hey, wait a minute Don't Fear Starbucks
Why the franchise actually helps mom and pop coffeehouses.

By Taylor Clark (Slate)
The first time Herb Hyman spoke with the rep from Starbucks, in 1991, the life of his small business flashed before his eyes. For three decades, Hyman's handful of Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf stores had been filling the caffeine needs of Los Angeles locals and the Hollywood elite: Johnny Carson had his own blend there; Jacques Cousteau arranged to have Hyman's coffee care packages meet his ship at ports around the world; and Dirty Dozen leading man Lee Marvin often worked behind the counter with Hyman for fun. But when the word came down that the rising Seattle coffee juggernaut was plotting its raid on Los Angeles, Hyman feared his life's work would be trampled underfoot. Starbucks even promised as much. "They just flat-out said, 'If you don't sell out to us, we're going to surround your stores,' " Hyman recalled. "And lo and behold, that's what happened—and it was the best thing that ever happened to us."
Ever since Starbucks blanketed every functioning community in America with its cafes, the one effect of its expansion that has steamed people the most has been the widely assumed dying-off of mom and pop coffeehouses. Our cities once overflowed with charming independent coffee shops, the popular thinking goes, until the corporate steamroller known as Starbucks came through and crushed them all, perhaps tossing the victims a complimentary Alanis Morrisette CD to ease the psychic pain. In a world where Starbucks operates nearly 15,000 stores, with six new ones opening each day, isn't this a reasonable assumption? How could momma and poppa coffee hope to survive? But Hyman didn't misspeak—and neither did the dozens of other coffeehouse owners I've interviewed. Strange as it sounds, the best way to boost sales at your independently owned coffeehouse may just be to have Starbucks move in next-door.
That's certainly how it worked out for Hyman. Soon after declining Starbucks's buyout offer, Hyman received the expected news that the company was opening up next to one of his stores. But instead of panicking, he decided to call his friend Jim Stewart, founder of the Seattle's Best Coffee chain, to find out what really happens when a Starbucks opens nearby. "You're going to love it," Stewart reported. "They'll do all of your marketing for you, and your sales will soar." The prediction came true: Each new Starbucks store created a local buzz, drawing new converts to the latte-drinking fold. When the lines at Starbucks grew beyond the point of reason, these converts started venturing out—and, Look! There was another coffeehouse right next-door! Hyman's new neighbor boosted his sales so much that he decided to turn the tactic around and start targeting Starbucks. "We bought a Chinese restaurant right next to one of their stores and converted it, and by God, it was doing $1 million a year right away," he said.
Hyman isn't the only one who has experienced this Starbucks reverse jinx. Orange County, Calif., coffeehouse owner Martin Diedrich started hyperventilating when he first heard a Starbucks was opening "within a stone's throw" of his cafe, yet he reported similar results: "I didn't suffer whatsoever. Ultimately I prospered, in no small part because of it." Ward Barbee, the recently passed founder of the coffee trade magazine Fresh Cup, saw this happen scores of times. "Anyone who complains about having a Starbucks put in next to you is crazy," he told me. "You want to welcome the manager, give them flowers. It should be the best news that any local coffeehouse ever had."
Now, lest we get carried away with the happy civic results of Starbucks' global expansion, I hasten to point out that the company isn't exactly thrilled to have this effect on its local competitors' sales. Starbucks is actually trying to be ruthless in its store placements; it wants those independents out of the way, and it frequently succeeds at displacing them through other means, such as buying a mom and pop's lease or intimidating them into selling out. Beyond the frothy drinks and the touchy-feely decor, Starbucks runs on considerable competitive fire. Consider Tracy Cornell, a former Starbucks real-estate dealmaker who found and locked up a staggering 900 North American retail sites for the company in her decade-plus career. "It was sort of piranha-like," Cornell told me of her work for Starbucks. "It was just talking to landlords, seeing who was behind on their rent. All I needed was an opening like that, where the landlord wanted out. I was looking for tenants who were weak."
