VENEZUELA’S THREAT OF A GOOD EXAMPLE
The inner-city parish of La Vega sits in the lush mountain terrain of Western Caracas. Roughly 130,000 poor residents are cordoned off sociologically from nearby El Paraíso, a wealthy neighborhood that supplies the clients for the upscale shopping centre that separates the two communities. In La Vega, the bottom 20 percent of households live on US$125 per month, while the average family income is US$409. Well over a third of households are led by a single mother. Proletarians of mixed African, indigenous, and European ancestries populate the barrio’s informal economies.1017
In Venezuela, one of the most urbanized countries in Latin America, these households constitute a key demographic base of chavismo. Six years ago, the journalist Jacobo Rivero asked a 50-year-old black woman from La Vega what would happen if Chávez died. The Bolivarian process “is irreversible,” she told him, its roots are too deep to be easily torn asunder in the absence of el comandante. In the years since Chávez’s rise to the presidency in 1999—an interval of unprecedented popular political participation and education for the poor—the woman had learned, for the first time, the history of African slavery and the stories of her ancestors. The historical roots of injustice were being demystified, their causes sorted out. Dignity was being restored in inner-city communities, and their political confidence was on the rise. There had been motive, it now seemed to her, behind the manufactured ignorance of the dispossessed.1018 The “Venezuelan people stood up,” political theorist George Ciccariello-Maher observes, “and it is difficult if not impossible to tell a people on their feet to get back down on their knees.”1019
The residents of La Vega, Petare, San Agustín, and 23 de Enero, among the other poor urban barrios of Caracas, entered an extended period of public commiseration, of shared mourning, on March 5, 2013, when Vice President Nicolás Maduro announced on television that Hugo Chávez had passed away at the age of fifty-eight, after fourteen years as president, the last two years of which he struggled with cancer.1020 Identification with this improbable president ran in the veins of the popular classes of contemporary Venezuela.
Elected in late December 1998, Hugo Chávez assumed the presidency of Venezuela in February 1999, and was succeeded by the chavista loyalist Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s former vice-president. Given that Venezuela is Canada’s second largest export market in South America, and that Canada’s foreign investment stock in the country amounted to between C$800 million and C$1 billion between 2007 and 2012, the direct interests of Canadian capital in taming the radicalism of Chávez’s government were not insignificant. One of the embassy’s goals, as it explained in a Country Strategy report, is to “defend and promote Canadian business interests,” 1021 a task whose importance was undoubtedly shaped by the Chávez’s government’s selective apprehension towards the influence of foreign capital in Venezuela, and its often publicly hostile stance towards imperialist power. Perhaps searching for a silver lining in the grey cloud of chavismo, the embassy suggested to Ottawa as late as 2006 that, “the good news for Canadian investors and exporters is that Venezuela remains highly dependent on foreign capital and technology, especially in extractive industries.” In reality, however, it has been much more difficult for a number of Canadian companies, which have experienced the Chávez administrations as a period of uncertainty and frustration.1022 Venezuelan dependency did not play out under Chávez as Canada would have preferred.
This chapter begins by mapping Canadian investment interests in the country, as well as its wider geo-strategic concerns over the possibility that the Venezuelan example of confronting neoliberalism under Chávez might spread to other parts of Latin America. From here it shifts to an analysis of the reality of Chávez’s legacy domestically compared to the demonization he faced in rhetoric of the state managers of the most powerful states in the world system and much of the international mainstream media. Next the chapter examines critically the oft-repeated claims that Chávez was responsible for a Venezuelan turn toward authoritarianism, clientelism, and institutional decay. On this historical basis, the chapter proceeds next to dissect Canada’s role in drumming up the image of Chávez as dictator. Flowing from this assessment of the Canadian diplomatic record vis-à-vis Chávez, a following section explores the precise role of Canadian mainstream media in the defamation of the Venezuelan government. Finally, the chapter provides an interrogation of Canada’s foreign policy in Venezuela since the death of Chávez.
Three Canadian companies launched lawsuits against the Chávez government under the Canada-Venezuela Foreign Investment Protection Agreement (FIPA). Two of these lawsuits are related to the lucrative Las Cristinas property, Venezuela’s largest gold deposit. Canadian company Placer Dome (subsequently acquired by Barrick Gold) co-owned Las Cristinas with a Venezuelan government company. When Placer sold its share to Vannessa Ventures—which subsequently changed its name to Infinito Gold and attempted to sue Costa Rica over the Las Crucitas mine—Venezuela terminated the company’s ownership in 2001 arguing that the sale was illegal. Vannessa Ventures responded by suing for over C$1 billion, though the case was dismissed in 2013 when the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes found that Venezuela did not violate the FIPA despite Canada’s intervention on behalf of the Canadian company.1023 After taking Las Cristinas from Vannessa Ventures, Venezuela transferred it to another Canadian company, Crystallex International, launching a new saga. Crystallex’s investment in Venezuela was fraught with uncertainty for a decade. Approval of its environmental impact study from the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources took roughly three-and-a-half years, and even after this period, the company still faced roadblocks from the government in its efforts to proceed.
