The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (21 page)

Yovanny is a pragmatic, no-nonsense voter. He respects the Colombians who live up and down his street—almost all of his neighbors are Colombian immigrants—because they are hard workers. He cast his lot with Chávez not because of promises of a revolution but because of promises of results. Today he considers himself a former Chavista. The accomplishments are just not there. “I like how he started,” he tells me, referring to Chávez. “He came from nothing. But then he got to power. Twice he has been elected president, and because of that he thinks he owns the world.” I asked Yovanny what he thinks explains Chávez’s failure to deliver. “Simón Bolívar and Castro have made him crazy,” he says. “Why doesn’t he worry about what really goes on in this country? He talks a lot, but he doesn’t do much.”

What matters to Yovanny is the price of food and the cost of building material. In the corner of his concrete patio, he has stacked a small pile of bricks, a few metal pipes, and a bag of cement. He has his eye on putting a rooftop over this patio so that he can make a separate bedroom for his daughters. He buys a little material here and there, whenever he can afford it. But it isn’t easy. “Almost every day there is an increase in prices,” he says. “Construction material is in the clouds.”

As Chávez’s ideological campaigns alienated him, what came to matter more for this resident of Petare is his local representatives. I ask him if he is happy with the new mayor. Yovanny says he is. He has been in the neighborhood, and he has gotten many of the streets paved. “Here there have been many mayors and governors, but [the
new one] has done a good job,” he says. The previous mayor was José Vicente Rangel, a staunch Chavista and son of a former vice president. Referring to Rangel, Yovanny says, “He came once with fifty police escorts before the election and once after. We didn’t even know if he was alive or dead.”

The new mayor is Carlos Ocariz. The thirty-nine-year-old opposition leader oversees the mayoralty of Sucre, one of the largest barrios in Latin America. (Yovanny’s home in Petare is just one part of a much larger slum.) Roughly two million people call Sucre home, and 80 percent of them are poverty-stricken. Like Capriles, Ocariz won his post in a surprise victory for the opposition in the 2008 regional elections. Ocariz had spent years doing community work in Sucre, so the people there knew him long before he announced his candidacy. Nevertheless, it was a bruising campaign. “
There were forty days of campaigning. Out of the forty days, Chávez came to Sucre fifteen times and delivered thirteen national
cadenas
from here,” Ocariz tells me as we sit in his office. Chávez had been determined to keep Sucre as a political stronghold, he explained. “All of the power structure was Chavista. All the local officials were Chavistas. They were giving away washing machines, mattresses, and refrigerators.”

It wasn’t enough. On Election Day, Ocariz won 55.6 percent of the vote over his Chavista opponent’s 43.8 percent. But Chávez didn’t take long to respond. “The day after the election, the government took away sixteen garbage trucks, which was 60 percent of garbage collection,” says Ocariz. Also, the pipelines that carry water up Sucre’s steep hillsides mysteriously had less water pressure. Many people in the poorest sections saw their taps reduced to a drip, if they had any water at all. According to Ocariz, “It’s a mixture of negligence and political revenge.”

But Ocariz knows his constituents aren’t interested in excuses or, as he says, “the problems of politicians.” Like Yovanny, they want results, and whether the central government is hamstringing him or not, Ocariz must deliver. One thing he has going for him is the incredible mismanagement of the previous mayor. When he saw the books, Ocariz was stunned at how inefficient his predecessor’s team had been. In his first year in office, Ocariz reduced administrative expenses from 51 percent to 38 percent of the budget. Doing so helped
him increase the police force by 20 percent, as well as double their salaries. In turn, Sucre’s homicide rate dropped 25 percent. When water stopped flowing from the faucets, Ocariz created a program called My Water that drives trucks filled with water to the most impoverished areas of the community. He also invested in revamping the entire pumping system.

