To the poor, Chavez is hope

Despite economic turbulence that has gripped Venezuela's poor, the embattled president retains their support.

By PHIL GUNSON
© St. Petersburg Times
published August 25, 2002

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Omar Leon should be playing an important softball game for the local amateur team. Instead, he's dressed in work clothes, sitting in the dirt, cutting lengths of 2-inch plastic pipe.

Leon is missing the game in order to bring drinking water to his neighbors in the San Miguel Arcangel barrio in eastern Caracas. "The team has to win today and tomorrow to go through to the finals," he says with a shrug. "But this is really important to me."

Leon chairs the San Miguel neighborhood association. With other local volunteers, he spends his evenings and weekends repairing steps, alleyways, water and sewage systems. The materials are provided at no charge by the municipality, which is run by President Hugo Chavez's Fifth Republic Movement.

The scheme is called Plan Mosquito, and it's one of the answers to a question that often puzzles Venezuelans and outsiders alike. Why, amid an acute economic crisis and worsening conditions for the poor, does the embattled leftist government retain so much support in the barrios?

The economy is likely to shrink this year by more than 3 percent, and inflation is set to top 30 percent. With figures like that, the anti-Chavez camp -- dominated by the middle class -- has been counting on the poor deserting the president. Poverty reduction was a major theme of his 1998 presidential campaign.

"We calculate the ranks of the poor have swollen by 15 percent in the last three years," says Luis Pedro Espana of the Catholic University, a leading poverty expert. Given the current recession, he adds, this year will see "a spectacular increase in poverty."

Among the poor, however, many continue to see Chavez, a former army officer, as their ally. "Now, we get help," says San Miguel resident Elsa de Navarro, 53. "Before, we would ask and ask and get nothing. Politicians never even came around here."

On Saturday, tens of thousands of Chavez supporters rallied in Caracas to show support for Chavez, and protest a Supreme Court decision this week absolving military leaders who lead the coup against him. Chavez even joined the march as it neared Congress.

Opinion polls suggest the president's support is around 30 to 35 percent. That puts him well ahead of many other South American leaders. It's a long way from the 80 percent-plus he commanded in 1999, but it's still bad news for the angry -- and vocal -- opposition. They came close to ousting Chavez in a coup in April and remain desperate to pry him from the presidential palace.

As the short-lived government of business leader Pedro Carmona crumbled April 12-13, thousands of slum-dwellers poured into the streets to demand the return of Chavez. Among the benefits they feared losing were improvements in health and education services.

"We have a clinic -- and there are doctors there," says de Navarro. "Before, you'd go and there was no one. They vaccinate the kids. I often pray to God to give strength to the government."

Free medical care

For two decades the Venezuelan public health system has been in decline. Anyone who can afford it uses private medicine. Among Chavez's first moves was to send military doctors to treat the poor for free and repair collapsing clinics. He also increased the share of the national budget devoted to health.

By ordering public school principals not to charge fees, the government increased the number of children in school by some 600,000. And popular markets, which aim to cut out middlemen, bring staples to barrio residents at more accessible prices.

Not far from San Miguel, in one of the few remaining pockets of colonial architecture in Caracas, stands the local town hall. An upstairs room, outside the office of council member Luis Mora, is always full of local residents waiting for service.

"Health had become a business in this country," Mora says. "And everything was privatized. Now we take medical teams into the barrios, and no one is charged a cent." In the town hall itself, a free clinic treats 100 to 150 people a day.

Outside, a group of men waits against the iron railings of the Plaza Bolivar. They are here to collect the 92,000 bolivares (about $66) each is owed for a week's construction work under a government "rapid employment plan."

The mood is not cheerful. Their regulation three months' work under the plan is over. "We thought if we put our backs into it and showed what good workers we are, they'd rehire us," says Helio Izquel, a bricklayer in his 50s. But the rules are strict.

Even among convinced chavistas, many admit that there is a long way to go. Angelica Gil is one of almost 2-million unemployed. Her 14-year-old son has had a fever for the past week and she says she can't afford the medicine. But she won't go to the free clinic because, she claims, the municipal authorities "only treat people they know will turn out to help them in the next election."

Around her, the sidewalk teems with street traders, mostly selling contraband clothes and other goods. Known in Venezuela as buhoneros, the street traders are among the one in every two workers employed in the "informal" economy.

Despite her misgivings about the local authorities, however, Gil is a convinced defender of what Chavez calls "the revolution."

"If they want to put a stop to it," she says, "they'll have to kill I don't know how many -- every Venezuelan. Because we (the poor) have never had anything. And we support this process because we see a light at the end of the tunnel."

'Our last hope'

The president himself said recently that even if his compatriots had to go "hungry and barefoot," the important thing was to defend the "revolution." The middle class was shocked. But in the barrios many understand and approve of the sentiment.

"This is not for us, whose lives are nearly over," Gil says. "It's for our children -- maybe they will have something better than we had. We're in this for keeps, even if it means going hungry."

Many experts doubt that the Chavez government will succeed. When almost half the population cannot afford daily food requirements, an economic plan that produces growth -- and hence employment -- is the only recipe, they argue.

Even a group of academics broadly sympathetic to the administration recently conceded that social justice existed "more in the rhetoric of the president . . . than in effective government action."

But Chavez, who was born into a provincial family of modest means, speaks a language the poor understand and is seen as "one of us."

"He's the only president who's ever gone into the really poor neighborhoods, where the opposition says only muggers live," says Gil.

Behind her hangs a reproduction, in poster form, of a naive-style painting showing Chavez in the jail cell he occupied after leading a failed coup in 1992. Above him, in the clouds, the spirit of independence hero Simon Bolivar hands down a sword. And from the floor emerge arms and hands, holding banners calling for freedom, work and justice.

The painter, Jorge Molina, says the image came to him in a dream. And it is the dream, more than the reality of "revolution," that keeps the faith alive. Chavez, says Gil, "is our last and only hope."

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