QUERETARO, Mexico, April 10 (UPI) -- "No one stops Venezuela," said Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Tuesday. The president was being modest. He has brought the country to a halt.
Chávez once divided Venezuelans; now he unites them. The Confederación de Trabajadores Venezolanos, or CTV, the main trade union organization, called a general strike Tuesday and, late on Tuesday, called for it to be extended for another day. Both the original call for a strike and the extension of it were supported by Fedecamaras, the main employers' organization.
It is not often that workers and employers have shared the same view in Venezuela. But on Chávez they have begun to share the same view. After a narrow election victory in 1998, he became enormously popular in his first months of power. The country has had a collective sense for some time that it has problems to which it needs a radical solution. For a while it shared a view that Chávez might be that solution. The belief is now almost entirely eroded. Three years of abundant oratory, with speeches lasting, Fidel Castro-style, for hours, have been accompanied by economic decline and a growing sense of frustration and anger.
Chávez's behavior this week has not helped the cause of the self-styled Bolivarian revolutionary. To try to deter support for the strike, Chávez denied it was taking place. "No one stops Venezuela" was Chávez's judgment. In American parlance, Chávez was in denial: pretending that what was happening was not happening. It is not a tactic likely to impress the electorate.
His other move was to institute another monopoly: of television and radio. The government had its own propaganda broadcast for hours on end Tuesday. Was this legal? A lawyer, Juan Manuel Ravalli, said that constant transmission of "official communications" was illegal under the telecommunications law. The TV channels had a response of their own, transmitting split screens, showing the government broadcast on one side and their own reporting, not least of the general strike, on the right.
Chávez, for his part, said that the "private channels send cameras and journalists to places where there are hardly any people." As the strike is being reported as having won 80 percent support, it is yet another comment by Chávez that bears little relation to reality.
It was another of Chávez's controversial moves that triggered the strike. Since February, he has worked himself into a worse and worse position with Venezuela's most important company, the state-run Petróleos de Venezuela, SA.
Chávez has long seen PDVSA as a cash cow from which he could extract funds. He placed in charge of it last year one of his most competent lieutenants, an officer who served with him in the army years before, General Guaicaipuro Lameda. Despite his military background, Lameda was a thoroughly trained financial professional. Indeed, he would not say "despite." In a meeting with this correspondent some years ago Lameda pointed out that he owed all his training to the armed forces. Lameda came across as a highly professional, firm, honest and loyal person--loyal not least to the Venezuelan armed forces and to Chávez. In February of this year, however, Lameda departed unwillingly from PDVSA. Since then Chávez has been at war with the company.
PDVSA's employees would not accept Lameda's dismissal and replacement by Gaston Parra, an economist from the Central Bank, nor a new board with many Chávez appointees. Within PDVSA, Parra was seen as Chávez's agent, a person who would ensure that the company cut its spending on exploration and production and paid to the government the 30 percent royalties prescribed by the new Hydrocarbons Law and the high dividends that Chávez has been wont to demand: in 2001 the required dividend payment was a huge $4 billion.
Many in PDVSA believe Chávez is going to run the company into the ground, harming its prospects and those of Venezuela for years to come. Workers began a go slow in March. The CTV called a general strike for April 9. Chávez responded April 7 by firing seven dissident executives in PDVSA and obliging twelve others to take early retirement.
Now PDVSA, which is respected internationally and by Venezuela's elite, but which Venezuela's poor normally see as a headquarters for big money and corruption, has become an unlikely symbol of unity for anti-Chávez protests. But will this unity last?
What is most disturbing about Venezuela is not the fact that Chávez is harming the country--though that is what he is doing. It is a matter of time before Chávez falls. What is more disturbing is that the country may not learn from his disastrous period in government.
Many Venezuelans condemn Chávez not as a demagogue whose only economic policy is to sack PDVSA and spend the money unwisely but as a "neo-liberal," the term Latin America uses for a modernizer, a follower of the IMF line on privatization and fiscal finances and monetary policy. It is an accusation that would cause astonishment in the IMF where Chávez's handling of the economy can cause nothing but dismay. So we can laugh at "Down with Chavez, the neo-liberal" scrawled on Venezuelan walls. But we should also be concerned.
For twenty years, ever since oil prices began to fall from their Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries-inspired highs in the 1970s, Venezuela has been floundering to find a way forward politically and economically. The country, once wealthy by Latin American standards, is getting poorer. The poor want a share of the country's dwindling wealth and suspect they are being robbed by the elite. Governments have placated the poor with subsidies and price freezes and edicts on interest rates and manipulated exchange rates that help to keep prices down. These kind of policies have made Venezuela a terrible place in which to invest (other than in oil) and have ensured that the economy does not grow.
What Venezuela needs is some neo-liberalism: some sound economic policies that will help this overly oil-dependent country to grow and provide jobs. But if Chávez's tenure of bullying and clown-like incompetence is seen as neo-liberalism, how will a neo-liberal be seen?
The unity Chávez is creating in Venezuela seems unlikely to survive him. The poor will look for a true revolutionary, not a Chávez, who betrayed them, while the middle class will look for a neo-liberal, whom the poor will oppose as "another Chávez."
As Chávez's ridiculous term works his way towards a premature end, its final tragedy may be that this rich and poor country learns little from his passing.
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