International spotlight Venezuela
daily.stanford.edu By Eric Eldon News Editor Tuesday, February 4, 2003 last updated February 4, 2003 2:47 AM
Editor’s Note: This is the sixth in a weekly series of interviews with international students at Stanford meant to heighten awareness of issues of social and political importance around the world.
This past weekend, The Daily sat down to discuss Venezuelan politics with second-year chemistry doctoral student Eileen Jackson, president of the Venezuelan Association at Stanford, and fifth-year geophysics doctoral student Sandra Vega, a member of the association.
Venezuela emerged with Colombia and Ecuador from the collapse of Simón Bolívar’s post-Spanish colonial Gran Columbia in 1830. Venezuela has overcome a long line of military strongmen and economic instability, largely with money earned through its vast oil fields. It has successfully implemented many political reforms and attained, until recently, a remarkable level of economic stability.
Democratically elected governments have been in power since 1959. Today, the populist, leftist President Hugo Chavez is losing his once-solid support among Venezuelans — having survived one coup on his government, Chavez and his supporters are now confronting a popular two-month-old national strike led by the state oil company and, until yesterday, other business leaders.
The oil strike goes on even as the Chavez government continues to increase oil production without company involvement.
Yesterday, opposition leaders called off the general strike in response to the worsening economy and mediation efforts by a group of countries including the United States.
The Daily: The United States buys a lot of its oil from Venezuela, a member of OPEC, and it affects the oil prices and industries there. Many U.S. oil companies are invested in Venezuela, or at least used to be. How do U.S. and other foreign interests affect Venezuela?
Sandra Vega: Everything related to oil is [run by] the state. It’s managed by the state. Sometimes they have deals with other international oil companies. These companies go to Venezuela, they work there, and they have to pay taxes, and, depending on how much they produce, they have to give some [oil] to the government. You can say it’s an investment, but everything is controlled by the state.
TD: What do you think about President Hugo Chavez as a leader, as a person and about his economic plans?
Eileen Jackson: I don’t like him at all. I think he’s a very resentful person. He’s very aggressive, he has very violent speech. His economic plan is a mystery to me. He’s always talking about his revolution, he’s always talking about feeding the poor and making their lives better. What I see in Venezuela is more poverty since he’s been in government. Every year I go home and I can see it deteriorating. Unemployment is terrible. Chavez sets himself up there like he’s some new world leader, like he’s Jesus Christ, like he’s Simón Bolívar, like he’s going to change the world. But then it’s mostly rhetoric, there’s no real plan. Some of the things he’s done, some of the social programs have been more of a corruption case. He’s bankrupted the national bank. [Chavez’s government] has built houses [for the poor], but the houses are falling apart. He talks about public education, but there’s not enough money going into it. He says he’s building more schools, but I don’t see them. It’s turned into more of an indoctrination system, where they’re re-writing history. I think it’s dangerous because people actually believe in him, because he doesn’t have a plan — nothing different than communism, nothing new.
TD: So do you hold him responsible for the problems that Venezuela currently has?
EJ: I don’t think Chavez is responsible for all the problems. I think the problems are from the past and they’ve been growing. We’ve had a lot of corruption and a lot of inefficient governments, but instead of solving these problems, he’s making them worse. He’s created a lot of hate among classes that hadn’t been there before . . . in his speeches, he tells the poor people that they’re poor because [the rich] exploited them. There’s still a belief that the country is rich and it hasn’t been divided well. But it’s not only distribution of wealth, it’s also that you have to work, that you have to create wealth, and he doesn’t really have a plan for creating more wealth, or creating sources of employment, there’s something that’s long-term or long-standing. He hasn’t given any security, and no one invests in Venezuela nowadays. He talks about nationalizing businesses and that doesn’t help, either.
SV: Chavez took advantage of a very important historical moment in Venezuela. The people were tired of the corrupt political parties that had been governing the country for the last 40 years, and he promised to help the situation. Many people from the middle classes, especially who leaned towards the left, voted for him. He had a lot of support from people in different political parties. He tried to put everything in his favor to stay in power for a very long time — he changed the constitution — but in the years that he’s been in government, he hasn’t done a lot. He does a lot of talking, like every day on the television, but not about important things, and he has been very insulting to people who don’t support him. Now the private media doesn’t support him, and he does not want to tolerate this.
EJ: As time progressed, it became more and more obvious that he was becoming more and more authoritarian. At the beginning, it wasn’t so obvious, but anyone in the government who would criticize or say something against him would be removed from office, and that’s been happening more and more lately.
SV: He was elected democratically, but now he’s acting like a dictator.
TD: Could you talk about how you as individuals — your family backgrounds and work experience, such as experience in the national oil company — relate to how you perceive Chavez.
SV: I worked for PDVSA, the national oil company, I don’t work there anymore, but I have a lot of friends in the oil company, which gives me a different perspective on what’s going on. It is a very polarized situation now, and even though I don’t agree with Chavez’s behavior, the way he has done things, at the same time I also don’t agree with those who call themselves the opposition and the things they have also done.
TD: Are there noticeable shifts taking place in public opinion?
SV: Venezuela is in a process right now where the people are learning, where the people who used to be apathetic about these sorts of issues are out on the streets protesting. They realize that they have to participate to improve the situation. But the problems that we’re facing will take years to fix.
SV: There are many students, especially [studying] geophysics from Venezuela, especially from PDVSA. They have scholarships.
EJ: The company is paying for them. Scholarships from PDVSA and their affiliated consortiums
SV: No one knows what is going to happen now with the scholarships because Chavez has taken control of PDVSA and is firing a lot of people. I know at least three people who went to Stanford, who got their master’s degree here, who are fired. They are some of the thousands of people who are fired. No one knows what the strategy is that Chavez and his supporters are using, except that those who stay in the street protesting him are fired. He says he’s only firing managers, but that’s not true, he’s firing people who don’t manage anything. They’re managing PDVSA right now in a way that nobody understands. People are being fired who have been in charge of paying the scholarships for the people at Stanford.
EJ: The people that are at Stanford right now don’t know what is going to happen.