Chávez Archipelago
It seems that Maduro’s words in the National Assembly were redacted by a kind of Ciceronian aspiration, as if to place the clumsy and dyslexic reader in the position of the tribune anguished by the moral health of the republic. There appeared mentions of what any Wikipedia article could have suggested as pillars of classical republican thought, from civic humanism: Aristoteles, Machiavelli... Contaminated of course not so much by the orator’s oceanic ignorance but by the rain of allusions to ramshackle or improperly cited authors, in a typical example of the postmodern hubbub that furnishes the head of the “intellectuals” hired for the occasion.
In the field of intentions, which is in any case what we have to look at, it would have been better to mention directly Robespierre and The Committee of Public Safety; the speech, the occasion, the antecedents, the rhetoric, even the moments of babbling, all of it wants to communicate the beginning of a period of Terror that might substitute the charisma lost and buried as a principle of authority. An authority that is escaping from he who presides de Presidency and that must be reconstituted with internal ends, for recomposing the Chavista cadre, and be strategically directed toward repressive action against political (and non-political) factors that can (and are actually doing so) galvanize the deception, the hangover from the disappeared and broken mirage that the regime’s mafias are trying to snatch for themselves.
One cannot insist enough on the pathological irresponsibility of Mr. Chávez for obstructing all initiatives for institutionalizing his own factors of power and for having propitiated an archipelago of voracities in the form of tribes, clans, families (consanguineous or not) that turned the public into the private and particular patrimony of a few capos. These now look for some form of equilibrium by means of purges and shifts that could be successful, if this is understood as their survival in power.
But there are the elections. And there is something else, what isn’t framed exactly within the political but rather in the end of the world sensation that permeates everyday life. Because of this we infer from what Maduro emitted in the Assembly and in previous actions, in that Red October Plan that has been announced, the matter passes through constructing the regime’s “irreversibility”, that is, to install the message that things will no longer be, effectively, as they were before. Politics give way to the brutal threat of repeating, not just metaphorically as they’ve done up until now but in actuality, the menace of actually existing socialism. The redistributionist and rentier outline would have thus reached its end so as to install an economy of perpetual scarcity in which the only salvation will to to connect oneself to the system of privileges of the government apparatus.
But once again: there are the elections. Turning them into a mere acclamation of Chavismo isn’t possible, there’s not enough human material for that; but creating, with the message of irreversibility and the repressive operations that can be exercised, the toxic atmosphere that might strip it of its political meaning, this might be possible. Because if all that pre-political strength (to give it a name) that one breathes in the weariness and frustration to be found on the street, passes onto the political act (which on this occasion is to vote, and which on other occasions will have another expression), the archipelago is rendered quite compromised, and the measurements of opinion are registering this overwhelmingly. The efficacy of the vote is now measured in another dimension: that of repudiation, and the message that must be given in December is that the only thing that is irreversible is the will to change of a society that doesn’t want to be the property of a caste.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 10 October 2013 }
Showing posts with label Colette Capriles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colette Capriles. Show all posts
6.14.2008
La revolución ha terminado / Colette Capriles
The Revolution is Over
That’s what Napoleon Bonaparte laconically decreed in November of 1799, during the dissolution of the revolutionary institutions that after ten years had left France divided and impotent in the face of its own contradictions. Like so many things Bonaparte said, the phrase is at once true and false.
The recovery of the monarchical forms that Napoleon undertook proves that the revolutionary parenthesis hadn’t erased the popular nostalgia for centralization and hierarchies, while the bourgeois personality of the Napoleonic regime, along with his obsession for legislating to create a national order, manifests that the old order, definitively suppressed, nevertheless continued to live in the new one. The revolution would be like a parenthesis, a type of time tunnel leading to the place history had already planned, just quicker.
Maybe it turns out that revolutions end as soon as they’re declared clinically dead with a memorable phrase. Or perhaps, in actuality, revolutions are nothing more than “speech acts” (as Searle would say), that is, words that cause practical effects and create or destroy themselves discursively. At the beginning was the word, always lit up and incendiary.
The question would be: How does one know a revolution has ceased to exist? If one supposes a revolution is a leap between two eras, a type of agitated hallway that joins two universes, its death would be marked by the advent of a new order, or better said, of a certain normality. In other words, when it becomes habitual. When it definitively and inevitably encounters the past from which it disengaged and against which it wanted to fight so much. The successful revolution is the one that dies while contributing to the integration of past and future, that is, the one that ends up negating itself by admitting that societies don’t move by means of leaps and ruptures, but rather through complicated syntheses of new and old. But revolutions want to be eternal, within revolutions there’s always an impulse to perpetuate themselves as perennial exceptions, with the suspension of history that in Cuba, for example, transformed streets and bodies into examples of a carefully maintained wax museum. In the Soviet Union and the countries of the “socialist field” even the future was old. The representation of the contemporary and of the future’s technological delights could barely update the contrasted images of Fritz Lang.
Revolutionaries are never the first ones to perceive the pestilence of the revolution’s cadaver, protected as they are, always, by ideological Kleenexes at their noses. And what tends to be more paradoxical is that the announcement of a revolution produces, in and of itself, revolutionary effects that its leaders cannot foresee. The unexpected, unforeseen effects are what matter. That is exactly why, even though there might be family resemblances among revolutionary gestures, there is no definitive recipe that will guarantee for them (as they claim they want to do) an arrival at the sea of happiness. Actually, the repetitions are reduced to Marx’s comment about the 18th Brumaire: what is tragedy the first time reappears as farce.
And after the farce? Who picks up the pieces? How do we recycle what can still be used? One thing is true: revolutions fall apart from within, when the tension between the orthodox forces who’ve lost their sense of smell and the revisionist forces that still have it becomes unsustainable.
And for this to happen the revolution doesn’t need to have changed anything. It can have successes or failures, it doesn’t matter. Revolutions don’t die from inefficiency, from their own cruelty or because of the injustices they inevitable carry alongside them, but from weariness.
Like a plant that’s watered too much and produces nothing. The slogans and phrases are endlessly repeated, but each time they become a purely empty ritual that’s mechanically recited without being able to mask the terrible disenchantment.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 12 June 2008 }
That’s what Napoleon Bonaparte laconically decreed in November of 1799, during the dissolution of the revolutionary institutions that after ten years had left France divided and impotent in the face of its own contradictions. Like so many things Bonaparte said, the phrase is at once true and false.
The recovery of the monarchical forms that Napoleon undertook proves that the revolutionary parenthesis hadn’t erased the popular nostalgia for centralization and hierarchies, while the bourgeois personality of the Napoleonic regime, along with his obsession for legislating to create a national order, manifests that the old order, definitively suppressed, nevertheless continued to live in the new one. The revolution would be like a parenthesis, a type of time tunnel leading to the place history had already planned, just quicker.
Maybe it turns out that revolutions end as soon as they’re declared clinically dead with a memorable phrase. Or perhaps, in actuality, revolutions are nothing more than “speech acts” (as Searle would say), that is, words that cause practical effects and create or destroy themselves discursively. At the beginning was the word, always lit up and incendiary.
The question would be: How does one know a revolution has ceased to exist? If one supposes a revolution is a leap between two eras, a type of agitated hallway that joins two universes, its death would be marked by the advent of a new order, or better said, of a certain normality. In other words, when it becomes habitual. When it definitively and inevitably encounters the past from which it disengaged and against which it wanted to fight so much. The successful revolution is the one that dies while contributing to the integration of past and future, that is, the one that ends up negating itself by admitting that societies don’t move by means of leaps and ruptures, but rather through complicated syntheses of new and old. But revolutions want to be eternal, within revolutions there’s always an impulse to perpetuate themselves as perennial exceptions, with the suspension of history that in Cuba, for example, transformed streets and bodies into examples of a carefully maintained wax museum. In the Soviet Union and the countries of the “socialist field” even the future was old. The representation of the contemporary and of the future’s technological delights could barely update the contrasted images of Fritz Lang.
Revolutionaries are never the first ones to perceive the pestilence of the revolution’s cadaver, protected as they are, always, by ideological Kleenexes at their noses. And what tends to be more paradoxical is that the announcement of a revolution produces, in and of itself, revolutionary effects that its leaders cannot foresee. The unexpected, unforeseen effects are what matter. That is exactly why, even though there might be family resemblances among revolutionary gestures, there is no definitive recipe that will guarantee for them (as they claim they want to do) an arrival at the sea of happiness. Actually, the repetitions are reduced to Marx’s comment about the 18th Brumaire: what is tragedy the first time reappears as farce.
And after the farce? Who picks up the pieces? How do we recycle what can still be used? One thing is true: revolutions fall apart from within, when the tension between the orthodox forces who’ve lost their sense of smell and the revisionist forces that still have it becomes unsustainable.
And for this to happen the revolution doesn’t need to have changed anything. It can have successes or failures, it doesn’t matter. Revolutions don’t die from inefficiency, from their own cruelty or because of the injustices they inevitable carry alongside them, but from weariness.
Like a plant that’s watered too much and produces nothing. The slogans and phrases are endlessly repeated, but each time they become a purely empty ritual that’s mechanically recited without being able to mask the terrible disenchantment.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 12 June 2008 }
6.06.2008
Felicidad y felicitadores / Colette Capriles
Happiness and Congratulators
Maybe you need to have been educated, as I was for example, in the religion of the future and perfect society whose example was thought to exist in the Soviet Union, in order to have one’s head furnished by the most common or communicable images regarding the happiness we’d be given by a classless society: Eisensteinian drama and agrarian innocence, geometric order and broadsides flapping freely in the wind, barefoot doctors and happily disciplined children, consummate chess players and exultant workers gratefully marching before the Olympus of the Supreme Soviet, swollen with a warrior’s patriotism facing the military panoply. An ample collection of faded images that concealed the fear and subjection to the infernal and impersonal machine of the State and which have remained as relics, testimonies of the vain attempt to create ex nihilo a distinctive culture (and cult).
