Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  Simon and I sat down, and eventually I got into a conversation with the Tupamaros. When they discovered I was a North American, one of them, a tall blonde man with no front teeth, but a wicked laugh, started talking to me in fluent English. I found out that his name was Malacara and he had grown up in a very poor family in Caracas where he’d joined the Communist Party as a young teenager. He’d been “adopted” by a wealthy benefactor and eventually had the opportunity to study ballet in New York. Now he was working with the Tupamaros of Mérida, who were under the leadership of a man named Matute, who seemed like a friendly enough guy. Malacara loved to talk, and he loved to talk above all about art and revolutionary politics. Malacara would eventually become a good friend because, like a handful of others including Juan Veroes, Betty, and Humberto at Colibrí, he was dependable and you could count on him when he made a commitment.

  Part of the problem was that oil, known by many as “the devils excrement,” had had a truly nefarious effect on Venezuelan culture, and that was according to the Venezuelans, themselves. With money bubbling out of the ground and a pipeline of dollars pouring into the government’s hands as a result, the question on everyone’s mind was how to get some of those “free” dollars.3 Thus “rent chasing,” that is, finding some way of getting a “subsidy” or beca (grant or scholarship) from the government when it was flush with money from an oil bonanza became a way of life. Certainly there were people like Humberto and Betty, and a few others I got to know when I lived in Mérida, who worked hard for their money. But the main source of income for the country, some 95% of the money that came into the country, came in the form of petrodollars.

  One poet friend, José Gregorio Hernández Márquez, described to me how it worked, as Angel had done describing the NDEs, by drawing it out, this time on a napkin in Café Magnolia, which by now had become one of my haunts in Mérida. Jose Gregorio had been in the Bandera Roja (Red Flag), a Maoist guerrilla organization that eventually became a legal political party. When they split and went with the opposition to Chávez, José Gregorio left them. When I met him he was teaching elementary school and running a small publishing company, La Casa Tomada, which was mostly financed by the government.

  “Look,” he said, drawing a square and dividing it up by a number of vertical and horizontal lines so as to make eight little squares in the big square, “this is how it works. The government does a land reform. It gives people each a little parcel.” He stuck his pen in each square, counting them out with eight stabs. “The people go there and they say, ‘hey, we need to work this.’ But do you think they’ll work in the hot sun? No. They look for Colombians and hire them to work the fields. Or they find some way of selling off their parcel so they can party. That’s how it is in Venezuela,” he finished, pushing the napkin in front of me so I could assimilate his lesson.

  I’d already seen this reality in the cooperatives. I spent many mornings sitting around one of the outdoor tables at the Café Paris Tropical in an alley off of Mérida’s Plaza Bolívar. The alley was known as “Artist’s Alley” because many of the city’s painters worked there, painting and selling their work. Café Paris Tropical was one of two or three cafes near Plaza Bolívar where the Chavistas congregated to talk politics, and I could usually find Malacara there, or Poeta Simon. I would often be invited to sit for a while as I wandered through the alley on my way to or from the city center, and I listened to the dreams of the odd assortment of nouveau revolutionaries who would drink coffee as they described in detail the worker collectives they planned to organize when the financing from the government was approved. Much of it came to nothing, but a few of those cooperatives were financed, and then disappeared as quickly as they began.

  Marcy came to visit me over the Christmas holidays and after a trip on a “pirate” bus (privately contracted bus) to Mérida, we went exploring the region, visiting cooperatives as we went. In one cooperative in Azulita we recorded the beginning of the collective breaking down and transmogrifying into a capitalist enterprise of the worst kind, with employees doing the work of the “cooperative owners.” We found out about this only when we asked about why the office was locked, and the collective member took us into a room and began detailing the problems the collective was having. This was a process that, unbeknownst to us, was beginning to happen all over the country. By 2007, it appeared that “the majority of registered cooperatives [were] already inactive.”4 Even supporters of the Bolivarian government agree that by that year, “184,000 cooperatives were officially registered,” but “only about 30,000, or 15 percent, were active.” But as I noted, several years later,5 According to the National Institute of Statistics figures, released “in a nonofficial capacity,” there appear in 2009 to have been “47,000 collective associations, of which only 33.5% were active—some 15,745 cooperatives. And 75% of those were in the service sector.”6 Worse still, these cooperatives were used by the Bolivarian government “as a means of circumventing labor laws. Cooperatives that were not complying with the labor regulations received contracts from public institutions—a means of politically correct outsourcing.”7

