Chavismo without Chávez

Episode 19  |  In March 2013, Venezuela faced a question it had never confronted before: could chavismo survive without Hugo Chávez? 

In this episode we follow Chávez’s massive state funeral, the extraordinary ten-day campaign that turned the dead president into Nicolás Maduro’s most powerful electoral weapon, and the razor-thin and deeply disputed 2013 presidential election against Henrique Capriles Radonski. 

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Transcript

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The morning after Hugo Chávez died, his coffin began its slow procession through Caracas. Draped in the Venezuelan flag, his body was carried through the Paseo de los Proceres, the monumental promenade aligned with statues of the heroes of Venezuelan independence. Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets as the procession made its way toward the military academy. There, Chavez would lie in state for three days before his funeral. Day and night, mourners waited for the chance to see him. The line stretched for kilometers. Some people waited for more than 26 hours, standing through the night for a few fleeting seconds before the coffin of the president that they had loved. Men and women sobbed in the streets. Strangers held one another in the crowds. Grief was everywhere. One woman, crying uncontrollably, looked towards the sky and asked God. Why? Why did you have to take him? By the morning of the funeral, Caracas had become the center of the diplomatic world. More than 30 heads of state had arrived in Venezuela. In the front rows sat some of Chavez's closest international allies. So was Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who leaned down to kiss Chavez's coffin. Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto came. Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos also came. The United States even sent a delegation. Even in death, Hugo Chavez could still summon the world to Caracas. But several hundred miles away, in Miami, a very different scene was unfolding. Inside Venezuela, whatever relief Chavez's opponents felt was largely kept behind closed doors. In South Florida, it spilled into the streets. Waving flags, honking car horns, celebrating what many believed could finally be the beginning of political change back home. And those images of Venezuelans mourning one man while other Venezuelans celebrated his death captured the country Hugo Chávez left behind. A country split almost completely in two. Because here he is. His truth. He spoke about Chavez as a father, as a liberator, as a man larger than a president. And with every sentence the emotion built until his voice finally cracked. Pure, transparent. One of a kind. Alive forever. For all of time. For this time and for all future times. Commander. They could not be you. They will never be able to defeat us. They never will. The room erupted. Foreign dignitaries rose to their feet. Military officers applauded. Chavista ministers cried. And then they began to chant. Chavez lives, the struggle continues. Even Chavez's funeral had become a call to arms. In the days after his death, the mythology around him only grew. He was no longer simply President Hugo Chavez, he became Comandante Supremo, the supreme commander of the Bolivarian Revolution. It had all the architecture of a Stalinist funeral, mass public mourning transformed into political ritual, the dead leader elevated into something almost immortal, and the men surrounding his coffin the rightful custodians of his revolution. But there was one enormous problem. None of these men were Chavez. After the funeral, the public viewing continued. Millions would eventually pass through to see his coffin. Days later, Chavez's body made one final journey through Caracas. He was taken to the Cuartel de la Montaña, the old military barracks from which he had directed the failed coup attempt of February 4th, 1992. The place where Chavez's political story had begun became his final resting place. But Chávez couldn't remain frozen in mourning forever. Someone now had to govern the country Chavez left behind. And Chavez had already chosen him. That man was Nicolás Maduro. Three months earlier, before leaving Cuba for the final time, Chávez had given his supporters one last instruction. If his illness prevented him from continuing as president, they were to elect Nicolás Maduro. Now that Chávez was dead, that instruction became a political command. The