The Hugo Factor
Venezuela's firebrand president seems stronger than ever. Why the conventional wisdom may be dead flat wrong
CARACAS, VENEZUELA--The palm trees and 19th-century, British-made, forged-iron fountain that grace the courtyard of Venezuela's neoclassical Congress buildings offer a cool respite from the chronic noise and pollution of this capital's historic center. Today, the white-and-lime-colored structure, once the site of a convent, is home to a most unusual institution--a freely elected legislature whose 167 members are, each and every one, government loyalists.
This unprecedented situation in a nominally democratic country resulted from the December election boycott by Venezuela's opposition parties to protest what they feared would be a rigged vote, a charge some believe was a cover for their anticipated defeat. Whatever the case, their last-minute withdrawal prompted most voters to stay home and produced a rubber-stamp legislature for the country's fiery leftist president, Hugo Chavez.
Polarization. The election results further consolidated power for Chavez, who allies himself with Cuba's Fidel Castro and gleefully flaunts his bad-boy reputation with Washington. But even as he uses influence and money to push other Latin America nations leftward, political watchers say Chavez may face a serious domestic backlash. "The conditions now exist," says Luis Vicente Leon, head of the Datanalisis polling organization, "for the radicalization of the debate and the formation of extreme groups to get rid of Chavez."
This country of 25 million people--whose importance is magnified by being the world's fifth-largest oil exporter (and fourth-largest U.S. oil supplier)--has become increasingly polarized in the seven years since Chavez was first elected president. "There exists in Venezuelan society today what we have never seen before, the division and resentment between social classes," remarked a young woman who would give only her first name, Mariana.
Since Chavez took office, the country has gone through a cascade of political tumult: the adoption of a new Constitution that many consider antidemocratic, a failed coup attempt, an unsuccessful recall referendum that large segments of society say was fixed, and a costly two-month oil-workers strike. For disaffected Venezuelans, their president is simply illegitimate. "His only objective is to remain in power; he does not have a model for the country," says Miguel Henrique Otero, editor of El Nacional, one of Caracas's leading dailies. Rejecting any Chavez comparison with the early days of the Cuban Revolution, he adds: "It's just the opposite. There is no ideology--they just want to steal and get rich."
Chavez says his goal is to create a 21st-century socialism, a nebulous and ill-defined mix of Soviet collectivism, Chinese-style capitalism, and Cuban populism. To date, his socialist model has tried to sidestep private enterprise by setting up nearly 7,000 state-financed cooperatives employing some 200,000 persons, creating state enterprises, and increasing government controls on the banking sector and the oil industry, which accounts for 80 percent of export earnings. The Venezuelan president also pushed a restrictive press law through the National Assembly and packed the Supreme Court by increasing the number of its judges from 20 to 32. Four of the five members of the National Electoral Council are Chavez loyalists.
For the average Venezuelan, however, perhaps the most troublesome aspect of his "Bolivarian Revolution," named after Simon Bolivar, the 19th-century independence hero, are Chavez's harsh verbal attacks against private ownership--although, in fact, few acres have been collectivized and only a handful of abandoned factories expropriated. Chavez put a halt to the exercise and stopped talking about the issue after polls showed that the vast majority of Venezuelans favor private property. "This is not the Cuba of Batista. This is not an island," says Cesar Perez Vivas, the secretary general of the center-right Social Christian Party known as Copei, referring to Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator overthrown by Castro. "A very strong base of democratic values exists here."
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."
The key question now is how the president will use his undivided control of the government. Pointing out that he failed to inspire his supporters to vote in the parliamentary elections, some analysts see serious trouble ahead for the mercurial president. With deep divisions within the Chavez camp, a hard-core revolutionary wing is likely to demand even more radical reforms now that it controls all of the country's political institutions. "It will be easier for dissidence to develop within the Chavez camp itself than for the political opposition to damage him,"says Alberto Garrido, who has written several books about the president. "The opposition does not know what to do; it has neither political leadership nor strategic direction."
The most serious threat to Chavez, a former lieutenant colonel, may come from the military. Although he purged the Army of officers who showed dubious loyalty during the failed 2002 coup, and many retired military personnel have been put to work within the bureaucracy, large segments of the armed forces are unhappy with the close ties to Castro and Chavez's socialist initiatives.
Chavez has proved to be a canny political operator who has outfoxed the opposition time and again. Whether his luck will hold is the key question facing Venezuela.
POPULATION: 25.4 million
LIVING IN POVERTY: 54 pct.
OIL RESERVES: 76 billion barrels (plus oil sands)
This story appears in the January 30, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.