By Peter Bolton, Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
To download a PDF version of this article, click here.
Reports in the English-language press last week highlighted a series
of small-scale street protests in Venezuela that bemoaned the scarcity
of certain basic products, chronic shortages of medical supplies, and
continued power and water outages throughout the country. According to
Reuters, for instance, more than a thousand such protests occurred in
January and February and, taken together, “show the depth of public
anger” and “could become a catalyst for wider unrest.”
[1]
News accounts proclaiming Venezuela’s state of emergency are not new
but in recent weeks have reached hysterical levels, with the
Boston-based Global Post claiming that Venezuela’s economic situation is
now “worse than 1960s Cuba.”
[2]
The mainstream narrative explanation is that the crisis is the result
of economic mismanagement and the ideological rigidity of the country’s
“authoritarian” Chavista led-government. For instance, Andreas E.
Feldmann, Federico Merke, and Oliver Stuenkel, writing for the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, wrote last November that “Venezuela’s
steep recession has been worsened by economic mismanagement leading to
mounting inflation, a widening fiscal deficit, and growing shortages of
essential goods including food, soap, and diapers.”
[3]
Similarly, Arlecchino Gomez at The Daily Signal, wrote, also last
November, that Venezuela’s recession “was largely due to government
incompetence and mismanagement.”
[4]
The Workings of the “Free” Market
These sentiments are strongly predicated on the standard line of
economic thought prevailing in the Western media and political class:
that stringent price and currency controls are distorting the mechanisms
of the “free” market and have led to stagnant production, soaring
inflation and a burgeoning black market in U.S. dollars and consumer
goods. The explicit or strongly implied conclusion is that the crisis
proves beyond doubt that socialism “doesn’t work” and that the solution
to Venezuela’s ills is a return with gusto to Chicago School economic
policy and hence a restoration of the unimpeded mechanisms of the
market. Making this point in
Forbes magazine, Tim Walstall goes
so far as to compare the situation in Venezuela with the collapse of
the Soviet Union; he argues that the solution “is to do as Russia did at
the end of their socialist nightmare… [and implement] an immediate move
to full blown free marketry [sic].”
[5]
To achieve this, “regime change” is presented as an imperative
prerequisite and the only viable way for things to improve. Michael
Shifter, writing in
Foreign Affairs, says that even though many
on the Latin American left initially found Chavismo an “appealing
alternative to market-based approaches,” these days “few dispute that it
has failed.”
[6]
The Alternative Thesis
Within Venezuela itself, however, this analysis is just one of two
competing narratives, both of which are discussed and taken seriously in
discussions of policy, governance, and economic dynamics. The economic
mismanagement thesis is the natural position taken by the Venezuelan
opposition and its allies. But the fact that it is practically the only
narrative reported in the English-language press misrepresents the
intricacies of Venezuela’s economic problems while revealing how Western
media heavily favor the opposition’s analysis, often by its own
admission. (Rory Carroll of The Guardian, for instance, boasted
that he moved almost exclusively in opposition elite circles while
based in Caracas as the paper’s Latin America editor.)
But there is another narrative, favored by the government and the
pro-Chavista social movements and civil society sectors, which, it is
important to stress, are independent of the government. This perspective
can loosely be called the economic war thesis. It explains the crisis
in terms of the economic and social dynamics at play outside policy and
governmental action. It holds that business sectors friendly to the
opposition are waging an aggressive and protracted campaign of economic
sabotage to deliberately stir up social unrest to destabilize and
discredit the governing Chavista bloc and in the ensuing chaos bring
about an end to the PSUV government and the installation of a new one
made up of opposition parties. The central pillars of the economic war
thesis are that these hostile sectors have been engaging in acts such as
hoarding and price speculation and have purposely generated scarcity in
pursuit of calculated chaos.
Naturally, all of the allegations that make up this narrative are
dismissed out of hand by the opposition, which argues that they amount
to a desperate propaganda stunt to shift blame from the government’s own
incompetence onto its political opponents. President Nicolás Maduro’s
use of the term “bourgeois parasites” in particular has been seized on
by opposition commentators to portray him as a hopeless buffoon
desperately holding onto to power and flailingly seeking to prop up a
failed political project. Friendly commentators in the Western press are
equally disparaging, with the aforementioned Michael Shifter, for
instance, claiming that these accusations “have no merit,” but do serve
to “show that any semblance of cooperation between the executive and the
assembly to alleviate the country’s economic collapse is, at least for
now, far-fetched.”
[7]
Similarly, Jeffrey Taylor writes in Foreign Policy, “Maduro’s response
[to shortages and currency crises] has been to blame everything on
scheming “Yanquis,” Venezuela’s “far-right elite,” the “parasitic
bourgeois,” and, of course, the opposition, “even though he has
effectively neutralized its leadership.”
