Salsa music blares through the narrow streets of Gramoven, a shanty town in western Caracas. The houses are made of breeze blocks and corrugated iron but the occupants have painted them in bright cheerful colours.
It is here that Odeinys Pereira runs a clinic. He is one of 800 Cuban doctors invited by left-wing President Hugo Chavez to live and work in the shanty towns.
”In 40 years of democracy, it’s the first time we’ve had a doctor in this area,” Jesus Sanchez (70) said.
But Douglas Leon Natera, head of the Venezuelan Medical Federation, is not so enamoured. ”We’re being invaded by so-called doctors trained in Marxist-Leninism and the Castro-communism of the dictator of the Caribbean island of Cuba.”
Venezuela is sharply polarised. Middle-class voters say they feel cheated: they voted for a politician who promised to end corruption and rejuvenate Venezuela, they say, but he has veered towards communism.
Chavez — a former paratroop commander who led a failed coup in 1992 and won a landslide election victory in 1998 — continues to command support among the poor. How much support may soon be put to the test: the opposition have demanded a referendum on revoking his mandate.
The Constitution says that a referendum on a president may be held midway through his term of office if 20% of the electorate sign a petition.
Chavez reached his mid-term on Tuesday.
The opposition says it has collected 2,7-million signatures, but Venezuela has no electoral authority to verify this, because the deeply divided Congress has been unable to agree who should sit on an electoral commission.
The government’s critics complain of a ”creeping Cubanisation” — and there are similarities of style. Chavez frequently clears the airwaves and obliges all TV channels to broadcast his speeches live. His trademarks are a red beret and fatigues. He jokes and cajoles the audience. He breaks into song.
As a former lecturer at a military academy, he has a pedagogic streak. His favourite subject is Simon Bolivar, the 19th-century independence leader whose unfulfilled mission to unite Latin America he has adopted.
His language divides the country. Although the son of a teacher, he uses the street-slang of the poor, peppering his speeches with words such as chamo (mate). To the middle classes such language is vulgar and unbefitting a president, but in the shanty towns people say he talks like them.
Those poor neighbourhoods are abuzz with activity: not only have thousands joined the government-funded ”Bolivarian circles”, hundreds of cooperatives, community assemblies and alternative radio stations have been set up as well.
”Chavez is the product of social exclusion — of the growing divide between the rich and the poor we have experienced over the [past] 20 years,” a local historian, Margarita Lopez Maya, said.
In the shanty towns surrounding Caracas the government has given out property titles. It has opened six cheap state-run food shops and plans to open subsidised chemists as well. Nationally, it has begun a literacy campaign, built 3 000 ”Bolivarian” schools for the poor and created dozens of ”neighbourhood water committees” to bring clean water to the slums.
To his critics these schemes are tokenistic, incoherent and a breeding ground of corruption. But they have given Chavez a support base that has enabled him to withstand numerous attempts to unseat him: most famously the botched coup attempt last year.
On April 11 2002 Chavez was detained by the military. On April 12 Pedro Carmona, head of Venezuela’s business federation, was sworn in as president. But thousands of Chavistas flooded on to the streets, the army split, and the plotters’ alliance fragmented. Within 48 hours Chavez was back in the presidential palace.
In December last year the business federation, managers of the state-owned oil company (PDVSA) and an opposition trade union began a strike that lasted two months and paralysed the economy, but Chavez survived.
Once victorious, he showed no mercy, sacking 18 000 PDVSA employees whom he described as ”coup-mongers, traitors and saboteurs”.
Chavez says he will hold a referendum if the opposition fulfils the requisite steps, but is in no mood to hurry things along.
Carlos Correa, director of the human rights group Provea, says the government’s democratic credentials are not spotless.
”There’s a strong streak of authoritarianism in Chavismo. For all its talk of participation, there’s been a centralisation of power in the hands of the president … There is also a real institutional weakness.
”The attorney general, the national ombudsman and the national auditor, all those posts [that] ought to be a counterweight to the power of the executive, have simply gone to friends of the government.”
As the fourth-largest oil supplier to the United States, Venezuela has attracted the keen interest of Washington. It was one of the few governments to recognise Carmona’s short-lived presidency. It is backing the opposition’s call for a referendum.
The polls say that Chavez has 30% support. He claims that the surveys are wrong because the pollsters never go to the shanty towns, but the opposition says that even the poor have grown weary of his crisis-ridden regime. The economy contracted by 9% last year, and 29% in the first quarter of this year.
But even if the opposition did win a referendum, Aran Aharonian, editor of the magazine Question, said, it has no clear idea of what would come after.
”They are a heterogeneous movement, united only in wanting to get rid of Chavez. They have no alternative proposals, no leaders, no project for the country. Some simply want to go back to the past.”
Whether Chavez wins or loses a referendum, the deep fracture in society will be hard to mend. — Â