by Clifton Ross
When the smoke of the battle one day clears and the besieged defender in the form of the rifleman emerges from the fortress back into the world beyond the reinforced ramparts, he sees the victims of what he thought were only his “defensive” volleys: certainly some of the enemy would be dead, but so would many friends. Worse yet, Kolakowski tells us, is the sudden recognition that the commanding officer who had led the “defense” of the fortress “enjoys giving orders so much that he would rather deceive his soldiers by inventing a siege than do anything to promote peace, for with peace his power would vanish. Power is dangerous; it wants to last forever, and the less it is controlled, the more easily it can maintain itself. This is why power—not just on a subjective whim, but by virtue of the workings of a historical mechanism—invents its own myths.”5 In Venezuela, I would come to discover, the “mechanism” was the oil wealth gushing out of the earth, and the myth would be the “petrosocialism” or the “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century” that Chávez would proclaim.
Marcy and I left Venezuela after a few weeks, returning home with a sense of uneasiness about the whole situation in the country; we were particularly concerned about the verticalist nature of the PSUV that Chávez had founded a little less than four years earlier.
I returned later that year, in August, passing as I usually did through Bogotá to Cúcuta, and then going on to Mérida by bus from San Cristóbal. I landed at Teatro Colibrí and after spending time with Betty and Humberto, I went off to see what had happened to the worker occupation of Cambio de Siglo and Diario El Vigía.
Arturo joined me and we walked with our cameras over to the office where the banner, “Control Obrero,” still hung from the second story of the building. Inside we found only two of the workers left, as all the others had moved on. Judith and her partner agreed to do a follow-up interview. Judith said she was disappointed that, despite all their efforts, Chávez hadn’t responded to their call for help. She clearly didn’t understand why. I asked her if she thought Chávez had read our article about the situation in Correo de Orinoco, and her letters to him. She nodded. I asked her what she felt that said about Chávez and the Bolivarian project. She shook her head and then looked at me as if to indicate she didn’t understand the question, but she said nothing.
As always, I went looking for my friend Juan Veroes. We met up at the Café Paris Tropical and sat at a plastic table under an umbrella in the shade of the jacaranda trees and drank café marrónes and caught up. I asked him how things were going on the project of a new roof for the clinic. He laughed and waved the question away. Then he said it had been approved by the national government, but as the money went through the state governor, the latter awarded the work contract to friends—a company that was run by a COPEIista.6 No, he said, shaking his head, the unemployed people of the neighborhood had gotten no work out of the project.
A few days later Arturo and I went to do an interview with a Uruguayan couple, friends of Arturo’s who were living in Barinas. They had received a tract of land along with a number of other people when Chávez expropriated a large finca in his home state of Barinas. Now Ignacio and Jimena Birriel were in a struggle to hold on to their finca, a thirty-three hectare plot they called Mama Pancha. They were about the only ones who were producing on their land, and they were using agroecological methods in the process.
The hundred or so other families, Ignacio explained to us, lived in the hills of Barinas; they were middle class folks, most of whom never even came by to visit their parcels. Ownership of the land was dependent on both production and residence, so only Ignacio and Jimena were legitimate owners of the land. Now the others had formed a community council and were in the process of selling the entire plot of land, but Ignacio wouldn’t go along with it. “It’s illegal,” he said. “We were given this land to produce on, not so we could turn around and sell it.” I asked how they could manage to sell the land if to do so was illegal. Ignacio smiled wryly and said, “by bribes. The government of Barinas is controlled like everything else, by mafias.”
His community council would not allow him time to speak before it, and when he did manage to speak at the meetings, they refused to record his statements. He was essentially eliminated from the record.
Then someone set fire to his land. His crops had been destroyed. Next, their neighbor, who had left his own parcel fallow, but on whose parcel the community well was located, refused Ignacio and his family water. Ignacio went by night to the well and furtively pumped water out. Then the well was poisoned. Finally, in recent days he’d received death threats. A group of armed men had arrived and threatened his life.
His house was a palm choza or hut with no walls and within ten or so yards off the road. It was night, and we sat in the hut drinking coffee under a single light bulb as he explained his situation. Every car that drove down the dirt road made my heart race, especially as Ignacio would stand and peer out into the darkness to try to identify the passersby.
Ignacio’s situation appeared hopeless to me, but he managed to hang on for a couple more years before he and his family suddenly left, presumably back to Uruguay. I don’t know what happened to the finca, but with the departure of Ignacio, what little production that had been undertaken on that massive estate came to an abrupt end.
In early 2012 Marcy and I went to Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay to gather the final interviews for our book. In Montevideo we planned to meet Raúl Zibechi, who had promised to write a foreword to our book. I particularly wanted to sit down and talk with him about social movements in Latin America, as I knew I would be doing a major part of the “theorizing” for our introduction. By the time we met him at his apartment, I’d had plenty of time to puzzle over the main question I wanted to ask him, and I posed it almost as soon as we sat down for coffee in his kitchen.
