The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (25 page)

In authoritarian countries around the world, the first years of the twenty-first century witnessed a rising number of youth movements challenging some of the most well-entrenched regimes and strongmen. In Serbia, it was the youth-led Otpor (Resistance) that helped topple Miloševic in 2000. Inspired by their example, the Georgian youth group Kmara (Enough) brought people into the streets to successfully call for political change in 2003. A year later, Pora (It’s Time) mobilized thousands of young people in the wake of Ukraine’s fraudulent election. In 2007, with opposition political parties in disarray, the Venezuelan student movement led the charge against Hugo Chávez’s authoritarian power grab. In fact, the
Venezuelan students had higher approval ratings than any other political force in the country, including the Catholic Church. In Iran, there would have been no Green Movement without the countless youth who protested the regime’s stolen presidential election in June 2009. And it was the dramatic force of millions of young people pouring out into the streets in early 2011 that shook North Africa and the Middle East, upending regimes and rewriting the region’s history forever.

Of course, youth activists, like any activists targeting a repressive regime, frequently fail to achieve their goals. Groups from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe have risen up and been brutally suppressed. But across authoritarian countries, two constants almost always hold. The most outspoken, creative, and effective activists are often drawn from society’s younger members. And a significant percentage of them choose to go to battle against the ruling regime as political independents, eschewing the parties, factions, or organizations that have long been a part of their country’s political tug-of-war. In conversations with youth
activists in country after country, a common thread emerges: far from seeing their age and inexperience as sources of weakness, they believe these qualities bring them a status as new, uncontaminated political outsiders that is potent against regimes that are unwilling to relinquish power. “
Our power is that we are not a political party,” Ahmed Maher told me. “We do what we want anytime we want. We don’t have a headquarters that we fear is going to be closed. There is no ceiling to our opposition. We decide what we should do and we do it. The opposition parties always have calculations.”

Activists everywhere agree with Maher. The political environment in modern authoritarian regimes is typically highly artificial. In Russia, with the exception of the Communist Party, the so-called opposition parties represented in the Duma are creatures of the state, literally created by the Kremlin. No one disputes that the opposition parties in Venezuela, which governed the country for decades, are responsible for the incredible mismanagement that led to Chávez’s rise. But despite their incompetence, it has taken more than ten years for the Venezuelan opposition to jettison many of these old political players in favor of new faces. In Egypt, the secular opposition parties routinely proved to be more concerned about squabbling among themselves than producing a credible challenge to Mubarak. Not surprisingly, youth in such circumstances view the traditional political actors as compromised, either from negotiating too closely with the regime or through the sheer accumulation of failures. They shun the recruitment efforts of not just the ruling party but the traditional opposition parties as well. They remain outside a political mainstream they view as poisoned or polarized, often defying the established rules of political contest. And because they do so, and because as movements they make no claim of wanting power for themselves, the regime often considers them one of the greatest threats to its continued rule. “
It allows us to effectively move past the politics,” says Douglas Barrios, one of the leaders of the Venezuelan student movement in 2007. “We’re not here as part of the opposition, we’re not here as part of the government, we’re not here as part of the past. We’re just a couple thousand young kids demanding something better.”

In the face of dismal alternatives, Ahmed Maher, Douglas Barrios, and countless other young people joining movements across the globe have become new, unexpected threats to modern authoritarians.

Hugo Chávez couldn’t lose. In late 2006, Venezuela’s charismatic president was at the peak of his power. That December, he was reelected in a landslide victory, trouncing the opposition party candidate, Manuel Rosales, by a margin of 26 percent. A year earlier he had secured complete control of the National Assembly when the same political opposition boycotted the parliamentary election. His coffers were overflowing. Oil prices were already at more than $60 a barrel—up more than three and a half times from what they were when he came to power—and showed no signs of slowing down. The opposition’s election defeat was just the most recent drubbing in a string of losses going back to 1998. On election night, when Chávez walked onto the balcony of the presidential palace and looked out over Venezuela, there was virtually no opponent left to conquer. If he was going to have a fight, Chávez was going to have to look for enemies. Which might explain why his next target was a TV station.

Radio Caracas Televisión, or, as it was best known, RCTV, had been broadcasting for fifty-three years. It was the oldest television station in Venezuela, and the channel occupied first place in the ratings, with 40 percent of the viewing public. Although almost all of its programming was entertainment shows—it was home to some of Venezuela’s most beloved Latin soap operas—the editorial line in its news coverage took a clearly critical view of Chávez and his policies. So, a few weeks after winning his new term in office, Chávez, dressed in military fatigues, announced that he would not be renewing the government concession that allowed RCTV to operate. Come May 28, 2007, when its contract would lapse, RCTV would go off the air. Most Venezuelans, even the president’s own supporters, were stunned by the move. RCTV was an institution, the TV channel everyone had grown up watching.
Polls showed that 65 to 80 percent of the public was against its closure. Chávez, however, was undaunted.

Douglas Barrios was a fourth-year student of economics at Metropolitan University at the time. He was twenty years old, so, like most of his classmates, he was part of the first generation of young Venezuelans to come of age under Chávez. Barrios was in sixth grade when Chávez was first elected, so he didn’t really remember what it was like to have anyone other than Hugo Chávez as president. But
he does remember sitting at home on the night of May 27, 2007, as a “powerful moment.” In the months leading up to that day, Barrios and many of his friends in school had watched in disbelief as no one came forward to organize opposition to the president’s decree. “When I try to explain it to people, I say it’s like they shut down NBC, ABC, and CBS at the same time,” says Barrios. And that night, precisely at midnight, RCTV went dark. The final image people saw was of the station’s journalists, news anchors, actors, and employees singing the national anthem, many of them crying, as they waved good-bye. “You were sitting in front of your TV, probably the lights were off, and you saw this TV station go to static,” recalls Barrios. “It just represented how choice can go away, how your options can go away, how something that’s very, very established can just go to static.”

