Category Archives: Venezuela

Brazil, Venezuela

Lula’s Maduro endorsement highlights strategic Brazilian ties to Venezuela

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Though the full-throated nature of the endorsement of former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of acting Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is perhaps somewhat of an eyebrow-raiser, it should not be unexpected, and it highlights the extent to which much of official Latin America has a vested interest in the continuation of chavismo — for now at least. brazilVenezuela Flag Icon

Lula is perhaps second to just Fidel Castro in terms of living politicians who are nearly universally popular throughout Latin America, so his hearty endorsement gives Maduro some international credibility, extolling both Chávez and Maduro for their passion for the rights of the poor, and it may well sway some voters who are on the fence between Maduro and challenger Henrique Capriles:

Lula says in a video released by VTV, astate-controlled television station, that he got to know Maduro in his years as foreign minister, and that Maduro will carry on Chávez’s grand hope of transforming Venezuela into a more just country where oil wealth is shared with those suffering most in society.  While Lula (pictured at top, left, with Chávez) notes that the decision is for Venezuelans alone, and he doesn’t want to interfere, but he could not help but share his testimony about Maduro, declaring, ‘Maduro Presidente; es la Venezuela que Chávez soñó‘ (Maduro for President! It’s the Venezuela of which Chávez dreamed!

But as Reuters noted last month, there may be more to Lula’s endorsement than just ideological solidarity:

“In the near term, a Maduro win would be best,” said Jose Augusto de Castro, head of Brazil’s Foreign Trade Association….

Key infrastructure projects launched during the 14 years of Chavez’s government, from the Caracas metro expansion to bridges across the Orinoco river that divides Venezuela, are run by Brazilian firms like Odebrecht.

Lula refused throughout his tenure as president from 2003 to 2010 to criticize Chávez openly, to the consternation of U.S. foreign policymakers.  But Chávez’s more strident socialist path may have made Lula’s more moderate leftism seem even tamer in contrast, and Lula’s example in Brazil stands as a pointed counter-example to chavismo in many ways — Lula managed to reduce poverty in Brazil much as Chávez did in Venezuela, but he did so while also cultivating ties to the business elite and development from the United States, the European Union and the People’s Republic of China alike.

Lula’s friendship with Chávez meant that Brazilian firms were shielded from many of the tumultuous aspects of doing business in Venezuela, most of all Chávez’s snap decisions to expropriate and nationalize industries.  Furthermore, Brazil has benefitted from Venezuela’s oil wealth, and trade between the two countries quintupled over the course of Lula’s presidency, though the ties were strategical as well:

[T]he main goals of Lula and Chávez were geopolitical. Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães, the most influential diplomat in the Brazilian chancellery, explained that Brazil’s strategy sought to prevent the “removal” of Chávez through a coup, to block the reincorporation of Venezuela into the North American economy, to extend Mercosur with the inclusion of Bolivia and Ecuador and to hinder the US project to consolidate the Pacific Alliance, which includes Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.

If you didn’t need a reminder, Latin American leaders and politicians from the moderate left, populist left and the right all attended Chávez’s funeral in March — showcasing just how entrenched chavismo has become in the region, if for no other reason than as a channel for oil subsidies and alternative finance.

Indeed, with the suspension of Paraguay from Mercosur (Mercado Común del Sur) following the impeachment and removal of Fernando Lugo in June 2012, Brazil and other countries wasted little time in making Venezuela a full member — Paraguay’s senate had long blocked Venezuela’s membership.

Campaigning kicked off today officially for the April 14 presidential race.  I attempted yesterday to argue a rationale for supporting each candidate — the policy case for Maduro is here, and the policy case for his challenger, Capriles, is here.

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The policy case for Maduro in Venezuela

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In my earlier companion piece today, I discussed the policy case for electing Henrique Capriles as the next president of Venezuela in an attempt (however vain) to separate the emotional divide in Venezuela from the policy rationales that underline each candidacy.Venezuela Flag Icon

Separating the policy from the personal is even more difficult in the case of Nicolás Maduro, however, whose campaign at every turn has been one massive embrace of Chávez, not only as a predecessor, but as nearly a deity in his own right.  So far, the Maduro campaign begins and ends with ‘Chávez,’ and there’s no guarantee that once elected, Maduro would wield a sufficient personal mandate even to take sufficient control of Chávez’s Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, or United Socialist Party of Venezuela).

There’s frustratingly little substance as to what Maduro (pictured above) would do with a six-year presidency, let alone whether he could come to dominate a governing regime with a handful of key powerbrokers, such as energy minister Rafael Ramírez, finance minister Jorge Giordani, and national assembly president Diosdado Cabello, none of whom will easily step aside from their relative and significant fiefdoms in government.

But, as I asked with respect to Capriles earlier today, what policy arguments should motivate a moderate voter who enthusiastically supported Chávez in 1998 but who’s become increasingly disenchanted about the reality of Venezuelan governance and who may be flirting with supporting Capriles — is there a rational case for supporting Maduro over Capriles?  Continue reading The policy case for Maduro in Venezuela →

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The policy case for Capriles in Venezuela

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Tuesday kicks off the official start of the campaign in Venezuela for the presidential election on April 14.Venezuela Flag Icon

It’s a little artificial, given that the campaign really began unofficially the day that Hugo Chávez died and certainly both the pro-chavismo and opposition forces have been preparing for such a campaign since Chávez left for his final, unsuccessful round of treatment in Cuba.

Not surprisingly, much of the pre-campaign has been waged on visceral and emotional lines — the pro-/anti- chavismo debate in Venezuela has become inextricably so linked to personalities and identity politics that it’s often hard to step back and articulate the policy rationale for each candidate.  Henrique Capriles, the opposition candidate, has even stepped up his attacks against acting president Nicolás Maduro, in a much more insistent (even populist) tone than he ever took in his 2012 presidential campaign against Chávez.

That seems likely to intensify over the next 13 days.

But to the extent it’s possible to put aside the emotional in favor of policy, what policy arguments should sway, say, the moderate voter who enthusiastically supported Chávez in 1998 and well into the last decade but who has doubts about the performance of the government in recent years to make the jump to support Capriles (pictured above) and the broad Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD)?

