At first, this sounds like little more than an ethical pronouncement, a declaration of lofty principles. But Chávez himself believes in thinking on his feet, that theory is born from praxis, that twenty-first-century socialism has yet to be invented and, apparently, declared. Time and words feed off each other, they work in a dialogue. In mid-2005, at the World Festival of Students and Youth, held in Caracas, the president proclaimed, “After the referendum, we find ourselves in a transitional phase headed toward postcapitalism that might be called presocialism.”11
More than one adviser pleaded with him to be prudent, warning him that this definition might affect his popularity. The word “socialism” may be an uncomfortable term for Venezuelans to digest, given that they tend to be highly aspirational people with a desire to improve their quality of life. Every time Chávez begins to wax Franciscan, he strikes an inevitably discordant note with his audience. In this sense, oil is not necessarily an advantage. Venezuelans are aware of their country’s wealth, and they may understand chavismo to be a more fluid and democratic system for distributing the country’s oil income. But they do not seem interested in taking it any further. Whenever Chávez proposes Cuba as a kind of model, he only aggravates the discord and disgruntlement.
On August 21, 2005, from Havana, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution asserted that “Cuba is not a dictatorship, it is a revolutionary democracy.” According to a survey by Hinterlaces, 91 percent of Venezuelans value equality of opportunity, but Oscar Shemel, the director of the firm, also points out that
people disagree with social uniformity. They reject extreme wealth and extreme poverty, identifying the ideal political system as one that combines capitalism and socialism: a combination of private investment that generates employment and a society where justice prevails. From this, it may be inferred that an important sector of the population would not agree with the idea that there should be a shift from private to collective property in their country.12
Without a doubt, between the abundant oil income, with which Venezuelans have an unresolved relationship, and the religious overtones that occasionally creep into the Chávez discourse, there is something tenuous, a stumbling block of sorts: the person who triumphs because he has offered to redistribute the enormous wealth that belongs to everyone is the same person who now says that those who possess an excess of whatever product they work to produce are bound to give it away, donate it to charity. This is Chávez’s message to the country: “Rich is bad.”
AT THIS POINT it is no longer clear how many Venezuelans live in poverty. This has also generated controversy. At the end of 2004, 53.1 percent of Venezuelan households were at the poverty level, according to official figures from the National Statistics Institute. This indicates that poverty grew during the first six years of the present administration by more than 10.8 percent despite the considerable rise in oil revenue.13
But shortly after these statistics were published, Chávez questioned the National Statistics Institute: “I have no doubt that the instruments they are using to measure reality are not appropriate, they are measuring our reality as if this were a neoliberal country, a capitalist country, where no revolution was taking place.”14
In fact, toward the end of the 1980s, a number of governments did suggest that the income indicator as a method for measuring poverty was limited. The United Nations, in response, developed another form of measurement based on the indicator of Basic Needs Unsatisfied and the Human Development Index. With the aid of these two instruments, the National Statistics Institute, prompted by Chávez’s concerns, decided to develop new parameters that would incorporate access to the misiones and other state-run social welfare programs, as well as people’s evaluation of their own “level of satisfaction.” In 2005, using the evaluation methods suggested by the president, poverty appeared to have decreased by a surprising 15 percent in one year.
There are other areas in which the Venezuelan president has made progress that his more moderate opposition has questioned less and even broadly acknowledged, including the Misión Barrio Adentro, which provides basic medical attention, and the literacy campaign that led him to declare Venezuela, with the support of UNESCO, an illiteracy-free territory, in October 2005.15
DESPITE THE INTERNAL criticism that continues to flow, there was no doubt that by late 2006, Hugo Chávez was Latin America’s most influential leader. A consummately newsworthy figure whose face graces the covers of countless magazines and the front pages of newspapers everywhere, it is hard to believe that ten years ago he was just a skinny former coup plotter, an unemployed nobody who received little or no attention from the Venezuelan media. The little boy who played baseball in Barinas is finally what he always wanted to be: an international celebrity.
