Venezuela Calls for Regional Mechanisms to Guarantee Human Rights

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Gunfire erupted at a Venezuelan prison on Tuesday, prompting National Guard troops to use tear gas as they sought to take back control from armed inmates.

Venezuela's government is trying to close La Planta prison following two escape attempts and complaints of overcrowding, saying the facility doesn't meet standards. About half of the prison's inmates have already been transferred to other lockups, but a group of armed inmates have effectively kept the authorities out of the prison since late last month.

Top prisons official Iris Varela said that a small group of inmates has been resisting being transferred. She said heavy gunfire erupted on Tuesday, with inmates firing from inside the prison.

Dozens of troops in anti-riot gear gathered outside, and clouds of tear gas floated in the air over the prison.

Hundreds of prisoners' relatives, worried by the gunfire, stood outside. Some of them wept.

Varela appealed for calm. She urged the resisting inmates to "give up their violent attitude, listen to their relatives."

"We know there are some who are resisting the evacuation," Varela said on state television. "However, they aren't right to be acting in that violent way."

She said one vehicle used by authorities was hit by a bullet.

However, no one was hurt, said Reinaldo Rangel, a national prisons administrator.

Some of the inmates' relatives outside the prison hurled rocks and other objects at the National Guard troops, who responded by using tear gas. Firefighters said at least eight people received medical help after inhaling tear gas.

Maria Escobar, whose brother is imprisoned, said relatives were rightly protesting out of concern that there could be clashes involving inmates and troops.

"If they go in there like this, there's going to be massacre," Escobar said.

The gunfire eventually died down, and Varela said the authorities would keep talking with the inmates to convince them to leave voluntarily and be transferred to other prisons.

She said that La Planta is unfit to hold "any human being."

Tensions have grown at the prison recently after what the authorities said were escape attempts. On April 27, Varela said the authorities foiled an escape attempt when they found a tunnel dug by inmates that led to a sewer. On April 30, gunfire erupted at the prison after what Varela described as another escape attempt.

Hundreds of inmates remain in the prison, and some of their relatives have said that a group of armed prisoners has been holding out saying they don't want to be taken to other prisons that have severe crowding problems and are far away from courts in Caracas that are handling their cases.

Venezuela's prisons were built to hold about 12,000 inmates, but officials have said they hold about 47,000.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/05/08/world/americas/ap-lt-venezuela-prison.html?ref=americas&pagewanted=print

 ribbon unfurls in the colors of the Venezuelan flag, while a drum roll announces the show’s title sequence and a trumpet tootles. Block-letter words pop up on the screen: “humanity,” “struggle,” “socialism.” It looks for all the world like a “Daily Show” parody. And then comes a close-up of the show’s host and star, Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, usually dressed in all red or a military jacket, sometimes crowned with a Che-style beret, standing on the road among his supporters or before a live audience at Miraflores Palace in Caracas. The show is entirely unscripted. Chávez usually begins by stating the date and saying, “Aló Presidente!” then grinning and giving himself a round of applause. “Aló Presidente!” he repeats and you can’t tell if he’s introducing the program by its title or simply greeting and congratulating himself.

“Aló Presidente” (“Hello President”) is broadcast live in Venezuela on Sundays from 11 a.m. until Chávez is done talking, which can take anywhere from four to eight hours. It is the only television show in the world in which a head of state regularly invites cameras to follow him as he governs. (Two other South American presidents, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, briefly spun off their own shows after appearing as guests on “Aló Presidente” and being interviewed Oprah-style by Chávez.) But with the exception of the logorrheic Fidel Castro, it’s hard to imagine another political figure with the combination of manic exhibitionism and entertainer’s stamina required to star in this sort of show, never mind the autocratic control required to make it, literally, must-see TV in his home country.

The show has been running for more than a decade. In its most infamous scene, from 2006, Chávez sits at a desk in a field before a collection of rural supporters, while cows swish their tails behind him. “You are an ignorant man,” he says, looking straight into the camera, addressing President George W. Bush, whom for the purposes of the show he has nicknamed Mr. Danger after a villain in a popular Venezuelan novel. It is the height of the Iraq war. “You are a donkey, Mr. Danger,” Chávez says, then goes on to call him a coward, assassin and genocidist. “It’s very easy to command an army from far away,” he says. “If one day you ever get the crazy idea of invading Venezuela, I’ll be waiting for you on this savanna.” His eyes blaze. The crowd cheers. “Come on here, Mr. Danger!” he cries. “Come on here, Mr. Danger!”

