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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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The beat on the street in Venezuela
Friday 24 February @ 11:12:12 |
 [see also "In Venezuela, the alternative media has been fighting political ignorance" by John Peterson & Maria Pena]
story and photos by Johnny Hazard
The most recent stop on my tour of pariah nations was Venezuela.
My first surprise upon arrival in Caracas on Dec. 29 was that it’s more chaotic than Mexico City: vulture taxi drivers besieged me at the moment I emerged—with zero inspection—from customs. They not only offer unauthorized rides, but money-changing at apparently more favorable rates. (How was this possible? Where’s the iron fist order that a modern tourist demands?) Later I learned that acceptance of this offer had an interesting result for a locally famous Australian tourist, Phillip. He arrived at Barrio Nuevo Día, a fascinating working-class neighborhood in the hills of west Caracas, because the informal taxi driver who robbed him upon arrival left him there. He made friends with the people of the area and stayed three years.
 My
second surprise was that it’s more dangerous, apparently, than Mexico
City. People from all walks of life constantly warned me not to be on the streets
after dark, something I’ve rarely heard and never heeded anywhere. I stayed
at a cheap hotel in the center of the city overlooking the cathedral and
Plaza Bolívar. On a Friday night, Dec. 30, I stepped out around 10 p.m.
The hotel clerk had already barricaded the door, but I was restless. On one
side of the square, four women sitting on a bench. On another side, a guy selling
coffee and cookies. I bought some and asked the women why they weren’t
afraid. They said: “It’s true that it’s dangerous. You shouldn’t
be out here. But we’re waiting for a discoteque to open.” (Strange,
this, because the nightclubs in Caracas usually open and flourish at 4 in the
afternoon.) Because Venezuelan women of all ages look good, or because I can’t
judge ages anymore, I was surprised to learn that two of those present were
mother (Dubis) and daughter (Emily). A few days later, I went to their
house in the aforementioned barrio and met Dubis’ brothers, two of
my principal sources of information in Venezuela.
Julio César is a facilitator of Misión Robinson, the new adult
literacy campaign. (The people who “run” classes are called facilitators,
not teachers. Julio is also a trainer of facilitators, a former elementary school
teacher, a social worker, and an activist in general.) The house was their mother’s;
she moved to the countryside several years ago and Julio and Dubis moved in
when they separated from their spouses. With her three children, too, the house
is a bit crowded. The living room serves as classroom, complete with antique-looking
school desks. The day I went to their house, I ended up staying about 24 hours
because it rained so hard that there was no real transportation. (Thanks, greenhouse
gas guys.) That, and they didn’t want me to leave because the neighbors
thought I was the reincarnation of Phillip and offered me food, a wild Christmas
liquer called ponche crema, coffee (of which I’d consumed less than a
litre in 46 years of existence till I tried the Venezuelan brew), and work,
as well as Venezuelan citizenship. We saw firefighters remove two dead bodies
from a collapsed, water-logged house in a squatter settlement on the next
hill. Julio pointed to some new houses on another hill and said the Chávez
government is trying to move people out of settlements in environmentally vulnerable
areas and into “dignified housing.”
 The
missions are a variety of social and empowerment programs instituted in the
past few years since the revolutionary government has been bolstered and emboldened
after having survived a coup attempt, a lockout led by the then-executives of
the national oil company, who ran it as if it were a private business, and
a recall attempt. The oil company, PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela), was resuscitated
from the economic damage occasioned by months of no sales and the physical damage
of sabotage—benign and malignant neglect. Venezuela owns several refineries
and thousands of gas stations (Citgo) in the United States. Logically, this
money should have gone into the general fund of the government or to fund specific
programs. But the money didn’t arrive until last year. This and other
revenue generated from oil sales—recently very profitable, of course—fund
the missions and other social programs. After the oil lockout, Chávez
dismissed the executives of PDVSA and thousands of their fellow travelers, many
of whom worked in a building of about eight stories near Plaza Venezuela in
Caracas. He closed the building, arguing that no oil-related work needed to
be done in the city, and had it rehabilitated as the campus of a new public
university, La Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, part of Misión Sucre,
whose purpose is to expand higher educational opportunities. The use of the
word mission is part of the Chávez government’s tendency to use
religious nomenclature to implement what the hippie of Nazareth advocated: socialism.
