CLASS WARS, SICK SOCIETIES

SOUTH AMERICAN REVOLUTION If the nature of a revolution can be established by the manner of its dress, then the one led by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela must rate as one of history’s more ambiguous upheavals. Chávez has had three standard outfits during his five-year presidency – baseball kit, military fatigues, Italian suit and silk tie – and he has generated an ideological froth to match. On returning from the Middle East, he proclaimed that his country should turn to Islam; when back from Cuba, his preferences turned to the rigours of communism. Like a compass surrounded by attractions, his heroes and sacred texts pull the president in as many different directions as there are forms of punishing the rich. “Where is this revolution going?” Chávez asked himself in an interview with Le Monde Diplomatique at the end of 2001, on the eve of the year that would see him ousted, reinstated, and confronted by a two-month general strike. “Well, like every revolution it’s going towards the transformation of political, social, economic and also moral structures.” For those wanting more specifics, he highlighted a recent protest by employers: “that was the first lockout [of employers] in Venezuelan history. Now, that shows we’re going in the right direction.” The travails of heroism Amid the global roster of bland, business-courting political leaders, such flagrantly provocative statements are the sort to have won Chávez a following on the international left. Selective glimpses at the recent history of his country would also suggest that the former paratrooper is rightfully seeking justice in a land of outrageous inequality. Consider, for example, the cabal which toppled him for two days in April 2002. One meeting just hours before the coup was held in the offices of the Venevisión television station, and featured Latin American media tycoon Gustavo Cisneros, employers’ federation chief Pedro Carmona, and hereditary oil magnates. Carmona then journeyed to the army headquarters, seized power, annulled the constitution, and suspended all elected officials – all to a sigh of approval from the White House. The romantic vision of Chávez would then no doubt proceed to tell of the tens of thousands of incensed shanty-town dwellers who descended on the capital, at great risk to themselves. “The top dogs are coming back, the old bunch of thieves,” they shouted; and Chávez, aided by a bout of infighting in the military, reassumed a mandate to last until 2006. Any reasonable judgment, based on the rhetoric and the personalities, would indeed opt for the corner of the people’s hero. But Venezuela is ample proof that the course of revolutionary government does not always follow its precepts, and can well betray them. Does it really serve the interests of the poor to enrage the middle and upper classes with forty-nine laws in the space of a year (2001), including ones designed to hand out land, stiffen “Bolivarian” school education and “democratise capital” in the banking sector, while also offending the mighty in Washington by likening the attack on Afghanistan to terrorism? On paper it may, but in the context of Venezuela, these were essential precursors to a year of civil breakdown, economic collapse and huge capital flight. The bombast of Hugo Chávez in the face of what he termed a “rancid oligarchy” did not so much empower the underprivileged as bring to the surface Venezuela’s latent class war. The current cost is a decline of 29% in GDP in the first three months of 2003, the bankruptcy of 15% of businesses, interest rates in the region of 50%, and unprecedented levels of civil paranoia and crime. Chavez may try as hard as he can to shift all the blame for these figures onto the shoulders of the “squalid” overlords, who in his eyes spent the 1970s sampling French cheese and Scotch whisky, but he is also responsible for committing the cardinal Latin America error of ignoring the economic balance of power. The same occurred to Alan García’s Aprista government in Peru during the second half of the 1980s. This pledged to pay in debt servicing no more than 10% of the value of its exports, only to find hyperinflation and the flowering of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrilla insurgency hastening its downfall. Fidel Castro’s Cuba, of course, is the epitome of beneficial action for the poor gone wrong. At present, some 700,000 Cubans out of a population of 11 million have been to university, only to graduate before a vista of minimal employment and enrichment. Venezuela, in Chavez’s Bolivarian imprint of revolutionary associations, a schooling boom and an intense dislike for business, is heading in precisely the same