“What do you see as the main problem confronting social movements in Latin America today?”
Without hesitation he replied, “Oh, well, the progressive governments, of course.”
I was baffled by the response. “How so? What do you mean?”
He looked at me as if he thought the answer was obvious. “These new left governments are all following in the footsteps of your ‘War on Poverty.’ You remember that, don’t you? It was the policy of the [Lyndon] Johnson administration, designed by the architect of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara. The idea was not to resolve the problem, but to design a way of hiding it or keeping it quiet. You may recall that McNamara went on to become the president of the World Bank and there he applied the same ‘solutions’ all around the world. So this current crop of left governments is doing the same thing here. Welfare programs are developed out of new income from extractivist industries, but the real problems aren’t addressed by this approach because they’ve problematized poverty and not wealth.”
Our meeting only lasted a little over an hour, but by the time Marcy and I left, I felt Raúl had opened up a whole new vista on the interviews. Over the next few months as I translated and we edited the transcripts, we found themes emerging that confirmed, over and over again, Zibechi’s critique of the left governments, a critique that some felt he was hesitant to apply to Venezuela.7
Marcy and I wrote a review for NACLA of a book co-written by our friend Roger Burbach and two contributors to our own book, Michael Fox and Marc Becker, in which the writers considered the changes of the Pink Tide governments as experiments in “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century.”8 We wanted to give the book a good review, but found much of the thinking, with the exception of Marc Becker’s chapter on Ecuador, muddled by an inconsistent definition of terms (such as “socialism”), wishful thinking and an uncritical acceptance of the line of the governments of the region, especially the Bolivarian government. It was becoming increasingly apparent to me that the term “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century” had little or no content in the Latin American context, especially if one worked from the traditional Marxist definition of “socialism” as a “new mode of produc
tion.” Not only did the predominant mode of production in Latin American countries remain capitalist, with the exception of Cuba, and to some degree, Venezuela, none showed significant signs of moving beyond economies based on extraction by transnationals. The new model of “development” after the import-substitution model had died, and with it, any hope of national industrialization.9 In Cuba, a state capitalist model that the Bolivarians appeared interested in replicating, had developed under the rubric of “socialism,”but it had nothing of the “Twenty-First” century about it.10 Cuba, it seemed to me, was a decidedly twentieth century Marxist-Leninist holdout that was only slightly more appealing than North Korea or Vietnam. And Venezuela now seemed to be going in a similar direction, with even fewer prospects for success, judging from the increasing chaos in the country.
The “Pink Tide,” then, was characterized by a post-neoliberal capitalist economic model propelled by extractivist industries working to inflate and supply a commodities boom and states that allowed some of the wealth from the sale of those commodities to “trickle down” on the multitudes neglected throughout the “neoliberal nineties.” But did a greater role for the state and increased welfare policies constitute “socialism” in any sense? Was this not the clearest example of what Zibechi meant by “problematizing poverty and not wealth”?
I thought over Raúl’s critique of the governments of the region and wondered about Venezuela. I wondered, and I considered all the contradictions as we finished up our review and as I rewrote my introduction to the Venezuela chapter of our book. And on the day that I finished another, probably the seventh or eighth complete rewrite of my Venezuela introduction, I got a call from a friend telling me that Chávez had died. I knew then I would have to return to Venezuela before I finished writing my introduction.
Chapter Thirteen: Locked Out at the Border
There were a number of changes that enabled me to come at the problematic of Venezuela and the Bolivarian process from a different angle in the Spring of 2013. First off, something I had discounted, but later came to see as crucial, was the fact that I had been teaching composition and critical thinking at Berkeley City College. I imagined my class might have had an impact on my students; I had no idea that it would transform me and how I saw the world. In my first critical thinking class I had taught students to begin with a working thesis and then assemble evidence to support it. I chose readings that offered my perspective on the world, and that formed my own, and students’, expectations of what the final essays would look like, both in form and content. That simplistic approach got me through the first semester, but I found it boring—and also dishonest. It was what Paulo Freire called the “banking model of education,” in which the teacher puts the ideas in the students’ heads, and the students give them back with a little interest. There is no dialogue, no broad discussion, diversity of opinion, nor clash of viewpoints. In my defense I could argue that the ideas I offered the students were likely different from what they were accustomed to in their educational system thus far, but now I’m not even so sure of that, given that many of my students had grown up in liberal/radical Berkeley. In any case, the “banking method” was the way I’d been taught, and that was clearly the reason for my having hated school so much that I took decades to finish my studies. And like the abused that grows up to be an abuser, I was teaching as I had been taught.
