The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (19 page)

What you will not hear from Chávez’s many media outlets is the number of people who died in Caracas over the weekend. You will not see a report on the government’s failure to build the housing that it promised ahead of the last election. You will not learn that some stores are running low on basic goods or that inflation is rising. I was in Venezuela in July 2010, shortly after the story of state-owned shipping containers carrying more than 100,000 tons of spoiled food broke. The scandal dominated newspaper headlines but was utterly ignored by Chávez’s networks. All Chávez spoke of was his growing war of words with neighboring Colombia. With his media empire in place, he can simply ignore the stories he doesn’t like or change the conversation. When I brought up the subject of crime with Robert Serra, the loyal Chavista, he admitted it was a problem, then proceeded to blame the media for sowing conflict. That argument might have worked ten years ago. But it is far less plausible today. That is the problem for authoritarian leaders everywhere. Eventually, you run out of scapegoats.

Teodoro Petkoff is not easy to interrupt, especially when the topic is Hugo Chávez. In the space of a few minutes, the editor of
Tal Cual
, a respected opposition newspaper, refers to Chávez as a “fascist,” a “banana tyrant,” and, in perhaps the strongest language, “a very good disciple of Hitler and Goebbels.” Like many Venezuelans, he claims that he always knew Chávez’s intentions. The difference is, when it comes from Petkoff, you are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. The editor with the signature bushy mustache has been a fixture of Venezuelan politics for decades. Born in 1932 to immigrant parents—his father was Bulgarian, his mother a Pole—he has been an economist, author, leftist guerrilla, presidential candidate, minister, and political prisoner. He was even a prison escapee. (In 1967, he and several other leftist guerrillas tunneled their way out of the San Carlos military prison.) And today, from his editor’s perch, the cantankerous Petkoff is one of Chávez’s most outspoken critics.

Time, however, has not made him cynical. In fact, it is his faith in Venezuelan history that makes him believe there is a limit to what Chávez’s authoritarian project can accomplish. “
This is not a totalitarian society,” bellows Petkoff. “The Venezuelan society has what I call democratic antibodies. We have lived not only a half century of democracy, but there is a tradition, a history before us that makes it very difficult to impose on us a totalitarian society. Is this an authoritarian government? Of course. Is this an undemocratic government? Of course. There is not an inch of separation of powers. There are no checks and balances. Chávez has encroached on all political powers, all of them—parliament, justice, attorney general, comptroller, ombudsman, and the National Electoral Council. Is this a militaristic society? That’s true. And the society has a propensity for totalitarianism. There is a
propensity
.” He draws out the syllables slowly for emphasis. “And the country, so far, is containing that propensity.”

The key in his mind is that the one thing that made Chávez different from most autocrats—massive popular support—is withering. “Sixty percent of our population believed in him. People love him,” he says from across his crowded desk. “But this is changing. Today it is not 60 percent. It is less than 50 percent. There is a slow but
persistent and, in my opinion, irreversible tendency of decline in his popular support.”

I ask him, “When do you think Chávez is most dangerous?”

“Right now, because he is losing popular support,” replies Petkoff.

Just as the words come out of his mouth, his eyes look up, beyond me, to a television in his assistant’s office. I turn to see what has distracted him. It’s a live news broadcast on Globovisión that has interrupted programming. Emilio Graterón, the opposition mayor of Chacao, is holding an impromptu press conference outside in the street, only a few blocks away from Petkoff’s office. An animated Graterón is describing how a local piece of municipal property, designated to house a new community center, has been “invaded” by Chavistas. Locals surround the mayor, shouting their support. Holding the city government’s legal title to the property, Graterón explains that Chavistas showed up and seized the land. No title, no authority, no process. They just took it in the name of the revolution. Moments later, national guard units begin to arrive. They spray tear gas over the mayor and his supporters, who quickly disperse. It is as if, hearing Petkoff’s last statement, Chávez conjured up a demonstration of his muscular power at work—live on TV.

Picking up on his train of thought, Petkoff says, “Will he try to make a massive fraud? Will he be much more repressive than oppressive? I don’t know. I think he is at the threshold of what to do. Will he cross that threshold of repression?” He lets the question hang in the air, without answering.

Still, Petkoff is optimistic. He believes deeply in the “democratic antibodies” of the Venezuelan people and has faith that whatever distance separates Venezuela from Cuba or other more repressive regimes will remain. Despite the difficulties of the past decade, he sees signs of new political life. “We have lived a historical tragedy. All the old leadership of this country went to the showers. They disappeared from the political scene. All the big, old parties are dead,” says Petkoff. “Now this country is reconstructing its system of political parties. It’s creating a new leadership … Until a year ago, people were asking, ‘What opposition leaders?’ Today, you find the names—the mayor of Chacao, the mayor of Caracas, the governor of Miranda, the governor of Zulia … Of course, they are young, but after eleven years of Chavismo they are veterans.”

It is not simply that the opposition is rebuilding; the problems Chávez faces are also growing more entrenched. Alfredo Croes, the businessman turned opposition strategist, made this point when we met. Croes is good at crunching numbers. Almost a year before the National Assembly elections, with his desk covered with spreadsheets, he told me he thought that the opposition would win sixty-six to sixty-eight seats. He proved remarkably accurate: Chávez’s opponents picked up sixty-seven seats. But he wasn’t basing his calculations only on the appeal of the opposition in key districts. He also understood that the demographics of Chávez’s support are shifting. When Chávez started, he could credibly claim to represent nearly all of Venezuela’s poor. But more than a decade on that was no longer true. In 2008, growing blocs of urban poor began voting for the opposition. Election maps started to show an increasing urban-rural divide, with voters in the countryside making up the bulwark of Chávez’s support. The fact that someone is poor is no longer a reliable indicator that he or she is pro-Chávez. “
The rejection of Chávez will grow on the hills,” Croes told me, pointing out his office window to one of the many slums that ring the city of Caracas. “They will not vote for the opposition; they will [vote to] punish him.”

