In data dark Venezuela, facts are in short supply

In data dark Venezuela, facts are in short supply
By Jim Wyss jwyss@MiamiHerald.com

As a police reporter in Venezuela, Deivis Ramirez swings by the morgue
almost daily to engage in a grim piece of detective work: determine how
many people have been murdered in the capital.

In a country where even basic information — from inflation, to highway
fatalities, to tourism spending and miscarriage rates — seems shrouded
in mystery, body counters like Ramirez are trying to fill in the
knowledge gap.

"It's like giving birth every day," Ramirez said, of trying to extract
figures from cagey officials or count the corpses. "Crime statistics are
some of the hardest to find."

Venezuela's constitution guarantees public access to "timely and
accurate" government information. And President Nicolás Maduro
challenges the press to "tell the truth" about his socialist
administration. But the reality is that the truth — and the statistics
that underpin it — is often in short supply.

Last week, opposition Gov. Henrique Capriles made news when he said
inflation during the first four months of the year was near 50 percent —
putting the country on track to dwarf last year's inflation rate of 68.5
percent, the highest in the hemisphere.

Capriles said the information came from "non-official" sources and
challenged the government to come clean. (Days earlier, La Patilla
website, citing anonymous sources, said inflation during the first two
months hit 22 percent). The revelations carried weight because the
Central Bank hasn't provided any information for this year.

"The Central Bank used to publish inflation numbers religiously the
first days of the month," said Carlos Correa, the director of Espacio
Abierto, a Caracas-based free-speech organization. "Now, it's not that
they're publishing wrong information, it's that they're not publishing
anything at all...I don't think that's an accident."

The administration has a track-record of burying bad news. In 2003, when
Venezuela's murder and crime rate started spiking, the government
shutdown the police press office that provided regular data.

When food and product shortages started to make headlines last year, the
Central Bank quit publishing the "scarcity index," which had been part
of its regular data output for years.

Earlier this month, Bank of America resorted to "forensic economics" to
try to paint a picture of Venezuela's economy. Using official reports,
private sector estimates, trading-partner data and "statistical
estimation" techniques, they tried to recreate information that, in many
countries, would be just a few mouse-clicks away.

"The Venezuelan economy poses a formidable challenge for researchers,"
the bank said in the forward to the report. "Data on key indicators
needed to evaluate fiscal and external sustainability is either
unavailable or reported with severe delays."

Even seemingly innocuous information can be hard to unearth. In 2014,
Espacio Publico asked government offices for 10 pieces of information.
Among the questions were: How much money is in the FONDEN National
Development Fund? How much money did the Ministry of Health spend on
reproductive health? And how much money did state-run TeleSur television
pay Argentine soccer-star Diego Maradona for his commentary during the
2014 World Cup games?

Espacio Publico says it didn't get any answers. In one case, they went
to court to find out what steps the Ministry of Health had taken after
it was revealed that medicine imported from Cuba was lost or allowed to
expire. The Political Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court shot
down the request calling it a threat to "the efficiency and efficacy of
public administration."

During a similar exercise in 2013, Espacio Publico sent out 70 questions
to government agencies. A full 91 percent of them were turned down, and
only 4 percent were answered.

It's not just secrecy at work. There are departments that simply don't
have the manpower to produce reports. In 2012, the civil society group
Paz Activa started the Observatory for Roadway Security to track traffic
accidents and fatalities.

It came about because there was a large discrepancy between how many
vehicular deaths the police and local hospitals were reporting, said
Luis Cedeño, the organization's director.

In that case, authorities weren't trying to hide the truth, he said. "We
knew the issue was institutional weakness, or lack of capacity to
process information."

In other cases it's not so clear. In December, Venezuela's Ministry of
Communication and Information quit sending press releases to many
foreign reporters. When asked about the issue, the department said
"computer problems" were keeping them from emailing information. Four
months later the problem is yet to be fixed.

Computer glitch or not, over the last decade, the government has clamped
down on the independent media as it has created powerful state-run
television, radio and newspaper outlets. Local media are sometimes
barred from government press conferences.

"Opacity is the law and it's every-day policy," said Mercedes De
Freitas, the director of Transparency International in Venezuela.
"What's unusual is to have complete and public information."

That's particularly true of government's finances.

While the administration touts huge social spending on, say, subsidized
housing, "we don't have a way to verify how much has been spent, who was
paid or how many new houses were built," she said. "It's impossible to
know how public funds are being spent"

Not surprisingly, corruption has flourished in the data darkness. Not a
week seems to go by without a public official being accused of
squirreling away funds or revelations that a bridge or road was never
finished.

The combination of lack of information and impunity has Venezuela ranked
161 on Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index — just
11 spots from the bottom and tied with Haiti and Yemen.

Occasionally, the government does announce figures — often to try to
disprove an embarrassing unofficial figure. But those announcements
rarely come with context or a way to make year-on-year comparisons, De
Freitas said. "When they do provide information it's often propaganda,"
she added.

Venezuela isn't alone in trying to hide its dirty laundry. Argentina has
been accused of fiddling with its inflation figures, China is suspected
of tweaking its economic growth data and the United States has been
blamed for fudging unemployment figures. But analysts said they were
unaware of countries that had simply turned off the information tap.

During his decade on the crime beat, Ramirez said his job has been
getting trickier. On the rare occasions that he does get "official"
murder figures it's hard to tell what he's looking at. Recently,
authorities began classifying those gunned down by police not as
homicides but as "resisting authority," he said. And many obvious
murders are put into an "under investigation" file permanently.

"This job is Titanic," he said. "Along with trying to find information
you have to deal with the authorities…Because there are no official
figures you're always at risk of being told you're wrong."

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