Meanwhile, the initial start date of 2008 the company had projected for commencing production came and went. Then in November of that year, the Venezuelan government announced it was planning to nationalize Las Cristinas, as it sought to increase its gold reserves in the wake of the global crisis and the rising price of gold on the world market. Though the planned nationalization never took place, three years of ambiguity dragged on as Crystallex’s hopes of developing the Las Cristinas money pit were stuck in a state of limbo. The death knell was finally sounded in early 2011, and all prospects for the Crystallex development permanently thwarted, when the Venezuelan government terminated the company’s rights to the mine. Crystallex initiated a lawsuit under the FIPA in 2011 for C$3.8 billion. Facing debts it could not repay, the company was forced to file for bankruptcy, and was delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange. In 2012, Venezuela commenced a partnership with a Chinese state investment company to develop Las Cristinas.1024
The Crystallex experience proved to be more representative of the overarching investment climate than the Canadians had initially hoped. In 2009, to point to another example, Gold Reserve Inc. had its Las Brisas project terminated by the government after receiving a permit from the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources in 2007. It responded by suing Venezuela for C$2 billion in damages.1025 Similarly, PetroCanada exited the country in 2007 due to the uncertainty in the oil sector.
Canadian frustrations with Chávez’s challenge to neoliberal imperialism were not restricted to the domestic Venezuelan sphere, and the fate of specific Canadian investments therein. Canadian political leaders and Foreign Affairs officials have been more concerned about the broader regional implications of Chavismo for Canadian interests—regional implications understood both in terms of the example “twenty-first century socialism” in Venezuela might represent beyond its borders, and in terms of Chávez’s efforts to actively influence developments in the regional political economy in a manner designed to privilege Latin American autonomy over relations with North American powers. Canada’s engagement with Venezuela has been driven by these decisive geopolitical concerns. The mandate letter to the Ambassador to Venezuela, Perry Calwood, on his appointment in 2007, from the Deputy Ministers of Foreign Affairs and International Trade was clear: “Canada’s presence in Venezuela is increasingly important to our broader strategic interests.” 1026
Country Strategy reports were obviously keenly aware of Chávez’s place within the emergent sphere of left-of-centre Latin American governments, noting, for example, that “Venezuela is an increasingly important regional player, working closely with Cuba as well as newly elected leaders such as Bolivian President Morales, Ecuadorian President Correa and Nicaraguan President Ortega.”1027 But his potential influence extended beyond these allies, and included Venezuela’s outreach to “the Caribbean region, providing subsidized fuel oil to Carribbean states under the Petrocaribe initiative.”1028 Petrocaribe was born as an oil agreement in 2005 between a series of Caribbean states and Venezuela. According to the terms of the agreement, Caribbean states were able to acquire access to Venezuelan oil on preferential terms, unavailable on the open market.
In 2013, Petrocaribe solidified links with the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA) to promote further economic ties that went beyond merely oil transactions. The use of subsidized oil to foster relations in the region would be a regular thematic focus of FAIT assessments of Chávez, sparking FAIT’s Inter-American Relations Division to reflect on Canada’s potential to contain Venezuela’s regional influence through subsidized oil with its own dominance in natural resources: “as an emerging energy power internationally [redacted] Canada is a serious and credible partner that can offer a different model, one in which democratic governance is efficient, transparent and accountable.”1029 The reality Canadian policymakers and capital had to face, though, was, as the Caracas embassy acknowledged, “Chavez [sic] increasing popularity amongst the region’s masses.”1030
Haiti was one country FAIT identified to which Chávez’s influence could potentially extend, and in which Canada has been playing a leading role in reinforcing imperialist power. Ottawa and the embassies in Port-au-Prince and Caracas, for example, watched closely as Chávez’s efforts to build stronger ties to Haitian President René Préval developed during a March 2007 visit to the Caribbean nation. In particular, the Canadians expressed concern about a US$20 million Venezuelan and Cuban funding agreement for the health and energy sectors (not a significant amount of money relative to Canadian aid). “If successfully carried out,” according to the Canadian embassy in Port-au-Prince, it “will likely have highly visible results” and strengthen Venezuelan and Cuban credibility in the impoverished nation where Canadian aid has focused more heavily on the highly problematic security sector.1031
Canadian political leaders and policymakers were also alert to the possible influence of Chávez in Central America, in the context of the election of Centre or Centre-Left governments in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, and the growth of social movements targeting Canadian companies. Fear of Chávez in particular, and a renewed Central American Left in general, were often conflated—with Chávez identified as responsible, through his “meddling”—for the growing popular discontent with neoliberalism and unchecked and unaccountable natural resource extraction. As noted in the chapter on Honduras, Conservative member of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, Dave Van Kesteren, blamed the 2009 Honduran military coup on Manuel Zelaya and his supposed move into the sphere of influence of Chávez, arguing that
a real power struggle is taking place, and it’s what we believe in as a free society; that’s to have freedom of goods, what we call the unguided [sic] hand, as opposed to total government control or freedom versus totalitarianism, prosperity versus poverty.1032
