by Amy Chua
This domination was at its most visible in the country’s beauty pageants. Whiteness was equated with perfection. The blond Sáez—the Miss Venezuela who lost to Chávez—was described by the media as “the most perfect woman in the history of all the beauty pageants of the universe.” Conversely, any sign of African or Indian heritage—including broader noses, fuller mouths, or pelo malo (bad hair), the derogatory term for tightly curled black hair—was considered ugly. (Hair straightening is another extremely profitable industry in Venezuela.) Many black, indigenous, and darker-skinned Venezuelans internalized this Eurocentric standard of beauty.
PRESIDENT HUGO CHÁVEZ
It probably never occurred to Venezuela’s white elite that they actually might lose power. It probably never occurred to the U.S. foreign establishment either, since these elites were basically their only points of contact. After all, they controlled not only the country’s oil sector but the media, banks, foreign investment networks, all the most valuable land, and the most lucrative businesses. As elsewhere in Latin America, this minority was also very closely knit. As one Venezuelan put it, “In Venezuela there are more boards of directors than there are directors.”
But in 1998, the Venezuelan people—exercising their democratic power—elected Hugo Chávez as president in a landslide victory, to the horror of the United States. Chávez reversed the vector of Venezuelan racism. Instead of being embarrassed by his mixed origins, Chávez defiantly called himself “the Indian from Barinas” and reveled in his indigenous and African features, once gloating to an interviewer, “Hate against me has a lot to do with racism.” By combining ethnicity with populism and class appeals, Chávez galvanized Venezuela’s destitute majority, most of whom, like Chávez, are mixed-blooded, with “thick mouths” and visibly darker skin than most of the nation’s elite. “He is one of us,” cried cheering washerwomen, maids, and peasants. “We’ve never had another president like that before.”
For all the talk of color-blind racial democracy, Venezuela’s elite couldn’t help themselves. They called Chávez “El Negro” (The Black) and ese mono (that monkey). Political graffiti like “Death to the Monkey Chávez!” began to appear on the walls of upper- and middle-class neighborhoods. In one political cartoon he was depicted as an ape. But Chávez used all this to his advantage. He fashioned himself as the champion of Venezuela’s oppressed. Once in office, he passed a new constitution guaranteeing for the first time cultural and economic rights for indigenous populations. His government also passed a Law Against Racial Discrimination, a remarkable step in a country where the mere existence of race, let alone racism, had long been denied.
Commentators disagree slightly about whether Chávez created racial consciousness in Venezuela—by repeatedly sending the message that “[t]he rich people are racist and they hate you”—or whether he embraced an already existing “movement demanding that race be taken seriously.” Regardless, what differentiated Chávez from other politicians was, in the words of Moisés Naím (a former Venezuelan minister of trade and industry and later editor of Foreign Policy), “his enthusiastic willingness to tap into collective anger and social resentments that other politicians failed to see, refused to stoke, or more likely, had a vested interest in not exacerbating.” Deliberately fomenting class conflict and lacing it with ethnic and racial resentment, Chávez “broke with the tradition of multiclass political parties and the illusion of social harmony that prevailed in Venezuela for four decades.”
Like all demagogues, Chávez was a master at tribal politics. “Oligarchs tremble,” he campaigned to great, agitated crowds, referring to Venezuela’s “rotten” elites. He also attacked foreign investors, calling them “squealing pigs” and rich “degenerates.” Chávez swept to electoral victory not by offering a well-thought-out economic policy. Rather, in Naím’s words, he “cater[ed] to the emotional needs of a deeply demoralized nation,” employing an “inchoate but very effective folksy mixture of Bolivarian sound-bites, Christianity, collectivist utopianism, baseball and indigenous cosmogony, peppered with diatribes against oligarchs, neoliberalism, foreign conspiracies, and globalization.”
