THE NERVOUS MIDDLE CLASS
La Guardia, Isla de Margarita, Venezuela, Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Depending upon how you look at it, the intermittent stream of visitors at our front door can be a nuisance, a welcome distraction from the little jobs you would prefer not to get started at or a chance to meet the neighbours. Last night, for example, as we are just finishing our dinner, Paola, who lives just kitty-corner from us, calls out from the front. (At night and when we are out of the house, this is a wooden door that is locked tight. During the day and early evening the wooden door stands open and only the steel security gate is kept closed and locked. There is no doorbell so visitors announce themselves by calling out to us somewhere in the inner reaches of the house or patio. The calls range from Olla! Amigo! Hoo-aahh! and various other whistles or calls. Sometimes they even remember to hail Señor Ron or Capitan Ronaldo.)

Paola, anyway, is here to talk about us staying with her son Alexander in Caracas on our bus trip to Columbia and right on through to Quito, Ecuador. What we have forgotten to tell Paola is that we have already decided not to do this at this time. “Gracias de dios!” she says clapping her hands together and rolling her eyes heavenward under the full moon and bright early-evening stars where we sit in the patio. The bus trip to Caracas alone would be 14 hours, she reckons out for us, with another similar time just to get to the Columbian border. And then twenty-fours to Bogotá and we would not even be halfway across the country.

Although we had originally thought of making the trip in stages with stops in interesting places like Cartegena, Medellin, etc., she still thinks we would need culos de acero (bums of steel) to ride across Columbia by bus. It’s not dangerous, she says. Just long! We were able to relieve her mind: in fact, just today we paid for our flights to Guayaquil via Caracas and booked for 24 may 2007.

Paola and her family are Columbians. Her Spanish is far clearer and easier for us to understand than the dialect and difficult accent of the Margariteños with their dropped S’s (Bueno dia = Buenos Dias; do mi = dos mil). Columbians talk fast but they speak clearly and roll their R’s nicely. Usually Paola speaks with reserve. But tonight she is very lively. In the discussion she makes quite a lot of comparisons between Columbia and Venezuela for our benefit. She grew up the sixth child of a large ranch family near the border and then, later, in a small agricultural border city in an area where the para-militarios play a prominent local role. She and her family moved to Venezuela for economic opportunity. Venezuelans at one time considered themselves completely above Columbians. This was long before Chávez and before the collapse of last oil boom totally and IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes completely inflated Venezuela’s sense of national achievement and self-importance.

Now, she says, it is physically much, much safer in Columbia than Venezuela. At one time, it was the police who were the most corrupt element in Columbia along with the whole public administration. Now, however, the people and the streets are at least safe. The para-militaries cleaned up the drug scene (she says) in the rural areas where they are strong, and the government sorted out the police elsewhere. Both groups exert a lot of summary power to arrest, threaten or even kill drug users and pushers outright. The para-militaries, of course, try to show the people that they can govern better than the government. They probably can too. But they are even less undemocratic than the government of Columbia.

Meanwhile, Paola thinks the police are corrupt in Venezuela and do nothing to help the little guy: she would not waste her time approaching them even for a serious complaint. A waste of time and it would require money to grease palms. She stays away from them here even though they are just around the corner and there are lots of reasons to call them. The amount of drug usage in the village is enormous, not to mention the drunkenness and violencia. Venezuela has the highest level criminality and violence of South America.

Back to Columbia, on the other hand, the government is totally in the pocket of wealthy oligarchs, who in turn are close to the U.S.A. Nobody does anything whatsoever for the poor people. Columbia lives from American “Plan Columbia” foreign aid (Columbia is the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel and Egypt). It is supposed to stop drugs flowing to the U.S.A. Drug usage, Paola says, is in fact a thing of the past in Columbia (hard to believe): it all now goes - lots of it - to the U.S.A., Canada, etc.

In Venezuela, at least, there might be a lot of drug usage, Paola says, and the streets are still a long way from being as safe as in Columbia. But Chávez is at least doing something for the poor people: food, housing, healthcare and education are only the beginning. Like other pro-Chávez Venezolanos we have talked to, they think perhaps that Chavez should not be “wasting” domestic oil monies by giving too much away to other countries even though they understand it might be necessary to help create a new Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR) and greater political integration for Latin America. The little guy in Venezuela might like suck up American culture. But they know what has happened, politically, in the past in Latin America and are cynical about American actions here. The backing of the anti-Chavez coup in 2002 is just one thing.

Having studied the phenomenon of Venezuela and Chávez now for some time including parallel developments in Ecuador and other countries (see earlier articles on this blog: “Chávez, Venezuela and the Pink Tide”; “The New Face of Latin America ”; “Ecuador Elections”: etc.), I was interested to hear again the opinions of various local people. Paola is a strong contrast to, say, several middle-class ex-pats that I have met. They are to a man anti-Chávez. They think he is a dictator. What’s worse, they are convinced that he will one day kick them all out and grab their houses. This is completely against Venezuelan law and atypical of Chávez’s actions to date, of course. But that does little to alleviate their worries. They lump Chavez together with expropriators like Castro and Lenin.

