Posted on 04/17/2002 11:39:41 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
ARACAS, Venezuela, April 17 — It was not just political differences that stirred Ramón Rodríguez to reject the coalition led by business leaders that forced President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela out of power briefly last week. It was the sight of them in the newspaper on Saturday.
"All of them oligarchs," said Mr. Rodríguez, a street vendor, using the term by which the country's poor masses describe the wealthy white minority. "Couldn't they have appointed one person like us?"
Outraged, he went out to join the protesters who poured from the slums and tore through the streets to seize the national palace and put President Chávez back. Within 24 hours, Mr. Chávez resumed his presidency.
"If they rise up again," Mr. Rodríguez said, referring to the elite, "then we will rise again too."
The turmoil surrounding Mr. Chávez has exposed the deep social and racial rift in Venezuela between the upper and middle classes, who tend to be lighter skinned, and the poor majority. The brash president's turbulent political career has been driven by the entrenched polarization.
A former army paratrooper from a poor family, he rose to power by seizing on the swelling discontent among Venezuela's poorest masses, promising to champion their causes against what he denounced as the corrupt forces of the old establishment. Although this is a country rich in oil and natural resources, some 80 percent of the people live poor.
Yet Mr. Chávez's opposition, while led by business executives, draws on an increasingly mobilized middle class of office workers, unionized laborers, even some military officers. They, too, have grown into a combative force.
Mr. Chávez, with his tan skin and curly dark hair, embodies the racial mixture of Venezuela. Some 67 percent of the people here are mestizos, a mixed race of the whites, blacks and Indians who are the nation's minorities. Economic and political power, however, remains concentrated in the hands of whites.
After he was restored to power, Mr. Chávez set aside his combative talk and said he would work for national reconciliation. But the depth of the social divisions, which Mr. Chávez himself has aggravated, makes political peacemaking difficult.
Rather than working to mend the fractures in society, political experts said, Mr. Chávez exploited them to sustain his populist revolution. One result comes clear in the views of a street vendor and the rancorous, edgy or just plain exhausted expressions of others across the capital.
An unemployed carpenter, Joisé Pérez, 31, compared the weekend of protests and looting by the pro- Chávez demonstrators to rioting by African-Americans after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. On the other hand, Lenin Guerrero, 18, a high-school student from a well-to-do family, compared the violence to the activities of the Ku Klux Klan.
A worker at a psychiatric hospital, Manzur Torre Alba, lamented that the rich looked down on him as "subhuman." A doctor, Pedro Baldallo, lamented equally indignantly that the poor called people like him "squalid ones," believing they were tainted by corruption.
Strolling with his family through a plaza in a wealthy neighborhood called Altamira, Rony Moscovitz, a businessman, said he felt alienated by the anticapitalist slogans of the Chávez government because he would like to see reforms that attract increased foreign investment and trade.
After President Chávez appointed several of his allies to the board of the state-owned oil company, Mr. Moscovitz joined a march last week calling for the president's resignation. He insisted it was a "civilized, peaceful march," in contrast to the extensive looting over the weekend by pro-Chávez demonstrators. Even though Mr. Chávez is back in power, Mr. Moscovitz said, he still feels proud to have risen up against him.
As he spoke, the blaring horns of a passing caravan of pickup trucks broke the calm. The trucks were filled with Chávez supporters who waved Venezuelan flags and chanted, "He's back!"
"We have lost a battle," Mr. Moscovitz said. "But we have not lost the war."
Calls for healing have come in from around the world in the wake of last week's turmoil. Today, Pope John Paul II urged Venezuelans to "ensure that a spirit of reconciliation prevails."
César Gaviria, the president of the Organization of American States, said today that Venezuelans must find ways to live with one another or face renewed instability.
"There is a risk, probably not of another coup, but that social unrest will come again soon," he said.
Most people have returned to their daily routines, but are still tense. The television broadcasts angry statements by pro-Chávez officials charging that he was forced out of power in a coup orchestrated by the elite.
Opposition politicians declare that they will not recognize the authority of the Chávez government. People say they are going straight home after work, rather than dallying at malls, markets and restaurants.
At Mr. Rodríguez's bookstall in a neighborhood called Catia, shoppers seemed united in their support for Mr. Chávez and resentment toward those who supported his removal. They complained that the rich hoard their wealth and use little of it to generate jobs that pay decent salaries.
Mr. Chávez, they said, did not take power and forget the poor people who supported him. They said he had devoted government resources to low-cost housing and expanding public education.
"We are committed to him because he is committed to us," said Mr. Rodríguez, a thin, dark-skinned man whose cloudy eyes make him look older than his 44 years. "The rich people underestimated us."
To be sure, there were also measured voices coming from offices, social service centers and shopping plazas.
In a chic mall with sushi bars and Vietnamese restaurants where a meal costs a quarter of Venezuela's $40 monthly minimum salary, Corina Salas, 23, who works in a tourism agency and considers herself middle class, said she was exasperated by the lingering polarization. Rich and poor people have to find common ground, she said.
"We know that if they don't get ahead," she said, referring to the poor, "we don't either."
OK I may need to get out a calculator...but I believe 67% out of 100% is not a minority.
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