Opposition victory rocks Venezuela

As it happened, I was present as a journalist at the birth of a new model for Latin America.

It was an exciting time, that fall of 1998. Exactly a week before the presidential elections that would bring the dynamic, handsome, confusing Hugo Chávez to power, I sat talking with him in his beautiful apartment on a mountaintop overlooking Caracas for several hours, as though he had nothing better to do.

"I am not a communist, not a fascist," he began to think out loud, sitting dramatically, as if posed there, under a painting of the Latin American liberator Simon Bolivar. "I am a Bolivarian, whose ideology exists as an ideology of liberty. Bolivar was the author not only of physical independence but of an ideological project - for Latin America, for all the world."

His own Venezuela, about to be born, a model? "A model?" he repeated, almost mockingly. "There isn't any model - certainly not Cuba or the Soviet Union." Then he paused theatrically. "We don't copy other models," he summed up. "We invent them!"

Were Hugo Chávez alive today, part of him would doubtless be happy he died in 2013 for, by all appearances, his own model finally keeled over and died this week in a ferociously fought political battle that may change the southern Americas for all time.

Newspapers here called it everything from a "political earthquake" to a "resounding loss" for "Chavismo" to a "chance at revival" for one of this hemisphere's "lost countries." In some ways, the elections last Sunday might be compared to Cuba holding elections for the assembly and Fidel Castro being elected "out."

The elections, of course, were only for the legislature (Chavez once dubbed himself "Commander of the Constituent Assembly"), not the presidency. Chavez' hand-picked successor as president, Nicolas Maduro - a former bus driver who, if anything, has shown even less common-sensical political grasp than Chavez - remains as president, but ...

The elections gave the opposition, the Democratic Unity coalition, a grouping of business leaders, small entrepreneurs, freethinking politicians and sick-and-tired average Venezuelans, 112 of 167 seats in the new legislature. This is a veritable bombshell in a country where everything has been controlled by the ruling United Socialist Party since my "moment" with "El Comandante" in 1998.

While Chavez was alive, with his "Bolivarian socialism," or whatever it was called at any one moment, the government nationalized more than 1,500 companies, leaving the few privately owned companies without dollars to function. Venezuela's enormous oil wealth is at the heart of an economy that has contracted 10 percent this year alone, and 4 percent last year, according to the International Monetary Fund (in large part due to the decline in oil prices).

Inflation, at 200 percent, is the world's worst, and Venezuela now has the world's second-highest murder rate. Public hospitals constantly run out of medicines, and public universities have been shut for four months. In short, the average citizen's purchasing power has declined 60 percent so far this year alone, and dozens of political prisoners taken from the opposition rot in jail.

But none of this happens by chance; everything in the world, whether one's personal life or a nation's existential life, has roots and branches and soil.

The late Arturo Uslar Pietri, the most famous intellectual from Venezuela, explained this to me one day in 1992 as we chatted in his office in Caracas.

"Venezuela is the richest country in Latin America, by far," he said. "Yet, in the last 20 years, it received $250 billion in oil income for a country of no more than 15 million people and half of those people now live in poverty.

"There is not a public service - education, health, housing - that is not in crisis or that works. People are very angry at this miracle in reverse. There are many things happening here that are ... also general in Latin America."

The Venezuelan "democracy" he spoke of, which preceded Hugo Chávez' putative socialism, doomed the country to impoverishment, and then to Chavismo, because virtually all of the oil income went to the elected presidents. Politics itself consolidated around little groups called "cogollos," which meant that the center controls everything, while the people stand outside, waiting.

President Chavez tried at first to help the poor, but at heart he was too much of a classic leftist. He just loved going to Cuba and posing with Fidel! He couldn't stand the "yanqui" businessmen. He didn't understand capitalism. He had all the old Latin American vices, only delivered in revolution-talk, a la the 21st century.

So now, what model is there for Latin America? Are there any left? God forbid they would have to look to the United States!

Georgie Anne Geyer can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2015, Universal