Chapter 3
The death of Hugo Chávez, in March 2013, poses a range of serious questions for Venezuela. In particular, there are questions of social and political stability in the wake of a charismatic but deeply polarizing leader. More specifically, there is the question of whether Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, can hold together the extraordinary but fragile phenomenon known as “Chavismo” in the face of an inflationary economy, major infrastructural and law and order problems, and a deep and relentless hostility emanating from the large landholding oligarchs, the middle classes, and the business community in Venezuela. This hostility is not surprising. It was, after all, Hugo Chávez who, during his fourteen-year domination of Venezuelan politics, most personified the anti-neoliberal sentiment of the post-1990s era and who, via his “Bolivarian Revolution,” expressed most fiercely the desire to refashion the theory and practice of democracy in Venezuela and across the Latin American continent. This hardly endeared him to those traditionally in control of the Venezuelan society and economy, who railed at policy programs designed to radically improve the living standards of the poorest in Venezuelan society. In this regard, as a Chávez government minister put it, the traditional ruling classes despised Chávez because he created a society in which “the people who clean their houses are now politically more important than them.”1
More generally, the death of Chávez raises questions about the whole democracy debate within the pink-tide states in Latin America, which he, more than any other regional leader, encouraged and facilitated. And it was Chávez’s concern to harness Venezuela’s natural resources (particularly oil) for indigenous democratic purposes that sparked similar responses in many areas of Latin America and a more generalized hostility from a global corporate sector with traditional designs on Latin American markets and profitability. It also created anger and frustration within a U.S. foreign-policy community imbued with its own notions of what global democracy should look like and with traditional expectations of its dominant role in the Latin American region. In spite of continuing U.S. hostility, the end of the Chávez era raises more directly the question of the future prospects of the democratic zeal awakened by Chávez among the majority of poor Venezuelans, those who made up his support base for fourteen years and who are crucial to the continuing political success of his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). The question more precisely is whether the structural and ideological legacy of Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution will survive and flourish among the barrio dwellers and previously disenfranchised Venezuelans without his iconic presence.
Structurally, the Chávez legacy is to be seen in the thousands of grassroots institutions—district councils, cooperatives, and local communes—established to facilitate the delivery of new social services for the poor and illiterate, principally health clinics, schools, and subsidized food outlets, and to allow the masses direct access to the levers of power and decision making as the foundation of a genuine participatory democracy. Ideologically, the Chávez legacy is apparent in the ongoing process that sees the “common sense” of the neoliberal era challenged at almost every level by the PSUV and its supporters. In its place, an adapted Bolivarian ethos is proclaimed that emphasizes human capital over its “monetarist” counterpart and that imbues the Venezuelan masses with the sense that they have both the capacity and the right to take democratic power and use it for the benefit of the poorest and the indigenous peoples, in Venezuela and in Latin America as a whole. This Chávez-induced Bolivarianism seeks to emancipate the Venezuelan masses from their poverty and disenfranchisement as the basis of a new democratic order in which an educated, politically engaged Latin American society might free itself more generally. Integral to this process is an inclusive, multifaceted attitude to the democratic process, which represents it as much more than a political or institutional project (as in polyarchy) but argues that “where the calamities of hunger and poverty exist . . . democracy is in doubt and human rights are a fiction.”2 This particular notion of democracy necessarily confronts the neoliberal world order, perceived as the corporatized projection of a global ruling class that, from Chávez’s perspective, seeks to exploit Venezuela’s crucial resources and undermine the development of democratic desires throughout Latin America.
The question in 2014 is whether the “Chavistas” can sustain and develop the democratic structure and ideology bequeathed by Chávez or whether their great enthusiasm for Bolivarian democracy will dissipate without his powerful presence. There are some positive signs in this regard, at least in terms of the commitment of the Venezuelan voters in the election of October 2012, which saw Chávez reelected by an impressive margin (11 percent) as president of Venezuela following a turnout of over 80 percent of Venezuelan citizens; Chávez thus received 55 percent of the vote, almost the same percentage he obtained in 1998.3 This was a remarkable result, given that elected presidents invariably suffer an erosion of support, particularly over such a long time period and in the kind of volatile social and political environment such as that in Venezuela.
And while the Western media cried foul and alleged corrupt practices and intimidation on the part of Chávez, other responses emanating from those actually on the ground during the election process concluded otherwise.4 From the Carter Center, for example, global experts on democratic electoral practices who concluded that the election was scrupulously fair and that, moreover, “of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored . . . the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” Moreover, those sent to validate a BBC report that insisted that the intimidation of the state-owned media was the key to Chávez’s victory found something else—that only 5 percent of the Venezuelan media is actually state controlled, with the great majority of TV and radio in the hands of the private sector, almost all of it opposed to president Chávez.5
Consequently, reported Tamara Pearson, despite the best efforts of the corporate media, inside and outside Venezuela, to denigrate Chávez, “eight million people voted for a man who stands up to U.S. imperialism. They re-confirmed a passionate desire for a country that prioritizes humanity over profits.” Similarly, and contesting the Western media’s allegation that Chávez’s anti-neoliberal democracy has ruined the Venezuelan economy, and was therefore bound to lose to his free-market opponent, she noted that, since Chávez took power,
extreme poverty has dropped from nearly a quarter [25 percent] to 8.6 percent last year [2011]; unemployment has halved; and GDP per capita has more than doubled. [And] rather than ruining the economy—as his critics allege—oil exports have surged from $14.4bn to $60bn in 2011, providing revenue to spend on Chavez’s ambitious social programs.6
In this context, there is no great mystery concerning the reasons why a clear majority of Venezuelans support the Chávez project and why, in the face of considerable odds, they might well continue to do so into the future. There is evidence too that this commitment to democracy was never entirely dependent upon support for Chávez, with the Venezuelan people on at least two occasions willing to use their democratic power against the wishes of their president (e.g., the Constitutional Referendum of 2007 and the University Act of 2009). In short, there are indications that a radical form of democracy has become embedded in Venezuela and that it could be difficult to dislodge it, either structurally or ideologically. Indeed, if Chávez’s legacy is as potent as he wished it to be, this democratic radicalism could well become integral to the politics of some of his pink-tide allies in Latin America also and at the very least consolidate the strong antipathy to the neoliberal world order and U.S. leadership of it.
