Recent events in Venezuela--brought to a crisis point by a national strike that has virtually immobilized the country’s petroleum industry, its principal source of revenue--have raised two troubling questions. One is whether there is a civilized and orderly way out of the country’s political conflicts. The other is whether--regardless of the outcome--Venezuela will ever again know civil and social peace. These are not trivial issues, and their resolution may not apply to one country alone. Where Venezuela goes, others may yet follow.
It seems like only yesterday that Venezuela represented a beacon of hope for all of Latin America. For decades it had the highest per capita income, the best-organized labor movement, one of the largest middle classes, and the most vigorous multiparty system. Moreover, unlike Argentina and Uruguay--whose social templates were somewhat similar--Venezuela seemed to have resolved the problem of civil-military relations. Once among the most socially integrated of Latin American republics, today it seems poised on the narrow edge of a civil war.
Chávez
At the center of the storm--and to some extent the cause of it--is President Hugo Chávez, an eccentric former army colonel elected by a landslide vote in 1998. In a mere four years he has turned the vast majority of Venezuelans against him. This drastic reversal in public opinion was probably predictable from the very start. Venezuela has been in serious economic trouble for a long time, and it was unlikely that the simple act of changing presidents would magically resolve the country’s problems.
To be sure, Chávez has made a difficult situation far worse. Although democratically elected, he lacks many of the talents required of a successful politician. He regards all opposition as immoral and perverse and is convinced that to cede ground to it--no matter on how minor a point--amounts to caving in to extortion. Even more troubling is his apparent lack of interest in building a political movement of his own, presumably because even this would require wheeling and dealing with various elements of civil society. Like Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, he prefers to meet the public as an undifferentiated mob rather than as a collection of individual or overlapping constituencies. And finally, his authoritarian style and his incendiary rhetoric have alienated most of the able people who supported him four years ago, including retired colonel Arias Cárdenas (a fellow coup-plotter in 1992 and subsequently governor of Zulia state) and Alfredo Peña (President Chávez’s former chief of staff, now mayor of metropolitan Caracas). Even many chavista members in the unicameral National Assembly are turning against him. At this writing, in fact, he maintains a majority there by razor-thin margins.
Perhaps Chávez’s most serious deficiency has been an unwillingness to keep his hands off the state oil company, known by its acronym PDVSA. Created in the late 1970s, PDVSA has long been regarded as one of the most successful and professionally run state enterprises in Latin America. Since his election Chávez has slowly been raiding its coffers for mysterious off-budget projects, many of which appear to have been intended to purchase political support from high-ranking military people. At the same time, he has twice attempted to replace the professional management of PDVSA with political appointees wholly unqualified to run such a complicated industry.
The prospect of destroying Venezuela’s chief source of wealth has understandably alarmed many employees and the population as a whole. This explains the current refusal of many oil workers to report for work, and it created a ripple effect throughout the business community, the labor movement, the media, and the middle class. As of this writing, a national strike that began December 2 continues. With oil production and cash running out, Venezuela is hovering on the edge of financial collapse. But so far Chávez is refusing to step down, or even to negotiate seriously with his opposition. As time goes on, the latter has also lost interest in anything but assuring the president’s early departure.
Is Chávez on His Way Out?
This can be accomplished in two ways. One is to hold new elections well before 2006, when Chávez’s current term ends. At present the constitution does not provide for that, but new elections could be arranged through an amendment if one were to be approved by the National Assembly. The other is to wait until August, when the president will be at midpoint in his six-year term and vulnerable to impeachment by a recall vote, the procedure for which is already established. Since August is only a little more than six months away, one might imagine that the opposition would want to use that interval to organize its forces more effectively, much as the Chilean opposition used the run-up to the 1988 plebiscite on General Augusto Pinochet to lay the groundwork for a political alliance that has already lasted fifteen years there.
For the most part, however, opposition leaders do not want to wait. Quite apart from the fact that they do not believe the country can survive another six months of mismanagement and financial chaos, many are convinced that Chávez will use the remaining time to consolidate his hold on the military and the National Guard, as well as to arm and deploy his "Bolivarian circles"--bully-boys whose purpose is to intimidate the opposition and to act as a reserve army of chavistas in the event of a civil conflict. In this scenario, there might be no referendum at all in August, constitution or no constitution. Venezuela would have slipped, almost imperceptibly, into becoming "another Cuba." The fact that Chávez is thought to spend hours on the telephone talking to Fidel Castro--and that he conferred with the latter on a recent trip to Brazil until four in the morning--lends a superficial credibility to this scenario.
But some important differences distinguish Venezuela’s situation from Cuba’s. For one thing, Venezuela has never been occupied by the U.S. military, and its principal industry was nationalized over a quarter-century ago. Thus Chávez’s anti-American rhetoric has fallen a bit flat among ordinary Venezuelans. For another, Venezuelans are not being allowed to emigrate in wholesale quantities to the United States--as was the case with Cubans during the early revolutionary period from 1959 to 1961--so that Chávez has been unable to export his opposition. For yet another, no Soviet Union is available to step in and provide Venezuela with abundant financial assistance to stave off collapse. And finally, Venezuelans already know how the Cuban drama ends, and they have no intention of staying for the final act. Thus whatever aspirations Chávez may ultimately harbor, he is unlikely to be able to force his country into the authoritarian harness he has been brandishing of late.