direction, with one principle consolation: while Cuba exports tobacco and sugar, Venezuela deals in oil. Venezuela: class war, sick society Yet seen through the prism of Venezuelan society, the reading of Hugo Chávez as self-destructive philanthropist is far too contrived. Such is the polarisation of opinion around Venezuela that blame for the country’s economic and civil implosion is attributed wholly either to Chávez or to the oligarchy (which, as if to emphasise the country’s singularity, includes the trade union movement). This marks a social divide that is astonishing in its production of blinkered hatred. The seam that has always run through Venezuela – separating anyone with formal employment from the 60-70% of the population clinging to semi-urban hillsides and scraping by – has now become an abyss, across which empathy and understanding rarely travel. Plead for neutrality, and you are sure to be hounded: a television reporter for one of the five private television stations, all of which openly despise Chávez, revealed that her efforts to give objective coverage of a street fight received short shrift from the producer. “Go on, say it was the chavistas who attacked with stones. Say it, or you’re fired.” The prospect of a referendum on the president’s rule, which is constitutionally permitted from 19 August onwards, is now the principal hope for the opposition, and will doubtless renew the bitter political contest. Thus, as much as the chavistas may fume and lambast their enemies, the alternative they represent is no more enlightened or accommodating. “I had a gold mine with 250 employees and we managed to extract 1,300 kilograms of gold,” recalls Héctor Mezones, who recently fled to Madrid to set up an exclusive restaurant. “But Chávez ordered a revision of the concessions, and that halted all activity. I wasn’t going to stay around to see how we were going to be ruined in a society where the proletariat is happy with having bread to eat, but doesn’t realise it has lived through a forty-year educational and cultural regression.” In these circumstances, which resemble the racially-tinged class cleavages of Allende’s Chile or Central America in the 1980s, Chávez’s haranguing and occasional persecution of the television bosses, the oil executives and his political opponents is understandable, if not laudable or wise. Should anyone question his mission, the president can easily point to his election in 1998 with 56% of the vote, and his success in no less than four referenda that followed to ratify a new constitution. These events together signalled fundamental landslide reactions to an unsustainable system of government and distribution of the social spoils. The medicine for such a sickened society was always going to be painful. Forty years for the locust From the Punto Fijo pact of 1958 which opened the way to a new constitution, to Hugo Chávez’s victory forty years later, Venezuela appeared to the outsider to be a relatively rich, stable two-party democracy. This appearance, however, shrouded a Hispanic hacienda tradition which treated the state as private property, accentuated by an oil boom fuelling over half the government’s revenues without any contribution from the public. Vast quantities of money were wasted, crony-run monopolies multiplied (in beer and canned food, for example), and the poor who flocked to the city fringes received just enough through the circuits of patronage to sustain them, without ever having a larger claim over the dollars that magically filled state coffers. This was a society shorn of democratic entitlement and responsibility, hinging on elections yet without a shared public life. Inevitably, it collapsed. In February 1989, following a steep decline in the world price of oil, President Carlos Andrés Pérez (prompted by the IMF) announced a 30% increase in bus prices: the poor were to pay for the absence of oil riches. Over the days of rioting, looting and police repression that followed, some 400 people were killed, constituting the bloodiest uprising in recent South American history. In February 1992, Hugo Chávez, a paratrooper and thereby a member of the sole institution that was open to all sectors of Venezuelan society, mounted his one and only coup. It failed; he nevertheless became a national hero. For those seeking vindication of Chávez’s regime, there is no better reference: while the so-called “Caracazo” riots illustrated the absolute exclusion of the marginalised poor from Venezuelan political life (their only options were violent), Chávez seemingly represents an effort to bind these people to the system, to channel their legitimate grievances. There is certainly evidence to support the claim. His Bolivarian circles and creation