Prior to Van Kesteren’s Cold Warrior performance, a 2007 report by The Privy Council Office’s Intelligence Assessment Secretariat (prepared at the request of FAIT) on the influence of Venezuela in Central America (released with heavy redactions) observed that “Chávez’s commitment to export his revolution…has run up against pragmatic governments.…Nevertheless,” it cautions, “Chávez is unlikely to be deterred by these initial setbacks, and will continue to meddle in CA [Central America’s] domestic affairs”—Canada of course never “meddles.” The report goes on to worry about the fact that polls continue to indicate that Chávez’s “popular appeal in the region exists.” It concludes that “Chávez failure”—that is, the defeat of Central America’s Left, still recovering as it is from the brutality of the dirty wars of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—“is a positive sign for Canadian interests in assisting in the development of good government, and in negotiating a free trade agreement, with the region.”1033 The Honduran coup in 2009 proved to be the biggest defeat for the Left in this period, and offered Canada the best opportunity for a free trade agreement in the region. The small matter of over three hundred targeted assassinations of dissidents and poor farmers was deemed insufficiently important to force any rethinking by Canadian officials of their relations with the Lobo government.
On live television, Venezuelan Vice-President Nicolás Maduro choked on his words. Hugo Chávez, the improbable President, born in the rural poverty of Sabaneta, in the state of Barinas in 1954, had died of cancer. To his wealthy and light-skinned enemies he was evil incarnate. To many impoverished Venezuelans, his contradictory and eclectic ideology—a labyrinthine blend drawing on the thought of nineteenth century Simón Bolívar and Ezequiel Zamora, twentieth century left-military nationalism and anti-imperialism, Soviet-inflected, bureaucratic Cuban socialism, social Christianity, pragmatic neostructuralist economics, and currents of socialism-from-below—made a good deal of sense at least insofar as he had come from origins like theirs and had made the right sort of enemies.
There’s something about Chávez that encourages a starker-than-usual embrace of mediocrity in the quarters of the establishment press. How else to explain the appeal of Rory Carroll whose dystopic fantasies about the life and times of Venezuela since 1999 found their unmitigated expression in the pages of the Guardian, New York Times, and New Statesman, among others, in the weeks following Chávez’s death.1034 For Carroll, the Venezuelan popular classes had been the mute and manipulable playthings of the “elected autocrat,” whose life in turn was reducible to one part clown, one part monster.1035
If we once imagined that Chávez emerged out of the debauched embrace of neoliberalism by an old rotating political elite ensconced in the traditional Democratic Action (Acción Democrática, AD) and Independent Political Electoral Organization Committee (Comité Organización Politica Electoral Independiente, COPEI) parties in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concomitant socio-political fissures created by the popular explosion of anti-neoliberal sentiment during the caracazo riots of 1989, and the folkloric rise of a dissident military man to the status of popular hero though a failed coup attempt of 1992 (targeting the status quo), we now stand corrected.1036 The idea that Chávez is the result of Chavismo—a pervasive groundswell of demands for social change, national liberation, and deeper democracy—becomes a fraud. “We Created Chávez!”—a popular delusion.1037 “His dramatic sense of his own significance,” we learn from Carroll, is rather what “helped bring him to power as the reincarnation of the liberator Simón Bolívar”—the trope of autocratic caudillo, and crocodile charisma. It was this very same “dramatic flair” that “deeply divided Venezuelans” rather than, say, the uneven and combined development of neoliberal capitalism in a dependent country of the Global South—the trope of manufactured polarization. “He spent extravagantly on health clinics, schools, subsidies and giveaways”—the trope of populist clientelism and the undeserving poor. “His elections were not fair”—the trope of creeping authoritarianism. He “dominate[d] airwaves”—the trope of media monopolization. Ultimately, though, his evil was banal, his rule was that, “in the final analysis,” of “an awful manager.”1038 “As Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in response to the death of Chávez, “the United States remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights,” all implicitly absent in the South American country.1039 “At this key juncture,” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper noted in the same register, “I hope the people of Venezuela can now build for themselves a better, brighter future based on the principles of freedom, democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights.”1040
Although disingenuous in the extreme, this was still more measured than Harper’s comments in 2009, just prior to a Summit of the Americas meeting. There he noted that Chávez was representative of certain leftist leaders in the Western hemisphere who were “opposed to basically sound economic policies, want to go back to Cold War socialism…want to turn back the clock on the democratic progress that’s been made in the hemisphere.…There’s nothing out here that says that running an authoritarian state on petro dollars is not going to get you very far in the long term.”1041 We are to understand from this that contemporary liberal democracy is the selection of good managers. A proper manager for the twenty-first century is presumably something closer to the pliant figure of unelected free market Italian technocrat Mario Monti, whose loss in the recent Italian elections was mourned by the same media outlets demonizing Chávez. The Economist spoke of the stubborn Italian electorate’s “refusal to recognise the underlying causes of Italy’s plight” achieving its full expression in “their refusal to back Mr Monti.”1042 The tidal wave of anti-Chávez vitriol on behalf of the world’s rulers is rooted in the refusal he represents for the poor and dispossessed, for the exploited and oppressed—a refusal to go on as before, to submit to neoliberal capitalism, and to get on one’s knees before imperialism. It is true, in other words, that he made an awful manager.
