Caracas was once a small town circled by relatively friendly ranchos, or makeshift shanties, on the surrounding hills. At night, the lights of the poor twinkled like candles. Yet the wealth and luxury of the city centre, and the visible poverty and misery of the ranchos, were dramatic reminders of Latin America’s most famous characteristic – inequality of income and opportunity based on deep-seated attitudes of unacknowledged racism.
The middle class is not as large and as privileged as it once was, yet those not squeezed by the economic crisis remain informally convivial, with an international standard of living. Enjoy Saturday lunch in one of the cervecerías, or beer restaurants, of El Rosal or Sabana Grande, and you could easily be in Barcelona, Turin or Frankfurt. Visit the multistorey shopping mall at the Centro Sambíl and you could be in any city of the US Midwest. Even at the height of a prolonged economic and political crisis, this is a social group that continues to live extraordinarily well, importing their food and consumer goods from all over the world, though chiefly from the United States, and preferring the cosmopolitan to the national. A country that once exported chocolate now imports Hershey bars.
In recent years the scale of inequality has changed, and the danger inherent in the urban situation has become increasingly obvious. Caracas is now a North American-style metropolis that always looks spectacular. The visitor is greeted by an urban jungle of freeways and concrete intersections, of pedestrianised precincts and shopping malls. A forest of gigantic skyscrapers, in every architectural style, reflects half a century of unbridled urban development.
Some of the shanty towns have been absorbed and upgraded; some, from a distance, now have the apparent charm of an Italian hill town. Yet above and beyond, on the sprawling cliffs to the south and east of the city, the shacks of wood and concrete are still growing in number, stretching over new ground, ring after ring of impoverished suburb and dormitory town. They remain as a permanent and seemingly ineradicable threat to the good life on the valley floor.
There was a time when the hilltop ranchos were able to use their height to remind the Venezuelan rich of their existence, but nowadays the construction of skyscrapers has symbolically turned the tables. The great tall blocks in the middle of the city are able to flaunt the wealth of the consumer society over the small hills of misery, while the poor have been driven ever further from the centre.
Like many of the other megacities of Latin America, Caracas is characterised by the virtual absence of law and order. It is a city under siege, with each shopping centre barricaded by fences of steel, each residential street marked off with a guardhouse and a lifting road barrier, and each block of flats protected by armed wardens. The rich live behind high walls with their own private security guards; the youthful poor survive by organising their own armed gangs. The middle class, sandwiched miserably in between, live in constant fear for their property and their lives.
On one dramatic day in February 1989, their worst nightmares were realised. The poor from the surrounding hills descended for a week of indiscriminate looting throughout the city. Hundreds of people were killed during the subsequent period of fierce military repression, a reminder to the country of just how thin the veneer of tolerance between the classes had become. The event, soon called the Caracazo, had a simple cause: the price of petrol went up; the bus fares went up; and simmering anger turned to active rebellion. The police, on strike at the time for a pay increase, were ill-prepared for an urban riot. When television screens began to show people looting in Caracas, and the police standing around and letting it happen, citizens in other cities saw this as an invitation to join in. Even today, years after those extraordinary and frightening days, many middle-class inhabitants of Caracas no longer feel really ‘safe’.
The country’s ancien régime, like that of the Soviet Union at the time, had been groping blindly towards new models, and the urban revolt of February 1989 occurred partly because of the movement towards reform. Since the late 1950s, Venezuela had had all the attributes of a one-party state, not unlike those that once existed in Communist Eastern Europe. Venezuela’s peculiarity, shared with neighbouring Colombia, was that two parties rather than one were given the chance to control the state, turn and turn about. The largest and most significant party, Acción Democrática, had the predominant and hegemonic role, but to keep up the pretence that Venezuela was a ‘democracy’, an alternative Christian Democrat party, Copei, was allowed on occasion to win elections. The two political movements carved out this cynical agreement in the so-called Pact of Punto Fijo, signed in 1958, which effectively ensured that other parties, of left or right, would be prevented from ever taking power.
Acción Democrática and Copei both had large memberships. You joined a party to get a job, and to keep it. The party leaders, and the bosses of their tame trade unions, grew accustomed to the perks of power, and particularly to the pickings from the blossoming state industries created from the revenues from oil. Corruption on an almost unimaginable scale became endemic, particularly within the ranks of Acción Democrática but also in the wider banking and commercial community, and it snowballed with the years. The corruption and conspicuous consumption of the Venezuelan political elite became famous throughout the continent. They also created a deep anger within the poorer strata of society, and an unquenchable desire for revenge.
