http://www.opendemocracy.net/node/34312/print
By Ivan Briscoe
Created 2007-08-09 17:50
Lands have been confiscated, foreign companies driven out and utilities
renationalised, but even so there is a special place in Venezuela for
Louis Vuitton. The immaculate store in the Sambil shopping-mall now
ranks as the firm's most successful in the whole of Latin America,
shifting several hundred thousand-dollar carpetbags week in week out.
"We have a mix", explains the extremely reticent shop manager, flown in
days before from Paris. "We have older clients, and we have newer
ones."
Not far to the east the free flow of wealth has also engulfed Petare,
the giant settlement of breeze-block houses, sticking like a biblical
citadel to the hills of Caracas valley. Here there are new blue
water-cisterns on every house, concrete supports to halt mudflows,
Cuban
ophthalmologists, education and literacy programmes. There are
subsidised food stores, committees fighting for residents' property
rights, community sports facilities. But it is best not to leave home
after 7 pm: Petare is also home to a plague of drive-by shootings and
erratic teenage gunfire.
"Before it was static, now there's hope. Now it's all mobile", declares
Miren Eguiguren, a Basque emigrant who for thirty-seven years has
struggled to bring basic education and social services to the district
through the /Casa de Nazareno/ centre. "Everything is broken, and there
is total movement."
*Caracas**'s wonderland*
Venezuela, as many like to observe, tongue in cheek, is now a
"wonderland." The rhetoric emanating from President Hugo Chávez is of
revolution, socialism and, as he declared in a television _interview_ ,
a "war of all the people" against the pretensions of "imperialism". In
the country beyond the /Palacio de Miraflores/, fortunes are being made
at lightning pace, and the only blood-war is between the people, poor
against poor.
Condemnations of creeping dictatorship, meanwhile, rain down both from
abroad (foreign governments, international bodies) and at home (the new
student movement). Even two months before the free-to-air license for
Radio Caracas Televisión (_RCTV_ ) was rescinded in April 2007,
Condoleezza Rice had _accused_ Chávez of "destroying his own country,
economically, politically." The litany of power-concentration since the
December 2006 elections has indeed proved indigestible: the
congressional vote to hand eighteen-month "special powers" to the
president; the creation of a united ruling party (the _/Partido
S//o//cialista Unido de Venezuela/_ [4] ) that entails the effective
dissolution of others in broad sympathy with the "Bolivarian
revolution"; the creeping ideology of total militarisation; and the
venom directed towards any attempt at opposition. Accused by the
country's bishops of sponsoring a "Marxist-Leninist" takeover, Chávez
let rip in customary style: "either you're ignorant", he told the
priests, "or you're cheating, lying perverts."
Supporters of the president point to his ever increasing majority in
three presidential elections, and his enormous, undeniable popularity
in
deprived neighbourhoods. Both sides of the debate repeat the same old
axioms and historical references; there seems little room for nuance or
compromise. And to prove the point, his critics have unearthed a new
ideological bogeyman, supposedly cherished by certain /chavista/
ministers: the German-Mexican sociologist _Heinz Dieterich_ , whose
"21st-century socialism" entails the use of computer networks to decide
who should get what, providing the long-awaited
"mathematical-conceptual
solution of the problem of objective value."
The frenzied impasse over Chávez's democratic credentials or
digitalised
Marxism, however, utterly fails to capture the contradictions of the
Venezuelan street. Just as the president's socialism jostles uneasily
with the habits of an oil-rich state, the conviction that a new tyranny
is settling into place ignores abundant evidence that the government's
greatest battle, which it may be losing, is to keep control of its own
/proceso/. Venezuela may now be more or less democratic than during its
forty years of two-party oligarchy; the arguments (as a July 2007
_report_ by Coletta A Youngers for the _Washington Office on Latin
America_ underscores) cut both ways. But a truth that cannot be avoided
is that without effective steerage, a revolution - democratic, populist
or dictatorial - sinks little deeper than a television show. And it is
in the effort to make /chavismo/ stick, and the resistance this
produces, that the true identity of this regime will emerge.
*Two loopholes
*
It is crime, the leading concern of 85% of Venezuelans according to a
poll conducted in 2006, that most confounds the government's
expectations. Loath to punish the wayward poor, Chávez consistently
skirts the issue. If anything, his model for a solution can be found in
_/23 de Enero/_ (23 January), a district of mean tower-blocks and
hillside tenements in western Caracas, where tight community
organisation - including armed groups, such as the radical Tupamaros -
have made the streets relatively safe to walk.
