The Devil's Excrement

When Employees Attack. Editorial in Nature, Vol 446, 702 (2007)

Government scientists should be able
to comment publicly — within reason.

Badmouthing one’s government is a
fashionable pastime in some parts of the world. Many US climatologists, even those who
receive federal funding, have grave reservations about the White House’s
continued neglect of international climate agree­ments, and they aren’t shy
about saying so. In Britain,
meanwhile, scientists as well as political analysts have been quick to
criticize the government’s plan to spend billions on renewing the national
fleet of nuclear-weapons submarines.

Roll those two examples together, and
transplant them into a soci­ety where freedom of speech is often seen as being
under pressure from several directions, and you get the case of Claudio
Mendoza. Until recently the head of a government physics laboratory in Ven­ezuela, Mendoza has been demoted after making
sarcastic comments about the government over what he regards as its tendency to
ignore scientists and their advice (see page 711).

What infuriated Mendoza’s paymasters most was probably his
suggestion — made in a newspaper article promoting a play about nuclear weapons
— that president Hugo Chávez might want to pur­sue a nuclear-weapons programme and
that, if he did so, he was liable to fail because of this alleged disdain for
expert advice.

Mendoza’s comments
were not made in any official capacity (his article was signed, with no
affiliation given), raising the fraught ques­tion of whether senior government
scientists should be free to make disparaging public comments about the state
institutions that they serve, when they are away from work.

On a facile level, this is a
disagreement about whether it is accept­able for someone to be fired because
their bosses can’t take a joke. In many countries, acerbic comments about the
machinations of politics are a valid and effective mode of public discourse.

But, of course, a line has to be
drawn somewhere. It is hard to escape the feeling that, in this case, it has
been drawn in the wrong place. Many civil servants in other countries might
expect a dress­ing-down if they behaved in this way, but might justifiably argue that
they have a right to express a grievance. The message coming from Mendoza’s bosses
within the Venezuelan national research institute is an unsavoury one. His
removal from a management position implies that someone who voices contrary
opinions is not fit to be a lab head. What’s more, Mendoza has been warned that he had better
clam up if he doesn’t want to lose his job altogether.

The play that Mendoza was writing
about was Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, the
international hit that deals with a crucial 1941 meeting between Niels Bohr and
Werner Heisenberg, and their struggle to comprehend the feasibility and consequences
of devel­oping nuclear weapons during the Second World War (see Nature 394, 735; 1998).

One of the reasons for the play’s
success was general interest in what physicists of Bohr’s generation thought about
the issues surrounding nuclear weapons. Of course, these thoughts
only became public some time after the United States had built and used
the bomb. But times have moved on, and people in Caracas, as elsewhere, would benefit if their
scientists were be able to participate openly in public debate on nuclear
policy.

The prestigious scientific journal Nature had double coverage of the case of Venezuelan scientist Claudio Mendoza, which I have talked about a few times here. I will make two posts with the material from Nature, in this post I will post the news item reported by the Journal and in the next one, the Editorial which was obviously prompted by the news itself and the clear threat to freedom of speech implied by Claudio’s removal or the words of the Director of IVIC, who clearly threatens Dr. Mendoza in his last sentence, no?

Venezuelan Free Speech Row goes Nuclear in Nature by Michael Hopkin, Vol 446, page 711 (2007)

Freedom-of-speech groups have
expressed concern at the treatment of a prominent Ven­ezuelan physicist who has
been fired as head of a government research lab after poking fun at the
government over nuclear policy issues.

Claudio Mendoza was stripped
of his posi­tion as head of a computational-physics lab in the Venezuelan
Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC) in Caracas
because of comments he made in an article written to promote a science-related play. He sarcastically suggested that Venezuelans should not worry about their country’s growing alliance
with ‘rogue’ nuclear states such as Iran,
because Venezuelan officials do not listen to experts and so would not be able
to develop nuclear technology anyway.