As much as independent coffeehouse owners generally enjoy having a Starbucks close at hand, most of them seem to have a story or two of someone from the company trying to undercut them. And occasionally a new Starbucks will hurt a mom and pop—even drive them out of business. For example, in 2006, cafe owner Penny Stafford filed a federal antitrust suit against the company, alleging a nearby Starbucks illegally sank her Bellevue, Wash., coffeehouse. Starbucks employees were passing out samples right outside her front door, Stafford claims, even though the company's nearest outlet was over 300 feet away.
But closures like this have been the exception, not the rule. In its predatory store placement strategy, Starbucks has been about as lethal a killer as a fluffy bunny rabbit. Business for independently owned coffee shops has been nothing less than exceptional as of late. Here's a statistic that might be surprising, given the omnipresence of the Starbucks empire: According to recent figures from the Specialty Coffee Association of America, 57 percent of the nation's coffeehouses are still mom and pops. Just over the five-year period from 2000 to 2005—long after Starbucks supposedly obliterated indie cafes—the number of mom and pops grew 40 percent, from 9,800 to nearly 14,000 coffeehouses. (Starbucks, I might add, tripled in size over that same time period. Good times all around.) So much for the sharp decline in locally owned coffee shops. And prepare yourself for some bona fide solid investment advice: The failure rate for new coffeehouses is a mere 10 percent, according to the market research firm Mintel, which means the vast majority of cafes stay afloat no matter where Starbucks drops its stores. Compare that to the restaurant business, where failure is the norm.
So now that we know Starbucks isn't slaughtering mom and pop, the thorny question remains: Why is Starbucks amplifying their business? It's actually pretty simple. In contrast to so-called "downtown killers" like Home Depot or Wal-Mart, Starbucks doesn't enjoy the kinds of competitive advantages that cut down its local rivals' sales. Look at Wal-Mart. It offers lower prices and a wider array of goods than its small-town rivals, so it acts like a black hole on local consumers, sucking in virtually all of their business. Starbucks, on the other hand, is often more expensive than the local coffeehouse, and it offers a very limited menu; you'll never see discounts or punch cards at Starbucks, nor will you see unique, localized fare (or—let's be honest—fare that doesn't make your tongue feel like it's dying). In other words, a new Starbucks doesn't prevent customers from visiting independents in the same way Wal-Mart does—especially since coffee addicts need a fix every day, yet they don't always need to hit the same place for it. When Starbucks opens a store next to a mom and pop, it creates a sort of coffee nexus where people can go whenever they think "coffee." Local consumers might have a formative experience with a Java Chip Frappuccino, but chances are they'll branch out to the cheaper, less crowded, and often higher-quality independent cafe later on. So when Starbucks blitzed Omaha with six new stores in 2002, for instance, business at all coffeehouses in town immediately went up as much as 25 percent.
The key for independent coffeehouse owners who want to thrive with a Starbucks next-door is that they don't try to imitate Starbucks. (As many failed coffee chains can attest, there's no way to beat Starbucks at being Starbucks.) The locally owned cafes that offer their own unique spin on the coffeehouse experience—and, crucially, a quality brew—are the ones that give the Seattle behemoth fits. Serve an appetizing enough cappuccino, and you can even follow Hyman's lead and take aim at almighty Starbucks, where automated espresso machines now pull consistently middling shots at the touch of a button—no employee craftsmanship required.
After all, if Starbucks can make a profit by putting its stores right across the street from each other, as it so often does, why couldn't a unique, well-run mom and pop do even better next-door? And given America's continuing thirst for exorbitantly priced gourmet coffee drinks, there's a lot of cash out there for the taking. As coffee consultant Dan Cox explained, "You can't do better than a cup of coffee for profit. It's insanity. A cup of coffee costs 16 cents. Once you add in labor and overhead, you're still charging a 400 percent markup—not bad! Where else can you do that?" Until Americans decide they need to pay four bucks a pop every morning for a custom-baked, designer-toast experience, probably nowhere.Taylor Clark is a writer based in Portland. His first book, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture,was published in November.