All this indicates that the barely concealed hostility to Chávez, evident within the Western liberal commentary on Venezuela and within the U.S. foreign-policy elite in particular, seems destined to continue. The lowest point in this whole affair was reached when George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, likened Chávez’s Venezuela to the Third Reich, with Chávez “a person elected legally—just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally—and who then consolidated power.”7 A similar insight was offered by the Republican spokesman Connie Mack in 2010, who described the leader of Venezuela, and his counterparts in Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba, as “thugocrats . . . [who] alter their constitutions so they can remain leaders for life.”8 And George W. Bush saw fit to distinguish between his own role in the world, as the chief promoter of “freedom, justice and human dignity,” and “that demagogue awash in oil money [who] is undermining democracy and seeking to destabilize the [Latin American] region.”9
Chávez’s contribution to this particular dialogue of vilification was equally crude. He referred to George W. Bush, for example, as a “devil” and “a donkey” and a “drunkard,” who dealt with the global community and Latin America in particular “as if he was the owner of the world.”10 Chávez concluded also that after a promising beginning the Obama administration was fundamentally no different (albeit a little more polite) from those that preceded it, representing Hillary Clinton, when she was secretary of state, as little more than a “blonde Condoleezza Rice.”11 Insults aside, Chávez’s attitude toward the Obama administration had everything to do with Obama’s perpetuation of the democracy-promotion program of the Bush administration. For the most part, nevertheless, the relationship with Obama was relatively civil, at least on the surface. But Chávez was always aware of the enhanced role played beneath the diplomatic surface, by USAID in particular, as Obama ramped up attempts to undermine the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.
We explore this issue in more detail later in this chapter. Its significance here is that it sees a democracy-promotion strategy being used against a fairly elected democracy. Indeed, Venezuela has now witnessed three U.S. presidents (Clinton, Bush, and Obama) using government instrumentalities designed to project democratic values worldwide (e.g., NED, USAID) to undermine an administration that was fairly elected on five occasions and that never resorted to force in order to either retain or maintain its position. It is worth reiterating in this regard that there were fifteen elections or referendums held during Chávez’s time in power (one of which he lost), but Venezuela’s democracy has never been accepted by the United States. Rather, as the former undersecretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs Peter Romero insisted, “in Venezuela you do not see a government that rules; only plebiscites, referenda, and more elections.”12 Leaving aside any (polyarchic) irony associated with this statement, it is clear that for the United States, Venezuela’s democracy was never considered valid while Hugo Chávez won its elections.
Crude rhetoric aside, the often bitter engagements between the United States and Chávez’s Venezuela bring into stark relief the very deep contestation over what “democracy” means in the neoliberal era. This contestation is central to the discussion to follow, which concentrates principally upon the Venezuelan alternative to neoliberal democracy, with its emphasis upon social justice and political egalitarianism as key systemic features of its Bolivarian Revolution. It provides a broad historical and intellectual account of this alternative democracy, it says something more substantial about Venezuelan democracy and its critics, and it touches on some of its implications for Latin American and global political economy more generally in an era dominated by a U.S.-led neoliberalism. It indicates finally what the Venezuela–United States conflict contributes to the question of what democracy means in the early years of the twenty-first century.
Chávez and Bolivarian Democracy: A Brief Overview
During the Punto Fijo era in Venezuela (1958–1998), the country was led by conservative elites who sought in the 1970s to protect important industries from the incursions of foreign capital (e.g., the oil industry). They failed to institute promised programs of social progressivism and political democracy, however, and the plight of Venezuela’s poor worsened under the neoliberalism of the 1980s. Consequently, by 1989, under the presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez, the great social and class divisions in Venezuelan society were starkly evident, with the government now explicitly supportive of its traditionally wealthy and powerful sectors and, increasingly, of international capital seeking control of Venezuela’s oil industry. Indeed, within a month of his inauguration in 1989, Pérez announced his paquete económico in line with IMF parameters, which saw the installation of neoliberal programs and major cuts in social spending alongside an unequivocal commitment to trade liberalization, deregulation, and privatization.