The driving principle behind “Aló Presidente” is that the revolution will be televised, at great length. We follow Chávez as he visits housing projects, cuts ribbons at factory openings and expropriates businesses and private property “owned by the bourgeoisie” for the state. “Expropriate it!” is Chávez’s catchphrase, his version of “You’re fired!” When he points at a building and says, “Exprópiese!” it’s always a cue for applause from his followers.

In fact, Chávez makes so much policy, ad hoc, on the show that cabinet members and army officials are required to attend tapings just to keep up. In 2008, live, Chávez reacted to news that the Colombian Army had made an incursion into Ecuador to kill a FARC leader — “a good revolutionary, I knew him personally” — by ordering a mustachioed general in the audience to send 10 battalions to the border. This caused a near-war and full-on diplomatic crisis. It was questionable policy. But it certainly made for great TV.

This kind of unexplained turn can help explain why a four-hour show made up of presidential rambling can be compelling, especially from afar. The show’s cheap production values and quirky theme music bring to mind nothing so much as an old-school cable-access TV show, of the kind that used to play in New York City in the 1980s — shows that were part performance art and part gleeful absurdism, like “Mrs. Mouth,” which starred an upside-down person’s chin dressed as a woman. These shows were distinct for their complete unpredictability, of a type that has since beat a full retreat onto the Internet. “Aló Presidente” has that same wacky quality. The difference is that Mrs. Mouth wasn’t the autocratic leader of an oil-rich country of 29 million people.

Despite the long run of “Aló Presidente,” I’d never watched it until this year; I’d seen Chávez’s pronouncements quoted in news articles, so I’d always imagined the show to be a straightforward political address. I discovered its exuberant weirdness only after I began following Chávez on Twitter, then idly clicked on links to clips of the show. At first, I was puzzled and entertained by its format and tone. What was this weird mash-up of state of the union, variety hour, propaganda newsreel and talk show? Chávez’s folksy patter, with digressions about baseball and his own gastrointestinal difficulties and the occasional crooned folk song, doesn’t at all resemble how heads of state usually comport themselves on TV. (As for foreign affairs, Chávez always likes to mix in some warmongering and crowd-pleasing Yanqui baiting, having moved on from Bush to Obama.) And watching a show that was so obviously meant for other eyes — that is, the citizens of Venezuela — seemed to me, on my couch in Brooklyn, surreal and even slightly voyeuristic.

I started watching as a lark but became fascinated with the show when I realized, with some unease, that it was the most real reality TV I’d ever seen. Most shows called “reality TV” are marked by a strong measure of fakery. Strangers are stuffed into a house together or “stranded” on an island. Bachelors artificially vie for the affections of a surgically enhanced bachelorette. Chávez’s show not only reflects reality, it also affects reality. Whatever he says on air, whatever he orders his inferiors to do, however he decides to spend public money, becomes law and policy right away. It’s not Monopoly money that he’s throwing around. In that sense, it’s the only really real reality show out there.

As a piece of pure political theater, one precedent for the show is F.D.R.’s fireside chats, the innovation of which was to make the president sound casual and unguarded. But Chávez, like F.D.R., has not embraced total transparency — especially when it comes to his own physical frailty. Chávez had a cancerous tumor removed last year, and instead of allowing cameras to follow him through treatment and convalescence in a Cuban hospital, he temporarily canceled the show and stifled information about his medical condition to such an extent that we still don’t know what kind of cancer he has. His health, or his perceived health, will be a big factor in the October elections, which Chávez could conceivably lose to a younger, more vigorous challenger. Recently, Chávez returned to Cuba for further medical care, suspending the show again.

