June/6/06
Hugo Chavez and the Road To Failure
Elected in 1998,Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez maintains that the US, capitalism and free markets are all "savage," the arch enemy of Venezuela’s poor. Chavez pretends to hate Bush; he wants all US influence out of Latin America; he has threatened to cut off oil exports and otherwise disrupt and harm US interests there. In the process of nationalizing the oil industry he has seized the assets of US firms. The US should not repeat Powell’s mistake of responding to Chavez’s provocations through appeasement but instead refuse to take the bait and support a democratic process in Venezuela, urging the West to denounce what amounts to an emerging police state.
Chavez considers himself the successor to Castro as the Marxist leader of Latin American. He has formed a leftist, autocratic welfare state in Venezuela that supposedly channels profits from state-run monopolies (especially the state oil company) to the poor. He has armed Venezuela to the teeth, curiously "to protect the Amazon river and the Panama canal." He supports local and regional narcotics terrorists; he finances Columbia’s FARC rebels who aim for a Marxist dictatorship in that country. He idolizes Castro, is pals with Khadafy and Carlos the Jackal, and (at one time) Saddam. He has repressed his own citizens by confiscating property and by permitted thousands of Cuban officials to form a secretive shadow regime within his government. He has re-written the constitution to consolidate his power, he has stacked the courts, he has jailed his political opponents. In 2002 an uprising briefly took him out of power but he came back as another Nelson Mandela, the man who will destroy the free-market forces which are held to be wholly responsible for that country’s social and economic failures (poverty and corruption have only expanded under his rule). In short, the perfect role model of the autocrat disguised as the savior of the disenfranchised.
Background: Latin America is ripe for producing such a personality and such a cycle - misery, the quick fix, dictatorship, corruption, then chaos, finally violence. For five centuries Venezuela has been controlled by a minority of white people, pure-blood descendants of the Spanish conquerors. The other 85% are brown and live in shanty towns. There is a real apartheid of sorts, discord between citizens of European descent and the majority indigenous poor. Not only in Venezuela, but through out the region Spanish descendants have received land grants and access to political power from crony governments while natives live apart, mostly uneducated - a petri dish for any would-be dictator.
The experiment in Venezuela is a mirror of past experiments in Germany and Italy, the UK in the 20's, Indonesia, the USSR - the quick fix, the immediate emotional argument for state control, for a planned society. It is an easy sell. (The argument for a free society and market is more subtle, a tough sell, an indirect rational argument.) Through history, central planning always leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals; it is essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible. Taking this one step further, Chavez looks to re-direct resources not only to whom he selects as the beneficiaries in Venezuela but also to other leftist countries in Latin America. The poor are but pawns in what really amounts to a power grab throughout the region.
