The late president and revolutionary leader of Venezuela, Comandante Hugo Chávez, pictured during a political rally raising his fist, with a billboard featuring Che Guevara in the background. Photo: Sven Creutzmann/Gettyimages.ru/File photo.
By Oleg Yasinsky – Mar 4, 2024
Perhaps one of the best portraits of Chávez is contained in this phrase by Fidel, spoken 11 years ago, a few hours after the painful news: “Do you want to know who Hugo Chávez was? Look who mourns him and who celebrates his death…”
At a press conference in May 2002 in Madrid, after the meeting of heads of state between the European Union and Latin America, tired and somewhat annoyed, Chávez uttered a phrase that bothered more than one authority: “Governments go from summit to summit, while people go from abyss to abyss.”
He was never what they wanted him to be, perhaps because he never fit within the protocol function that he formally represented. Being the first president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, like Fidel or Allende, he is a character of more than a regional, planetary dimension, and his humanist thought transcends all the borders of his time and of the times in the borders that still divide us.
In this short and intense historical time that passed after his departure, the figure of Chávez is already a heroic part of the pantheon of giants of the Latin American continent, and there is no way to oust him from there.
One of the most incredible things about him, in my opinion, was his incredible ability to remain a totally normal person on the highest platform of State power and persist in his stubborn and almost child-like dream to, together with his beloved people and millions from all over, giving all his body and soul in the fight for human beings.
Thus, he earned the hatred of several Chilean and European so-called ‘socialists.’ While they, from their armchair positions as managers of the capitalist system, lied to their people, saying that they “do what they can” and “nothing else that can be done,” Chávez demonstrated daily that, from a reality much harsher and more complex than theirs, having a true intention means you can always do much more. Even when something is not possible yet, there is always the freedom to call things by their name. The freedom that others did not have. Unlike most rulers, Chávez was much stronger and more solid than the power that so easily changes others.
The enemy media did not spare qualifiers against him, doing masterful exercises in something in which they are insurmountable: manipulation and disqualification. Words, phrases, gestures, real and invented, always decontextualized, always in bad faith, and with a total irresponsibility towards any consequence, that only this kind of mainstream so-called ‘democratic’ press can have.
The media war against Chávez in times of relative international calm, more than a decade ago, seems to have been the general rehearsal before launching this onslaught of global ‘fake news’ that the major international media have become today.
As the traditional parties, totally discredited and obsolete, could not compete against Chavismo, the role of the opposition party was assigned to the private Venezuelan press, which, little by little, became a true political agent of the northern empire. Defying the local, regional, and global media war, Chávez fought against it with the mechanisms of the only true democracy possible: participation. This is how Eduardo Galeano described it:
This Hugo Chávez is a strange dictator. Masochistic and suicidal: he created a Constitution that allows the people to throw him out, and he risked that happening in a recall referendum that Venezuela has held for the first time in universal history. There was no punishment. This turned out to be the eighth election that Chávez has won in five years, with a transparency that Bush would have wanted for a holiday. Obedient to his own Constitution, Chávez accepted the referendum, promoted by the opposition, and made his position available to the people: “You decide.” Until now, presidents interrupted their administration only due to death, barracks, population, or parliamentary decisions. The referendum has inaugurated an unprecedented form of direct democracy. An extraordinary event: How many presidents, from any country of the world would dare to do it? And how many would still be presidents after doing it?
This tyrant invented by the major media, this fearsome demon, has just given a tremendous injection of vitamins to democracy, which in Latin America, and not only in Latin America, is weak and in need of energy…
Between Pain and Hope: The Mark That Hugo Chávez Left on the People of Venezuela
What could have happened to Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez Frías, then 38 years old, so that he first led Operation Zamora, on February 4, 1992, and then, after his military defeat, called on the rebel military to depose weapons, personally taking responsibility of everything in a country where none of the politicians at that time were assuming responsibility for anything? The debut of neoliberalism in his country, which suddenly woke up from the dream of a prosperous Venezuela passing into the nightmare of the Caracazo, while the government forced the Army to repress its hungry people? Any memories of his grandmother, the Savanna Pumé indigenous woman Rosa Inés, ‘Mama Rosa,’ who raised him, giving him the most valuable thing in the world, a tremendous sense of belonging and duty to the humble people that marked all of his political work?
Among the countless stories of the failed April 2002 coup against Chávez, I was very impressed by one of those tales that cannot be made up, told by two of its protagonists in a humble neighborhood of Puerto Ordaz.
Two poor women, both grandmothers for a long time, laughingly told me how, upon finding out about the kidnapping of their president, they stole a truck that was parked in front of their houses and headed to Caracas to save Chávez. Luckily, halfway along the bumpy path, the president had already been freed by the people. The grandmothers celebrated in one of the squares and the truck was safely returned to its owner, who at first got angry, but then also became friends with them.
The defeat of the 2002 coup of a people united with the Army has been a very important continental example of a new and powerful political protagonist: an Army that comes out to defend its people, something that surely exacerbated much more the imperial hatred against the Bolivarian Revolution.
Beyond the several or many possible errors and undoubted successes of Hugo Chávez in charge of the Presidency, which can be topics of long and complex discussions, I believe that there is something very evident. His first government, since the first days in power, for the first time in the history of the country, made millions of humble Venezuelans, always marginalized and neglected by elites of any political color, feel that this was their country too, and that if they wanted to improve it for their children, they had to participate, demand, defend, give their opinion, discuss and, above all, organize. Accused by the mercenary press of being ‘populist,’ Chávez did the complete opposite of the well-known practices of the regional populist leaders, he demanded that his people read, educate themselves, learn, not be afraid of ideas, opening the doors for new opportunities for the education of people of all ages and from all social strata, who for centuries had been excluded from citizen life. He understood that this was the only way that his people would not be manipulated by the media or by politicians and thus he would be able to build a society different from the capitalist one.
I was impressed by his bravery and honesty when, already very ill, he spoke openly in an interview about his fear of dying. You have to be really very big to face life without false superhero masks.
Today, 11 years after his physical departure, at this time of the worst global crisis in several decades, we will keep our eyes and hearts wide open, we will feel how from the darkness of the skies of Latin America and the world the light of his legacy continues to reach us, which is, as he would say, “the love that can only be repaid with love.”
(RT)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/AU