When Fidel Castro became ill in mid-2006 and announced his temporary leave of absence from the presidency, many people began to make predictions about Hugo Chávez’s potential role in Cuba. Many of his followers even went so far as to hypothesize that he was on his way to becoming the political successor of the Cuban revolutionary in Latin America.
A few weeks later, on August 13, 2006, the rumors of Castro’s death suddenly came to a halt when the Venezuelan president made a trip to Havana. “This is the best trip of my life, better even than when I used to travel to see my first girlfriend,” Chávez said jokingly after a conversation with Castro on the occasion of the Cuban leader’s eightieth birthday, portions of which were broadcast on Cubavisión.
Chávez is clearly proud of his friendship with the most legendary Latin American politician of the twentieth century and tends to offer optimistic reports regarding his health. Observers note that Chávez’s bond with Raúl Castro will never be as strong, but they also dismiss the idea that Fidel’s death will have any impact on the close relations Venezuela and Cuba presently enjoy.
Controversial and magnetic in the media, Chávez has ensured that he will remain a fixture all across Latin America, far beyond the exposure that his friendship with Fidel Castro offers him. The Venezuelan president has a guaranteed stage wherever he goes, as well as sympathizers ready to applaud him and swoon from his charisma. A controversial supporter of efforts to aid the poor, whether they are Bolivarians from Potosí or gringos in the Bronx, Hugo Chávez is no longer a tropical curiosity, and hasn’t been for a long time.
Chávez masterfully exploits the disenchantment of people who feel excluded for whatever reason, and he feeds on controversy whenever he can. A considerable amount of his fame stems from his anti-imperialist stance and his fierce antagonism for the man believed to be the most powerful in the world, George W. Bush, whom he has recently been calling “Mr. Danger.”16
Chávez loves to measure himself up against the American president and never misses a chance to call Bush a murderer responsible for acts of genocide. For Chávez, Bush is both a tool and an obsession. The comandante has accused his opposition of obediently following the librettos of the CIA and has even gone so far as to attribute natural disasters and climate change to the American president’s refusal to sign the Kyoto protocols.
But not everything is rhetoric. In the middle of 2005, the government decided to raise the tax paid by multinational oil companies operating in Venezuela, from 1 percent to 16 percent at first and to 30 percent by 2006. Local analysts considered the measure to be fair, given that when the 1 percent rate was established, crude oil was at $12 a barrel, whereas by January 2006 it had reached $60. Given the vast income derived from the oil business, the companies in question did not object.
Chávez has questioned the policies of the Bush administration from the very heart of the empire. In September 2005, while in New York to attend the U.N. General Assembly, he joined Jesse Jackson and Democratic congressman José Serrano on a visit to the Bronx, where he told local residents that he would invest a portion of Venezuela’s petrodollars in health and environmental programs.17
The president walked through the Bronx neighborhood serenaded by the Latin rhythms provid
ed by a local band. He gave hugs all around, evoking shades of Che Guevara with comments like “The present is a struggle, the future belongs to us” and stopping for a moment to dance and play the congas. He seemed magnanimous and very much in his element.
“We are going to save the world, not for us, we are fifty-one years old, but for you,” the Venezuelan president said to a needy young woman who, he said, reminded him of his daughters.
Shortly afterward, the president established a humanitarian program to provide 25 million gallons of oil to heat the homes of the poorest residents of the northeastern United States, through the Venezuelan-owned CITGO.18 The program was designed to help out some 100,000 families and, according to certain analysts, humiliate Bush on his own turf. The idea came from a group of Democratic senators who sent letters to the principal oil distributors in the country, asking them to sell fuel oil at a discount to the neediest communities. CITGO was the only company that responded to the initiative.
The White House, often befuddled when dealing with the Chávez phenomenon, decided to take action in 2005, when Bush declared the Venezuelan president “a threat to regional stability,” “decertified” Venezuela in the fight against the drug trade,19 and blocked the sale of Brazilian and Spanish planes—the manufacture of which required U.S. parts—to the Venezuelan armed forces.
