Yesterday, Hugo Chavez, the controversial president of Venezuela died. While I am not a historian of Latin America--though I have a degree in the field--I sought to keep up with the actions of the man. I also went to Venezuela a few years ago to see what was going on since leftist politics is an interest of mine. I read several books, interviewed people and used my former journalist's eyes and ears and historian's mind to learn as much as I could about the man. Having gone to Cuba, Mexico, Central America and even the Middle East to study revolutionary movements, I developed some notions of Chavez and Chavismo.
I have no interest in writing about my personal feelings on the man or his movement, but I do want to write the just initiated discussions of the man and Venezuela. And I have to admit I quickly concluded that most journalists and even the "informed" pundits know so little about the man and his politics. They apply no framework for understanding the man but simply speak as admirers or disdainers. They evaluate him on issues that are political but which often have little to do with things on the ground. He is either a dilusional socialist or a corrupt leader, or he is the savior of Latin America. While these claims may have some "truth" within them, they are hardly good analysis of the man.
This leads me to my dismay in recent years of seeing pundits and journalists claim to be historians. From Chris Mathews to Bill O'Rielly, these individuals get interested in a topic--mostly one that will make money--hire a ghost writer, peruse the sources that fit their views, and then put out a mostly sensational work that has little merit, adds little to the historical record but stirs up the pollitical waters and thus sells books. None of these men--mostly men--ever find that their research and study of some political leader ever changes their mind. The view they have of their topics is the same when they are finished as when they started. Though historians have always written with ideological and political lenses, they could at least claim to bring in some expertise and some time spent looking at the sources. And surprisingly there are a few who admit to having learned something new or even changed their view about their topic. Those, of course, were individuals who took their professions seriously.
Today, however, most people write about what they like and they end up liking even more what they write. In one day, I saw people line up on either side of the Chavez divide and pontificate, though the anti-Chavez crowd were the most numerous. This was particularly true in Univision which is headquartered in Miami. And while the station claims a liberal view on American politics, they tend to be anti-anything left when it comes to Latin America. That is particularly true about Jorge Ramos who often seems "embarrassed" that Latin Americans leaders don't act like his favorite white politicians.
Most analysts, like Ramos and the mostly conservative analysts he brings in, will miss Chavez's growing up years, his evolution during his military stint, and will fail to connect his political views to a long tradition of military populism in Latin America that navigates between right and left. They will fail to understand that his closeness to Fidel Castro did not come initially because of ideology but because of the open door that Cuba offered to those in Latin American who were against the status quo. Most will also fail to note how the American approved coup radicalized him, and led him to embrace those who hated the U.S. not because of ideology but because of shared bitterness. They will either judge him a socialist who ruined his country or mock him as a candy-store leftist who was anything but ideologically inconsistent. Then, they will look at the problems of Venezuela and accuse him of failing to fix all the problems that the nation faced. They will do this while ignoring the fact that almost all of the Latin American countries--governed from the left or the right--are currently facing the same challenges.
They will compare him to Fidel Castro, maybe even Che Guevarra, and find him "wanting" as a leader with legacy. And then they will feel good about having done their job. This reminds me of when I went to cover El Salvador with a team of reporters during its civil war. While I read as much as I could about the country, the insurgency and Latin American politics, most of the other journalists were worried about whether they were in shape in case they had to "hump" out in the countryside. Some even learned a few spanish words to order a beer. As expected, most came back feeling the same about that "banana republic and its tin-sword" leaders as they did when they left. In fact, the chief copy editor actually provided the overarching thesis of the newspaper's coverage even though he knew nothing about the civil war or Central America. My complaints over the shoddy and unprofessional work got me fired, one week before my part of the coverage was honored for outstanding reporting. What the award committee found was that I cut through numerous layers of politics and perceptions to get to the core of what people were thinking as they lived through a horrible civil war. I did this because I prepared and I asked questions that went beyond the interviews and also spent time in country trying to decipher how people thought. Getting the "scoop" was less important than understanding the story of El Salvador.
El Comandante was a complicated figure and his life and politics say much about Latin America, its past, its ghosts, it racial divisions and its future. Few will noticed how much Latin American has changed because of him and how much less it is under the influence of the U.S., which for many Latin Americans is a great improvement. Most of that, however, will be missed by the pundits and need I say by a lot of the Latin American historians who will be asked for sound bites. My experience in the academy has taught me that most American Latin Americanists have little sense of Latin America. They may know the sources and they can figure out the larger actions but they know little about what people think, or why they vote the way they do. Few of them will have ever spent time walking up the mountainsides among the poor, lunched with military men, or interviewed refugees, or guerrillas. And most will care very little about the people they write about. So El Comandante will be just another "South American dictator" who came and went and left his country worse off. And then everyone will be surprised when another Hugo Chavez arises in Latin America, and they will then chalk it up to the craziness of Latin Americans.
