Colombia v. Venezuela: Reasons to be skeptical

Forrest Hylton makes some good points in this analysis of Colombian claims of what the FARC laptops show about the Venezuelan connection.

Hugo and the FARC

An old friend has called my attention to Interpol desacredita a Colombia en el caso del computador de Raúl Reyes (“INTERPOL discredits Colombia in the case of Raúl Reyes' computer”). I'd seen most of this (except the signatures on the letter). Yes, it seems that Uribe and his policemen are manipulating info to make the Chávez-Farc connection look worse than it probably is. Meanwhile, Chávez lets himself be photographed embracing Farc leaders and makes speeches calling for respect for the Farc as "interlocutores válidos". I don't know what truth there is in claims that the Venezuelan military gives sanctuary to Farc, but probably some truth -- if not from the top command, at more local levels. In isolated army or Guardia Nacional posts, there will be commanders either sympathetic to Farc or susceptible to bribes, or both, and it's pretty clear that Farc units move regularly across the borders into Venezuela and Ecuador. Some of the testimony in this report in Spain's El País from last December sounds more than plausible: El narcosantuario de las FARC.

I just learned (from a speech by Chávez) that there is a Venezuelan guerrilla group in the border area calling itself "Frente de Liberación Bolivariano" claiming to support Chávez -- he has disowned them.

Anyway, its a chaotic frontier, where bands of armed men and a few women make up their own rules while obeying no central authority. And some of those bands are no doubt in the pay of outside organizations who want to exploit the area's resources, including private, state and mixed enterprises looking for oil, pharmaceuticals, and other riches. Just like in José Eustasio Rivera's famous novel, La vorágine (1924, when the coveted resource was rubber).

Photo: Iván Márquez del Secretariado de las Farc y el presidente Hugo Chávez, durante la reunión que sostuvieron en Caracas como parte del proceso en búsqueda de un acuerdo humanitario con el grupo guerrillero. (November 2007. Source: La Tarde)

Venezuela again

An excellent review of the strengths and shortcomings of Hugo Chávez's charismatic leadership appears in the March 10 issue of The Nation: Chávez's Fix, by Daniel Wilkinson.

I'll have something to say about the intense and nasty electoral campaign in Spain shortly. I was in Madrid the past two weeks, where I didn't have easy (home) access to the Internet and also had a touch of fever, which seemed to me to be two good excuses to miss last week's blog deadline. Instead, I spent what writing energy I could summon on my personal priority, the novel on a great historical conflict that I'm anxious to complete.

Venezuela commentary in Spanish

Those of you who read Spanish may be interested in the commentary that my colleague, Baltasar Lotroyo, and I have been writing on another blog, Lecturas y lectores.

Protégete de los vacilantes (on the Dec. 2 referendum vote)

Otra visión de Caracas. Visit to the posh "Country Club" section and to the club itself, and to a very skillfully designed and popular shopping center, with the center's architect.

Política y espacio. A visit to Caracas' notorious "23 de Enero" housing project (mammoth superblocks, a violent political history) in August 2007. Photos.

"Socialismo del s. xxi": Hugo Chávez' big idea.

Hugo Chávez' military strength and problem

Last month's "No" vote in the referendum on changing the Venezuelan constitution, despite Hugo Chávez's energetic campaigning for "Sí", came as something of a surprise, given his continuing high approval ratings. It showed that not everybody who voted for him (over 60% in the last election) is willing to follow him anywhere he wants to lead, suggesting that the Venezuelan electorate is maturing and discriminating. The other surprise, to those who think of him as a dictator, was that Chávez accepted the result.

Jorge Castañeda, Mexican politólogo and former foreign minister (under President Vicente Fox), offered a cynical explanation of that second surprise: that army officers who knew that the vote was negative (hours before any public announcement) let him know that they would not tolerate fraud. (See Castañeda's article in El País, ¿Qué pasó en Venezuela?)

We can't know whether this is what really happened -- Castañeda's informed speculation is dubious, and his anti-Chávez bias is apparent. But Nikolas Kozloff's Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the United States (2006. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), originally published in 2006 and recently re-published as a paperback, includes two chapters suggesting that something like that is at least possible: "Chávez's Civil-Military Alliance" and "The Test of Chávez's Civil-Military Alliance" (pp. 71-104).

The "test" of his alliance with the military was the short-lived coup (Ap. 11-14, 2002), which Hugo survived by a hair, thanks to intervention of two generals (Carneiro & Baduel) and lower ranks, which changed the structure of the alliance in 2 ways: 1, allowing Chávez to identify and purge those most likely to betray his revolution, but 2, making very clear his dependence on those other officers who saved him but whose vision of the Bolivarian revolution does not depend entirely on his.

