I thought of another FDR-Chávez parallel: the opposition. Ask someone whose grandparents were straight-ticket Republicans during the Depression, and they’ll tell you that Roosevelt was reviled. Venezuela is a politically polarized country, and the 35% of Venezuelans who oppose the revolution abhor Chávez. Their vehemence is amplified by the fact that most of the newspapers and TV stations are in their hands, and they have the full cooperation of the international media. Back 1933, business leaders in the United States are believed to have approached World War One veteran General Smedley Darlington Butler to plan a fascist overthrow of the Roosevelt presidency, something that thankfully did not come to pass. See http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/generalsources.html for a list of sources about that plot (note that the Wikipedia article on this plot, entitled Business Coup, has been flagged as a possible hoax). In 2002, a Venezuelan coup did in fact overthrow Chávez and install businessman Pedro Carmona in his place, but, thankfully, the elected president was quickly restored due to an outpouring of popular support, and troops that who were loyal not to their officers, but to their president.
The parallels have their limits, of course. Roosevelt´s presidencies were never subject to the destabilizing interference of a foreign superpower, but the machinations of the United States are a constant and continuing threat to Venezuela´s democracy. (See for instance http://www.chavezcode.com/2008/03/chronology-of-4th-generation-war.html) And Chávez has never taken an action as dastardly as Roosevelt´s internment of 110,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans, and it is hard to imagine his ever doing so. Their careers leading to the presidency were very different as well; FDR ascended to the presidency from the governership of New York, while Chávez spent much of the 1990s in prison for his failed 1992 coup, although he was eventually pardoned due to popular pressure…he became a popular hero after the coup failed and he took full responsibility.
I spent Sunday afternoon at the zoo in Mérida. It’s an interesting place;
they have a collection of native Venezuelan wildlife—Andean condors, tapirs, coatamundi, spectacled bears, jaguars, capuchin monkeys—including some species I haven’t seen before. (I was disappointed that there wasn’t an anaconda.) Conditions for the animals were variable. The tapirs had an large wooded enclosure with a big pond to paddle around in, and were active and looked happy. The big cats and the monkeys were in bare concrete cages, and seemed pretty stressed out.
The zoo was crowded with locals and with Venezuelan tourists enjoying a Sunday afternoon in high season. There’s nothing much else to do here on a Sunday; almost everything’s closed except the churches. Socialism or no, Venezuelans remain a religious lot, and images of the Holy Family and of saints abound.
On Monday afternoon we went back to the university to meet with the coordinator of the March 13 Movement, Mérida’s largest and most important student group. Movimiento 13 long predates the Chávez presidency, and initially supported Chávez, but turned against him early in his first term. The University of the Andes here in Mérida has many faculty, students, and administrators who oppose the government; it’s a little disorienting for us North Americans to be in a place where the government is on the left and the students are on the right!
The main thrust of his talk was that, while the programs of the revolutionary government are well-intentioned, they are poorly administered, leading to graft and corruption and a squandering of national resources. I think his argument is disingenuous; the opposition in Venezuela has made it clear that they are opposed to the government’s redistributive project itself, and are committed to protecting the privileges of the economic class that controlled the country’s economy and politics prior to 1999. This coordinator’s motivation is not as clear to me; he does not come from that privileged class, but from a barrio…i.e. Chávez’s base.
Several people here in Mérida have spoken to me with bitterness of the violence and destruction of the student protests here, and the restraint of the police in the face of provocation and injury. The Movimiento 13 coordinator told a different story, complaining of police attacks against students, and lifting his shirt to show us his many battle scars.
He spoke as if a majority of Venezuelans share his views; when we asked him about Chávez’s re-election in 2006, he claimed a level of abstention that simply wasn’t true. 2006 saw a huge voter turnout in Venezuela, much higher than we ever see in the U.S., and the president won handily. That he then lost the 2007 referendum on constitutional reform speaks to the fact, I think, that while Venezuelans support their president, they’re not afraid to disagree with him.
As for corruption, people here tell me that yes, absolutely, there is corruption, and not all of the resources that the government has dedicated to people’s needs get where they’re supposed to go. One Venezuelan spoke of the “Bolibourgeoisie,” bureaucrats who have enriched themselves off of the Bolivarian revolution. All have emphasized, however, that this is not a problem unique to the Chávez government, but one that plagued the liberal and conservative governments that preceded it. In my opinion, the worst thing that can be said about the revolution in this regard is that it has not yet succeeded in addressing the problem of corruption that it inherited. Now, if we could just begin to tackle the issue of corruption in the U.S. (did somebody say ¨Halliburton¨?)
On Tuesday afternoon we went to the outskirts of Mérida to visit a Socialist Training Center (Centro de Formación Socialista) of Misión Che Guevara, the government job training and economic development program. 
We sat in on a small class of men, ranging from teenagers to middle-aged, who were learning basic electronics, digital electronics, and specialization in TV repair or other areas, working on equipment donated by the EU. The teacher emphasized that he is a facilitator, not the professor, and that they engage in constructivist education at the center. The students spoke with us about the equality and solidarity amongst them, regardless of previous academic achievement (or lack thereof). They had a lot of questions for us about education in the U.S. At the end of their 4½ month program, they’re prepared to take a job in the national telephone company, start a business together, or take a number of other career paths. We asked if women participate in electronics training, and were told that only a handful do.
