Venezuela
The Chávez EffectFall 2008
Between Militarization and Compassion
Paula Vásquez
Between militarization and compassion
Disaster Victims Assistance Policies After the Tragedy
By Paula Vásquez
The front page of the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional on December 6, 2000, showed the picture of a woman standing in front of an open, empty refrigerator, her back turned to the readers. The caption explained that the refrigerator belonged to displaced victims or “damnificados” of the December 1999 natural catastrophe known as “the Tragedy.” Massive floods and landslides had wracked the Venezuelan coast and the Caracas metropolitan area that month, leaving more than 1,000 dead and 150,000 people displaced and homeless. In the newspaper report, I found echoes of my own field research, which was to last five years and trace the outcomes of people’s lives after the tragedy.
The newspaper story, published a year after the disaster, examined the tremendous socio-economic instability of the families, the damnificados of the Tragedy. Many of them had been relocated to other towns, far from Caracas, in 2000 and later in 2001. The woman in the photograph charged that assistance from governmental institutions was not enough to begin a new life in the urban development outside Maracaibo in Zulia state, where her new house was located. There were no jobs, no public transportation or even basic utilities, she said. El Nacional later published a reply to the newspaper story from the director of the Special Social Fund (Fondo Unico Social/FUS), the institution in charge of providing assistance to disaster victims. The director, William Fariñas, an Army Lt. Colonel, asserted that the problem was that the family had too many children, that the woman’s husband had benefited from “plans for quick employment” and that “what’s wrong is they have problems of self-esteem.”
Complaints of this sort came up quite often until the end of 2003, when the “Plan for the Dignification of the Venezuelan Family” ended. The Plan, which had several stages, was among the first of the Chávez government’s social policy programs aimed at helping the 1999 disaster victims. Until the end of the year 2000, the Plan, coordinated by the FUS, the Plan Bolívar 2000 (PB 2000) and the Urban Development Fund (Fondo de Desarrollo Urbano/FONDUR), placed disaster victims in housing in military bases throughout the country and provided minimum-wage jobs or “plans of quick employment” such as cleaning streets and military installations. Later, the families received new housing through low-interest loans, provided they agreed to stay out of the metropolitan Caracas area and live far from their places of origin.
Thus, in 2000, 2001 and 2002, more than 100,000 families of “damnificados” were relocated to different cities throughout the country on the outskirts of Maracaibo, Guanare, El Tigre, Barquisimeto and San Carlos. It was one of the most important migrations of people in all of Venezuelan history. But families began to drift back to Caracas and Vargas after only a short time. Those who did not return to the devastated zones settled down in places known as the “refuges,” precarious settlements of poor families that had lost their homes to the continuous landslides that affected the metropolitan area.
Between 2000 and 2005, I interviewed disaster victims in the military forts of Tiuna (Caracas) and Guaicaipuro (Miranda state), and in five working-class settlements in Caracas. The displaced victims all emphasized the difficulties in finding work and in reorganizing their lives in places without transportation or jobs. Most of the families who lived in the Caracas and Vargas settlements consisted of women with small children.
The December 15 Tragedy is also a political symbol because it took place at the same day as the national elections in which the Venezuelan people voted for a new Constitution, the basis of a new “Bolivarian republic,” as the country had been baptized by President Chávez. Thus, the “Plan of the Dignification of the Venezuelan Family” was born in the context of a revision of the national foundations, thanks to Chávez’s creative lexicon. In Spanish, the word “damnificado” has strong connotations because of its Latin root damnun, which also means “to condemn.” The “dignification” thus fits a specific Venezuelan context because the Bolivarian government was distinguishing itself from previous governments that never formulated a social policy especially directed toward Caracas families who had been losing homes over the years in constant landslides.
