The Ebb of the Pink Tide

The Decline of the Left in Latin America

Mike Gonzalez

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786803405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Following the election of Hugo Chavez to the Venezuelan presidency, and the Cochabamba water wars, Latin American politics were radicalised and their governments populated with former activists and trade union leaders. In this book, renowned Latin Americanist Mike Gonzalez explores the course of the Left in Latin American politics. In the last few years, Latin America's Left have suffered many setbacks and reactionary challenges, which has led many to wonder if the 'Pink Tide' is on the wane. Gonzalez argues that whilst left-wing developments have been widely celebrated, less has been written to address the problems that have arisen. Through examination of the successes and failings of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Venezuela, Gonzalez is able to identify weaknesses and strengths and suggest possible future pathways for the Left in nations across Latin America. Providing a critical but sympathetic analysis of the records of the left governments across the continent, Gonzalez offers a refreshing reflection on the prospects and future of Latin American politics, asking whether Chavez's vision of twenty-first century socialism may ever be realised.

1

From the Caracazo to Chávez

The election of Hugo Chávez to the presidency of Venezuela in late 1998 was a critical event, though its implications would take a little time to filter through to the rest of Latin America. The opposing candidates were Irene Sáez, an ex-beauty queen and mayor of the bourgeois Chacao district of Caracas, who represented the white middle class that had been a key beneficiary of the consensual pact that had run the Venezuelan state for four decades. The other candidate was Henrique Salas-Romer, the governor of Carabobo state who was endorsed by the two puntofijo parties, COPEI and Acción Democrätica representing the bourgeoisie.

Chávez had famously made his mark on Venezuelan politics with a phrase he used on television during a speech conceding the failure of a short-lived attempted coup he led in February 1992. Our action has failed, he said, ‘for the moment’ (por ahora). These two words became legendary, appearing on walls and fences in various colours and smuggled into texts of every kind. Chávez spent the next three years in prison at Yare, where he was involved in a continuous conversation with the other political forces in the country. There were several currents vying for his attention. As Cicciarello-Maher describes in detail,¹ the previous decade had seen the rise and demise of the guerrilla movements led by the PRV,² the party formed by Douglas Bravo after an internal disagreement inside the Communist Party over strategy. Bravo had broken with Cuba over what he saw as Castro’s abandonment of guerrilla warfare and of the still existing movements in Latin America. In the wake of Guevara’s death in Bolivia, the Cuban regime changed direction, turning towards what might be described as realpolitik; it was symbolic that in 1970, Castro had spoken at the Algiers conference, supporting the role of the Soviet Union on the continent, and more generally Soviet geopolitics. It was the same conference where, just five years earlier Guevara had expressed frustration at the reluctance of the Soviets to support national liberation movements and the armed struggle, which had created a rift between him and Castro after the Soviets protested at Guevara’s political misbehaviour. Guevara departed for the Congo shortly thereafter and only returned to Cuba once, in secret and heavily disguised, to form the group that would later go to Bolivia, where he was killed in October 1967.³

The Venezuelan guerrilla movement has been largely ignored by the left outside Venezuela, as has its brutal repression by President Rómulo Betancourt during the 1960s.⁴ Betancourt was elected after the overthrow of the Pérez Jiménez regime in 1958, with the support of the communist party, many of whose members were now being tortured, ‘disappeared’ or killed. Several thousand guerrillas died in what were called the ‘theatres of operations’. Others survived in a range of different organisations, but key figures, like Fabricio Ojeda,⁵ did not survive the wave of repression launched by a politician (Betancourt) regarded abroad as a paragon of democracy. Chávez’s brother, Adán Chávez, was a member of the PRV and close to Bravo; it was he who had earlier introduced Hugo to Bravo, who would become a key political influence. Bravo describes himself as a Bolivarian Marxist; his interpretation of Simon Bolivar’s legacy shaped Chávez’s concept of Bolivarianism⁶ in these early days. But Bravo and Adán Chávez were not the only visitors. Alfredo Maneiro (1937–82), an extremely influential thinker and organiser had split from the communist party to form CausaR; he saw the working class as the centre of a revolutionary movement, and built a base in the steel complex of SIDOR in Guayana. CausaR also worked with students and in the Caracas barrio of Catia. Maneiro died in 1982, and CausaR’s effective leader became Andrés Velazquez, ex-general secretary of the steel workers union. He was later elected governor of Bolivar province and was CausaR’s presidential candidate in 1993, winning 22 per cent of the vote. Both SIDOR and the emblematic aluminium factory Alcasa are based in Bolivar state The other formation which played a key role in Chávez’s political thinking was the group of military men who plotted the February coup with him.