Continue reading The policy case for Capriles in Venezuela →

Books, Venezuela

Book review: ‘Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela’ by Rory Carroll

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comandante

I’ve been reading an increasing amount of material in advance of the Venezuelan presidential election on April 14 (and will be covering it in Caracas), so luckily for me, Rory Carroll’s newly released book on the Chávez era was right on cue.Venezuela Flag Icon

Like most thoughtful writing on Chávez and chavismo, Carroll notes how incredibly complex the phenomenon has been — Chávez is neither hero nor villain, and he captures with credibility the reasons why Chávez was, and remains, so popular with a majority of Venezuelans, especially the country’s poorest.

It’s a fascinating read throughout, very highly recommended — I learned something about Venezuela on nearly every page.

The most jaw-dropping parts of the book are those that explain the ‘through-the-looking-glass’ nature of Miraflores, the presidential palace, and El Silencio, the colonial Caracas neighborhood that’s home to Venezuela’s government ministries.

This part of the book felt inspired by Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Emperor, a short (perhaps fictionalized) work on the final years of Ethiopian emperor Haile Sellassie II’s reign, so thick does the sycophancy hang in the air among Venezuela’s ministers — ministers nervously laugh over Chávez’s public claim that capitalism may have killed off life on Mars, and they fret when suddenly Chávez appeared in a yellow shirt (not the trademark red shirt that had become associated with his Bolivarian revolution) and announced there was too much read.  What follows is something out of Kapuściński or even Kafka:

Consternation around the palace. What to do? Some ministers hesitantly abandoned the color, worrying it was a trick.  Others flashed just a bit of red, trying to gauge the correct level.  When, a few weeks later, the comandante resumed wearing red again without elaboration, the crisis passed, and ministers reverted to red.

The winner of the survival game, Jorge Giordani, Chávez’s longtime finance minister, comes off as especially craven and incompetent, the ‘monk,’ a man of austere personal finances who turned a blind eye to widespread corruption and economic mismanagement, all while expending energy to retain his own favor in the administration.

The Castros in Cuba come off as wily as ever, having tapped into Chávez a willing disciple (or, less charitably, a dupe) to provide the ostracized island with precious fuel subsidies and cheap credit, and the relatively rapid infiltration of the G2 Cuban intelligence apparatus into Chávez’s security regime.

Here too are also details from the ill-fated April 11, 2002 coup against Chávez, and Carroll here paints one of the most damning portraits of Pedro Carmona, who took power for just hours and who, ‘drunk with power,’ literally failed to fit into the gold-plated sphinx chair, feet dangling, in the presidential office in Miraflores.

There are anecdotes a-plenty, too, like the episode of ¡Alo, Presidente! in which Carroll is invited to ask Chávez a question, lobs a mildly critical question, and is treated to a long diatribe about colonialism in the New World, Christopher Columbus and, oddly enough, given Carroll’s Irish background, the British monarchy.

We meet Giovanni Scutaro, tailor to chavismo (and, one suspects, everyone with enough money for fashion in Caracas), the American writer and Chávez enthusiast Eva Gollinger, and Baldo Sansó, a fast-talking executive at Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.

Later in 2010 during an energy shortage, we’re treated to Chávez counseling Venezuela to take three-minute showers:

‘Some people sing in the shower, in the shower half an hour.  No, kids, three minutes is more than enough.  I’ve counted, three minutes, and I don’t stink.’ He wagged his finger. ‘If you are going to lie back in the bath, with the soap, and you turn on the, what’s it called, the Jacuzzi… Imagine that, what kind of communism is that? We’re not in times of Jacuzzi.’

But it’s not all fun and games and showers.

Despite the histrionics of U.S. conservatives and others, Chávez’s administration been a largely bloodless regime, though there are plenty of chilling tales human rights shortcomings: stories of folks like Raúl Baduel, who was imprisoned on a politically motivated conviction after asserting the separation of the Venezuelan military from politics and becoming increasingly critical of Chávez’s rule, and María Lourdes Afiuni, a judge who delivered an acquittal of disgraced superstar Eligio Cedeño, who thereupon found herself imprisoned.  We also meet the Nuñez brothers of the El Cementerio barrio, caught in a bleak life-and-death struggle for survival as the leaders of El Cementerio’s gang in the rough hills above the Caracas valley.

Though Carroll could hardly have known his book would emerge nearly simultaneous with the death of Chávez, its publication comes at a time when both Venezuelans and non-Venezuelans are wondering about what comes next — under either Nicolás Maduro or Henrique Capriles.

I would have liked to see more discussion on how chavismo actually replicates many of the elements of the petrostate of the regimes that preceded it in Venezuela, and in other petrostate regimes throughout the world, as well as more discussion of the future of chavismo after Chávez, but those are topics that could easily be volumes of their own.  And it’s notable that neither Maduro nor Capriles play a starring role over the past 14 years.  Máduro himself is a bit player in the book, a sycophant who’s managed to survive in El Silencio from the earliest days of Chávez’s ‘Movement for a Fifth Republic’:

Whatever hour Chávez phoned, whatever law he wanted amended or revoked, Maduro assented.  He became head of the assembly in 2005 and then, despite not speaking any foreign languages, foreign minister in 2006, a post he held for six years.  He crisscrossed the world following Chávez’s orderes and reading Chávez’s script, never deviating, never ad-libbing, never proposing his own initiatives… When the comandante praised Maduro in public — ‘Look at Nicolás there, handsome in his suit, not driving a bus anymore’ — he just smiled.  Foreign ambassadors said the foreign minister grew into his job but that he never took a big decision.  Only Chávez was allowed to shine, so Maduro did not shine.  And thus he prospered.  He acquired an extensive wardrobe, put on weight, grew thick around the trunk.

That perhaps explains why Maduro, not the more cunning current assembly president, Diosdado Cabello, won Chávez’s pre-death endorsement as his successor.

