Hugo! (61 page)

The literacy program was named for Simón Rodríguez, Bolívar's
tutor who — when he went into exile — gave himself the pseudonym
Samuel Robinson to honor Robinson Crusoe. Chávez created another
educational program,
Mision Ribas, named for independence hero
José Félix Ribas, who married one of Bolívar's aunts. Eventually a
slave betrayed him to the Spanish, who severed his head, boiled it in
water, and displayed it in a cage in Caracas.

Mision Ribas was aimed at allowing young dropouts to complete
their high school education. It had plenty of potential participants:
Huge numbers of Venezuelans had never finished their secondary
or even elementary education. The first year six hundred thousand
students signed up; eventually the number reached 1.4 million.
They studied mainly at night, focusing on mathematics, advanced
grammar, geography, and English as a second language. Some students
received small stipends to make up for time they could have
spent working or to provide for child care or bus fare. The compressed
course was designed to be completed in two years.

Finally, Chávez created another program for those who had a high
school diploma but needed financial assistance to go to college. Named
for General Antonio José de Sucre, who helped conquer Bolivia, the
program provided aid to one hundred thousand students each year.
Chávez also created a new university for low-income students: the
Bolivarian University of Venezuela. Symbolically, it was opened in
the PDVSA office building in Chuao emptied after Chávez fired thousands
of striking oil executives and managers. It later opened campuses
across the nation, offering majors that included public health,
architecture, medicine, computer science, and environmental management,
along with activities such as dance and soccer.

While the educational programs received widespread praise from
Venezuela's lower classes, they were not without critics. Some questioned
the quality of the classes, especially in Mision Ribas, where they
doubted a proper high school education could be compressed into two
years. Others complained that the Bolivarian University of Venezuela
was more about pro-Chávez political indoctrination than the pursuit of
higher education.

To Venezuela's poor, however, the missions were revolutionary.
Flaws and all, they were a genuine and massive effort to help lift the
underclass the likes of which the country had never seen. By some
estimates, by 2006 some three million people had enrolled in one of
the educational missions since their initiation in 2003.

The programs didn't stop at health care and education. Chávez
also created thousands of subsidized food markets across the country
called
Mercals. They offered flour, pasta, bread, rice, beans, meat, and
other products at steep discounts to shantytown dwellers and peasants.
By 2006 an estimated 40 to 47 percent of the population shopped at the
Mercals, which sold food at discounts that averaged between 41 and
44 percent. The government also created thousands of soup kitchens
in low-income areas such as La Vega. It donated the pots, dishes, and
food to small groups of neighborhood women who set up a kitchen
in one of their homes and cooked a nutritious hot lunch each day for
about 150 people in extreme poverty.

While the government focused on improving education and health care
— at the most basic level getting food into hungry people's stomachs —
it also initiated projects aimed at
job creation.
Mision Vuelvan Caras, or
Mission About-Face, was designed to reduce unemployment and foster
community development by creating thousands of small-scale
cooperatives
in agriculture and other areas. It was based on a concept called
endogenous development, or development "proceeding from within."

Eschewing traditional Marxism-Leninism, the concept envisioned
using local cooperatives to make Venezuela self-sufficient by favoring
domestic products as opposed to imports brought in by what one government
official called a "parasitic oligarchy" that then resold the products
at vast profit. Items like baby strollers or computers often sold for
two or three times the price consumers paid in the United States, where
Venezuelan businessmen bought them. On trips to Miami, Venezuelan
tourists with money loaded everything from air conditioners to stereos
onto airplanes for the return trip. Chávez wanted to take Venezuela's raw
materials and, instead of shipping them to the United States and other
industrialized nations, keep them at home to make the country's own
products. As
Carlos Lanz, the aging university professor who helped
lead the effort, put it: "We hand over cheap raw material to The Empire
[the United States] and the multinational corporations, and they sell us
very expensive goods. So who benefits? People in the North."

