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PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
On Sunday night, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was reelected. Now joining us from
New York City to talk about his views on the election is Gregory Wilpert. He's a sociologist
who between the years 2000 and 2008 lived in Venezuela, where he taught at the Central
University of Venezuela. And he also founded Venezuelanalysis.com. In 2007 he published
the book Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The History and Policies of the Chavez Government.
He moved back to the U.S. in 2008 when his wife was named consul general of Venezuela
in New York. And since returning to the U.S., he's been adjunct professor of political science
at Brooklyn College. Thanks very much for joining us, Greg.
GREGORY WILPERT: Hi. Thanks for inviting me.
JAY: So the polls had been showing Chávez ahead, and the polls more or less turned out
to be correct. And he's now elected for a new term, a six-year term, I believe. Let's
talk a little bit about what the challenges facing Hugo Chávez are. What do you think
are the main things he needs to accomplish over this next period, and to some extent,
why hasn't he already accomplished some of these things?
WILPERT: I think one of the main things that Chávez has to accomplish is to gain the trust
of the youth. I'm not saying that he necessarily lost most of the youth; however, since he's
been in office for 14 years, there's a significant proportion of the population, about 30 percent
of the population, that basically grew up under his government and who have become frustrated
with various problems and don't have the reference point that Chávez always talks about, which
is the pre-Chávez era. And so these problems are problems such as crime and corruption
and inefficiency in the public administration, but some of the main problems and issues that
the youth have serious problems with, and they need to figure [incompr.] they want that
addressed, obviously, in a way that gives them a brighter future, really, and for whom
this comparison to the past just doesn't have much impact.
JAY: Right. And some of those youth were in the opposition. I mean, you see a lot of young
people in these opposition protests. There were a fair number of university students
that were in the opposition. I know a lot of them come from the sort of more elite classes,
but not all, I mean, in the sense that some of them are the kids of professional families,
and working families in Caracas, too.
This--you know, Caracas is fairly divided. When Chávez went to Cuba for his medical
treatment, one of the times he came back, he did a kind of a self-criticism where he
said that some of his rhetoric against the opposition and against some of the middle-class
opposition--he called them squalidos and things like this--he said that it was probably a
mistake, he shouldn't have labeled everyone under the same category. Has he changed that
language? And has he changed--do you think there's evidence he's changing his approach
to those other sections of the population?
WILPERT: Well, he goes back and forth on that. Sometimes when he gets very frustrated with
the opposition and becomes very strident, he falls back into this old language of insulting,
basically, and of disqualifying the opposition. And then, afterwards, he apologizes and tries
to--and for a while manages to tone down his verbal rhetoric against the opposition. And
that's, of course, also something that turns off many voters, I think. And Chávez knows
this, which is why he tries to back-, you know, step on that and improve it.
And the thing is that the people who--this youth that we're talking about who grew up
under the Chávez government, they--actually, many of them benefited tremendously and were
given social mobility through Chávez's policies. However, as they rise, so to speak, in the--you
know, and as Venezuela becomes a less unequal country, their aspirations change and their
willingness to identify with Chávez and with his rhetoric of rich versus poor doesn't have
as much of an impact on this rising youth, really, that was enabled, really, thanks to
Chávez's mostly educational policies and other social policies.
JAY: Now, we should put all this into context. We're kind of assuming everyone else has already
followed the results of the election. But Chávez won this election by ten points, and
there's a massive turnout in the celebrations and in the pro-Chávez rallies of young people.
So, you know, clearly there's a--he has a big support amongst youth. But you're talking
about who's in that 45 percent that voted the other way, or young people who may not
even be old enough to vote yet but, you know, who have questions about why the pace of progress
has not been more swift.
WILPERT: Yes. I mean, one of the things that I always find interesting when you look at
polls that divide the voting preferences according to both age and according to social class,
you see that Chávez has overwhelming support in the poorest sectors of the population,
which make up about half of the population, which is--they're usually referred to as the
classes E and D, which are the poorest. But where he has one of the weakest supports--obviously,
as you go up it weakens. But the middle-class section, it really drops off quite dramatically,
that as soon as, you know, people become slightly better off, their support for Chávez drops.
