I haven't read _In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chavez and the Transformation of Venezuela_, so I'll welcome reviews of & comments on it.
Here's an article by Richard Gott on Chavez:
***** The Guardian (London) September 12, 2000 SECTION: Guardian Leader Pages, Pg. 22 HEADLINE: Comment & Analysis: This man means business: One person above all is responsible for the recent oil price hike - President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela BYLINE: Richard Gott
The crisis over petrol prices in Britain and elsewhere is almost entirely due to the myopia of governments and markets over the past 18 months in failing to recognise the emergence of a new star in the global political firmament. The youthful Hugo Chavez, aged 46, elected president of Venezuela in December 1998, is the principal figure behind the price rise. Last year he singlehandedly revived the moribund organisation of petroleum exporting countries, Opec, by calling for and securing a cut in oil production, and this year he has singlemindedly persuaded its members to stand firm in defence of a reasonable price.
He recently toured all the Opec countries and sought agreement on an optimum price of Dollars 25 a barrel. He will host a great jamboree of Opec presidents in Caracas at the end of the month, only the second such event ever held.
This man means business. The west has had plenty of warning of what he has been up to, and where he is coming from, but blinded by the arrogance of globalisation it has taken no steps to prepare anyone for the dramatic developments of recent days.
Although Opec has usually appeared to western eyes as an organisation dominated by Arabs, it was actually conceived and founded by Venezuela in the heyday of what used to be called the Third World. The countries of Opec, for Venezuelans, constitute a large extended family. In the 1990s, when Venezuela was ruled by unpopular governments that signed up to the dominant strand of neo-liberalism that spread like a plague across the whole of South America, Opec was abandoned and ignored. Venezuela was one of the great cheaters of the organisation, ignoring the quotas set, and bringing in foreign companies to help increase production through the development of new fields. When the world oil price dropped below Dollars 10 a barrel, the west fondly imagined that the exporting countries - many of them perceived as "rogue states", like Iran, Iraq and Libya - were permanently defeated and that this low price would be the established pattern of the future.
Colonel Chavez - for he was originally a military officer - had other ideas. Petroleos de Venezuela, the state oil company nationalised in 1975, is the country's chief source of wealth. Chavez needed a steady and larger flow of income from the oil wells to finance his ambitious plans to transform the country and to satisfy his voters in the poorest section of society. He was well aware that his radical rhetoric, avowedly hostile to what he describes as "savage neo-liberalism" imposed on Latin America by the US, would do him no favours with nervous foreign investors. He decided to play the oil card.
At an Opec meeting in March 1999, his oil minister, Ali Rodriguez Araque, was instructed to announce that Venezuela would in future respect the cutbacks in production already agreed, and would support a further cutback of 4%. It was "a change of 180 degrees" in the policy of previous governments, Chavez proudly announced. Ali Rodriguez is now Opec's president, and the oil price has risen from Dollars 10 to over Dollars 30 a barrel.
Although the Latin American military are usually remembered for the rightwing dictators that they spawn, Chavez belongs to another tradition, that of radical junior officers, in touch with the raw conscripts from the peasantry, whose revolutionary politics are fuelled by anger at the degenerate state of the nation. Chavez is also an heir to a civilian tradition of rebellion in Latin America, that of the leftwing guerrillas of the 1960s inspired by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Some of his advisers were once associated with a Chinese-oriented split from the Venezuelan Communist Party who went on to make lasting contacts with radicals in the Arab world in the 1970s. Ali Rodriguez himself was a guerrilla in the 1960s, before becoming a labour lawyer and an oil expert for one of the smaller radical parties. One member of that generation, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, "Carlos the Jackal", famous among other things for an armed attack on Opec headquarters in Vienna in December 1975, now languishes in a French jail.
Chavez is a good friend of Fidel Castro and a frequent visitor to Cuba, and his ambitions are as grandiose as those of the Cuban leader. He hopes that his reconstruction of Opec will help him to forge a new "Bolivarian" alliance in Latin America that will fulfil the dreams of Simon Bolivar, the South American liberator of the 19th century, who sought continental unity against the outside world.
Yet Chavez is no populist demagogue. He seeks a fair price for Opec oil, not an exorbitant one. This would mean price stabilisation, as Opec has reiterated throughout the summer, in a band between Dollars 22 and Dollars 28 a barrel. This week's Opec decision to increase production by 3%, might just allow that to happen eventually, but no amount of "pressure" from Tony Blair or Bill Clinton on individual countries is likely to break the fresh sense of purpose that Chavez has infused into the organisation.
In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chavez and the Transformation of Venezuela by Richard Gott is published by Verso
Rwgott at aol.com *****
And Gott's letter to the Financial Times editor:
***** Financial Times (London) August 3, 2000, Thursday London Edition 1 SECTION: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR; Pg. 16 HEADLINE: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Venezuela needs investment from patriotic businessmen BYLINE: By RICHARD GOTT
From Mr Richard Gott.
