2/3 Hugo Chávez and Petro Populism
Guerrero started supporting Chávez in 1992, on that fateful day when the then-unknown 37-year-old colonel launched a failed coup of his own. When defeat appeared imminent, Chávez surrendered. To avoid a bloodbath he went on television and asked his compatriots who were still holding two cities to put down their weapons. During that short live broadcast Chávez did two things that electrified the Venezuelan imagination. First, he took personal responsibility for the botched coup. This seemed to many viewers like a significant break from the standard political tradition of lying and blaming others for failure. Then, in explaining the defeat, Chávez said, "For now, the objectives that we have set for ourselves have not been achieved." During the next two years, while Chávez was in prison studying, that key phrase--"for now," or por ahora in Spanish--became a rallying cry, a slogan of defiance painted on walls, a talisman of hope in an otherwise squalid and corrupt political landscape. Guerrero's sentiments, down to the details about the coup and the por ahora speech, were echoed again and again in dozens of interviews throughout some of Caracas's poorest slums. The majority of people here--ranging from formerly apolitical housewives to hard-core veterans of the urban guerrilla movements of the 1970s--revere President Chávez. They view him as a political saint, a savior, the embodiment of a new national ideal. But through Guerrero's open front door we can see the Modernist towers of offices, banks, hotels and luxury apartments in the other Caracas, a city that has grown fat on the vast oil fortunes flowing from Venezuela's subsoil. It is this contrast between rich and poor--a contrast so visually obvious as to make the landscape of Caracas feel almost didactic--that animates Venezuelan politics. And in the other Caracas, the one with the country clubs, the citizens hate Chávez with an ardor as strong as the devotion one finds for him in the barrios. Just as the urban poor and campesinos love Chávez because of his swarthy, indigenous looks, tight curly hair and his rough, down-to-earth talk, so too are the wealthier classes driven apoplectic with rage by the fact that their president looks likes a construction worker or cab driver. For six years Chávez and his supporters have battled this opposition, an enemy that Chávez has nicknamed los escuálidos, or "the weaklings." But the opposition has not always been so weak. It includes the privately owned mass media, which have been virulently and propagandistically hostile to the government, devoting days at a time to commercial-free attacks on it as "totalitarian" and "Castro communist." There was the armed coup, then the oil strike, which cost the economy an estimated $7.5 billion and led to severe shortages of gas, food and beer. As one consultant in the Planning Ministry said in all seriousness: "I thought the day we ran out of beer would be the day the country fell into anarchy and civil war." There was also a prolonged public protest by a group of respected former generals who urged active soldiers to rebel. Then there was a series of violent protests by rightist street fighters calling themselves the Guarimbas, who set up burning barricades during early 2004. Despite all this, Chávez and his political allies have won seven national ballots, including the approval of a new Constitution, an overhaul of the notoriously corrupt judiciary, two national legislative elections, two presidential elections and one attempted presidential recall. Through it all, occasional armed clashes between hard-core Chavistas and opposition militants have left about twenty people on both sides dead or seriously wounded. And the Chávez government has enacted a media law that punishes slander with jail time and prohibits broadcast of the twenty-four-hour-a-day video loops that were an opposition favorite, drawing sharp criticism from press-freedom advocates. But there has been no major government campaign of repression, not even against the architects of the coup, many of whom are at liberty and still in Venezuela. The barrio 23 de Enero (January 23) is to the Venezuelan left what Compton is to hip-hop: the home of its hard core. The barrio's eponym is the date of a popular uprising that took place in 1958 against dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Tucked into a Caracas valley and flowing over a few hillsides, 23 de Enero is a mix of 1950s-era cement tower blocks and the usual cinder-block homes wedged along winding staircases and walkways. The ten- and fifteen-story tower blocks are adorned in an improbable and tatterdemalion layer of colorful laundry hanging from external drying racks or barred windows. Behind the clothes and the bars one can see lush potted plants, caged and squawking birds or household items stacked up in the tiny, overcrowded apartments. On the back sides of the towers, mounds of trash sit in and around dumpsters that are placed below long, dilapidated external garbage chutes that usually have