Chávez's government set up one example of its new economic
model on a hill overlooking the sprawling working-class barrio of
Catia, creating a manufacturing and agricultural cooperative in the
neighborhood of Gramoven. It was built on the site of an old PDVSA
plant where delivery trucks once filled up with gasoline. The plant had
been abandoned more than a decade earlier, but large empty tanks
were still sitting on the hillside.

The government restored a huge storehouse on the site and
turned it into a plant where workers manufactured shoes. Another
converted warehouse was devoted to producing T-shirts and other
clothing. The site also included a shining new health clinic, a
"Bolivarian" school that offered free meals and Internet-connected
computers, and a large gazebo where residents held weekly community
meetings. Off to the side, co-op members planted tomatoes and
other crops on a small mountainside urban farm. In a poor community
where past governments were nearly invisible, the project was a
source of great hope and pride to residents.

Beyond Mision Vuelvan Caras, one of the government's most
important and most overlooked efforts was a program to hand out
land titles to barrio dwellers. Many of the barrios in Caracas and
elsewhere were started by poor Venezuelans who simply "invaded"
the land, set up makeshift houses of cardboard or even tents made of
plastic bags, and eventually constructed simple cinder-block homes,
many of them stacked on top of one another. Some of the barrios
sprang up on dangerous mountainsides prone to the kind of mudslides
that had killed thousands in December 1999. Chávez's government
initiated a program to give the residents of areas that were not
in disaster zones titles to their homes. It was a milestone for the residents,
opening up myriad possibilities such as obtaining bank loans
to start small businesses.

The list of missions went on.
Mision Identidad was a voter registration
drive aimed at bringing all eligible residents onto the electoral
roll. Thousands of Venezuelans had long ago lost their national
identification cards, seen them expire, or never received them in
the first place. Now they could get a new one quickly without going
through the typical nightmarish bureaucracy. Skeptics charged it
was a ploy by Chávez to pack the voting rolls with supporters, but
others compared it to the voter registration drives in the United
States in the 1960s aimed at bringing disenfranchised blacks into the
political system. The program also allowed hundreds of thousands
of foreigners who had lived in Venezuela for years but never became
nationalized to receive legal papers and gain voting rights.

The identification card, the
cedula,
was also critical in Venezuela
because without it, it was impossible to obtain government licenses,
apply for government programs, or in many cases get a job. Gaining
the card made people full citizens for the first time in their lives.

Other missions addressed everything from the indigenous population
to gold miners.
Mision Zamora sought to assist peasants.
Mision Guaicaipuro targeted the Indian tribes and their five hundred
thousand members in some of the remotest corners of the country.
Mision Piar reached out to the miners who used high-pressure water
hoses to blast through the dirt in the Amazon rain forest looking for
gold, and often lived in miserable conditions.

The missions came under attack from Chávez's critics, who accused
him of pandering to the poor and engaging in "populism" — a pejorative
term in Latin America associated with government handouts and
cheap short-term gimmicks to win votes. They criticized his endogenous
economic model as nothing but a poor imitation of the import-substitution
policies that had swept Latin America in the 1960s and
1970s, with limited success. They thought the missions were poorly run
and failed to get to the root of the major systemic problems plaguing
Venezuela such as a corrupt judicial system, one of the most bloated
government bureaucracies in Latin America, rising crime and poverty
rates, and widespread unemployment.

Luis Pedro España, a professor at the Andrés Bello University in
Caracas who studied poverty, contended that "the government does
not really have a
social policy. What they have is social theater." He
and other critics predicted that Chávez's
social missions would all
come tumbling down — along with his presidency — when oil prices
dropped.

That argument posed a legitimate question. Yet Chávez's supporters
asked: What's wrong with spending oil money on the majority poor
while it lasts? Chávez was merely
following the IMF-endorsed formula
that had turned South Korea, Singapore, and other nations into the
"Asian Tigers" by boosting spending on health and education, which
in the long run helped send economic growth soaring at record rates.
Venezuelan political scientist Edgardo Lander wondered if there was a
double standard when it came to presidents like Chávez redirecting state
resources to the poorest sectors of their countries. "Why is that populist?"
he said. "Why isn't that the state fulfilling its responsibilities?"

