Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  We drove past the guarimba down an open road, and stopped at a roadside cafe/filling station where I invited the Spaniard to a cafe marrón, an espresso with just a shot of milk. My headache disappeared as the sweat dripped off my nose. The Spaniard, it turned out, was a professor of chemistry at the University of the Andes in Mérida, and had once been a Chavista himself.

  “I supported the revolution. It did some great things, like helping poor people get an education and come out of poverty. Those were some good programs. Several years ago I started to see how the inflation was destroying the country, how Venezuela was going in debt even with all its oil wealth. How is that possible? Such mismanagement, such corruption and impunity. I couldn’t support that any more. So I’ve gone over to the opposition.”

  We walked back to the bus and I decided to stay and try to find a way to Mérida. A young man, who introduced himself as Luis, joined me and we watched the bus pull away, leaving just the two of us. We gathered our baggage and started walking toward the guarimba and the road leading to Mérida.

  The crowd was energetic, even angry, but not threatening. As we approached the other side, I stopped Luis. “Luis, would you mind if I got out my video camera to record some of this?”

  “No. Go ahead. I’ll watch your stuff.”

  I thanked him and walked into the crowd. I recorded the national guardsmen, facing off with the crowd, then turned for a pan of the crowd. Almost immediately a number of demonstrators approached me and asked who I was. I looked at them and froze up for an instant. What should I tell them? How would they react? Would they tear me up in an instant?

  “I’m a gringo from the United States,” I said.

  To my relief they celebrated. They patted me on the back and spoke into the camera. “We’re here to call for a recount. Capriles is President! He won the election.”

  After a few minutes I returned to Luis and we continued down the road, interviewing people as we went, some Chavistas, some Capriles supporters. We walked and as we walked my shirt soaked with sweat. Sweat dripped in my eyes and ran down my glasses as I walked faster, trying to keep up with Luis. We tried to get on one bus that was turning around, but it was full and pulled away. And then, at some point, a man in a jeep said something to Luis and Luis asked where he was going.

  “I’m headed to Mérida,” he said. “You need a ride?”

  Luis and I thanked him and as the conversation continued and he loaded our baggage in the rear of his jeep, he smiled and said, “I’m happy to have people from the opposition with me! Get in!”

  The driver, whose name I didn’t get, drove fast, passing everything on the road. As we entered El Vigía he found his way up hillsides on dirt roads and got us around the guarimbas while I interviewed Luis.

  “I used to be a Chavista,” Luis said. “I mean, there were great programs that helped the poor. But this process has polarized the country. It’s not possible any longer to have a dialogue. We’ve got to resolve this problem, but the oficialistas (Chavistas) attack the middle class. I’m in the middle class. I work hard, but I get nowhere. We have the highest inflation in the world. With the devaluation, it’s impossible to live. Our salaries barely make our living expenses. And we’re all in this situation. The opposition is really growing for those reasons.”

  “We help all these countries, building hospitals in Argentina and Bolivia and we spend all this money giving oil to countries while our own economy is being destroyed. This shouldn’t be happening. We have all this oil, but it’s being wasted, and being used by these corrupt people. And it has to stop.”

  Over the next hour or so as we sped towards Mérida, Luis continued to explain why he’d joined the opposition. He talked about the closing of businesses in the country and the destruction of small business owners, the middle and working classes. He asked, “If from one day to the next the government can come in and expropriate a business, who’s going to invest when there’s no juridical guarantee of property?” Certainly the government was giving the poor “a kilo of flour, a kilo of rice and a kilo of corn” where previous governments had done nothing for the poor, but at what cost? What was this teaching the poor about initiative, and doing things for themselves? It was keeping them poor and more dependent than ever on the government. And was this even sustainable in the long term? The government was expropriating land that was under production and giving it to the poor who did nothing with it because they didn’t have the means since the government had nationalized other businesses like Agroisleña, the major producer of fertilizers, and other agricultural products in the country (now nationalized as Agropatria) and they no longer produced the needed inputs for agriculture.