Though the tension between the two countries frequently approaches the breaking point, both presidents have taken care to back away from an official rift. Two episodes from 2005 illustrate this well: at one point Chávez threatened to break off relations if the U.S. judicial authorities did not approve the extradition of the anti-Castro activist Luis Posada Carriles, but when the Venezuelan request was rejected, no further action was taken. And in the middle of the year, the Venezuelan president ordered the suspension of the country’s agreement with the DEA claiming that certain agents had been involved in “intelligence infiltration that threatened the security and defense of the country.” But by January 2006 the two countries had worked out a new bilateral agreement.
One month later, relations froze over when the Venezuelan government had John Correa, the naval attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, expelled from Venezuela under accusations of espionage. In response, the U.S. government ordered Jenny Figueredo, the general secretary of the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, to leave the United States.
Chávez’s most memorable anti-imperialist moment, however, came when he took the stage at the U.N. General Assembly in September 2006. “The Devil came here yesterday. It still smells like sulfur today,” declared the Venezuelan president in reference to U.S. President George Bush, whom, later on in Harlem, Chávez described as an “alcoholic” with “a lot of hang-ups.”
His thundering words caused a fair amount of disgruntlement in the United States, but they did not affect business in any real way. According to an estimate that the U.S. Embassy in Caracas released a month after the incident, the Venezuela-U.S. trade balance for 2006 may well have topped $50 billion, which would be a 25 percent increase over the previous year and the highest dollar amount in recent years. The lion’s share of their deals these days revolve around Venezuela’s export of oil and oil-derivative products to the U.S. market. In 2005, bilateral trade between the two countries reached $40 billion, with Venezuelan exports accounting for $32 billion and U.S. exports for only $8 billion of this colossal pie.
In the Venezuelan daily El Nacional, U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield underscored the importance of accepting the fact that Venezuela and the United States were bound to have ideological and philosophical differences. He also observed that these differences would not go away and instead focused on the fact that there are plenty of other things both nations agree upon—such as economics.20
The effect of the Bush-Chávez dynamic can be felt all across Latin America. The Venezuelan leader has had serious run-ins with government leaders he considers to be allies of Washington (Mexico’s Vicente Fox, Peru’s Alejandro Toledo, Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe) and has cultivated alliances with the leftist governments that have emerged up and down the continent. Though he may have been something of an inconvenience to certain leaders in the beginning, Chávez has conquered more and more territory, and nowadays there are few who can resist the generous offers of his “petrodiplomacy.”
THE TURMOIL THAT CHARACTERIZED the early years of the Chávez administration has worn off a bit. The everyday mood in Venezuela during 2006 was less contentious. Some believe that while the government may have made its presence felt in every corner of the Venezuelan experience, the oil bonanza has also managed to reach every corner, as well. The restaurants and malls of Caracas are bustling, Venezuela is once again one of the world’s number one importers of scotch, and the sale of luxury automobiles has gone through the roof. The atmosphere is once again redolent of “sweet cash” and the spirit of the “Saudi Venezuela” that Carlos Andrés Pérez governed in the 1970s.
The dance of dollar signs also continues to obey the dictates of the revolution, as Chávez maintains his adversarial discourse. The government has purchased a hundred thousand rifles from Russia for the defense of the country in the event of a United States invasion, which it considers a serious possibility. In 2005, more than $2 billion went to the acquisition of military equipment, and Chávez appointed himself the direct military chief of a reserve corps that, he hopes, will grow to 2 million members. He has also expressed his desire to create popular defense units out of the social organizations that support his revolution.