Carroll begins with an anecdote from an interview from beloved Latin American writer Gabriel García Márquez, who wrote the following about Chávez on the eve of his inauguration in 1999:

While he sauntered off with his bodyguards of decorated officers and close friends, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I had just been traveling and chatting pleasantly with two opposing men.  One to whom the caprices of fate had given an opportunity to save his country.  The other, an illusionist, who could pass into the history books as just another despot.

Carroll’s sophisticated treatment of chavismo produces examples of all of the above — Chávez as savior, Chávez as illusionist and Chávez as despot — and takes chavismo up as a mirror to reflect how all of those impressions have marked Venezuela for the past decade and a half.

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In death, the Chávez cult has become even creepier

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If you already thought that Venezuela was the Turkmenistan of Latin American politics, you need no further proof than the latest stunt on Tuesday from acting president Nicolás Maduro.Venezuela Flag Icon

In the clip below, Maduro has launched an oversized check up to the heavens to a grateful Hugo Chávez, representing the dividends received by CANTV, the Venezuelan telephone company that Chávez nationalized in 2007.  It’s another great find from Caracas Chronicles, which has been on quite a roll in the post-Chávez era in covering Venezuelan politics:

‘!Vuela, Vuela!, ¡en homenaje al Comandante!,’ Maduro exclaims (‘Fly! Fly! In tribute to the comandante!’), as red balloons (red symbolizing the color most associated with Chávez) float the check of 1,800 million bolívars upward to the skies.

As outrageous as it seems, it’s part of a series of impressions that the post-Chávez era is featuring an even creepier cult of personality in Venezuela than when el comandante was alive.

It began with the plans — now apparently aborted — to embalm Chávez and place him on display, just like Vladimir Lenin is on display in Moscow or Mao Zedong is on display in Beijing.  Those plans were belatedly phased out after officials determined that officials had waited too long after Chávez’s death in order to embalm him.

Then there are the over-the-top tributes like this, mingling the legacy of Chávez with that of Venezuelan founding father Simón Bolívar and other left-wing martyrs, and even Chávez’s Cuban benefactors have a thorough celebration of his life at Granma. 

Maduro even joked (or was it a serious claim?) that Chávez, his place in heaven secured, nudged God to make Argentine cardinal Jose Maria Bergoglio the world’s first Latin American pope.

It wouldn’t surprise me if, like in Turkmenistan, Maduro started trying to rename the months of the calendar after Chávez — there’s even a snarky website, madurodice.com, that tracks the number of Maduro’s mentions of Chávez on the campaign pre-campaign trail.

But the massive miles-long queues of people waiting to pay tribute to Chávez in death, and an extremely elegant funeral that drew nearly every leader in Latin America from Chile to México, with a ley seca (dry law) implemented to keep life in Caracas especially a bit more subdued in the potentially challenging days following Chávez’s death should have been enough to mark the extremely oversized impact that Chávez played within Venezuela’s political system — and above all in the spoils system that funneled oil wealth from the government to its supporters, from top government officials on downward.

All of this and Venezuela’s formal campaign season doesn’t even kick off until April 1.

French public intellectual Bernard Henri-Lévy has already decried the growing chavismo cult of personality:

What is less known, something that we will regret overlooking as the posthumous cult of Chávez swells and grows more toxic, is that this “21st-century socialist,” this supposedly tireless “defender of human rights,” ruled by muzzling the media, shutting down television stations that were critical of him, and denying the opposition access to the state news networks.

For Chávez supporters, there are certainly myriad policy reasons to support Maduro in the upcoming election over challenger Henrique Capriles — like him or not, he fundamentally transferred Venezuela’s oil wealth to the poorest Venezuelans in amounts unknown in nearly a century of the country’s oil wealth.  You can argue that Chávez’s redistribution of wealth has been inefficient, that his expropriations and other economic policies have left Venezuela mired in debt, a pariah of the global financial system and ill-prepared for the day that oil prices drop, and that other more moderate regimes from Perú to Brazil have notched records of poverty reduction just as impressive as — or more so than — Venezuela under chavismo. Continue reading In death, the Chávez cult has become even creepier →

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¡Hasta siempre, comandante!

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I don’t know quite what to make of this.  Fifth circle of hell or cielo bolivariano?Venezuela Flag Icon

In any event, it’s a good reminder that the April 14 presidential election is still about Hugo Chávez, perhaps even more than the elections in which Chávez himself contested since 1998.

There’s of course Salvador Allende there (in the suit), the martyr of Chilean socialism whose fall ushered in nearly two decades of military rule by Augusto Pinochet; Eva Peron, the wife and successor to her husband’s mid-20th century peronismo movement in Argentina; and, of course, Che Guevara, who’s practically become the patron saint of revolutionary spirit.

Finally, of course, no paean to Chávez would be complete without the Great Liberator himself, Simon Bolívar.

H/t to Caracas Chronicles, which should be required reading for anyone interested in Venezuela.

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Meet the new heir to Hugo Chávez: the feistier, populist Capriles 2.0

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Just days after the death of longtime Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, his previous opponent in the 2012 election, Henrique Capriles, lost no time in taunting acting president Nicolás Maduro:Venezuela Flag Icon

Nicolás, nobody elected you president. The people didn’t vote for you, kid.

It was quite a bit out of character for Capriles (pictured above), who often campaigned against Chávez, then ailing with the cancer that ultimately took his life, with kid gloves — after all, Chávez remained the beloved champion of Venezuela’s poor, and Capriles himself pledged to retain the misiones that provided education and health benefits in the event of his election.

In fact, Capriles’s sneering and taunting attitude was more reminiscent of Chávez, who never lost an opportunity for a little name-calling.

Although Capriles is reported to have seriously considered boycotting the election, he announced March 10 that he would accept the presidential nomination of the opposition coalition, the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD) with the kind of intensity that critics claimed his previous 2012 campaign lacked.  In a fiery, nearly hour-long speech, he attacked the record of chavismo and pursued Maduro with a newfound aggression, challenging Maduro by his first name (¡Y tu, Nicolás…) and attacking the government’s handling of the constitutional succession and its performance since Chávez won reelection:

Maduro was hand-picked by Chávez as his new vice president and anointed as his preferred successor, and he has — for now — secured the support of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, or United Socialist Party of Venezuela) and much of the Venezuelan army, now sympathetic to the ruling chavista regime after 14 years of Chávez in power.

