Hugo Chavez: Socialist for the Twenty-first Century

Hugo Chávez

Revolutionary Lives

Series Editors: Sarah Irving, University of Edinburgh;

Professor Paul Le Blanc, La Roche College, Pittsburgh

Revolutionary Lives is a series of short, critical biographies of radical figures from throughout history. The books are sympathetic but not sycophantic, and the intention is to present a balanced and, where necessary, critical evaluation of the individual’s place in their political field, putting their actions and achievements in context and exploring issues raised by their lives, such as the use or rejection of violence, nationalism, or gender in political activism. While individuals are the subject of the books, their personal lives are dealt with lightly except insofar as they mesh with political concerns. The focus is on the contribution these revolutionaries made to history, an examination of how far they achieved their aims in improving the lives of the oppressed and exploited, and how they can continue to be an inspiration for many today.

Also available:

Salvador Allende:

Revolutionary Democrat

Victor Figueroa Clark

Leila Khaled:

Icon of Palestinian Liberation

Sarah Irving

Jean Paul Marat:

Tribune of the French Revolution

Clifford D. Conner

Sylvia Pankhurst:

Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire

Katherine Connelly

Ellen Wilkinson:

From Red Suffragist to Government Minister

Paula Bartley

Gerrard Winstanley:

The Digger’s Life and Legacy

John Gurney

www.revolutionarylives.co.uk

Hugo Chávez

Socialist for the Twenty-first Century

Mike Gonzalez

First published 2014 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © Mike Gonzalez 2014

The right of Mike Gonzalez to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN    978 0 7453 3466 0    Hardback

ISBN    978 0 7453 3465 3    Paperback

ISBN    978 1 7837 1029 4    PDF eBook

ISBN    978 1 7837 1031 7    Kindle eBook

ISBN    978 1 7837 1030 0    EPUB eBook

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

10     9     8     7     6     5     4     3     2     1

Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Text design by Melanie Patrick

Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and

Edwards Bros in the United States of America

For Nella

With my love my thanks

and

my admiration

Contents

List of Illustrations

Glossary

Timeline

(A young boy converses with Simon Bolívar)

Boy: Oh if you could see the destiny

Of the peoples you liberated with your sword

They have more liberty now

To die of hunger

Crushed by the northern boot

That you warned us about ….

And looking straight at the boy

Bolívar said: take my spurs

Go from town to town

Wake the people up

Tell them to raise their heads

To make history again.

Ali Primera, ‘Bolívar’

Introduction:

A Man for Difficult Times

¹

Hugo Chávez was nothing if not controversial. In Venezuela, his presidency provoked deep divisions, or rather exposed divisions that already existed.

When he died, on 5 March 2013, a majority of Venezuelans mourned his passing with genuine grief; but there were harsh reactions to the news of his illness from that section of the population who had opposed him throughout his presidency. Outside the country, opinions were equally polarised. The Spanish press was consistently critical of him, and in the United States successive administrations alleged that he was part of the ‘Axis of Evil’. But there was an equally large, if not larger, number of people for whom his scorn for protocol, his eloquent attacks on neo-liberalism, his solidarity with the struggles of the oppressed, earned him their admiration and support.

Venezuela had not figured large in the consciousness of the world in previous years. It was an important oil producer and a member of OPEC – people did know that – and it produced a number of winning entrants to the Miss World contests, star baseball players and boxing champions. But it always surprised me how many people would ask where it was, and what language was spoken there. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, the more likely response in most parts of the world to the mention of Venezuela’s name has been ‘Hugo Chávez’, often accompanied by a smile. His famous appearance at the United Nations speaker’s podium immediately after George W. Bush – or ‘Mr Danger’ as he used to call him – had spoken, when he commented that you could still smell the sulphur, endeared him to those many millions who had marched across the world on 23 February 2003 in protest at the Iraq War.

Chávez’s first interventions in national politics, as this biography traces, began while he was a military officer organising small conspiratorial cells of dissidents.

Many of them, like him, came from poor backgrounds and still felt a connection and an allegiance to their class. Yet despite this early experience, Hugo Chávez became a spokesperson for a very different kind of politics, neither a guerrilla strategy nor clandestine conspiracies, but a vision of participatory democracy. The trigger for this new way of thinking about how societies change was an event that marked a critical conjuncture in Venezuela’s modern history – the insurrectionary rising of Venezuela’s marginalised populations called the Caracazo, on 27 February 1989. This explosion of rage and frustration was a reaction to the imposition of a neo-liberal package of emergency economic measures called euphemistically ‘structural adjustment’. Translated, this meant massive cuts in social spending, the privatisation of industry and services in public ownership, and a consequent collapse of the standard of living of most Venezuelans. These austerity measures became painfully familiar throughout Latin America in the decade that followed.

At the same time, the Caracazo was an early form of a new kind of struggle – mass social movements mounting a sustained and determined resistance structured around innovative organisational methods. Sometimes these were expressed in the language of community, sometimes by historical references long buried in popular culture, sometimes in the symbolic universe of grassroots religion. Analysts in the West referred to these groupings collectively as ‘civil society’; yet they were very different from the largely middle-class pressure groups or the NGOs that in the 1990s came to take the place of absent representative institutions in Latin America and elsewhere. The collapse of Stalinism had discredited and disoriented the socialist tradition; and privatisation brought widespread industrial closures and a crisis on the land as global capital overwhelmed small scale agricultural production. The marginalisation of whole communities, the explosive growth of the precarious sector of the economy and the dispossession of indigenous populations generated responses that were framed in unfamiliar ways. The NGOs, most of which originated in Europe or America, operated in a familiar territory of political negotiation; the new social movements grew up on a different terrain – the poor barrios, the isolated indigenous communities, the peasant communities fighting for their very survival, often against ruthless landowners. And they would respond to their alienation in different ways – with explosions of rage, or forms of local self-help. They produced their own leaders and their own imaginary. But they tended, at least at first, to remain local and uncoordinated.

Throughout the 1990s, neo-liberalism continued its destructive march across the globe. But it always met resistance, exemplified by the Zapatista rising in southern Mexico in January 1994. That movement was quickly isolated physically in the state of Chiapas, where the Zapatista communities were surrounded by over 60,000 soldiers. But its political message reached most corners of the world, thanks to the newly developed worldwide web, which was intended for use by the powerful, not the powerless. That message argued for a democratic and egalitarian society, an alternative to the merciless neo-liberal order and its spurious democracies. Like the social movements, the