of local councils, as Dan Storey discusses in openDemocracy, appear to have inserted political practice into the heart of previously anarchic and combustible communities. He is, evidently, the president of the poor. Populism or patience? Yet placed against Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva in Brazil, or even Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, the demagogic populism, the buffoonery and love of outrage take much of the shine off Chávez. He is, in truth, a traditional Latin American populist, a man who has violent fringes, as shown by bombs in embassies, television stations and even the Organisation of American States (OAS) offices; peculiar allies, including China, Qatar and Saddam Hussein; and an interminable Sunday evening television show, Aló Presidente, a That’s Life spin-off where people’s problems are solved and the president vents his spleen. All government flows through him, a fact he excuses by arguing that his will and the real interests of the Venezuelan nation are one and the same passion, born from his 1992 coup: “the people even invented a prayer: ‘Our Chávez who art in prison, hallowed be thy name.’ How do you fight that? It’s messianic, yes. But not because I pushed for it.” Not unlike those shantytown rebels in 1989 who stole the best whisky and champagne from the boutiques of Caracas, Chávez seems to have partaken too much of the political culture that preceded him. While the international banks speak of “second-generation” institutional reforms in the continent, Chávez is the relic who goes to a EU conference in Spain and berates the massacres of the conquistadors. Lula, by contrast, comes from a background even more deprived than that of Chavez, yet assiduously courts foreign capital and manages the world stage with ease. He is just as determined to bring the poor into the social mainstream, but wishes it to happen through the rule of law, business creation, and some variant of European consumer capitalism. The terrific austerity now being imposed in Brazil is the exertion to be made before the “orchestra” is tuned up, and in his words, “the symphony can begin.” The comparison between Lula and Chávez does not flatter the Venezuelan leader – though the latter would certainly protest, with some justice, that civil society is much more mature in Brazil, and its elites far more perceptive. Indeed, Lula himself has been inclined to indulge Chavez rather than rebuke him, and (as well as welcoming the Cuban leader to Brazil) has turned an approving eye to the intensifying mutual aid between Fidel Castro and Venezuela – the sugar factories, health services and university places are contributed by Cuba, the oil by Venezuela. Both within Brazil and in forays to the richer nations, Lula has never failed to listen to the bankers and portray his policies in terms of the future profitability of business. In a Latin American perspective, however, the arrival in power of the Workers’ Party leader is also part of a continental shift in which a certain space for repositioning is perceptible. Washington’s hawkish US assistant secretary of state Otto Reich, who played some part in the April 2002 coup against Chávez, is no more. Chile and Mexico successfully resisted US pressure for a second Iraq resolution in the UN Security Council. And the renegade revolutionaries from Cuba and Venezuela, their economies in tatters, are once again on the guest list for major functions across the continent, which the two men enjoy enormously. One simple reason to explain Chavez’s embrace of the revolutionary left is that semi-tropical export economies tend to present a highly-circumscribed choice of leader: as one impoverished Venezuelan put it to a visiting reporter, “he’s an idiot, but he’s our idiot.” Another, more significant consideration is that both Chávez and Castro lie within the political spectrum of the fight for equity in hostile surroundings. They stand at the destructive extreme of levelling politics, yet Lula must be aware that the pole they represent is a useful and persuasive menace in his own coming battles with business, land and financial elites. Many of the goals espoused by the three leaders are after all similar. Where they differ is over the extent to which historical conditions and ideological dogma have driven each to see different group interests as essentially incompatible – and society as a zero-sum contest between rich and poor. The hold of an inclusive vision, which argues for mutual benefits between classes and ethnicities, has always been tenuous on the continent: the more defective the underlying political and social settlement, the more likely that economic orthodoxy and the democratic rule-book will be flouted.