But from his newfound abilities in populist rhetoric and campaign aggression, it may well be Capriles who is becoming the true heir to Chávez.

For example, on March 10, in response to ‘homophobic’ slurs from Maduro, Capriles took the opportunity not only to deny them, but to make a full-throated attack on the machismo of the chavistas and to argue forcefully for social inclusion for all Venezuelans, no matter what their sexual orientation:

That takes a lot of brass — and perhaps it’s the kind of brass that comes from a campaign against Maduro that seems more doomed than the one last year.

The conventional wisdom is that Maduro will ride the wave of sympathy for Chávez to victory so soon after the funeral, and polls show that Maduro is leading Capriles, in some cases by a wider margin than the 11% victory Chávez won in 2011 (such as a recent Datanalysis poll that gives Maduro a 14-point lead).

Capriles has attacked the polls, too, arguing that the government are paying pollsters to show Maduro leading.  True or not, it’s a classic play from the Chávez playbook — disregard the facts, and turn a negative into a way to attack your opponent.

What it means is that Capriles is running the kind of offensive campaign that Chávez ran throughout his career, and Maduro is running the kind of defensive, hesitant campaign that’s typically been associated with the opposition.

But regardless of whether Capriles has a chance to win, he’s now free to run against chavismo without having to run against the charismatic commandante himself.

After a setback for opposition forces in the regional and gubernatorial races in December 2012 (Capriles himself won reelection only narrowly against Elías Jaua, a well-financed former Chávez vice president), a feisty loss in the April 14 presidential election would not only energize the opposition, but keep it united and prepare it to take on the PSUV in parliamentary elections due in 2015.

Even more slyly, one of the subtle themes of the Capriles campaign is simply, ‘Maduro is no Chávez.’

The subtext here is that, even if you supported Chávez, and perhaps especially if you supported Chávez, you don’t necessarily need to support Maduro, who doesn’t measure up to Chávez.  Capriles has argued that Maduro, in less than a hundred days as the de facto acting president during Chávez’s terminal illness, has already begun to dismantle the achievements of the Chávez era.

That’s one reason Capriles has been so aggressive in attacking Maduro’s February devaluation of the bolívar, Venezuela’s currency, which lowered its value by 32%.  Maduro doubled down this week, however, announcing a second devaluation that is expected to cut even more deeply into the value of the currency, and a new foreign exchange system to assist importers acquire increasingly rare U.S. dollars.  The devaluations are also designed to cut a budget deficit that swelled in 2011 and 2012 in advance of Chávez’s reelection, despite abundant oil wealth.

It’s also why Capriles has gone on the offensive about cutting subsidies to Cuba — it’s widely believed that Maduro was Havana’s preference as Chávez’s successor, hoping that Maduro’s election will secure the uninterrupted flow of oil subsidies, cheap credit and other goodies to the Castro regime.  Again, the anti-Cuba rhetoric is subtle way of reclaiming nationalism at the expense of Maduro’s relatively weaker position.  Capriles would never have been able to attack the nationalist bona fides of Chávez, the 21st century champion of ‘bolivarian’ revolution.  Not so with Maduro.

Consider, too, this television advertisement from the Capriles campaign yesterday — although it’s only a simple 21-second spot, it’s a harsh indictment of chavismo that lists five reasons for change: violence, power outages, expropriations, deficient hospitals and lack of water:

Capriles may well still lose the election because the wall of sympathy for Chávez was always going to be too high to surmount.

But make no mistake, Capriles is certainly waging a more spirited campaign than anyone every really anticipated — it may not be enough to win the election, but it may well make it a far closer run than the chavista regime would have liked.  That, in turn, will lay the groundwork for a future challenge if Maduro wins and conditions deteriorate in advance of parliamentary elections or before the next presidential election in 2018.

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In Depth: Venezuela

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<See below Suffragio’s preview of Venezuela’s April 2013 presidential election, followed by a real-time listing of all coverage of Venezuelan politics.>

Venezuelans will go to the polls on April 14 to select a successor to Hugo Chávez, who died on March 5, 2013, just months after winning reelection to a fourth term in October 2012.Venezuela Flag Icon

Shortly after winning reelection, Chávez returned to Cuba for further treatment for a (still unspecified) illness related to cancer — a cancer that turned out to be terminal.  His inauguration on January 10 came and went, and much of Venezuela spent early 2013 in a state of suspended animation waiting for Chávez to either improve or worsen.

Chávez, who took power after the 1998 election, anointed his newly appointed vice president, Nicolás Maduro, the former foreign minster, as his preferred successor, and Maduro is running as the candidate of the governing Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, or United Socialist Party of Venezuela) to carry forward the chavismo project.

His opponent will be the governor of Miranda state, Henrique Capriles, who lost the October 2012 presidential race to Chávez, and who represents the broad united opposition coalition, the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD, the Democratic Unity Roundtable).

NOTE: I will be in Venezuela covering the lead-up to the election from April 9 to 16 — if you’re in Caracas and will be around, drop me a line.