  By March of 2006 I was ready for a break from Venezuela. I began the trip by flying to Montevideo where I visited the anarchist “Comunidad del Sur” (Community of the South) and interviewed Rubén Prieto. Rubén introduced me to Raúl Zibechi, who I later visited and interviewed at his home. At a demonstration for a worker cooperative whose members had been arrested for occupying and producing at their abandoned workplace, I met Jorge Zabalza, a Tupamaro who had spent years in prison and now worked as a butcher in a ­working-class neighborhood of Montevideo. I spent one Sunday visiting and interviewing him at a local bar, where I had my first máte. I met some anarchists who had a magazine stand on the street and one of them, Pablo, took me to visit the Galpon de Corrales, a free community space that had organized a library, radio station, bakery, community garden, and café. I was surprised to hear that Pablo’s group of anarchists had broken relations with Venezuelan anarchists to side with Chávez and the Bolivarian process because they felt the struggle against imperialism was decisive for Latin America and Chávez appeared to be the first leader in the hemisphere since Fidel Castro who had the courage to stand against the US.

  I went to Buenos Aires on an overnight ferry and was present a few days later for the thirtieth anniversary of the 1976 military coup. The commemoration was marked by an enormous demonstration, at the center of which was a blocks-long banner carried by members of the families of the thirty thousand disappeared and decorated with the photos of the “desaparecidos.”

  I took a bus to Bolivia where I did interviews just two months after Evo Morales took the office of the presidency. One of the most powerful interviews I had took place at the Plaza Abaroa in La Paz with Pedro Portugal Mollinedo who opened up the Andean cosmovision as a means of illuminating a way through the modern political impasse from which all the world suffers.8 He saw the political Left and political right as nothing more than the two hands of colonialism, and the government of Evo Morales as a continuation of the same colonial policies behind an indigenous mask. I would later come back to this interview for insight on how to understand the Pink Tide governments and their relations with social movements.

  I spent a few days on the Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca with a new acquaintance, Keith Richards, a writer and scholar of Bolivian culture and literature, and then I went on to Lima, Peru. By then I’d been on the road for two months and I was ready to go home, which in this case, meant Venezuela.

  I got back to Venezuela in time for May Day and was surprised to learn of more changes that had taken place in my absence. Community councils were being formed in response to Chávez’s initiative. They would be organisms of the “participatory protagonistic democracy” he’d promised the country to replace the “fake” representative democracy of the previous forty years of government. Chávez also promised that these councils would be the seeds of the future communal state.

  I was on
my way to other adventures but first I had to clean out my studio in Mérida. I ran into Malacara and he offered to help and in return I told him he could have my phone and everything else I was leaving behind. He arrived the next morning talking about how he thought maybe Chávez was being left in place by the empire to help build up Venezuela as a market for “all the goodies from the US” I shrugged. Could be, I said. I raised my own suspicions about the fact that so little prosecution for corruption was taking place. How was it that Chávez couldn’t know about the corruption or could move so slowly to prosecute it?

  “Cause it’s payback time. You get it, man? All those Copeistas and Adecos who got him votes are now in the government and they’re stealing just like before. And Chávez can’t do anything about it because they got him in power. It’s the devil’s bargain. You know, the thing with Fausto. You know Fausto?”

  “Yeah. Okay, the Faustian bargain.”

  “Exactly. And I guess everybody figures that the people won’t mind if they steal as long as the people are getting all the programs. You know, the Misiones.”