A slogan frequently seen on the streets of Caracas is “Democracy, participation,
and Christianity equals Socialism.” Church attendance, according to some,
is down since then; resenting the competition, the Pope and his emissaries began
to attack Chávez.
All the programs mentioned so far bring charges of populism. The word always
has a derogatory connotation in Spanish, sometimes analogous to the right-wing
attacks against “government giveaway programs” in U.S. English,
but sometimes as part of a criticism from the left against paternalism and centralism
and advocating something more grassroots. The counterargument is that Venezuela
is using the nation’s (and the people’s) resources to help people
to help themselves, and to redress centuries of grievances. And to facilitate
that, the people, having satisfied their material needs and received a degree
of education previously unavailable, organize themselves. Chávez
has said about a $600 million-a-year program to give grants to people
in extreme poverty: “The neo-liberals say this is throwing money
away. No! The money that, in the past, was stolen, we’re redistributing,
giving power to poor people, so they can defeat poverty.”
The new constitution, approved by referendum about two years after Chávez
took power, states: “The means of participation by the people in the exercise
of their sovereignty include, at the political level, elections of public office,
initiative and referendum, recall, assemblies of citizens whose decisions are
binding, among others; at the social and economic levels, offices of citizen
services, self-initiated and grassroots enterprises, cooperatives of all types
including financial, credit unions, and other forms of association guided by
the principals of mutual cooperation and solidarity.” (Article 70—my
translation.)
The implicit challenge here is to make this more than the dream—or worse,
the mandate—of a charismatic leader and his followers. But one of my primary
sources, Luis Enrique, pre-med student and vendor of newspapers and incense
outside the Bellas Artes Metro station, disagrees with this suggestion: “I’m
not a Chavista, but I’m with Chávez, and I love Chávez,
because he’s the vehicle for what I, as a Bolivarian and a Marxist, have
always wanted.”
Despite having a reputation in some circles as a “dictator,” Chávez
is seen as a bit soft by many supporters. The perpetrators of the coup attempt
of 2002 are not in prison. The leaders of the subsequent oil industry lockout,
which included sabotage of installations and resulted in untold economic and
environmental damage, have, with one recent exception, also avoided jail. Many
supporters ask how this is possible. Luis Enrique criticizes the presence of
an “escuálida” (“squalid,” the Chávez
term for coup supporters) on the faculty of his university, but says Chávez
demands this level of plurality.
On Jan. 2, Evo Morales, indigenous activist, socialist and now president
of Bolivia, visited Venezuela. One newspaper greeted him with the flattering
headline: “Morales is closer to (Brazilian president) Lula’s social
democracy than to the communism-fascism of Castro and Chávez.”
 What
U.S. daily newspaper would call a sitting president a fascist? Would freedom
of the press survive this test? Of about seven daily newspapers in Caracas,
five are strongly anti-Chávez. Leaving aside the inflammatory language
of the headline, the assertion is not true: Venezuela and Cuba were the first
two countries Morales visited, procuring offers of literacy training volunteers
from the former and medical assistance from the latter. Castro offered 5,000
university scholarships to Bolivians, so Chávez offered 5001.
Mild critics of the government complain that the president gives away so much
to other countries that he doesn’t help the poor of Venezuela. (The assistance
has even extended to Massachusetts, where Citgo was the only oil company to
respond to a request to participate in a winter heating-oil assistance program.)
The truth is that social spending vastly exceeds that of any other time in Venezuelan
history.
