How the Hills Came Down in Venezuela and Elected Hugo Chavez, Pt. I
Before Hugo Chavez arrived to power in Venezuela, there was a strangely popular saying among the country’s citizens: “Cuando bajen los cerros.”
Translated, it means, “when the hills come down.” This was a reference to the day when the poorest of the barrios, who live on the hills and mountainsides of the urban cities of Venezuela, would emerge from their homes to make elected officials pay for decades of political exclusion and social inequality.
Of all the questions I’ve heard about Venezuela, “Why?” is the most difficult to answer. Why is Venezuela the way that it is and why is it so difficult to change its path, even though so many people inside and outside the country wish to see it happen?
The answer requires a look at the country’s political, economic and social history. In this this article, I will try to provide the first half of the answer, outlining how did Venezuela elect a populist military leader named Hugo Chavez, who led the outbreak of 21st Century Socialism and started the nation’s current path to where it finds itself today.
Before beginning, it’s important to know that for the first 130 years, democracy either barely existed in Venezuela or not at all. The presidency was mostly exchanged or forcibly taken over by military strongmen called caudillos. In the few cases where there were “elections,” transparency was nonexistent and winners were often puppets of the military dictators that came before them (see Juan Vicente Gomez).
Because of this, the institutions which are designed to prove the legitimacy and protect the basic threads of a democratic government did not begin to develop until democracy finally arrived in Venezuela on January 23rd, 1958. On this day, the last military dictator was overthrown and replaced by a democratic republic governed by the Punto Fijo Pact.
The pact was an agreement between the principal political parties in Venezuela and called on them to respect the outcomes of the 1958 and all future presidential elections. It also urged winning parties to include opposition members in their administrations. This essentially guaranteed a coalition government that helped represent all members of the Venezuelan electorate and maintained a system of checks and balances, in theory.
However, a retrospective look shows the way the parties governed built an imperfect democracy and corrupt political system dominated the Social Christian Party (COPEI) and Democratic Action (AD). This system promoted intra-party patronage, corruption, and internal exchanges of power. In fact, one historian documented over 68 scams during the first 20 years of Venezuelan democracy, later publishing a second volume which detailed 93 more shady cases just between 1979 and 1984.
Though one would think Venezuelans would tire of perpetual corruption and domination of government by AD and COPEI, record high prices of oil throughout the 1970s allowed governing parties to reap the benefits of domestic oil production and offer citizens an abundance of benefits.
Huge subsidies on domestic energy and transportation costs, ambitious infrastructure projects, and Venezuela’s status as the best country to live in all of South America and even better than some European countries helped citizens forget about the nationalization of major national industries like oil and air travel, agreements to sell subsidized oil to other Latin American nations, and little investment into the economic future.
What felt like a miraculous transformation eventually proved to be temporary. The end of AD’s Carlos Andres Perez’s term as Venezuela’s fourth democratically elected president brought with it accusations of mismanagement of state funds and graft. While the allegations never amounted to any criminal charges, the situation escalated political tensions between the ruling parties and left many Venezuelans desiring a change in leadership and the nation’s path.
Perez’s successor, COPEI’s Luis Herrera Campins, continued the trend of domestic subsidies, oil diplomacy, irresponsible investments, and an administration laden with accusations of graft and corruption. It did not help when the bolivar, the national currency, took its biggest historic tumble in international markets on February 18th, 1983, known as Black Friday, nor that it was followed just five months later by the 1983 Pan American Games held in a spectacular display of wealth and extravagance.
The currency controls implemented by Campins in response to Black Friday, known as RECADI, were utterly plagued by allegations of abuse, fraud, and corruption. The continuing episodes of corruption exhibited the weakness of independent democratic institutions in their failure to prosecute and execute justice against government officials.
Judge Guillermo Urbina Cabello, who was in charge of presiding over numerous investigations and trials related to RECADI, defended the judicial system’s inability to achieve justice by stating, “In these cases, especially when high-ranking public officials are involved, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to prove an act of corruption, because they are generally well-known and respected figures who acted through [others].”