The poor now faced massive increases in the price of food and transport and an even more precarious situation regarding jobs and health care. The result was the Caracazo (1989), which saw widespread riots and protests against the ruling political parties and the democratic system in general. In the wake of these protests, that saw impoverished barrio dwellers involved in rioting in downtown Caracas and middle-class suburbs, at least 1,000 people were dead and there was open resistance to neoliberalism and its promises of modernity, progress, and democracy.13 Violent protests continued through the 1990s, reaching a peak in response to the imposition of a second wave of neoliberal austerity measures by Perez’s successor, Rafael Caldera, in 1996. By 1998, consequently, 63 percent of people believed “radical change” was necessary to rescue Venezuela from neoliberalism.14
Chávez had already sought to intervene in this situation via a failed coup in 1992. But in the 1998 elections, his major weapons were his narrative of the Bolivarian Revolution and his commitment to a “real” popular democracy. The Punto Fijo elites, he argued, were “not defending democracy . . . [but rather] trying to defend their privileges.”15 In contrast, Chávez pledged to defend the (democratic) interests of the poorest and most marginalized in Venezuelan society. In this way, by emancipating the poorest people (el pueblo), he would emancipate Venezuela, per se, from its antidemocratic past and from its dependencies upon the United States and its global capitalist allies and create in the Americas a living symbol of “Bolivarian” emancipation and social justice.
There was skepticism, and widespread alarm in some quarters, at the crude populism sometimes apparent during the Chávez era, but it was always something more than just opportunistic populism. The most disadvantaged among el pueblo were structurally and ideologically privileged under Chávez, and where once they were ignored and marginalized, they were now given a political voice, and their concerns over housing, food prices, education, employment, sanitation, and health care were prioritized. More precisely, from its beginning, the Chávez administration sought to introduce programs of participatory democracy that involved el pueblo in decision-making processes at all levels of society—hence, the increased use of referenda to ask the people for their support, or otherwise, and the initiatives for local organizations in urban and rural areas to become engaged in the processes by which public officials are chosen and by which local and regional concerns can be channeled quickly and effectively to government. Hence, the two additional branches of government, created to democratically complement the traditional divisions of the executive, legislative, and judicial sectors. The first mandates the participation of el pueblo in the selection of the judiciary and appointment of the National Electoral Council. The second centers on “citizens power” organizations designed to be independent from the other branches of government. Its members are nominated by civil society and tasked with protecting the interests of the masses from the state. Citizens are given rights to recall elected officials, initiate laws by referendum, and promote social audits of any government activity.
The response to these efforts to increase political participation has been mixed since 1998. Great numbers of previously marginalized people mobilized to support Chávez when his radical restructuring plans were in danger, forming grassroots “Bolivarian Circles” to support his referenda proposals and to demand his return to power after the coup against him in 2002. On the other hand, there was fear and skepticism among el pueblo about becoming involved in a formal political system so long dominated by the traditional elites.16 Chávez nevertheless pushed on with his participatory programs, effectively constructing a parallel governmental structure designed to give direct institutional expression to the everyday needs of el pueblo. Central to this process are the Communal Councils, which are tasked with creating committees and working groups to undertake social and structural projects in their neighborhoods.17 Proposals for the funding of these projects are put to various state agencies, and the funds are deposited into communal banks and administered collectively. The Communal Councils, therefore, allow people to take an active role in planning, financing, administering, and carrying out projects in their own communities. There have been 30,000 of these councils established since 2006.18
Another initiative for encouraging grassroots participation in decision making saw the creation of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in 2006 to provide local groups and individuals the opportunity to develop a political organization from the ground up, in ways that specifically engage the social and political concerns of the poorest citizens. By 2009, the PSUV had 6.7 million members, almost half the registered voters in Venezuela.19 Moreover, the unparalleled numbers of the previously marginalized who attend rallies, marches, and other forms of political activity in Venezuela indicate that democratic participation has become embedded in the popular consciousness.20 This was indicated also in a Latinobarómetro poll that showed an extraordinary rise in satisfaction with democracy in Venezuela, from 35 percent in 1998 to 77 percent in 2011.21 The 81 percent voter turnout in the election of 2012 is perhaps the strongest indicator yet of this deepening democratic consciousness.
Important, too, in this regard are changes in the economic sphere, designed again to democratize Venezuelan society. On this issue, Chávez emphasized the need to confront neoliberalism with a new kind of economics, “based on the principles of social justice, democratization, efficiency, free competition, protection of the environment, productivity, and solidarity.”22 In practice, this has seen a range of economic changes, some emanating from government, some initiated by the broader community with government assistance. Most significantly, crucial sectors of the economy, such as steel, cement, banking, electricity, and communications, have been nationalized, as have a number of smaller companies in food production and agriculture. Many of these companies have been reconfigured into social production enterprises, whose priority now is to “privilege the values of solidarity, cooperation, complementarity, reciprocity, equity and sustainability ahead of the value of profitability.”23 This obliges these companies to dedicate 10 percent of their net revenue to “social labor” programs that benefit the communities where they are located, that give workers the opportunity to make decisions about how the money is allocated in the interests of the local community, and that provide discounted goods and services for the local populations. In this regard, Chávez directly confronted neoliberal logic in refuting the notion that every sector of modern life should be open to market principles, arguing instead that food, health care, education, and social welfare are “public goods” and must be insulated from market forces.24
There have been some problems with these programs, with the government deeming it necessary to expropriate companies that fail to live up to their social responsibilities. Many of these expropriations were designed to achieve what Chávez called “food sovereignty.” In this regard, there has been significant success, and in 2012, state-owned companies were producing rice, coffee, cooking oil, milk, and other foodstuffs at discounted prices.25 In a poll taken in September 2012, there was widespread support for this policy initiative and for Chávez, more generally, whose performance as president was deemed “above average” by 62.4 percent of respondents.26
