Hugo Chavez: Failed Messiah
2019-05-05 · Guest: Clif Ross (Writer, poet, and filmmaker) · 50:34
Systemic failures and crisis of Venezuelan socialism
Charlie Deist, filling in for Bob Zadek, interviews Clif Ross, a writer, poet, and filmmaker who was once a supporter of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. They discuss the systemic failures of socialism, the deep-seated corruption within the Venezuelan military and government, and the messianic, apocalyptic ideology that fueled the rise of Hugo Chavez.
Topics: Venezuela, Socialism, Hugo Chavez, Nicolás Maduro, Bolivarian Revolution, Economics, Corruption, Military Dictatorship, Markets
Speakers:
- Charlie Deist: Guest Host
- Clif Ross: Writer, Poet, and Filmmaker
Introduction to Clif Ross and the Venezuelan Crisis [00:21]
Charlie Deist: Good morning and welcome to the Bob Zadek Show. I am Charlie Deist, filling in for Bob Zadek on the show of ideas, not attitude. This morning, I am privileged to be speaking with my friend Clif Ross. You might remember Clif from a couple of months ago when Bob had him on the show to discuss the goings-on in Venezuela, where Clif has an interesting history of writing and directing films about the socialist movement, the socialist revolution—sometimes referred to as the Bolivarian Revolution—that has taken root in South and Central American countries, sometimes to the devastating results that we see today when we read the headlines about Venezuela.
It’s a serious topic. We read about famines, we read about the electricity shortages, and there’s a magnitude of suffering that I think that people in the United States are unacquainted with in a lot of ways. We can all hope that we’ll never see the kinds of riots and famines that are currently happening in Venezuela. But rather than get stuck in the desolation, that mindset that nothing can be done, it’s tempting to look around and say, “We need to do something. We need to act.” There have been murmurs about the US potentially using its own military force to come in and do something about what’s happening in Venezuela.
I’ve been thinking, sometimes it’s tempting to say, you know, why not go in and accelerate some sort of toppling of the current regime, the socialist regime that began with Hugo Chavez and which has transferred power to Nicolás Maduro. Clif is someone who I honor and respect as an independent thinker and someone who is able to look at these issues with nuance. He was formerly on the side of the revolutionaries, but at some point he started to look around and see what was happening in Venezuela and questions started to emerge—contradictions, things that he couldn’t account for within the framework of revolutionary socialism.
If you didn’t catch Bob’s initial interview with him, I encourage you to go back into the archives at BobZadek.com and listen to the full interview where Clif describes this evolution that he also wrote about in his memoir, Home from the Dark Side of Utopia. It was a fascinating show and it’s a fascinating book if you have time to read the whole thing. But today we want to focus on what Bob and Clif weren’t able to cover in that hour, which is what’s actually happening in Venezuela today. How did we get to this point? We’ll summarize briefly, but we want to really focus on some of the real dynamics of this transition that hopefully is going on as we speak and that hopefully can take place with a minimum of friction, as the military euphemism is sometimes stated. We know that these things never happen without—what did Lenin say? “You can’t bake a cake without breaking a few eggs.” That’s not the mindset that we have going into the show this morning. The mindset is just what’s happening and what does it mean to stand in solidarity with the people of Venezuela during this dark hour that they’re going through. So we hope that we won’t put you to the brink of despair. We want to give some message of hope, but at the same time we want to weave in some of these themes that warn against taking too strident an approach of righting these wrongs. So with that, I’d like to welcome Clif to the show. Clif, how are you this morning?
Clif Ross: Doing great. Thanks for having me on.
