A small crowd gathers at six each evening on the steps outside a dilapidated high school in one of Caracas's many impoverished barrios. With the sun dipping in the distance, middle-aged women arrive with their daughters. A few old men stand smoking cigarettes. One guy with tattoos on his arms labours up in a wheelchair and two rugged-looking characters help him ease it down the steps. The whole scene feels like something out of a Hugo Chávez infomercial.
The crowd has come for another evening of free classes aimed at bringing high-school diplomas to the millions of poor Venezuelans who, prior to President Chávez's election in 1998, lived in a world void of such opportunities. Social welfare programmes like this are one reason Chávez is likely to win his re-election bid on Sunday 3rd December. "If he loses, these programs will be eliminated," says Miguel, a 32-year-old sixth grader at the night school. Like most in the city's sprawling barrios, he sees Chávez as a kind of saint bent on liberating the poor from an oppression that reaches back to the days of Spanish conquest. Around half of Venezuela's 25m people live in poverty, and Chávez is a hero to them.
The social programmes, funded by Venezuelan oil profits worth £500m a month, may be central to understanding the lead—32 per cent in one recent opinion poll—Chávez enjoys over opposition candidate Manuel Rosales. But they are not the only reason this controversial president is on his way to another six years at the helm of some of the planet's largest untapped oil reserves. Of equal importance is the fact that Chávez's predominantly pro-capitalism opposition has only recently begun to emerge from the shambolic disunity that has defined its activities since Chávez was first elected. "When the campaign started in August, it wasn't foreseeable that the opposition would be able to unite and put together a coherent candidacy," says Margarita López-Maya, a historian at Venezuela's Central University.
While the failure of pro-privatisation conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s paved the way for Chávez's rise to power, the president's vocal pursuit of an exclusively co-operative-based economic model has caused a split among Venezuela's left in recent years. The opposition has scrambled to win the support of moderate leftists who previously backed Chávez but now fear that he aims to implement full-blown dictatorial communism. However, many are still too suspicious of the opposition's hyper-conservative ties to join the anti-Chávez ranks.
These ties, according to López-Maya, obliterated the possibility of any broad-based unification between the hardcore opposition and the moderate, Chávez-tolerant left in 2002 when a group of US-backed business leaders attempted to overthrow Chávez. The coup failed after two days when throngs of Chávez supporters descended on the presidential palace from the barrios calling for their leader's return, but not before the US had publicly approved the coup, and Pedro Carmona, head of the country's largest private business-owners' association, had been sworn in as interim president.
Carmona has since been exiled. But other key players in the coup remain active, including Rosales himself, who as governor of oil-rich Zulia was among those to sign a decree embracing Carmona as president. Rosales also backed a 2004 national referendum on Chávez's presidency, after opposition groups had collected enough petition signatures to force a vote. Chávez survived the recall with 59 per cent of the vote. Reeling from the defeat, several opposition parties, Rosales's among them, then lost strategic ground by boycotting Venezuela's national assembly elections last year—a move that resulted in the 150 seats to 17 majority pro-Chávez parties now hold.
The opposition's tactics have made Rosales "compromised by those interests and those groups that the country's poor see as the enemy," says López-Maya. While the last few months may have seen Rosales engage in "better campaigning than Chávez," she says, "the problem is their lack of credibility and coherence, and the fact that they haven't come up with a real alternative proposal to Chávez."
Rosales's campaign is built upon the proposed creation of the "Mi Negra" ("My Black") card, effectively a debit card provided to citizens that would be credited monthly by the government as a means of channelling a chunk of the country's oil revenues directly to the public. As the Rosales campaign passed pretend versions of the cards to cheering supporters, some observers decided that he may actually be on to something. The pre-election poll figures favouring Chávez have been inaccurate, according to Carlos Carbacho, until recently the head of the Organisation of American States office in Venezuela, who believes this Sunday's vote will be "a close call."
"The modern view of social change is on the opposition's side and the older view of pursuing a welfare state is on the side of the government," claims Carbacho, who maintains that the masses voted for Chávez during the 2004 referendum out of fear that their votes could be tracked by the government. With no list of names at play this Sunday, Carbacho says faith has increased among voters that their ballots will remain anonymous.
Chávez-backers dismiss such logic. They claim the true force behind the president's hold on the vote is the pulsating connection he has with the country's poor. "He's made people feel like they are human beings again," says Eva Golinger, the author of two recent books linking the US government to opposition efforts to drive Chávez from power through extra-democratic means.
Furthermore, much as it may rile the US state department to admit, the Venezuelan president's colourfully worded public outbursts against the US and George W Bush resonate firmly in the barrios. "We were very proud that he put George Bush in his place and that he did it on Bush's turf," says barrio health worker Luisa Nieves, referring to Chávez's September speech in New York before the UN, in which he called the US president "the devil" bent on preserving "domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world."
During the weeks leading up the election, Chávez has capitalised on the euphoria felt for him in the barrios, appearing at raucous, beer-soaked street rallies held daily in Caracas neighborhoods and beyond. While Rosales led two large marches in Caracas in November—with one attracting perhaps 300,000 into the streets—they have felt tame next to the madness that gets unleashed when an appearance is made by Chávez. The president has a personal troupe of rappers who fill the air at rallies with pro-Chávez anthems. A brief stampede broke out at one rally last month after Chávez was followed through the crowd by a group of curvaceous and scantily-clad young women dancing atop a tall flat-bed truck.
Yolbis, a 12-year-old boy at the rally who watched the whole thing with wide eyes, offered perhaps the simplest reason I've heard as to why Chávez gets so much support from the ghetto: "He throws good parties." Somehow I wouldn't expect to see this observation in the pro-Chávez infomercial.
