We know things work ... when they work

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Thursday, May 08, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel

VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: A long letter by Daniel Burnett (May 1, 2003) starts with the question: How will we know what works ... if nothing is ever given a fair chance to succeed? He elaborates on this question only briefly and almost at the end of the letter.

In essence, he claims that we Venezuelans, who are seeing how the country has been destroyed by the inept group of people now in power, should be ... patient!

He claims we should not expect miracles in too short a period of time. And he quotes Gerver Torres who says that " any serious development program will take many years to be successfully carried out"...

Since he refers to me often in his letter, which is mostly about PDVSA, I will comment on it.  First of all, let me say that Mr. Burnett has no right to ask us to be patient ... we are living the Venezuelan tragedy day after day. We are not occasional visitors here, who can gloss over the myriad of small and big horrors of the so called "Bolivarian revolution". We suffer them.

This is not a social laboratory that can be revisited for years to come, just to see how the natives are doing. Four years is plenty of time, by any standards, to get a pretty clear idea of whether things are working or not working or whether they are going to work.

I say that things are not going to work for us Venezuelans while we have this bunch of clowns in charge of the government. All we have to do to think along these lines is to open our eyes and take a look around, inhale deeply and listen. What we see is poverty, unemployment, invasions of private property, crime, uncollected garbage, buhoneros galore, beggars, children living in the streets, food rationing, an universal lack of hope among the people, social resentment.

As we see this, we refuse to be patient. Iraqis were patient with Hussein, Cubans have been very patient with Castro, Haitians very patient with Duvalier, Argentineans extremely patient with their military gorillas and political demagogues....

We do not want to be patient in that manner....

As we inhale in our cities we smell the urine, the filth, the rotten foods in the sidewalks and we refuse to be patient. We want to be civilized and not live like a tribe of savages. Chavez said something last Sunday that Mr. Burnett will be interested to hear: "Caracas is a pigsty....it revolts me."

Well, Chavez, welcome to the club.  But it is like listening to the pilot of the plane, where we are passengers, complain over the loud speakers about the dismal mechanical conditions of the machine.  And, as we listen we do not hear about development programs of the type Gerver Torres talks about. We hear about our importing Brazilian chickens, Cuban blackbeans, Algerian oilmen, Cuban medical staff and medicines, Colombian flour and cattle...

We do not hear about incentives to investment, but about new red tape against investors.

We do not hear about competent ministers but about nitwits like Giordani and Lucas Rincon being the "stars" of the cabinet.

We do not hear about how important it is for the nation to become united behind a clear political or economic vision but all we hear is "us" and "them", about we the good guys and you the saboteurs, the criminals, the squalid....

And, after four years of this operetta, tragic as an opera but too bizarre to be taken seriously, we refuse to be patient and wait for better times, which would come, according to Mr. Burnett, if we just could wait to see what happens.

Let me add this: When we came aboard the bus (or plane, to be consistent), as passengers our ticket read Democracy, Transparency, Social progress, First World.  This was our destination. Four years later we look out the window and we can clearly see that the route the driver or pilot is taking, from the very beginning of the journey, is not leading where we want to go. He is taking us to Authoritarianland, to Corruptionland, to Socialhateville.

We are going to Cuba or to Zimbabwe or to North Korea.

But, you see, we do not want to go there. Do we wait to get there to tell the pilot to go and fly a kite? No, thanks, Mr. Burnett. By then it will be too late and you know it. Being democratic and idealistic, you will then say "I do not agree with this turn of events. Coronel was right. I do not want to visit that place anymore." But we will left, as a society, slowly twisting in the wind.

Regarding PDVSA, you make a long analysis to conclude that the managers of PDVSA had to be fired, that Chavez waited too long to fire them, that Chavez was too magnanimous, that employees can not run the companies but obey, that they should quit if they are not in agreement with the orders they get. Well, I have gone over this issue many times, but it seems that I can not put my case clear. Let me list once more my main arguments:

1. Managers did not rebel to gain control of the company. Managers rebelled to protect the integrity of the company against its systematic destruction at the hands of Chavez. The rebellion came after some very incompetent presidents and boards were imposed on the company. Of course you can make a mistake in judgment. But when one president is mentally unbalanced, when another is a sworn enemy of the company and still another has a terrorist record. When a president has sued the company he is presiding. When the directors do not have the qualifications to be at that level. When political commissars check the moves of the employees searching for counter-revolutionaries ... then we can see that this is no poor judgment but a plan to control politically and financially the only profitable State Company in Venezuela. And this was a crime that the managers refused to accept...

2. You assume as the gospel that the rebel managers sabotaged the oil installations. This is not true. It is not enough that a pathological liar makes this accusation on national TV for it to be true. Have any proofs been presented? When have the accidents and fires and explosions and oil spills taken place?  Well, after the company fell in the hands of the incompetent. It is not logical to assume that the people who built the installations were now destroying them. Have you seen "The Bridge over the river Kwai"?

3. I certainly would not advocate open rebellion as a recurrent manner to protest. But to fully understand what has gone on in PDVSA you have to see the whole picture. You walked into the theater in the last quarter hour of the film and all you saw was a group of "criminal managers in mutiny against the legitimate President." But you did not see the way this "legitimate" President had been trying to destroy the only company that provides revenues for the country. The managers have been educated not as "owners" of the company but as "trustees". They behaved as "trustees" which is the proper role. As such they were there to guarantee that the company would be well managed, profitable and free from politics.

In summary, What is going on in Venezuela right now is not a social experiment. It is an attempt, on the part of Chavez, to convert the country into a Cuban-type regime. And there are millions of Venezuelans who refuse being dragged in that direction, who will resist it in all legal ways, as long as the rules of the game are respected.

But the purposes of Chavez, by definition, can not be obtained by legal means.

In our Constitution, Venezuela is defined as a democratic country, not as a revolutionary country ... and democracy entails checks and balances, respect for dissidence, accountability by the government bureaucracy to the nation, transparent use of public funds, leadership for all and not for the few converted.

Mr. Burnett can not judge our actions against the framework of a theoretical democracy that does not exist in Venezuela.

But, of course, in the very last instance, when all is said and done, we will all be fully responsible for our actions: I, he, they ... I could have made mistakes and done some things in the wrong way. But I have not killed, I have not stolen and I do not want to see my country become another wretched fundamentalist, dictatorial society. And I will clearly oppose those who want to go that way...

Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983.  In 1998, he was presidential election campaign manager for Henrique Salas Romer and now lives in retirement on the Caribbean island of Margarita where he runs a leading Hotel-Resort.  You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email gustavo@vheadline.com