Tout auteur capable d’expliquer ce qui se passe dans le monde sans jamais écrire « oligarche » ou « hégémonie » a droit au respect du Kiosque. C’est le cas de Gwynne Dyer. Né à Terre-Neuve en 1943, à la fois ancien militaire, historien, professeur et journaliste, il a le don d’écrire pour que tout le monde comprenne.  (Le Kiosque en avait parlé en 2006)

…

Venezuela After Chavez

By Gwynne Dyer

“The graveyards are full of indispensable men,” said Georges Clemenceau, prime minster of France during the First World War, and promptly died to prove his point. He was duly replaced, and France was just fine without him. Same goes for Hugo Chavez and Venezuela.

Venezuela never stopped being a democracy despite 14 years of Chavez’s rule. He didn’t seize power. He didn’t even rig elections, though he used the government’s money and privileged access to the media to good effect. He was elected president four times, the first three with increasing majorities — but the last time, in 2012, he fell back sharply, only defeating his rival by 54 percent-44 percent.

(….)

Chavez was an unnecessarily combative and polarising politician and a truly awful administrator, but he has actually achieved what he went into politics for. Twenty years ago Venezuelan politics was a corrupt game fought out between two factions of a narrow elite. Now the task of using the country’s oil wealth to improve the lives of the poor majority is central to all political debate in the country.

(…) Over the past dozen years Chavez’s governments have poured almost $300 billion into improving literacy, extending high school education, creating a modern, universally accessible health-care system, build housing for the homeless, and subsidising household purchases from groceries to appliances. What made that possible was not “socialism”, but Venezuela’s huge oil revenues.

(…) Venezuela today has the fairest distribution of wealth in the Americas, with the obvious exception of Canada. Venezuela’s “Gini coefficient”, which measures the wealth gap between the rich and the poor, is 0.39, whereas the United States is 0.45 and Brazil, even after ten years of reforming left-wing governments, is still 0.52. (A lower score means less inequality of income.)

For all of Chavez’s ranting about class struggle and his admiration for Fidel Castro, this was not achieved in Venezuela by taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. It was accomplished by spending the oil revenue differently. He changed the political psychology of the country, and it now has the potential to be a Saudi Arabia with democracy.

That is not a bad thing to be, and the Venezuelan opposition has finally grasped that fact. It remains for Chavez’s own party to understand that it has actually won the war, and to stop re-fighting the old battles. A spell in opposition might help it to come to terms with its proper role in the new Venezuelan political consensus: no longer an embattled “revolutionary” movement, but the more radical alternative in a more or less egalitarian democracy.

This will be hard for the PSUV to do, because the people around Chavez are still addicted to the rhetoric and the mindset of “struggle”against the forces of evil that they see on every side. Nicolas Maduro, for example, could not resist claiming that Chavez’s cancer had been induced by foul play by Venezuela’s enemies when he announced the leader’s death.

One day, Maduro promised, a “scientific commission” would investigate whether Chavez’s illness was brought about by what he called an enemy attack, presumably by the United States. Ridiculous, paranoid stuff, and it shows just how far the PSUV has to travel to take its proper place in a modern, democratic Venezuela. But the journey has begun, and it will probably get there in the end.