Although Mendoza
is still a researcher in the lab, his
dis­missal as head after 10 years raises fears that his right to free speech
has been infringed, says Juan Carlos Gallardo, chair of the American Physical
Society’s Committee on International Freedom
of Scientists. The com­mittee has written to Venezue­lan
officials to request details of the case. Although no other
scientists there have reported similar harassment, the government has been
accused of waging a campaign against freedom of speech in the media, and the
fear is that similar repression is now extending to the research community.
Gallardo has pledged to monitor the situation and take further action if Mendoza
is sacked outright.

Mendoza says he has been accused of
treason, even though his comments were meant to be witty and
he was not writing in an official capa­city. His remarks were published on 13
Septem­ber 2006 in an article to publicize a production of Copenhagen by
British playwright Michael Frayn. The play
dramatizes a discussion between physicists Neils Bohr
and Werner Heisenberg about the feasibility of
developing nuclear weap­ons. Addressing fears that Venezuela might seek to join the nuclear club, Mendoza
wrote: “Here bridges are built without engineers, diagnoses are made without doctors, oil is refined without petroleum experts, one can teach without being a teacher, you can govern without being a states­man. We will therefore explode nuclear energy while
ignoring the physicists.”

But it seems that nuclear policy is no joking matter. Although Venezuela has no nuclear
pro­gramme of its own, it has significant reserves of uranium ore, and in 2005 Venezuela announced that it
would join forces with Iran
to develop domestic nuclear power. Venezuela is also thought
to have endorsed Iran’s
controversial uranium-enrichment programme, although without a seat on the UN
Security Council, it was unable to influence the
council’s unanimous vote in December 2006 to ban
the project.

Four days after the article
was published, IVIC’s board of directors removed Mendoza
as lab head, and gave him 30 days to provide evidence of his apparent insin­uation
that Venezuela
might be planning to enrich uranium. Mendoza
submitted a dossier of newspaper articles but this was rejected as sufficient
proof. When asked to retract his arti­cle, he refused.

The article was “the last
drop” in a series of altercations in which Mendoza
has criti­cized his paymasters, says IVIC director Máximo García Sucre. In
2003, for example, Mendoza complained
that the govern­ment was not giving enough
financial support to IVIC — a claim denied by IVIC directors (see Nature 422, 257; 2003).

“He has manifest many times
his noncon­formity with IVIC decisions,” García Sucre told Nature. “In a
certain sense he is an activist. In this situation it is not possible to be
head of a lab — there must be a minimum of affinity with scientific politics.” He adds that such personnel changes are routine, and that Mendoza
still has all the rights of any IVIC staff member.

Mendoza says that he is unsure whether he
will be dismissed entirely. “I don’t think I will try to get reinstated as head. I am just basically trying to survive as a researcher,” he says.

“I hope he will understand that the measure that has been
taken is a mild one,” says García Sucre, adding that in making fun of
government officials, Mendoza
has indirectly criticized pres­ident Hugo Chávez. Asked whether Mendoza
will be fired outright, García Sucre says: “He should start to work in his lab
instead of being in the newspapers all the time saying he is being victimized.
Then I don’t see any problem.”

So, who do you root for when it is your country´s up and coming baseball pitching star, against your favorite teams news star from Japan?

And with the same speed that judges reverse decisions when the Government asks them or forces them out, the accident statistics during the past Easter week also suffered from remarkable shifts as the week went along. First, the Head of Civil Defense Antonio Rivero told us that accidents were up 38%, which to him showed that the prohibition was a success, but he failed to explain how. But then, faster than a speeding bullet, the number of accidents was announced to be down by 11% by the Minister of Interior and Justice Pedro Carreño, who certainly can work miracles, even if his statistics seemed to mysteriously differ from those by the fire departments. And indeed if you look at the handy chart below from El Nacional, accidents were indeed down:

And so were the number of those injured in accidents too, but in another mystery, the number of deaths in these accidents was actually up 28% compared to last year, a curious result in a country whfrere accidents and injuries may be hidden, but cars can’t even be moved from the road until the medical examiner shows up at the scene.

