Using Oil Wealth To Help The Poor

Chávez leads the way

In using oil wealth to help the poor, Venezuela's leader is an
example to Latin America

Richard Gott in Caracas
Monday May 30, 2005, The Guardian

A muddy path leads off the airport motorway into one of the small
impoverished villages that perch on the hills above Caracas, a
permanent reminder of the immense gulf between rich and poor that
characterises oil-rich Venezuela. Only 20 minutes from the heart of
the capital city a tiny community of 500 families lives in makeshift
dwellings with tin roofs and rough breeze-block walls. They have
water and electricity and television, but not much else. The old
school buildings have collapsed into ruin, and no children have
received lessons over the past two years.

Two Cuban doctors are established in a temporary surgery here on the
main track. They point out that preventative medicine is difficult to
practise in a zone where the old clay sewer pipes are cracked and
useless, leaving the effluent to flow unchecked down the hillside.
The older inhabitants have been here for years; they first came from
the country to take root on these steep hillsides in the 1960s. Many
are morose and despairing, unable to imagine that their lives could
ever change.

Others are more motivated and upbeat, and have enrolled in the ranks
of the Bolivarian revolution of President Hugo Chávez. They expect
great things from this government, and are mobilised to demand that
official attention be focused on their village. If their petition to
the mayor to repair their school and sewer pipes does not get
answered soon, they will descend from their mountain eyrie to block
the motorway, as they once did before during the attempted coup
d'état of April 2002.

Hundreds of similar shanty towns surround Caracas, and many have
already begun to turn the corner. In some places, the doctors brought
in from Cuba are working in newly built premises, providing eye
treatment and dentistry as well as medicines. Nearly 20,000 doctors
are now spread around this country of 25 million people. New
supermarkets have sprung up where food, much of it home-produced, is
available at subsidised prices. Classrooms have been built where
school dropouts are corralled back into study. Yet it is good to
start with the difficulties faced by the motorway village, since its
plight serves to emphasise how long and difficult is the road ahead.
"Making poverty history" in Venezuela is not a simple matter of
making money available; it involves a revolutionary process of
destroying ancient institutions that stand in the way of progress,
and creating new ones responsive to popular demands.

Something amazing has been taking place in Latin America in recent
years that deserves wider attention than the continent has been
accustomed to attract. The chrysalis of the Venezuelan revolution led
by Chávez, often attacked and derided as the incoherent vision of an
authoritarian leader, has finally emerged as a resplendent butterfly
whose image and example will radiate for decades to come.

Most of the reports about this revolution over the past six years, at
home and abroad, have been uniquely hostile, heavily influenced by
politicians and journalists associated with the opposition. It is as
if news of the French or the Russian revolutions had been supplied
solely by the courtiers of the king and the tsar. These criticisms
have been echoed by senior US figures, from the president downwards,
creating a negative framework within which the revolution has
inevitably been viewed. At best, Chávez is seen as outdated and
populist. At worst, he is considered a military dictator in the making.

Yet the wheel of history rolls on, and the atmosphere in Venezuela
has changed dramatically since last year when Chávez won yet another
overwhelming victory at the polls. The once triumphalist opposition
has retired bruised to its tent, wounded perhaps mortally by the
outcome of the referendum on Chávez's presidency that it called for
and then resoundingly lost. The viciously hostile media has calmed
down, and those who don't like Chávez have abandoned their hopes of
his immediate overthrow. No one is any doubt that he will win next
year's presidential election.

The Chávez government, for its part, has forged ahead with various
spectacular social projects, assisted by the huge jump in oil prices,
from $10 to $50 a barrel over the past six years. Instead of gushing
into the coffers of the already wealthy, the oil pipelines have been
picked up and directed into the shanty towns, funding health,
education and cheap food. Foreign leaders from Spain and Brazil,
Chile and Cuba, have come on pilgrimage to Caracas to establish links
with the man now perceived as the leader of new emerging forces in
Latin America, with popularity ratings to match. This extensive
external support has stymied the plans of the US government to rally
the countries of Latin America against Venezuela. They are not
listening, and Washington is left without a policy.

Chávez himself, a youthful former army colonel of 51, is now
perceived in Latin America as the most unusual and original political
figure to have emerged since Fidel Castro broke on to the scene
nearly 50 years ago. With huge charm and charisma, he has an infinite
capacity to relate to the poor and marginal population of the
continent. A largely self-educated intellectual, the ideology of his
Bolivarian revolution is based on the writings and actions of a
handful of exemplary figures from the 19th century, most notably
Simón Bolívar, the man who liberated most of South America from
Spanish rule. Chávez offers a cultural as well as a political
alternative to the prevailing US-inspired model that dominates Latin
America.

So, what does his Bolivarian revolution consist of? He is friendly
with Castro - indeed, they are close allies - yet he is no out-of-
fashion state socialist. Capitalism is alive and well in Venezuela -
and secure. There have been no illegal land seizures, no
nationalisations of private companies. Chávez seeks to curb the
excesses of what he terms "savage neo-liberalism", and he wants the
state to play an intelligent and enabling role in the economy, but he
has no desire to crush small businesses, as has happened in Cuba.
International oil companies have fallen over themselves to provide
fresh investment, even after the government increased the royalties
that they have to pay. Venezuela remains a golden goose that cannot
be ignored.

What is undoubtedly old fashioned about Chávez is his ability to talk
about race and class, subjects once fashionable that have long been
taboo, and to discuss them in the context of poverty. In much of
Latin America, particularly in the countries of the Andes, the long-
suppressed native peoples have begun to organise and make political
demands for the first time since the 18th century, and Chávez is the
first president in the continent to have picked up their banner and
made it his own.

For the past six years the government has moved ahead at a glacial
rate, balked at every turn by the opposition forces ranged against
it. Now, as the revolution gathers speed, attention will be directed
towards dissension and arguments within the government's ranks, and
to the ever-present question of delivery. In the absence of powerful
state institutions, with the collapse of the old political parties
and the survival of a weak, incompetent and unmotivated bureaucracy,
Chávez has mobilised the military from which he springs to provide
the backbone to his revolutionary reorganisation of the country. Its
success in bringing adequate services to the shanty towns in town and
country will depend upon the survival of his government. If it fails,
the people will come out to block the motorway and demand something
different, and yet more radical.

Richard Gott's book Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution will
be published by Verso in June. Rwgott@aol.com

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005