On March 7, 2013, the conservative opposition media in Venezuela reported hundreds of thousands in the streets of Caracas mourning their manager’s demise. An editorial in the Mexican daily La Jornada speaks of millions. A quick search of Google images and Youtube produces a veritable red tide of mourners. Through Carroll’s prism these multitudes must radically misunderstand the legacy of fourteen years of Chávez: “the decay, dysfunction and blight that afflict the economy and every state institution.”1043 They must misconceive the “profound uncertainty” the late president has thrust them into. They must be blind to the “bureaucratic malaise and corruption” surrounding them.1044
CHARGES OF AUTOCRACY, CLIENTELISM, AND DECAY
Mark Weisbrot, a social-democratic economist based in the United States, once complained that Venezuela “is probably the most lied-about country in the world.”1045 In fourteen years Chávez won fourteen national electoral contests of different varieties, coming out securely on top of thirteen of them. According to Jimmy Carter—former U.S. President, Nobel Prize winner, and monitor of ninety-two elections worldwide in his capacity as director of the Carter Centre—these Venezuelan contests were the “best in the world.”1046 In the 2006 presidential race, it was opposition candidate Manuel Rosales who engaged in petty bids of clientelism aimed at securing the votes of the poor. Most notoriously, he offered US$450 per month to 3 million impoverished Venezuelans on personal black credit cards as part of a plan called Mi Negra. In what his right-wing critics could only understand as a rare act of agency, the ungrateful would-be recipients apparently aligned themselves on the other side of history, backing Chávez with 62 percent of the vote.1047
The “suppressed media” mantra is another favourite go-to card of the opposition. In one representative report, the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists claimed that the heavy hand of the Chávez government wielded control over a “media empire.”1048 In actual fact, Venezuelan state TV reaches
only about 5–8% of the country’s audience. Of course, Chávez can interrupt normal programming with his speeches (under a law that predates his administration), and regularly does so. But the opposition still has most of the media, including radio and print media—not to mention most of the wealth and income of the country.1049
Walking the downtown streets of the capital in the lead up to the presidential elections of October 2012, with billboards of right-wing candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski hanging from the lampposts, and Kiosks overflowing with newspapers beaming headlines on the latest disaster induced by the Chávez regime, even the most spiritual of journalists would strain in vain to find a ghost of Stalin in Caracas.1050
At its root, explaining support for Chávez among the lower orders involves neither the complexity of quantum mechanics nor the pop-psychological theory of masses entranced by a charismatic leader. Venezuela sits on oil. Other petro-states, such as those in the Gulf, have funnelled the rent into a grotesque pageantry of the rich—skyscrapers, theme parks, and artificial archipelagos—built on the backs of indentured South Asian migrant laborers. They’ve done so, moreover, while aligning geopolitically with the U.S. Empire—backing the wars, and containing the Arab uprisings. Much to the bizarre dismay of journalists like Ian James, the Venezuelan state in the last fourteen years has been forced into different priorities.1051 After recovering from the steep collapse in gross domestic product (GDP) in 2002 and 2003—hitting -8.9 and -7.8 percent respectively as a consequence of political crisis spurred by an unsuccessful coup attempt and business-led oil lockout—GDP soared on high petroleum prices to 18.3, 10.3, 9.9, and 8.2 percent in the years 2004–2007. There was a drop to 4.8 percent in 2008 as the international oil price took a fourth-quarter plunge from US$118 to $58 a barrel due to centrifigual waves of the global crisis spreading out from its American and Eurozone epicentres. Within six months, however, world oil prices had largely recovered, and countercyclical spending brought the Venezuelan economy up to 4.2 percent growth in 2011 and 5.6 in 2012.1052
After the relative modesty of state policy between 1999 and 2002, the extra-legal whip of the Right lit a fire of self-organization in the poor urban barrios of Caracas and elsewhere. The empty shell of Chávez’s electoral coalition in the early years began to be filled out and driven forward in dialectical relation to the spike in organizational capacity from below in the years immediately following 2003. New forms of popular assembly, rank-and-file efforts in the labour movement, experiments in workers’ control, communal councils, and communes increasingly gave Venezuelan democracy life and body for the first time in decades, perhaps ever. The dispossessed were solidly aligned with Chávez in opposition to the domestic escualidos (the squalid ones who supported the coup), and ranged against the multifaceted machinations of U.S. intervention and the pressures of international capital; but they were also rapidly transcending the timid confines of government policy.
