[DEBATE] : LRB on Tariq Ali et al on left in Latin America

[Sean Jacobs]

     * LRB
     * 1 November 2007

Baseball’s Loss
Geoffrey Hawthorn

     * Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope by Tariq Ali  Buy this book
     * Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today by 
D.L. Raby  Buy this book
     * Venezuela: Hugo Chavez’s Revolution, Latin America Report No. 19 
www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=4674&l=1

In Venezuela at the end of June, Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez and Diego 
Maradona, three heroes of the people in Latin America, kicked off the 
Copa América. Morales, pleased with his dribbling, kept possession for 
rather longer than might have been thought polite. When he passed, 
Chávez, instinctive politician that he is, at once flicked the ball on 
to the feet of the Hand of God. (He originally wanted to be a baseball 
player. Football is not his game.) What was important was that his 
largesse had secured the Copa for his country, thereby strengthening 
his popular appeal at home, enhancing his determination to be a 
presence in Latin America, and allowing him to cast a mote, as he likes 
to do, in the eye of the United States.

Chávez’s election in Venezuela in 1998 and his repeated victories 
since, Morales’s in Bolivia in 2005 and Rafael Correa’s in Ecuador in 
2006, together with governments of a more moderately leftish 
inclination in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and, it now seems, Nicaragua, 
have excited wide attention. Washington is nervous of the more extreme 
leaders, all of whom gain easy support at home by attacking it, and 
makes no secret of its particular distaste for the new Venezuela. Two 
years ago, in her list of ‘outposts of tyranny’, Condoleezza Rice 
included only one country in the Americas, Cuba. Chávez, already close 
to Cuba, has responded by supporting two more of those Rice deplored, 
Zimbabwe and Iran; has persuaded a fourth, North Korea, to move its one 
Latin American embassy to Caracas; and has gone so far as to describe a 
fifth, Lukashenko’s beleaguered Belarus, as ‘a model social state of 
the kind that we are trying to create’. Sober liberal observers, like 
the International Crisis Group, an NGO founded by Mark Malloch Brown in 
1995, more quietly worry about the absence of checks on presidential 
power in Venezuela and the possibility that Bolivia will actually fall 
apart. Enthusiastic radicals, like Tariq Ali and Diana Raby, suggest 
that a truly popular socialism has been reborn in these places. And 
rebirth, Ali thinks, is half the battle. Raby, convinced that the 
battle can be won, and whose hopes for it extend even to Europe, 
believes that when it is won, the new politics, having a sounder base, 
will prove to be more resilient than the old. Of others with an 
interest in the matter, the Foreign Office may not be alone in 
believing that we have nothing at all to learn from such countries.

Notwithstanding his compliment to Lukashenko, Chávez might say he has 
little to learn from us. Simón Bolívar, the hero of the liberation of 
several South American territories from Spain at the beginning of the 
19th century and Chávez’s own rhetorical inspiration, insisted that 
those he was trying to carry with him were not just the criollos, of 
Spanish descent. There were Indians and Africans also, and each group 
had been affected by its relations with the others. The new republics 
should not therefore try to imitate what was being achieved in Europe 
and the United States. ‘If we do not invent,’ Bolívar’s tutor, Simón 
Rodríguez, had impressed on him, ‘we err,’ and Chávez repeats the 
point. One can nonetheless see why the European left has the hopes it 
has. All three presidents are in favour of the poor and against foreign 
support for the rich. And Chávez, who, his opponents like to say, has 
no brain in his tongue, does like the old language. He has mentioned 
Trotsky, talked of teaching Marxism, and after his recent re-election, 
announced a ‘socialism for the 21st century’. One can also see why 
liberals are nervous. There is no doubt about the elections. Each 
president gained between 53 and 63 per cent of a large vote, and apart 
from some doubts about null and spoiled ballots in the second round in 
Ecuador, where voting is compulsory, the process in each was declared 
to have been fair. Each government also respects civil and political 
rights. Constitutionally, however, they are all unsettled. Morales, the 
former leader of coca growers who comes from one of the two large 
indigenous groups in Bolivia, and Correa, a dissident finance minister 
in the short-lived previous administration who describes himself as a 
Catholic humanist, both face obstruction from their congresses. Both 
are fighting to reduce their opponents’ constitutional advantages. 
Chávez has been more fortunate. He was able to promulgate a new 
constitution in his first year. This extended the scope of referendums, 
ended the exclusion of the military from politics, and increased the 
power of the centre. But he does not now think it enough. There is to 
be a referendum in December on moving in a more determinedly 
‘socialist’ direction, and the assembly has meanwhile granted him power 
of decree until next summer. He is, for the moment, secure. The other 
two, as yet, are not.

