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Venezuela: Revolutionaries and a Country on the Edge

By Johann Hari
The Independent (UK)
August 25, 2005

Venezuelans were hardly surprised by an American preacher's call to kill their President. After all, the US funded a coup attempt against him.

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It is harder to see why the opposition loathe Chavez with such snarling ferocity that they want a foreign power to intervene. Opposition spokespeople from Primera Justicia, one of the main anti-Chavez parties, offer me polite but vague formulations - soft sentences that do not seem to explain the intensity of their hatred. I decide instead to meet ordinary anti-Chavistas, so I head for Las Mercedes where Caracas's air-conditioned restaurants are. I soon find Mario and Ellie Novo Chavez (Armani suit, Donna Karan dress). I ask Mario if is related to the President. "Please! We are about to eat, don't make us vomit!" Ellie laughs. She explains that Chavez is "a fucking communist", a man who looks to "Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein" for inspiration. Mario is about to change his surname, because he thinks it is bad for his business as an IT technician to be associated even nominally with "that psycho" . He says: "There are really only two classes in this country - the educated, and the stupid. The poor are poor because they are incredibly ignorant. But Chavez tells them it is because we are taking the oil money. It's ridiculous! He is giving the poor money for nothing." Yet there is an irony here: while lambasting the poor as ignorant, it turns out the couple are entirely ignorant of life in their own country. They have never been to a barrio, and they say I am "insane" to visit one.

"They don't have roads in the barrios! You won't be able to get there," Mario says, bizarrely. "You will be kidnapped and killed!" Ellie adds. I remembered what one maid in Barquisimeto, in the south of the country, told me: "We know how they live because we are in their houses every day, cleaning their homes and raising their children. But the rich have no idea, no idea at all, how we live." But Ellie interrupts my thought, declaring: "Please - let's not talk about Chavez any more! He is in every conversation in Venezuela, and I am sick of it!"

How much of the division in Venezuela is based on race? Although there are exceptions, the wealthy elite tends to be white, and the skin tone gets darker the farther you go into the barrios. In the newspapers - which are all anti-Chavez - the depictions of the President in cartoons look like Ku Klux Klan propaganda, wildly exaggerating the thick curliness of his hair and the indigenous slant to his features. "Oh, there was no problem with racism before Chavez," Ellie tells me. "You know, it used to be a sign of affection to call somebody el negro. If you had a slow member of your family, that's what you would say. But now, since Chavez, people have begun to think it is racist!"

Across the opposition heartlands, people talk like this - and worse. The wealthy seem to have whipped themselves into a hysteria, convinced that their maids, their police and their president are going to turn on them and lynch them in their homes. The media carefully reinforces this impression, creating a fantasyland for the top 20 per cent to scream in. Yet if you ask them for facts - actual examples of persecution or dictatorial behaviour - they either offer demonstrably false urban myths, or declare: "It will happen soon!" It is true that the medical missions are staffed by Cuban doctors, who Chavez has exchanged with Castro in return for access to Venezuela's oil.

The opposition has seized on this as "evidence" that Chavez wants to make Venezuela into a Castroite dictatorship. But his supporters insist he is taking the good parts of the Cuban model - generous health and education services - while eschewing the pernicious parts, like the liquidation of free speech, elections and the freedom of the poor to make and sell goods. But you would not know - from what the opposition says in every Venezuelan newspaper, or from the propaganda of Pat Robertson - that Venezuelan elections are open and fair, that Chavez has been approved in polls or referenda no less than seven times, and there is more substantial free speech than in Britain. In Venezuela, people can (and, every night, do) call on television for the President to be killed. Indeed, Chavez has been so reluctant to commit a crackdown that the leaders of the coup are still free and unpunished. Venezuelans are still nervously waiting for them to return, in the form of another coup - or a CIA bullet.

At 2am on one of Caracas's party-heavy mornings, I head again for Plaza Bolivar's hot corners, below the parrots that sit in the trees. I ask Zaid Cortez, 27, what will happen if Chavez is assassinated. "Venezuela will never go back to being governed by Los esqualidos. We won't go back to being a country where the petrol money is used for a minority and not for the barrios. So what will happen if Chavez is killed? Civil war. We are ready."

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