  He swept up the kitchen the way he did everything: quickly and efficiently. The Tupamaros were lucky to have him among them, I thought.

  “I don’t trust anything but passion,” he said, leaning on his broom. “You know, you can’t make a revolution throwing money around. It has to be a creative thing. People need a whole new way of seeing things. Like about money and materialism. People here need to get over the idea that ­everywhere is going to be just like the United States. There isn’t enough to go around. Rather than flying all over the world they need to learn how to fly with their minds. They need to get free in their heads. Like you. And just like you, they need to learn this technology so they can learn how to fly in their heads.” He continued sweeping, then as he swept the dirt into the dustpan he said, “You know I taught people how to fly, don’t you? In New York when I worked at Alvin Ailey School of Dance. I learned it myself, just so I could teach people how to do it. You know Baryshnikov? I saw him do it. He came onto the stage flying, thirty feet and landing like...” he made a graceful move, one hand holding the dustpan high before his eyes and a foot extended behind him. He shook his head. “Incredible, man. And it’s all passion.”

  I told him about St. Symeon the New Theologian and the Uncreated Energies of God as I cleaned the sink. How all the universe scintillates with the leftover uncreated energies of God.

  He nodded and agreed. “It’s like passion, right? I don’t believe in anything but passion,” and he shook his head as he put the broom in the corner.

  I returned home and went back to work teaching at Berkeley City College, but Venezuela remained my focus and I returned the next year to work on two films.9 Then in January 2008 my father died. We’d been in a long process of reconciliation and rapprochement, and no doubt dealing with the loss played a part in decisions I made to take off the summer and fall semesters from teaching at Berkeley City College (formerly Vista Community College). I spent summer and fall traveling through South America and gathering material for a book of interviews with Latin American social movement activists.10 The trip would begin in Venezuela where I would meet up with another filmmaker, Ari Krawitz, who offered to help me with a film project I had in mind. From there I planned to travel through Colombia and Ecuador by bus, then fly to Buenos Aires and go overland to Paraguay and Bolivia to do interviews.

  Ari and I joined Arturo Albarrán, a Venezuelan filmmaker who was working at the Ministry of Agriculture and Land (MAT) and others from the ministry who were promoting agroecology and organic agriculture among campesinos in the state of Mérida. I’d met Arturo the year before and had gone into the field with him, filming projects of the government-sponsored Fondos Zamoranos (Zamoran Funds, projects to fund community-based agriculture). I immediately liked him and trusted him, perhaps because he didn’t need anything from me, so I didn’t have to wonder about his motives in befriending me.

  Arturo was a hard-working man committed to the Venezuelan peasantry and to agroecology, an ecological agricultural idea that accounts for socio-political dimensions of the problems of food production. He came from peasant stock and, under the presidency of Carlos Andres Pérez, he’d studied film and filmmaking at the University of the Andes as the government at the time was committed to giving scholarships to people from poor families. Arturo had come up politically in the CEPs, Popular Education Centers, and that led him to a left social movement perspective and commitment.

  Ari, Arturo, and I went with others from the MAT to film meetings between government agricultural workers and campesinos in Aricagua. Through the meetings the people from MAT hoped to introduce the campesinos to a new government program emphasizing the use of ecological agriculture.

  We rode in the Ministry jeeps up through the mountains and down into valleys where the vegetation looked like something out of a set for a film on dinosaurs. We arrived in the evening in Aricagua, and over the next two days Ari and I filmed as the MAT people talked and invited discussions about the new policies.

  Ari and I traveled around Western Venezuela for the next month before I started out on my trip through Colombia. From Cúcuta I took an all-night bus to Bogotá and stayed there with Martha Henriquez, a school teacher in an alternative school who I’d met when she was in Venezuela the previous summer. She and her daughter Daniela lived in the north of Bogotá and they were just getting ready to go to Suesca for the week to go rock climbing, so they invited me along.