It’s not that I’m trying to give [Andrés] Izarra and his people a lesson, as I suspect they’re actually trying to create the visual dictionary of Chavismo in order to pull it out of the apologetic image of the “poor man with a uniform” who evokes such a scarce future, but I can’t help noticing that the events of the past few weeks don’t really help the selfless functionaries accomplish their corporate task, at such a hurried electoral pace. The predictions that contemplated the emergency of the intestinal contradictions in the government’s field (from the very moment when it seemed to bask in the hegemony of the 2006 presidential elections) are inexplicably coming true, like a well tempered curse, and they’re unveiling not political factionalism (that, most definitely, is normal) but rather a terrible blind spot for this government: the immeasurable mediocrity and coarseness of its spokesmen and decision makers.
The effect is so vast that even the calls to discipline (that is, to silence) are willfully ignored. On the contrary, they amplify them, because they’ve provoked a type of competition of adulation that convokes the most extraordinary verbal juggling and the most astonishing conceptual pirouettes, revealing a shameful intellectual nakedness. We already know the art of congratulation is only effective when it is undetectable and that requires a refined verbal repertoire.
It’s also due to arrogance, though it would be an arrogance that’s somehow naïve. I suppose the members of the government, starved of sane intellectual commerce with the well-trained people who’ve been excluded from the national project, have developed a type of private language (like univiteline twins) and have forgotten the public tongue. Maybe that’s what explains the profusion of crude terms so many official spokesmen use to whip their auditoriums: most definitely, they speak “domestically,” because the country is like their plantation. And as I was saying, it sometimes seems they genuinely believe, these peculiar speakers, that their private world is universal. The gravity of this is that they’ve lost their original language and no longer understand the tongue everyone else uses. The Greeks, inventors of democracy, never ceased to think about it and recognize (or almost, celebrate) the constant struggle against their own defects. The starting point of democracy is that every citizen has the capacity for judgment necessary to evaluate political life and speak in the assembly.
In Athens this simply meant that he could govern. But this natural wisdom was in no way spontaneous: it stemmed from what they called paideia, which is precisely a general education, not a specialized one. It is the apprenticeship of justice and reverence, of decency, as we’d say now.
The Government doesn’t need to be more efficient. Better said, efficiency is not what it lacks. It’s not a matter of administrating better the handouts for the “slight” demands of the masses, as the President qualified them not too long ago. What’s lacking is decency, consideration, common sense.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 1 May 2008 }
Maybe you need to have been educated, as I was for example, in the religion of the future and perfect society whose example was thought to exist in the Soviet Union, in order to have one’s head furnished by the most common or communicable images regarding the happiness we’d be given by a classless society: Eisensteinian drama and agrarian innocence, geometric order and broadsides flapping freely in the wind, barefoot doctors and happily disciplined children, consummate chess players and exultant workers gratefully marching before the Olympus of the Supreme Soviet, swollen with a warrior’s patriotism facing the military panoply. An ample collection of faded images that concealed the fear and subjection to the infernal and impersonal machine of the State and which have remained as relics, testimonies of the vain attempt to create ex nihilo a distinctive culture (and cult).
It’s not that I’m trying to give [Andrés] Izarra and his people a lesson, as I suspect they’re actually trying to create the visual dictionary of Chavismo in order to pull it out of the apologetic image of the “poor man with a uniform” who evokes such a scarce future, but I can’t help noticing that the events of the past few weeks don’t really help the selfless functionaries accomplish their corporate task, at such a hurried electoral pace. The predictions that contemplated the emergency of the intestinal contradictions in the government’s field (from the very moment when it seemed to bask in the hegemony of the 2006 presidential elections) are inexplicably coming true, like a well tempered curse, and they’re unveiling not political factionalism (that, most definitely, is normal) but rather a terrible blind spot for this government: the immeasurable mediocrity and coarseness of its spokesmen and decision makers.
The effect is so vast that even the calls to discipline (that is, to silence) are willfully ignored. On the contrary, they amplify them, because they’ve provoked a type of competition of adulation that convokes the most extraordinary verbal juggling and the most astonishing conceptual pirouettes, revealing a shameful intellectual nakedness. We already know the art of congratulation is only effective when it is undetectable and that requires a refined verbal repertoire.
It’s also due to arrogance, though it would be an arrogance that’s somehow naïve. I suppose the members of the government, starved of sane intellectual commerce with the well-trained people who’ve been excluded from the national project, have developed a type of private language (like univiteline twins) and have forgotten the public tongue. Maybe that’s what explains the profusion of crude terms so many official spokesmen use to whip their auditoriums: most definitely, they speak “domestically,” because the country is like their plantation. And as I was saying, it sometimes seems they genuinely believe, these peculiar speakers, that their private world is universal. The gravity of this is that they’ve lost their original language and no longer understand the tongue everyone else uses. The Greeks, inventors of democracy, never ceased to think about it and recognize (or almost, celebrate) the constant struggle against their own defects. The starting point of democracy is that every citizen has the capacity for judgment necessary to evaluate political life and speak in the assembly.
In Athens this simply meant that he could govern. But this natural wisdom was in no way spontaneous: it stemmed from what they called paideia, which is precisely a general education, not a specialized one. It is the apprenticeship of justice and reverence, of decency, as we’d say now.
The Government doesn’t need to be more efficient. Better said, efficiency is not what it lacks. It’s not a matter of administrating better the handouts for the “slight” demands of the masses, as the President qualified them not too long ago. What’s lacking is decency, consideration, common sense.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 1 May 2008 }
3.07.2008
Así en la guerra como en la paz / Colette Capriles
In War As in Peace
As at other junctures throughout this near decade, war seems to be a continuation of politics: Chávez acts not with institutional logic (annoying normative procedures that seek consensus based on petit bourgeois neutrality) but rather with the logic of the Guevarista and Maoist foco: “When the enemy advances, we step back; when the enemy stops, we assault him; when the enemy becomes exhausted, we attack; when the enemy retreats, we chase him.”
Thanks to the equalizing power of television, which has allowed him to develop a unidirectional rhetorical arsenal with which he doesn’t so much rule as emit irrefutable orders, war and peace end up being the same thing, or merely a change of scenery and costumes.
Expelling people from Petróleos de Venezuela is the same as moving tanks from Maracay. And not only are the distinctions blurred between the civilian and the military but those that divide the internal and the external are also dissolved.
As though the swelling of vanity that has been underway in the President’s body could no longer contain itself within the narrow confines of the national territory and instead spilled over like a stain that fights to grow.
From the beginning, the President’s management confuses all borders: the ghost of La Gran Colombia, that unfinished project, has always obfuscated the perception of the geopolitical context. The nationalism involved in the sanctification of Bolívar’s “thought” necessarily implies, by definition, Bolivarian imperialism notoriously reincarnated in our President.
Maybe the circumstances will turn out to be opportune, serving as a release of domestic pressure within his administration. But what is revealed isn’t just a simple maneuver to cover up discontent and convoke disappointed public opinion through nationalism. On the contrary, it is a strategic moment.
As it was demonstrated by the hierarchy of relations with Colombia in the Venezuelan government’s recent agenda, ever since the failed negotiation up until what we saw last weekend, and as the documents found in the laptop belonging to Reyes are now revealing: it is effectively an offensive strategy that, given the increasingly weakened objective conditions of the guerrillas, couldn’t be delayed any longer.
But, whose offensive? What is important to elucidate politically is how the alliance between the Colombian FARC and Chávez’s political project is integrated. From what can be intuited amid the informational fragmentation, we can now discern a type of broad continental group (that far from being progressive and of the left, is completely reactionary and retrograde, isolationist, autarchic and caudillista), whose threads move by means of the flow of petrodollars to a great degree, yet isn’t completely dominated by the Venezuelan President.
There is a confluence of interests among different actors, but there is no clear political axis. Hoping to mime the role of Cuba and Castro during the subversions of the 1960s, Chávez is not pondering the differences that exist between the revolution based on moral incentives preached by Guevara and the revolution of the electronic transaction of hundreds of tons of cocaine.
The relative power of the narco-guerrillas can’t be compared to the penury of potential guerrillas in all the regions of Latin America that Cuba received and carefully trained to initiate subversion in their countries of origin.
And the same can be said about the other actors: governments like those of Morales and Correa, no matter how aligned they might be with Chavismo’s imperial power, have to guard their own interests.
The Colombian government decided to create a crisis so as to unveil in all its splendor the role of Chávez’s government in the various domestic scenarios of neighboring countries. Chavismo and its franchise with Correa will keep trying to bring ideology into the situation, as though it were a repetition of the Bay of Pigs. But Colombia will try to demonstrate that, actually, this situation isn’t about politics or ideology, good intentions, or socialism: what we have here are merchants who traffic in drugs, in people, in ideas, in hopes.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 6 March 2008 }
As at other junctures throughout this near decade, war seems to be a continuation of politics: Chávez acts not with institutional logic (annoying normative procedures that seek consensus based on petit bourgeois neutrality) but rather with the logic of the Guevarista and Maoist foco: “When the enemy advances, we step back; when the enemy stops, we assault him; when the enemy becomes exhausted, we attack; when the enemy retreats, we chase him.”
