Opinion – Latinoamérica21: When did Venezuela get screwed?

The question that opens Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterful novel “Conversa na Catedral” serves as a pretext to introduce us to the discussion on Venezuela. The complex and multifaceted crisis that this country is going through is increasingly becoming a reason for readings that go beyond the Chavez era. To paraphrase the Nobel Prize winner, we could ask ourselves if it was with the arrival of Chavismo to power that Venezuela was screwed.

A recent forum of analysis, organized by the Catholic University Andrés Bello in Caracas, brought together Venezuelan academics based in other countries, analysts who remain in Venezuela and what we might call Venezuelanists, scholars from the South American country interested only in Venezuela as an object of study. .

Under the category of dedemocratization, a long-term view has begun to reflect on why Venezuela has reached its current level of political and institutional deterioration. What happened in this country, which four decades ago was presented as an example of a democratic model in the midst of a South America ruled by military governments. Today, however, it is at the base of the different specialized indices on freedoms, democracy and the rule of law.

The emergence of Hugo Chavez

The emergence of the commander at the head of a failed coup d’état in 1992, the spontaneous connection of many ordinary Venezuelans with this coup figure rather than the head of state who defended the institutions, along with the unprecedented alignment of actors in the bipartisan political system with the postulates of the military who took up arms, it was a clear sign that the stormy times were to come.

The February 1992 picture is highly symbolic of the crisis that paved the way for the outsider who had a speech that would change everything and would do it radically. Then-president Carlos Andrés Pérez managed to avoid the coup d’état, but Chávez was the symbolic winner.

Due to an error that no high-command military officer at the time could explain, the commander who had risen but had already surrendered had the opportunity to address the country on the entire television system. It’s a brief but powerful message.

At that carnival in the streets of Caracas, many children dressed like the rebel commander Hugo Chávez. The phrase that he was defeated “for now” and his decision to show his face and take defeat personally, ended up catapulting Chavez in terms of public opinion. He went from being a total stranger to being the figure who related to the desire for change that was already taking place in the country.

Democratic dismantling before the Commander’s arrival

In January 1988, on the 30th anniversary of the democratic system, a special edition of the SIC magazine, published by the then politically influential Centro Gumilla, revealed a series of fundamental problems that the political-institutional model had not been able to resolve.

After spending a decade of the 1970s in what was known as “Saudi Venezuela” due to the oil boom that started in 1973, the image was one of a hangover in the following decade. The country was left with a huge external debt; public education and social security were in tatters; most Venezuelans were already in poverty.

For many, the 1958 dream of democracy was beginning to fade. That year, the military dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez came to an end. The armed forces withdrew their support, amid a climate of protest, social mobilization and rejection of the regime. After the dictator fled, distant Rómulo Betancourt, the first elected president to complete his term in Venezuela, returned to the country, along with many other exiles.

Although Acción Democrática, the party Betancourt had founded in 1941, was the main national force, during his exile he learned from the mistakes of his sectarianism in the 1940s. In 1958, he managed to forge a pact that not only included the other two major democratic parties, the Christian socialist Copei and the centrist Democratic Republican Union, but also businessmen and unions. SIC magazine called it “the elite conciliation pact”.

Venezuela’s pact-based democracy worked well for its first three decades. It guaranteed universal suffrage, promoted social reforms, provided public education and, in general, modernized Venezuela.

The oil boom brought confusion. With public budgets tripling from one year to the next, corruption has spread, while expectations of wealth have been generated in various strata without much effort in production. This magical wealth turned things upside down.

The political class, which in the 1960s faced various challenges, including the guerrilla struggle supported by Castro’s Cuba, and managed to overcome them successfully, sank in the 1970s. It was not able to respond either politically or institutionally to the management of such enormous resources . In Venezuela, politics became synonymous with enrichment.

Caught up in the scheme of how to distribute wealth and run an oil state, political leaders overlooked the fact that a country’s main capital is its people, its people. They distanced themselves from the people, they stopped being the people themselves, despite the fact that everyone, with few exceptions, had a popular social past.

The 1980s is synonymous with crisis in Venezuela. In 1983 the currency, the bolivar, was devalued for the first time and the state was literally bankrupt, a decade after swimming in resources. Years of economic decline and a fall in all social indicators followed. In February 1989, Venezuela made international news when the social outbreak known as El Caracazo occurred.

The destruction of democracy in Venezuela is the responsibility of Chavismo, there is no doubt about that. The point is to be aware that Chavez’s rise to power and the popular connection with his radical change project was possible as the democratic system was already eroded and eroded. Before 1999, unfortunately, Venezuela’s dedemocratization was underway.