MAKING OF THE NEW LATIN LEFT

Latin American authoritarianism: the 19th century's post-independence strongmen (including capricious butchers such as Paraguay's Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia); the mid-20th century's military rulers, inspired by national-security doctrines and the demonisation of the left after the Cuban revolution; and - today - the "third wave" represented by Morales and Chávez. The former shunned democracy entirely, while the latter shelved altogether the need for popular consultation ("the ballots boxes are in safe keeping" proclaimed the Argentine junta of 1976); what marks the current generation (so the argument goes) is that it rules through the "tyranny of the majority", exploiting long pent-up grievances to overrun all state institutions and taint opposition with the stigma of being oligarchs, imperial lapdogs, and enemies of the poor. This story, wholeheartedly propounded by the US military's southern command (whose chief, General Bantz J Craddock, predicts a "backwater of violent, inward-looking states") is not without its truths. At the level of rhetoric, both Morales and Chávez do specialise in bombast and confrontation. The actions of their states tend to be sudden, top-down, and geared to mass approval: take the 1 May nationalisation of Bolivia's hydrocarbons, or Chávez's blizzard of forty-nine decrees in 2001 and his incessant military build-up. Inside the states, and despite differences of circumstance and history, new prerogatives of presidential power emerge. Some $15 billion, taken from "surplus" oil revenues and central bank reserves, are now under the control of Venezuela's development fund, Fonden - an organisation run by a president-appointed board, with decisions rubber-stamped by a parliament where all 167 seats are occupied by chavistas. "Others used them (presidential decrees) to put their hands in people's pockets," Kirchner recently explained of his own ruling habits in Argentina. "I use them to fill pensioners' pockets and protect people." As the various legs and arms of public power become occupied - first the executive and parliament, then the courts, the civil service, the armed and security forces, state-run companies, and finally the press and provinces (which not even Chávez has yet achieved) - the mística of power intensifies. The Venezuelan leader, according to his brilliant ex-guerrilla opponent Teodoro Petkoff, exerts a "magical-religious" thrall; López Obrador, though he will have to wait, is denounced for "messianic" tendencies; Morales received his ceremonial vestments of the Great Condor at Tiwanaku a day before his presidential sash. "There is a classic and well-known fear of freedom, an insidious and pernicious feeling," writes Chilean author Jorge Edwards, with urbane disillusion, of the continent's penchant for "Napoleon's imitators." A question of land The criticisms are valid, but in themselves they hardly amount to the dawn of leftwing tyranny. In all cases, barring Cuba, the opposition is alive and vociferous, the ballot secret, the press free, and the courts still function; there is definitely no sign that prison cells are receiving political inmates. Yet the sense of imminent institutional shutdown is undeniably strong. Middle and upper classes in Bolivia and Venezuela look to Havana with grave foreboding, uncertain what the much-vaunted Chávez-Morales-Castro "axis of good" might entail. They find swaggering populism tolerable, even normal: it is and always has been the default mode of the right across the region. But a state that extends its purported revolutionary mission into a country's most ingrained institution - private property - is quite another thing. The extent to which the fears of Latin America's wealthier social strata, the denunciations of encroaching dictatorship, and the attempts to reorder a nation's ownership structure are strapped together should never be underestimated. Time and again, the region's societies have tolerated far-reaching reform, only to snap into warring factions when the issue of land deeds is broached. The seed of Chile's coup in September 1973 can largely be found in fears of a property revolution that had in fact been initiated in the 1960s, under a reforming Christian Democratic government. And as a recent, unofficial biography of Chávez makes clear, the item in the waterfall of Bolivarian legislation in 2001 "that provoked the greatest agitation" concerned legal controls over land and agrarian development; Chávez termed it "hot stuff"' and said "I worked on it myself." The raw neurosis that the lexicon of land reform produces - the word "expropriation" has similar connotations to violent mugging in Latin America - stems from firm historical roots. Shaped by an invasive, colonial rule, the region's economies generated centuries of fine living for some, married to low-paid extraction and harvest for the rest. Ownership, in other words, bequeathed wealth and status; it defined social identity in a profoundly conservative fashion, sapping the continent of the less fecund north's capacity for market innovation, mobility, and industrial investment. When attempts are made to rewrite the underlying property structure, the margin for democratic compromise appears minimal: those who gain do so at the expense of someone else's loss. This is, more than anything, a zero-sum game. Bolivia is now living the early stages of this conflict. Some thirty-five million acres, say government officials, are to be distributed to 2.5 million people, or 28% of the population, by 2011; this in a country where, according to the Catholic church, 50,000 families own 90% of the land. "The historical enemies of the