For more information and also some good laughs, see this video of Nikolas Kozloff on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Aug. 20, 2007.

Bolivarian Alternatives

A reader has asked about "Hugo Chávez' ALBA" which I mentioned as an example of inter-state associations that can limit multinational corporations' activity (see below, under headline "Globalization"). Here goes:

The Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de América is one of a half-dozen or more political-cum-trade associations among Latin American countries, in their attempts to establish policies and resources independent of the United States. In name and intention, "ALBA" is a direct response to "ALCA" (Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas ), Spanish acronym for the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas.

ALCA/FTAA was founded at U.S. initiative in 1994 to reduce tariff barriers among 34 countries of the Western Hemisphere, that is, all of them except Cuba. Few, however, have actually joined, though the U.S. is still pushing the idea. Hugo Chávez has denounced it as another tool for imperialist exploitation by the U.S. The presidents of Brazil (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) and Argentina (Néstor Kirchner) have conditioned their participation on U.S. elimination of its agricultural subsidies (which appears unlikely), and there has also been loud objection to ALCA/FTAA's attempts to impose U.S. principles of "intellectual property" and patent protection, which the critics fear (with some historical basis) would be used to prohibit independent research and even exploitation of native plants which have been "patented" by a U.S. chemical company.

ALBA is the "alternative" proposed by Hugo Chávez. It does not exclude Cuba -- in fact, it was founded in Havana in 2004. (Just this week, Chávez surprised his Cuban hosts by proclaiming that "Cuba and Venezuela are really one government.") It does however exclude the U.S. It is "Bolivarian" both because Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) imagined a union of Spain's ex-colonies in America (he wanted to put its capital in Panama) and because it is Venezuela's treasury of bolívares (the national currency) that give it some plausibility. So far, besides Venezuela and Cuba, ALBA has negotiated agreements with Nicaragua, Bolivia, Haiti, and "bilateral agreements" (something less than full participation) with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, etc.

Along the same lines, but with more radical implications, Venezuela and Cuba (with Venezuela's money) have created a new alternative to the International Monetary Fund, from which Cuba was excluded and which Venezuela recently abandoned. It was launched in Haiti with with $1 billion of Venezuelan money. Most of the countries of South America have already agreed to participate in what has now been redefined as a development bank which (at Brazilian insistence) will limit its lending to South America (thus leaving out Nicaragua and Haiti and other Caribbean countries -- Venezuela presumably will continue lending to them outside of the new bank).

Cities and Revolutions in Latin America

A call-for-proposals (CFP) with this title caught my attention, because it's something I've been pondering for practically all my adult life -- since my days in rebellious Caracas back in the 1960s. The session organizers, Federica Morelli and Jordana Dym, have also given it a lot of thought. But if their summary of current historiography is right, I have some doubts about the split between pre-modern (colonial and 19th century) and 20th-21st century views of city dynamics.

They write that scholars specializing in the colonial period "tend to emphasize cities as places of social revolution and economic dynamism. Scholars of independence and the nineteenth century see cities as places for popular mobilization (riots) and organized political opposition (juntas, coups) by elites. Scholars of the twentieth century and beyond tend to contrast Indian or peasant villages with the 'mega-cities' of Latin America where factories take in internal and external migrants, housewives demonstrate against dictators, gangs use urban institutions to organize, and politicians develop popular support that launches presidential careers."

The cut seems to be ca. 1920 or so. As described above, “colonialist” & 19th c. histories both see cities as “as places of social revolution and economic dynamism,” including riots & coups. That is, the rapid, innovative social dynamic of “cities,” built places with the greatest density of population – and an inertia of change – is clearly differentiated from the inertia of much slower change in their rural hinterlands, where Marx remarked on “the idiocy of rural life.” It is in the 20th century that ‘megacities’ incorporate the urban v. rural conflict within the urban density: that large numbers of rural people “invade” the cities, that is, are impelled to migrate there, but are not fully assimilated culturally.

Q1: Is this view of the premodern periods generally accurate? In Argentina and Venezuela (the 2 countries whose social history I know best), in the late colonial period and throughout the first century of independence, pressure for change came mostly from the rural areas: montoneras (rebellious bands of mounted men) in Argentina, in Venezuela the many rural revolts leading to changes in the central government in Caracas. The men who came to power, almost always by revolution (i.e., rural revolt), included Páez, a cattleman from the southern llanos, followed by the Monagas brothers (especially José Tadeo) from the rural east, others from rural Miranda or Falcón, and then a whole series of cattlemen and shepherds from the western Andes, especially the state of Táchira, where there was no city of important size.

