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2010-04-23T13:54:00.001-07:00

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Chavez marks Venezuela independence, foes unhappy

2010-04-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

Chavez marks Venezuela independence, foes unhappy

By Andrew Cawthorne
Reuters
Sunday, April 18, 2010; 2:43 PM
CARACAS (Reuters) - President Hugo Chavez kicked off a national party on Sunday for the 200th anniversary of Venezuela's independence, but critics used the date to accuse him of turning the nation into a Cuban-style dictatorship.

The socialist leader -- who casts himself as the heir to 19th century South American independence leader Simon Bolivar -- was due to welcome fellow leftist heads of state, including Cuba's Raul Castro and Bolivia's Evo Morales, during the day.

On Monday, exactly 200 years after Venezuela's initial declaration of independence from Spain, the leaders of the Chavez-led ALBA alliance of nations are to hold a summit in Caracas amid celebrations across the nation.

"We are just a few hours away from the great party," Chavez wrote. "Happy commemoration of 200 years of struggle. Fatherland, Socialism or Death! We will overcome!"

As well as adopting the language of his friend and mentor Fidel Castro, the former Cuban president, Chavez has likewise presented his 11-year rule as a chance for Venezuela to finally achieve true independence after decades of capitalist rule.

The Venezuelan socialist, who came to prominence in a failed 1992 coup and then won power at the ballot-box six years later, has taken over Fidel Castro's role as the continent's leading critic of U.S. power.

Street-parties and special events were beginning all over Venezuela on Sunday. Armies of workers and volunteers -- dressed in the red T-shirts and caps of Chavez supporters -- swarmed over Caracas, sprucing up streets and buildings ahead of a military parade and other events planned for Monday.

Opponents, who have only beaten Chavez once in about a dozen votes since 1998, fumed as they saw him turn the anniversary into a massive show of support for his government.

Some supporters of the "First Justice" party rallied at a Caracas square for an alternative "independence declaration".

"After 200 years, we are again under an odious foreign domination," its leader Julio Borges said, accusing Chavez of an "indignant submission" to the Castro brothers. "The freedom fighters 200 years ago did not fight for ... dictatorship."

"CHAVISTA TO THE CORE"

Thousands of Cubans are working with the Chavez government, deployed in shanty-town medical clinics and sports training centers and delicate areas such as security agencies and energy projects.

Chavez supporters view that as a model of international cooperation, while critics say it breaches sovereignty.

Former Venezuelan president Carlos Andres Perez, whom Chavez failed to oust in 1992, also weighed in.

"It is not possible to celebrate when a militarized, authoritarian and pro-Communist regime, headed by a murderous coup-monger, has kidnapped the nation," he said.

Perez even compared Chavez to Hitler in his buildup of a pro-government militia. The training of teenage "communications guerrillas" -- to counter the anti-Chavez push of private media -- has divided Venezuelan opinion this week.

Chavez and his critics are building up to a September assembly vote, where opposition parties hope to cut into the government's majority and show his popularity is waning.

Though opinion polls are difficult to follow in Venezuela, due to accusations of political bias, it is clear Chavez's popularity has fallen in the last year, from more than 60 percent to about 50 percent or less.

That, however, is still a relatively high rating and enough to help him win in September, analysts say. Venezuela's poor majority give Chavez high marks for social policies including free clinics and schools, and subsidized food networks.

"This idea that Chavez is losing approval and is on the way out is absolute rubbish," said pensioner Edith Valencia, eating at a state-run "socialist pancake" shop in Caracas.

"We admit not everything is perfect and it is a tough year, we even admit he has made some mistakes. But will we vote for him? You bet! I am a Chavista to the core."

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko -- both recent visitors to Venezuela -- sent congratulations for the 200th anniversary.

Chavez is seeking to strengthen global ties that work against U.S. dominance and would have been hosting Chinese President Hu Jintao this weekend were it not for a major earthquake in western China.

Press Freedom In Venezuela

2010-04-14T23:00:00.000-07:00

spite the many advances we have witnessed among countries in our region, democracy is still threatened in the Western Hemisphere.

Authorities cannot let political concerns undermine the freedom of expression.
Despite the many advances we have witnessed among countries in our region, democracy is still threatened in the Western Hemisphere. The rights of free speech, a free press and individual expression are essential to the functioning of our institutional democracies. Nevertheless, authorities in Venezuela have recently taken actions against press critics and others who engage in peaceful dissent.

The arrest of the owner of a local television channel for allegedly making offensive remarks toward the Venezuelan government sends a strong message that citizens there are not free to express their opinions and engage in an open dialogue. Without that freedom, all other rights are in jeopardy. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press must be respected for all individuals and media organizations, regardless of their political philosophies.