Charlie Deist: So when we last left off three months ago, you had just written an article for Quillette, which is a sort of independent political online publication, and it documented—some people, I think Jordan Peterson characterized it as a mea culpa, a fascinating mea culpa from someone who used to stand on the side of the Bolivarian Revolution but who switched over. Or I shouldn’t say switched over because I think that again it kind of implies this dichotomy. I know you as an intellectually independent person, and I’m curious to know, as someone who has a lot of friends who maybe still are on more of the leftist side of the political divide, how was that article received where you came out and said that you no longer supported the Bolivarian Revolution? This had been something that you had undergone in the years prior, but when you came out with this article that went viral, so to speak, how did that change your life? How did it change your relationships to people who you had previously known, and what was sort of the 10,000-foot view of that article?
Clif Ross: I don’t think that most of the people that I know would read Quillette. I was over on the ultra-ultra left for a long time, I mean the revolutionary socialist left. Venezuela was what convinced me that that didn’t work. I moved more towards social democracy at that point and then began to really examine liberalism. So I think people have—my friends recognize that I have become what I suppose is, I guess at this point, an anti-communist liberal with a strong affection and belief in the social movements. Because, after all, you have to have an open, liberal, democratic society to have social movements. I believe that they’re not a negative thing. I really do believe in social movements.
One of the books that I put together before I wrote Home from the Dark Side of Utopia was a book called Until the Rulers Obey. I did that with my wife; we co-edited it. It’s a book about social movements in Latin America from 13 countries; it’s their testimony. So I still believe that. I still hold to that. I still think that’s the way we need to go in the future. But socialism is definitely not the way to go, and you don’t find social movements under socialist regimes. They just don’t exist. They’re never allowed to emerge. So I think that still probably puts me over on the left, but over on the left side of the people who believe in markets. I don’t even like the word capitalism because it was invented as a pejorative by Karl Marx, but a liberal economy, a market economy with a liberal democratic government that sort of defines the limits of the market.
The Tipping Point: Why Markets Work [08:04]
Charlie Deist: So there are the people who believe in the market, and I count myself as one of those people. I hope that it’s not a blind faith or an unthinking adherence to some sort of dogma, but I do think that markets are the best way to organize economic activity. That doesn’t necessarily dictate the entire scope of the society. You can have other laws and other kinds of practices that are organizing behavior and that are organizing communities. But when it comes to economics, what was the tilting point that brought you over to kind of believe in markets as a reasonably good way, or maybe even the best way that we know of, to organize economic activity?
Clif Ross: The Bolivarian Revolution and seeing that the alternative doesn’t work. I mean, if you read Karl Polanyi, there are only about three ways of organizing any kind of production and distribution of goods and services. You can have a market, a democratic market, which Adam Smith conceived, and that’s kind of the—his views are, I think, they best express that type of social or economic organization in a market. He was the one who really conceived that or theorized it.
You could bring it all to the headman of a village and have him redistribute it according to needs. That’s what we’d call socialism. Or you could do it with reciprocity. You know, if you have a small enough village, everyone just kind of knows who they’ve given to and who owes them something. It’s sort of a bartering thing. You give some of the potatoes you’ve grown to your neighbor and they give you some apples. Everyone in that interchange has a sense of obligation to the other to be fair because they’re neighbors and so forth.
Reciprocity works very well in a small band of people, or even as much as a tribe possibly. But when you get into cities and towns and cities and then larger states and then worlds of seven billion more people, it doesn’t work because you just can’t interface with so many people and you can’t depend on reciprocity. When you’re giving everything to the headman of the village, you’re essentially—the whole village is turning over their power to the headman to be ethical and to be responsible. So those two ways don’t work in more complex societies. The only thing that really does work effectively and in a way that empowers everyone would be the market.
I could see that the headman in the case of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro—when I arrived there, he’d just been elected the day before in 2013—I realized that it wasn’t working at all. The country was falling into chaos even in 2013, April of 2013. That was when the price of oil was over $100 a barrel still. Oil is 96% of the country’s national income. So I recognized that there were some—and the corruption was immense under Chavez and then Maduro. So if you have a corrupt leader who is in charge of organizing all of the economic activity, you really are in trouble if they’re corrupt. The problem from the very beginning with Chavez was that, and that’s the whole problem also with all socialist projects we’ve seen so far: the problem of corruption, the problem of power. You only have power when you centralize and you bring all your activity—otherwise, it’s distributed among all the actors. Adam Smith describes that in The Wealth of Nations very well.