Every new event is just one more confirmation. Take the new tax policies, for example: user and sales taxes are being replaced by progressive income and inheritance taxes. Or take the programme of “nationalisation” of foreign corporate holdings: Chávez is in the process of buying back key industries like communications and electrical utilities that were privatised into American ownership under the disastrous IMF neo-liberal Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP’s) of the nineties. The Venezuelan Government is not expropriating these, mind you, as in Cuba back then, but is paying the market price for the shares. Whatever Chávez does, however, is characterised as dictatorial or communistic, or the work of a mad clown.

Two recent events are making the ex-pats and Chávez opponents in Venezuela nervous again. First, the decision not to renew the public TV licence of RCTV, a large and prominently anti-Chávez national channel with studios and offices in Caracas. RCTV has turned out its very large staff as well as staff and suppliers from other media institutions like newspapers, magazines, etc. for hugely public street demos in Caracas last week. All the actors and cameramen and business executives were out there demonstrating for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. A trifle self-serving since they are not actually about to lose their jobs, as I understand it. RCTV was one of the active initiators of the violent, seditious and American-backed coup against Chávez in 2002 and it’s the public airwaves licence that is not being renewed. This would have happened in any other democratic country, I am sure. Press freedom is not a licence for the violent overthrow of duly elected civilian governments, surely.

Note what has not happened. The government, for example, has never moved in with secret police or the military to shut things down. The TV station, a leading producer of soap operas that it sells throughout Latin American, can still broadcast via their large cable and satellite systems and is still free to produce and sell soaps or to produce anti-government propaganda at will. The government argues that RCTV lost its right to the Venezuela’s public airwaves because RCTV acted seditiously and irresponsibly. That‘s certainly true enough! The problem is that there is not really any due process in this country to decide things like this and it can also be presented by the opposition to look like high-handed and dictatorial behaviour. I wonder what will happen now after the licence expires this month. Will RCTV just continue broadcasting? That is the sort of provocative thing RCTV might attempt. Would the police move in and the media shout “Dictator?”

Chávez may have bitten off more than he can chew on this one. There is an old adage: if you want to fight a newspaper (or TV station, one supposes), you should buy a newspaper. Although Chávez’s popularity remains undiminished, a lot of normal people think he should not have done this. Of course, they are getting their information on the issue from RCTV and their fellow anti-Chávez stations. The ex-pats, meanwhile, find they cannot sleep at night.

The second event to raise local ex-pat ire and nervousness is the closing of the large gambling casino on Isla de Margarita. I was first told that the government arbitrarily started assessing income taxes or some sort of gaming taxes and the owners, whoever they are, decided to shut down the casino and lay off the employees. Although I haven’t been able to figure it out, there has to be more to this story. A casino, for example, would be an ideal place to launder money. Margarita is famous for it thanks to all the tourists coming through. The official rate for bolivars is about half of the black market rate at present. Maybe this explainbs why the casino was closed.

Just another arbitrary and anti-democratic measure, the ex-pats exclaim, and hasten to add other titbits. Chávez, I have been told with absolute confidence, only won the last federal election by fraud. It might well have been reported that he received 63% of the votes with 75% of the 16 million voters turning up at the polls. All rubbish! Don’t bother pointing out that, not only did Rosales, the neo-liberal opposition candidate and governor of one of the big Venezuelan provinces, publicly concede defeat and personally state that the elections were fair. Nonsense! One ex-pat even told me authoritatively that Rosales was coerced into saying this because Chávez threatened Rosales’s son with assassination. No source given for this piece of startling news beyond the boulevard press, which needless to say, is owned by the opposition magnates. Go ahead, tell them that the E.U., the O.A.S. (Organisation of American States) and Jimmy Carter all certified the elections as fair and properly run. The ex-pats become perhaps a little uncertain but refuse to abandon their position.

Maybe they aren’t selling their houses yet. But they seem to live with their mental baggage packed and probably keep their money in Zurich. The ex-pats I have talked with here, Germans, Danes and Americans, as it happens, - they none of them really read a newspaper beyond Bild-Zeitung type boulevard sheets. They get their real info from the rumour mills. It reminds me a lot of the middle-class Germans I knew over there in the seventies and eighties: they were absolutely gut-afraid that the Reds were going to take Oma’s little cottage and turn her out into the street. For them, Willy Brand, Helmut Schmidt and that whole pack of Social Democrats were just the spearhead of a wave of Marxist expropriations. Chávez might do well to make efforts to reassure these people here in Venezuela. But, since they do not trust him one iota anyway, maybe it would be just a waste of time. As for the Venezuelan well-to-do, they continue to hate Chávez and all his works and their capital takes flight for Miami every time Chávez holds a press conference. The loyal opposition!