Liberator or Castro clone?
By Sharon Behn, The
Washington Times, October 16, 2005.
CARACAS, Venezuela -- Flush with oil money
and political power, Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez is firmly implanting his socialist
-- and anti-American -- vision at home and
buying influence in Latin America and the
Caribbean.
A former paratrooper who spent time in
prison for leading a failed 1992 coup, Mr.
Chavez delights in portraying himself as
the Latin American counter to the United
States, a modern-day Simon Bolivar -- the
19th-century Venezuelan-born general who
freed the region from Spanish rule.
He calls the United States a "terrorist
state," has ended exchanges with the
U.S. military and sold off Venezuelan financial
assets in the United States.
"The United States is the champion
of double standards. The United States government
defends terrorism," Mr. Chavez said
at the United Nations last month, while
calling on the world body to move its headquarters
to another nation.
"They talk of the fight against the
terrorism, but they commit terrorism, state
terrorism," he said.
In Venezuela, he appeals to impoverished
masses with free education, health care
and other social programs funded by his
nation's oil wealth.
That, plus a populist message that stokes
widespread poor vs. rich resentment, makes
him untouchable at the polls.
Mr. Chavez was freely elected to office
in 1998 and reconfirmed in the 2004 referendum.
He insists that everything he does is in
accordance with the new constitution, also
approved by voters during his tenure.
A close friend of Cuban leader Fidel Castro,
he supplies other nations in the Andean
and Caribbean region with oil at below-market
prices, a largesse he believes will bring
him closer to his Bolivarian dream of a
united greater Caribbean region -- with
him at the helm.
"He is a revolutionary that wants
to resuscitate an epoch that no longer exists,"
said political analyst Manuel Felipe Sierra.
"He wants to take on Castro's mantle
as the anti-U.S. leader in Latin America,
except that he is younger, and he has oil
during an energy crisis. Oil is a political
tool," said Mr. Sierra.
Mr. Chavez turned 51 in July.
At home, his government is taking over
land and infrastructure after declaring
age-old property deeds invalid or areas
underproductive, broadening central control
of the judiciary, the economy and the military.
To his critics, Mr. Chavez is leading
a militaristic left-wing "social revolution"
that is ripping his nation apart.
Politics -- and the future of oil-rich
Venezuela after decades of right-wing pro-business
rule -- has become a bitter feud, and Mr.
Chavez appears to be winning.
He projects a relaxed, chummy approach,
especially during his weekly television
show "Alo Presidente," where he
can appear one week dressed as a physician
and the next in a finely tailored suit.
For example, he kicked off one recent
show by announcing that he is opening a
military hospital to the public, emphasizing
that even the nurses and hospital workers
had not been able to receive medical attention
there before.
It is the kind of populist dig against
former governments that ignored the underprivileged,
which has won him adoring support among
the country's poor.
"Life has changed a lot," says
Benedicta Garcia, 59, who displays Mr. Chavez's
framed picture on the wall of her tiny concrete
house, right next to the pope and Simon
Bolivar.
"Before, we had to go to a hospital,
and it would take all day and night, just
to lower a fever," says Mrs. Garcia,
who runs a government-funded soup kitchen
for about 170 people, most of them children,
from her home.
"Now, when one of my grandsons was
sick, they cured him, and I didn't have
to pay for a bus, and the doctor is very
nice. They come to the house if you need
them," she adds, picking through a
red plastic basin of black beans that would
be served out to the neighborhood the next
day.
U.S.-trained economist Alejandro Grisanti
says, two-thirds of the population lives
in poverty.
Rich and poor
Caracas, a city of high-rises, shopping
malls and wealthy Spanish-style houses ringed
by soaring green mountains -- is scarred
by miles of hillside shantytowns.
For the residents of these jumbled burrows
of brick and cement, poor access to health
care, jobs and food has been a way of life
for decades.
The benefits of years of pro-U.S., market-oriented
economic policies never quite made it to
the "barrios."
Then along came Mr. Chavez with his fiery
anti-capitalist speeches, his vision of
a social revolution and a national budget
awash with oil dollars to carry it all out.
Venezuela, a prominent member of the Organization
of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),
is the biggest oil producer in the Western
Hemisphere and a key supplier of petroleum
to the United States.
Critics of Mr. Chavez accuse him of creating
a left-wing, oil-dependent military oligarchy
to replace an old right-wing, oil-dependent
oligarchy.
They say the slums are havens for drug
smugglers, gunrunners and violent gangs,
and that Marxist rhetoric resounds off the
rooftops.