So that was what convinced me that socialism didn’t work. It hadn’t worked in the 20th century, I already knew that. But this new socialism of the 21st century, as it was called, also wasn’t working. And then I came home and began asking all the questions that I had not asked and doing more thorough study of the problem. I returned again later that same year in November, and that was the last time I was in Venezuela, in November 2013. I realized at that point I was in danger when I was there, and I couldn’t risk going to the world’s second-worst prison system in the world. Philippines is the worst prison system in the world, according to I believe it was Amnesty International, and Venezuela’s is the second-worst in the world. This is after 20 years of so-called revolution. So that’s kind of how I came to love markets.
Corruption and the “Magical State” [13:27]
Charlie Deist: Wow. The analogy to giving all of the goods to a tribal leader I think is an interesting one to think about with how socialism has at least played out in the 20th and 21st century. The idea I think was maybe supposed to be that this was a movement of the people, but the first person to implement it, Vladimir Lenin, changed this into an idea of, well, we need some sort of organizing party and that will be the vanguard of the people, the vanguard of the proletariat, which will stand for the people. I was reading one of your articles that talks about how you have come to be ostracized by some of the people who maybe still believe that the party stands for the people in Venezuela. How do you see this when you look at just the wording “the people”? At the top you have Maduro, that’s your strongman, and then beneath him you have his cronies, you have people in the military who have been bought off with oil revenues or have been given special positions, maybe within the narco-trafficking scheme. I wanted to steer the conversation a little bit just to what is going on in those upper echelons of Venezuelan power and why might Maduro be starting to get nervous today.
Clif Ross: Yeah, my views on this whole thing change day to day because the situation is changing day to day and new information is coming out. There definitely are fractures in Chavismo. There have been since the beginning. Maduro has lasted far longer, on the other hand, than anyone imagined he would. Most people thought that he wouldn’t serve out his term, his first term, and certainly he couldn’t possibly get elected—it was just inconceivable to anyone that he could be re-elected. But he’s proved himself to be—he is sort of like—reminds me of other people we’ve seen in this country: not really very smart, but really adept at working out deals with different sectors of their power base.
So there is one man named Hugo Carvajal, who was—
Charlie Deist: Is this “El Pollo”?
Clif Ross: El Pollo, El Pollo. El Pollo, who has—I was just writing about him in my website. It’s on how there’s now a shift from oil to narco money in Venezuela. The economy has been dependent for 96% of its foreign exchange on oil, but as it’s completely collapsed and destroyed its own oil company, Pdvsa, it’s resorted to narco-trafficking—the trafficking of the drugs from Colombia that are produced in Colombia through Central America, Cuba, and the East Coast of Africa, cocaine primarily, cocaine and heroin.
Carvajal knows all about that. He was Chavez’s military intelligence director for his whole term, his whole time in office. So he knows everything. He knows about Chavez’s ties to the FARC and the FARC’s trading cocaine for guns that Chavez was buying for his military. When you talk about the military in Venezuela, it’s really sort of—everything in Venezuela—Fernando Coronil, who was a Venezuelan sociologist and historian, wrote a wonderful book called The Magical State. That’s really a good title for a book and it’s also a wonderful description of Venezuela. It’s just over the top. I mean, magical realism may have originated in Colombia next door, but it really describes Venezuela.
You have in Venezuela today over 2,000 generals. In the United States, we have a couple hundred. So what Maduro’s done to stay in power is he’s given people rank and he’s—Chavez purified the military before him. There was the coup in 2002, which we can talk a little bit later about millenarianism and messianism and so forth. But Chavez purified the military thereafter, after the coup.
