The Chavez Paradox

In June, the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, traveled to Cuba for emergency surgery. A month later, the announcement that he was undergoing cancer treatment threw the apparent hegemony of his revolution into disarray and began to cast doubts on the future of his radical social agenda. Since then, updates concerning his health have been scarce, leading to rife speculation as to the exact nature of his illness and his political future. As Venezuela faces its greatest period of political uncertainty in close to a decade, the debate over the influence of 21^st century Latin American socialism and its emblematic leader rages more intensely than it ever has. Well into his third term and thirteenth year in office, Chávez is the longest serving head of government in the Americas, inheriting the distinction from his maitre à penser and mentor, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Throughout this period, he has proven to be a resilient figure, overcoming public anathematization, rabid—albeit unorganized—political opposition, and even a coup attempt in 2002. His political brainchild, the Bolivarian Revolution, has brought substantial change to Venezuela, but has been contentious on several grounds.

The very notion of the Revolution is a source of disagreement. Whereas some consider it to be a quasi-cartoonish illustration of the government’s limits and an assured catastrophe, others see it as the strongest element of the Chávez presidency and the greatest agent of change in a country that has been greatly pauperized over the last fifty years. Others doubt whether it is genuinely revolutionary, while its greatest detractors see it as a demagogical, populist front for the mass appropriation of power by Chávez. Almost fifteen years after its inception, Chavez’s Revolution strives to present itself as a viable alternative to the liberal-democratic model championed by the United States. In The Revolution in Venezuela, Thomas Ponniah notes that common analysis of the chavista reforms has been largely too Manichean to capture the essence of the movement, which he argues cannot be understood in unequivocal terms. The crux of the argument concerning the value of the revolution thus lies in an evaluation of the government’s statist policies and the degree to which they have brought forth a genuine amelioration of the Venezuelan population’s condition. 

Some view these changes as a growing threat to Venezuelan democracy, especially when seen in concert with some of the other measures enacted by the Chávez government. In 2009, after several failed attempts at doing so, Chávez finally passed a referendum allowing him to run for the office of President for an indefinite number of successive terms and has indicated his intention to keep running for several decades to come. Furthermore, the Chávez government has arrested a number of high-profile opponents to the regime, such as his 2006 election challenger Manuel Rosales, under the pretext of corruption, and media mogul Guillermo Zuloaga, for issuing remarks deemed to be offensive by Chávez. The latter was the owner of Globovision, one of the few remaining media outlets taking a strong anti-chavista stance before the government acquired a 20 percent share of it, and Chávez’s interactions with the network have drawn scrutiny and criticism from international organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Catholic Church. However, proponents of the government argue that accusations levied against these individuals are accurate and that the Revolution needs to give itself the tools to defend itself.

Furthermore, those who defend the Bolivarian Revolution point to the social progress that has been accomplished under Chávez’s leadership. Indeed, according to the United Nations Development Program, Venezuela’s Human Development Index (HDI) had fallen below the regional average at the beginning of the 1990s and largely plateaued during the subsequent decade. Since 2000, it has risen considerably faster than it had at any point since 1980, and has now largely caught up to the regional average. Furthermore, an 8.5 drop in Venezuela’s Gini coefficient over the course of the Chávez presidency has positioned its level of income equality above that of the United States and most other countries in the region. However, critics of Chávez’s policies question how meaningful these figures actually are, given the general economic expansion in the region. Indeed, many other nations in Latin America and the Caribbean saw improvements on these fronts, and despite pursuing far less radical policies, countries such as Brazil and Colombia experienced similar drops in inequality and increases in HDI.

Meanwhile, the Chávez government, which intended to redistribute the prodigious oil wealth that Venezuelans feel they are entitled to, has largely benefited from very high revenues due to heightened prices throughout the 2000s. Tellingly, at certain periods of his presidency, Chávez has had a public approval rating that mirrored national oil prices. The question of petroleum in Venezuela has had particular, and at times counterintuitive, political and cultural ramifications, as Professors Terry Karl and Fernando Coronil have each explored in depth. Chávez’s reforms of the national petroleum industry fall within the conception Venezuelans have of their country’s rich subsoil as the “national body,” as argued by Professor Coronil. However, the waves of petroleum nationalization and the nationalistic language used to justify them have not been reflected economically, as the trade balance with the United States, which is presumably constituted almost exclusively of barrels of oil, continued to grow year after year, even at the peak of anti-Americanism in Venezuelan rhetoric, until the financial crisis of 2008. According to the US Census Bureau, this figure went from US$6 billion the year Chávez came into office to nearly US$39 billion the year Bush left office.

One of the most significant challenges for Chávez in the coming years remains the issue of security. In the past decade, the incidence of violent crime, including kidnapping and murder, has risen dramatically in Venezuela, in part due to its proximity to the Colombian cocaine trade and its emergence as a transit nation for drug traffickers. This indicates an alarming corruption problem within the Venezuelan government, as a report for the US Congress concluded in 2009. Furthermore, the surge in the murder rate has hit the poor populations extremely hard, with most estimates putting Venezuela’s rate far above the regional average and some going so far as putting it above that of Colombia. A 2010 study by Roberto Briceño-León, a sociologist at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, puts the homicide rate in Caracas at 200 for every 100,000, far greater than Bogotá’s 22.7 and São Paulo’s 14. Chávez’s policies concerning this issue have repeatedly been questioned and criticized as the statistics continue to worsen. This phenomenon severely threatens the revolution as it attacks the core of his support base, and largely undoes much of the progress made during the last decade. The success of the movement thus largely relies on turning this situation around by allaying the mounting fears that are driving the middle and upper classes away, and ensuring the safety of those who sustain the revolution.

Much has been said over the years concerning the anti-American and anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Bolivarian Revolution, but an assessment of the scope of its actions has proven to be much more difficult. In some domains, the Chávez presidency has provided vectors for social change in ways that represent a real departure from the policies his predecessors had put forth, as indicated by the increase in equality among social strata. In other domains, particularly the foreign oil market, the Chavez administration has been quite content to take more conventional avenues. In The Revolution in Venezuela, Jonathan Eastwood compellingly argues that from a Marxian understanding—and the Bolivarian Revolution increasingly self-associates with Marxism— it is in fact not a revolution at all, as it fails to bring radical change to the country’s social structure. He notes that supporters of the movement claim that Chávez has empowered the disenfranchised lower classes and that his policies have improved their quality of life, even if he has not yet been successful in providing fundamental change to the way in which Venezuelan society is structured.

The danger for 21^st century socialism thus lies in the distance between its message and its action. In espousing some of the most radical language in modern political speech, Chávez has alienated a number of local and international powers, despite advancing a program that is reliant on local cooperation and fueled by profits from the international oil market. His government will have to continue to carefully juggle the socialist discourse that makes him overwhelmingly popular among the lower classes and a more tempered and inclusive approach when interacting with foreign nations that have not espoused 21^st century socialism as fondly as Venezuelans have, at the risk of ending up as isolated as Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

As the issues of domestic security and the weight of the financial crisis intensify, it may only be a matter of time before Chávez is forced to choose one over the other. Furthermore, with the political future of its founder and talisman in doubt, the paradigm has changed altogether. Both chavistas and the opposition may have to prepare for a Venezuela without Chávez, undoubtedly one of the central figures in Venezuelan political history. What the Bolivarian Revolution will become without its figurehead may likely force the movement, which has so carefully treaded the line separating radical socialism from pragmatist liberal commerce for years, to make a fundamental choice and decide how revolutionary it truly is, at the risk of disappearing altogether.