Racial Politics and Hugo Chavez's Failed Socialist Legacy

Racial Politics and Hugo Chavez's Failed Socialist Legacy
By Andrew Natsios
March 11, 2013 RSS Feed Print

Andrew S. Natsios is an executive professor at the George H.W. Bush
School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, a
senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and the author of Sudan, South
Sudan and Darfur: What Everyone Needs to Know. Natsios served as
administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and as
President George W. Bush's special envoy to Sudan.

Hugo Chavez's death this week has inspired a range of polarized
commentary on his legacy after fourteen tumultuous years as president of
Venezuela. Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil wrote a
glowing column on Chavez's championing of social justice for the Latin
American poor, while ignoring his suppression of human rights and press
freedom, his broad and sustained attacks on civil society (including
independent labor unions), the exponential rise in the murder rates and
violence, and the long term damage his policies have done to the
Venezuelan economy. His critics have pointed to the decline in
macro-economic indicators: state debt has steeply risen, inflation is at
22 percent, private businesses have been expropriated, private property
nationalized, and the Venezuelan currency has been devalued three times
in 10 years.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum described in her column the
destructive and malevolent influence of Chavez on an entire generation
of Venezuelans who opposed his policies and his despotic rule, many of
whom have been driven into exile. But little has been written in the
United States about why he rose to power and why he was able to sustain
his support among the Venezuelan poor and working classes, even with his
suppression of individual freedom and his mismanagement of the economy
and public services.

Woven through Chavez's endless speeches and diatribes against capitalism
and the United States and his socialist ideology are references to the
racial divisions in Latin American society. Chavez himself claimed to be
of racially mixed ancestry—Spanish, black, and Indian blood—which he
used to appeal to the legitimate grievances of the poor of Indian,
black, or mixed ancestry. Race determines social class in Latin America
more than any other single factor. Two Latin Americas exist side by side
on the same continent: a westernized white middle and upper class elite
of European ancestry juxtaposed against a poor and working class of
black and indigenous Indian populations. The demographics—education
levels, living standards, child and maternal mortality rates, and family
income—of the white population in Latin America resemble those of first
world countries, while the demographic profile of the Indian, black, and
mixed races is that of poor developing countries. Many of the civil
conflicts in Latin America over the past several decades have pitted the
indigenous Indian population, many of whom speak their own languages and
not Spanish, against the white elite-controlled governments which they
have seen as excluding them from political power.

Chavez skillfully appealed to these racial divisions and the disparities
in standards of living and human development to build his movement
inside Venezuela. In the preamble to Chavez's 1999 constitution it
declares Venezuela to be "a multiethnic and multicultural society" which
guarantees equal access to public services, jobs, and justice without
discrimination. In 2005 he created the Presidential Commission for the
Prevention and Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination in the
Venezuelan education system to deal with unequal access to public
education, and he created Afro-Venezuelan Day. His appeals were
accompanied by a reduction of the number of extreme poverty from 23
percent of the population to 9 percent. He reduced unemployment among
his followers by expanding public sector employment massively, but also
unsustainably: The employees of the state-owned oil company (which
produces the revenue for Chavez to subsidize his supporters) doubled in
10 years while oil production has declined by 13 percent because
investment in preventative maintenance has steeply declined. Thus Chavez
is strangling the petro-goose that laid the golden egg and the goose is
producing fewer eggs. The redistributive benefits to the poor will
eventually evaporate, leaving Chavez successors to clean up the mess.

All this has guaranteed the devotion at the ballot box of the
long-neglected Venezuelan poor to his Bolivar revolution. Chavez tried
to extend his racial and ideological revolution in Venezuela to other
Latin American countries using oil money to subsidize the campaigns of
indigenous candidates sympathetic to his revolution. But his plans did
not all turn out as he expected.

After Chavez's election in Venezuela, two political figures of
indigenous race were elected to the presidency of their countries for
the first time in history: Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006-present) and
Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) in Peru. These two men embody the very
different routes the racial revolution in Latin America is taking.
Morales is an Aymara-speaking Indian and Toledo a Quechuan-speaking
Indian (Inca), but they were of radically different political
ideologies. Until the past decade none of the three countries in Latin
America with the largest Indian and black populations—Peru, Guatemala,
and Bolivia—had produced an indigenous head of state, despite the fact
that they make up a majority or large plurality of the population. Both
Morales and Toledo used their indigenous support to get elected and
govern. Morales, a close ideological ally of Chavez, nationalized
private businesses, damaging foreign investment and economic growth in
Bolivia. Toledo, who was no ally of Chavez, was a Ph.D. economist
educated at Stanford University who worked at the World Bank and took a
free market approach to economic growth. He negotiated a free trade
agreement with the United States and encouraged private investment,
policies which Chavez attacked across Latin America. Toledo left office
with Peru's economy growing at 6 percent annually. Toledo did not
suppress civil society, intimidate the media, or undermine human rights
and the rule of law the way Chavez did in Venezuela, but he did
antagonize the traditional white elites in Peru because of his reform
agenda which decentralized power from the capital to the provinces and
localities where the indigenous population would have more control over
government budgets, public services, and political power. Chavez may
have started the racial revolution in Latin America, but he has been
unable to control how it will manifest itself in other countries.

Chavez may be most remembered in the United States for his alliance with
Cuba and his friendship with Fidel Castro. Ironically, the relationship
between the two men and the two countries may embody Chavez's ultimate
legacy. Chavez succeeded in mobilizing the black and Indian population
of Venezuela and in some parts of Latin America, an effort at which
Castro failed. It was Fidel Castro who sent Che Guevara to lead a
peasant uprising among the Indian population in rural Bolivia, only to
end in Che's capture and execution. The Indian villagers proved too
conservative and resisted the revolutionary Marxist message, perhaps
because of Guevara's arrogant manner, which alienated the local
Communist party leadership. Guevara complained in his diary that the
"the peasants do not give us any help and are turning into informants."

While Chavez successfully used race to mobilize the poor, the failed
socialist ideology he has employed to end injustice has been a grand
failure in the 20th century and has left terrible human wreckage in its
wake. The best source on the failure of socialism is none other than
Chavez's mentor and hero, Fidel Castro, who in an interview with Jeff
Goldberg of The Atlantic admitted that "the Cuban model doesn't even
work for us anymore." Fidel's brother Raul, who is now running the Cuban
government, has admitted in an interview that Cuba can no longer blame
the U.S. embargo for the failures in their economic system. It has been
Venezuelan oil which has kept the sclerotic Cuban economy afloat, just
as Soviet subsidies did during the cold war. Raul Castro has been slowly
implementing many Chinese-style economic reforms, which is a tacit
admission of the failure of the grand Cuban experiment. Several weeks
ago Raul Castro named his successor when he retires in 2018, a man who
is a quiet pragmatist more interested in what works than in failed
Marxist ideology. Cuba, which was the model for the Bolivarist
revolution in Venezuela, appears to be ideologically abandoning Hugo
Chavez just as his chaotic and despotic rule ends with his death. It
remains to be seen whether Venezuela will now change course and return
to democratic pluralism and a free market economic system; if it does,
it might be wise for the middle and upper class white elites to
acknowledge that the old order that kept them prosperous did little to
improve the lives of the black, Indian, and mixed race poor.

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