World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [76]
Like Bolivia’s Amerindian rebel leader Mallku and Ecuador’s Villavicencio, Chavez generated mass support by attacking Venezuela’s “rotten” largely white elites. “Oligarchs tremble,” he campaigned to great, agitated crowds. “The plan of battle” was to “take every piece of space by assault.” Chavez’s platform could not have been more anti-market. He relentlessly attacked foreign investors and Venezuela’s business elite, calling them “enemies of the people,” “squealing pigs,” and rich “degenerates.” He lashed out at “savage capitalism,” describing Cuba as “a sea of happiness.” “I will bring about the end of the latifundia system,” he repeatedly declared, “or stop calling myself Hugo Chavez.” Over and over, Chavez has said that he is not proposing “anything like Communism.” Rather, he intends “urgently” to expropriate the “idle” land of the agrarian elite and redistribute it to “the Venezuelan people.”
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After taking power, Chavez changed the country’s name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in honor of the revolutionary hero Simón Bolívar. He passed a new constitution, hailing it as the most democratic in the world. The right to food, he proclaimed, was more important than corporate profit. Displaying distinctly autocratic tendencies, Chavez disbanded the “worm-eaten” Congress and Supreme Court. He stopped privatization of the oil sector, “outlawed” large landowners, and guaranteed free education and worker benefits for “housewives.”
30 He “decreed” almost fifty anti-market laws. In 2001, Chavez threatened to nationalize all banks that refuse—in accordance with one of Chavez’s new laws—to grant credit to small farmers and small businesses. “Not only can we nationalize any bank,” declared Chavez, “any banker who does not abide by the law could go to jail.”
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Chavez swept to electoral victory not by offering any affirmative economic policy. Rather, in Naím’s words, he “catered to the emotional needs of a deeply demoralized nation,” employing an “inchoate but very effective folksy mixture of Bolivarian sound-bites, Christianity, collectivist utopianism, baseball and indigenous cosmogony, peppered with diatribes against the oligarchy, neoliberalism, foreign conspiracies, and globalization.” That Chavez would even try to play the ethnic card—and proudly describe himself as “the Indian from Barinas”—is remarkable. Unlike Bolivia or Ecuador, Venezuela has only a tiny Amerindian population and, despite the glaring disproportionate whiteness of the wealthy minority, many middle- and upper-class Venezuelans will still insist that their country has “no ethnic divisions” and that to see otherwise is to impose a lens of North American racism. Ironically, given Chavez’s constant railing against globalization, it was one of globalization’s major components—democracy—that allowed Chavez to convert generations of bitterness and frustration into a powerful political engine. Stirred to political consciousness by the demagogic Chavez, Venezuela’s 80 percent dark-skinned majority, most of whom live below the poverty line, voted for a leader whose nationalization and other anti-market policies seem to Westerners utterly irrational.
Unfortunately, democratization in Venezuela ran smack against free markets. Chavez’s antibusiness policies have had a devastating effect on the economy. As soon as Chavez took office, Venezuela’s wealthy whites, fearful of confiscation, whisked away more than $8 billion out of the country, mostly to the United States. As Chavez’s incompetent state interventions accelerated, foreign investment fled. The real battle, however, occurred in the oil industry, which generates 80 percent of Venezuela’s export revenues and represents the country’s lifeblood. Although technically state-owned, Venezuela’s oil company PDVSA has for years been professionally run by members of the business elite—“oligarchs,” in Chavez’s view. In spring 2002, Chavez fired PDVSA’s president, Gen. Guaicaipuro Lameda, widely admired by foreign investors for his efficient steering