It is easy to look at anyone who criticizes you as being out of bounds, but authorities cannot let political concerns undermine the freedom of expression. In the end, whoever is elected needs constructive criticism.

It also is the responsibility of democratic countries to expose attacks on democratic principles wherever they may occur. In so doing, they ensure that future generations will enjoy the same rights that we demand for ourselves. Along with Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, the United States has expressed its concerns about the willingness of the Venezuelan government to honor its commitment under the Inter-American Democratic Charter to uphold this principle.

In this regard, it is also hoped that the Organization of American States will enforce the charter within the hemisphere to protect democratic principles and individual liberties.

IACHR report on Venezuela: and you really thought Venezuela was a democracy?

2010-02-26T16:28:00.003-08:00

Source:
http://devilsexcrement.com/2010/02/24/iachr-report-on-venezuela-and-you-really-thought-venezuela-was-a-democracy/

Full Report:

http://www.vdebate.org/archive/VENEZUELA.2009.ENG.pdf

IACHR report on Venezuela: And you really thought Venezuela was a democracy?
February 24, 2010

Since the report is long, I wanted to summarize the highlights from the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights report on Democracy and Human Rights in Venezuela. Despite the Venezuelan Government’s refusal to allow a visit since 2002, the Commission felt it could still analyze the Venezuelan situation in order to comply with its mandate.

Here are some highlights, for those that still want to believe or defend that Venezuela is a democracy:

