Hugo Chavez and Donald Trump: it couldn't happen here, but it sort of almost did?
In May 1998 I came to Caracas to court my wife. We’d fallen in love while we lived in the USA, but she’d overstayed her visa and was quite homesick, so I took six weeks’ instruction in Spanish and followed her. I knew I was welcome in her parents’ flat in Magallanes. I knew Magallanes was a tough neighborhood, but I figured I could find employment, as I was then a college instructor in Math, so at least I could teach.
We have been married for twenty years and we have two daughters. Our personal story is in many respects more interesting than the one I shall tell, but please read on.
I did get work, teaching English to mostly upper-class individuals in Caracas. My students included Miss Venezuela and Mr. Venezuela (Venezuela takes beauty pageants as seriously as the USA takes the Olympics), individuals close to the top at various multi-nationals, an air traffic controller, several members of wealthy families who were about to take an American in-law or leave Venezuela entirely, middle managers at oil and telephone companies who dealt with Americans, rich kids who needed help with TOEFL exams, lawyers, doctors, and anyone else who could afford my employer’s hefty fee. As a native-born citizen of the USA with extensive experience in education and the ability to create material to supplement the textbooks we used, I proved very useful to my employer.
I arrived in the middle of the first election that Hugo Chavez, the late founder of the “Bolivarian Revolution.” I was against him from the start. I’m an elitist; I think that governments ought to be run by men and women who are trained in, and capable of upholding, the constitutions and systems they lead. This sentiment did not play as well with my colleagues at out small school in Caracas as you might imagine it would play at my college in the states.
That is all “water under the bridge” now, as the colleagues of mine who could get out of the country have done so. Everything I predicted has come true, even worse than I imagined, and I imagined a lot.
Hugo Chavez was a field-grade Army officer who led two attempted coups against the administration of Carlos Andres Perez in February and November 1992 and served time in prison for his crimes. By 1998 he had been released and was leading a field of eight or nine candidates for President. He confidently positioned himself as the populist in the race; it was common knowledge that he had Marxist leanings, but in May 1998 the inflation rate was 40%, the working class was basically done with the current parties, and even the middle managers I was instructing were under stress. “You can afford a house,” one of my students, an employee of TelCel, the mobile service provider, told me, “or you can afford a car payment. You can’t do both.”
Carols Andres Perez, by the way, was impeached in 1993, prosecuted again for embezzlement in 1996, but had been elected to the Senate and gained immunity, until the 1999 Constitution stripped away that immunity. He died in Miami in 2010. Chavez went on to win the presidency in that 1998 election, and hold that office until his death in 2013. His chosen successor, Nicolas Maduro, won the Presidency that year in a squeaker, and “won” (but please read “stole”) reelection in 2019. I wonder what my friends and family think of Perez today, if they think of him at all.
Salaries had not increased at the same rate as inflation. My fiancee was a receptionist at an import/export firm, and her monthly pay was good enough to buy her bus and train fares and half of the family groceries most months, if we took it easy on the meat and dairy and sweets. (She still has fond memories of company dinners at restaurants she would never afford otherwise.) Perhaps in a good month she could pay for the long-distance calls she occasionally made. My salary wasn’t much more. I chipped in for the expenses whenever I could. We went on very inexpensive dates: parks, afternoon movies at the English school, dinners at shopping mall food courts where we would buy one dinner and split it. Newspapers and coffee were still inexpensive enough to buy; beer and Coca-Cola were treats. I saved the rest for the occasional weekend getaway in the mountains south of Caracas, where it was cooler. We always traveled by bus, the least expensive means, and my fiancee pulled me off the bus whenever she saw something amiss—thieves would board the bus, draw weapons, and take what they could from the driver and passengers. Any passenger entering who didn’t seem legit? She would pull us off that bus—losing a fare was better than being robbed.
