Proponiamo di seguito un interessante reportage dal Venezuela, datato 2005, ma che da' un'idea equilibrata di cosa fosse il paese sotto Chavez. I suoi pregi, i suoi problemi. Poca propaganda, molti fatti.
Hugo Chávez and Petro Populism
di Christian Parenti
da The Nation
The views from the slopes of Barrio San Agustín del Sur are
spectacular. Tight passageways frame Caracas and the lush, cloud-draped
Avila Mountain beyond. Along the neighborhood's rough cement steps,
teenagers lounge around, flirting, arguing or lost in the cheap
text-messaging functions of their cell phones. Ascending a nearby cliff
is a small garbage dump. From afar its refuse looks like the sand in
some ominous urban hourglass.
Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.
Illiteracy, violence, disease and the listlessness of endemic
unemployment have shaped the life of this barrio since landless
squatters from the countryside first settled it about forty years ago.
But much of that could be changing.
"Even though we have had problems, we are moving forward," says
Carmen Guerrero, a woman in her late 40s who is one of San Agustín's
most dedicated activists. "Here, we are all with President Chávez.
Everybody except for maybe six families."
On the yellow walls of her living room are masks in the form of
fashionable ladies' faces, a clock, a mirror and a small picture of
Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chávez Frías. Guerrero explains
that she and her neighbors are studying in several government-created
programs called missions and organizing themselves into committees to
deal with everything from local and national election campaigns to
sanitation and legalization of land titles.
Like most slums in Caracas, this community also has a state-owned,
subsidized market, a soup kitchen, a number of small-scale cooperative
businesses and a little two-story, octagonal, red-brick medical center.
Upstairs two Cuban doctors live in cramped quarters; downstairs is a
small waiting room and clinic.
Guerrero's neighbor, a young man named Carlos Martinez, is showing me
around; he works with the local construction cooperative. They have a
contract from the mayor's office to lay new drainage pipe in the barrio.
Given the recent flooding, it is an important task. Later he shows me
where a patch of
ranchos--dirt-floored shacks made of corrugated tin and wood--are being replaced at government expense by solid, two-story brick homes.
For this little barrio and a thousand others like it, such changes
mean a lot. Like two generations of Venezuelan politicians before him,
Chávez has pledged
sembrar el petróleo--to sow the oil. That is,
to invest its profits in a way that transforms the very structure of
Venezuela's economy. But what would that entail? Are social programs
enough?
Lately Chávez has been talking about a "revolution within the
revolution," about "transcending capitalism" and about "building a
socialism for the twenty-first century." It is a discourse that
frightens his enemies, electrifies his base and inspires the left
throughout Latin America. After two decades of the US-promoted
Washington Consensus--a cocktail of radical privatization, open markets
and severe fiscal austerity--Latin America is an economic disaster
marked by increasing poverty and inequality.
Taken as a whole and controlling for inflation, Latin America has
grown little since the mid-1980s and hardly at all in the past seven
years. With the entire region primed for social change, a new breed of
populists and social democrats is coming to power. Brazil, Argentina and
Uruguay, in addition to Venezuela, have leftist governments of some
sort, while Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru will hold
presidential elections in 2006.
But a closer look at Venezuela reveals just how vexing and
complicated a political and economic turn to the left can be, even in a
country that is rich with oil and not deeply indebted.
Thus far, Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, named for South
America's nineteenth-century liberator, Simón Bolívar, has deepened and
politicized a pre-existing tradition of Venezuelan populism. Despite
Chávez's often radical discourse, the government has not engaged in mass
expropriations of private fortunes, even agricultural ones, nor plowed
huge sums into new collectively owned forms of production. In fact,
private property is protected in the new Constitution promulgated after
Chávez came to power.
What the government has done is spend billions on
new social programs, $3.7 billion in the past year alone. As a result,
1.3 million people have learned to read, millions have received medical
care and an estimated 35-40 percent of the population now shops at
subsidized, government-owned supermarkets. Elementary school enrollment
has increased by more than a million, as schools have started offering
free food to students. The government has created several banks aimed at
small businesses and cooperatives, redeployed part of the military to
do public works and is building several new subway systems around the
country. To boost agricultural production in a country that imports 80
percent of what it consumes, Chávez has created a land-reform program
that rewards private farmers who increase productivity and punishes
those who do not with the threat of confiscation.
