[NV Greens] Fwd: Hugo Chávez and Petro Populism

[Paul Etxeberri]

>
>
>Hugo Ch·vez and Petro Populism
>
>by CHRISTIAN PARENTI
><http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i 050411&s=parenti>
>[from the April 11, 2005 issue]
>
>The views from the slopes of Barrio San AgustÌn del Sur
>are spectacular. Tight passageways frame Caracas and the
>lush, cloud-draped Avila Mountain beyond. Along the
>neighborhood's rough cement steps, teenagers lounge
>around, flirting, arguing or lost in the cheap text-
>messaging functions of their cell phones. Ascending a
>nearby cliff is a small garbage dump. From afar its
>refuse looks like the sand in some ominous urban
>hourglass.
>
>Illiteracy, violence, disease and the listlessness of
>endemic unemployment have shaped the life of this barrio
>since landless squatters from the countryside first
>settled it about forty years ago. But much of that could
>be changing.
>
>"Even though we have had problems, we are moving
>forward," says Carmen Guerrero, a woman in her late 40s
>who is one of San AgustÌn's most dedicated activists.
>"Here, we are all with President Ch·vez. Everybody
>except for maybe six families."
>
>On the yellow walls of her living room are masks in the
>form of fashionable ladies' faces, a clock, a mirror and
>a small picture of Venezuela's populist president, Hugo
>Ch·vez FrÌas. Guerrero explains that she and her
>neighbors are studying in several government-created
>programs called missions and organizing themselves into
>committees to deal with everything from local and
>national election campaigns to sanitation and
>legalization of land titles.
>
>Like most slums in Caracas, this community also has a
>state-owned, subsidized market, a soup kitchen, a number
>of small-scale cooperative businesses and a little two-
>story, octagonal, red-brick medical center. Upstairs two
>Cuban doctors live in cramped quarters; downstairs is a
>small waiting room and clinic.
>
>Guerrero's neighbor, a young man named Carlos Martinez,
>is showing me around; he works with the local
>construction cooperative. They have a contract from the
>mayor's office to lay new drainage pipe in the barrio.
>Given the recent flooding, it is an important task.
>Later he shows me where a patch of ranchos--dirt-floored
>shacks made of corrugated tin and wood--are being
>replaced at government expense by solid, two-story brick
>homes.
>
>For this little barrio and a thousand others like it,
>such changes mean a lot. Like two generations of
>Venezuelan politicians before him, Ch·vez has pledged
>sembrar el petrÛleo--to sow the oil. That is, to invest
>its profits in a way that transforms the very structure
>of Venezuela's economy. But what would that entail? Are
>social programs enough?
>
>Lately Ch·vez has been talking about a "revolution
>within the revolution," about "transcending capitalism"
>and about "building a socialism for the twenty-first
>century." It is a discourse that frightens his enemies,
>electrifies his base and inspires the left throughout
>Latin America. After two decades of the US-promoted
>Washington Consensus--a cocktail of radical
>privatization, open markets and severe fiscal
>austerity--Latin America is an economic disaster marked
>by increasing poverty and inequality.
>
>Taken as a whole and controlling for inflation, Latin
>America has grown little since the mid-1980s and hardly
>at all in the past seven years. With the entire region
>primed for social change, a new breed of populists and
>social democrats is coming to power. Brazil, Argentina
>and Uruguay, in addition to Venezuela, have leftist
>governments of some sort, while Colombia, Ecuador,
>Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru will hold presidential
>elections in 2006.
>
>But a closer look at Venezuela reveals just how vexing
>and complicated a political and economic turn to the
>left can be, even in a country that is rich with oil and
>not deeply indebted.
