ZadekpediaHugo Chávez is discussed across three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as the central figure in Venezuela’s descent from a comparatively wealthy democracy into what guests describe as a socialist dictatorship. The episodes treat his career as a case study in the resource curse, the abandonment of the price mechanism, and the hazards of messianic politics.
Rise and rule
In the earliest of the three episodes, Fergus Hodgson places Chávez in a long Venezuelan pattern. Oil discovered and utilized in the early part of the 20th century made the country one of the wealthiest in the region and produced a transition to democracy in the late 1950s, but dependence on a single economic element brought corruption and political instability—the resource curse. Hodgson says instability culminated in the 1990s with two coup attempts led by Chávez, who went to prison, was later pardoned, and then ran for president as an anti-establishment candidate Venezuela on the Brink with Fergus Hodgson (2017). Hodgson calls Chávez a student of Fidel Castro and says he imported that ideology and approach to Venezuela; over the last 17 or 18 years, he and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, have been converting the country into a socialist basket case. Hodgson notes thousands of Cuban agents in Venezuela advising and supporting the regime, and says Maduro’s chief advisor worked with Che Guevara in Cuba during the Cuban Revolution. On the Fraser Institute’s ranking of economic freedom, Venezuela stands 159th and absolute lowest in the world among countries that can be ranked.
Clif Ross, a writer, poet and filmmaker who was once a supporter of the Bolivarian Revolution, offers a longer historical frame. He says that from Venezuelan independence up until 1958, virtually every leader was a general of one sort or another, beginning with Simón Bolívar, who was born in Venezuela, led the struggle for independence, and was named the Liberator—a demigod and messianic figure to Venezuelans Hugo Chavez: Failed Messiah (2019). Democracy came in 1958, when the last military general was overthrown and civilian governments followed. Ross says Chávez, a lieutenant colonel, came along in 1992 to rescue the people, fulfilling that same pattern—rescuing them from democracy. The 1992 coup attempt failed, Chávez was imprisoned, then released, ran for president and won in 1998. Oil was about $10 a barrel at that point and he was a pretty orthodox president first; then the oil boom following the US invasion of Iraq sent prices skyrocketing, and Chávez, facing an unpopular referendum, won it by spending oil money on projects and boondoggles, egged on by Fidel Castro, and soon declared the Bolivarian Revolution.
The false messiah
Charlie Deist, guest-hosting, frames the 2019 episode around the title “Hugo Chavez: False Messiah,” asking what evidence places Chávez in the category of figures who try to create the kingdom of heaven on earth but do not follow the real way that brings lasting peace Hugo Chavez: Failed Messiah (2019). Ross answers that Venezuela today is the best evidence—it is in tatters, it has been destroyed—and invokes Eric Voegelin’s term “the immanentization of the eschaton,” the problem of the modern secularization of a Christian idea. Ross’s argument is that transcendent reality cannot be brought down to earth by force, and that attempts to make this world into a paradise have always been dismal failures. Quoting Karl Popper at the end of his article for Quillette, “The Bolivarian God That Failed,” Ross says we can work to eliminate evils but cannot create a perfect utopia without coercion, violence, force, massive numbers of people killed, repression, and lives destroyed.
Ross draws on Michael Barkun’s Disaster and the Millennium for the factors a millenarian movement requires: a series of complex crises, a population already predisposed to a millenarian ideology, and a charismatic figure. He says all three were present in Chávez. The previous attempt to build the Bolivarian utopia was called Great Venezuela under Carlos Andrés Pérez, who spent huge amounts of money during the oil boom of the 1970s in exactly the same way as Chávez, with corruption, leading to an IMF structural adjustment program in the early ’80s that by the early ’90s was so onerous that people rebelled in 1989—the Caracazo. Ross describes a messianic cult and a cargo cult around Chávez, and says he began borrowing massively to fund his projects. One project, ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, was to lend money to underdeveloped Latin American countries at 1 or 2% interest so they would not be indebted to the IMF, while Chávez himself was borrowing at 14% and 15% interest because the debts were so high he was becoming a credit risk.
Across episodes
The same question—how a country with so much going for it reached such a state—is argued in the 2017 Hodgson episode and the 2019 Ross episode, with Hodgson emphasizing Marxist ideology, Cuban infiltration and the resource curse, and Ross emphasizing Venezuelan military history, millenarian theory and Chávez’s borrowing. The 2019 Mike Munger episode treats Venezuela only in passing, as an example of a developed nation that reverted to developing status after electing a leader who said capitalism was not sufficiently considerate of the needs of the people Mike Munger is Taking Public Choice Seriously (2019). The episodes show no development in the treatment of Chávez between the earlier and later episodes.