Would you like to get Haier than you’ve ever been in your life?

Amazingly, some bits of Bolivarian bureaucracy actually do work properly. Among them is the system for giving out passports, which has morphed from insane, Kafkaesque ordeal to freakishly quick and stress-free tramite in the last few years: a 10 minute web form, some copies, a bank deposit, and then you wait a few days for an email giving you an automatically-generated appointment at a Saime office. Easy pleasy.

Alas, my appointment turned out to be in Ocumare del Tuy, about an hour and a half southwest of Caracas. No problem, I trekked on out there, parked, and set out across the Plaza Bolívar to the Saime office.

Except, something seemed to be going on in the Plaza. A bunch of olive-green tents were set up, with people queuing to get to rows of lap-top enabled operativo workers. Soldiers with AKs guarded the whole thing. From the center of the square, we were soon treated to a rousing recording of Chávez – yes, Chávez – singing the National Anthem, followed by a recording of the PSUV party anthem at full blast.

Some kind of incestuous PSUV-Army-Pueblo clusterfuck, no doubt – but I had no time for it, I needed my passport.

At the Saime office I really had to pinch myself to believe I wasn’t dreaming it all or back in Quebec somehow – official paperwork was never meant to be this straightforward and hassle-free. It’s unvenezuelan, if you ask me.

Ten minutes later, tramite done, I’m walking back across Ocumare’s Plaza Bolívar and notice the preliminaries are over. An MC has taken up the mike and is in the middle of the square. With his best fake VTV Telonero voice, he starts announcing, “and now, we proceed to assign this brand new washing machine to Mrs. Fulanita De Tal”. Only then do I notice the big lines of huge Haier cardboard boxes in the middle of the square.

“Ah claro,” I think to myself, “they’re giving out appliances!”

Welcome to Misión Mi Casa Bien Equipada: the government’s Chinese appliance clientelist spree. Chávez claims some 3 million appliances, TVs and AC units will be distributed at knock-down prices through the misión before the year is out. (Consider: there are 6 million households in Venezuela.)

Everything on offer is Haier branded and, I suspect, the operational face of the infamous, hyper-opaque $30+ billion Export-Loans-for-Future-Oil deal with the Chinese, where Chávez gets paid for tomorrow’s oil barrels with today’s clientelist goodies.

At first I thought the Misión was a straight-out giveaway, but poking around online I see it’s more like a subsidy within a subsidy. You do have to pay for your Haier products, but the government sells you the stuff at deeply discounted prices, then lets you pay over time at very low interest rate loans from state-owned banks, but only if you’re in the “qualified” category.

As you can already intuit from that, there’s a nightmarish amount of bureaucracy involved in getting the appliances, complete with the inevitable baffling bureaucratic holdups and corrupt scams that can’t fail to spring up when you start selling 10 bolivar bills for Bs.6.

After all, if the government is going to sell you  a 42″ flatscreen TV for Bs.3,327 and that same TV goes for Bs.6,500-10,000 down the street, why wouldn’t you just turn around and re-sell it? And if you were a Misión worker living on a Bs.2,500 monthly wage and your job consisted entirely in handling out those TVs, wouldn’t you be tempted to cut out the middleman and cash in on the deal yourself?

In fact, it’s when you start getting into the numbers that you realize just how insane the Misión really is – because those same 42″ Haier flatscreens that the government sells for a low, low Bs.3,327 retail for $450 on Amazon.com.

But wait, at the official exchange rate, $450 is less than Bs.2,000!

There’s more. A 12 cu.ft. Haier fridge sells for Bs.2,628 at the Misión. At the official rate, that’s $611. But go Stateside and you can get that same fridge for $499.

In other words, the Misión’s products aren’t actually cheap at all. They seem cheap, though, but only because the rest of Venezuela’s economy is so pathologically distorted.

Those $499 gringos have to pay Amazon.com for that fridge buy close to Bs.4,150 on the parallel market, which is what the same fridge ends up costing in private shops here. The misión price is only cheap compared to the insanely inflated cost you face if you’re shut out of access to price-controlled dollars.

Really, that’s all a convoluted way of saying that the government isn’t really subsidizing the appliances, or even the credit for the appliances: what they’re subsidizing is the dollars that buy the appliances.

(Or, rather, they’re subsidizing the government’s access to the dollars that buy the yuan that denominate the swap for future oil shipments that buy the appliances – nothing is simple with these people!)