poor must accept this land revolution," declared Morales in June. According to his vice-president and strategic mastermind, Álvaro García Linera, the eventual goal is a three-tiered "Andean capitalism": modern industry (initially gas production), urban trade, and traditional farming. Already the countryside has witnessed shootouts and deaths. The strident opposition in the eastern Santa Cruz lowlands has spawned a protest network (Nación Camba). It boasts vigilante, racist tendencies and an agenda of halting land reform, as well as a civic leader, Germán Antelo, who excoriates the government for "authoritarian fascism", and for its "manuals of subversion written in foreign lands." It is no coincidence that the lion's share of the land destined for redistribution - on the basis of laws passed in 1953 and 1996, albeit to little effect - should lie in the fertile east. It may be predictable, but there is still something unsettling in the way Bolivia's great popular awakening, that of Morales's landslide election in December 2005, should have so soon produced a stand-off threatening the very foundations of democracy. "In this tug of war, democracy keeps going only as a precarious balance between demands for social change and the interests that resist it," explains Ana María Romero de Campero, who heads the Unir-Bolivia foundation, devoted to the unenviable task of pacifying the country. The conflicts, she says, are still building up, "exacerbated by one side, then another." Other countries in the left-leaning quadrant, where urban population densities are much higher, have not suffered the same extreme polarisation through agrarian reform. But the propertied still shiver with anxiety at the morning news: a tremendous row is brewing within chavista ranks - oxymoronic as that may seem to some - over decrees to expropriate ninety-five supposedly underused properties in Caracas, two of them golf courses. Luis D'Elía, former piquetero (picketer) leader in Argentina and now a government housing official, has likewise lobbied for a more radical treatment of land, particularly the tracts in hands of foreigners - starting with 300,000 hectares belonging to United States businessman Douglas Tompkins. In these countries, however, a rather different form of redistribution provides a greater cause for alarm. Violent crime is not government policy, but the terror it generates, and its sharp recent rise - Latin American accounted for 75% of all the world's kidnappings in 2003 - would seem to express in a diffuse way the abandonment felt by the wealthy, and the vengeance that society is preparing for them. Where governments should exert firm control, there now appear territories run by sub-states forged in prisons (as in Brazil's Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command / PCC), or armed gang networks camped out in the hearts of cities. It is not difficult to imagine the panic felt by the Portuguese business community in Venezuela when, for several weeks in 2006, a list of their names and addresses were sold first at street-stalls, before then being posted on the internet. All power to the informal A populist leftwing drift is neither novel nor particularly threatening: Brazil under Getulio Vargas, Argentina under Perón, Bolivia from 1952, Peru from 1968 - all provided less democratic and constitutional varieties of the very same phenomenon. But this new political climate is marked by Cuban guidance, institutional fragility, and a bellicose rhetoric of them-and-us; for many, it seems in word and deed to be heading to a democratic dead-end and an overarching state. Were Hugo Chávez to lose in December, would he really give up power? Radical intellectuals respond with a familiar, yet powerful argument. Drawing on the great theorists of Latin American revolution, the Cuban José Martí and the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, they stress the primacy of social rights, derived from the moral urgency of combating extreme poverty. Fidel Castro still draws on huge sympathy across the continent for this very reason; his government counterpoises its extraordinary aid of 2,600 medics to Pakistan after the earthquake in October 2005, its eye-surgery for 6 million poor people across the continent, with the export of war by Washington in the name of freedom. "Democracy is under threat in Latin America, but not in Bolivia and Venezuela," argues Atilio Borón, a prominent Argentine sociologist. "The great problems are to be found in countries where governments are failing to rule in line with the expectations of the electorate, causing a very serious corrosion of legitimacy." Were social welfare and the full quota of civic and political rights incompatible, then it might be right to choose the former. But from the developed west, this trade-off sounds suspect: surely a formula in which the two feature, as they did in post-1975 Spain, would be preferable. Surely political movements and parties can reach an accommodating pact to serve the common good while also blocking authoritarian takeovers. The blueprint for best-practice democracy, however, must at some stage face up to the domestic particularities of Latin America. Spain's parties of right and left struck a constitutional deal that has brought thirty years of growth and alternation in power. Colombia in 1957 and Venezuela in 1958 witnessed very similar left-right pacts, whose signatories pledged growth, civil rights and social justice - only for Colombia to be consumed by over four decades of fratricidal conflict, and Venezuela to seize up in 1998, victim of rampant corruption and a hobbling, hapless state. "We do not know what sort of country we want to be, nor how