The death of Hugo Chavez prompts me to reproduce this article, my report from Caracas , which was first published in the Mail on Sunday in April 2008.
OUT OF the grave we thought we’d shovelled it into all those years ago, revolutionary Marxism comes climbing once again. Most of us were pleased to see it go, but not all of us.
No wonder the world’s incurably fashionable Leftists, who hate their own countries, love Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. They have been homeless since the USSR fizzled away in a cloud of rust, and even more bereft since a trembling Fidel Castro laid down his combat fatigues and went off into the twilight in his pyjamas.
Comrade Chavez has given them back a fatherland, and provided them with a hero – a strangely lovable, smiling one, with a sense of humour and a good line in teasing mockery of the United States. He also has some of the biggest oil reserves in the world.
Castro, of course, never had any oil. But Venezuela is overflowing with it, which changes everything. In this increasingly sinister country, oil money sustains a more or less unhinged regime that mixes the methods of Stalin and the presentational skills of Richard and Judy to impose socialism on the Caribbean’s southern shores.
It also makes global mischief, flirting with Iran and the rest of the outcast and stroppy nations of the world. Does it matter? Yes. Venezuela is now an important global focus for trouble; a rallying point for the enemies of Western society and lawful democracy, a new source of hope for every silly idealist, from London’s Ken Livingstone upwards.
And it is a menace to the wobbling economies of the world. Chavez has been busily nagging Opec to keep up the world price of oil, while cunningly keeping down the cost at home to buy votes. Oil may fetch more than $100 a barrel on the world markets, but Venezuelans can fill their cars for just 75 pence .
Still, economic bungling of the standard Marxist kind can create bankruptcy and rationing out of the greatest abundance. What ought to be one of the most prosperous societies on earth is suffering grave shortages of the most basic things. This week in Caracas I have seen many queues for milk, which even the rich cannot get. If a delivery arrives at a supermarket it is gone in half an hour. Last week there was no lavatory paper. Before that, it was rice and meat you couldn’t get.
Inflation is terrible, and power cuts are increasingly common.
Amid this mess, the nation’s would-be despot rules largely through a curious weekly TV talk show – Hallo, President! – in which he harangues his people, argues with his audience, publicly humiliates and lectures his terrified ministers, invents policies, prophesies grandiose schemes which will never happen and occasionally breaks into song. Comrade Chavez fancies himself as a singer, a baseball player and a comedian.
As he himself says: ‘It’s a religious programme – because God only knows when it will end.’ Which is true enough. Dignitaries invited to join the studio audience take cushions, sandwiches and bottles of water to help them endure the hours of raging, reminiscence and chatter.
El Presidente’s unending rants have become a national joke. At a recent summit in Chile, King Juan Carlos of Spain snapped at Chavez: ‘Why don’t you shut up?’ Millions of Venezuelans downloaded the rebuke and use it as the ring-tone on their mobiles.
Sleepless and obsessive, Chavez pursues his revolutionary ends into the small hours, ringing his cabinet with his latest ideas, commandeering TV stations, descending on remote townships and ordering local officials to complete 17 impossible targets before breakfast.
They just hope he won’t come back and check, for his wrath can be terrible.
This might appear to be a fun revolution: student politics on a big budget. It must be the only country where the graffiti is done by the government, with the police standing guard over artists as they spray pro-Chavez murals. Activists are everywhere in their scarlet, slogan-covered T-shirts. In the squares of Caracas, little stalls called ‘Hot Corners’ blare out revolutionary speeches and hand out propaganda – which probably helps make up for the lavatory-paper shortage.
But it is not half so funny if you look closely. And it is not funny at all if you dare to stand up to Chavez. For this brilliant, impulsive and charming former parachute officer is also a ruthless seeker of power and true believer in revolution. And he does not really care how he gets control, or how he holds on to it.
He may go on about democracy, but he would have been perfectly happy to attain office with gunfire and tanks. His first attempt at the presidency was in 1992, when he tried a military coup. It was a clownish failure; the sort of putsch where people fail to turn up on time, get lost and cannot find the keys to vital buildings.
So much for Lieutenant Colonel Chavez’s military skills. But amazingly, before they took him away to prison, the authorities put him on TV so he could order his followers to lay down their arms. He did so, but added two crucial words: ‘Por ahora’ (For now).
Like Schwarzenegger’s ‘I’ll be back’ in The Terminator, this has become his catchphrase – it thrills supporters and frightens opponents.
From that day, his popularity grew. And it is easy to see why. Like almost every oil state, Venezuela has fouled up its inheritance. Needless poverty besieges Caracas in the form of squalid, chaotic, violent shanty towns that are so dangerous the police won’t go there at weekends. In this country of 28million people, there are 1,000 murders a month and guns are everywhere.
Yet these shameful slums lie within sight of the modern towers of the city. Chavez realised there were millions of votes in these suppurating places, so he scattered his oil bounty among them. Cuban medical workers have set up clinics in the slums. Smart new schools are being built there. Hundreds of thousands receive state handouts direct from Chavez, who has seized the state oil company and uses it as a private bank to reward supporters.
These supporters know which side their votes are buttered: pro-Chavez posters decorate their wretched homes. Standing outside his sister’s tiny three-room house – or shed – in the San Agustin shanty district, Juan, a security guard working for a state project, told me: ‘In all my 53 years Hugo Chavez is the best leader this country has ever had. Before him, this neighbourhood was abandoned. Now we have such good health care that doctors come to our homes on house calls.’ He adds quickly: ‘This is thanks to our Cuban brothers.’