Thanks to the equalizing power of television, which has allowed him to develop a unidirectional rhetorical arsenal with which he doesn’t so much rule as emit irrefutable orders, war and peace end up being the same thing, or merely a change of scenery and costumes.
Expelling people from Petróleos de Venezuela is the same as moving tanks from Maracay. And not only are the distinctions blurred between the civilian and the military but those that divide the internal and the external are also dissolved.
As though the swelling of vanity that has been underway in the President’s body could no longer contain itself within the narrow confines of the national territory and instead spilled over like a stain that fights to grow.
From the beginning, the President’s management confuses all borders: the ghost of La Gran Colombia, that unfinished project, has always obfuscated the perception of the geopolitical context. The nationalism involved in the sanctification of Bolívar’s “thought” necessarily implies, by definition, Bolivarian imperialism notoriously reincarnated in our President.
Maybe the circumstances will turn out to be opportune, serving as a release of domestic pressure within his administration. But what is revealed isn’t just a simple maneuver to cover up discontent and convoke disappointed public opinion through nationalism. On the contrary, it is a strategic moment.
As it was demonstrated by the hierarchy of relations with Colombia in the Venezuelan government’s recent agenda, ever since the failed negotiation up until what we saw last weekend, and as the documents found in the laptop belonging to Reyes are now revealing: it is effectively an offensive strategy that, given the increasingly weakened objective conditions of the guerrillas, couldn’t be delayed any longer.
But, whose offensive? What is important to elucidate politically is how the alliance between the Colombian FARC and Chávez’s political project is integrated. From what can be intuited amid the informational fragmentation, we can now discern a type of broad continental group (that far from being progressive and of the left, is completely reactionary and retrograde, isolationist, autarchic and caudillista), whose threads move by means of the flow of petrodollars to a great degree, yet isn’t completely dominated by the Venezuelan President.
There is a confluence of interests among different actors, but there is no clear political axis. Hoping to mime the role of Cuba and Castro during the subversions of the 1960s, Chávez is not pondering the differences that exist between the revolution based on moral incentives preached by Guevara and the revolution of the electronic transaction of hundreds of tons of cocaine.
The relative power of the narco-guerrillas can’t be compared to the penury of potential guerrillas in all the regions of Latin America that Cuba received and carefully trained to initiate subversion in their countries of origin.
And the same can be said about the other actors: governments like those of Morales and Correa, no matter how aligned they might be with Chavismo’s imperial power, have to guard their own interests.
The Colombian government decided to create a crisis so as to unveil in all its splendor the role of Chávez’s government in the various domestic scenarios of neighboring countries. Chavismo and its franchise with Correa will keep trying to bring ideology into the situation, as though it were a repetition of the Bay of Pigs. But Colombia will try to demonstrate that, actually, this situation isn’t about politics or ideology, good intentions, or socialism: what we have here are merchants who traffic in drugs, in people, in ideas, in hopes.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 6 March 2008 }
1.25.2008
Licuefacción del Estado y el estado de los negocios / Colette Capriles
Liquefaction of the State and the State of Business
This is what we have in front of our astonished eyes: the definitive implementation of a transnational corporation, a fine example of the ubiquity and efficiency of market globalization, dedicated to the purchase and sale of ideology, not just producing fabulous profits but also, fundamentally, creating a business model that should already be featured as a case study in the Harvard Business Review.
This model sustains itself in liquefaction or, more precisely, the hemolysis of political institutions (in other words, of the normative conventions that regulate relations between the different parts of society) and their substitution by a series of “business units” or command centers, and a parallel and autonomous execution in charge of developing strategic lines of work for the conservation of power, and which are definitely articulated only in the figure of the capo di tutti capi.
These business units, made up of an easily replicable structure, thanks to portable functionaries (generally linked to the military estate) occupy themselves with creating a few high profile social programs that (paradoxically) leave the financial and political operations that sustain them in absolute darkness while assuring the widest possible opacity. While the spectator’s attention is distracted and overwhelmed by the good intentions of the managers of these business units, the extraordinary profits derived from trading public goods remain hidden at the far edge of the stage. Those of good conscience give out sighs of relief, while they consume the different episodes of the “fight against poverty” that parade in front of their astonished eyes, their critical conscience dulled by the illusion of the definitive vindication of the excluded.
This monstrous corporation, which at first glance can be decoded as the epiphany of Latin American populism (a great contribution to 20th century politics by our Americas), is now revealed as being more than that: this TGL (Transnational of the Global Left, Inc.) has been installed under the premise that, erasing the borders between public and private funds (due to the effect of the increase of state control over private activity and over society in general), the fortunes of the countries where it operates can be managed as the corporate and personal patrimony of those who have been elected to public office. But just as the Devil’s great ability is to convince us he doesn’t exist, the TGL’s is to become rich by means of the idea of eradicating profit, to extract capital gain from the idea of revolution, converting the latter into the most sophisticated product of global capitalism.
Flocks of flying suitcases full of dollars cross the skies of this continent’s large homeland following the seasonal migration of electoral cycles; prêt a porter constituent assemblies and virtual constitutions that are “customized” according to the user’s taste; a flabby left that celebrates with well-aged whiskey and its intelligence given over to praising the Supreme Being: those are the heralds of this latest incarnation of moribund imperialism.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 27 December 2007 }
This is what we have in front of our astonished eyes: the definitive implementation of a transnational corporation, a fine example of the ubiquity and efficiency of market globalization, dedicated to the purchase and sale of ideology, not just producing fabulous profits but also, fundamentally, creating a business model that should already be featured as a case study in the Harvard Business Review.
This model sustains itself in liquefaction or, more precisely, the hemolysis of political institutions (in other words, of the normative conventions that regulate relations between the different parts of society) and their substitution by a series of “business units” or command centers, and a parallel and autonomous execution in charge of developing strategic lines of work for the conservation of power, and which are definitely articulated only in the figure of the capo di tutti capi.
These business units, made up of an easily replicable structure, thanks to portable functionaries (generally linked to the military estate) occupy themselves with creating a few high profile social programs that (paradoxically) leave the financial and political operations that sustain them in absolute darkness while assuring the widest possible opacity. While the spectator’s attention is distracted and overwhelmed by the good intentions of the managers of these business units, the extraordinary profits derived from trading public goods remain hidden at the far edge of the stage. Those of good conscience give out sighs of relief, while they consume the different episodes of the “fight against poverty” that parade in front of their astonished eyes, their critical conscience dulled by the illusion of the definitive vindication of the excluded.
This monstrous corporation, which at first glance can be decoded as the epiphany of Latin American populism (a great contribution to 20th century politics by our Americas), is now revealed as being more than that: this TGL (Transnational of the Global Left, Inc.) has been installed under the premise that, erasing the borders between public and private funds (due to the effect of the increase of state control over private activity and over society in general), the fortunes of the countries where it operates can be managed as the corporate and personal patrimony of those who have been elected to public office. But just as the Devil’s great ability is to convince us he doesn’t exist, the TGL’s is to become rich by means of the idea of eradicating profit, to extract capital gain from the idea of revolution, converting the latter into the most sophisticated product of global capitalism.
Flocks of flying suitcases full of dollars cross the skies of this continent’s large homeland following the seasonal migration of electoral cycles; prêt a porter constituent assemblies and virtual constitutions that are “customized” according to the user’s taste; a flabby left that celebrates with well-aged whiskey and its intelligence given over to praising the Supreme Being: those are the heralds of this latest incarnation of moribund imperialism.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 27 December 2007 }
10.18.2007
Confederados / Colette Capriles
Confederated
In one corner of the mapamundi, or of the international news agencies, Latin America reveals itself, wrapped, as it has been since its invention, within a chiaroscuro that feeds all the projections of the West. The continent of imperfect modernization, in other words, of dead utopias, repeating, now in the 21st century, its same history of fragile governments and phantasmal masses. The left and the right of happy societies maintain, without acknowledging it, the same languid glance over us: the left enjoys the great opportunity of promoting itself through Latin American resentment; the right deplores it, but both of them coincide that, as the common citizen in Argentina during the dictatorship would say about those who left their homes and never returned, “there must be some reason.” We deserve the eternal tragedy of petty tyrants, because we haven’t known how to emerge from tyrannies and we even vote for them. Excellent reasoning.
Things are like that, we’re guilty of being victims, and this conviction is so intense that it frightens off the perception of history, so that not even the most informed of the foreign observers seem capable of recalling let’s not say the “achievements” of American societies, but at least the tremendous efforts we’ve made to bear that supersonic process of building nations from the ruins of an empire, that is, on a structure that was left suddenly emptied of any sense.
The victims should receive their redemption, or more accurately, their redeemer. And thus benevolence towards voluntarism is woven (because it’s always about that, about having the will to change) and tolerance towards the cruel social experimentation that has taken place on the continent. Congratulations, you have won a new constitution! Just in time, step inside to pick up your reloaded caudillo! As long as the perception of the victim as the central perspective for interpreting the American world is not disarticulated, we will continue to drag ourselves through the delusions of a grandeur that, unjustly of course, we never had.