In January, after his first rounds of chemotherapy, I tuned in for episode No. 376, filmed on a visit to the Orinoco oil belt. Chávez looked paler, his face swollen, but was as expansive as ever, announcing that Venezuela would refuse to participate in a World Bank arbitration panel that could award billions to ExxonMobil after Chávez expropriated its assets, and implementing a new social program with the Orwellian name the Great Mission Knowledge and Work. Then he made visits to various oil facilities, and footage of him disembarking to cries of “Viva!” alternated with long shots between stops, taken from inside his jeep, of rain falling on the gray road.

During my first few hours of watching “Aló Presidente,” I felt a mild thrill: the anticipation that the host might make some unexpected move that would affect millions of people. Eventually, though, the show’s relentless sameness began to resemble a different aspect of reality — tedium — and soon I felt as if I were watching the TV equivalent of Andy Warhol’s “Empire.” I’d get up to fetch something to eat, and when I returned, there he was, still filling my screen, smiling, proclaiming, self-satisfied, eternal. A normal show could never get away with this, of course. But when you flip through the channels of a Sunday in Caracas, it’s all “Aló Presidente,” all the time.

But then, the show’s intended audience may be watching with a very different perspective. The historian Enrique Krauze has written that “Aló Presidente” gives Venezuelans “at least the appearance of contact with power, through his verbal and visual presence, which may be welcomed by people who have spent most of their lives being ignored.” While poverty has fallen under Chávez, more than a quarter of the population of Venezuela still lives under the poverty line; inflation last year was second only to Ethiopia’s; the slums of Caracas are more dangerous than Baghdad or Ciudad Juárez. As in most Latin American countries, poverty tracks with race, and leaders tend to be “white,” which is to say of Spanish ancestry. So it would be hard to overstate the pride that Venezuela’s poorest and most marginalized feel in having a black-white-indigenous man as their democratically elected president. But there is no real way of knowing how many people, even among his supporters, follow him on TV.

In one of the more surreal segments, an interviewer stops passers-by on the street in Caracas and asks them whether they watch the show. “Yes, with great frequency,” replies an earnest man in glasses. Why? asks the interviewer. “It’s the best way to inform ourselves, with the most clarity,” he replies. “The president tells us everything, he hides nothing.” One girl says she watches to “absorb our leader’s wise words.” Some of these people chosen apparently at random may in fact be true believers. But if one of them said, “I don’t watch it because I think Chávez is a clown and a tyrant,” the show might take a darker turn. These interviews also mark the moment that “Aló Presidente” finally folds into a house of mirrors: forcing citizens to play the role of engaged viewers while appearing on the show in order to persuade other real-life viewers that the citizens are engaged.

In the end, it doesn’t matter much what these people say when the cameras are rolling; and, of course, the opposite is true of Chávez, whose utterances to the camera matter supremely. Anything he decides or does or says on the show instantly becomes the audience’s reality, in a tangible way, regardless of whether they are watching. In this sense, “Aló Presidente” is unlike anything else on television. A TV show in America, no matter how engaging or successful or artfully put together, is always, in essence, a distraction from life. “Aló Presidente” inverts this formula, at least for Venezuelans. Instead of high entertainment value with no real-life significance, it offers low entertainment value with absolute significance. From the safety of my couch, if I become frustrated or bored or enraged or no longer amused, I can interrupt Chávez midsentence, reach out, just turn him off and he is gone. In his own country, it doesn’t matter if people watch or not. The Chávez show goes on (and on), and it is the exact same thing as real life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/hugo-chavezs-totally-bizarre-talk-show.html?ref=americas&pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan government officials have transferred more than half of the inmates out of a trouble-ridden prison where gunfire recently erupted and where authorities reported two escape attempts.

More than half of the inmates at La Planta prison in Caracas had been moved out, most of them voluntarily transferred to other prisons, said Iris Varela, the government’s top prisons officials. She told reporters on Saturday that 55 inmates also were freed.

Varela said the prison will be shut down because it doesn’t meet required standards and “can’t be repaired.” She didn’t say how many inmates remained in the prison or specify how soon it could be entirely closed.

Tensions have grown at the prison recently after what the authorities said were two escape attempts. On April 27, Varela said the authorities foiled an escape attempt when they found a tunnel dug by inmates that led to a sewer. On April 30, gunfire erupted at the prison after what Varela described as another escape attempt.