>
>Thus far, Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, named for
>South America's nineteenth-century liberator, SimÛn
>BolÌvar, has deepened and politicized a pre-existing
>tradition of Venezuelan populism. Despite Ch·vez's often
>radical discourse, the government has not engaged in
>mass expropriations of private fortunes, even
>agricultural ones, nor plowed huge sums into new
>collectively owned forms of production. In fact, private
>property is protected in the new Constitution
>promulgated after Ch·vez came to power. What the
>government has done is spend billions on new social
>programs, $3.7 billion in the past year alone. As a
>result, 1.3 million people have learned to read,
>millions have received medical care and an estimated
>35-40 percent of the population now shops at subsidized,
>government-owned supermarkets. Elementary school
>enrollment has increased by more than a million, as
>schools have started offering free food to students. The
>government has created several banks aimed at small
>businesses and cooperatives, redeployed part of the
>military to do public works and is building several new
>subway systems around the country. To boost agricultural
>production in a country that imports 80 percent of what
>it consumes, Ch·vez has created a land-reform program
>that rewards private farmers who increase productivity
>and punishes those who do not with the threat of
>confiscation.
>
>The government has also structured many of its social
>programs in ways that force communities to organize. To
>gain title to barrio homes built on squatted land,
>people must band together as neighbors and form land
>committees. Likewise, many public works jobs require
>that people form cooperatives and then apply for a group
>contract. Cynics see these expanding networks of
>community organizations as nothing more than a
>clientelist electoral machine. Rank-and-file Chavistas
>call their movement "participatory democracy," and the
>revolution's intellectuals describe it as a long-term
>struggle against the cultural pathologies bred by all
>resource-rich economies--the famous "Dutch disease," in
>which the oil-rich state is expected to dole out
>services to a disorganized and unproductive population.
>
>But for the moment, the Venezuelan battle against
>poverty is possible only because oil prices have been at
>record highs for several years, and the state owns most
>of the petroleum industry. All of Venezuela's oil and
>mining and most of its basic industry were nationalized
>in the mid-1970s. On average, oil sales make up 30
>percent of Venezuelan GDP, provide half of state income
>and make up 80 percent of all Venezuelan exports.
>
>Internal and often sympathetic critics of the reform
>process in Venezuela say it is one thing to "spend the
>oil" on social welfare; it is another altogether to "sow
>the oil" and create new collectively owned, productive,
>nonsubsidized industries that will generate wealth in an
>egalitarian and sustainable fashion.
>
>"When the coup happened we realized we had to get
>involved or we would lose everything," explains Carmen
>Guerrero. She says she was always a Ch·vez supporter but
>was not very active until the April 2002 coup d'Ètat
>against Ch·vez launched by Venezuela's main business
>council, its notoriously corrupt labor federation,
>dissident military officers and masses of middle- and
>upper-class CaraqueÒos. Declassified documents have
>since revealed that the CIA knew at least a week
>beforehand that a coup was planned, while other US
>government agencies, such as the National Endowment for
>Democracy, were channeling aid to the opposition.
>
>"There is no going back now," says Guerrero. Then, very
>seriously, she adds: "I hugged Ch·vez at a rally. I
>don't know how I got through security. I guess because I
>am short. I can't explain the feeling, the emotion was
>so strong." She clutches her fists to her breast and
>looks away.
>
>Guerrero started supporting Ch·vez in 1992, on that
>fateful day when the then-unknown 37-year-old colonel
>launched a failed coup of his own. When defeat appeared
>imminent, Ch·vez surrendered. To avoid a bloodbath he
>went on television and asked his compatriots who were
>still holding two cities to put down their weapons.
>
>During that short live broadcast Ch·vez did two things
>that electrified the Venezuelan imagination. First, he
>took personal responsibility for the botched coup. This
>seemed to many viewers like a significant break from the
>standard political tradition of lying and blaming others
>for failure. Then, in explaining the defeat, Ch·vez
>said, "For now, the objectives that we have set for
>ourselves have not been achieved."
>
>During the next two years, while Ch·vez was in prison
>studying, that key phrase--"for now," or por ahora in
>Spanish--became a rallying cry, a slogan of defiance
>painted on walls, a talisman of hope in an otherwise
>squalid and corrupt political landscape.
