Petroleumworld`s
Opinion Forum:
viewpoints on issues in energy, international
politics & civilization.
Saturday
Lagniappe
The
Ghost Of Simón Bolívar
"There is Bolívar in the sky of
the Americas, watchful and frowning ... because what he left
undone remains undone
to this very day." Chavez at the oath to overturn
the previous political order, in
front of the "Saman de Guere" tree, in
Maracay.
By
Joseph Contreras
Nearly
200 years ago Venezuelan patriot Simón Bolívar
declared his country a free and sovereign state, and went
on to liberate four other South American nations from Spanish
colonial rule, envisioning a confederation of Andean republics
that would stretch from the isthmus of Panama to the high
plateau country of Bolivia. His dream inspired another, decades
later, when a young Hugo Chávez, then an Army officer
in his late 20s, gathered with some of his military colleagues
in the Venezuelan city of Maracay on the anniversary of Bolívar's
death and declared, "There is Bolívar in the
sky of the Americas, watchful and frowning ... because what
he left undone remains undone to this very day."
Chávez
has attempted to finish the job ever since. Already "the
most influential head of state in Latin America," according
to a critical biography by Venezuelan writers Cristina Marcano
and Alberto Barrera Tyszka, his guiding star has always been
Bolívar, who at the apex of his career exerted an
influence that went far beyond the borders of his native
land. Bolívar, in 1819, merged Venezuela with Colombia
and Ecuador to found the Republic of Gran Colombia. He was
subsequently appointed chief of state in the newly independent
nations of Peru and Bolivia, and believed Venezuela would
carry more heft as part of a larger entity than it could
ever hope to acquire on its own. "Only a Venezuela united
with New Granada [Colombia] could form a nation that would
inspire in others the proper consideration due to her," he
argued in 1813.
Chávez
also renamed his native country—the Bolivarian Republic
of Venezuela—in one of his first acts after his Inauguration
in 1999. And he too has attempted to transform the nation
into a powerful regional player that would serve as a counterweight
to the hegemony of a foreign power, the United States. His
goal, according to a recent government document, is the "consolidation" of
a left-wing alliance that encompasses Cuba, Venezuela and
Bolivia and the strengthening of "alternative movements
in Central America and Mexico" to distance them from
Yankee "domination."
To
achieve it he has mixed oil revenue and economic and political
meddling with his neighbors with strident anti-U.S. rhetoric,
much like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladimir Putin have done
in Iran and Russia. In the first eight months of 2007, Chávez
pledged an estimated $8.8 billion in financing, aid and energy
funding to more than a dozen countries in the hemisphere.
But uniquely, he has also attempted to create a slew of institutions
and organizations including a 24-hour news channel, Telesur,
that aspires to combat what its handpicked chief calls "cultural
imperialism"; a regional development bank, the Bank
of the South, that will offer credit to countries on easier
terms than those provided by the International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank, and a trading bloc called the Bolivarian
Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) that he hoped would neutralize
Washington's ongoing efforts to negotiate a hemispheric free-trade
treaty.
Like
his hero, Chávez has also become a force in the politics
of other nations. In the run-up to the 2006 presidential
election in Nicaragua, Caracas signed a deal with an association
of Sandinista mayors to provide up to 10 million barrels
of Venezuelan oil on preferential terms. Voters rewarded
their candidate for president, Daniel Ortega, with a victory
at the polls later that year. He has made similar appeals
to the people of Bolivia and Ecuador, firming up support
from their presidents, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa. In
October, Chávez urged Cuba's acting President Raúl
Castro to link their two countries' fortunes more closely. "Cuba
and Venezuela could perfectly form a confederation of nations
in the near future," he said during a visit to Havana,
channeling Bolívar's vision, if not his words. "Two
countries in one."
Yet
Bolívar never succeeded. Despite his attempt at drawing
Latin America together, he believed he never truly had the
support of enormous swaths of the population. "I shall
always be a foreigner to Peruvian people and I shall always
arouse the jealousy and distrust of these gentlemen," Bolívar
observed in a September 1823 missive to his Colombian vice
president, according to a biography by British historian
John Lynch. "We will always be guilty simply by our
birth: whites and Venezuelans," he complained six years
later in a dispatch from Ecuador. "We can never rule
in these regions."
Chávez's
star appears to be getting dimmer as well. In the Mexican
and Peruvian presidential elections of 2006, Felipe Calderón
and Alan García defeated their closest rivals in part
by portraying them as spendthrift Chávez clones who
would lead those countries to the brink of bankruptcy. Opposition
members of the Brazilian Senate later cited the authoritarian
drift of the Chávez regime in blocking Venezuela's
admission into South America's Mercosur trading bloc. Still
more recently, authorities stopped a Venezuelan-American
businessman at Buenos Aires's main international airport
in August with a suitcase stuffed with nearly $800,000 in
cash—allegedly from Chávez's associates and
earmarked for the campaign of Argentina's future president
Cristina Fernández.