  The driver then introduced himself as Ricardo Uzcátegui and I asked him if he’d always been in the opposition. “No. Before there was no opposition. There were COPEIistas and ADecos, but we were all Venezuelans. The country wasn’t divided as it is now.”

  Luis said that the night before when he went to vote in San Antonio where he lived, the National Guardsmen at the voting booth told him they opposed the Bolivarian process. And they’d told him that the Chavistas had lost the presidency because former supporters had stayed home or gone over to vote for Capriles. Luis talked about the illegal use of state money to pay for Maduro’s campaign. “We all paid for his campaign,” he said, indicating Ricardo, the other passenger and himself. “And then there was the abuse of the cadenas [obligatorily broadcasted presidential transmissions] that blocked out Capriles’s few campaign broadcasts. And all the free airtime Maduro had on government television, which is now most of the television. If you go into the small towns, unless you happen to have cable television, all you have access to are the government stations. So they’re creating an ideology, and a fanaticism of a single point of view.” Luis continued talking and I recorded and listened, and Ricardo and his partner agreed and threw in additional details to Luis’s narrative and missing pieces of the puzzle of the Bolivarian Revolution fell into place for me one by one.

  We passed a thermoelectric plant that, Ricardo explained, was owned by the Chinese. “They’re going to be administering everything. They’re taking over everything: the teleférico (aerial cable car or ski lift) of Mérida, everything.”

  The texts were coming in all this time, fact mixed with rumor and, based on that mix, unsubstantiated extrapolations and conclusions. Were ballots being destroyed? I didn’t know. But Luis assumed it to be true. “And if Maduro is so sure of his victory, why is he burning the physical ballots?” He looked down at his phone again.

  “They’re inaugurating Maduro now. I just got a text,” he said. And so, I thought, there would be no recount after all. Or if so, it would now make no difference. Maduro had been scheduled to be sworn in four days after the election, but they moved it ahead to the day after to guarantee his taking the office. After all, the winner in such a situation is the one who’s sworn in first.

  Ricardo left us near a trolley stop where we hailed a cab that took Luis home first, then headed for Plaza Bolívar where I’d take a room before getting in touch with Betty and Humberto. I knew if I called them, they wouldn’t let me stay in a posada but would insist that I stay at their house at Teatro Colibrí. Tonight I wanted to be alone, and ready to record whatever happened as the night went on.

  The taxi got within eight or ten blocks of Plaza Bolívar after moving around various guarimbas, and at last I let the taxi driver drop me at a place from which I could walk the rest of the way. I passed two or three guarimbas where students were burning tires and waving flags, their faces covered with scarves. I moved through their midst and they raised the wire that crossed the lanes of the Avenue of the Americas so I could pass.

  The guarimberos seemed to be having a good time, and the police just sat quietly in their jeep and watched. Everyone obviously had the same script. I walked the familiar streets of Mérida, pulling my suitcase behind me and headed up Avenida 2 finally arriving at the Posada Alemania. There was a new person at the d
esk, a man a few years younger than me with a beard and glasses, named Marco Castillo. He checked me in and I went to my room, dropped off my pack, and immediately set out to go back to Plaza Bolívar to record the cacerolazo2 and the Chavista demonstration. As I prepared to leave, Marco warned me against going. “There’s likely to be violence. It’s very dangerous out there tonight.” I thanked him for the warning and left with my camera. I stopped by a street food vendor to get an arepa since I hadn’t had much lunch nor any dinner. While I ate a group of Chavistas came by and began throwing rocks at a window where people where banging on pots. Then they moved up the street menacingly toward the fires. I finished my arepa and walked across Plaza Bolivar to see what was happening at the Chavista event. Compared to the guarimba in Coloncito, this group of Chavistas was a distinctly less friendly crowd, something I hadn’t expected. Then, at the edge of the park I ran into the “Poeta” Simon. We talked and several Chavistas came up to greet us. They were friendly and I began to relax. Suddenly, there was a commotion and I turned to see a large contingent of Chavistas charging up the street towards another group of people protesting with cacerolazos. Simon started to follow, crying out, “we’ve got to stop them! They’re going to destroy the city!”

