Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution by Richard Gott

Author:Richard Gott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution
ISBN: 9781844677115
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2011-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

24

DIVISIONS OVER THE ECONOMIC PROGRAMME

Venezuela may enjoy huge oil revenues, but these have traditionally been mopped up by a tiny percentage of the population. The great majority of the country is permanently poor and hungry. While the top 10 per cent of the population of 23 million receives half the national income, 40 per cent (according to an estimate of 1995) lives in ‘critical poverty’. 80 per cent (according to the figures for 1996) earns the minimum wage or under. As if this was not bad enough, the situation has been growing dramatically worse. Real purchasing power declined by 35 per cent between 1989 and 1995.

These statistics were well known to Chávez and his government, and he would constantly tell foreign visitors how difficult it was to explain how such a rich country could at the same time be so desperately poor. He was also aware that he could wave no magic wand. Much of his time has been spent, with Christian rhetoric, in urging the poor to be patient, and the rich to acquire some sense of solidarity with the people with whom they are obliged to share the country.

Yet although disguised and not fully formulated in the early years, the government’s economic policy has never been in doubt. In spite of the powerful rhetoric against neo-liberalism, Chávez has always been interested in securing foreign investment. He has sought to steer a difficult and almost impossible course, telling his nationalist country what it has wanted to hear, and making the right kind of reassuring noises that would not frighten the foreign investor. In this, of course, he has the warm support of Castro. According to Fausto Masó, a usually wellinformed journalist, Castro had told Chávez that his own principal preoccupation was ‘to secure the last US dollar for Cuba, because the only revolutionary way to secure development today is to open up the entire country to foreign investors’.

What is good enough for revolutionary Cuba would be fine for Venezuela, and Chávez sought to follow this implicit instruction. John Maisto, the US ambassador in Caracas in 1999, spent much time trying to get the Chávez government to sign the treaty on the promotion and protection of foreign investment that all other Latin American governments have been obliged to sign. Maisto tried to get the treaty signed before the first meeting of the Constitutional Assembly, knowing that the nationalist Assembly would be averse to its terms. He turned out to be knocking at an open door. Chávez’s cabinet quietly agreed to sign, in October, and Chávez ensured that this was done when he was out of the country. ‘He now goes round making speeches guaranteeing stability and investment,’ one disillusioned economist told me.

Yet in Chávez’s first year in office, his radical supporters made no objection to this strategy. Many of them were involved with another project, debating in the Constitutional Assembly the parameters of a future economic policy rather than contemplating the here-and-now. A strong element in their programme was the encouragement of local investors.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.