Proponiamo qui di seguito un articolo di The Nation che ci racconta i rapporti tra Venezuela ed America, l'avventura del Chavismo, i suoi limiti e le sue forze e la sua evoluzione. Una analisi chiara e diretta per inquadrare Chavez nel suo continente e nella sua storia.
On the Legacy of Hugo Chávez
di Greg Grandin
da The Nation
I first met Hugo Chávez in New York City in September 2006, just
after his infamous appearance on the floor of the UN General Assembly,
where he called George W. Bush the devil. “Yesterday, the devil came
here,” he said, “Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still
today, this table that I am now standing in front of.” He then made the
sign of the cross, kissed his hand, winked at his audience and looked to
the sky. It was vintage Chávez, an outrageous remark leavened with just
the right touch of detail (the lingering sulfur!) to make it something
more than bombast, cutting through soporific nostrums of diplomatese and
drawing fire away from Iran, which was in the cross hairs at that
meeting.
The press of course went into high dudgeon, and not just for the
obvious reason that it’s one thing for opponents in the Middle East to
call the United States the Great Satan and another thing for the
president of a Latin American country to personally single out its
president as Beelzebub, on US soil no less.
I think what really rankled was that Chávez was claiming a privilege
that had long belonged to the United States, that is, the right to paint
its adversaries not as rational actors but as existential evil. Latin
American populists, from Argentina’s Juan Perón to, most recently,
Chávez, have long served as characters in a story the US tells about
itself, reaffirming the maturity of its electorate and the moderation of
its political culture.
There are at most eleven political prisoners in
Venezuela, and that’s taking the opposition’s broad definition of the
term, which includes individuals who worked to overthrow the government
in 2002, and yet it is not just the right in this country who regularly
compared Chávez to the worst mass murderers and dictators in history. New Yorker critic
Alex Ross, in an essay published a few years back celebrating the
wunderkind Venezuelan conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo
Dudamel, fretted about enjoying the fruits of Venezuela’s much-lauded
government-funded system of music training: “Stalin, too, was a great
believer in music for the people.”
* * *
Hugo Chávez was the second of seven children, born in 1954 in the
rural village of Sabaneta, in the grassland state of Barinas, to a
family of mixed European, Indian and Afro-Venezuelan race. Bart Jones’s
excellent biography,
Hugo! nicely captures the improbability of
Chávez’s rise from dirt-floor poverty—he was sent to live with his
grandmother since his parents couldn’t feed their children—through the
military, where he became involved with left-wing politics, which in
Venezuela meant a mix of international socialism and Latin America’s
long history of revolutionary nationalism. It drew inspiration from
well-known figures such as Simón Bolívar, as well as lesser-known
insurgents, such as nineteenth-century peasant leader Ezequiel Zamora,
in whose army Chávez’s great-great-grandfather had served. Born just a
few days after the CIA drove reformist Guatemalan president Jacobo
Arbenz from office, he was a young military cadet of 19 in September
1973 when he heard Fidel Castro on the radio announce yet another
CIA-backed coup, this one toppling Salvador Allende in Chile.
Awash in oil wealth, Venezuela throughout the twentieth century
enjoyed its own kind of exceptionalism, avoiding the extremes of
left-wing radicalism and homicidal right-wing anticommunism that
overtook many of its neighbors. In a way, the country became the
anti-Cuba. In 1958, political elites negotiated a pact that maintained
the trappings of democratic rule for four decades, as two ideological
indistinguishable parties traded the presidency back and forth (sound
familiar?). Where the State Department and its allied policy
intellectuals isolated and condemned Havana, they celebrated Caracas as
the end point of development. Samuel Huntington praised Venezuela as an
example of “successful democratization,” while another political
scientist, writing in the early 1980s, said it represented the “only
trail to a democratic future for developing societies…a textbook case of
step-by-step progress.”
We know now that its institutions were rotting from the inside out.
Every sin that Chávez was accused of committing—governing without
accountability, marginalizing the opposition, appointing partisan
supporters to the judiciary, dominating labor unions, professional
organizations and civil society, corruption and using oil revenue to
dispense patronage—flourished in a system the United States held up as
exemplary.