>
>Guerrero's sentiments, down to the details about the
>coup and the por ahora speech, were echoed again and
>again in dozens of interviews throughout some of
>Caracas's poorest slums. The majority of people here--
>ranging from formerly apolitical housewives to hard-core
>veterans of the urban guerrilla movements of the 1970s--
>revere President Ch·vez. They view him as a political
>saint, a savior, the embodiment of a new national ideal.
>
>But through Guerrero's open front door we can see the
>Modernist towers of offices, banks, hotels and luxury
>apartments in the other Caracas, a city that has grown
>fat on the vast oil fortunes flowing from Venezuela's
>subsoil.
>
>It is this contrast between rich and poor--a contrast so
>visually obvious as to make the landscape of Caracas
>feel almost didactic--that animates Venezuelan politics.
>And in the other Caracas, the one with the country
>clubs, the citizens hate Ch·vez with an ardor as strong
>as the devotion one finds for him in the barrios. Just
>as the urban poor and campesinos love Ch·vez because of
>his swarthy, indigenous looks, tight curly hair and his
>rough, down-to-earth talk, so too are the wealthier
>classes driven apoplectic with rage by the fact that
>their president looks likes a construction worker or cab
>driver.
>
>For six years Ch·vez and his supporters have battled
>this opposition, an enemy that Ch·vez has nicknamed los
>escu·lidos, or "the weaklings." But the opposition has
>not always been so weak. It includes the privately owned
>mass media, which have been virulently and
>propagandistically hostile to the government, devoting
>days at a time to commercial-free attacks on it as
>"totalitarian" and "Castro communist." There was the
>armed coup, then the oil strike, which cost the economy
>an estimated $7.5 billion and led to severe shortages of
>gas, food and beer. As one consultant in the Planning
>Ministry said in all seriousness: "I thought the day we
>ran out of beer would be the day the country fell into
>anarchy and civil war."
>
>There was also a prolonged public protest by a group of
>respected former generals who urged active soldiers to
>rebel. Then there was a series of violent protests by
>rightist street fighters calling themselves the
>Guarimbas, who set up burning barricades during early
>2004.
>
>Despite all this, Ch·vez and his political allies have
>won seven national ballots, including the approval of a
>new Constitution, an overhaul of the notoriously corrupt
>judiciary, two national legislative elections, two
>presidential elections and one attempted presidential
>recall.
>
>Through it all, occasional armed clashes between hard-
>core Chavistas and opposition militants have left about
>twenty people on both sides dead or seriously wounded.
>And the Ch·vez government has enacted a media law that
>punishes slander with jail time and prohibits broadcast
>of the twenty-four-hour-a-day video loops that were an
>opposition favorite, drawing sharp criticism from press-
>freedom advocates. But there has been no major
>government campaign of repression, not even against the
>architects of the coup, many of whom are at liberty and
>still in Venezuela.
>
>The barrio 23 de Enero (January 23) is to the Venezuelan
>left what Compton is to hip-hop: the home of its hard
>core. The barrio's eponym is the date of a popular
>uprising that took place in 1958 against dictator Marcos
>PÈrez JimÈnez. Tucked into a Caracas valley and flowing
>over a few hillsides, 23 de Enero is a mix of 1950s-era
>cement tower blocks and the usual cinder-block homes
>wedged along winding staircases and walkways.
>
>The ten- and fifteen-story tower blocks are adorned in
>an improbable and tatterdemalion layer of colorful
>laundry hanging from external drying racks or barred
>windows. Behind the clothes and the bars one can see
>lush potted plants, caged and squawking birds or
>household items stacked up in the tiny, overcrowded
>apartments. On the back sides of the towers, mounds of
>trash sit in and around dumpsters that are placed below
>long, dilapidated external garbage chutes that usually
>have big sections of pipe missing.
>
>>From the top of each tower flies a red-and-blue flag:
>the colors of the Coordinador SimÛn BolÌvar, a powerful
>community organization that has its roots in the urban
>guerrilla movements of the 1970s and '80s. Described
>with the catchphrase Tupamaros, these urban partisans
>were really a collection of groups and factions rather
>than a single force, as the name would suggest.
