ReVista HARVARD REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICA • FALL 2008 Venezuela The Chávez Effect DAVID ROCKEFELLER CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY Editor’s LETTER Long, long ago before I ever saw the skyscrapers of Caracas, long before I ever fished for cachama in Barinas with Pedro and Aída, long before I ever dreamed of ReVista, let alone an issue on Venezuela, I heard a song. “Qué triste vive mi gente en sus casas de cartón,” my Dominican friends played over and over again on their pho- nographs in our New York barrio. “How sadly live my people in their cardboard houses.” I soon learned the song was by Venezuelan singer-composer Alí Primera, and the words stuck in my head as I trav- eled Central America, the Caribbean and Colombia as a budding journalist in the mid-70s. The song became a wrench- ing songtrack as I witnessed poverty and inequality throughout the region. When I went to Caracas for the first time in 1979, I was startled. I was living at the time in Colombia, where new cars and televisions were a luxury—even among the middle-class, where children slept on the streets with dogs and rags to keep them warm. In Caracas, the new cars whizzed by me; imported goods of all types were sold in the stores and hawked in the streets; bookstores and cultural centers burst with energy derived from the Venezuelan oil boom. Since then, I’ve visited Venezuela three times, the latest earlier this year in preparation for this issue of ReVista. Each time, I saw the skyscrapers, only later noticing the ring of cardboard houses on the hillsides, the houses Ali Primera so eloquently sang about. And each time, hearing about the immense wealth generated by oil, I hoped the inequality would disappear. “Hoy es lo mismo que ayer,” wrote Ali Primera. “Es un mundo sin mañana.” (“Today is the same as yesterday. It is a world without a tomorrow.”) On this last trip, I saw Venezuela through an editor’s lens. What was the effect of Hugo Chávez’s government and what difference was it making in the lives of those who lived in those cardboard boxes? Was there indeed a world “with tomorrow”? I came away with more questions than answers. Despite the tremendous hospitality of my many and diverse hosts, despite the endless conversations—or perhaps because of them—I began to feel like the blind man touching the elephant in the famous parable in which each man touches a different part of the elephant’s body and comes to a different conclusion about what an elephant really looks like. The language of hope, the language of despair, shortages and conspicuous consumption, empowerment and inequality, democracy and disenfranchisement, all mix together in a heady and dangerous brew of polarization. I never could have done this issue by myself. Today’s Venezuela is extremely complicated and conflicted; to achieve a multi-voiced forum, I needed a team. Four wise and talented experts on Venezuela have guided me through this pro- cess from beginning to end: Fernando Coronil, Jeffrey Cedeño, Jonathan Eastwood and Vicente Lecuna. Former DRCLAS Visiting Scholar Fernando Coronil is Presidential Professor at CUNY’s Graduate Center and author of The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela; Jeffrey Cedeño is Professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas; Jonathan Eastwood, a former Lecturer for Har- vard’s Committee on Social Studies, is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and author of The Rise of Nationalism in Venezuela; Vicente Lecuna is Chair of the Department of Literature at the Universi- dad Central de Venezuela. In this issue, we hear many voices interpreting what’s going on in Venezuela in anticipation of next month’s elec- tions. We’ve covered a variety of themes, ranging from oil and revolution to international relations, and also remember that Venezuela is more than just the Chávez effect; it’s orchids and architecture and music and art. As I write these words at my comfortable desk in Cambridge, rereading Arachu Castro’s powerful piece on her experience in the missions, I pause to reflect that it’s really not about us and our words, after all. Again, the lyrics and melody of Alí Primera’s song float through my brain, and I remember only a few months ago looking up on a dark Caracas night at the twinkling of the cardboard houses that are still on the hillsides. The question perhaps is, for the poor in Venezuela and for us all, is today the same as yesterday? And is there now a tomorrow? HARVARD REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICA • Volume VIII, Number 1 ReVista Published by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies DRCLAS: Merilee S. Grindle, Director • Kathy Eckroad, Associate Director EDITORIAL STAFF: June Carolyn Erlick, Editor in-Chief • Anita Safran, Copy Editor Annelie Berner, Clotilde Decker, Publications Interns SPECIAL EDITORIAL ADVISORS FOR THE ISSUE ON VENEZUELA: Fernando Coronil, Jeffrey Cedeño, Vicente Lecuna, Jonathan Eastwood 2COMMUNIQUÉ/www.2communique.com, Design • P & R Publications, Printer Cover photograph: 1730 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA 02138 Telephone: (617) 495–5428 Facsimile: (617) 496–2802 An image from the series SUBSCRIPTIONS AND READER FORUM: [email protected] “Camisetas Rojas.” Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. ISSN 1541–1443 Photograph by Sandro Oramas [email protected] INTRODUCTION Chávez’s Venezuela A New Magical State? BY FERNANDO CORONIL What do you think of Hugo Chávez? Are you for or against him? Venezuelans hardship but rising political expectations, is an emblematic moment of this inevitably confront these questions when we travel or meet people unfamiliar political betrayal. with our ideas. Unless one stands at one of the two opposite poles dominating Treating it as a popular rebellion, Chávez has transformed the Caracazo political life in Venezuela during this last decade, it is hard to answer them. into a founding threshold of the Bolivarian revolution. As if following the script A generalized Manichean mind-set tends to push and flatten every position of the great social revolutions of the modern period, Chávez is re-writing towards the extreme ends and nuanced views are often dismissed or cast the nation’s history through his prolific verbal production—as far as I know, aside as camouflaged versions of either pole. Can this issue ofReVista escape he speaks publicly more than any national leader ever anywhere. Yet his from this tendentious debate? Can it help readers explore these questions? words, perhaps because of their exuberant proliferation, serve not to just to Historical ruptures often divide people and polarize political discourse. reconstruct past history or to guide its new construction, but to substitute for it. Ever since Chávez was elected in 1998 by 56% of the vote, an already As they conjure up a world of their own, at times it is not clear whether one is polarized society has become even more painfully divided as Chávez has living through a real or a rhetorical revolution, perceiving the initial flowering not only talked revolution but has unleashed it from the commanding heights of human capacities in a freer society or the manicuring of a bonsai revolution, of an increasingly oil-rich petro-state. A product of a fractured nation, Chávez having a dream or a nightmare, or awakening to recognize history as both. has built on the growing chasm between rich and poor and given it historical To his credit, through words that are also acts and guide actions, Chávez and moral significance. has brought the pueblo to center stage again, first through his failed coup From his initial appearance as a rebel officer until now, Chávez has in 1992 that turned him overnight into their avenging champion, and then proclaimed the need to regenerate Venezuelan society, but guided by through several elections (particularly in 1998, when he became president, different principles and through different means. As president, Chávez and in 2006, when he was reelected), which legitimated his leadership as the initially focused on changing the political system’s formal institutions; his chosen commander of the revolución. While he is in fact its absolute leader, major accomplishment at the outset was the formulation of a new constitution, his self-fashioning as its humble soldier and his celebration of “participatory approved by general elections in December 1999. Since then, we have democracy” has opened significant spaces for popular mobilizations in the seen a rather rapid replacement of ruling sectors and of the parties that name of the revolución. Revolution now rules. represent them, an expansion of social programs, a progressive move Since AD’s October 1945 coup—which it hyperbolically baptized as “la towards instituting what he called in 2005 “socialism of the 21st century,” Revolución de Octubre”—successive regimes have legitimated their rule by and uneven steps towards expanding the role of the state in the economy claiming to be enacting a revolution on behalf of the people. After 1945, when and society—some taken even after the defeat of his constitutional reform a displacement of ruling sectors took place, the entrenched elites arrogantly in 2007, his first electoral loss. The impetus to create a more ethical society, sought to contain AD leaders and their “barbarous” masses. Once again, however, has not changed. During his rule, “the people” (el pueblo) have after Chávez was elected in 1998, after he proved not to be a malleable become widely recognized as the sovereign—el soberano. pawn, the established elite has sought to maintain power through a variety Even if much would have to happen to turn this principle into reality, in my of means, from coups, to alliances, to elections.