By
Javier Corrales / Foreign Policy
Just
when you thought Latin America was safe for democracy, along
came Hugo Chávez. The charismatic Venezuelan president
has amassed a stunning amount of power and become the world’s
most strident anti-American. Chávez is also a political
innovator who has created a playbook for authoritarians in a
democratic age—and leaders everywhere are taking notes.
-
Javier Corrales
Ever heard of a regime that gets stronger the more opposition
it faces? Welcome to Venezuela, where the charismatic president,
Hugo Chávez, is practicing a new style of authoritarianism.
Part provocateur, part CEO, and part electoral wizard, Chávez
has updated tyranny for today.
As the 20th
century drew to a close, Latin America finally seemed to have
escaped its reputation for military dictatorships. The democratic
wave that swept the region starting in the late 1970s appeared
unstoppable. No Latin American country except Haiti had reverted
to authoritarianism. There were a few coups, of course, but
they all unraveled, and constitutional order returned. Polls
in the region indicated growing support for democracy, and the
climate seemed to have become inhospitable for dictators.
Then came
Hugo Chávez, elected president of Venezuela in December
1998. The lieutenant colonel had attempted a coup six years
earlier. When that failed, he won power at the ballot box and
is now approaching a decade in office. In that time, he has
concentrated power, harassed opponents, punished reporters,
persecuted civic organizations, and increased state control
of the economy. Yet, he has also found a way to make authoritarianism
fashionable again, if not with the masses, with at least enough
voters to win elections. And with his fiery anti-American, anti-neoliberal
rhetoric, Chávez has become the poster boy for many leftists
worldwide.
Many experts,
and certainly Chávez’s supporters, would not concede
that Venezuela has become an autocracy. After all, Chávez
wins votes, often with the help of the poor. That is the peculiarity
of Chávez’s regime. He has virtually eliminated
the contradiction between autocracy and political competitiveness.
What’s
more, his accomplishment is not simply a product of charisma
or unique local circumstances. Chávez has refashioned
authoritarianism for a democratic age. With elections this year
in several Latin American states—including Mexico and
Brazil—his leadership formula may inspire like-minded
leaders in the region. And his international celebrity status
means that even strongmen outside of Latin America may soon
try to adopt the new Chávez look.
The Democratic
Disguise
There are
no mass executions or concentration camps in Venezuela. Civil
society has not disappeared, as it did in Cuba after the 1959
revolution. There is no systematic, state-sponsored terror leaving
scores of desaparecidos, as happened in Argentina and Chile
in the 1970s. And there is certainly no efficiently repressive
and meddlesome bureaucracy à la the Warsaw Pact. In fact,
in Venezuela, one can still find an active and vociferous opposition,
elections, a feisty press, and a vibrant and organized civil
society. Venezuela, in other words, appears almost democratic.
But
when it comes to accountability and limits on presidential power,
the picture grows dark. Chávez has achieved absolute
control of all state institutions that might check his power.
In 1999, he engineered a new constitution that did away with
the Senate, thereby reducing from two to one the number of chambers
with which he must negotiate. Because Chávez only has
a limited majority in this unicameral legislature, he revised
the rules of congress so that major legislation can pass with
only a simple, rather than a two-thirds, majority. Using that
rule, Chávez secured congressional approval for an expansion
of the Supreme Court from 20 to 32 justices and filled the new
posts with unabashed revolucionarios, as Chavistas call themselves.
Chávez
has also become commander in chief twice over. With the traditional
army, he has achieved unrivaled political control. His 1999
constitution did away with congressional oversight of military
affairs, a change that allowed him to purge disloyal generals
and promote friendly ones. But commanding one armed force was
not enough for Chávez. So in 2004, he began assembling
a parallel army of urban reservists, whose membership he hopes
to expand from 100,000 members to 2 million. In Colombia, 10,000
right-wing paramilitary forces significantly influenced the
course of the domestic war against guerrillas. Two million reservists
may mean never having to be in the opposition.
As important,
Chávez commands the institute that supervises elections,
the National Electoral Council, and the gigantic state-owned
oil company, PDVSA, which provides most of the government’s
revenues. A Chávez-controlled election body ensures that
voting irregularities committed by the state are overlooked.
A Chávez-controlled oil industry allows the state to
spend at will, which comes in handy during election season.