What we can anticipate then is a continuation of this tug of war with neither side apparently able to prevail. Chávez is clearly determined not to concede a single substantive point to the opposition, regardless of the cost to the country. He is waiting out the collapse of the strike movement, which for all we can know may come at any moment. But even if it does, the opposition that drives it will not go away. In fact, Chávez is likely to draw the wrong lessons from just such an eventuality. Instead of using the breather to consolidate his gains, divide his enemies, and win new support among the public, he is likely to push the envelope further, reigniting protest at a far higher level of intensity, with a significantly greater potential for serious violence.
What Will the Military Do?
The big question hovering over Venezuelan politics today is what the military will do if the crisis escalates out of control. To all appearances Chávez has the armed forces in his pocket. He has relieved many officers he suspects of potential disloyalty and has given particular care to the assignment of troop commands. He is also thought to have strong and deep support among the noncommissioned officer corps. Caracas is awash with rumors of money changing hands, special deals for the purchase of houses and cars, and all kinds of material incentives that are supposed to shore up ideological and institutional support for the president up and down the ranks.
However, appearances may be deceiving. As long as Chávez can show he is in control, he may be able to count on support from the military. At some point, however, if the institution as a whole--or even an important part of it--decides that its interests lie elsewhere, then regardless of past professions of loyalty, or even material incentives, Chávez may be sent packing. The recent history of Latin America is full of just such cases. Exactly what would have to happen for the military to change sides is impossible to say, but a sudden turnaround can never be wholly discounted as a real possibility.
What If Chávez Goes?
What would follow Chávez requires extended speculation. In today’s Latin America a repressive military regime of the type experienced by Argentina or Chile in the 1970s is simply not a possibility. Today the human rights movement has monitors everywhere, the international community has established new sanctions for violators, and the end of the cold war removes any geopolitical incentive for major powers to turn a blind eye to the misconduct of second-tier allies. Nor--after forty years of democracy, however imperfect--are Venezuelans likely to tolerate the replacement of one would-be dictator with a more finished model. It is therefore reasonable to assume that if Chávez is ousted, Venezuela would be returned to civilian, elected authorities within a relatively short period of time. Presumably these authorities would hold new elections, in which chavistas, if not Chávez himself, would be eligible to participate. At this point the weakness of the present opposition would become glaringly apparent.
What makes that movement powerful today is what renders it potentially less so tomorrow--its very diversity. Probably never in the history of Venezuela has any political coalition been so broad--from Bandera Roja and Causa R on the left, all the way over to the business community, professional middle classes, and dissident exmilitary on the right. Between the two poles one can identify center-left organizations like Primero Justicia, and social-democratic parties like MAS and Acción Democrática, as well as the Venezuelan labor federation. In the event of Chávez’s departure, the glue that holds it together would naturally dissolve. In and of itself this need not be a problem, but the fact that Venezuela’s major political parties are now largely discredited--the very reason Chávez was elected in the first place--raises the disturbing question of who will be able to aggregate large constituencies to prop up the democratic order in the future.
With Chávez gone, it would become obvious that Venezuela’s problems are far larger than the particular individual occupying the presidential palace. The country’s economic decline in recent decades has partly resulted from falling oil prices, but even more from a drop in its share of the world petroleum market (11 percent in 1965, a mere 3 percent today). Meanwhile, the population those same oil exports must support has trebled in size. As economist Ricardo Haussman has said, "Venezuela has grown too big for oil." Exactly what could replace it, providing Venezuelans the same standardof living they enjoyed in the 1970s, or for that matter even the 1960s, remains to be seen.
In that sense, one might see Chávez as merely the latest in a series of recent Venezuelan presidents whose popularity has descended rapidly once in office, thanks to his inability to fulfill his electoral promises. What has made his presidency far more dramatic has been the fact that, by pretending that the country’s problems have solely to do with unearned privilege or racial discrimination or "globalization," he has managed to solidify his hold on about a third of the population, mostly the least affluent and less sophisticated members of society, while driving the other two-thirds into vehement opposition. Ironically, his ratings with the public are probably higher at this point in his presidency than at least three or four of his immediate predecessors. He has been able to accomplish this, however, only at the cost of a potentially explosive social polarization that holds out no hope of peaceful resolution.
To be sure, Chávez is not spinning these grievances out of thin air. There is social and racial discrimination in Venezuela, however subtle. There is--and has been--a massive misallocation of public resources, and there areserious economic and regional inequalities. The problem is that Chávez has approached these issues from a wholly ideological and demagogic perspective, without the slightest nod in the direction of wealth creation. While many of Chávez’s humbler supporters have not benefited economically from his rule, many reportedly derive vicarious pleasure at seeing him attack the rich, the wellborn, and the able. How long Chávez’s vituperative rhetoric can replace concrete economic benefits is difficult to say, but if his presidency is abruptly truncated and he himself consigned to exile, the legend of What Might Have Been is bound to grow, assuring his return at some point in the future.
That eventuality can be forestalled only by a drastic rethinking of Venezuela’s economic model and by serious attention to the development of new industries. This is the challenge that the opposition should be taking up now, rather than mortgaging all its hopes for the future on Chávez’s early and expeditious departure from power. Sooner or later these people will get another bite at the apple--either through a referendum in August, the next presidential election in 2006, or some unspecified eventuality. When they do, it is vital that this time they do not fail.
Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI.