  I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Don’t they have a right to protest? Is it now illegal to protest in Venezuela?”

  “No, no, it’s just that they want to burn the city down!” he replied angrily.

  “Simon, they’re lighting tires and trash on the street. There’s no danger of fire. They’re just angry and want to protest.”

  He stopped, then nodded and dropped his gaze. After a moment he said, “You’re right. People say they want to burn down the city. But really a lot of these people are bourgeoisie, and if they set fire to the city, they’d burn up their own shops. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  Chapter Fifteen: After the Election

  In the morning I stopped by the front desk of the guesthouse and talked with Marco.

  He said that the night before he’d seen Chavistas on motorcycles attack and beat a group of protestors. One of the Chavistas was carrying a pistol. This attack was corroborated later by a Chavista friend who acknowledged that “people in red t-shirts” were attacking people, and they even attacked her ordinarily a-political landlord, who was holding a sign calling for peace, splitting her scalp open with a rock. My friend, however, didn’t want to acknowledge that these violent people in red t-shirts were “Chavistas” even though we both knew that in Venezuela only Chavistas wear red t-shirts.

  Both Marco and I suspected these “motorizados” or motorcyclists were Tupamaros, and I tried to imagine Malacara participating in such activities. I drew a blank on that image, but I also knew that he was fully capable of joining in if he felt obliged to defend the “Revolution” from the “counterrevolutionaries.” The fact that the “Revolution” might have won by fraud and, in the name of “protagonistic and participatory democracy,” have violated the principle of democracy, would be a trivial problem compared to the defense of the “Revolution”: in fact, the history of most revolutions shows that every imaginable crime can be justified by revolutionaries. Somehow the Chavistas managed to justify their beating of the opposition parliamentarian of Mérida, William Dávila, the day after the election and during a session of the National Assembly. And no doubt they also missed the irony of their calling him “fascist” as they beat him.

  In a bad sign for the “oficialista” Chavistas, the dissatisfaction began spreading to all sectors of society. As Marco pointed out, cacerolazos were taking place all over the country and “not only in ‘bourgeois’ neighborhoods, but also in Petare and 23 de Enero,” that is, in traditional Chavista strongholds.

  Rumors and suspicions abounded, and with good reason. Capriles, in a news conference, claimed that over three thousand “irregularities” had occurred in the elections. According to the opposition leader, these included 535 damaged voting machines; 1,176 voting centers where Maduro received more votes than Chávez had and one where Maduro received 1,000% more than Chávez had. “Who can believe that Maduro had received more votes than Chávez when nearly a million Chávez voters voted [this time] for Capriles?” he asked. Capriles went on to claim that witnesses were pulled by force from 286 centers that represented altogether 722,983 voters. He went on to say that there were “assisted votes” affecting 1,479,774 voters and that more than 600,000 dead people, including people over the age of 100 (and even some over 120) had voted.1

  Chavistas and their supporters proclaim the Venezuelan electoral system to be “the best in the world,” quoting, or misquoting, Jimmy Carter who, in the case of this election, praised the voting machines used and the fact that they functioned well, but was more guarded on other aspects of the elections themselves. In a final report on the 2013 Venezuelan presidential elections released in May 2014 the Carter Center said that “while the Venezuelan population, political parties, and candidates generally have shown confidence in the performance and integrity of the automated voting machines when counting votes, such trust is not automatically transferred to the particular conditions under which the vote took place, or to the capacity of the system to ensure that every registered voter can vote once and only once.”2 The report also noted “a number of inequities in campaign conditions, both in access to financial resources as well as in access to the media, which reduces the competitiveness of elections.”