— March 19, 2013

Please note below Suffragio‘s prior coverage of Venezuelan politics:

Politics turns violent in Venezuela
February 20, 2014

SiriusXM: More thoughts on Venezuela and Argentina
February 5, 2014

The National Interest: Will Venezuela or Argentina be the first to crumble into economic crisis?
January 30, 2014

Chavismo offers no solutions for Venezuela’s violent crime
January 8, 2014

After local elections, what next for Venezuela’s government?
December 23, 2013

Show us the long-form, Nicolás (in which birtherism comes to Venezuela)
September 27, 2013

Where Capriles and the Venezuelan opposition go from here
August 20, 2013

Pragmatic Merentes winning control over Venezuela economic policy — but to what end?
August 17, 2013

It’s Diosdado Cabello’s world, the rest of Venezuela is just living in it
June 4, 2013

We’re starting to see what Madurismo will look like in Venezuela
May 8, 2013

Gettin’ raucous in Caracas
May 1, 2013

CNE agrees to 100% audit of Venezuelan votes
April 19, 2013

The National Interest: Chávez’s radical antics provide space for progressive Latin American left
April 17, 2013

Photo essay: Caprilistas block traffic in Caracas suburb to protest fraud
April 15, 2013

A primer on the MUD, Venezuela’s broad opposition coalition
April 15, 2013

The Atlantic: Chavismo is a continuity of — not a rupture from — the petrostate
April 15, 2013

The New Republic: Venezuela’s economy is tumbling despite oil prices over $100/barrel
April 15, 2013

Cabello comments indicate cracks in the chavista high guard?
April 15, 2013

LIVE BLOG from Caracas: Election night in Venezuela
April 14, 2013

Photo essay: Political graffiti and street art in Caracas
April 13, 2013

What’s the deal with Venezuelan presidential campaigns and jumpsuits?
April 13, 2013

Capriles campaign optimistic with 48 hours to go — but can it win?
April 12, 2013

Livin’ la vida seca — the election dray law takes effect in Venezuela
April 12, 2013

Deutsche Welle: Growing U.S.-Venezuelan commercial ties won’t lead to diplomatic thaw if Maduro wins
April 12, 2013

A conversation with former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, Patrick Duddy
April 12, 2013

The National Interest: Capriles could be the better guarantor of chavismo in Venezuela
April 12, 2013

Photo essay: A chavista party in central Caracas
April 11, 2013

Venezuela marks coup anniversary in leadup to election
April 11, 2013

A diatribe against arepas — and food policy in the Caribbean basin
April 11, 2013

Not a banana republic but an avocado economy
April 10, 2013

Maduro campaign active on penultimate campaign day in Caracas
April 10, 2013

The political geography of Caracas
April 10, 2013

Does Venezuela need its own Margaret Thatcher?
April 9, 2013

Lula’s Maduro endorsement highlights strategic Brazilian ties to Venezuela
April 2, 2013

The policy case for Capriles in Venezuela
April 1, 2013

The policy case for Maduro in Venezuela
April 1, 2013

Book review: ‘Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela’ by Rory Carroll
March 29, 2013

In death, the Chávez cult has become even creepier
March 27, 2013

¡Hasta siempre, comandante!
March 23, 2013

Meet the new heir to Hugo Chávez: the feistier, populist Capriles 2.0
March 22, 2013

World leaders descend upon Chávez funeral: one photo but mil palabras
March 8, 2013

Should Capriles automatically get a second shot at Venezuela’s presidency?
March 6, 2013

Chávez’s death kicks off sudden presidential election in Venezuela
March 5, 2013

Despite Capriles win, regional elections a setback for Venezuelan opposition to Chávez
December 26, 2012

With Chávez’s health in doubt, regional Venezuelan elections assume greater importance
December 12, 2012

Chávez officially names Maduro as anointed successor
December 10, 2012

In naming Maduro as new VP, Chávez indicates preference for successor
October 11, 2012

Chávez headed for apparent narrow reelection in Venezuela
October 7, 2012

But really: can Henrique Capriles defeat chavismo?
October 7, 2012

Doubts surface in media about Capriles in Venezuelan presidential race
June 2, 2012

A shift in tone about Chávez’s health
April 6, 2012

Venezuelan presidential race a toss-up
March 23, 2012

And Chávez is back
March 19, 2012

Eventos, my dear boy, eventos
February 23, 2012

Can Henrique Capriles defeat chavismo?
February 14, 2012

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World leaders descend upon Chávez funeral: one photo, but mil palabras

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whoswho

What’s always been so interesting about chavismo is the way that the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez managed to build alliances both with just about every leader in Latin America, no matter how radical or moderate, while also building close alliances with a ‘who’s who’ of world rogue leaders on poor terms with the United States of America.Venezuela Flag Icon

It makes for an interesting set of photos from Chávez’s funeral — the photo above comes from the Facebook feed of Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of México, a country that’s had relatively little use for Venezuela over the past 14 years — former president Felipe Calderón used Chávez as a boogeyman in the 2006 Mexican presidential election to warn voters against the one-time leftist frontrunner, former Mexican City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and that may have made the difference in that election.

Chávez died Tuesday in Caracas after a long fight with cancer, suddenly bringing to life Venezuelan politics that had largely been frozen in waiting on Chávez’s health since his 11-point reelection in October 2012.

Peña Nieto was expected to move Mexican relations closer to Venezuela than under the more right-wing Calderón, but Peña Nieto and Chávez were hardly best friends.  That relationship was part and parcel of the diverse set of relationships that Chávez had with the rest of Latin America — sometimes ally, sometimes foil, sometimes donor and often, all three simultaneously.  Those relationships, all of which are on display this week in Caracas, give us a rough sense of whether chavismo — and the broader form of the populist, socialist left that has been on the rise in Latin America (though not necessarily in its largest, most economically successful, countries like México and Brazil) — will live beyond Chávez.

Peña Nieto is in the fourth row, standing between businessman Ricardo Martinelli, Panama’s conservative president to his left and Peruvian president Ollanta Humala to his right.  Humala, who won a very close election in 2011 in Perú, was feared as a potential chavista radical leftist, anathema to Peru’s business elite, despite renouncing a chavista-style government in Perú.  In fact, Humala has turned out to govern as a business-friendly moderate, garnering relatively more criticism from environmentalists and social activists on the left since his election.

There in the front row, you can see Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Cuba’s president Raúl Castro (who has the distinction of belonging to both the ‘rogue state’ and ‘Latin American’ groups), the new ‘acting’ first lady of Venezuela Cilia Flores, and her husband, acting president Nicolás Maduro. Continue reading World leaders descend upon Chávez funeral: one photo, but mil palabras →

Venezuela

Should Capriles automatically get a second shot at Venezuela’s presidency?