Tariq Ali’s account of Venezuela and Bolivia is exuberant and good to 
read. Diana Raby’s account of how Chávez’s Venezuela has come to be is 
one of the best (she is an academic as well as an activist). And the 
Crisis Group’s fair-mindedness is admirable. But the languages of 
socialist hope and liberal fear, although not absent from Latin America 
itself, do not there connote what they do to us. The criollos were 
Catholic, and their republican ambitions, like their opponents’, have 
inclined more to the irreducibly collectivist conceptions of what 
Benjamin Constant, lamenting the French Revolution, called ‘ancient 
liberty’. The new radicals, like Bolívar, who was Constant’s 
contemporary and admired what had been happening in France, take this 
to mean the liberty of an inclusive nation, and give it a socialist 
cast. But until the late 20th century, the criollos’ refined sense of 
racial difference (made all the more acute by much cross-breeding) led 
them to keep active citizenship, and in practice much of the vote, to 
themselves. Unlike those who made the new United States, they also 
continued to be mercantilist, disposed to extract wealth rather than 
produce it. The result was a defensive oligarchic greed. In some 
countries, this until recently remained much as it had been. Landed 
classes and mine owners presided over excluded populations of poor 
workers on large estates, small plots and in the mining towns. In 
others, the collapse of markets for beef, coffee, metals and other 
primary products at the end of the 1920s, and the consequent loss of 
income to buy things from abroad, prompted industrialisation and a 
‘modernising’ politics, in which aspiring industrial and commercial 
classes co-opted new working classes, all mainly white, to fight the 
barons. But the rural workers and miners, indigenous peoples and those 
of mixed descent, were still ignored. In all except Mexico, which had 
had a revolution before the Depression, the military – conservative in 
the unreconstructed states, disposed to be progressive in those that 
were changing, and not infrequently divided in them all – took it on 
themselves to be the guardians of republican integrity. Politics 
remained a series of more or less continuous battles within the criollo 
elite.

The elite in Bolivia ruled over a large indigenous population working 
mines or scrabbling a poor living on the western altiplano, mestizos 
working on estates in the east, and migrants, like Morales’s family, 
growing coca there. In Ecuador, the exportable resource has been oil 
(the country is Latin America’s second exporter), but that has employed 
few; for the rest of the inhabitants, which includes a smaller 
proportion of indigenous people, the story has been much the same as in 
Bolivia. In both countries, a fall in commodity prices in the 1980s and 
1990s, and debts that became accordingly difficult to service, led 
governments to accede to the disciplines of the international financial 
institutions and rising destitution. The criollo governments fell apart 
in swift succession and the excluded, moved in part by what was 
happening in Venezuela, began to demand a voice.

Venezuela had been an unimportant territory for the Spaniards, a mere 
captaincy. There was little good land and no gold or silver. What there 
was was abundant oil, which American companies found around Lake 
Maracaibo in 1918. (The indigenous people, who lived in huts over the 
edge of the lake, used to set fires on its surface. It was the lights 
from these that reminded Spanish sailors of Venice. Hence the 
territory’s name.) By 1935 and the death of Juan Vicente Gómez, a canny 
caudillo who was to arrange for exploitation by Standard Oil and Royal 
Dutch Shell, the country’s notional income per head was the highest in 
Latin America. Gómez’s civilian successors, overcome by a military coup 
in 1948, recovered their authority ten years later and agreed a pact by 
which left and right of centre parties would aim, through elections, to 
alternate in government, denying the armed forces (and ‘communists’) 
access to it. This political class proceeded to take large amounts of 
state revenue for itself (oil production was nationalised in 1976), 
made a few industrial investments (metal companies produced trade 
unions that are now hostile to Chávez’s championing of the poor), and 
extended a placating patronage. In the mid-1980s, however, the price of 
oil fell, borrowings made against future revenue could not be repaid, 
the patronage dried up, and in February 1989, faced with rising prices 
imposed in an emergency agreement with the IMF, the poor came down from 
the barrios in Caracas to riot. Chávez had already in 1982 sworn 
‘horror a la oligarquía,’ and from inside the army began to conspire. 
In 1992, he attempted a coup; other young officers tried and failed 
again later in the year. Discharged from the service, and released 
early from prison, he decided to stand for president and in 1998 he 
won.