Sir, Your surprisingly knee-jerk editorial reaction to the re-election of President Hugo Chavez ("Chavez's chance", August 1), with its banal suggestion that he should "embrace more fully market friendly economic policies", will almost certainly fall on deaf ears in Caracas, as will your well-meaning advice that he should recruit economic advisers who can command the respect of business. In practice Venezuela has run out of the latter, since the country's pro-business economists all supported the previous succession of corrupt and discredited regimes.
The interesting truth about Mr Chavez is that, although he is undoubtedly hostile to "international capitalism" and "globalisation", he strongly favours national capital and national entrepreneurs.
While the Venezuelan-American chamber of commerce in Caracas, dominated by the representatives of multinational companies, remains hostile to Chavez, the local FBI, or Fedecamaras, composed largely of national business leaders, is more ambivalent in its attitude.
Venezuela has plenty of money coming in from abroad in terms of oil rent; what it desperately needs is patriotic businessmen prepared to invest in their own country. In a nation deeply divided by race and class, that is a tall order, but Mr Chavez's efforts to involve the local business community in the task of endogenous development deserve greater international understanding.
Richard Gott, 88 Ledbury Road, London W11 2AH *****
And some reviews of the book in several newspapers:
***** The Irish Times September 2, 2000 SECTION: CITY EDITION; WEEKEND; SOUTH AMERICA; Pg. 68 HEADLINE: Macho strongman in a suit In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chavez and the Transformation of Venezuela. By Richard Gott. Verso. 246pp, (pounds) 18 in UK BYLINE: By MAURICE WALSH
For well over a decade Latin America has not produced the powerful romantic heroes that the rest of the world craves. Stable democracy represented by a succession of well groomed, urbane, middle-aged men in suits (whose names are rarely remembered) may look better than the bloody horrors of the 1970s and 1980s. But it has not been enough to satisfy our latent desire that Latin America should indulge our fantasies by delivering stories of desperados who triumph against the odds. Now there's Hugo Chavez, the recently re-confirmed president of Venezuela.
Chavez led a coup in 1992, and touched the hearts of Venezuelans even though he failed to overthrow the spectacularly corrupt president, Carlos Andres Perez. The coup attempt set off a chain reaction which eventually consumed everything that had been built up over the previous 40 years. First the political establishment turned on Perez and destroyed him. They, in their turn, were destroyed by Chavez when he ran for the presidency in 1998 and was voted into the presidential palace he had once tried to occupy by force. Since then he has dismantled all the institutions made rotten from within by the corrupt politicians.
As well as being immensely popular, Chavez has all the characteristics we've come to expect of a radical Latin American strongman. He is macho, active, smart, witty, brave and counts himself a friend of Fidel Castro. Richard Gott has fallen in love with Chavez. He admits as much in the last few pages of his book; though the extraordinary novelistic description of their first meeting at the beginning has already given the game away.
Gott catches sight of Chavez in the presidential palace in Caracas: " . . . he was standing in the garden with his back to me, gazing out towards the small forest of bamboos and palms fringing the far end of the lawn. (In public) he always appears decisive and radiates confidence and optimism. Yet alone in the garden he appeared more vulnerable, a monochrome and ambiguous sculpture on a green lawn dressed in a grey suit."
Chavez in government has surrounded himself with many of Gott's old friends from the 1960s, former revolutionaries now in their seventies and eighties whom Gott would have known when he wrote about Latin America when Che Guevara was in his heyday. There is a sense in which Chavez is the dynamo of their dreams. One of them, the Venezuelan foreign minister, Jose Vicente Rangel tells Gott: "It is a mistake to demonise Chavez just as it is a mistake to sanctify him. If he had not emerged there would certainly have been somebody else."
There are two deep reasons why there might have been somebody else. One is that - as Conor Cruise O'Brien recognised in an acutely observed piece of reportage on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua 15 years ago - an appeal to nationalism is an essential feature of radical politics in Latin America. Hidden beneath the simple and well-known inequalities of wealth is a corresponding radical divide between the (white) criollos and the (brown) mestizos. Any attempt to represent the dispossessed majority involves reconstitiuting the nation as Chavez has set out to do. The Latin American elite which wields power - the businessmen, the bankers and the intellectuals - takes its cues from abroad. Thus for more than a decade one country after another has faithfully followed the prevailing orthodoxy of globalisation and free trade. Chavez, like a long line of social reformers before him, is appealing to those dispossessed, non-cosmopolitan masses whom he regards as citizens of the real nation.