Like everything else that happens around here lately, the image of Mr. Castro and Mr. Chávez sitting cozily as if they were family but, instead of chatting about the vicissitudes of the grandkids, talking about the Latin American epic, can’t be any more incredible or lamentable. Castro’s legacy undoubtedly includes the indulgence of the global left who saw him as the living fossil through which they stumbled upon the unpleasant topic of Stalinism. Castro secluded in his island, Stalin a corpse in his mausoleum, we the “modern” left with no account to give. But with the inheritor, empowered by oil and extending his chubby humanity throughout the confines of the territory, the horizon of expectations becomes more complicated. Or maybe it is simplified: when the President announces the “confederation” between Cuba and Venezuela, perhaps he’s sending the most musical message progressives around the world could ever hear. He’s saying that with Venezuelan oil Cuban “socialism” will cease being the monstrous failure it has been for fifty years, and just like the transfusions that saved Castro’s life, it will be injected into the continent. In this way it relieves the bad conscience of those who in the name of social justice have ratified the Cuban dictatorship and its dead, announcing for them the arrival at the Promised Land. Chávez would then be a type of capitalist partner for Castro’s social design; the executive producer for the blockbuster production of the final redemption.
But the most important element for explaining Castro’s seizure of power in 1959 is Cuban nationalism. It wasn’t the military factor (the rebels fought against a demoralized Army that had no operational capacity) nor of course the economic factor (the Cuban standard of living was far ahead of the rest of Latin America). For the way in which the Cuban temperament has been built, the idea of being subjected to a foreign will is simply unacceptable. There’s plenty of room for the sale, rent or concession of the Castro franchise, but not for submission to another country’s politics. The “confederation” can only be conceived as the subordination of Venezuela.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 18 October 2007 }
In one corner of the mapamundi, or of the international news agencies, Latin America reveals itself, wrapped, as it has been since its invention, within a chiaroscuro that feeds all the projections of the West. The continent of imperfect modernization, in other words, of dead utopias, repeating, now in the 21st century, its same history of fragile governments and phantasmal masses. The left and the right of happy societies maintain, without acknowledging it, the same languid glance over us: the left enjoys the great opportunity of promoting itself through Latin American resentment; the right deplores it, but both of them coincide that, as the common citizen in Argentina during the dictatorship would say about those who left their homes and never returned, “there must be some reason.” We deserve the eternal tragedy of petty tyrants, because we haven’t known how to emerge from tyrannies and we even vote for them. Excellent reasoning.
Things are like that, we’re guilty of being victims, and this conviction is so intense that it frightens off the perception of history, so that not even the most informed of the foreign observers seem capable of recalling let’s not say the “achievements” of American societies, but at least the tremendous efforts we’ve made to bear that supersonic process of building nations from the ruins of an empire, that is, on a structure that was left suddenly emptied of any sense.
The victims should receive their redemption, or more accurately, their redeemer. And thus benevolence towards voluntarism is woven (because it’s always about that, about having the will to change) and tolerance towards the cruel social experimentation that has taken place on the continent. Congratulations, you have won a new constitution! Just in time, step inside to pick up your reloaded caudillo! As long as the perception of the victim as the central perspective for interpreting the American world is not disarticulated, we will continue to drag ourselves through the delusions of a grandeur that, unjustly of course, we never had.
Like everything else that happens around here lately, the image of Mr. Castro and Mr. Chávez sitting cozily as if they were family but, instead of chatting about the vicissitudes of the grandkids, talking about the Latin American epic, can’t be any more incredible or lamentable. Castro’s legacy undoubtedly includes the indulgence of the global left who saw him as the living fossil through which they stumbled upon the unpleasant topic of Stalinism. Castro secluded in his island, Stalin a corpse in his mausoleum, we the “modern” left with no account to give. But with the inheritor, empowered by oil and extending his chubby humanity throughout the confines of the territory, the horizon of expectations becomes more complicated. Or maybe it is simplified: when the President announces the “confederation” between Cuba and Venezuela, perhaps he’s sending the most musical message progressives around the world could ever hear. He’s saying that with Venezuelan oil Cuban “socialism” will cease being the monstrous failure it has been for fifty years, and just like the transfusions that saved Castro’s life, it will be injected into the continent. In this way it relieves the bad conscience of those who in the name of social justice have ratified the Cuban dictatorship and its dead, announcing for them the arrival at the Promised Land. Chávez would then be a type of capitalist partner for Castro’s social design; the executive producer for the blockbuster production of the final redemption.
But the most important element for explaining Castro’s seizure of power in 1959 is Cuban nationalism. It wasn’t the military factor (the rebels fought against a demoralized Army that had no operational capacity) nor of course the economic factor (the Cuban standard of living was far ahead of the rest of Latin America). For the way in which the Cuban temperament has been built, the idea of being subjected to a foreign will is simply unacceptable. There’s plenty of room for the sale, rent or concession of the Castro franchise, but not for submission to another country’s politics. The “confederation” can only be conceived as the subordination of Venezuela.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 18 October 2007 }
4.20.2007
El estado parapléjico / Colette Capriles
The Paraplegic State
In the first days, the key word was renewal. With a few historical flashes in the head, mixed in with peplum films evoking classic antiquity and republican glories, with the fitted pants and long coats of the Latin American patriots, the new elite placed all its hope in the idea that the writing and proclamation of a new constitution could disarm the past and open the doors to a new world, of unknown physiognomy, but with fertile ground for the invention of another political order. It was a matter of a deductive scheme: if the profound premises change, everything else will crumble by implication.
But the kidnapping of the constituent assembly debate was not enough: in actuality, the displayed results of the 1999 Constitution show that the new leaders did not know how to give shape to a new project, a different sociopolitical model: they settled with adding to the magna carta a few mechanisms for consolidating the base of their power, because they neither had a mature alternative project nor did Venezuelan society have any other aspirations than clearly conservative reformist ones. The Bolivarian project, a blanket of ideological remnants, would then develop with regulations adjusted to the political game of representative democracy, a limitation that forced them to provoke the crisis of 2002. That breaking point brought many lessons to the apprentices of power: they had to make for themselves, on the spot, some sort of ideological construction that would mark the inside and outside of the project. They began, in the middle of 2003, to make references to socialism and to exhibit their ties to the Cuban revolution (a Latin American form of beatification), as their complete control of the petroleum industry eliminated all restrictions on the Government budget and its expansive will.
Meanwhile, a focus in opposition to the first one develops: the consolidation of power will come by inductive means, to put it in those terms. The multi-billion dollar construction of the Parallel State begins. Since public institutions showed an inertial resistance to the disarticulated presidential will, which tried switching ministers as a treatment against popular discontent, the creation of a parallel reality is activated, one which concentrates the resources and the discourses around the most vulnerable and electorally profitable groups. Within a couple of years, the structures of the public powers were duplicated and each dusty institution now has its informal shadow, its twin mission connected without interposition to the neuralgic center of power, by means of the reggaeton of the billions.
Having crossed the docile electoral Rubicon, it is manifest that the parallel state has become paraplegic. Its achievements, the little numbers of public policies, are so disproportionate as to the number of zeros in its budget that it’s impossible to ignore the sibylline discontent, inarticulate but as fearsome as the terrifying tremors of a herd on the loose, rising from those who should be its beneficiaries.
In this way we reach the third act of the performance: now it is a matter of penetrating the remaining institutional carapaces. What could have been a logical unfolding of the previous stage, that is, the institutionalization of the missions strategy, turns out to be an inversion: the object is de-institutionalization. The slogan is “Invasion and Penetration,” believing that everything outside presidential control constitutes a threat and must disappear. We won’t find the formal educational system coexisting with the fast-education programs (as toxic as fast-food), but instead the goal is to reduce the formal system to an express one, colonizing the university system. We won’t find any political games within the Chavista field. All sources of variability and uncertainty are being shamelessly strangled right now.
So, what is happening is not so much an ideological coming out of the closet: it’s that the autocratic conception of power can be felt everywhere in the Stalinist discourse, because the previous strategies are no longer useful. The commissar formula is adopted as a link between society and the Government, trusting that the communal councils project will be able to effectively destroy the intermediary institutions.
It’s like the inscription found on many Renaissance maps that represented the known world as a type of large, central island surrounded by an ominous Ocean: “Beyond lie monsters,” wrote the cartographers in the middle of the oceanic emptiness. That’s how the Venezuelan Government conceives its world: like a citadel that sees any different thing, any pluralism, any form of diversity as monsters.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 19 April 2007 }
In the first days, the key word was renewal. With a few historical flashes in the head, mixed in with peplum films evoking classic antiquity and republican glories, with the fitted pants and long coats of the Latin American patriots, the new elite placed all its hope in the idea that the writing and proclamation of a new constitution could disarm the past and open the doors to a new world, of unknown physiognomy, but with fertile ground for the invention of another political order. It was a matter of a deductive scheme: if the profound premises change, everything else will crumble by implication.
But the kidnapping of the constituent assembly debate was not enough: in actuality, the displayed results of the 1999 Constitution show that the new leaders did not know how to give shape to a new project, a different sociopolitical model: they settled with adding to the magna carta a few mechanisms for consolidating the base of their power, because they neither had a mature alternative project nor did Venezuelan society have any other aspirations than clearly conservative reformist ones. The Bolivarian project, a blanket of ideological remnants, would then develop with regulations adjusted to the political game of representative democracy, a limitation that forced them to provoke the crisis of 2002. That breaking point brought many lessons to the apprentices of power: they had to make for themselves, on the spot, some sort of ideological construction that would mark the inside and outside of the project. They began, in the middle of 2003, to make references to socialism and to exhibit their ties to the Cuban revolution (a Latin American form of beatification), as their complete control of the petroleum industry eliminated all restrictions on the Government budget and its expansive will.