The earlier independence wars were also largely rural affairs. The assemblies of dignitaries who declared independence met in cities (Tucumán, a quite small provincial capital in the remote north or Argentina, and the colonial capitals were usually centers of conspiracy, but the troops and very soon their officers came from smaller towns & villages). And even earlier, in Peru, Mexico and other places, the most serious threats to the colonial administration had come from small towns and villages.

Q2: In 20th & 21st centuries, why has the assimilation of rural migrants been such a difficult issue? Why have they formed villas miserias (Argentina), barrios (Venezuela), favelas (Brazil), campamentos (Chile), etc., that is, dense and precarious shantytowns surrounding and in interstices within the city, but seemingly antagonistic to its urban culture? Here are some likely explanations:

• Too many arriving too suddenly
• Rejection of the newcomers by the urbanites
• Preference of the newcomers for maintaining family ties & other traditions

The problem with the first hypothesis is that Buenos Aires, Caracas, Mexico City, Lima, Sao Paulo and other great cities have had much more difficulty assimilating their own rural compatriots than they have had with the large numbers of foreigners who began arriving around the beginning of the 20th century. I don't mean that all those Italians, Gallegos, Japanese, and Eastern European Jews were welcomed by the native urbanites, but that many of them found oportunities in their new environment to become effective urban actors, whether in politics, arts, business, or crime. The rural-urban migrants mostly did not.

I'm tempted to submit a proposal, even though I probably won't be able to get to Lyon (France) next August (I plan to be in the U.S. around that time). At the very least, I wanted to develop some ideas about it.

See the call for papers, IXth International Conference on Urban History, Lyon, France, 27th - 30th August 2008: Cities and Revolutions in Latin America

Chile & Venezuela: different Lefts, different paths

Someone just forwarded an anonymous attack --a string of insults, really -- on Ricardo Lagos, former president of Chile, because he dared to say in an interview that Hugo Chávez's kind of leftism was not replicable in other countries without Venezuela's fat "checkbook". An obvious enough point, one would think, but unacceptable to the anonymous author, who seems to think that boldness and clear revolutionary thinking are all that are needed to bring about revolutions everywhere.

We should be skeptical of all politicians, including Lagos & Chávez. Nevertheless, Lagos appears to me to be one of the most honest and effective of the bunch. He left office even more popular than when he entered, so clearly a lot of Chileans have a high opinion of him. He is of course pragmatic -- like all successful and long-lasting politicians, Left or Right. What the French call a possibiliste. And he is also cautious, as anybody governing Chile (with its terrible recent history) should be. So if his policies were "liberal" or "neoliberal", that was due less to his personal wishes than to his estimate (pretty astute, I think) of what his government could get away with.

Hugo Chávez is less obviously pragmatic, and far less cautious in what he says -- though I think he's very careful about maintaining good relations with his armed forces, which is a kind of pragmatism. He has also discovered that he can get away with, can dare to pursue, much bolder anti-U.S. policies than could Lagos. Not only that he can do it, but that he will be applauded for it. There are at least three immense differences between Venezuela and Chile that make Chávez's defiant rhetoric and aggressive reforms possible, all of them conjunctural (that is, produced by a convergence of historical processes that may not last long): (1) the high price of petroleum, and Venezuela's abundance of it; Chilean copper is selling well, too, but not like oil. So Chávez has the resources to spend on projects both useful and wasteful. (2) The weakening of the U.S. government's interest or capacity to slap down this opponent, because of its contradictory petroleum needs and the calamitous failure of its Iraq war (which was supposed to secure the needs of U.S. petroleum interests forever, but has ended up producing nothing but costs in all areas -- military depletion, diplomatic weakness, spiraling deficit). (3) The utterly different social-political history of the two countries. Just one aspect to note: Chile has a very large, established and monied conservative bloc, nearly as large as its very deeply established left. Votes, when free (before and after Pinochet) have always been close, with either Right or Left's hold on government precarious. Neither Lagos, nor Allende, nor anybody had the kind of support in the polls that Hugo Chávez musters. I think the main reason that the Right is so ineffective as a political force in Venezuela is that it never really had to bother about mobilizing voters, it was enough for them to make money while a whole series of corruptible governments of the white elite kept the darker masses at bay. The Venezuelan Left is also radically different from that in Chile, where both the Socialist and Communist parties became highly institutionalized, with large bases of trade union members, producing a more cautious political culture than in Venezuela where the ideologues of the Left parties, with much smaller and more marginalized rank-and-files, were responsible to no one but their own visions of the truth.