Ike Turner leaves bad reputation and historic rock'n'roll
Jon Parele New York Times
IKE TURNER, whose achievements as one of the founding fathers of rock'n'roll were overshadowed by his former wife Tina Turner's claims that he beat her for almost two decades, has died at the age of 76.
His death was announced on Wednesday by Jeanette Bazzell Turner, who married Turner in 1995. She gave no cause of death, but said he had had emphysema.
Turner was best known for discovering Anna Mae Bullock, a teenage singer from Nutbush, Tennessee, whom he renamed Tina Turner. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue recorded a string of hits in the 1960s before the Turners broke up in 1975.
Tina Turner described the relationship as abusive in her autobiography, I, Tina, which was adapted for the 1993 film What's Love Got to Do With It? and made Ike's name synonymous with domestic abuse.
"I got a temper," he admitted in 1999 in his autobiography, Takin' Back My Name: The Confessions of Ike Turner, co-written with Nigel Cawthorne. But he maintained that the film had "overstated" it.
Turner's career extended back to the 1950s, when he played with pioneering Mississippi Delta bluesmen and helped shape early rock'n'roll as well as soul and rhythm and blues. Rocket 88, a song his band released in 1951, is regularly cited as a contender for the first rock'n'roll record for its beat, its distorted guitar and its honking saxophone.
Turner, whose full name is variously given as Izear Luster Turner jnr and Ike Wister Turner, was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and was brought up there by his mother after his father, a minister, was beaten to death by a white mob.
He grew up around Delta musicians such as the bluesman Robert Nighthawk jnr and the pianist Pinetop Perkins, who gave him boogie-woogie lessons, and he learned to play guitar.
In high school he formed a group called the Kings of Rhythm. B.B. King helped that band get a steady weekend gig and recommended them to Sam Phillips at Sun Studios in Memphis. They had been performing jukebox hits, but on the drive to Memphis, they decided to write something of their own. Their saxophonist, Jackie Brenston, suggested a song about the new Rocket 88 Oldsmobile. The piano-pounding intro and the first verse were by Turner, and the band collaborated on the rest; Brenston sang. It sold half a million copies. Turner was paid $US20 for the record.
In 1958, Anna Mae Bullock joined his band and quickly became its focal point as Tina Turner. The band was renamed the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.
The Rolling Stones chose the Revue as their opening act on a 1969 tour, introducing them to many rock fans. In 1971, the Revue reached the pop Top 10 with their version of Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary, with Ike's deep vocal counterpoint and Tina's memorable spoken-word interlude.
"We never do anything nice and easy," Tina Turner said. "We always do it nice and rough."
She walked out on him in 1975. He, already abusing cocaine and alcohol, spiralled further downward during the 1980s while she became a multimillion-selling star. In 1989, he went to prison for cocaine possession offences and was in jail when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
On his release from prison, Turner set out to reclaim his place in rock history. In the end, the music business embraced him: his 2006 album, Risin' With The Blues, won the Grammy as best traditional blues album.
The New York Times

OPINION/IDEAS
Last call
Why the gay bars of Boston are disappearing, and what it says about the future of city life
By Robert David Sullivan
THE FIRST THING I ever did to identify myself as a gay man - before coming out to a friend or relative, before putting a rainbow-flag pin on my jacket - was to walk into a gay bar. This was not so unusual in the early 1990s, when few gay men identified as such before they left high school. Some of us needed to walk around the block four or five times before finally pushing open a dimly lit, unmarked door.
At the time, there were plenty of dimly lit doors in Boston. The Napoleon Club was a piano bar near Park Square that attracted theater students and older men who left big tips on small glasses of red wine. A few blocks away, Luxor was a video bar for younger guys; nearby were Buddies (all ages) and Chaps, a dance club where dressing conservatively meant keeping your shirt on. In other parts of town, there were Sporters, a friendly Beacon Hill dive, and Playland, a Combat Zone bar known for its sketchy clientele, banged-up piano, and year-round Christmas lights. In all, there were 16 gay bars in Boston and Cambridge, according to Pink Pages directories from 1993 and 1994.
