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<P> <BR>I first met Hugo Chávez in New York City in September 2006, just after
his infamous appearance on the floor of the UN General Assembly, where he called
George W. Bush the devil. “Yesterday, the devil came here,” he said, “Right
here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now
standing in front of.” He then made the sign of the cross, kissed his hand,
winked at his audience and looked to the sky. It was vintage Chávez, an
outrageous remark leavened with just the right touch of detail (the lingering
sulfur!) to make it something more than bombast, cutting through soporific
nostrums of diplomatese and drawing fire away from Iran, which was in the cross
hairs at that meeting.</P>
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<H3>The press of course went into high dudgeon, and not just for the obvious
reason that it’s one thing for opponents in the Middle East to call the United
States the Great Satan and another thing for the president of a Latin American
country to personally single out its president as Beelzebub, on US soil no
less.</H3></DIV></DIV>
<P>I think what really rankled was that Chávez was claiming a privilege that had
long belonged to the United States, that is, the right to paint its adversaries
not as rational actors but as existential evil. Latin American populists, from
Argentina’s Juan Perón to, most recently, Chávez, have long served as characters
in a story the US tells about itself, reaffirming the maturity of its electorate
and the moderation of its political culture. There are at most eleven political
prisoners in Venezuela, and that’s taking the opposition’s broad definition of
the term, which includes individuals who worked to overthrow the government in
2002, and yet it is not just the right in this country who regularly compared
Chávez to the worst mass murderers and dictators in history. <EM>New Yorker
</EM>critic Alex Ross, in an essay published a few years back celebrating the
wunderkind Venezuelan conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo
Dudamel, fretted about enjoying the fruits of Venezuela’s much-lauded
government-funded system of music training: “Stalin, too, was a great believer
in music for the people.”</P>
<P align=center>* * *</P>
<P>Hugo Chávez was the second of seven children, born in 1954 in the rural
village of Sabaneta, in the grassland state of Barinas, to a family of mixed
European, Indian and Afro-Venezuelan race. Bart Jones’s excellent biography,
<EM>Hugo! </EM>nicely captures the improbability of Chávez’s rise from
dirt-floor poverty—he was sent to live with his grandmother since his parents
couldn’t feed their children—through the military, where he became involved with
left-wing politics, which in Venezuela meant a mix of international socialism
and Latin America’s long history of revolutionary nationalism. It drew
inspiration from well-known figures such as Simón Bolívar, as well as
lesser-known insurgents, such as nineteenth-century peasant leader Ezequiel
Zamora, in whose army Chávez’s great-great-grandfather had served. Born just a
few days after the CIA drove reformist Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz from
office, he was a young military cadet of 19 in September 1973 when he heard
Fidel Castro on the radio announce yet another CIA-backed coup, this one
toppling Salvador Allende in Chile.</P>
<P>Awash in oil wealth, Venezuela throughout the twentieth century enjoyed its
own kind of exceptionalism, avoiding the extremes of left-wing radicalism and
homicidal right-wing anticommunism that overtook many of its neighbors. In a
way, the country became the anti-Cuba. In 1958, political elites negotiated a
pact that maintained the trappings of democratic rule for four decades, as two
ideological indistinguishable parties traded the presidency back and forth
(sound familiar?). Where the State Department and its allied policy
intellectuals isolated and condemned Havana, they celebrated Caracas as the end
point of development. Samuel Huntington praised Venezuela as an example of
“successful democratization,” while another political scientist, writing in the
early 1980s, said it represented the “only trail to a democratic future for
developing societies…a textbook case of step-by-step progress.”</P>
<P>We know now that its institutions were rotting from the inside out. Every sin
that Chávez was accused of committing—governing without accountability,
marginalizing the opposition, appointing partisan supporters to the judiciary,
dominating labor unions, professional organizations and civil society,
corruption and using oil revenue to dispense patronage—flourished in a system
the United States held up as exemplary.</P>
<P>Petroleum prices began to fall in the mid-1980s. By this point, Venezuela had
grown lopsidedly urban, with 16 million of its 19 million citizens living in
cities, well over half of them below the poverty line, many in extreme poverty.