big sections of pipe missing. >From the top of each tower flies a red-and-blue flag: the colors of the >Coordinador Simón Bolívar, a powerful community organization that has its >roots in the urban guerrilla movements of the 1970s and '80s. Described with >the catchphrase Tupamaros, these urban partisans were really a collection of >groups and factions rather than a single force, as the name would suggest. Even today, many comrades in the barrios are still armed. A fellow journalist was pulled over by masked gunmen at a Tupamaro checkpoint in 23 de Enero during the tense days around the August 2004 referendum. The homies were making sure no escuálido thugs snuck into the 'hood to do a drive-by. They also wanted my friend to donate his videocamera to the revolution, putting a gun to his head to help him make his decision. But when adult supervision finally showed up, the muchachos running the traffic stop were persuaded to give back the camera. At the Coordinador's little headquarters I meet this other type of Chavista: not a sentimental housewife like Guerrero, but a hard-core ex-guerrilla. Juan Contreras is balding, a bit paunchy and has rather unassuming boyish features, but he got his political education the hard way and at a young age: in the form of demonstrations, police beatings and shootouts with the paramilitary forces of the state. He is now one of the key organizers in the Coordinador. The walls outside the office are covered in revolutionary murals: One honors a youth killed in a demonstration against Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, another is for the Zapatistas, a third displays the classic Alberto Korda portrait of Che Guevara. Most of the art predates Chávez, and none portrays his image. "Chávez did not produce the movements--we produced him," explains Contreras. "He has helped us tremendously, but what is going on here cannot be ascribed only to Chávez." According to Contreras and a few of his comrades, the Coordinador got its start after the failed Chávez coup in 1992. In the wake of that defeat, the government began jailing leftists. Contreras fled to Cuba for a month with twenty-nine other activists from 23 de Enero; upon their return, almost all of them were arrested, and Contreras went into hiding. About a year and a half after the attempted coup, the activists regrouped and decided that armed struggle was definitely over and done with. They created the Coordinador and devoted themselves to aboveground work. Today the Coordinador pursues a three-pronged strategy that involves reclaiming public space from drug gangs, recovering local cultural traditions and promoting organized sports. Already the barrio has produced several players for Major League Baseball, including Ugueth Urbina, Juan Carlos Ovalles and Juan Carlos Pulido. Later a young guy named Kristhian Linares stops by to pay his respects to Contreras. Only 18 years old, Linares has just signed with the Florida Marlins. He starts spring training as soon as his papers are in order. After building these forms of social solidarity, the Coordinador then launched another project, setting up committees to deal with health, land titles, elections and the like. Some of this work interfaces with government-funded missions, some doesn't. But the paramount issue here is security. The slums of Caracas are extremely violent. Every week, around eighty people are murdered in this city of 5 million. "We use culture and sports and organization to take over public spaces," explains Contreras. What if the drug gangs refuse to move? "Well, many of them are connected by family to the larger community, so we use that pressure. There is the armed tradition here, and they respect that. And there is a tradition of lynching in this barrio. In the past the community has killed some criminals. Not recently, but it has happened. So most of the gangs take us seriously and stay away from the central areas." Later, as we scale a ridge packed with little homes, he explains that farther into the barrio are some agricultural projects but that I'll have to come back to visit them because the outlying areas become dangerous in the afternoon. Clearly, cultural reclamation plus threat of lynching does not completely displace crime. It also seems that the opposition, or elements in it, have on occasion used criminals against Chavistas. An activist from nearby 23 de Enero, a woman who once lived in California, tells the story of a gangster who was paid to make death threats against the local Cuban doctors. The doctors got so freaked out they split. But the woman, a trained social worker, found the young thug, a local guy, and explained to him that he would certainly be tracked down and killed by angry Chavistas if he persisted with his threats. The gangster reconsidered and decided to stay out of politics. The Cuban doctors returned. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose. A simple way to provide underprivileged children resources often lacking in public schools. 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