Today, that number has been cut to less than half. None of the bars I've mentioned are still in business, and most of the city's seven remaining gay-every-night bars have sparse customers for most of the week. (Lesbian bars were never numerous to begin with.) The gay population may have political clout and the right to marry in Massachusetts, but it has fewer and fewer public spaces to call its own.
The disappearance of places like Buddies and Chaps may sound like a problem limited to gay men, but it is part of a much larger trend reshaping American cities. As gay bars vanish, so go bookstores, diners, and all kinds of spaces that once allowed "blissful public congregation," as sociologist Ray Oldenburg described their function in his 1989 book "The Great Good Place."
In New York, the Jewish deli - a staple of the city's identity - has all but vanished. In the Boston area, many of Harvard Square's bookstores, Kenmore Square's student eateries, and myriad other places that guaranteed a diverse urban experience have closed their doors, replaced by a far more uniform lineup of bank branches, chain stores, and upscale restaurants.
This change is a serious challenge to the city, which has historically been defined by the breadth and variety of its street-level experience - and the wide diversity of people it threw together. "City air makes free," a saying that dates to medieval times, was a favorite of urban-studies pioneer Jane Jacobs. But as a wide range of gay bars dwindles to a handful of survivors - and the city's diners, indie bookstores, and dive bars yield to high rents and shifting patterns of commerce - that air is becoming the province of an increasingly narrow set of people.
Oldenburg calls public gathering spots a "third place" where we can temporarily step out of our household and workplace roles. Besides taverns, he cites drugstores (the kind with soda fountains), pool halls, and barber shops as examples. But if you were a gay man in the late 20th century, the place with all the qualities of an ideal third space was the gay bar.
For many closeted gays, bars were the only places where they could safely be themselves. They were also a nexus for political organizing and charitable work, they promoted safer-sex education after the onset of AIDS, and they served as a welcome mat for gay newcomers to a city.
"When I was in college, I'd go out to a few different bars with my friends every week," says gay novelist Wayne Hoffman, who came to Boston in the late '80s and now lives in New York. "It was a chance for us to socialize off campus, meet new people - including new boyfriends - and figure out how we fit into the larger gay world. The bars opened up a whole world of possibilities for me."
For decades gay bars kept a low profile (unmarked doors, blackened windows), and were often run by mobsters or underworld figures, since more respectable businessmen weren't crazy about the prospect of frequent police raids. The general population was either unaware of them or saw them as sinister.
But in 1969, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a rather boisterous Greenwich Village bar, and the gay patrons unexpectedly fought back. The resulting riot helped to turn bars into flag-bearers for gay culture, and "Stonewall" itself began to be used in the names of gay and lesbian political organizations (the Stonewall Democrats, for example) as shorthand for "don't push us around."
When gays moved out of the shadows during the '70s, then began settling in certain areas of major cities (like the South End in Boston), gay bars evolved. Some became respected neighborhood institutions, offering meeting space to social groups, sponsoring softball teams and arts festivals, distributing condoms and health information, and buying ads in local newspapers. By the mid-1980s, they were a major force in turning Gay Pride holidays into citywide celebrations, sponsoring eye-catching parade floats and raucous block parties.
But at the same time, larger trends in American life were massing that would soon sweep these bars away.
One was the rising price of urban real estate. Gay bars traditionally appeared in marginal neighborhoods, or in predominately gay neighborhoods, with cheap rents and accommodating (or indifferent) neighbors. As those areas have progressively been developed with high-end housing, bars have struggled to pay their rent, and neighborhood groups have been increasingly hostile toward anything that creates noise or attracts idlers. The same forces have stripped such neighborhoods of other iconic businesses, such as fringe theaters and free and low-admission art spaces.
