Robinson’s Footprints
Richard Gott writes about Hugo Chávez and the Venezuelan Revolution
The mountains of Venezuela rise up almost sheer from the shores of the Caribbean, with gashes of red earth below and vivid green forest above, the peaks entirely lost in grey cloud. From the aeroplane window I have often liked to imagine this as the land on which the local Indians stood when they first discovered Columbus on their beach in 1498 – although he landed some four hundred miles to the east, on the Peninsula de Paría, across the water from Trinidad.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
Letters
Vol. 22 No. 5 · 2 March 2000
From Aidan Foster-Carter
To read Richard Gott on Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, the latest Third World chap in uniform to take his fancy (LRB, 17 February), is to be plunged back in time, into traps and tropes one had thought (or hoped) extinct. What could it mean for Venezuela to defy globalisation? Do they drink the oil? And if previous attempts at state-led 'endogenous development' ended in tears, corruption and rusting white elephants, why should it be different this time? If the economics is utopian, the politics is frankly ominous. Chávez, Gott tells us, 'does not really like political parties at all'. Being 'first and foremost a soldier', what he wants is to militarise society, apparently permanently. He has already sidelined most existing political institutions: Gott quaintly calls this 'reorganising the political superstructure'. True, Chávez has popular support, but when that ebbs, what's to stop him doing as they all do: in Brecht's phrase, dissolve the people and elect another?
What clinches it is that trip to the interior. For the President to alter his diary at a day's notice and drag half the Cabinet with him flatters Gott, but is it any way to run a country? On the ground, marching about hectoring everyone, Chávez comes across like Kim Il-sung, whose 'on-the-spot guidance' added endless micro-damage to the macro-disaster already being inflicted by his policies.
Enough already. Gott's 'late unlamented 20th century' gave us Nasser and Ben Bella, Mao and Pol Pot, Castro and Perón. It taught most of us the hard lesson that there are no short cuts to development; and that those who overthrow established institutions to pursue economic chimeras are the worst menace of all. At the end Gott rhetorically raises some doubts, but only to dissolve them in a mist of wistful thinking. To give Chávez the last word: 'How many times have we failed in the past? We can't fail this time.' We shall see.
Aidan Foster-Carter
Shipley, Yorkshire
Vol. 22 No. 6 · 16 March 2000
From Richard Gott
I have sparred happily with Aidan Foster-Carter (Letters, 2 March) before, and it is no secret that his disillusion with Kim Il-sung colours his now rather conservative attitude towards all innovative programmes of Third World development. I do not share his view that because Venezuela has a lot of oil it has no right to 'defy globalisation'. Selling oil, which the Venezuelan state does competently and with comparative advantage (over, say, the Caucasus), is an activity that long preceded the onset of globalisation, and continues to take place under President Chávez. So far he has had the wit to reactivate Venezuela's participation in Opec, leading to a cut in production and a higher oil price, and to take literally the old Venezuelan ambition to 'sow the oil' by putting the emphasis on rural development. I am as familiar as Foster-Carter with the failure of comparable schemes elsewhere in the world, but this one is clearly a bit different, and seems worth a try. Chávez is far more benevolently disposed towards the private sector than the statist autocrats Foster-Carter mentions, and any country that tries to move towards self-sufficiency in food production still gets my vote.
Although Chávez, like General de Gaulle, gave the coup de grâce (through a constituent assembly) to the moribund political institutions of Venezuela's fourth republic, most people would agree that these institutions, through corruption, cronyism, and the wilful squandering of public money, had already withered on the vine before the Colonel appeared on the scene. Paradoxically, in view of Foster-Carter's belief that 'those who overthrow established institutions to pursue economic chimeras are the worst menace of all,' the beginnings of the collapse of the old Venezuela can be dated very accurately to 1989, the year when the ancien régime imposed the economic policies drafted by the International Monetary Fund – a far greater menace to established institutions than the emerging programme of President Chávez.
Richard Gott
London W11
Vol. 22 No. 11 · 1 June 2000
From Leo Zaibert
Richard Gott's optimism regarding Hugo Chávez's statesmanship is naive at best (LRB, 17 February). Corruption has indeed been endemic in Venezuela, but Gott's exaggerations render his assumption that Chávez's Government is likely to be honest even more suspect. Chávez's 'most intimate political advisers', Luis Miquilena (President of the Congresillo) and José Vicente Rangel (Chancellor), are already involved in corruption scandals. Miquilena has been accused by the Attorney General of being a major shareholder in the company which printed Chávez's new 'Bolivarian' constitution. Rangel confessed to giving diplomatic posts to Chávez's cronies but claimed that it was only reprehensible to ask for favours, not to grant them. Chávez himself has now been accused of corruption by the lieutenant-colonels who joined him during the failed 1992 coup. Gott, like Chávez, describes this coup as a 'rebellion'. Euphemisms like this abound in Gott's article, as do many textbook examples of the fallacy of mere assertion. Backed by virtually no evidence, Gott asserts that Venezuela's recent democratic past was spurious: there was only one real political party (Acción Democrática) – the other major party (COPEI) 'was allowed on occasion to win elections'. Gott never tells us why it was important (and how it was possible) to 'keep up the pretence that Venezuela was a democracy'. Nor does he say why he credits Chávez with the 'significant success' of securing, 'with a little help from his partners in Opec', an increase in international oil prices.
Leo Zaibert
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Vol. 22 No. 12 · 22 June 2000
From Richard Gott
Leo Zaibert (Letters, 1 June) accuses me of naivety and optimism, because I wrote positively about the Venezuelan Government of Hugo Chávez. It is safer, of course, to greet every new development in Latin America with cynicism. For the moment, however, Chávez's project appears to be the most interesting development in Latin America for many years. He has staked his reputation on rooting out the corruption in Venezuelan society. The accusations mentioned by Zaibert against Luís Miquilena, his chief civilian adviser, are under investigation, and it remains to be seen whether they are true. Since I wrote my article, Chávez has shown a preference for his civilian entourage over his old friends in the military. This has much to do with the decision of some former colonels to form an opposition – something the old and discredited political parties cannot do.
Chávez's decision effectively to rejoin Opec and not to cheat on the quota system – the strategy of the previous Government – was the principal cause of last year's rise in oil price, a fact the organisation recognised when it chose Ali Rodríguez, the Venezuelan oil minister and a former guerrilla, as its new president.
Richard Gott
London W11
