The rift in Venezuela
Editorial
Stabroek News
January 17, 2003
The very least that can be said about the ongoing crisis in neighbouring Venezuela is that both sides have behaved with total irresponsibility. Absolute right lies with neither, and the language being employed is of such a rabid order (Guyana's political exchanges sound quite gentlemanly in comparison), that it makes it difficult to create any space for genuine debate, let alone compromise. Neither side can 'win' in the long term, and even if there is a victory in the immediate term, it will be Pyrrhic in nature, as the underlying tensions will remain unresolved and will simply flare up again in more virulent form somewhere down the road.
From a constitutional point of view, President Chavez stands on somewhat ambiguous ground. The leader of an abortive coup in 1992, he not only never repudiated his past, but actively sought to celebrate it by organizing a huge procession last year on the tenth anniversary of the failed putsch. More important, he attempted to give it some patina of constitutionality by having inserted in the constitution a provision allowing Venezuelans to refuse any "authority that contradicts democratic values, principles and guarantees, or impairs human rights."
In an ironic twist, it is this very clause which the opposition has seized on now to justify its actions. It too, of course, has a failed coup in its recent past, which leaves everyone standing on more-or-less the same moral plane, politically speaking.
Whatever the opposition says to the contrary, in a general sense, President Chavez has operated constitutionally. It is true that the constitution by which he is guided has not been hallowed by time, and was explicitly tailored to suit his needs. Congress was abolished, for example, and in its place came a single-chamber assembly which was dominated by Chavez sympathisers. Chavez people were also put in key public posts, including the Supreme Court and the elections council. That notwithstanding, neither of the two last-named institutions has consistently handed down decisions in his favour during the current crisis. The only two entities which he did not manage to bring under his direct control were the Caracas Metropolitan Police, and the oil company, PdVSA.
While President Chavez is technically in compliance with the framework of the state - most recently when Vice President Rangel said on Tuesday that the Government would abide by any court-ruling which allowed the February 2, consultative referendum demanded by the opposition to go ahead, even though the President deems it unconstitutional - he has sought ways around the rules. The most problematical of these is the arming of the Bolivarian Circles, his hardline supporters who are thought responsible for many of the deaths and injuries during the demonstration which preceded the April coup, and who have attacked opposition marchers since that time, most recently last weekend. They have also been responsible for physical attacks on private media-houses, which are uniformly hostile to the regime.
Last November, the Venezuelan head of state did attempt the take-over of the Caracas police force, which is under the control of one of his leading opponents, Mayor Alfredo Pena, but the Supreme Court ordered him to return it by Tuesday, January 13. He complied, but he sent the military in to denude the force of all its riot-gear and weaponry, apart from .38 revolvers. The Mayor has since announced that the police will no longer be able to patrol the capital's most dangerous zones (among other places) in what is one of the hemisphere's most dangerous cities, while the opposition has expressed fears that their strikers will now have no protection from the Bolivarian Circles.
The opposition has accused the President of being a dictator, and while he is clearly more comfortable with an authoritarian approach than a democratic one, he has not in practice been able to exercise dictatorial powers as such. His closeness to Presidents Fidel Castro of Cuba, Gaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, has certainly made his middle-class opponents nervous; however, even that is not a primary issue. Class antagonism apart, one of the major fault-lines separating the opposition from those who support the Government is quite simply, economic policy.
President Chavez is a kind of romantic socialist by sentiment, and his favoured policies hark back to a discredited economic era when the distribution of goods rather than their production was the main concern of governments in the developing world. It is no accident that the hard-core of Mr Chavez' support is among the poor - the majority - and while his commitment to them cannot be faulted, his uncertain grasp of economic principles and his apparent lack of understanding of how systems and institutions work, have meant that there has been little overall improvement in their lot. When the opposition alleges that he has destroyed the economy, therefore, they may be a little premature in their judgments, but that is the direction in which he seems to be headed.
At the core of the problem lies the nationalised oil company, PdVSA. The Venezuelan economy is quite literally fuelled by oil, and without the participation of PdVSA employees in the strike, there would be no strike and no crisis - at least not at its current level. From the time he acceded to office, President Chavez made no secret of his hostility to PdVSA, which he saw as a symbol of the old oligarchy, and which he called "a state within a state." He is uncomfortable with what is essentially a purely profit-driven entity, and envisions an important part of its role as working with the state on social projects. "PdVSA will serve the interests of Venezuela," he is reported as saying, "and not the elite." One of the company's executives he sacked recently commented, "Venezuela's widespread poverty is a failure of politics, not commerce."
PdVSA is acknowledged by industry analysts to be a fairly efficient operation. From the beginning, says the Los Angeles Times, the intention was to keep it separate from politics, and consequently it is run more like a private corporation than a public one. The newspaper also stated that its executives belonged to a corporate culture which believed in "open markets, corporate ladders and trickle-down economics." The essence of that corporate culture, the report continued, was meritocracy. President Chavez' attempts to politicize the company in defiance of its ethos, therefore, have met with inevitable resistance from the vast majority of its employees, who have put their pensions and their mortgages on the line, and more than 1,000 of whom have been fired by the administration in consequence.
Even if a case could be made out for the current strike, the opposition which has organised it is far from being above reproach. It contains among its leadership, for example, elements from the discredited, corrupt oligarchy which governed before Mr Chavez was propelled into the Miraflores Palace. It is a rag-bag of groups, which has no coherent political programme, no agreed leader and is united only in its hatred of the President. Furthermore, unlike the President, it has displayed a disinclination to abide by Supreme Court rulings when not in its favour.
If the head of state is behind the times in his thinking, so are they in a different sense. While the middle and upper classes dominate the opposition, they appear to have forgotten that the vast majority of Venezuelans are impoverished, and that to be credible, they have to address the concerns of the poor at a policy level, and find a single leader who is acceptable to a broad spectrum of the electorate.
While they have rightly accused the President of dividing the society with his unalloyed aggression towards the business, professional and upper classes, they too are doing nothing to heal the rift. If Venezuela went to the polls tomorrow, as they would like, President Chavez would almost certainly win again because they are in such disarray. But even if they could win, the thirty per cent of the population which believes that Mr Chavez is their only salvation, would not let them govern in peace. In other words, an election will solve nothing unless the winner can articulate a vision for the whole of Venezuela, and not for any particular class-interest.
It is true that President Chavez learnt nothing from the experience of the April coup, but it seems that the opposition may not have done so either. The President's limitations as a head of state and as an administrator are only too evident, but at the moment, no viable alternative is in sight.
