Redeemers (62 page)

When Borges was writing in 1949 (under the dictatorship of Perón in Argentina) it had become clear, even along the spectrum of Latin American intellectuals, that Carlyle was a direct ancestor of fascism.

Hugo Chávez, in his political ideology (though it is not likely that he has ever read Carlyle), is a descendant in Carlyle's lineage. He is the “hero,” the real protagonist of his regime, and hero worship is his central ideology. Can one throw the charge of “fascist” at him?

A man eminently qualified to judge, one of the most respected members of the Venezuelan democratic left, and a critic of Chávez on various fronts, most intensely for his mishandling of the economy and his disdain for the rules of democracy, the former guerrilla fighter Teodoro Petkoff says that he is not yet a fascist but that he shows some disturbingly similar traits:

 

Chávez is not a fascist but he has fascistoid elements: the cult of the leader sent by providence . . . the manipulation of history for political ends, the disregard for legality and republican forms in the name of the voice of the people, his permanent and oppressive presence in the media, his brutal and aggressive speech-making against his adversaries . . . Chávez, for his enemies, neither bread nor water. And also he's a soldier, a man trained to annihilate the enemy.

 

IV

The purpose of the Bolivarian Revolution, according to Chávez, is to confront head-on the problems of poverty that afflict the majority of Venezuelans and (as Chávez would likely say) to rescue them. And the route toward that rescue leads through Venezuela's oil. The pride (and curse) of modern Venezuela has been its “black gold.” Rómulo Betancourt, the Father of Venezuelan Democracy, in his first term as president (1945–48), succeeded in negotiating rather favorable terms with the foreign oil companies, and in his second term (1959–64) he and his minister of energy resources, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, were driving forces behind the formation of OPEC and its impressive capacity to maneuver for the benefit of “Third World” oil-producing countries. But after fifteen years of economic growth, expansion of social benefits, and an exemplary democratic political process, the oil boom of the mid-1970s brought a new generation to power that combined positive actions (like the nationalization of the oil industry and a vastly increased support for culture and education) with widespread and growing corruption. The collapse of oil prices in the latter half of the 1980s called for budget adjustments. When cuts were imposed rapidly and drastically in February 1989 (through various means, including sudden price increases in gasoline), rioting broke out in Caracas over a three-day period, with the police facing the populace and hundreds of dead. This “Caracazo” was, in retrospect, a fatal blow to the democracy that had been solidly evolving since 1959 for the first time in Venezuelan history. A collapse of confidence began that eventually brought Hugo Chávez to elected power, in February 1999.

After 1999, the oil was in the hands of the Bolivarian Revolution in the person of its leader, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth, gushing from the wells at a time when oil prices were soaring day after day. Venezuelan oil is the property of the nation, under the steward-ship of the government oil company, PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela S.A.). The oil had been fully nationalized in 1976 and the company, at the operational level, had been perhaps the most efficient state-run oil enterprise in Latin America. For Chávez, the revenues from Venezuelan “black gold” would nourish two essential currents of his enterprise, one flowing downward to the Venezuelan people, the other across his borders to support and influence other Latin American countries. By the year 2008, he had spent $62 billion in subsidies to fifteen countries.

Chávez essentially ruined Petróleos de Venezuela. As with many other aspects of the nation, he wanted his faithful loyalists in charge. After an unsuccessful coup attempt against him in 2002, from which he was rescued by General Raúl Isaías Baduel (whom he imprisoned in 2008) and by popular protest, he moved against the management of PDVSA. The managers called a strike that collapsed after two months. The eventual result was the dismissal of virtually all trained management and a third of the skilled work force: 18,765 workers, technicians, and engineers. Many left the country. The march of political loyalty had trampled down efficiency. PDVSA became an inefficient, corrupt, and dependent bureaucratic monster. By 2008, production of oil had declined by 34 percent, exports by 50 percent, while the president, between 1999 and 2008, was dispensing, on average, $122 million in oil revenues per day.

