The Twilight of Chávez: Are the Supporters of Venezuela's President Ready to Revolt?

Venezuela's President rose to power on the support of the barrios. Now, in a tight re-election battle, many of his supporters are ready to revolt.

Tim Padgett 

A gang member poses with a gun in Caracas. Some 50 homicides occur in the city each week. Photo: Oscar B. Castillo/TIME

There has never been a shortage of
 bereaved mothers in the sprawling, violent Caracas barrio known as Catia. But these days the sidewalks seem haunted by legions of women like Luz Marina Morón. In recent years, Morón has seen her brother-in-law, niece and 23-year-old son Roger murdered on Catia's streets — the latter shot in the face by a gangbanger who wanted Roger's New Balance tennis shoes. "Have you seen our homicide statistics?" Morón, 53, a nurse, asks me as we sit down for a guayoyo, a Venezuelan-style cup of coffee. "We might as well be in Syria."

Caracas on average suffers some 50 homicides a week (similar-size Los Angeles had just 12 per week in 2011), making it one of the world's deadliest capitals. As many as a third of them occur in Catia (pronounced Kaw-tee-a), where gunmen even use hillside garbage chutes to more efficiently dispose of corpses. Few of the killers — including Roger's, who was freed by police for lack of evidence despite eyewitness testimony of the crime — are ever prosecuted. That's not the way folks thought things would play out 13 years ago, when socialist President Hugo Chávez took power pledging to use the prodigious revenue from Venezuela's oil reserves — now the world's largest — to make long-neglected barrios like Catia not just sounder but safer. "The people around [Chávez] have to be hiding our reality from him. That's the only conclusion I can come to," says Morón. "Whatever it is, he won't get my vote." She adds, "Estoy harta" — I'm fed up.

On Oct. 7, Venezuela will hold its most important presidential election since 1998 — the year that Chávez, until then a failed coup leader, stunned his country's venal establishment and proved that the end of the Cold War didn't mean the demise of the Latin American left. Catia, whose cinder-block and corrugated-tin poverty is the first thing visitors to Caracas see en route from the airport, is considered the cradle of Chávez's support. But today its residents seem to crave answers more than ideology, and Chávez's "21st century socialism" has begun to evoke failed 20th century regimes like Fidel Castro's Cuba. Chávez's share of the vote in Catia has been shrinking, from over 70% in 2006, when the last presidential election was held, to less than 55% in the 2010 parliamentary elections.

If that trend continues in October, Chávez and his United Socialist Party could lose Catia to Henrique Capriles Radonski, Chávez's centrist challenger from the party Justice First. Capriles, 40, the governor of Miranda state — which adjoins Caracas — pledges a more Brazilian-style mix of pro-welfare and pro-business policies. Chávez could even lose the presidency itself if the barrio continues to be the electoral bellwether it's been since 1998.

Such an upset is still a long shot. Some polls show Chávez, 58, with a double-digit lead among voters, despite the cancer (whose type he won't disclose) that he's been battling since last year. Chávez opined recently on why he's ahead: "We have pulled Venezuela out of the corrupt swamp it was sunk in." His access to billions of petrodollars and a large state-run media machine hasn't hurt him either. But he still enjoys genuine and robust popularity in places like Catia, thanks to new health clinics and other improvements rendered by his Bolivarian revolution (named for 19th century South American independence hero Simón Bolívar). "Chávez," says Elio Uzcá tegui, who owns a paint store in Catia, "is still the only guarantee of social benefits we have here."

Yet almost a third of the electorate is undecided, and other credible polls indicate a much tighter race or even put Capriles ahead. Capriles' campaign rallies are drawing thousands even in Catia and other Chávez strongholds, especially as a spate of recent disasters — including an August explosion at a state-run oil refinery in western Venezuela that killed at least 42 people — casts more doubt on the revolution's competence. Although Chávez's health has softened his polarizing bluster somewhat, he insists that a win by his "majunche" (low-class loser rival) is "impossible." But many of his supporters are panicking, tossing rocks and torching a campaign vehicle at one recent Capriles event, while Chávez resorts to tactics like forcing television networks to interrupt broadcasts of Capriles' speeches so el Presidente can trumpet his socialist triumphs.

