The Chavez Family Business

The rule of Hugo Chavez has been called a personality cult, but perhaps a better way to understand it is as royalty — or a crime family. The New York Times reports on an eruption in kidnappings in Chavez’ home state of Barinas, but also at the resentment among the poor over the sudden wealth of Chavez’ relations. For a socialist, Chavez has a taste for nepotism:

But nowhere in Venezuela comes close in abductions to Barinas, with 7.2 kidnappings per 100,000 inhabitants, as armed gangs thrive off the disarray here while Mr. Chávez’s family tightens its grip on the state. Seizures of cattle ranches and crumbling infrastructure also contribute to the sense of low-intensity chaos.

Barinas offers a unique microcosm of Mr. Chávez’s rule. Many poor residents still revere the president, born here into poverty in 1954. But polarization in Barinas is growing more severe, with others chafing at his newly prosperous parents and siblings, who have governed the state since the 1990s. While Barinas is a laboratory for projects like land reform, urgent problems like violent crime go unmentioned in the many billboards here extolling the Chávez family’s ascendancy.

“This is what anarchy looks like, at least the type of anarchy where the family of Chávez accumulates wealth and power as the rest of us fear for our lives,” said Ángel Santamaría, 57, a cattleman in the town of Nueva Bolivia whose son, Kusto, 8, was kidnapped while walking to school in May. He was held for 29 days, until Mr. Santamaría gathered a small ransom to free him.

The governor of Barinas, Adán Chávez, the president’s eldest brother and a former ambassador to Cuba, said this month that many of the kidnappings might have been a result of destabilization efforts by the opposition or so-called self-kidnappings: orchestrated abductions to reveal weaknesses among security forces, or to extort money from one’s own family.

“With each day that passes,” the governor said recently, “Barinas is safer than before.”

The people of Barinas do not share the governor’s optimism. By the way, the governor’s name is Adan Chavez — the elder brother of Hugo, and the successor to their father Hugo de los Reyes Chavez, who held power for a decade in Barinas. The president-for-life’s other three brothers run the city of Sabaneta, a regional bank that gets a lot of its business from Adan and Barinas, and the economic engagement with Cuba. His cousin Asdrubal has a high-ranking position at PDVSA, the nationalized oil company that has managed to kill production of Venezuela’s chief export.

Nor is this the only way the Chavez family keeps a grip on power and money in Venezuela. Locals in Barinas, who have a ringside seat to Chavez’ gangsterism, tell the Times that Chavez has front men acquiring land and wealth fraudulently in the region. Not surprisingly, this corruption has made Barinas the poorest in the country, with the wealth accumulating into the hands of the Chavez family.

However, the poverty doesn’t protect people from the kidnappings. One woman was instructed to sell her refrigerator — her only asset of any value — to secure the return of her three-year-old daughter. The people of Barinas have had enough of Hugo’s family and of the crocodile tears Chavez sheds for the poor in Venezuela.

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