The galloping opacity of the set-up is both the point, and totally beside the point.

From the beneficiaries’ point of view, all that’s visible is that the turco coño’e'madre especulador in the shop down the street wanted to charge me Bs.4,150 for a fridge whose  ”fair cost” is just Bs.2,628, and the one reason I can take it home is that Chávez really cares about me.

The politics of manipulated resentment and manifactured loyalty are that straightforward.

How the opposition begins to disarm the heady-cocktail of petro-largess and emotional attachment chavismo has built through misiones like this one isn’t at all clear. The one thing I note is that from the beneficiaries’ point of view, the key shortcoming to the system is obvious: to hop onto the Misión bandwagon, you first have to jump through a neverending set of administrative hoops, hoops that make no sense to people and shut out many who feel legitimately entitled to the stuff on offer.

Promise to make access to Misión Mi Casa Bien Equipada as straightforward and hassle-free as getting a passport, and you might just get somewhere with them.

Posted in Misiones | Tagged , | 26 Comments

Sunday night in Las Mercedes; Tuesday, Parapara

So, for the first time ever, Juan and Quico are going to coincide in Caracas over the next few days.

Since a grand total of one reader turned up to Masa Critica (you know who you are, and you’re a star) we’re doing a more traditional Meet’n'Greet at Boo! Café in Las Mercedes – Calle Londres con calle Nueva York, Centro DMC, across from Movilnet – on Sunday night.

We’ll be there from 8 p.m. sharp…unless they decree 3 days of mourning for Carlos Escarrá and shut down the whole neighborhood!

I hear Boo! is a nice place, and it won’t break the bank. You can RSVP here, or just show up.

Then, on Tuesday, we’re hoping to trek on out to Parapara, in Guarico State, for a one day fact-finding mission on a randomly picked bit of rural Venezuela. We’ll try to leave very early, stop for lunch in San Juan de los Morros and be back before midnight. With luck, we can even stop at El Layero.

Thing is, we need a ride. If no better solutions bubble up, we’ll rent a car. But if you have a car and a Tuesday to burn, why not drive us out there?

Posted in In Other News | 36 Comments

Another take on our economic elites

My latest over at the Foreign Policy blog.

Posted in The Economy | 31 Comments

Critical Mass Caracas – Tonight! Can’t come? Come to a Tasca afterwards…

Just a reminder: Critical Mass is today, at Plaza Bolivar in Chacao (we’re assembling at 5:30-6:00 p.m.)

At this point, I have a grand total of three confirmed CaracasChronicles readers coming. C’mon, folks, we can do better than that!

Update: If you can’t make the ride, we’ll try to stop for a beer or two at Tasca LaFayette at 8:30-9:30 p.m. or so, or whenever the ride makes it back to Plaza Bolívar in Chacao.

Posted in In Other News | 62 Comments

How do you explain clientelism to a gringo?

Might not actually be possible, but that’s not going to stop me from trying.

Posted in Chavismo, Corruption | 46 Comments

Venezuela’s useless elites

#Rosinesing

“That thing you just said,” he growls, pointing right at me, “that Cadivi is a subsidy for the rich … that is FALSE!”

My dad’s friend is a smart, well-respected maracucho lawyer, someone I looked up to when I was growing up. He’s fired up at my comment, his voice raised in anger, but also trying to overcome the deafening sound of the AC.

“You don’t live here, so you don’t know the number of poor and middle class people that benefit from Cadivi. Just the other day, I helped my secretary fill out her paper work so she could go to Aruba and use her cupo.”

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Posted in The Economy | 56 Comments

LL puts an end to what little suspense there was

Allegory of Leopoldo López, in devolvating goat mode

So, in his last debate answer tonight, Leopoldo López just about announced he’s dropping out and backing Henrique Capriles. The official announcement is tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m. And the real question is, what did they offer him?

The obvious guess is, the Vice-Presidency. But that can’t possibly be right. The vice-presidency has to go to a member of the AD-UNT tribe, that much is obvious to me. Perhaps he got a commitment for his new party to have a clear run at the Chacao mayorship. Who can tell?

My sense, instead, is that Leopoldo plain old can’t face the humiliation of coming in the low double digits (or worse.) He’d much rather share a stage with the winner. And so, in the end, he’s come full circle…from PJ, to UNT, to VP, and right back home to PJ.

