The crowd at the corner of MLK Boulevard and Himes Avenue — not counting two uniformed police officers and one in plain clothes — numbered about 60 people. Their nationalities-in-solidarity: Venezuelan and Cuban. Their signs: hardly nuanced – most notably “Chavez = Castro + Hitler.” Their ardent message: Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s easily demonized, polarizing president, must go.
“We’re here to tell the world, ‘No more Chavez,'” said protest organizer Norma Camero Reno, a Temple Terrace attorney and one of an estimated 2,600 Venezuelan natives living in Hillsborough County. “He’s dangerous. He’s signed treaties with Iran. Sure, the U.S. makes mistakes, but we’ve got to take care of our hemisphere first. There has to be a leader. If not the U.S., who?”
What’s a super power to do?
Arguably, it’s the question of the ages for the U.S., especially in America’s own backyard. And nowhere, including Fidel-less Cuba, is this more apparent or more important than in The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the socialista South American nation with oil and attitude.
I was there for two weeks recently with the Washington-based Latin American Working Group, and while I wouldn’t presume to have divined all there is to know, I do feel confident in saying that Venezuela looks very much like a country in the midst of a sloppy, hybrid upheaval. “Revolution” is too dialectical a term.
You can’t always get milk or black beans; toilet-flushing can be a real crapshoot; inflation hovers near 25 percent; and an even-tempered discussion on oil-revenues-as- foreign-policy-priority is an oxymoron. But it has its own time zone (Eastern minus 30 minutes); satellite dishes dominate skylines; and gas goes for about 15 cents a gallon.
This is obviously not the zero-sum solution that Castro imposed on Cuba at the end of a gun barrel. This is a messy mix of bona fide ballot box, unwieldy bureaucracy, education and health commitments to the traditional “have nots” and swaggering, in-your-face nationalism combined with socialism, consumerism, idealism, pragmatism and populism. Sprawling, carbon emission-choked Caracas has five-star hotels, a financial district, high-end fashion, Chrysler Dodge dealers, over-the-top media, tony neighborhoods, Domino’s Pizza delivery, a spotless, world-class metro system, internet cafes and ubiquitous visages of Chavez, Che and Simon Bolivar.
It also features gridlock from hell, motorcycle mayhem, foreboding street crime and some of the worst slums anywhere. Caracas has relegated Bogota, Colombia, to the runner-up spot as South America’s most dangerous capital.
Venezuela is one of those Latin American countries that, until Chavez was elected in 1998, largely stayed under the geopolitical radar. What happened in Venezuela stayed in Venezuela.
Sure, it had the usual hemispheric syndrome: a negligible middle class, a majority of dark-skinned poor and an entrenched, largely white, minority upper class – plus endemic corruption, “Midnight Express” prisons and electorate-insulated politicians. However, this country of 26 million was stable; it loved baseball, beer, American fast-food franchises and T-backed bathers; it led the world in Miss Universe finalists; and it was a reliable energy source. Our kind of OPEC member.
The charismatic Chavez has become a geopolitical game-changer and unwelcome security variable for America, Venezuela’s biggest oil-trade partner. One upshot: the U.S. has been regularly upping the ante on aid to quasi governmental entities — such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Office for Transition Initiatives — that “promote democracy” in Venezuela without actually (illegally) intervening in a sovereign country’s domestic politics. Talk about fine lines.
Venezuela is also a volatile, border antagonist to Colombia, America’s South American surrogate.
For Venezuelans living in the teeming barrios and remote rural areas, Chavez is the avatar of hope. Illiteracy has been virtually eliminated, and infant mortality rates are down during his tenure.
For political incumbents, the business community, the private media and the traditionally educated, professional class of Venezuela, Chavez is a worst-case scenario. There aren’t enough upsides to an authoritarian enamored of nationalization. It’s hardly happenstance that the ranks of Venezuelans in Florida, especially Miami, have been swelling for nearly a decade.
There is no neutrality; no political DMZ. Chavez, 54, is the personification of polarization. He’s already survived a coup attempt (2002), a devastating strike/lock-out (2003), a Recall Referendum (2004) and an ongoing, opposition-media drumbeat. He was re-elected in 2006.
