VENEZUELA: Chavez Vs. Chavez

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Aug 12 2004 (IPS) - “We are willing to give our lives for him. For the first time in 200 years, a president really cares about the poor,” Arnaldo Ríos, a 64-year-old retired schoolteacher in the Venezuelan capital, told IPS.

“If (President Hugo) Chávez disappears, someone else will continue along those lines,” Ríos, who works in a small grocery stand on the southwest side of Caracas, said with conviction.

But Rosa Centeno, an executive secretary in a telecommunications firm, said Chávez is “the worst we have ever had. He has divided Venezuelans, and is the cause of the closure of many companies, and we have to get rid of him any way possible – through the referendum if there is no other way.”

Centeno participates in a group of volunteers getting out the “Yes” vote for Sunday’s presidential recall referendum, aimed at cutting short Chávez’s mandate, which ends in January 2007, while Ríos is active in the pro-government campaign for the “No” vote.

Political analysts and the latest polls indicate that 10 million or more voters will turn out on Sunday, out of an electoral register that has swelled from 12 to 14 million registered voters in the space of a few months – an indication of the high level of interest in participating.

In that heavily polarised terrain in this South American country in the grip of a nearly three-year political crisis, which has included a short-lived April 2002 coup d’etat and a two-month business shutdown in late 2002 and early 2003, the 50-year-old Chávez and his supporters launched a major offensive, filling the streets with posters, graffiti and even balloons for the “No” vote.

In the meantime, the opposition movement that in the past few years had mobilised massive street demonstrations demanding that Chávez step down, is staking its bets on a “hidden vote” by supposed opponents of the president who – according to opposition analysts – camouflage themselves as his supporters but will actually cast their ballots against him on Sunday.

On Jun. 3, just two hours after the election authorities announced that the opposition had gathered enough signatures to activate a referendum, Chávez took command of the campaign, and outlined to his followers, in a televised address, the main lines of “the new battle of Santa Inés”.

Over the next few weeks, he stepped up his public appearances and speeches, with lengthy explanations aimed at the poor, who form his main support base.

The president not only has a strong, clear speaking voice, but sings, tells anecdotes from his childhood, life in the barracks and his travels as president, cracks jokes, recites fragments of literature and even dances.

“He is a much better candidate than president,” analyst Luis León, the head of the Datanálisis polling firm and a member of the anti-Chávez opposition, told IPS. “Actually he is extraordinary, because of his incredible capacity to connect with the public.”

For months, León predicted that Chávez would call on his supporters not to participate in a presidential recall referendum. (Voting is not compulsory in Venezuela). To remove Chávez, the opposition would have needed more than the 3,757,763 votes with which the president was elected in 2000.

But Chávez chose instead to test his strength against that of the opposition, which “makes him a leader who is facing the wear-and-tear of five years in power and agrees to test his support base, knowing that he must win more than half of the votes. In what other country have you seen a similar test?” one of the ruling coalition leaders Samuel Moncada asked IPS.

(Chávez originally took office in February 1999 and was re-elected in 2000 under the new constitution).

For years, the opposition movement and the U.S. government repeated over and over that Chávez was evading a referendum on his mandate to avoid showing the real level of support he had.

The December 2002-January 2003 business shutdown, which basically paralysed the oil industry – the backbone of the Venezuelan economy – and caused 10 billion dollars in economic losses, was called to demand a non-binding referendum in which voters would merely have expressed whether they wanted him to complete his term or not.

But Chávez explained his strategy on Jun. 3: “We have done what General Zamora did, and have drawn the adversary into a new battle of Santa Inés.”

That battle, which took place during Venezuela’s 1859-1864 Federal War, was a brilliant show of military strategy in which the peasant army of popular revolutionary leader Ezequiel Zamora, one of Chávez’s heroes, defeated the conservative government.

Zamora let the army chase his outnumbered followers under the belief that they were merely fleeing. But on Dec. 10, 1859, he lured the army into an ambush on the plains of Santa Inés, in southwestern Venezuela, setting up four lines of defence.

One by one, he allowed the trenches to fall to the adversary, at the cost of many casualties. But when the army troops reached the last line of defence, Zamora launched a surprise counter-attack with reserve forces, dealing the enemy a devastating defeat.

For his “new battle of Santa Inés”, Chávez dubbed his campaign “Misión Florentino”, based on a legend from Venezuela’s plains region that is sung in the form of couplets in a poem by Alberto Arvelo.

In the legend, which is rooted in Venezuelan folklore, Florentino, a singer, confronts the devil and defeats him in a traditional poetic competition with improvised verses. “I am Florentino; we are all Florentino!” Chávez has repeated in rallies to his cheering followers.

For Chávez, the devil is represented by the opposition, the traditional parties and political and economic elites, the business and labour organisations that are opposed to him, as well as U.S. President George W. Bush, imperialism, and “neo-liberal” free-market policies.

Chávez “is like Fidel Castro early in the Cuban revolution,” political scientist Vilma Petrásh told IPS, “in the sense that they are charismatic figures, capable of transmitting their ideas with credibility, although Castro is more ideological and Chávez is more along the lines of the Latin American nationalist caudillo (strong-man).”

Retired general Alberto Muller, who was the head of Chávez’s first presidential campaign in 1998 but later broke ranks with him, told IPS that Chávez’s personality “is in keeping with the phenomenon of the caudillo (a strong-man style of rule based on the force of personality rather than ideology), and he can be called an autocrat…but he is not at all a tyrant.”

On the contrary, he said, Chávez “has been the most permissive leader in a century. No one can say there is no democracy here.”

Despite his military background, Chávez, in a personal sense, “is the most undisciplined person I know, he doesn’t follow social conventions,” said Muller.

And in the political terrain, “he sees everything from a military perspective of friend-foe, rather than from the more political view of ally-adversary,” he added.

Chávez was first elected in December 1998 at the head of an alliance of centre-left parties and his newly created Fifth Republic Movement.

But allies like the moderate Movement to Socialism (MAS) and his political mentor Luis Miquilena distanced themselves in 2001 due to discrepancies over laws and measures that affected the business community, and how to run the government.

MAS secretary-general Leopoldo Puchi commented to IPS that the party’s decision was influenced by “Chávez’s authoritarian leanings…his intolerance of criticism and opposition in parliament, and the distance between his words and his deeds, especially in terms of fighting poverty.”

However, Chávez has channelled part of the windfall profits resulting from the current soaring oil prices into social programmes such as subsidised food products for the poor, an adult literacy drive, incentives for farmers, loans for small businesses, and a health programme through which 13,000 Cuban doctors have brought primary health care to Venezuela’s slums.

The president also announced new public works in July to be financed by a special fund of two billion dollars.

According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Venezuela’s economy is on its way to recovery, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) could grow 12 percent this year, after shrinking 12.6 percent in 2002 and 10.7 percent in 2003, partly due to the two-month business shutdown.

Unemployment has dropped so far this year from 17.5 to 15.5 percent.

Vice-President José Vicente Rangel, a veteran leftist politician, says the charismatic leader “represents a watershed in Venezuelan politics, because of his absolute respect for democracy. And we will demonstrate that on Sunday: we have no problem accepting the verdict of the ballot boxes, no matter which way it goes.”