Talking about a revolution
Molly Watson part of the fun of visiting Venezuela is witnessing, at close quarters, the rapid descent into egomaniacal madness of its President, Hugo Chavez. Venezuelans, as Chavez never tires of reminding them, are in the grip of an anti-American socialist revolution and Chavez has begun to furnish himself with the sweeping powers befitting a revolutionary dictator.
Last month, when I was in the middle of a three-week trip through some of his country's remotest islands, his parliament, an institution packed with loyalists after an opposition boycott of elections in 2005, voted unanimously for his 'mother of all revolutionary laws', enabling him to rule by decree for the next 18 months. First on Chavez's To Do list is likely to be a measure allowing him to remain in office indefinitely.
Venezuela's armed forces, supreme court and attorney general's office have already been politicised to serve the Chavez regime. Now the country's central bank is set to lose its autonomous status as part of a purge of neoliberalism that includes plans to nationalise the electricity and telecommunications industries, secure the government a bigger portion of the spoils from the huge oil deposits under the Orinoco delta, shut down the largest opposition-run television channel and radio station and curb the powers of state governors and local mayors.
Everywhere you go, you see signs that Chavez is getting a taste for near-absolute power. Like his hero Fidel Castro, he has begun to indulge his eccentricities. Posters around the country show him donning military uniforms and presidential sashes (the latter worn symbolically over his left shoulder). There he is on television, making rambling, hyperbolic speeches lasting several hours. His denunciation of George Bush as `the Devil incarnate' was followed by the announcement of a direct flight service between Caracas and his new friends in Tehran — a long-haul route that is surely destined to be the least frequented in history. Twice married to women who have disappeared from public view amid rumours of domestic violence, he is alleged to have an active social life — one he shares with his brother, Adan, who, surprise surprise, has risen from obscurity to a key role in Chavez's 27-member cabinet of toadies.
If you're lucky, you'll see his fleet of enormous blacked-out Humvees sweeping through Caracas, and even in places where everyone goes barefoot and people can scarcely summon the energy to go fishing due to the equatorial climate where every imaginable tropical fruit is pretty much always in season, the very latest pro-Chavez slogans are immaculately painted on all prominent buildings. Persuading the vast majority of Venezuelans who live below the poverty line to vote for his policies of co-operatives and government subsidies was a trifle compared to the logistics of registering them to vote and getting them to polling stations.
Perhaps it sounds unnerving, but in fact, once you've grown sick of Chavez-watching, you'll find the ordinary Venezuelans have little interest in the revolutionary zeal of their President. Playful, charming and obsessed with their appearance, they struck me as natural-born consumers much more interested in tuning into MTV than redistributing the means of production along Marxist lines. Venezuela is a country where the average citizen spends a fifth of his or her income on cosmetics and personal grooming and the reaction to living in an economy where inflation runs at between 14 and 30 per cent is to spend every spare bolivar on plastic surgery. El Nacional, the major newspaper in Caracas, recently ran an editorial that its author precised for me as 'Big New Tits Can Buy You Paradise', describing how women would rather try to look beautiful and many a man with money than save up for a mortgage or a university education.
Even the female receptionists at sleepy provincial car-hire outlets are caked in immaculately applied make-up, tap at their keyboards with perfectly manicured fingernails and wear six-inch heels to set off clothes so revealing they might give even Vicky Pollard pause. When a fellow passenger had a violent fit on a tiny plane I was island-hopping in, the locals on board seemed more concerned that she hadn't waxed under her arms recently than that the cabin was losing air pressure.
The national psyche of Venezuela is much too frivolous for socialism I think it is a fun country whose culture and lifestyle is destined to get more, not less, American. The Venezuelans love telly. When they aren't watching their girls win the Miss World crown for the umpteenth time, they're glued to telenovelas — a variety of soap opera that makes Dynasty look like gritty realism. They love gambling. They have a collective sweet tooth that, combined with their insistence on driving everywhere (petrol in Venezuela costs 2p a litre), is turning them into a nation of fatties. When I decided to walk half a mile from a posada I was staying in on the island of Margarita to buy some chocolate, my landlady treated the venture as an epic trek born of the loftiest saccharine-craving ideals — not because of the ever-present danger of being violently robbed or worse, but due to the enormous distance I would be undertaking on foot.
Middle-class Venezuelans, who are now severely restricted from exchanging their bolivars for dollars or any other foreign currency, don't share my optimism that Chavez will ultimately fail to subvert his countrymen's natural inclination (a Latino version of capitalism) to get rich and then pump up the music and make merry. One Venezuelan friend drew an analogy with Cuba, asking, 'Would anyone who lived through the era of Havana's casinos, dancing girls and mafia money have imagined communism would have succeeded there?'
When I asked him what he would like me to send from England as a birthday present, he grimaced, then smiled, and suggested that I dispatch a parcel of condensed milk and tinned meat for the lean times that may lie ahead.
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