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Venezuela’s now-acting president Nicolás Maduro is tending to affairs of state today, including a funeral for the late president Hugo Chávez on Friday, and making sure that his longtime Venezuelan predecessor’s death doesn’t result in any turbulence.Venezuela Flag Icon

But as Francisco Toro, of the always-insightful Caracas Chronicles writes today in The New York Times, politics has not stopped simply because the 14-year leader has died:

And now, Chávez’s hand-picked successor is telling the man’s grieving followers that we — those who disagree with him — are responsible for the illness that took his life.

Within hours of the president’s death being announced, gangs of motorcycle-riding Chávez supporters burned down an encampment where opposition-minded students had been demanding that the government tell the truth about his condition. Rumors of riots circulated feverishly on Twitter throughout Tuesday evening, still unverified.

Maduro, for now at least, seems to have firmly grasped control of the government, including the immediate support of the Venezuelan military, and the parallel power structures of Chávez’s governing Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, or United Socialist Party of Venezuela).

Foreign minister Elías Jaua (former vice president), who announced that Maduro was taking over as acting president, seems to be on board the Maduro bandwagon, and Cuba has long thought to have favored Maduro as Chávez’s successor (incidentally, one of the most fascinating aspects of the past three months and the months ahead is the role that Cuba plays in Venezuelan governance).

There’s a chance that Diosdado Cabello, the speaker of the National Assembly, could attempt to win the presidential nomination, but that seems unlikely, at least today. Time will tell.

Under the Venezuelan constitution, Maduro must call an election within 30 days of Chávez’s death but, as Diego Moya-Ocampos noted last month in Americas Quarterly, it’s not clear whether Maduro must call the election to be held within 30 days or whether Maduro must make the announcement within 30 days.

In one instance, Venezuela faces a presidential election on or before April 5.  In another instance, Venezuela faces an election anytime over the course of 2013, conceivably, so long as it is announced before April 5.  My first instinct is that Maduro will want to schedule the election as quickly as possible — to take advantage of lingering sympathy for Chávez and the legacy of his ‘Bolivarian’ project, to subdue intraparty rivals such as Cabello and to avoid giving the opposition a chance to develop support over a long campaign, especially at a time when so many problems are so visible: Venezuela’s economy remains in shaky condition, shortages and outages are commonplace and the country’s violent crime remains, as ever, some of the worst in the Western hemisphere.

Chávez’s former opponent, Henrique Capriles (pictured above), is assumed to become the candidate who will challenge Maduro in the upcoming presidential election to determine Chávez’s successor — he was the candidate of the unified opposition umbrella group, the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD), in the October 2012 presidential election.

There are a lot of strong reasons to make that assumption: Continue reading Should Capriles automatically get a second shot at Venezuela’s presidency? →

Venezuela

Chávez’s death kicks off sudden presidential election in Venezuela

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Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has died today at age 58 after a long battle with cancer, and that sets off a snap 30-day campaign to select his successor. Venezuela Flag Icon

Putting aside politics and policy for a moment, it is clear that Chávez commanded a huge amount of support among the 29 million residents of Venezuela.  Though many critics, both within Venezuela and outside the country, especially in the United States, found his style of populist ‘bolivarian’ socialist government offensive, his largest legacy may well be addressing poverty in Venezuela after decades of leaders ignored Venezuela’s poorest– and even lift many Venezuelans out of poverty with massive amounts of social welfare spending on health, education and other support through his misiones, though we’ll leave for another day the question of whether that spending, based largely on Venezuelan natural resources and high global demand for oil, is sustainable in the long run.

It’s a testament to Chávez’s influence that Henrique Capriles, his opponent in the October 2012 presidential election, campaigned on a basis of retaining many of the misiones.  Although Chávez won reelection with nine-point victory over Capriles, the opposition made clear to Venezuelans that, to some degree, ‘we’re all chavistas, now.’ (follow all of Suffragio‘s coverage here).

His legacy will also be one of a troubling, divisive, oppressive autocrat — an erratic style of rule that diminished press freedom and blurred the line between the military, the government and politics.  Although elections remained free in Venezuela under Chávez, his mobilization of government to support his political survival meant that elections weren’t necessarily fair.  He also championed an anti-imperialist style that antagonized the United States and other Western governments (he famously called former U.S. president George W. Bush ‘Mister Danger‘ and a donkey), seeking instead common cause with countries like Iran and other rogue states.

But Chávez’s health — which was always an issue, however muted, during the campaign — took a turn for the worse after his reelection.  He departed for Cuba very soon after the election for cancer treatment, missing his own re-inauguration, and really since the day he was reelected, Venezuela’s been trapped in a bit of political paralysis with a president on what turned out to be his deathbed.

Upon reelection, Chávez was scheduled to have remained in office through January 2019; now that he’s died in office, Venezuela faces a snap election to be held within 30 days.

That’s right — Chávez’s successor will be chosen by April 5.

Before leaving for treatment in Cuba, Chávez appointed a new vice president, former foreign minister Nicolás Maduro, and anointed him specifically as his successor.  That means Maduro is likely to lead Chávez’s ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, or United Socialist Party of Venezuela) into the snap election, though it’s possible that Diosdado Cabello, the speaker of the National Assembly, could attempt to win the presidential nomination.  Given the outpouring of sympathy for Chávez, though, and the suddenness of the election, that seems unlikely.

I’ll note that Cabello himself is far from Caracas today, dealing with the death of his own mother, Felicia de Cabello, which makes the timing of Chávez’s own death perhaps suspicious.

Though Cabello may command more support within the PSUV ranks, Cuba’s leadership is thought to back Maduro, and that’s likely to be a hugely determinative factor in the days to come — one of the key questions is the role that the Cuban government of Raúl Castro has played in Venezuela’s governance in the past couple of months while Chávez has been incapacitated.

