Venezuelans Likely to Vote In a Strongman

Gen. Simon Bolivar, the Venezuelan national hero and liberator of South America, once lamented that the nations of the continent were “condemned to oscillate between anarchy and tyranny.”

Venezuela has fought off tyranny for 40 years, clinging to a boisterous democracy while its neighbors suffered under dictatorships.

Yet today, Venezuela has come close to anarchy. Its oil-dependent economy is in shambles. The credibility of political parties has crumbled. A large and larcenous bureaucracy has crippled schools, hospitals and other public services. The streets are full of fear and rage.

That rage propels the populist presidential candidacy of former Col. Hugo Chavez, the man who would be Bolivar, a self-described “citizen-soldier” with a startling resume. Six years ago, Chavez led the tanks that rammed the doors of the presidential palace in a bloody attempted coup.

Opinion polls and the results of recent legislative elections make Chavez the favorite to win today’s presidential election.

“The Commander,” as he is known, appeals to the downtrodden with his red paratrooper’s beret and his revolutionary rhetoric about liberating Venezuela from predatory elites and “savage” free-market economics. An estimated 80% of the population here lives in poverty, and almost half those people once considered themselves middle class.

“We are living in the time of the apocalypse: Something ends and something begins,” Chavez declared last week in a melodramatic baritone that mixes the styles of a commander, a preacher and a boxing announcer. “We are at a crucial moment in our history. I believe it. I feel it. We are seeing with our own eyes the resurrection of a people, a people that has risen with dignity and conscience. We are on the threshold of writing indelible pages of our nation’s history.”

Candidate Seen by Foes as a Throwback

Opponents fear that Chavez is the inevitable tyrant of Bolivar’s prophecy. Business leaders, foreign investors, diplomats and many ordinary Venezuelans see this maverick admirer of Fidel Castro as a throwback to the days of authoritarian populism. They say he means disaster for the democratic institutions and economy, South America’s fourth largest, of a nation that is the top supplier of oil to the United States.

Chavez scares traditional bosses so much that in the campaign’s final days, the two main parties--Democratic Action and COPEI--dumped their candidates and endorsed an independent, former Gov. Henrique Salas Romer of Carabobo state. A Yale-educated economist known as an innovator, Salas has struggled to close a gap in polls of 5 to 10 percentage points by portraying himself as a modern reformer and the last chance for a nation on the brink of a big mistake.

“What is at stake here is not the presidency of Venezuela, but liberty,” Salas said last week.

Chavez’s powerful patchwork alliance--leftists, rightists, nationalists, the poor, even some big landowners--heralds a gathering wave in Latin America.

Disgusted with stagnant, chaotic democracies whose economic modernization has made life harder for millions, voters are turning to figures who resemble the messianic, militaristic strongmen of old.

The Chavez phenomenon, according to political analysts, recalls Cuba’s Castro, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and Juan Peron, the Argentine general whose populism somehow incorporated Marxist guerrillas and fascistic nationalists.

The Venezuelan candidate also echoes contemporary leaders: Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, the steely anti-politician who shut down Congress in a “self-coup”; former Gen. Lino Oviedo, the convicted coup plotter whose behind-the-throne power threatens Paraguay’s stability; and the eccentric Abdala Bucaram, who won election with populist flamboyance but lasted less than a year as Ecuador’s president before he was ousted last year for mental incompetence.

“This has happened before,” said Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, a Colombian author of two recent books on Latin American politics who visited this Venezuelan capital last week. “When a nation reaches the peak of disorder, which is reflected by the poverty, the failure of the political parties, our nations look for the magic solution, the providential man. The strongman. What is terrible is that we keep going in circles. We must stop going in circles.”

Venezuelans blame their woes on decades of looting and ineptitude by archaic party machines. The traditional bosses’ switch to Salas, therefore, could prove a mixed blessing. The frantic stop-Chavez movement unmasks the desperation of a doomed system, Chavez said recently.

“All the corrupt politicians have banded together so we can beat them on a single day,” he chuckled. “It’s practically a miracle.”

Despite its faults, Venezuelans are proud of a democracy restored in 1958 after decades dominated by military rulers. So it is remarkable that they might elect a cashiered colonel who spent two years in prison for trying to overthrow the government.

The United States has denied Chavez a visa because of his rebellion, citing a law that blocks entry to those who have participated in terrorism. Nonetheless, the State Department says it will accept the outcome of today’s vote and expects the strong U.S.-Venezuelan relationship to continue.

Whether he terrifies or electrifies them, most observers find Chavez fascinating.

“He is charming and witty, and his diagnosis is very accurate,” said Vladimir Chelminski, director of the Caracas Chamber of Commerce. “But people are scared of his coup attempt, the way he speaks with hatred, the company he keeps. He is surrounded by the most incredible characters, extremist Communists. . . . He could destroy the economy in a day.”

