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On the Legacy of Hugo Chavez
http://www.thenation.com/article/173212/legacy-hugo-chavez#by Greg Grandin
I first met Hugo Chávez in New York City in September 2006, just after his infamous appearance on the floor of the UN General Assembly, where he called George W. Bush the devil. Yesterday, the devil came here, he said, Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of. He then made the sign of the cross, kissed his hand, winked at his audience and looked to the sky. It was vintage Chávez, an outrageous remark leavened with just the right touch of detail (the lingering sulfur!) to make it something more than bombast, cutting through soporific nostrums of diplomatese and drawing fire away from Iran, which was in the crosshairs at that meeting.
The press of course went into high dudgeon, and not just for the obvious reason that its one thing for opponents in the Middle East to call the US the Great Satan and another thing for the president of a Latin American country to personally single out its president as Beelzebub, on US soil no less.
I think what really rankled was that Chávez was claiming a privilege that had long belonged to the US, that is, the right to paint its adversaries not as rational actors but as existential evil. Latin American populists, from Argentinas Juan Perón to, most recently, Chávez, have long served as characters in a story the US tells about itself, reaffirming the maturity of its electorate and the moderation of its political culture. There are at most eleven political prisoners in Venezuela, and thats taking the oppositions broad definition of the term, which includes individuals who worked to overthrow the government in 2002, and yet it is not just the right in this country who regularly compared Chávez to the worst mass murderers and dictators in history. New Yorker critic Alex Ross, in an essay published a few years back celebrating the wunderkind Venezuelan conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, fretted about enjoying the fruits of Venezuelas much lauded government-funded system of music training: Stalin, too, was a great believer in music for the people.
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On the Legacy of Hugo Chavez (Original Post)
Ken Burch
Mar 2013
OP
"We're all mortal". True enough, but he was still young by today's standards, and it pains me
truth2power
Mar 2013
#9
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)1. More from the link:
Hugo Chávez was the second of seven children, born in 1954 in the rural village of Sabaneta, in the grassland state of Barinas, to a family of mixed European, Indian and Afro-Venezuelan race. Bart Joness excellent biography, Hugo! nicely captures the improbability of Chávezs rise from dirt-floor povertyhe was sent to live with his grandmother since his parents couldnt feed their childrenthrough the military, where he became involved with left-wing politics, which in Venezuela meant a mix international socialism and Latin Americas long history of revolutionary nationalism. It drew inspiration from well-known figures such as Simón Bolívar as well as lesser known insurgents, such as nineteenth-century peasant leader Ezequiel Zamora, in whose army Chávezs great-great-grandfather had served. Born just a few days after the CIA drove reformist Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz from office, he was a young military cadet of nineteen in September 1973 when he heard Fidel Castro on the radio announce yet another CIA-backed coup, this one toppling Salvador Allende in Chile.
Awash in oil wealth, Venezuela throughout the twentieth century enjoyed its own kind of exceptionalism, avoiding the extremes of left-wing radicalism and homicidal right-wing anticommunism that overtook many of its neighbors. In a way, the country became the anti-Cuba. In 1958, political elites negotiated a pact that maintained the trappings of democratic rule for four decades, as two ideological indistinguishable parties traded the presidency back and forth (sound familiar?). Where the State Department and its allied policy intellectuals isolated and condemned Havana, they celebrated Caracas as the end point of development. Samuel Huntington praised Venezuela as an example of successful democratization, while another political scientist, writing in the early 1980s, said it represented the only trail to a democratic future for developing societies a textbook case of step-by-step progress.
We know now that its institutions were rotting from the inside out. Every sin that Chávez was accused of committinggoverning without accountability, marginalizing the opposition, appointing partisan supporters to the judiciary, dominating labor unions, professional organizations and civil society, corruption and using oil revenue to dispense patronageflourished in a system the US held up as exemplary.
Petroleum prices began to fall in the mid-1980s. By this point, Venezuela had grown lopsidedly urban, with 16 million of its 19 million citizens living in cities, well over half of them below the poverty line, many in extreme poverty. In Caracas, combustible concentrations of poor people lived cut off from municipal servicessuch as sanitation and safe drinking waterand hence party and patronage control. The spark came in February 1989, when a recently inaugurated president who had run against the IMF said that he no choice but to submit to its dictates. He announced a plan to abolish food and fuel subsidies, increase gas prices, privatize state industries and cut spending on health care and education.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)2. And this:
My impressionistic sense is that this support breaks down roughly in half, between voters who think their lives and their families lives are better off because of Chávezs massive expansion of state services, including health care and education, despite real problems of crime, corruption, shortages and inflation.
The other half of Chávezs electoral majority is made up of organized citizens involved in one or the other of the countrys many grassroots organizations. Chávezs social base was diverse and heterodox, what social scientists in the 1990s began to celebrate as new social movements, distinct from established trade unions and peasant organizations vertically linked toand subordinated topolitical parties or populist leaders: neighborhood councils; urban and rural homesteaders, feminists, gay and lesbian rights organizations, economic justice activists, environmental coalitions; breakaway unions and the like. Its these organizations, in Venezuela and elsewhere throughout the region, that have over the last few decades done heroic work in democratizing society, in giving citizens venues to survive the extremes of neoliberalism and to fight against further depredations, turning Latin America into one of the last global bastion of the Enlightenment left.
Chávezs detractors see this mobilized sector of the population much the way Mitt Romney saw 47 percent of the US electorate, not as citizens but parasites, moochers sucking on the oil-rent teat. Those who accept that Chávez enjoyed majority support disparaged that support as emotional enthrallment. Voters, wrote one critic, see their own vulnerability in their leader and are entranced. Another talked about Chávezs magical realist hold over his followers.
One anecdote alone should be enough to give the lie to the idea that poor Venezuelans voted for Chávez because they were fascinated by the baubles they dangled in front of them. During the 2006 presidential campaign, the signature pledge of Chávezs opponent was to give 3,000,000 poor Venezuelans a black credit card (black as in the color of oil) from which they could withdraw up to $450 in cash a month, which would have drained over $16 billion dollars a year from the national treasury (call it neoliberal populism: give to the poor just enough to bankrupt the government and force the defunding of services). Over the years, theres been a lot of heavy theoretically breathing by US academics about the miasma oil wealth creates in countries like Venezuela, lulling citizens into a dreamlike state that renders them into passive spectators. But in this election at least, Venezuelans managed to see through the mist. Chávez won with over 62 percent of the vote.
niyad
(118,069 posts)3. k and r--sadly, some of the people who most need to read this will ignore it
Judi Lynn
(161,952 posts)5. Tremendous author. K & R. n/t
bemildred
(90,061 posts)6. Interesting, thank you. nt
truth2power
(8,219 posts)7. Thank you for posting, Ken. It saddens me to think that Chavez
had to go, one way or another. Can't be displeasing the great and exceptional US of A.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)8. We're all mortal.
The people live on...and it's the people we have to stand with.
truth2power
(8,219 posts)9. "We're all mortal". True enough, but he was still young by today's standards, and it pains me
to think that Darth Cheney and Bush the Lesser are still kicking.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)10. To say nothing of THIS old ghoul...
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)11. Well done and thanks. K&R n/t