Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  It was an interesting theory, and it certainly was confirmed by the popular ethos, especially the mood among Chavistas who now referred to Chávez as the “Eternal Commander” (el Comandante Eterno). All the elements of a messianic and millenarian faith were in place, but the savior had only thus far resurrected in the form of a “little bird” that whispered its secret to his successor and then flew away, taking with it the plans for the Socialism of the Twenty-First Century.

  Chapter Nineteen: The Curves of the Road

  The Proud Sinner’s Prayer:

  O God forgive me for having loved you more

  than life itself and correct me in my ways;

  make my way crooked

  so I might delight in the curves of the road.

  Give me more tasks and less success

  that I may always be occupied with work

  but never with fame.

  And this daily bread

  may I gain with the work of my own hands.

  Withhold from me the love you bestow on prophets

  and lead me not in the way of saviors

  that I might have a long life,

  unblessed by your rewards for the just.

  May I never again fall into belief,

  nor tarry long in the way of doctrine,

  but rather live by my own experience,

  guided only by the light of my soul.

  Deliver me not from evil,

  for in evil

  have I found the good;

  and lead me not,

  for I have found my own way, straying

  from the narrow path to the open field,

  a realm that is your infinite loving heart,

  where there is neither power, nor glory, nor kingdom,

  forever and ever.

  Amen.1

  Even before I left Venezuela to return home, I’d organized an event at the Public School, a community-based project that came out of the Occupy uprising in late 2011. In my presentation I wanted to complement my experience with factual information. So I began reading, studying, and researching, starting with all the sources I’d ignored for years, like academics, mainstream journalist’s reports, human rights reports, left oppositionists, the economics/business sections of magazines and newspapers and then reading the online opposition press in Venezuela. I found and read Dragon in the Tropics by Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold, and if one book put it all together, that was the book. After the interviews with Margarita López Maya and Rafael Uzcátegui, I decided I needed to learn more about populism, so I got a copy of The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America by Sebastian Edwards and Rudiger Dornbusch who, I was warned by a professor I met when we went on tour with Until the Rulers Obey, were “right wingers.” He suggested that I complement their works with readings from the work of Kenneth Roberts and Carlos de la Torre on the same subject, which I happily did. Still, I found all of these writers, left and right, informative, and I practiced critical analysis and the guiding idea, suggested in the Anonymous programs, to “take what you like and leave the rest.”

  In the academic literature there was a whole range of opinions to read, but I also complemented academic analysis of Venezuela with news and analysis from the evanescent opposition press. I began to make a practice of daily reading the opposition newspapers online, until they were bought up or driven out of business by the Bolivarian government as has happened to so many newspapers in recent years, deprived of newsprint by the government.2 Nevertheless, El Nacional, Pro Davinci, the right-wing news aggregator Dolar Today, so reviled by Maduro, Run Run.es by the excellent investigative reporter Nelson Bocaranda, Teodoro Petkoff’s Tal Cual, all in Spanish, and sites like Caracas Chronicles (in English) all became my daily haunts. I still stopped in at the Chavista sites like Aporrea and Venezuelanalysis, but I ceased to rely on them for information as I once did. From the latter two sites I gained little else than the increasingly narrow and thin Bolivarian “government line.”

  Some twenty or so people showed up for my presentation at the Public School and I began by offering Kenneth Robert’s list of the features of populism that Rafael Uzcátegui quotes in his book, which seemed to me to perfectly describe the Bolivarian process under Chávez:

  A personalist and paternalistic model based on charismatic leadership

  A multiclass political coalition targeting primarily the lower social sectors

  A process of political mobilization directed from above to below that skips the institutional mechanisms of mediation or subjects them to more direct ties of the leader with the people.

  An amorphous or eclectic ideology expressed in a discourse that exalts the subalterns or is anti-elite.

  An economic project that uses redistributive or clientelist methods on a massive scale so as to build a material base so as to gain the backing of the popular sector.3

  I talked about the destruction of the nationalized industries; the increasing reliance on imports (a policy in direct contradiction with “endogenous development”) and an oil industry that was declining in production, at a rate of 3–4% per year, due to lack of maintenance and investment, and despite historically high oil prices; the growing authoritarianism; shortages of basic necessities and increasing rates of inflation that were pulverizing workers’ salaries; the government’s refusal to discuss collective contracts; the severe problem of corruption and impunity among PSUVistas and use of the judicial system apparently only to persecute pol­itical opponents.