From above, more state resources consequently began to flow, feeding an expanding array of parallel health and education systems for the poor.1053 According to official national statistics, the cash income poverty level fell 37.6 percent under Chávez, from 42.8 percent of households in 1999 to 26.7 percent in 2012. Extreme poverty dropped 57.8 percent, from 16.6 to 7 percent between 1999 and 2011.1054 If these income poverty measures are expanded to include welfare improvements from the doubling in college enrollment since 2004, new access to health care for millions, and extensive housing subsidies for the poor, it is easy to see how Carroll’s narrative of decay breaks down. All of this background provides a reasoned explanation for the red tide of mourners – they are not so easily written off as delusional dimwits.
CANADA AND THE AUTHORITARIAN DRUMBEAT
Together with the U.S., Canada attempted to reinforce the idea that Chávez was a thuggish authoritarian holding power through a mix of populist appeal, intimidation, and repression. The putative authoritarian character of the Chávez government informed the perspective of Canada’s Caracas embassy on the Venezuelan political terrain. The mandate given to the Canadian ambassador by the Deputy Ministers in FAIT was framed by a sharply critical view of Chávez, and the strategic vision of the embassy was directed toward supporting organizations critical of the government. The views of Ottawa and the embassy—the former providing a political mandate, the latter, in response to that mandate, providing regular on-the-ground critical reports—were self-reinforcing; in blissful contradiction with all available evidence, both declared Chávez a repressive authoritarian with regional ambitions. The embassy’s 2008–09 Country Strategy report, for example, describes the “Bolivarian Revolution led by President Hugo Chavez [sic]” as “an attempt to convert Venezuela to an authoritarian socialist state” where “government spending will continue to be defined by lower-class concerns.”1055
The implication here is, first, that focusing on “lower-class concerns” is in and of itself a negative development. Lower-class concerns, in the eyes of the Canadian embassy, are contradictory to the needs of Canadian capital, and a government that takes them seriously will inevitably produce unsound economics, based on state intervention and the redistribution of wealth. Secondly, and still more absurdly, the mere act of focusing on “lower-class concerns” is bound up with a proclivity towards authoritarianism. In this fantastical worldview, where common sense meanings are turned on their head, any limits placed on the power and privilege of the wealthy (including foreign investors) are, by their very nature, anti-democratic. Nonetheless, it is true that under the Liberals, and during the first year of the Harper government, the embassy and Ottawa consciously contrasted their engagement with Venezuela from that of the more publicly acerbic U.S. strategy, which rapidly descended into verbal conflagration. In this period the Country Strategy reports point to the desire to “maintain open channels of communication,” while still being critical. This was a calculated early strategy on Canada’s part, to fly below the radar as much as possible, so as to avoid the opprobrium of the Venezuelan government and the bulk of Latin American peoples incurred by the more aggressive posture adopted by the U.S. from the outset of the Chávez administration.
However, there was never any genuine effort to establish dialogue with Chávez. Instead, Canada honed in on officials it thought might be softer targets, and used the limited number of meetings it organized with these officials over this period as an opportunity to criticize the Venezuelan government. The idea, presumably, was to test the commitment of select Venezuelan officials to the more radical tenets of the Bolivarian process. During Kent’s January 2010 trip to Venezuela, for instance, establishing a personal relationship with future President Nicolás Maduro was cited as one of the goals of the diplomatic mission.1056 The Harper government, however, was ultimately true to form in its discomfort with the soft-power approach to the Venezuela file. Harper saw Chávez as a dangerous threat necessitating more forceful methods of containment and soon became more publicly hostile toward the Venezuelan regime, earning public rebukes from Chávez, and a reputation for being meddlesome and impudent. In a clear reference to Venezuela, Harper himself declared in a 2008 speech, “while many nations are pursuing market reform and democratic development, others are falling back to economic nationalism and protectionism, to political populism and authoritarianism.”1057 Curbs on the free market and the rights of capital are again conflated with authoritarianism.
