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Chavez's brand of democracy

By Lori Zett
The Philadelphia Inquirer
August 25, 2005

"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."
- Pat Robertson

Today, charges that Venezuela is being "Cubanized" are constantly and shrilly repeated in newspapers and on radio and TV talk shows, in Venezuela as well as in the United States, with the extreme call by televangelist Pat Robertson to assassinate Chavez. What are the causes of these accusations, and what is the truth?

Chavez, with his unmeasured speech, his political inexperience, and his unusual, almost filial relationship to Fidel Castro, is the first source of these charges. A second source is various groups who feel their interests - forged over the last four decades when an alliance between the ruling parties and the privileged classes dominated the national scene - are being threatened. Finally, there is paranoiac fear, the toxic residual of the Cold War, easily reawakened and manipulated.

Chavez has a long history of rejecting the kind of capitalism that has increased poverty and dependency in third-world countries. Coming himself from the lower classes, Chavez uses the language of the people, which at times is harsh, coarse, and even vulgar. His provocative discourse, his ridicule of the upper classes, his references to leftist ideology, untutored and shallow in its conception, have earned the animosity of sectors of the population that were initially on his side and of others whose neutrality he should have worked harder to conserve.

As Teodoro Petkoff, minister of finance during the last term of former President Rafael Caldera's and now editor-in-chief of the newspaper TalCual, said: "Chavez's primitive and elemental discourse as well as some of his political behavior, generated fears, especially in the middle class, which voted for him in significant proportions. This made it possible for the political groups that were displaced in 1998 [when Chavez won the election], to manipulate these fears from the wildest anticommunist perspective."

Clearly, having governed abominably and with no constructive solutions, the opposition has reverted to anticommunist fear-mongering. The wildest accusations are accepted as fact. For example, people are sending their children out of Venezuela because, as one person said, "the government is about to take away parental rights, just as they did in Cuba." There is no such law in the planning stages; in fact, there is no such law in Cuba, and yet people have been whipped up to such panic and distrust by the media, that it is impossible for them to disbelieve such rumors.

The fact is that Chavez has a solid basis of social programs. For example, Barrio Adentro, a free health program for the poor, with 5,000 medical modules that dispense free primary medical treatment, house calls, and medicines. Barrio Adentro, and other programs for the poor such as Mercal, distributor of subsidized food, the women's bank, and mini-credits, are all more than just statistics. They are programs that focus the power of the government on the previously ignored and invisible: the poor, both urban and rural, who were always marginalized, and who had to be content with crumbs that fell off the table, are now suddenly the focal point of the government and the economy.

Educational programs are all community based, participatory, and empowering.

Consider such programs as Mission Robinson, an initiative whose goal is to eradicate illiteracy; Mission Ribas, a high school equivalency program; and Mission Cultura, a service-learning, university-degree program established to prepare future teachers.

Chavez, as Reinaldo Quijada, political coordinator of Clase Media en Positivo (a national group of professionals who support these programs), points out, "has sought to reinforce popular participation and community leadership. It is from within this community leadership that the great moral reserve for advancement lies."

I don't believe it will be possible, even if that was Chavez's goal, to take democracy, especially participatory democracy, away from the people who have finally been allowed to taste it. In addition, unlike Cuba, which moved from the extreme right with Batista, to the extreme left with Castro, Venezuela deposed its last dictator in 1958 and has been practicing democracy, however flawed, since then. Neither the people, nor the military would accept a dictatorship today. What Chavez promises, and is today achieving, is a socially conscious democratic government. It is time for people in the United States to take notice.

Lori Zett (lorizett@yahoo.com) is an adjunct professor at Temple University; she lived in Venezuela for 12 years and spent this summer there, interviewing people and visiting barrios and missions.

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