Chávez, nevertheless, was consistently under great pressure from the middle classes and business sectors alarmed at the implications of the increasingly democratic changes intrinsic to his Bolivarian Revolution. For example, he encouraged the development of people’s cooperatives that are assisted with low-interest loans, tax rebates, and preferential contracts for community-designed projects. Some of the expropriated companies have also been reinscribed as comanagement enterprises, with workers engaged in a consciously democratized workplace dedicated to the collective good rather than to capitalist first principles. After an enthusiastic beginning, with 141,000 people’s cooperatives established within the first year, this project has faltered, both because of resistance from anti-Chávez forces and the lack of a consistent “democratic” consciousness on the part of those tasked with carrying out Chávez’s Bolivarian restructuring programs.27
Central to Chávez’s response to this, and other setbacks, was a massive investment in education, both to raise the basic literacy levels of those who previously had little chance of a formal education and to install alongside the traditional education curriculum an alternative body of political knowledge aimed at raising the consciousness of democracy and democratic participation. As Chávez put it in 2007, the alternative curriculum aimed to create for Venezuelans “our own collective, creative and diverse ideology,” as opposed to the “colonial Eurocentric, ideological education,” which “promotes consumerism and contempt for others.”28 In 2009, he developed this theme, proposing that a “Bolivarian” education would prioritize the “democratization of knowledge and the promotion of the school as a space for the formation of citizenship and community participation, for the reconstruction of the public spirit.”29
Education then, for Chávez, was the way in which a radical democratic culture might become embedded in the next generation of Venezuelans, which is why priority was given to structurally democratizing the whole education system in recent years. Thus, fees have been abolished in schools and universities, and free meals, scholarships, and public transport concessions have been provided to assist even the poorest to become part of the education revolution. The funding of education was increased from 3.38 percent of GDP in 1998 to 5.43 percent in 2007, with special attention paid to the establishment of education “missions” in poor neighborhoods.30 These include Misión Robinson, which has eliminated illiteracy by teaching over 1.3 million adults to read and write; Misión Ribas, which provides free secondary education to almost 2 million adult Venezuelans; and Misión Sucre, which provided tertiary-level education and was subsequently expanded into a new system of Bolivarian Universities (Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, UBV), with campuses across the country.31 As a result, participation rates have increased across the board between 1998 and 2006: from 89.7 to 99.5 percent for primary-school children, from 27.3 to 41 percent for secondary school, and from 21.8 to 30.2 percent for tertiary education.32 Most important, there was an increase in participation from the poorest sectors, especially at the tertiary level, with the proportion of twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds in higher education in the bottom four quintiles increasing by 4.4, 7.8, 5.2, and 8.2 percent between 1997 and 2002.33
The basic philosophy of education has also undergone reconstruction, with the perceived capitalist notion of education—as a “commodity” to be bought by an individual consumer and then sold in the occupational marketplace for the benefit of that individual—altered, to one that is redefined as “a human right and a fundamental social duty,” at the service of society.34 A new national curriculum was constructed in 2007, which sought to translate this philosophy into everyday practice. It has seen significant changes to the way teaching and learning take place. Less emphasis is placed on a “fragmented” approach to knowledge, designed to prepare students for specialized functions in a capitalist economy, and more on integrated, holistic knowledge designed to allow students a broader, deeper understanding of a complex sociopolitical reality, particularly that experienced on the global economic periphery.35 Emphasis too has been placed on the need for schools and universities to integrate more closely with their local communities. In 2009, the government sought to move this process forward by encouraging students and other community members to become involved in the management of universities through their Communal Councils. This provoked an outcry about university autonomy, and Chávez backed off.36
Interesting initiatives have nevertheless taken place in this context. Most significant perhaps is the introduction of “participatory action” research, which sees a range of students from various disciplines working in and with the poorest communities, in order to advance both their problem-solving skills and their sense of political praxis.37 Outside of the formal education system, Chávez urged el pueblo to work hard at their education, to study as individuals and in groups, to read widely, and to decide for themselves what changes they would like to see made in a democratic Venezuela. Shortly after this exhortation to self-education, over 700 study groups (between 10 and 30 members) emerged, from basic literacy collectives to political forums.38
The oil economy has been a crucial site of struggle to make an alternative democracy a reality for Venezuela. A central part of Chávez’s program has been the strategic use of Venezuela’s oil supply, represented now as a resource increasingly for the benefit of the Venezuelan people and less for the national and multinational capitalist sectors that previously controlled it. In Venezuela, oil has been widely viewed as the symbol of modernity and prosperity since the 1920s, always something more than a mere commodity, representing instead the nation’s “collective inheritance,” its key to a future of national prosperity and the kind of social and political modernity enjoyed by the rich world. But Chávez emphasized that it has been an inheritance squandered by generations of elites who have plundered the nation’s wealth and sold out to foreign oil companies.39
In an effort to reassert Venezuela’s economic sovereignty, and to be in a position to redistribute the national inheritance, Chávez sought to regain control of the oil industry. This meant a constant battle with the management of the state-owned oil company PDVSA, which, during the late Punto Fijo era, committed itself to neoliberal principles and effectively operated as a transnational company, investing in foreign markets and spiriting profits out of the country. The confrontations with PDVSA resulted in management locking out oil workers in 2002 and 2003 and a crisis in Venezuela’s primary export industry. But Chávez prevailed and managed to stop the siphoning off of oil profits to foreign subsidiaries, thus increasing government revenue. Revenues were also boosted by the high oil prices in the first decade of the twenty-first century, partially as a result of the Iraq War but also as a consequence of Chávez’s efforts to revive OPEC and strengthen its hand in setting prices. Chávez also sought to diversify Venezuela’s economic base, by encouraging investment and trade relations with China, in particular, and a range of other states, for example, Iran, Russia, Belarus, and Brazil, and by developing closer trading ties with regional neighbors.