By the way, here's what Lagos really had to say about Chávez, in an interview in El País (26/03/2007). It sounds very sensible.

¿Considera válidos los análisis que dividen a América Latina entre los países en favor y en contra del presidente venezolano, Hugo Chávez?
Las políticas de Chávez se sustentan en la capacidad financiera que le da el petróleo y no son reproducibles en otros países que no tienen petróleo, donde no tienen esa solvencia. A lo mejor, a muchos jefes de Estado les gustaría tener la chequera abundante; otra cosa es saber darle el mejor uso a esa chequera. En condiciones mucho más modestas, Chile ha experimentado una holgura financiera producto del precio del cobre y ha hecho un uso cuidadoso de esos fondos, destinando parte de esos recursos al desarrollo en ciencia y tecnología y guardando otra parte... El tema de los pros y los anti Chávez es maniqueo.

Photo of Lagos from Chilean newspaper Clarín

Socialism today in South America

Like you, I've been wondering what "socialism for the 21st century" might look like. Here's a good overview of what it looks like so far in South America. It's especially interesting for its insight into what it might mean for the relations between Venezuela and its English-speaking, pro-"socialist" neighbor Guyana. The author is Odeen Ishmael, Guyanese ambassador in Caracas. Socialist Ideology Takes New Roots in South America

Also check out the other articles on this site.

Guest commentary: Venezuela

Douglas C. Smyth takes a sensible, balanced position on the momentous changes in Venezuela.

"If Chavez had done nothing else, he has at least galvanized the middle class to think of those less fortunate, instead of hiding behind the walls of their gated communities, even if they go only to counter him politically. ... But Chavez seems to be doing much more than that...," he writes.

Will Chavez Become a Dictator?

By Douglas C. Smyth

One of my Venezuelan cousins emailed me over Christmas, and mentioned Chavez putting into place more restrictive policies for the media, as well as new education laws, more taxes, and his consolidation of the political parties of the left. This is hardly surprising, given past history.

My cousin has become an activist for the opposition, a retired agronomist who will go into the barrios, probably for the first time in her life, to work for social change. If Chavez had done nothing else, he has at least galvanized the middle class to think of those less fortunate, instead of hiding behind the walls of their gated communities, even if they go only to counter him politically. I expect that my cousin will learn at least as much as she will teach. But Chavez seems to be doing much more than that: health care clinics, cooperatives, literacy programs, water and electricity to the barrios, vacant land occupations and much more, including cutting the poverty rate by 10%.

On the other hand, his political and security moves are worrisome. He has six more years, and he has consolidated all left-wing parties, and has begun a campaign against the private media, denying the renewal of a license for RCTV. The corporate media has been, admittedly, even more biased than Fox News, stridently anti-Chavez, but democrats everywhere get worried when freedom of the press is threatened. He has also beefed up his military, and armed a peoples militia.

Given history, though, you can hardly blame Chavez. The US did immediately support the coup d'etat that overthrew Chavez, the elected president, for two days in April, 2002, and there is conflicting evidence as to whether the US had a part in the coup itself. Further, it is incontestable that the US played a role in destabilizing Chile in the early 1970's and, at very least, supported Pinochet's overthrow of the Socialist government of Salvador Allende in September, 1973. I'm sure Chavez is very aware of the fate of Allende's peaceful revolution.

History has consequences. Chavez has clearly taken steps to prevent either destabilization (arguably attempted by the labor federation CTV in 2002), or a military coup, and his program to broaden Venezuela's market for oil beyond the US, and his regional trade pacts are, in part, understandable defensive measures, as well as a challenge to the Washington Consensus.

And why should he renew a TV license to a channel that used it to support a coup against the legitimate government? Broadcast TV should recognize that it has a public responsibility: it is granted a license to use the public's airwaves. If NBC supported a coup attempt against President Bush, would its license be automatically renewed?

While he has made mistakes, and while his programs have only begun to scratch the surface of his country's problems, Chavez offers something new, inspiring new leaders in Latin America to look for alternatives to the neo-liberal Washington Consensus dominated by the US.

We can just hope that the opposition will cohere enough that Chavez will be kept honest and democratic.

No leader, facing only token opposition, remains a democrat for long, ­as witness our own government under total Republican rule. Here’s hoping that the opposition in Venezuela will force at least the honesty that we are hoping for from the Democrats taking over Congress in this country.