Petroleum prices began to fall in the mid-1980s. By this point,
Venezuela had grown lopsidedly urban, with 16 million of its 19 million
citizens living in cities, well over half of them below the poverty
line, many in extreme poverty. In Caracas, combustible concentrations of
poor people lived cut off from municipal services—such as sanitation
and safe drinking water—and hence party and patronage control. The spark
came in February 1989, when a recently inaugurated president who had
run against the IMF said that he no choice but to submit to its
dictates. He announced a plan to abolish food and fuel subsidies,
increase gas prices, privatize state industries and cut spending on
health care and education.
Three days of rioting and looting spread through the capital, an
event that both marked the end of Venezuelan exceptionalism and the
beginning of the hemisphere’s increasingly focused opposition to
neoliberalism. Established parties, unions and government institutions
proved entirely incapable of restoring legitimacy in austere times,
committed as they were to upholding a profoundly unequal class
structure.
Chávez emerged from the ruin, first with a failed putsch in 1992,
which landed him in jail but turned him into a folk hero. Then in 1998,
when he won 56 percent of the vote as a presidential candidate.
Inaugurated in 1999, he took office committed to a broad yet vague
anti-austerity program, a mild John Kenneth Galbraith–quoting reformer
who at first had no power to reform anything. The esteem in which Chávez
was held by the majority of Venezuelans, many of them dark-skinned, was
matched by the rage he provoked among the country’s mostly white
political and economic elites. But their maximalist program of
opposition—a US-endorsed coup, an oil strike that destroyed the
country’s economy, a recall election and an oligarch-media propaganda
campaign that made Fox News seem like PBS—backfired. By 2005, Chávez had
weathered the storm and was in control of the nation’s oil, allowing
him to embark on an ambitious program of domestic and international
transformation: massive social spending at home and “poly-polar
equilibrium” abroad, a riff on what Bolívar once called “universal
equilibrium,” an effort to break up the US’s historical monopoly of
power in Latin America and force Washington to compete for influence.
* * *
Over the last fourteen years, Chávez has submitted himself and his
agenda to fourteen national votes, winning thirteen of them by large
margins, in polling deemed by Jimmy Carter to be “best in the world” out
of the ninety-two elections that he has monitored. (It turns out it
isn’t that difficult to have transparent elections: voters in Venezuela
cast their ballot on an touch pad, which spits out a receipt they can
check and then deposit in a box. At the end of the day, random polling
stations are picked for ‘hot audits,’ to make sure the electronic and
paper tallies add up). A case is made that this ballot-box proceduralism
isn’t democratic, that Chávez dispenses patronage and dominates the
media giving him an unfair advantage. But after the last presidential
ballot—which Chávez won with the same percentage he did his first
election yet with a greatly expanded electorate—even his opponents have
admitted, despairingly, that a majority of Venezuelans liked, if not
adored, the man.
I’m what they call a useful idiot when it comes to Hugo Chávez, if
only because rank-and-file social organizations that to me seem worthy
of support in Venezuela continued to support him until the end. My
impressionistic sense is that this support breaks down roughly in half,
between voters who think their lives and their families’ lives are
better off because of Chávez’s massive expansion of state services,
including healthcare and education, despite real problems of crime,
corruption, shortages and inflation.
The other half of Chávez’s electoral majority is made up of organized
citizens involved in one or the other of the country’s many grassroots
organizations. Chávez’s social base was diverse and heterodox, what
social scientists in the 1990s began to celebrate as “new social
movements,” distinct from established trade unions and peasant
organizations vertically linked to—and subordinated to—political parties
or populist leaders: neighborhood councils; urban and rural
homesteaders, feminists, gay and lesbian rights organizations, economic
justice activists, environmental coalitions; breakaway unions and the
like. It’s these organizations, in Venezuela and elsewhere throughout
the region, that have over the last few decades done heroic work in
democratizing society, in giving citizens venues to survive the extremes
of neoliberalism and to fight against further depredations, turning
Latin America into one of the last global bastion of the Enlightenment
left.
Chávez’s detractors see this mobilized sector of the population much
the way Mitt Romney saw 47 percent of the US electorate not as citizens
but parasites, moochers sucking on the oil-rent teat. Those who accept
that Chávez enjoyed majority support disparaged that support as
emotional enthrallment. Voters, wrote one critic, see their own
vulnerability in their leader and are entranced. Another talked about
Chávez’s “magical realist” hold over his followers.
