Hugo Chávez and the Tragedy of the Venezuelan Arrival City

Hugo Chávez and the Tragedy of the Venezuelan Arrival City

This is a chapter from my book Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World.

Revolutionary movements originating in the wealthy centre, probably beginning with the Jacobins in 1789, have used the grievances and frustrations of the arrival city as their source of ideological and human support, and then abandoned those communities as soon as they come to power.

A most extreme and fascinating variation on this theme is found in Venezuela, where the “Bolivarian revolution” that began with the election of Col. Hugo Chávez to the presidency in 1999 promised to produce a South American government focused exclusively on the arrival city. Turning the rural-migrant slums into the symbolic instrument of their legitimacy, the Chávez regime managed to stoke these marginal lives into a revolutionary conflagration, and then to provoke a fresh crisis in the arrival city.

To understand what went wrong, it’s worth speaking to the residents of Petare, an enormous shantytown community that covers a large upper slope of the Caracas valley, a dense warren of streets that overlooks the wealthier city below. The slums of Caracas are likely the most vertical in the world; rural arrivals have spent decades staking their claims on theoretically uninhabitable rock walls, the residents of Petare jerry-building steep cascades of squatter settlements that are both physically and economically precarious.

Its people—they number between 400,000 and 900,000, depending how they’re counted—have been described from the beginning as Chávez’s most ardent supporters and most lavishly rewarded beneficiaries. The Mexican writer Alma Guillermoprieto described this slum as embodying the essence of the Chávez revolution. “Petare has … possibly more chavistas [followers of Chávez] per square foot, and more cohesively organized, than anywhere else in the country. It is in Petare that Hugo Chávez’s ambitious social welfare programs are implemented most ambitiously, because he has turned the poor into his de facto party, and as a result, whether his presidency stands or falls can be determined by the residents of this barrio.”

These would prove to be prophetic words, as we shall see. It is no surprise that a new sort of arrival-city politics arose in Venezuela, for this oil state has had huge arrival cities longer than most countries. Venezuela was one of the first developing countries to make an urban transition, its population becoming 61 per cent urban by 1961. From 1941 through 1961, the annual growth rate averaged more than 7 per cent, greater than any other city in Latin America. As in Iran, ultra-rapid migration was encouraged without much consideration for either village or urban destination. During the 1970s, rising petroleum prices created an employment boom in Caracas, and governments encouraged tens of thousands of villagers to migrate to the city, tolerating their “land invasions” and occasionally granting them ownership of their squatter homes in exchange for electoral support.

The economy was virtually engineered to prevent a decent urban transition. Beginning in 1970, food prices were set by a Law of Agricultural Marketing, and then price controls were extended to 80 per cent of wage goods in 1974. This was accompanied by the massive subsidizing of goods at the consumer level, notably food and gasoline—an expenditure that amounted to 7 per cent of government revenues—and rigid currency-exchange controls. These policies continued in the 1980s, this time without the oil revenues to back them, leading to staggering government debt. Together, these rigid policies had several effects. They destroyed the agricultural industry, sending hundreds of thousand of people fleeing the villages for Caracas, and they provoked high levels of inflation, which destroyed the non-oil-productive economy. This, in turn, led to double-digit unemployment, which struck just as the slums on the outskirts were becoming most crowded.

In 1989, as the government was forced to abandon its gasoline subsidies in order to receive emergency bailout loans, the slums of Caracas exploded into days of violent rioting and repression known as the Caracazo. Bodies shot by government soldiers were dumped in Petare. This set the seeds for Chávez’s unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992 and then his successful presidential election, built on the support of arrival-city residents, in 1998. By that point, Petare was badly in need of state support: the endless shantytown slums of Caracas were becoming unlivable, their canyons of sewage undermining the very hills that supported them, causing their roads to collapse and entire neighbourhoods to plummet off the hills in rivers of mud and human waste. There were no jobs, and crime was rife.

The Bolivarian revolution seemed to be made for the arrival city, and Chávez was lucky enough to launch it just as petroleum prices were beginning their decade-long climb, providing him with the resources to support it. By 2003, Chávez had established the signature programs of his revolution, the “social missions” (misiones) aimed mainly at the urban poor. Key programs were Mission Robinson and Mission Ribas, which taught basic literacy and skills-training courses to Venezuelan adults; Mission Mercal, which provided subsidized, low-cost meat, grains and dairy products in the barrios; Mission Barrio Adentro, which provided free health care in the slums; and Mission Hábitat, which was intended to replace slums with 100,000 new units of high-quality housing per year.