Caracas, 1963-64: Buckets of cement

Someone signing as "Curious" has asked: "You say in your personal description that after college you "worked in the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela"-- that seems to have been a pivital experience for you, so we'd like to know--under whose auspicios was that experience (we may not have the right English word, we mean, which group provided that opportunity for you to do that)?"

The organization was called "ACCION en Venezuela" ("ACCION" was an acronym for a long name that we in the organization could never remember -- "Americans for Community Cooperation" in something or other). Created by an American (i.e., U.S. citizen), Joseph Blatchford, and some young associates around (I think) 1961, and funded by private corporations with investments in Venezuela, it recruited both young foreigners like me and Venezuelan nationals, mostly college students, to work in poor urban neighborhoods to foment community associations, or asociaciones de vecinos, for social improvements. I personally worked and lived in Barrio Sucre in Petare and later in Bo. Las Minas de Baruta, in close association with Venezuelan co-workers who, like me, were in their early 20s. Our projects included building cement stairways, digging ditches for sewer and waterline installation, and even building a small school, all in operaciones cayapas -- campaigns of collective volunteer labor by the men and women of the community. Our little organization used its contacts to acquire bags of cement and other materials needed, including usually the food that the women prepared for us laborers in every operación cayapa. Years later I went back to visit, and could see one of our stairways in constant use. It gave me a thrill. I even found one of the men I'd worked with on that occasion, shouldering buckets of cement mix to climb the hill and dump into the frame. Toribio Blanco, in Bo. Sucre, Petare -- if you see him, please give him my regards.

For an interesting discussion of the history of community development and asociaciones de vecinos in Venezuela, see DHV para nosotros. "ACCION en Venezuela" is one of the many programs mentioned there.

The smell of sulphur

Hugo's UN performance was political comedy, which played very well for his intended audience. "Taste" had nothing to do with it , any more than it does for George Carlin or Stephen Colbert. It's a kind of comedy very familiar in Venezuela, where everybody makes outrageous statements as the only way to attract attention. The alcalde mayor of Caracas -- part of Chávez's team -- got off some real zingers a week or so ago, and is probably still spouting off, but the most outrageous of all come from Chávez's opposition, who pride themselves on being better educated and should know better. The lamentable historian Guillermo Morón (I had the dubious honor of being his house guest for a few weeks, many years ago) formally and pompously declared that "magnicidio" would be appropriate in the case of Chávez ("“es lícito matar a un gobernante cuando éste incumple las leyes, comete injusticias y deja de gobernar”).

See La bárbara e irreflexiva oposición venezolana

Portrait of Satan pursued by the people is from El Phineas » Blog Archive » La Carta de Satanas

Fukuyama on Hugo Chávez

Not all the news is from Lebanon. This is an analysis worth pondering, by Francis Fukuyama in Sundays Washington Post. History's Against Him

Chávez & the Chavistas

A friend writes: "I've been reading in the NYRB about Hugo Chávez. I have a soft spot for him but he sounds really weird. Maybe you should put up something about him."

Thanks for the suggestion. Yes, I should say something about Chávez. I kind of like him, too, and think he is a good phenomenon -- that is, that it's good for Venezuela that he happened. About him personally: He's a very quick thinker but not a deep one. What I mean is that he latches onto ideas that he reads or hears about without working out their likely consequences -- to an even greater degree than Fidel. He's also a very quick talker (I had a five-or-ten-minute impromptu conversation with him once; see Chatting with Chávez). He's also got a strong authoritarian tendency, which could bode ill.

First, about chavismo being a good phenomenon, apart from whether Chávez is or is not a good president.

The overthrow of the last military dictator, Lt. Gen. Marcos Pérez Jiménez, on January 23, 1958, raised great democratic hopes, but in the decades since, a narrow elite of business leaders, political party bosses and their allies managed to turn the institutions of Venezuelan democracy into a machine to guarantee their privileges and exclude the masses. The electoral laws, party structure, judicial system, etc., protected them and their property from scrutiny, while the national petroleum company channeled the oil wealth into their bank accounts or into projects benefitting mainly the elite. The two major parties entered into a pact to share the spoils of the country's oil wealth, while neglecting the needs of the mass of the population and of the nation as a whole: public schools, public health, affordable housing, economic development to create jobs. Those who were born poor faced ever decreasing chances to become less poor. The elite, because they were mainly descendants of generations of privilege, were and are mostly white; the great majority is dark.

Pressure from below threatened to blow this system apart several times, most dramatically in the guerrilla war of the 1960s and the riots of 1989. In the unions, the barrios, professional associations, the armed forces and minority parties, many people were working more or less independently of one another to change things. Finally, in 1998, all that pent-up energy for change found its almost-ideal leader in a hyper-energetic, quick-witted, dark-skinned, up-from-poverty military man, who had tried and failed to lead a coup six years earlier and now was ready to try politics.