But I can’t prove the numbers were fudged, but in any case that is not the main point of the post. What I found intriguing were the explanations given by Mr. Rivero about why the number of deaths were up. According to him, the New Man of the XXIst. Century, the new Venezuelan of the revolution has some sort of kamikaze wish inside and the high number of deaths arose due to a “psychosocial factors”, which he denominated “the revenge”, or “rejection of change”. Thus, Rivero explained, Venezuelan vacationers expressed their opposition to the prohibition by driving fast. Thus, he concluded: “People drank less, but drove faster”

Jeez, I don’t know where to begin in responding to this pseudo scientific research by Mr. Rivero. I guess it means, as I suggested last week, that we may have to experiment with having people be allowed to drink more, see if they go slower or drive better. That would follow from Rivero’s remarkable statement. The truth is that the ability of some Chavista officials to lie, twist the truth or simply invent the most far fetched concepts, has no limits and even Minister Carreño’s “we are being spied by the CIA via the Direct TV set top boxes” may soon be toppled as the all time worst.

Today began the tender by the Venezuelan Government for all of the shares of two well run companies, Electricidad de Caracas and CANTV. By May 8th. these two companies will become Government owned, will begin to deteriorate and will be a burden on the Government’s finances. Thus in a country with huge crime rates, poverty rates at 40%, a failed state health system, malnutrition and all sorts of problems, ideology domiantes reality and the Government will spend some US$ 3 billion in purchasing two companies it does not need (That is $ 120 per citizen). Meanwhile, the prison observatory reports that the institute that trains people to run the prison system is being shut down, at the same time that the number of prisoners is increasing rapidly and that deaths at prisons are running at one a day. Funny, no? Makes you wonder how priorities are set by the revolution. Well, we know, it is what Fabre called Government by witticism, that of the autocrat.

So, Chavez woke up one day and decided to “nationalize” CANTV and Electricidad de Caracas, just because he felt like it. The Ministers scrambled and explained to him that Venezuela has lost all arbitration cases in international Courts, owns CITGO in the US and the Government could not “nationalize” anything without creating problems all over the place. So, the Government negotiated a high price for Electricidad de Caracas and a cheap price for CANTV, the latter indicating Verizon wanted to get out of here as fast as possible. Funny thing was, the Government ended up paying less that Mexican Carlos Slim was willing to pay for CANTV, about 18% less. Who gets hurt? First, international investors who held the stock and will be paid less. More interesting, the second largest chunk of shares after the international investors is owned by the company’s workers. So, in this era of “shared-ownership”, “coops”, “Co-management” and the like, the revolution is buying back the workers shares at around $2 per ordinary share. Funny things is, the workers paid around US$ 4 for them in 1996 and some of them had to pay financing. You got to love the workers paradise of the XXIst. Century!

The Government will not only pay US$ 3 billion for these companies, but the money will leave the country (Uups, there go those international reserves again!). You see, Electricidad de Caracas was 84% owned by Virginia based AES and a fraction of the remaining 16% traded in the US in the form of over the counter ADR’s. A similar thing happens with CANTV and Verizon. While Verizon owned only 28% of the shares, most of the shares traded in the US market under an ADS registered in the New York Stock Exchange. In 1996, when the secondary offering of shares was made, 95% of it was placed in the international markets, only 5% here in Venezuela and these shares have been migrating slowly over the years as people converted them to ADS’s. The rest of the shares are in the hands of the workers and Bandes. So, most of the US$ 3 billion will leave the country, so that the appetite for control of the Lt. Colonel can be satisfied, rather than spending it on the numerous problems the country has, generate jobs, build schools, improve hospitals and silly things like that.

In time, the service of these companies will deterioarte, after all, the Government’s electric company is the pits and Electricidad de Caracas and its affiliates have better service and fewer blackouts than the Government’s companies. CANTV is in my mind in even bigger trouble. In contrast with Electricidad de Caracas, which has no competition, CANTV does and slowly Movistar and Digitel will erode its hard earned market share. People forget that CANTV used to be a distant second to Movistar (then Telcel), but over the last three or four years it really went after the market and is now tied with Movistar for first place. I don’t think this will last, between good management, quick decision making and use of the latest technology, the two competitors will surely gain market share very fast. In fact, the two companies are already raiding some of the better executives at CANTV and both have better technology (GSM) deployed already.