Chávez considers lifelong rule his messianic destiny. But Latin American caudillos with tighter grips on their countries than he has have lost elections in recent decades, often undone by the same ills that afflict Venezuela today. Not only has security collapsed — by some estimates, Venezuela's murder rate is four times what it was in 1998, and many political analysts say it could be the deciding factor in this election — but prison riots abound, spiraling inflation is devouring wages, food and hospital-supply shortages are common and power outages and infrastructure collapses seem routine. "Chávez's development model has failed," Capriles told me this year, noting that foreign investment has all but dried up in Venezuela. "I believe in his social programs, but to help the poor more effectively you also have to build economic capacity." Says marine engineer Saverio Vivas, 39, once a Catia leftist but now a Capriles campaign coordinator: "I used to take communism classes and read Sputnik magazine. But Chávez's revolution has taken my barrio for granted." As Venezuela's elite found out, that's not smart.

Barrio Blues

Catia's more than 300,000 residents are among the best people I've known in Latin America: generous, hardworking and talented — evidenced by all the local kids who fill Venezuela's famed Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. They're hardly the niches, or uncouth rabble, the Caracas upper class calls them. And that makes their living conditions all the more tragic. If you arrive in Caracas at night, as I did in 1985, the lights of the city's vast hillside slums, known as los ranchos, shimmer like rough diamonds. Not so in the morning. When I arrived in Catia that year as a volunteer teacher, the community seemed consigned to the far side of the moon.

Shantytowns were the barrio's norm. For many families, a typical dinner was pasta and ketchup, and potable water was drawn in jugs at the bottom of steep, garbage-strewn streets. There were no decent public schools. Getting to grocery stores or clinics could mean two or three bus rides. Street noise often included gunfire, but some of the worst criminals were the police, like the drunken cop I remember who, while extorting money from residents, shot and killed an 8-year-old boy as the child flew a kite. The Catia prison, since demolished, was a Dantean hell where I saw boys who were arrested for petty theft sharing cells with men convicted of multiple murders. All the while, Venezuela's kleptocracy kept plundering the oil wealth, leaving more than half the population in inexcusable poverty.

It was no surprise, then, that cazerolazos, the beating of pots and pans, rang out in Catia in 1992, when Chávez, then an army officer, led a botched but bloody coup against President Carlos Andrés Pérez. People in the ranchos declared Chávez their hero, especially since he, like so many of them, hails from the central plains, where llaneros, or cowboys, are known for their defiance of authority.

Photo: Tomas Bravo/Reuters

The barrios catapulted Chávez to the presidency six years later. He set out to empower marginalized populations like Catia's via lavish social programs called misiones. At least one Caracas barrio now has cable cars ferrying residents to the city below, making jobs and other critical activities more accessible. On balance, Chávez has reduced Venezuela's poverty. I asked a supporter in Catia eight years ago if she thought el comandante was just using his misiones to buy votes. The woman replied, "No Venezuelan President before Hugo has ever even tried to buy my vote."

Yet if Chávez isn't quite a dictator in the Castro mold, he's become what critics call a "democratator" à la Russian President Vladimir Putin. He seems to believe that the practice of being elected democratically excuses him from an obligation to govern democratically. But it hasn't, not even in Catia. In fact, as Chávez has amassed more power — subordinating the legislative and judicial branches, nationalizing thousands of businesses and farms, eliminating presidential term limits, arbitrarily disqualifying hundreds of opposition candidates for office, enacting anti-defamation laws that chill free speech and forging gratuitous anti-U.S. alliances with global pariahs like Syria — his barrio base has weakened. He lost a 2007 referendum on expanding his socialist agenda largely because poorer voters stayed home; the opposition won the popular vote in the 2010 elections, but arcane rules denied it a majority of National Assembly seats.

And that has perhaps less to do with the revolution's authoritarian bent than with its retro creed. As Chávez described it to me in a 2006 interview, he believes "capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation" and that "only socialism can really create a genuine society." More moderate leftist governments in South America, from Brazil to Uruguay to Peru, are developing with a third-way hybrid of capitalism and socialism. But Chávez's obsession with imitating his communist idol, Castro, has made Venezuela's economic situation increasingly dysfunctional — despite the oil-price bonanza of the past decade, average annual economic growth has been less than 3% — as Catia demonstrates.

Rain and the Revolution

Like most caracas barrios, catia is a perilous place during heavy rains, which can wash away the homes clinging to the slopes that ring the capital. I spent my first day in Catia not teaching but helping residents shove boulders under their houses to keep them from sliding down hillsides during a November downpour.

No one disagrees with the Chávez government's efforts to build new housing for the victims of those disasters, nor with the need for land reform in Venezuela. But officials — as if to score populist points, if not confirm their dogmatic disdain for the private sector — are telling many Catia business owners that their properties, despite an abundance of vacant tracts in or near the barrio, are being confiscated to make way for refugee apartments. "None of this makes any sense," says Augusto Sciacca, whose ceramic-tile company employs 16 people in Catia and who is facing eviction. "They're not just pulling the rug out from under our feet but from under Catia's economy too."