The point here is that Chávez was subject to a range of influences from the left. His own basic position was, as he himself described it, more akin to the ideology of military nationalists like Velasco Alvarado in Peru or Omar Torrijos in Panama. By contrast his political reputation among the mass of Venezuelans, the consequence of the failed coup of 1992, was based on his brief television appearance, and the claim he made then and thereafter to be the voice of the Caracazo. Ciccariello-Maher shows how the decimation of the guerrillas led to the growth, or reinforcement of the grass roots groups and community organisers within the barrios who represented a network of resistance. Their presence, and their permanence calls into question the simple definition of the 1989 rising, the Caracazo, as we have argued, as a spontaneous outburst. It was certainly an immediate reaction to Carlos Andrés Pérez’s betrayal of his election promises in imposing IMF austerity measures. It did not have any central coordinating organisation at its heart, but it did activate the networks across the city. It might be best described as a coincidence of resistances that rose up together in the face of a universal assault on the living standards and conditions of the poor, born out of the widespread repression under Betancourt and his successors. The nature of the identification between these social forces and Chávez is critical to an understanding of his future relationship with the mass movement, and its unique character.

The barrios identified more easily with Chávez than with any members of the traditional political class who were by and large white, male, educated and clearly middle class in their background. Chávez, by contrast, looked and sounded like them. He had not grown up in the urban barrios but in the state of Barinas in a household of poor teachers, and with a background that placed him clearly with the pueblo, that social layer that embraces workers, the unemployed, small local businesses, street traders, among others. In the racial hierarchy of Venezuela, significant despite its claim to be a racially blind society, Chávez’s chiselled face announced his indigenous origins. In other Latin American, countries his membership of the armed forces might have aroused suspicion, but in Venezuela, in marked contrast to neighbouring Colombia, there was a career path in the military for people of humble origins. It is part of the Chávez myth that he was really only interested in baseball, and joined the army to be a pitcher in a military team. His rise was rapid, and he graduated quickly to the military academy as a tutor. There his immersion in Venezuelan history and his fascination with Simon Bolivar in particular, was his trademark. Bolivar has an enormous significance for Venezuelans, and particularly so for Chávez, but the content of his Bolivarianism varied over time. Bolivar himself came from the colonial elite and led the independence movement with a vision of the unity of Latin America, and the creation of a Gran Colombia independent of imperialist control and set on the road to national capitalist development. For Chávez, he represented a heroic struggle for national independence, but for Douglas Bravo Bolivarianism was revolutionary,⁷ embracing nationalism and social revolution.

At this stage Chávez’s links to a number of political and left-wing organisations served to develop his general political education, but he remained a radical nationalist in ideology, and a radical military reformist in his concept of organisation. His decision to stand for election, for example, did not meet with universal support on the left, and there was a clear reaction in left circles against a military man standing for the presidency – with the recollection of Pérez Jiménez and Gómez before him still fresh in the popular memory. Chávez’s identification with the popular rebellion of 1989 and more generally with the traditions of grass roots mobilisation were not translated into strategy. The February coup was just that – an attempted military takeover of power.⁸ Douglas Bravo is emphatic in his criticism of Chávez in that respect; according to Bravo there were popular forces ready to enter the fray with Chávez, to take up arms on the streets in support of his bid for power, but Chávez chose not to mobilise them. For Bravo it was a replay of the overthrow of Perez Jimenez in 1958, when the social forces on the ground were marginalised in a political action.⁹ In 1958, the decision not to mobilise the popular forces, fundamentally by the communist party, was the price paid for an alliance with Acción Democrática, and Rómulo Betancourt, in exchange for a share in power. Shortly after entering the presidential palace, and having publicly expressed support for the Cuban revolution, Betancourt launched the repression that introduced the concept of the ‘disappeared’ into the political vocabulary of Venezuela.

Chávez’s commitment to an electoral strategy involved a number of compromises, and a distancing from the left groups he had been dealing with until then. The implications were not immediately obvious, and the more optimistic – or romantic – commentators at the time and afterwards insisted that Chávez’s long term objectives were more revolutionary than his manifesto or his political practice suggested. For Bravo, however, Chávez’s compromise, particularly with a figure as emblematic of the old political arrangements as Luis Miquilena¹⁰ reflected a political shift away from revolutionary Bolivarianism. For Bravo this was all too closely reminiscent of what had happened after the overthrow of Pérez Jiménez. And there was, for him, a second problematic element in the equation, whose consequences would emerge as fundamental in the future direction of Chavismo – the role and influence of Cuba, and of Fidel Castro in particular. Bravo had broken with Castro in a very public way at the end of the 1960s over the abandonment of guerrilla strategy.