Peter Kent, Minister of State for the Americas who laid part of the blame for the Honduran military coup on deposed President Manuel Zelaya, played an active role in calling out the Chávez government as authoritarian. In January 2010, in the context of criticizing the suspension of broadcasting by six television stations, Kent was quick to denounce the “shrinking of democratic space in Venezuela” and the “violations of the right to freedom of expression and other basic liberties,” despite the fact that Venezuela continues to be dominated by private, anti-Chávez media, and freedom of speech was clearly never endangered in the country under Chávez’s rule.1058 The six national cable television stations in question were only temporarily closed, as a result of various failures of the stations to comply with the country’s Law on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television. The law sets out acceptable parameters and standards for child and adult programming, prohibits racist and sexist materials, as well as incitements to violence, limits commercial advertising, and obliges stations to broadcast government announcements deemed to be of central importance. Most cable stations remain outside the ambit of this law, but for those cable stations with 70 percent domestic content and operations, the law is applicable.1059
Chávez responded to the provocation from the Canadian government by criticizing the Conservatives for proroguing (that is, completely shutting down) parliament in Ottawa. In March, 2010, Kent would again target “the shrinking of democratic space in Venezuela,” and suggest that “the judiciary is being used to harass those who criticize the government,” following the arrest of Oswald Álvarez Paz, former state governor in Zulia in March, 2010.1060 Álvarez Paz was convicted and sentenced to two years of house arrest for “spreading false information” after claiming on television that Venezuela had “become a safe haven for drug trafficking and terrorism” and “subversive and terrorist groups [from] around the world,” with obvious implicit reference to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Basque Homeland and Freedom, or Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) during a time of tense relations between Venezuela and the Spanish and Colombian states. Álvarez Paz was found guilty of violating Article 296-A of Venezuela’s Penal Code, which prohibits “any individual, by way of print, radio, television, electronic mail, or written leaflets, from using false information to cause panic or a sustained anxiety in the general collective.”1061 During a January 2010 visit to Venezuela, Kent met with “representatives of civil society.”1062 The names of those with whom he met, however, have not been disclosed by the Canadian government. A Senior Special Assistant to Kent reported that FAIT will not disclose the groups or individuals with whom Kent met in order to protect their safety. “Unlike in Colombia where rights are protected,” he said—ignoring that country’s ignominious murder rate of trade unionists, which is the worst in the world, among other things—in Venezuela they are not.1063 And while the danger to the unnamed individuals is grossly overstated, it is nonetheless indicative that Kent was meeting with opposition forces. We will return to Canada’s relations with opposition groups in greater detail below.
Even the electoral basis of Chávez’s government—a key ingredient of the narrow standards of any liberal democracy—was insufficient to soften Canada’s repeated assertion that Venezuela was in the grips of authoritarianism. When Chávez was re-elected for the fourth time in the fall of 2012—by a significant margin over united opposition candidate Henrique Capriles—it was not interpreted as a sign of Chávez’s sustained commitment to democracy, or his enduring popularity among the Venezuelan public. None of the standard diplomatic gestures of congratulations were extended to Chávez as the recently re-elected head of state by the Harper government.
This reproach stands in stark contrast to Ottawa’s official relations with new Presidents of a different political hue throughout the region. Canada congratulated Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo on his election in Honduras in November 2009, for example, and extolled the return to democratic normalcy in the country, despite the increase of political murder that occurred immediately upon his assumption of the presidency; Otto Pérez Molina was likewise congratulated on his election victory in Guatemala, despite his high-ranking military position during the genocidal campaigns against Mayan peoples carried out at the height of his country’s civil war in the 1980s, or the increase in political repression that followed his election; and Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos were congratulated for their respective presidential wins in Colombia, despite the systematic violation of the rights of social movement activists, individuals associated with the political Left, and trade unions in that country under their rule.
In other words, Canadian officials routinely congratulated state representatives with incomparably worse human rights records than Chávez, while the latter was shunned and shamed by Harper in front of the “international community” on a regular basis. Canada could not entirely ignore the fact of clean elections in 2012 in Venezuela, and thus an official felt obliged to note that the election, “demonstrates the commitment of the Venezuelan people to democracy.”1064 Somehow, though, Chávez’s name was conspicuously absent from that praise. Tellingly, when union activists are the target of bloody violence in Venezuela, such as the seven who were murdered in the state of Aragua between 2008 and 2010 by what the National Union of Workers (Unete) describe as hired killers working for a private multinational, Canada remained silent.1065 Right-wing violence is not cause for concern, nor seen as a source of instability.
In truth, the branding of Chávez as an authoritarian demagogue speaks more about the Canadian government than it does about Chávez himself. For Chávez’s Venezuela, as we have demonstrated, was clearly a democratic society, indeed more democratic than Canada’s narrowly liberal democracy, both on paper and in practice. Nonetheless, for the Harper government and FAIT, limits on the free market, criticism of imperialism and neoliberalism, and the push against the narrow parameters of liberalism (however uneven in the Venezuelan case) are, by definition, a clear indication of authoritarianism. This is clearly the logic animating Van Kesteren’s Cold War call to arms against Chávez’s purported influence in Central America, the comments from Harper conflating market reform and democracy, and FAIT sensibilities about Venezuela expressed in its various reports and communiqués between Ottawa and the Caracas embassy. Foreign investor rights, strong free markets, popular input rigidly circumscribed in elections every four years—this is what democracy is for imperialist Canada. Breaking from these narrow strictures—even if in the direction of greater popular participation in the political process, or rebalancing the rights of communities vis-à-vis foreign capital—therefore constitutes a rupture with democracy.