The results have been positive for Venezuela. Between 2003 and 2008, Venezuela’s GDP grew by 78.8 percent, or 11.7 percent annually.40 The economy suffered between 2009 and 2010, due primarily to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), but it rebounded with 4.2 percent growth in 2011.41 Unemployment, which reached an alarming high of 19.2 percent during the oil lockout (2002–2003), was down to 6.2 percent in 2011. Meanwhile, the minimum wage was increased from Bs120,000 in 1999 to Bs614,790 in 2007.42 This was only one dimension of the equation for Chávez, of course, and he used the increased oil revenue specifically to serve the interests of the majority of Venezuelan people, as part of their national and cultural “inheritance.” In particular, the government used the increased oil revenue to fund a range of welfare programs and to increase general spending on democratic projects by 300 percent between 1999 and 2006. Indeed, spending in this area continued even after the problems of the GFC in 2008.43 Most important here have been the “missions” programs (see above) set up in the poorest neighborhoods to provide free health care, education, heavily subsidized food and housing, and other benefits to the most impoverished sections of the population. Poverty rates have thus dropped, from 48.6 percent of the population in 2002, to 27.8 percent in 2010. Infant mortality has declined by 34 percent. Deaths from malnutrition have dropped by more than 50 percent, and while there were just 3.5 million Venezuelans with health coverage in 1998, in 2007, the figure was 20.5 million.44 In 2008, under Chávez’s Bolivarian democracy, Venezuela had the least unequal distribution of income in Latin America, a status it still retains.45
For all this, or perhaps because of it, there was significant resentment and dissent in Venezuela against Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution. Inflation in Venezuela’s economy was a problem throughout the Chávez era, and this hurt many of his supporters in the poorest sectors of the economy. This had become less of a problem before his death, with inflation in decline in 2012, but in 2014 it spiked again, effectively cancelling out president Mauro’s decision to raise the minimum wage by 30 percent.46 There was general dissent also from some within the ranks of Chavistas, whose expectations were raised by the early democratic gains of the Chávez era and who became frustrated by the difficulties of the post-GFC era in particular.47 Overwhelmingly, however, the dissent has come from the middle classes and the business community, many of whom profited from the upsurge in Venezuela’s economic fortunes during the Chávez era but who always feared the growing influence of the “mob” under Chávez. Likewise, while Chávez’s “twenty-first-century socialism” did not seek to abolish capitalism, both national and international capitalist sectors saw fit to punish him. Following the GFC, for example, domestic capital largely withdrew its cooperation, and in response to Chávez’s reassertion of Venezuelan economic sovereignty, the rate of international investment capital significantly slowed.48 Hostility from the United States and corporate elites also persisted. This is important because the Venezuelan economy remains to a large extent dependent upon its relations with the global economy, particularly concerning oil—a finite resource dominated by price fixers in the neoliberal marketplace. And, as indicated above, in response to Chávez’s attempts to construct an alternative democratic model to that preferred by the United States and neoliberalism, there was a constant stream of invective and politico-strategic enmity toward him and his Bolivarian Revolution. This saw an upscaling of the U.S. democracy-promotion programs aimed at undermining Chávez, and we will return to that theme shortly.
For now, however, it is worth returning to the proposition inherent in U.S. critiques of Venezuela under Chávez, which insists that he ruled there by the manipulation of the democratic system and as head of a regime of terror and fear. Even on the basis of the skim across the surface of the Chávez era presented here, this does not appear plausible. On the contrary, there is more plausibility in the notion that, in the most difficult of national and global circumstances, a genuine democratic impulse underlies Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution and that it has had some genuinely democratic outcomes for those most in need of social, political, and economic reform. More specifically, it is hard to see on what basis Chávez’s alternative democracy can be considered “thuggish” or likened to the fascist viciousness of Hitler and the Nazis, as major U.S. spokespeople have charged.
A more sensible summation of the Chávez era is to be found in the works of commentators such as Ellner and Hellinger, who proposed in 2004 that “Chávez’s record on democracy and the efforts to deepen it were far from uniform or consistent. Undoubtedly, his government scored pluses for some initiatives and minuses for others.”49 Crucially also, as Phil Gunson points out:
There are no mass executions, death squads, or concentration camps in Venezuela. Civil society has not disappeared, as it did in Cuba after the 1959 revolution. There is no systematic state-sponsored terror leaving scores of desaparecidos as in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s. And there is no efficiently repressive and meddlesome bureaucracy a la the Warsaw pact.50
Which begs, more precisely, the question of why there is so much hostility from the mainstream of the democratic world to the alternative Bolivarian democracy in Venezuela when, by any criteria, it is structurally democratic, it is functionally democratic, and it has profoundly democratized the everyday realities of the Venezuelan majority.
The answer, we suggest, is that the dominant democratic model adopted by partisans of neoliberalism is the polyarchal model touched on in the previous chapter—a model of democracy in which corporate and political elites rule in the interests of neoliberal globalism and a systemic status quo dominated by the major states of the capitalist world. In this context, the Bolivarian democracy in Venezuela perhaps does pose something of a threat, albeit perhaps a rather exaggerated one at times. But as Gramsci suggests, even the most powerful and deeply embedded hegemonies are never entirely secure, never entirely in total control, and are always susceptible to counterhegemonic tendencies. Hugo Chávez has perhaps prompted such tendencies.
