The Hugo Factor
Venezuela's firebrand president seems stronger than ever. Why the conventional wisdom may be dead flat wrong
Plots. Whatever Chavez-style socialism may turn out to represent, there is a sense of deja vu in Caracas. As in Cuba, everything that goes wrong, from the recent arrest of two Venezuelan businessmen in Miami for allegedly trying to smuggle arms into the country to the high abstention rate in the recent elections, is part of an American plot to overthrow the regime. Chavez, whose live weekly television program may run as long as six hours, speaks endlessly about American imperialism. In the Caracas subway and on some major avenues, posters can be seen with quotes from Bolivar claiming that the United States appears "destined by providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty."
Yet even Chavez's most outspoken critics readily admit that his charisma and revolutionary rhetoric have touched a chord with many of Venezuela's poor, who represent 54 percent of the population and have long been shut out of the country's political and economic life . "A lot of poor people feel understood and represented by Chavez," says Perez Vivas, "even if they don't receive anything."
But since Chavez established his so-called outreach missions to the poor in 2003, many of Venezuela's poor have concrete reason to believe that this government cares about them. At the Fabricio Ojeda mission in the hills of Caracas's Catia neighborhood, which one bus driver described as "hell's antechamber," workers like Milagro Correa praise Chavez. "I was a housewife and never left my home. Here I found an additional source of income for my family,"she said while working at the mission's shoe cooperative, which was trying to fill an order of 10,000 pairs for the Cuban government. "He is the only president who has not been afraid to come to the barrios, to give to the people what is theirs."
Besides the shoe cooperative, the Fabricio Ojeda mission, named after an assassinated guerrilla leader, also includes a textile plant, a subsidized supermarket, and a modern, air-conditioned clinic. But perhaps the most impressive of the government's social programs can be seen inside the octagonal, two-story brick buildings constructed in hundreds of poor neighborhoods. In these local health centers, Cuban doctors provide services to residents living in previously neglected areas. With world oil and natural gas prices unlikely to drop significantly anytime soon, Chavez will most likely be able to continue his largess for some time to come.
Influence. Not content with carrying out his Bolivarian Revolution at home, Chavez has been using the huge windfall from oil profits, an estimated $20 billion last year alone, to make friends and influence people. He bought $1.5 billion of Argentine debt; sells oil at much reduced prices to Caribbean countries, including Cuba; and, in a political stunt, has even shipped cheap heating fuel to the poor in New York and Massachusetts. To Washington's consternation, Chavez is trying to buy nuclear power reactors from either Argentina or Brazil, and he has forged close ties with Iran and China. "He clearly controls the streets of Latin America," Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, said in a telephone interview. "Whatever the leaders may feel, it is Chavez who is the man of the hour."
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