“Inflation is bad, there are shortages, this is not working,” said Ingrid Melizan Lanser, the coordinator of educational programs for Fundacion Cisneros, the media conglomerate owned by billionaire Gustavo Cisneros. “Chavez is embarrassing in some of the things he says and does. We are stuck with him until at least 2012.”
But, interestingly enough, Melizan Lanser, hardly a prototypical Chavista , voted for Chavez – the first time. She said the festering poverty and intractable, third-world housing that dot the hillsides surrounding Caracas were demeaning reminders of derelict priorities. “Nobody ever did anything,” she sighed. “We needed a change from the past. He had appeal — but no more.”
Schools, Clinics and Hope
Then there’s Carolina Bello, wife and mother of two, who lives in a modest house at the base of a citrus hill in Charallave outside Caracas in northern Venezuela. Her husband, Emilio, is a bus driver. She talked about what the Bolivarian Revolution has meant to her, and why she was grateful. She mentioned access to schools and health clinics and community councils. When she got to “hope,” tears welled up and she sobbed audibly and reverently about “a brown man with a mole” who was her president.
This is what Chavez has tapped into. He doesn’t look like a Spanish land baron. He’s mestizo. The indigenous people see themselves in their president. As do others: An estimated 60 per cent of the population is of African ancestry.
When Chavez called President George W. Bush “Satan” at the United Nations, Americans saw a buffoonish caricature. When he insulted King Juan Carlos, Spaniards saw a Latin lout. But Chavez’s constituency of workers and the dirt poor — and it is a majority — saw one of their own standing up to the imperialist bully and a classic symbol of colonialism.
The challenge for Chavez, it would seem, is meeting the lofty expectations he, himself, ushered in with his people-empowering call for a “Bolivarian Revolution.”
The plan to keep expanding and upgrading the (Mision Barrio Adentro) health clinics as well as eventually replacing the thousands of Cuban doctors and related health-care personnel must work. (Even the fiercely partisan, opposition Federacion Medica Venezolana concedes the Barrio Adentro approach is a “good idea,” but lacks the properly qualified people — including Cuban doctors of “unknown quality” — for successful implementation.)
Improvements in housing, crime rates and inflation must be manifest. Venezuela, the fifth largest oil exporter in the world, has a petro-skewed economy that still cries out for diversification. Using oil revenues for weapons purchases as well as a barter-and-leverage commodity throughout Latin American must be seen by the disaffected as a meaningful benefit.
Chavez’s poll ratings have slumped recently, which government officials attribute to bureaucratic bungling and resultant frustrations. And the Chavez administration lost an important referendum vote (51%-49%) four months ago.
While it was vote up or down on a 69-amendment proposal, no one denies that a critical provision was the one to remove the president’s term limits. It’s no secret that Chav
ez thinks 2012 is too soon to call it a career at the Miraflores presidential palace. And no one thinks that referendum won’t be revisited soon with a down-sized package and a major, get-out-the-Chavista-vote campaign starring Chavez, his own best advocate — especially on television. Chavez even has his own TV show, the Sunday afternoon “Alo, Presidente,” a quirky, often interminable, paean to his father-figure status among true believers.
Chances are that channeling Bolivar, who distrusted the U.S. and dreamed of uniting the continent, will only go so far with those expecting their piece of the action. Rallying cries against “Neo-liberalism” and all things Adam Smith won’t obviate the need for bread-and-butter-issue help. And Venezuelan oil, among the most expensive to extract in the world, is particularly vulnerable to recessionary ripples because of Chavez’s ambitious domestic agenda.
Phil Gunson, who covers Latin America for The Economist magazine and is based in Caracas, thinks Chavez is teetering politically. “Only high oil prices stand between this government and a really frightening economic, social and political collapse,” opined Gunson. “And the worst thing is there’s no organized alternative ready to take over if the government implodes.”
And, yet, there’s no gainsaying the impact of clinics and schools where there were none. Or higher education access for those traditionally excluded. Or community television and public radio for areas previously considered too unimportant. Or the visceral power of “hope” for those who see the face of Venezuela in “a brown man with a mole.”