The Military and the Narco-Economy [18:15]
Charlie Deist: Before we get there—and I do want to get into the apocalyptic millenarian element to the driving ideology behind socialism—but when you talk about the generals beginning—in one article you said, “El Pollo is beginning to squawk.” The “Chicken” is his nickname, which does sound like something out of a novel. I don’t know much about magical realism, but you could imagine this story being told as pure fiction, but the truth here makes for a great story. You said that the information that he has is about Maduro’s ties to the FARC. It seems like you know something about this. It’s almost like an open secret, if it is a secret at all. How would this information even be damaging to Maduro if it’s so well known already? What kind of information could he be giving and what kind of law enforcement would he cooperate with if he decides to break off?
Clif Ross: Well, all the connections. So we know that the First Lady, Cilia Flores, her nephews, who were raised in her own home—so they were raised like her own sons—trafficked tons of cocaine into the United States, or were trying to, when they were arrested by the DEA. They went to trial in New York. They actually said on tape, one of them said, “Well, we’re doing this to raise money for my aunt’s, Cilia Flores’s, run for the parliament or the National Assembly.” So they were trafficking all this in a plane that flew out of the presidential hangar, flown by a military pilot who was an active-duty Venezuelan military pilot, trafficking a planeload of cocaine that flew into Haiti where they were arrested by the DEA.
So what you have is at the very top level of government with Nicolás Maduro’s family, you have the cocaine trafficking. You have money laundering. He’s involved in all sorts of criminal activity in terms of the CLAP, the local committees for food production, which of course they don’t produce anything but the money laundering, corruption in terms of skimming, embezzlement of funds, state funds. So El Pollo knows all this. He knows everything. Diosdado Cabello, the number two in power in Venezuela, former military himself, is involved also in the money—there’s currency control. The Venezuelan government controls currency, so you can only change money, get foreign exchange through the government.
That’s been a source of incredible—it’s been called by some people the seedbed of corruption. It’s where all the corruption takes place, where the money, currency exchange on the black market—the bolívar is—the dollar is worth much, much more than on the official market. So people get money from the government and then they take that money and trade it on the black market and multiply their wealth by just hundredfold and more. Such that at this point there’s a currency shortage in the country at the same time that there’s hyperinflation. So it’s just an unimaginable situation.
But this is all related to people selling all their money on the black market, this money just going into Colombia because they’ve sold huge amounts of money in the official money exchange places in Colombia. So El Pollo knows about all this. He knows about where everybody has their money. He knows who they’re dealing with. He knows the drug trafficking routes. And it’s in the news today that he’s now ready to tell the Spanish government, where he’s being held, everything. He defected. He went over to Guaidó’s side earlier this year in February, after having escaped from the custody in Aruba where he was in danger of being extradited to the United States. He flew back to Venezuela—this was in 2014 or 2015—he flew back to Venezuela and was received as a hero. So he was there for a number of years in the parliament then, after having been an intelligence chief as a Chavista parliamentarian or National Assembly rep. And then he went over to Guaidó’s side and then left for Spain where he was in hiding for a while, but then he was picked up. So now he’s awaiting extradition to the United States on all sorts of drug trafficking, collaboration with the FARC terrorist organizations, and so forth.
The Chess Game of Power [23:51]
Charlie Deist: It really does seem like a kind of three-dimensional chess game where these different players are figuring out, “Okay, where can I move? Where will I have protection?” Let’s step back a few moves on the chessboard and just go from the time when you first discovered that Venezuela socialism wasn’t working there. This was at a time when oil revenues were through the roof. They had a lot of money to spend on social programs, and the people in general were maybe thinking that socialism wasn’t so bad. This is where you get figures like Noam Chomsky defending Venezuela as having had better healthcare, better education than maybe we give them credit for. I digress, but we can talk a little bit about your most recent Quillette article about Chomsky’s hypocrisy on the issue of Venezuelan socialism.