Chávez
thus controls the legislature, the Supreme Court, two armed
forces, the only important source of state revenue, and the
institution that monitors electoral rules. As if that weren’t
enough, a new media law allows the state to supervise media
content, and a revised criminal code permits the state to imprison
any citizen for showing “disrespect” toward government
officials. By compiling and posting on the Internet lists of
voters and their political tendencies—including whether
they signed a petition for a recall referendum in 2004—Venezuela
has achieved reverse accountability. The state is watching and
punishing citizens for political actions it disapproves of rather
than the other way around. If democracy requires checks on the
power of incumbents, Venezuela doesn’t come close.
Polarize
and Conquer
Chávez’s
power grabs have not gone unopposed. Between 2001 and 2004,
more than 19 massive marches, multiple cacerolazos (pot-bangings),
and a general strike at PDVSA virtually paralyzed the country.
A coup briefly removed him from office in April 2002. Not long
thereafter, and despite obstacles imposed by the Electoral Council,
the opposition twice collected enough signatures—3.2 million
in February 2003 and 3.4 million in December 2003—to require
a presidential recall referendum.
But that
was as far as his opponents got. Chávez won the referendum
in 2004 and deflated the opposition. For many analysts, Chávez’s
ability to hold on to power is easy to explain: The poor love
him. Chávez may be a caudillo, the argument goes, but
unlike other caudillos, Chávez approximates a bona fide
Robin Hood. With inclusive rhetoric and lavish spending, especially
since late 2003, Chávez has addressed the spiritual and
material needs of Venezuela’s poor, which in 2004 accounted
for 60 percent of the country’s households.
Yet reducing
Chávez’s political feats to a story about social
redemption overlooks the complexity of his rule—and the
danger of his precedent. Undeniably, Chávez has brought
innovative social programs to neighborhoods that the private
sector and the Venezuelan state had all but abandoned to criminal
gangs, though many of his initiatives came only after he was
forced to compete in the recall referendum. He also launched
one of the most dramatic increases in state spending in the
developing world, from 19 percent of gross domestic product
in 1999 to more than 30 percent in 2004. And yet, Chávez
has failed to improve any meaningful measure of poverty, education,
or equity. More damning for the Chávez-as-Robin Hood
theory, the poor do not support him en masse. Most polls reveal
that at least 30 percent of the poor, sometimes even more, disapprove
of Chávez. And it is safe to assume that among the 30
to 40 percent of the electorate that abstains from voting, the
majority have low incomes.
Chávez’s
inability to establish control over the poor is key to understanding
his new style of dictatorship—call it “competitive
autocracy.” A competitive autocrat has enough support
to compete in elections, but not enough to overwhelm the opposition.
Chávez’s coalition today includes portions of the
poor, the bulk of the thoroughly purged military, and many long-marginalized
leftist politicians. Chávez is thus distinct from two
other breeds of dictators: the unpopular autocrat who has few
supporters and must resort to outright repression, and the comfortable
autocrat, who faces little opposition and can relax in power.
Chávez’s opposition is too strong to be overtly
repressed, and the international consequences of doing so would
in any case be prohibitive. So Chávez maintains a semblance
of democracy, which requires him to outsmart the opposition.
His solution is to antagonize, rather than to ban. Chávez’s
electoral success has less to do with what he is doing for the
poor than with how he handles organized opposition. He has discovered
that he can concentrate power more easily in the presence of
a virulent opposition than with a banned opposition, and in
so doing, he is rewriting the manual on how to be a modern-day
authoritarian. Here’s how it works.
Attack
Political Parties: After Chávez’s attempt to take
power by way of coup failed in 1992, he decided to try elections
in 1998. His campaign strategy had one preeminent theme: the
evil of political parties. His attacks on partidocracia were
more frequent than his attacks against neoliberalism, and the
theme was an instant hit with the electorate. As in most developing-country
democracies, discontent with existing parties was profound and
pervasive. It attracted the right and the left, the young and
old, the traditional voter as well as the nonvoter. Chávez’s
antiparty stand not only got him elected, but by December 1999
also allowed him to pass one of the most antiparty constitutions
among Latin American democracies. His plan to concentrate power
was off to a good start.
Polarize
Society: Having secured office, the task of the competitive
autocrat is to polarize the political system. This maneuver
deflates the political center and maintains unity within one’s
ranks. Reducing the size of the political center is crucial
for the competitive autocrat. In most societies, the ideological
center is numerically strong, a problem for aspiring authoritarians
because moderate voters seldom go for extremists—unless,
of course, the other side becomes immoderate as well.