The director of the center then taught a short lesson on political education for us and for the electronics students; the lesson was unabashedly partisan, despite the director’s assertion that he was not “ideologizing.”
We proceeded down the road to a spot where people from the community were queued up for heavily subsidized groceries. Many of the products have an article of the Venezuelan constitution printed on the label; zoom in on the bag of rice at the right
and you can read Article 326 (“The security of the Nation is based on the joint responsibility of the government and civil society…”)
The parallels have their limits, of course. Roosevelt´s presidencies were never subject to the destabilizing interference of a foreign superpower, but the machinations of the United States are a constant and continuing threat to Venezuela´s democracy. (See for instance http://www.chavezcode.com/2008/03/chronology-of-4th-generation-war.html) And Chávez has never taken an action as dastardly as Roosevelt´s internment of 110,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans, and it is hard to imagine his ever doing so. Their careers leading to the presidency were very different as well; FDR ascended to the presidency from the governership of New York, while Chávez spent much of the 1990s in prison for his failed 1992 coup, although he was eventually pardoned due to popular pressure…he became a popular hero after the coup failed and he took full responsibility.
I spent Sunday afternoon at the zoo in Mérida. It’s an interesting place;
they have a collection of native Venezuelan wildlife—Andean condors, tapirs, coatamundi, spectacled bears, jaguars, capuchin monkeys—including some species I haven’t seen before. (I was disappointed that there wasn’t an anaconda.) Conditions for the animals were variable. The tapirs had an large wooded enclosure with a big pond to paddle around in, and were active and looked happy. The big cats and the monkeys were in bare concrete cages, and seemed pretty stressed out.The zoo was crowded with locals and with Venezuelan tourists enjoying a Sunday afternoon in high season. There’s nothing much else to do here on a Sunday; almost everything’s closed except the churches. Socialism or no, Venezuelans remain a religious lot, and images of the Holy Family and of saints abound.
On Monday afternoon we went back to the university to meet with the coordinator of the March 13 Movement, Mérida’s largest and most important student group. Movimiento 13 long predates the Chávez presidency, and initially supported Chávez, but turned against him early in his first term. The University of the Andes here in Mérida has many faculty, students, and administrators who oppose the government; it’s a little disorienting for us North Americans to be in a place where the government is on the left and the students are on the right!The main thrust of his talk was that, while the programs of the revolutionary government are well-intentioned, they are poorly administered, leading to graft and corruption and a squandering of national resources. I think his argument is disingenuous; the opposition in Venezuela has made it clear that they are opposed to the government’s redistributive project itself, and are committed to protecting the privileges of the economic class that controlled the country’s economy and politics prior to 1999. This coordinator’s motivation is not as clear to me; he does not come from that privileged class, but from a barrio…i.e. Chávez’s base.
Several people here in Mérida have spoken to me with bitterness of the violence and destruction of the student protests here, and the restraint of the police in the face of provocation and injury. The Movimiento 13 coordinator told a different story, complaining of police attacks against students, and lifting his shirt to show us his many battle scars.
He spoke as if a majority of Venezuelans share his views; when we asked him about Chávez’s re-election in 2006, he claimed a level of abstention that simply wasn’t true. 2006 saw a huge voter turnout in Venezuela, much higher than we ever see in the U.S., and the president won handily. That he then lost the 2007 referendum on constitutional reform speaks to the fact, I think, that while Venezuelans support their president, they’re not afraid to disagree with him.
As for corruption, people here tell me that yes, absolutely, there is corruption, and not all of the resources that the government has dedicated to people’s needs get where they’re supposed to go. One Venezuelan spoke of the “Bolibourgeoisie,” bureaucrats who have enriched themselves off of the Bolivarian revolution. All have emphasized, however, that this is not a problem unique to the Chávez government, but one that plagued the liberal and conservative governments that preceded it. In my opinion, the worst thing that can be said about the revolution in this regard is that it has not yet succeeded in addressing the problem of corruption that it inherited. Now, if we could just begin to tackle the issue of corruption in the U.S. (did somebody say ¨Halliburton¨?)
On Tuesday afternoon we went to the outskirts of Mérida to visit a Socialist Training Center (Centro de Formación Socialista) of Misión Che Guevara, the government job training and economic development program. 
We sat in on a small class of men, ranging from teenagers to middle-aged, who were learning basic electronics, digital electronics, and specialization in TV repair or other areas, working on equipment donated by the EU. The teacher emphasized that he is a facilitator, not the professor, and that they engage in constructivist education at the center. The students spoke with us about the equality and solidarity amongst them, regardless of previous academic achievement (or lack thereof). They had a lot of questions for us about education in the U.S. At the end of their 4½ month program, they’re prepared to take a job in the national telephone company, start a business together, or take a number of other career paths. We asked if women participate in electronics training, and were told that only a handful do.
The director of the center then taught a short lesson on political education for us and for the electronics students; the lesson was unabashedly partisan, despite the director’s assertion that he was not “ideologizing.”We proceeded down the road to a spot where people from the community were queued up for heavily subsidized groceries. Many of the products have an article of the Venezuelan constitution printed on the label; zoom in on the bag of rice at the right
and you can read Article 326 (“The security of the Nation is based on the joint responsibility of the government and civil society…”)
1 comment:
I wonder how much the American CIA contributes to the Movimiento 13.
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