A Democratic Threat to Democracy? Exporting the Bolivarian Model
Above all, Chávez challenged fundamental liberal-capitalist logic, which insists that only markets can create “real” economic prosperity. In so doing, he reasserted the role of a democratic state in the development of the good modern society, particularly for states on the global periphery. The nature of the Bolivarian state is thus important, both structurally and symbolically, in directly challenging the polyarchic democratic model favored by the global hegemon, the United States, seeking to maintain the systemic and conceptual status quo. Ideologically, too, Chávez’s “twenty-first-century socialism,” inconsistent and incoherent as it might occasionally be, has infused millions of otherwise marginalized people with a sense that they are capable of meaningful intellectual and political participation in the societies in which they live and that they don’t “need” to be ruled—either by indigenous elites, powerful foreigners, or global hegemons. This sense of democratic power might not be easily suppressed.
For all this, the threat posed by Venezuela’s democracy should not be overstated. It is eminently manageable by the United States and the neoliberal world order as long as it remains contained within the parameters of a still relatively poor Latin American country. The larger danger lies in the proliferation of Venezuelan popular democracy models elsewhere in Latin America and beyond. Chávez understood this and worked both to bolster the confidence of his supporters and to help buttress his vulnerable economy in a hostile neoliberal world, to transport his Bolivarian perspectives far and wide. Hence, his reaching out to China and other “friendly” states for enhanced trade relationships. Hence also, his consistent attempts to influence the broader Latin America region, at the expense of the United States in particular. In this regard, his strengthening of relations with Cuba, via special oil deals, is important, in that it disrupts the U.S. sanctions regime and indicates to others that perhaps the regional hegemon is not quite as powerful as it once was.
This is a message that has resonated powerfully in Latin America in recent years particularly among the so-called pink-tide states, which, following Chávez’s lead in 1998, shifted Latin America to the left or, more accurately perhaps, the center-left, during the 2000s, in Argentina (2003), Bolivia (2005), Brazil (2002), Chile (2000), Ecuador (2006), El Salvador (2009), Guatemala (2007), Nicaragua (2006), Paraguay (2008), Peru (2011), and Uruguay (2005). Circumstances have changed in some of these countries (e.g., Paraguay, Chile) since the early successes of the pink tide, and there has been no real equivalent of Bolivarian democracy in any of them.
But Chávez’s influence was evident across the region for many years as he agitated for an alternative democratic vision for Latin America, primarily via his Social Charter of the Americas introduced in 2001 at the Organization of American States (OAS) general assembly. At the core of the Social Charter is the notion of a regional and global democracy characterized, above all, by social justice. Or, as the Venezuelan foreign minister Ali Rodriguez put it in 2005, it represents “an inclusive democracy with equality” as a counterpart to “an elitist democracy, a democracy that is merely electoral.” Going further, Rodriguez proposed that democracy “cannot be limited purely to the political realm. It has to be included in the economic, the social, and the cultural . . . [and recognize] social justice as a fundamental component of democracy.”51 In other words, and with the United States firmly in his sights, Rodriguez, on behalf of Chávez, explicitly and publicly condemned polyarchy as a democratic model, with its emphasis on the formal political process and its insistence on the compatibility of free-market economics.
In this regard, in particular, the Venezuelan model has received support from a number of otherwise more moderate actors among the pink-tide states in Latin America. The Bolsa Familia (Brazil without Poverty) program in Brazil and social welfare programs in Argentina have, for example, explicitly acknowledged the “economic” as intrinsic to the political in their movement toward democracy.52 Constitutional reforms in Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009) also reflect attempts to develop broader democratic participation in their societies.
For all this, the Venezuelan-sponsored Social Charter of the Americas was resisted and strongly opposed by the United States, in particular, for many years. The volatility of the debate was evident enough during the 2005 meeting of the OAS, in Miami, when the United States put forward its counter to Chávez’s Social Charter in the form of the Declaration of Florida, which proposed the need to “monitor” the development of democracy in the region, particularly the radical variants of it in places such as Venezuela. This raised the ire of a number of Latin American states who perceived it as, at best, more North American paternalism and, at worst, an updated interventionist strategy for the post–Cold War era. Consequently, there was resistance to the U.S. proposal from a number of OAS members. Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Amorim, responded that democracy cannot be “imposed,” and that while Brazil fully supported the strengthening of democracy in the region, “we’d also like to avoid intruding mechanisms.” The Mexican spokesman also agreed in principle but warned that “we are not in agreement with any tutelage [about democracy] from anybody.”53 Chávez was, typically, more blunt, insisting that, “if any member government of the OAS needs monitoring, it is the government of the United States . . . a government that supports terrorists and invades other countries, . . . a government that violates human rights around the world, a false democracy.”54 The Venezuelan OAS ambassador Jorge Valero perhaps summed up the concerns best, proposing that there would be “no acceptance in the heart of the Americas for any proposal that means trying to impose a single model of democracy [italics added].”55
As an indication of the increasing influence of this attitude in the region, Venezuela’s Social Charter was finally approved at the OAS meeting in Bolivia in June 2012. The approved text now states that in a democratizing region, “the peoples of the Americas have a legitimate aspiration for social justice and their governments the responsibility to promote it.” Chávez reflected bitterly upon U.S. intransigence on the Social Charter issue over eleven years but made it clear that a range of previously ignored social rights—to health, work, education, basic services, and the political and economic participation of all citizens—must now be integral to democracy in the Americas. If this was not accepted by the United States and its allies, he suggested, the OAS should be “finished with” and greater emphasis placed on the new “geopolitical spaces of unity” being developed in the region.56
Chávez was here pointing, in particular, to institutions such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños), CELAC, which brings together all the countries in the Western Hemisphere, aside from the United States and Canada, and aims to supersede the U.S.-controlled OAS. Important too is the Union of South American Nations (Unión de Naciones Suramericanas), UNASUR, established in 2008, which has been increasingly concerned to monitor democratic affairs from a Latin American rather than a U.S. perspective. In 2012, UNASUR introduced a “democracy clause” into its constitution aimed at imposing sanctions and bringing other pressures to bear upon those who overthrow democratically elected governments (i.e., in Paraguay, 2012) or seek to disrupt democracy per se (e.g., in Ecuador, 2012).57 Of great significance for Venezuela also is the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América), ALBA, which emerged from the trading alliance between Venezuela and Cuba and also includes Antigua, Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.