>
>Even today, many comrades in the barrios are still
>armed. A fellow journalist was pulled over by masked
>gunmen at a Tupamaro checkpoint in 23 de Enero during
>the tense days around the August 2004 referendum. The
>homies were making sure no escu·lido thugs snuck into
>the 'hood to do a drive-by. They also wanted my friend
>to donate his videocamera to the revolution, putting a
>gun to his head to help him make his decision. But when
>adult supervision finally showed up, the muchachos
>running the traffic stop were persuaded to give back the
>camera.
>
>At the Coordinador's little headquarters I meet this
>other type of Chavista: not a sentimental housewife like
>Guerrero, but a hard-core ex-guerrilla. Juan Contreras
>is balding, a bit paunchy and has rather unassuming
>boyish features, but he got his political education the
>hard way and at a young age: in the form of
>demonstrations, police beatings and shootouts with the
>paramilitary forces of the state. He is now one of the
>key organizers in the Coordinador.
>
>The walls outside the office are covered in
>revolutionary murals: One honors a youth killed in a
>demonstration against Henry Kissinger in the 1970s,
>another is for the Zapatistas, a third displays the
>classic Alberto Korda portrait of Che Guevara. Most of
>the art predates Ch·vez, and none portrays his image.
>
>"Ch·vez did not produce the movements--we produced him,"
>explains Contreras. "He has helped us tremendously, but
>what is going on here cannot be ascribed only to
>Ch·vez."
>
>According to Contreras and a few of his comrades, the
>Coordinador got its start after the failed Ch·vez coup
>in 1992. In the wake of that defeat, the government
>began jailing leftists. Contreras fled to Cuba for a
>month with twenty-nine other activists from 23 de Enero;
>upon their return, almost all of them were arrested, and
>Contreras went into hiding. About a year and a half
>after the attempted coup, the activists regrouped and
>decided that armed struggle was definitely over and done
>with. They created the Coordinador and devoted
>themselves to aboveground work.
>
>Today the Coordinador pursues a three-pronged strategy
>that involves reclaiming public space from drug gangs,
>recovering local cultural traditions and promoting
>organized sports. Already the barrio has produced
>several players for Major League Baseball, including
>Ugueth Urbina, Juan Carlos Ovalles and Juan Carlos
>Pulido. Later a young guy named Kristhian Linares stops
>by to pay his respects to Contreras. Only 18 years old,
>Linares has just signed with the Florida Marlins. He
>starts spring training as soon as his papers are in
>order.
>
>After building these forms of social solidarity, the
>Coordinador then launched another project, setting up
>committees to deal with health, land titles, elections
>and the like. Some of this work interfaces with
>government-funded missions, some doesn't. But the
>paramount issue here is security. The slums of Caracas
>are extremely violent. Every week, around eighty people
>are murdered in this city of 5 million.
>
>"We use culture and sports and organization to take over
>public spaces," explains Contreras. What if the drug
>gangs refuse to move? "Well, many of them are connected
>by family to the larger community, so we use that
>pressure. There is the armed tradition here, and they
>respect that. And there is a tradition of lynching in
>this barrio. In the past the community has killed some
>criminals. Not recently, but it has happened. So most of
>the gangs take us seriously and stay away from the
>central areas."
>
>Later, as we scale a ridge packed with little homes, he
>explains that farther into the barrio are some
>agricultural projects but that I'll have to come back to
>visit them because the outlying areas become dangerous
>in the afternoon. Clearly, cultural reclamation plus
>threat of lynching does not completely displace crime.
>
>It also seems that the opposition, or elements in it,
>have on occasion used criminals against Chavistas. An
>activist from nearby 23 de Enero, a woman who once lived
>in California, tells the story of a gangster who was
>paid to make death threats against the local Cuban
>doctors. The doctors got so freaked out they split. But
>the woman, a trained social worker, found the young
>thug, a local guy, and explained to him that he would
>certainly be tracked down and killed by angry Chavistas
>if he persisted with his threats. The gangster
>reconsidered and decided to stay out of politics. The
>Cuban doctors returned.