Meanwhile, a focus in opposition to the first one develops: the consolidation of power will come by inductive means, to put it in those terms. The multi-billion dollar construction of the Parallel State begins. Since public institutions showed an inertial resistance to the disarticulated presidential will, which tried switching ministers as a treatment against popular discontent, the creation of a parallel reality is activated, one which concentrates the resources and the discourses around the most vulnerable and electorally profitable groups. Within a couple of years, the structures of the public powers were duplicated and each dusty institution now has its informal shadow, its twin mission connected without interposition to the neuralgic center of power, by means of the reggaeton of the billions.
Having crossed the docile electoral Rubicon, it is manifest that the parallel state has become paraplegic. Its achievements, the little numbers of public policies, are so disproportionate as to the number of zeros in its budget that it’s impossible to ignore the sibylline discontent, inarticulate but as fearsome as the terrifying tremors of a herd on the loose, rising from those who should be its beneficiaries.
In this way we reach the third act of the performance: now it is a matter of penetrating the remaining institutional carapaces. What could have been a logical unfolding of the previous stage, that is, the institutionalization of the missions strategy, turns out to be an inversion: the object is de-institutionalization. The slogan is “Invasion and Penetration,” believing that everything outside presidential control constitutes a threat and must disappear. We won’t find the formal educational system coexisting with the fast-education programs (as toxic as fast-food), but instead the goal is to reduce the formal system to an express one, colonizing the university system. We won’t find any political games within the Chavista field. All sources of variability and uncertainty are being shamelessly strangled right now.
So, what is happening is not so much an ideological coming out of the closet: it’s that the autocratic conception of power can be felt everywhere in the Stalinist discourse, because the previous strategies are no longer useful. The commissar formula is adopted as a link between society and the Government, trusting that the communal councils project will be able to effectively destroy the intermediary institutions.
It’s like the inscription found on many Renaissance maps that represented the known world as a type of large, central island surrounded by an ominous Ocean: “Beyond lie monsters,” wrote the cartographers in the middle of the oceanic emptiness. That’s how the Venezuelan Government conceives its world: like a citadel that sees any different thing, any pluralism, any form of diversity as monsters.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 19 April 2007 }
3.30.2007
La revolución como espectáculo
The Venezuelan philosopher Colette Capriles (Paris, 1961) has written a study of the years 1998 - 2004 that will serve as a useful resource for anyone trying to make sense of the social and political crisis Venezuela is undergoing today. Her book La revolución como espectáculo (Editorial Debate, 2004) [Revolution as Spectacle] is based on diaristic writings, letters, e-mails, contributions to listservs, and journalistic texts she wrote in response to political events in Venezuela. This use of an informal, loosely-structured format for her book gives it a flexible timeliness, allowing the reader to trace the author's shifting responses to political events as they occurred. The chronological order of the book (each entry has a date and title), and the brevity of the entries, at times gives the book a feeling of being a personal blog that has been translated into a book.
Capriles currently writes a bi-weekly column for the newspaper El Nacional and teaches in the Social Sciences Department at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. In her column for El Nacional, as well as in a previous one for TalCual, Capriles has been one of the most insightful commentators on Venezuela's confusing political landscape. Part of what makes her book so important is the way it acknowledges the social and ideological chaos that has engulfed Venezuela, while never losing her faith in the clarifying power of reason. Capriles does not offer explicit solutions, but she does help the reader understand certain patterns of thought and their influence on all sides of the Venezuelan political divide.
Among the philosophical traps Capriles identifies in Venezuela is the unproductive reduction of discourse to the repetitive imposition of a single figure, who is either praised or derided, but who is enthroned as a vortex either way:
“I'm inclined to continue thinking that this is a dictatorship, and one of the finest ones, because one cannot stop thinking about Chávez for even an instant. ” (02.12.99, “The Paralegal”)
Perhaps one can read this brilliant book as an attempt to move beyond that cult of personality. While Chávez is of course mentioned throughout the book, Capriles does not linger on him. Instead, she devotes her energies to understanding the entire process he leads, and the effects he has created in Venezuela. Her study posits the notion that Chávez is, more than anything, a symptom of problems that have been an essential part of Venezuela since its foundation nearly 200 years ago.
Perhaps the central concern of this book is the identification and deconstruction of an apolitical, or anti-political, impulse that has taken hold of many Venezuelans in recent years. According to Capriles, one of the factors that has maintained Chávez in power is the deep-seated sense of mistrust of any type of political action among Venezuelans. This sentiment became exacerbated during the 1990s, when disenchantment with corruption and and a growing antagonism toward political parties led Venezuelans to dismiss the entire political sphere as useless. Seen in this light, the rise of Chávez can be understood as an opportunistic use of generalized discontent for the accrual of an autocratic concentration of power in a single person. Capriles identifies the recent political turmoil in Venezuela as a positive development in at least one sense:
“[T]he only thing that impresses me out of everything that's happening in the country today is that we've finally re-encountered our political culture, and Chávez forces us to think politically (in terms of power, and not exactly in terms of good intentions).” (05.21.99, “Politics and Anti-politics”)
This book aims to identify a dangerous retreat from the political sphere, a situation that has allowed a single ambitious person to monopolize an entire nation's destiny under the guise of liberation. For Capriles, the problem of dictatorship in Venezuela today cannot be blamed solely on Chávez, but instead must be acknowledged as a result of Venezuelans not taking the time to understand themselves within a historical and political context. Throughout the book, we get a sense of Capriles struggling to outline a political and social landscape that evades definition. If analysts throughout the world have had trouble making sense of events in Venezuela, so have Venezuelans themselves:
“There is nothing more difficult to understand than what is happening, and part of this lack of understanding has to do with the fear of seeing our country run in the wrong direction. But part of it also has to do with our own ignorance of our history and our political culture.” (07.29.99, “Consummatum est”)
As the book progresses, the entries become more pessimistic but also more insightful. For any one of us who has followed the Venezuelan situation in recent years, events have at times served as a profound education on the country's political and social character. The chaos, animosity and violence that are now fixtures in Venezuela reveal that we never fully escaped the caudillo era of the 19th century or the dictatorship era of the first half of the 20th. Chávez's genius as a political leader has been his ability to understand the crooked dynamics of power at the heart of Venezuelan culture and to exploit those weaknesses for his own benefit. His simultaneous use of democratic and revolutionary rhetoric allows him to portray himself internationally as a redeemer of the disenfranchised, without building the necessary infrastructure to sustain such an emancipatory project. Instead, what he has invented is a hybrid form of dictatorship that is strengthened by its wealth of petrodollars and an international stage rendered chaotic by the blundering actions and hubris of the Bush administration. Capriles defines Chavismo as a perverse phenomenon:
“Truly, I don't think there's any other political process as perverse as the one we're enduring. It's not just that the regime is not democratic, but that it claims to be so, and thus it mortally wounds the very notion of democracy.” (01.16.00, “Skepticism”)
As the book proceeds into the years 2002 and beyond, when the opposition to Chavismo gathered momentum, Capriles's entries become longer and more complex. But her prose never loses the colloquial quality that makes each entry feel like a conversation with the reader. Capriles expects her reader to be reasonably well-informed of events in Venezuela, but this text should translate for readers outside the country. While the book was briefly cited by Alma Guillermoprieto in an article on Venezuela for The New York Review of Books in 2005, it has not yet been translated into English. Because Editorial Debate is an imprint of Random House, however, it is being disseminated widely throughout Spanish-speaking countries. I noticed this book, along with several other titles on Venezuela from the excellent series Colección Actualidad edited by Sergio Dahbar, prominently displayed at most of the bookstores I visited in San Salvador earlier this month.
I'd like to mention one final point that Capriles raises in her book, and that is the odd but important fact that Venezuela has never had a substantial right-wing tradition. While Chavismo has employed, to great success, the lie that its opposition is from the far right, in fact much of the Venezuelan left opposes Chavismo. In many senses, Chavismo employs fascist rhetoric and militaristic methods while successfully camouflaging these essential components under a banner of progressive revolutionary imagery. In one of her last entries, Capriles explores this ideological confusion in Venezuela:
“Because the thesis that would be interesting to sustain is: it is not that there haven't been people who cultivated right-wing postures and who have acted in consequence, but rather that what has been absent is political representation and legitimacy, in other words, a democratic political space in which right-wing thought might be able to identify itself, perfect itself and be an object of scrutiny. And the polemical aspect of this thesis comes next: it consists in affirming that what has had representation in our political universe, and has come to substitute or accomplish the ideological function of that spectral right, is anti-politics and its twin brother militarism.” (04.20.04, “Where is the Right in Venezuela?”)
Anti-politics and militarism, then, are two of the symptoms Capriles identifies as central components of the Venezuelan crisis. In an interview she gave to the newspaper El Universal (available in this English translation) soon after her book was published, Capriles emphasized the role that political parties can play in countering the nihilism and fear that allow dictatorial impulses to thrive. This book is most valuable as a reminder that political engagement requires a historical consciousness. Capriles demonstrates for her readers how democracies always need citizens that are informed, educated and engaged. La revolución como espectáculo is a valuable analysis of the apathetic, anti-political mind set that has crippled Venezuela, while also being a spirited critique of Chavismo's undemocratic militarisim.
