Writing About Chávez

I’ve received a number of questions about my recent writing on Venezuela, which I’d like to address here.

At issue are sentences in three different pieces written in the course of a number of months—two on The New Yorker’s Web site and one in the magazine. Readers pointed out what they saw as factual errors in each. In two cases I agreed, and corrected the sentences; in the third I didn’t, for reasons I’ll explain. And there is a larger issue: some have cited these sentences as evidence of bad will on my part (and The New Yorker’s)—of a politicized bias against Hugo Chávez.

Last October 7th, I wrote in a blog post that Venezuela had the highest homicide rate in Latin America. Actually, Honduras has the top rate. I acknowledged the error in a Twitter exchange, and we have corrected the post, noting the change.

Since I have also been accused of making the mistake deliberately, or because I was committed to a cartoonish view of Venezuela, I’ll note that even the Venezuelan government sees the high homicide rate as a crisis; it was a major issue in the elections, which is what I was writing about. What I could and should have said is that, according to the United Nations, the country has the fourth-highest murder rate in the entire world. Last year, in Venezuela, there were at least sixteen thousand murders—according to Venezuelan government figures—or more than twenty-one thousand, as the nongovernmental monitoring group Venezuelan Observatory of Violence believes. (The United States, which has more than ten times as many people as Venezuela, had fourteen thousand six hundred and twenty-one homicides in 2011.) Venezuela’s Minister of the Interior and Justice acknowledged recently that last year’s numbers represented an alarming fourteen per cent increase over 2011. Indeed, in the election campaign that followed Chávez’s death, Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s own designated successor, said that violence “is one of the gravest problems” his country faces.

In my January 28, 2013, magazine piece, “Slumlord,” I wrote, “Chávez suggested to me that he had embraced the far left as a way of preventing a coup like the one that put him in office.” This was not correct; though Chávez became a national player in Venezuela by leading a failed military coup in 1992, he gained the Presidency by winning an election in 1998, events about which I have written whole articles for The New Yorker. (The first was a thirteen-thousand-word Profile in 2001; I’ve interviewed Chávez a number of times, travelled with him, and came to know him fairly well.) My point in the reference in this magazine piece was that, having once participated in a coup, Chávez had later looked over his shoulder. When this error was brought to its attention, the magazine ran a correction in The Mail in the April 1st issue. (The piece itself is available online to subscribers or though the digital edition.)

In the hours after Chávez’s death, on March 5th, I wrote an obituary entitled “Postscript: Hugo Chávez, 1954-2013.” A number of letters I’ve received dispute, out of context, my reference to “the same Venezuela as ever: one of the world’s most oil-rich but socially unequal countries”; several cite an economic statistic known as the Gini coefficient—a measure of income inequality. Others are simply angry at the suggestion that Chávez left Venezuela “the same.”

Here is the missing context:

In 1998, Chávez won Venezuela’s Presidential elections, promising to change things in his country forever, from top to bottom. Since the day he was first sworn in as President, in February, 1999, he devoted himself to doing precisely that. What he has left is a country that, in some ways, will never be the same, and which, in other ways, is the same Venezuela as ever: one of the world’s most oil-rich but socially unequal countries, with a large number of its citizens living in some of Latin America’s most violent slums.

To his credit, Chávez was devoted to trying to change the lives of the poor, who were his greatest and most fervent constituents….

Brazil’s last leader, Lula, who was also a left-wing populist, also made “the people” and poverty alleviation a priority of his Administration, and, with a better management team and without all the polarizing confrontation with the imperio, he succeeded to an impressive degree. In Venezuela, by contrast, Chávez’s revolution suffered from mediocre administrators, ineptitude, and a lack of follow-through.

In terms of some of the components of social inequality, notably income and education, Chávez had some real achievements. (Income is what’s captured by the Gini coefficient, although that statistic has its own limitations, some particular to Venezuela.) But in housing and violence, his record was woefully insufficient. Those social factors are intimately related, to each other and to the question of equality. Most of the Venezuelans who are murdered are poor, and they are being killed in greater numbers than ever before, while living in desperately miserable and violent slums, where many of those murders occur.

To quote again from my own blog post of last October, “Despite some successes, such as raising the living standards of those living in extreme poverty through government subsidies, effective administration seems woefully beyond the Chavistas. Despite a great spirit of voluntarism amongst his grassroots loyalists and many well-intentioned government officials, Chávez’s government has been extremely mediocre in actual policy implementation. His greatest legacy to his countrymen may well be a sense of unfinished business, a result of the expectations he raised but left unfulfilled.”

Maduro, and Chávez before him, blamed the violence on capitalism. If the truth be told, there probably is something in this—the idea that a materially based society somehow fuels greed, moral corruption, and therefore rampant crime. The problem, in Venezuela’s case, is that the political phenomenon known as Chavismo has been in power since 1999. Fourteen years, in other words, of a vocally anti-capitalist and (since 2005, at least) avowedly “socialist” system. By any calculus, the Chavistas own Venezuela’s social problems, which are profound. Surely a country as oil-rich as Venezuela—with about seven hundred billion dollars earned in oil revenues since 1999—could have done better?

Photograph by Sebastian Liste/Reportage by Getty Images. More of his photographs of Venezuela are featured in a Photo Booth slide show.