  Martha supported the Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA), the democratic left option of Colombia, which included former guerrillas of the M19 (Movement 19) like Antonio Navarro Wolff, Gustavo Petro, and others. Martha was more than happy to orient me to the ins and outs of Colombian politics and gave me contacts for people she thought I should interview for my book. Colombia, as it turned out, wasn’t the drug den, terrorist, and guerrilla haven of its reputation in the exterior, or the scary, lawless place my Venezuelan friends warned me not to visit. I actually felt safer walking the streets of Bogotá than I did in Caracas, and the militarization of the country was far from evident in most areas that I visited.

  Martha and I had a lot in common, but when the subject of the Bolivarians came up, we’d begin arguing. She despised Chávez and thought the whole Bolivarian process was a sham, and I couldn’t understand why. We kept approaching an argument, but both of us felt it was better to remain friends and just avoid the subject.

  One morning after breakfast Martha said she wanted me to meet a couple of her friends. “Laura has a story I think you’ll want to hear,” she told me mysteriously. We took a cab to Guatavita, a beautiful tourist town with lots of colonial architecture and white adobe buildings. We went to Ramón Valdez cafe, a new cafe run by Martha’s friends, near the artisan market. Martha introduced me to her friends Sergio and Laura, and then we all sat down to talk over a coffee.

  Laura had gone to Venezuela to study medicine on a scholarship the Bolivarian government was offering to poor people from all over Latin America. They were told they “would study in an institute with top quality equipment” but instead they were taken to a military base in Caracas and left in a building that she described as being “like a prison” with inaccessible windows, no library, minimal facilities, minimal security, and “nothing to read but Chávez’s speeches.” There were no phones, and when they went to use the computers they found there were only screens with no functioning computers. A little later Chávez arrived to inaugurate the program and “the red carpet was rolled out and white curtains were hung and we had to all wear red t-shirts with some slogan to Chávez written on them. He arrived, he spoke, and then he left. And the red carpet was rolled back up and the white curtains were taken down and things went right back to normal.”

  “Normal,” Laura said, was so terrible that a month into the process, a month without lessons, teachers, access to books, computers or anything else that could be considered a “study program,” a strike and a pro
test was organized that included everyone but the Bolivians, who didn’t want to damage relations between Venezuela and their country.

  In the end Laura was able to get access to a telephone and get her family to send her a plane ticket home and she left after more than a month in what she described as “imprisonment.”

  We spent a bit more time with Laura and Sergio, and then Martha and I strolled around town a bit until the gray clouds, tinged a ruddy orange, slowly moved over our heads, threatening rain, and we caught a bus back to Suesca. All the way into Suesca I silently mulled over Laura’s troubling story. I wondered if the white curtains and red carpet that had been brought out for Chávez might not be an apt image for the entire Bolivarian process with missions that never seemed to accomplish their goals before they were abandoned for other projects, and the buildings, the great projects, all inaugurated and then somehow forgotten and left to rust like the yucca processing plant I’d seen near Lake Maracaibo.

  I spent the next three months traveling through South America and conducting interviews. In October, on my way home from the Southern Cone I made a stop for a week or two in Venezuela again and stayed with Marc Villá, a Venezuelan filmmaker and a friend who lived in Caracas. The last day, just before I left for the airport, it was raining and Marc was depressed. I asked him what was bothering him and he said that he was depressed about the situation in Trujillo with the father of our mutual friend, Eduardo Viloria, who was the governor of the state. Gilmer Viloria came out of COPEI11 but joined the Chavistas early on and he had done a lot for the peasantry of Trujillo. He’d also been a great promoter of culture in the region, especially in the inaccessible mountain areas. Gilmer Viloria had sent cultural workers with books into those remote areas to read to the peasants, and he’d also set up small libraries and cultural centers around the state. I knew that for a fact, because I’d read there with his son Eduardo during the World Poetry Festival in 2005 and had seen what the cultural centers were doing in terms of publishing and organizing cultural activities.