Fernando Fernández has a piñata shop nearby. He's bracing for his own summons, especially since Venezuela's inflation rate — almost 28% last year, the world's highest — and tight currency controls have made the price of his once best-selling candy-stuffed piñata about $70 today. "The Chavistas come around in their red T-shirts," says Ferná ndez, 56, "and they tell me I exploit my neighbors."

The office of Jorge Rodríguez, Chávez's campaign manager and mayor of the Caracas borough that includes Catia, did not respond to my questions about the property seizures. Chávez's Housing Minister, Ricardo Molina, has said only that owners will be compensated, but those I interviewed say they've yet to be told when or by how much. Meanwhile, many Catia residents question whether Chávez's administration — whose promise to build 200,000 new homes this year faces scepticism — will ever complete the housing projects. That's because after 13 years, there's less to show for the estimated $300 billion the misiones have spent in Venezuelan barrios like Catia than you'd expect — especially when it comes to preventing flood catastrophes.

In one vulnerable section of Catia, homeowners like Beatriz Castro, who shares a modest house with 15 family members, have been waiting a decade for dikes and drainage gutters. Castro points to the 1.5-m-high water line that stains her sitting-room wall, the result of the latest deluge. "The Chavistas protect us from imperialism but not the rains," she says, referring sardonically to the barrio militias Chávez formed to fend off what he calls an imminent U.S. invasion. Her neighbor Alfredo López says his complaints led officials to question his socialist loyalties, so he put a Capriles poster on his house. "I supported Chávez's politics of inclusion," says López, "until I figured out inclusion wasn't what it seemed."

López's exasperation demonstrates why ideological regimes like Chávez's, whether left wing or right wing (see the George W. Bush Administration in the U.S., Chávez's great Satan), so often lose their way: revolution becomes more important than results, power more important than people. Refinery calamities are hardly unique to Venezuela, but the August explosion, the worst in Venezuelan history, reignited criticism of Chávez's mismanagement of the state-run oil monopoly, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). He has long faced charges that he uses PDVSA, with revenue of $128 billion last year, less as an economic-development engine and more as a political-patronage trough where socialist ideology matters more than skills. Amid the politicization, production has dropped from 3.2 million barrels per day a decade ago to about 2.4 million barrels today.

The Bolibourgeoisie

Meanwhile, the Chavistas haven't exactly displayed a Marxist aversion to the petrocorruption they once decried. The hypocritical emergence of a wealthy cohort of "Bolivarian revolutionaries" known as the Bolibourgeoisie and moguls called Boligarchs came into full view five years ago when a pro-Chávez millionaire businessman traveling with PDVSA executives was caught at a Buenos Aires airport with a suitcase carrying $800,000 in cash. Chávez has ordered some corruption arrests, but critics note that his relatives have turned his home state of Barinas into a family fiefdom, including the questionable acquisition of large parcels of land when Chávez's father was governor in the 2000s. (They deny any wrongdoing.) In Caracas, government officials are regularly spied driving luxury cars to bistros in trendy zones like Las Mercedes. "During the day they wear red berets," says Castro in Catia, "and at night they wear Rolexes." She's not far off, according to the Berlin-based watchdog Transparency International, which ranks Venezuela 172 out of 183 nations on its corruption index.

That's not to say the opposition has totally cleaned the sleazy pre-Chávez era from its shoes. The Capriles campaign was rocked by a recently released video showing an official taking a cash-stuffed envelope from the agent of a shipping magnate. Capriles immediately fired the aide, but the episode was a reminder that until now, Chávez benefited from clueless opposition leaders. Capriles in fact is irked at some conservative backers for trying to de-legitimize the election by calling the voting process fraudulent — even though international observers don't foresee problems and Chávez relies on transparent balloting to counter charges that he's a tyrant.

Still, Capriles was nominated in an unusual, unified opposition primary. That, and not just Chávez's cancer, has the revolution spooked. So Chávez takes every opportunity to declare the inevitability of his victory. Any other result, he warns, would be robbery — probably perpetrated by the U.S. There is a conspiracy afoot, he said in August, "to deny the people's triumph."

The potential for postelection unrest is great no matter who wins, especially since Chávez's Defense Minister has hinted that the armed forces might not recognize an opposition victory. But Chávez's biggest threat isn't foreign; it's the plagues at home, like the rampant violent crime. Chávez is finally responding: he recently banned gun sales and inaugurated a new law-enforcement academy, located, fittingly, in Catia. It arrived too late for mothers like Luz Marina Morón. The question is whether it comes too late for Hugo Chávez.

Tim Padgett, Caracas, TIME, Oct. 08, 2012