THE other reason why Chavez is not unique is that, despite the fixed image of the Latin American general as a thug in dark glasses, reforming military leaders are not an aberration but part of a long tradition. Over the last 40 years Peru, Panama, Bolivia and Ecuador and even, for a few months, El Salvador have all been led at one stage by colonels with a conscience. Ultimately they were unable to desist from the authoritarian outlook which enabled them to carry off their coup d'etats. A habit of conspiracy and plotting was no preparation for building popular support for transforming the nation. Gott writes that Chavez is an exception because the aims of his failed coup were subsequently "ratified by a grateful people" (a phrase which carries a faint odour of that demogogic messianism which Chavez has repudiated). He mentions Chavez's detractors but dismisses their concerns - elsewhere, though, he confesses uncertainty about whether Chavez's rule will end in tears.
We'll see how things turn out. But for the moment Chavez has a competitor as a model for the rest of Latin America: Vicente Fox, the new president of Mexico, whose election ended more than 70 years of one-party rule. He's a man in a suit, but like Chavez he's on a crusade against corruption; he's a former Coca Cola executive, but he has a similar charisma to Chavez, the former paratrooper: and like Chavez, he has enlisted support from a wide range of social groups. Hugo Chavez is an interesting phenomenon after years of great suits. But he's not the only Latin American leader worth keeping an eye on.
Maurice Walsh is a BBC journalist: he has reported extensively on Latin America *****
***** The Guardian (London) August 26, 2000 SECTION: Guardian Saturday Pages, Pg. 8 HEADLINE: Saturday Review: Books: Paratrooper president: Andrew Graham-Yooll worries about Venezuela's future: In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chavez and the Transformation of Venezuela by Richard Gott 246pp, Verso, pounds 16 BYLINE: Andrew Graham-Yooll
Hugo Chavez, formerly a mutinous paratrooper, has just won an enviable 59 per cent in the Venezuelan elections, confirming him as the "king of plebiscites" - as one paper said - and as president for the next six years. The timely release of this biography speaks well of Richard Gott's wisdom on Latin America.
Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), the liberator who inspired Hugo Chavez's quest to remove the old order, once said that South American nations "must make kings whom we call presidents". He did not say "and make courtiers out of the English left". But that too came to pass.
Until economic chaos in the late 1980s revealed the depth of its corruption, Venezuela was the most robust democracy in Latin America. Between November 1998 and December 1999, Venezuelans voted five times. Now Chavez has a mandate for reform, and he must show that he is as good at governing as at sweeping away an old system. Gott ably describes Chavez's dream of a "Bolivarian" revolution - a mixture comparable with developmentist programmes of the 1960s and 1970s.
Chavez shot to Latin American notoriety on February 4, 1992, when he led a rebellion against the government of Carlos Andres Perez, then in his second term in office. The paratroop officer failed and spent two years in prison, then slowly began to build his platform for government.
Since he took office in February 1999, Chavez has proclaimed his identification with the Cuban revolution, and roused members of the dormant Opec oil-producing cartel - originally the project of a Venezuelan - to secure a three-fold increase in world oil prices.
But just when he had won a massive "Yes" vote in the December constitutional-reform referendum, tropical rains hit Caracas with awesome force. In the early hours of Thursday, December 16, 1999, huge chunks of Caracas's shanties, and some not-so-poor suburbs, were wiped out by ferocious floods coming down from the Avila mountain. Thousands of slum-dwellers were killed, and an estimated 100,000 people were made homeless.
Gott's view of Chavez, which includes an interview with him, is largely flattering. He sees Chavez as the most intriguing political figure to have emerged in Latin America since Fidel Castro. This could be a blessing for academics seeking fresh material for their theses, but it is a doubtful gift to democratic progress in South America. We would really like to see fewer Messiahs and more ordinary men and women with good economic management credentials.
The author describes the Venezuelan's visionand presents a far-reaching alternative future for Latin America. But presumably, like those before him, Chavez will eventually be screwed by his leftist friends, who will claim that his brand of revolution is not good enough. That is our fate.
Gott is thorough in his description of Chavez's efforts. He goes to Barinas, where the president was born in July 1954, and reveals his own nostalgia, which is a little patronising. "This is the provincial Latin America that I like most, only eight hours by bus from the capital, but light years away by most other measurements." He compares the country's pre-Chavez political structure to a one-party East European system, in which two groups simply agree to take turns at the Miraflores presidential palace. And he has an entertaining chapter on the selection of "Miss Venezuela", which ignores the Caribbean nation's indigenous people and descendants of Africans, because, he is told, "Venezuelans would not feel represented by a black woman".
