How Did Venezuela Get Here?
A generation ago, a charismatic former military officer swept into the highest office in Venezuela on a promise to deliver a more inclusive democracy, a system for the common man that would transfer the levers of power from the political elite to the people.
That man was Hugo Chávez, who in a democratic vote rode a wave of discontent into the presidential palace in 1999, eventually founding what he called the country’s socialist revolution.
But 25 years later, Mr. Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, oversees an authoritarian regime that jails dissidents, tortures enemies, censors the media — and has just claimed victory in an election that opponents say was blatantly manipulated, contrary to the will of the people.
On Monday, as anti-Maduro protests erupted around the country and armed government-aligned gangs tried to dissuade them, demonstrators in the northern state of Falcón climbed atop a Chávez statue. First, they attempted to hack off his head. Then, hindered by its bulk, they instead sent his entire mammoth metal body crashing to the ground.
Venezuela is now internationally isolated, reeling from a decade-long economic crisis and suffering from a gaping emotional wound: the loss of millions of citizens who have fled abroad.
Steve Levitsky, an expert on democracy at Harvard University, called Sunday’s vote “one of the most egregious electoral frauds in modern Latin American history.”
What happened to Venezuela?
How did a resource-rich nation, home to the world’s largest known oil reserves, once governed by a flawed but functioning democracy, fall so far in just a generation?
How is it that a movement once backed by “the people” has lost so much support that much of the nation believes it had to steal an election to stay in power?
In the 1970s, when oil prices were high, the nation flourished. The rich made millions and the poor made a decent living working for the rich. Venezuela was a destination for migrants and refugees from around the world.
A period of political stability and democracy reigned, following a deal known as the Punto Fijo Pact, in which the country’s major political parties agreed to respect election results and work together to prevent dictatorship, which had roiled the country in the past.
But when oil prices collapsed in the 1980s, poverty and prices rose, as did discontent with political leaders. At the time, Venezuela had devolved into a “crony democracy” in which the members of the country’s two-party political system mostly served their patrons and themselves, said Phil Gunson, an analyst with the International Crisis Group.
People took to the streets to protest the rising cost of living. A series of violent demonstrations that came to be known as the Caracazo were a sign of a rumbling political volcano. By 1992, a young military officer was leading a coup meant to oust President Carlos Andrés Pérez, a symbol of the crony democracy.
The young officer was Mr. Chávez. His effort failed. But after a brief stint in prison, he was released and ran for president. In 1998, he bulldozed the traditional parties, winning 56 percent of the vote.
He was, as the journalist Rory Carroll wrote in his book “Comandante,” an “insurgent candidate, telling Venezuelans their old model of oil dependence and corrupt politics, their mirage of development, was dead.”
One of Mr. Chavez’s rallying cries was to lift up the poor.
It was only later that Mr. Chávez began to call his movement “socialism” and began to shape his revolution around what Mr. Carroll called the “holy trinity” of Jesus Christ, Karl Marx and Simón Bolivar, the revolutionary who fought Spanish colonial rule in South America.
Andrés Izarra, a journalist who later became Mr. Chávez’s communications minister, said that when Mr. Chávez came to power his goal was to bring “democracy closer to the people.”
This meant a new constitution that included new tools, like referendums, which allowed citizens to decide policy. It meant new institutions, called “missions,” that would circumvent longstanding government bodies to bring services to the poor.
And it meant a system in which many people would solve their problems by going directly to the president, writing him letters (known as “papelitos”) begging for favors — a job, a loan, a home — and Mr. Chávez would grant their wishes. Sometimes he did so on his television program, Aló Presidente, in which he would address citizens for hours on end.
Mr. Izarra initially backed this system. But he eventually came to believe that direct democracy was fiction. “It doesn’t exist,” he said. “It’s populism.”
By becoming the only man who could solve the country’s problems, Mr. Chávez had undermined the very state he was supposed to lead.
Mr. Chávez “was a hegemon,” Mr. Gunson said, who built a cult of personality. “He was the messianic leader. He was going to lead them into the promised land, and everything in between was a nuisance to him: any checks and balances, division of powers, any kind of civil society, free press, all the rest of it. It’s just a nuisance, gets in his way.’’
But Mr. Chávez’s project “was a con,” Mr. Gunson said, “because what it was all about was giving Chávez more and more power.”
In 2002, a group of dissident military officers and members of the opposition attempted to oust Mr. Chávez in a short-lived coup. Shortly after, the managers of the country’s powerful state oil company, led a nationwide strike against the government, paralyzing the economy for months.
Concerned about losing power, Mr. Chávez ushered in new measures of control, including the creation of a database of citizens who had signed on to a 2004 effort meant to oust him in a recall. This formed the core of a new surveillance system.
Still, Mr. Chávez remained enormously popular. Oil prices had rebounded and the country was flush with cash. The state expanded free education, grants, scholarships and medical care. Social indicators soared.
He was an icon of what analysts called “the Pink tide,” leftist leaders across South America who wanted to emulate Mr. Chávez.
Mr. Levitsky, co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” described the years between 2004 and 2016 as a period of “competitive authoritarianism.”
“Government abuses power and violates rights such that the opposition is playing on a tilted playing field,” he said. “But there is a playing field, there is an opposition and there is real competition for power.”
That began to shift when Mr. Chávez died in 2013.
His handpicked successor was Mr. Maduro, his vice president, who lacked the charisma of his predecessor.
But the new president’s biggest problem was that oil prices were plunging, and the economy — extremely dependent on oil and propped up by government subsidies that kept goods cheap — began to spiral.
That year, Mr. Maduro narrowly won a hard-fought presidential election. The next year, his government responded violently to protesters angry over the economic downturn.
The movement started by Mr. Chávez was losing popularity, and Mr. Maduro was going to have its death on his hands. In a 2015 vote, the opposition won control of the legislature, a major threat to the relatively new leader.
But Mr. Maduro found a way to consolidate power. In 2017 he called for the election of a new body that would rival the legislature. The vote for this was viewed by many as a farce, even the company that tallied the votes said the count had been altered by at least one million votes.
Security forces crushed a new round of protests and in the presidential election of 2018, Mr. Maduro’s allies banned the largest opposition parties and major politicians from running. Mr. Maduro won.
“That’s when Venezuela approached dictatorship,” Mr. Levitsky said.
Inflation was soaring, grocery stores were stripped bare and children were dying of malnutrition. Then the United States issued broad sanctions on the country’s oil industry, pushing the economy to the brink of collapse.
Desperate for cash, Mr. Maduro loosened his reins on the economy. Goods began to flow in, and soon the U.S. dollar had replaced the Venezuelan Bolivar as the country’s de facto currency.
But the cost of food and medicine soared and inequality intensified. Mr. Maduro’s inner circle became synonymous with corruption, including a scheme in which a businessman, Alex Saab, was accused of making off with hundreds of millions of dollars meant to feed Venezuela’s hungry.
The shift away from any sort of socialism seemed to be complete.
Like many Venezuelans, Mr. Izarra, the former communications minister, still has affectionate words for Mr. Chávez. But he is a harsh critic of Mr. Maduro.
Today, Mr. Maduro’s concern “is not Venezuela’s poverty, is not Venezuela’s democratization, is not ‘power to the people,’” he said. “It’s ‘power to his kleptocrats.’”
In Venezuela now, he added, “there are more reasons to rebel,” against the ruling party than there were a generation ago when Mr. Chávez became president promising to oust the elite.
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