And then there are the workers, besides getting a raw deal (Electricidad workers bought shares last year and are most likely to sell them back to the Government), the Government has refused to talk to the unions and in the case of Electricidad de Caracas, decided to stop the new collective bargaining agreement which had already been negotiated with the company. In the case of CANTV, the workers union said that they have tried to talk to the Government about co-management, buying more shares and the like, but not once has the Government received them, thus they plan to sell their shares in the tender. In fact, at the recent shareholders meeting, Bandes proposed delaying the dividend until after the tender was completed which led to a revolt by the union representatives and the proposal was withdrawn.

Thus, an era ends for Venezuela’s capital markets. Electricidad de Caracas, one of the oldest and most succesful private companies in the country’s history, which has traded for decades in the Caracas Stock Exchange and CANTV, the only Venezuelan stock that traded in the US markets. After this, foreign investors will have no access to the local market, due to exchange controls and current rules for buying and selling shares in the local exchange. This is what led Dow Jones and Wilshire to drop the country from its equity indices. Morgan Stanley can not be far behind. Thus, as the world opens up, Venezuela shuts itself out, as if the country had the wealth and resources to give its inhabitants a much better life. Eight years have gone by and little has changed in that respect. How many more years and billions of dollars will be wasted in the follies of the witticism of the autocrat before people wake up to reality?

And today we got point #8 to my earlier post on the travesty of Justice on the Lapi escape, when the judge named to replace the one fired this weekend by the Government because it did not like that it released the 29 prison workers, changed the earlier ruling , and jailed them again until they can satisfy the conditions for bail. The problem is that this new Judge ruled only to please the Government and forgot to check what the law says about what she could or not do.

You see under the Codigo Organico Procesal penal, the so called COPP, which regulates such decisions, the judge could not change the ruling by the prvious judge, because she was ocuppying that same position and had the same hierarchy. Under the COPP, only a higher instance can change decisions. Thus, once againg, the decision is illegal and the judge rushed to suck up to the Minister of Justice. But I guess she will not be removed for ignorance, miscarriage of Justice or making a political decision.

Oh! Mis-Justice in the revolution!

In the meantime, the Minister accused the previous Judge who freed the 29 prison workers of beong bribed or ” a bribe was coming”, I guess he was watching her via the Direct TV set top box or something screwy like that. You have to wonder how Lapi convinced all 29 to let him go, how they kept it secret and how come the Government had no proof that even one of them was involved.

(In Spanish here)
Just before the blog went on the blink for a few days I wrote about
the PDVSA bond issue that was announced first on March 22^nd., but
the details of which were not known until Monday the 25^th. As I
suggested when the final details were announced, it turned out to be another
gift to those that can afford to buy them, as the implicit exchange rate at
which the bonds were bought turned out to be around Bs. 2900 per US$, giving
“investors”, if we can call them that, a tidy profit, since the parallel
exchange rate closed on Wednesday at a bid price of Bs. 3480. Thus, if you
already sold your bonds in the “when and if” market and sold the dollars, you
made a nifty return of 20% for each dollar you purchased. Initially it looked
that there was going to be some risk, but by increasing the coupon of the
bonds, the risk was removed.

There were a few surprises: First, the allocation was
supposed to be announced last Monday, but when the time came for the
announcement, all people got was a press release, saying that there was such
demand for the bonds (surprise, surprise!) that PDVSA and the Central Bank
needed another day for assigning them.

While this was going on, rumors began suggesting that PDVSA
may increase the amount of the bonds to US$ 7.5 billion, which would make it
the largest corporate bond in Latin America’s
history. This made the bonds drop in the informal “when and if” market even if
it seemed unlikely that it would be increased. There were two reasons to think it
unlikely, one, it may be too large for the international market and two, the
prospectus called for a “maximum” of US$ 5 billion when you added the
maximum for each type of bond. But such minutiae don’t stop a revolution, who
would dare sue the Government for lying? After all, the chance of getting a
ruling in your favor would be minimal anyway.