 

Posted in Capriles, Leopoldo López | 103 Comments

Department of Comes-Round-Once-a-Year

Hey, it’s 23 de enero, everyone. 

Posted in History | 49 Comments

Love Chávez; Hate the Government

Some friends invited me to the Comuna Cacique Tiuna, the big new housing development behind the Poliedro, in Caracas’ southwest corner. I tagged along hoping for some insight on low-income housing in Chávez’s Venezuela, and on the people who benefit (and suffer) from it.

Our contact at Cacique Tiuna was the head of the Communal Council there, a lovely, very friendly lady who also happened to be a hyper-partisan chavista. We asked her to introduce us to some recently resettled families, so she took us to meet the Spokeswoman for one of the new buildings, handed out to 50 families brought up from the shelter in the La Rinconada stands in the last few weeks.

Before we’d really managed to ask the first question, the building spokeswoman was off on a rant about how useless the government was.

“They told us we’d get to coordinate with the national government to decide who got which apartments, but it wasn’t like that at all. They just forgot all about the Popular Power (poder popular) and started handing out the apartments to whoever they wanted … plus they don’t really coordinate with each other, so you have two ministries plus the vicepresidency, plus another foundation – all handing out apartments here. Nobody asks for our opinion.”

I found this bizarre. I’d expected that maybe some disgruntled chavistas might take me aside and, under their breath, mumble their frustration about the government out of their handlers’ earshot.

But this wasn’t like that at all. The spokeswoman was ranting right in front of her communal council head, a woman with the power to throw her out of her apartment if she wanted to. As her chavista neighbors came in and out of the building, they’d stop by and join the little circle all casual like.

Clearly, Pyongyang it ain’t.

The rest of the visit was all like that: bitching and moaning about shoddy building work, bad urban planning leading to sewers that overflow, deteriorated rainwater collection leaving the area prone to flash floods, and the looming fear these recently homeless people felt that the buildings were so rickety that as soon as a hard rainy season comes they could be made homeless all over again.

Maybe a few years ago chavistas bitched about the government under their breath, but that was then. These days, there’s no taboo about it anymore.

Of course, the story is entirely different when you ask about president Chávez himself. Genuine gratitude and real warmth shine through whenever people talked about him. There wasn’t anything coerced about it, as far as I could tell: people seemed genuinely delighted to look up to him as their leader.

But the disconnect between the way they saw him and how they viewed his government struck me as … weird.

In fact, if I let myself tune out the sporadic incantations of personal loyalty to Chávez that would pepper their rants, I could easily forget myself altogether, losing sight that I was in one of the flagship projects of the Gran Mision Vivienda deep in chavista Caracas, and imagine I was listening to a gaggle of ranting escuálidos.

This gap between people’s perceptions of the government and their perception of Chávez isn’t new. Chávez’s personal popularity has outstripped his government’s approval for most of the last decade. But the gap seems to be widening, in ways that have important political consequences.

What you see in Cacique Tiuna is a new discursive standard at work, a set of ground rules about what is sayable and what is un-sayable in polite company.

Just as you would tune out anyone who said, “personally, I hate all niggers, but…” people in Cacique Tiuna are not willing to engage in conversation with someone who launches a head-on attack on the president.

It takes a real effort of the escuálido imagination to picture just how socially unacceptable that is in the social universe they inhabit. To East Side ears María Leon’s speech during Chávez’s Memoria y Cuenta might have seemed insanely extreme, but in Cacique Tiuna her outraged response to any direct attack on Chávez is just common sense.

Faced with this kind of knee-jerk solidarity with the president, it’s easy for opposition minded people to throw in the towel, picturing chavistas as an unthinking horde. Of course, when we do that, we fall directly into the rhetorical trap Chávez has set for us, and we shut ourselves off from the possibility of engaging a broad swathe of middle-of-the road Venezuelans who love Chávez and hate his government.

Chavistas are not an unthinking horde. You can engage them, critically, seriously, about shortcomings in the central government (shortcomings that they’re very lucid about) … but only so long as you leave Chávez out of it.

That, ultimately, is the price of entry into the conversation.

Perhaps you think that’s too high a price to pay. But it’s important to be clear eyed about what that means. You need to grasp that in demanding that Oppo leaders “take the fight to Chávez”, you’re demanding that they engage the 15-20% of the country in classes A, B and C at the cost of a fatal rift with the bulk of the 75-80% of the country in classes D and E.