Now I am sure some of what Juan said was intended for the suspicious-looking character who hung around nearby as we talked, ears flapping, plainly spying for the state.
But some of it was true. The San Agustin slum has been festering on its humid hillside for 70 years, and this is the first time anyone has done anything about it. That is why Venezuela’s ‘democratic’ non-socialist political parties are discredited and widely hated.
Chavez has proved that neglect of the poor is not inevitable, he speaks and thinks like them and has used the oil billions to build up an army of followers who will vote for him.
Nobody can claim Venezuela was ever a well-run, fair country. But it does have quite a strong civil society, independent of the state in a way Marxists cannot stand. Press and TV are free. The universities teach without state interference. The government more or less abides by the constitution. Private property is as safe as steel bars, guards and barricades at the ends of wealthy streets can make it.
Yet there is now a dark threat: last year Chavez moved beyond social reform and began to show his very sharp teeth. He began by shutting down the country’s oldest TV station, RCTV, because its criticisms had annoyed him. That’s when he encountered dangerous resistance for the first time.
It came from people he could not dismiss as plutocrats or supporters of the old regime. His opponents were middle-class students. One of their leaders was Geraldine Alvarez, a 22-year-old who does not look or sound like a would-be politician, but as if she would rather be out at a party. And that is what makes her so dangerous to Chavez. She is not a professional politician, she serves no vested interest and she is immune to all his nasty Bolshevik tactics.
When Chavez said he would close RCTV, she and some friends began a protest. The official TV station censored them. The police attacked their peaceful protests with tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets.
Geraldine said: ‘When we went to the National Assembly and asked for the right of reply, they said we were terrorists and trained by the CIA. They said on state TV that I was mentally ill. But most people did not buy these lies. Poor people in this country view students with sympathy. They could see the placards we carried were home-made, not mass-produced like those of the government.’
Nor did people believe it when Chavez sneered that the students were ‘spoiled rich brats’, since most came from modest middle-class or working-class homes.
WHEN censorship and smears failed, the regime re-sorted to the bully tactics familiar in Eastern European countries as they were dragged into communism in the Forties. Supposedly spontaneous ‘counter-demonstrators’ appeared, hurling stones and bottles at the students – from behind police lines.
Chavez supporters, firing guns, raged through the campus of the main Caracas university. The bullet holes can still be seen in buildings.
‘It was so dangerous at one time that we had to wear bulletproof vests,’ Geraldine recalls. But they never fell into Chavez’s trap, refusing to attack the President personally and ignoring calls from the opposition leaders: ‘We said, “We are students, not politicians.”’
By this time, Chavez had taken his next step: a planned new constitution that would have abolished the 12-year limit on his term of office, and which many believed would threaten private property.
Geraldine said: ‘We stopped people in the streets and on the buses and urged them to read these proposals. We wanted to wake the people up.’
Their courage and determination paid off. Chavez began to lose powerful support among his own oldest friends. General Raul Isaias Baduel, 52, had been a comrade from their early days in the army together, but he resigned as defence minister in protest at the planned constitutional changes. He is now trying to build a new opposition.
The desk in Baduel’s office – untypically for a paratroop commander – is covered in books on politics and philosophy.
The table behind it is crowded with Roman Catholic religious images curiously mingled with a Koran and an Israeli army camouflage skullcap. He and Chavez are no longer friends. ‘I feel he has cancelled our friendship,’ he says. Typically, Chavez was charming at first but later Baduel’s bodyguards were abruptly withdrawn and Chavez supporters began to smear him. Baduel’s actions, while commanding a paratroop unit based near the capital, saved Chavez from a Right-wing coup attempt in 2002. Yet, in 2007, Baduel accused his old friend of planning what was in effect a coup against the constitution. He says on both occasions he was acting according to the same principle.
Chavez’s admirers would also find it hard to dismiss Ismael Garcia, leader of the socialist Podemos party (the name means ‘we can’). Garcia shows me a picture of himself at a rally a few years ago, sitting smiling two seats away from his one-time comrade, Chavez. But he, too, has now split with him, refusing to merge his group into the single party Chavez wants, once again using Stalinist tactics from 60 years and 4,000 miles away.
Garcia says Chavez’s constitutional reforms would have threatened private property had they gone ahead: ‘He proposed the state model that failed in the Soviet Union, in which the state controls everything.’
Together, the student movement, the shortages and the defections of his old allies led to Chavez being narrowly beaten in a referendum on his constitutional changes. Many feared he would ignore the result and go ahead anyway, others suspected he would rig the vote, but with surprising wisdom and patience, he did neither. It is rumoured his old friend Castro called him from his sick-bed to tell him to bow to the verdict and play a long game. So he waits.
He continues to use oil money to buy the backing of the poor and – it is widely believed – arm them against the remote danger of another army coup.
He plans a slow revenge on the students: he is demanding that universities drop their entrance exams so he can pack them with his young, half-educated supporters.
Oil prices continue to climb, so Chavez will be able to buy off most trouble for the foreseeable future. And then?
To reassure supporters and intimidate critics, huge red placards have been placed on high points in the city, bearing those two words ‘Por ahora’ with which he once before promised to be back.
As the United States weakens and China grows in power, as the victories of the Cold War are frittered away and Russia slides back towards its ancient autocracy, what happened to all those brave hopes that free societies were here to stay and the mad experiments of the 20th Century would never be repeated?
Here we go again, red flags flapping, off to the same old disaster – and fashionable Leftists in the West are applauding, as usual.
