London 2.5.12 | A recent post by Francisco Toro on Caracas Chronicles reminded me of a conversation I had not long ago: “But you can’t deny that Chávez is an extremely popular politician, right?” joked the former UK ambassador to Venezuela at a meeting. “Of course, he’s popular. Give me that kind of money to spend without oversight, and I could also be the most popular politician in Venezuela! Even a mentally challenged guy could become popular with that amount of money!” I replied.
Using PDVSA’s own figures, Francisco calculated how much money Chávez has regularly spent, analyzing the amounts transferred from PDVSA to Venezuela’s Treasury through taxes, royalties, and dividends (Carrot Contribution in the chart), versus how much money the dictator allocates at his sole discretion—money that PDVSA spends directly upon Chávez’s orders. It’s worth quoting Francisco here.
He searched everywhere in the 1999 Venezuelan constitution for PDVSA’s right to spend money this way. Within the courteous fictions of Bolivarian constitutional doctrine, Venezuela operates under the principle of a “Unified Treasury”: all funds paid to the state should go into a single pot. Once there, elected representatives in the National Assembly must provide explicit permission through a budget law before the government can spend any of it.
That obviously cannot happen if PDVSA skips all the parliamentary nonsense and starts spending money as ordered by the president that day. Which, increasingly, is what’s really occurring.
But it gets worse: there’s more “social spending” in Chávez’s style, that is, bypassing any constitutionally prescribed oversight mechanisms, to the point that, according to Francisco’s calculations based on PDVSA’s own figures, “for every petrodollar spent under careless law” in Venezuela, $2.08 is spent outside the approved budget, according to Chávez’s direct and absolute discretionary orders.
Better to borrow from Francisco again:
Recently, in 2009, only 24 petrocents were spent without legislative approval for every petrodollar spent under legislative oversight. Last year, that ratio skyrocketed to 2.08 to 1.
That’s why I can scientifically state that today we are 8.7 times more petrocaudillistas than we were three years ago.
And it gets even worse: since 2001, Hugo Chávez has been able to spend freely, without oversight or accountability, $123.1 billion. No, that’s not a mistake. Add up the figures from the chart on the left, and voila, $123.1 billion. In addition to regular spending in the form of official handouts, known as missions, which are basically vote-buying programs, Chávez designed these to keep his ‘popularity levels’ very high. Considering all this money, the scale of Chávez’s administrative failure is, unfortunately, too large: whether it’s in housing, inflation, the highest in Latin America, poverty, unemployment, or crime levels, his ‘revolution’ only has fiascos to show for it.
Therefore, I challenge any of the many analysts who have an opinion on Chávez’s ‘popularity’ to provide one example (just one) of another politician in contemporary Venezuelan history, or anywhere else, with the purchasing power that the Venezuelan dictator has enjoyed. In the last decade. I hear Gaddafi and Libya, the Saudi autocrats, Putin… all the truly ‘popular’ petrodictator democrats. And that’s why the opposition in Venezuela simply cannot build a moderately coherent platform against Chávez: the damn bully has too much money at his disposal and has managed to co-opt almost everyone. In politics, whether in Venezuela or the United States, money talks and bullshit walks.
Fortunately, this shameful caudillo will die soon enough under the care of communist medicine, and then… then things will just get worse, hopefully for a while, although no one knows how long.