And indeed PDVSA appeared to decide to take advantage of the
opportunity and increase the size of the offering to US$ 7.5 billion. Of
course, the Government hailed it as “the confidence of the Venezuelan investor
in its oil industry”, which was pure hogwash and an outright lie. Estimates are
that more than 90% of the bonds in previous issues have been sold by the local
“investors”, as three types of people buy these bonds: i) speculators who buy
them, sell them immediately and sell the dollars in the parallel market for a
quickie profit. ii) Individuals who want to protect their savings and these
bonds offer a chance to buy dollars at a cheap rate and iii) Corporations, mostly
multinationals, who have tons of cash in local currency and find this a good
way to either repatriate, keep their money in hard currency or use it abroad
until when and if, the Foreign Exchange control office CADIVI gives them
foreign currency. Of these, a very small fraction of the individuals may keep
the bonds, but this is rare, Venezuelans are famous for not trusting investing
in Government bonds. In fact, they have an irrational belief that their money
may be safer in a local bank than in a Government bond.

But the Government kept the pretense, even having PDVSA run
ads thanking Venezuelan investors for “trusting” their oil company and
investing in it. The disinformation was so huge, that some of the PDVSA ads
even said that for the first time, Venezuelans were becoming partners of PDVSA,
as if owning a bond gave you any right to owenership, even if the company
belongs to us in the end.

There was, of course, no real answer to the question of why
PDVSA increased the offering to US$ 7.5 billion. After all, the company never
said what it was raising the money for when it said it would be US$ 5 billion;
it had to give no explanation for increasing the size of the offering. In fact,
the whole documentation was a charade: The prospectus
had unaudited 2006 financial statements, which differed from the previous three
financial statements issued by the company so far this year, including those
handed to the National Assembly. In fact those used for the offering were the
best ones (financially) so far, with the company paying the smallest amount of
taxes of them all, no dividend to the Government (despite the Government saying
it got one) and thus the highest profits. Additionally, the production figures
in the prospectus were those of 2005 not 2006.

But even 7.5 billion US$ is not too much new debt for a
company with PDVSA’s revenues, which only had some US$ 3 billion in debt at the beginning of the year
and now has US$ 15 billion. And that may be the concern, that in the last three
months PDVSA has increased its debt from US$ 3 billion to US$ 15 billion with
little explanation. Thus, the amount of debt is not a concern, but the rate at
which it is being increased has raised concerns about the financial status of
the company.

If we believe the 2006 financials presented with the bonds,
PDVSA spent almost 90% of its EBITDA, it’s earnings before interest taxes and
depreciation, which measures a company’s earnings capability, on “social
programs”, but the truth is that PDVSA has become Chavez source of petty cash
for his pet projects, whether social or not. Thus, PDVSA now funds what people
thought the regular budget or the development fund Fonden was funding. Last
year, as an example, PDVSA funded the troubled Government airline CONVIASA to
the tune of US$ 60 million dollars, funded infrastructure projects like the Tuy
railroad for US$ 272 million, the Barquisimeto subway for 250 million,
Argentinean cooperation for US$ 188 million, Uruguay for US$ 149 million and
paid Cuba US$ 1,347 for Barrio Adentro II, which is separate from the daily oil
subsidy given that Nation to pay Barrio Adentro I.

Thus, Venezuela now seems to have three budgets with some
transparency in only one, The National Budget, the development Fund Fonden and
now PDVSA which appears to fund anything, even a foundation with the last name
of the Minister of Energy and Oil.

Thus, it would seem as if the money could be spent on many
things, but we just don’t know, in line with the lack of transparency the
revolution has accustomed us to. Personally, I think PDVSA may simply be
accumulating cash to fund the acquisition of a majority stake in the heavy
crude partnerships, Cerro Negro, Petrozuata, Sincor and Hamaca. That may
explain the US$ 7.5 billion in bonds, the US$ 3.5 billion in a credit line from
a consortium of Japanese companies and the US$ 1 billion from BNP Paribas, all
of which took place this year.

