Shifting the Balance: Obama and the Americas

The Chavez Challenge for Obama: An Inconvenient Marriage or Frosty Separation

69 five The Chávez Challenge for Obama: An Inconvenient Marriage or Frosty Separation Jennifer McCoy Ideology, geopolitics, and domestic political dynamics in Venezuela and the United States make for a volatile relationship between the Obama and Chávez administrations. Ever since his election in 1998, President Hugo Chávez has been trying to create a new model of politics and economics, and to challenge U.S. dominance in the region and the world. Through a strategy of intense confrontation with adversaries at home and abroad, combined with new foreign alliances globally and integrationist schemes regionally, his administration seeks to redistribute power and resources both domestically and internationally. At the same time, the mutual dependence of the United States and Venezuela on oil trade leads to a relationship full of contradictions and mixed messages. The challenge for the Obama administration is to manage this “inconvenient marriage” in such a way as to protect U.S. strategic interests in a difficult international environment while avoiding being drawn into unnecessary conflicts with a strong-willed personality. When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, he found himself in the midst of a severe financial crisis, plummeting oil prices, and troubled relations with Venezuela and Bolivia. Venezuela had withdrawn its ambassador from Washington five months earlier in solidarity with Bolivia’s expulsion of its U.S. ambassador for alleged interference in domestic affairs, and the United States had retaliated in kind. Faced with a recalcitrant but strategically important trade partner in Venezuela, the Obama administration sent signals of willingness to enter a dialogue, promising a new era of cooperation with all of Latin America. Hugo Chávez adopted a wait-and-see attitude, 05-0562-8 ch5.indd 69 11/2/10 11:11 AM 70 Jennifer McCoy with prospects for conciliation when the two presidents shook hands and exchanged words of goodwill at their meeting in Trinidad and Tobago in April 2009. Two months later the two countries quietly reinstated their ambassadors. Soon, however, the contentiousness of the Bush years seemed more in evidence than any movement toward rapprochement. Understanding Chávez’s Venezuela With the Chávez election in 1998, Venezuela became the first of several countries—Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay followed in quick succession— to choose presidents to bring about radical political change through constitutional “re-founding,” or rewriting, or the inclusion of previously excluded groups in the distribution of power and resources. In Venezuela’s case, the demands for change arose from its political dynamics. A serious dislocation caused by the near tripling of poverty rates from the 1970s to the 1990s and subsequent rejection of the traditional political elites led to the gradual collapse of what had once been considered one of the strongest political party systems in the region. Chávez initiated a process of elite displacement, redistribution of economic and political resources, concentration of power, and experimentation with new forms of participatory democracy encoded in a new constitution written by a popularly elected constituent assembly and approved by Venezuelan voters in 1999. The political process since then has been conflictive, with mass protests, occasional violence, an attempted coup in 2002, a two-month petroleum strike in late 2002 and early 2003, and a presidential recall referendum in 2004. Although President Chávez survived each attempt to remove him from office and subsequently consolidated his power, the country has not yet achieved a new social contract including all sectors of society, which remains polarized, albeit with less visible conflict. Inspired by the South American liberator Simón Bolívar, Chávez’s revolution is full of contradictions: it incorporates both a nationalistic and a Latin American integrationist dream, and it seeks both top-down (centralized) and bottom-up (participatory) change, with a concentration of executive power.1 Foreign policy is a fundamental component of Chávez’s vision, his goal being to counterbalance U.S. global and regional hegemony with a more multipolar world, and to use Venezuela’s status as an energy exporter to enhance its influence in regional affairs.2 Venezuela’s foreign policy, like its domestic policy, is confrontational and conflictive. 05-0562-8 ch5.indd 70 11/2/10 11:11 AM The Chávez Challenge for Obama 71 The Bolivarian Revolution actually retains many of the basic traits of Punto Fijo politics, the democratic system in Venezuela from 1959 to 1998:3 dependence on oil revenues and their distribution; highly...