How Chavez Rules

President Chavez's Bolivarian "missiones" are a highly personalized form of presidential largesse financed by the secret unaudited accounts of Venezuela's oil revenues. But these "missiones" do not function like a social welfare program.

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A story from a small businessperson. She had an unskilled employee earning a small wage, living in one of the shanty barrios around the city. The employee wanted a better house. A mortgage was unavailable for reasons familiar to a reader of Hernando de Soto: Her shanty was perched on invaded land. She lacked clear title. Nor are Venezuelan banks interested in lending and monitoring payment of the tiny sum her income would sustain.

So instead she did what poor people here do in need: she applied for help to one of President Chavez's Bolivarian "misiones": a highly personalized form of presidential largesse financed by the secret unaudited accounts of Venezuela's oil revenues. (Chavez describes his program as a "Bolivarian" revolution, although of course it has nothing to do with anything ever believed or said by the actual Simon Bolivar.)

But these "misiones" do not function like a social welfare program. Aid is not available on a no questions asked basis. A lot of questions are asked, or rather one big question: Do you support President Chavez? The previously apolitical employee insisted that she did. She obtained a letter of recommendation from the local Bolivarian precinct captain. On the strength of this word from her new patron, she obtained the money to pull down her shanty and erect instead a modest bungalow with running water. Better: because she had a child at home, the political machine topped up her house award with a small homemaker's pension. The pension was not much, only half her previous wage, but it required no work. Her pension and her husband's salary plus a free new house added up to an acceptable standard of living. She promptly quit her job to live on the state.

However, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Money always comes with strings. Her string: she is required to attend pro-regime rallies: to wear a red shirt, clench her fist, chant slogans, and applaud when signaled to do so. It's a pattern of politics familiar to the Caesars: I give you bread, you chant my name and jeer as my enemies are ripped apart by wild beasts.

There is however an unwritten clause in such agreements: they continue only so long as the flow of benefits continues. Let it falter, and it's Caesar whom the wild beasts will rip.