Tag Archives: caracas

Venezuela

Politics turns violent in Venezuela

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Though critics can dump a lot of problems on the doorstep of Hugo Chávez’s 14-year reign as president of Venezuela, the one thing that you can’t say about Chávez is that he used state violence (as opposed to expropriation, media censorship or other tactics) to undermine Venezuela’s rule of law, excepting perhaps the aborted April 2002 coup, a complex incident in Venezuelan politics in which neither the Venezuelan military, the Chávez administration nor the Venezuelan opposition was entirely blameless.Venezuela Flag Icon

It’s hard to extend the same credit to Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, in light of the violence against protestors in Caracas, Valencia and elsewhere across Venezuela last night.

A 22-year-old beauty queen, Génesis Carmona, was shot in the head in central Valencia Tuesday night, the fifth fatality in a series of escalating student protests against the Maduro government — the photo above shows Altamira, a relatively wealthy neighborhood in Caracas that’s seen some of the most tense confrontations of the past 48 hours.

Venezuela’s oil production allowed Chávez to circumvent violent repression by using money to buy and consolidate his support among his natural base — Venezuela’s poorest citizens who hadn’t benefitted from the petrostate’s largesse (and, increasingly, a corrupt ‘boligarchy’ whose continued prosperity depends on the continuity of the chavista regime).

Though the February 2014 protests aren’t as widespread as the ones that led to the 2002 coup against Chávez, economic conditions are much poorer today in Venezuela than they were 12 years ago, when Chávez was just three years into his presidency and the country exported more oil — and other products — than it does today.  The fact that five people are dead, with many more injured, is a serious escalation in a country where, though political polarization has been common for the past decade and a half, political killing has not.  Maduro’s government is censoring the media even more than usual, putting much of Caracas on lockdown and arresting protestors by the truckload.  Most fundamentally, governments in truly liberal democracies do not respond to political protest with lethal violence.  Chávez could point to legitimate majoritarian support throughout the entirety of his presidency, even if it obscured the deterioration of the rule of law and public institutions.  By contrast, Maduro’s increasingly violent response to protest underlines the fragility (or, perhaps, the illegitimacy) of his political support.  Continue reading Politics turns violent in Venezuela →

Venezuela

A primer on PDVSA — and the interaction of oil and politics in Venezuela

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CARACAS, Venezuela — You’d think in Caracas that the governing party were the PDVSA, not the PSUV.Venezuela Flag Icon

But the state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., functions as much as any other organ in Venezuela in service of the government, formerly headed by Hugo Chávez and now, Nicolás Maduro.

Indeed, a stroll through Caracas finds the PDVSA brand saturates the city — much more than the nominal governing party, the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela). Here’s a PDVSA-branded hopscotch:

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PDVSA (pronounce it ‘pay-duh-vay-suh’) was founded in 1976 when then-president Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the oil industry at the height of an oil boom the likes of which Venezuela had never seen. Venezuela’s oil industry began in 1914 when the first oil well was drilled in Mene Grande, in western Zulia.  It began exporting petroleum by 1918, and that soon eclipsed an economy once based largely on cacao and coffee — though cacao production was dwindling in the early 20th century, Venezuela exported more coffee than any country in the world other than neighboring Brazil.

Venezuela was the world’s leading oil exporter by the end of the 1920s — Caracas was known as ‘the gas station south of Florida.’ We think of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) as a largely Middle Eastern cartel today, but it was founded in large part in 1960 on the initiative of Venezuelan energy minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, who helped create it after reaching out to his ministerial counterparts in Saudi Arabia.

Through the next 40 years, Venezuela’s fortunes rose and fell with global oil price, but PDVSA remained relatively at arm’s length from the government — it paid income taxes and royalties to the government, as well as dividends (because it’s entirely state-owned).

This continued even after Chávez was elected — until 2002, that is, when Chávez attempted to take control of PDVSA, leading to a rebellion/coup attempt and a general strike among PDVSA employees later that year. Chávez, as it turns out, simply fired most of the offenders, and over the past 11 years, PDVSA has become essentially an arm of the government, which itself increasingly became an organ of chavismo.

So PDVSA employees today wear red, the color of chavismo, and over the past decade, PDVSA has been a direct contributor of funds to social programs, bypassing the formal channels of government — and also incurring its own liabilities (indeed, the IMF’s estimate of Venezuela’s public debt of around 51% includes PDVSA debts as well).

