Will Chavez’s reforms last in Venezuela?

IT was almost 20 years ago that Hugo Chavez threatened to upset the established order in Latin America with the first of his many electoral victories. Six years after he had led an abortive coup attempt in Venezuela, he decisively won the 1998 presidential election and set about ushering in transformation.

One of his first steps was to bring in a new constitution, which won approval in a vote. That Chavez’s chosen successor, Nicolas Maduro, is now determined to rewrite that constitution, seemingly against popular will, is widely viewed as a desperate gamble by a leader who is out of his depth, yet determined to cling on to power.

Maduro was elected president by a small margin in 2013, largely on the basis of his predecessor’s imprimatur, after Chavez sadly succumbed to cancer in 2013, but the parliamentary elections two years later yielded a majority for the opposition. The constituent assembly that Maduro has assembled following a disputed electoral exercise is obviously intended to override that democratic disadvantage. But it marks a significant break with Chavismo, given that none of the elections that sustained Chavez in power was manipulated.

Venezuela’s crisis isn’t exactly of Maduro’s making. Chavez had a reasonably clear agenda that he was willing to articulate. Maduro’s bluster increasingly does not pass muster. It’s not just that he lacks Chavez’s charisma and sense of humour: he also appears to be bereft of any good ideas about countering the crisis in which Venezuela has become embroiled.

The crisis, signified by severe shortages and rampaging inflation, isn’t exactly of Maduro’s making. He inherited many of the problems, which were exacerbated when Chavez’s demise more or less coincided with a sharp dip in oil prices on which Venezuela has long relied.

At the same time, the USbacked forces of neoliberalism that resisted Chavez from the get-go and almost succeeded in toppling him in 2002, but were never quite able to seriously dent his appeal, found a much easier target in Maduro.

Initially, it was arguably Chavez’s anti-imperialist foreign policy rather than his government’s domestic measures that led Washington to back efforts to unseat him. It’s useful to remember that the New York Times and Washington Post, supposed paragons of liberal virtue, celebrated the 2002 coup attempt with as much enthusiasm as factotums of the George W. Bush administration.

There can be no doubt that, alongside its international initiatives, the Chavez administration implemented a domestic agenda that vastly reduced poverty and brought literacy and healthcare to many Venezuelans. However, the redistribution of resources was reformist rather than revolutionary, and the earlier beneficiaries of neoliberalism for the most part retained their disproportionate wealth. The international liberal brotherhood lost no opportunity to call out what it saw as Chavez’s excesses, not least in actions against a virulently oppositionist media owned mostly by oligarchs with vested interests, but tended to be complacent about efforts to undermine the elected government’s progressive agenda.

The opposition arrayed against Maduro’s regime certainly contains democratic elements but it consists of forces that have all along viewed Chavez’s vision of a more equal society as anathema. And let us also not forget that US administrations have consistently striven to undermine social-democratic impulses in Latin America.

Washington was particularly disconcerted by the fact that the Chavez phenomenon ushered in a ‘pink tide’ pretty much through its backyard. The backlash against neoliberal civilian governments that has replaced equally neoliberal military dictatorships the US so insouciantly sponsored in the continent until well into the 1980s, was alarming.

That pink tide has lately receded, notably through democratic means in Argentina and undemocratic ones in Brazil. The fate of Venezuela, though, remains to be decided, and perhaps the biggest risk is that once the nation moves into its next phase, it may be too late to preserve some measure of the socioeconomic gains that Chavez brought to the dispossessed. Should that turn out to be the case, Maduro will go down in Venezuelan history as one of the culprits responsible for it.