The solution
is to provoke one’s opponents into extreme positions.
The rise of two extreme poles splits the center: The moderate
left becomes appalled by the right and gravitates toward the
radical left, and vice versa. The center never disappears entirely,
but it melts down to a manageable size. Now, our aspiring autocrat
stands a chance of winning more than a third of the vote in
every election, maybe even the majority. Chávez succeeded
in polarizing the system as early as October 2000 with his Decree
1011, which suggested he would nationalize private schools and
ideologize the public school system. The opposition reacted
predictably: It panicked, mobilized, and embraced a hard-core
position in defense of the status quo. The center began to shrink.
Chávez’s
supporters, meanwhile, were energized and not inclined to quibble
as he colonized institutional obstacles to his power. This energy
within the movement is essential to the competitive autocrat,
who actually faces a greater chance of internal dissent than
unpopular dictators because his coalition of supporters is broader
and more heterogeneous. So he must constantly identify mechanisms
for alleviating internal tensions. The solution is simple: co-opt
disgruntled troops through lavish rewards and provoke the opposition
so that there is always a monster to rail against. The largesse
creates incentives for the troops to stay, and the provocations
eliminate incentives to switch sides.
Spread the
Wealth Selectively: Those expecting Chávez’s populism
to benefit citizens according to need, rather than political
usefulness, do not understand competitive autocracy. Chávez’s
populism is grandiose, but selective. His supporters will receive
unimaginable favors, and detractors are paid in insults. Denying
the opposition spoils while lavishing supporters with booty
has the added benefit of enraging those not in his camp and
fueling the polarization that the competitive autocrat needs.
Chávez
has plenty of resources from which he can draw. He is, after
all, one of the world’s most powerful CEOs in one of the
world’s most profitable businesses: selling oil to the
United States. He has steadily increased personal control over
PDVSA. With an estimated $84 billion in sales for 2005, PDVSA
has the fifth-largest state-owned oil reserves in the world
and the largest revenues in Latin America after PEMEX, the Mexican
state-oil company. Because PDVSA participates in both the wholesale
and retail side of oil sales in the United States (it owns CITGO,
one of the largest U.S. refining companies and gas retailers),
it makes money whether the price of oil is high or low.
But
sloshing around oil money isn’t polarizing enough. Chávez
needs conflict, and his recent expropriation of private land
has provided it. In mid-2005, the national government, in cooperation
with governors and the national guard, began a series of land
grabs. Nearly 250,000 acres were seized in August and September,
and the government announced that it intends to take more. The
constitution permits expropriations only after the National
Assembly consents or the property has been declared idle. Chávez
has found another way—questioning land titles and claiming
that the properties are state-owned. Chávez supporters
quickly applauded the move as virtuous Robinhoodism. Of course,
a government sincerely interested in helping the poor might
have simply distributed some of the 50 percent of Venezuelan
territory it already owns, most of which is idle. But giving
away state land would not enrage anyone.
Most
expropriated lands will likely end up in the hands of party
activists and the military, not the very poor. Owning a small
plot of land is a common retirement dream among many Venezuelan
sergeants, which is one reason that the military is hypnotized
by Chávez’s land grab. Shortly after the expropriations
were announced, a public dispute erupted between the head of
the National Institute of Lands, Richard Vivas, a radical civilian,
and the minister of food, Rafael Oropeza, an active-duty general,
over which office would be in charge of expropriations. No one
expects the military to walk away empty-handed.
Allow the
Bureaucracy to Decay, Almost: Some autocracies, such as Burma’s,
seek to become legitimate by establishing order; others, like
the Chinese Communist Party, by delivering economic prosperity.
Both types of autocracies need a top-notch bureaucracy. A competitive
autocrat like Chávez doesn’t require such competence.
He can allow the bureaucracy to decline—with one exception:
the offices that count votes.
Perhaps
the best evidence that Chávez is fostering bureaucratic
chaos is cabinet turnover. It is impossible to have coherent
policies when ministers don’t stay long enough to decorate
their offices. On average, Chávez shuffles more than
half of his cabinet every year. And yet, alongside this bureaucratic
turmoil, he is constructing a mighty electoral machine. The
best minds and the brightest técnicos run the elections.
