After Chavez – Letter From Nicaragua

March 5th, 2013.

It’s a dark night in Managua, but people are gathered in a brightly lit area at the entrance to the marginal neighbourhood known as Barrio Hugo Chávez. They heard the news several hours ago, but the idea that their hero, Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez, has died hasn’t quite sunk in.

It doesn’t seem possible that the larger-than-life, fearless leader could have been snatched away before his time.

“Yo soy Chávez” (“I am Chávez”) was the phrase on the lips of his supporters upon his death, but it doesn’t sit quite right with me. A friend seems okay with it and she recently suggested that “time is now measured before Chávez and after Chávez.” She has a point, and even when it became clear that his illness was terminal, it was really difficult to imagine an “after Chávez.”

First elected in 1999, Venezuela’s oil wealth allowed Chávez to embark on massive social spending benefiting the poor, including universal access to free health care, new schools, the abolishment of illiteracy, the reduction of poverty by half and extreme poverty by 70 per cent, according to the North American Congress on Latin America.

On the international scene, Nicaragua’s newly elected socialist government was greatly bolstered through partnering with Chávez and also by its inclusion in ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of our Americas.

I feel like I spent Chávez’s entire term trying to figure out whether he was as good—or as bad—as he was depicted. When I first came to Nicaragua, I was already convinced that the Sandinistas were the “good guys” and while a few Nicaraguan friends tried unsuccessfully to persuade me otherwise, they did add more of a spectrum of ideas to my black and white view.

One well-known figure who spoke out against Chávez was a fellow Latin American, the new Pope Francisco (Francis). Prior to his election to the papacy, Cardinal Bergoglio stated in an interview that Chávez had created an “empire of dependence.” I don’t believe that the poor of Venezuela, or those of Nicaragua, would agree; they see it more as finally getting what the government has owed them.

Latin Americans/Nicaraguans hoping for transformation and transition have reason for hope, however. Francisco is the first Jesuit pope, and the first not only from the Americas, but the first from the southern hemisphere. “Ya era hora,” (“It’s about time”) is the general consensus here.

Still, while there are promising signs of renewal in Rome, no one expects Nicaragua’s firmly entrenched, conservative and politically powerful Roman Catholic ruling class to start crumbling any time soon and some sectors of the population are fine with it as is.