[8]
But though more scholarly research is necessary for a detailed and
considered analysis of the myriad factors contributing to Venezuela’s
economic situation, it is worth giving the claims of Chavismo a fair
hearing. A fuller picture shows that this alternate thesis should not be
so glibly dismissed.
Take hoarding, for instance. Before Hugo Chávez was elected president
in 1998, the economic levers of society were near-exclusively in the
hands of a social elite of overwhelmingly light-skinned Venezuelans: the
inhabitants of the wealthy neighborhoods of Venezuela’s urban centers
and wealthy landowners of the campo. Not only were they in
charge of importation, distribution and wholesaling of all manner of
goods for the Venezuelan markets, but they also had a stranglehold over
the state apparatus needed to profiteer from effective importation in
the first place. A central goal of Chavismo was to wrest control of the
economic levers from this elite and more evenly disperse it throughout
society. The Chávez and Maduro administrations have sought to
democratize economic decision-making and predicate it on serving the
public interest rather than the pursuit of private profit.
Confronting Entrenched Privilege
Political psychology provides important insights into the socio-economic dynamics of Venezuelan society. In his book,
Angry White Men,
sociologist Michael Kimmel argues that much of white men’s rage in the
United States is the result of privileges that were historically
bestowed on them gradually becoming less automatic. As historically
disadvantaged sectors gain more opportunities and influence, the change
appears to the previously favored group as a great injustice.
[9]
The same dynamic is evident in Venezuela: an unaccountable elite of
overwhelmingly white, Euro-descent Venezuelans hold positions of
influence and has had control of many of the important economic
decisions. In great part the Chavista movement was based on giving voice
to the country’s poor majority, which incidentally is overwhelmingly
black, brown, indigenous, and/or mixed race. Hugo Chávez was himself of
mixed-race heritage, with European, native Venezuelan, and African
ancestry. The mere idea that such a person (or
mono, meaning monkey, as the opposition frequently called him) could be president and give voice to the dark-skinned
chusma was seen as a veritable insult to the Venezuelan elite.
The Chávez and Maduro governments have attempted to transition
Venezuela away from a society that has been not only inherently racist
and classist, but also highly rigid, stratified and oligarchic. Problems
inevitably arise because this elite already holds the reins and can
aggressively resist a recalibration of economic and social power. In
1998, the highly corrupt business class controlled almost every economic
structure imaginable from distribution of food and production of oil to
systems for obtaining dollars and importing consumer goods. As James
Petras and Henry Veitmeyer argue in their 2013 book
What’s Left in Latin America? Regime Change in New Times,
“The government’s socialist project depends on mass social
organizations capable of advancing on the economic elite and cleaning
the neighborhoods of rightwing thugs, gangsters and paramilitary agents
of the Venezuelan oligarchs and [Colombia’s] Uribe regime.”
[10]
Since these are the people who were already in positions of economic
power and influence when the Bolivarian process began, their ability to
throw a wrench in the government’s efforts for reform has been
formidable. Ryan Mallet-Outtrim, writing in Venezuela Analysis, points
out that “Venezuela’s private sector has long attacked the socialist
government.” So much so, he adds, “that for years Venezuelans have
acknowledged that scarcity of basic consumer goods spikes around
important elections, as businesses seek to pressure voters into turning
against Chavismo.”
[11]
Evidence of such efforts by pro-opposition sectors has not been
lacking. Immediately following the opposition victory in the 2015
National Assembly elections, for instance, social media commentators
indicated that staple goods miraculously began to reappear on shelves
throughout the country.
[12]
Tellingly, some of the products had expiration dates that suggested
that the problem was not with production but rather with distribution,
which is largely controlled by the right-wing business elite. By
creating this kind of scarcity, the elite were essentially trying to
starve the public into rejecting the revolution, a tactic influenced by
the United States’ economic blockade against Cuba.
When these dynamics are taken in the wider context of Venezuelan
politics over the last two decades, they begin to seem less and less
ridiculous and more and more plausible. Throughout the period of
Chavismo there have been times when these aggressive tactics of economic
sabotage have been too obvious to allow for the opposition’s usual
equivocation. During the so-called oil strike, for example, opposition
forces led by Venezuela’s largest business association, Fedecamaras,
orchestrated a nationwide disruption of oil production in hopes that the
ensuing economic chaos would destabilize the government and precipitate
a coup.
[13]
Taken in the context of this history of instigated pandemonium, the
economic war thesis emerges as at least equally worthy of consideration
as its major competitor.
