In Maracaibo
Richard Gott · Chávez's Victory
With Hugo Chávez’s election victory, the uncertainty that had built up about Venezuela’s future, sloppily fostered by the media in Europe and the United States, was swept away at a stroke. Venezuela enjoyed one of those great explosions of popular joy and excitement on Sunday night that occur just occasionally in Latin America, and of which I have been privileged to watch not a few. It may not survive – the euphoria created by Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution may evaporate as quickly as it began – but it should be enjoyed while it lasts. Chávez is the most popular figure not just in Venezuela but throughout Latin America, and it is high time that this was more widely recognised. Where in Europe can a politician achieve such popularity?
On polling day I went to Zulia, a state in the far west that borders with Colombia. The capital, Maracaibo, stands on the western shore of Tablazo Strait, which joins Lake Maracaibo to the sea. Oil derricks have been nodding on the eastern side of the vast lake since the 1920s. The state is also famous for its large and independent-minded population of Wayúu Indians, who have negotiated their relationship with the settler state with considerable success. Zulia, while alternating its elected governor between government and opposition in successive elections, has always supported the incumbent president. Sunday’s election was no exception. Chávez won handily in Zulia as in most of the rest of the country, losing only in Miranda and Táchira.
I am travelling as one of a small group of people who were recruited by the election authorities as international ‘accompanists’. In other circumstances we might have been called ‘observers’, but the Venezuelans found that expression too colonialist. We come from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, the US, Switzerland and Britain. We are a job lot of academics, lawyers, journalists and social activists.
On Sunday we left our hotel at 4.30 in the morning and set off for a tour of the polling stations. We have two senior military officers with us on the bus, both women, one of them a colonel, and are followed by a second bus with security back-up, and two motorcycle outriders. I first spent time in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s and still find it difficult to remember that these days the military are supposed to be on our side. And so they are, a relaxed and friendly bunch. At one point we stopped the bus so the colonel could vote, and she found her husband in the queue. But she was whisked to the front so she could get on with her important job of guarding us (he wasn’t allowed to join her).
We had got up early in order to see the local team in charge of the voting booths prepare the ground, unpacking the voting machines from their cases and setting them up. The inexperienced team did their best, with an election official snapping at their heels like a sheepdog. Even at five in the morning, an hour before the polls opened, there was a queue round the corner of more that fifty people.
Just after six, Francisco Arias Cárdenas appeared. He’s running for governor of Zulia in December’s elections. At the heart of the Bolivarian Revolution since the beginning, he has had his arguments with Chávez but is now back in the fold. Formed in the military academy, once a candidate for the Church, he has also been Venezuela’s representative at the United Nations. He would get my vote as the man to succeed Chávez, if the president were to succumb to cancer, but that is not a widely held view. He came to vote at a school that he opened in 1998, bringing a vast retinue of advisers and television cameras that delighted the chavistas in the queue but irritated those planning to vote for Henrique Capriles Radonski.
We drove north, crossing the Limón river in the rain and into the territory of the Wayúu. At St Francis primary school in Sinamaica, the children’s work was still on the walls around the voting booths.
The Liceo Las Robles in Maracaibo is a private secondary school for boys only, run by Opus Dei. It had kindly loaned its building to the state for the day, and even left the air conditioning on. But the queue of upper-class inhabitants looked askance at the chavista accompanists, and we didn’t feel welcome.
We arrived at our last school at 6.30 p.m., half an hour after the sun went down and voting was supposed to have stopped. A handful of stragglers were still coming in to vote, but most of the tables had packed up. All day I had had a nervous feeling that Chávez might lose. There seemed to be a hefty vote for Capriles in many places in the city. Then I thought, well, this is Maracaibo, an opposition stronghold. Elsewhere things will not be so bad. At 7.15 I heard that our last school had done their electronic count and Chávez was winning three to one. Then I was told that we were in a very poor area, so the encouraging result was not surprising.
At 10 p.m. we retired to the local headquarters of the electoral commission to watch the results on television. Capriles’s grey face told us all we need to know. But no one was prepared for the large vote for Chávez, perhaps not even Chávez himself. The rector of the commission came out grinning from ear to ear (not as professional as he might have been, perhaps) to read the results, with Chávez ten points ahead of Capriles. An hour and a half later, Chávez appeared on the palace balcony, singing the national anthem and waving the sword of Bolívar.
Comments
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10 October 2012
at
11:57am
semitone
says:
By lrb standards this is a very dewy-eyed post. Let's all join hands in our own great explosion of popular joy and excitement that Chavez can continue his support for the Assad regime by shipping it oil in defiance of the embargoes that were initiated in response to its brutal massacres of civilians. Hurrah!
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10 October 2012
at
8:10pm
rhexsel
says:
@
semitone
Just where do we start?
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11 October 2012
at
8:56am
semitone
says:
@
rhexsel
answers on a postcard ...
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10 October 2012
at
5:49pm
Pennywhistler
says:
Please cite some examples of "the uncertainty that had built up about Venezuela’s future, sloppily fostered by the media in the United States".
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11 October 2012
at
12:45am
RobotBoy
says:
It's really hard to get a read on Venezuela in the U.S. The mainstream media touted Capriles and crowed over the coming end Chavez. Even after Chavez's win by a margin that would be considered a landslide in the U.S., the headlines were all about how close the election was. It's impossible to argue against the fact that Chavez has done a great deal to empower the poor and indigenous groups. That said, it seems equally clear that there's been some very sloppy governance going on, and the rising crime rates can't be overlooked. I know some far-from-privileged Venezuelans who loathe and fear Chavez and think Caracas is falling apart. Gott's snapshot would have benefited from more content; but it still serves as welcome antidote to the bulk of English-language reporting, and reminds us that Chavez is actually quite popular at home.
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11 October 2012
at
10:48pm
IanGFraser
says:
Amen RobotBoy (from a North American). Wish I could say more, but I can't, and that's kinda the point.
Read moreShouldn't Tony Blair be behind bars because of war crimes against the Iraquis?
Is it true that Margaret Tatcher's husband was an arms dealer? Ditto her son?
What's so wrong with the Syrians deciding what to do with THEIR oil/gas?
the list goes on and on...
Dewy-eyed, yes, sure!
1. The issue of Blair illustrates my point. Most mentions of Blair on this blog are going to explicitly or implicitly bring up Iraq at some point; how might a similarly dewy-eyed post about Blair have been received?
2. No idea about Mr T, but being an arms dealer is not actually a criminal offence. Arms smuggling is, which is why the law took an interest in his son.
3. It's not Syria's oil, it's Venezuela's. And Chavez is selling it to Syria specifically to support Assad's regime, which would otherwise be under pressure because of the US-led embargo (which I support).
And be sure to show us which ones were the sloppy ones.