Put in another way, the suffering of these victims did not lower their status for the Bolivarian government, but rather made them more worthy. However, this quasi-religious reclassification of suffering had little practical effect on the conditions of the families confined to military bases and urban settlements. More than a name change is required to transform the reflexes of a society and the state in regards to the poor. Nevertheless, the linguistic emphasis on dignification revealed the force of Christian symbolism in the political handling of the crisis. Echoes of liberation theology’s emphasis on the preferential option for the poor, in viewing the poor as blessed, found its way into official rhetoric. Policy was tangled up with power and redemption. The militarized handling of the disaster victims and the administration of social policies are justified by a political and rhetorical link between misfortune and compassion.
In Caracas, landslides are a chronic problem and risk because of the topography of the area, particularly in the working-class neighborhoods on the hillsides. The victims of violent rains and other turbulent weather such as Hurricane Brett in 1993 had been forced to live for years in makeshift housing and barracks while waiting for “housing solutions.” Nevertheless, the Tragedy of 1999 can be differentiated in two ways from these chronic landslides caused by flooding. The first is quantitative: the spectacular brutality of the cataclysm and the number of dead, injured and homeless. The second is qualitative: the apparently undiscriminating natural violence that affected rich and poor alike. I say “apparently” because social differentiation appeared over the long term, once the permanence of poor people in the settlements became chronic. Over time, middle-class and upper-class victims of the natural disaster found social resources such as training or contacts in the job market, as well as family support, to begin a new life.
What happened to make the dignification’s beneficiaries, in principle the new subjects of the social policies of the recently installed revolutionary government, become contemptible in the eyes of people heading the institutions such as Col. Fariñas? To understand this outcome it is necessary to comprehend the moral, social and political itinerary of the families involved, as well as of the institutions assigned to help them. Two institutions, FUS and PB2000, are emblematic of social policies that existed until 2003. At the beginning of his government, Chávez inaugurated PB 2000, a social program in which the army played a predominant role. The chiefs of Venezuela’s most important garrisons coordinated and carried out a series of actions of a communitarian nature with their own resources, personnel and criteria. Villages and hamlets witnessed the arrival of soldiers offering medical services and food, the type of help that had arrived previously only during electoral campaigns. The Venezuelan state has historically been very weak institutionally in rural zones, and the novelty of the actions was in effect political. President Chávez had introduced PB 2000 at the beginning of 1999, almost a year before the catastrophe, as “the most important humanitarian action ever carried out in Venezuela up until now.”
Already then it was not a public policy issue, but an act of salvation. PB 2000, as established by the government in the 2000-2007 Plan, put forth a civil-military program “to provide urgent assistance to the most needy population and to those who have been most marginalized.” Because it was an emergency program, contracts were awarded without bidding for them; there was no form of administrative accountability. But the Tragedy converted this “social” emergency into a very tangible one. According to the National Assembly’s Special Commission for Vargas, between December 1999 and 2003, US $1,372,107,891 were spent on the “dignification plan.” In the year 2000 alone, the amount invested by FUS and PB 2000 was US$36 billion (in 2000, 670 bolivares to a dollar). After 2005, the PB 2000 was declared “incapable of being audited,” that is, government officials themselves could not determine the amounts of the budget. PB 2000 had carte blanche for spending, a situation that favored diversion of funds. It was impossible to demand accountability from the Armed Forces in its handling of resources. In April 2007, El Universal reported that six bank accounts belonging to General Víctor Cruz Weffer, director of PB 2000, were frozen on charges of corruption.
Let’s return to the scene we opened with. Families complained about very specific conditions that resulted from the gap between expectations created by the discourse of the proposed dignification and the reality of the relocations. The institutions themselves generated new forms of exclusion that caused conflicts when the beneficiaries did not adapt to the imposed norms, a situation that very frequently degenerated into violence. On one occasion, FUS officials were kidnapped in a settlement because of unfulfilled promises to relocate the disaster victims to where they wanted to live.
In 2003, FUS closed down its “office of shelters” and transferred the cases to agencies that oversee housing policies; the disaster victims then became part of the “natural demand” for low-cost housing. The administration of the shelters, temporary refuges where displaced victims waited until being transferred to new settlements, was given to associations that handled the money to buy food and to guarantee a minimum level of aid. The discontent of those who had not received housing intensified. In December 2006, a married couple, disaster victims who had waited in line for more than a week at the door of the offices of the Housing Ministry, crucified themselves to a tree on the sidewalk outside the ministry by hammering nails into their own hands. It was the cusp of an extreme act of desperation, the mobilization of the physical body, of pain and suffering, to attract the attention of those who one day had promised them dignity.
