With his country teetering on the brink of disaster, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez clings to power -- thanks primarily to the passionate support of the nation's poor.
By Barry C. Lynn January/February 2003 Issue
The populist former paratrooper has mobilized Venezuela's poor to participate in their own government
You can buy a plastic-bound copy of the Venezuelan Constitution for 60 cents, a leather-clad copy for $3, a coffee-table edition for $5. Not that you really need a copy of your own, since someone standing near you on the subway in Caracas will have one in his pocket. Or you can always listen to one of the ongoing debates at a downtown park. "Look at this article," someone will shout, and a half dozen people will flip through the constitution's 35,000 words and 350 articles to find the pertinent passage. "Yes," someone else will cry out. "But this one here is more to the point."
Leila Escobar, a lab technician in her early 30s, carries a pocket-size copy of the new constitution, bound in blue plastic. I meet her late one morning in Nueva Grenada, a grimy, run-down neighborhood in the Venezuelan capital, and the mid-October day is unseasonably hot. As a passing cloud offers relief, Escobar pauses to wipe the sweat from her face with a red handkerchief. She has walked seven miles already, near the head of a march by hundreds of thousands who have come out in support of President Hugo Chávez. It has been six months since Chávez was ousted briefly in a coup, and now his opponents -- business leaders, a handful of military officers, almost all of the nation's media -- are once again trying to orchestrate his removal. So Escobar and other chavistas have taken to the streets, vowing to protect the president -- with their bodies, if necessary.
The reason for their support has everything to do with the little blue book Escobar carries. In one of his first acts as president, Chávez held a nationwide referendum on the constitution that effectively redrew the political boundaries of Venezuela from the ground up. Over the past four years, through a series of new laws and programs, he has mobilized the poor to participate in what had always been a top-down, two-party political system dominated by the country's upper and middle classes. "The president has brought us hope, and he has brought us democracy," says Escobar. "They will not take him from us."...
If Chávez is ousted, however, it will not be because he is a brutal dictator....Opposition political parties, as well as the press, operate freely in Venezuela, and the federal police -- once among the most feared forces in South America -- have not hindered even those advocating outright rebellion. And for the first time in Venezuelan history, ordinary citizens are being encouraged to create and elect local councils, to work with local officials to improve their neighborhoods, to get directly involved in their government. Acting together, these are the people who have become the single most powerful group in Venezuela. These are the people who, in many ways, have made themselves the real sovereigns of Venezuela's oil....
...[W]hen people gather in neighborhoods like Hoyo de la Puerta [one of the shantytowns that ring Caracas], the talk seldom centers on the price of food or the lack of health care. Instead, what excites them is the new constitution, drafted by a popularly elected assembly in 1999 and approved by an overwhelming vote in December of that year. A somewhat haphazard amalgam, the document protects minority rights, permits people to claim title to their farms and homes, and expands political participation at the grassroots level. De Peña, for example, is particularly excited by a new law that gives citizens the right to take part in the kind of urban planning that drove her from her home 30 years ago. "Before, the government could come and do whatever they wanted to us," she says, pulling a newsprint copy of the law from her purse and waving it about. "But this paper gives the community a voice. This law forces the authorities to listen."
The issue of land ownership, especially, inspires poor residents to praise Chávez. As is true of about half the people of Caracas, most here do not hold legal title to the houses in which they live, or to the lots underneath. Some say they bought their land years ago. Others admit they simply took the land and built on it. Now, a new law permits them to "regularize" their ownership by registering their claim.
Indelgard Vargas, an unemployed engineer and father of two small children, says land ownership is partly a matter of self-respect. "It is better to own a little plot," he says, "than to trespass on a great expanse." But it also has practical consequences. For the first time, the poor will be able to sell their lots, protect them in court, or mortgage them with a bank. Chávez, the revolutionary, promises to make the poor into property owners -- and, in the process, he has already given them a sense of entitlement as citizens. "How can you demand service from the mayor when you don't pay property taxes?" says Vargas. "And how can you pay any taxes if you don't own any property?"...
For anyone who knew Venezuela during the years of the oil boom, as I did as a foreign correspondent during the late 1980s, the current level of political polarization is shocking. For three decades after the last dictator fell in 1958, the country was often held up as Latin America's model democracy. There were two powerful political parties, both with a strong base of support among the upper and middle classes, both able to rally large masses of the poor via well-honed patronage systems. It was, everyone liked to say, just like the United States.
This system served the country's elite well, rewarding them with highly lucrative monopolies in everything from beer bottling to food canning to domestic airlines. It also did well by the millions of immigrants who came from Italy, Spain, and Portugal in the 1930s and 1950s. These people managed most of Venezuela's industries and service companies, and filled most professional positions. And when the big oil dollars started flowing in the early 1970s, it was a system that organized one of the longest-running fiestas of the 20th century. Awash in a seeming sea of money, Venezuelan elites built themselves wide highways, a sparkling subway, a glittering array of office towers and luxury apartments, a beautiful national theater. They imported great chefs, danced in glamorous clubs, vacationed in Paris, annexed large chunks of Miami. Jeep Wagoneers, bottles of Johnny Walker Black, kilos of French cheese -- all were heavily subsidized with public money.