Chávez was the first president not to invite the winner of the Miss Venezuela pageant to the presidential palace after her crowning. He also ordered that two oil tankers named after former white Miss Venezuelas—the Maritza Sayalero and the Pilín León—be named Negra Hipólita and Negra Matea, two legendary black women who, according to lore, raised Simón Bolívar. The Chávez regime also saw Venezuela crown its first nonwhite Miss Venezuela.
BACKLASH BY VENEZUELA’S ELITE
Chávez’s nationalization and antibusiness policies upended the economy. Fearful of confiscation, Venezuela’s wealthy elites withdrew more than $8 billion, transferring most of it to overseas banks. But the real battleground between Chávez and the Venezuelan elite was the national oil company, PDVSA, which generates about 95 percent of the country’s export earnings and represents the nation’s lifeblood.
Although technically state owned, PDVSA was famous for being efficiently run by members of the business elite—“oligarchs,” in Chávez’s view. In March 2002, Chávez fired PDVSA’s president, General Guaicaipuro Lameda, widely respected by foreign investors for his professional steering of the oil behemoth. In Lameda’s place, Chávez installed a left-wing academic with little business experience.
In April 2002, only a few weeks later, a coup deposed Chávez, who was taken by force to a military base. Astonishingly, the Bush administration hailed the coup as “a victory for democracy.” If, as is rumored, the United States was behind the coup, the move was a massive moral and strategic mistake. If instead, as the Bush administration insisted, it had no connection to the coup and genuinely believed that Chávez’s ouster was a democratic triumph, this was an astounding display of blindness to the realities of Venezuela’s tribal politics.
The coup was a classic effort led by a market-dominant minority to retaliate against a democratically elected government threatening their wealth and power. Although supported at first by trade union leaders and skilled labor, the regime that briefly uprooted Chávez “looked like it had come from the country club.” Interim president Pedro Carmona, a wealthy white, was head of the country’s largest business association. Union representatives were completely excluded from positions of authority. “All of them oligarchs,” scoffed a dark-skinned street vendor. “Couldn’t they have appointed one person like us?”
To the dismay of the Bush administration—and the embarrassment of major U.S. newspapers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, which initially supported Chávez’s “resignation”—a popular uprising returned Chávez to power with stunning speed. Not thousands, but millions, of Chávez supporters, mostly poor from the barrios, surrounded the presidential palace, and within forty-eight hours, Chávez was back in office. Except for the United States, every democratic country in the western hemisphere, even those at odds with Chávez, had condemned the coup. By appearing to support the abortive overthrow of a democratically elected leader, and calling it a victory for democracy, the United States committed a serious misstep. We looked not only, as the BBC put it, “rather stupid,” but hypocritical, and our influence in the region declined sharply.
But the battle was not over; it would be a fight to the death. In December 2002, strikes broke out, shutting down oil production and bringing the entire economy to a grinding halt. In the United States, strikes are usually instigated by blue-collar workers seeking higher wages. Venezuela’s strikes, however, were spearheaded by the country’s wealthy business elite, along with other anti-Chávez groups. I explained this in a January 2003 op-ed in the New York Times, while making the larger point that democracy in conditions of extreme inequality can “create political and economic instability,” leading to the election of populist, anti-free-market leaders. In addition, I pointed out:
There is also an ethnic dimension to Venezuela’s crisis. Along with r
oughly 80 percent of Venezuela’s population, Mr. Chávez is a “pardo”—a term with both class and ethnic overtones that refers loosely to brown-skinned people of Amerindian or African ancestry. But Venezuela’s economy has always been controlled by a tiny minority of cosmopolitan whites. . . .