Capriles currently writes a bi-weekly column for the newspaper El Nacional and teaches in the Social Sciences Department at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. In her column for El Nacional, as well as in a previous one for TalCual, Capriles has been one of the most insightful commentators on Venezuela's confusing political landscape. Part of what makes her book so important is the way it acknowledges the social and ideological chaos that has engulfed Venezuela, while never losing her faith in the clarifying power of reason. Capriles does not offer explicit solutions, but she does help the reader understand certain patterns of thought and their influence on all sides of the Venezuelan political divide.
Among the philosophical traps Capriles identifies in Venezuela is the unproductive reduction of discourse to the repetitive imposition of a single figure, who is either praised or derided, but who is enthroned as a vortex either way:
“I'm inclined to continue thinking that this is a dictatorship, and one of the finest ones, because one cannot stop thinking about Chávez for even an instant. ” (02.12.99, “The Paralegal”)
Perhaps one can read this brilliant book as an attempt to move beyond that cult of personality. While Chávez is of course mentioned throughout the book, Capriles does not linger on him. Instead, she devotes her energies to understanding the entire process he leads, and the effects he has created in Venezuela. Her study posits the notion that Chávez is, more than anything, a symptom of problems that have been an essential part of Venezuela since its foundation nearly 200 years ago.
Perhaps the central concern of this book is the identification and deconstruction of an apolitical, or anti-political, impulse that has taken hold of many Venezuelans in recent years. According to Capriles, one of the factors that has maintained Chávez in power is the deep-seated sense of mistrust of any type of political action among Venezuelans. This sentiment became exacerbated during the 1990s, when disenchantment with corruption and and a growing antagonism toward political parties led Venezuelans to dismiss the entire political sphere as useless. Seen in this light, the rise of Chávez can be understood as an opportunistic use of generalized discontent for the accrual of an autocratic concentration of power in a single person. Capriles identifies the recent political turmoil in Venezuela as a positive development in at least one sense:
“[T]he only thing that impresses me out of everything that's happening in the country today is that we've finally re-encountered our political culture, and Chávez forces us to think politically (in terms of power, and not exactly in terms of good intentions).” (05.21.99, “Politics and Anti-politics”)
This book aims to identify a dangerous retreat from the political sphere, a situation that has allowed a single ambitious person to monopolize an entire nation's destiny under the guise of liberation. For Capriles, the problem of dictatorship in Venezuela today cannot be blamed solely on Chávez, but instead must be acknowledged as a result of Venezuelans not taking the time to understand themselves within a historical and political context. Throughout the book, we get a sense of Capriles struggling to outline a political and social landscape that evades definition. If analysts throughout the world have had trouble making sense of events in Venezuela, so have Venezuelans themselves:
“There is nothing more difficult to understand than what is happening, and part of this lack of understanding has to do with the fear of seeing our country run in the wrong direction. But part of it also has to do with our own ignorance of our history and our political culture.” (07.29.99, “Consummatum est”)
As the book progresses, the entries become more pessimistic but also more insightful. For any one of us who has followed the Venezuelan situation in recent years, events have at times served as a profound education on the country's political and social character. The chaos, animosity and violence that are now fixtures in Venezuela reveal that we never fully escaped the caudillo era of the 19th century or the dictatorship era of the first half of the 20th. Chávez's genius as a political leader has been his ability to understand the crooked dynamics of power at the heart of Venezuelan culture and to exploit those weaknesses for his own benefit. His simultaneous use of democratic and revolutionary rhetoric allows him to portray himself internationally as a redeemer of the disenfranchised, without building the necessary infrastructure to sustain such an emancipatory project. Instead, what he has invented is a hybrid form of dictatorship that is strengthened by its wealth of petrodollars and an international stage rendered chaotic by the blundering actions and hubris of the Bush administration. Capriles defines Chavismo as a perverse phenomenon:
“Truly, I don't think there's any other political process as perverse as the one we're enduring. It's not just that the regime is not democratic, but that it claims to be so, and thus it mortally wounds the very notion of democracy.” (01.16.00, “Skepticism”)
As the book proceeds into the years 2002 and beyond, when the opposition to Chavismo gathered momentum, Capriles's entries become longer and more complex. But her prose never loses the colloquial quality that makes each entry feel like a conversation with the reader. Capriles expects her reader to be reasonably well-informed of events in Venezuela, but this text should translate for readers outside the country. While the book was briefly cited by Alma Guillermoprieto in an article on Venezuela for The New York Review of Books in 2005, it has not yet been translated into English. Because Editorial Debate is an imprint of Random House, however, it is being disseminated widely throughout Spanish-speaking countries. I noticed this book, along with several other titles on Venezuela from the excellent series Colección Actualidad edited by Sergio Dahbar, prominently displayed at most of the bookstores I visited in San Salvador earlier this month.
I'd like to mention one final point that Capriles raises in her book, and that is the odd but important fact that Venezuela has never had a substantial right-wing tradition. While Chavismo has employed, to great success, the lie that its opposition is from the far right, in fact much of the Venezuelan left opposes Chavismo. In many senses, Chavismo employs fascist rhetoric and militaristic methods while successfully camouflaging these essential components under a banner of progressive revolutionary imagery. In one of her last entries, Capriles explores this ideological confusion in Venezuela:
“Because the thesis that would be interesting to sustain is: it is not that there haven't been people who cultivated right-wing postures and who have acted in consequence, but rather that what has been absent is political representation and legitimacy, in other words, a democratic political space in which right-wing thought might be able to identify itself, perfect itself and be an object of scrutiny. And the polemical aspect of this thesis comes next: it consists in affirming that what has had representation in our political universe, and has come to substitute or accomplish the ideological function of that spectral right, is anti-politics and its twin brother militarism.” (04.20.04, “Where is the Right in Venezuela?”)
Anti-politics and militarism, then, are two of the symptoms Capriles identifies as central components of the Venezuelan crisis. In an interview she gave to the newspaper El Universal (available in this English translation) soon after her book was published, Capriles emphasized the role that political parties can play in countering the nihilism and fear that allow dictatorial impulses to thrive. This book is most valuable as a reminder that political engagement requires a historical consciousness. Capriles demonstrates for her readers how democracies always need citizens that are informed, educated and engaged. La revolución como espectáculo is a valuable analysis of the apathetic, anti-political mind set that has crippled Venezuela, while also being a spirited critique of Chavismo's undemocratic militarisim.
3.25.2007
Conciencia de enfermedad / Colette Capriles
Awareness of Illness
For me, the most brutal paradox of all this is the drama we now contemplate in astonishment: that the iron fist of power has been able to dissolve, without intending to, the structures of the State that should serve as its instrument. The situation in Venezuela today is that there is neither State nor public authority in the normal sense of these words; we live in the pre-political state of nature, with institutions substituted by “because I feel like it” and “whoever doesn’t like it can leave.” At this point Gramsci’s inevitable dictum is spoken by the acolytes of the “revolution:” “The old dies, the new emerges; it is the season of the monster,” now turned into a justifying slogan, a celebration of the original chaos that will give birth to the new era.
But the street smells chaos and its eternal companion, fear. One would have to remind the “Government” (it’s just a saying) that if the voters once obviated the uniform and the coup-plotting of Chávez the candidate, it was precisely because the mythology of military discipline and its promise of order presented itself as the final solution for a worn-out political cast. Today, that zeal for “final solutions” has ended up being characteristic of Chavismo; public work is conceived with the same short-sighted will, packaged in “missions” of limited reach and evanescent presence.
I’ve heard, from primary sources, that when general Ochoa, many years before he was killed in a firing squad by the Cuban regime, was sent to operate with Venezuelan guerrillas, he emitted a definitive diagnosis: that oil made revolution impossible in Venezuela. I have no doubt that the thousands of Cubans living among us now must think the same thing, as they observe the national obsession with Hummers and silicone breasts, and they thank God for that. But just as in Cuba the adoption of Marxism ended up being mixed together with nationalism, creating the “cold war” model package needed for justifying Castro’s personal power, the revolutionary combo in Venezuela is serving to justify not only the formation of a new oligarchy around the caudillo, but above all to legitimate chaos, paralysis and the abandonment of those who are society’s object. Using the revolutionary template and the format of the supposed Caribbean left, new meanings of the political map are being sketched: the adoption of the correct vocabulary guarantees, like a flying carpet, a perfect slide over the twists of reality.
It is true that there is an epidemic of what the protagonists have baptized a turn to the left in Latin America. With that name they camouflage the illness of populism and caudillismo that once again flowers precisely because it is baptized with new adjectives. We have not ceased being the West’s laboratory: if this continent has any importance it is to keep serving as an experimental space, like during the Independences whose failures or successes barely leave a trace in the world’s historical consciousness. The dance of the Latin American oligarchies continues: new elites are formed, new captains of industry, new political and union mafias, while the masses gather the few rations demagogic discourse concedes to them. The political fatigue of other latitudes has allowed for the fact that 21st century authoritarianism disguises itself as socialism so as to be seen with some sympathy, as if a tolerance towards the self-proclaimed left could redeem old Europe from its indifference and the United States from its egocentrism.
