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Edited on Fri Sep-16-05 05:35 PM by Taxloss
(I wrote this a week ago. It will be published in the UK in a week or two in a minor monthly magazine, in the "reputations" slot which I edit. It is neither pro- or anti-Chavez, but is written from a leftist perspective. I hope it helps.)
(edited to add length warning)
starts
Pat Robertson is not a man known for holding his tongue. The hugely influential US preacher and Christian broadcaster has garnered a large and intensely loyal following for his no-compromise stance on public morals and Stateside politics. And his stern line on issues such as homosexual rights, abortion, and feminism (in case you were wondering, he’s against all three) draw devoted support and vicious opprobrium in equal measure.
But he may have gone too far even for some of his most powerful friends on the 22 August broadcast of his flagship television show, The 700 Club, when he called for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. “If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it,” Robertson said. “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop.”
Robertson’s remarks sparked instant and widespread condemnation. Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary for defence, said: “Our department doesn’t do that type of thing.” Senator Norm Coleman, the chair of the Senate foreign affairs subcommittee, branded the comments “incredibly stupid”.
And that was just the Republicans, a party more commonly known for its cosy willingness to associate with evangelicals such as Robinson. Understandably, the Venezuelan government itself did not miss the opportunity for candour, and Jose Vicente Rangel, the country’s vice president, called the remarks “criminal” and “terrorist”. Chavez himself preferred an air of frosty aloofness, claiming that he did not know who Robertson was and saying: “I don’t care what he said.”
Whatever the carefully nuanced Washington response to the assassination furore, it’s worth noting that Chavez has long been a man capable of raising high passions in the United States and across the world. He is an incredibly controversial world figure, but for one rarely out of the world news pages, also an enigmatic one. Is he a genuinely popular leader, using Venezuela’s oil wealth to improve the lot of its sprawling underclass and lessen the nation’s agonisingly deep social divide? Or a tinpot dictator, a Castro figure tightening his control over his government through a string of fraudulent elections and harassment of opposition figures?
Or is the real picture more subtle, somewhere between these extremes; is Chavez simply a demagogue, genuinely popular but a little too fond of autocracy for comfort?
Where your opinion rests on this spectrum is largely a factor of your political persuasion – at least, it is in a bitterly polarised America. What both sides agree on is that this time it really is all about the oil. Venezuela is blessed with some of the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere with proved reserves of 78 billion barrels, and is the only South American member of OPEC, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries. In contrast, the United States has proved reserves of 22 billion barrels. Petroleum generates one-third of the country’s GDP and four-fifths of its export earnings – and more than half of all Venezuela’s exports go to the USA, making up about 12% of the USA’s total oil imports.
This oil brings more than wealth – it means political power, and plenty of it. At a time of rising petroleum prices, Venezuela can use its exports to wield considerable leverage over Washington DC, a fact Robertson was happy to allude to in his remarks. Similarly, the cash bonanza that rising prices have brought to the Venezuelan state coffers can be used to shore up support among his political base, which largely consists of the poorest section of the nation’s society.
Chavez has proven to be unabashed in using this petro-power. At home, he has set up an organisation called Mission Mercal, which provides half-price groceries to 10 million Venezuela’s poor, an understandably popular move. Abroad, in a happily blatant bid to gain support among the people of the United States, he offered cut-price gasoline to people on lower incomes in areas affected by August’s Hurricane Katrina. This was a mere fortnight after the Venezuelan energy minister, Rafael Ramirez, threatened to turn off oil exports to the USA if Washington threatened the Chavez government.
Is this idea – that the USA might actually threaten Venezuela’s sovereignty – credible? Certainly, despite the political aces Chavez holds, he has a lot of reasons to feel insecure in power. The political career of Hugo Chavez Frias has been a markedly turbulent one. The centrepiece of Chavez’s political cosmos is the figure of Simon Bolivar, a national hero in Venezuela and across South America. Bolivar, who was born in Caracas in 1783, led liberation struggles against imperial Spain in Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Peru and Bolivia - which is named after him – and devoted his life to Latin American independence and unity. Chavez has clearly identified himself with “El Libertador” throughout his life. As a young colonel in Venezuela’s paratroops, Chavez picked the 200th anniversary of his hero’s birth to form a revolution cell within the military, and gave it Bolivar’s name. This organisation was used in two coup attempts in 1992, a debacle that landed Chavez in prison for two years.
This experience did not deter the energetic former colonel. Instead, he switched to legitimate democratic methods and stood for the presidency on a populist platform in 1998. Once thus installed, Chavez was free to put his political philosophy – which he termed “Bolivarian Socialism” – into action. Every Bolivar needs an imperial Spain to oppose, and Chavez did not have to look far to find one – globalisation. His 1992 coup attempts were inspired by public unrest over austerity measures imposed by then-president Carlos Andres Perez under the instruction of the International Monetary Fund. Chavez saw the globalised market economy – and its chief proponent, the United States – as a threat to Venezuelan sovereignty and an oppressive force for South America’s teeming millions of poor. In contrast, he admired the defiance of Fidel Castro’s communist regime in Cuba. And he fired his base with successive vicious rhetorical attacks on what he saw as the agents of the US-backed globalised economy in the Venezuela, its rich, who he characterised as a clique of decadent, whisky-swilling, palace-dwelling oligarchs.
Chavez announced the writing of a new constitution, which would be designed to sweep away the old establishment and give Venezuela a political clean slate. The new constitution was endorsed by no fewer than three referenda, and Chavez vindicated. A new election resoundingly returned Chavez to office. These results, which some characterise as the product of vote rigging, were endorsed by the Carter Center, a humanitarian organisation founded by former US president Jimmy Carter.