"What is happening here is 'Matrix
Reloaded.' We've seen this picture before,"
says Leopoldo Lopez, mayor of the wealthy
Caracas neighborhood of Chacao, referring
to a popular movie that features a battle
between good and evil.
There is no long-term sustainable investment,
he argues. Instead, there is merely government
largess, "a distribution of wealth,
generated by oil, by the state to society."
Thanks to the close relationship between
Mr. Chavez and Mr. Castro, about 15,000
Cuban doctors live in slums around Venezuela,
providing free medical care, dedicating
their afternoons to house calls.
The soup-kitchen program and the Cuban
doctor project are but two examples of oil-funded
social-welfare efforts by Mr. Chavez.
Free literacy classes have been an enormous
success.
Teary senior citizens, proudly able to
read for the first time in their lives,
have had a huge emotional effect among those
who felt pushed aside by previous governments.
There are subsidized pharmacies and subsidized
community supermarkets, called Mercal, for
those who cannot afford the abundance of
local and imported goods available to those
of means.
And just so poor Venezuelans don't forget
who gave them all this bounty, each bag
of corn flour, sugar and beans has an article
of Venezuela's new constitution printed
on it, with cheery mottoes such as, "Now
our resources are being invested in the
people."
Even Mr. Chavez's adversaries acknowledge
that the medical, food and literacy programs
are a good first step. For his supporters,
Mr. Chavez is a hero.
"If they kill that man, there will
be blood," says Mrs. Garcia, referring
to a recent call -- later retracted -- by
evangelist Pat Robertson for U.S. forces
to assassinate Mr. Chavez.
Patiently watching men shouldering large
bags of free potatoes and vegetables up
the steep concrete stairs from the road
to her house and soup kitchen, she says:
"We love our president. We will give
our lives for him."
Angry landowners
That adoration stops at the doorsteps of
landowners, whose property is being taken
away under a veneer of constitutional legitimacy
and handed over to landless peasants, of
activists jailed as political prisoners
for daring to challenge Mr. Chavez and his
political backers, and of the small, emergent
middle class.
"He is a disgraceful dog," says
Pedro, who runs a small company outside
the city of Valencia. He asked that his
last name be withheld.
"I hope the Americans get us out of
this mess. Look at him, giving oil away,
when we have so much poverty here,"
he says, pointing out straggly villages
alongside a potholed road running across
the ranch country in eastern Venezuela.
Labor leader Saul Lozano Contreras, 48,
is one such victim of Mr. Chavez's "revolution."
His spine is a nightmare of lesions and
damaged disks that he says was caused by
repeated beatings. He has spent the past
year in an all-tiled hospital room in the
border town of San Cristobal, in extreme
pain.
At first handcuffed to the bed, Mr. Lozano
is now allowed to pace between two beds.
A TV, boxes of medication and a cell phone
make up the rest of his life.
"I am a political prisoner because
I think differently than the government
of Chavez," he says, after a brief
meeting with Caracas-based opposition journalist
Patricia Poleo, who leads the fight for
the rights of Venezuela's political prisoners.
Mr. Lozano is a die-hard labor leader who
studied in the United States, Israel and
Russia and led the worker movement in western
Venezuela until his arrest in 2003.
He is on month 29 of a six-year sentence
for supporting an unsuccessful April 11,
2002, coup against Mr. Chavez.
"I fought hardL; I fought a lot of
corruption, in the local government ...
I was an object they had to eliminate,"
he says. "I never did anything that
makes me deserve being in jail."
Mr. Lozano's case is currently before
the Organization of American States.
Mr. Chavez denies that the country has
any political prisoners, but those who visibly
stood up against him in the coup or in the
subsequent referendum on his leadership
have found themselves either in jail, out
of a job or hard-pressed to get a bank loan.
Big-time cattle ranchers, part of the
country's elite, have found themselves targeted
in a land-expropriation campaign that is
spreading to smaller holdings.
Government entities are questioning their
deeds, taking away land and distributing
them to landless "campesinos."
Land grab
Ranchers complain that the land grab is
being carried out without due process. The
government insists it is following the constitutionally
backed revolution championed by Mr. Chavez.
Now, any property or plant considered
by the government to be "unproductive"
or "underproductive" is open to
being taken over.
"It sets a very bad precedent because
this is private property," says a 34-year-old
Argelino, a veterinarian from Maracaibo,
in northwest Venezuela. "Anyone who
has a house or land can have it taken. And
they are not impartial. They are biased."
Political opposition to Mr. Chavez is
fractured. Members of the opposition parties
concede that their organizations are badly
organized and underfunded.