But after that, that’s when things started to deteriorate. When oil prices fell, they could no longer meet the obligations that they had made in the good times, and suddenly it became this sort of scramble to get your hands on the currency at the same time they are printing lots of it and giving it to privileged insiders. So the military all along has been bought off. That’s my understanding anyway. What’s happening today with the military and whose side are they on? How is this chess game unfolding in the country? Is there still a center of power in the capital city, and what is Maduro likely to be thinking as some of his top generals defect?
Clif Ross: Well, I think he’s thinking that they’re not going to defect. At this point, with this new uprising we just saw this past week, we saw a few lower-ranking military coming over to Guaidó’s side.
Charlie Deist: So the military on the whole is still on the side of Maduro. They’re still quelling the protests. And this also, we should mention, when we talk about the people, what do the people think of Maduro right now and have they on the whole, have a majority of the people shifted sides?
Clif Ross: Yeah, I think the overwhelming—most polls I’ve seen show Maduro’s about 90% of the people are opposed to Maduro. About 85 to 90% of the people want him to leave power right away. They want him out. So the only thing really holding him, keeping him in power is a very small power base among the people and the military. I mean, the military is really the elephant in the room.
Charlie Deist: And the military is distinct in some ways from the party that originated in this Bolivarian socialist uprising, or were they one and the same? Have the people from the party been given positions in the military?
Clif Ross: No, the party is separate. It’s a separate organization, top-down kind of Leninist-type socialist United Venezuelan United Socialist Party called PSUV (P-S-U-V) distinct from the military. The military basically—what Chavez knew from the very beginning was you can’t stop corruption, but you can use it to control people. So if you give people—allow people to steal what they want to steal and you just watch them and you keep your eyes on all the people, you can control them. You have control over them. Anytime you want, you can pull in the leash and throw them in prison. He’s done that with General Baduel, who’s been in prison since he defied Chavez in the referendum, the only referendum that Chavez lost in 2007. He’s been in prison, he’s still there. Baduel’s sons are also in prison.
So there’s also the whole tendency of the country—there’s no longer rule of law. All the judges have been selected as political appointees. So when the military defect, they know that their families will also be tortured, imprisoned, raped. There was an article that came out recently in the New York Times on this. But the generals don’t defect because these 2,000 generals that have all been given rank—they’ve been given rank in exchange for loyalty—they’ve all been given chunks of the economy. So some of them have power over the basic industries of Guayana, which is the region near Guyana right near the border in the state of Bolívar where all the other mineral wealth is. Some have been given in that same state, the state of Bolívar, there are huge gold mines and gold trafficking, so some generals have control over the gold. Some have power over the drug trafficking in Aragua. And so they have different domains and they’re able to just steal with impunity.
But Maduro knows who’s stealing what, and at any moment he can just, if he feels like it, they know that he can just have them called in and put on trial by one of his judges because Maduro also owns the judiciary and have them thrown in prison. And so that’s how it works. So there has been no defection on the part of the generals, only some lower-ranking military. And this is what Guaidó was hoping that the military—he’s been calling for the military to defect.
But in addition to the military, there’s also another factor in this: there are the militias. There are the militias, about 50,000 milicianos, people who are armed and they also have the military’s back, but they have the military’s back with their guns aimed at them. So the military is under a lot of pressure, the generals, to stay with Maduro. And then there are the secret police, there are the—and the Cuban G2 secret police are also involved in directing now the intelligence services, they call the SEBIN, in Venezuela. So you have this whole network of spies, you have this whole network of militias who are armed, and then you have the paramilitaries, the colectivos, so-called colectivos, who are paramilitaries who are armed. So you have all these armed forces, a whole array of formal and informal armed forces who are still supporting Maduro. And on the side of the opposition, you have a completely disarmed population and a few soldiers who dared to defect, most of whom now have gone into exile and had to leave their families to be imprisoned and tortured and know that that’s what’s happened to them.