I was completely unprepared for what happened next. I began receiving a deluge of vicious hate e-mails—at a rate of about a hundred a minute—all from Venezuelans. A number of things stood out. First, they were all in English, suggesting that they were written by relatively privileged Venezuelans; many of the writers were affiliated with businesses or universities and had U.S. connections. Second, they virtually all insisted that Chávez was an antidemocratic force, rarely mentioning that he had been democratically elected. Finally, they were adamant that anti-Chávez opposition had nothing to do with race, because racism did not exist in Venezuela. Here are a few relatively moderate samples:
As a Venezuelan I was appalled at Dr. Amy Chua’s superficial and biased treatment of the Venezuelan situation in her January 7 article Power to the Privileged. . . . Class hatred and racism have never been a real issue in Venezuela. . . . Venezuela is a social and racial melting pot that has allowed children from humble backgrounds to move up in the world, get a good education, job or political position. . . . Also, this melting pot has produced some of the most beautiful women in the world, who consistently earn Miss Universe and Miss World titles.
Race has never been an “issue” in Venezuela. The fact that Chávez—whom you describe as a “pardo” (which he is not by the way) may have a darker colour of his skin does not at all constitute—and has never constituted—a social prejudice in Venezuelan social behaviour. . . . So Professor Chua you don’t have the slightest idea of what you are talking about. HOWEVER Chávez himself has openly spread the issue of the colour of his skin in order to justify his dictatorial behaviour. And you have fallen for it.
Having grown up in Venezuela and lived there for 30 years, I can attest that racial lines are almost non-existent. Blacks and “pardos” have today the same opportunities and life style as Caucasians.
And literally hundreds more like this. The e-mail campaign seemed to be well organized. As if following a protocol, most of them copied my dean, the president of Yale, and every member of my faculty (not to mention Hillary Clinton and the head of the United Nations). As it happened, I had just started teaching at Yale Law School, and many of my brand-new colleagues came up to me with strange looks on their faces to ask what was going on. I also received death threats, including one that said, “Venezuelans will get you in Chicago,” where I was scheduled to give a talk (the venue provided bodyguards). When I gave a talk at the University of Pennsylvania, Venezuelans protested the lecture.
Today, the story line has changed. Venezuela’s glaring racial inequities are now widely acknowledged, as is the fact that Chávez’s popularity was based in significant part on his ability to turn Indian and African heritage into a source of pride, identity, and mobilization against a long-dominant white elite. (Chávez was not the only Latin American leader to play the ethnic card. Similarly ethnically tinged populist movements swept Alejandro Toledo to victory in Peru and Evo Morales to the presidency in Bolivia.)
Chávez was reelected in a landslide in 2006, then again in 2012. However else his legacy may be judged, Chávez undoubtedly delivered to his poor constituents. As of 2012, Chávez had cut poverty “by half, and extreme poverty by 70 percent.” College enrollment doubled, and millions had access to health care for the first time. As Brazil’s president Lula said that year, “A victory for Chávez is . . . a victory for the people of Venezuela.” Although Chávez was the beneficiary of high oil prices for many years—it’s often said that Venezuela’s leaders’ fortunes rise and fall with the price of oil—the fact remains that by many metrics, Venezuela was more democratic under Chávez than before he came to power.
At the same time, there is also no doubt that Chávez was a strongman with autocratic leanings and that his achievements exacted an enormous economic cost. By 2006, government expenditures were exceeding government revenues. To stay afloat, Chávez borrowed more than $55 billion from China and Russia. As inflation soared, Chávez imposed price controls, which, according to many, disincentivized manufacturing and started the country on the road to today’s disastrous shortages. Oil production, drained of expertise and foreign investment, fell sharply, crippled by operational failures.
Nevertheless, Chávez maintained surprising popularity right up until his death, which was met with massive grief among “Chavistas” and Venezuela’s underclass. Chávez had won the hearts of the poor. His embrace of a long-neglected, long-spurned swath of Venezuela endeared him to them, and they were willing to look past his shortcomings.