>
>The organized opposition to Ch·vez is rather thin on the
>ground these days, having been largely discredited by
>the right-wing extremism of their coup and the economic
>devastation caused by their oil strike. So I visit the
>offices of the right-wing tabloid AsÌ Es la Noticia,
>owned by one of Venezuela's top-circulation dailies, El
>Nacional.
>
>"Look, Ch·vez won the referendum. People have to accept
>that," says the editor, Albor Rodriguez. She is in her
>early 30s, an escu·lido all the way, but she respects
>the facts.
>
>Standing erect at her desk, one black-clad shoulder
>tipped forward, she takes long drags on her cigarette
>between comments. "There is no 'Castro communist' here.
>That's ridiculous. They say there are Cubans in the
>government and the security. But there is no proof.
>However, does Ch·vez have autocratic tendencies? Yes! He
>comes from the military. Does his government, or he
>himself, know what they are doing? No! His head is a
>mix--a marmalade of notions and slogans. He speaks
>without thinking. He makes innuendoes about Condoleezza
>Rice being in love with him. That's insane. He's totally
>erratic."
>
>Albor, to my surprise, is almost as harsh on the
>opposition: "They lost because Ch·vez has a deep
>emotional connection with the people, and they have no
>connection with the people. Also, he has spent a lot of
>money on the barrios. He pours money into the barrios."
>
>She explains that when her paper reported on the real
>work of the missions, some readers accused her of lying
>and "having gone to the moon to find these things." She
>explains: "The opposition lied to itself. They were
>deluded and now they are smashed." With that rather
>definitive summation, she puts out her cigarette and
>invites me to lunch.
>
>There are some in the opposition whose critique focuses
>less on Ch·vez's supposed abuses of power and more on
>the government's alleged mismanagement and left-wing
>economic tomfoolery. Oscar Garcia Mendoza is president
>of Banco Venezolano de Credito, a very old and
>conservative bank. He's what Ch·vez would call an
>"oligarch," the official enemy: a capitalist financier.
>But when I meet him in his beautiful corner office on
>the ninth floor of a Modernist highrise, he is beaming.
>He wears a dark blue suit, his gray hair is cropped
>stylishly short and he has that healthy look that seems
>to come from being rich and relaxed.
>
>Classical music filters out from speakers in the
>ceiling; on the table are fine Cuban cigars. We sit in
>bent plywood and leather Herman Miller chairs, and gaze
>out across the city through a glass wall lined with
>thick green plants.
>
>"Business has never been better," says Garcia. "This
>government is totally incompetent. They have no idea
>what they are doing. The head of their land reform,
>Eliezer Otaiza, is a former male stripper. And did you
>see they just appointed Carlos Lanz, a former terrorist
>kidnapper, a communist, as head of Alcasa, our largest
>aluminum company?" Through it all, Garcia wears a
>slightly suppressed grin as if he thinks the whole thing
>is hilarious. "I mean, can you imagine that?"
>
>In a way, Lanz's appointment is not so outrageous:
>Another former guerrilla, Ali Rodriguez Araque, once
>minister of mining and energy, then head of OPEC, is now
>foreign minister and widely respected as a level-headed
>negotiator.
>
>Garcia also has some very concrete criticisms. He says
>that the current economic boom is a chimera based on oil
>prices. In 2004 government spending jumped 47 percent,
>much of which went to pay for healthcare and education--
>the missions. But despite the oil windfall, the
>government has had to borrow heavily. Instead of turning
>to international financiers, it has increased its
>internal debt to Venezuelan banks.
>
>Garcia says that in the past four years this internal
>debt has gone from $2 billion to more than $27 billion.
>The Finance Ministry confirms these figures and says
>that 60 percent of this debt is held in government
>bonds.
>
>"But what makes this really crazy," says Garcia, "is
>that the government is depositing all its oil revenue in
>the same banks at about 5 percent, then borrowing it
>back at 14 percent. It's a very easy way for bankers to
>make money. That's why I say this is a government for
>the rich."
>
>Last year Venezuelan banks made $1.38 billion in
>profits, just a bit more than they did the year before.