There is no question that large sums of money were poured into the arrival cities of Caracas during the first decade of the Bolivarian revolution, or that the arrival-city residents appreciated any food, health care and money that came their way. Yet it quickly became apparent that the social missions were doing nothing for the arrival city in terms of its most important needs: land ownership, business opportunities, an autonomous economy and a pathway into the middle class. The residents of Petare knew what was needed for this, but were never asked.

They soon realized that the social missions directed at their barrio had not delivered. While the free food and money brought about a decrease in absolute poverty during the period in which the money was coming, the arrival-city residents complained that nothing lasting was being built. This was often literally true. Housing construction never really got going; 150,000 homes were meant to be built, and fewer than 35,000 were, many of them social-housing apartment blocks that didn’t suit the needs of arrival-city residents. There was never any effort to give the arrival cities a chance to determine what housing suited their needs. Such long-term investments never became a priority, and in fact declined: average per capita levels of public spending on housing dropped by a third between the 1990–98 period (against which Chávez had campaigned) and his own 1999–2004 period.

As for the education programs, these have been shown in extensive studies to have produced no measurable decrease in illiteracy. The writer Tina Rosenberg, on a visit to a slum near Petare, was surprised to find how Mission Ribas functioned: “Political and ideological training, Ribas officials told me, is the top qualification for a facilitator. I attended a session for new Ribas students in Las Torres, a La Vega barrio near the top of the mountain. After Ribas officials told students how to register for classes and what would be expected of them, María Teresa Curvelo, the district coordinator, began a 90-minute talk about a referendum of great importance to the government … Afterward we rode down the mountain in a truck. When she got out, I thanked her. ‘Fatherland, Socialism or Death!’ she replied.”

At the end of 2008, Petare rebelled. Along with many other poor urban neighbourhoods, it turned against the revolution, defeating the Bolivarian candidates in regional elections and protesting against the failure of the social missions. Petare’s member of Parliament, Jesse Chacón, one of Chávez’s best-known allies, was defeated by Carlos Ocariz, a social-democratic opposition candidate. “There were people who got tired of the same old thing—it was payback,” said Arleth Argote, a 31-year-old voter who had enthusiastically backed Chávez during the previous decade, then became frustrated as the arrival city failed to evolve into a thriving community. “People are tired of living poorly,” Ocariz told reporters. “It was a struggle between ideology and daily life.”

What Chávez had done, in essence, was to replace existing state programs with his own “revolutionary” programs, staffed by volunteers and visiting Cuban professionals, and with an ideological, rather than an economic or social, mission. The largest sum of money was spent subsidizing consumption, which did not change the underlying conditions, and often replaced programs that might have done so. As a result, rather than improving life, these programs actually caused a sharp decrease in the material conditions of the rural-migrant poor. Between 1999 and 2006, the proportion of Venezuelan families living on dirt floors almost tripled, from 2.5 per cent to 6.8 per cent; the percentage with no access to running water rose from 7.2 to 9.4 per cent; the percentage of underweight babies rose from 8.4 per cent to 9.1 per cent. Despite the rhetoric, Chávez decreased the proportion of public spending on health, education and housing compared with the years leading up to his attempted coup. Most tellingly, social inequality actually increased during the years of the revolution, according to the regime’s own estimates. It has been described as a process of “hollow growth”: even though the oil-dominated economy grew by 9 per cent each year in Chávez’s first decade, it failed to create jobs, and half of Venezuela’s factories closed their doors between 1998 and 2008, mainly because price and foreign-exchange controls made it impossible to do business.

That view was reinforced by Edmond Saade, a generally regime-supporting scholar who runs the Caracas-based Datos research firm. He realized, a few years into the regime, that the money spilling into the arrival cities of Caracas was leaving no lasting effect. “The poor of Venezuela are living much better lately and have increased their purchasing power … [but] without being able to improve their housing, education level, and social mobility,” he told an interviewer. “Rather than help them become stakeholders in the economic system, what [the Chávez regime] has done is distribute as much oil wealth as possible in missions and social programs.” In the view of disgruntled regime supporters, Chávez had done exactly what previous governments had: poured oil money into the economy, thus causing inflation and destroying the possibility of slum-based entrepreneurship, and given vote-winning handouts to the people on the margins, ignoring their real needs. “Despite its revolutionary rhetoric and its curtailment of democratic institutions,” the economist Norman Gall concluded in an impressive study, “the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ seems merely to be continuing the history of colossal waste of oil revenues, disorganization and failed investments that have impoverished the Venezuelan people in recent decades.” By the end of its first decade, the first great South American revolution of the arrival cities had fizzled, failing to deliver the rural migrants anything it had promised. Chávez, his popularity fluctuating wildly, turned his attention toward dramatic seizures and nationalizations of foreign companies, all but forgetting the promises of housing, development and more prosperous slums. In Petare, time froze.