Supporters Are Fervid and Get No Apologies

Especially among his most impoverished supporters, Chavez makes no apologies. He spoke Wednesday night before hundreds of thousands of partisans who flooded Bolivar Avenue in downtown Caracas, a noisy tangle of skyscrapers and freeways filled with aging U.S. gas-guzzlers. The city that night was like a giant amphitheater, a valley walled by the hillside slums from which legions of the candidate’s faithful had descended.

Suspended on a crane-borne platform over the sea of raised fists and red berets that are his movement’s emblems, Chavez used the ominous language that makes critics cringe.

“I want to alert the nation and the world,” he thundered. “In the name of the anger of the people, the result of the election will be respected. If they don’t respect the result, we’ll make them respect it. They are not going to steal this election.”

His military uprising in 1992 was a legitimate response to chaos, Chavez told the crowd. It culminated grim years in which Venezuela, which has one of the region’s flabbiest public sectors and most protected economies, squandered the oil wealth that in the 1970s allowed a free-spending middle class to make Miami a kind of second home.

Chavez and fellow soldiers had been building his clandestine Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement for almost 10 years. He attacked in February 1992, amid a nightmare of riots, strikes and scandals that later resulted in the impeachment and ouster on corruption charges of President Carlos Andres Perez.

Before forces loyal to Perez put down the uprising, street combat resulted in at least 80 deaths.

Chavez claims that many of the dead were executed by pro-government forces. Asked once about how he justifies the bloodshed, Chavez responded, according to a diplomatic source: “More people die on an average weekend in Caracas than died during the uprising.”

‘We’ve Gone From Guns to Ballots’

Among the cheering supporters Wednesday night on Bolivar Avenue was a veteran of the firefights six years ago, a broad-shouldered 33-year-old who identified himself only as Henry. He recounted how he took part in an attack on an air force base. Reaching into his wallet, he showed off a weather-beaten business card that Chavez once gave him.

“I was ready to give my life so my kids could live in a better country,” said Henry, a caretaker at a military pistol range. “We failed then, but this time we are going to make it. We’ve gone from guns to ballots.”

Chavez is a patriotic and honest crusader, Henry said.

“He’s for Venezuela,” he said. “He’s not a leftist or an ultra-leftist. He’s going to exploit our natural resources. He’s going to get rid of corruption in the oil industry. He’s going to stand up to the American economy that prevents us from realizing our potential.”

Chavez has worked hard at moderating his image.

He has appealed to conservatives and business leaders, insisting that he is not “the big bad wolf.” He downplays his leftist politics, which moved him in 1994 to visit Cuba after President Rafael Caldera pardoned him and released him from prison. Venezuelan television has repeatedly played grainy footage of a respectful Chavez thanking Castro for the honor of receiving him at the Havana airport.

A televised panel discussion last week gave Chavez an opportunity to reach out to undecided or dubious voters. Straight-backed in a dark suit and red tie, the husky former baseball player crossed himself, like a batter stepping up to the plate, just before the studio lights came up.

Chavez displayed verbal agility and an easy smile in responses to the five questioners, a panel of academics and political analysts. Although he is no professor, he seems well read: He has dabbled in playwriting and quotes Rousseau, Camus, Bolivar and the Bible. He identifies himself as an economic humanist and praises British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “third way” between capitalism and socialism.

“Neoliberal economic policies have a savage principle--that’s a quote of Pope John Paul II--savage neoliberalism . . . that comes close to social Darwinism,” Chavez said. “The neoliberals regard macroeconomics as the most important thing. I think social policies should be just as important as macroeconomics.”

To aid working Venezuelans, Chavez plans to raise the minimum wage. He intends to fund social programs and reduce the budget deficit by cracking down on tax evasion and customs corruption, which he said total $6 billion a year.

His rhapsodies about realizing the dreams of a potentially rich nation, though, tend to be vague on specifics. That gives rise to numerous scenarios, including speculation that, like Fujimori, he could turn out to be surprisingly conservative in office.

“Listening to Chavez talk about his program for governing is still an exercise in rhetoric,” wrote columnist Nelson Rivera in the newspaper El Nacional. “Where he fails is in explaining his promised good works: what will be the orders, the content, the criteria with which he would govern a divided, expectant and wounded Venezuela.”

Pledge to Oversee a New Constitution

A central promise is the convening of a popular assembly to write a new constitution, which Chavez sees as a fundamental first step toward comprehensive reform.

His rivals say that drastic measure could be a strategy for shutting down the National Congress, creating extraordinary presidential powers or otherwise undermining institutions.

Whether Chavez is a sincere democrat or a would-be dictator, whether he wins or loses, hardly anyone disputes his basic assessment: Venezuelans have had enough of broken promises and unfulfilled potential.

Wednesday night, pumping his fist in the air on the platform high above jampacked Bolivar Avenue, “The Commander” mocked the political bosses who are scrambling to defeat him--and who bear the blame for his rise.

“Why didn’t they defend the democracy during these past 40 years?” he rumbled. “Why didn’t they defend the people during 40 long and dark years?”