Chávez’s electoral base was the Movement of the Fifth Republic, the MVR, which reflected an alliance between his group within the military and politicians seeking a return to the state after the virtual collapse of the 40-year puntofijista agreement, which locked the main bourgeois parties into a long term, consensual, power-sharing agreement. But the reality was that the brutal economic realities of the 1990s had undermined their earlier influence – the crumbs from the table were growing scarce, and the levels of poverty in the population were rising at an alarming rate. Yet there was no organisation at a national level capable of channelling and shaping the popular discontent, and none of the traditional political forces could do so either. Among those who had entered the state and taken responsibility for the imposition of the IMF rules for survival were those who had not long before been members of guerrilla organisations, among them the extremely influential ex-guerrilla and tireless political commentator, Teodoro Petkoff, who had directly imposed austerity measures through the so-called Venezuela Agenda during a brief period as minister of planning in the mid-1990s.

The 1998 election was a manifestation of the decline, if not collapse, of the political compromise that had controlled the Venezuelan state for 40 years. It was exactly the condition which exposed what Laclau had called ‘the empty signifier’. Without accepting the totality of Laclau’s theory, this concept is useful. The emptiness, to which Laclau and Mouffe refer, is best seen as the absence of a dominant discourse, where no political force has, for any number of reasons, the capacity to establish political hegemony. This political or ideological crisis was obvious in Venezuela in 1998. The right-wing candidates were unable to deploy again the dominant populist language which had prevailed throughout the puntofijista period; it had functioned because its maintenance of social equilibrium could be financed from oil profits. In the conditions of the 1990s this was not possible; the state could only offer austerity, poverty and subordination to the menaces of the global market. The political terrain was therefore unoccupied in any real sense, and the language of nationalism, the symbolism of Bolivar, a broad anti-imperialism, a rejection of the old politics, and a populist imaginary, combined convincingly in the person of Chávez who could represent all of these things, occupied the political space. It could fill the empty space precisely because of its imprecision, of its generality. But the signifier had to be able to carry the responsibility for winning ideological dominance in this confused and contradictory moment. At such times, individuals count. Laclau had developed his theory in his exploration of the phenomenon of Peronism; he found similar characteristics in Chávez.

Even some very serious political analysts in the Marxist tradition have found themselves seduced by a notion of the special and unique nature of Chávez as an individual, his very ambiguities transformed into special personal qualities. Much the same, of course, was done with Castro, whose undoubted political skills metamorphosed into almost superhuman characteristics over time.

Chávez’s programme was radical and liberal. Despite his already intimate relationship with Cuba, it did not in any sense present a revolutionary or a socialist character. It was liberal in its emphasis on human rights, nationalist in its central assertion of national sovereignty, and reformist in its insistence on the renegotiation of the contribution that the oil industry should make to the national exchequer. Immediately after his election Chávez announced the calling of a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the Venezuelan Constitution for the new Bolivarian Republic.

Constituent and Constituted

The concept of the Constituent Assembly or Constituyente is central to the political discourse of the pink tide, but it is not always clear when it is translated. For the key intellectuals of the revolutionary process in Latin America it is fundamental – for Roland Denis, for example, it defines a different concept of power – and yet it is ambiguous. Cicciarello-Maher describes the grassroots response to the attempted coup against Chávez in 2002 in this way:

This was a central moment for grappling with the peculiar relationship that exists in contemporary Venezuela between movement and state, constituent and constituted. Again, however, an apparent paradox disintegrates once we recognize that it was not a constituted order but a process – itself comprising the dynamic interplay between constituent and constituted that the most revolutionary elements of the Venezuelan people were defending in those fateful days.¹¹

The issue re-emerges at every stage of the flowing of the pink tide, so it is important to clear about its meaning.

The constituyente is not the elected assembly itself, but the new social forces it represents and that speak through it. In appearance the assembly and the parliament may look very similar, especially once the latter has been transformed into a plurinational institution. But it is not the form nor the appearance that distinguishes the constituent from the constituted, nor solely the content of its deliberations, but rather the relationship between the assembly and its social base. The constituted, by contrast, is that complex of institutions and structures through which bourgeois democracy functions, an expression of a relationship of representation, or to give it another name, substitution. The constituted reflects a marginalisation of the majority population who exist politically as voters only. It is the representatives who act on their behalf. The constituyente, by contrast, is not different simply because it elects delegates charged to present the views of those they speak for but because those delegates are accountable at every stage. They are answerable not simply because they see themselves differently but because they are in a direct relationship with an active and mobilised base through organs of direct democracy.

The argument thus returns to the core debates on the left, to the distinction between reform and revolution. What has changed, of course, from earlier debates is the concept of revolution itself. The state is a class formation, the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, as Marx admittedly crudely put it. In the modern world, that executive is surrounded and bolstered by networks of institutions which administer the apparatuses of power and the structures which sustain the relationship between the state and the population at large. Their role...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction Neo-liberalism on the Attack
• 1 From the Caracazo to Chávez
• 2 Bolivia Rises
• 3 Evo Morales in Power
• 4 Ecuador and the Battle for Yasuni
• 5 Venezuela: Decline and Fall
• 6 On the Margins of the Pink Tide: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index