The real fault-line running through the February 12th primary campaign, I think, has been between the three candidates willing to pay that price (Capriles, Pérez and López) – and those not willing to (Machado, Arria, and Medina).

And that’s one thing we can be grateful for: after 13 years struggling to settle this question, the opposition is on the verge of putting this debate to bed. February 12th is, after all, just around the corner.

Posted in Chavismo | 109 Comments

Is Leopoldo López Venezuela’s Rick Perry?

I was reading through the excellent comments debate that followed Juan’s Capriles post – really, it’s been a long time since so much good stuff came out in our forum – and suddenly it struck me: where’s Leopoldo?

Even among my readers, who should be friendly ideological territory if ever there was one, the guy barely rates a mention. The CaracasChronicles primary, at least, is a head-to-head between MCM and Henrique.

The gap between how strong a candidate we figured LL might be  and his performance so far has been staggering. His messaging’s all over the place, his ads self-aggrandizing and memorable for all the wrong reasons, his delivery weirdly flat. The guy just has no buzz and looks to come a distant third.

What happened?

Posted in Leopoldo López | 62 Comments

I will vote for Capriles, and you should too

I am going to vote for Henrique Capriles on February 12th, and I am asking you to do the same.

This will come as no surprise to frequent readers, but I would like to lay out my reasoning explicitly so, hopefully, you’ll come to the same conclusion.

Continue reading

Posted in Capriles | 148 Comments

C21 Confirms It – In December HCR Was Miles Ahead

The survey is a month old, but back in mid-December, the opposition primary really wasn’t a race.

Henrique Capriles’s voters skew younger, more feminine, wealthier and less maracucho than Pablo Pérez’s voters.
 
Still and all, Capriles was ahead in every demographic, except Zulianos. 
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Posted in Polls, Primaries | 10 Comments

Caracas Chronicles Meet-and-Greet, Critical Mass Edition

So, as some of you’ll know, I’m in Caracas for the next couple of months. It’s always fun to do a meet and greet when I’m in town, to get in touch with readers I normally only know as commenter tags, or not at all.

Last time I did it at a foufy east-side bar, a cupulopodrida decision roundly criticized as busting the bank for younger readers.

This time, I’m doing something a little bit different and more solidario: I’m going to roll it into next Wednesday’s Caracas Critical Mass for a bit of a bike ride from Chacao to Los Próceres and back.

So if you like the blog and you have access to a bike, meet me – and 100-200 other common-sense challenged people – at Chacao’s Plaza Bolívar at 5:30 p.m on Wednesday, January 25th.

Random costumes heartily encouraged. Should be fun.

Posted in In Other News | 12 Comments

67% of Likely Oppo Primary Voters are Class D and E

That’s one a key nugget from that Datanalisis December paper - it’s on page 14. More than 2/3rds of self-reported likely voters in the opposition primary are likely to be struggling working class/poor people in class D and E. We’re not talking about the General Election here, we’re talking about the MUD primary.

I think that goes some ways towards answering Juan’s question about why there’s been so little pandering to what we conventionally think of as the Oppo base. There’s a huge mismatch between the cultural power of classes ABC – the tweeting, newspaper-reading, globovision-discussing classes who set the agenda for Venezuela’s public sphere – and their actual numerical weight even within the opposition primary voting population.

The opposition keeps misimagining itself – which, really, is one reason the primaries are such a healthy process: they force the candidates to talk to their electorate as it is, not as the Caracas East Side bubble imagines it to be.

Posted in Primaries | 19 Comments

The lonely base

Una moneíta por favor

One of the more salient aspects of last night’s PSUV … er Panorama Debate was how all of the candidates missed golden opportunities to pander to the opposition’s hard-core base.

Two examples come to mind, both from the latter stages.

The first came when Leopoldo López was asked, and I’m paraphrasing, how he could have sat down with Colombia’s former President Álvaro Uribe, when he was being questioned for human rights abuses. The journalist went so far as to say that Uribe was in bed with paramilitaries and killed peasants to later disguise them as FARC guerrilla fighters.

Now, there are probably two things the opposition’s base is united on: their hatred of Hugo Chávez, and their love of Álvaro Uribe. This was a golden oportunity for López to respond something along the lines of:

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Posted in Opposition | 9 Comments