Lights Out in Chavez Land

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Yesterday morning I visited the Central University of Venezuela. The campus is built in the Tropical Modernist architecture of the 1960s: hallways open to the outdoors, louvered windows in every room, undulating concrete canopies over the walkways. Over every elevator and centered in every hallway is a round electric clock, again in the high 1960s Modernist style. And every one has stopped dead.

I ask why. It’s explained: The clocks are controlled by a central computer. And the computer stopped working a decade ago. The parts are so ancient that they cannot be replaced, and the university has not got the money to install a new system.

The university’s financial problems are indeed extreme. Although funded by the state, it has maintained independence in its faculty hiring. For that reason, it has been a special target of animosity from the regime. Inflation has sliced the real purchasing power of faculty salaries by some 60% over the past 2 years.

Maintenance of university buildings has not been so much deferred, as abandoned.

But while the university’s decay is accelerated, the physical collapse can be seen everywhere. I’m in Maracaibo tonight, Venezuela’s second city. Huge blocks of the city are dark, a consequence of the rolling blackouts that strike for 2 hours per day. The blackouts are worst in cities and states where the opposition is strong, as here. But even Caracas (with an opposition mayor, but firmly under central control) is not entirely exempt: the city does not go black, but it does go brown, with street lights shut even on highways and half the lightbulbs removed from public places.

The government blames the blackouts on imperialist-caused global warming, which has supposedly dried the reservoirs that power the hydroelectric dams. In fact it’s the clock problem all over again: underinvestment in equipment leading to collapse in infrastructure.

Even the oil industry, on which this country so utterly depends, is crumbling. Oil production has declined from 3.3 million barrels a day in 2005 to about 2.4 million. Venezuela is not succumbing to peak oil, the country still possesses huge proven reserves. But in response to a 2-month strike by anti-Chavez oil workers in 2002, the government dismissed 17,000 workers – terminating their pension rights at the same time. Many of the most skilled engineers have emigrated. Meanwhile the government spends every dollar it collects abroad, runs a huge fiscal deficit (Venezuelan budget numbers are utterly opaque, so nobody can begin to guess how huge the deficit is), neglects to reinvest, and still has to inflate at 40% per year to close the gap.

Price controls and exchange controls conceal the inflation, which instead manifests itself in shortages of everything from beans to … parts for clocks.