His
popular support is clearly waning, too. A 2006 Latinobarómetro
survey of more than 20,000 people in 18 Latin American and
Caribbean countries found that 39 percent of the respondents
had a negative view of Chávez, comparable with U.S.
President George W. Bush, one of the more reviled presidents
in recent history. A Pew Global Attitudes survey released
last June found that overwhelming majorities of Chileans,
Brazilians, Peruvians and Mexicans had little or no faith
in Chávez to "do the right thing" in the
realm of world affairs. "Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez
inspires little public confidence, even in Latin America," concluded
the Pew survey. "He is widely recognized—and widely
mistrusted."
Indeed,
for all of his attempts to build regional institutions rooted
in Caracas, there is little progress on construction. Only
a handful of countries actively participate in the Telesur
project, and many question whether the Bank of the South
will function as a development-oriented financial institution
or become another propaganda tool for Chávez's foreign
policy. While the bank enjoys the official imprimatur of
seven South American countries, Peru and Chile have joined
Colombia in shunning it thus far and the lion's share of
the financial institution's startup capital is expected to
come from Venezuela and Brazil. The sixth summit of the ALBA
trading-bloc alliance, scheduled to be held in Caracas in
December, was postponed, but only two foreign chiefs of state—Bolivia's
Evo Morales and Nicaragua's Ortega—had planned to attend.
Their nations rank among the poorest in Central and South
America. Meantime, governments in three of the fastest growing
economies, Colombia, Peru and Panama, ignored the ALBA initiative
and instead signed free-trade agreements with the United
States.
Chávez's
meddling in the politics of other countries has also angered
neighbors and undercut his efforts to promote greater regional
integration. Last week Chávez suffered a major embarrassment
when he failed to obtain the release of three hostages held
by guerrillas belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia. His overheated rhetoric attracts headlines—he
has called a number of world leaders devils, fascists and
other choice words—but little respect. "Chávez
has crossed the line on too many occasions recently, and
he's run into a rough patch not just at home but also in
the region," says Michael Shifter of the Washington-based
Inter-American Dialogue policy-research group. "There
are very few Latin American governments that will reject
his largesse, but there hasn't been a great embrace of Chávez's
regional projects."
If
history is any guide, this rough patch is likely to continue.
In December, Venezuelan voters rejected a change to the Constitution
that would allow Chávez to stay on indefinitely. The
Liberator had a similar interest in creating a lifetime presidency—and
it, too, aroused intense opposition from political elites
in the foreign countries he helped unshackle. His insistence
on maintaining a unified Gran Colombia angered powerful players
in Venezuela who eventually seceded from the union and barred
Bolívar from returning to his homeland in the final
year of his life. He died of tuberculosis, at 47, in lonely
exile in the Colombian port of Santa Marta, soon after writing
a letter to a former comrade-in-arms in which he enumerated
the lessons he learned. First on the list: "America
is ungovernable, for us." And despite Chávez's
plans and rhetoric, it seems it will be equally so for him.
Joseph
Contreras is
a writer with Newsweek Magazine, one of the leading news
weekly magazines of the United States. Petroleumworld does
not necessarily share these views.
Editor's
note: This commentary was originally published by Newsweek,
on Jan 14, 2008 Issue | Updated: Jan 5, 2008. Petroleumworld
reprint this article in the interest of our readers.
All
comments posted and published on Petroleumworld, do not reflect
either for or against the opinion expressed in the comment as an
endorsement of Petroleumworld. All comments expressed are private
comments and do not necessary reflect the view of this website.
All comments are posted and published without liability to Petroleumworld.
Fair
use Notice: This site contains copyrighted material the use
of which has not always been specifically authorized by the
copyright owner. We are making such material available in
our efforts to advance understanding of issues of environmental
and humanitarian significance. We believe this constitutes
a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided
for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. For more information go
to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
All
works published by Petroleumworld are in accordance with
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. Petroleumworld has no affiliation whatsoever with
the originator of this article nor is Petroleumworld endorsed
or sponsored by the originator.
Petroleumworld
encourages persons to reproduce, reprint, or broadcast Petroleumworld
articles provided that any such reproduction identify the
original source, http://www.petroleumworld.com or else and
it is done within the fair use as provided for in section
107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use copyrighted
material from this site for purposes of your own that go
beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright
owner.
Internet
web links to http://www.petroleumworld.com are appreciated
Petroleumworld
welcomes your feedback and comments: editor@petroleumworld.com.
By using this link, you agree to allow E&P to publish
your comments on our letters page.
Petroleumworld
News 01/13/08
Copyright© 2008
Joseph Contreras. All rights reserved.
