Venezuelan Exceptionalism and the Soviet Dog

Venezuelan Exceptionalism and the Soviet Dog

Fredericka A. Schmadel

February 20, 2010

“This is about a Soviet dog, a Polish dog, an American dog, and a Venezuelan dog. The Venezuelan dog says, ‘I have a better life than any of you. Whenever I bark, the servant brings me a steak.’”

“The American dog says, ‘What’s a servant?’”

“’The Polish dog says, ‘What’s a steak?’”

“’The Soviet dog says, ‘What’s bark?’”

This joke, as told by Sammy Alvarez, computer entrepreneur,

was making the rounds in 1985 in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Sammy,

his American-born wife, and two sons now live in Manhattan. In

1985 Sammy, his family, and his bodyguards occupied two

inconspicuous houses joined side-by-side side in a middle-class

neighborhood. Windows and doors had bars, an elaborate alarm

system, and multiple sets of locks. The guards, Sammy’s cousin’s

men from a ranch in the nearby Sierra de Perija Mountains on the

Colombian border, carried guns inconspicuously and never said

anything. Sammy Alvarez’s yacht, a small yacht with inboard

V. Except.Sov.Dog.FSchmadel Page 1

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motor, had satellite navigation in 1985, before I had ever heard

of such a thing, and before it became available commercially. I

met Sammy at my boss’s house; I was a newly-arrived first-tour

Vice Consul at the American Consulate. My boss was the Consul.

Values expressed in the joke include – in descending order

of importance – freedom (of expression), prosperity, and personal

service/interpersonal relationships. The latter value functions

as the indicator of the Venezuelan lifestyle’s superiority.

Prosperity comes next, the sign of the American lifestyle, which

is also included in the Venezuelan lifestyle. These two aspects

are lacking in the Polish dog’s experience. The bottom of the

totem pole, occupied by the hapless Soviet dog, is total lack of

self-expression as well as poverty and lack of personal

service/contact. So little barking is allowed that the Soviet

dog does not even know what it is. The assumption is that the

Soviet dog is also unaware of the benefits of prosperity (the

steak) and personal service or interpersonal relations (the

servant).

V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 2

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Language and tradition, along with the concomitant

worldview, make modern life modern and functional (Bauman and

Briggs 5). Jokes encapsulate the frontier edges of discourse,

while engaging teller and listeners on mutually familiar ground,

familiar based on what has gone before. Jokes constitute a new

slant on the known, a meeting place for creative language and

tradition, a way to adapt to new social developments – in this

instance Venezuela’s state-capitalist wealth-and-democracy

society, intertwined with the traditional feudal element of the

servant, adapting to the fast-paced, polarized world of the late

20th century. The Venezuelan dog surpasses in good fortune even

the American dog due to this feudal element. Alan Dundes saw in

Jewish American Princess jokes an encapsulation of processes of

adaptation to American society by immigrants and the even newer

element of women’s liberation (459, 470, 471).

Because I arrived in Maracaibo in January of 1985 I had not

experienced “Black Friday,” February 18, 1983, when falling oil

prices and a debt burden caused abrupt, shocking currency

devaluation. The Bolivar, Venezuela’s national currency, emerged

with less than 50% of the value it had had the day before. For V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 3

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foreigners Venezuela became a bargain overnight. More than half

the Venezuelan middle class, however, slipped down into poverty

and subsistence. People were still talking about it in outraged

tones in 1985.

My tour of duty did not extend to the somewhat delayed

reaction to this shock, the Caracazo revolt of February 27-28,

1989. Riots exploded when the new, democratically elected

President imposed draconian neo-liberal economic austerity

measures, breaking campaign promises not to do so. Venezuelan

military forces stifled the unrest mercilessly. Human rights

organizations reported hundreds of deaths as a result, but the

real numbers might well have been ten times that, as there was

never a reliable count. The spectacle of Venezuelan soldiers

firing on Venezuelan rioters with deadly force transfixed and

radicalized a cadre of young officers, a certain Hugo Chavez

among them. Venezuela’s government had been that of an

apparently model Western democracy since 1958, when leaders of

the two mainstream political parties had signed the Pact of Punto

Fijo, agreeing to succeed one another peacefully in elections

(Bruce xv-xvi). V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 4

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Venezuela’s self-image today, amounting to individual

Venezuelans’ images of their country, and affecting their

personal self-images as well, has suffered due to the well-known

media appetite for the sensational, the startling, or the

humorous. Venezuela is well-known for having vast petroleum

wealth. Venezuela is well-known for being a long-term,

functioning democracy. Venezuela has been condescended to for

decades by its neighbor Colombia and other Spanish-speaking

nations as a less-cultured wannabe.