Payday in Caracas was always an adventure. With inflation so high, it was pointless to keep your money in an account—most of which paid single digit interest rates—so you needed to cash your check and buy your essentials while you could. Two hours was the standard wait time at the bank. When I fully realized I had no alternative, I changed my mood somewhat. My wife, my friends, and I would sing, laugh, tell crazy stories to pass the time. Often I’d buy a small can of soft drink for the teller, who always loved it and sometimes gulped it down before moving on to the next customer, as payday was stressful for them, too.
One of the very first things I noticed upon arriving to Magallanes was the pile of uncollected garbage--”pile” being perhaps too modest a phrase to describe it. Imagine enough garbage to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool crammed into an empty lot sufficiently removed from apartments but near enough to the bus stops we used. The garbage brought with it everything you’d expect: rats, stray dogs, a fearsome odor when the conditions were just right. When my wife and I talked about the state of the nation, the garbage pile always came up. “If the garbage pile is ever removed” became the condition for hope that Magallanes would get better.
By now, the Venezuealn Bolivar is worthless. You can search the exchange rate as you read this—as I write it’s more than 240,000 bolivar to 1 dollar. If you don’t have dollars you can’t function in the Venezuelan economy, aside from bartering goods and services.
My friends would often tell me that Venezuela is “such a rich country.” They meant it seriously, but I took it as a joke. I tried to explain what seemed obvious to me: Venezuela had the “resource curse,” and as long as the oil company was nationalized, highly regulated, and (ab)used by whichever administration was in charge to take care of unrelated expenses, Venezuela would never tap the wealth its oil reserves promised. Twenty years before I arrived, Venezuelans had indeed been wealthy enough to fly to Miami and shop, but this was an anomaly—oil sold for nearly $100 per barrel in 1979, the government redistributed enough of the wealth to allow even my in-laws, a dress-maker and TV repairman, to have some luxuries. This could not last. When I perused their LP collection I found that the vast majority of their records were purchased in the 1970s or earlier. There were no LPs from the 1990s.
In retrospect, I see that I “won” that argument, and that I am sorry that I did.
In the main, my time in Caracas was pleasant, given where I lived. My mother-in-law would watch me walk down the hill from the flat to the Plaza Sucre, just to make sure I got at least part of my way to work unmolested. My wife kept me on a tight lead, sometimes staying after her work so that I wouldn’t travel alone after 8pm. I memorized the routes of the private “mini-bus” lines that I needed to use to get to my school, the British Council library, the gardens, and the parks. The informal family curfew from dusk to dawn was a strain, but as Caracas is 10 degrees north of the equator, there were always enough daylight hours to take care of all that I needed to do. It was often jarring to take tea from the butler at the top floor of a bank building at 3pm and find myself trudging through garbage in a rainstorm two hours later, soaked to the bone, trying to dodge the dog shit and garbage flowing through the streets; or to watch a lovely sunset from my in-laws’ balcony, then look down on half-naked kids playing in the trash. I spent my working hours among the wealthy but lived near the destitute.
We haven’t returned since 2006. My wife’s family thinks that I or either of our daughters would get kidnapped, and they don’t think our visit would be worth the risk. My in-laws, sister-in-law, and niece live with or near us now. (Our crime rate is significant, but it’s nowhere near theirs, and of course you can eat in the USA.) My brother-in-law recently revisited Magallanes, and he was certain he’d get mugged, until he found one former neighbor, who signaled to the others that he was okay. The best man at my wedding worked as a negotiator, and the security firm at which he worked specialized in negotiating the release of kidnapped foreign oil workers. I almost applied for a teaching post in 2017 in the state of Monagas. I figured my brother-in-law could live with me and share the food. Both my wife and brother-in-law said “no, you must be crazy,” and killed the idea.
To the extent that regular Americans think of Venezuela at all, it’s either as the poster child for Socialism or a cautionary tale: “If you let AOC and her squad gain power, we’ll wind up just like them.” This misses the mark badly. There are Socialist countries (and not all in Europe) that manage better than Venezuela has. We also miss the eerie similarities between Hugo Chavez and Donald Trump.