Whatever the benefits to deploying that capital for social welfare programs (and I’m not arguing for or against), it means there’s simply less capital to maintain production or develop new avenues for refining oil.

Rafael Ramírez, a loyal chavista, was appointed minister of energy and petroleum in 2002 and PDVSA’s president in 2004. If Maduro wins the election, it’s expected that Ramírez will stay in place — and so will continuity in oil policy under the Maduro administration. If Maduro replaces Ramírez, however, it could be an indication that he wants to shake up some of his predecessor’s policies.

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Oil proceeds represent around 95% of Venezuela’s exports, around 20% of its GDP and over 50% of the government budget. So what happens in the oil industry matters for what happens with Venezuela’s government and its economy. Continue reading A primer on PDVSA — and the interaction of oil and politics in Venezuela →

Venezuela

Photo essay: Political graffiti and street art in Caracas

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CARACAS, Venezuela — Apropos of nothing, I wanted to collect some of the more interesting shots of political graffiti I’ve captured this week in Caracas.Venezuela Flag Icon

Most of the graffiti, of course, promotes the late president Hugo Chávez and his successor, acting president Nicolás Maduro, and not opposition challenger Henrique Capriles.

I’ll say one thing, though, and this goes well beyond street art: if any of my friends want to run for politics, I’ll send them to Caracas to talk to the chavistas because, while Capriles has a rapidly deteriorating economy, an aggressive campaign, and a defensive and lackluster Maduro all working in his favor, Maduro remains the favorite because the chavistas certainly know how to win votes.

Of course, standard political campaign banners abound throughout the city:

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But even five weeks after his death, Chávez’s presence dominates the city, even on its sidewalks and on its buildings:

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In fact, even the ‘libertador’ himself, Simón Bolívar has more street cred than Maduro:

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Here’s a commemoration of the 2011 bicentennial of the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence:

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But that’s not to say that Maduro isn’t a common enough presence (both in favor and against):

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Capriles campaign optimistic with 48 hours to go — but can it win?

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CARACAS, Venezuela — The national headquarters of Henrique Capriles on Friday morning buzzed with optimism, with less than 48 hours to go before polls open in a race that many have judged hopeless for the opposition.Venezuela Flag Icon

In the wake of a rally in downtown Caracas last Sunday that brought hundreds of thousands of supporters to rally behind Capriles (without having to bus in massive numbers of supporters from across the country, as the chavista candidate Nicolás Maduro did in a similar rally on Thursday), and in the wake of a widely ridiculed comment by Maduro that a little bird told him that the spirit of Hugo Chávez blessed his campaign, Capriles campaign advisers are optimistic that their candidate has the momentum going into Sunday’s election, especially as voters realize the extent of Venezuela’s rapidly tumbling economy in recent months.

But Maduro, who is hoping to win a full term in his own right after the 14-year rule of his predecessor, Chávez, has everything else — the implicit support of the structure of the entire government, the armed forces, the state-owned oil company, plenty of resources, and significantly stronger media presence.

Though election law prohibits the publication of polls in the week prior to the election, polls are rumored to show Capriles closing a gap with Maduro — one such poll allegedly shows Maduro with a narrowing 55% to 45% lead, and Capriles’s internal polls show a massive swing as well. But whittling down Maduro’s lead and winning the election are two different things.

Leopoldo López, the former mayor of Chacao (one of five municipalities, and generally the ritziest, within Caracas) from 2000 to 2008, is one of the rising stars of the opposition. Chávez’s government barred López from running for office until 2014, a move that brought the censure of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In 2009, he founded Voluntad Popular, a centrist party that’s a member of the broad opposition coalition, the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD, Democratic Unity Roundtable).

‘I’m excited about change, I’m excited about the real possibility of winning, I’m excited about Venezuela opening a new cycle,’ Lopez said on Friday morning at Capriles headquarters. ‘The worries? What the government could do to put a stain on what will happen. This is not a regular election. This is not Bush-Clinton, this is not Candidate A versus Candidate B. This is a race against a state. I doubt there are other democracies where there are [such] clear differences in terms of the abuse of power. In this case, this is PDVSA, the state oil company, and the other powers of the state, against the people. But we have great faith the people will make the difference.’

The executive director of the MUD, Ramón Guillermo Aveledo (pictured above, with Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma and other top MUD officials at his right, rejected outlandish charges made in recent days at a press conference earlier today at Capriles headquarters as well.

