Hugo Chavez
Page 31
If there is one thing the president has most successfully communicated, it is that he cares about people, that he has true concern for the poor. As José Vicente Rangel puts it, “He is a man of simple language. That is the connection to the streets. Chávez abandoned the stereotype of the politician. He is not a shameless populist, he does not banalize language, he has succeeded in rescuing the popular lexicon and placing it at the center of the presidential discourse. He is one more among the people.” Over and over again he reminds people of his past, his rural, humble origins. He does not speak English, and in public he has made a point of laughing at his dubious pronunciation of the language. He describes himself as an ugly man of the popular class, without property and without the background for high-handed affairs, with no other ambition than to offer affection and service to the neediest. His slogan during 2004 went beyond allusions and into the terrain of direct definition: “Chávez is the people.”
In this light, his existence, his conquest, and the pleasure he derives from the power he wields are a triumph, a victory for many people.
The academic Patricia Márquez points out that “many people who felt excluded for many years now see themselves as part of a project for change, which they believe to represent, at the very least, a transformation of the rules of the political and social order.”7 For these people, Chávez is the symbolic and emotional guarantee of that change, the incarnation of the hope that they may one day break out of their poverty—despite the fact that poverty rose by 10.8 percent during his first six years in office, according to official statistics.8 His figure serves as a sacred intermediary between the country’s millions of oil dollars and the dreams of a majority population held captive by poverty.
Nevertheless, during the first four years of his administration, popular expectations did not seem to receive concrete answers. The majority of the changes implemented were in the area of political conquests, while the social welfare programs were inefficient. Indeed, they seemed a bit too similar to the previous government’s programs—asphyxiated by cronyism, bureaucracy, and accusations of corruption. This landscape changed in 2003, when the government implemented the misiones, a compendium of social assistance plans and aid to the poor, which remain mired in controversy.
The first of these plans was called Barrio Adentro (Into the Neighborhood). Its principal goal was to manage health issues in the huge lower-middle-class urban neighborhoods all over the country. The protagonists of this plan were volunteer Cuban doctors who would move into these neighborhoods and, in small clinics, attend to the medical needs of their local community. There were two great advantages to implementing this project: First, it would enable on-site treatment for certain emergencies, stanching the flow of patients and alleviating the workload at the large public hospitals. And second, the project gave these communities a greater sense of security and ease in the event of a medical emergency. On the other hand, certain sectors of society were disturbed by the fact that the doctors were Cuban and perceived this as part of Hugo Chávez’s “Castrocommunism” project. Matters were not helped by the government’s implementation of this plan, which allowed the Cuban doctors to practice without legal consultation or supervision by the Venezuelan Medical Federation, or the appropriate academic associations.
A series of education programs followed this initiative: first was the Misión Robinson, a literacy program baptized with the pseudonym used by Simón Rodríguez, mentor of Simón Bolívar. After that came Misión Sucre and Misión Ribas, which focused on people who had been unable to study or who had been forced to leave school at the primary and secondary levels. The next initiative, Misión Vuelvan Caras (“About Face”), which took its name from a battle cry of the Venezuelan plainsman and independence hero José Antonio Páez, was designed to combat unemployment and foment self-management. Another program, Mercal, focused on food distribution and established a network of local markets. The Misión Miranda was more specific, granting benefits to all those who had once belonged to the national armed forces.
When there were no more social programs left to offer, Chávez coined a grandiloquent term to bring them all under the same umbrella. “We want to put an end to poverty, and power must be given to the poor. We are at the birth of a new power. It is a power that leaves behind the concept of oligarchy and plutocracy. Only this way can there be life,”9 he claimed. He then went on to announce that on December 24, 2003, he would launch the Misión Cristo, which would serve as an umbrella for all the other missions. Its goal: to eradicate poverty by 2021.
Criticism of this project is centered on three fundamental points: it is populist, discretionary, and operated without the benefit of external control. According to sociologist Luis Pedro España, the misiones are just like the government’s other social programs in that they seem designed more to help Chávez retain power than to combat poverty in Venezuela effectively. All the programs function by remitting salary grants to the participants, according to a system of partisan affiliations and loyalty to the government. Moreover, none of these programs is audited. For this reason, there is no way to know how many people participate in these programs, how much is invested in them, or what kind of results they obtain. The only possible source for this information is the government itself. On top of this, certain analyses show that a parallel state has been created on top of the one that already exists. Instead of solving the country’s dire problems of education and public health, the government has created new structures, generating another administration and another budget, in an unequal and uncontrolled manner. Sooner or later, some believe, both entities will cease to be viable. The most effective aspect of these programs, it seems, is in the electoral sense.