Geraldine Alvarez, a student at the Andrés Bello Catholic University, remembers that night the same way. She was a fourth-year student, studying advertising and journalism. Growing up, she had never been particularly interested in politics. But the day before the RCTV closure, her classmates had elected her to the University Council. She had always assumed becoming active in student government would mean organizing academic debates or taking up campus issues. She certainly didn’t see it as a pathway into the wider political arena. That all changed on May 28. “
It was the first time I felt the government was coming into my house and telling me not to do something,” says Alvarez. “That was the reason why so many people felt so shocked. The next day we closed the university.”

At first, the reaction was spontaneous. Venezuelan student leaders from that time all say there was no carefully choreographed plan. They hadn’t thought much beyond the next few hours. Certainly no one thought their actions were about to give birth to a movement.
But a small group of students from the five major universities across Caracas had decided that May 28, 2007, couldn’t be just another day. On that morning these students, numbering in the hundreds, got up early and stood out in front of their various universities to protest what everyone had seen happen on television the night before. They were angry. “We just said tomorrow can’t be a normal day,” says Barrios. “Because if we allow this to be normal, if we allow ourselves to accept this as normal, then we will be losing a bit of ourselves.”

As it happens, Caracas’s five major universities occupy strategic positions around the city. Four of them are located at the entrances to Caracas; the fifth is smack in the middle of the city. So if even a relatively small number of people were to blockade the roads in front of these universities, it would shut down the city. And that is precisely what these students did.

Not surprisingly, the student protesters were quickly met with resistance. The government dispatched police and national guard units to break up the blockades. Students at the Metropolitan University were hit with tear gas and rubber bullets. They had no choice but to retreat back into their university. When they tried to return to the street, they were beaten back again. Rather than accept the stalemate, student leaders decided to regroup. They would leave their schools and start to amass at Plaza Brión. The plaza was in a safer part of town, it had a metro stop, and the authorities weren’t expecting them at that location. And that was when something truly surprising happened: their numbers began to grow.

When other students, friends, and family heard about the clashes in front of the universities, many decided to go out to show their solidarity. Whereas in the morning there had been only hundreds of students spread out over five universities, there were soon more than two thousand people in Plaza Brión. That number continued to climb until, by most estimates, there were nearly ten thousand people assembled there by the afternoon. Eventually, they filled the plaza and began to spill out onto surrounding streets. Again, the regime dispatched the police and the national guard to disperse the crowds. But the rally had hit a chord that kept it from being contained to a single time or place. The next day protests erupted again. But instead of just those in Caracas, students at other universities in other major cities began to stage their own blockades and demonstrations. “We weren’t people with a plan,” says Yon Goicoechea, a law student and student leader from Andrés Bello Catholic University, who soon became the most recognizable face of the Venezuelan student movement. “But we understood that we needed to do something the next day. We had to guide that spontaneous expression. We couldn’t imagine the dimensions of the protest.”

For the next month, student protests against the closing of RCTV
took place every day around the country. Even though the demonstrations had clearly caught a spark and spread quickly, they had, in truth, almost no chance of changing anything. Chávez had already forced RCTV off the airwaves and replaced it with a government-owned channel. If the goal had been to save RCTV, then it was already lost. But that had not been the goal. Rather, the protests in May and June 2007 announced the presence of the student movement as a force in Venezuelan political life going forward. “
We did not achieve a concrete objective,” admits Goicoechea. “But when you are in a dictatorship, the act of giving hope and defeating fear is a very important objective in itself.”

The students did not feel entirely alone in their new political role. In many ways, they saw themselves as heirs to President Rómulo Betancourt, the first democratic president of modern Venezuela. Betancourt had been a member of the student movement in 1928 that fought against the repressive dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. The students then had been the only ones willing to stand up to Gómez. For thirty years, they were imprisoned, persecuted, and in exile because of their fight for democracy. In 1959, Betancourt was elected president. In 2007, Venezuela’s students saw themselves joining this tradition. Even if they hadn’t achieved some clear objective, Goicoechea told me that he thought these early summer protests were the most important period of the student movement because they established a link to previous defenders of Venezuelan democracy. “During our history, in every dictatorship, the students have taken to the streets,” he says. “The relevance of the youth movement after decades of non-activity was very important to mobilize the opposition. We were saying that the opposition isn’t just the political parties, but the people who want to live in a democracy in Venezuela.” If no one else was going to stand up to Chávez, then the students would.

They didn’t have to wait long for another opening. On August 15, Chávez proposed a constitutional referendum that would grant him new and significant powers as president. It was an incredibly bold proposal containing sixty-nine separate constitutional amendments. One revision permitted him to declare states of emergency during which he could censor all media outlets. One empowered him to draw up new administrative regions governed by his own handpicked vice
presidents. Another made it more difficult to collect signatures to recall the president—a tactic the opposition had attempted in 2004. Perhaps most controversially, one amendment abolished presidential term limits, opening the way for Chávez to be president for life. And, in an effort to help generate public support for the referendum, it was chock-full of populist proposals such as a six-hour workday and social security benefits for everyone from street vendors to stay-at-home moms. Chávez was not seeking to merely revise the constitution; he sought to fundamentally change the relationship between state and society. His proposed reforms ran over forty-four single-spaced pages.