With the passing this past week at the age of fifty eight of Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan leader, Latin America has lost one of its most colourful leaders and potent force against global imperialism. The iconic colonel was in every material respect an original in the true sense of that word. An unreconstructed military putchist, he had twice tried to seize power in bloody military uprisings only to be eventually swept into the Venezuela Presidential Palace in a popular and democratic uprising against the ancient regime.
Thereafter and for the next 14 years, the son of impoverished middle class teachers unleashed his strange and utterly quixotic brand of socialism on the Venezuelan populace, winning unprecedented popular approval in the process. By the time he died of cancer-related complications in a military hospital in the capital city of Caracas last Tuesday, Chavez has become an authentic hero of the teeming masses of the Venezuelan people and the nearest thing to a secular saint.
The unprecedented outpouring of grief on the streets, the hysterical wailings and chants of “Chavez to the pantheon”—a heartrending reference for the late leader to take his place beside the legendary Simon Bolivar, a.k.a the Liberator—only confirm Chavez status as one of the most illustrious sons of Latin America of all time. The pantheon of great Latin American leaders who lived and died at the behest of their people would be smiling indeed .
In order to better appreciate the global odds Chavez faced, it is appropriate to situate his career and anti-imperialist and anti-American jingoism within the context of the turbulent template that threw him up , particularly the end of the cold war and a resurgent and rampart American mega-power. Unlike the morally and ethically compromised Manuel Noriega who screamed at “Gringo piranhas” even while cutting a deal under the table, Hugo Chavez was as straight as a primitive arrow. He was a genuine article and a real man of the people.
Almost 30 years after President George Bush, the Elder called for a kinder and gentler world as an antidote to the neo-conservative cruelties of the Reagan years, the world is neither a kinder nor a gentler place. If anything, the modern world is increasingly marked by arbitrariness, by a brutal and random contingency, and by the sure and sheer certainty of uncertainty. The only thing predictable is what is unpredictable.
Perhaps it is foolish and delusionary in the extreme to expect human society to escape the more sinister anomalies of human nature itself. Even the so-called idyllic and harmonious communities of the past are nothing but ideological mirages; fictional constructs through which we vent our frustrations and disappointment with the present. As somebody famously quipped, if there is anything sure about the organic communities, it is that they are always gone.
Still, there can be no denying the fact that militarily, economically, politically and spiritually the world might have gone to the dogs in the last 30 years. Thanks to the principles of globalisation which made it possible for capital and labour to be switched round the globe and for the constraints of time and space to be summarily abolished, western countries, particularly the USA, have been able to exponentially increase their wealth.
But this new-found prosperity has also led to a widening of the gap between the filthy rich and absolute poor, thus fuelling social disaffection within countries and among countries. The great political irony here is that it is the social inequity arising from economic inequality of staggering and idiotic proportions that has brought an African American to the White House for the very first time in the history of the United States.
It is only the politically incurious who will be taken by surprise that the most potent forces against Barack Obama’s ascendancy comprise of the rump of the old Reaganite redoubt in alliance with the new missionary right with its bible-thumping fundamentalists. This is America’s contribution to the New Crusade. They brook no intellectual opposition, and with their wild-eyed fanaticism and the zealotry of their unipolar vision of human civilization and modernity, they represent a danger to both America and an increasingly multi-polar world.
Militarily, the USA has extended its unrivalled dominion over the rest of the world. Perhaps, not since the Roman Empire has the world seen such awesome power and might. It has been suggested by military experts that after America, the next 25 countries combined do not possess the martial superiority of Uncle Tom. Grappling with America is like wrestling with a 500 pound gorilla in the jungle.
Yet the tense stalemate of Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq suggests that in the evolving world, military might is not enough to prevail. Discretion may still be the better part of military valour in matters of political and ideological contestation, particularly if the ideological conflict comes with a religious and spiritual coloration. It is easy to militarily subjugate a territory, but it has proved not so easy to coerce a people into surrendering their religious beliefs. It is always a duel unto death.
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 have shown the world how globalisation can work both ways. Switching men and material round the globe in a ceaseless manner, using electronic transfer of funds to thwart financial surveillance and deploying modern communication gadgets to abolish the constraints of time and space, the religious adversaries of the west were thus able to use the very principles of globalisation against the masters of globalisation
This is the turbulent trajectory that has defined the life and times of the late Venezuelan leader. Yet despite Hugo Chavez’ sterling patriotism, there are a sizeable number of his country people who would frown at this posthumous apotheosis and near deification of a man they consider to be a mortally flawed demagogue. To a few of his fellow Venezuelans, Chavez remains a divisive and controversial figure who exacerbated the economic and ethnic fault lines of his nation.
To them, his economic doctrine was barmy and simply did not make much sense, based on socialist emotionalism rather than a sound attempt to use god-given resources for truly transformative purposes. By dipping his hands freely and joyously into the petroleum reservoirs of his nation like some oilman of Caracas, Chavez has shown himself to be nothing but a vagabond potentate who would have led his country eventually into economic ruination.
This may make economic sense, but it is a politically worthless argument. There can be little doubt about the salutary and telling effect of Chavez largesse to his people. By his emancipatory policies, Chavez has freed the most wretched of the Venezuelan earth from the clutches of the most desperate of poverty, disease and illiteracy.
But more importantly by allowing the Venezuelan people to enjoy their god-given bounty, Chavez has returned us to the first principles of sovereignty: that power and national resources belong first and foremost to the people and not to a thieving political elite and their mealy-mouthed equivocations about a mythical transformation. This is a signal lesson to the ruling classes of other Third World countries, particularly Nigeria.
In the end, what is important is what a leader means to his people and not what the homogenising citadels of political and economic correctness feel. In the age of western-induced globalisation, the reaffirmation and reassertion of national destiny has returned to the front burner. The nation-state paradigm may be frayed and frazzled at the edges but it still remains the most dominant instrument of territorial mapping.
In death, Hugo Chavez has joined the illustrious pantheon of Latin America leaders who lived for their people and fought with them. Simon Bolivar, Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, Fidel Castro, etc. Together with a stellar galleria of equally iconic writers, poets, novelists, essayists and philosophers they have succeeded in forging a unique identity for the Latin American continent and as the counter-hegemonic lodestar against late imperialism.
It was often said that the right may win all the major political battles in Latin America, but it will never produce great leftwing writers of the global stature of Pablo Neruda, Louis Borges and the incomparable fabulist, Gabriel Marcia Marquez. Yet the rise and ascendancy of a series of leftwing, anti-imperialist governments committed to a more humane and equitable vision of human society in contemporary Latin America may no longer be a historical fluke but the final working out of some momentous historical contradictions.
The world and humanity at large may yet have the Latin Americans to thank for providing us with a way out of the six hundred year epistemological cul de sac of western modernity. As they have done with their Liberation Theology, their concept of no-capitalism, the stellar challenges of their original and groundbreaking scholars to the grandiose claims of Metropolitan modernity, the contributions of their institutions to a new global knowledge order and the vast array of different developmental models emanating from their governments, they have shown us that it is possible to envision a more humane and redemptive world order. May the great soul of Hugo Chavez rest in peace.