The flow abroad was in large part liquid—the oil itself at bargain prices or direct donation—to countries with left-wing governments aligned in varying degrees with Chávez's worldview, whether Cuba with its own president-for-life or the elected governments of Bolivia or Nicaragua. It was an unprecedented (and for his purpose effective) ideological use of Venezuela's oil riches, and Chávez felt certain that he could combine this huge exterior outlay with a massive expenditure on social programs within the country. But much depended on the worldwide price of a barrel of oil. Venezuela was immersed in the magic realism of an economy that now produced less and consumed more, all thanks to the exponential increase in oil prices, which between February 1999 and 2008 went up, from $10 to $140 per barrel. In mid-2008, Chávez's ministers considered it “impossible” for the price to come down for the time being. The Comandante boasted that he could raise it to $250 a barrel. The near collapse of the world economy in the autumn of 2008 put brakes on his bravado, as the price of oil plummeted along with the decline in world industrial production.

 

WITHIN VENEZUELA
, his social programs have been extensive, though their success is debatable. They have gained him the loyalty of large segments of the poor. Chávez created the Bolivarian Missions, a parallel system meant to bypass formal government structures so as to rapidly reach the poor in areas like health and basic education. Venezuela was meeting the Cuban need for oil and Castro made good-neighborly use of Cuba's considerable investment in medical education by dispatching doctors and nurses and technicians (and military specialists in state intelligence) to Venezuela. The social programs implemented through the different “Missions” (subsidized food, free medical assistance, literacy training, and general education) did in fact have a strong period of growth between 2004 and 2006. But by 2007 they were in decline, and their loss of credibility was perceptible: empty shelves in stores as well as problems of supply, staff, and low quality in both medical and educational services. The deterioration has recently grown worse, including the scandal of ten tons of chickens discovered rotting in warehouses.

The whole program has suffered from its pell-mell inefficiency, the rapid attempt to replace traditional institutions with new forms intimately connected with the Chavista mystique and its empowerment. The government hospitals, for instance, have suffered from reduced investments—with the money channeled instead to the Missions—and as a direct result, mortality in childbearing has increased. The expropriation of strategic assets such as electricity, telecommunications, iron and steel, aluminum and cement went hand in hand with the deliberate exclusion of private enterprise, which, unsurprisingly, reduced investment to historic lows. But the effect of this weakening of the means of production was postponed because the gap in supply was filled by unparalleled imports of consumer goods. There was, for a time, a growth of per capita income in Venezuela—14.6 percent between 1999 and 2006—attributable of course to oil revenues, but since 2007, real income has fallen substantially as a result of inflation, which reached 31 percent in 2008 and was then the second highest in the world after Zimbabwe. In 2009, the rate of inflation stood at 25.1 percent, the highest on the continent and second globally only to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And in 2010 the economy shrank by 19 percent.

As for corruption, its magnitude is hard to measure given the system's total opacity. But there is external evidence, based on numbers from the Central Bank of Venezuela itself. Of the $22.5 billion that left the country between 2004 and 2008, $12 billion was never accounted for. Something similar happened at PDVSA, with $5 billion vanishing in 2005. Venezuela ranks quite low in the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), an international measure not of corruption itself, which because of its criminal nature is always largely hidden, but of a nation's internal perception of corruption. In 2009, Venezuela was ranked at number 162 of 180 countries assessed, the lowest in Latin America except for Haiti.

 

WITHIN VENEZUELA
Chávez is omnipresent. Every Sunday he appears on television for a minimum of five hours, live from the palace of Miraflores. It is his weekly show,
Aló presidente
(Hello President!). Presiding over his silent, acquiescent ministers, all dressed in red, the Comandante tells stories from his life and unleashes a stream of consciousness about romantic adventures, gastric ailments, baseball games; he also sings, dances, recites, prays, laughs, and most of all bashes Yankee imperialism and capitalism in general. In these sessions Chávez may also announce electoral strategies, huge transfers of fiscal resources, petroleum subsidies, social initiatives, troop movements, diplomatic ruptures, business expropriations, cabinet changes.

