Asia Times Mar 6, 2013
El Comandante has left the building
By Pepe
Escobar
Now that
would be some movie; the story of a man of the people who rises
against all
odds to become the political Elvis of Latin America. Bigger than
Elvis,
actually; a president who won 13 out of 14 national democratic
elections. No
chance you will ever see such a movie winning an Oscar - much
less produced in
Hollywood. Unless, of course, Oliver Stone convinces HBO about a
cable/DVD
special.
How enlightening to watch world leaders' reactions to the death
of Venezuela's
El Comandante Hugo Chavez. Uruguay's President Jose Mujica - a
man who actually
shuns 90% of his salary because he insists he covers his basic
necessities with
much less - once again reminded everyone how he qualified Chavez
as "the
most generous leader I ever met", while praising the "fortress
of
democracy" of which Chavez was a great builder.
Compare it with US President Barack Obama - in what sounds like
a dormant cut
and paste by some White House intern - reaffirming US support
for "the
Venezuelan people". Would that be "the people" who have been
electing and re-electing Chavez non-stop since the late 1990s?
Or would that be
"the people" who trade Martinis in Miami demonizing him as an
evil communist?
El Comandante may have left the building - his body defeated by
cancer - but
the post-mortem demonization will go on forever. One key reason
stands out.
Venezuela holds the largest oil reserves in the world.
Washington and that
crumbling Kafkaesque citadel also known as the European Union
sing All You
Need is Love non-stop to those ghastly, feudal Persian
Gulf petro-monarchs
(but not to "the people") in return for their oil. By contrast,
in
Venezuela El Comandante came up with the subversive idea of
using oil wealth to
at least alleviate the problems of most of his people. Western
turbo-capitalism, as is well known, does not do redistribution
of wealth and
empowerment of communitarian values.
I hate you, cabron
According to the Foreign Ministry, Vice-President Nicolas Maduro
- and not the
leader of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, very close to
top military
leaders - will be temporarily in power before new elections to
be held within
the next 30 days. Maduro is bound to win them handily; the
Venezuelan political
opposition is a fragmented joke. This spells out Chavismo
without Chavez - much
to the chagrin of the immense pan-American and pan-European Chavez-hating
cottage industry.
It's not an accident that El Comandante became immensely popular
among
"the people" of not only vast swathes of Latin America but also
all
across the Global South. These "people" - not in the Barack
Obama
sense - clearly saw the direct correlation between neoliberalism
and the
expansion of poverty (now millions of Europeans are also tasting
it).
Especially in South America, it was popular reaction against
neoliberalism that
led - via democratic elections - to a wave of leftist
governments in the past
decade, from Venezuela to Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay.
The Bush administration - to say the least - abhorred it. They
could not do
anything about Lula in Brazil - a clever operator who adopted
neoliberal
clothes (Wall Street loved him) but remained a progressive at
heart. Washington
- incapable of getting rid of the coup after coup reflexes of
the 1960s and
1970s - thought that Chavez was a weak link. Thus came the April
2002 coup led
by a military faction, with power given to a wealthy
entrepreneur. The
US-backed coup lasted less than 48 hours; Chavez was duly
restored to power,
supported by "the people" (the real thing) and most of the army.
So there's nothing unexpected in the announcement by Maduro, a
few hours before
El Comandante's death, that two US embassy employees would be
expelled in 24
hours; Air Attache David Delmonaco, and assistant Air Attache
Devlin Costal.
Delmonaco was accused of fomenting - what else - a coup with
some factions of
the Venezuelan military. Those gringos never learn.
Immense suspicion among Chavistas that El Comandante may have
been poisoned - a
convoluted replay of what happened to Yasser Arafat in 2004 - is
also
predictable. It could have been highly radioactive polonium-210,
as in Arafat's
case. The Hollywood-friendly CIA may have some ideas about that.
All shook up
The verdict is now open on what exact brand of revolutionary was
Chavez. He
always praised everyone from Mao to Che in the revolutionary
pantheon. He
certainly was a very skillful popular leader with a fine
geopolitical eye to
identify centuries-old patterns of subjugation of Latin America.
Thus his
constant reference to the Hispanic revolutionary tradition from
Bolivar to
Marti.
Chavez's mantra was that the only way out for Latin America
would be better
integration; thus his impulsion of myriad mechanisms, from ALBA
(the Bolivarian
Alliance) to Petrocaribe, from the Banco del Sur (the Bank of
the South) to
UNASUR (the Union of South American countries).
As for his "socialism of the 21st century", beyond all
ideological
straitjackets he did more to explore the true spirit of common
values - as an
antidote to the putrefaction of turbo-charged, financial
capitalism - than tons
of neo-Marxist academic analyses.
No wonder the Goldman Sachs gang and cohorts saw him as worse
than the Black
Plague. Venezuela bought Sukhoi fighter jets; entered strategic
relationships
with BRICS members Russia and China - not to mention other
Global South actors;
maintains over 30,000 Cuban doctors practicing preventive
medicine living in
poor communities - what led to a boom of young Venezuelans
studying medicine.
Stark numbers tell most of the story that needs to be known.
Venezuelan public
deficit is a mere 7,4% of GDP. Public debt is 51,3% of GDP -
much less than the
European Union average. The public sector - defying apocalyptic
"communist" accusations - accounts for only 18,4% of the
economy;
less than state-oriented France and even the whole of
Scandinavia. In terms of
geopolitics of oil, quotas are established by OPEC; so the fact
that Venezuela
is exporting less to the US means it's diversifying its
customers (and
exporting more and more to strategic partner China).
And here's the clincher; poverty accounted for 71% of Venezuelan
citizens in
1996. In 2010, the percentage had been reduced to 21%. For a
serious analysis
of the Venezuelan economy in the Chavez era, see here.
Years ago, it took a superb novelist like Garcia Marquez to
reveal El Comandante's
secret as The Great Communicator; he was one of them (his
"people",
in the not-Barack Obama sense), from the physical appearance to
the mannerisms,
convivial attitude and language (the same applied to Lula in
relation to most
Brazilians).
So while Oliver Stone surveys the film market, one will be
waiting for a Garcia
Marquez to elevate Chavez to novelistic Walhalla. One thing is
sure; in terms
of a Global South narrative, history will record that El
Comandante may have
left the building; but then, after him the building was never
the same again.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How
the Globalized
World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books,
2007) and Red Zone Blues: a
snapshot of
Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does
Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepe...@yahoo.com.