This was, like its Iranian cousin, an explosion from the urban centre that simply used the arrival city as fuel. There is another way arrival cities can explode: by developing their own potent political movements and sending them inward to seize the political centre of the larger city, and possibly the nation. The arrival-city takeover of the city and the nation is a new phenomenon, but is likely to become the defining political event of this century, as neglected ex-migrant communities, which in many countries will soon represent a majority of the population, demand their own representation.

It is the little-noticed force behind the revolutions in the Arab world, the new protests in China and the economic booms in India, Turkey and South America: The largest population shift in human history, currently at its peak, is probably the most significant, and misunderstood, global event of our time.

Read essay in the Los Angeles Times

In Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, hundreds of millions of people are rapidly moving from rural areas, where they practiced peasant agriculture, to cities — a shift that makes itself felt in the rough-and-tumble transitional neighborhoods where rural migrants first land, both in their own countries and in places like the United States, where they are make up the largest group of immigrants.

We need to pay attention to these neighborhoods, and to the huge demographic shift that is shaping them, for they are where either the next great economic opportunity or the next wave of violence and conflict will be born.

Never in human history have so many people changed their locations and lifestyles so quickly. Each month, there are 5 million new city dwellers created through migration or birth in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. China alone has an estimated 200 million “floating” citizens with one foot in a village and the other in a city. If current trends continue as expected, between 2000 and 2030, the urban population of Asia and Africa will double, adding as many city dwellers in one generation as these continents have accumulated during their entire histories. Between now and 2050, the world’s cities will add another 3.1 billion people.

This will be matched by an almost as dramatic decline in rural population. The United Nations Population Division predicts that the population of the world’s villages and rural areas will stop growing around eight years from now and that, by 2050, the rural population will have fallen by 600 million due to migration to cities and urban encroachment on villages.

We need to remember our own history here. This is the same shift that transformed Europe and North America from peasant to urban life in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. That transition gave us both the violent revolutions and teeming slums of that period, but it also triggered, in the West, the end of starvation as a mass phenomenon, a vast rise in living standards and the end of uncontrollable population growth.

The shift began in the developing world during the decades after World War II, and it is now at its peak: The world has gone from being more than 70% peasant in 1950 to 50% urban today. By 2025, 60% of the world will live in cities; by 2050, more than 70%; and by century’s end, the entire world will almost certainly be as urban as we are in the West.

How is this massive migration being felt? Take a look in the chaotic Cairo neighborhood of Boulaq el Dakrour, home to 650,000 people, most of them families of rural migrants from Upper Egypt. This slum’s frustrated residents formed the first crowd to storm Tahrir Square in January, driving a rebellion that ultimately forced President Hosni Mubarak from power. Or look at Guangdong, the sprawling industrial province in southern China, where thousands of rural-urban migrants rioted for three days this month in anger at their mistreatment by officials, in the most serious uprising China has seen in years. China’s first-time apartment owners, typically the children of village migrants, have also become political activists, directing their anger not at Beijing but at municipal or neighborhood officials. The ex-peasant is increasingly the most potent political actor in the world.

Or look at Brazil and Turkey, two successful countries that have experienced a decade of democratic stability, open borders and economic growth after parties representing rural-urban migrants came to power. The “arrival city” neighborhood is increasingly producing the political leaders who can unite communities and end divisions: Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are all children of rural-urban migrants who grew up in bottom-rung urban neighborhoods.

These neighborhoods want to succeed. They can be the birthplace of a new middle class, as many of America’s immigrant neighborhoods have been. But they can also spiral into violent failure and threaten entire countries when barriers are placed in the way of migrants’ natural inclination to succeed.

The barriers can be physical: the isolating absence of infrastructure or transportation links. They can be bureaucratic: the use of zoning, licensing or security regulations to prevent new-immigrant neighborhoods from becoming teeming mixes of industry, commerce, restaurants and homes. And they can be citizenship barriers. Around the world, there is nothing more damaging to a nation than the presence of a large population of residents who have no pathway to legal citizenship. Without a permanent legal stake, migrants’ networks of self-support are forced to become hidden, illegal and often violent, a huge lost opportunity and a threat to a nation’s security.

This is a population shift that will affect almost everyone, in every country. Never before have so many people reached for the bottom rung of urban success. Our challenge is to make sure there is a second rung waiting for the next wave of brave ex-villagers.