His recent opponent, Capriles, was narrowly reelected as the governor of Miranda, Venezuela’s second-most populous state, in the state elections in December 2012, and so the dynamics of the snap elections, held so closely after the previous presidential election, means that Capriles, the highest-ranking official from within the broad opposition coalition, the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD), will likely be its candidate — and we’ll be asking once again whether Capriles defeat chavismo, this time without Chávez.  Again, the governor of Lara state, Henri Falcón, himself a former chavista, might also emerge as a potential challenger, though with such a short presidential campaign, Capriles has more national name recognition and the ability to mobilize a rapid campaign team, and the opposition will surely see this as their best opportunity to take power in the past 13 years.

I’m not sure what the next 30 days will bring.

We could see infighting over the nomination from both the PSUV or the MUD or we could see very rapid alignment in light of the election ahead.

We could see Venezuelans turn away from the chavistas without their charismatic leader, with Venezuela’s economy sputtering and with the most credible opposition in years providing a compelling alternative government.  We could also see a wave of sympathy for the long-ailing Chávez sweep his chosen successor Maduro into power.

Although for now the military has vowed loyalty to Maduro, meaning that there’s no imminent threat of a coup, will the military, now fully integrated into Chávez’s political empire, even allow a fully free and fair election in 30 days that could result in the election of an opposition candidate?  We just don’t know.

For now, it’s enough to note Chávez’s passing, note his complicated legacy to Venezuela and to the world, and hope for the most peaceful and seamless transition possible for the people of Venezuela.

Argentina, Australia, Bavaria, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Egypt, Falkland Islands, France, Georgia, Germany, Honduras, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Ontario, Pakistan, Paraguay, Philippines, Quebec, Tunisia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe

13 in ’13: Thirteen world elections to watch in 2013

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Welcome back and a happy new year to all of Suffragio‘s readers.

With 2013 off and running, here are the 13 world elections that will undoubtedly make a difference to the course of world affairs this year — and a key number of them are coming very soon, too. Continue reading 13 in ’13: Thirteen world elections to watch in 2013 →

Venezuela

Despite Capriles win, regional elections a setback for Venezuelan opposition to Chávez

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With so much going on in world politics, namely the Japanese and South Korean elections earlier last week and the holidays, it’s been easy to sidetrack the gubernatorial elections throughout Venezuela last Sunday — but that doesn’t diminish their importance.Venezuela Flag Icon

As you probably know by now, it was a good day for Hugo Chávez and the ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, or United Socialist Party of Venezuela).  The chavista left won 20 out of 23 races, leaving them with more regional power after Sunday than before and the various opposition groups with five less governors.  And Chávez is still alive, as of today, following surgery in Cuba, although, perhaps troublingly, his vice president Nicolás Maduro has now assumed key economic powers in the country.

The opposition held onto the second most-populous state, Miranda, where the current governor, Henrique Capriles, recently lost the October presidential race to Chávez by 9% as the candidate of the opposition Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD) — though it doesn’t quite seem so, it was actually the best performance by an opposition challenger against Chávez in his 13 years in power, in stark contrast to the previous near-comical attempts to defeat Chávez.

Capriles, in the Dec. 16 race, faced Chávez’s outgoing vice president Elías Jaua, and despite Jaua’s somewhat lackluster campaigning skills, Jaua had the full force of the PSUV and the Chávez government behind him.

Capriles’s win — by a relatively narrow 51.83% to Jaua’s 47.82% margin — makes him the highest-ranking opposition governor in Venezuela, and the fact that he’s held on to the governor’s office in Miranda, despite a hard-charing effort from the PSUV, means that if Chávez dies or retires in office anytime soon (a question that’s on everyone’s mind following yet another surgery for the cancer-stricken Chávez), Capriles will be the natural candidate to contest any impromptu presidential race — which would take place within 30 days.  No one else in the opposition has the same level of name recognition or could so quickly mobilize a national campaign apparatus.

Notably, Capriles’s rival for the opposition presidential nomination, the governor of Venezuela’s most populous state, Zulia, Pablo Pérez lost his reelection bid, ending a 12-year run for Pérez’s Zulia-based Un Nuevo Tiempo (UNT, a New Era).  Although Pérez was favored to win the race in Zulia, he lost to the man who held the governor’s office in Zulia from 1995 to 2000, Francisco Arias Cárdenas, with a strong assist from Chávez and his federal government’s spending program for Zulia, the federal Corpozulia program.  It’s the brightest jewel for the chavistas, given that they have not won a gubernatorial race in Zulia since 1998 when Chávez took office, despite the fact that Chávez has won a majority in Zulia in every presidential race, including in his race against Capriles, even if by a relatively narrow 53.34% to 46.27%.  Cárdenas won the gubernatorial race by an even more narrow margin of 52.22% to 47.68%,

Capriles widely defeated Pérez last February for the MUD presidential nomination, but Pérez could have been a fierce challenger for a future presidential election.  So, ironically, although the Zulia race is a huge loss for the opposition to Chávez, it’s rather a boost for Capriles, personally.  Furthermore, as Furthermore, as Juan Cristóbal Nagel at Caracas Chronicles notes, the Miranda campaign showed that Capriles, despite his overwhelmingly positive campaign for president, has the grit to attack an opponent.

In the third-most populous state of Carabobo, Henrique Salas Feo lost his reelection bid to former parliamentary speaker Francisco Ameliach, the PSUV’s candidate by a lopsided 55.73% to just 43.61% for the incumbent.  Given that the Salas family has ruled Carabobo since 1989 (except for four years), however, the loss is seen as less of a statement about the opposition forces than about fatigue with the Salas family.

Capriles’s largest competitor for the opposition’s standard-bearer, however, was reelected as governor of Venezuela’s fourth-most populous state, Lara.  Henri Falcón, who won election in 2008 as the former mayor of Barquisimeto and a PSUV candidate, albeit a fairly independent candidate who failed to embrace fully the chavista label, and in 2010, he founded his own party, Patria Para Todos (PPT, “Fatherland for All”), fully cutting his ties to Chávez and the PSUV.  Falcón faced a tough race against Luis Reyes Reyes, Lara’s governor — and a one-time mentor to Falcón — from 2000 to 2008, and from 2008 the deputy leader of the National Assembly.  His win, with a robust 53.87% to just 45.86% for Reyes, gives Falcón a strong platform to enter national politics, especially given the time to continue developing a national profile.