Chávez has by now survived a coup and won a whole series of elections, the most recent by over 59%. But the huge movement we call "chavismo" is bigger than Chávez and parts of it are much older than his political presence, stemming from movements founded in 1989 or even earlier. Those older movements need him, and he still needs them, and for now the uneasy alliance between them leaves space for a lot of divergent opinion -- as we saw in the recent, hotly contested internal elections inside the chavista party.

Is this democracy? What else would you call it? You have a popularly elected president and legislature, and a lot of room for debate -- although the guarantees of freedom of speech are not really secure, and the meaning of certain constitutional restrictions (by the new "Bolivarian" constitution) not entirely clear. But the opposition to chavismo has hardly been muzzled (just sometimes threatened), and the debate within chavismo continues.

I haven't been back to Venezuela recently, and it's hard to judge the tenor of political discourse without actually being in it. But I do know the country's recent past, and have some idea of the dynamics of revolutionary regimes, and here's my hypothesis: The danger for democracy in Venezuela will come if and when Hugo Chávez establishes such a wide base of power in organizations of his own creation, that he no longer needs to heed the other organizations that so far have been supporting him. At that point we may expect a Creole and (probably but not certainly) bloodless version of the "night of the long knives," as the Germans called the 1934 purge of the SA.

But I don't think that will happen, or -- if it should happen -- that consolidation of absolute dictatorial power would last very long. Partly as a consequence of all the agitation and political education that has been going on for the past seven years, including the government's health and education misiones in the barrios, Venezuelans across the land will know how to recognize and resist any sort of dictatorship. And so far, Hugo Chávez has been very good at reading the national mood.

For more detail, look at my 1991 book, The Land and People of Venezuela (written for young readers), or these more recent essays: Venezuela, 2004/05/01, and Venezuela Now, 2003

See also:
Steve Ellner, Venezuela’s “Demonstration Effect”: Defying Globalization’s Logic

Alma Guillermoprieto, Don't Cry for Me, Venezuela, New York Review of Books, 10/6/2005, and The Gambler, NYRB 10/20/2005 -- and be sure also to check out the Corrections to several errors in the first piece (Alma must have been in a hurry when she wrote it).

What's happening in Venezuela

What happens in Venezuela matters, to the U.S. and to every other country in the region. At issue: Can the Chávez government and its movement -- the MVR -- survive, despite fierce U.S. opposition? If so, will they be able to fulfill their program of reducing social inequality and broadening participation and opportunity, without going bankrupt? Can the chavistas maintain its honesty and openness despite being so embattled? Or have they, as the opposition claims, already lost them?

I think: (a) the movement will survive any coup attempt -- just look what happened in April 2002; (b) the oil wealth won't last forever but probably long enough to finance huge institutional changes that will be felt for ever after; (c) they (or at least the leadership) are going to try to be pure, but it's tough to remain democratic when you're under siege, and not everybody is going to resist temptation when there's so much money being invested. Finally, (d) the chavista movement will continue to inspire radical reforms throughout the continent and beyond.

To find out what's up and get a sense of what may happen next, from the chavista perspective, check the text and links on The Cyber Cycle, weekly newsletter of the Venezuelan Information Office.

Bolívar's politics

I have now scanned my 1982 typescript, "Liberty and People: Ideological Analysis of the Political Writings of Simón Bolívar." (It took hours, and will take more to correct the garbles from the scan.) A short summary in Spanish, Libertad y pueblo, is up on my website. If anyone wants to see the whole essay (in English) and bibliography, please write to me.

More on Venezuela news bias

AP's One Sided Venezuela Coverage - by Dan Feder -- (December 26, 2002)

Venezuela: Checking bias in reporting

Lou-Bette Herrick sends this article from the WP by Mark Weisbrot, which should change how you see the conflict in Venezuela. (You'll be asked for age, sex & zip code before you get to the article.) According to Weisbrot, hardly anybody outside of the oil workers is actually on strike, though a lot of workers are locked out by employers (including FedEx and McDonald's) that sympathize with the opposition. And the opposition is berserk, violent and utterly untrustworthy in their reporting of the news (and they own all the TV stations but one). Lou-Bette comments that Weisbrot's is "Perhaps a more balanced view." She adds:

Much of the NYTimes reporting has not been impartial. For alternatives to the usual 'opposition' media reports from Venezuela you may explore, in English: VHeadline.com as well as The Narconews Bulletin and, in Spanish Veneconomy Be prepared to sift everything for the truth (?), but you will find more than one perspective.