The launch of these initiatives coincided with a downward trend in Hugo Chávez’s popularity ratings. The upturn was immediate. A few months later, Chávez’s approval rating rose to 46 percent, highlighting the hopeful effect of the government’s projects: though only 15 percent of those polled stated that they had actually benefited from the projects, 85 percent felt hopeful that, at some point, they would see some of that “distribution of resources” the government often talked about. Even with this very high approval rating, there is something here that jibes with Norberto Ceresole’s theories. “The middle and upper classes despise populism because that implies distribution. But those of us who come from the lower class say, ‘Long live populism! It dignifies us…every dollar we give the people is a dollar that we will not give the International Monetary Fund. And so, long live populism. There is no other form of revolution in Latin America.”10
For many, Chávez’s victory in the 2004 recall referendum was inextricably linked to the distribution of money and hope through the misiones. The president even admitted to this on one occasion: “In 2003, they gave me a news bomb: if the referendum were held today, you would lose…. That was when we started to work with the misiones and I began to ask Fidel for help. He said to me, ‘If there’s one thing I know, it’s about that kind of thing.’ And we started to invent the misiones.” After an intense campaign for which, according to the opposition, the president availed himself of state funds and indulged in electoral opportunism, 5.6 million Venezuelans11 (59.06 percent of the voters) decided on August 15 that Hugo Chávez would stay in power.
The controversial victory, however, was sullied by accusations of fraud both inside and outside Venezuela. On one hand, it is true that the majority of the National Electoral Council was sympathetic to the Chávez government (three out of five in the executive committee) and that in the very process of activating the constitutional recourse of the recall referendum, the Council seemed determined to complicate rather than facilitate the work of the citizens who had petitioned for the recall referendum. But it is also true that the opposition has not produced any conclusive evidence of the purported electronic fraud. And in a highly questionable move, some opposition members accused César Gaviria and Jimmy Carter, observers and guarantors of the referendum process, of sealing
an agreement with the government and participating in what they termed as fraudulent proceedings.
SOME STUDIES12 INDICATE a difference between the notion of the caudillo, the classic Latin American strongman, and that of the “populist leader.” The first figure evolves in a rural environment and concentrates its power through the exercise of direct personal relationships, whereas the second figure engages in the dynamic of the big city and exercises its power through the political party. Hugo Chávez is right in the middle of these two paradigms. Galloping over classifications, he represents a kind of leadership that, for those who legitimize him as well as those who question him, is difficult to define.
According to the academic Alfredo Ramos Jiménez, Chávez’s case falls into a category that might be termed “neopopulism,” which “includes elements of domination and manipulation of the popular classes, combining them with participatory experiences that include a high level of identification. In such circumstances, the leader will always be unique and irreplaceable, entirely necessary. His power is not delegated except in unusual circumstances, and his charisma represents a threat to democracy.”13
The philosopher Alberto Arvelo Ramos states that “Chávez is a nineteenth-century military caudillo. And not just any caudillo: a reactionary nineteenth-century caudillo.” Arvelo Ramos also acknowledges the ideas of Chávez’s old Argentinian adviser: “Ceresole convinced him that he was the second Simón Bolívar, he filled him up with that megalomania of the universal, historic man…. Chávezdoes not believe in plural democracy, where the social and political forces balance each other out and control each other. It is a complete dictatorship of one single person.” Among other things, Arvelo Ramos mentions the absence of balance. In Venezuela, all power is fused to the executive branch. The parliament, dominated by the Chávez party, has not distanced itself one inch from the Miraflores mandate, and the same is true of the institutions designed to control the presidency. The Comptroller’s Office and the attorney general, which were decisive in the impeachment of Carlos Andrés Pérez, for example, are in the hands of Chávez acolytes. In fact, the attorney general of the Republic was his first vice president. Moreover, there is a fear that, thanks to a 2004 legal reform, the Supreme Court will soon be dominated by pro-Chávez magistrates. In this structure, the president will be bulletproof. No claim against him—there are already a dozen or so languishing in the attorney general’s office—can constitute a threat to his power. Hugo Chávez is the Venezuelan president with the greatest accumulation of power since 1958.
No analysis is complete without taking Chávez’s personal attributes into account. The leader’s individualistic idiosyncratic style is a key factor. At a rally in his native Barinas, during the campaigns leading up to the regional elections of October 2004, he declared, “To be a chavista, you have to be like me!”
In campaign posters, all the pro-Chávez candidates were shown anointed by the president. Chávez traveled all over the country raising the arms of his candidates, adding fire to their rallies, and guaranteeing them an audience that, on their own, they probably wouldn’t have attracted.
Within the Latin American caudillo and populist tradition, the Chávez movement may well have added a new twist. After all, the situation of the oil-rich Venezuela on the map of a globalized world at the dawn of the twenty-first century is a new twist in and of itself. But while the previous administration was forced to adhere to a maximum price of $16 per barrel, the Bolivarian revolution has navigated through a market that has driven the price of crude oil to over $50 per barrel by 2006. In a country like Honduras or Peru, Hugo Chávez probably would not have made it through two assaults on his government. According to some analysts, the economic reality of the country’s plata dulce, or “sweet cash,” an oft-used term for describing boom periods in Latin America, offered a luxury that facilitated this “Bolivarian revolution.” It is a situation that concentrates and reinforces the various elements that give Hugo Chávez the power—both symbolic and real—of being the protagonist of the process, the head of state and the star of the story.
