The Ominous Future Of Hugo Chavez

The posters and graffiti, still blaring from the walls of every town and city in Venezuela, couldn’t be simpler. Roughly half scream “Si!” and the other half “No!”

They’re souvenirs of February’s referendum on the personal future of President Hugo Chavez, and by default on the political future of his oil-rich nation. In the first months of 2009, politics in Venezuela came down to a bluntly limited choice: saying yes or no to the whims of Chavez, who won the backing of 54 percent of the electorate.

The referendum annulled Venezuela’s constitutional limit of two six-year terms in the presidency. The country’s head of state since his election in 1998, six years after he led a failed military coup, Chavez says he hopes to remain in office beyond 2030.

Some foreign observers see the vote as a crucial victory for the left, the consolidation of a new politics-for-the-poor amidst the ongoing crisis of global capitalism. The influence of Chavez , thanks in part to his generous distribution of petrodollars abroad, now extends across much of Latin America, where his “Bolivarian Revolution” is hailed as the laboratory of 21st century socialism.

Up close, it looks far less benevolent.

THE STREETS OF CARACAS
What a visitor sees in the streets – especially in greater Caracas, the capital and home to a quarter of the nation’s population – are classic signs of a personality cult to rival that of North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, and the ominous hallmarks of entrenched totalitarianism disguised as social reform.

The image of Chavez is everywhere, grinning and raising his hand in a clenched-fist salute on thousands of government buildings, schools and billboards. The effect is a constant reminder that the revolution is synonomous with a single leader.

Also like Kim Jong-il, Chavez has organized a vast army of enforcers and informers, the so-called “people’s militia,” whose ostensible purpose is to safeguard the revolution’s gains and provide security to the public. Militia units of half a dozen or so armed men, without uniforms or insignias, are posted at nearly every major intersection in Venezuelan cities.

“We’re terrified of them. You never know what they might ask if they stop you – how you voted in the referendum, for instance – or what they might do if they don’t like the answer,” a Caraqueno postal worker told me. He himself had been robbed at gunpoint several times by men he recognized as members of the people’s militia.

In Merida, a city 300 miles west of Caracas in the Venezuelan Andes, residents spoke of an entire highrise university housing complex that had been seized and occupied by militiamen, who now use it as their operations base. “It’s dangerous to go anywhere near it,” said an engineering student.

As for the impact on public security, a horrifying set of numbers tells the story. When Chavez became president in 1998, Venezuela already had a homicide rate of 30 murders annually per 100,000 people, more than five times the figure for the gun-toting United States. In the decade of Chavez rule, the rate has doubled to 60 nationwide, and is now estimated to have reached 160 homicides per 100,000 per year (or a total of roughly 8,000) in greater Caracas.

In 2006, almost 13,000 Venezuelans were known to be murdered. Many more, in the festering shantytown “barrios” that have mushroomed over the urban landscape, go unreported.

The barrios are a key constituency in the Bolivarian Revolution, which is named for the Venezuelan who led South America’s colonial insurgency against the Spanish in the early 19th century. Mindful of his base, Chavez has launched highly publicized initiatives in the shantytowns.

Special “missions” now provide free or inexpensive medical services to impoverished slum-dwellers who had little access to health care in the past.
The services are genuine and long overdue. Yet the missions should not be confused with a broad wave of updated socialist reform, the new model promised by Bolivarian rhetoric.

INSIDE AN ERRATIC REVOLUTION
Symbolic nationalizations have occurred over the past six months in the rice industry, and in the management of highways, ports and airports. Apart from rice, the impact of these steps on poorer Venezuelans is likely to be negligible. But they are essential to the continued extension of Chavez’s personal power.

Meanwhile, large parts of the infrastructure, including what passes for a comprehensive public transit system, not only remain private but are often controlled by presidential cronies. At the end of the work day in Caracas, enormous lines form at bus stops from which hundreds of such companies transport workers to and from distant hilltop barrios. In the absence of a more rational system, many of the poorest are forced to commute two or three hours in each direction. The frustration shows in their faces as dusk falls, along with sheer exhaustion and the anxieties of night in the most dangerous city-center on Earth.

To make up for a projected budget deficit – the result of falling oil prices—the government has ordered a 33 percent increase in the value added tax, which falls most heavily on low-income earners. It is accompanied by a 20 percent increase in the minimum wage, but inflation is expected to exceed last year’s 32 percent.

Despite uneven delivery on his revolutionary promises, Chavez has tightened his grip, year after year, through relentlessly divisive media campaigns. They pit the barrios against an increasingly demoralized middle class, and even more effectively, Venezuela’s small towns against its cities.

Virtually every large population center voted “no” in the February referendum, despite a sustained government assault on the opposition media, widespread intimidation tactics by militia thugs and adroit manipulation of class resentments. The loudest “si” came from the rural countryside, where conditions are frequently more impoverished than those in urban slums.

“There is no serious opposition, fighting for the middle ground, because there is no effective middle in Venezuela anymore,” said a political scientist at one of the nation’s top universities. “We’ve have been totally polarized.”

What gives poignancy to the vanished center, in economic life as well as politics, is that Venezuela has every reason – except politics – to be a solid, comfortably middle class society.

In addition to massive oil reserves that have made it an energy giant for more than a century, the country boasts significant deposits of gold, iron, aluminum and other valuable minerals, a strategic location at the northeast corner of South America, and a dazzling 1,800-mile Caribbean coastline that should be one of the world’s principal winter vacation destinations.

With a landscape that ranges from the pristine jungles of the Orinoco Delta and the Amazon Basin, to vast cattle grazing plains and the towering Andes, Venezuela is the size of Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom combined.

Its 26.4 million inhabitants ought to be among the globe’s richest and most complacent. Instead, they are mostly poor, deeply divided and immersed in endess violence.

CLOUDS ON THE FOREIGN HORIZON
Many progressives on both sides of the Atlantic, few of whom have ever traveled to Venezuela, accept at face value the claims of the Bolivarian Revolution. Their willingness to believe has been augmented by Chavez’s carefully wrought identity as a fervent anti-American, rivaled only by one of his favorite allies, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Whatever charges might be leveled at the volatile Iranian president, hypocrisy is not one of them. His antagonism for the U.S. Great Satan is a matter of consistent state policy and not merely political symbolism.

Under Chavez, by contrast, the commercial reality behind shrill anti-American speeches is an export policy weighted overwhelmingly toward close American ties. More than 1.4 million of the 1.9 million barrels of oil exported daily from Venezuela are shipped straight to the United States, which remains the country’s number one overall trading partner.

That contradiction didn’t effect Chavez’s standing so long oil fetched $100 or more per barrel, and huge windfall profits were available as a tool of foreign policy. But the value of a barrel of crude has plummeted to roughly a third of its $147 peak in 2008, and the coffers of the Bolivarian Revolution are rapidly emptying.

The looming question today is whether a cash-strapped Hugo Chavez will be able to maintain an outsized role abroad – notwithstanding his constitutionally limitless mandate at home.

Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5