Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  After Ortega lost his second bid for the presidency in 1990, and the rule of the Sandinistas came to an end, the FSLN underwent a number of splits, each one allowing Daniel Ortega to further consolidate his grip on power and eventually become the sole powerful caudillo of the FSLN.18 He cut a deal with the right-wing former President Arnoldo Alemán, the infamous Pacto (Pact), to maintain control and power between their two parties, the FSLN and the Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC) and keep other parties out.19 The Pact also helped Ortega avoid charges for the rape of his step-daughter, Zoilamérica Narváez. One agreement in the Pact resulted in a change in the electoral law that enabled a presidential candidate to win with 35% of the vote in a first round, and this had allowed Ortega to take the presidency again in 2006.

  By 2010 Ortega had been in power three years, and the FSLN had become a relatively conservative institution, only slightly distinguishable from the other caudillo-led parties. The FSLN had been at the forefront of a conservative battle to impose some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Latin America—and Latin America is home to five of the seven most restrictive countries in the world.20 The move was Ortega’s way of ingratiating himself with the Catholic Church so as to regain power. Since that time, Ortega has gone on to rule the party, and the country of Nicaragua, as his personal kingdom. A later pact with big business, along with constitutional reforms eliminated his partner in the earlier pact, sending Alemán into obscurity and making Ortega effectively the new “King Somoza.”21

  When I arrived in 2010 I met a number of people willing to talk about the increasingly dark political situation in Nicaragua, but Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal, both of whom I’d interviewed and recorded in 2004, weren’t among them. In response to a query for an interview, Ernesto wrote back an email, dated June 3, 2009. He said, “it wouldn’t be advisable for us to talk about the political issues of Nicaragua because there’s not a free climate for doing so” (my translation).

  Cardenal’s reluctance to speak on film was understandable given that, in relation to previous statements he had made about Ortega, including calling him a “thief,” and “the betrayal of Sandinismo,” the President had begun a campaign of persecution to punish the aging priest-poet. 22 Nevertheless, I found many others in Nicaragua prepared to help me understand the current political reality. Among them was former Sandinista commander Victor Hugo Tinoco, then a parliamentarian as member of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS). Ortega, now effectively controlling most if not all branches of the state, including the judiciary, had maneuvered to revoke MRS status as a party in 2008.

  Tinoco met with me in his office at the Parliament in Managua in January 2010. He started off talking about a basic conflict that has characterized the Left in Latin America and the world, saying “two theses have developed in the struggle within the FSLN since 1990. There were those who developed the opinion that the struggle for social justice wasn’t compatible with civil liberties, so there had to be authoritarian thought married to the proposal of social transformation. And there were those who saw these [ideas] as complementary, that social justice can only be attained through a process that profoundly respects civil social and individual freedoms, and furthermore that social transformations are only sustainable over time if they are built and sustained on the basis of respect for civil rights and liberties.”23

  These words provided a framework within which I worked as I continued puzzling over the political process of Nicaragua, and it helped me understand the complex panorama of Latin American politics that unfolded before me as I conducted interviews for the book I was working on. Tinoco also mentioned the oil money pouring into Ortega’s personal account from Venezuela, and this raised questions that I knew I would have to take back to Venezuela when I eventually returned, as I did a year later, with Marcy. Certainly, ALBA was strengthening the left governments of Latin America as it had intended, but what impact was it having on the people of the region? In Nicaragua its main impact appeared to be to enrich and empower an emerging dictatorship.

  An old friend, Daniel Alegría, had introduced me to a friend of his, a taxi driver named Mario.24 Like Daniel, Mario was an ex-Sandinista who had come to hate Ortega, and Daniel thought he’d be a good person to show me around Managua and re-introduce me to the country. He was right.

  One morning Mario showed up at my hostel to take me somewhere. We’d been arguing about Venezuela for a few days, in a good-humored sort of way. Mario was convinced Chávez was a dictator just like Ortega and he distrusted his association with the military. I was arguing that things appeared to be mostly on a good course in Venezuela, but left the question open since we didn’t yet know where things would end up. Despite our disagreement about Venezuela, we had common ground in our views on the situation in Nicaragua under Ortega.

  Mario was smiling broadly as he stood in the doorway of my room while I got myself ready to go.

  “So tell me, how is it that the country with the most oil in the world could be having electrical shortages?” he asked.

  I stopped. “What? What do you mean?”

  “Oh,” he said, coming towards me to make his point,” so you don’t know about all the electrical outages in Venezuela?”

  I didn’t.

  “Sounds like they’re in trouble, to me, compa,” Mario said, shaking his head. Then smiling slyly, he raised an eyebrow as if to say, “didn’t I tell you?”

  Chapter Twelve: The Revolution that Wasn’t

  That winter Marcy and I returned to Venezuela. It had been five years since we’d been there together, although I’d visited the country alone just over two years before. We got a room at the Posada Alemania for a week. The posada had been recommended to us as an inexpensive option run by people one friend described as “critical Chavistas.”