In Caracas, combustible concentrations of poor people lived cut off from
municipal services—such as sanitation and safe drinking water—and hence party
and patronage control. The spark came in February 1989, when a recently
inaugurated president who had run against the IMF said that he no choice but to
submit to its dictates. He announced a plan to abolish food and fuel subsidies,
increase gas prices, privatize state industries and cut spending on health care
and education.</P>
<P>Three days of rioting and looting spread through the capital, an event that
both marked the end of Venezuelan exceptionalism and the beginning of the
hemisphere’s increasingly focused opposition to neoliberalism. Established
parties, unions and government institutions proved entirely incapable of
restoring legitimacy in austere times, committed as they were to upholding a
profoundly unequal class structure.</P>
<P>Chávez emerged from the ruin, first with a failed putsch in 1992, which
landed him in jail but turned him into a folk hero. Then in 1998, when he won 56
percent of the vote as a presidential candidate. Inaugurated in 1999, he took
office committed to a broad yet vague anti-austerity program, a mild John
Kenneth Galbraith–quoting reformer who at first had no power to reform anything.
The esteem in which Chávez was held by the majority of Venezuelans, many of them
dark-skinned, was matched by the rage he provoked among the country’s mostly
white political and economic elites. But their maximalist program of
opposition—a US-endorsed coup, an oil strike that destroyed the country’s
economy, a recall election and an oligarch-media propaganda campaign that made
Fox News seem like PBS—backfired. By 2005, Chávez had weathered the storm and
was in control of the nation’s oil, allowing him to embark on an ambitious
program of domestic and international transformation: massive social spending at
home and “poly-polar equilibrium” abroad, a riff on what Bolívar once called
“universal equilibrium,” an effort to break up the US’s historical monopoly of
power in Latin America and force Washington to compete for influence.</P>
<P align=center>* * *</P>
<P>Over the last fourteen years, Chávez has submitted himself and his agenda to
fourteen national votes, winning thirteen of them by large margins, in polling
deemed by Jimmy Carter to be “best in the world” out of the ninety-two elections
that he has monitored. (It turns out it isn’t that difficult to have transparent
elections: voters in Venezuela cast their ballot on an touch pad, which spits
out a receipt they can check and then deposit in a box. At the end of the day,
random polling stations are picked for ‘hot audits,’ to make sure the electronic
and paper tallies add up). A case is made that this ballot-box proceduralism
isn’t democratic, that Chávez dispenses patronage and dominates the media giving
him an unfair advantage. But after the last presidential ballot—which Chávez won
with the same percentage he did his first election yet with a greatly expanded
electorate—even his opponents have admitted, despairingly, that a majority of
Venezuelans liked, if not adored, the man.</P>
<P>I’m what they call a useful idiot when it comes to Hugo Chávez, if only
because rank-and-file social organizations that to me seem worthy of support in
Venezuela continued to support him until the end. My impressionistic sense is
that this support breaks down roughly in half, between voters who think their
lives and their families’ lives are better off because of Chávez’s massive
expansion of state services, including healthcare and education, despite real
problems of crime, corruption, shortages and inflation.</P>
<P>The other half of Chávez’s electoral majority is made up of organized
citizens involved in one or the other of the country’s many grassroots
organizations. Chávez’s social base was diverse and heterodox, what social
scientists in the 1990s began to celebrate as “new social movements,” distinct
from established trade unions and peasant organizations vertically linked to—and
subordinated to—political parties or populist leaders: neighborhood councils;
urban and rural homesteaders, feminists, gay and lesbian rights organizations,
economic justice activists, environmental coalitions; breakaway unions and the
like. It’s these organizations, in Venezuela and elsewhere throughout the
region, that have over the last few decades done heroic work in democratizing
society, in giving citizens venues to survive the extremes of neoliberalism and
to fight against further depredations, turning Latin America into one of the
last global bastion of the Enlightenment left.</P>
<P>Chávez’s detractors see this mobilized sector of the population much the way
Mitt Romney saw 47 percent of the US electorate not as citizens but parasites,
moochers sucking on the oil-rent teat. Those who accept that Chávez enjoyed
majority support disparaged that support as emotional enthrallment. Voters,
wrote one critic, see their own vulnerability in their leader and are entranced.