It looks like the governing elite don't know this country very well. It’s not enough with being or believing yourself to be Venezuelan to understand it, because understanding comes from reflection, from sensibility to the interpretations of what we are, and not merely from the particular experience of having been raised in the tropics or thinking of oneself as being more mestizo. Having substituted dogmatism for reflection, the fast-food of military authoritarianism in a socialist version, the disconnection suffered by the world of power with the one of the street can be understood. There is no comprehension of the inertial forces that Venezuelan society acquired during its modern transit through the 20th century and an effort is underway to make them submit to a pulse, as if more power and more control could erase what power and control have created. Before his transformation into Mr. Hyde, vice-president Rodríguez, as a psychiatrist, must have surely encountered the greatest obstacle to therapy, which is the lack of what is called “awareness of illness,” that suspicion that something is not right, which is absolutely necessary for beginning any cure. The Government (just to call it something) should consider the voices, attuned to the revolution’s 440, that are pointing out the symptoms of its illness, which amid euphoria and depression are keeping it too far from the real world.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 22 March 2007 }
For me, the most brutal paradox of all this is the drama we now contemplate in astonishment: that the iron fist of power has been able to dissolve, without intending to, the structures of the State that should serve as its instrument. The situation in Venezuela today is that there is neither State nor public authority in the normal sense of these words; we live in the pre-political state of nature, with institutions substituted by “because I feel like it” and “whoever doesn’t like it can leave.” At this point Gramsci’s inevitable dictum is spoken by the acolytes of the “revolution:” “The old dies, the new emerges; it is the season of the monster,” now turned into a justifying slogan, a celebration of the original chaos that will give birth to the new era.
But the street smells chaos and its eternal companion, fear. One would have to remind the “Government” (it’s just a saying) that if the voters once obviated the uniform and the coup-plotting of Chávez the candidate, it was precisely because the mythology of military discipline and its promise of order presented itself as the final solution for a worn-out political cast. Today, that zeal for “final solutions” has ended up being characteristic of Chavismo; public work is conceived with the same short-sighted will, packaged in “missions” of limited reach and evanescent presence.
I’ve heard, from primary sources, that when general Ochoa, many years before he was killed in a firing squad by the Cuban regime, was sent to operate with Venezuelan guerrillas, he emitted a definitive diagnosis: that oil made revolution impossible in Venezuela. I have no doubt that the thousands of Cubans living among us now must think the same thing, as they observe the national obsession with Hummers and silicone breasts, and they thank God for that. But just as in Cuba the adoption of Marxism ended up being mixed together with nationalism, creating the “cold war” model package needed for justifying Castro’s personal power, the revolutionary combo in Venezuela is serving to justify not only the formation of a new oligarchy around the caudillo, but above all to legitimate chaos, paralysis and the abandonment of those who are society’s object. Using the revolutionary template and the format of the supposed Caribbean left, new meanings of the political map are being sketched: the adoption of the correct vocabulary guarantees, like a flying carpet, a perfect slide over the twists of reality.
It is true that there is an epidemic of what the protagonists have baptized a turn to the left in Latin America. With that name they camouflage the illness of populism and caudillismo that once again flowers precisely because it is baptized with new adjectives. We have not ceased being the West’s laboratory: if this continent has any importance it is to keep serving as an experimental space, like during the Independences whose failures or successes barely leave a trace in the world’s historical consciousness. The dance of the Latin American oligarchies continues: new elites are formed, new captains of industry, new political and union mafias, while the masses gather the few rations demagogic discourse concedes to them. The political fatigue of other latitudes has allowed for the fact that 21st century authoritarianism disguises itself as socialism so as to be seen with some sympathy, as if a tolerance towards the self-proclaimed left could redeem old Europe from its indifference and the United States from its egocentrism.
It looks like the governing elite don't know this country very well. It’s not enough with being or believing yourself to be Venezuelan to understand it, because understanding comes from reflection, from sensibility to the interpretations of what we are, and not merely from the particular experience of having been raised in the tropics or thinking of oneself as being more mestizo. Having substituted dogmatism for reflection, the fast-food of military authoritarianism in a socialist version, the disconnection suffered by the world of power with the one of the street can be understood. There is no comprehension of the inertial forces that Venezuelan society acquired during its modern transit through the 20th century and an effort is underway to make them submit to a pulse, as if more power and more control could erase what power and control have created. Before his transformation into Mr. Hyde, vice-president Rodríguez, as a psychiatrist, must have surely encountered the greatest obstacle to therapy, which is the lack of what is called “awareness of illness,” that suspicion that something is not right, which is absolutely necessary for beginning any cure. The Government (just to call it something) should consider the voices, attuned to the revolution’s 440, that are pointing out the symptoms of its illness, which amid euphoria and depression are keeping it too far from the real world.
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 22 March 2007 }
5.10.2006
Más allá del mal y del CNE / Colette Capriles
Beyond Evil and the CNE*
Maybe revolutions are, simply and essentially, a linguistic act.
Not just any act, of course: a gigantic linguistic act, a discursive subversion, whose object is to create a “truer” reality, even realer you might say than the one we endure every day, but (this is very important) one that never substitutes it completely but instead coexists with reality. This artificial reality, but in the end a reality, is provided a history and assigned a future, is given a vocabulary, an aesthetic, some symbols, a way of saying and certain characters. Presented in this manner, it seems as though it were a certain type of branding or the creation of a logo which could be designed in some dark situational laboratory (or in a secret meeting of Santería initiates, either way). In fact, since 1998, we spectators have been placing bets to guess how much is deliberate and how much is involuntary in the design of this Frankenstein which our country has become. The answer should be obvious: there is a more or less formed design in which the will (which is, one could say, the realization of the national spirit, more or less in a Hegelian manner) is presented and for this, the will searches for its riverbed in an improvised manner, opportunistically taking advantage of any road that presents itself.
The fight is, then, for the forms of representation. A logomachy, a struggle for the appropriation of the symbolic territories. I believe the great substrata or the great text upon which all our ideological representations are mounted today is precisely petroleum as a metonymy of modernity, and the dispute involves determining how that image of ourselves is carried. If revolution (this which defines itself as such) exists, it's because it is like the stertor of the petroleum universe. I can’t help thinking of Alexis De Tocqueville’s lessons showing how the ancien régime placed its greatest efforts into destroying itself, in the measure that it believed it was modernizing: the reforms, directed at making the government’s management more efficient and, in this manner, legitimizing a modern conception of power (modern does not mean democratic, obviously), only succeeded in emptying the power of the traditional institutions, turning them into mere decorations of an isolated State. Perhaps the shudders that inundate us Venezuelans when we read De Tocqueville’s account are provided by the role the “illustrious” played in the diffusion of the technocratic thought that eventually confirmed the maxim of the end justifying the means.
In other words, this revolution (this which defines itself as such, I repeat) is the daughter of a crowd, and inscribes itself within the long moment of Juan Vicente Gómez,** if that's what one can call it. Notice the recent material that pollster Alfredo Keller has been circulating, in which, less concerned with Chávez’s political project, his popularity or his electoral destiny, the author dedicates himself to poking through the cultural substrata where the symbolic satisfactions the so-called revolution distributes can be found.
Keller notices a consolidation of the utilitarian culture that places the relations between citizen and government in terms of an ideological market, where a series of representations regarding well-being, wealth, poverty and the State government as a redistribution machine are settled. A public culture that is not a political culture, since the relationships between people and what they'd like to achieve (their well-being, for instance) are not mediated by institutions for the distribution (or the disputation) of power, but rather by a completely ecstatic link: vindication.
More or less, the end of history.
In this way, depoliticized society separates itself, disintegrates and, more accurately, pulverizes itself.
Fragments of magical thinking continue to circulate, attempting to erase (I’m sure they won’t succeed) the timid and hopeful apparitions of political discourse: not a few continue to believe in the curse of the CNE, as though the evils of the country were concentrated in the silicon soul of those voting machines, without wanting to give credit to the vindicating beliefs as electoral fuel and to the fascination they provoke. With or without the CNE, with or without electoral decency, with or without a unitary candidate, with or without primaries, the matter at hand is to win the discursive war, to confront the dissolving ideology that deforms social experience, making poverty seem like a prize, corruption like “bureaucracy,” arbitrariness like State reason, history like an eternal present.
* Consejo Nacional Electoral, Venezuela’s electoral council
** Military dictator who ruled Venezuela during 1908-1935
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 4 May 2006 }
Maybe revolutions are, simply and essentially, a linguistic act.
Not just any act, of course: a gigantic linguistic act, a discursive subversion, whose object is to create a “truer” reality, even realer you might say than the one we endure every day, but (this is very important) one that never substitutes it completely but instead coexists with reality. This artificial reality, but in the end a reality, is provided a history and assigned a future, is given a vocabulary, an aesthetic, some symbols, a way of saying and certain characters. Presented in this manner, it seems as though it were a certain type of branding or the creation of a logo which could be designed in some dark situational laboratory (or in a secret meeting of Santería initiates, either way). In fact, since 1998, we spectators have been placing bets to guess how much is deliberate and how much is involuntary in the design of this Frankenstein which our country has become. The answer should be obvious: there is a more or less formed design in which the will (which is, one could say, the realization of the national spirit, more or less in a Hegelian manner) is presented and for this, the will searches for its riverbed in an improvised manner, opportunistically taking advantage of any road that presents itself.
The fight is, then, for the forms of representation. A logomachy, a struggle for the appropriation of the symbolic territories. I believe the great substrata or the great text upon which all our ideological representations are mounted today is precisely petroleum as a metonymy of modernity, and the dispute involves determining how that image of ourselves is carried. If revolution (this which defines itself as such) exists, it's because it is like the stertor of the petroleum universe. I can’t help thinking of Alexis De Tocqueville’s lessons showing how the ancien régime placed its greatest efforts into destroying itself, in the measure that it believed it was modernizing: the reforms, directed at making the government’s management more efficient and, in this manner, legitimizing a modern conception of power (modern does not mean democratic, obviously), only succeeded in emptying the power of the traditional institutions, turning them into mere decorations of an isolated State. Perhaps the shudders that inundate us Venezuelans when we read De Tocqueville’s account are provided by the role the “illustrious” played in the diffusion of the technocratic thought that eventually confirmed the maxim of the end justifying the means.
In other words, this revolution (this which defines itself as such, I repeat) is the daughter of a crowd, and inscribes itself within the long moment of Juan Vicente Gómez,** if that's what one can call it. Notice the recent material that pollster Alfredo Keller has been circulating, in which, less concerned with Chávez’s political project, his popularity or his electoral destiny, the author dedicates himself to poking through the cultural substrata where the symbolic satisfactions the so-called revolution distributes can be found.
Keller notices a consolidation of the utilitarian culture that places the relations between citizen and government in terms of an ideological market, where a series of representations regarding well-being, wealth, poverty and the State government as a redistribution machine are settled. A public culture that is not a political culture, since the relationships between people and what they'd like to achieve (their well-being, for instance) are not mediated by institutions for the distribution (or the disputation) of power, but rather by a completely ecstatic link: vindication.
More or less, the end of history.
In this way, depoliticized society separates itself, disintegrates and, more accurately, pulverizes itself.
Fragments of magical thinking continue to circulate, attempting to erase (I’m sure they won’t succeed) the timid and hopeful apparitions of political discourse: not a few continue to believe in the curse of the CNE, as though the evils of the country were concentrated in the silicon soul of those voting machines, without wanting to give credit to the vindicating beliefs as electoral fuel and to the fascination they provoke. With or without the CNE, with or without electoral decency, with or without a unitary candidate, with or without primaries, the matter at hand is to win the discursive war, to confront the dissolving ideology that deforms social experience, making poverty seem like a prize, corruption like “bureaucracy,” arbitrariness like State reason, history like an eternal present.
* Consejo Nacional Electoral, Venezuela’s electoral council
** Military dictator who ruled Venezuela during 1908-1935
{ Colette Capriles, El Nacional, 4 May 2006 }
11.01.2005
Crítica de la ilusión pura / Colette Capriles
Critique of Pure Illusion
Socialism is the kingdom of necessity, or better said, of necessities.
The inefficiency displayed by socialism in the production and distribution of wealth is not a secondary effect but rather the result of a deliberate artificial creation of scarcity. The resulting penury is not only material (sharper each time precisely because of the exacerbation of not being able to find necessities): among the scarce goods are liberty (there is only liberty for a few, for the members of the nomenclatura, for the beneficiaries of power's lottery) and the truth (power's privilege; the masses don't deserve the truth; the majority, as Benedetto Croce denounces, "find the un-truth and the mistake convenient").
The agitation of the last few months is different from other paroxysms the government has also provoked, because the macabre announcement of the adoption of socialism is in itself an ideological operation of great significance. Let us examine the roundest metaphor, not too sophisticated, that circulates in the communicational galaxy of the regime: the image of a locomotive that traverses emblematic natural landscapes, or small towns that would represent the deepest Venezuela, under the inclements of the most brutal developmentism, "bound toward socialism" (which is no longer even of the XXI century).
A locomotive composed of a thread of "missions" (that always evade the classification of public politics and maintain the military and militant rhetoric) that plunges into the infinite. Double message: on one hand, the tranquilizer: the "missions" are already themselves the expression of the socialist project (in other words: socialism is nothing different from what you know, nation); on the other, the threat: the impetus of this force takes us to "another" reality, toward the unthought or the unimagined. Socialism is in this way alpha and omega, beginning and end of illusion.
Present, but also inevitable future.
If ambitions for governing once existed, little is left of them.
We have entered the very field of ideological battle, that is, the universe of the representations of reality, and it no longer matters much what the government might do or not do. None want to harvest votes anymore, but wills instead, and this quantum leap supposes the paroxyst development of a double message, fundamentally through a propaganda apparatus whose dimensions seem nearly impossible to quantify. Its purpose, to mask the actual miseries by superimposing on top of them gigantic simulacra of successes: reality is superceded by another reality, a hyperreality that shrinks daily experience and engages in continuing conflicts against it. We will thus be forced to choose between believing what the ideological apparatuses of the State show us or living in perpetual dissonance with them, which requires an uncommon psychological nature.
The locomotive is running and will continue to run outside the central framework: socialism is not being discussed here but instead the most rancid manuals of the Soviet Academy are being dusted off to complete the primer that functionaries repeat, in a postmodern way, in the most servile ignorance as to what they are saying, as is demonstrated by the lamentable intervention by the Minister of the Environment trying to explain the idea of collective property with which she tried to praise, or drastically humiliate, the angered indigenous groups last October 12th.
Or perhaps it wasn't lamentable since it contributes to the general confusion that offers the government such good results.
Reducing political discourse to the mere interpretation of the Great Oracle and his premonitions, trying to decipher what the street vendor's shout of socialism "actually" means, in this manner society's capacity for articulating clear messages is also reduced. There is not a truth in all of this, but instead an infernal kaleidoscope of truths manufactured in the government's situational rooms.
The pre-revocatory outline repeats itself: as soon as the opposition builds an answer less incoherent than usual, the confounding artillery is released, ranging from pinching the ass of property (taking numerous surfaces from it) to the recent episode of the morochas [twin parties], on which they count for disassembling the opposition's electoral strategy and to provoke fissures in the fragile unity accord, consolidating the perception that there is no other future than the one designed by power and once again oxygenating the immature voices of their most fervent allies, those apostles of antipolitics.
{ Colette Capriles*, El Nacional, 20 October 2005 }
_____________________________________________
* Alma Guillermoprieto discusses Colette Capriles's book La Revolución como espectáculo (Random House Mondadori, 2004) in a recent two-part essay for the New York Review of Books: "Don't Cry for Me, Venezuela" and "The Gambler."
Socialism is the kingdom of necessity, or better said, of necessities.
The inefficiency displayed by socialism in the production and distribution of wealth is not a secondary effect but rather the result of a deliberate artificial creation of scarcity. The resulting penury is not only material (sharper each time precisely because of the exacerbation of not being able to find necessities): among the scarce goods are liberty (there is only liberty for a few, for the members of the nomenclatura, for the beneficiaries of power's lottery) and the truth (power's privilege; the masses don't deserve the truth; the majority, as Benedetto Croce denounces, "find the un-truth and the mistake convenient").
The agitation of the last few months is different from other paroxysms the government has also provoked, because the macabre announcement of the adoption of socialism is in itself an ideological operation of great significance. Let us examine the roundest metaphor, not too sophisticated, that circulates in the communicational galaxy of the regime: the image of a locomotive that traverses emblematic natural landscapes, or small towns that would represent the deepest Venezuela, under the inclements of the most brutal developmentism, "bound toward socialism" (which is no longer even of the XXI century).
A locomotive composed of a thread of "missions" (that always evade the classification of public politics and maintain the military and militant rhetoric) that plunges into the infinite. Double message: on one hand, the tranquilizer: the "missions" are already themselves the expression of the socialist project (in other words: socialism is nothing different from what you know, nation); on the other, the threat: the impetus of this force takes us to "another" reality, toward the unthought or the unimagined. Socialism is in this way alpha and omega, beginning and end of illusion.
Present, but also inevitable future.
If ambitions for governing once existed, little is left of them.
We have entered the very field of ideological battle, that is, the universe of the representations of reality, and it no longer matters much what the government might do or not do. None want to harvest votes anymore, but wills instead, and this quantum leap supposes the paroxyst development of a double message, fundamentally through a propaganda apparatus whose dimensions seem nearly impossible to quantify. Its purpose, to mask the actual miseries by superimposing on top of them gigantic simulacra of successes: reality is superceded by another reality, a hyperreality that shrinks daily experience and engages in continuing conflicts against it. We will thus be forced to choose between believing what the ideological apparatuses of the State show us or living in perpetual dissonance with them, which requires an uncommon psychological nature.
The locomotive is running and will continue to run outside the central framework: socialism is not being discussed here but instead the most rancid manuals of the Soviet Academy are being dusted off to complete the primer that functionaries repeat, in a postmodern way, in the most servile ignorance as to what they are saying, as is demonstrated by the lamentable intervention by the Minister of the Environment trying to explain the idea of collective property with which she tried to praise, or drastically humiliate, the angered indigenous groups last October 12th.
Or perhaps it wasn't lamentable since it contributes to the general confusion that offers the government such good results.
Reducing political discourse to the mere interpretation of the Great Oracle and his premonitions, trying to decipher what the street vendor's shout of socialism "actually" means, in this manner society's capacity for articulating clear messages is also reduced. There is not a truth in all of this, but instead an infernal kaleidoscope of truths manufactured in the government's situational rooms.
The pre-revocatory outline repeats itself: as soon as the opposition builds an answer less incoherent than usual, the confounding artillery is released, ranging from pinching the ass of property (taking numerous surfaces from it) to the recent episode of the morochas [twin parties], on which they count for disassembling the opposition's electoral strategy and to provoke fissures in the fragile unity accord, consolidating the perception that there is no other future than the one designed by power and once again oxygenating the immature voices of their most fervent allies, those apostles of antipolitics.
{ Colette Capriles*, El Nacional, 20 October 2005 }
_____________________________________________
* Alma Guillermoprieto discusses Colette Capriles's book La Revolución como espectáculo (Random House Mondadori, 2004) in a recent two-part essay for the New York Review of Books: "Don't Cry for Me, Venezuela" and "The Gambler."
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