L’héritage de Simon Bolivar
Chavez has spent more than a year altogether on trips abroad since taking office, in February, 1999, and so the jet is a kind of second home. His seat bears an embossed leather Presidential seal. Paintings of nineteenth-century Latin-American independence heroes hang on the walls, including a prominent one of Simon Bolivar, known as El Libertador. Bolivar led military campaigns to free large parts of South America from Spanish rule, and in 1819 he helped create a vast nation called Gran Colombia, which encompassed the present-day republics of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama. But political rivalries and internecine warfare frustrated Bolivar’s dream of a United States of South America, and Gran Colombia fell apart soon after his death, in 1830.
Bolivar is Chavez’s political muse ; Chavez quotes and invokes him constantly, and is unabashed about his desire to resuscitate Bolivar’s dream of a united Latin America. In his first year in office, Chavez held a successful referendum to draft a new constitution, which officially renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
Pétrole et socialisme
(...) Chavez campaigned for the Presidency, in 1998, with promises to bring radical change, but, for a time after he won, it was unclear whether he could deliver much more than symbolism and oratory. When he took office, oil was at a mere ten dollars a barrel, and his first government budget was seven billion dollars ; last year, as oil approached a hundred dollars a barrel (by last week, it was a hundred and thirty-six dollars), the budget rose to fifty-four billion. The oil money has allowed Chavez to triple spending on social programs. Even though many of these "missions," as they’re known, have foundered or have proved inadequate, the volume of revenues has meant an improvement in living standards for the country’s poorest citizens, who are, unsurprisingly, Chavez’s strongest supporters. It has also given him the means to buy influence with his neighbors, usually at the expense of the United States.
Grandeur et misère de Caracas
(…) Caracas is, in many respects, a failed city, and it looks and feels like a place that has spun out of control. The crime rate is shockingly high ; there were an estimated five hundred and fifty murders in the first three months of this year. Indigents live openly in the public parks and along the embankments of the city’s sewage trough of a river, the Guaire. Here and there are skyscrapers built in the boom years of the sixties and seventies, their concrete carcasses discolored and crumbling. Hundreds of thousands of shanties scar the surrounding green mountains. Garbage lies uncollected, and the streets are choked with traffic—and, since Venezuela is flush with oil money, there are brand-new cars everywhere. Four hundred and fifty thousand new vehicles were sold last year. Wealthy Venezuelans, meanwhile, live in gated communities and secure apartment buildings on hilltops with panoramic views over Caracas ; a nouveau-riche class has emerged from the official ranks and is known, disparagingly, as the boliburguesia, for Bolivarian bourgeoisie.
Le "modèle Gazprom"
Five years ago, Chavez took direct control of the state oil company, P.D.V.S.A., after sitting out a two-month strike by its union. He fired more than eighteen thousand employees, replacing many of them with his supporters. Since then, he has used P.D.V.S.A.’s revenues to fund his most revolutionary schemes, which include the so-called missions to Venezuela’s poor. Rafael Ramirez, the P.D.V.S.A. chief, told me that Chavez intended to use P.D.V.S.A. as the vehicle for transforming Venezuela from an "oil sultanate to a productive society within a socialist framework." Like a state within a state, the oil company has begun to replicate or supersede many of the functions of the national government. New P.D.V.S.A. branches oversee everything from agriculture to shipping, construction, and food distribution. "The plan is to make P.D.V.S.A. like Gazprom," Ramirez told me, referring to the Russian energy giant, "but with a social role."
Objectif : le pouvoir jusqu’en 2050
(...) Chavez’s current term ends in 2013. Last year, he held a referendum to amend the constitution and remove provisions that would prevent him from running for a third term. He let it be known that he would like to stay in power until 2050, when he would be ninety-six years old. The referendum was narrowly defeated ; it was his first loss at the polls since becoming President, and it reinvigorated the political opposition.
Teodor Petkoff, who campaigned against Chavez in 2006, told me, "Chavez is a charismatic leader, and he understood that the result of the referendum meant that his popularity with the people had been somewhat eroded. He needed to find a way to reconnect more directly with the people, and so he has turned everything into a kind of personal ’They’re coming for me’ drama." Petkoff added, "Chavez is bipolar, really. One side of his brain is Girondin, and the other is Jacobin. He is prudent, and he is also radical."
Insécurité et pauvreté
(...) Jose Vicente Rangel, who served as Chavez’s Vice-President from 2002 until 2007, said he thought that Chavez’s "infatuation" with foreign affairs and his neglect of Venezuela’s domestic problems had contributed to the referendum’s defeat. "Public insecurity is the scourge of Venezuelans, but Chavez never comprehended it," Rangel said. "He sees the crime rate as a product of poverty, a social issue, and this is because he believes in a mythology of poverty in which all the poor are good, and it just isn’t that way ; the poor are criminals, too."