One of Chávez’s most influential electoral whizzes
is the quiet minister of finance, Nelson Merentes, who spends
more time worrying about elections than fiscal solvency. Merentes’s
job description is straightforward: extract the highest possible
number of seats from mediocre electoral results. This task requires
a deep understanding of the intricacies of electoral systems,
effective manipulation of electoral districting, mobilization
of new voters, detailed knowledge about the political proclivities
of different districts, and, of course, a dash of chicanery.
A good head for numbers is a prerequisite for the job. Merentes,
no surprise, is a trained mathematician.
The results
are apparent. Renewing a passport in Venezuela can take several
months, but more than 2.7 million new voters have been registered
in less than two years (almost 3,700 new voters per day), according
to a recent report in El Universal, a pro-opposition Caracas
daily. For the recall referendum, the government added names
to the registry list up to 30 days prior to the vote, making
it impossible to check for irregularities. More than 530,000
foreigners were expeditiously naturalized and registered in
fewer than 20 months, and more than 3.3 million transferred
to new voting districts.
Chávez’s
electoral strategists have also figured out how to game the
country’s bifurcated electoral system, in which 60 percent
of officeholders are elected as individuals and the rest of
the seats go to lists of candidates compiled by parties. The
system is designed to favor the second-largest party. The party
that wins the uninominal election loses some seats in the proportional
representation system, which then get assigned to the second-
largest party.
To massage
this system, the government has adopted the system of morochas,
local slang for twins. The government’s operatives create
a new party to run separately in the uninominal elections. And
so Chávez’s party avoids the penalty that would
normally hit the party that wins in both systems. The benefit
that would otherwise go to an opposition party gets captured
instead by the same people that win the individual seats—the
precise outcome the system was designed to avoid. In the August
2005 elections for local office, for instance, Chávez’s
party secured 77 percent of the seats with only 37 percent of
the votes in the city of Valencia. Without morochas, the government’s
share of seats would have been 46 percent. The legality of many
of the government’s strategies is questionable. And that
is where controlling the National Electoral Council and the
Supreme Court proves useful. To this day, neither body has found
fault with any of the government’s electoral strategies.
Antagonize
the Superpower: Following the 2004 recall referendum, in which
Chávez won 58 percent of the vote, the opposition fell
into a coma, shocked not so much by the results as by the ease
with which international observers condoned the Electoral Council’s
flimsy audit of the results. For Chávez, the opposition’s
stunned silence has been a mixed blessing. It has cleared the
way for further state incursions, but it left Chávez
with no one to attack. The solution? Pick on the United States.
Chávez’s
attacks on the United States escalated noticeably at the end
of 2004. He has accused the United States of plotting to kill
him, crafting his overthrow, placing spies inside PDVSA, planning
to invade Venezuela, and terrorizing the world. Trashing the
superpower serves the same purpose as antagonizing the domestic
opposition: It helps to unite and distract his large coalition—with
one added advantage. It endears him to the international left.
All
autocrats need international support. Many seek this support
by cuddling up to superpowers. The Chávez way is to become
a ballistic anti-imperialist. Chávez has yet to save
Venezuela from poverty, militarism, corruption, crime, oil dependence,
monopoly capitalism, or any other problem that the international
left cares about. With few social- democratic accomplishments
to flaunt, Chávez desperately needs something to captivate
the left. He plays the anti-imperialist card because he has
nothing else in his hand.
The beauty
of the policy is that, in the end, it doesn’t really matter
how the United States responds. If the United States looks the
other way (as it more or less did prior to 2004), Chávez
appears to have won. If the United States overreacts, as it
increasingly has in recent months, Chávez proves his
point. Aspiring autocrats, take note: Trashing the United States
is a low-risk, high-return policy for gaining support.
Controlled
Chaos
Ultimately,
all authoritarian regimes seek power by following the same principle.
They raise society’s tolerance for state intervention.
Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century British philosopher, offered
some tips for accomplishing this goal. The more insecurity that
citizens face—the closer they come to living in the brutish
state of nature—the more they will welcome state power.
Chávez may not have read Hobbes, but he understands Hobbesian
thinking to perfection. He knows that citizens who see a world
collapsing will appreciate state interventions. Chávez
therefore has no incentive to address Venezuela’s assorted
crises. Rather than mending the country’s catastrophic
healthcare system, he opens a few military hospitals for selected
patients and brings in Cuban doctors to run ad hoc clinics.