These events further cemented anti-government sentiment and political cynicism among the populace. Campin’s 1983 successor, AD’s Jaime Lusinchi, only perpetuated previous trends, despite benefiting from a temporary rise in oil prices. An escalating foreign debt crisis and the weakness of the bolivar proved too difficult and precluded him from being able to rescue the economy.
Lusinchi was also not immune to the stains of corruption. His most famous political scandal involved his then-mistress, Blanca Ibañez, being appointed as a private secretary who traveled often with Lusinchi on extravagant trips abroad while his wife lived in the presidential mansion. Despite leaving office with high popularity, he was later accused of also stealing from RECADI along with several charges of graft.
By the time of the 1988 elections, a weak bolivar made it almost impossible for Venezuela to escape from its foreign debt crisis or grow its economy. The electorate’s short-term memory allowed AD’s Carlos Andres Perez, the president between 1974–1979, to win a second time in an attempt to return to the “good times.” In short, this did not happen.
Within days of his inauguration in 1989, Perez accepted an IMF proposal worth nearly $5 billion in exchange for an economic reform package that gutted social programs and government spending. The economic crisis had escalated so much that the poorest in the country turned to dog food as the only affordable product to feed themselves and their families.
The situation finally reached a tipping point when a protest against rising public transportation costs in a suburb outside of Caracas erupted into a nine-day wave of protests and riots known as El Caracazo which officially killed 276, though subsequent independent investigations and the discovery of mass graves put estimates closer to 3,000 dead.
The episode led to a severe degradation of civil and political liberties along with rising inflation and little improvement in the economy. A second tipping point arrived on February 4th, 1992 when lieutenant colonel Hugo Chavez and his Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement 200 (MBR-200) launched a coup against Perez which failed, but allowed Chavez to deliver a nationally televised speech where he famously quipped he had failed “for now.”
Determined to uproot the entire political system and find a solution to the economic and social turmoil exacerbated by neoliberal economic reforms that failed to benefit the poor and middle class, soldiers loyal to Chavez launched a second coup nine months later that even led to a spectacular air battle over the capital. The government responded to the events by arbitrarily detaining citizens, militarizing police officers during protests, and organizing a series of trials against the coup participants that were ultimately found to be unconstitutional.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyBgbhEEg3s
With his public image in tatters from public discontent, two coups, and failed economic reforms, Perez took anti-government sentiment to a whole new level when he was impeached and convicted a year later on charges of misusing $17 million dollars from a secret security fund for personal and political gain.
By now, Venezuelans had all but given up with the political system. The elections that followed saw the single largest drop in voter participation, from 74% to 45%, and brought to power a man who had already served as president some 20 years before, Rafael Caldera.
Despite governing as a member of COPEI from 1986–1973, Caldera won the presidency as an independent candidate, the first time in Venezuela’s democratic history. The following year’s regional elections inaugurated one of the key members of the 1992 coup as governor, Francisco Arias Cardenas, who Caldera had pardoned along with all other coup participants including Hugo Chavez.
This was a foreshadowing of things to come. When Caldera failed to revive a stagnant economy with a 49% poverty rate or excite a national electorate, along came an independent populist candidate who promised to end the monopoly of power brought on by the Punto Fijo Pact and act as a representative of the people after fighting on their behalf during the 1992 coups.
On December 6th, 1998, the hills came down in Venezuela and elected Hugo Chavez president with the largest percentage of the popular vote in national history. Chavez was able to build a coalition, not only of the marginalized poor, but that also enjoyed support from middle class individuals and large media and business enterprises throughout the country. On this tenor began a Chavismo’s rule that has exceeded 18 years of control in Venezuela.
Next week I will pick up here and attempt to answer the second part of the why question: Why is it so difficult to change Venezuela’s current path, even though so many inside and outside the country wish to see it happen.
