On 18 August a polarised country went to the polls to vote on their future in a referendum created, bizarrely, by its leader who stood to lose from it. The options open to them were like chalk and cheese. On one side there was the left of centre populist incumbent, on the other an alliance of business friendly right of centre groups opposed to the presidents rule. The stark choice offered to Venezuelans in this historic referendum highlights the level of division amongst people in one of Latin America’s oldest democracies.
Venezuela is oil rich; it produces 1.4 million barrels of refined and crude oil every day making it one of the richest states in Latin America. Accordingly, this wealth, who it goes to and how it’s spent, defines the nation politically. The country’s oligarchs have benefited greatly from the proceeds of the country’s oil sales. The huge oil companies such as PhillipsConoco and PDVSA currently enjoy 84 percent of the income from Venezuelan oil sales leaving the state and the people of Venezuela with a mere 16 percent.
The current President, Hugo Chavez is a classical Latin American leftist: redistributionist in intent, often erratic in action. Chavez has undoubtedly empowered vast swathes of Venezuela’s poor both symbolically and in reality. On the symbolic side, the people, seeing a ‘Negro e Indio’ – a dark skinned native Latin American – as their president, now feel they have a leader who represents them. In real terms 1.2 million adults have been taught to read and write through a literacy drive, secondary education has been expanded to 250,000 of the country’s poorest children, and health in the country’s bourgeoning slums has been vastly improved with the help of 10,000 specially brought in Cuban doctors and 11,000 new neighbourhood clinics.
But there is another side to the story. Whilst the Chavez government resides on a legitimate electoral mandate there are serious and genuine concerns over his authoritarian tedencies. Chavez has substantial reach in the country’s legal system and a zealous, some might say, intimidating approach to electoral campaigning. Furthermore, as with so many populist leaders, Chavez has suffered huge drops in approval ratings from the poor as he struggles to fulfill his pre-election vision of a utopian Venezuela. Welfare spending under his rule has increased but real wage levels have continued to drop and the poor are yet to see the kind of radical wealth redistribution they had expected.
But to argue that the growing tension over Chavez’s rule has been augmented by his move towards authoritarianism and an inability to fulfill election promises is missing the point. Venezuela is a country separated starkly into the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ and the ‘haves’ don’t like what they’re seeing. The rich, who represent roughly a fifth of the population and who are predominantly of white European descent, have seen Chavez double the royalty payments they have to pay on their oil revenue as well as curtailments in their lifestyles as Chavez tries to redistribute wealth within the country.
Opponents of Chavez counter the claim that his enemies are simply the rich by highlighting the many public strikes, which have taken place in opposition to his reign as president. But there are question marks over how much opposition involvement there has been in cajoling the unions into forcing out the workers. And this suspicion gained weight when an attempted coup failed after Venezuelan workers came out in support of their president rather than accepting the coup.
The fact is that it is ostensibly the richest 20 percent of the population of Venezuela that want Chavez out. Their dislike of the leftist leader is paralleled, and latently supported from Washington, who, like the rich in Venezuela, sees Chavez’s inability to accept an orthodox neoliberal model of development as simply unacceptable. When Chavez’s reforms are looked upon there really isn’t anything there that can be seen as overly conflictual with free-market economics. He still allows the Venezuelan oil giants to remain operational, and as far as can be seen, is harbouring no intention of nationalising the country’s most profitable industry. Perhaps more importantly, especially when looking at it from a US perspective, is Chavez’s position as the leader of OPEC, the oil cartel. Having an unpredictable leftist in charge of a group, which holds so much sway in the US is, unsurprisingly, a hard pill to swallow in Washington.
Chavez is essentially an old leftist, out of synch with more progressive left of centre leaders now governing in Chile, Argentina and Brazil but he is not entirely in the mould of his friend and ally Fidel Castro. However, the rich in Venezuela are not satisfied; they fear his social policies, his combative taxation policies and his populist presidential style. Their fears, whether warranted or not, gain a disproportionate amount of coverage for two reasons. First, the rich own the vast majority of the Venezuelan media allowing them the luxury of getting the message across to the Venezuelan public day in, day out. Second, they are in the ascendancy within foreign editorial offices as more and more of the Western worlds press, not least Britain’s Economist and FT, play safe and simply take Chavez as another Latin American autocrat instead of attempting any greater deconstruction of the man.
But Chavez seems to have a continual get out of jail card, which he played during the attempted coup and which he again utilised on 18 August in the referendum success, namely popular support. The irony of the situation in Venezuela is that every time groups such as the American National Endowment for Democracy, or the combined Venezuelan opposition try to oust Chavez in the name of democracy he is kept in power by that very system. To the constant annoyance of Venezuela’s opposition groups, the public actually support the Chavez policy agenda and will not buy into the opposition rhetoric.
Chavez won the referendum, which has been subsequently deemed legitimate by election observers led by former US president Jimmy Carter. And, yet again, the opposition has huffed and puffed in annoyance, condemning the referendum as a fraud even though they pressed for it in the first place.
It seems that democracy in Venezuela was great for almost half a century when it was controlled by the top fifth of the population. However, now the tables have turned and the country has elected a ‘Negro e Indio’ things have turned sour for the rich. They are no longer willing to accept that the poor should have a say in who runs the country.