Venezuelan politics get personal, divide families

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A portrait of Hugo Chavez stared down from a black metal frame as Jose Pastano sipped coffee after dinner with his sons in the slum house he shares with 17 relatives on the western edge of the capital.

Leaning forward in his chair, the retired bus mechanic chided his children for backing Venezuela's opposition, calling them ungrateful for all that the late president had done for the country during his 14 years in power. The ruling party's narrow win in last month's presidential vote, Pastano declared, was the only thing keeping U.S. firms from taking over Venezuela's state oil company.

"You are blind and deaf, you simply do not want to accept the truth," Pastano fumed. "The truth is that Chavez lifted millions of our countrymen out of poverty."

In a country evenly split between the ruling party and opposition, countless families have been torn apart by political divisions, mirroring tensions that have spilled out into in the street in sometimes bloody fashion.

Husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children find themselves on opposite sides of the bitter fight between Nicolas Maduro, whom the dying Chavez picked to succeed him, and an opposition that accuses the socialist government of using fraud and intimidation to win the presidency by a slim 1.49 percentage point margin.

Even the country's legislature broke down in violence last month, when pro-government lawmakers and their aides beat opponents who refused to recognize Maduro's electoral win.

To be sure, Venezuelans have long been obsessed by politics, especially during the Chavez years, as the populist leader denounced his opponents as "the squalid ones" and the opposition tried vainly to oust him through a coup and a referendum. Many, however, say the tensions have reached a pitch not seen here since that 2002 coup, which briefly pushed Chavez from office.

Throw in a postelection government crackdown on the opposition and, for many, daily life has become a balancing act between personal relationships and fiercely held political convictions.

"In every Chavista family you can always find a member of the opposition, and that relationship leads to conflict," said Mirla Perez, a professor of social work who studies family relations at the Central University of Venezuela. "It's a permanent tension that only gets relieved by not talking."

Many families are splitting along generational lines.

On one side: parents who vividly remember Venezuela's pre-Chavez struggles with inflation, currency devaluation, crime and political instability. While those problems have remained, and may have even worsened during Chavez's reign, his supporters point to the social programs Chavez started and take pride in the nationalistic rhetoric Chavez loved spinning.

On the other side of the familial divide: better-educated, more upwardly mobile adult children who spent their formative years exposed to Chavez's failings.

Jose Pastano's 43-year-old son Edwin, for example, is a transportation safety consultant, while his other son, Mauri, 47, works in a government medical lab.

"What is the socialism they are talking about?" Mauri cried out on a recent night after dinner. "They call themselves socialists, but they don't go up into the barrios to help the community!"

Edwin joined in on the attack. The government does nothing about the high crime, buckling roads and piles of trash choking the drains, he argued.

All the while, Jose Pastano's right eye twitched furiously as he tried to interrupt.

The 71-year-old father suddenly began breathing heavily, then slumped back in his chair and grabbed his chest, trembling.

"I need to calm down," Pastano said as his wife helped him to his bedroom. The debate was over, at least for that night.

Variations of that scene have played out even among many of Venezuela's best-known families.

Information Minister Ernesto Villegas frequently goes after government critics as the head of the state's media operation, while his brother Vladimir is a well-known journalist and prominent government critic.

Vladimir Villegas announced Thursday that he would be taking over as director of Globovision, the country's last opposition television channel.

"It's a question of navigating in the middle of a country that's very polarized and divided, a really complicated situation of political animosity," he said, stressing that he has always maintained good relations with his brother.

"Now, with the minister, I hope to have the best relations," he said.

In another high-profile case, one of the most important youth organizers for opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles is the daughter of former state governor Didalco Bolivar, who heads a party in the government's coalition.

"I love my father but I share Capriles' vision of the country," said Manuela Bolivar.

Injecting heat into the equation is the closeness many felt for the folksy, charismatic Chavez, who became a virtual member of many families. Since his death, government officials have been even proclaiming that Venezuelans remain all of Chavez's children.

"The relationship that ordinary Venezuelans had with the president wasn't a pragmatic relationship, a relationship of power," Perez said. "It's a family relationship."

Perez said she herself has seen her family divided along political lines.

"I had a tremendous argument with my mother" over the Easter holidays, Perez said. "She compared the feelings that she had after the death of Chavez with the feelings she had after my brother's death."

Angelica Ramirez, a 22-year-old university student from the eastern Venezuelan state of Bolivar, said she's stopped talking to her Chavista cousin and avoided visiting her grandparents the day after last month's vote for fear that political arguments would break out.

"Of course this affects emotions, it creates tension in the family," Ramirez said.

Her relatives declined interview requests.

In such an environment, 68-year-old Ines Pastano is indeed a rarity: a middle-of-the-road political agnostic.

She explained that her husband suffers from hypertension and heart palpitations and often can't stand the stress of the family's political discussions.

Then, she trudged to the center of the living room, and moved to one side.

"The Chavistas are over here," she said.

She motioned across the room. "And the opposition supporters are over here."

Finally, she moved back to the center, planting herself squarely between the two halves.

"And I'm here, right in the middle."

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Christopher Toothaker on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ctoothaker

Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mweissenstein

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Politics rule everyday govt in Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A sea of marchers in red and yellow T-shirts flowed through the capital's main downtown boulevard, paralyzing traffic while state TV cameras stood ready to record every second. The crowd had come out to show their support for the late President Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, but they weren't student activists or community organizers.

