Mahir Ali :
A year after Hugo Chavez lost his battle against cancer, his legacy continues to be contested on the streets of Venezuela.
The adversarial pressure was more or less a constant during his 14 years as president, and it came primarily from two sources: the domestic elite – which had been accustomed, until the advent of Chavez, to controlling the domestic agenda – and the United States, which has long kept an eye out for unwelcome trends in a region it considers as its backyard, with the aim of nipping them in the bud.
A collaborative coup attempt in 2002 actually succeeded in toppling Chavez (with the head of the chamber of commerce, no less, named as an interim replacement), but the festivities in Washington and in the mansions of Venezuela’s one per cent were short-lived. The mansion-less multitudes from the barrios of Caracas marched to the presidential palace, agitating for the return of a president who, unlike his predecessors, was willing to address their concerns. A more crucial factor in saving Chavez, however, may have been the support he continued to enjoy within the army in which he had once served.
It is instructive to note that at least two of the opposition leaders who have been prominent in the past month’s unrest, Maria Corina Machado and Leopoldo Lopez, were eager participants in the 2002 coup. It is also interesting that one of the opposition propagandists’ lines of attack against the incumbent president is that “Nicolas Maduro is no Chavez” – which seems to imply that they have posthumously perceived some redeeming qualities in his predecessor.
In last April’s presidential election, Maduro defeated Henrique Capriles by less than two per cent – a decidedly smaller margin than the one by which Chavez had beaten him just a few months earlier. This may have suggested to the opposition that chavismo would steadily fade away without Chavez, and Capriles intended December’s municipal elections to serve as a referendum on Maduro. In the event, the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) secured about 10 per cent more votes than the opposition coalition.
It is likely this played a part in the latter reassessing its strategy for the New Year, and possibly relying on unrest to deliver what it failed to achieve electorally. There have been a number of deaths in violence evidently perpetrated by both sides. Although the protests began among student groups complaining against lack of security and rampaging inflation – and both issues do indeed provide cause for consternation – they have spiralled into destructive demonstrations demanding Maduro’s exit. Lopez now awaits trial, and imprisoning him probably wasn’t a sensible move. Maduro has also expelled three US diplomats, accusing Washington of seeking to foment another coup. John Kerry has denied the charges and reciprocated the expulsion. The US clearly has form in this respect – its role in Chile in 1973 and Nicaragua in the 1980s suffices to make the point – and its funding of Venezuelan groups opposed to chavismo is hardly a secret.
It may seem facetious for the Maduro government to be blaming shortages of commonplace commodities on hoarding by retail capitalists, but it’s hardly a far-fetched scenario.
It does not, of course, necessarily follow that these are symptoms of a specific attempt by the US to destabilise the country at this juncture although it certainly wouldn’t object to turning back the clock. It’s worth noting, though, that when Venezuelan president Carlos Andres Perez brutally repressed the uprising known as the Caracazo 25 years ago, entailing the loss of up to 3,000 lives, after introducing precisely the sort of neoliberal, IMF-approved policies he had railed against during his election campaign, he was rewarded with the offer of a $450 million loan by George Bush the Elder.
Perez’s policies prompted a coup attempt in 1992, in which Chavez played a prominent part. He surrendered, successfully called for a rebel ceasefire, and during his years in prison managed to convince himself that there were better ways of acquiring power. He managed to retain it for 14 years chiefly by instituting policies that appealed to a majority of the electorate, including the delivery of health and education services to those who had never encountered them before, and the pursuit of trends towards participatory democracy – as opposed to the so-called representative model whereby voters generally choose between candidates selected by an elite.
The innovations were introduced, however, within the constraints of a pre-existing structure. The wealth gap has been reduced chiefly by lifting millions out of poverty rather than by asset-stripping the elite. To America’s dismay, the emergence of Chavez precipitated a sea-change across South America.
There may be no immediate threat to Maduro’s government, but whether Venezuela can hold on in the longer term to the gains of the past decade and a half remains an open question – and one that could help to determine the fate of comparable experiments across that relatively enlightened, but often volatile, continent.
Back in 1989, western interest in barely believable developments across Eastern Europe may have helped to bury any inclination to focus on the Caracazo. Today, the events in Venezuela are inevitably overshadowed by the goings-on in Ukraine. In signposting the trajectory of global trends in the 21st century, however, Caracas may well serve as a more accurate indicator than Kiev or Crimea.
(Mahir Ali is a journalist basedin Sydney)