Both Chavez and Trump were very good on TV. In the case of Trump this is obvious, for if he were never the star of “The Apprentice,” would he have more than a snowball’s chance of snagging the 2016 Republican nomination? I seriously doubt that. Chavez had Trump’s ability on TV and radio—his radio call-in show “Allo Presidente” was a big hit. He deftly managed the response to the mudslides that devastated La Guaira in December 1999, reading messages from loved ones and the names of the missing on air. Though I was against both Trump and Chavez from the start, I had to admit they could do TV better than their competition.
Both Chavez and Trump have sensationally large egos that needed to be stroked at every moment. After I heard and read President Trump’s inauguration address, I asked my friends whether they heard Chavez in it. They said it was a perfect copy: “the elites have failed you, I can fix it, the carnage stops here.”
You may doubt me, but please read this article from Reuters and re-published by the National Review (6/27/2007):
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Insecurity, “malignant narcissism” and the need for adulation are driving Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s confrontation with the United States, according to a new psychological profile.
Eventually, these personality traits are likely to compel Chavez to declare himself Venezuela’s president for life, said Dr. Jerrold Post, who has just completed the profile for the U.S. Air Force.
Chavez won elections for a third term last December. Since then he has stepped up his anti-American rhetoric, vowed to accelerate a march towards “21st Century socialism” and suggested that he intends to stay in power until 2021 — a decade beyond his present term.
But Post — who profiled foreign leaders in a 21-year career at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and now is the director of the Political Psychology Program at George Washington University — doubts that Chavez plans to step down even then. “He views himself as a savior, as the very embodiment of Venezuela,” Post said in an interview.
“He has been acting increasingly messianic and so he is likely to either get the constitution rewritten to allow for additional terms or eventually declare himself president-for-life.”
Post portrays Chavez as “a masterful political gamesman” who knows that his popularity largely rests on being seen as a strong leader who takes on the United States, the Venezuelan elite and a host of other perceived enemies — often with public insults that are rarely used by other leaders.
“To keep his followers engaged, he must continue outrageous and inflammatory attacks,” Post said.
Even Chavez’s most determined opponents concede that he is a gifted orator and has a rare ability to mesmerize audiences. In the language of political psychology, this is a “charismatic leader-follower relationship.”
This was hilarious while I was a spectator in Caracas, secure in the comfort of my US citizenship, with the understanding that I could leave at any time. It’s not so funny now. The behaviors described in every paragraph above apply to President Trump.
Both Trump and Chavez have been determined to weaken or kill institutions that stood in the way of their desired control of the government. In this case, Chavez mostly succeeded. A constituent assembly convened in 1999 and rewrote the previous Constitution (which dated from 1961, and had been the longest-serving constitution the people of Venezuela had enjoyed in their history). That constitution passed a national referendum later that year. I asked my friends what was in it: “I don’t know, but Chavez says we need it, so let’s have it,” was the average reply. It was nicer to Chavez than to the people, expanding his term from five to six years, and setting a limit of two terms, though this was abolished in a separate referendum in 2009—confirming the intuition of Dr. Jerrold Post in the Reuters article above. Ironically, a feature of this very constitution (Article 333) would be used by the leader of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido, to declare himself the transitional leader of Venezuela until elections could be called, as the re-election of Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, was deemed illegal. My friends and family believer that this action, taken in January 2019, would lead to the salvation of Venezuela. “How many divisions does Guaido have?” I asked. “Where are your weapons? Will any of Venezuela’s neighbors join your fight? Can the USA help?” Now, more than eighteen months later, Maduro still controls Venezuela.
Incidentally, that Constitution established free, quality health care as a right to every Venezuelan citizen. That system, however, is so lacking in funding that patients need to bring their own food, bedding, medicines, and even a relative to look after them while in hospital. The system has no antibiotics, so that patients with gunshot wounds (still very prevalent there) must have amputations; otherwise, the infections spread and becomes a greater threat than was the wound. My sister-in-law, first a nurse and later a doctor at a military hospital in Caracas, was routinely brought to tears by these deficiencies.