National Guard troops and police were subsequently posted outside the prison recently while the authorities said they were in talks with inmates.

Inside Venezuela’s prisons, inmates often manage to obtain weapons with help from corrupt guards, and violence is common. The watchdog group Venezuelan Prisons Observatory said about 560 people died in Venezuelan prisons last year, up from 476 in 2010.

Varela said dialogue between inmates and authorities had led to the transfers out of the crowded prison. She said the situation was peaceful, but didn’t say whether some inmates were still resisting against prison authorities.

Prison rights activist Carlos Nieto, who leads the non-governmental organization Una Ventana a la Libertad, had said before the transfers that La Planta prison was built for about 350 prisoners but housed about 2,600.

Similar problems exist at prisons across the country. In all, Venezuela’s prisons were built to hold about 12,000 inmates, but officials have said they hold about 47,000.

When asked how other prisons would cope with the influx of inmates moved out of La Planta, Varela said: “there is space in other detention centers.”

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/more-than-half-of-inmates-moved-out-of-trouble-ridden-prison-in-venezuela/2012/05/05/gIQAyTXJ4T_print.html

After writing the first part of a critique on Venezuela’s present economy, I was busy preparing some bemused mutterings about the current foreign exchange regimen when I suddenly realized Bloomberg had beaten me to the punch with this article dated September 3^rd 2007.

As befits a news agency with a reputation for unbiased and informative journalism, the headline was understated and non-partisan: “Chavez Economy Unravels as Bolivar Devaluation Pressure Climbs”

There followed an article from Alex Kennedy and Matthew Walter about how bad things are in Venezuela. We are told that:

• “Annual inflation has risen to 16 percent.”
• “..consumers face shortages of meat, flour and cooking oil.”
• “Chavez may have to devalue the bolivar to reduce the gap (between the official exchange rate and the unofficial parallel rate) and increase oil proceeds that make up half the state’s revenue.”
• We are also reminded that Chavez calls capitalism “evil” and he’s currently on a “march to socialism”. Thanks guys.

There’s plenty more where those came from, but let’s start here. The present inflation rate is 15.9%. This compares to 17.2% last month and 16.5% at the beginning of 2007. If we look back at previous Augusts, we see August 2006 at 15.0%, August 2005 at 15.3% and August 2004 at 21.2%. Presumably our commentators …..oops sorry reporters wished to make it clear they were comparing a year over year inflation rate and that gaping 0.9% gap was suitably newsworthy.  Even so, they can’t go too far back as inflation is in fact substantially lower now than in previous years.

Now the food shortages. Helpfully, Kennedy and Walter explain further down the op-ed OOPS… SORRY AGAIN!! …the report that goods (and I quote) “have disappeared from store shelves in Caracas at times this year”. Worried about this alarming turn of events, your correspondent took time out to contact acquaintances in Caracas. Dear reader, rest easy. It would seem that the present time is not one of “those times” and the supermarkets have adequate supplies for the moment. Apparently mayonnaise stocks are a tad low, but the aforementioned staples of meat, flour and cooking oil are all in stock. Phew! 

As for the given reason why Chávez (not his administration or government, of course, but good ol’ Hugo himself) may have to devalue, it sounded a little odd. Why should Hugo have to devalue while running a balanced budget? Am I missing something? Is it to do with the amount of money one analyst speculates that Chávez will spend in the run-up to the constitutional reform vote? Is it because devaluation eases inflation…no no!! That can’t be right! Ok, is it because the parallel market is only 10% of all forex trade? No!…that can’t be right either! Hmm, so is it because… No… sorry… give up. 

And then there are the quotes. It would seem that Kennedy and Walter have a useful list of contacts for Venezuelan economy quotes. 