Rather than addressing the economy’s lack of competitiveness,
he offers subsidies and protection to economic agents in trouble.
Rather than killing inflation, which is crucial to alleviating
poverty, Chávez sets price controls and creates local
grocery stores with subsidized prices. Rather than promoting
stable property rights to boost investment and employment, he
expands state employment.
Like most
fashion designers, Chávez is not a complete original.
His style of authoritarianism has influences. His anti-Americanism,
for instance, is pure Castro; his use of state resources to
reward loyalists and punish critics is quintessential Latin
American populism; and his penchant for packing institutions
was surely learned from several market-oriented presidents in
the 1990s.
Chávez
has absorbed and melded these techniques into a coherent model
for modern authoritarianism. The student is now emerging as
a teacher, and his syllabus suits today’s post-totalitarian
world, in which democracies in developing countries are strong
enough to survive traditional coups by old-fashioned dictators
but besieged by institutional disarray. From Ecuador to Egypt
to Russia, there are vast breeding grounds for competitive authoritarianism.
When President
Bush criticized Chávez after November’s Summit
of the Americas in Argentina, he may have contented himself
with the belief that Chávez was a lone holdout as a wave
of democracy sweeps the globe. But Chávez has already
learned to surf that wave quite nicely, and others may follow
in his wake.
Oil money
and an expansive ideology mean that Chávez’s influence
knows no bounds.
When Hugo
Chávez travels, controversy rarely trails far behind.
In recent years, the Venezuelan leader’s peregrinations
have come to resemble an anti-American road show. He makes it
a point to visit countries on the outs with the United States—Cuba,
Iran, and Libya—where he is feted as a brave and progressive
statesman.
But Chávez
is peddling more than an anti-American tirade. His potent mix
of ideology and oil money is increasingly leading him to meddle
in the internal politics of his neighbors, much to the frustration
of some Latin American leaders. “Chávez is orchestrating
a campaign throughout Latin America to inject himself into the
electoral processes of Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, and Nicaragua,”
says former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda.
A favored
Chávez tactic is funding left-leaning civil society groups
with political aspirations. In Nicaragua, he has stumped for
Marxist Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and offered him cheap
oil. Chávez has supported Brazil’s Landless Workers
Movement, which is pushing for dramatic land redistribution.
The Venezuelan president has also been active in Bolivia, where
he has funded the cocaleros, a powerful group of small-farm
owners that opposes coca eradication efforts. Evo Morales, the
Bolivian leftist leader, has even taken to calling Chávez
“mi comandante.”
Rumors
of Chávez’s machinations are everywhere in Latin
America—and Chávez seems content to see them spread.
Ecuador’s El Comercio newspaper recently reported that
members of an underground leftist movement there had received
weapons training in Venezuela. In Mexico, there are published
reports that the Venezuelan Embassy has become a hub for antigovernment
activities. Venezuela, it appears, is not enough for Chávez.
Hugo
Chávez’s Rules for the Aspiring Dictator
|
OUT |
IN |
| Old-fashioned
Authoritarianism |
Chavismo
|
|
Ban
legislative bodies |
Revise rules so that sweeping changes require fewer votes |
| Ban
opposition parties |
Antagonize
them |
| Desaparecidos:
Make your political opponents disappear |
Aparecidos:
Make new voters suddenly appear on electoral rolls |
| Keep
a low international profile |
Parade
abroad with an antiglobalization message |
| Consolidate
power within the military |
Create
an army of reservists |
| Spend
on big public-works projects |
Spend
on ad hoc social services |
| Appoint
experts to handle economic affairs |
Appoint
experts to handle electoral strategies |
| Use
torture, curfews, and intimidation to keep people in line
|
Allow
rampant crime to keep people off the streets |
| Ban
the vote or conduct massive fraud |
Publicize
lists of voters and their voting habits |
| Warn
about "destabilizing" domestic groups |
Warn
about the dangers of George Bush |
Javier
Corrales,
is an associate professor of government at Amherst College.
Ph.D. in political science, Harvard University; a Fulbright
Scholar in Caracas where he taugth at the Institute of Higher
Studies in Administration (IESA). He is the author of Presidents
Without Parties: the Politics of Economic Reform in Argentina
and Venezuela in the 1990s (Penn State Press 2002). Fellow at
the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington,
D.C., consultant for the World Bank, the United Nations, and
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Petroleumworld not
necessarily share these views.
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