Juan Contreras has lived all his life in the district. A veteran of the
leftwing _/Coordinadora Simón Bolívar/_, from which the Tupamaro
group
emerged, he now runs a community newspaper and radio station, occupying
a building that was once the local headquarters of the metropolitan
police. "I was the culprit for anything and everything that happened
here", he recalls. "The police came and took you to the station. Then
it
was whack, whack, whack, and when they'd whacked you twenty times,
they'd switch the television on."
On the day of an unannounced visit, dozens of young children are
listening to a classical musical recital in the courtyard where local
suspects were once dragged. Leashed monkeys play in a tree. Seventy
brand-new Chinese computers, all with broadband connections, sit idle
in
an adjoining hall; the electricity doesn't work, and the ministry is
not
picking up the phone. But Contreras is unfazed: "Never before in forty
years would we even have got computers!", he proclaims.
The /barrio/, however, is an exception. Around fifty people are killed
in Caracas every weekend, clogging public hospitals with the corpses of
young men: victims of revenge killings, gang wars, narcotic highs and
pure bad luck. Total murder statistics for the country suggest at least
16,000 are being killed each year; so far in 2007, this rate has risen
by 15%. Guns, a community teacher says in Petare, "are easier to buy
than a bag of flour", and the murder of choice is carried out now by an
adolescent pillion-passenger firing a pistol from a speeding motorbike.
"A few weeks ago, I was telling a 15-year-old kid from around here that
he had a nice face, so why was he involved in all this business",
recalls _Miren Eguiguren_. "But it was too late. He was shot dead a few
days ago. It was what he deserved. He'd killed ten people himself."
Comprehensive reform of the country's 135 different police forces is
pending, but few in the shanty-town /cerros/ around Caracas are ever
likely to trust officers long associated with "social cleansing",
corruption, and kidnapping. The sheer complexity of recasting the
country's security forces and judiciary instead generates systematic
inertia, at most punctuated by an occasional politically-motivated
purge, or a quick tamper with the courts - which often serves to
undermine judicial competence. Chávez is accused by his critics of
sympathising with criminal outlaws, yet his indulgence does not stretch
too far: convicted offenders still end up beached in Latin America's
most hellish jail system, short of space and food, where around 250
inmates have been killed so far this year.
For a revolution bent on encouraging solidarity and social ownership,
the current crime wave serves as a kind of manic, bipolar disorder.
Senior police officers, evidently ignorant of Bolivarian etiquette,
freely hand out their advice on how one should behave when driving
one's
car: "distrust accidents, distractions, and injured people in the
road",
one inspector recently told /El Universal /newspaper.
The siege of the egalitarian, cooperative ethic vaunted by Chávez and
his ministers is even more marked in the nation's economy. Vast sums of
_oil money_ have certainly reached the poorest areas, while also
spawning bridges across the Orinoco river, a new "socialist city", a
flyover to the airport and nine glimmering football stadia, created for
the _Copa America_ tournament of June-July 2007. Yet the outlay on such
investments - public spending has increased by 60% as a proportion of
GDP since 2000 - has brought, inevitably, an inflationary tide, which
the government is attempting to rein in through price controls, a fixed
currency-rate, debt emissions and nationalisations. "Rest assured, we
will not introduce any economic policy that affects the interests of
the
poor", finance minister _Rodrigo Cabezas_ has asserted.
His pledge, made on the heels of the International Monetary Fund's call
for an interest rate rise to 40%, must nevertheless be treated with
caution. For an economy drip-fed by the dollar revenues of oil exports,
protecting the poor has in practice incurred a great bloating of
imports, particularly food from Colombia and Brazil. Venezuela's own
farm sector, essential to Chávez's ideal of agrarian resettlement, is
hobbling along, stymied by its high prices and menaced by state
takeover. Instead of putting into place a system of progressive
taxation, the desperate race to keep purchasing power up has seen taxes
slashed.
Meanwhile, there is serious money to be made. No minister seems willing
to explain the treatment of billions of dollars in foreign bonds -
including the $4.2 billion of Argentine paper-debt bought over the last
two years - which are resold on the quiet, at the official
exchange-rate, to handpicked local banks. Their resale to Venezuelans
needing dollars, seemingly at the black market exchange-rate, nets 100%
profits.
The web of economic controls, social programmes and bilateral deals
with
foreign countries affords further opportunities for personal enrichment
at almost every level of officialdom. Cases cited by the press and
analysts are numerous and staggering: abuse of funds for poor people's
housing; a $100 million swindle in a deal to build Iranian factories;
the mismanagement of Fonden, the trust-fund from oil revenues destined
for social development, now totalling over $15 billion.
Even stripped of most of its powers, the national assembly - /chavista/
from head to toe - has made a modicum of effort to track government
spending. Its audit commission, however, is a regular target for
threats, while one of its members has endured a brief "express
kidnapping". "When it comes to extra money for the executive, we
approve
it overnight", explained the commission's chairman, Ángel Landeta.
