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News Desk


IN THE SHADOW OF CHÁVEZ

By Boris Munoz

April 13, 2013
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A month ago, I attended the epic funeral of Hugo Chávez. What amazed me most
were the huge crowds of Venezuelans, above all women from the lowest rungs of
society, who were ardently—and melodramatically—devoted to the cult of his
personality. It didn’t matter that his death had been foreseeable, nor that
those in charge of the government had deliberately kept millions of Venezuelans
misinformed about the true state of the President’s health. The sea of people
who had been waiting for hour upon hour had a single aim: to see Chávez for the
last time, to see the face of the man who had wooed them and won them by giving
them a political identity, by giving direction to their desires and resentments.
Now they swore their loyalty to him beyond death. It seemed evident to me that a
new religion had been born—a religion whose prophet was Hugo Chávez.



I interviewed several average Chavistas during the funeral and wasn’t surprised
by their adoration for Chávez. But I was struck by the similarity of their
responses. I asked Luz Marina Laya, an outgoing and committed militant, what
Chávez meant to her. Tearfully, she replied that Chávez was her father, her
brother, her lover, her husband, and her protector. On July 1, 2012, during the
opening act of Chávez’s final electoral campaign, I’d put the same question to
America Carvallo, a woman in her mid-fifties wearing a red T-shirt. Her response
was almost identical. “He’s my brother, my husband, my friend, my mother, and my
father,” she said. “I love him, and all I want is for God to give him good
health.”



This kind of dèjà vu was not limited to the funeral; it has pervaded the
Presidential election to replace Chávez, which ends Sunday. Memories of the last
Presidential election are still fresh and the cult of Chávez’s personality is
sponsored by the state and indirectly supported by the opposition. Nicolás
Maduro, the government candidate proclaims, ”I am the son of Chávez!”, while
Henrique Capriles, the opposition leader, says “Maduro is not Chávez.”

Apart from this, the most notable aspect of the campaign has been the offensive,
vicious, and sexist language. Chávez used to bully his opponents and disparage
them, but he wrapped his attacks in an entertaining and grandiose flood of words
on his strategic objectives in defense of the revolution. This time, the attacks
have been direct and barefaced.

Many Venezuelans say they miss Chávez’s presence in the campaign. One can
inherit political machinery, political rhetoric, and a political party, and win
elections by doing so, but a leader’s charisma, popularity, and strategic vision
are not transferable.



Like Chávez did in the last election, Maduro has called Capriles an oligarch and
a Nazi—a particularly hurtful epithet for Capriles, whose great-grandparents
were both killed in the Holocaust. But he has also mounted an attack on the
sexual orientation of Capriles—a forty-year-old bachelor—insinuating that he’s a
closeted homosexual, which has aroused the fury of the L.G.B.T. community.
Unlike the last campaign, when Capriles did all he could to avoid confronting
Chávez, this time he has accepted the fight. A lesson he learned from that
campaign was that political ends can’t be separated from the means employed to
reach them. In fact, he has gone on the offensive, continuously denouncing the
abuses of power and poor government under Chavismo. The campaign has, as a
result, been marked by the near-total absence of substantive proposals for
change.

One leitmotif among Chavistas has been that even a dead Chávez would win the
elections by a landslide. No one doubted this a month ago. Maduro was the
candidate of the multitudes who mourn for Chávez. He wagered that his
identification with Chávez would attract the popular vote, and bring Chávez’s
party to him. This strategy will likely end up as a winning one, but it has had
downsides. Maduro tries hard to fill his predecessor’s shoes, but it has become
clear that the differences between the leader and his apostles are overwhelming.
Compared with Chávez, a consummate showman, a master of oratory and
manipulation, Maduro seems like the sorcerer’s apprentice. The comparisons have
worn him down rather than strengthened him.

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Luis Vicente León, the president of Datanálisis, one of the country’s most
reliable polling companies, says Maduro is still the favorite, but Capriles has
been gaining ground. “The present situation is completely different from what
the surveys showed a month ago,” León says. “When Chávez died, it didn’t matter
if his heir was good or bad. All the people’s feelings of adoration were
transferred to Maduro. Those feelings have weakened. Maduro had decided not to
be himself but to be the representative of Chávez’s legacy here on earth, but
there was a limit to that strategy. Capriles forced Maduro to stop being
Chávez.”

On October 5th, two days before the last Presidential election, I asked León
what the result would be, and he did not hesitate to say that Chávez would win
by eleven percentage points. Chávez won by ten points. On Thursday, three days
before the current election, I asked him the same thing. He told me that the gap
between Capriles and Maduro was now only six points and narrowing. The acting
President was still the favorite, but of Capriles, León said, “If he wins it
will be a surprise, but not a miracle anymore”.




The Venezuelan economy is marching over a cliff. The murder rate was already one
of the highest in the world, and the number of murders was up by fourteen per
cent last year. (The rate grew by nine per cent.) There are shortages of
electricity, food, and medicines, and the country is divided in two. Margarita
López Maya, a historian of Venezuelan social movements and left wing activist,
sees a pattern similar to the one that led to the social explosion that took
place in 1989, known as the Caracazo, which was brutally repressed and left more
than three hundred dead. “The fall in the standard of living is frightening. My
husband, a faculty professor, took his car for a routine maintenance and had to
pay the equivalent of three months’ salary. On Sunday we’ll know if many people
whose conditions of life have deteriorated dramatically are going to vote for
Maduro because of their debt to Chávez, or if they’ll abstain.”

There is a small chance that Capriles could pull off the upset. If he does win,
though, it would likely be by a very narrow margin, and he would find himself in
an almost impossible situation, with the National Assembly, the Supreme Court,
and twenty out of twenty-three state governors against him, as well as many
other parts of the government. “This would force him to look for ways to widen
his popular support by opening up to Chavista ideas and try to move towards a
hybrid model that combines elements of Chavismo with some proposals of the
opposition”, says López Maya.

If, as is more likely, Chavismo wins, it will need to ask itself if it can
gradually open up to the other half of the country without abandoning the social
ideals that inspired Chávez’s vague twenty-first-century socialism, and if it
can improve its style of government, which so far has been dysfunctional and
inefficient. “The winning margin will be decisive not only in relation to the
opposition, but internally,” León says. “If Maduro manages to maintain or
improve on Chávez’s margin of ten points, he’ll consolidate his leadership. If
it’s smaller and Capriles catches up on him, the problems inside Chavismo that
were hidden because of the need to survive a transition without Chávez will come
to the fore.”

What’s at stake is not just the choice between Chavismo and change or between
two men, but between a viable society and one in permanent conflict. The winner,
whoever he is, will have to struggle with the spectre of a violent social
crisis.



Photograph by Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty.




More:Hugo ChávezPoliticsVenezuela


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