we want to be it, nor how we can be it," reads the confession of Ramón Escovar Salom, an interior minister in the last pre-Chávez government. Those political parties which might steer a moderate course towards reform, meanwhile, have vanished from sight in the countries that would most appear to need them. The new movements - the Bolivarian cause in Venezuela, Bolivia's MAS - rose in the twilight of party systems, staking out constituencies at extreme speed through a febrile grassroots and a national media presence. And in no way do they resemble the parties they superseded: locating stable membership, manifestos and conventions is a fruitless quest. MAS is a focal-point of dozens of different social sectors and radical causes, which it does not altogether control. Chávez, meanwhile, is at the pinnacle of a bewildering array of groups and neighbourhood committees, first engendered by his propaganda trips across Venezuela in a Toyota Samurai after his release from jail in 1994. If there is any glue in these huge and powerful movements, it is a certain defining social experience. These are the quintessential products of 1990s Latin America, where the state pulled back, poverty rose, mass media spread, and formal contractual employment withered. Indeed it is the people subsisting in black market employment, accounting for 47% of all the region's urban jobs in 2003 - rising to 66.7% in Bolivia, the highest rate on the continent - who are the bedrock of this political transformation. Apart from limited labour laws, their lives are virtually without a safety net - and 75% of Latin Americans are afraid they will lose their job. The state has done nothing for them. Their homes are built, not bought: a United Nations study in 2000 found that 50% of homes in Caracas were constructed unofficially. Their hopes of social advancement are virtually nil. Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez memorably reported the case of one man from Berazategui in Greater Buenos Aires, who encapsulates just such a struggle with shift work, penury and constraint: a factory hand who on losing his watch, and unable to pay for a new one, regularly gets up to walk to the bus station during the night so he can ask for the time, and thus not be late to start his job at 6am. It is no surprise that voters such as these demand sweeping change. Nor is it remarkable that coarse nationalism and primetime TV proclamations are the political response. Their plea - echoed in multiple Latinobarómetro surveys from across the continent - is for effective, accessible government. Their leaders' venom against the oligarchy or petrolatifundismo (oil and estate ownership) or the empire strikes a popular chord, and soothes high expectations. But this impatience and battle-readiness is leavened with far more pragmatic demands, complicating the prognosis for imminent authoritarianism. Ideology is fuzzy and volatile: having spent five years in jail for training a revolutionary militia in the 1990s, García Linera now appears to be Bolivia's chief pacifier of the opposition and foreign investors. There is certainly no systematic revolutionary plan, nor state structure able to pull one off, nor a cold-war power willing to sponsor such a transformation. Just as significantly, the popular social demands are material - for food, health and education. Any threat to the future provision of these goods would quickly sap the leaders of authority. Chávez, for instance, may have built up a massive war chest of discretionary funds, but focus-group work by the Hinterlaces agency in Caracas in 2004 noted just how willing his supporters in that year's referendum would be to change sides should he not deliver on his promises. Inside the regimes, crude and boisterous democracy is in fact the normal working practice. Frequent governmental chaos in Bolivia, particularly involving the nationalisation of gas fields, is a faithful reflection of the clamour of so many powerful social groups, with their front line in the shanty towns of El Alto. Even if this would seem to entail a tyranny by the poor majority and the construction of huge constituencies fed by political patronage, there are sounds reasons to expect that issues such as crime, economic stability and growth - on which a future opposition might thrive - will gain greater popular leverage. For just as free trade's creative destruction promises in the long-run to make rich workers out of the world's labouring poor, so these governments are hoping to turn the marginalised into an aspiring bourgeoisie, a boli-burguesía. Horizontal movements, driven by vocal material demands, are not harbingers of dictatorship. Extreme polarisation, however, has fostered a climate in which violent action, curbs on independent institutions, electoral boycotts and vigilante groups may flourish. It is easy to lament or condemn the clumsy aggression of a populist regime; but much harder to accept that it emerges from a process of political and governmental decomposition that has left millions to survive without support, and to give their votes to the promise of instant remedies. Wise diplomacy and the counsel of neighbouring moderate governments, especially once the Brazilian election campaign is over, should serve to allay many of these tensions. Yet all concerned, inside and outside, should remember that these new leaders are not dangerous and disposable puppets, but the products of history, pouring from groundswells in their societies. Cuba's Josè Martí said it well: Injértense en nuestras repúblicas el mundo; pero el tronco ha de ser de nuestras repúblicas ("Let the world form part of our republics; but the foundation has to be of our republics").