One of his more innovative educational initiatives is called Study and Progress. The program offers small cash stipends to mothers of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders who attend public schools in Sucre. In order to receive the stipend, the student must attend at least 85 percent of his or her classes. In the first month, roughly 75 percent of those eligible signed up for the program, but one-third did not receive the stipend because of their children’s absences. It was a better start than most expected, and the program’s mix of incentives quickly took hold. By the fourth month, the number of mothers not receiving stipends dropped to 12 percent. “In order to govern within an authoritarian system, you have to be a lot more creative,” Ocariz tells me. “Many opposition leaders haven’t realized that the problem isn’t Chávez. The problem is the problems of the people. If you efficiently address those problems, that is how you take support away from Chávez.”

Many of the younger leaders in Venezuelan opposition parties view Chávez as a problem they inherited. He is, in part, a product of the mistakes made by an earlier political generation, especially those leaders who failed to adjust once Chávez came to power. Ocariz takes a dim view of the opposition’s leadership from these years and puts a fair share of the blame on their shoulders. “There were many errors. One of the main ones being the opposition wanted to take a shortcut to power, instead of understanding that we needed to construct a new majority or a new political proposal. They wanted to get to power through a shortcut, be it through a coup, the oil boycott, or something else,” he says.

But the more shortcuts the opposition leaders attempted, the more they compounded the problem, reinforcing Chávez’s message that they were elite, moneyed interests disconnected from everyday Venezuelans. These mistakes and miscalculations led to “the worst possible mistake” in Ocariz’s view—boycotting the political process altogether. In 2005, opposition leaders abstained from competing in
congressional elections in protest. Chávez was more than happy to run his candidates and take full control of the National Assembly. All 167 of the body’s representatives were Chavistas. Now Chávez was truly in a position to run the table. “When we retreated from the congressional elections,” says Ocariz, “Chávez was able to take control of the rest of the institutions and branches of government. So in the end, he didn’t take control. We gave it to him.” Ocariz closes his eyes and shakes his head, as if even now he can’t fully understand the strategy the opposition pursued. “The opposition always asks ourselves, ‘What will Chávez do when he runs out of money and popularity?’ ” he continues. “Instead of asking what Chávez is going to do, we need to ask what we are going to do.”

It’s a good point, and one shared by many younger opposition leaders. In my meetings with more than a dozen members of the opposition, there is surprising consensus about the broad outlines of what is necessary to be successful in the upcoming campaigns against Chávez and his political machine. Like Capriles, they must be connected to the people. Like Ocariz, they must offer true political alternatives to Chávez, solving problems and not simply complaining about how they are treated in a system that almost everyone agrees is unfair. And they must be unified. Even with the gains made in the 2008 elections,
the opposition lost seventy-six elections around the country because it failed to throw its support behind a single candidate. One senses that most leaders, especially the younger rising stars, understand what is necessary to put forward a credible challenge. The question is whether they will act on it.

Of course, it isn’t fair to say that it is entirely up to them. The rules will be rigged against them. They won’t have the opportunity to broadcast their message on national television. Chávez will pour hundreds of millions of the state’s oil revenue into supporting himself and his own people in races.
The head of the Venezuelan military has even intimated that the armed services might not defend an election if the result was anything other than a victory for Chávez. Ocariz is right that the opposition needs to ask itself what it can do to make itself the most viable opponent to a regime that has amassed extraordinary powers. But I am still interested in Ocariz’s first question, “What do you think Chávez will do?”

“I don’t know,” Ocariz replies, warily.

“Is that scary?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says, pausing for a moment. “Right now he is crazy with power.”

Carlos Ocariz had been reluctant to talk about Chávez and his government’s dirty tricks. In our conversation, he wanted to focus on the innovations and solutions he and his team had implemented in Sucre. He didn’t want to seem like a mayor under siege. It is, in part, his desire to change the narrative about the Venezuelan opposition. He believes it is important to showcase more than the complaints and injustices of governing in Chávez’s authoritarian system. The other reason he didn’t want to complain, perhaps, is that he knows he is lucky. As difficult as it may be for Henrique Capriles and Carlos Ocariz to govern, they are more fortunate than those who are barred from trying.

