The case for despondency
Saturday, January 11 Francisco Toro caracaschronicles.blogspot.com
Today I came closer than ever to succumbing to complete despondency, just complete hopelessness about the crisis here. The impasse is total right now, and it's very difficult for me to visualize any way out. On the one hand, as Gaviria keeps saying, the only possible solution to the crisis is through negotiations, through give-and-take. On the other hand, Hugo Chávez will not, cannot, and doesn't know how to negotiate. Everyone can see that escalation is mad at this point, just mindlessly destructive and stupid. But escalation is all we seem to get.
Gaviria's speech two nights ago was powerful and wise. He said Venezuela might find an "outcome" that's not negotiated, i.e. the government might crush the opposition outright, or the opposition might overthrow the government against its will. But those wouldn't be solutions, they would be outcomes. They wouldn't address the underlying causes of the crisis, and they could leave the country unstable for years to come.
The status quo is obviously unstable, way too unstable to hold much longer. The opposition may not be able to stop the country cold, but they can disrupt life enough to make it ungovernable. And the government clearly retains enough supporters that they can't be wished into nothingness: if Chávez was shoved out of power in a way his supporters don't accept as legitimate they could set the country alight. So outcomes are cheap, there are lots of possible outcomes. But a solution to the crisis, a solution that leaves the country peaceful and democratic and minimally functional...that's something else entirely. One can only be found through negotiation, through bargaining and give-and-take between the sides.
Now, it's sad but true that not everyone in the opposition wants a negotiated solution. There's a violent fringe that would clearly prefer a right wing coup. But I think there's a critical mass of opposition opinion that would support a negotiated agreement, if one was on offer. Moderate voices would probably rise to the occassion and reach a deal if they could. The opposition crazies could be marginalized through debate.
That's because, in the opposition, there is a debate in the first place. The opposition is a notedly diverse bunch, made up of a variety of voices all vying for power and influence. Thankfully, they've deviced a process for processing those differences around a table. The problem is that there is no comparable debate on the government's side, because there is no comparable variety of opinions. There's no such thing as "a critical mass of government opinion" because "government opinion" is exactly the same thing as Hugo Chávez's opinion. And you can't marginalize the government's crazies because the only voice that matters in the government is that of the crazy-in-chief.
The autocratic, cult-of-personality underpinnings of the chavista movement are so marked that only the president's opinion matters. Hugo Chávez has made a political career out of equating negotiation with selling out, compromise with treason, and accomodation with surrender. Every time he speaks, he makes a mockery of the hopes of those who think it might be possible to work out an agreement with him.
It's hard to know how to write about Chávez's style of oratory. For those of you who've heard him any description is superfluous; for those of you who haven't any description is insufficient. Picture the most charismatic southern preacher you've ever seen, and square it. Behind a podium, Hugo Chávez is a man possessed. He doesn't speak, he shouts into a microphone in a kind of ecstatic fit. He can keep it up for hours and hours at a stretch. In four years he's fine-tuned his fire-breathing style of oratory. As his face contorts and the bombastic nonsense spews out in thicker and thicker densities, it's impossible not to wonder about the man's mental health. And as his ecstatic supporters get worked up into a hero-worshipping frenzy, it's impossible not to wonder about theirs.
The soundbytes that make it into the following day's newspapers vary, though usually they focus on the most over-the-top remark of the speech. Picking it out is not always easy, there are so many candidates. Real jewels get relegated to the inside pages by truly grotesque nuggets of megalomanic gobbledygook. For instance, yesterday he described Venezuela's four major private TV channels as "the four horsemen of the apocalypse." But the remark - incredibly incendiary though it was - was upstaged by his even more sinister threats to order a military take-over of Venezuela's entire food industry.
On the other hand, some of the most destructive, near-psychotic stuff he says doesn't even make the news anymore simply because he's repeated it so often. Nobody cares that he labelled the oil industry's managers a cabal of coup-plotting terrorist saboteurs again yesterday: it's the Nth time he's said it this week. There's a strong element of pathos to the nonsense marathons: nobody really takes him that seriously. After all, if he literally thought the PDVSA managers were really terrorist, might not one expect him to put them in jail? So it's fluff, and people recognize it as fluff, but it still irritates. Today it was a threat to takeover all the nation's private schools to break the strike, tomorrow it will be some other fantastically unworkable bit of neomarxist intelectual onanism. The specifics don't really matter that much, because none of these mad schemes are even remotely practicable. Nobody really takes them that seriously.
Now, it's an open question whether the president intentionally sets out to inflame the crisis with statements like that or whether they're just an accidental byproduct of the fits of psychopathological raving that TV cameras seem to send him into. But what nobody can question is the poisonous streak this kind of talk infuses into the nation's political atmosphere. The torrent of bile that pours out of the president's mouth everytime he gets near a microphone could be the single biggest obstacle to a negotiated solution in Venezuela today. Columnists here have said it a million times in a million different ways: it's impossible to reach a negotiated agreement with someone who slanders you as a treasonous coup-plotting terrorist every chance he gets.
The president's rhetoric suggests a man lost in his own private reality, totally unable to interact with the world around him in even a minimally reasonable way, and prey to truly bizarre delusions of grandeur. He really does seem to think he's starring in some sort of epic, world historical struggle between good and evil. The consistent use of military analogies, military rhetoric, "grand battles," "decisive struggles," and such suggest anything but a man who's seriously working towards a negotiated agreement.
At this point, even if he did have some secret plan to settle in the end, he's worked up his followers into such a millenarian frenzy it's impossible for me to see how he could send them home by now. It can't happen.
So you can understand my despondency: negotiating an agreement is the only way to find a peaceful, democratic solution to the crisis, but one of the parties to the conflict is working as hard as he can every single day to make sure negotiations can't succeed. Ergo, there cannot be a peaceful, democratic solution to this crisis. It's a dire, dark, depressing realization. The deadlock continues indeffinitely into the future while more and more businesses fail, more and more people lose their jobs, and the nation continues its steady, seemingly irreversible descent into total chaos. It's grim, it's really grim.