The once comfortable elite, having run a country which they regarded as 
their own, and believing that even if Chávez were to win, they could 
adopt the dollar and continue to run it, were soon furious, and still 
are. His constituency, the poor in the countryside and those who had 
come to the cities hoping for pickings in the former prosperity, were 
ecstatic, and remain so. Personally compelling and a gifted 
rhetorician, Chávez fanned a discontent that had become all the more 
intense because the promise of wealth had been so suddenly snatched 
away. His support has since been augmented by many in the middle class 
and some now from the old elite who have become persuaded by his 
sincerity, his energy and his novel refusal to profit financially from 
his position.

It is a distinctively Latin American story. Yet a comparison does come 
to mind. Thucydides said of Pericles, the political general who 
extended the ‘ancient liberty’ in Athens in the 440s and 430s BC, that 
he had ‘advantages in abundance’. Indeed he reported Pericles himself 
as having told the Athenians that he had them all: an ability to see 
what to do, the capacity to expound it to an audience, unimpeachable 
patriotism, and an indifference to personal gain. Pericles was a rich 
patrician from a distinguished line. Chávez, part criollo, part Indian, 
part African (the three constituencies of the Venezuela that Bolívar 
described), shares his gifts. He is the son of a poor primary-school 
teacher in the provinces; he joined the army, he says, to play baseball 
in the military leagues. Athens had a wide empire, whose tribute it had 
to strain to maintain. Chávez has oil, which once he had managed to 
wrest Petróleos de Venezuela away from directors who favoured American 
buyers and their own pockets (eventually firing them on television in 
terms borrowed from baseball), he has not had to defend against anyone. 
And the tribute of the markets (the US remains the largest) meanwhile 
rose from $9 a barrel in 1999 to more than $60 in 2006 and touched $80 
this summer. Both Pericles and Chávez, however, can be seen to have 
been carried away by their own success. Pericles insisted that Athens 
could win against Sparta; yet his very insistence suggested that he 
knew the risks, and was anxious.

Chávez is showing something of the same anxiety. His government wisely 
budgets on an oil price of $29 a barrel. And although it continues 
optimistically to assume an annual production half as large again as 
Petróleos can presently manage (the infrastructure groans from lack of 
earlier investment), it still has sums at its command, not least from 
reserves in the central bank, that few revolutionary regimes anywhere, 
of any stripe, have been able even to imagine. It has been spending its 
revenue generously. Adult literacy is complete, there are new schools 
across the country, and excellent free medical facilities, staffed in 
many cases by doctors from Cuba sent as payment in kind for oil; basic 
foods, with some reluctance from suppliers, are sold at subsidised 
prices; poor housewives are paid for keeping house and people owed 
pensions are again receiving them. Getting around the country is also 
becoming much easier: railways are being built, urban transport is 
improving, and one meets roadworks in the remotest places. Most 
important, the government is trying to increase productive employment. 
With help from Petróleos, it has spent nearly $900 million on 130 
‘nuclei of endogenous development’ in manufacturing, agriculture and 
tourism, and a further $400 million to encourage more than six thousand 
co-operatives. It is also attempting to redistribute uncultivated land. 
To encourage these initiatives, it has announced the creation of 12,000 
local communal councils. Some corporations are also being nationalised. 
The only price of this so far is an overvalued currency, which makes 
imports cheap and exports, apart from oil, too expensive.

