World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [77]
32
The coup that momentarily deposed Chavez in April 2002 was a classic effort led by a market-dominant minority to retaliate against a democratically elected government threatening their wealth and power. Although supported at first by trade union leaders and skilled labor, the regime that was briefly installed to replace Chavez “looked like it had come from the country club.” Interim president Pedro Carmona, a wealthy white, was head of the country’s largest business association. Union representatives were completely excluded from positions of authority. “All of them oligarchs,” scoffed a dark-skinned street vendor, referring to the country’s wealthy white minority. “Couldn’t they have appointed one person like us?” The new leadership was “pure business”; its exclusion of anyone but “country club” elites as well as its attempt to dissolve the democratically elected national congress turned even supporters of the coup against it.
33
To the dismay of the Bush administration, which hailed the coup as a “victory for democracy,” the high-handed actions of the Carmona regime combined with Chavez’s still-considerable support among Venezuela’s poor majority returned Chavez to power with stunning speed. But in many cases, as the next chapter will show, market-dominant minorities have much more success in their collisions with poor, democratic majorities.
CHAPTER 6
Backlash against Democracy
Crony Capitalism and Minority Rule
When a poor democratic majority collides with a market-dominant minority, the majority does not always prevail. Instead of a backlash against the market, there is a backlash against democracy. Often, this antidemocracy backlash takes the form of “crony capitalism”: corrupt, symbiotic alliances between indigenous leaders and a market-dominant minority. For the global marketplace, this is a cozy solution. The indigenous regime protects the market-dominant minority’s wealth and businesses. In turn, the World Bank and IMF supply loans. In the short run the result is a boom in foreign investment, economic growth, and riches for the rulers and their cronies. At the same time, however, the country’s inner furies begin to boil. Sooner or later—and it is usually sooner—the situation explodes.
In the late 1990s, members of Sierra Leone’s rebel force, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), often gave their victims a choice. Farmers could either rape their own daughters or have both hands cut off. Young girls could either have their fathers shot or their mothers and sisters burned alive. The mass butchery suffered by the people of Sierra Leone is most startling because children perpetrated much of it. High on cocaine, children as young as six wielded machetes, following orders to chop off fingers, hands, arms, legs, and ears. In the January 1999 invasion of Freetown—known as Operation No Living Thing among the RUF—the rebels first killed all the patients in the hospitals to make room for their own injured. They then slaughtered an estimated six thousand civilians, raped thousands of women, and hacked off the limbs of thousands more. The central villains behind the mass murders and mutilations include RUF leader Foday Sankoh and apparently Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi and Liberian president Charles Taylor.
1
In the West we tend to think of Sierra Leone as a country where modernization and globalization have not yet penetrated. But Sierra Leone reached this state of savagery in part as a result of modernization and globalization. Sierra Leone was a classic case of the collision between markets and democracy in the face of a market-dominant minority—here, the entrepreneurial Lebanese, who for decades controlled the country’s diamond mines. There was a backlash against democracy, an extended period of crony capitalism, and then the inevitable