One anecdote alone should be enough to give the lie to the idea that
poor Venezuelans voted for Chávez because they were fascinated by the
baubles they dangled in front of them. During the 2006 presidential
campaign, the signature pledge of Chávez’s opponent was to give
3,000,000 poor Venezuelans a black credit card (black as in the color of
oil) from which they could withdraw up to $450 in cash a month, which
would have drained over $16 billion dollars a year from the national
treasury (call it neoliberal populism: give to the poor just enough to
bankrupt the government and force the defunding of services). Over the
years, there’s been a lot of heavy theoretically breathing by US
academics about the miasma oil wealth creates in countries like
Venezuela, lulling citizens into a dreamlike state that renders them
into passive spectators. But in this election at least, Venezuelans
managed to see through the mist. Chávez won with over 62 percent of the
vote.
Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether Chavismo’s
social-welfare programs will endure now that Chávez is gone and shelve
the left-wing hope that out of rank-and-file activism a new, sustainable
way of organizing society will emerge.
The participatory democracy that
took place in barrios, in workplaces and in the countryside over the
last fourteen years was a value in itself, even if it doesn’t lead to a
better world.
There’s been great work done on the ground by scholars such as
Alejandro Velasco, Sujatha Fernandes, Naomi Schiller and George
Ciccariello-Maher on these social movements that, taken together, lead
to the conclusion that Venezuela might be the most democratic country in
the Western Hemisphere. One study found that organized Chavistas held
to “liberal conceptions of democracy and held pluralistic norms,”
believed in peaceful methods of conflict resolution and worked to ensure
that their organizations functioned with high levels of “horizontal or
non-hierarchical” democracy. What political scientists would criticize
as a hyper dependency on a strongman, Venezuelan activists understand as
mutual reliance, as well as an acute awareness of the limits and
shortcomings of this reliance.
Over the years, this or that leftist has pronounced themselves
“disillusioned” with Chávez, setting out some standard drawn, from
theory or history, and then pronouncing the Venezuelan leader as falling
short. He’s a Bonapartist, wrote one. He’s no Allende, sighs another.
To paraphrase the radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens in
Lincoln, nothing
surprises these critics and therefore they are never surprising. But
there are indeed many surprising things about Chavismo in relationship
to Latin American history.
First, the military in Latin America is best known for its homicidal
right-wing sadists, many of them trained by the United States, in places
like the School of the Americas. But the region’s armed forces have
occasionally thrown up anti-imperialists and economic nationalists. In
this sense, Chávez is similar to Argentina’s Perón, as well as
Guatemala’s Colonel Arbenz, Panama’s Omar Torrijos and Peru’s General
Juan Francisco Velasco, who as president between 1968 and 1975
allied Lima with Moscow. But when they weren’t being either driven from
office (Arbenz) or killed (Torrijos?), these military populists
inevitably veered quickly to the right. Within a few years of his 1946
election, Perón was cracking down on unions, going as far as endorsing
the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954. In Peru, the radical phase of Peru’s
military government lasted seven years. Chávez, in contrast, was in
office fourteen years, and he never turned nor repressed his base.
Second and related, for decades now social scientists have been
telling us that the kind of mobilized regime Venezuela represents is
pump-primed for violence, that such governments can only maintain energy
through internal repression or external war. But after years of calling
the oligarchy squalid traitors, Venezuela has seen remarkably little
political repression—certainly less than Nicaragua in the 1980s under
the Sandinistas and Cuba today, not to mention the United States.
Oil wealth has much to do with this exceptionalism, as it also did in
the elite, top-down democracy that existed prior to Chávez. But so
what? Chávez has done what rational actors in the neoliberal interstate
order are supposed to do: he’s leveraged Venezuela’s comparative
advantage not just to fund social organizations but give them
unprecedented freedom and power.
* * *
Chávez was a strongman. He packed the courts, hounded the corporate
media, legislated by decree and pretty much did away with any effective
system of institutional checks or balances. But I’ll be perverse and
argue that the biggest problem Venezuela faced during his rule was not
that Chávez was authoritarian but that he wasn’t authoritarian enough.
It wasn’t too much control that was the problem but too little.
Chavismo came to power through the ballot following the near total
collapse of Venezuela’s existing establishment. It enjoyed overwhelming
rhetorical and electoral hegemony, but not administrative hegemony. As
such, it had to make significant compromises with existing power blocs
in the military, the civil and educational bureaucracy and even the
outgoing political elite, all of whom were loath to give up their
illicit privileges and pleasures. It took near five years before
Chávez’s government gained control of oil revenues, and then only after a
protracted fight that nearly ruined the country.