Headlines like these, collected over a six-week period in

late 2009, are typical. Venezuela makes news, but it makes news

in specific ways as seen in these headlines: “Kidnapping has

become big business for Venezuela’s criminals,” El Mercurio

(Chile), Dec. 31, 2009; “77% of Venezuelans believe the country’s

democracy is deteriorating,” El Mercurio, Dec. 29, 2009; “President

Chavez of Venezuela threatened to nationalize Toyota,” The Wall

Street Journal, Dec. 26, 2009; “President Chavez renames world’s

tallest waterfall,” Guardian Unlimited (UK), Dec. 22, 2009; “There

is a rush to immigrate to the United States from Venezuela,”

Miami Daily Business Review, Dec. 22, 2009; “Chavez is putting V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 5

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Venezuela on a war footing with Colombia,” Gaceta de los negocios, Dec.

22, 2009; “Venezuela – Energy Rationed,” L’Expansion (Paris), Dec.

20, 2009; “La DEA descubre nexus entre Venezuela y las Farc,”

(The DEA discovers connections between Venezuela and the FARC –

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), El Nuevo Herald (Miami),

Dec. 12, 2009; “Venezuela between Socialism and Warmongering,”

Zeit Online (Frankfurt), Dec. 5, 2009; “Ask the President – Diet,

Showering, Night-time Bathroom Trips – Chavez’s Daily Tips Stop

at Nothing,” Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), Nov. 21, 2009; “The most

corrupt in America,” Gaceta de los negocios, Nov, 20, 2009; “Oil and

Socialism Won’t Stop the Recession in Venezuela,” Le Temps

(Paris), Nov. 20, 2009.

These headlines and others fall into three categories:

Venezuela is an evil influence, Venezuela is going downhill fast,

and Venezuela’s President is a buffoon. They come down to fear-

mongering, doom-saying, and condescension or ridicule. How did

this trend get started?

Venezuela, a former colony of Spain on the northern coast of

South America, had remained largely agrarian from the time it was


7

first glimpsed by Christopher Columbus in 1498. Gradually,

however, after the first oil well went into production near Lake

Maracaibo in 1913, it became clear that Venezuela had the seventh

largest proven oil reserves in the world. Those are the reserves

from oil fields now mapped and charted. Because there are so

many unexplored areas, speculation exists that Venezuela may have

the largest reserves worldwide, possibly even by far the largest.

Press reports say that Venezuela is the fourth or fifth largest

supplier of oil to the United States. Much of Venezuela’s oil

is well known to be heavy, sludgy crude, too heavy for refineries

not built specifically to accommodate it.

Before 1958 Venezuela’s national government was more or

less authoritarian and kleptocratic. A history of Venezuela that

came out as recently as 2006 sees the 1958 Pact of Punto Fijo as

part of a grand process of national conciliation, in which true

coalitions and true cooperation had been the order of the day

(Tarver and Frederick 102). A student leader’s comment in 2002:

“After the pact in 1958, when the parties starting trading the

government back and forth, first one party stole all they could,

then the other group got elected and did the same” (Interview 6).V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 7

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The economy was always a more or less controlled economy.

Venezuela nationalized oil and steel production in the 1970’s,

expropriating Royal Dutch Shell operations and those of Standard

Oil of New Jersey, among others. Some international oil

companies, Schlumberger, for example, remain in Venezuela as

contractors. The country has significant but mostly unmeasured

natural resources of gold, diamonds, bauxite, and uranium. It

has the northeastern edge of the Andes, with truly rugged, snow-

covered peaks, as well as vast plains and extensive low-lying

jungle areas with no roads and only the most perfunctory human

settlement. Over the years successive Venezuelan governments

gave lip service to developing sources of revenue other than oil,

known as “sowing the petroleum” (Indextur, 43 – 59).