  Once a week the posada hosted political discussions, and in conjunction with presentations by other guests, they asked me to present on what I’d learned doing interviews with social movement activists in Latin America. It was an informal setting and some fifteen or twenty people gathered around the table and nearby in the large outdoor patio for the discussion. After my presentation, there was, not surprisingly, a long discussion about corruption and then the topic of nationalizations was raised. This, evidently, was Chávez’s new economic strategy for building the “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century” after the disappointing collapse of the cooperatives. Despite the propaganda widely disseminated on the Left in the US (and to which I contributed my share), by 2011 nearly all Venezuelans, including Chavistas, were well aware of the fact that all but perhaps a tenth of the 150,000–200,000 cooperatives funded by Chávez starting in 2005 were “phantom,” fake or had simply disappeared.1 Now Chávez appeared to be implementing the more “tried and true” approach to building the “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century,” that is, by replicating the twentieth century model.

  After listening to the discussion for a while, I entered the fray with a question. “We’ve just had this long discussion about the incredible corruption and inefficiency that we’d agree is pretty much everywhere in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and the state, and as a result, nothing is functioning well in the state or the party. And yet you’re suggesting that the best approach to building socialism is to nationalize more industries that are functional and profitable, and give them over to this non-functional and corrupt state? Do you see the problem there?” I asked.

  There was a moment of silence before the man facilitating the discussion agreed that this was, indeed, a problem. And then, incredibly, the conversation went back to the need for more nationalization.

  Marcy and I met up with Juan Veroes and he mentioned that a newspaper had been taken over by the workers in Mérida. The occupation had been going on for a few months already, and he offered to take us over to the offices. It didn’t take much to convince us to go.

  We met with Judith Vega, a reporter for the two newspapers produced in the building, Cambio de Siglo (Change of
Century) and Diario El Vigía (El Vigía Daily). She told us that the owners of the paper hadn’t paid the staff for four months, so one day after the owners left, the workers took over the business. They hung a “Worker Control” banner off the balcony of the second story, and began putting out their own weekly paper.

  In an article Marcy and I later wrote about the occupation, we said that “Venezuela has worker-run businesses in many sectors, but this action [was] ‘unprecedented,’ according to Hugo Peña of the National Workers’ Union (UNT), one of Venezuela’s trade union federations. ‘There are no other cases of a group of workers deciding to take control of a media outlet,’ said Peña, Unete coordinator for Mérida.”2 You would think that this action would have received support from a revolution, and a revolutionary people, but so far only Alexis Ramírez, a PSUV member of Parliament and later governor of the state, had come by to bring some food and other necessities. On the multiple occasions we came to visit the occupation, we were the only people we saw in the offices other than the workers themselves and their family members.

  As we did interviews we realized that the workers were feeling this isolation, and the vulnerability of being without salaries and dependent on donations. They were running their own workplace now, but that, apparently, wasn’t what they wanted. One of the workers explained what they hoped would be the ultimate outcome. “We’re hoping that our letters will arrive on the desk of the President [Chávez] and the government will come in an take over the business and make us employees,” she said. “Worker control,” it seemed, was just too daunting, certainly much more so than joining the growing hordes of “rent chasers” with their government sinecures. What was beyond doubt, however, was that the “Comandante” would be able solve the problem.

  In our article, published in both Venezuelanalysis.com and Correo del Orinoco, the government-run daily, we ended by noting that “the workers wrote to the Ministry of Communications in Caracas early this year, explaining their situation and asking for a meeting. They are optimistically waiting for a response. Whether or not they get the needed help will be a test of the government’s willingness to follow through on its rhetoric advocating worker control. ‘We are sure we will get the support we need at a national level,’ Vega said.”

  Juan Veroes took us to the office that his community council had arranged for him to use while organizing projects and applying for funds from the government. The main project now was to get a new roof put on the clinic next door to his office.

  “It’s really in bad shape,” he said, shaking his head. “Every time it rains, there are leaks everywhere. You shouldn’t have that in a clinic.” So Juan had done the paperwork and he was hopeful that when the money came through, people in the community council would get the work because there was a lot of unemployment in the community. A little later he took us to a meeting of his community council but there were only a handful of people there and for some reason or other that wasn’t clear to us, the meeting didn’t happen.

  I caught up with Arturo again, hoping for an update on the agroecological projects that he and Ari Krawitz and I had filmed two and a half years before. I did a short interview with him in the lobby of the MAT building and asked him if the new agroecological policies of MAT had been implemented and funding had come through for the small farmers doing ecological agriculture. He laughed. “Nothing. Nothing came of it. They haven’t given anything to the small farmers and all the money is still just going to the conventional ‘Green Revolution’ agribusiness with pesticides and commercial fertilizers.”

  Arturo accompanied us to meet his friend, Mariá Vicenta Dávila, who had been doing community organizing, particularly among women, in the páramo town of Mucuchíes.3 We interviewed Arturo on the bus going up to the páramo, and then did a couple of short interviews at an artisan’s center before walking up to María Vicenta’s house.