Here’s the arithmetic. Continue reading Capriles campaign optimistic with 48 hours to go — but can it win? →

Venezuela

Maduro campaign active on penultimate campaign day in Caracas

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CARACAS, Venezuela — One morning spent traipsing through Sabana Grande and Altamira is all you need to know who has the greater resources in Venezuela’s snap presidential campaign.Venezuela Flag Icon

It’s clear that election activity is very much in full swing. In the heart of cosmopolitan Caracas — and even in the eastern districts that are wealthier and which you’d expect to be very much behind opposition candidate Henrique Capriles — the more pronounced street presence belongs to the chavistas and their candidate, acting president Nicolás Maduro, the hand-picked candidate of his late predecessor, Hugo Chávez (pictured below in effigy in Altamira earlier today), notwithstanding a massive rally last Sunday on the Avenida Bolívar in support of Capriles.

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It’s astonishing the extent to which the Maduro campaign is really just a rehash of the October 2012 Chávez campaign — at one booth on the Sabana Grande, a Maduro volunteer handed me a poster of el comandante himself with a pamphlet describing Chávez’s 2012 campaign plan for the next term. While it’s a function of facility, there’s also certainly no electoral downside for Maduro in making Chávez very much his 2013 running mate.

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Capriles signs are few and far between, but they do exist and they are around, though I certainly didn’t see much in the way of boisterous caravans of Capriles supporters in the way that red-shirted chavistas paraded throughout the city today:

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I didn’t see much in the way of anti-chavista or anti-Maduro graffiti, though it’s very much in favor of Maduro — and in opposition to Capriles. Here’s one building with the words ‘un gran cobero,’ a slur that roughly translates to ‘big liar’ in Venezuelan slang, against Capriles that Chávez was known to use in the 2012 campaign:

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I’ve never been to a country with such a basketcase economy (more on that later), Maduro has less personal commitment and charisma than Chávez had, Capriles has run a much more aggressive campaign, and polls even showed the race tightening last week. So there’s really no way to extrapolate a Maduro victory just because the government has more resources to use to bring carloads of supporters out or to print more posters to hand out. But if one morning and afternoon stroll is worth anything (and it’s anecdotal, nothing more), Maduro has the upper hand — the key, of course, is whether the ground game on Sunday will turn out as effectively.

Photo credit to Kevin Lees.

Venezuela

The political geography of Caracas

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When you fly into Caracas, you fly into Maiquetía on the coast — at basically sea level, Maiquetía is everything you’d expect from a sweltering, languid coastal climate in the Caribbean.

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The coast is really just a narrow strip of land, the ‘Litoral Central,’ prone to mudslides and which has a coastal attitude separated from Caracas proper by a mountain — El Ávila, which rises 8,000 feet from the coast before cascading back down into a valley of around 3,000 feet.

That’s Caracas, there in the valley, which enjoys more temperate weather than the coast from which El Áliva separates it. But as the city has grown exponentially to include up to 3 million residents since its initial burst of oil-fueled growth in the 1950s, Caracas has expanded out from the valley and into the mountains above.

So when you come into Caracas, you drive first from the coast up to the mountains, where your first impression is a sea of shanties in the barrios overlooking the valley.

Though there’s an east-west socioeconomic divide (unlike London, Caracas’s east side is tonier), the central geographic feature of Caracas is that the higher up you go, the poorer it gets.  Like Lima (pictured below) or the famous favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the best real estate is owned by the poorest residents of the city.

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That’s ultimately at odds with the norm throughout much of the rest of the world, where the highest real estate belongs to the wealthiest. Think about New Orleans in 2005 — the wealthier Ninth Ward was spared the brute force of Hurricane Katrina that essentially destroyed lower-lying areas. Think of New York, and the consistent march of the aristocracy uptown in the 19th century. The same holds true of Los Angeles County and the Hollywood Hills, or of Montmarte in Paris or even cities like Port-au-Prince. I can’t find the link, but I’ve read studies that indicate this was because higher-elevation real estate was originally healthier when cities originally developed — farther from the sewage and other microbes further below.

Today, there’s not much risk of cholera or other 18th century illnesses afflicting anyone at any altitude in Caracas. But of course, much of the poverty in Caracas, and the corresponding violence that afflicts Caracas, (that’s made Caracas increasingly one of the most dangerous cities in the world), takes place in the barrios far higher than the valley below.

Top photo credit to Caracas1010a, bottom photo credit to Kevin Lees — Cerro San Cristobal, Lima, November 2010.