“That man either changed or he didn’t; maybe that was the real one, the one I didn’t know,” says Luis Miquilena with a twinge of melancholy. “There is a refrain that says, ‘Give a man a bit of power and you will learn what kind of man he is.’ I found out who my friends really were after I saw them in power. Power swallowed them up, carried them away…. What I mean is, the humble man I bought into turned out to be an autocrat, authoritarian, absolutely different.”
Those in Chávez’s circle, obviously, do not share this vision. Pedro Carreño has known Chávez since their days in the armed forces, when the president was his teacher. Carreño was also at Chávez’s side in the early days of his political life, when they traveled around the country together, roughing it and making tremendous sacrifices. Carreño does not believe that power has affected him adversely. “He is the same Chávez, the same dreamer and tireless fighter he always was, with the same social sensibility and thirst for social justice. He is touched by poverty, by a little boy in school with an unemployed father. I don’t see any change.”
Others believe that the problem is the people who surround him. Yoel Acosta, who participated in the 1992 coup, maintains that “The president is almost a hostage. He doesn’t make the decision to find people who are committed, because it seems that those bigwigs, that circle, has taken him hostage, they don’t allow him to see beyond what they want him to see.” Still, it seems highly unlikely that someone with a personality like Hugo Chávez would so easily submit to a circle of advisers. On the contrary, in fact: it is common knowledge that he does not tend to delegate, that he likes to have a hand in everything.
General Alberto Müller Rojas, who was his campaign chief in 1998 and is currently Chávez’s military adviser, observed a particular personality trait that might explain certain people’s ambivalence regarding Hugo Chávez: “People have to feign, at the very least, absolute submission to him, which reveals a total lack of self-confidence on his part. For me, this is one of the most negative things about him: he does not have faith in himself, because a person who has faith in himself has faith in other people and faith in his own ability to convince people of his leadership and the things he proposes. And so he is quite a voluble individual in that sense. He goes from one position to another very easily. He is an individual who has a tendency toward cyclothymia—mood swings that range from moments of extreme euphoria to moments of despondence.”
As often occurs in this type of situation, Hugo Chávez and his purportedly mercurial personality have given rise to more than a few mysteries and legends. He has been said to suffer from periods of severe depression, panic attacks, and lithium imbalance, and some people claim that he is medicated. None of this has ever been confirmed. Edmundo Chirinos, who was once Chávez’s psychiatrist, says that Chávez “has a need for recognition. In that he is not humble, he is arrogant. He needs to be listened to, paid attention to, admired, even idolized.”
Chávez has abandoned a great many friends and allies on the road to power, starting with his comrades in arms, the other figures in the 1992 military uprising. Many others who stood by him during his first few years in office have also distanced themselves, joined the opposition, or disappeared from the political realm entirely. Chávez does not seem troubled by these separations. In this process, the leader’s personalist quality always springs into action. Luis Miquilena, who distanced himself from Chávez and is now part of the opposition, refuses to say anything about his former friend’s private life, but when asked about his personal defects, he is very direct: “He is a man who cannot resist flatterers, and that is a terrible weakness. He is an immensely vain man.” Edmundo Chirinos, who does still feel close to Chávez, points out, “Maybe my one criticism is that his vocation for power is so passionate. With this thing of feeling that he is a conqueror, plus the adulation and all the trappings, he would be capable of sacrificing everything, even his own life, for power.
” Francisco Arias Cárdenas, who was appointed as Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations in 2006, believes that this is the key element that drives Hugo Chávez. “I think he lives in the clutches of a paranoia to preserve his power. The preservation of his power is his own personal hell, and that is why he is constantly at battle.”
The image of the very powerful man who becomes a hostage to his own power, sooner or later, is one that paints every populist leader or caudillo into a corner. This notion has even become an integral part of the Latin American literary tradition, to the point that it is almost a cliché: the solitude of power.
“He has become a sad man,” confesses Alcides Rondón, “a lonely man. For Chávez this must be very difficult…. He is a man who takes such pleasure in going to baseball games, but now he can’t go. He is a man who lives to have good, clean fun with his friends, but he doesn’t have time for that type of thing anymore. Definitely, like all powerful men, he is all alone. The court of a king does not always make the best company. That is an axiom of power.”
IT IS A SOLITUDE that is compensated for, more and more, by power and the vertigo of omnipotence. Not only does Hugo Chávez feel confident that he will govern until 2013, as allowed by the Constitution that was designed under his guidance in 1999, he believes that he will project himself further beyond that date and continue to fuse his life with the history of Venezuela. In the early morning of August 16, after the National Electoral Council declared his victory in the recall referendum, Hugo Chávez appeared with his three eldest children on the “people’s balcony” of Miraflores. On that occasion more than a few relatives and cabinet members wore red T-shirts with “2021”—the date that Chávez refers to as the year of his “retirement”—emblazoned in black. The president knows that there is no democratic way for him to remain in his position until 2021. Nevertheless, he has frequently repeated this intention: “I’m not leaving until 2021. So start getting used to it.”14