Chavez can't be left to Run Amok
By
Daniel Mandel
My opinion piece of this title appeared in Wednesday's Australian
Financial Review (no free web access), which I reproduce
here.
Venezuela's
Hugo Chavez's appears to be free to continue subverting democracy
in his country. Since winning re-election in January
in a campaign that involved – on his behalf – saturation
publicity, government-funded campaigning and illegal modes
of advertising, he has continued his march towards one-man
rule.
Enormous
oil revenues are insulating his regime from the consequences
of its economic mismanagement. Having recently nationalized
the last of the companies working Venezuela's vast oil fields,
the country is likely to experience the reduction in production,
deterioration in performance and environmental wastage that
has afflicted other regimes bent on nationalizing oil – Muammar
Ghaddafi's Libya, to name one. With the Venezuelan local oil
industry's manpower mushrooming, production shrinking and shipping
costs mounting, Chavez seems to have set his sights on the
same ruinous course.
Already
on his watch, the country has dropped by two on the list
on the 2006 United Nations Human Development Report's
list of poorest nations. Over 2 million of the country's 25
million people live on a daily income of US$1. The Detroit
News’ Manny Lopez recently visited the country to find
the airport a ghost town, crime rampant, chicken and beef unaffordable
or unavailable, supermarket aisles bereft of staples and water
and electricity available only for limited, irregular periods.
None of this however has weakened Chavez's hold on power or
his progress in monopolizing it. Electrical and telecommunications
companies are being nationalized and Chavez is also seeking
to remove the autonomy of the Central Bank. He has stacked
the courts with judges dependent on his favour and purged the
military of anyone who might oppose him.
Two
remaining pillars of democratic balance remain – the
parliament and the media. But Chavez has used his parliamentary
majority to award himself power to rule by decree, announced
moves to merge several pro-government parties into one, and
revoked the licence of Radio Caracas Television (RCTV), an
opposition-aligned television station, which the Washington
Post describes as the "country's most popular."
Jose
Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the Organization of
American
States, expressed his dismay publicly, "The
shut-down of a large media company is a very rare occurrence
in the history of our continent, and has no precedent in the
last decades of democracy." Chavez's response was to simply
label Insulza an "idiot."
Chavez,
one of whose political mentors was an Argentinean right-wing
nationalist, Holocaust denier and conspiracy theorist,
Norberto Ceresole, has permitted official publications to indulge
in anti-Semitic propaganda. Unsurprisingly, he is strongly
supportive of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, another Holocaust
denier who has called repeatedly for Israel to be wiped off
the map. Ahmadinejad returned the compliment when Chavez visited
last July – "I feel I have met a brother and trench
mate after meeting Chávez."
The US has ostentatiously ignored Chavez and his support for
like-minded forces in Latin America, but that is not a strategy.
Some useful ideas for developing one might include: building
a free trade agreement with South American nations; isolating
Chavez through judicious support of his regional opponents,
including the responsible left-of-centre governments in Brazil,
Uruguay, and Chile (as opposed to the radical firebrands holding
sway in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua); and the creation
of a political working group on Latin America within the Bush
Administration to devise and implement a long-term strategy.
Any or preferably all of these would be an improvement on
the muddling through that has characterized Washington's lack
of focus to date.
