The left’s thorny relationship with Venezuela

Distrust-enthusiasm-disappointment (more or less silent). The relationship between the Latin American left and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has gone through different stages, in line with the dynamics of the Caribbean country itself. The leadership of Hugo Chávez — an almost infinite machine of charisma — undoubtedly provided a dose of unusual energy to a doubly defeated regional left: the fall of the Berlin Wall not only affected the militarized left that supported the regimes of “real socialism” — with Soviet tanks included —, but the left as a whole. Meanwhile, neoliberalism seemed to reign without any ideological counterweight.

But the relationship between the left and the Venezuelan commander was not love at first sight. The Chávez who followed the failed coup in 1992 was still difficult for the left to understand, and was viewed with suspicion. His links with figures such as Norberto Ceresole — a former leftist who ended up taking a right-wing nationalist line close to Argentina’s Carapintadas mutineers — generated suspicion, while his proposal for a third way à la Tony Blair made him appear overly moderate.

In fact, the 1999 Constitution does not speak of socialism, but of “participatory democracy.” This was a Chávez who, in the words of journalist Marc Saint-Upéry, seemed to have “learned from the failures of the 20th century statist left and knew that there is no pre-constituted and purely voluntary model of economic alternative.” Later, Saint-Upéry says that Chávez would move towards a “confusing mix of moderate pragmatism, promises of generalized welfare and incendiary rhetoric without real support,” amidst a growing “administrative chaos due to a mixture of inexperience and bureaucracy.”

It was the attempted coup against Chavez in 2002 that would radically change the situation. The image of a “corrupt plutocracy” ousting a constitutional and plebeian president from power, through a coup supported by the United States and part of Europe, was a turning point.

The coup was Chavez’s Bay of Pigs. If that botched attempt at a U.S.-supported invasion of Cuba gave Fidel Castro the necessary epic for the “socialist construction” of Cuban, the failed coup, with its racist overtones, gave Chavez an enormous political boost.

Venezuela would end up being the only country in the world to declare itself socialist after the fall of the Soviet Union; albeit with the tag “of the 21st century.” The idea, it was insisted, was not to repeat “the mistakes” of 20th century socialism.

If the coup allowed Chávez to present himself a leader who symbolized the contempt of the elites over the people themselves, for the Venezuelan opposition, it was an almost indelible stain on their project. From then on, it would be known as a “coup-plotting opposition.” That led the regional left to adopt a discourse that persists to this day: whatever Chávez did, and — since his death in 2013 — whatever Nicolás Maduro, the opposition would always be “worse” than Chavismo.

With the price of oil rising from $10 to $100 a barrel, Chávez had the resources to implement sweeping social policies, such as the so-called “missions.” And he was a truly popular leader, inside and outside of Venezuela. At an event in the Argentine city of Mar del Plata, at the end of 2005, Chávez said the FTAA — the Free Trade Area of the Americas, promoted by the United States — “could go to hell.” This marked one of the milestones of the Latin American Chávez, who reactivated the old Venezuelan oil diplomacy in his favor. That same year, Chávez could say at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre that “socialism is the way.” Like “a new Fidel Castro,” according to a Brazilian media outlet. It was a moment of great enthusiasm. When a president was talking about revolution again, sending the Yankees to hell and even had books by theorists such as the Marxist philosopher István Mészáros on his desk. Left-wing leaders and activists began to travel to Venezuela, seen as the land of a bold social experiment.

But despite the good relationship between left-wing governments and Chávez, the major countries of the region did not join his Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). For Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Brazil, it was a small club with no interest, and for Néstor Kirchner’s Argentina it was too ideological. In fact, according to his biographer Walter Curia, Kirchner once told Chávez: “Hugo, stop messing around with socialism,” which the pragmatic Peronist considered a thing of the past. The game between a radical Venezuela and a moderate Brazil seemed to work from a geopolitical point of view.

During his successive administrations between 1999 and 2013, Chávez fell in love with different models, but despite the various forms of “popular participation” adopted, the “leader, army, people” tripod proposed by Ceresole was maintained, which led to an increasingly authoritarian regime. The only time Chávez put socialism to a vote (in the constitutional referendum of 2007) he lost, but he still made progress with his project.

Faced with these problems, most of the Latin American left adopted a position with Venezuela similar to its one with Cuba: not to criticize Chavez/Maduro, nor the democratic setbacks, while the country was under attack by the “empire” and the local “oligarchy.” Opposition figures who called for an invasion undoubtedly fueled these discourses.

But the problem is that this approach always ignored the predatory dimension that the regime was acquiring, with a plundering of public resources that went hand in hand with a catastrophic decline in the living conditions of the population, which worsened under Maduro, who relied on the military even more than Chávez. So much so that, in the last election campaign, he praised the “perfect civic-military-police union” that Chavismo-Madurismo embodies.

If in the past Chavismo was an asset — material and symbolic — for the regional left, since the mid-2010s, it has become more and more of a burden. Conservative forces grew tired of using the Venezuelan question as domestic propaganda material, even more so after the Venezuelan exodus. The ghost of Venezuelanization — used to the point of ridicule — was part of the change of political cycle in 2015, when the region seemed to turn to the right. It was a time of disappointment, but also of silence on Venezuela, with a large part of the left (with the exception of the eternal believers) staying quiet.

The July 28 elections marked an even greater decline of the Bolivarian project. This time, Maduro’s victory, as Chilean President Gabriel Boric said, is “hard to believe.” The illegitimacy of Maduro is becoming more evident, while the election gamble of the entire opposition — which was always divided between sectors in favor of insurrection and supporters of fighting Chavismo at the ballot box — has paid off inside and outside the country. Even the Venezuelan Communist Party is demanding respect for the popular will.

In this context, Lula da Silva, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador are seeking an orderly solution to the crisis. Even former Argentine president Cristina Kirchner has asked for the voter tally sheets to be published, “for the legacy of Chávez.” But the solution is not clear: without internal divisions, of which there are none so far, the Maduro government has no incentive to initiate an agreed transition.

Increased repression, which seems to be the only way to overcome the crisis, and its resulting consequences for Venezuelans, will have a high cost for the left in the region. Not only for the remaining Bolivarian supports who are championing the official results and Maduro’s “wide lead” over Edmundo González, but also for the critical left, which today faces new, radicalized right-wing movements.

The images of repression in Venezuela — and of a government that has dug in without even showing the records of its supposed victory — are an invaluable gift for reactionaries everywhere. A “socialism” associated with repression, daily hardships and ideological cynicism does not seem the best basis for “making progressivism great again.”

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