Constitution required a new presidential election. Article 233 called for it to be held within 30 consecutive days of the president's death. The Electoral Council eventually scheduled the vote for April 14th, 40 days after Chavez died. And Maduro's opponent would be a familiar one, Henrique Capriles. Three months earlier, the 40-year-old governor of Miranda had mounted the strongest presidential challenge of the Chavez era, and still lost by nearly 1.6 million votes, around 11 percentage points. Now he would have another chance. But remember what Venezuela looked like by 2013. Chavez had spent 14 years bringing every public institution under his political control. The Electoral Council, the courts, ministries, state television, governors, and the enormous machinery of the Venezuelan state had all been mobilized, in one form or another, to preserve his revolution. Maluro inherited almost every advantage Chavez had built. What he didn't inherit was Chavez himself. No one inside Chavismo even came close to possessing his charisma. For 14 years, Chavez had been the movement's center of gravity. Its ideology was his ideology. Its victories were his victories. Its supporters didn't primarily identify themselves as socialists or even as members of the United Socialist Party. They were Chavistas. The movement even carried his name. Without Chavez, Chavismo suddenly faced a problem it had never been forced to solve. How do you preserve a political movement built around a man after that man is gone? The answer is that you keep Chavez on the ballot. The formal presidential campaign lasted only ten days, from April 2nd until April 11th. By the time it began, Chavez had been dead for less than a month, and everywhere Venezuelans looked, there he was. His face covered campaign posters, his voice returned through television broadcasts and loudspeakers at Maduro rallies. Campaign advertising repeatedly paired the dead president with the man he had chosen to succeed him. It was a presidential campaign in which Chavez often seemed more present than Maduro. Even the campaign songs and slogans were a promise to the dead president. Maduro called himself Chavez's son, his apostle, the man entrusted with carrying the revolution forward. In effect, the campaign asked Chavistas to treat their vote for Maduro as a final act of loyalty to Chavez. But grief and loyalty were only part of the strategy. The machinery of the state also went to work. Government institutions, public employees, state media, and public resources gave Maduro an enormous structural advantage. It was the same machine Chávez had spent years building, only now Nicolas Maduro was the one sitting behind the wheel. Capriles' campaign of the problems Venezuelans could already feel: rampant crime, corruption, inflation, food shortages, and constant blackouts. He promised "un nuevo camino," a new path, and relentlessly attacked Maluro as a substitute, an unelected successor hiding behind the memory of a much more popular man. His message, in essence, was brutally simple. That was precisely why the election appeared winnable. Six months earlier, Capriles had faced Chávez at the height of an enormous campaign mobilization and lost by 11 points. This time, he didn't need to convince millions of Chavistas to abandon Chávez. Chávez was technically no longer on the ballot. Capriles only needed enough of them to decide that their loyalty to Chávez didn't automatically belong to Maduro. For government opponents, it was difficult to overstate what that meant. For 14 years, every apparent opening had seemed to close. They had watched institutions fall under Chavista control. They had seen the government opponents blacklisted, candidates barred from running, and opposition victories stripped of power after the votes had already been counted. And through it all, Chavez had remained at the center, always campaigning, always winning. Now he was gone. For the first time in more than a decade, Venezuelans opposed to the revolution could imagine defeating Chavismo without having to defeat Chavez. The hope was enormous. So was the fear. Across Venezuela, both campaigns poured into the streets. A country that had just buried its president was now locked in an intense fight over who would inherit it. And on April 14th, 2013, Venezuelans went to the polls. Nearly 80% of registered voters turned out. Just before midnight, the president of the National Electoral Council, Tivisay Lucena, appeared before the cameras.

