By Owen Jones
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Chávez
on the streets of Cabimas in September last year. Photograph: Juan
Barreto/AFP/Getty Images
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Is all the Western
media coverage that portrays him as a dictator by chance related to his
politics? Here in Venezuela, the truth is very clear to see.
If much of the Western media is to
believed, I write this column from a country brutalised by an absurd tinpot
caudillo, Hugo Chavez, who routinely jails any journalist or politician with
the temerity to speak out against his tyranny.
According to Toby Young, Venezuela is
ruled by a “Marxist tyrant” and a “Communist dictator”. Chavez’s defeated
opponent in Sunday’s presidential elections, Henrique Capriles, was portrayed by
contrast as an inspiring, dynamic democrat determined to end Venezuela’s failed
socialist experiment and open the country to much-needed foreign investment.
The reality of Venezuela could not be
more distant from the coverage, but the damage is done: even many on the left
regard Chavez as beyond the pale. Those who challenge the narrative are
dismissed as “useful idiots”, following in the footsteps of the likes of
Beatrice and Sidney Webb who, in the 1930s, lauded Stalin’s Russia, oblivious
to the real horrors.
Venezuela is a funny sort of
“dictatorship”. The private media enjoys a 90 per cent audience share and
routinely pump out vitriolic anti-Chavez propaganda, pro-opposition areas are
plastered with billboards featuring Capriles’ smiling face, and jubilant
anti-Chavez rallies are a regular event across the country.
Venezuelans went to the polls on Sunday
for the 15th time since Hugo Chavez was first elected in 1999: all of those
previous elections were judged as free by international observers, including
ex-US President Jimmy Carter, who described the country’s election process as
“the best in the world”.
When Chavez lost a constitutional referendum in 2007,
he accepted the result. Before his massive registration drives, many poor
people could not vote. In stark contrast to most Western democracies, over 80
per cent of Venezuelans turned out to vote in Sunday’s presidential elections.
Even opponents of Chavez told me that
he is the first Venezuelan president to care about the poor. Since his
landslide victory in 1998, extreme poverty has dropped from nearly a quarter to
8.6 per cent last year; unemployment has halved; and GDP per capita has more
than doubled. Rather than ruining the economy – as his critics allege – oil
exports have surged from $14.4bn to $60bn in 2011, providing revenue to spend
on Chavez’s ambitious social programmes, the so-called “missions”.
His critics attack him for his association
with autocrats and tyrants such as Gaddafi, Ahmadinejad and Assad. They have a
point, but given the West’s own support for dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia,
Bahrain and Kazakhstan – whose regime is currently paying Tony Blair $13m a
year for PR services – a giant glasshouse looms behind them.
Venezuela’s main
allies are fellow Latin American democracies, themselves ruled by progressive
governments that Chavez helped inspire, such as Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia.
That’s not to say that Venezuela is free
of problems, or even close. Security was the main concern of Venezuelans I
spoke to, and little wonder: violent crime has surged, with up to 20,000 people
murdered last year.
An ineffective and often corrupt local police and justice
system, the spill over from conflict in neighbouring Colombia, and a society
with more guns than people are largely to blame. The government is beginning to
roll out a national police force, but urgent action is clearly required.
But when it comes to his relationship
with his opposition, Chavez has arguably been pretty lenient. Many of them –
including Capriles – were involved in a US-backed, Pinochet-style military coup
in 2002, which failed only after Chavez’s supporters took to the streets.
It
was incited and supported by much of the private media: I wonder what would
happen to Sky News and ITN if they had egged on a coup d’état against a
democratically elected government in Britain. Five years later, the government
refused to renew the licence of one broadcaster, RCTV, because of its role in
the coup.
Even many Chavistas acknowledge that it was a tactical mistake, but I
wonder how many governments would tolerate TV stations advocating their armed
overthrow.
Venezuela’s oligarchs froth at the
mouth with their hatred of Chavez, but the truth is his government has barely
touched them. The top rate of tax is just 34 per cent, and tax evasion is
rampant.
Why do they despise him? As Chavez’s vice-minister for Europe, Temir
Porras, puts it to me, it’s because “the people who clean their houses are now
politically more important than them”.
Under Chavez, the poor have become a
political power that cannot be ignored: no wonder even Capriles at least
claimed he would leave the social programmes intact.
Chavez’s critics in the West are entitled
to passionately disagree with him. But it’s time they stopped pretending he is
a dictator. Chavez has won fair and square.
Despite formidable obstacles, he
has proved it is possible to lead a popular, progressive government that breaks
with neo-liberal dogma. Perhaps that is why he is so hated after all.
This article first appeared in October 2012.
Source: The Independent
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