When you strip away Canada’s linguistic claims to selfless devotion to human rights, and dig below the rhetorical surface of Canadian foreign policy, what Canadian leaders and policymakers are really talking about is the threat to the rights of Canadian capital to invest where it chooses, use the environment as it pleases, and repatriate its profits without interference from the troublesome locals. As was mentioned in the chapter on Honduras, this preoccupation with the rights of Canadian multinationals, dressed up in liberal humanitarian dross, was captured during the hearings on Honduras in the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s Subcommittee on International Human Rights. In those proceedings, Conservative member Gary Schellenberger, together with a Gildan executive, argued that a free trade agreement would benefit Honduras because it would bring the rule of law to the country.1066 Such a statement is patently false if, by rule of law, one means equality before the law for all Hondurans—the ostensible premise of the rule of law under liberal democracy. In reality, what the FTA will do, what constitutes in fact its central purpose, is to establish the juridical foundations for Canadian capital’s freedom to invest and repatriate profits in a context where the rules for doing business, in the buzzwords of FAIT negotiators, are transparent and predictable. Canada’s preoccupations with Chávez are no different in motivation, except that in the case of Venezuela, Chávez’s perceived regional influence posed a significant threat to Canadian capital.
While this book is not a study of mainstream media, the latter can and does play an important role in Canada in forging a popular perception of Canadian foreign policy as largely selfless and humanitarian. Occasional criticisms of particular incidents or aspects of Canadian foreign policy can be found in the media, but these are rarely integrated into investigations of the systematic driving forces underlying that policy, or the broader ambitions being pursued. As a result, particularly bad incidents that require media attention can be presented merely as mistakes or unrepresentative anomalies, rather than as natural expressions of the core priorities underpinning the Canadian state’s policy agenda abroad. Coverage of Venezuela under Chávez is perhaps one of the best examples of the obsequiousness of the mainstream media in Canada in this regard. With rare and partial exceptions, the Canadian media faithfully conformed to and uncritically regurgitated the official line on the Chávez government delivered to them by the Canadian and U.S. governments.
Canada’s national paper of record, the Globe and Mail, was in the vanguard of this servility masquerading as serious reporting. The Globe’s subservience to the cause of imperialism reached something of a fever pitch when Chávez died, with full coverage sparing no unsubstantiated accusation: one article accused him of using “brute force” to maintain power, and of being a “polarizing dictator.” It also celebrated his opponent in the last election, noting that Henrique Capriles “galvanized Mr. Chávez’s opponents like never before and led the party to an impressive 44-percent-finish”—apparently unaware of the fact that this observation implies, first, that the “dictator” actually won the presidency through election and, second, he did so in his fourth consecutive victory with 56 percent of the vote. That a Canadian party has only received more than 56 percent of the popular once—the Conservatives in 1917—or that Stephen Harper won the 2011 election with 39 percent of the popular vote but has total control over the federal political process is, of course, unmentionable as it undermines the official narrative of a Venezuelan president run amok.1067
The Globe also offered insight on the physical presence and pyschic make up of Chávez, describing him as, “physically imposing as he pointed his finger and gesticulated. You could sense a ruthlessness right below the surface.”1068 At 5ft, 8in in height, Chávez was hardly Goliath, but because of his Afro-Venezuelan heritage his physical features were a perennial target of derisive commentary by the racist opposition in Venezuela and abroad. The Globe acknowledged, his followers were “devoted,” if also simple and easily-manipulated. Chávez reportedly, “played on their insecurities and fed their nationalist passions.” Venezuelans were said to be suffering for their indiscretion, facing economic instability and the rise in violent crime during his tenure, in which “Caracas became one of the most dangerous places to live in Latin America.” 1069
Of course, the economic stagnation for the poor majority and the bloody repression in Honduras under the post-coup government is not subject to any similar reflections from Canada’s mainstream media, and the Globe conveniently ignores the fact that Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo’s Honduras had the worst murder rate in the world. Lobo was an ally, and thus, officially, a responsible president bringing democracy and stability to Hondurans. The Globe predictably endorsed his 2009 election despite it taking place in a state of siege with no candidate participating from the anti-coup movement—conditions without question far worse than anything experienced under Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.