• “For the macroeconomic house of cards not to come crashing down, the price of oil has to go up at double digit growth rates…” (Richard Hausmann, teacher of economics at Harvard)
• “It’s like our director of marketing, our director of sales, our director of manufacturing is President Chavez,” (Edgar Contreras, food manufacturing executive in Caracas)
• “We can’t go on like this.” (Edgar Contreras)
• “People are invoking their right to circumvent what are very, very stiff (foreign exchange) controls..” (Alberto Ramos, Goldman Sachs)
•  “A devaluation is a foregone conclusion. The only question is when.” (Richard Hausmann)
• “The growth in imports is so out of whack that it’s choking off the local sector…” (Teodoro Petkoff, publisher of Venezuela’s Tal Cual newspaper)
•  “The engine of growth isn’t the real economy. It’s the government.” (Teodoro Petkoff)
• “This has been the worst managed oil boom in Venezuela’s history..” Richard Hausmann)

In the spirit of balanced journalism (they are after all journalists, not commentators, please remember) they gave us one quote from government circles:

• “We’re not going to devalue no matter how much they pressure us,” (Finance Minister Rodrigo) Cabezas told reporters in Caracas on Aug. 31. “The so-called parallel market doesn’t dictate our fiscal, exchange or monetary policies.”

Now as a matter of fact, your correspondent happens to agree with some of those quotes and disagree with others. That’s fair enough, debate is a healthy thing etc. But when one sees so many voices giving a negative view of current affairs and only one supporter of the government who happens to be the very same finance minister pushing through these policies, it all seems a little lop-sided, does it not?

If this were the only example of this kind of journalism from news sources on Venezuela then I could rightly be accused of being just a bit too touchy. But to give just two more examples (from a list that would take up far too much RGE monitor bandwidth if expanded upon): 

• On 25^th January 2007, in the London Financial Times article “Cheap Petrol May Be Victim of Chávez’s Socialism”, reporter Andy Webb-Vidal told us “Venezuela‘s inflation rate is already running at close to 25 per cent per annum”. In fact, Venezuelan inflation hasn’t been that high since early 2004. Today’s rate of 15.9% may not be the best of situations, but there’s no need for such …ahem… exaggerations.
• On September 1^st 2007, Bloomberg reported the latest macroeconomic figures from Peru and Venezuela. Under the happy headline “Peru Inflation Slows in August as Bus Fares, Fuel Prices Drop”, Lima correspondent Alex Emery noted Peru’s month on month rate rose and the year-on-year rate dropped. Meanwhile, under the worrying headline “Venezuelan Inflation Accelerates on State Spending” Caracas correspondents Theresa Bradley and Steve Bodzin noted Venezuela’s month on month rate rose and the year-on-year rate dropped.  

Why not read that last one again and play spot the difference?

Back to those quotes, and to choose just one of them, “This has been the worst managed oil boom in Venezuela’s history,” said Ricardo Hausmann.  It’s an opinion, and a strong one at that, but that’s fine with us. Hausmann is eminently qualified to speak on the subject and his viewpoint is noteworthy. However there are plenty of achievements that counter such a comment. According to accepted and reliable sources, poverty levels have dropped dramatically. School attendances have quadrupled. The middle class is growing as a percentage of total population. Health care is now widely available where it was once scarce. Unemployment levels have dropped significantly. Salary increases have outstripped inflation in the last 3 years. All these improvements and more are arguably attributable to that oil boom, even without considering the political pressure of an attempted coup, a crippling oil strike and a recall election that stripped away development time between 2002 and 2004.

To hear that spending oil boom money on the poor constitutes bad management is all well and good, but why can’t we at least hear an opposite view from another eminent economist? It is of course a rhetorical question, but I feel like answering it anyway. It seems to me that we are not given balanced articles on Venezuela because reporters, controllers and editors are not interested in balanced articles on Venezuela, not even in the quality services like Reuters, Bloomberg, DJNW, WSJ, FT and all the rest. We are told Chavez has taken $17Bn from the central bank reserves, but we are not told about the Fonden reserve set up with a very large chunk of that money. We are told that Chávez has threatened to take over cement makers when all he said was the government wanted to look into said cement maker’s environmental record. The list goes on.

My conclusion is a simple request to the newswires: When it comes to Venezuela, more facts, more balance and less spin. Please. There are already enough opinions of all colours, flavours, sizes and shapes about Chávez without otherwise reliable services adding their two cents. I’m now going back to my charts and stats to try and write a real part two.