Why did Venezuela surrender to Chávez?

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Exactly half a century ago, Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez fled hurriedly abroad, overthrown by other military men after several weeks of popular disturbances. The episode was not surprising. Up to that point, Venezuela's political history had been a lamentable succession of violent leaderships imposed at the barrel of a gun.

Although the country nominally was a republic, it had not managed to organize the transfer of authority in a civilized manner, according to the law. It was not the citizens who ruled, as supposedly occurs in republics, but the saber-rattlers. Nevertheless, thanks to the income from oil, Venezuela had gradually prospered until it became one of the six wealthiest nations in Latin America.

Beginning in 1958, and for the following four decades, a miracle occurred. Venezuelans managed to peacefully change their leaders every five years, resorting to reasonably honest elections in which two parties -- the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats -- took turns in power.

In addition, in that period, the population -- half rural, half urban at the start of the democratic stage -- grew from seven million to 23 million people, of whom 86 percent in later years lived in cities generally supplied with electricity, telephone service, drinking water, sewage, paved streets, schools, sports arenas and medical assistance.

In 1999, when President Hugo Chávez began to govern, 87 of every 100 homes had color television, and the number of telephones per capita was greater than in Brazil or Mexico. At the same time, illiteracy affected only 9 percent of the population, public and private universities proliferated, millions of children attended school, and life expectancy was 73 years.

At that moment, ample middle-class sectors existed in the country, and Caracas, full of impressive buildings, had the finest contemporary art museum in all of Latin America. The institution, founded by Sofía Imber, hosted remarkable exhibits by fine artists of international rank.

There were major problems, naturally, but one indicator demonstrated Venezuela's relative success: Very few Venezuelans emigrated. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Colombians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Italians moved to that land in search of the opportunities they could not find in their respective countries, or -- as happened with the Cubans, Chileans and Argentines -- in search of the freedom that did not exist in their tyrannized countries.

Today, unhappily, the sign of the exodus has turned around. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans, many of them magnificently trained, flee to other, less-ludicrous social and economic climates where they can be free and make a decent living.

What happened in Venezuela in those 40 years -- with all its defects, the best four consecutive decades in its entire history -- and why did the country surrender so irresponsibly into the hands of a street-fair charlatan like Chávez?

The best answer I know appears in a recent book by Ramón Guillermo Aveledo, a university professor, writer and former president of the Chamber of Deputies. The Fourth Republic: Virtue and Sin, published in Caracas, describes with absolute objectivity ``the rights and the wrongs during the years that the civilians held power in Venezuela.''

Why did 62 percent of the Venezuelans, according to the polls at the time, support the bloody and failed military coup in 1992, when Chávez attempted to shoot to death the legitimate government of Carlos Andrés Pérez? Aveledo does not answer that question but places all the cards on the table so the reader may draw his own conclusions.

Aveledo was an unimpeachable politician, totally devoted to public service, but he knows that the corruption, impunity, patronage and economic disasters (many of them the result of the errors caused by Keynesianism, the prescriptions of the the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and so-called ''Dependency Theory'') alienated Venezuelans from the political class that governed them until they pushed the people into the arms of an ignorant adventurer, hoping that he might rapidly solve the ills that beset the country.

The lesson deduced from the Venezuelan experience is quite simple. The fragile republican structure, with its three independent powers, limited authority, accountability, and periodic and pluralistic elections can survive only if the entire society, led by the politicians who manage it, places itself humbly under the authority of the law.

Simultaneously, the whole of the population, in addition to perceiving that the rules are equitable and submitting to them, must look at the future with some hope. They must rationally believe that the system will allow them to gradually improve the quality of their lives. That failed in Venezuela, it seems. But it is not true that the 40 years of democracy were lost. The real disaster came afterward.

January 8, 2008

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