  I published an article at dissidentvoice.org entitled, “The Venezuelan Elections—Again” that drew criticism from Gregory Wilpert, directed at me, and also at the editors of Dissident Voice for having published my piece. About this time I did another talk in Berkeley for a Trotskyist group, Speak Out!, along the same lines as my earlier talk, only now with footage of the wrecked factories of the nationalized ­basic industries and charts showing production of those industries dropping dramatically after nationalization. Another of my articles came out a few days later posted, significantly, on July 19th, the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, at Counterpunch.org, under the title of “Building a Critical Left Solidarity Movement.”4 Within days of the publication of that article the attacks began, and continued through the summer, fall, winter, and into the following spring. I was informed by a few people who now qualified as “ex” friends, that they didn’t any longer wish to be seen in public with me; they wanted no more contact with me; that they could no longer publish me and I should keep that to myself; that I was a “traitor” and, much later (2016), an “apostate.”5 The scatological comments came from academics, one saying in a message to a mutual acquaintance that Clif Ross had “lost his shit.” Michael Lebowitz called my article “idiotic crap” and ended his “critique” saying “Anyone who has read Cliff Ross before will not be surprised by the shallowness of his work. The surprise, though, is that Counterpunch has valorised it. Are there no fact-checkers or editors there anymore?”6

  In fact, no one bothered to “check the facts” because they would have found them to be accurate. Nor did anyone bother to address the issues I’d raised. And of all the people I knew, and of the many places I’ve published, still no one has addressed the issues I raised in that article. But evidently Lebowitz’s comment was enough to end my relationship with Counterpunch.org as they quit responding to my submissions and queries from that time on.

  There was one very touching moment in all this. Roger Burbach called me one day to see if he could “talk me back” to supporting the Bolivarian cause. Our review of his final book, Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions, had just come out in the Summer issue of NACLA’s Report on the Americas and he thanked me for the review. I was surprised because we hadn’t been too enthusiastic about the book and I was now even more convinced than ever that “Twenty-First Century Socialism” was the same naked emperor of the twentieth century dressed up in a new set of visible clothes.

  Roger and I spent nearly an hour on the phone in an intense discu
ssion and neither of us could convince the other of his point of view. But what I did find moving was that the discussion was principled and avoided personal attacks, and it was one of few respectful conversations I’ve managed to have with my old solidarity comrades since I withdrew my support from that cause. Roger Burbach was an honest and courageous writer who had been one of the first North American solidarity activists to break with the corrupt Sandinistas under Daniel Ortega. At the time of our last conversation he was already in failing health, and he died less than two years later.

  By the fall Marcy and I had finished most of the work on our book so when Arturo got in touch and suggested he and I do a movie on the Yukpa people in the Sierra de Perijá I jumped at the chance.7 I knew that eventually my change of heart regarding the Bolivarian “revolution” would get around and it would be increasingly difficult for me to get in and move around Venezuela.

  Sabino Romero, the Yukpa cacique (native chief) had been murdered around the same time Chávez had died, and the native people were all under attack. I thought that while I was in the country it might also be a good time to return to Guayana City and try to interview Rubén González, the Chavista and Secretary-General of the iron-worker’s union who had been imprisoned for leading a strike.

  By now Arturo had also come to believe that the process was at a dead end and that it had been an “estafa” (swindle, fake). We planned to meet in Cúcuta and then return to Mérida by taxis and buses.

  Everything went according to plan this time. Arturo and I met up at a hotel and then the next morning went to the bus terminal to change dollars on the black market. I stuffed the bills into two compartments of my pack and into a folder in the main compartment and we caught a cab to the border. After passing through immigration we caught another collective cab from San Antonio to San Cristóbal. Midway to San Cristóbal we saw a checkpoint on the other side of the road, and then we knew we were in for trouble. Arturo had warned me about this when we were in Cúcuta.

  “The National Guard has checkpoints around the country. We’ve got to be careful when we change the money to hide it well because they’re stopping people and robbing them as they come over into Venezuela.”

  I thought of that now as we approached the checkpoint, and I said a little prayer. At this point in my life I no longer pray except when there’s nothing else I can possibly do. I figure that Whatever It Is knows all, and my trying to tell it anything would be presumptuous. So I pray as an anxiety response, an involuntary spasm in response to conditions over which I have no control.

  The prayer, I thought, had failed me because when the guardsman checked our identification, Arturo and I, sitting in the back seat, became the object of suspicion. When he searched Arturo’s wallet and found another person’s I.D. card, the soldier became convinced that we were traffickers. Arturo tried to convince the guardsman that it was the I.D. card of a friend who had left it at his house and he was holding it until the friend returned to reclaim it (which was the truth), but it didn’t work. The guardsman went through his pack with a thoroughness that made my blood run cold. He found nothing but our hard drives and he asked about them. They were hard drives, Arturo explained, because we were documentary filmmakers. The guardsman looked at me with an expression meant to break me, but I showed nothing.

  After he finished with Arturo, he began to go through my pack. He went through one side of pockets, but neglected the other side where he would have found a third of my money. Then he went through my pack, pulling out my socks, underwear and t-shirts; pulling out my camera bag and looking inside, but ignoring the one pocket where I had another third of my money; he searched through the book I’d just bought in Cúcuta, and he pulled out the folder, but didn’t look inside where he would have found the other third of my money. Then he stood up and nodded at me to repack my things. By now I was trembling, but I carefully repacked my pack and suitcase. When Arturo and I were both packed up, he motioned for us to return to the car, which we did.

  The taxi had patiently waited the forty-five minutes or so we were being searched, and now that we were inside, the guardsman stepped in front of the car and looked the driver in the eye. He stood there a moment, hesitating, then stepped aside and waved us on.