>And most of that money came from lending to the Ch·vez
>government and trading in special government-approved,
>dollar-denominated bonds, a legal loophole in the new
>currency-control law. Garcia's bank actually does no
>business with the government, but the huge increase in
>oil revenues has doubled his loan portfolio. The economy
>is awash in money: Growth was 17.3 percent in 2004.
>
>So if the economy is booming, why does Garcia dislike
>Ch·vez?
>
>"These people are crooks," he says. "Look, Venezuela has
>always been corrupt, but these guys are the worst." When
>I point out that the government just fired 120 managers
>in Zulia state for corruption, Garcia waves it away as
>insufficient.
>
>"What are they doing with all the money? They are not
>investing. They spend it all on food and medicine. As
>soon as oil goes down, their party is over." So what
>should the government do to avoid this? "They should
>privatize everything."
>
>Getting a Ch·vez government response to charges of
>mismanagement, corruption and overdependence on
>freakishly high oil prices is difficult. My inquiries
>are fed into the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the
>Information Ministry, where every few days a new
>official loses my paperwork and needs a full CV and
>another letter from my editors and another complete
>written explanation of my project.
>
>After three weeks no one in the Ch·vez government has
>come forth with an on-the-record statement except for
>one laid-back spokesperson at the Higher Education
>Ministry.
>
>Finally an old friend gets me an interview with his
>boss, Jorge Giordani, a former academic who befriended
>Ch·vez during the rebellious paratrooper's stint in jail
>and is now the planning and development minister. On
>matters of economic development, Giordani is the
>revolution's brain. We meet in his office near the top
>of South America's tallest building, one of a pair of
>towers, the other of which stands half-burned, its gold-
>tinted, mirrored windows blown out and black, the result
>of a recent accident caused by bad maintenance.
>
>Giordani is tall, gray and hunched. He wears big
>glasses, a tie, a brown cardigan sweater and has a short
>white Abe Lincoln beard. He evades most specific
>questions. As for corruption, he says simply: "We are
>not doing enough. It is a very serious problem."
>
>Mostly he offers a long but interesting explanation of
>Venezuela's historical development and its lack of
>internal economic integration. We move from map to map
>as he explicates the economic geography of various
>regions.
>
>Many Chavistas hope that investing in physical
>infrastructure, health and education will open new,
>nonpetroleum industries in high technology, business
>services, healthcare and agriculture. When I ask
>Giordani how the country plans to wean itself from oil,
>about land reform and about the many so-called
>"endogenous" development projects being promoted, he
>sighs and shakes his head as if I am naÔve.
>
>"We've been fighting political battles for most of our
>time in office. Many people have learned to read in the
>last few years, but how long will it take for them to
>work in high technology, or medicine, or services? Ten
>years? A generation? We are fighting a very
>individualistic, rentier culture. Everything has been
>'Mama state, Papa state, give me oil money.' To organize
>people is extremely hard."
>
>After a long, roundabout discussion in which I press him
>on the question of import substitution and new
>industrialization, he settles on one key point:
>Venezuela's only real hope lies in regional economic
>integration. Only then will internal markets be big
>enough to nurture alternative technologies and new
>industries that might otherwise threaten current
>multinational monopolies.
>
>Giordani seems weary and cynical. "No, I am just
>practical," he says with a chuckle. "Development in
>Venezuela will take at least fifty years."
>
>And how long will the oil last?
>
>"Maybe twenty years, maybe thirty."
>
>_______________________________________________________
>
>portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news,
>discussion and debate service of the Committees of
>Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to
>provide varied material of interest to people on the
>left.
>
>For answers to frequently asked questions:
><http://www.portside.org/faq>
>
>To subscribe, unsubscribe or change settings:
><http://lists.portside.org/mailman/listinfo/portside>
>
>To submit material, paste into an email and send to:
><moderator at portside.org> (postings are moderated)
>
>For assistance with your account:
><support at portside.org>
>
>To search the portside archive:
><http://people-link5.inch.com/pipermail/portside/>


-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand