by Todd Gordon
Canadian political leaders and policymakers were also alert to the possible influence of Chávez in Central America, in the context of the election of Centre or Centre-Left governments in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, and the growth of social movements targeting Canadian companies. Fear of Chávez in particular, and a renewed Central American Left in general, were often conflated—with Chávez identified as responsible, through his “meddling”—for the growing popular discontent with neoliberalism and unchecked and unaccountable natural resource extraction. As noted in the chapter on Honduras, Conservative member of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, Dave Van Kesteren, blamed the 2009 Honduran military coup on Manuel Zelaya and his supposed move into the sphere of influence of Chávez, arguing that
a real power struggle is taking place, and it’s what we believe in as a free society; that’s to have freedom of goods, what we call the unguided [sic] hand, as opposed to total government control or freedom versus totalitarianism, prosperity versus poverty.1032
Prior to Van Kesteren’s Cold Warrior performance, a 2007 report by The Privy Council Office’s Intelligence Assessment Secretariat (prepared at the request of FAIT) on the influence of Venezuela in Central America (released with heavy redactions) observed that “Chávez’s commitment to export his revolution…has run up against pragmatic governments.…Nevertheless,” it cautions, “Chávez is unlikely to be deterred by these initial setbacks, and will continue to meddle in CA [Central America’s] domestic affairs”—Canada of course never “meddles.” The report goes on to worry about the fact that polls continue to indicate that Chávez’s “popular appeal in the region exists.” It concludes that “Chávez failure”—that is, the defeat of Central America’s Left, still recovering as it is from the brutality of the dirty wars of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—“is a positive sign for Canadian interests in assisting in the development of good government, and in negotiating a free trade agreement, with the region.”1033 The Honduran coup in 2009 proved to be the biggest defeat for the Left in this period, and offered Canada the best opportunity for a free trade agreement in the region. The small matter of over three hundred targeted assassinations of dissidents and poor farmers was deemed insufficiently important to force any rethinking by Canadian officials of their relations with the Lobo government.
WHO WAS CHÁVEZ?
On live television, Venezuelan Vice-President Nicolás Maduro choked on his words. Hugo Chávez, the improbable President, born in the rural poverty of Sabaneta, in the state of Barinas in 1954, had died of cancer. To his wealthy and light-skinned enemies he was evil incarnate. To many impoverished Venezuelans, his contradictory and eclectic ideology—a labyrinthine blend drawing on the thought of nineteenth century Simón Bolívar and Ezequiel Zamora, twentieth century left-military nationalism and anti-imperialism, Soviet-inflected, bureaucratic Cuban socialism, social Christianity, pragmatic neostructuralist economics, and currents of socialism-from-below—made a good deal of sense at least insofar as he had come from origins like theirs and had made the right sort of enemies.
There’s something about Chávez that encourages a starker-than-usual embrace of mediocrity in the quarters of the establishment press. How else to explain the appeal of Rory Carroll whose dystopic fantasies about the life and times of Venezuela since 1999 found their unmitigated expression in the pages of the Guardian, New York Times, and New Statesman, among others, in the weeks following Chávez’s death.1034 For Carroll, the Venezuelan popular classes had been the mute and manipulable playthings of the “elected autocrat,” whose life in turn was reducible to one part clown, one part monster.1035
If we once imagined that Chávez emerged out of the debauched embrace of neoliberalism by an old rotating political elite ensconced in the traditional Democratic Action (Acción Democrática, AD) and Independent Political Electoral Organization Committee (Comité Organización Politica Electoral Independiente, COPEI) parties in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concomitant socio-political fissures created by the popular explosion of anti-neoliberal sentiment during the caracazo riots of 1989, and the folkloric rise of a dissident military man to the status of popular hero though a failed coup attempt of 1992 (targeting the status quo), we now stand corrected.1036 The idea that Chávez is the result of Chavismo—a pervasive groundswell of demands for social change, national liberation, and deeper democracy—becomes a fraud. “We Created Chávez!”—a popular delusion.1037 “His dramatic sense of his own significance,” we learn from Carroll, is rather what “helped bring him to power as the reincarnation of the liberator Simón Bolívar”—the trope of autocratic caudillo, and crocodile charisma. It was this very same “dramatic flair” that “deeply divided Venezuelans” rather than, say, the uneven and combined development of neoliberal capitalism in a dependent country of the Global South—the trope of manufactured polarization. “He spent extravagantly on health clinics, schools, subsidies and giveaways”—the trope of populist clientelism and the undeserving poor. “His elections were not fair”—the trope of creeping authoritarianism. He “dominate[d] airwaves”—the trope of media monopolization. Ultimately, though, his evil was banal, his rule was that, “in the final analysis,” of “an awful manager.”1038 “As Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in response to the death of Chávez, “the United States remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights,” all implicitly absent in the South American country.1039 “At this key juncture,” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper noted in the same register, “I hope the people of Venezuela can now build for themselves a better, brighter future based on the principles of freedom, democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights.”1040
Although disingenuous in the extreme, this was still more measured than Harper’s comments in 2009, just prior to a Summit of the Americas meeting. There he noted that Chávez was representative of certain leftist leaders in the Western hemisphere who were “opposed to basically sound economic policies, want to go back to Cold War socialism…want to turn back the clock on the democratic progress that’s been made in the hemisphere.…There’s nothing out here that says that running an authoritarian state on petro dollars is not going to get you very far in the long term.”1041 We are to understand from this that contemporary liberal democracy is the selection of good managers. A proper manager for the twenty-first century is presumably something closer to the pliant figure of unelected free market Italian technocrat Mario Monti, whose loss in the recent Italian elections was mourned by the same media outlets demonizing Chávez. The Economist spoke of the stubborn Italian electorate’s “refusal to recognise the underlying causes of Italy’s plight” achieving its full expression in “their refusal to back Mr Monti.”1042 The tidal wave of anti-Chávez vitriol on behalf of the world’s rulers is rooted in the refusal he represents for the poor and dispossessed, for the exploited and oppressed—a refusal to go on as before, to submit to neoliberal capitalism, and to get on one’s knees before imperialism. It is true, in other words, that he made an awful manager.
On March 7, 2013, the conservative opposition media in Venezuela reported hundreds of thousands in the streets of Caracas mourning their manager’s demise. An editorial in the Mexican daily La Jornada speaks of millions. A quick search of Google images and Youtube produces a veritable red tide of mourners. Through Carroll’s prism these multitudes must radically misunderstand the legacy of fourteen years of Chávez: “the decay, dysfunction and blight that afflict the economy and every state institution.”1043 They must misconceive the “profound uncertainty” the late president has thrust them into. They must be blind to the “bureaucratic malaise and corruption” surrounding them.1044
CHARGES OF AUTOCRACY, CLIENTELISM, AND DECAY
Mark Weisbrot, a social-democratic economist based in the United States, once complained that Venezuela “is probably t
he most lied-about country in the world.”1045 In fourteen years Chávez won fourteen national electoral contests of different varieties, coming out securely on top of thirteen of them. According to Jimmy Carter—former U.S. President, Nobel Prize winner, and monitor of ninety-two elections worldwide in his capacity as director of the Carter Centre—these Venezuelan contests were the “best in the world.”1046 In the 2006 presidential race, it was opposition candidate Manuel Rosales who engaged in petty bids of clientelism aimed at securing the votes of the poor. Most notoriously, he offered US$450 per month to 3 million impoverished Venezuelans on personal black credit cards as part of a plan called Mi Negra. In what his right-wing critics could only understand as a rare act of agency, the ungrateful would-be recipients apparently aligned themselves on the other side of history, backing Chávez with 62 percent of the vote.1047
The “suppressed media” mantra is another favourite go-to card of the opposition. In one representative report, the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists claimed that the heavy hand of the Chávez government wielded control over a “media empire.”1048 In actual fact, Venezuelan state TV reaches
only about 5–8% of the country’s audience. Of course, Chávez can interrupt normal programming with his speeches (under a law that predates his administration), and regularly does so. But the opposition still has most of the media, including radio and print media—not to mention most of the wealth and income of the country.1049
Walking the downtown streets of the capital in the lead up to the presidential elections of October 2012, with billboards of right-wing candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski hanging from the lampposts, and Kiosks overflowing with newspapers beaming headlines on the latest disaster induced by the Chávez regime, even the most spiritual of journalists would strain in vain to find a ghost of Stalin in Caracas.1050
At its root, explaining support for Chávez among the lower orders involves neither the complexity of quantum mechanics nor the pop-psychological theory of masses entranced by a charismatic leader. Venezuela sits on oil. Other petro-states, such as those in the Gulf, have funnelled the rent into a grotesque pageantry of the rich—skyscrapers, theme parks, and artificial archipelagos—built on the backs of indentured South Asian migrant laborers. They’ve done so, moreover, while aligning geopolitically with the U.S. Empire—backing the wars, and containing the Arab uprisings. Much to the bizarre dismay of journalists like Ian James, the Venezuelan state in the last fourteen years has been forced into different priorities.1051 After recovering from the steep collapse in gross domestic product (GDP) in 2002 and 2003—hitting -8.9 and -7.8 percent respectively as a consequence of political crisis spurred by an unsuccessful coup attempt and business-led oil lockout—GDP soared on high petroleum prices to 18.3, 10.3, 9.9, and 8.2 percent in the years 2004–2007. There was a drop to 4.8 percent in 2008 as the international oil price took a fourth-quarter plunge from US$118 to $58 a barrel due to centrifigual waves of the global crisis spreading out from its American and Eurozone epicentres. Within six months, however, world oil prices had largely recovered, and countercyclical spending brought the Venezuelan economy up to 4.2 percent growth in 2011 and 5.6 in 2012.1052
After the relative modesty of state policy between 1999 and 2002, the extra-legal whip of the Right lit a fire of self-organization in the poor urban barrios of Caracas and elsewhere. The empty shell of Chávez’s electoral coalition in the early years began to be filled out and driven forward in dialectical relation to the spike in organizational capacity from below in the years immediately following 2003. New forms of popular assembly, rank-and-file efforts in the labour movement, experiments in workers’ control, communal councils, and communes increasingly gave Venezuelan democracy life and body for the first time in decades, perhaps ever. The dispossessed were solidly aligned with Chávez in opposition to the domestic escualidos (the squalid ones who supported the coup), and ranged against the multifaceted machinations of U.S. intervention and the pressures of international capital; but they were also rapidly transcending the timid confines of government policy.
From above, more state resources consequently began to flow, feeding an expanding array of parallel health and education systems for the poor.1053 According to official national statistics, the cash income poverty level fell 37.6 percent under Chávez, from 42.8 percent of households in 1999 to 26.7 percent in 2012. Extreme poverty dropped 57.8 percent, from 16.6 to 7 percent between 1999 and 2011.1054 If these income poverty measures are expanded to include welfare improvements from the doubling in college enrollment since 2004, new access to health care for millions, and extensive housing subsidies for the poor, it is easy to see how Carroll’s narrative of decay breaks down. All of this background provides a reasoned explanation for the red tide of mourners – they are not so easily written off as delusional dimwits.