JAY: Well, just for the--let's define what you mean by middle class, 'cause the United
States, they use middle class as a way to say
working class, but for some reason they don't want to use the word working class. When you're
saying middle class, what are you talking about?
WILPERT: Well, basically I'm talking about people who live, you know, on something like
double what Venezuela's poverty level would be, which is still quite poor, because the
poverty level is set very low. I mean, it's people who might still live in the barrios
but have slightly better incomes, who are--you know, they might--you could call them working
class, perhaps, but they have studied a little bit at a technical school or something like
that. And, yeah, I don't know. It's very difficult to describe, really.
JAY: But the people that have a job that have, you know, in the Venezuelan context relatively
decent pay--we're not talking about, you know, well-, high-paid professionals and we're not
talking about the poor; we're talking about, you know, working-class people with working-class
jobs that pay okay.
WILPERT: Exactly.
JAY: Right. And you're saying there his support falls off. But one would think he should have
support there.
WILPERT: Exactly. But I think it's a very common phenomenon that this group of people
that belong to that class aspire to something better and are much more willing to adopt
the viewpoints and world view of the class that's, so to speak, just above them. And
therefore their rejection of Chávez is even stronger, because they want to--they, you
know, come from that poor background and, basically, want to leave it, and therefore
reject everything that is associated with that background. And Chávez belongs to that.
JAY: Well, if Chávez wants this 21st-century socialism to last beyond him--and this is
assuming his health stays good and he fulfils his whole six-year term. But one assumes he's
hoping this is something that sets a course for Venezuela for decades, not just for another
six years. He needs that youth and he needs that working-class youth and he needs to address
some of these problems that have been lingering for what many people think too long, and I
guess starting with crime is one of the most important. People are afraid simply to go
out at night, and even to some extent in the day. And we've talked about this before in
previous interviews. But what are some of the recent things he's been doing to try to
solve this? And what is the direction these policies are going in?
WILPERT: Well, it's a policy that was started a couple of years ago already, but which is,
of course, still very late in the Chávez presidency. But a couple of years ago they
started implementing a new national police force to replace the municipal police forces,
and the reasoning is pretty clear. I mean, the municipal police forces were completely
and hopelessly corrupt, and the local mayors had no way of combating them or replacing
them or improving them. And so the national government really had to step in there.
And now there's a transition phase, and they're being instituted or being introduced in the
municipalities, and very gradually, bit by bit. And the transition process from the municipal
to the national police is extremely slow, and it's going to take several more years,
actually, for it to be fully implemented. And in the meantime, you also have various
transition problems, where there's more uncertainty precisely because of the transition, although
once they're in place, actually, crime has dropped in those municipalities quite dramatically--I
mean, well, crime is still pretty high, but by 20 percent, more or less, on average, which
is a pretty significant bit. But a lot more remains to be done in that area.
JAY: Right. Now, I've--when I was in Venezuela, I heard some people suggest to me that one
of the reasons crime isn't more cracked down on is that a lot of it's being organized out
of the barrios, the poor areas. And this is also the base of Chávez electoral support.
And there's some reluctance to go after some of the kind of more organized crime there,
because it may affect the outcome of elections. Do you think there's anything to that?
WILPERT: I'm not sure, because the problem is, of course, obviously, the high crime rate
is affecting Chávez just as much, or probably a lot more, I think, than--and especially
since, you know, the--even though he might count on the support from some of the people
who are connected to crime, I really think that's exaggerated, and it's not that significant.
JAY: Yeah. Certainly the people that suffer most from the crime are actually people in
the barrios.
WILPERT: Yeah, and they're much more; the people who suffer from crime, the number of
victims, basically, are far more larger than the people who perpetrate it.
