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By Root 1622 0

missions directed at their barrio had not delivered. While the free food and money brought about a decrease in absolute poverty during the period in which the money was coming, the arrival-city residents complained that nothing lasting was being built. This was often literally true. Housing construction never really got going; 150,000 homes were meant to be built and fewer than 35,000 were, many of them social-housing apartment blocks that didn’t suit the needs of arrival-city residents. There was never any effort to give the arrival cities a chance to determine what housing suited their needs. Such long-term investments never became a priority, and, in fact, declined: average per capita levels of public spending on housing dropped by a third between the 1990–98 period (against which Chávez had campaigned) and his own 1999–2004 period.20

As for the education programs, these have been shown in extensive studies to have produced no measurable decrease in illiteracy.21 The writer Tina Rosenberg, on a visit to a slum near Petare, was surprised to find how Mission Ribas functioned: “Political and ideological training, Ribas officials told me, is the top qualification for a facilitator. I attended a session for new Ribas students in Las Torres, a La Vega barrio near the top of the mountain. After Ribas officials told students how to register for classes and what would be expected of them, María Teresa Curvelo, the district coordinator, began a 90-minute talk about a referendum of great importance to the government … Afterward we rode down the mountain in a truck. When she got out, I thanked her. ‘Fatherland, Socialism or Death!’ she replied.”22

At the end of 2008, Petare rebelled. Along with many other poor urban neighborhoods, it turned against the revolution, defeating the Bolivarian candidates in regional elections and protesting against the failure of the social missions. Petare’s member of Parliament, Jesse Chacón, one of Chávez’s best-known allies, was defeated by Carlos Ocariz, a social-democratic opposition candidate. “There were people who got tired of the same old thing—it was payback,” said Arleth Argote, a 31-year-old voter, who had enthusiastically backed Chávez during the previous decade, then became frustrated as the arrival city failed to evolve into a thriving community. “People are tired of living poorly,” Ocariz told reporters. “It was a struggle between ideology and daily life.”23

What Chávez had done, in essence, was to replace existing state programs with his own “revolutionary” programs, staffed by volunteers and visiting Cuban professionals, and with an ideological, rather than an economic or social, mission. The largest sum of money was spent subsidizing consumption, which did not change the underlying conditions and often replaced programs that might have done so. As a result, rather than improving life, these programs actually caused a sharp decrease in the material conditions of the rural-migrant poor. Between 1999 and 2006, the proportion of Venezuelan families living on dirt floors almost tripled, from 2.5 percent to 6.8 percent; the percentage with no access to running water rose from 7.2 to 9.4 percent; the percentage of underweight babies rose from 8.4 percent to 9.1 percent.24 Despite the rhetoric, Chávez decreased the proportion of public spending on health, education, and housing compared with the years leading up to his attempted coup. Most tellingly, social inequality actually increased during the years of the revolution, according to the regime’s own estimates.‡ It has been described as a process of “hollow growth”: Even though the oil-dominated economy grew by 9 percent each year in Chávez’s first decade, it failed to create jobs, and half of Venezuela’s factories closed their doors between 1998 and 2008, mainly because price and foreign-exchange controls made it impossible to do business.

That view was reinforced by Edmond Saade, a generally regime-supporting scholar who runs the Caracas-based Datos research firm. He realized, a few years into the regime, that the money spilling into