The government has also structured many of its social programs in
ways that force communities to organize. To gain title to barrio homes
built on squatted land, people must band together as neighbors and form
land committees. Likewise, many public works jobs require that people
form cooperatives and then apply for a group contract. Cynics see these
expanding networks of community organizations as nothing more than a
clientelist electoral machine. Rank-and-file Chavistas call their
movement "participatory democracy," and the revolution's intellectuals
describe it as a long-term struggle against the cultural pathologies
bred by all resource-rich economies--the famous "Dutch disease," in
which the oil-rich state is expected to dole out services to a
disorganized and unproductive population.
But for the moment, the Venezuelan battle against poverty is possible
only because oil prices have been at record highs for several years,
and the state owns most of the petroleum industry. All of Venezuela's
oil and mining and most of its basic industry were nationalized in the
mid-1970s. On average, oil sales make up 30 percent of Venezuelan GDP,
provide half of state income and make up 80 percent of all Venezuelan
exports.
Internal and often sympathetic critics of the reform process in
Venezuela say it is one thing to "spend the oil" on social welfare; it
is another altogether to "sow the oil" and create new collectively
owned, productive, nonsubsidized industries that will generate wealth in
an egalitarian and sustainable fashion.
"When the coup happened we realized we had to get involved or we
would lose everything," explains Carmen Guerrero. She says she was
always a Chávez supporter but was not very active until the April 2002
coup d'état against Chávez launched by Venezuela's main business
council, its notoriously corrupt labor federation, dissident military
officers and masses of middle- and upper-class Caraqueños. Declassified
documents have since revealed that the CIA knew at least a week
beforehand that a coup was planned, while other US government agencies,
such as the National Endowment for Democracy, were channeling aid to the
opposition.
"There is no going back now," says Guerrero. Then, very seriously,
she adds: "I hugged Chávez at a rally. I don't know how I got through
security. I guess because I am short. I can't explain the feeling, the
emotion was so strong." She clutches her fists to her breast and looks
away.
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.
The organized opposition to Chávez is rather thin on the ground these
days, having been largely discredited by the right-wing extremism of
their coup and the economic devastation caused by their oil strike. So I
visit the offices of the right-wing tabloid
Así Es la Noticia, owned by one of Venezuela's top-circulation dailies,
El Nacional.
"Look, Chávez won the referendum. People have to accept that," says the editor, Albor Rodriguez. She is in her early 30s, an
escuálido all the way, but she respects the facts.
Standing erect at her desk, one black-clad shoulder tipped forward,
she takes long drags on her cigarette between comments. "There is no
'Castro communist' here. That's ridiculous. They say there are Cubans in
the government and the security. But there is no proof. However, does
Chávez have autocratic tendencies? Yes! He comes from the military. Does
his government, or he himself, know what they are doing? No! His head
is a mix--a marmalade of notions and slogans. He speaks without
thinking. He makes innuendoes about Condoleezza Rice being in love with
him. That's insane. He's totally erratic."
Albor, to my surprise, is almost as harsh on the opposition: "They
lost because Chávez has a deep emotional connection with the people, and
they have no connection with the people. Also, he has spent a lot of
money on the barrios. He pours money into the barrios."
She explains that when her paper reported on the real work of the
missions, some readers accused her of lying and "having gone to the moon
to find these things." She explains: "The opposition lied to itself.
They were deluded and now they are smashed." With that rather definitive
summation, she puts out her cigarette and invites me to lunch.
There are some in the opposition whose critique focuses less on
Chávez's supposed abuses of power and more on the government's alleged
mismanagement and left-wing economic tomfoolery. Oscar Garcia Mendoza is
president of Banco Venezolano de Credito, a very old and conservative
bank. He's what Chávez would call an "oligarch," the official enemy: a
capitalist financier. But when I meet him in his beautiful corner office
on the ninth floor of a Modernist highrise, he is beaming. He wears a
dark blue suit, his gray hair is cropped stylishly short and he has that
healthy look that seems to come from being rich and relaxed.
Classical music filters out from speakers in the ceiling; on the
table are fine Cuban cigars. We sit in bent plywood and leather Herman
Miller chairs, and gaze out across the city through a glass wall lined
with thick green plants.
"Business has never been better," says Garcia. "This government is
totally incompetent. They have no idea what they are doing. The head of
their land reform, Eliezer Otaiza, is a former male stripper. And did
you see they just appointed Carlos Lanz, a former terrorist kidnapper, a
communist, as head of Alcasa, our largest aluminum company?" Through it
all, Garcia wears a slightly suppressed grin as if he thinks the whole
thing is hilarious. "I mean, can you imagine that?"