Venezuela’s population consists of indigenous people, who

now mostly live in rural areas or far inland, and immigrants

whose forebears came from Spain, Italy, and Portugal, some of

them in the country for ten or more generations. Lebanese and

other Middle Easterners arrived in relatively small numbers in

the early twentieth century. Mixed-ancestry Afro-Caribbean

people have intermarried over several centuries with other V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 8

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groups; mixed-race people of varying skin hues now may constitute

a narrow majority of the population (Bruce xi). Venezuela has no

official policy of skin color or racial discrimination, but

racism is a de facto social and economic force in the country.

My personal observation – I lived in Venezuela for a total of

five years 1985-86 and 2000-2003 -- confirms popular Venezuelan

assumptions that university graduates tend to have fairer hair,

lighter eyes, and taller stature, as well as bigger bank

accounts, than the population in general.

In 1992 Air Force Colonel Hugo Chavez, with other military

officers, staged a coup d’état against the democratically elected

government of President Carlos Andres Perez. Chavez was

unsuccessful, tried, convicted, and jailed. In jail he wrote a

manifesto. After his pardon he went into national politics as a

reformer. He was elected President in 1999, by the widest margin

in Venezuelan history, as a voice of the people against

corruption. He has won six national elections and referendum

votes since then, all by huge margins. The only one he lost, in

2007, was a result of his proposing widespread constitutional

changes only seven years after the most recent constitution – V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 9

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also crafted by Chavez -- was voted into existence. Among the

changes the voters rejected was a revocation of Presidential term

limits, so that Chavez, with the consent of the voters, would

have been eligible to continue to run for President indefinitely.

Chavez’s personal popularity even after nearly 12 years in

the Presidency is still very high. He is a powerful, mesmerizing

public speaker, able to hold the enthusiastic attention of

gigantic crowds for hours at a time. His enormous charisma comes

through in his weekly television program. On it he speaks for

hours, calling his own government officials to account, taking

phone calls from ordinary citizens, singing folk songs,

philosophizing, and working to inspire a return to Venezuela’s

greatness of the past, especially in the glory days of

Venezuela’s great liberator from Spanish colonial rule, Simon

Bolivar.

This popularity is far from universal, however. South

Florida has been filling up with members of the Venezuelan middle

class; the sizable community of Weston – dubbed “Westonzuela” –

is a place where tens of thousands of Venezuelans now live, most


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of them economic refugees from Chavez’s Venezuela. A web site

entitled Mequieroir.com (I gottagetouttahere.com) continues to

exist, thrive, and grow as Venezuelans negotiate their exit

strategies. Currency controls prevent Venezuelans from taking

more than a small amount of money with them. The waiting list to

obtain an appointment for a visa interview at the American

Embassy in Caracas – just the initial step in obtaining a visa to

visit the United States -- is now more than 18 months, according

to recent reports. Of course any mass exodus of Chavez

opponents will leave a population inside Venezuela increasingly

predisposed in Chavez’s favor, in higher percentages than before.

That is a logical expectation, anyway, demographically speaking.

The university student informant: “There was never a really free

economy. But the poor were too poor to leave. And the middle

classes did sometimes leave, but … here they had servants. Here

they had connections (palanca)” (Interview 6 2002). The word

palanca means connections, influence, even networking. It is very

similar to the term pile in Brubaker’s Cluj (197).

According to a 2008 Human Rights Watch report there was at

that time no dictatorship in Venezuela. Since 2008 some V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 11

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privately owned radio and television stations have closed or have

been closed, the most prominent of those for declining to present

some of the President’s multi-hour speeches to the nation, which

can occur more than once a week and are obligatory. Chavez’s

political party and its allies have massive or exclusive control

of the national legislature, now unicameral, of the supreme

courts, and of the national electoral council, the fourth arm of

government. Venezuela has been using its recent bonanza of oil

money to buy the debt of other Latin American countries, such as

Argentina, and to sell them petroleum at heavily subsidized

prices, or in return for promises to pay. Cuba receives

petroleum at prices below the producer’s cost in return for its

medical doctors serving in the poor barrios. President Chavez

has even provided, through a Venezuelan-owned oil U.S.

corporation (Citgo), gasoline and heating oil at reduced prices

to a small number of poor neighborhoods in New York City and New

Orleans. He says he is in business to return power to the people

and to give the poor a fair shake.