  I stayed at Arturo’s house in Ejido, just a few miles from the city of Mérida. We bought our bus tickets to Maracaibo, Zulia, on the Coromoto Line for seven in the evening. We arrived in plenty of time and went in to eat a couple of empanadas in the bus station before boarding our bus.

  As he ate his empanada, Arturo smiled broadly. “This is the beginning of a big adventure,” he promised. I looked back at him without saying anything. I’m sixty, I thought. At my age I don’t need, I don’t want, any more adventures. I smiled back.

  We boarded the bus, and looked for our “buscama” or “bus bed” but the “bed” turned out to be dirty blue seats with dirty white seatcovers on the heads that were embroidered in English, “Elegance on Wheels.”

  We put on all our clothes to get ready for the night ride in the freezing conditions of the air-conditioned bus. I had on three t-shirts and a special light polyester jacket perfect for such conditions. Only my nose would get cold in the night as I could put my hands in my jacket pockets. Arturo wasn’t as fortunate, but with a couple of towels and a washcloth and other clothing he managed to get comfortable.

  We arrived at sunrise, groggily gathered our bags, and hailed a cab to take us to the place where we were to meet Lusbi. We waited at the appointed spot, in front of the offices of Panorama Newspaper, for nearly an hour, and by nine o’clock the heat was unbearable, even in the shade. Even Arturo was sweating. Finally, Lusbi arrived and we went to a café to have a juice before heading over to his friend’s house for the interview.

  Lusbi Portillo came up through the Socialist League of Venezuela but found the vanguard approach not to his liking. After graduating from the university, he moved across the north side of Lake Maracaibo to Cabimas. He found his experience in the League of great value since he’d learned there that though he wasn’t a great orator, he excelled in organizing, and he put his skills to work with the Indigenous movement in Zulia, working with the Barí, the Yukpa, and the Wayuu as part of his work teaching at the University of Zulia. His non-profit NGO, Homo et Natura (Humans and Nature), has been working on land and mining issues as they relate to the indigenous people of the region. For the past fifteen years or so Lusbi has been targeted by ranchers as a communist guerrilla. At the same time the Chavistas accuse him of being CIA because he defends indigenous people from the Bolivarian government. Lusbi sees himself as a left social movement activist in a struggle for indigenous rights.

  The protests of indigenous people of Zulia and the work of Homo et Natura Society forced President Chávez to back down on mining concessions he’d planned to hand out in 2009, but President Maduro has since been negotiating with Chinese and Russian corporations to exploit the rich coal reserves, Lusbi told us.

  Lusbi wondered aloud, with a wind energy park in the extreme northern region of Zulia, the Goajira, why would they want to exploit the coal? And there were the plans for the natural gas line that would begin in Anzoátegui in the east, cross all of Venezuela, continue through Colombia, and pass Panama into Costa Rica, through Central America and Mexico, to arrive in the United States. Surely, Lusbi said in disbelief, “they’re not planning to send the lowest polluting fuel to the United States and burn the worst ­polluting here?”

  “Zulia also has incredible potential for solar energy, so let’s use the clean energy of the sun and wind and the cleanest fossil energy, natural gas; all this is there to be used so there’s no reason at all to open coal-generated electrical plants with all these other options.”

  But the governor of Zulia, Arias Cárdenas, other military officials, and transnational capitalists, are colluding to make a deal on the Sierra’s coal. There’s also another coal-fired plant they want to build, planned for Venezuela by the Initiative for the Integration of the R
egional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA). The IIRSA began in 2000, under the Brazilian presidency of Fernando Cardoso and funded by the Interamerican Development Bank, with strong private business input. Cardoso, as Lusbi put it, “tricked” all the presidents of South America, including Chávez, into the plan that is designed according to the needs of the transnationals and Europe.

  “The transnationals, with Colombian, Venezuelan, and US capital, want to use the coal they plan to mine for their own purposes. And at whose cost? At the cost of more CO2 that will worsen climate change, at the cost of the mountains, the rivers, the forests, and the lands of the indigenous people because the Sierra de Perijá is the ancestral territory of the Wayuu, the Yukpa, the Japrería and the Barí…” he said, listing them off.

  Lusbi said that the environmental impact study had already been completed and all that was left was to grant the mining permits. The Wayuu opposed the mining because it would be done on their territory, and those living nearby would be negatively impacted by the coal dust and pollution. Two great reservoirs, the Manuelote and the Tulé provide water to Maracaibo and the region and he said, “if the coal is mined, the days of life of these two reservoirs are numbered.” The mines would be located between the rivers Guasare and Maché and in a zone of various water flumes. In the end, a choice will have to be made, Lusbi said: “What do they want: water or coal?”

  I’d remember seeing programs on government television in which people talked about all the legal and constitutional protections native people enjoyed and I asked Lusbi about that. Oh yes, indeed, there were all sorts of protections for native people, but they weren’t enforced, he said, “laws about language and the obligatory use of indigenous languages in their territories, and requiring translators when they go to the cities, or when they are involved in legal processes” were all good, but they hadn’t been put into effect.