Meanwhile, the gay population is becoming more dispersed. As gay men feel more comfortable coming out to family, neighbors, and co-workers, they may also feel more comfortable living in small cities or towns rather than in the "gay ghettos" of large cities. As a result, it's much harder for a neighborhood gay bar to attract a steady clientele.
Perhaps the most important change, however, is the Internet. When Internet access became widespread in the mid-1990s, gay chat rooms on America Online and other subscription services quickly attracted a crowd. More elaborate sites such as Gay.com quickly followed, usurping gay bars' most important function: a place for men to meet each other.
At the time of the Stonewall riots, "gay people had to go out to a bar to meet other gay men," at least if they didn't want to go to more dangerous cruising areas such as parks and men's rooms, says Michael Bronski, Dartmouth College professor and author of "The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom."
There are several gay chat sites where a month's membership can cost as little as the price of one cocktail at Club Cafe - and on a recent Saturday night, one of them listed nearly 600 Boston-area members online. The site claims 600,000 members nationwide.
As a result of these changes, there are stories of gay bars closing all over the country. Since the early '90s, New York has lost its two biggest leather bars (the Spike and the Lure), as well as piano bars (the Five Oaks and Pegasus) and martini lounges (the popular but short-lived Hell). In Laguna Beach, Calif., the first city in America to elect an openly gay mayor, one of the two biggest gay bars closed this spring, and the other has been purchased by a developer who wants to tear it down. And the oldest gay bar in Pittsburgh (ironically, the setting for the TV series "Queer as Folk") closed earlier this year, after Carnegie Mellon University purchased its building.
Gay bars are just one kind of business struggling to survive in what is, to use the phrase popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name, the age of "the long tail." That phrase refers to an economy in which the Internet can make even low-demand products profitable. Until the Internet, large cities offered the closest thing to a long tail economy. Thanks to Cambridge's concentration of intellectual shoppers, for instance, Harvard Square had stores full of the most obscure books, magazines, and records you could think of buying. The students in Kenmore Square kept cheap eateries, music clubs, and record stores alive; the South End's gay population once supported not just bars, but also inexpensive card-and-gift shops (such as Tommy Tish), a sex-toy shop with the feel of an old-fashioned general store (the Marquis de Sade), and a gay bookstore.
Now the classic example of a long tail business is online retailer Amazon.com, which stocks close to a million book titles - including more gay novels and intellectual books than any local store could offer. As long tail businesses migrate to the Internet, cities like Boston are being skinned alive.
Businesses like bookstores, video stores, and gay bars can no longer afford to occupy valuable real estate when their goods or services are more easily and cheaply delivered electronically. As these businesses disappear from Boston streets, they're usually replaced by more profitable land uses, such as office towers and high-end restaurants. The result is a variant of the "tragedy of the commons": Hotels, condo complexes, and other upscale businesses market themselves as part of a vibrant city, but they can also make it more difficult to maintain that vibrancy. (The ground floors of new office and housing buildings are often reserved for retail use, but CVS and other chain stores usually snap up the space.) These high-end businesses attract new residents and consumers to urban neighborhoods, but when they aren't balanced by other types of economic activity, the result can be a sterile streetscape rather than a diverse ecosystem.
This development would have disappointed William H. Whyte, the sociologist who may be rivaled only by Jane Jacobs in the cogency and passion of his arguments for active city life. Albert LaFarge, editor of "The Essential William H. Whyte," says that the ideal urban neighborhood from Whyte's point of view is fueled by "the intensity and unpredictability of different people using the same space for their own reasons, and often contradictory ones, but all respecting the goals of vibrancy and function."
If a place like the South End accommodates fewer and fewer of these reasons for a person to be there, says LaFarge, it not longer meets the definition of a successful urban neighborhood.
Gay neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco are reportedly undergoing the same transformation as in the South End, but there is at least one exception to this trend. In Philadelphia, the city has encouraged the development of its "Gayborhood," a nine-block part of downtown, by adding rainbow flags to street signs, and the city's tourism board has an aggressive campaign targeted at gay travelers. Jeff Guaracino of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. says that the Gayborhood provides "a very good economic return for the city. Businesses are making a profit there."
