Maduro, Chavismo and the Venezuelan Military

The protagonist of one of the most striking moments in last night’s post-election spectacle in Venezuela was not presumed victor Nicolás Maduro nor his unrelenting opponent Henrique Capriles, but rather Major General Wilmer Barrientos. One of several generals to speak in their own press conference, Barrientos is the Strategic Operational Commander of the Venezuelan (“Bolivarian”) National Armed Forces (Comandante Estratégico Operacional de la Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana or “FANB”), who was called upon to effectuate a military operation designed to ensure peaceful and transparent elections. In his press conference late last night (04/14/13), Barrientos celebrated the victory of governmental official candidate Maduro over opposition candidate Capriles, and declared that the opposition’s refusal to accept defeat was “irresponsible” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NmKWA3Cn3E).

The imagery of a stage packed with the Venezuelan top brass voicing their support of a political candidate brought to mind a statement made by Brazilian historian José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy of the University of São Paulo around 1984. As an outside observer of the campaigns and election process in the United States, he expressed dismay at the multimillion dollar marketing schemes that dragged on for more than a year, but came away with one critical observation: In the United States, nobody ever raised the question of which presidential candidate the military supported. Indeed, in the U.S. there is no such thing as an official candidate formally representing the armed forces. Brazil at the time was in the waning days of its 20-year military government. Five generals held the title of “President of the Republic” from April 1964 through March 1985, with a brief triumvirate junta in control in the latter half of 1969. Throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and other Latin American countries were abuzz with the notion of re-democratization: the transition from authoritarian power to democratically elected civilian control of the government. The discussions included not only issues of how to remove the yoke of “illegitimate” governments but also how to develop new forms of public policy with representational input and transparency. Three decades after much of the continent dealt with the transition away from military meddling or even direct control of the government, history seems to be poised to repeat itself in Venezuela.

Former career military man Hugo Chávez’s political career was a blend of authoritarianism and populism, not unlike numerous other charismatic politicians around the globe. Reminiscent of Munich’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Chávez first tried to seize power in a coup d’etat in February 1992, was unsuccessful and eventually imprisoned. Released in 1994, Chávez adjusted his strategy and developed his popular base to eventually win the 1998 presidential elections. In other words, his attempted military revolution failed as such, but laid the groundwork for his rise to power from within the framework of the existing constitution. After that, in the manner of Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s, Chávez began modifying the constitution and other political apparatuses to continually strengthen his own hold on presidential power. Under the laws that he had created, Chávez legally retained his position for 14 years. Yesterday’s election was practically a draw: official results gave Maduro approximately 50.7% of the vote and Capriles 49.1%. These figures reflect an almost evenly divided – and strongly polarized – country, similar to the situation in Chile under Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s. Maduro does not have the charisma of Chávez, but for now appears to have the Military’s support. The big questions are: How long will that support endure? And at what point will a true majority of the Venezuelan people tire asking who the military wants to run the country.

Chavismo without Chávez II

What is surprising is not that Hugo Chávez’s chosen successor Nicolás Maduro has claimed victory in the special election necessitated by Chávez’s death, but rather that even with the full force of the Chavista political machine the National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner with a margin of only 1.5%. As can be expected in such circumstances, opposition candidate Henrique Capriles has not recognized the results, and has called for the ballot boxes to be opened and the ballots recounted. Few international observers doubt that the ultimate victor of this election will be Maduro, given that the President of the National Electoral Council, Tibisay Lucena, stated that the announced results favoring Maduro were “irreversible,” and given that, as observed by the University of Miami’s Bruce Bagley, “In the final analysis, it will be the Chavistas counting the votes” (L.A. Times, 04/14/13, A3). Regardless of the final outcome or the recount – if there is one – one comment repeated tonight by Capriles goes to the heart of the situation. Addressing his opponent, Capriles said, “The loser is you” (“El derrotado es usted”). Just last October, an ailing Hugo Chávez extended his 14-year reign winning re-election against Capriles by almost 10 percentage points. Tonight Maduro’s “mandate from the people” depended on a difference of less than 235,000 votes, out of 18.9 million registered voters. It remains to be seen how he will be able to consolidate his support more effectively than during this brief campaign. It will be surprising if he learns how to project the kind of charisma that Chávez leveraged into what might best be deemed a “constitutional coup de etat.”

Significantly, the top brass of the Venezuelan armed forces announced their support for the official results. The military’s press conference included General Wilmer Barrientos – the man charged with ensuring the transparency and fairness of the election process – celebrating Maduro’s win.

Asian Globalization and Latin America

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I collaborated with Steve Heine at Florida International University on a project called “Asian Globalization and Latin America.”  Funded by a U. S. Department of Education Title VI-D grant and sponsored by FIU’s Latin American and Caribbean Center (http://lacc.fiu.edu/), our grant spawned research in Pacific Rim studies and the forerunners of BRICS (the association of the emerging economies of Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa). The focus of that early research and dissemination was the multi-level relationships between the established and emerging economies of East Asia and those of Latin America. A large amount of our work dealt with the Japan-Brazil connections, beginning with the arrival at the port of Santos of the Kasato Maru in 1908, and continuing up to the so-called “return immigration” of Nikkei-Brazilian workers to Japan in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Ironically, the beginning of Japanese immigration into Brazil was motivated by two contrary perceptions of Japanese racial identity: the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907 between the U.S. and Japan designed to curtail the immigration of Japanese manual labor into California in part as a response to anti-Japanese public opinion, and the re-marketing of Japanese identity as “white Asians” in order to promote immigration as laborers for Brazil’s booming coffee plantations at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. For a detailed discussion of Japanese immigration as part of the “whitening” of Brazil see Jeffrey Lesser’s Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil; also see Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism (Lesser, ed.)

At the same time that we began work on the grant, the second stage of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms started opening doors for foreign direct investment in the People’s Republic of China. The Asian globalization issues that developed from this policy revolved around the balancing of opportunities present in the pent-up commercial demands of a country with about a billion inhabitants, against the risks intrinsic in foreign enterprise coupled with at times contradictory stances from a government not accustomed to free-market practices. As we progressed into the first decade of the new millennium, the Chinese economy loomed immense in the world commercial outlook. The economic advantages of large numbers of very low-paid workers, and of minimal workplace regulations in terms of working conditions and salaries, combined to enable a flood of low-cost Chinese goods. The market realities led to China being able to undercut similar goods from Latin American producers even as many of the region’s economies strived to attain more stable and developed economies. Chinese made “knock-off” goods also led to conflicts of international intellectual property rights, a problem that had previous existed in Latin American economies during the periods of import substitution models in the 1970s and 1980s. The 2010s have seen a new role for Chinese products: a move toward not merely “Made in China” but rather “Created and Made in China.” As a Brazilian engineer put it after a 2012 trade show in Europe, in the past we would see armies of Chinese engineers roving the stands taking notes, and four to six months later the Chinese imitation products would hit the world markets. Now it’s the Chinese who have mounted their own stands with original products, especially high-end, luxury designs. In other words, the Chinese have leap-frogged over much of the Latin American industrial production while maintaining their output of lower-end, mass productions. This is viewed by many as an economic threat to the relative stability that the economies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico have experienced since the beginning of the recession that struck the U.S. and the Euro Zone.

As I write these words, Kim Jong-un’s saber rattling dominates global concerns regarding Asia. Headlines in Latin America’s major newspapers, such as the Jornal do Brasil and Argentina’s Clarín, share the concerns expressed in all major world media. As North Korean missiles stand poised for launch, international and regional interactions with Japan, China, and other East Asian countries – especially South Korean – also face the threat of disruption and potential global economic impact.