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Even before I arrived in Venezuela for a recent visit, I encountered the great
class divide that besets that country. On my connecting flight from Miami to
Caracas, I found myself seated next to an attractive, exquisitely dressed Venezuelan
woman. Judging from her prosperous aspect, I anticipated that she would take
the first opportunity to hold forth against President Hugo Chavez.
Unfortunately, I was right.
Our conversation moved along famously until we got to the political struggle
going on in Venezuela. “Chavez,” she hissed, “is terrible,
terrible.”He is “a liar”; he “fools the people”
and is “ruining the country.”
She herself owns an upscale women’s fashion company with links to prominent
firms in the United States. When I asked how Chavez has hurt her business, she
said, “Not at all.” But many other businesses, she quickly added,
have been irreparably damaged as has the whole economy. She went on denouncing
Chavez in sweeping terms, warning me of the national disaster to come if this
demon continued to have his way.
Other critics I encountered in Venezuela shared this same mode of attack: weak
on specifics but strong in venom, voiced with all the ferocity of those who
fear that their birthright (that is, their class advantage) was under siege
because others below them on the social ladder were now getting a slightly larger
slice of the pie.
In Venezuela over 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty level.
Before Chavez, most of the poor had never seen a doctor or dentist. The neoliberal
market “adjustments” of the 1980s and 1990s only made things worse,
cutting social spending and eliminating subsidies in consumer goods.
Successive administrations did nothing about the rampant corruption and nothing
about the growing gap between rich and poor, the worsening malnutrition and
desperation. Far from ruining the country, here are some of the good things
the Chavez government has accomplished:
** A land reform program designed to assist small farmers and the landless poor
has been instituted. In March 2005 a large landed estate owned by a British
beef company was occupied by agrarian workers for farming purposes.
** Even before Chavez there was public education in Venezuela, from grade level
to university, yet many children from poor families never attended school, for
they could not afford the annual fees. Education is now completely free (right
through to university level), causing a dramatic increase in school enrollment.
** The government has set up a marine conservation program, and is taking steps
to protect the land and fishing rights of indigenous peoples.
** Special banks now assist small enterprises, worker cooperatives, and farmers.
** Attempts to further privatize the state-run oil industry---80 percent of
which is still publicly owned---have been halted, and limits have been placed
on foreign capital penetration.
** Chavez kicked out the U.S. military advisors and prohibited overflights by
U.S. military aircraft engaged in counterinsurgency in Colombia.
** “Bolivarian Circles” have been organized throughout the nation,
neighborhood committees designed to activate citizens at the community level
to assist in literacy, education, vaccination campaigns, and other public services.
** The government hires unemployed men, on a temporary basis, to repair streets
and neglected drainage and water systems in poor neighborhoods.
Then there is the health program. I visited a dental clinic in Chavez’s
home state of Barinas. The staff consisted of four dentists, two of whom were
young Venezuelan women. The other two were Cuban men who were there on a one-year
program. The Venezuelan dentists noted that in earlier times dentists did not
have enough work. There were millions of people who needed treatment, but care
was severely rationed by the private market, that is, by one’s ability
to pay. Dental care was distributed like any other commodity, not to everyone
who needed it but only to those who could afford it.
When the free clinic in Barinas first opened it was flooded with people seeking
dental care. No one was turned away. Even opponents of the Chavez government
availed themselves of the free service, temporarily putting aside their political
aversions.
Many of the doctors and dentists who work in the barrio clinics (along with
some of the clinical supplies and pharmaceuticals) come from Cuba. Chavez has
also put Venezuelan military doctors and dentists to work in the free clinics.
Meanwhile, much of the Venezuelan medical establishment is vehemently opposed
to the free-clinic program, seeing it as a Cuban communist campaign to undermine
medical standards and physicians’ earnings.
That low-income people are receiving medical and dental care for the first
time in their lives does not seem to be a consideration that carries much weight
among the more “professionally minded” practitioners.
I visited one of the government-supported community food stores that are located
around the country, mostly in low income areas. These modest establishments
sell canned goods, pasta, beans, rice, and some produce and fruits at well below
the market price, a blessing in a society with widespread malnutrition.