Making a profit, of course, isn't always the same as serving a community's needs. Gay bars seem to be doing well in resort areas such as Palm Springs and Provincetown, but they're more vacation party spots than true third spaces for locals.
The fate of the Jewish delicatessen in New York is a reminder that "theme park" gay bars would be no substitute for what we've lost in Boston. Thousands of delis have disappeared from New York since the 1930s. Many of the dozen or so survivors seem to be thriving, but the tourist-oriented Carnegie and Stage delis, with their long lines and rapid turnover of tables, don't bear much resemblance to the classic model. At a panel discussion called "Jewish Cuisine and the Evolution of the Jewish Deli," held this summer and reported on by The New York Times, food historian Joel Denker described the delis of the '50s and '60s as having "this sort of yeasty combination of intellectuals, writers, and leftists, sitting together over tea and cottage cheese and fruit, talking about the issues of the day."
Sitting and talking for hours at a time. Sadly, that's not considered an efficient use of space during today's supposed revival of city life.
Boston's gay community is adapting to its scaled-down bar scene, but there's still a sense of something missing. There are probably more spiritual groups, youth programs, and health resources than ever in the gay community, but none of them really fit the definition of a third space where one can drop in and hang out. "There was a whole group of friends who I would only ever see at the Napoleon Club," says Rick Park, a Boston-based actor, "and when it closed, they all disappeared."
You can see the change for the worse in the city's annual Gay Pride celebration. Years ago, the highlights of the parade were the outrageous parade floats, featuring drag queens and go-go boys, sponsored by gay bars. Now those delightfully pointless displays are outnumbered by contingents of waving employees from banks and utility companies in matching T-shirts. It's a positive development that so many people are out at work, to be sure, but the parade has become a lot less fun for gay and straight spectators alike.
A few weeks ago I attended a panel discussion sponsored by the History Project, which maintains archives on Boston's gay and lesbian history. A lesbian of a certain age, reflecting on the changes in the gay community since the Stonewall rebellion, said with rueful irony that "life may be easier now, but it might have been more exciting then."
That sounded a little bit like Red Sox fans complaining that they liked watching the team more when it was laboring under an 86-year curse. But I knew what she was talking about. So does Abe Rybeck, artistic director of the gay-themed Theater Offensive. He no longer considers himself a bar regular - there's too much to do running a theater company and participating in other activities - but he says that he would feel their disappearance.
"I went to Fritz to watch a World Series game this year," he says, "and it was fun to be in a room with a bunch of gay men enjoying a sports event in the way gay men would. In their minds, they were all going home with Jacoby Ellsbury. I was glad I could watch the game with my people."
Robert David Sullivan is the managing editor of CommonWealth magazine and primary writer of the blog Beyond Red & Blue (at massinc.org). The History Project (historyproject.org), which maintains archives on Boston's gay and lesbian history, provided much of the information in this article.
© Copyright Boston Globe

From Time Magazine
Chavez Tastes Defeat Over Reforms
By TIM PADGETT
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's left-wing, oil-fueled revolution usually carries itself like a swaggering, cocksure juggernaut. So it was a sign that things perhaps weren't looking good for the fiery, anti-U.S. leader Sunday night when he didn't appear on the balcony of Miraflores, the Caracas presidential palace, pumping his fists and crowing confidently about victory. Venezuela's polls had closed in a national referendum on a raft of constitutional reforms that would have profoundly tightened his hold on political power in Venezuela — including an amendment to eliminate presidential term limits (which currently last six years). Instead, Chavez's Vice President, Jorge Rodriguez, appeared as the night wore on and told reporters, "We will respect the result, whatever it is."