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Nicolas Maduro Moros con el 50.

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Nicolas Maduro won 50.66%. Enrique Capriles won 49.07%. Maduro had won, but barely. After 14 years of Chavez, after the funeral, the mourning, the enormous machinery of the state, and Chavez's explicit command that his followers elect Nicolas Maduro, Maduro had beaten Capriles by fewer than 235,000 votes in the initial count. Six months earlier, Chavez had defeated the same man by nearly 1.6 million. Outside Miraflores palace, Chavistas celebrated. Capriles refused to concede. Shortly after midnight, he appeared before his supporters and announced that his campaign had documented approximately 3,200 incidents and irregularities during election day. And in a country with independent institutions, an election decided by such a tiny margin might have led to an exhaustive process designed to eliminate every possible doubt. But Venezuela was not a country with independent institutions. That was the problem. For years, government opponents had watched the Electoral Council bend electoral rules in Chavismo's favor. They had watched the Supreme Court protect the government. State resources deployed during campaigns, opposition politicians blacklisted, and public institutions transformed into instruments of the revolution. Now those same institutions were asking them to trust that Nicolas Maluro had won with one of the closest presidential elections in Venezuelan history. Many refused. The margin was simply too small. The abuses that they had witnessed were too extensive. And suddenly, irregularities that might not have mattered in an 11-point election could have mattered enormously in an election decided by less than two. The streets began to protest. Opposition demonstrations spread across the country demanding an audit. Violence followed. Security forces dispersed demonstrations. People were arrested, protesters were beaten, threatened, and abused in custody. The government, meanwhile, blamed Capriles for the unrest and accused him of attempting to destabilize the country. Within days, several people were dead, and more than 100 had been detained. Maludo called it another coup attempt. But on election night, he had also made what sounded like an extraordinary concession. Open 100% of the ballot boxes. Audit the election. The Organization of American States supported a full audit and offered its own electoral experts. The United States also called for a process capable of restoring confidence in the result. Eventually, the Electoral Council agreed to expand its verification of the election, but almost immediately the two sides began fighting over what the word audit actually meant. The opposition wanted an audit of the entire process. Did the signatures of the voter notebooks correspond to real voters? Had the same person managed to vote more than once? Those questions mattered because Venezuela's electoral machines also produced a paper receipt. Comparing the paper receipt to the electronic totals could establish whether the machines had been correctly recording the ballots deposited into them. But it could not necessarily establish who had cast those ballots in the first place. Capriles therefore demanded access to the voter notebooks, signatures, fingerprints, and other electoral materials. The Electoral Council refused to conduct the audit on those terms. Instead, beginning in May, it carried out what it called an expanded citizen verification, comparing the paper receipts with the electronic voting records across essentially all the country's voting tables. And on that narrow question, the results overwhelmingly matched. But that wasn't the question Capriles and the opposition were asking. They wanted verification of the identities behind the votes. And that process was never conducted in the form that they demanded. The Carter Center noted that reviewing the voter notebooks and biometric records became the central dispute between the two sides. Capriles challenged the election before the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court not only declared his challenge inadmissible, it actually fined him for offending and disrespecting state institutions. So in the end, Maduro's victory was certified. Certified by the institutions he controlled. And on April 19th, only five days after the election, Nicolás Maduro was sworn in as president of Venezuela. I swear. In the name of absolute loyalty to Commander Hugo Chávez. Lo juro. I swear it. Now, if you ask me, there's a strong case that the identity-related irregularities played a decisive role in Madudo's narrow victory. By 2013, the Chavista government had not only consolidated control over the electoral system, but they had also developed extensive mobilization networks that could affect voting behavior and custody over the machines at polling stations with limited oversight. What the audit established was that the voting machines had counted the paper ballots correctly. What it never resolved was the broader issue that the opposition was asking: whether the election that produced those ballots had been free, equal, and worthy of trust. More than 11 years later, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights would reach its own conclusion about the process. It ruled that Venezuela had violated Capriles' political rights and denied him judicial protection when he tried to challenge the election. But even securing the disputed election, Maduro's problems were only just beginning. He entered the presidency with far less political strength than Chavez had ever enjoyed. Chávez had beaten Capriles by 11 points. Maduro had survived him by barely one and a half. He inherited Chavez's party, his government, his military, and his state. What he hadn't inherited was Chavez's authority, his charisma. Hugo Chavez was gone. Chavismo had just survived its first election without him. But barely. Now Nicolas Maduro would have to figure out how to rule a political movement that belonged to a dead man. As always, thank you for listening, and if you want to support the show, the Patreon link is in the description. See you next week.