The acquisition and subsequent loss of the status of victims of a natural catastrophe is a paradoxical process. With the passing of time, victims want more than compassion and demand that society and its institutions treat them as citizens who have a right to expect accountability. In the Venezuelan case, the social representations of the help given to the families affected by the catastrophe reinforced old clichés. Opinion articles talked about the “culture of the damnificado,” recalling the so-called culture of poverty and using stereotypes and labels to disqualify the poor as the “lazy dregs of Venezuelans” with the mentality of a“negrito del batey,” which politely translates as “a black fieldhand” (José Maria Felix, El Universal 12/02/2000). What is odd is that the FUS director alludes to “Venezuelans’ self-esteem problems” to “explain” the victims’ situation. I’m not saying here that there aren’t disaster victims who don’t take advantage of their situation. The question is to examine the foundations for the moral ordering that regulated an aid program that dwindled on a daily basis.
For an example of such moralizing, legal penalties were imposed on those who sold their houses in the far-off countryside. When people didn’t want to stay where they were sent, they were treated as children and told that they shouldn’t sell a gift from the state. They did not have the freedom to determine their own destiny and could not freely administer the indemnification they had been granted. Women heads of households bent over backwards to demonstrate their honesty to the institutions. They learned to sometimes shed tears at the appropriate moments and at other moments demonstrated their strong-willed capacity to negotiate.
In 2006, February 4 was named the “Day of National Dignity.” The use of the word “dignity” is constantly invoked the official Bolivarian rhetoric and, as frequently occurs with institutional rhetoric, it is seldom defined. In the headline of an opinion piece, Javier Biardeau (El Nacional, 11/03/2007) mentions the word “dignity” and explains that socialism of the 21st century rejects the “dominant values of capitalism” and seeks a profound transformation of social, economic and legal structures. Taking into account that dignity is an inherent concept in the rule of law, one could ask: what institutions would operate during the definitive transformation that the revolution would carry out? Courts? Schools? Clinics and hospitals? Public Prosecutor’s Office? Aren’t these the very institutions that are intended to guarantee human dignity, as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? In theory, these are the institutions that should guarantee the right to life and the integrity of the individual, without social, ethnic and political distinctions. But the passionate revolutionary exaltation of the “absolute subordination to the power of the people” appears to be more of a rationale for violence than a demand for participatory democracy.
The “dignificados”—the dignified (indemnified) victims—of the Tragedy have been one of the social groups most stigmatized by public institutions. Families were accused of being “deserters from the program of dignification” when for varied reasons they left the housing they had been allocated. At this time, almost ten years from the time of the Tragedy, “popular dignity” is limited to mere symbolism and is entrenched in the military apparatus, so much so that the official emblem of the “4F Day of Dignity” is much more military, patriotic and bellicose than humanist. The image speaks a thousand words.
Paula Vasquez holds doctorates (2007) in social anthopology and ethnology from the Institut de recherce interdisciplinaire sue les enjeux sociaux (I.R.I.S), Ecole des hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de Paris, and in sociology from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. Her doctoral thesis was on the “Politics of catastrophe in times of the Bolivarian revolution; management of the disaster victims of the Tragedy of 1999 in Venezuela.” She is particularly interested in the political anthropology of humanitarian action and the governmentality of extreme crisis in Venezuela and Latin America. The management of the emergency was analyzed in detail in Fassin, Didier et Paula Vasquez (2005). "Humanitarian exception as the rule: The Political Theology of the 1999 Tragedia in Venezuela." American Ethnologist 32(3): 389-405. Another article on the symbolism and ritualization of the dignity will appear shortly in a Venezuelan magazine. E-mail: mailto:paula.vasquez@wanadoo.fr .