And, to the astonishment of his opponents, Chavez did. At around 2 am this morning, Caracas time, Chavez conceded his first electoral defeat since winning Venezuela's presidency in 1998. After facing an unusually strong protest movement on the streets of Venezuela's major cities — led not by traditional opposition figures but by university students who'd grown fearful that Chavez was moving the country toward a Cuba-style dictatorship — his reforms were narrowly beaten back by a 51% to 49% margin. The result, and Chavez's graceful acceptance of it, may well have set not only Venezuela, a key U.S. oil supplier, but all of Latin America on a far surer path to democracy in the 21st century. "This was a photo finish," Chavez told his stunned backers after his defeat was announced. "Don't feel sad, don't feel burdened."
Only about half of Venezuela's 16 million registered voters showed up at the polls on Sunday. Low turnout was supposed to have hurt the opposition's NO vote; but in the end it was Chavez, thought to have a reliable populist political machine at his disposal to get out the YES vote, who couldn't rouse his base among Venezuela's majority poor. Even that cohort, despite having benefited from Chavez's vast socialist project, backed away from his bid to solidify "21st-century socialism," which also would have put the autonomous Central Bank under his control and exerted deeper federal authority over local and state governments. Given the fact that Venezuela's National Assembly and Supreme Court are already Chavez's rubber stamps, those issues seem to have overridden the economic carrots Chavez's reform package held out, like expanded social security benefits and shorter working hours (from 8 to 6 hours each day).
Venezuelans also appear to have told Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution (named for South America's 19th-century independence hero, Simon Bolivar) that despite the country enjoying the fruits of record oil prices — the country has the hemisphere's largest oil reserves — they're fatigued by almost a decade of polarizing revolutionary rule and would like to return to some normalcy. "This is a country divided in two," said Stalin Gonzalez, a student at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas. "There's a part that loves Chavez and a part that hates him. A middle ground is lacking. We won't build a country that way."
The movement led by Gonzalez and tens of thousands of fellow students proved decisive: they articulated an opposition message and galvanized its sympathizers far more effectively than Venezuela's older political elite ever could. It was a force Chavez had not planned on reckoning with, particularly since students have long been a bloc that Latin America's political left could depend on. Chavez also couldn't withstand the defections within his own bloc, including socialist state Governors and, perhaps most important, his erstwhile pal and former Defense Minister, Raul Baduel, who earlier this month called Chavez's amendments a "constitutional coup d'etat." The attempt by Chavez and his backers to demonize figures like Baduel — labeling them "traitors" — backfired, especially since Baduel had helped put Chavez back in power after a botched opposition coup attempt against him in 2002.
But just as important was Chavez's concession. The opposition "won this victory for themselves," he admitted in a voice whose subdued calm was in contrast to his frequently aggressive political speeches. "My sincere recommendation is that they learn how to handle it." Despite his authoritarian bent, Chavez (whose current and apparently last term ends in 2012) had always insisted he was a democrat — that he was, in fact, forging "a more genuine democracy" in a nation that had in many ways been a sham democracy typical of a number of Latin American countries. His presidential election victories — in 1998, 2000 and 2006, as well as his victory over an attempt to recall him in a 2004 referendum — were all recognized by credible international observers; and that conferred on him a democratic legitimacy that helped blunt accusations by his enemies, especially the U.S., that he was a would-be dictator in the mold of Fidel Castro.
In the end it was a cachet that, fortunately, he knew he couldn't forfeit. As a result, the referendum result will resonate far beyond Venezuela. Latin Americans in general have grown disillusioned by democratic institutions — particularly their failure to solve the region's gaping inequality and frightening insecurity — and many observers fear that Latin Americans, as they so often have in their history, are again willing to give leaders like Chavez inordinate, and inordinately protracted, powers. Chavez, critics complained, was in fact leading a trend of what some called "democratators" — democratically elected dictators. His allies in Bolivia and Ecuador, for example, are hammering out new Constitutions that may give them unlimited presidential re-election. The fact that Venezuelans this morning resisted that urge — and that Chavez so maturely backed off himself when he saw it — may give other countries pause for thought as well. It could even revive the oft-ridiculed notion that this might after all be the century of the Americas.
with reporting by Jens Erik Gould/Caracas