I looked out the window in the direction Croes was pointing. Along a steep slope, I could see thousands of small, makeshift structures, built one on top of the next like some precarious pyramid. “What you see over there, on that hill, is where the D and E people live.” Croes was pointing at Petare, one of the largest slums in South America. “They have never had regular water. And they have never had a reliable power supply. What kills them is inflation,” he says, his expression turning grim. “They need to climb a thousand steps to get home. They must cross circles of danger—gangs, narco-dealers, murderers. To carry food up those steps, they have to buy food in small quantities. The cost goes up to carry it up. They can’t catch up. Inflation kills them.”

In late 2009, Venezuela’s inflation had risen to nearly 30 percent. A few weeks before I met Croes, the International Monetary Fund said that it expected Venezuela’s inflation to continue to climb, surpassing even Zimbabwe and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. A few months later, according to several estimates, Venezuela had the highest inflation in the world. And many economists expect it will
remain there for years to come. For Croes, it’s Chávez’s inability to tame this economic variable that will push a growing percentage of the Venezuelan poor into the arms of the opposition. “Inflation will be there in 2012,” says Croes. “The distance between D and E and Chávez is now economics. It isn’t easy to solve, because you have no infrastructure to get food prices down.”

The question may be how much the factors that should matter—crime, decaying infrastructure, the price of food—will determine Chávez’s political future. Each day he proves that the durability of his regime has only a passing relationship with the success of his own governance. Has the architecture of his authoritarian state advanced to such a point that he will be able to continue to ride roughshod over any opponent? Now that the country’s democratic facade is paper-thin, if the moment comes, will he become more repressive? Or will the formula that has taken him this far continue to succeed? “
Chávez is weaker, but he is not weak,” says the pollster Luis Vicente León. “Chávez is like a tenor—he is getting older, but he knows how to sing. And he knows how to sing the important song.”

In late June 2011, Venezuela learned that Chávez was weaker in another sense as well: he had cancer. For months, Chávez ferried back and forth to Cuba for chemotherapy treatments as rumors of his health and speculation of the political fallout his prognosis would have for the regime swirled around Caracas. In October, he declared himself cancer-free, but his true condition remained a state secret. Whatever the case, there was no question that he had long been gearing up for the fight—and intended to see it through to the 2012 presidential election.

After the opposition made gains in the National Assembly in September 2010,
Chávez effectively hollowed out the institution from the inside. In late December, during the waning days of the session, he directed the National Assembly to grant him the power to rule the country by decree for the next eighteen months. (Chávez supposedly asked to have the power for twelve months, but the delegates insisted he take eighteen.) The new congress now only meets four days a month. Speeches from the well must not exceed fifteen minutes. True to form, the former tank commander would rather destroy the institution than share it.

Chávez also knew he needs to be able to foot the bill. In April 2011, using his new decree powers,
he unilaterally revised the tax on oil revenues to fill his campaign war chest. With the price of Venezuelan oil hovering around $108 a barrel, he declared that 95 percent of the amount above $100 a barrel will now flow to Fonden, an opaque off-budget fund that operates at Chávez’s personal discretion. If the price of oil remains relatively stable, this surplus tax would conservatively generate more than $10 billion in new revenue by the end of 2011. (Near the end of the year, Venezuela’s finance minister claimed there was roughly $32 billion sitting in Fonden.) In effect, Chávez decreed himself a war chest of billions, months ahead of a presidential election season.

But perhaps the surest sign that he is steeling himself for a fight came in one of the last-minute laws passed by his pliant National Assembly. In the final hours, Chávez’s regime passed a law that forbids representatives to switch political parties. This law had nothing to do with the opposition; this time the sharp point of the spear was pointed squarely at Chávez’s own party. Chávez knows the battle may get ugly, and he does not plan to suffer defections. The message was clear: Once with Chávez, always with Chávez. No exceptions.

The late political scientist Samuel Huntington once observed that what decides if a democracy survives is not the size of the problems it faces or even its ability to solve those problems.
What matters is the way in which a democracy’s leaders respond to their
inability
to solve the problems that confront their country. By the late 1990s, Venezuela’s political leaders had effectively stuck their heads in the sand. When they looked up again, Hugo Chávez was their president, and their democracy, however poor and ill functioning, was at the beginning of a slow descent into the authoritarianism that rules it today.

S
unday mornings in Caracas are one of the few times the city stands still. The traffic jams are gone. The honking car horns fall silent. People are at home with their families or preparing to attend Sunday Mass. A couple of hours outside the city, however, it is anything but quiet. We had traveled in a pickup truck for two hours into the countryside of the state of Miranda, our destination the small town of Cupira in a poor farming area called Pedro Gual. While Chávez’s approval ratings had begun to slump in Caracas and other urban areas, the countryside is still largely a Chavista stronghold, and Cupira is just like countless other small agricultural towns. Its mayor is a staunch Chavista. Pro-Chávez signs and billboards dot the roadway, some claiming credit for one public project or another, others simply proclaiming their love for a leader. Cupira is also emblematic of how Chávez’s political opponents are beginning to take the fight to him. On this Sunday, Henrique Capriles, the governor of the state of Miranda, is doing precisely the sort of work that he and other leaders of the opposition hope will turn the tide against Hugo Chávez.