Chavez has ejected North American and European missionaries

who had been working for decades with indigenous communities in V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 12

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the interior of Venezuela. He has forced profit-sharing and

joint-ownership contracts on international oil companies working

in Venezuela as contractors for PDVSA, the national oil company.

As a leader of OPEC he has politicked against economically

liberal democracies – powerful countries. He has publicly

befriended and defended the native Venezuelan terrorist Carlos

the Jackal, now in prison in France. He recently called upon

international organizations to remove Colombian guerilla bands

and self-styled freedom fighters from lists of known terrorist

groups. Some press reports accuse him of secret alliances with

one or more of these groups. Interpol and the U.S. DEA cite a

huge increase over the last six years of illegal narcotics

transiting Venezuela, heading for Europe and North America.

Jewish organizations within Venezuela have reported arbitrary

police raids on their cultural centers.

According to recent press reports, the Venezuelan national

oil company is declining in efficiency, producing about one third

less petroleum than it reports. Some sources state that it is

neither replacing its equipment nor maintaining the oil field

operations (Interview 6). Recently it sent a drilling rig to V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 13

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Chavez ally Ecuador on loan. Oil company employees reported

disloyal to Chavez or his Bolivarian political party have left or

been ousted. The brother of the student informant is reportedly

among those let go.

On April 11, 2002, some Venezuelan business and military

leaders toppled Chavez in a coup d’état. The United States

recognized the new government right away. Four days later, after

massive protest demonstrations, penitent military leaders

returned Chavez to power. Where Chavez had been sporadically

anti-U.S. before, he then became virulently so, sealing a close

alliance with the Iranian regime, and proclaiming that Fidel

Castro was his best friend. He announced grandiose plans to

build atomic facilities in Venezuela, to build a natural gas

pipeline through Brazilian Amazonia to Argentina, to set up a

free trade zone of his own in Latin America, one that excludes

the U.S., to merge Venezuela with Cuba politically and

militarily, and to become the leader of a new, multi-polar world.

He set up a Caracas-based South American international television

news channel to compete with CNN en espanol. Recently his

government has joined Uruguay in a scientific expedition to the V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 14

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Antarctic. Complaints against the Chavez government from within

Venezuela center on corruption, street crime – including murders

committed by police officers --, and shortages of basic foods

under government price controls for years.

Venezuela is now deeply divided politically and culturally.

In my own offices in the American Embassy in Caracas 2000 to

2003, where I ran a huge visa-interviewing, background-checking,

fingerprinting, and visa issuing (and refusing) operation, I had

to watch what I said very carefully, and so did everyone else,

including the ten American Vice Consuls who worked for me. About

20 highly-skilled Venezuelan paralegals and database experts

worked in that operational area at that time, along with contract

employees, a guard force, and some part-time staff.

We never talked about Venezuelan politics; we worried about

offending each other. Many of the employees were convinced the

American Embassy had led or instigated the April 2001 four-day

coup d’état against Chavez. We knew we hadn’t. It was clear

that the middle class was fleeing Venezuela in large numbers; we

never mentioned it. I chatted online briefly in 2001 with


16

diplomatic colleagues running visa operations in a Middle Eastern

country, where the staff came from two mutually distrustful,

opposing ethnic groups. Ours was the more divided, the more

repressed atmosphere.

We who lived in Venezuela had enough to eat; we had not

descended to the point of starving like the Polish dog. We

certainly had employees working for us, so we might have thought

of ourselves as the happily indulged Venezuelan dog in the joke,

whose servant brings him a steak. Our self-censorship, however,

put us into the same category as the most unfortunate dog of all,

the Soviet dog, who does not even know what barking is like.