Chavez and Trump both preferred loyalty to competence when choosing ministers and supervisors. “You wouldn’t believe the idiocy of the people he chooses to oversee oil production,” one of my students, who worked for PDVSA, the national oil company, told me. “They don’t know anything about the industry. And we have to take their orders!” Today, Venezuela, which in 1998 exported approximately one-eighth of the oil the USA imported, is the third-smallest oil producer in OPEC, ahead of only Equatorial Guinea and Libya.
Neither Chavez nor President Trump seemed to understand economics. Trump thinks that the biggest problem we have is the trade deficit with China, doesn’t understand that we get stuff from the deal, and then promotes policies that ironically make our currency stronger, increasing the trade deficit he rails against. Trump imposes tariffs that US consumers pay for, and spends so recklessly that my brother and I are convinced we shall see a currency crisis in the 2020s. (As of September 2021 I am still convinced.)
Chavez’s plan was much more simple: make OPEC great again. This plan worked for a while: oil revenue went up, and Chavez re-distributed it to his people (his cronies directly and richly and the people indirectly and less generously). In my 2006 visit I even saw the neighborhood garbage pile cleaned up, something I had believed would never come to pass. But, as all economies dependent on the value of one export learn, the price of that export can collapse. The Maduro government had by then imposed strict price and wage controls that chased away just about all Venezuelan food production, which was fine if you could import food with oil money, but terrible when that you couldn’t afford that, either. Farms had been collectivized and given to loyalists. The in-laws who remain in Caracas depend on a monthly food ration that is tolerable as long as they can collect my in-laws’ share while those in-laws reside here. The people of Venezuela are starving.
You may wonder, then, how does Maduro get by? An amusing video I saw recently puts his position clearly. The Caracas Metro is running slowly, and there are crowds of Venezolanos waiting (hoping) for the next train. The man holding the phone shouts “Maduro!” and the crowd screams “Chinga Tu Madre” in reply. The phrase translates to something you should never consider doing to your mother. Maduro is despised by all and can’t manage to feed his people, but he has the loyalty of the Army—the Army gets a cut of the smuggling of gasoline and metals and drugs at market prices.
Family members tell me that Maduro isn’t in charge of the day-to-day events—the drug gangs are. The definition of a failed state: a state whose political or economic system has become so weak that the government is no longer in control. In another era, the US would engineer a coup or invasion to remove the government. We wouldn’t now, since we’ve calculated the loss of lives and material isn’t worth it, and we don’t have the stomach to eliminate yet another left-wing government, no matter how dreadful it is. I tell my in-laws to hang on, and that the Maduro regime will last as long as they have the Army’s support, or until one of its neighbors decides to invade.
Most of the US public didn’t give President Trump any of the deference that the Venezuelans gave President Chavez, but they might have—if President Trump were not so lazy and incompetent, and the opposition were not united. President Trump that he didn’t have the full set of President Chavez’s skills on TV—empathy and coherence were lacking. The 2020 election was close enough to make Trump’s opposition glad that he was so incompetent; if he had governed responsibly during the pandemic, he’d have won the 2020 election, but he blew it. I suspect Hugo Chavez would have done no better, but that he would have been much more disciplined and on-message in his repeated television appearances that the opposition would not have been able to win a small majority of the legislature.
My advice to Americans is more or less the same as that which I give the Venezuelans. Be ready to defend political freedom with everything you’ve got, remain united in opposition, stay as happy and as optimistic as you can be, but never assume that things can’t get worse than they already are. Don’t treat elections as battles that must be won by any means necessary. Don’t accept simple solutions to complicated problems. Defend individual rights, especially for those who disagree with you. I used to think that we couldn’t collapse the way Venezuela did over the last twenty years, but if we had years of repeated inflation and stagnant employment and wages through the 2020s, I could see it happen here. The next authoritarian candidate for US President might be a Chavez and not a Trump.