JAY: Right. So, I mean, people do ask this question, then: there's been enough money,
there's been enough resources; why does it take so long to face up to this or deal with
it?
WILPERT: Well, like I said, it's a very difficult problem which takes a long time to just deal
with in general. Any country in the world, it would take a long time. The big problem,
really, was that Chávez recognized the problem very late, that is, you know, not until almost
ten years into his presidency. And the reason for that is simply because there was an assumption
that once you lower the crime, once you decrease inequality, crime will resolve by itself.
And that just didn't happen. And so it was a massive miscalculation, I think, on the
part of the government.
JAY: Right, that if you deal with the social conditions, you don't need to deal with the
policing in the same way. So what--so, after crime, in terms of this youth, this working-class,
urban youth that are quite divided about Chávez, what else does he have to do to kind of win
them over or solve--what's the next problem they want solved?
WILPERT: Well, I think it's also the quality of the education. I mean, they--people are
very grateful, I think, that many new educational programs have introduced and given tremendous
amounts of opportunity to them. But they've been introduced very quickly and with relatively
little funding, although, I mean, obviously, a lot of money has been spent on it. But professors
and teachers still don't get paid very much in Venezuela. And so the quality of the education
is actually--it's increasingly recognized that that is an issue, and I think that's
an issue for this segment of the population.
JAY: And the other issue I heard when I was there was that there was a lot of support
in the barrios for some of the on-site--Cuban, often, Cuban doctors that were doing, like,
what GPs do. But there's a lot of critique about the hospitals themselves, that once
you get past that kind of GP-level care that was created in these new medical centers,
that the hospitals didn't live up to what people's expectations were.
WILPERT: Yeah, that was, I think, a major issue, actually, a couple of years ago. In
the meantime, many--almost all of the hospitals, actually, have been thoroughly renovated.
I mean, there are still places that haven't been dealt with that still need to be fixed
up, but I think a lot of investment has been made in that area. So that's not such a big
issue anymore.
JAY: So who else is in that 45 percent that voted against Chávez? And we know the more--the
really rich and elite sections on the whole were anti-Chávez, but that they don't make
up the rest of that 45 percent that voted against him.
WILPERT: No. I think there's also a segment of the people living in Barrios who aren't
young and who used to be Chávez supporters. A matter of fact: there was a serious of articles
that I think dealt with the problem very badly, that is, in The New York Times and in The
Los Angeles Times. But it is an issue, in the sense that there are people who used to
support Chávez who aren't young but live in the Barrios, and basically they've become
disenchanted for a variety of reasons. And I think one of the main reasons is to see
the persistence of corruption and clientalism in many of the social programs that do exist,
and the inefficiencies. For example, Venezuela's constantly struggled with a housing problem
and building public housing, but oftentimes that gets all mired in local corruption and
so on. And so that's one of the things that also has turned some people off.
JAY: I mean, that's really his big challenge, isn't it, to find a way to govern more effectively.
The people--I mean, much of the opposition people that actually vote against him really
do support many of the objectives of his administration. They're fed up with the ineffectiveness of
some of the execution.
WILPERT: Well, exactly. That's one of the reasons why Capriles, the opposition candidate,
was running practically on the same platform as Chávez: he was promising to continue almost
all of Chávez's policies. I mean, many people didn't buy that argument that that was what
he was really trying to do, but he had to do that because he realized--I mean, he's
smart and he realized that that was a major reason for Chávez's popularity.
JAY: Okay. Well, in the coming weeks and months, we're going to follow some of these big issues
like crime, like education and such and see how this next term unfolds, and we're going
to make Venezuela kind of a regular go-to story. And we'll be going back to Gregory.
And we're also going to have some people go again to Venezuela, as we have in the recent--last
few weeks. And if you want to see more Venezuela stories, there's a donate button over here--'cause
it's expensive to send people to Venezuela.
Greg, thanks very much for joining us.
WILPERT: Thanks again.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.