In a country where the everyday conflicts between yuppies and ... I don’t
know what to call a non-yuppie in U.S. English. I have to revert to the terminology
employed by S.E. Hinton in “The Outsiders”: In a country where the
everyday conflicts between the “soc” and the “greasers”
were, for a period that has apparently, partially, subsided, I was shocked to
find that there are people who are indifferent. I was surprised, also, to find
that the anti-Chávez people I met were unable to express their opposition
in eloquent, or even coherent, terms. In some Latin American countries, New
Year’s Eve is a family holiday. In Venezuela, it is such a family holiday
that all bars and restaurants, and most public spaces are closed. During the
Christmas-New Year season, museums and even bookstores close. To get a map of
the city I had to go into the Hilton Hotel. So there is a lack of basic tourist
infrastructure. But the food? Forget about it. Though you’ll never find
a Venezuelan restaurant anywhere (OK, maybe “los escúalidos de
Miami” have opened one by now), it’s the best food. The only public
New Year’s celebration that I knew of was in a plaza in Altamira, a right-wing
area that was the staging ground for various anti-Chávez marches, including
the one that set the stage for the coup. It was boring, a forum for the most
superficial element of Venezuelan society. It was going to be televised (on
a commercial network), I’d heard, but it was worse: It was a television
event that you could witness. The first musical act was a police band, underlining
the connection between the police and opposition forces.
 Luis
Enrique and others insisted that I return when it’s not “low season.”
Come in January, they said. The World Social Forum is going to be here, including
hundreds of nudists who have an interesting political proposal. Anyway ... I
was reminded of something that I once read during the Sandinista period in Nicaragua:
that the average length of stay of a U.S. congressmember who went to explore
the Nicaraguan political situation was 24 hours. My stay in Venezuela was one
week. Better than a day, and I speak more Spanish than the average Senator
Smith, but I don’t pretend to have seen or understood everything.
There is a certain rigidity of gender roles in Venezuela that is more pronounced
than in some other Latin American countries that obviously predates Chávez.
The only feminist expression that I saw was in a pro-Chávez women’s
newspaper. The day that I left, however, I read that the newly selected vice-president
of the congress, a woman, was calling for referenda about the legalization of
abortion and of gay marriages. In Mexico, we would say that the purpose of such
a move is to kill the proposal with overwhelming popular rejection. In Venezuela
I suspect that the motive is the contrary: to stimulate discussion about taboo
human rights issues. The women’s and gay movements are barely visible
in Caracas (for that matter, rockers and men with long hair are barely visible
and, unlike in the United States, the Venezuelan progressive movement is not
a collection of issue advocates), so it doesn’t appear to be a case of
responding to pressure. The constitution has a variety of human rights guarantees
not seen in the Magna Cartas of other countries, such as the prohibition of
torture and the prohibition of derogatory references to parents’ marital
status on birth certificates. (This sounds baroque, but trust me, it’s
progress.)
 “The
United States seems destined by Providence to plague America with misery in
the name of democracy.” —Simón Bolívar
I regret to have to explain here that Bolívar, the liberator of Venezuela
and various South American countries, didn’t mean the United States when
he said America, but the entire hemisphere. References to Bolívar are
everywhere in Venezuela. When Chávez took power and pledged to change
the name of the country to “la república bolivariana de Venezuela,”
the international powers that be ridiculed this in the same breath that they expressed
a dim view of his whirlwind tour of “terrorist” (read: oil-producing)
countries.
Chávez does see himself as a modern-day Bolívar, this time fighting
a different colonial power. His election, constant re-election, and evolution
toward the left, together with the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia and various
less radical left presidents in, by now, most major South American countries,
is a benchmark: In 1954, a young Argentine medical school graduate and vagabond
was in Guatemala and witnessed the first CIA-sponsored (though not the first
U.S.-sponsored) coup in Latin America. The liberal and populist, but not socialist,
president Jacobo Arbenz was deposed because he was not seen as good for business
by the executives of the United Fruit Company. The young doctor, Ernesto
Guevara, concluded that the possibilities of social change via electoral politics
were null. He soon moved on to Mexico City, where he met various mysterious
Cubans, including a young lawyer named Fidel Castro; they bought a used boat, and
the rest is history. Guevara died trying to “export the revolution”
to Bolivia, where now one of his disciples has taken power via elections. ||
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