Chavez: ten years on

Great avenues will again be opened through which will pass the free man to construct a better society.” These were some of the last words of Chilean president Salvador Allende. This, in his final radio broadcast as the presidential palace was bombed by the military forces of General Pinochet, as his democratically elected socialist government was overthrown by another violent US-sponsored coup in

Latin America.

In 2002 another US-sponsored coup was attempted in Venezuela against Hugo Chavez. After two days it failed under the overwhelming popular pressure of the poor forcing the coup to end in two days.

Venezuela can boast in the ten years since Hugo Chavez came to power a drop in extreme poverty from twenty-three percent to nine percent and twelve years of strong economic growth as well as great advances in health and education, including huge adult literacy programmes. Infant mortality has dropped from twenty-one to thirteen per thousand. It’s not just improvements in these living conditions but a change in the structure of society itself, cooperative societies have begun to spring up conducting economic activity at the base. The Bolivarian revolution is not a top-down statist bureaucracy but a national movement built on participation.

Hugo Chavez’s secret to success has been to politicise the poor in Venezuela’s hugely polarised society. A kind of socialist ski lift helps the poor to get down from the Barrios on the hill side into the centre of Caracas; this is Chavez’s base of support. He has provided them with subsidised food, free health and education. These people had been ignored by the elite in Venezuela’s oil rich economy. Articles from Venezuela’s constitution put to referendum by Chavez guaranteeing political and economic rights to citizens and indigenous communities are on many of the food products in Venezuela’s subsidised stores, this is the social justice combined with political empowerment.

However, while Venezuela may be a democratic country, Chavez is highly authoritarian; speaking on protest, he indicated that if it were to break any of the rules of protest, such as blocking up a road, the Interior Ministry can and ought to “spray them with [tear] gas and dissolve any disturbance. We cannot begin showing weakness as a government.”

Hugo Chavez wouldn’t put up with an S0.21 room occupation against him! He is the president of a democratically elected government which has had the opposition mount a coup against it, but the history of revolutions warns that too much power should never be put in the hands of one person. Human Rights Watch made a highly critical report on Chavez, who promptly expelled the group.

Bakunin, writing in the nineteenth century, criticised Marx’s idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat by saying that “If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself” – and the rest is history.

On the fifteenth of February a referendum will be held as to whether to end term limits on the president, potentially allowing Hugo Chavez to run after 2013. Chavez said of the referendum that it would be dangerous to lose the captain halfway through the ship’s voyage. (The voyage presumably ends when Chavez deems it so, requiring his own power maximisation.)

What is greatest about the Bolivarian revolution is that is has largely been a ship driving itself; a grass roots movement. Chavez will have been in power for fourteen years and perhaps it would be better for someone else to continue what Chavez has started, to inject fresh ideas and greater pluralism into

Venezuelan politics.