In a way, Lanz's appointment is not so outrageous: Another former
guerrilla, Ali Rodriguez Araque, once minister of mining and energy,
then head of OPEC, is now foreign minister and widely respected as a
level-headed negotiator.
Garcia also has some very concrete criticisms. He says that the
current economic boom is a chimera based on oil prices. In 2004
government spending jumped 47 percent, much of which went to pay for
healthcare and education--the missions. But despite the oil windfall,
the government has had to borrow heavily. Instead of turning to
international financiers, it has increased its internal debt to
Venezuelan banks.
Garcia says that in the past four years this internal debt has gone
from $2 billion to more than $27 billion. The Finance Ministry confirms
these figures and says that 60 percent of this debt is held in
government bonds.
"But what makes this really crazy," says Garcia, "is that the
government is depositing all its oil revenue in the same banks at about 5
percent, then borrowing it back at 14 percent. It's a very easy way for
bankers to make money. That's why I say this is a government for the
rich."
Last year Venezuelan banks made $1.38 billion in profits, just a bit
more than they did the year before. And most of that money came from
lending to the Chávez government and trading in special
government-approved, dollar-denominated bonds, a legal loophole in the
new currency-control law. Garcia's bank actually does no business with
the government, but the huge increase in oil revenues has doubled his
loan portfolio. The economy is awash in money: Growth was 17.3 percent
in 2004.
So if the economy is booming, why does Garcia dislike Chávez?
"These people are crooks," he says. "Look, Venezuela has always been
corrupt, but these guys are the worst." When I point out that the
government just fired 120 managers in Zulia state for corruption, Garcia
waves it away as insufficient.
"What are they doing with all the money? They are not investing. They
spend it all on food and medicine. As soon as oil goes down, their
party is over." So what should the government do to avoid this? "They
should privatize everything."
Getting a Chávez government response to charges of mismanagement,
corruption and overdependence on freakishly high oil prices is
difficult. My inquiries are fed into the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the
Information Ministry, where every few days a new official loses my
paperwork and needs a full CV and another letter from my editors and
another complete written explanation of my project.
After three weeks no one in the Chávez government has come forth with
an on-the-record statement except for one laid-back spokesperson at the
Higher Education Ministry.
Finally an old friend gets me an interview with his boss, Jorge
Giordani, a former academic who befriended Chávez during the rebellious
paratrooper's stint in jail and is now the planning and development
minister. On matters of economic development, Giordani is the
revolution's brain. We meet in his office near the top of South
America's tallest building, one of a pair of towers, the other of which
stands half-burned, its gold-tinted, mirrored windows blown out and
black, the result of a recent accident caused by bad maintenance.
Giordani is tall, gray and hunched. He wears big glasses, a tie, a
brown cardigan sweater and has a short white Abe Lincoln beard. He
evades most specific questions. As for corruption, he says simply: "We
are not doing enough. It is a very serious problem."
Mostly he offers a long but interesting explanation of Venezuela's
historical development and its lack of internal economic integration. We
move from map to map as he explicates the economic geography of various
regions.
Many Chavistas hope that investing in physical infrastructure, health
and education will open new, nonpetroleum industries in high
technology, business services, healthcare and agriculture. When I ask
Giordani how the country plans to wean itself from oil, about land
reform and about the many so-called "endogenous" development projects
being promoted, he sighs and shakes his head as if I am naïve.
"We've been fighting political battles for most of our time in
office. Many people have learned to read in the last few years, but how
long will it take for them to work in high technology, or medicine, or
services? Ten years? A generation? We are fighting a very
individualistic,
rentier culture. Everything has been 'Mama state, Papa state, give me oil money.' To organize people is extremely hard."
After a long, roundabout discussion in which I press him on the
question of import substitution and new industrialization, he settles on
one key point: Venezuela's only real hope lies in regional economic
integration. Only then will internal markets be big enough to nurture
alternative technologies and new industries that might otherwise
threaten current multinational monopolies.
Giordani seems weary and cynical. "No, I am just practical," he says
with a chuckle. "Development in Venezuela will take at least fifty
years."
And how long will the oil last?
fonte: http://www.thenation.com/article/hugo-ch%C3%A1vez-and-petro-populism?page=full#