These bodies are not without their tensions, but they indicate that Venezuela, in particular, has widespread support in its attempts to confront and modify the neoliberal world order. At the Summit of the Americas in Argentina in 2005, consequently, the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) plan was rejected in favor of closer economic and political integration programs between the members of CELAC, UNASUR, and ALBA. In December 2010, thus, UNASUR introduced a $13.7 billion ten-year plan for infrastructure projects and energy integration within the Latin American region. Moreover, UNASUR has established a South American Defense Council, to create “a regional defense strategy outside of the tutelage umbrella from the United States.”58 This defense initiative was prompted by suspicions (later proved to be warranted) that a proposed U.S. security agreement with Colombia, ostensibly part of the war on drugs, was actually part of a U.S. plan to get its military closer to “anti-U.S. governments” in Latin America.59
Another issue that has indicated a growing sense of unity in the Americas is the response to U.S. attempts to widen divisions within the pink tide and isolate the “bad left” (e.g., Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador) from the “good left” (e.g., Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile).60 The latter grouping is distinguished effectively by its acceptance of the neoliberal free market as fundamental to its political and economic status in the global order. There has been tension here, nevertheless, and the relationship between the United States and Brazil under Lula and now Dilma Rousseff has been sometimes prickly. But the “moderate” democratization of Brazil in recent years has found favor in the United States, which has applauded and assisted the economic growth and lessening of poverty in that country, often using it as a “good” counterpart to the “bad” Venezuela under Chávez. This “bad left,” meanwhile, is distinguished by its animosity toward the neoliberal world order and its unwillingness to acknowledge the leadership and good intent of the global hierarchy led by the United States. This “bad left” is perceived as unconcerned about economic rationality and democracy but intent upon “picking as many fights as possible with Washington and getting as much control as they can over sources of revenue.”61
In some of the U.S. global-security literature, the alleged irresponsibility and danger of this “bad left” is even more specifically condemned, via the suggestion that its “radical populism” is connected to the Islamic terrorism of al Qaeda and Iran, thus posing a direct threat to the United States.62 The major target here, unsurprisingly, is Venezuela, deemed the “terrorism hub of South America” by a U.S. House of Representatives report in 2006.63 This is a theme still constant within sectors of the U.S. political spectrum. Republican senator Marco Rubio, for example, in 2012, invoked the view that
Hugo Chavez is not only a threat to the Venezuelan people’s freedom and democratic aspirations, he has also supported Iran’s regime in its attempts to expand its intelligence network throughout the hemisphere, facilitated money laundering activities that finance state sponsors of terrorism and provided a safe haven for FARC narco-terrorists, among many other actions.64
The rhetoric has been reined in a little under Obama, but the “two lefts” thesis remains integral to U.S. Latin American policy. Thus, in Brazil in 2010, Hillary Clinton made clear her “deep concern” with the Venezuelan situation, insisting that the solution to the problem was for Venezuela to “look at Brazil and look at Chile and other models of successful countries.” Most of Latin America, she proposed, was in a period of economic growth “and sustainable democracy” under the neoliberal world order, “with the notable exceptions” of Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua.65
This divide-and-conquer strategy has not been lost on the Latin American states, of course, and while there are obvious benefits in going along with it, this has not always been the response of the pink tide. In 2004, for example, on the eve of an opposition referendum designed to force Chávez out of power, Venezuela was invited to join Mercosur (the Common Market of the South) led by Brazil—a powerful political and symbolic act of unity between “bad” and “good” Latin Americans. Likewise, as indicated above, when the United States introduced its proposed “monitoring” program of Latin American democracies—a strategy aimed squarely at Venezuela—Brazil, Mexico, and others stood just as squarely with their “bad state” colleague. And when Evo Morales was under threat from a U.S.-backed rebellion in Bolivia in 2008, UNASUR stood with Morales and against U.S. interests.
This is not to suggest that the pink tide is becoming a hotbed of Bolivarian-type leftism. There are real differences, for example, between the social democracy in Brazil and the radical version under Chávez. But the resistance against the “two lefts” strategy and the development of major forums for political integration in Latin America does indicate perhaps that Chávez’s alternative democracy stance has resonated at all kinds of levels within the Latin American community and is stiffening the resolve against U.S. attempts to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution. However, for all his growing influence in the region, Chávez was always concerned about the democracy-promotion strategies of the United States that are continuing in the Obama era. The belligerence of the G. W. Bush years has largely gone, and the more obvious stylistic continuity now is with the Clinton administration, which also spoke softly while carrying a big stick, albeit a concealed one (via NED, USAID, etc.). And while Obama, like Clinton, shook Chávez’s hand and spoke of his desire to help establish prosperity and democracy in the Americas, the nature of that democracy remains effectively beyond discussion.