Of course, there are other intentions with these bonds.
First, monetary liquidity is reduced because basically locals buy the bonds
with Bolivars and get US$, thus these Bolivars are taken out of circulation,
which reduces the pressure on the parallel market. The problem is that even
this is not clear from the information given out. Here we can assume that since
PDVSA is a net receiver of dollars, these funds will go back to circulation. If
true, this will have little impact on the parallel rate. On the other hand, assume
they use all of it for buying US$, then they buy US$ from the Central Bank and
international reserves would drop below US$ 25 billion, which is right about
the point where foreign investors begin to get edgy. In fact, last week some Wall St. banks were
telling their customers to watch reserves and switch to PDVSA if it gets
foreign currency with the bonds proceeds. The argument is basically that PDVSA
owns CITGO and you can always sue in the US
if PDVSA does not pay, that would be a more direct way of recovering your money
than if Venezuela
stopped paying.

But the size of the issue shows how the Government has
little room for maneuver. If it removes US$ 7.5 billion from monetary liquidity
with this huge issue, liquidity only goes back to where it was on Nov. 10^th.
2006, but international reserves go down significantly and they have not
increased since August of last year. Unless oil prices go up significantly,
which may or not happen, this could get you into dangerous territory. At the
same time, by going to such a huge issue, it bars the possibility of going to
the markets anytime in the next three to six moths, since international markets
will have to digest the equivalent of 33% of what was outstanding for Venezuela in
the international markets since the new issue. This limits the range of action
of the Government, which may be forced into only issuing Argentinean bonds or
those from any other Latin American country to reduce liquidity.

And this brings us to another issue: the allocation. When I
first heard they were increasing the size of the bond to US$ 7.5 billion, I
thought this meant they were going to give corporations, which are the main
drivers of the parallel market, a large allocation. But this was not the case,
for amounts above US$ 500 thousand, you were given only 20% of the amount
requested and never more than US$ 20 million. Thus, corporate demand for
parallel dollars has not been satisfied which should keep that rate up after
wild gyrations the next two weeks as small investors return their US dollars to
pay for the bond.

As I suggested, small investors were assigned much more than
in the previous bonds which may lead to some defaults as they may not be able
to come up with the money to pay next Thursday. But those that can pay came out
really well in another strange capital markets operation by the revolution. Extreemely well, 20% return in one week is a return more in accord with ultra savage capitalism than that of a so called socialist revolution.

And by the way, the bonds are still tax free according to
the Minister of Finance, even if there is no legislation that grants them such a
status.

Is this the hallmark of a democracy?:

1) Former Governor charged with misuse of funds is jailed and after one year has not been brought to trail and all his requests to the Supreme Court are ignored.

2) After a bloody riot at the jail where he is being held, the former Governor escapes.

3) The Prosecutor charges 29 people of a group of 49 workers at the jail between civilians and National Guardsmen.

4) A Judge frees all 29 people saying there is no evidence proving that they were involved in the case.

5) Minister of Interior and Justice says that he will bring “all of the weight of the law” on the judge for ruling that way.

6) Judge is removed from her position.

7) Seven of the 11 civilians ordered freed by the Judge are held in the intelligence police headquarters and are not let go. El Nacional reports all 29 were not freed, El Universal reports the National Guardsmen were allowed to go home for the weekend.

From the dictionaryof the Royal Academy of the Spansih Language:

Dictadura (Dictatorship)

3. f.
Gobierno que, bajo condiciones excepcionales, prescinde de una parte,
mayor o menor, del ordenamiento jurídico para ejercer la autoridad en
un país

Government which, under exceptional conditions, prescinds of one part, whether minor or mayor, of the judicial order to exercize it authority in the country.

Well, this is becoming a daily ocurrence, not under “exceptional conditions”, that the law is set aside to follow the whims and desires of the Dictator/Autocrat.

Can it be any clearer than that?