Chavez seems to have been perhaps the most able politician of our times. According to Carroll, he managed to (1) rewrite history so that previous leaders seemed terrible by comparison, (2) take credit for anything that was going well, (3) duck responsibility for anything that was going badly, (4) continue to get elected in reasonably fair elections. Here are some samples relating to Chavez’s political skill:
Every government leader uses the media to justify and persuade, project and burnish, but none like Chávez. He was on television almost every day for hours at a time, invariably live, with no script or teleprompter, mulling, musing, deciding, ordering. … On days off you could leave your apartment, take the metro across town, pay utility bills, meet a friend for coffee, buy groceries, pick up laundry, come home, and find him still talking.
Chávez and his scholars were even bolder in rearranging the twentieth century. Traditionally, Venezuelans were taught that the uprising against Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958 ended the reign of dictators (so rushed was his flight to exile he left $2 million in a suitcase on the runway) and ushered in multiparty democracy. Chávez needed to reverse this sequence of virtue; otherwise how could he be the nation’s savior? Thus he half rehabilitated a U.S.-backed brute who murdered and jailed thousands, repeatedly praising his public works, his discipline, his patriotism. “I think General Pérez Jiménez was the best president Venezuela had in a long time,” he declared. “He was much better than Rómulo Betancourt [an elected president], much better than all of those others. They hated him because he was a soldier.” The democracy that followed the dictator was cast as the true villain: an electoral charade to dupe the people while oligarchs looted the country. Chávez’s family history was reordered to fit the new official truth. His father had been a proud member of COPEI, one of the “putrid” ruling parties, and despite his modest teacher’s salary all six of his children went on to college education and decent careers. The state provided subsidized housing (Chávez lived in one with his grandmother) and free, rickety education and health care, making Venezuela South America’s richest country until populism and corruption rotted the system in the 1980s. All this became heresy. The comandante, the nation was told a thousand times, was born in extreme poverty, a mud hut, and grew up in a venal, vicious system. “It punished the poor. Spat on the poor.” Thus his 1992 coup against Carlos Andrés Pérez was not a military conspiracy but the cry of an oppressed people. School textbooks were amended so the coup became “a rebellion that changed the destiny of the republic.”
The Liberator’s sacred work would be completed with socialist and communal values replacing capitalist individualism. The comandante called it the Great National Moral and Illuminating Journey. “Education, morals, and enlightenment in all spheres, everywhere, at all times.” He had spoken of this upon taking power, and by 2007 he had formalized it into an official campaign, inaugurating moral and enlightenment training brigades and creating a presidential council to guide schools and universities toward the new consciousness. The campaign did improve lives and elevate learning through literacy programs, which reached rheumy-eyed grandmothers in the slums, and expanded education, which let poor students stay in school and move on to free tuition at Bolivarian universities. The comandante, a talented didact, urged followers to read history, philosophy, and poetry, brandishing his latest favorite tome as an example. … Housewives and taxi drivers found themselves debating colonial history, social consciousness, and the global economy in communal councils and evening classes. Teenagers who normally would have dropped out enrolled in colleges to study architecture, engineering, and literature. A new state-run film studio, Villa del Cine, contributed by producing social documentaries and costume dramas about Venezuelan history. State television talk shows discussed gender equality, the rights of indigenous people, and the role of trade unions. All this unfolded, noted the comandante’s supporters, while the West hiked education fees and wallowed in shallow materialism.
What mattered, as the [2012] election neared, was having the means to confect a boom. Chávez ordered big pay raises for state workers—he was most generous with the army—and a blitz of new payments to pensioners, mothers, children, and students. For the first time the money supply exceeded $100 billion. To tamp down inflation, which was the hemisphere’s highest, the government fixed the prices of fifteen thousand goods, everything from coffee to toothpaste, based upon “scientific analysis” of what constituted fair prices. Soldiers and civilians in red T-shirts patrolled warehouses and stores to ensure that businesses complied, even if it drove them into bankruptcy. At the same time, ports worked overtime offloading containers from around the world to keep shelves stocked. It was like shaking a bottle of champagne and holding down the cork. Inflation and devaluation waited down the line, but in the short term the strategy worked. People had money in their pockets. And many, for the first time in their lives, had hopes of a decent roof over their heads. Venezuelans expected their government to supply cheap housing, but the comandante had built less than his predecessors. Three million people—almost a tenth of the population—lacked adequate accommodation. Thus was hatched the Great Housing Mission, a scheme to build two million houses within five years. “I will not rest in the quest to solve this drama inherited from the curse of capitalism,” said the comandante. It was impossible to build so many houses so fast, not least because nationalized cement and steel factories were sputtering and private contractors feared building anything that could be expropriated. So the government paid firms from Belarus, Russia, China, and Iran inflated prices to throw up apartment blocks all over the country. They also painted slums—those visible from the motorways—bright red, yellow, and blue, Venezuela’s national colors. By mid-2012, the comandante claimed to have reached 96 percent of the housing target for that period. Every few days he or a minister appeared on television to hand keys to a jubilant citizen. The 96 percent number was fanciful, but many homes had indeed been built, or at least redecorated, and it was enough to give hope to those on the waiting list. The list was the key. The government bombarded the population with text messages urging it to register for a home. Millions flocked to mobile registration centers where they received receipts with a name, the date, a registration number, and a stamp. A well-off person cannot understand what it means to possess such a slip of paper, cannot appreciate the solemnity with which a poor person memorizes it, makes copies, and guards it as something precious, a potential passport to comfort and dignity. A vote for Chávez would keep it valid. The list did not just give hope—it gave the government a formidable database come election day.