The march had been launched by state-run telecommunications company CANTV, and the hundreds of employees were heading for the presidential palace to "deliver" the company's 2012 dividends to Maduro, Venezuela's acting leader and the official candidate to replace Chavez.

"We want this political project to continue," said customer support supervisor Maya Leon. "We're all Chavistas here."

Former government workers and experts said Monday's event was only the latest example of changes a decade in the making. The late leader transformed this country's enormous state industries into political arms of the government, they said, with partisan loyalties trumping technical competence in hiring and ministries turning out thousands of civil servants for election year rallies.

State companies such as oil producer PDVSA and the manager of Caracas' subway system used to be known around the world for their professionalism. In recent years, many of those companies have seen service and revenue deteriorate as political cadres rather than engineers were brought in to run everything from oil exploration to mass transit.

Public safety nonprofit groups say the same politicization has crippled efforts to fix Venezuela's super-violent prisons or lower one of the world's highest homicide rates, with the government refusing to work with opposition governors or mayors on any public safety plan.

Vicente Gonzalez de la Vega, a Central Venezuela University law professor, said he remembers when the capital's 37-mile-long subway network was considered Latin America's most modern, and drew engineers from around the world to study it. Power outages began hitting the system more frequently and trains were often delayed, as Chavez grew suspicious of the autonomous state company that ran the transport system. New stations and rail lines were left unbuilt, despite booming ridership.

Tensions exploded in 2010 when passengers upset about the system took over a subway train, resulting in 33 arrests.

"We used to say there were two cities, one above, and one below that was more decent, more efficient," de la Vega said. "But this has become a hyper-politicized city. And we've seen the effects."

To Chavez supporters, politicization has merely meant awakening needed class consciousness in a federal bureaucracy that employs about a tenth of all Venezuelans. They also deny it's hurt government services or bottom lines.

"Before, a housewife didn't talk about politics because she said, 'I'm just a housewife,'" said Eduardo Saman, a former Chavez commerce minister. "An athlete was just surrounded by sports and didn't talk about politics. One of the great achievements of President Chavez was to elevate the level of political consciousness in general terms."

"Now, we have technicians who at the same time have the ability to come up with political solutions to problems. Now they're conscious in their work. Politics and technical capacity should not be separated."

More than anything else, the country's future hinges on the welfare of PDVSA and its management of the world's biggest proven oil reserves. The company produces about 90 percent of Venezuela's export income and about half of all government revenue.

Yet from 1999 to 2011, Venezuela's daily oil output dropped by nearly 25 percent, from 3.3 million barrels of oil a day to 2.5 million barrels, according to U.S. Energy Department figures. Data from the OPEC group of oil-producing countries show Venezuela trailing five other nations in daily production despite its massive reserves. Russia, for example, produced three times more oil than Venezuela although it has a quarter the proven reserves.

Oil industry analysts blame the production drop on a PDVSA brain drain during the Chavez years and the company's failure to invest in new exploration while it funded popular social programs. The economic effects are already being felt nationwide, with dropping exports bringing in fewer dollars, which in turn has spurred shortages of everything from cars to machine parts to basic foods.

Venezuelan officials have pledged to boost oil production, and the country's economy depends on that happening. Yet production numbers have stayed flat for the past three years, U.S. Energy Department figures show.

The company "isn't looking for people who have know-how," said Diego Gonzalez, a former PDVSA oil exploration engineer who left in 2001. "It doesn't seem to be producing new deposits now. There are no new refineries, petrochemical plants. There's nothing new."

On top of that, Venezuela continues to sell the cheapest gas in the world, at 6 cents per gallon, thanks to government subsidies designed to keep consumers happy. That program costs Venezuela about $16 billion a year, according to the International Energy Agency, further eroding potential export earnings.

Andres Izarra, a former Chavez information minister, called reports of declining oil production "lies" and said PDVSA's current workers had in fact saved the company after a general strike in 2002 and 2003 that paralyzed the economy.

"The PDVSA worker has been through a war," Izarra said. "They were the ones who recovered the oil industry. It's thanks to them we can produce oil again and have gasoline again. These are guys who are very much militants of the revolution."

By all accounts, the move to purge government ranks began in earnest with the strike, which shrank the economy by nearly 8 percent in 2003. Chavez responded by demanding loyalty throughout his government, from the armed forces to doctors, and replaced striking PDVSA workers with party members, Gonzalez said.

Once known as some of the best in the industry, many PDVSA engineers and managers have since moved to the Middle East and other oil-producing regions.

Saman said the company's workers are as professional as ever, even if they didn't come from the same social classes as before. He said education wasn't a prerequisite to public service, pointing to his own rise from pharmacist to commerce minister.

"The opposition thinks they're the owners of knowledge," Saman said. "They wrote me off because I didn't have education. The truth is I didn't have their kind of education."

Maduro, for one, has made direct appeals to government workers a key part of his campaign, holding rallies with workers from PDVSA, the federal electrical company and CANTV, among others.

"I guarantee and say before you oil workers," Maduro told PDVSA workers last week, "brothers and sisters of the petroleum working class, that if you elect me as president of the republic, I will know how to defend the accomplishments of the petroleum industry in the streets."

Luis Izquiel, an aide to opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, said such partisan governing would end with a change of administration.

"This has to stop," Izquiel said. "We have to stop dividing people in these categories, of red or yellow or blue. We have to bring in people independent of their politics."

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