Another talked about Chávez’s “magical realist” hold over his followers.</P>
<P>One anecdote alone should be enough to give the lie to the idea that poor
Venezuelans voted for Chávez because they were fascinated by the baubles they
dangled in front of them. During the 2006 presidential campaign, the signature
pledge of Chávez’s opponent was to give 3,000,000 poor Venezuelans a black
credit card (black as in the color of oil) from which they could withdraw up to
$450 in cash a month, which would have drained over $16 billion dollars a year
from the national treasury (call it neoliberal populism: give to the poor just
enough to bankrupt the government and force the defunding of services). Over the
years, there’s been a lot of heavy theoretically breathing by US academics about
the miasma oil wealth creates in countries like Venezuela, lulling citizens into
a dreamlike state that renders them into passive spectators. But in this
election at least, Venezuelans managed to see through the mist. Chávez won with
over 62 percent of the vote.</P>
<P>Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether Chavismo’s
social-welfare programs will endure now that Chávez is gone and shelve the
left-wing hope that out of rank-and-file activism a new, sustainable way of
organizing society will emerge. The participatory democracy that took place in
barrios, in workplaces and in the countryside over the last fourteen years was a
value in itself, even if it doesn’t lead to a better world.</P>
<P>There’s been great work done on the ground by scholars such as Alejandro
Velasco, Sujatha Fernandes, Naomi Schiller and George Ciccariello-Maher on these
social movements that, taken together, lead to the conclusion that Venezuela
might be the most democratic country in the Western Hemisphere. One study found
that organized Chavistas held to “liberal conceptions of democracy and held
pluralistic norms,” believed in peaceful methods of conflict resolution and
worked to ensure that their organizations functioned with high levels of
“horizontal or non-hierarchical” democracy. What political scientists would
criticize as a hyper dependency on a strongman, Venezuelan activists understand
as mutual reliance, as well as an acute awareness of the limits and shortcomings
of this reliance.</P>
<P>Over the years, this or that leftist has pronounced themselves
“disillusioned” with Chávez, setting out some standard drawn, from theory or
history, and then pronouncing the Venezuelan leader as falling short. He’s a
Bonapartist, wrote one. He’s no Allende, sighs another. To paraphrase the
radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens in <EM>Lincoln, </EM>nothing surprises these
critics and therefore they are never surprising. But there are indeed many
surprising things about Chavismo in relationship to Latin American history.</P>
<P>First, the military in Latin America is best known for its homicidal
right-wing sadists, many of them trained by the United States, in places like
the School of the Americas. But the region’s armed forces have occasionally
thrown up anti-imperialists and economic nationalists. In this sense, Chávez is
similar to Argentina’s Perón, as well as Guatemala’s Colonel Arbenz, Panama’s
Omar Torrijos and Peru’s General Juan Francisco <EM>Velasco</EM>, who as
president between 1968 and 1975 allied Lima with Moscow. But when they weren’t
being either driven from office (Arbenz) or killed (Torrijos?), these military
populists inevitably veered quickly to the right. Within a few years of his 1946
election, Perón was cracking down on unions, going as far as endorsing the
overthrow of Arbenz in 1954. In Peru, the radical phase of Peru’s military
government lasted seven years. Chávez, in contrast, was in office fourteen
years, and he never turned nor repressed his base.</P>
<P>Second and related, for decades now social scientists have been telling us
that the kind of mobilized regime Venezuela represents is pump-primed for
violence, that such governments can only maintain energy through internal
repression or external war. But after years of calling the oligarchy squalid
traitors, Venezuela has seen remarkably little political repression—certainly
less than Nicaragua in the 1980s under the Sandinistas and Cuba today, not to
mention the United States.</P>
<P>Oil wealth has much to do with this exceptionalism, as it also did in the
elite, top-down democracy that existed prior to Chávez. But so what? Chávez has
done what rational actors in the neoliberal interstate order are supposed to do:
he’s leveraged Venezuela’s comparative advantage not just to fund social
organizations but give them unprecedented freedom and power.</P>
<P align=center>* * *</P>
<P>Chávez was a strongman. He packed the courts, hounded the corporate media,
legislated by decree and pretty much did away with any effective system of
institutional checks or balances. But I’ll be perverse and argue that the
biggest problem Venezuela faced during his rule was not that Chávez was
authoritarian but that he wasn’t authoritarian enough. It wasn’t too much
control that was the problem but too little.</P>
<P>Chavismo came to power through the ballot following the near total collapse
of Venezuela’s existing establishment. It enjoyed overwhelming rhetorical and
electoral hegemony, but not administrative hegemony. As such, it had to make
significant compromises with existing power blocs in the military, the civil and
educational bureaucracy and even the outgoing political elite, all of whom were
loath to give up their illicit privileges and pleasures. It took near five years
before Chávez’s government gained control of oil revenues, and then only after a
protracted fight that nearly ruined the country.</P>
<P>Once it had access to the money, it opted not to confront these pockets of
corruption and power but simply fund parallel institutions, including the social
missions that provided healthcare, education and other welfare services being
the most famous. This was both a blessing and a curse, the source of Chavismo’s
strength and weakness.</P>
<P>Prior to Chávez, competition for government power and resources took place
largely within the very narrow boundaries of two elite political parties. After
Chávez’s election, political jockeying took place within “Chavismo.” Rather than
forming a single-party dictatorship with an interventionist state bureaucracy
controlling people’s lives, Chavismo has been pretty wide open and chaotic. But
it significantly more inclusive than the old duopoly, comprised of at least five
different currents: a new Bolivarian political class, older leftist parties,
economic elites, military interests and the social movements mentioned above.