The second semester I brought readings with contrary perspectives into my critical thinking classroom, and I introduced students to opposing viewpoints that I had them debate. As time went on, I tried to sharpen contradictions, encourage students to explore contrary points of view, and come up with their own perspectives. That was great for my students, but as I looked at my work with Venezuela, how well had I implemented my own approach to “critical thinking”? In my film I’d certainly raised questions at the end, but I also had ended on an upbeat note, celebrating the Bolivarian “Revolution.” In my articles I’d done the same, which was why they were so widely published and disseminated. I’d gotten lazy in my writing and thinking, as I’d discovered in my own classroom.
Unforeseen events had made it possible for me to leave teaching in the summer of 2011, and it had been a great relief as I’d found the contradictions of the “educational system” too great to deal with any longer. I realized as much when I opened my first class that spring semester by telling my students that the university was definitely no place to get an education, but the ideal place to accrue an enormous debt. I suggested if they wished to get an education they might try getting a card at the public library three blocks away, and spending their time there. At the end of that semester, I managed to get laid off and went on unemployment for a year or so, during which time I was able to dedicate myself completely to work on Marcy’s and my book.
As I did my research in preparation for my next trip to Venezuela, patterns began to emerge that I hadn’t seen before, almost certainly because I hadn’t looked for them. There was, for instance, the scandal at FONDEN, the development fund constantly filling up with cash from oil sales, and constantly being emptied out, where billions had gone missing and the accounts were all hidden.1 FONDEN is the entity, funded by the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela Sociedad Anónima (PDVSA), that funds development and social programs. It operated as a secret corporation with Hugo Chávez at the head, and directly under him Finance and Planning Minister Jorge Giordani (who was later dismissed from the government by President Nicolas Maduro) and other trusted government ministers. Funds came and went, but a great part simply disappeared from what some have called “Chávez’s piggy bank.”2 As Francisco Toro pointed out in an August 2011 report, at the time “42% of public spending was secret” and, unsurprisingly, US $29 billion of US $69 billion dollars had gone missing.3
There were the “mega-projects” that were never built, or were abandoned half-way, but which in either case cost hundreds of millions—even billions—of dollars, like the national paper company, Pulpa y Papel, CA, the “vanguard socialist business.” That project today remains a fenced empty field with a cleared space and nothing else, which alone has cost Venezuelans more than half a billion dollars.4 No doubt much of the enormous amount of missing money went into foreign bank accounts of government officials, and as patronage to Chávez supporters in the community councils, as later reports showed.5
All this was just the tip of the iceberg of corruption in the country, and it had been increasingly clear to me that Chávez must have known about most, or all of it. And now Chávez was dead, but the mysteries continued. Worse yet, all those corrupt people who surrounded the “Comandante,” as the Chavistas themselves characterized them, would now be in charge.
Any analysis of what was going on in Venezuela under the Bolivarian “Revolution,” like it or not, had to start with Chávez. He was as crucial a part of the narrative as Jesus is to the Gospel of Mark. I didn’t want to acknowledge that for the longest time, but as I puzzled over what was happening in Venezuela this much became clear to me. So this time around I started with Chávez himself, and I found the biography by Cristina Marcano and Alberto Tyszka a particularly interesting and enlightening study on the man behind the public mask.6 Their work as opposition journalists was fair, but critical, and certainly a far cry from the adoring propaganda of the government that fed the popular mythology about Chávez.
While left media in the US was uncritically applauding the Bolivarian “Revolution,” and denying, or minimizing the problems of the country, Reuters, The Economist, The Guardian and other mainstream (“bourgeois”) media were putting out some damning reports on Venezuelan government policies, and I found these enlightening.
Noam Chomsky had once said “My impression in general is that the business press is more open, more free, often more critical, less constrained by external power and external influences,” which was how he explained why he read the Financial Times.7 So I began focusing on the business press, and it immediately became apparent that in the nation supposedly bu
ilding “protagonistic participatory democracy” it was practically impossible to get information on the Venezuelan government’s finances and when information was available, it was frequently incoherent and contradictory, as cooked books usually are.8
Secondly, I began looking at all the information I was finding from a different perspective, that is, not so much on how it supported what professed to be a “socialist” or “left” state, but from the perspective of what encouraged and nurtured “organized civil society” or social movements. Marcy and I had spent the previous year assimilating the interviews of social movement activists from all over Latin America, and their testimony had clarified for us a left alternative that was quite distinct from anything in the Marxist, socialist, or communist traditions. A social movement perspective proper was emerging for us that, while as yet inchoate, was distinctly its own.
The emerging social movement perspective also fit with my own view of the world that was shifting and growing as a result of reading about and observing indigenous social movements, reflecting on my own experiences, and working in the Twelve Step programs. This all went into my personal preparation for a return to Venezuela, but my recovery process was central. I’d had a relapse on marijuana nearly four years before and had returned a year later to a recovery program with a greater sense of humility and willingness to “work a program.” In Anonymous programs this requires open-mindedness, a desire to focus attention on one’s own comportment and, above all, honesty. I began “working the steps,” that is, methodically undergoing a process of self-examination with a sponsor, guided by the Twelve Steps.