In February 1989, the era of black gold came to a sudden, violent end. Oil prices had been falling for years, and everyone knew the party had to slow. But when the Pérez government tried to pass much of the bill on to the country's poor through higher bus fares and bread prices, hundreds of thousands took to the streets. At first the mobs burned buses, then they looted and burned stores, then they looted the apartments and houses of anyone who seemed to have more. Scores died in battles among neighbors. And when the army came, many hundreds more were shot down. Yet thousands of people refused to go home, even after soldiers opened fire with automatic rifles. In some neighborhoods, mobs armed only with sticks and rocks repeatedly charged ranks of terrified soldiers trucked in from the countryside. No one knows exactly how many people died, but many estimates put the total at well over 1,000. "The Caracazo," as the riot was called, was the single bloodiest uprising in Latin America in the last half century.
By taking to the streets, however, Venezuela's poor became a force that had to be reckoned with. What Chávez has done, through the new constitution, is to start a process of formalizing and solidifying their political power, channeling their anger through political institutions rather than the streets. "Venezuela is a time bomb that can explode at any moment," Chávez said when the constitution was approved. "It is our task, through the power of the vote, to defuse it now." Chávez threatens Venezuela's elite because he wants to turn the mob of February 1989 into what he likes to call el soberano -- "the sovereign citizen." Which is reason enough, in a country where the poor and working class form a solid majority of the voting population, for the elite to want Chávez out....
Democratic Action and COPEI, the two political parties that long dominated Venezuelan politics, have all but collapsed in recent years, and opponents of Chávez now have no real leaders or political platform. What they have is money, and they are voting with their bank accounts and passports. Since Chávez took office, tens of thousands of upper- and middle-class Venezuelans have fled the country, many to the United States. Last year they were on pace to remove an estimated $8 billion from the economy -- a staggering 8 percent of the annual gross domestic product.
They also control the media. All of Venezuela's private television stations and national newspapers are owned by the opposition, and all are employed to deliver an unadulterated flow of anti-Chávez propaganda in the form of news, popular music, even soap operas. The distortions can be dramatic. Today's anti-Chávez march is covered by all four TV channels from five in the morning until midnight. The pro-Chávez march three days later -- though twice as large -- is ignored entirely by three of the channels, and covered only sporadically by the fourth. (The American media also played up the anti-Chávez march, inflating its turnout to a million.) The marchers and the media are demanding that a popular referendum on the president be held immediately. They also call on European courts to indict him for crimes against humanity, as Spain did with Pinochet.
It is this charge of repression that most infuriates Chávez's supporters. Not a single leader of the April coup, they note, is in jail, even though some of them continue to openly advocate his overthrow. Not so long ago, the same could not be said for many of the poor who spoke out against Venezuela's old regime. Even at the height of the good times, the country's democracy was a preserve of the upper and middle classes, and it was protected at gunpoint. Anyone who tried to oppose the government from outside the two-party system ran a risk of being arrested, beaten, or killed by the National Guard or the federal police known as the DISIP. The DISIP sported black leather jackets and tall black boots, and the attire was more than a fashion statement.
Juan Contreras was a college student in the 1980s. He was also a member of a left-wing party considered "subversive" by the government. The DISIP and the National Guard routinely broke into his apartment -- 46 times in all, he says. Often they arrested him; sometimes they beat him. These days, Contreras places his faith in community organizing rather than party politics. A 39-year-old social worker, he travels around Venezuela to help poor farmers claim title to their land. He also leads a left-oriented group in the 23 de Enero housing project, a collection of immense and decrepit apartment blocks that rise on hills just west of the presidential palace. The group polices the projects at night, raises money to make needed repairs, and helps the elderly get medicine. "It has been years since any political party did anything for us," says Contreras. "We have to fight for our community by ourselves, every day."
Contreras doesn't expect much in the way of material help from the government -- but he is grateful to Chávez for calling off the police. The DISIP no longer visit his house, nor do they break up public meetings at the housing project as they did in the past. The president, Contreras says, has created a political environment in which the poor can assemble without fear of reprisals. On this day, a group of neighbors at 23 de Enero has organized a dance to raise money to fix an elevator in the 14-story Apartment Block 28. "For the first time," Contreras says, "we can breathe."...
At the local level, the new constitution encourages poor communities to create district councils to decide neighborhood affairs. Venezuela has no tradition of electing councils that are open to all parties -- or to people of no party -- so building them means starting at the very bottom. In the neighborhood of Petare, which includes some of the poorest and most violent barrios in Caracas, Alejandrina Reyes is going door to door with a small team of city workers and student volunteers. The goal is to speak with every adult in each district of roughly 3,000 people, to explain how residents can elect a council of 12 representatives. "It takes two months or more of almost full-time attention to get one community ready to vote," Reyes says. "And we've only been working with the easy communities, the ones where people have already set up associations and cooperatives." Then she smiles. "It's slow, but the word is really getting out."
One of the first to heed the call was Gloria Baroso. Only 40, Baroso has six children and four grandchildren, and has been on her own since her husband left home seven years ago. She runs a cooperative bakery in the El Carmen section of Petare, and also helps out as a nurse when people in the community take sick. Now she holds a seat on the new district council.
Baroso knows that before Chávez, it would have been unthinkable for a single mother who bakes bread for a living to hold elected office in Venezuela. In the street in front of the cooperative, she wipes her hands on her apron and sighs. Even before she joined the council, she had too much to do. "But it's worth it," she says. Already, she has seen a profound change. "The Venezuelan people are not the same people they were even a few years ago," she says. "We know our rights. And no matter what the rich do to Chávez, this is something they can never erase." What do you think?
Barry C. Lynn lived and worked in Venezuela in the late 1980s during the last years of the oil boom as a staff reporter for Agence France-Presse.
[The full article is available at <http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/02/ma_208_01.html>.]
-- Yoshie
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