Oil money gave Chávez the luxury of acting as a broker between these competing
tendencies, allowing each to pursue their interests (sometimes, no doubt, their
illicit interests) and deferring confrontations. </P>
<P align=center>* * *</P>
<P>The high point of Chávez’s international agenda was his relationship with
Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Latin American leader whom US foreign
policy and opinion makers tried to set as Chávez’s opposite. Where Chávez was
reckless, Lula was moderate. Where Chávez was confrontational, Lula was
pragmatic. Lula himself never bought this nonsense, consistently rising to
Chávez’s defense and endorsing his election.</P>
<P>For a good eight years they worked something like a Laurel and Hardy routine,
with Chávez acting the buffoon and Lula the straight man. But each was dependent
on the other and each was aware of this dependency. Chávez often stressed the
importance of Lula’s election in late 2002, just a few months after April’s
failed coup attempt, which gave him his first real ally of consequence in a
region then still dominated by neoliberals. Likewise, the confrontational Chávez
made Lula’s reformism that much more palatable. Wikileak documents reveal the
skill in which Lula’s diplomats gently but firmly rebuffed the Bush
administration’s pressure to isolate Venezuela.</P>
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<P>Their inside-outside rope-a-dope was on full display at the November 2005
Summit of the Americas in Argentina, where the United States hoped to lock in
its deeply unfair economic advantage with a hemisphere-wide Free Trade
Agreement. In the meeting hall, Lula lectured Bush on the hypocrisy of
protecting corporate agriculture with subsidies and tariffs even as it pushed
Latin America to open its markets. Meanwhile, on the street Chávez led 40,000
protesters promising to “bury” the free trade agreement. The treaty was indeed
derailed, and in the years that followed, Venezuela and Brazil, along with other
Latin American nations, have presided over a remarkable transformation in
hemispheric relations, coming as close as ever to achieving Bolívar’s “universal
equilibrium.”</P>
<P align=center>* * *</P>
<P>When I met Chávez in 2006 after his controversial appearance in the UN, it
was at a small lunch at the Venezuelan consulate. Danny Glover was there, and he
and Chávez talked the possibility of producing a movie on the life of Toussaint
L’Ouverture, the former slave who led the Haitian Revolution.</P>
<P>Also present was a friend and activist who works on the issue of debt relief
for poor countries. At the time, a proposal to relieve the debt owed to the
Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) by the poorest countries in the Americas
had stalled, largely because mid-level bureaucrats from Argentina, Mexico and
Brazil opposed the initiative. My friend lobbied Chávez to speak to Lula and
Argentina’s president Néstor Kirchner, another of the region’s leftist leaders,
and get them to jump-start the deal.</P>
<P>Chávez asked a number of thoughtful questions, at odds with the provocateur
on display on the floor of the General Assembly. Why, he wanted to know, was the
Bush administration in favor of the plan? My friend explained that some Treasury
officials were libertarians who, if not in favor of debt relief, wouldn’t block
the deal. “Besides,” he said, “they don’t give a shit about the IADB.” Chávez
then asked why Brazil and Argentina were holding things up. Because, my friend
said, their representatives to the IADB were functionaries deeply invested in
the viability of the bank, and they thought debt abolition a dangerous
precedent.</P>
<P>We later got word that Chávez had successfully lobbied Lula and Kirchner to
support the deal. In November 2006, the IADB announced it would write off
billions of dollars in debt to Nicaragua, Guyana, Honduras and Bolivia (Haiti
would later be added to the list).</P>
<P>And so it was that the man routinely compared in the United States to Stalin
quietly joined forces with the administration of the man he had just called
Satan, helping to make the lives of some of the poorest people in America just a
bit more bearable.</P>
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