With the new constitution set up and his popular support apparently secure despite little to no progress in addressing poverty, in 2002 Chavez moved to address the control of the all-important oil industry. He appointed a new, ally-stuffed board of directors to PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, in an apparently naked attempt to bring it under full governmental control and threatened to back the move with military force.
This bold stroke almost proved to be Chavez’s undoing. PDVSA executives condemned the action and were backed by lower ranks and oil unions. The motor of Venezuela’s economy was turned off. Strikes escalated and came to a head when gunmen opened fire on an anti-government demonstration, killing eleven people. With that, Chavez lost the support of the military and was forced to resign.
Just as it looked like Chavez’s experiment in Venezuela was over, it took on a new lease of life. Pro-Chavez supporters flooded the streets and loyalist elements within the military split with the new administration, an extremely dangerous development. Within 48 hours, Chavez was back in power.
Denied their victory, the restored president’s opponents simply stepped up their efforts to depose a man they increasingly despised. In a move not without echoes of Chavez’s own political story, they resorted to democratic means and started to campaign for a referendum to recall the president. The vote went ahead on its second attempt after more than 2 million people signed a referendum supported it, but again Chavez demonstrated that he had not lost the power to mobilise his base as he prevailed by a 60-40 margin. Once again there were allegations of vote-rigging, but once again the Carter Center verified the result, saying that “the 15 August vote clearly expressed the will of the Venezuelan electorate”, but also drawing attention to what it called “numerous irregularities”.
Since then, Venezuela has returned to a degree of normality – certainly, as normal as possible as it could be with a colourful character like Chavez at the helm. The internal opposition seems to be lacking in leadership and thrown into confusion by its setback, although its passion remains undimmed. Provincial elections in 2004 were another victory for the government. But while Chavez’s spendthrift attitude has rendered him extremely popular – alongside cheap groceries, he has provided free healthcare – it has also created rising inflation, which now runs at around 20%. Similarly, it is questionable how much lasting good these populist tactics will do in Venezuela as they are reliant on buoyant oil prices.
Similarly, Chavez’s bolder reforms are beginning to cause alarm for observers concerned that the president might be planning to turn his country into a socialist command economy. In July he announced plans to take over private companies that were “idle” and place them in the hands of workers’ cooperatives. In August this year he called on private organisations to fill one-fifth of their board positions with workers, and began inducing similar reforms in state-owned enterprises. And in September he was reported to be planning to extend these measures to private banks by forcing them to include two state representatives on their boards. All this he described as the construction of a “socialism of the twenty-first century”.
These measures alone would be enough to spook an American government that is anything but comfortable with strongly left-wing governments in its back yard. Castro has been a thorn in the side of the United States since he took power in the 1950s; to learn that the leader of another major South American power might be headed in that direction, consciously modelling himself on Castro, would be unsettling to say the least. To hear it could be Venezuela, the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter, would be near-intolerable. And to hear that that government of Venezuela was not only supporting Castro but planning to export its revolution to other countries on the continent amounts to being intensely provocative.
Yet this appears to be Chavez’s plan. As well as using booming oil income to benefit the poorest in his own country, he has been active in attempting to export this influence across his continent. His Bolivarian inspiration extends to the internationalism of that era, and the idealistic dreams for continental unity; and, settling into Bolivar’s mould, Chavez seems happy to send his brand of popularism international.
Chavez exports oil to Cuba at a subsidised rate, aiding Castro’s government, as part of more general plans to offer good deals on petrol to Caribbean countries. He has also been instrumental in setting up and funding Telesur, a CNN-style news network that markets itself as “the true face of Latin America”. Castro has also chipped in funds to Telesur, as have the governments of Uruguay and Argentina. Telesur does seem to want to offer a genuine, balanced alternative to the American-backed CNN, but it is easy to see why many might consider it a vehicle for continent-wide Chavez propaganda. Similarly, Chavez’s creation of “citizen militias” was also a source of alarm for many who feared that he was building a private army not only in order to protect his country but also in order to protect himself and his hold on power.
More seriously, Venezuela has been accused of supplying arms to rebels in neighbouring Colombia, which has a pro-US government. Chavez’s government emphatically denies those claims, but that has not stopped right-wing critics in the United States from describing the present Venezuelan administration as a threat to regional security. This war of words grew yet more heated in the days prior to Robertson’s assassination remarks when Caracas suspended cooperation with Washington’s war on drugs in the country. Venezuela claimed that officials from the US Drug Enforcement Agency were spying on the Chavez government; this claim was vigorously denied by the Americans. Nevertheless, the president stripped US DEA agents of diplomatic immunity and stated that any actions in response would be reciprocated. The row sent already-precarious relations to a new low and created the climate where Robertson felt able to make his remarks.
So, Chavez. A revolutionary icon or a demagogue blessed by circumstance? The president faces the polls again in 2006, and has expressed his intent of serving through to 2013. There is certainly a clear limit to the diplomatic pressure the USA can apply, considering the aces the Venezuelan leader has at his disposal, and the fragile state of the US economy as petrol prices climb. But similarly Chavez himself faces a growing dilemma. Giveaway spending is great for building short-term support but does not leave a legacy, and his other reforms are thus far tenuous. Similarly, a regrouping opposition will not be quiescent for long. Becoming a latterday Simon Bolivar is a tall order, and will take more than flamboyant gestures to see it through. We have certainly not heard the last of Hugo Chavez.
ends
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