The Keystone Kops Show In Venezuela
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Foreign Affairs | Hugo Chavez | Venezuela — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
The Economist has the details on Hugo Chavez's attempts at providing political leadership. Once again, we see that Chavez is good for a laugh or a dozen:
HUGO CHÁVEZ has never been one to worry about a little inconsistency. Venezuelans, along with their neighbours, have become accustomed to his habit of switching from firebrand to conciliator and back again, with barely a pause for breath. But even by his own remarkable standards, Venezuela's left-wing president has recently been showing new virtuosity in the art of making surprising U-turns.
In January this year he told a startled world that the FARC guerrillas in neighbouring Colombia should be treated not as terrorists, as they are by most countries, but as an "insurgent force", with rights under the laws of war. On June 8th he surprised everyone again by calling on the same guerrillas to give up the struggle they had waged for four decades, release their 700 or so hostages and recognise that guerrilla warfare in Latin America "is history".
In this latest reversal Mr Chávez is plainly doing his belated best to extract himself from an embarrassment. Computer files seized by Colombia during a raid on a FARC camp inside Ecuador two months ago appeared to confirm that Venezuela has been helping the guerrillas--and that Mr Chávez's call for an upgrading of the FARC's status was part of a strategy he had cooked up with its leaders.
At Colombia's behest, Interpol has inspected the computer drives and confirmed that they have not been tampered with. Venezuela says their content is fabricated: its government is mounting a propaganda offensive to convince the world of that. But the fact that many governments have been queuing up to ask Colombia whether their own intelligence services can see the files suggests that they believe the contents to be genuine. And although Colombia has its detractors in the region, most countries consider it bad manners to provide help to a guerrilla movement that is inflicting mayhem on its neighbour.
Even before the dent this affair has now put in his international reputation, Mr Chávez had troubles on the home front. In December voters narrowly rejected his proposal to rewrite Venezuela's 1999 constitution along "socialist" lines and include a measure that would provide for the indefinite re-election of the president. It was Mr Chávez's first significant electoral defeat after nearly a decade in power. Since then, he has sought to reintroduce elements of the rejected constitution, in part by using a far-reaching enabling law, passed last year, to legislate by decree.
But Venezuelan society has proven remarkably resistant. Teachers, parents and students have blocked the introduction of a politically inspired school curriculum and the abolition of university-entrance requirements. The private media forced a retreat on attempts to charge them exorbitant fees for material from a state-owned television channel. And a decree setting up a new intelligence-system, dubbed the "Gestapo law", was repealed on June 10th, less than a fortnight after its introduction, following an outcry from human-rights groups. This would have obliged people to co-operate with intelligence agencies or face up to six years in jail.
If Chavez can't provide stalwart and consistent leadership for his country, maybe it is time for him to get out of the way in favor of someone who can. I am sure that more and more Venezuelans would appreciate him doing so.
the basis for a civil society was far more advanced there than in Mexico, another country on my entry-strategy concerns. Chavez is a traditional cacique with his own populist claque clamoring for goodies & begging for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. That large mass of Venezuelan society is about 40% of the country, almost all packed into urban favelas.
Unfortunately, people keep pouring into Venezuela's cities relentlessly because of the oil wealth, which is distributed more in large urban venues. And Colombians comprise about 20% of the Venezuelan population, according to the country's official Chief Demographer. Economic immigrants from other countries nearby are also numerous, making Venezuela the Latin equivalent of the USA.
Chavez's chief problem is that he really cannot trust the main body of the military, which even after a decade of his misrule, has remained impervious to much of his tinkering. The biggest problem of all, I was told by then-president Carlos Andres Perez, is that the country itself is governable only by corrupt bargains with local caciques who comprise a bunch of oligarchies spread across the country. The corruption is endemic, but the system works, he said, if democracy allows some sort of arena for compromise.
Sadly, Chavez is a near madman, closer in mentality to Cindy Sheehan and High-School dropout Sean Penn than to the advanced technocrats I dealt with in the Oil & Foreign Ministries.