Hugo Chávez Has A Mission - And Oil
But with Venezuela consistently the fourth largest supplier of oil to the United States and with Chávez using the country’s petroleum wealth to win friends and influence neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, U.S. officials cannot dismiss him so easily.
Chávez’s story resembles an overwrought Venezuelan soap opera -- an up-by-the-bootstraps protagonist given to passion and rancor, shifting alliances and betrayals, dreams, protests, gunshots and at least three failed coups.
In fact, however, the story of Chávez’s rise to power is even more riveting than fiction, and the man himself is more complicated than the international caricature that has developed.
Chávez was in the news earlier this year for brokering the February release of some political hostages being held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and, more recently, for breaking diplomatic ties with Colombia over that country’s spat with Ecuador. When Chávez leaped into the fray over a cross-border attack by Colombian troops that killed a guerrilla leader at a makeshift camp inside Ecuador March 1, some observers, including Peru’s President Alan García, were quick to criticize him for meddling. He is often accused of being authoritarian and undemocratic.
Journalist Bart Jones, however, says Chávez is simply doing what any world leader with spare cash does -- trying to win friends and bring other countries around to his vision for the region.
Jones, a former lay Maryknoll missioner, has come to understand Chávez’s hold on the country from the point of view of Venezuela’s poor. Last year, he published an ambitious account of Chávez’s life, ¡Hugo!: The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution. Jones interviewed Chávez extensively for his book, and said the Venezuelan president sees himself as the heir to South American liberator Simón Bolívar’s vision of a united continent.
“Chavez’s mission to spread the ‘Bolivarian’ revolution is a fundamental part of his program and his mission in life,” Jones said. “He’s trying to fulfill Simón Bolívar’s dream of uniting Latin America, in part to fight the great monster to the north. He takes it very seriously and spends a lot of time promoting it.”
In Jones’ nuanced portrait, the iconoclastic president comes across as neither the savior sought by his followers nor the demon painted by his opponents, but as a well-read, self-made man.
“I’m not a Chávez proponent, but I am a proponent of fair, balanced, honest journalism,” Jones said. Chávez’s critics tend to forget, he said, that before the former military officer won the presidency, the country was ruled by a powerful elite that amassed great wealth at the expense of the impoverished masses.
Born in 1954, Chávez was raised by his grandmother in a mud-brick house with no running water or indoor plumbing in a dusty rural town on the Venezuelan plains. With few other pastimes, he developed a passion for aseball, a skill that won him admission to the country’s military academy -- changing his destiny and the country’s.
As a child, Chávez learned that Venezuela’s oil wealth benefited a “fortunate few,” said Jones, who arrived in Venezuela shortly after Chávez burst onto the scene with a failed coup attempt in 1992.
Although Chávez was in prison after the coup, some of his allies tried again to overthrow President Carlos Andrés Pérez six weeks after Jones moved into the impoverished neighborhood of El Trompillo in Barquisimeto. Jones recalls standing in the street with his neighbors, watching dogfights in the skies overhead. When soldiers stormed into a neighborhood on the next hill, all the residents ducked for cover.
It was a wild welcome. “I was fairly disoriented,” Jones told NCR. “We don’t have a lot of coups in the United States.”
While he was in El Trompillo, Jones lived like his neighbors and was initiated into the lives of poor Venezuelans. The bathroom was a hole in a concrete slab in the back yard. He bought water from a tank truck that came around twice a week to fill barrels.
After a three-year stint with Maryknoll, Jones took a job with The Associated Press in Caracas. When he moved into his more upscale surroundings, he never forgot the early lessons. Life in El Trompillo, he said, “was great preparation for a journalist who was going to cover the country.”
In the press corps, though, he felt like “a voice in the wilderness.” Because his colleagues steered clear of the hilly, crime-plagued Caracas barrios where houses are jumbled on top of one another, they did not understand the frustrations of the masses of poor Venezuelans who swept Chávez into office, pinning their hopes on a military officer who had grown up poor as they had.
