Say Venezuela and it brings up the name of Hugo Chavez. El
comandante, as his supporters call him, comes with an unsavoury reputation. He
rules forever in a country awash with petroleum. He has built a personality
cult around himself. The capital Caracas is also the murder capital of the
world. He wants to transform Venezuela into a socialist society and get rid of
private property. He befriends leaders the Americans don’t like. They can’t
wait to get rid of him and el comandante reciprocates: once, on live
television, he called George W. Bush a donkey.
I have been following events in Venezuela for years and
have a very different understanding of what is going on in the South American
country. The presidential elections of October this year gave me the opportunity
to test my impressions.
The flight to Caracas was filled with opposition
supporters flocking home to vote. A young couple told me they wouldn’t vote at
the consulate in London: it was staffed by Chavez supporters, the Chavistas.
This would be a familiar refrain. Curiously, for a supposed dictatorship, I
found them speaking freely to strangers, in their homes and on the streets.
Taxi drivers and tour guides opposed to Chavez would turn off the radio as soon
as they heard him. At the home of the lady from whom I had rented a room, the
daughter would change the television channel whenever Chavez appeared on it.
The mother was a Chavez supporter, but she kept quiet.
Most of the major newspapers, the more popular television
stations and almost all radio stations were with the opposition. Their
headlines were partisan and their coverage of the young opposition challenger
to Chavez, Henrique Capriles, adulatory. The dictatorship and restrictions on
freedom of expression were becoming harder to understand.
The Chavez-baiters were obsessive, especially with
outsiders. All that was good about Venezuela had always been so but everything
wrong with their country was Chavez’s fault. Their hate was personal and it ran
deep. This time, they thought, they had Chavez on the ropes. He had cancer and
was unpopular. His supporters had turned against him. He would lose the
elections, they kept telling me, which is what the private media kept telling
them. In the end, Chavez won comfortably in elections which even the Opposition
admitted were free and fair.
For Chavez to win, he must have had supporters. They were
not hard to find. I met them in droves, from the small Andean town of Merida
where I stayed most of the time to fishermen on tourist islands and even more in
Caracas, conspicuous in their red T-shirts and caps that said, ‘Chavez, the
heart of the people’. The love for their comandante was something personal,
something between them and him, without in-betweens and without expecting
anything in return. I had not known anything like it and without setting foot
in Venezuela it would have been impossible to vouch for its authenticity. This
was not a cult of personality imposed from above; it was a like a new Latin
American religion taking shape from below, from among the poor. Chavez was
their messiah.
This love had its reasons. Since coming to power 13 years
ago, Chavez has made dramatic improvements to the life of the poor majority. I
found health units staffed mostly by Cuban doctors in every town, small or big,
where treatment and basic medicines were free. There were new play areas in
even the remotest Andean villages. The state schools were clean and spacious
and every primary schoolchild in Venezuela gets a free sturdy laptop called
Canaimita.
Food is not cheap in Venezuela. It remains a speculative
economy, used to living on easy oil money. Inflation runs high but the poor can
at least buy from the state food shops where the subsidy on basic items like
oil, flour and sugar is as high as 80% of the market price. And now the state
is starting up bakeries and selling ‘arepas’, a staple Venezuelan breakfast
resembling a maize burger.
Thousands of spacious flats are coming up all over
Venezuela. The country plans to build three million houses in the next six years
and hundreds of thousands have already moved into their new homes. Some of
these are in small clusters; others are brand-new cities with their own
schools, primary health units, transport, playing fields and even churches.
These houses would not look out of place in any European country. But they are
for the poor and are massively subsidised. In Caracas, I saw new apartment
blocks in prime business districts. It was as if council estates had come up
right next to the British museum.
The list could go on for a while. But three things stood
out for me. At a time when retirement ages are being pushed back in Europe, the
age for receiving state pensions has been brought forward by two years in
Venezuela. It includes even the informal traders. While working rights are
under threat in the West, a new labour law in Venezuela makes it harder to
dismiss people. No one with a disabled child can be sacked to save costs.
Employers who flout the new law face not just fines; they can be imprisoned.
This has not caused an economic disaster. The country is growing at close to
six per cent and not because of high oil prices alone.
Chavez is also handing real power to the people.
Venezuelans by law can form community councils with enormous powers in their
local communities. I saw a middle class community council in Merida stall the
building of new tower blocks because the developer had damaged a local road.
Not even the mayor of the town was able to bail him out. The Venezuela of Hugo
Chavez intends to weave these community councils into communes that will have
their own socially-owned businesses, local laws, local currencies and a voice
in the national state.
This is the new reality of Venezuela. But the new jostles
with the old order. I saw very little extreme poverty there but plenty of
obscene wealth: glittering new shopping malls, pricey restaurants, fancy
electronics and flashy four by fours. The wealthy and the middle class
complained of the power of the marginals, as they call the Chavistas. And the
Chavista ranks complained about corruption, bureaucracy and the arrogance of
many of their local leaders.
What I did not see was a society cowering with fear, as
you would expect in a tyranny or in a country overrun by crime. Venezuelans are
a happy people; they drink enormous quantities of alcohol and love to play
their music full volume on ghetto blasters. They hate wearing seat belts, lane
driving or stopping for pedestrians at zebra crossings.
I saw people expressing themselves loud and clear,
disagreeing about politics and arguing about the future of their country.
Support for the revolution runs deep but so does the hatred of the wealthy and
the middle classes. I saw the venom that the private media unleashes every day
against the government but I did not see much evidence of censorship. I saw
plenty of soldiers on the streets but most of them were unarmed and they were
often in the company of civilians. Every day for a month, I saw a country with
multiple personalities.
The night before leaving, the country was lashed by the
tail end of a tropical storm. Just outside Caracas, I was in the house of Tony
who I had befriended. Tony is sometimes a tourist guide and an itinerant
salesman at other times. We had arranged a party that night but nobody could
come. We thought we would get over the disappointment by preparing the many
bottles of wonderful Venezuelan rum with cola, crushed ice and lime for the
Cuba Libre cocktail. Suddenly, we were interrupted by the frightened yelps of
dogs and screams from parrots and the pet monkey. Running out, we saw a part of
a hill displaced by the rain heading straight for his home, bringing with it
large chunks of rocks. We ran for our lives but by a miracle the landslide
stopped before taking down the house.
Wet and shaken, we ventured back into the house. That
night, Tony understandably fell silent. I was preparing my excuses to leave the
family alone when Tony let out a hearty Venezuelan laugh. “Amigo,” he said,
“the house stands. We are alive. And then there is a tomorrow. Shall we put
some music on for now and sing to it?”
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