Popular food markets have eliminated the layers of middlemen and made staples
more affordable for residents. Most of these markets are run by women. The government
also created a state-financed bank whose function is to provide low-income women
with funds to start cooperatives in their communities.
There is a growing number of worker cooperatives. One in Caracas was started
by turning a waste dump into a shoe factory and a T-shirt factory. Financed
with money from the Petroleum Ministry, the coop has put about a thousand people
to work. The workers seem enthusiastic and hopeful.
Surprisingly, many Venezuelans know relatively little about the worker cooperatives.
Or perhaps it’s not surprising, given the near monopoly that private capital
has over the print and broadcast media. The wealthy media moguls, all vehemently
anti-Chavez, own four of the five television stations and all the major newspapers.
The man most responsible for Venezuela’s revolutionary developments,
Hugo Chavez, has been accorded the usual ad hominem treatment in the U.S. news
media. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle described him as “Venezuela’s
pugnacious president.” [1] An earlier Chronicle report quotes a political
opponent who calls Chavez “a psychopath, a terribly aggressive guy.”
[2] The London Financial Times sees him as “increasingly autocratic”
and presiding over what the Times called a “rogue democracy.” [3]
In the Nation, Marc Cooper---one of those Cold War liberals who nowadays regularly
defends the U.S. empire---writes that the democratically-elected Chavez speaks
“often as a thug,” who “flirts with megalomania.” Chavez’s
behavior, Cooper rattles on, “borders on the paranoiac,” is “ham-fisted
demagogy” acted out with an “increasingly autocratic style.”
Like so many critics, Cooper downplays Chavez’s accomplishments, and uses
name-calling in place of informed analysis. [4]
Other media mouthpieces have labeled Chavez “mercurial,” “besieged,”
“heavy-handed,” “incompetent,” and “dictatorial,”
a “barracks populist,” a “strongman,” a “firebrand,”
and, above all, a “leftist.” It is never explained what “leftist”
means. A leftist is someone who advocates a more equitable distribution of social
resources and human services, and who supports the kinds of programs that the
Chavez government is putting in place.
(Likewise a rightist is someone who opposes such programs and seeks to advance
the insatiable privileges of private capital and the wealthy few.) The term
“leftist” is frequently bandied about in the U.S. media but seldom
defined. The power of the label is in its remaining undefined, allowing it to
have an abstracted built-in demonizing impact which precludes rational examination
of its political content.
Meanwhile Chavez’s opponents, who staged an illegal and unconstitutional
coup in April 2002 against Venezuela’s democratically elected government
are depicted in the U.S. media as champions of “prodemocratic” and
“pro-West” governance. We are talking about the freemarket plutocrats
and corporate-military leaders of the privileged social order who killed more
people in the 48 hours they held power in 2002 than were ever harmed by Chavez
in his years of rule. [5]
When one of these perpetrators, General Carlos Alfonzo, was hit with charges
for the role he had played, the New York Times chose to call him a “dissident”
whose rights were being suppressed by the Chavez government. [6] Four other
top military officers charged with leading the 2002 coup were also likely to
face legal action. No doubt, they too will be described not as plotters or traitors
who tried to destroy a democratic government, but as “dissidents,”
simple decent individuals who are being denied their right to disagree with
the government.
President Hugo Chavez whose public talks I attended on three occasions proved
to be an educated, articulate, remarkably well-informed and wellread individual.
Of big heart, deep human feeling, and keen intellect, he manifests a sincere
dedication to effecting some salutary changes for the great mass of his people,
a man who in every aspect seems worthy of the decent and peaceful democratic
revolution he is leading.
Millions of his compatriots correctly perceive him as being the only president
who has ever paid attention to the nation’s poorest areas. No wonder he
is the target of calumny and coup from the upper echelons in his own country
and from ruling circles up north. Chavez charges that the United States government
is plotting to assassinate him. I can believe it.
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Michael Parenti’s recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights)
and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press) which won Book of the Year
Award, 2004 (nonfiction) from Online Review of Books.
His latest work, The Culture Struggle , will be published by Seven Stories
Press in the fall of 2005.
For more information visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org