  The English version of the full report, which in May 2014 was promised “in the coming months,” has yet to appear, but the Spanish report has been released.3 The full report noted a congruence between the electronic and the paper receipts, something the opposition never felt was much of an issue. What concerned the opposition were allegations of multiple voting, especially at the moment when the Internet went down just as the polls were closing. At that moment, many in the opposition allege that Chavistas were brought in to vote a second, or more times, which was why the opposition was more concerned with an audit that would match fingerprints to votes. The Carter report acknowledged that the CNE had done a biometric (analysis of fingerprints to check for multiple voting) but that “unfortunately, this audit didn’t have the expected effect of publicly dispelling doubts and questions raised by the MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable)” because no one in the opposition was allowed to attend that audit to verify the results.4 The Carter Center acknowledged the fact that the Internet had gone down for nearly twenty minutes just as the polls closed, but they attributed no importance to the fact.

  The Bolivarian government admitted it shut down the Internet “for three minutes,” (although it was widely reported that the net was down for twenty minutes) just as the polls were closing, supposedly to stop hacking attacks on government Twitter accounts. Spanish journalist Emili J. Blasco published his account of what happened that night in Bumerán Chávez, based on the testimony of Leamsy Salazar, Hugo Chávez’s, and later Diosdado Cabello’s, bodyguard who defected to the US in January 2015. According to Blasco’s account, Capriles had been ahead in the polls all day, but when the Internet inexplicably shut down in Venezuela (he mistakenly says it was at four p.m.), things began to change. Salazar told Blasco about his experience with Cabello in a secret location where top Chavistas sat with computers and monitors watching the elections, calling squads of the faithful out to vote “with false identification cards (cedulas).” The falsification of the vote was coordinated with the CNE and other agents, including future vice president Jorge Arreaza, and it also required the shutting down of the Internet so as to “better manage with greater guarantees the complex volume of data fed into the informational system parallel to that of the PSUV.” Blasco wrote that “this final operation of Chavismo required time, and so a little before six in the evening, when the electoral centers should have closed, the CNE announced an extension of the voting time until eight o’clock, where needed.”5

  This account raises many questions, and it is also questioned, not o
nly by Chavistas (most of whom know nothing about it) but also by solid opposition analysts like Juan Cristóbal Nagel, co-founder of, and writer for, the website, Caracas Chronicles. While he recognizes Blasco as a “well-sourced” Washington journalist who “has a reputation—at least in my book—for getting things right,”6 he sees contradictions between Leamsy Salazar’s account and that of Eugenio Martínez, aka “Puzkas,” an opposition expert in the Venezuelan electoral process. Nagel concludes “What nobody disputes, however, is the anomalous spike in Maduro’s votes in voting centers that stayed open until late. Both Blasco and Puzkas, as well as the MUD technicians, acknowledge that this was the crux of the issue. This is the heart of Capriles’ claim of fraud.”7

  We may never know the answer to this mystery, but there is a ring of truth to the charge that Chavistas have been organized to engage in multiple voting in close elections. The issue came up again in the December 2015 National Assembly elections when the CNE again illegally extended the polling hours in areas of the country and witnesses saw people lined up who had already voted, as was clear from the indelible ink on their pinkie fingers.

  Regardless of what fraud occurred that day, Maduro slipped into the presidency on what in the US would have been a hanging chad in Florida. In fact, he seemed to think he’d won a mandate and was apparently insulted that anyone would question his skimpy margin of victory. He continued on his tack of insulting and denigrating the increasingly diverse opposition, which now clearly included people who had voted for Chávez just a few months before. He said that the United States was behind the opposition’s “plot” to refuse recognition of his victory, and that “we won’t negotiate with the bourgeoisie.” Meanwhile, Capriles called for calm. It was Bush and Gore all over again, but al tropical. But in this case I no longer knew who was playing Bush and who was playing Gore.