Venezuela’s bombastic president has claimed victory at the polls at least 10 times since he took office in 1998. With his propensity for outrageous comments in rambling speeches and on his radio call-in program, “Hello, President,” Chávez earned the disapproval of many international observers who considered his style unbecoming of a president. Ordinary Venezuelans loved it, however, and turned out at the polls repeatedly, voting for him in presidential elections and re-elections, a constitutional referendum and balloting that put members of his party into local and regional government offices.
Chávez’s opponents then “launched a coup against a democratically elected president. Seven months later, they shut down the oil industry in an illegal strike in an attempt to strangle the economy and force Chávez out of office by undemocratic means,” Jones said.
The chapters in ¡Hugo! about the 2002 coup against Chávez -- during which he was spirited away for 24 hours and was sure he would be killed -- read like a thriller, complete with notes smuggled out by a sympathetic nurse and a guard, and a loyal soldier who stands up to would-be assassins.
“The opposition also needs to grow up and learn to play by the democratic rules of the game,” Jones said. “People are hoping that finally that may be happening,” now that they have proven that it is possible to defeat Chávez at the ballot box.
He was talking about Dec. 2, 2007, when Chávez’s triumphant streak ended and voters turned down a set of proposed constitutional amendments that would have expanded the groundwork for what Chávez has called “21st-century socialism.” The failed referendum was Chávez’s first electoral defeat in a decade.
Chávez had proposed changes to 32 articles of the constitution that was drafted and approved in 1999, the year after he first took office. Among the proposed changes were a six-hour workday, a benefits fund for independent workers, various forms of property ownership, and the designation of the armed forces as “patriotic and anti-imperialist.”
Proposals to put the currently autonomous Central Reserve Bank under presidential control and remove the two-term limit for president were among the most controversial. The reforms also would have given the government greater control over the country’s petroleum and gas deposits and over agriculture “if necessary” to ensure food security.
Chávez had expected to win handily, counting on the many voters in low-income neighborhoods who continue to provide a solid base of support. But they stayed away from the polls in droves.
Sr. Jenny Russian of the Missionaries of Christ Jesus and of the nonprofit Fundalatin in Caracas estimates that “3 million people who supported the president [in previous elections] abstained from voting.” People in low-income neighborhoods did not want to “betray” him by voting against him at the polls, but they did not support the changes, so they stayed home, Russian said.
Analysts say Chávez has been fairly effective at getting emergency social services to poor Venezuelans. He signed a decree, effective May 1, which raised the minimum wage in Venezuela by 30 percent to U.S. $372 a month. But he has had less success in tackling more deep-rooted structural problems such as crime and employment. Shortages of staple food items and rising consumer costs have heightened tension in recent months.
Although the unexpected rebuff in December threw his political plans into disarray, Chávez accepted the results. That Jones said, belies the oft-heard accusation that the Venezuelan president is a dictator.
“He is a strong president, no doubt about it, but there are a lot of things that don’t fit the definition of a dictatorship, including him losing an election ... and accepting the results,” said Jones, who now works for Newsday in New York. “Real dictators don’t do that.”
Part of the animosity toward Chávez may have more to do with his dirt-poor, rural roots than his politics.
“Rich elites call him ‘the monkey,’ ” Jones said. “He is supposed to be the servant in their mansions. He’s not supposed to be their president.”
Only time will tell whether Chávez -- like left-leaning presidents elected after him in various parts of Latin America -- will manage to dismantle an entrenched oligarchy.
“You cannot have a tiny group of filthy rich people atop the oil wealth heap, living in mansions, jetting off to Miami and Paris whenever they felt like it, and have the majority living in mud huts and tin shacks, barely able to eat,” Jones said. “That’s what brought Chávez to power. People don’t want to live in tin shacks. They want safe streets, decent schools and good hospitals.”
Barbara Fraser is a freelance writer living in Peru.