Original Article

When Cairo rose up against dictator Hosni Mubarak in January’s Tahrir Square protests, the unsung hero of the moment was not an individual but rather a rough-and-tumble neighborhood. Bulaq al-Dakrour, a haphazard labyrinth of narrow streets and jerry-built buildings on the city’s western edge, provided the main crowd of protesters who stormed into Tahrir Square, risking their lives against angry security forces, on Jan. 25, and a large part of the vast crowd that stayed there afterwards.

Read article in The Wall Street Journal

The protest organizers knew that Bulaq’s young residents would take up their cries for democracy: The poor district, unknown to most better-off Egyptians and isolated by canals and railway lines from the core city, has a history of angry disenchantment with the ruling regime. It was where the revolution of 2011 began.

We should get used to seeing places like this in the news: They’re the neighborhoods built on the premise of change and progress, not static complacency. Bulaq is known to Egyptians as an ashwaiyyat (“chaotic or haphazard place”)—a neighborhood that does not officially exist. Home to a third of Cairo’s population, the ashwaiyyat are products of one of the world’s most dramatic rural-to-urban shifts, one that has turned Egypt from a mainly village-based to a very urban country in a generation.

Along with more than 70 other such self-built districts across Cairo, it rose spontaneously as masses of people migrated from the rural villages of Upper Egypt into the city’s unused land beginning in the 1970s, drawn to an explosion of employment and small-business opportunities that promised to end the starvation and tedium of peasant rural life. The government has tried over and over to demolish it, and transfer its residents to planned high-rise communities in the distant outskirts. But its economy, tied to consumer markets in the city, has kept it alive, if angry.

People here have saved for years to obtain their raw cement dwellings, whether legally or (more often) informally, and speculate on their property value, using it to invest in rudimentary business. They don’t want to lose that value. Better-off Cairo denizens, and the ruling regime, tend to view these districts as cancerous tumors on the city, breeding grounds for crime and poverty.

Yet the demonstrations cast a light upon the real function of such places. These ashwaiyyat are aspirational neighborhoods, populated by families who arrived with very specific plans for self-improvement, attempting to build links through small business and higher education into the established city life. I call these bottom-rung urban neighborhoods “arrival cities,” to draw attention to their dynamic, transformational nature. They include a great many of the slums of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, gecekondu outskirts of Turkey, bidonvilles of North Africa, favelas and barrios of Latin America.

It’s within arrival cities that the flashpoints of conflict and change occur—not always for the better. They produced the Iranian revolution, the Hindu-nationalist violence of India and much of the revolutionary violence of Latin America. But they also, if they are supported and allowed the to flourish, the starting point for a new, dynamic middle class and the next wave of entrepreneurial growth (it was the arrival-city enclaves of Europe and North America that brought us democracy and modern industry in the last two centuries).

Turkey and Brazil, both of which experienced two decades of violence in their rural-migrant outskirts and saw military dictatorships arise in response, have both been governed for the past decade by political parties—and, frequently, leaders—drawn from the arrival city, leading to a decade of growth, democratic stability and economic openness in both countries. China’s fast-growing arrival-city middle class, the children of peasants who are buying their first, tiny apartments on the fringes of the major cities, is producing pressure for democratic change.These are places of poverty, but still an order of magnitude better than village poverty, and they are built on elaborate networks of mutual support for their originating villages and on economies of rudimentary capitalism. Many are troubled or violent. All began with dreams of a better life and well-thought plans for its attainment; when things go wrong and gangs or destructive politics take over, it is usually because some barrier (physical, bureaucratic, legal or citizenship-related) has been placed in the way of those ambitions.

As junctions between village and city, between deadly poverty and the beginnings of prosperity, these neighborhoods are the focal points of the largest shift of population in human history—the great rural-to-urban migration of the Eastern and Southern hemispheres, a historic shift that began in earnest after the Second World War, is at its peak right now, and will be largely complete long before this century’s end.

This final period of transition, in which peasant-based rural economies become commercial and the largest cities grow, will be tumultuous and full of peril, as governments repeat the errors that led to decades of crisis in South America, Turkey, Iran and other early-urbanizing regions. It will also be the greatest hope for humanity’s future: the end of the food crisis, and the end of continuous population growth, will be products of the arrival city. These in-between districts were the places that transformed Europe’s and North America’s economies from subsistence, starvation-prone economies into middle-class stability; there is every reason they can accomplish the same in the East and South. Rather than squashing the arrival city, we need to give it support and resources.

Original Article

In this really good interview with Allan Gregg, we discuss the core ideas behind Arrival City and their implications in policy, politics and economics.

Original Article

A feature interview with Steve Paikin of The Agenda about Arrival City: The Final Migration And Our Next World.

Original Article