"But
when it concerns controlling revenues, things change."
The feast of corrupt earnings, comparable in the opinion of one
academic
with excellent government contacts to the Sandinistas' annexation of
various Nicaraguan state companies in 1990 (the so-called /piñata/),
is
not a novelty in Venezuela; it is doubtful that it is worse than under
the infamous presidency of _Jaime Lusinchi_ of 1984-89. But this very
persistence of graft sits uncomfortably with a government whose
electoral base lies in the clamour for equality and respect, and which
obliges its military - whose officers run hundreds of state funds and
bodies - to chant everyday the new war-cry: /Patria, socialismo o
muerte/ (fatherland, socialism or death).
Teodoro Petkoff, editor of _/Tal Cual/_ newspaper and one of Chávez's
most incisive critics, baptises it "the government of Hummers and
Audis." As the new /chavista/ rich join old Venezuelan money in
shopping-trips to Louis Vuitton, the shame around exhibiting one's
wealth has started to fade. With a chortle, the 75-year-old _former
guerrilla_ leader pulls out the July 2007 edition of /Etiqueta/
magazine, bearing on its cover a young woman with a thick gold
bracelet.
Inside, Petkoff points to a photo-story on a wedding in Caracas's most
exclusive country-club, featuring the release of white doves, two
fireworks displays and a VIP suite, where illustrious guests such as
Chávez's interior minister and his former vice-president could
expatiate
in private.
*Sabotage and parallel states*
A former strategic assistant to the president, who spent three years
working in the _Miraflores Palace_ until 2006, declares that Chávez is
perfectly aware of his underlings' excesses. "Dozens of people", he
says, are employed by the president to monitor his ministries. But the
political dynamics of high office which he reveals suggest that one
man,
messianic though he might appear to his followers, is unable to force
through his desires. "My experience is that at most times, what Chávez
promises is not done."
Elected in 1998 after a bandwagon campaign, without a formal political
party structure supporting him, Chávez has long had to rely on the
state
apparatus he inherited, and the leaders of the pre-existing political
parties that have grouped behind him. Within the president's offices,
these factions spar with each other for spoils while mouthing an
impeccable faith in the revolution. The result, according to the former
adviser, is systematic "sabotage.... Those who really want to change
the
country are kicked out of power."
Increasingly isolated from his pack of hungry acolytes, Chávez readily
admits his own solitude. Speaking with the Associated Press in one
recent interview, he even appeared to have absorbed some of his
government's own dissonance: "my life doesn't belong to me."
The president's favoured alternative strategy, ritually deplored by his
opponents, has been to bypass the state apparatus entirely. A parallel
universe of government has emerged, structured first around the social
missions, now numbering fifteen, and reaching directly into the honey
pot of the state oil company /Petróleos de Venezuela SA/ _(PdVSA)_,
where presidential control is absolute and no media prying is
tolerated.
It would appear that the next step is the creation of 25,000 community
councils, funded straight from a presidential commission to the tune of
an estimated $3 billion a year, and effectively short-circuiting
municipal and regional authorities. Congress has been emasculated.
Pro-Chávez political parties are being fused into one. The national
reserve, Venezuela's 2-million-strong citizens' militia, is edging out
the _professional military_ from public duties; in July 2007, the
reserve's former chief, Gustavo Rangel Briceño, become the _defence
minister_.
As a result, and for the first time in over five years, both sides of
Venezuela's giant political chasm agree on one fundamental issue: the
state is not working as it should.
*Power and schisms*
There, however, the consensus ends. The principal ideologues of the
revolution trust that this parallel machinery - the "postmodern" state
in the words of _Juan Carlos Monedero_, a Spanish academic and
prominent
ideological aide to Chávez - will somehow devour the carcass of the
old
graft-tainted bureaucracy. In some cases, such as the extraordinarily
successful, Cuban-led /Barrio Adentro /health programme, the modest
octagonal clinics built in poor communities will act as the springboard
for reform that is due to end in a total reconstruction of the public
health service. In other cases, such as the new-look oil industry or
the
Bolivarian universities, critics round on official blacklists and a
debasement of professional standards. Meanwhile, anyone who has the
money rushes to the private sector: half of all private
health-insurance
policies are now contracted by state officials.
The multiple battles over state power and the place of revolution feed
straight into the future of Venezuela's democracy. Standing high in the
ranks of geopolitical superstardom, Chávez is usually portrayed by
foreign media - such as in his bid for indefinite re-election - as the
owner of a gargantuan ego. But on the ground, what matters more is his
avowed determination to make sure his political project outlives his
career: "Human beings are transitory", he declared in June. "The party
must be eternal, the most powerful revolutionary motor."
