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His name is Giovanni* and soon after we leave the airport we find ourselves imbedded in a barely-moving mass of cars, mopeds, and trucks, a traffic jam he had resignedly prophesied before our progress was so heavily forestalled along the main road between the Venezuelan coast and the urban-sprawl of Caracas. Giovanni owns two cars and is the boss and only employee of a transport service he began years ago. He is part of a small, slowly growing middle class in a country where according to him 80% of the people live in stark poverty, governed by a very wealthy elitist minority. Such a scenario is far from uncommon in South America, a continent where for many corruption is the norm and simply a way of life, a seemingly monolithic obstacle contributing in large part to the persistence of the gap between the very rich and the very poor (and the associated near-absence of a middle class).
The burgeoning Venezuelan middle class, Giovanni suggests, is confused, afraid, and somewhat unsure of their identity, capitalizing in part on the wealth of the now-nationalized petroleum industry, but feeling the effects of Chávez 's ever more openly socialist and dictatorial regime. Moving against privatization of all forms, Chávez has according to Giovanni begun reclaiming some peoples' land and homes, and Giovanni says he and other entrepreneurs like him are worried the government will soon come to claim their cars and houses as well. Chávez - apparently paranoid of being killed by the US government and a CIA coup to the point of refusing to live in the presidential palace like each of his predecessors, or even to tell the public where his residence actually is - hasn't yet begun any major acts of violence to maintain his power. Giovanni is sure, however, that it won't be long until people who speak and act against the regime start disappearing. Peaceful demonstrators and casually outspoken citizens have begun to suffer jail time in some instances, and the media is starting to fall completely under government control. Already there are times, Giovanni explains, when all radio and TV stations broadcast only the voice of Chávez for hours on end. In these broadcasts, the president speaks nationalistically about public works projects and community development tasks that Giovanni claims aren't actually being conducted but are instead one aspect of a broader project of propaganda used to create an illusion - nationally and internationally - of the Chávez regime as one concerned with and actively engaged in improving the welfare of the Venezuelan people.
Giovanni points to the garbage-strewn barrios with their ramshackle houses spewing over the hills surrounding Caracas and explains that the people struggling to survive here have no quality water or sewage system, and that gang violence over drugs, for example, results in countless deaths on a weekly basis; the money that Chávez claims is being directed to stem this suffering is in fact only being used to line the pockets of his friends and purchase Mercedes and BMWs for his political allies. Giovanni laughs somewhat bitterly and recalls a point when he talked on the phone with his sister, who has lived in France now for sometime. His sister spoke highly of Chávez , claiming that people in France were impressed with how much he was accomplishing in Venezuela. She initially refused to even believe her indignant brother when he protested that the apparent self-proclaimed successes of the Venezuelan president were no more than a well-crafted and well-presented mirage.
Now, Giovanni continues, with complete control of the military and the congress, Chávez can start being more bold and public in his moves to establish his vision of socialist Venezuela. Giovanni believes that Chávez will mirror the future Venezuela after the Cuba of Castro's golden days; apparently Chávez has already regaled Cuba with free petroleum (a gallon only costs 10 cents here) on several occasions in an effort to develop and maintain good relations with the Castro regime. Most recently in Chávez 's alarming and ever-more extreme leftist but internationally obscured decisions has been in relation to the food sector: Giovanni says exasperatedly that with no sense of the economy or the logistical effects of his actions, Chávez has begun taking over the meat and dairy industry. Within the last year, certain distributors and sellers of chicken and eggs, for example, have been shut down by the regime so the products can be sold in other venues, sometimes even abroad, leaving the Venezuelans at times with a complete a lack of food or with produce so expensive that it is completely unaffordable. Just yesterday, Giovanni grumbles, his wife went to buy chicken but found that all the local grocers had been unable to secure any poultry or eggs from the distributors, whose operations had had all their produce recently seized by Chávez.
As we near the address of my lodging in Caracas, Giovanni says that to understand how Chávez achieved his position of power, and why nobody will currently do anything concrete to prevent the despot from pursuing his agenda, I must understand the history of the president's predecessors. During the reign of the Venezuelan dictators Gómez [Juan Vincente Gómez**, 1908-14, 1922-29, 1931-35] and Jiménez [Marcos Pérez Jiménez, 1952-1958], Giovanni says, major, highly visible developments were achieved in the Caracas area and elsewhere. He takes one hand off the wheel to motion to the overpass arching above his taxi and the modern highway under the tires and explains that these are the same roads that were constructed under the direction of the regimes of those previous dictators. Their actions and devotion, in small part at least, to Venezuela and its people (in addition to the fatness of their own pockets) left the Venezuelans in a position of knowing a feeling of hope for their country and partial faith in its rulers, making it easy now for Chávez to convince the people that his views are in their best interest. Even if Chávez starts taking a more violent and militant stance to maintain his position of power and affluence, the precedent set by those previous despots might suggest to those yearning for a feeling of peace and prosperity here that Chávez will still bring to the country more money and perceived progress than it possess now, a big enough dangling carrot to keep the mule of the Venezuelan people struggling along even under back-breaking conditions.
*His name isn't actually Giovanni. I decided to use a different name because I don't think he'd want me to use his real name.
**According to Wikipedia, Gómez was granted by the Venezuelan Congress the title of El Benemérito (the Meritorious One) for his large-scale public works program and his role in Venezuela's development. Certainly the discovery of petroleum in Venezuela in 1918 provided Gómez with an enormous amount of monetary resources for the pursuit of development projects and, of course, for the benefit of his own fortune. Despite his contributions to the Venezuelan infrastructure, Gómez did use brutal tactics to maintain his position of power, "ruthlessly crushing his opponents through his secret police in a way that earned him the reputation of a tyrant".
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