It is too soon to decide how successful these moves will be. Poorer 
Venezuelans used to greet one in resentful mock deference. Now, they 
look one in the eye, tease and laugh. Chávez himself is adored when he 
appears before them. Roars greet his jibes at ‘Satan’ in the White 
House (an insult to the devil, Correa has said), and the Copa América 
was a popular coup. He also seeks support abroad. He has bought 
Argentinian bonds, provided cheap power to northern Brazil, offered to 
refine Ecuador’s oil at cost, is selling Venezuela’s own at 
below-market prices to Bolivia and several other countries in the 
continent as well as to the state of Massachusetts and the Greater 
London Authority. He has started a continental television station to 
counter CNN and connect with Al Jazeera. He has resisted an American 
free trade area, proposed a Banco del Sur to displace what is in fact 
the now reduced influence of the IMF and World Bank, expanded trade 
with China, which is investing in the extraction of heavy oils in the 
Orinoco basin, made co-operative arrangements with Iran, and opened a 
string of embassies in Africa. He wants, he says, to encourage a 
world-wide counter-hegemony, ‘outposts of tyranny’ and all, to the 
United States.

Chávez, in short, never stops. And like Pericles towards the end of 
what had been 15 years in office, he knows that he now cannot. In the 
constitutional changes for which he will seek approval in December, 
there will be provision for presidents to be re-elected more than once. 
He needs more time to use his power, and el pueblo are at once the 
people he wants to use it for and those whose support he needs in order 
to sustain it. To achieve what he has to, above all to get more of the 
poor properly employed, he believes that he has to stay in office until 
at least 2021. There is a case. There is no obvious successor and 
institutions are still weak. But he is anxious. He has brought the army 
into the ministries and other public work, revived the National Guard, 
and created a separate Territorial Guard. There is also a new Francisco 
de Miranda Front, ten thousand young ‘foot soldiers of the revolution’ 
who are for the moment involved in social ‘missions’. They were trained 
in Cuba and, the government says, they are to be given Kalashnikovs to 
defend the regime if they have to. These forces are all directly 
responsible to the executive. So too are the community councils, who 
may thereby undermine the discretion of provincial governors and local 
mayors. Checks provided in the existing constitution – by the courts, 
an independent comptroller general and an ombudsman – will remain, but 
these can already seem not to be quite as independent as they might be.

Chávez’s re-election last December has been called a landslide. Yet 
more than a third of voters cast against him. The political opposition, 
although fierce, can still be brainless. These escuálidos, as he calls 
them, ‘the squalid ones’ – they have come to rather relish the name – 
were foolish to let one of their media, the grotesque Radio Caracas 
Televisión, lie its way through an attempted coup in 2002 and continue 
to lie; in May, Chávez refused to renew the station’s public licence, 
though it remains online. The opposition was also self-pityingly silly 
to boycott the assembly elections at the end of 2005. But it may not be 
impotent for ever. Its more sensible members, like the provincial 
governor who stood against Chávez last December, see that the poor have 
now to be included, and only 15 per cent or so of electors would have 
to switch their vote to defeat Chávez at the next election. He says 
that he would accept that. But even if he were to, the Crisis Group and 
others wonder whether the new armed forces might not see themselves as 
responsible for continuing the revolution. Those leaders in Latin 
America now who are constrained to be more moderate – Lula in Brazil, 
and the beleaguered Michelle Bachelet in Chile – may privately hope 
that this revolution will fail, or at least that like Daniel Ortega, 
elected again last November for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Chávez 
will suffer a social democratic conversion. The more radical, like 
Morales and Correa, will hope that he succeeds, but neither they, nor 
any of Chávez’s more distant new friends, will be in a position to 
affect what happens. Like Pericles in extending the popular democracy 
in Athens, he has woken a tiger that he has at present no choice but to 
ride alone. Socialists elsewhere will no doubt continue to enthuse, but 
Venezuela will in the end be on its own.

Geoffrey Hawthorn has just retired as a professor of politics at 
Cambridge.

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Sean Jacobs
Blogging as Leo Africanus at http://theleoafricanus.blogspot.com