Once it had access to the money, it opted not to confront these
pockets of corruption and power but simply fund parallel institutions,
including the social missions that provided healthcare, education and
other welfare services being the most famous. This was both a blessing
and a curse, the source of Chavismo’s strength and weakness.
Prior to Chávez, competition for government power and resources took
place largely within the very narrow boundaries of two elite political
parties. After Chávez’s election, political jockeying took place within
“Chavismo.” Rather than forming a single-party dictatorship with an
interventionist state bureaucracy controlling people’s lives, Chavismo
has been pretty wide open and chaotic. But it significantly more
inclusive than the old duopoly, comprised of at least five different
currents: a new Bolivarian political class, older leftist parties,
economic elites, military interests and the social movements mentioned
above. Oil money gave Chávez the luxury of acting as a broker between
these competing tendencies, allowing each to pursue their interests
(sometimes, no doubt, their illicit interests) and deferring
confrontations.
* * *
The high point of Chávez’s international agenda was his relationship
with Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Latin American leader whom
US foreign policy and opinion makers tried to set as Chávez’s opposite.
Where Chávez was reckless, Lula was moderate. Where Chávez was
confrontational, Lula was pragmatic. Lula himself never bought this
nonsense, consistently rising to Chávez’s defense and endorsing his
election.
For a good eight years they worked something like a Laurel and Hardy
routine, with Chávez acting the buffoon and Lula the straight man. But
each was dependent on the other and each was aware of this dependency.
Chávez often stressed the importance of Lula’s election in late 2002,
just a few months after April’s failed coup attempt, which gave him his
first real ally of consequence in a region then still dominated by
neoliberals. Likewise, the confrontational Chávez made Lula’s reformism
that much more palatable. Wikileak documents reveal the skill in which
Lula’s diplomats gently but firmly rebuffed the Bush administration’s
pressure to isolate Venezuela.
Their inside-outside rope-a-dope was on full display at the November
2005 Summit of the Americas in Argentina, where the United States hoped
to lock in its deeply unfair economic advantage with a hemisphere-wide
Free Trade Agreement. In the meeting hall, Lula lectured Bush on the
hypocrisy of protecting corporate agriculture with subsidies and tariffs
even as it pushed Latin America to open its markets. Meanwhile, on the
street Chávez led 40,000 protesters promising to “bury” the free trade
agreement. The treaty was indeed derailed, and in the years that
followed, Venezuela and Brazil, along with other Latin American nations,
have presided over a remarkable transformation in hemispheric
relations, coming as close as ever to achieving Bolívar’s “universal
equilibrium.”
* * *
When I met Chávez in 2006 after his controversial appearance in the
UN, it was at a small lunch at the Venezuelan consulate. Danny Glover
was there, and he and Chávez talked the possibility of producing a movie
on the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave who led the
Haitian Revolution.
Also present was a friend and activist who works on the issue of debt
relief for poor countries. At the time, a proposal to relieve the debt
owed to the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) by the poorest
countries in the Americas had stalled, largely because mid-level
bureaucrats from Argentina, Mexico and Brazil opposed the initiative. My
friend lobbied Chávez to speak to Lula and Argentina’s president Néstor
Kirchner, another of the region’s leftist leaders, and get them to
jump-start the deal.
Chávez asked a number of thoughtful questions, at odds with the
provocateur on display on the floor of the General Assembly. Why, he
wanted to know, was the Bush administration in favor of the plan? My
friend explained that some Treasury officials were libertarians who, if
not in favor of debt relief, wouldn’t block the deal. “Besides,” he
said, “they don’t give a shit about the IADB.” Chávez then asked why
Brazil and Argentina were holding things up. Because, my friend said,
their representatives to the IADB were functionaries deeply invested in
the viability of the bank, and they thought debt abolition a dangerous
precedent.
We later got word that Chávez had successfully lobbied Lula and
Kirchner to support the deal. In November 2006, the IADB announced it
would write off billions of dollars in debt to Nicaragua, Guyana,
Honduras and Bolivia (Haiti would later be added to the list).
And so it was that the man routinely compared in the United States to
Stalin quietly joined forces with the administration of the man he had
just called Satan, helping to make the lives of some of the poorest
people in America just a bit more bearable.
fonte: http://www.thenation.com/article/173212/legacy-hugo-chavez#
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