So far, even the Primero Justicia (First
Justice) opposition party, which is ready
to back a rival presidential candidate next
year, does not have a clear alternative
political and economic platform.
Mr. Lopez, the mayor of the Caracas neighborhood
of Chacao, warns of the dangers of Mr. Chavez's
tightening his economic and political stranglehold
over the country.
"What we are seeing is the progressive
control of the state over the economy and
over society" by a government that
is increasingly military in its profile
and its demeanor, yet operates under a civilian
constitution, says Mr. Lopez, a handsome
young graduate of Harvard's John F. Kennedy
School of Government and a member of the
First Justice party.
Bureaucratic control is growing. A foreigner
changing money at a bank, instead of on
the black market, has to submit two sets
of thumbprints and several sets of papers.
Anyone wanting a restaurant receipt has
to write down his ID number.
Wary of tightening secret police control,
some Venezuelans have several sets of phones
-- at least one of them untraceable.
"It is harder to prove a degree on
intimidation that I feel is growing through
the country. Those that feel fear are not
willing to admit it publicly," says
Maria Corina Machado, who works for the
civil rights watchdog group Sumate.
The economy is still growing. Shopping
malls with the latest fashions and world-class
restaurants are packed. Plenty of new sport
utility vehicles are on the road, and tourists
still flock to beautiful island beaches
off the coast.
Economic and political analysts warn that
oil-funded welfare programs -- while popular
and necessary -- are not creating lasting
economic structures the country needs to
sustain growth when oil revenues eventually
dry up.
Parallel military
Mr. Chavez has established a 2-million-strong
national reserve force that parallels the
military, and some say it could counter
the military.
He has consolidated control of the judiciary
and legislative assembly, and he is centralizing
economic control and creating a government-dependent
population, critics warn.
Mr. Sierra, the political analyst, says
that communist groups working in the shantytowns
are providing badly needed services, but
he points out "that comes with an indoctrination
process and an increasing level of militarism."
One older woman who fled communism in
her native China 50 years ago to settle
in Venezuela, when asked about Mr. Chavez's
ambitions, retorted: "We voted for
a change, not a revolution."
Mr. Chavez's foreign policy has taken
a sharp anti-U.S. turn.
And because Venezuela is the fourth-largest
provider of oil to the United States and
the fifth-largest producer worldwide, Mr.
Chavez feels free to say whatever he pleases.
In an apparent push to increase its leverage
over the United States, the Venezuelan government
is searching for new export markets while
consolidating ties with Cuba, China, India,
Iran and other Latin American countries.
It also is reconsidering current oil exploration
and production contracts with large private
U.S. oil companies and considering awarding
them to non-U.S. firms.
Foreign Minister Ali Rodriguez told The
Washington Times that Venezuela was distributing
below-cost oil to Cuba and the Caribbean
while signing a series of agreements with
China in the oil and agricultural sectors.
Economist Manuel Ochoa says there is concern
that Mr. Chavez is "preparing the oil
sector for a potential conflict with the
United States."
But Mr. Rodriguez rejects that characterization.
"We are part of OPEC, and one of the
definitions of OPEC is not to use oil as
a political weapon," he says.
But, the foreign minister adds, "in
the case of armed aggression against Venezuela,"
all bets are off.
The oil weapon
Mr. Chavez recently threatened to cut
off Venezuela's oil flow to the United States
if Washington were to invade the Latin American
nation.
"Relations with China are excellent,"
Mr. Rodriguez said in a recent interview
in his office in Caracas.
China has signed agreements to invest
in the exploration and production of Venezuelan
oil and gas.
China's ambassador to Venezuela recently
told a local newspaper that his country
was not importing Venezuelan oil because
of the distance between the two countries
meant that China was not its natural market.
But Mr. Ochoa says, "There is talk
of building a pipeline through Colombia
to the Pacific. We would lose a lot of money
because of the transshipment, but trade
and economic concerns are secondary to the
ideological, geopolitical and regional leadership
of Hugo Chavez."
"Chavez is using all this to become
independent of the U.S. and develop a more
aggressive foreign policy," says the
Oxford-educated economist, who now teaches
in Caracas' Catholic University. "He
is using oil as a weapon of diplomacy."
Mr. Rodriguez insists that tensions between
Caracas and Washington were just a misunderstanding.
"The problems that are upsetting
both countries should not exist, because
there are substantial common interests,"
he says.
"The major problem, in my opinion,
is rooted in the deep misunderstanding that
exists in the dominant circle of the U.S.
administration over the political process
in Venezuela."
Sharon Behn reported this story from Venezuela
from Aug. 26 to Sept. 16.
|