An insider's exposé of press bias

And this, also forwarded by Lou-Bette, "Francisco Toro's weblog message before he did the honorable and exceptional thing: disqualify himself and resign as a non-partisan NYTimes reporter in Venezuela." Whatever you think of Toro's reporting, he's created a very valuable site.

Following the news: Caracas--This interactive Lonely Planet site may help. Also, see updates on my Latin American Cities page.

Venezuela opposition goes over the top--Now they're calling for assassination! A friend who knows and loves Venezuela well forwarded this web page. She writes: "This is outrageous and disgusting. A genuine opposition exists, and in large numbers, to the leadership of Hugo Chávez, mostly because he cannot or will not function in the confines of democratic accountability to further much needed changes in Venezuelan society. However, reactionary elements, apparently controlling opposition policy for their own agendas, have 'outclassed' President Chavez with their own arrogant ways. This is too bad. There can be no meeting of the minds with mindless behaviour rampant all 'round, i.e. mindless of the greater good. It looks like nothing more than spoiled brats squaring off, each with the attitude of 'if it can't be mine, there's going to be nothing left for you'. God help us."

Venezuela again--Here's a quick-reading piece that sounds about right: Hugo Chavez - the boxer.

Venzuela: politics vs. policy

Regarding my note Jan. 8 (see below), Emelio Betances of the University of Gettysburg writes:

"Your ideas certainly make sense, but they need to be developed more deeply. I am sure you know about Steve Ellner and Daniel Hellinger's edited book that just came out: Venezuelan Politics in the Chavez Era. Class, Polarization and Conflict (Lynne Rienner, 2003) where some of these ideas are expanded on. What I like about your idea is that you tried to provide a explanation which is above the simplistic version that both the Venezuelan and U.S. press feed us. What do you think of Chavez current efforts to restructure the oil industry into two sectors? Is this an effort to resolve the immediate political problem or is it a well thought-out plan to consolidate government control of the vital oil industry and prevent privatization?"

I don't know, Emelio, but my guess is both--although "well thought-out" might be an exaggeration. In times like these, politics take command.

Venezuela: The solution?

After reading the note below, my journalist colleague Maria Trombly asks, quite sensibly, "So what's your solution? ... you outline the conflict, the three sides, etc... So what is to be done?" Here's my response:

Maria -- It's not for us to solve. Venezuelans will have to work it out. Any stable settlement will have to take into account several conflicting interests.

What I think would be best for most Venezuelans, and for developing the country to provide more opportunities to its citizens, would be some form of the oil law reforms that the Chávez government is trying to enact, but with stronger guarantees of independent management so that neither this nor future governments will fiddle with oil revenues to enrich themselves. Especially, the reform to collect royalties on sales (easy to calculate -- how many barrels at what price) rather than as at present, as taxes on profits (easy to manipulate) makes a lot of sense. It's resisted by PDVSA executives, though, for obvious self-interested reasons.

Venezuela's three struggles

Chávez wins some, loses some-- This is why the Venezuelan conflict is so confusing: There are at least three different kinds of conflict going on, and the good guys in one or two of them are not always the good guys in the other one or two. First and most obviously to observers on the street, there's the ethnic-cum-class conflict that Amy Chua wrote about yesterday (see below, Venezuela: Privilege and ethnicity). In that one, Chávez has consistently been on the side of the pardos, the darker ones, and the humbler masses who've been excluded from the riches brought by oil from the very beginning. That makes him and his followers the good guys, in my book.

Second, there is a struggle to regain a greater share of the oil wealth for the Venezuelan nation. This has been the main objective of the oil reform Ch?vez has been insisting on. Here it's a little trickier figuring out who are the good guys. Since the so-called Oil Opening of the 1990s, the executives of the state oil company, PDVSA, have been running it almost as an autonomous enterprise, independent of the government. Given that past governments were notoriously corrupt (Pres. Carlos Andrés Pérez was a particularly conspicuous example), that wasn't altogether a bad thing; given that the PDVSA executives themselves were, if not corrupt, at least self-serving, then it wasn't such a good thing either. The net result was that very little of the oil revenue was available for development of things like infrastructure and public services that would benefit the masses of the people. On the whole, I think the Chávez backed reforms are a necessary and good thing.

Third, there is a struggle for political control, not just of PDVSA but of all the institutions. Here is where Chávez committed the "blunders" that Amy Chua and others talk about. As Luis Lander and Margarita López-Maya pointed out in an insightful article (NACLA Report on the Americas, July/August 2002), one of these blunders was signing the reform into law without extensive public debate. "This made it difficult for the common citizen to identify the competing interests involved," they write. "Further, during the three years of his administration, President Chávez has designated five different presidents of PDVSA... So the directors of the company feel insecure, unstable and ill-at-ease, and with some reason."