Things were surely not always that bad. University students

even in the early Chavez years held a wide range of political

opinions, Chavista, opposition, and the so-called “ni-ni,” or

“neither-nor.” Being interested in the “ni-ni” view I spoke with

the mother and uncle of a student leader to get his perspective

(Interview 6).

Rigo Dao had told them he was studying economics to beat the

capitalists at their own game. He said the Pact was just a


17

practical arrangement between two groups of thieves that called

themselves political parties. They kept the money in their inner

circles, talking about “sowing the oil,” but not doing it.

He didn’t think Chavez was the solution to the country’s

problems, either, however.

“Some of us are going to do something about this

constitutional reform. It’s just a way for the same guy to stay

in power forever,” he announced. Of course his mother worried.

The term palanca, which means a kind of hand tool, a lever,

i.e. leverage or influence, is a common term. You have to have

it. If you have a business it gets you contracts. If you are a

doctor it gets you referrals. If you don’t have it, a government

inspector might come to check out your safety procedures every

day for a month. At a social event I chatted with a Venezuelan

businessman who operated several franchise fast food restaurants

identified with the United States. He hoped the American Embassy

could do something to stop certain thugs from hanging around his

business, intimidating the customers just by being there. He

said it was because his company had a foreign-sounding name


18

(Interview 3). Was the entire idealistic-sounding Pact of Punto

Fijo just an exercise in palanca, like an arrangement between

organized crime groups?

Venezuelans have waited a long time for the rest of the

world to take them seriously. One of the first things I learned

in Spanish language classes at the Department of State’s Foreign

Service Institute in 1984 was that other Hispanic people had long

regarded Venezuelans with amused condescension, as the Texans of

South America, because of their petroleum wealth and because of

their version of Spanish. The way they speak is full of

diminuitives and is pronounced in low-brow Caribbean fashion

rather than high-brow Colombian fashion. In Venezuela you don’t

drink a Pepsi, for example, you drink a teeny-tiny Peksi, or even

a teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy Peksi. Brubaker connects the manner in

which a language is spoken with condescension or other pejorative

attitudes among listeners (218). It is easy to see why

Venezuelans might have a rather defensive attitude toward the

media and the rest of the world. The new thing, however, is that

a political faction -- the opposition -- uses international

headlines and attitudes like these to bash the other faction – V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 18

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the Chavistas. The Chavistas, however, are making serious

attempts to remedy long-standing economic and social injustices

in the country. They may be inept in going about it, and slow to

deal with large-scale corruption in their own ranks, but they are

making the attempt.

Iain Bruce (17-53) details some on-the-ground efforts by the

Chavista side of the equation, such as the “missions,” bringing

literacy to the huge shanty-towns ringing the big cities, places

where there is no running water, little or no electricity, and

people live in huts, throwing their refuse down the side of the

mountain. Cuban doctors have set up their offices and now make

house calls in such places. Neighborhood committees have taken

over abandoned businesses and are putting them back into use;

their owners have left them or been ousted by government policies

hostile to business. It’s a messy, slow process; the

dispossessed former owners have loud voices.

Some voices are hardly ever heard by either side. Maria

Elena told me about her efforts to make a tenement landlord live

up to the lease she signed with him (Interview 1). A single


20

mother, she and her 12-year-old daughter worked hard to spruce

up, repaint, and fix up the apartment they had rented in a

neighborhood with running water and electricity, and not even far

from the bus line. They spent every Sunday at it for six weeks,

and were quite pleased with themselves. Maria Elena had been

fired from her previous job as concierge of an apartment complex

in a rich part of Caracas; she had to vacate the concierge’s

efficiency apartment. Less than two months after moving into the

new place, she and her daughter got home late one night to find

their key did not work. Upset, they located the landlord, who

said the building had been sold.

“We had a contract! He signed it, too!” I could hear the

outrage in Maria Elena’s voice, even months later, when she told

me about it. She told me the landlord had said it was no use,

and that they would have to move out within a week. No, she

would not be allowed to stay and pay rent to the new landlord.