One of the most extraordinary features of Chávez’s presidency was his reality TV show, Aló Presidente (Hello President), which aired every Sunday at 11:00 A.M. and went on for as long as Chávez wanted, usually four to eight hours. Utterly unprecedented and shocking at the time, Chávez’s persona—part entertainer, part head of state—may seem strangely familiar to Americans today. The conceit was that the Venezuelan people should get to see “the revolution” unfolding, so every week Chávez would appear live, sometimes on the street, sometimes in front of an audience in the presidential palace, and talk, joke, sing, issue decrees, or order people to jail. Occasionally, he interviewed other heads of state, Oprah style. Because he made actual policy on the show, often without any warning, it was imperative for his cabinet members to watch in order to keep current. And when he would point to a building and declare, “Exprópiese!” (Expropriate it!), the live audience would burst into applause.
In 2010, Chávez joined Twitter and was immensely successful, using his account to post missives ranging from insults directed at other countries to what he had eaten for lunch (“Just ate a tremendous bowl of fish soup”). He once gave a nineteen-year-old woman an apartment for becoming his three-millionth follower. Outrageous and unfiltered, he tweeted about everything from trips (“Hey how’s it going . . . I’m off to Brazil”) to revolution (“We will be victorious!”) to his gastrointestinal problems (“Hello Tums”). Loathed by the elite, he was, until his death, a man of the people.
—
Chávez died suddenly of colon cancer in 2013—a little more than a year after he suggested that the U.S. government might be secretly infecting Latin America’s left-wing leaders with cancer cells. Chávez’s vice president and successor, Nicolás Maduro, tried to continue Chávez’s policies, but without Chávez’s charisma or shrewdness. Venezuela’s crisis turned into a full-blown collapse when global oil prices plummeted in 2014, plunging Venezuela into a state of mass hunger and rampant crime. In 2016, inflation hit 800 percent. Shortages of basic staples like milk, rice, meat, and toilet paper have triggered protests across the country, met by the government with deadly force.
Today, Venezuela is practically a failed state. While Maduro claims the “Chavista” mantle, it does not appear that he has popular support, with even many diehard Chávez supporters demanding that he step down, denouncing him for “destroy[ing] Chávez’s good name.” His July 2017 creation of a new “constituent assembly”—filled with supporters, including his son and his wife—was widely viewed as an anti-democratic bid to consolidate autocratic power and stifle dissent. Moreover, according to Naím, Maduro is increasingly a “puppet” for Cuba, military strongmen, and drug traffickers, who wield the real power over the country’s crumbling state.
When democracy does battle against a market-dominant minority—as it did in Venezuela throughout the Chávez era—the consequences can ultimately be catastrophic. In the worst cases, both the economy and democracy can be ravaged. Sadly, this worst-case scenario appears to be playing out in Venezuela today.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Inequality and the Tribal Chasm in America
What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what a
monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error, the glory and the scum of the universe.
—BLAISE PASCAL
Professing to be wise, they became fools. . . .
—ROMANS 1:22
The Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America may seem worlds away from the United States, but America is not immune to the forces of tribal politics tearing those regions apart.
We all have a vague sense that inequality lies at the heart of our country’s deep divides. But exactly how is poorly understood. It turns out that in America, there’s a chasm between the tribal identities of the country’s haves and have-nots—a chasm of the same kind wreaking political havoc in many developing and non-Western countries.
In America as in Venezuela, great swaths of the country have come to regard the “establishment”—the political and economic elite—as foreign and even threatening to them. In America as in Venezuela, a highly improbable candidate with no political experience swept to the presidency by attacking that establishment and leading what was widely called a revolution.
The difference, of course, is that Hugo Chávez’s revolution was Socialist, and Donald Trump’s decidedly was not. Populism in America is not anticapitalist. America’s have-nots don’t hate wealth—many of them want it, or want their children to have a shot at it, even if they think the system is “rigged” against them. Whether black, white, or Latino, poor and working-class Americans hunger for the old-fashioned American Dream. Hence the endless popularity of shows like American Idol, The Voice, The Apprentice, Empire, The Sopranos, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Shark Tank, and Duck Dynasty. When the American Dream eludes them—even when it mocks them, or spits in their faces—they would sooner turn on the establishment, or on the law, or on immigrants and other outsiders, or even on reason, than turn on the dream itself.