During the boom years of the 1970s, everything had seemingly gone well. President Carlos Andrés Pérez of Acción Democrática, an archetypal Third World leader with a penchant for stealing from the state, ruled from 1974 to 1979, and took the strong statist line that was popular at that time. Shell and Exxon and other foreign oil companies were nationalised, and state money was poured into the development of industry, to the applause of left-wing nationalists everywhere. Such was the flow of oil money in those years that even today there is still much visible to show for it, mostly in the southern region of Guayana: iron ore extraction, smelting operations, steel and aluminium plants, industrial complexes, and the gigantic hydro-electric dam at Guri on the Caroní river, capable of supplying Venezuela’s electricity needs – and those of much of northern Brazil as well.
Yet over the years the state sector began to ossify. It was revealed to be inefficient and uncompetitive, overmanned and corrupt. Short of fresh investment, the great industrial enterprises began to rust away. Projects begun were quickly abandoned. As elsewhere in Latin America, encouraged by greedy international bankers, the country accumulated an immense foreign debt, saddling future generations with the costs of the riotous living of today. In the course of the 1980s, both economically and politically, the country was spiralling towards disaster.
Finally, in 1989, plans were produced to restructure the economy on neo-liberal lines. Returned to power that year with a mandate to revive the atmosphere of the ‘good old days’ of his earlier presidency, President Pérez unexpectedly changed tack. With no advance warning, his government steered the economy out into the difficult and turbulent waters of the free market, the liberalised economy, and international competition.
The new economic programme soon undermined the established political system, meeting with sustained opposition in the streets and within the ruling parties. The peoples of Latin America, in spite of the surface opulence of the middle-class sectors of the cities, are much closer to the breadline than their counterparts in Eastern Europe. The old party bosses, understandably, were bitterly opposed to perestroika, Venezuelan-style. Quite apart from the inherent difficulty of making the country more competitive, a huge structure of vested interests would have to be dismantled.
In February 1992, three years after the Caracazo, Colonel Chávez made his dramatic appearance – a 38-year-old military leader who promised to overthrow the corrupt politicians, to improve the conditions of the poor, and to move the country onto a fresh course. Then the commanding officer of a parachute regiment in Maracay, an hour’s drive from Caracas, he was well positioned to challenge the ancien régime by staging a coup.
Although the rebellion was successful in other parts of the country, the attempt to seize the presidential palace in Caracas was a failure. Chávez surrendered and appeared on television to urge his fellow conspirators elsewhere to put down their arms. ‘Comrades,’ he said, ‘unfortunately, for the moment, the objectives that we had set ourselves have not been achieved in the capital.’ Maybe, he implied, we’ll have better luck next time.
The phrase ‘for the moment’, por ahora, caught the popular imagination. The aims of the rebellion had not been secured, but most people read his message optimistically, as a sign that Chávez would return to the struggle at a later date. Por ahora became his trademark slogan, and the red beret of the parachute regiment became his signature logo. José Vicente Rangel cited the television appearance to me when explaining his conviction that Chávez would always be a strong supporter of press freedom. ‘He knows that the word is much more powerful than the gun. He failed when he used the gun, and triumphed when he had access to the media. He spent ten years preparing a coup d’état that failed militarily; the single minute they allowed him to appear on television was enough to conquer the country.’
Chávez’s intervention, at a time of national disintegration, was to turn him into a national hero overnight, celebrated all over the country in poetry and song. In a continent where evangelical sects have been increasing exponentially over the past twenty years, to rival the power and influence of the Catholic Church, the arrival of Colonel Chávez was greeted as though it were the Second Coming.
Chávez spent two years in prison, but news of the revolutionary project on which he had been working with fellow officers soon leaked out. Resurrecting three South American heroes from the nineteenth century – Bolívar himself, Bolívar’s revolutionary teacher Simón Rodríguez, and Ezequiel Zamora, leader of the peasants against the landed oligarchy in the Federal wars of the 1840s and 1850s – Chávez began to sketch the outline of a politics of revolutionary nationalism, destined to have considerable popular appeal. From the country in Latin America that has been most deeply immersed in North American culture and politics, he launched a fierce counter-attack on the programme of globalisation imposed on the world by the United States in the aftermath of the Cold War. Soon he was topping the polls of public opinion. In December 1998, he was elected president.