As the means to institutionalise his creed, Chávez has opted for an
ever
greater concentration of power, radiating outwards through the
community
councils and the PSUV party. The problem is that the returns on this
power are endlessly diminishing: in certain regions the new
5-million-strong party, apparently joined by every opportunist in the
land, has more members than people who voted for Chávez in the last
election. "The president has a tendency to centralise, with the idea
that he can supervise matters more directly", argues _Margarita López
Maya_, a highly respected _social historian_ from Caracas's Central
University. "But more centralisation ends in less capacity to control.
It's madness. You need checks and balances."
The genetic code of /chavismo/, however, is deeply charismatic. "If
there's a problem with the taxis, the taxi-drivers want to speak with
Chávez. If there's a protest of street sellers they want to speak with
Chávez", explains Contreras in the /23 de Enero /neighbourhood.
Inserting a free-thinking layer of authority between the president and
his /pueblo/ thus risks displeasing everybody. Should Chávez's grip on
power actually diminish as a result, there is absolutely no guarantee,
given the vested interests of party and state officials, that it will
be
replaced by a flow of participation from the communities below; should
it increase, the accusations of violations of democracy will mount, the
diversion of resources by Venezuela's new elite will continue, and the
Bolivarian movement will slowly but surely run into the ground.
Two other factors are set to play pivotal roles in the government's
evolution. Fattened on a diet of electoral victories, the components
parts of /chavismo/ have grown restive. Schisms and splits have always
characterised the movement, but the last few months have been thick
with
internal friction, at the heart of which is the very same military from
which the coup-leader of 1992 emerged. No one knows precisely the level
of opposition to Chávez within the armed forces, yet it is evident -
and
he admits it - that certain officers dislike him and his "war of the
all
the people" intensely. One retired general and stalwart supporter,
Alberto Müller Rojas, recently described the government as being in a
"pre-anarchic" state, with the president sitting atop "a nest of
scorpions". The outgoing defence minister Raúl Baduel, meanwhile,
mounted a strident attack on irresponsible wealth distribution during
his farewell speech in late July. Small wonder that the president tours
the world buying new weapons for his generals.
If the threat of a military coup is an immediate concern - and it was
the army which unseated Chávez in the brief 2002 putsch - then a more
slow-burning source of tension can be found in the questionable allure
of "21st century socialism". A visit to any of Caracas' hill
settlements
gives the lie to any notion that the poor long for collective
ownership:
small businesses operate from shadowy ground floors, while residents of
/23 de Enero/ plaster their slum houses with stucco and inlay them with
balustrades. Even Contreras, a life-long Marxist, is willing to let the
locals crave home improvements and upward mobility.
"Some call it socialism, some calls it communism or participative
democracy, but I guarantee that work, education, housing and leisure
are
the means to create the greatest sum of happiness for our people. You
choose the name you want."
Opinion-poll work in these communities has thrown up fascinating
insights. Far from looking to a collectivist future, the popular mood
appears satisfied with the damage inflicted on the status of
Venezuela's
old elites. In the words of Oscar Schemel, head of the Hinterlaces
agency - which has conducted over 200 focus groups across the country -
the era of "social revenge" by the poor has now ended; it is so far
uncertain what will replace it. "The new citizen is not a socialist,
but
a liberal. There was a struggle of classes, but it was not
antagonistic.
The poor did not want to annihilate the upper classes, but demanded a
new class relation: to be able to have what they have, to enjoy their
opportunities."
Hugo Chávez, however, is the child of antagonism. Throughout 2006, his
heckling of George Bush and veiled threats to established property
rights served to identify and demonise the old, Miami-bound class
enemy.
Schemel's research, which is unique in Venezuela, suggests this
approach
might be now be foundering on its own success: the mass anxiety, the
rush to arm the poor and the hysteria over a US invasion stirred by
Chávez are slowly losing their relevance to daily life to the extent
that /chavismo/ beds down in power.
"There's an incredible plan of control, manipulation and propaganda",
argues Schemel, insisting that crime and corruption form an integral
part of these control mechanisms. "But eventually this will contradict
the democratic culture of the country and the new aspirations. Chávez
has said that to be poor is good, and to be rich is bad. Over 80% of
Venezuelans reject this statement."
Reputedly stronger than ever, reportedly on the verge of a totalitarian
takeover, Chávez is in fact, for the first time since 2001, starting
to
face the contradictions of a movement born from a high tide of public
despair. Sticking fanatically to the evil of the empire and the war of
the people has served him well; the old opposition from Venezuela's
elite has been utterly destroyed. Somewhere within Chávez's movement,
however, there is bound to emerge over the next five to ten years a
challenge, be it through established party or state interests, a
military coup, or popular discontent from below. It may not look very
democratic. It may indeed be violent. But at some stage the revolution
must stop its tailspin.
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