Internal and External Challenges to the Revolution
None of this is to say, of course, that there are no legitimate
criticisms of the central government, far less that the opposition’s
explanation for the economic crisis should be dismissed as casually as
it dismisses the government’s. Yet there are mitigating factors that
must be raised in the government’s defense. The Bolivarian process has
attempted not just to pay the social debt that was owed the country’s
poor majority, but also to radically transform society by offering an
alterative development model to the neoliberal consensus of the 1980s
and 1990s that plunged the entire region into disarray. The Chávez and
Maduro administrations have attempted this task while facing constant
hostility not only from an aggressive internal political opposition that
has often resorted to violence, but also from the hemisphere’s hegemon,
the United States. Washington, which almost instinctively has been
opposed to Chavismo from day one, has consistently interfered in
Venezuela’s internal affairs in the hope of crushing the Bolivarian
process. From a Bush administration-backed
[14] and CIA-aided
[15]
coup in 2002, in which then-President Chavez was nearly removed from
power by force, to refusals to recognize Chavista electoral victories,
threats of sanctions, and covert funding for opposition candidates, the
United States had been determined to do everything possible to ensure
that it would fail. The United States has viciously opposed anything
that threatens the dominance of the unfettered neoliberal capitalist
vision that it has sought to defend, and then spread, throughout the
world. As William Camacaro and COHA Senior Research Fellow Fred Mills
wrote early last year in
Counterpunch, “A great deal hangs in
the balance with regard to the feasibility of advancing a democratic
socialist project while under the continuous attack of a U.S.-backed
opposition, elements of which are bent on restoring the neoliberal
regime.”
[16]
The U.S. mainstream media, overwhelmingly owned by large corporations
and loyal to their interests, naturally reflects and promulgates the
ideological contours of this worldview. Herein lies the explanation for
why the debate has been so narrow, so inordinately skewed toward the
opposition’s account of the situation, and so disregarding of the
complexities and subtleties of the discourse regarding the admittedly
tragic and desperate circumstances in which the Venezuelan people find
themselves.
By Peter Bolton, Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
Please accept this document as a free contribution from COHA, but
if re-posting, please afford authorial and institutional attribution.
Exclusive rights can be negotiated. For additional news and analysis on
Latin America, please go to: LatinNews.com and Rights Action.
Featured Photo: Venezuela Central Madeirense. Taken from
Wikimedia.
[1] “Small Protests Proliferate in Simmering Venezuela,”
The New York Times,
accessed March 21, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2016/03/17/world/americas/17reuters-venezuela-politics-protests.html?ref=americas&_r=0.
[2]
“Venezuelans in the US say their country is worse than 1960s Cuba,”
Global Post, accessed March 21, 2016,
http://www.globalpost.com/article/6749177/2016/03/21/venezuelans-us-say-their-country-worse-1960s-cuba.
[3]
“Venezuela’s Political Crisis: Can Regional Actors Help?,” Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, accessed March 21, 2016,
http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/11/30/venezuela-s-political-crisis-can-regional-actors-help/im9t.
[4]
“Venezuela’s Economic Crisis,” The Daily Signal, accessed March 21,
2016, http://dailysignal.com/2015/11/09/venezuelas-economic-crisis/.
[5]
“Venezuela’s Economic Catastrophe Isn’t About To Happen, It Has
Happened,” Forbes, accessed March 21, 2016,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/02/07/venezuelas-economic-catastrophe-isnt-about-to-happen-it-has-happened/#41880a0a5a1e.
[6]
“Venezuela’s Meltdown Continues,” Foreign Affairs, accessed March 21,
2016,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/venezuela/2016-03-10/venezuelas-meltdown-continues.
[8]
Venezuela’s Last Hope, Foreign Policy, accessed March 21, 2016,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/10/venezuelas-last-hope-leopoldo-lopez-maduro/.
[9]
Angry White Men: A Book Review, Huffington Post, accessed March 21,
2016,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tristan-bridges/a-review-of-angry-white-m_b_4611216.html.
[10] James Petras and Henry Veitmeyer,
What’s Left in Latin America?: Regime Change in New Times, Routledge (2016).
[11]
How Bad is Venezuela’s Economic Situation?, Venezuela Analysis,
accessed March 21, 2016, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11832.
[12]
Basic Goods ‘Suspiciously’ Begin to Appear in Venezuela Stores,
TeleSur, accessed March 21, 2016,
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Basic-Goods-Suspiciously-Begin-to-Appear-in-Venezuela-Stores–20151214-0018.html.
[13] “Venezuelan general strike extended,” BBC News, accessed March 21, 2016, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1918189.stm.
[14] Venezuela Coup Linked to Bush Team,”
The Guardian, accessed March 22, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/21/usa.venezuela.
[16]
“Revolution, Counter Revolution and the Economic War in Venezuela,”
Counterpunch, accessed March 21, 2016,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/27/revolution-counter-revolution-and-the-economic-war-in-venezuela/.
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