Chávez is an aggressive, dominating presence who sometimes has guests on his show but rarely leaves them any room to speak. He rants against his enemies, unreservedly praises his own initiatives, and fills his language with colloquialisms and profanities. But for many,
Aló presidente
may be more than just a clown show. He gives them at least the appearance of contact with power, through his verbal and visual presence, which may be welcomed by people who have spent most of their lives being ignored. Teodoro Petkoff remembers that during the marches against the unsuccessful coup that temporarily imprisoned Chávez in 2002, he saw an old woman carrying a sign she had obviously made herself, with spelling and grammatical errors in its tiny quota of words and that read “Give me back my crazy guy!”

The main key to Chávez's enthronement lies not in his economic measures (though they have been truly disastrous) or even in the impact of his social programs, but in his handling, through the media, of his colossal persona. His takeover of the Bolívar myth is complete. All the fantastic strains of popular religiosity in Venezuela, its folk political theology, are now centered around him. Of course, demigods do not share power. From the moment he was first elected president, Chávez has used democracy to undermine democracy. Venezuela still holds elections but he has taken numerous measures to undermine all independent sources of power and to crush the opposition.

After the recall referendum in 2004 was defeated, he introduced what Petkoff has called “political apartheid”—job discrimination against, and the political harassment of, more than 2.3 million people who voted against him. In May 2007, he shut down RCTV, the oldest and most popular open TV station, and three years later he did the same to its cable TV affiliate. He has systematically harassed the other remaining independent network, Globovisión.

In December 2007 a referendum proposed by Chávez was defeated at the polls. It included a great number of constitutional changes (including the legalization of his possible reelection) and would have moved Venezuela more rapidly toward a Cuban model of government (there was even an article about the possible political integration of the two countries). In the following year, Chávez disqualified hundreds of possible opposition candidates for mayoral and gubernatorial office. After the opposition nevertheless made surprising gains in those elections, and aware that the global economic crisis would soon reach Venezuela, Chávez decided to wager everything on another referendum to be held in February 2009. The proposals were greatly slimmed down from the 2007 portmanteau referendum. The primary objective was to legalize the possibility of unlimited reelection to the presidency. The electoral process that culminated in the vote on February 15, like all such ballots since Chávez has been in office, was thoroughly unequal. On one side was the opposition, without economic resources, exhausted after years of intense protests; and, on the other side, Chávez, with all the economic and propagandistic power of the state and hundreds of thousands of state employees working illegally for his cause. In the weeks leading up to the vote, the abuse of power was not hidden. The government seemed to flaunt it as an instrument of intimidation. Having closed, harassed, or fined the few media outlets that opposed him, Chávez devoted the impressive media network that he has assembled (three hundred radio stations, a number of subsidized newspapers) to relentless propaganda for him and his regime. The opposition, barred from these outlets and slandered in them, was left with only one truly independent opposition channel (in which the Chávez government is now the majority stockholder and he may soon shut it down).

 

V

Among the sixty-nine articles of his constitutional reform rejected by plebiscite in 2007 was the possibility of indefinite reelection, which could give him a lifelong lease on Venezuela. Now, with the victory of his 2009 referendum—which reduced the bewildering variety of the 2007 plebiscite to only a single issue: eliminating term limits—he may have achieved this goal. It was approved by 55 percent to 45 percent, in a 70 percent voter turnout, though many constitutional lawyers thought the proposal was illegal.

Even before he assumed power, Chávez defended the need for a charismatic leader: “The
caudillo
is the representative of a mass with which he identifies, and he is recognized by that mass without any formal, legal process of legitimization.” As president he proclaimed himself “a revolutionary first and a Bolivarian second” and preached the need to wipe clean the slate of the past from Bolívar's death to his own ascension. The military dictatorships of the past (including the brutal one of Juan Vicente Gómez, from 1908 to 1935) were no better than the country's experience with “stinking democracy.” For him, all of Venezuela's military regimes before his own were “essentially the same” as the democratic governments of Rómulo Betancourt (1959–64), Raúl Leoni (1964–69), or Rafael Caldera (1969–74). With or without braid, “on horseback or in a Mercedes Benz,” they all represented “the same prevailing economic and political thinking, the same denial of the people's right to be the protagonist of their destiny.” The revolution that he stood for would bury the “ruinous political model . . . of the last forty years” and put the people back in control of their destiny.