If Venezuela faces a new presidential campaign anytime soon, Capriles would certainly have the edge.  But if Chávez serves his full term, somehow, Falcón might well be the favorite opposition candidate by 2018.

Although there remains some question of fraud in Bolivar state, the only other opposition win was in Venezuela’s most sparsely populated state, Amazonas, longtime governor (since 2001) Liborio Guarulla won reelection with just over 55% of the vote, despite the PSUV’s opposition.

So where does this leave the opposition? Not nearly in as bad shape as you might expect.  Despite the loss of Zulia state, which is certainly unlikely to transform into a chavista stronghold anytime soon, it could have been worse.  Of the opposition’s three strongest potential candidates for president, two emerged unscathed, and Pérez may well survive to run again in 2016, and some of the defeated candidates, such as Salas, were not quite exactly the best role models for a dynamic opposition in any event.

As Nagel also notes over at Caracas Chronicles, abstentions in the gubernatorial races exceeded 50%, more by far than any recent election — presidential, parliamentary or otherwise (in contrast, in October, less than 25% of voters abstained).  So the result may have more to do with voters tuning out after nearly a year’s election battle between Chávez and Capriles than voters rejecting the opposition.

Miranda, Venezuela, Zulia

With Chávez’s health in doubt, regional Venezuelan elections assume greater importance

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With Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez recovering from surgery, due to what may be terminal cancer, it’s easy to forget that this weekend will mark a handful of key regional races throughout Venezuela, including a gubernatorial race in Miranda state that pits Chávez’s former presidential rival against Chávez’s former vice president.zuliamiranda flagVenezuela Flag Icon

Although the attention this week has been mostly on Chávez’s health, his departure to Cuba for surgery and, perhaps above all, his speech last Saturday night indicating that his preferred successor is former foreign minister and vice president Nicolás Maduro, the results of Sunday’s races will establish the backdrop for the leading figures of both Chávez’s Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, or United Socialist Party of Venezuela) and the broad opposition coalition, the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD).

Indeed, with rumors flying of complications after his surgery, the weekend’s races have counterintuitively become more important as Venezuela prepares for the possibility, at least, of a new early presidential election if Chávez resigns or dies in office.

In their own right, however, because 20% of the federal budget is (theoretically) allotted to state governments, governorships provide the MUD and other opposition candidates a platform for government, notwithstanding the centralization of Venezuela’s federal system under PSUV rule.

venezuela states

The key race that everyone will be watching is the governor’s race in Miranda, where the incumbent, Henrique Capriles, recently finished his unsuccessful presidential campaign against Chávez as the MUD’s standard-bearer — although he lost by 9 points, Capriles won 45% of the vote, making him Chávez’s most successful political opponent in his 13-year reign.  Miranda state is likely Venezuela’s most developed state and its second most populous, bordering (and in some cases including) the broad Caracas metropolitan area.  Chávez actually won this state in the October presidential race by a squeaker — with 49.96% to Capriles’s 49.52%, and Capriles won the 2008 election with just over 52% of the vote.

His opponent is the somewhat humorless former vice president, Elias Jaua, and although one poll has shown Jaua with a five-point lead against Capriles, other polls have shown varying Capriles leads and it’s certainly difficult to believe Capriles is an underdog.  By all accounts, the fresh-faced Miranda governor has been a more-than-capable administrator in the past four years, bringing a dose of good government to Miranda after the corruption of his predecessor, Diosdado Cabello.  Furthemore, Jaua’s record as a colorless Chávez yes-man makes it seem like he’s less than likely to sweep to victory, although if Chávez’s health takes a serious turn for the worst between now and Sunday, Jaua may yet benefit from a vote of sympathy.

Capriles defeated Cabello, the governor from 2004 to 2008, in the prior election, and Cabello, who’s since become the leader of Venezuela’s PSUV-dominated National Assembly, would temporarily take over as president in the event that Chávez resigns or dies after he is sworn in for his next term (set to begin January 10), with a snap presidential election to follow within 30 days.  Despite Chávez’s speech anointing Maduro as his preferred successor, Cabello has long harbored presidential ambitions, he, along with Jaua (especially if Jaua wins) may try to become the PSUV’s presidential candidate in any such election instead.

Of course, in the event of such a rapid election, Capriles is very likely to lead the opposition against Maduro, Cabello or whomever the PSUV runs.  But that  could change if Capriles doesn’t win Sunday’s vote in Miranda handily — given his narrow loss to Chávez and the very short 30-day window for a new presidential election, Capriles may nonetheless still be the main opposition candidate.  But it would open the door for another candidate to emerge, likely from among the other six states where opposition governors are currently in power.

That brings us to Zulia state and with 3.8 million people, it’s Venezuela’s most populous.  Nestled in Venezuela’s far northwest bordering Colombia along the Caribbean coast, Zulia’s oil and agricultural wealth makes it, like Miranda, one of the country’s wealthiest states.  Pablo Pérez (pictured above, top), who widely lost the MUD’s presidential nomination to Capriles by a 2-to-1 margin way back in February 2012, is running for reelection in what should be an even more solid opposition win for Un Nuevo Tiempo (UNT, a New Era), the centrist party that was founded in Zulia in the late 1990s and which has controlled the governor’s office since 2000 (until 2008, under Manuel Rosales, who lost the 2006 presidential election against Chávez by a 25-point margin).  Pérez is running against the PSUV’s Francisco Arias Cárdenas, governor of Zulia from 1995 to 2000, though Pérez is heavily favored.  Capriles did better in Zulia than he did nationwide in October, winning 46.27% to just 53.34% for Chávez.  Both Chávez’s national government and Pérez’s UNT regional government have spent large sums on social programs in the state, and a win for the PSUV would be quite a staggering victory for chavismo.

If Capriles falters in Miranda, Pérez, who lies politically to the left of Capriles, could well become the next consensus opposition presidential candidate.

Continue reading With Chávez’s health in doubt, regional Venezuelan elections assume greater importance →