chávez expropriates you. You vote for one guy to be mayor of your city and suddenly...Chávez decides to name one of his cronies to do the job. 

Redundant though the entire concept was, I'm still a little bit staggered that the whole thing lasted literally one show. Which, I think, encapsulates chavista management pretty neatly. Take a half-baked idea, announce it with massive fanfare, then immediately forget all about it. 

 It's a pet peeve, sure, but would it kill the BBC to put a tilde over the Ñ in Sebastián Piñera's name?

The Chávez Expropriation song. Brought to you by - who else? - the Borderline Rat.

So lets all try to guess which country Alvaro Uribe could possibly be referring to when he says he has evidence that "a foreign country that wishes to intervene in Colombia" is illegally meddling in Colombia's presidential campaign by backing one of the candidates.

I'm going to go with...Zambia. Yeah, definitely Zambia. Or, ummmm...it could be Laos. No, wait, wait, don't tell me...I know, Mali! Yes Mali... hold on, Alvaro, it's too hard like this...can't you give us a clue?

Apparently it's a country that wishes Colombia to have "a government like those they have elsewhere, which eliminates the institutions, affects entrepreneurship and undermines liberty."  

Oh, now I get it!

Bhutan! I bet it's Bhutan...am I right, Alvaro, am I right?

Why can't Spain anger Hugo Chávez, even if he's aiding Basque terrorists? 

My TNR article this week tries to make sense of the little farce for the uninitiated. (And, before you say anything, no, I did not write that headline!)

 If you read Spanish and have an hour or so to spare, you really should check out this rivetting first-person account of life as a dignitary invited to a chavista Judicial Conference. Dr. Pedro Salazar Ugarte, the Mexican legal scholar who penned it, is an extravagantly gifted writer - though one in need of an equally gifted editor! A puzzled Juan Cristobal thought him an odd duck, a kind of "PSF-in-reverse", in that he comes across as a naïvely idealistic liberal dazzled (and horrified) by the otherness of Venezuelan political culture. I mean, hell, the guy insisted on buying bolivars with his Mexican bank card...at 2.15!

His write-up comes closer than anything I've read in ages to showing what it actually feels like to come face-to-face with chavista autocracy for the very first time eleven-years into this movie's runtime.

The thing is far too long to translate, but this tidbit towards the end was too telling not to relate. After the conference had ended, the Supreme Tribunal organized for a little excursion on the Teleférico - the cable car that takes you to the top of Avila Mountain, where Supreme Tribunal head Luisa Estela Morales would host a farewell dinner for the assembled jurists. Salazar Ugarte takes up the the tale:

Though the old Hotel isn't particularly interesting to a tourist, it was announced to us that given its past as a luxurious spot for the elite, it had great symbolic value. Convincing us of that much was the task entrusted to one of its young workers. Her mission seemed straightforward: letting us know where the dance floor used to be, what the bar was like in the 1970s, etc.

But the chief magistrate of the Supreme Tribunal was expecting something different. And so, when the girl was getting ready to finish, Dr. Morales asked her point blank: "tell us, please, who is restoring and remodelling this place?"

To which the girl, who gave no hint of having any aptitude for verbal sparring, answered: "um…some workers". You could feel the tension right away, and the chief magistrate did nothing to attenuate it: "yes, of course, but which authority decided to restore it?"

To which the girl responded, mumbling, "the ministry of people's power for tourism".

The answer, obviously, was not satisfactory.

"And…who stands above that ministry," demanded our host, unembarrassed.

"Ah!" managed to reply the girl, "president Hugo Chávez Frías". Silence ruled the room; a scene full of pathos.

Even more pathetic was the worried interjection of the Supreme Tribunal's head of protocol, who hurried to confirm that, in fact, the president had ordered the hotel's restoration, and had also decreed that it should henceforth be known by the indigenous name of the park where it stands: Waraira Repano.