Chávez
Leads The Way
By Richard Gott
01 June, 2005
The
Guardian
A
muddy path leads off the airport motorway into one of the small impoverished
villages that perch on the hills above Caracas, a permanent reminder
of the immense gulf between rich and poor that characterizes oil-rich
Venezuela. Only 20 minutes from the heart of the capital city a tiny
community of 500 families lives in makeshift dwellings with tin roofs
and rough breeze-block walls. They have water and electricity and television,
but not much else. The old school buildings have collapsed into ruin,
and no children have received lessons over the past two years.
Two Cuban doctors
are established in a temporary surgery here on the main track. They
point out that preventative medicine is difficult to practice in a zone
where the old clay sewer pipes are cracked and useless, leaving the
effluent to flow unchecked down the hillside. The older inhabitants
have been here for years; they first came from the country to take root
on these steep hillsides in the 1960s. Many are morose and despairing,
unable to imagine that their lives could ever change.
Others are more
motivated and upbeat, and have enrolled in the ranks of the Bolivarian
revolution of President Hugo Chávez. They expect great things
from this government, and are mobilized to demand that official attention
be focused on their village. If their petition to the mayor to repair
their school and sewer pipes does not get answered soon, they will descend
from their mountain aerie to block the motorway, as they once did before
during the attempted coup d'état of April 2002.
Hundreds of similar
shanty towns surround Caracas, and many have already begun to turn the
corner. In some places, the doctors brought in from Cuba are working
in newly built premises, providing eye treatment and dentistry as well
as medicines. Nearly 20,000 doctors are now spread around this country
of 25 million people. New supermarkets have sprung up where food, much
of it home-produced, is available at subsidized prices. Classrooms have
been built where school dropouts are corralled back into study. Yet
it is good to start with the difficulties faced by the motorway village,
since its plight serves to emphasize how long and difficult is the road
ahead. "Making poverty history" in Venezuela is not a simple
matter of making money available; it involves a revolutionary process
of destroying ancient institutions that stand in the way of progress,
and creating new ones responsive to popular demands.
Something amazing
has been taking place in Latin America in recent years that deserves
wider attention than the continent has been accustomed to attract. The
chrysalis of the Venezuelan revolution led by Chávez, often attacked
and derided as the incoherent vision of an authoritarian leader, has
finally emerged as a resplendent butterfly whose image and example will
radiate for decades to come.
Most of the reports
about this revolution over the past six years, at home and abroad, have
been uniquely hostile, heavily influenced by politicians and journalists
associated with the opposition. It is as if news of the French or the
Russian revolutions had been supplied solely by the courtiers of the
king and the tzar. These criticisms have been echoed by senior US figures,
from the president downwards, creating a negative framework within which
the revolution has inevitably been viewed. At best, Chávez is
seen as outdated and populist. At worst, he is considered a military
dictator in the making.
Yet the wheel of
history rolls on, and the atmosphere in Venezuela has changed dramatically
since last year when Chávez won yet another overwhelming victory
at the polls. The once triumphalist opposition has retired bruised to
its tent, wounded perhaps mortally by the outcome of the referendum
on Chávez's presidency that it called for and then resoundingly
lost. The viciously hostile media has calmed down, and those who don't
like Chávez have abandoned their hopes of his immediate overthrow.
No one is any doubt that he will win next year's presidential election.
The Chávez
government, for its part, has forged ahead with various spectacular
social projects, assisted by the huge jump in oil prices, from $10 to
$50 a barrel over the past six years. Instead of gushing into the coffers
of the already wealthy, the oil pipelines have been picked up and directed
into the shanty towns, funding health, education and cheap food. Foreign
leaders from Spain and Brazil, Chile and Cuba, have come on pilgrimage
to Caracas to establish links with the man now perceived as the leader
of new emerging forces in Latin America, with popularity ratings to
match. This extensive external support has stymied the plans of the
US government to rally the countries of Latin America against Venezuela.
They are not listening, and Washington is left without a policy.
Chávez himself,
a youthful former army colonel of 51, is now perceived in Latin America
as the most unusual and original political figure to have emerged since
Fidel Castro broke on to the scene nearly 50 years ago. With huge charm
and charisma, he has an infinite capacity to relate to the poor and
marginal population of the continent. A largely self-educated intellectual,
the ideology of his Bolivarian revolution is based on the writings and
actions of a handful of exemplary figures from the 19th century, most
notably Simón Bolívar, the man who liberated most of South
America from Spanish rule. Chávez offers a cultural as well as
a political alternative to the prevailing US-inspired model that dominates
Latin America.
So, what does his
Bolivarian revolution consist of? He is friendly with Castro - indeed,
they are close allies - yet he is no out-of-fashion state socialist.
Capitalism is alive and well in Venezuela - and secure. There have been
no illegal land seizures, no nationalizations of private companies.
Chávez seeks to curb the excesses of what he terms "savage
neo-liberalism", and he wants the state to play an intelligent
and enabling role in the economy, but he has no desire to crush small
businesses, as has happened in Cuba. International oil companies have
fallen over themselves to provide fresh investment, even after the government
increased the royalties that they have to pay. Venezuela remains a golden
goose that cannot be ignored.
What is undoubtedly
old fashioned about Chávez is his ability to talk about race
and class, subjects once fashionable that have long been taboo, and
to discuss them in the context of poverty. In much of Latin America,
particularly in the countries of the Andes, the long-suppressed native
peoples have begun to organize and make political demands for the first
time since the 18th century, and Chávez is the first president
in the continent to have picked up their banner and made it his own.
For the past six
years the government has moved ahead at a glacial rate, balked at every
turn by the opposition forces ranged against it. Now, as the revolution
gathers speed, attention will be directed towards dissension and arguments
within the government's ranks, and to the ever-present question of delivery.
In the absence of powerful state institutions, with the collapse of
the old political parties and the survival of a weak, incompetent and
unmotivated bureaucracy, Chávez has mobilized the military from
which he springs to provide the backbone to his revolutionary reorganization
of the country. Its success in bringing adequate services to the shanty
towns in town and country will depend upon the survival of his government.
If it fails, the people will come out to block the motorway and demand
something different, and yet more radical.
Richard Gott's book
Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution will be published by
Verso in June.
© 2005 Guardian Newspapers, Ltd.