Gott's 1960s book, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, is a definitive text, and he is an experienced writer on the area. But one's impression had been that his generation of British Latin Americanists, who dictated good ideas for governance from comfortable homes in England, had all retired. It is irksome to read England's incestuous, leftist Latin American specialists deciding what is best for the hemisphere. Those men and women sang the praises of Peron, Castro, Guevara, Omar Torrijos, and Forbes Burnham. I had liked to think that Richard Gott knew better, so his infatuation with Chavez is alarming. We have yet to see if the Venezuelan leader will leave a legacy any more worth celebrating than the rest of them.
Andrew Graham-Yooll is editor of the Buenos Aires Herald. *****
***** Financial Times (London) July 27, 2000, Thursday USA Edition 2 SECTION: COMMENT & ANALYSIS; Pg. 13 HEADLINE: COMMENT & ANALYSIS: Rose-tinted view of the revolution: Richard Lapper on a readable but romantic view of the rise to power of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela:
Leftwing intellectuals often have a soft spot for radical strongmen in exotic parts of the world. An authoritarian regime that would be intolerable at home is somehow exactly what is needed in Latin America or Africa. So it is with Richard Gott. He admits to being "susceptible to the charms" of the likes of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president. But his account of Chavez's rise to power takes at face value Chavez's version of recent events and completely ignores the shortcomings of his government.
The book's main redeeming feature is that it provides a colourful and readable account of Chavez's background and beliefs. The son of schoolteachers in the poor eastern state of Barinas, he was raised on folk tales of Simon Bolivar, the national hero of Venezuela who led Latin America's independence movement. His own great-great grand- father, Colonel Pedro Perez Perez, fought on the liberal side in the country's 19th-century civil wars.
As a military cadet in the 1970s, Chavez was influenced by the leftist military reformism of Panama's Omar Torrijos and Peru's Juan Velasco. His involvement in leftwing circles in the army led to a part in the unsuccessful coup of 1992; a period of imprisonment; subsequent political campaigning and a landslide election victory over Venezuela's corrupt and discredited political parties in 1998. But Gott's analysis is simplistic.
Surrounded by veteran leftwing advisers, Chavez is depicted as "a serious revolutionary" steeped in Utopian nationalist and Marxist ideas, who is not only "trying to carve out a new programme for Latin America" but could also lead an international crusade against globalisation. "His hostility to neo-liberalism and globalisation, support for indigenous peoples and his search for an agricultural strategy that would allow his country to feed its own people all combine to put him in tacit alliance with the protesters of Seattle," writes Gott admiringly.
Much of this amounts to wishful thinking that tells us more about the ideological certainties of the author, a former journalist at The Guardian, the left-leaning British newspaper. It underestimates Chavez's pragmatism. Thus while Chavez routinely criticises "savage neo-liberalism", his fiscal and monetary policies have been relatively orthodox. In spite of his rhetoric, the government has successfully raised bonds on international capital markets. This year it allowed a US company to acquire the Caracas electricity company in the country's first hostile takeover.
Bolivar was a national hero in Venezuela well before Chavez adopted him. More importantly, Gott seems oblivious to the flaws in Chavez's political leadership, which has weakened Venezuela's economy and made many of the country's institutions even more frail than before.
It is true that Chavez inherited an economy ruined by decades of mismanagement and corruption. And it is true also that by pressing for a change in the policy of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the new Venezuelan government has helped bring about a threefold increase in oil prices. But Gott exaggerates the extent to which Chavez himself is personally responsible for the rise in oil prices, underplaying the importance of the economic recovery in Asia and Europe that has increased demand. He also ignores how much of the oil bonanza has been wasted.
Moreover, Chavez's constitutional scheming and some of his more madcap ideas have created huge political uncertainty. Since the beginning of 1999 private investment has dried up, local businessmen have sent their capital abroad and foreign companies have put investment or expansion plans on hold. The economy shrank more than 7 per cent in 1999 and unemployment grew by 500,000.
Venezuela had become hopelessly corrupt under the governments of Democratic Action and Copei, the Christian Democrats - a degeneration that explains the collapse in popular support for those two parties during the past two years. But Chavez's tendency to centralise power has made the situation worse rather than better. Congress has been dissolved and converted into a single chamber body. So far the interim legislative body set up to replace it has done little more than respond to Chavez's wishes. The national electoral council, full of Chavez loyalists, was incapable of meeting commitments to hold elections at the end of May. The armed forces have been politicised; military officers have an important role in almost every ministry.
Chavez remains a popular figure but many Venezuelans are prepared to vote against him. Opinion polls suggest that Francisco Arias Cardenas, Chavez's former comrade and main opponent at next Sunday's elections, could win a third of the vote. For Gott this is an unnecessary complication. Chavez is taking Venezuelans on a trip to an "obviously positive but uncertain destiny", he says. It is just too bad if many of them don't agree.
To order call FT Bookshop on 44 20 8324 5511 or visit www.ftbookshop.com *****
The book is probably worth reading, I think.
Yoshie