CANADA AND THE AUTHORITARIAN DRUMBEAT
Together with the U.S., Canada attempted to reinforce the idea that Chávez was a thuggish authoritarian holding power through a mix of populist appeal, intimidation, and repression. The putative authoritarian character of the Chávez government informed the perspective of Canada’s Caracas embassy on the Venezuelan political terrain. The mandate given to the Canadian ambassador by the Deputy Ministers in FAIT was framed by a sharply critical view of Chávez, and the strategic vision of the embassy was directed toward supporting organizations critical of the government. The views of Ottawa and the embassy—the former providing a political mandate, the latter, in response to that mandate, providing regular on-the-ground critical reports—were self-reinforcing; in blissful contradiction with all available evidence, both declared Chávez a repressive authoritarian with regional ambitions. The embassy’s 2008–09 Country Strategy report, for example, describes the “Bolivarian Revolution led by President Hugo Chavez [sic]” as “an attempt to convert Venezuela to an authoritarian socialist state” where “government spending will continue to be defined by lower-class concerns.”1055
The implication here is, first, that focusing on “lower-class concerns” is in and of itself a negative development. Lower-class concerns, in the eyes of the Canadian embassy, are contradictory to the needs of Canadian capital, and a government that takes them seriously will inevitably produce unsound economics, based on state intervention and the redistribution of wealth. Secondly, and still more absurdly, the mere act of focusing on “lower-class concerns” is bound up with a proclivity towards authoritarianism. In this fantastical worldview, where common sense meanings are turned on their head, any limits placed on the power and privilege of the wealthy (including foreign investors) are, by their very nature, anti-democratic. Nonetheless, it is true that under the Liberals, and during the first year of the Harper government, the embassy and Ottawa consciously contrasted their engagement with Venezuela from that of the more publicly acerbic U.S. strategy, which rapidly descended into verbal conflagration. In this period the Country Strategy reports point to the desire to “maintain open channels of communication,” while still being critical. This was a calculated early strategy on Canada’s part, to fly below the radar as much as possible, so as to avoid the opprobrium of the Venezuelan government and the bulk of Latin American peoples incurred by the more aggressive posture adopted by the U.S. from the outset of the Chávez administration.
However, there was never any genuine effort to establish dialogue with Chávez. Instead, Canada honed in on officials it thought might be softer targets, and used the limited number of meetings it organized with these officials over this period as an opportunity to criticize the Venezuelan government. The idea, presumably, was to test the commitment of select Venezuelan officials to the more radical tenets of the Bolivarian process. During Kent’s January 2010 trip to Venezuela, for instance, establishing a personal relationship with future President Nicolás Maduro was cited as one of the goals of the diplomatic mission.1056 The Harper government, however, was ultimately true to form in its discomfort with the soft-power approac
h to the Venezuela file. Harper saw Chávez as a dangerous threat necessitating more forceful methods of containment and soon became more publicly hostile toward the Venezuelan regime, earning public rebukes from Chávez, and a reputation for being meddlesome and impudent. In a clear reference to Venezuela, Harper himself declared in a 2008 speech, “while many nations are pursuing market reform and democratic development, others are falling back to economic nationalism and protectionism, to political populism and authoritarianism.”1057 Curbs on the free market and the rights of capital are again conflated with authoritarianism.
Peter Kent, Minister of State for the Americas who laid part of the blame for the Honduran military coup on deposed President Manuel Zelaya, played an active role in calling out the Chávez government as authoritarian. In January 2010, in the context of criticizing the suspension of broadcasting by six television stations, Kent was quick to denounce the “shrinking of democratic space in Venezuela” and the “violations of the right to freedom of expression and other basic liberties,” despite the fact that Venezuela continues to be dominated by private, anti-Chávez media, and freedom of speech was clearly never endangered in the country under Chávez’s rule.1058 The six national cable television stations in question were only temporarily closed, as a result of various failures of the stations to comply with the country’s Law on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television. The law sets out acceptable parameters and standards for child and adult programming, prohibits racist and sexist materials, as well as incitements to violence, limits commercial advertising, and obliges stations to broadcast government announcements deemed to be of central importance. Most cable stations remain outside the ambit of this law, but for those cable stations with 70 percent domestic content and operations, the law is applicable.1059