In early 2008,
Chávez unveiled a new instrument against the opposition: the political ban. That February, only ten months before candidates would be competing in elections, Comptroller General Clodovaldo Russián presented a list of four hundred public officials who he declared were immediately banned from running for public office. His declaration was not accompanied by a court order. There had been no legal proceeding that arrived at this result. Those who appeared on Russián’s list were told they had no avenue for appeal. With the stroke of a pen, the comptroller general had simply eliminated them from Venezuelan political life. Not surprisingly, of the names on Russián’s list, 80 percent were members of the opposition.

One of the candidates banned from holding office was Leopoldo López. It is obvious why Chávez would want to keep López’s political star from rising: the young, handsome Harvard-educated López had been immensely successful as the two-term mayor of Chacao, one of Caracas’s wealthier districts. While Chávez hails Simón Bolívar as South America’s liberator and has dubbed his political project a “Bolivarian revolution,” López is from the famed hero’s bloodline. (He is a direct descendant of Bolívar’s sister; Bolívar himself had no children.)
When he was reelected in 2004, he won with a whopping 81 percent of the vote. During his time in office, his approval ratings were regularly above 70 percent. In 2008, López had set his sights on becoming the next mayor of Caracas. He was a virtual shoo-in for the job. López was leading the field of candidates with 65 percent of the vote when the comptroller general issued his edict. López believes that his campaign would have widened that margin by Election Day, and he thinks the regime knew it, too. “If we had won with 70 percent,” López told me in his offices, “it would have been a message.”

But Hugo Chávez struck first. In an effort to tilt the playing field, his regime was willing to use the flimsiest rationale to eliminate the candidates it believed it couldn’t otherwise defeat. The alleged justification for the political disqualifications was corruption. Yet those being banned had not been found guilty of committing any crime, and the allegations were often absurd. William Méndez, the former mayor of San Cristóbal, made the government’s list for allegedly accepting invoices without tax numbers printed on them. The law requiring tax numbers had been passed in 2003. But Méndez had accepted the invoices in 2001. He was therefore supposedly guilty of breaking a law that did not even exist. But Chávez gave his full support to the tactic and saw the initial list of disqualifications as only the beginning. “
I want to express my support as chief of state, and the support of my administration, and the support of the people for these honorable compatriots who represent our state institutions and a special vote of confidence for Clodovaldo Russián,” Chávez told a crowd of supporters shortly after the announcement. “Because now we are really fighting corruption.”

Although López was no stranger to Chávez’s tactics, the political ban left him stunned. His campaign—and perhaps his political career—had been snuffed out before it could truly begin. No Venezuelan president had wielded such a weapon against his opponents before. “In order to disqualify someone, there needs to be criteria. There needs to be a definitive sentence by a criminal court. There was no court. I didn’t even go to trial,” he told me. “It was an administrative decision. Our case presents a clear tool the government is using to not let strong candidates stand for office. It is similar to what is happening in Iran, Belarus, and Russia.”

He did not expect any part of the Venezuelan government to overturn the comptroller’s decree, but he tried nonetheless. He took his case to the Venezuelan Supreme Court. The court has never decided a case against President Chávez. Still, López addressed the constitutional chamber of the court, saying, “
You have the historic responsibility of becoming either the constitution’s executioner or the constitution’s defender. You are responsible for either burying the constitution or fully supporting the rule of law, with justice for all Venezuelans, so they can decide.” The court opted for a burial.

If López couldn’t get justice inside Venezuela, he decided to look for it outside his country. He brought his case to the Inter-American Human Rights Court, an international tribunal that convenes in Costa Rica. The court agreed to hear arguments between López and the Venezuelan government, the first time it expanded its mandate to include the protection of political rights. Clodovaldo Russián and others intimated that Chávez’s government would ignore a judgment from the international court, but López saw it as his only way to find an impartial hearing and hoped it would build political pressure on the regime. “This will have an impact not only in Venezuela but in the region,” he told me. “This mechanism of disqualifying elected officials will become a way of winning elections permanently.” López could sense my skepticism that Chávez would ever honor a decision handed down by an international tribunal. “Rationally, I can’t tell you we can overcome this government. Funding, media control, abuse of power, the military—it’s all on their side,” López said. “But politics is about hope.” In the meantime, political bannings have become one of the government’s favorite tools.
More than eight hundred candidates have been erased from political life since 2007.