I’m invited to deliver a public lecture Wednesday, 24 April, at 3:30 in New York City at The New School University‘s Graduate International Affairs. This will be a critical examination of the legacy of Hugo Chavez’ “oil socialism” as an “alternative developmental model” for Latin America. Continue reading
Posted in Chavez, Chavez lagacy, Chavez legacy, Chavezsuccession cancer, China, Faja of the Orinoco, heavy oil, Henry Capriles, Hugo Chávez, Institutions and rule of law, international relations, PDVSA, PDVSA weakness, Venezuela update, Venezuelan Democracy, Venezuelan elections, Venezuelan weak institutions
Tagged Hugo Chávez, Latin America, New York City, The New School, Venezuela
Deutsche Welle, the German international TV service, interviewed me on the
legacy of Hugo Chavez on their live evening news broadcast Journal from Berlin. I tried to relate two, strikingly contradictory aspects of President Chavez legacy:
The outpouring of sincere affection for him from the poor and many others in Caracas, which the world is witnessing, as the embodiment of their liberating political awakening. And, in contrast, the utter shambles in which Hugo Chavez, as a practical political leader of 14 years, left the Venezuelan state and economic institutions, including PDVSA. My segment comes at 4:08 minutes into the video stream here:
The Supreme Court of Venezuela has just made a rather strange decision. Rather than deciding between the two possible scenarios described in the constitution for the case when a president-elect is unable to take the oath of office on the prescribed day of 10 January, they have instead pronounced a third scenario proposed by leaders of Chavez’ party: There is “no temporary absence” of Chavez, and there is “administrative continuity” (i.e., that there is no new administration since he was the previous president).
The decision by the TSJ [press conference 9Jan 2012] seems particularly amazing as it rejects the constitutional option of declaring Chavez “temporarily absent” that would have kept Chavismo in the presidency without an election for 180 days.
This decision is just as transparently un-constitutional and invented as the rationals of the right-wing Honduran military and congress in 2009 for throwing the president out of their country in his pajamas, rather than pressing whatever grievances or charges they had against him within the framework of the constitution. There is a habit growing in Latin America of “democracies” being unwilling to fight out political crises within the sphere of the constitution and the nation’s institutions.
Here’s the situation in Venezuela: The vice-president and acting president, Continue reading
Leopoldo López, former Mayor of Chacao, Caracas
(Note: this post was expanded and some corrections made 23 Sept. Also, Part B will treat the “oil angle” – what are the policies of opposition candidates H. Capriles, P. Pérez and L. López as compared to the Chavista policies on PDVSA and on spending the nations’ oil income?)
This past week, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights overturned the administrative disqualification (inhabilitación) of Venezuelan opposition politician Leopoldo López from running as an electoral candidate. (see: decision of the Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, and press release from Lopez’ organization. )
What might be the effect on the October 2012 election? In polls till now, Lopez has run third behind top-runner Henry Capriles, his former political ally and governor of Miranda State, and behind Pablo Pérez, the governor of Zulia State. The Chávez administration has been actively shaping who may run for the opposition ever since President Chavez’ first electoral loss, in the December 2007 plebiscite. This decision is clearly a setback for this policy.
Posted in Chavez, corruption, Henry Capriles, Hugo Chávez, Human Rights, Institutions and rule of law, Leopoldo López, Maracaibo, PDVSA, Uncategorized, Venezuela update, Venezuelan Democracy, Venezuelan elections, Zulia
Tagged American Convention on Human Rights, Government, Henrique Capriles Radonski, Hugo Chávez, Human rights, Human Rights and Liberties, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Leopoldo López, Manuel Rosales, Miranda (state), Petróleos de Venezuela, United States, Venezuela, Zulia
Major Chinese Faja heavy-oil-production contracts had not materialized till now. Why not?
(This is continued from Part I) On the one hand, technical reasons would be given against closing deals with the Chinese. For example, it was thought by some in PDVSA that Chinese companies lacked the technology to efficiently implement the refineries needed to upgrade Venezuela‘s extra-heavy oil to a grade light enough to enable it to be accepted by foreign refineries. On this excuse, some top PDVSA executives had pressed Chinese firms to focus on making joint proposals together with, say, Total of France. This was because Total had already proven the quality of its upgrader-refinery technology in one of the four proof-of-principle projects foreign companies had implemented during the previous government’s apertura period. (The apertura was the liberal “opening” of the oil sector to significant Continue reading
Posted in Chavez, China, corruption, Economic Crisis, Faja of the Orinoco, heavy oil, Institutions and rule of law, international relations, PDVSA, Resource conflicts, The USA, Venezuela diplomacy, Venezuela update
Tagged Chavismo, China, Heavy crude oil, Hugo Chávez, Petróleos de Venezuela, States of Venezuela, United States, Venezuela
(Brooklyn, New York City) This is my first blog here. It will be short and rather disturbing.
The topic is the decline of institutions, especially state institutions, and of the rule of law in Venezuela. I study especially the oil sector and the national oil company, PDVSA, and its relation to the rest of society. It is not easy to see inside PDVSA, but here we have a rare window into the state of affairs in another Venezuelan state institution: a prison.
A Venezuelan friend sent me this video link to the NY Times story filed by Simon Romero about the prison on Margareta Island.
In passing this on to me, she drew two larger societal lessons from this report:
For example, take the insecurity and violence that citizens face. Venezuela appears to have the highest national homicide rate inthe Western Hemisphere, about 75 per 100,000 persons are now murdered annually according to Roberto Briceño-Leon, director of the Venezuelan Observatory on Crime, and professor at Oxford U. and UCV in Caracas. This rate has shot up since 2002. I have been reading a collection of essays by Venezuelan experts edited by Professor Briceño-Leon et al, 
Inseguridad y Violencia en Venezuela, Informe 2008, and I will soon post notes and commentaries on this serious sociological work. I must say, in a society where there is such extreme stress on individual lives, it is understandable for people to despair and of course this increases tension and polarization between and within all social classes. To break out of these cycles it is necessary not only for the experts, but for civil society at all levels to reach a consensus on what can be done, and to support politicians who have the will and stamina to implement these policies over the long run. Anyone who does not believe that Venezuela’s demoralizing decline of the rule of law and institutions, and the growth in anarchy this reinforces for everyone can be reversed, needs only look at neighboring Colombia, where a similar crisis in the 1980s and 90s has now been decisively reversed. Briceño-Leon draws important lessons from Colombia´s experience for Venezuela, and I promise to discuss these here soon.