The rate of muggings, kidnappings, and murders exploded, spreading fear like shrapnel. The state lost the ability to keep citizens safe, to protect them from each other. It was baffling. The maximum leader who liked to micromanage everything lost control of society’s most fundamental requirement, security, wringing his hands while criminals shot, stabbed, and strangled with impunity. It was not supposed to be like this. Poverty was falling and new social missions were bringing services to neglected barrios to ameliorate, as the government put it, decades of “savage capitalism.” Chávez’s opponents were also stumped. They called him a dictator, but real dictators—Trujillo, Pérez Jiménez, Fidel, Kim Jong Il—kept streets safe for ordinary people. The great journey shuddered to a halt because towns and cities were quarantined by fear. … The mayhem undermined official rhetoric about moral renewal and the poor being repositories of virtue and authentic national spirit. The government tried blaming the violence on U.S.-backed Colombian mercenaries out to destabilize the revolution, then on capitalism’s legacy of individualism. It deployed the national guard to bolster police, but the violence swirled around the bewildered soldiers, just as it did the police, and they returned to barracks. … Normally, all this would devastate a president’s support, especially if he was left-wing and could be painted as “soft on crime.” Chávez, to his credit, did not lunge for the death penalty and violent crackdowns, perennially popular but ineffective remedies in Latin America and the Caribbean. And still he managed to escape political damage. It was astonishing. His ratings held up while voters were held up, tied up, cut up, broken into, held down, gunned down, and buried. Chávez achieved this feat by doing something against his nature: he shut up. On crime, which polls said concerned voters more than any other issue, his lips were sealed. Caracas could endure a particularly grisly weekend, more than sixty dead, convoys of funeral corteges, and he had nothing to say. Thugs could abduct ranchers in Táchira, shoot police in Zulia, and rape in Amazonas without presidential comment. Grieving mothers with banners and whistles could block motorways in Valencia demanding justice for slain children, and from Miraflores silence. The comandante simply refused to own the problem. In muteness he sought and found refuge.
If Chávez had been a true dictator, the final act would have been predictable: a slide further into denial until the fantasy realm unraveled and enraged subjects booted the bewildered, pathetic figure into oblivion. His enemies scripted the imagined epilogue with various endings—Chávez boarding a plane to exile in Cuba, Chávez in handcuffs, Chávez forlorn and forgotten at the family ranch in Barinas. Each version involved disgrace and comeuppance. But here his enemies themselves succumbed to fantasy. However much they shouted “Tyrant!” and willed Chávez to act accordingly, he remained a stubborn, indefatigable hybrid: an elected autocrat. His rule stopped well short of dictatorship. Repression was mostly light and selective, involving threats, fines, and jail terms. Opponents organized freely and, with the help of a shrill (albeit shrinking) private media, fought elections. That Chávez hijacked state institutions and resources did not change the fact that people could vote against him.
According to Carroll, Chavez promised the same things as leaders in other countries:
Assisted by a big rise in oil prices, Chavez delivered on some of these promises. For example, he brought in 20,000+ doctors from Cuba and expanded health care delivery. But his efforts were stymied due primarily to two factors: (1) demographics, (2) incompetent administration.
Venezuela’s wealth is derived primarily from natural resources, such as oil and farmland. Carroll points out “When Hugo Chávez was born in 1954, Venezuela’s population was five million. By 1999 it was an estimated twenty-one million, with 80 percent crammed into crowded towns and hillside slums.” (And by 2012 it had risen to 30 million.) In other words, a fixed amount of natural wealth divided by 30 million did not go as far as when divided
. The book has a flawed structure, jumping back and forth across the 14-year period during which Chavez served as Venezuela’s elected president. There is also some redundancy that a good editor could have eliminated. However, the details, gathered by an Irish journalist who was the Guardian’s correspondent in Venezuela for about six years, make it a worthwhile effort.