Another posthumous reflection in the Globe repeats the idea that Venezuelans must have been duped into supporting Chávez, describing the “almost messianic hold” he had on his supporters. And if it begrudgingly acknowledges that he may have improved social indicators, it quotes professor of Latin American politics Max Cameron, who argues that “He eroded the quality of democracy in a country with a long history of democracy”1070—a remarkable assertion given the shallow character of Venezuela’s formal democracy prior to Chávez’s assumption to power, and the well-documented social and participatory deepening of democracy in the country under Chávez. The one Globe article that eschews the Chávez-as-authoritarian line nevertheless misleadingly, and against the easily obtainable facts to the contrary, claims that Chávez’s limits on the free market have left the economy in ruins and the poor ultimately more vulnerable going forward.1071 The Globe’s “Report on Business” section also offered its reflections after the death, seeing an opportunity for Canadian capital, noting excitedly that “the death of Hugo Chavez (sic) offers the promise of domestic oil market changes that could roil the energy world and place substantial opportunities at the feet of Canadian oil companies.”1072
The Toronto Star, the largest daily circulation newspaper in the country and a traditional supporter of the Liberal Party, also contributed to the systematic misinformation on the Chávez government—in fact, the Star was censured by the Ontario Press Council after a formal complaint for a series of inaccurate articles in 2006 by Tim Harper on the rise of violent crime and poverty as a result of Chávez, which relied exclusively on government opponents for sources.1073 Following Chávez’s death, the Star included opinion pieces contradicting the imperialist line about Chávez’s authoritarianism, but also ran an article by Oakland Ross that compared Chávez to Kim Jong Il, Francois Papa Doc Duvalier, and Rafael Trujillo. Chávez was “not in that class,” he notes, but he was nevertheless—so we have no illusions about him—“authoritarian, bombastic, and a lousy manager to boot.”1074
CANADA’S ENGAGEMENT WITH POST-CHÁVEZ VENEZUELA
Following the death of Chávez in March 2013, Canada, like the U.S., saw an opportunity to roll back the social gains of the Bolivarian revolution. In fact, two weeks before Chávez died Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, anticipating Chávez’s imminent demise, had made plans to meet with then-Vice President Nicolás Maduro, only to have the trip cancelled when Chávez returned unexpectedly from an extended convalescence in Cuba.
Whereas the Canadian government was quick to support Porifirio Lobo’s election in Honduras despite it taking place in the context of a military coup, a boycott by the anti-coup opposition, and widespread accusations of vote rigging, the Canadian government was publicly critical of Maduro’s narrow (1.8 percent) election victory over united opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, suggesting the legitimacy of the outcome was in question. Canada called for an audit of the vote to ensure democratic fairness, with Ablonczy asserting that “due process must take place in order for that to be achieved.”1075 Canada and the U.S. were the only countries of the Americas that challenged the legitimacy of the election, in a strategy designed to lend credibility to Capriles, who in turn used international criticism of the election to foment violent protests from his right-wing base and to continue calls for a recount.
This demand was described by Mark Weisbrot as “farcical,” given the fact that Venezuela has one of the most rigourous voting processes in the world, involving voting done by touch screen, with a receipt printed out to confirm the vote was recorded properly, which voters then put in a ballot box. When voting is closed it is followed by an audit of 53 percent of voting machines in front of witnesses from the different parties to compare their results to the paper results. Weisbrot suggests the chance of fraud occurring in this electoral system given the audit showed Maduro’s victory “would be far less than one in 25 thousand trillion.” Capriles’ claims regarding electoral fraud were a transparent façade for a political intervention designed to galvanize domestic and international opposition to Chavismo. In an indicative gesture, when the Electoral Council acceded to his initial demand for a full audit of all the paper receipts from the voting machines, Capriles introduced a new set of demands and said he would now boycott any such an audit as resolutely insufficient.1076
This chapter has demonstrated the intensity with which Canada’s leading geopolitical strategists have responded to what they see as the threat of Venezuela’s often successful opposition to neoliberalism under Chávez and Maduro spreading elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean—that is, the threat of a good example. Canadian capital has been directly involved in confrontations with the Venezuelan government, as indicated in our discussion of a series of lawsuits in the mining sector. More important than the protection of direct Canadian investments, however, has been the wider geopolitical concern on the part of the Canadian state that Venezuela under Chávez had become a strategic regional player within a wider turn to the Left in the region.
Containment of this kind of regional power has been a central motivation behind the campaign of demonization launched by the Canadian state and the Canadian mainstream media against Chávez and his successor. In this sense, the Canadians are mirroring a wider proliferation of disinformation and manipulation vis-à-vis Venezuelan politics in the mainstream international media. Our discussion above has systematically juxtaposed such claims of Venezuela’s turn to authoritarianism, clientelism, and institutional decay against the realities of Venezuelan political economy under Chávez and the opening period of Maduro’s administration. Above all, this chapter has demonstrated that Canadian capital and its supporters within the apparatus of the Canadian state will endure no deviation from neoliberal orthodoxy in Latin America if it can in any way, and by whatever means, be avoided.