The Apocalyptic Utopian Millenarian Matrix [31:45]
Charlie Deist: I’m speaking with Clif Ross, who is a writer, a poet, and a film director, former Bolivarian revolutionary who has since abandoned the cause of revolutionary socialism and has this inside story on what’s going on in Venezuela and he follows it closely. For those who don’t follow it so closely, they might not know about the opposition candidate Juan Guaidó, who has emerged as the leader of the party that maybe truly represents the people, or at least a majority of the people, who might be what we’d call a democratic socialist, although he’s probably much more friendly to markets and cooperating with the international community—and by that I don’t just mean Russia and China and other more dictatorial regimes.
But this is where I want to get into the conversation that I think Clif really sort of shines in his analysis, which is—what do you call it? Apocalyptic, utopian, millenarian—fill in what I’m missing from that—the urge that motivates people to adopt these programs that have been shown not to work, but in spite of that they still pursue it with this almost religious zeal. And people can also hear more of Clif’s story of his several conversions throughout life, and maybe you can just briefly summarize where you were coming from when you joined this movement and where you stand today with respect to that kind of thinking.
Clif Ross: Well, I think I wrote about it at Quillette. It’s called “The Bolivarian God That Failed,” and the listeners, if they’re interested to know more about my story, they can go there and read that. And they can also find a lot of information at my website, CliftonRoss.com. And I write for Caracas Chronicles, and if they want to keep up with really intelligent information about Venezuela from an opposition point of view, they could go to CaracasChronicles.com. It’s a really good site. They also try to personalize this struggle, I mean of the conflict and show what impact it’s having on people’s lives. It’s a really great website, I highly recommend it.
Yeah, I think that this all really goes back to a sort of an apocalyptic—what I call in my book “apocalyptic utopian millenarian matrix.” And probably in the case of Venezuela, we could take out the millenarian and say messianic, because Venezuela is really a great example of that. There’s a wonderful writer, somebody I really read a lot of, John Gray, the English philosopher—not the one who wrote Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus—but the English philosopher, real serious writer.
Charlie Deist: That’s Friedrich Hayek, not Salma Hayek, while we’re distinguishing pop culture figures from eminent philosophers.
Clif Ross: Yes. Yeah, John Gray wrote a wonderful book called Black Mass, where he goes into the whole problem of the millenarian apocalyptic—well, I think he calls it the apocalyptic in Western thinking. This is something that is so deeply in our consciousness it’s practically impossible to disembed. I was thinking of Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines. When the first Europeans arrived in Australia, they were convinced the Aborigines were not human because they had no concept of progress. In other words, they viewed this idea that came out of apocalyptic Christianity, i.e., progress, as a human attribute.
So anyway, the idea of the millennium, the apocalypse, which comes out of Christianity and the last book of the Bible—it’s canonical—has run as a theme through all of Western thinking. And then it became secularized in the 17th and 18th centuries as we moved away from Christianity with the Enlightenment and with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so forth. And in the 19th century, but it’s still a very dominant strain in our thinking. And you see it most of all in two ways: there’s a post-millennial Christian version of it, which is the idea of progress, that we’ll gradually evolve and progress to enter into the kingdom of God or whatever in one hand. And on the other hand is the apocalyptic version of that same—the revolutionary version of that same idea, which is that there will be a revolution and that we’ll overthrow the evil in the world, which is viewed as capitalism, and enter into the—start off first of all with a socialist state and then gradually become enter into communism. That’s Karl Marx’s version of the same thing.
Hugo Chavez: The False Messiah [37:56]
Charlie Deist: Yeah, and Clif, we both I think are people who read scripture and want to find what it is really trying to convey, maybe against some of these narratives that would position a socialist vanguard elite party as the ones to usher in this utopia, which has never worked out and it always seems to turn into dystopia. I think at one point in one of our conversations, I might have quoted a line from scripture which says that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force. I think that this has been interpreted and translated all kinds of different ways, and you could imagine someone saying that this—I think there are other translations that basically say the kingdom of heaven is realized through the use of force. So you have almost polar opposite interpretations stemming from different translations.