Chávez's missions, in reality, were more than government handouts.
They were serving to stimulate, excite, and organize communities like no
other government program before. Neighbors who'd barely said hello to
one another on the streets were coming together to form land committees,
which the government required before handing out titles. They were
working together in soup kitchens and studying side by side at night in
Mision Robinson or Mision Ribas. They were launching
grassroots community
projects to fix decrepit water systems, put up guardrails to keep
children off busy streets, or tack up posters to advise residents how to
combat dengue fever — often with little or no government assistance.

The infectious hope that was spreading through the barrios was
coming not only from services people were receiving from the government
for the first time in their lives, but from their own participation as
catalysts in the process. While previous governments didn't give much,
they didn't ask much either. Chávez was challenging people to give back
as much as they received. The thousands of volunteers cooking meals,
teaching literacy classes, and organizing land committees were gaining
a new sense of identity and dignity that no one could take away.

It was possible Chávez's entire project might collapse when the
day came that he departed or oil profits vanished. But it was more
likely that he had awakened the majority poor in a way there was no
turning back from. After decades of submission, the underclass had
risen up and taken
power. Venezuela would never be the same, with
or without Chávez.

To some followers it did not matter whether Chávez's programs succeeded
immediately. He was their president — the first to truly represent
them. People hung portraits of him on the walls of their homes
next to pictures of Jesus Christ. Women slept with posters of him above
their beds. Men vowed to defend him to the death. "I would prefer to be
hungry with Chávez than have the opposition return," said Julio César,
a Caracas shantytown dweller. He lost both legs to amputation after he
was shot during a robbery, but when Chávez visited his barrio and heard
his story, the president got him fitted with prostheses. "Chávez is the
only president who came here to the barrios. He loves the people."

To Chávez's supporters, the complaints about his government were
driven by one basic fact: The poor had taken power in Venezuela for
the first time in the country's history, and the wealthy elites who lived
in gated mansions and maintained second residences in Manhattan
or Paris didn't like it. "For the affluent sectors of the country the
problem is not that there is poverty," stated the Harvard-educated political
scientist Lander. "The problem is that the poor are organizing
and mobilizing. And that signifies a threat of the 'dangerous classes.'
The dangerous classes are dangerous if they mobilize, if they act, if they
demand."

He likened the situation to a high-society party of "the white people,
the refined people, the people who know how to speak well, who know
how to hold the crystal cups to drink wine. Suddenly, into the party
barge some people who don't have manners, who are poorly dressed,
who haven't taken a bath and smell bad. They grab the food with their
hands. They create the sensation they are taking over the country."

Chávez's mission — and his missions — sparked growing interest outside
Venezuela. "
Revolutionary tourism" became a booming business.
Academics, activists, students, civil rights leaders, church workers, and
union heads flocked to the country. Venezuela turned into the new
mecca of the left. The newcomers were the latest incarnation of the
activists who'd visited Cuba in the 1960s or 1970s or Nicaragua and El
Salvador in the 1980s. Many distrusted mainstream media accounts of
the Bolivarian Revolution. They wanted to see for themselves.

When they visited the barrios, the atmosphere was electric. Some
watched women and men in their seventies learn to read their first
words. "You've got a nation and a leader trying to provide an alternative
to neo-liberalism and the policies that have ravaged Latin America for
twenty years," one Australian student told
The New York Times
. "That's
why people are coming here. There's a sense that it's a moment in history."
Another visitor, New York City union leader Brenda Stokely, said
that "President Chávez is trying to provide poor people with health care,
education and decently paid jobs. Anyone opposed to that either has
their head under a rock or has no respect for human beings that live in
poverty."