Maria Elena, however, who had been working as a house cleaner on

an hourly basis, found a new full-time job working for a

handicapped lady, who offered her and her child a place to live

in her apartment. Many apartments in wealthy neighborhoods have V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 20

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extensive servants’ rooms, often spacious bedroom suites with

bath. It was very fortunate indeed, because Maria Elena had no

legal recourse at all about the undeserved and probably illegal

eviction. She was allowed to enter the apartment she had fixed

up so lovingly only to retrieve her belongings. This was the

system before Chavez.

Maria Elena had another story to tell about the system after

Chavez’s election, which had given so much hope to so many

people. Her employer wanted to go to Florida on vacation and to

visit relatives. She wanted Maria Elena and her daughter to go

with her to help her. Maria Elena had a passport, but her

daughter did not. Both ended up staying in Caracas, not because

of U.S. visa problems, but because it proved impossible to obtain

a Venezuelan passport for the daughter. They never got to the

stage of applying for a U.S. visa.

They had the money for the passport fee, and they had filled

out the passport forms. The daughter was Venezuelan-born, and

thus entitled to a Venezuelan passport. They stood outside the

door of the main passport office day after day for six weeks


22

without being allowed to enter the door and stand in line inside.

And Maria-Elena was not only miserably unhappy about it, but also

perplexed. “Usually I know who to flatter, who to play up to or

appeal to, to get in somewhere. If that doesn’t work, I know who

to give the bribe to, or I can find out. But this time, although

I knew I would have to bribe the guard in charge of the waiting

line, I didn’t know how many other people inside I would have to

bribe to get my daughter’s passport, and I only had just so much

money for the whole project, including the actual passport fee.”

(Interviews 1 and 4).

There are huge social and economic problems here, and they

go far beyond the relatively recent polarization into Chavista,

opposition, or ni-ni (neither-nor) factions. How does one deal

with such fear and defensiveness?

In an article by Daniel J. Wakin in its November 17, 2009,

edition, the International Herald Tribune described the debut of the

new conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a 28-year-old

graduate of El Sistema, a network of youth orchestras created in

poor neighborhoods. Gustavo Dudamel rose to conduct the crown


23

jewel of its orchestras, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in

Caracas. He then began to appear in various parts of the world,

appearing with the youth orchestra and as guest conductor of many

of the world’s great orchestras. The LA Philharmonic didn’t even

hold a search or audition anyone.

At his debut the orchestra pulled out all the stops, setting

up a free concert at the Hollywood Bowl for 18,000 people on

October 3, 2009. It was called “Bienvenido Gustavo!” Among the

presentations were gospel, jazz, and blues groups and soloists,

with movie-star announcers and introducers. Mr. Dudamel began

the evening by conducting a youth orchestra the LA Symphony

management had set up in homage to the Simon Bolivar Youth

Orchestra. He then went on to conduct the LA Philharmonic

playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The symphony management saw

to it that at the appropriate time the words of the “Ode to Joy”

appeared projected above the proscenium arch in Spanish. People

in the audience actually sang. Tears of solemn emotion fell,

especially among Hispanic concert-goers. The orchestra

management has put together a mini-web site devoted to its new

conductor. V.Except.Sov.Dog.PerfNat.FASchmadel Page 23

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This was the only positive piece of news about Venezuela or

Venezuelans appearing in non-Venezuelan media for more than six

months. A divided population can unite behind heroes. In the

future I hope to write about El Sistema, the youth orchestra

network in the poor neighborhoods of Venezuela, as a form of

national hero able to bring the Venezuelan people together. It

began before Chavez’s election and has continued to thrive under

the Chavez administration. In the process I will write a brief

outline of Venezuelan Exceptionalism, which is different from

American Exceptionalism, but has some features in common.

Sources Cited:

Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian

Town, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Bruce, Iain, The Real Venezuela: Making Socialism in the Twenty-first Century,

London: Pluto Press, 2008.


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Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language

Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2003.

Dundes, Alan, “The J.A.P. and the J.A.M.,” Journal of American Folklore

98 (Oct 1985) 456-475.

Tarver, H. Michael and Julia C. Frederick, The History of Venezuela, New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Venezuela: Indextur: A Tourist’s Directory, Caracas: LAGOVEN, S.A., a

subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela, S. A., 1985.


Venezuelan Exceptionalism and the Soviet Dog

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