It seems like the title for this show was “Hugo Chavez: False Messiah,” and this is another idea that we see in scripture is that there will be people who arise who try to create the kingdom of heaven on earth, but they’re fundamentally not—they’re not following the real way that will bring about a lasting peace. What evidence do we have that Hugo Chavez might fall into this category of kind of a false messiah?
Clif Ross: Well, Venezuela today I think is the best evidence. It’s in tatters. It’s been destroyed. But I think that here Eric Voegelin really helps us a lot because he was the one who came up with the term “the immanentization of the eschaton,” the problem of the modern secularization of this Christian idea, which whether you’re a Christian or not—and I don’t know how I’d define myself anymore in those terms—but I do have some kind of sense of a transcendent reality. But the problem is that that transcendent reality is transcendent. You cannot immanentize it. You cannot bring it down to earth. It comes down of its own accord in its own way. It can’t be brought down by force.
Essentially, you cannot make this world into a heaven, a paradise. And the attempts to do so have been dismal failures always. So what we can do is, I think I quote Karl Popper at the end of my article for the Quillette, “The Bolivarian God That Failed.” What we can do is work to eliminate evils, but we can’t—when we endeavor to try to create a perfect utopia, we always end up with coercion and violence and force and massive numbers of people killed and repression and lives destroyed.
Hugo Chavez was in the whole tradition of—so there in Venezuela, if you look back over the history of Venezuela, the last 200 years of Venezuelan history from its independence to the present, you’d see up until 1958, with the exception of maybe two or three years, a series of military dictators. Military presidents, virtually every leader in Venezuela up until 1958 was a general of one sort or another, starting with Simón Bolívar, the Liberator. He was born in Venezuela, led the struggle for independence. He was named the Liberator, capital L. So there’s—he has this kind of—he’s a demigod. He’s viewed by Venezuelans as absolutely a god of sorts, a messianic figure.
So you have a culture that has been essentially has lived under a series of military generals, always looking back to the golden moment when Simón Bolívar, who was viewed as a very noble man, took power and overthrew the Spaniards. So when Hugo Chavez came along in 1992 to rescue the people, he was really essentially fulfilling that same—he was a lieutenant colonel, another military man who was rescuing the people from what? From democracy. Democracy came to Venezuela in 1958. They overthrew the last military general and they had civilian governments ever since. But those governments came into crisis.
Michael Barkun, who wrote a book called Disaster and the Millennium, an authority on millenarianism, talks about the factors that you need to have a millenarian movement, which are a series of complex crises. You have to have a population already predisposed to a millenarian ideology. And then you have to have a charismatic figure. So you have all those things in Hugo Chavez because of the last time that they tried to build the utopia—the Bolivarian utopia was called Great Venezuela under Carlos Andrés Pérez. He did exactly the same things that Chavez did, which was spend huge amounts of money during the oil boom of the 1970s. Did it exactly the same way as Chavez, wasted huge amounts of money, there was all kinds of corruption and so forth. And then they ended up going into an IMF structural adjustment program in the early ’80s, which by the early ’90s was so onerous that people had rebelled in 1989. There was a huge rebellion called the Caracazo.
So when Chavez came to power in 1992—when he tried to take power in a military coup in 1992, he was viewed as a hero by many. And he was in prison for a while, the coup failed. Then he was released from prison and ran for president and won in 1998. And then oil was about $10 a barrel at that point. And he was a pretty orthodox president first. But then the oil boom happened. US invaded Iraq, the price of oil skyrocketed, and suddenly Chavez had all this money, was facing a referendum on his presidency, he was unpopular, and he won the referendum by spending the oil money on all kinds of projects, boondoggles mostly, but just all sorts of projects, and egged on by Fidel Castro. And so very soon declared the Bolivarian Revolution.
