By Marco Teruggi
Seven years have passed since the death of Hugo Chavez. The Latin American and national situation has changed in that time, and yet the Venezuelan reality can still be explained in part by what his life meant, particularly in the humble sectors of the country.
The night was darker in front of the Caracas Military Hospital. It was March 5, 2013, and thousands of us were gathered in front of the most feared news: the death of Hugo Chavez. The country was born with a sadness and a centuries-old oath inside.
The news was given at 4:25 in the afternoon by Nicolas Maduro. There are many stories about those minutes. One of them tells of a cold wind with a dark sky over the city. I saw it, it was on Baralt Avenue, near Bolivar Square, where we met until the early hours of the morning.
On the morning of March 6, the procession began. Chávez was taken from the Military Hospital to the Military Academy. We were millions, literally. The crowd crossed Caracas like a slow red wave, the Chávez’s casket in the center, with flowers, posters, tears, flags, songs.
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The wake lasted ten days. Men and women came from all over the country, each one of them as best they could, with what they had, to say goodbye to Chávez, to the commander, to thank him, to promise. The lines lasted for days, nights, dawns, and miles. I saw him around ten o’clock at night, a lady had fainted, outside the lights on the hill looked like a nativity scene.
In those days you could see the most pristine image of what Chávez represented to millions. There was the depth of a political process that moved a people, refounding a history. There was no doubt that Chavismo was in the majority, humble, and that its opponent, anti-Chavismo, with an indelible mark of the upper classes, was never willing to understand it.
A month and nine days later Maduro won the elections and Henrique Capriles Radonski, his opponent, did not recognize the victory, attempted a coup and left eleven dead, as well as health centers and party premises burnt down.
Chavez’s death occurred at a time when he was at the height of his powers. The continent was under a majority of progressive, left-wing governments Evo Morales, president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, for example, accompanied the procession from the Military Hospital to the Military Academy.
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The presidents of Ecuador, Rafael Correa; Uruguay, José ‘Pepe’ Mujica; El Salvador, Mauricio Funes; Cuba, Raúl Castro; Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner; and Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who was with former President Lula Da Silva, came to the funeral.
A process of offensive of demonization articulated by the United States was about to begin, which set in motion a process of restoration and revenge. One of the expressions of that process was the policy of dismantling the advances in Latin American integration created in previous years, such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).
At the center of these advances had been Chávez, in a cycle of accumulation of forces initiated in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 2005, to stop the North American attempt to impose the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) until promoting, in addition to the already mentioned organizations, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).
The period of greatest unity in Latin America since independence had Chávez among its central architects. His burial was not only a Venezuelan sadness but a Latin American one.
How do you measure the transformations and permanence of a country? How do you do it in the case of a political process with the power that the Bolivarian Revolution deployed? To arrive in Venezuela in Chavez’ time was to join a current that was projected to advance towards a clear outlet.
The country transmitted a political energy, an effervescence with a central dimension: the emergence of the humble people, of the popular neighborhoods, the rural areas, as makers of politics, despised and underestimated by anti-Chavismo.
The material impacts began to appear in 2014 and centrally in 2015 with the shortages. Cities were populated with long lines at the doors of supermarkets, grocery stores, pharmacies, at any time of the day or night. The country that had experienced years of growth entered a time of resistance.
The government’s discourse identified two central enemies: on the one hand, the oligopolistic business community, which was blamed for the hoarding of products; on the other hand, the U.S. government. Both were responsible for what was called economic warfare.
The difficulties mutated during those years: the devaluation of the currency forced a monetary change, inflation reached levels of hyperinflation and then decreased, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracted by more than half, there was a large-scale emigration, change from formal to informal jobs, and currently, there is a process in the streets called dollarization.
Those were years, with a legislative electoral defeat for Chavismo in 2015, right-wing insurrectionary escalations in 2014 and 2017, the election of a National Constituent Assembly in 2017, of governors and mayors that year, of a president in 2018, and the formation of a parallel fictitious government in 2019.
Time was always dizzying and in that absence of truce, profound changes took place. The government got rid of its discourse on big business as an enemy in order to attempt to incorporate an alliance, and focused the confrontation on the United States and the sector of the opposition pushing for the coup.
The social body, between political and economic assaults, went through a process of restoration of material and symbolic inequalities. This political energy that cut across the country was reduced to specific territories and dates, and the country went from a mostly mobilized society – both Chavismo and the opposition – to a largely demobilized society on the surface.
The image of Chavez’s burial showed the depths of Chavismo. Those who have always looked down on the Bolivarian process have never measured what the Revolution represented to the humble people at all levels: rational, political, subjective, cultural, emotional, and collective.
Chavismo was shaped into a political identity that was centralized in the popular classes. Thousands, millions, have not given up since the death of Chávez, and they make up that approximate 25% of so-called hardcore Chavismo.
Those who keep struggling, fought the dream, were and are, paradoxically, those who have been hit the hardest by economic difficulties. Loyalty was held up as a flag in the hills, in the peasant areas, in those who, before the Bolivarian Revolution, had only one place in the country: that of exclusion and the fight for the daily arepa.
Seven years of Chavez’ absence, of reconfiguration of several political keys, of a new economic scenario where those who historically won, a whole gale of events did not give up a political and cultural identity.
That is why Chavismo is a daily experience in popular neighborhoods, in debates, in imaginations of the country to come. That is also why, in the electoral calculations for – for example – the next legislative elections in December 2020, there is the possibility that it will obtain a majority.
Chavez still explains a central part of the Venezuelan reality. That which is denied by the big media, the opposition stories, the North American narrative. That reality has not given up.
Marco Teruggi
Argentinian Sociologist. He played in the Anahí Association, in HIJOS and in the Popular Front Darío Santillán. Since the beginning of 2013 he lives in Caracas. Author of the books: "I always return to the foot of the tree", "Founded days" and "Chronicles of communes, where Chávez lives". Currently collaborates in Telesur, Latin American Summary, Notes, Sudestada Magazine, Amphibian, among others.