The Venezuelan president has also decided to postpone the date of his retirement. In mid-August 2005, during an official event at the National Pantheon, he made an announcement that thrilled his followers and infuriated his opponents: “Yes, I said that I would retire in 2021. But no! I have changed the date, I have to continue until 2030.”21
To this end he is counting on the new parliament, made up entirely of congressmen loyal to his “process,” to reform the Constitution (which his own movement designed in 1999) and allow for the immediate reelection of the president, without term limits. To remove any lingering doubts, the president of the National Assembly, Nicolás Maduro, a former worker in the Caracas metro, said, “The contribution of this new Assembly will be to strengthen the revolution, to legislate so that Chávez governs not until 2021 but until 2030.” He said this on December 6, 2005. Maduro was appointed foreign minister in 2006. His wife, Cilia Flores, is now the president of the parliament.
One year later, on December 3, 2006, the Chávez dream continued to shine brightly, intact. “The Bolivarian victory is indisputable, unquestionable, and overwhelming,” the Venezuelan president proclaimed to the multitudes that had gathered around Miraflores Palace minutes after his reelection, with 62.84 percent22 of the votes, was made official. More than 7 million Venezuelans had decided that he should remain in power for another six years. The opposition, having wagered on a center-left platform, quickly conceded its defeat—a significant gesture that confirmed the legitimacy of the elections. “We acknowledge that today we were defeated,” stated opposition candidate Manuel Rosales, who obtained 36.9 percent of the vote.
Surrounded by his children and closest aides, Hugo Chávez heralded the end of the transition period and the start of a new era, the basis of which “will be to deepen, broaden and expand the Bolivarian Revolution…. More than 60 percent of the Venezuelan people voted not for Chávez but for a project that has a name: Bolivarian socialism.” Aware of the deep reservations that exist in Venezuela regarding this particular issue, he appealed to followers and detractors alike with the following exhortation: “Let none of us fear socialism!”
Despite the head of state’s broad support base, few people seem to have a clear picture of what Chávez means, exactly, when he speaks of twenty-first-century socialism. An interview conducted by the firm Datanálisis, published by El Nacional the last week of December 2006, revealed that 80 percent of those polled rejected the Cuban model, and 51.6 percent preferred socialis
m to capitalism, but in the sense of “a moderate, Chilean-or European-style socialism.”
Hugo Chávez keeps the rhythm of his revolution on tenterhooks. Even now, eight years after he became president for the first time, nobody seems able to make any predictions about him. And on the rainy night of December 3, 2006, only one thing was certain: Venezuela would most certainly continue to hang on his every word. For how long? Nobody knows. Though the Constitution states that this will be his last term of office, Hugo Chávez has a faithful parliament ready to help overcome that obstacle. In “the kingdom of socialism” that he has promised for Venezuela—that is, his kingdom—his popularity and power seem to know no end. The revolution still needs a quarter century to achieve its dreams. That, it seems, is its new destiny—for now.
APPENDIX 1: SOCIAL INDICATORS
APPENDIX 2: ECONOMIC INDICATORS
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: THE REVOLUTION HAS ARRIVED
1. Hugo Chávez, personal diary (unpublished).
2. Mempo Giardinelli, “Yo garantizo hasta el abuso en la libertad de expresión,” El Nacional, October 10, 1999.
3. Chávez, diary.
4. L. Lucía Lacurcia, “Entrevista con la madre del presidente,” Primicia, May 18, 1999.
5. Rosa Miriam Elizalde and Luis Báez, “Chávez nuestro,” an interview with Hugo Chávez, from a pamphlet published by the Venezuelan government, 2004.
6. Frontline/World, “Venezuela—A Nation on Edge,” June 2003, www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/venezuela/chirinos.htm. Rangel was replaced as vice president in January 2007.
7. After the government of dictator General Marcos Pérez Jiménez was overthrown, he was succeeded by the following presidents: Rómulo Betancourt (Acción Democrática [AD], 1959–64), Raúl Leoni (1964–69), Rafael Caldera (COPEI, 1969–74), Carlos Andrés Pérez (AD, 1974–79), Luis Herrera Campins (COPEI, 1979–84), Jaime Lusinchi (AD, 1984–89), Carlos Andrés Pérez (1989–93), Ramón J. Velásquez (independent, transition, 1993–94), Rafael Caldera (Convergencia, 1994–99), Hugo Chávez (1999– ).
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