And he became—so you have something of a messianic cult around Chavez, something of a cargo cult. You know, there were the cargo cults in the 19th and 20th centuries in the Pacific Islands where the natives would find this cargo that had fallen off of shipwrecked ships or left over from shipwrecks that floated onto the island and they thought it was a gift of the gods. And so you have the same thing essentially there with Venezuela, Chavez leading what was essentially a cargo cult of some form or another and as a messianic figure. But he began borrowing massively to fund his projects. I mean, his projects were insane if you think about it. He had one called ALBA, which was Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, where he was going to be giving all sorts of money away to all these underdeveloped countries in Latin America to unite them so they wouldn’t be indebted to the IMF and the Venezuela could lend this money out at 1 or 2% interest. But meanwhile, he was borrowing money at 14% interest and 15% interest because the debts were so high that he was becoming a credit risk.
The Symbolic Resurrection of Chavez [46:24]
Charlie Deist: So before we get to the end of the hour, I wanted to touch on one thing about this rise and establishment of Chavismo that you mentioned in an earlier conversation, and that was something more on the symbolic realm that helped cement him. Can you fill the audience in on what that was and how this plays into the idea of apocalyptic utopian millenarian or messianic matrix?
Clif Ross: Yeah, I mean, you have in 2002 when they overthrow him, April 11th, he’s overthrown in a coup. And then he’s taken out of the country. There’s some question about whether or not they were getting ready to kill him. But then through a series of circumstances, the coup fails on the 13th and he returns to Venezuela in a helicopter, arriving in the evening. So essentially you have this sort of the Christ narrative: he’s killed on Good Friday, he’s buried, and then on the third day he rises from the dead. Essentially the same thing happened here to Chavez. Friday he’s overthrown in a coup, Sunday night he returns in a helicopter from the skies with everyone applauding his return, or at least a good part of the population. So yeah, symbolically he worked on that narrative. He worked those symbols. He identified—he thought of himself as a reincarnation of Bolívar. And but the whole project has failed. And he tried to pass that charisma on to Maduro. Maduro was handpicked by Chavez to succeed him. But that now is has come to the end. And the only people who are left supporting him are the hard dead-enders who are caught up in that millenarian myth and those who are bought and paid for with drug money and corruption and all that. It’s a very sad ending, and the Venezuelan people are paying for it today.
Closing Thoughts and the Question of Intervention [48:47]
Charlie Deist: And sadly, we’re coming to the end of the hour. I’ve been speaking with Clif Ross. You can follow his work at CliftonRoss.com or on the Caracas Chronicles website. That’s CaracasChronicles.com. And there’s so much more that we could get to that I wanted to cover, including the possibility of a US military option, an intervention, which might be tempting when we look at the suffering that’s happening in Venezuela day to day. It just seems to be getting worse and worse. I kept thinking that we would be doing this interview maybe on the other side of some sort of tipping point, but we’re going to have to wait and have you back on the show very soon, Clif. Any closing comments or thoughts that you want to share or places people can follow your work?
Clif Ross: It would be a disaster for the United States to invade. That’s my view. I think everyone on the Bolivarian side is armed to the teeth and it would be a nightmare. I just can’t see any good coming out of it. So let’s just hope that doesn’t happen and let’s hope they will resolve this by themselves.
Charlie Deist: Yeah, the urge to do something is always strong and, you know, Vladimir Lenin, I think his tract before the Russian Revolution was What Is to Be Done? And a lot of people are asking that same thing today, but I think that it’s better to look and ask, you know, what can we do in our own small corner of the world, hopefully to improve our lives and the lives of those around us. Clif, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me this morning. Bob will be back next Sunday with another episode of the show of ideas, not attitude. And we hope that you all have a great weekend and we’ll talk to you soon.