In an interview in 2011 with the anti-Chávez El Universal in Caracas, Obama outlined his carefully worded position on Chávez and Venezuela.66 He began, as he invariably does, in conciliatory terms, stressing his desire for Latin Americans in general to make their own decisions about how they are governed and reiterating the U.S. attitude to this as one of “equality, shared responsibility, mutual interests and mutual respect.” He went on to stress that Venezuela under Chávez has not helped itself with its “anti-American tendencies.” Obama absolved the great majority of Venezuelans and Latin Americans from this sentiment, suggesting that they generally support the United States and are opposed to living in the “ideological” past. Obama then connected Chávez’s Venezuela directly to that of Cuba and Iran, as anti-American terrorist sympathizers, noting that “here in the Americas, we take Iranian activities, including in Venezuela, very seriously and we will continue to monitor them closely”—not a threat as such but another intimation that the notion of independence for the people of the Americas remains a highly restricted one that must effectively serve the interests of the United States and neoliberalism to be acceptable. Obama subsequently played down the significance of any terrorist threat from Venezuela, but Chávez always responded by insisting that Obama and the United States “leave us alone” and “mind your own business,” when it comes to Latin America, reminding Obama that “we are free now and will never again be a colony of yours or anyone else.”67
At first glance, and primed by years of newspaper and media coverage that represented Chávez as an excitable buffoon, this response was generally perceived as just another overreaction to a polite and respectful U.S. president understandably concerned about terrorism. But, as indicated, Chávez knew something else about Obama’s politeness and respect—that it concealed the continuation of a democracy-promotion project that in scale and function, if not in tone, owes as much to George W. Bush as it does to liberals such as Clinton and Obama. Thus, while Obama has made more sensitive noises in his public commentary on Venezuela, he has done so while overseeing a concerted attempt to destroy Chávez’s Bolivarian democracy.68 Central to these efforts has been the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was created in the J. F. Kennedy era to compete with the USSR for the hearts and minds of peoples in the global periphery, and, since George W. Bush reprioritized it in 2002, has been tasked with “winning” Venezuela for the post–Cold War neoliberal world order.
During its first two years of this program, USAID, and a subsidiary organization, the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), had a budget of US$10 million, the majority of which was used to fund approximately 64 opposition groups and programs in Venezuela. More specifically, the USAID funding in the early years of the first decade of the twenty-first century went mainly to anti-Chávez propaganda programs in the Venezuelan media and to the unsuccessful attempt to topple Chávez in the recall election of 2004.69 The United States has also been on a charm offensive regarding the anti-Chávez opposition. Echoing earlier strategies that saw anticommunists welcomed (whatever their human-rights records) from, among others, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, anti-Chávez groups and the individuals heading them have been privileged, when it comes to U.S. financial and cultural largesse. The quid pro quo here was clear enough during Chávez’s presidency, in that, “to receive U.S. financing, the opposition is required to advocate neoliberalism, support U.S. foreign policy and denounce Chávez.”70 Increasing effort has also gone into reformulating Venezuelan civil society, at all levels, with the NED in particular committed to the funding of anti-Chavista elements among workers, teachers, students, journalists, and local government officials. By 2010, under Obama, external funding for these programs had reached more than US$57 million, the majority coming from USAID and the NED. Moreover, from 2006 to 2010, over 34 percent of USAID’s budget was used to fund programs for Venezuelan youth in the attempt to turn them away from the “Chavistas.”71
In this regard Obama has illustrated clearly enough that his respect for democratic diversity is not much more profound than that of Condoleezza Rice, who in 2005 responded to the proposition that there might be room for a diversity of democratic models in Latin America by insisting that
I don’t believe that there are different kinds of democracy . . . when people talk about different kinds of democracy, I say let’s go back to the basics of democracy . . . I don’t think we need a new definition of democracy. We know it when we see it.72
In explaining the nature of this singular, universally applicable democracy, that is easy to know and easy to see, Rice emphasized what it decidedly is not, in pointing to “the authoritarian leadership and commodity driven economy” of a state such as Venezuela. And to indicate again the continuity of this view following the George W. Bush era, Obama’s first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, when asked how Venezuela might become a real democracy, proposed that above all, it “must restore private property and return to a free-market economy.”73 Democracy, it would seem, can only be “real” if it functions in a capitalist system and if, in the twenty-first century, it works in the interests of neoliberalism.
This, of course, is precisely what any number of groups and individuals have sought to contest in the current era. Indeed, social movements around the world have been contesting the notion of neoliberal democracy for decades, often appealing for the kind of social-justice perspectives and mass participation in the political and economic spheres that Hugo Chávez championed in Venezuela (e.g., the World Social Forum—see chapter 6). Indeed, at the heart of the neoliberal world order are increasing democratic challenges to the contemporary status quo. The Occupy movements in the United States, for example, have explicitly challenged both the inequality of wealth associated with the “winner take all” mentality of free-market logic and the inequality of social and political power that is perceived as integral to a neoliberal (e.g., polyarchic) democratic system. Chapters 5 and 6 return to this “rich world” challenge. The following chapter develops some of the themes introduced here in exploring the ways in which peoples and organizations in very difficult situations around the world have sought to challenge neoliberal democracy on behalf of a more inclusive, more emancipatory variant of it. It does so via three discussions on democracy drawn from three ostensibly very different places—South Africa, India, and Russia.