He finally got it right, it seems, with his sixth PDVSA president, Alí Rodríguez. But Chávez's "Bolivarian Republic" continues to waver between populist generosity and reckless bull-headedness (as seen in his relations with the Caracas mayor and police force). This is the problem with basing your political philosophy on a 200-year old military aristocrat, as I pointed out in my essay on "Bolivarian Democracy."

Venezuela: Privilege and ethnicity

On the op-ed page of today's The New York Times, Amy Chua writes that "there is also an ethnic dimension to Venezuela's crisis." The strikers don't represent the country's exploited working class so much as a very privileged group of wage-earners who think they deserve special privileges because they are white. The Ch�vez government has committed several blunders, she says (without specifying what they were), but "[t]he coup against Mr. Ch�vez last April was a classic effort by a market-dominant minority to retaliate against a democratically elected... government threatening its power."

This is an argument that I intend to develop as I continue the series on my website, "Venezuela: Background of the Conflict." Part I, from the first oil exports to the death of Juan Vicente G�mez (1917-1935), and Part II, taking us up to the revolution of 23 January 1958, are up and viewable. I welcome comments.

The clashes in Venezuela come out of a long history of struggle. Here I offer the first installment of my explanation of that history: Venezuela: Background of the Conflict (Part I).

Hi Douglas. It's not at all clear to me what's going on in Venezuela, and I really feel an obligation to find out so I can try to explain it to people. I suppose you saw Steve Ellner's short piece in The Nation -- he makes the point that the opposition's only demand is that Chávez resign, which seems utterly irresponsible. What will they put in his place? And why not wait until August, when it will be constitutionally possible to hold a referendum?

I don't know answers to your specific questions about women's rights, etc. -- maybe I'll be able to find out something. About the larger question, what's going on, here are my guesses:

1) It appears that the opposition has no unified program of government, and if they should succeed in getting Chávez out of office, there will be further turbulence as Carlos Ortega and his rivals try to outmaneuver each other to become -- what? Provisional president?

2) Venezuela's "Bolivarian Constitution" is exceptionally democratic -- it's been called the most democratic in Latin America, and that may be true. That is, there are stronger guarantees in it for representation, dissent and recall. The opposition's demand to ignore or override that constitution can have very grave consequences for the country's institutional stability.

3) The opposition is too disunited to characterize them all as one way or another; I assume that there are many well-meaning, racially tolerant and maybe even socially liberal people in those masses that assemble for the demonstration. However, they're not likely to be the ones too dominate if the opposition achieves its immediate goal, the overthrow of Chávez. The struggle is about many things (personal ambitions, opportunism, offended dignity), but the one thread that is most important is social class, which is to a large extent color-coded in Venezuela. The rhetoric and the dramatic protests by the better-off and lighter complexioned is setting back the considerable progress that I think Venezuela has made in overcoming racial antagonisms.

4) The Chavista forces appear to be much larger than the anti-Chavista, even now and facing the economic disruption brought about by the PdVSA executives, Ortega and their allies. This is probably (almost certainly) why the opposition doesn't want to wait for a legal referendum in June -- they'd lose.

5) I think Chávez's government will be able to hold on until June, by which time the opposition will have evolved into something else -- I expect it to divide and lose force. But, who knows?

Gee, I wasn't expecting to give such a long answer. Think I'll put it up on my new weblog.

Happy new year!

Geoff

Reasons for optimism

Happy new year! Reasons for optimism in 2003:
1) Hugo Chávez will probably survive the employers' strike in Venezuela, which is good, and will also have to pay closer attention to the demands of the middle class, which is also be good.
2) Luiz Inacio da Silva, "Lula," is sure to advance economic democracy in Latin America's largest country, Brazil.
3) The Russians' stupid repression of Chechens, and the Chechens' reckless assaults on Russians, may so exhaust the patience of Russian citizens that they force Putin to change policy or get out.
4) Good people in Africa will keep trying (against terrible odds) to make democracy a habit -- Kenya may be the latest example.
5) The Israelis will run out of ways to punish Palestinians and out of patience with their own aggressive settlers, so more of them will demand that the government seek peace.
6) Palestinians are running out of families willing to sacrifice their children in suicidal attacks, so more of them will be willing to respond.
7) My latest novel, just completed, will become a best-seller and a movie, which will make me and my friends very happy.