  We stopped first by the vermiculture project the women had started under Mariá Vicenta’s inspiration. They’d gathered compost from houses all around Mucuchíes and were hopeful that they’d soon be producing excellent fertilizer for the community. There was only one problem, and that was transport. The will was clearly there: the infrastructure had been built by the women’s own hands, using rocks gathered from the mountain slopes, and money to buy cement drawn from the women’s own savings. What they needed was a modest loan to buy a truck, and for that Mariá Vicenta had gone back and forth to Caracas, pleading with people in the government, as well as making presentations at the MAT in Mérida.

  We sat down on a crudely-built wall and looked down on the dried up remains of the worm bins. It was in the back yard of someone’s house and it occupied nearly the whole area. The women hadn’t managed to get a singe bolivar for their project. The compost, then, stopped arriving when their truck broke down. The project came to an abrupt end, and the worms had all died.

  Mariá Vicenta was visibly saddened by the experience and she referred to the problem obliquely in her interview with us a little later. As a Chavista, she felt that Chávez’s “plan of the community councils is really good but that this plan shouldn’t blot out those solid, grassroots organizations that have grown up locally,” which she felt was happening. She complained about the problem of the “paternalistic attitude of dependence: do it for me, search for me, direct me.” But clearly that attitude hadn’t been there among the women with whom she’d worked on the vermiculture project. They had, in fact, displayed considerable independence, and from that autonomous space where they worked they asked only for a loan. But perhaps that’s why they hadn’t gotten it. Perhaps they were just too autonomous.

  Taken together, all this information indicated a strongly top-down process underway in the country, regardless of the rhetoric of “participatory, protagonistic democracy.” This became clear to us when we interviewed a young woman who was working at our posada at the time and who we’ll call Ana Luz. One night when she and Marcy and I were alone in the kitchen Ana Luz told us about her experience as a grassroots Chavista activist. She and her fellow PSUVistas brought problems in the community to the attention of local PSUV directors, but it seemed to her that the concerns were never relayed any further up the chain of command. “Above the local PSUV is the state [of Mérida] bureau, and they are under the national bureau. That bureau is under the top ranks of the party, and then there’s Chávez. So you see, nothing ever gets all the way to the top,” she said. Then she added, wistfully, “if only we could get our concerns to the Comandante [Chávez].” Then she looked away thoughtfully, as if she was searching once again for how she and her fellow activists might be able to contact Chávez.

  This fit the usual narrative on the problems with the “Revolution.” From the beginning my friends—all my friends—had been complaining about the corruption among the ruling clique. I heard it so many times that I could almost predict when it would be coming up in a conversation, and almost the exact words: “Chávez is pure, but all those around him are corrupt.” It was repeated so often that it began to sound like a single script everyone was reciting from.

  While I was living in Venezuela I only rarely thought to question this “script,”—but I never expressed my thoughts on it aloud. The Chavista worldview, like that of most of the socialist left, is utterly Manichaean: Chávez and the Bolivarian “Revolution” represented for Chavistas all that is good, and aligned against it was utter evil: US imperialism, the oligarchy, the “escuálidos” (quislings, squalid ones), “apátridas,” (stateless persons or traitors), Colombian paramilitaries, and citizens of the empire who disagreed with Chávez. In this, the socialists of the twenty-first century were only the slightest variation on the real socialists of the twentieth century. But while the latter made a clear ideological distinction between the messianic proletarian class and the evil bourgeoisie, the former based the distinction on loyalty to a single personality, the “Comandante.”

  I found the black-and-white thinking that lacked any nuance increasingly annoying, as wel
l as the fact that no one wanted to raise the obvious question: Chávez ran the country so why is he doing nothing about corruption? This question would eventually lead to many others, but I would have to go outside of the Chavista circles to find the answers.

  I had once raised the question about impunity, cronyism, and corruption under Chávez with Juan Veroes and he had shrugged and laughed, as if to say, “Isn’t it obvious?” “You just can’t go after your own family,” he said. “Look, we’re in a war here, a struggle to build a Revolution. If you start shooting people on your own side, where are you going to end up?” I argued with him and asked him where he thought Venezuela would end up if Chávez doesn’t start getting rid of corrupt officials. Juan saw my point. “There will come a time,” he said, “when Chávez can go after them. It’s just not the right time now.”4

  It was the “Myth of the Fortress,” as described by Leszek Kolakowski, in operation. The forces of the Revolution (in his myth, the Communists) “are in a permanent state of war with the old world; they are defending a fortress besieged on all sides by the forces of the old order. In this besieged fortress there is only one goal: to withstand the siege. And whatever furthers this goal is a good thing. In the besieged fortress every conflict, every dispute, is catastrophic, every sign of weakness a triumph for the enemy, every relaxation of the penal system a calamity,” especially as concerns the enemy to whom no quarter should be offered. Kolakowski emphasizes this latter point, saying, “in a besieged fortress it is out of the question to seek allies in the enemy camp.” And this fortress mentality results in two disastrous consequences. First, “it requires the besieged to perceive the whole visible world outside the fortress as the enemy, preventing them from swelling their ranks and so strengthening their forces, and cutting them off from all values and possibilities that lie outside. And within the fortress itself it creates a military hierarchy based on blind obedience and intolerant to criticism.”