The Commission also finds that in Venezuela, not all persons are ensured full enjoyment of their rights irrespective of the positions they hold vis-à-vis the government’s policies.
The Commission also finds that the State’s punitive power is being used to intimidate or punish people on account of their political opinions.
The Commission’s report establishes that Venezuela lacks the conditions necessary for human rights defenders and journalists to carry out their work freely.
The IACHR also detects the existence of a pattern of impunity in cases of violence, which particularly affects media workers, human rights defenders, trade unionists, participants in public demonstrations, people held in custody, campesinos (small-scale and subsistence farmers), indigenous peoples, and women.
The IACHR’s report indicates that mechanisms have been created in Venezuela that restrict the possibilities of candidates opposed to the government for securing access to power. That has taken place through administrative resolutions of the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic, whereby 260 individuals, mostly opposed to the government, were disqualified from standing for election. The Commission notes that these disqualifications from holding public office were not the result of criminal convictions and were ordered in the absence of prior proceedings, in contravention of the American Convention’s standards.
The Commission also notes how the State has taken action to limit some powers of popularly‐elected authorities in order to reduce the scope of public functions in the hands of members of the opposition.
The IACHR also notes a troubling trend of punishments, intimidation, and attacks on individuals in reprisal for expressing their dissent with official policy.
The Commission notes a trend toward the use of criminal charges to punish people exercising their right to demonstrate or protest against government policies.
The IACHR considers that the right to demonstrate in Venezuela is being restricted through the imposition of sanctions contained in provisions enacted by President Chávez’s government.
The Commission describes cases of people facing criminal charges for which they could be sentenced to prison terms of over twenty years in connection with their participation in antigovernment demonstrations.
In the Commission’s view, this practice constitutes a restriction of the rights of assembly and freedom of expression guaranteed in the American Convention, the free exercise of which is necessary for the correct functioning of a democratic system that includes all sectors of society.
The rules for the appointment, removal, and suspension of justices set out in the Organic Law of the Supreme Court of Justice lack the safeguards necessary to prevent other branches of government from undermining the Supreme Court’s independence and to keep narrow or temporary majorities from determining its composition.
Since judges are not appointed through public competitions, judges and prosecutors are freely appointed and removable, which seriously affects their independence in making decisions.
The Commission also describes how large numbers of judges have been removed or their appointments voided without the applicable administrative proceedings.
The numerous violent acts of intimidation carried out by private groups against journalists and media outlets, together with the discrediting declarations made by high‐ranking public officials against the media and journalists on account of their editorial lines and the systematic opening of administrative proceedings based on legal provisions that allow a high level of discretion in their application and enable drastic sanctions to be imposed, along with other elements, make for a climate of restriction that hampers the free exercise of freedom of expression as a prerequisite for a vigorous democracy based on pluralism and public debate.
The Commission observes with particular concern that there have been very serious violations of the rights to life and humane treatment in Venezuela as a result of the victims’ exercise of free expression.
The IACHR notes that recent months have seen an increase in administrative proceedings sanctioning media that criticize the government.
The Commission has also verified the existence of cases of prior censorship as a prototype of extreme and radical violations of freedom of expression in Venezuela.
The report also analyzes the impact on the right of free expression of the proceedings initiated in July 2009 toward the possible cancellation of 240 radio stations’ broadcasting concessions, and of the decision to order 32 stations to cease transmissions.
The Commission calls the attention of the Venezuelan State to the incompatibility between the current legal framework governing freedom of expression and its obligations under the American Convention.
The Commission also stresses that the offenses of desacato (disrespect) and viipendio (contempt) contained in the amendments to the Penal Code in force since 2005 are incompatible with the American Convention in that they restrict the possibilities of free, open, plural, and uninhibited discussion on matters of public importance.
The Commission also deals with the major obstacles faced by human rights defenders in their work in Venezuela. It also notes with concern that witnesses and relatives of the victims of human rights violations are frequently targeted by threats, harassment, and intimidation for denouncing violations.
The IACHR also finds that inadequate access to public information has hindered the work of defending human rights in Venezuela.
One of the issues relating to human rights in Venezuela of gravest concern to the Inter‐American Commission is that of public insecurity.
The IACHR’s report identifies certain provisions in the Venezuelan legal framework that are incompatible with a democratic approach to the defense and security of the State.
During 2008, the Ombudsman’s Office recorded a total of 134 complaints involving arbitrary killings arising from the alleged actions of officers from different state security agencies. It also recorded a total of 2,197 complaints related to violations of humane treatment by state security officials. In addition, it reports receiving 87 allegations of torture and claims it is following up on 33 cases of alleged forced disappearances reported during 2008 and 34 reported during 2007.
Homicides, kidnappings, contract killings, and rural violence are the phenomena that most frequently affect the security of Venezuela’s citizens.
Information made available to the Commission indicates that in 2008, there were a total of 13,780 homicides in Venezuela, which averages out to 1,148 murders a month and 38 every day. The victims of these killings include an alarming number of children and adolescents.
The Commission’s report also notes with extreme concern that in Venezuela, violent groups such as the Movimiento Tupamaro, Colectivo La Piedrita, Colectivo Alexis Vive, Unidad Popular Venezolana, and Grupo Carapaica are perpetrating acts of violence with the involvement or acquiescence of state agents.
The Commission also continues with its observations on the alarmingly violent conditions within Venezuelan prisons.
The laws and policies pursued by the State have not been effective in guaranteeing the rights of women, particularly their right to a life free of violence.
The Commission notes in its report that impunity is a common characteristic that equally affects cases of reprisals against dissent, attacks on human rights defenders and on journalists, excessive use of force in response to peaceful protests, abuses of state force, common and organized crime, violence in prisons, violence against women, and other serious human rights violations.
On the other hand, in this report the Commission highlights the Venezuelan State’s major achievements in the fields of economic, social, and cultural rights, through legally recognizing the enforceability of the rights to education, to health, to housing, to universal social security, and other rights, as well as by implementing policies and measures aimed at remedying the shortcomings that affect vast sectors of the Venezuelan population.
The IACHR notes that the Missions have succeeded in improving the poverty situation and access to education and health among the traditionally‐excluded sectors of Venezuela’s population. Nevertheless, the Commission expresses concern at certain issues relating to the Missions as an axis of the government’s social policies.
The Commission notes that Venezuela is still characterized by constant intervention in the functioning of its trade unions, through actions of the State that hinder the activities of union leaders and that point to political control over the organized labor movement, as well as through rules that allow government agencies to interfere in the election of union leaders.
There you have it, the IACHR demonstrates that Venezuela is no longer a functioning democracy through the neglect and intimidation of a Government that discriminates its citizens even when they are in agreement with its policies. And, despite the Dictator’s claims, most of his policies show atotal disregard for the “people” that he claims to love so much.

Cuba invades Venezuela

2010-02-15T20:59:00.002-08:00

The venezuelans have never agree to this....we don't want to be like Cuba ..... we are tired of Chavez...... please help us.

Cuba Invades Venezuela
Mac Margolis

Cuba may be a fading star in the socialist firmament and run by a sclerotic dynasty, but don't tell Hugo Chávez. The Venezuelan president is giving the Castro franchise a second life by farming out more and more of his crisis-battered government to Havana. A growing number of corner offices in Chávez's bureaucracy--including defense, national security, police, immigration control, and now energy--are occupied by Castrocrats. Ramiro Valdés, Fidel's former comrade in arms and an ex-interior minister, was recently picked to coordinate Venezuela's response to an energy emergency causing widespread blackouts. (Critics note that Cuba has long been afflicted by power failures.) Chávez's foes suspect that Valdés, famed for policing the Internet in Cuba, was hired to spy on Venezuelan dissidents. Other Havanians are serving as key advisers in the Defense Ministry and the newly reformed Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, and dealing on Caracas's behalf with trade unions, coffee growers, and hospitals (apparently the final straw for the health minister, who quit on Feb. 10). Chávez argues that no one is better prepared to handle domestic crises than the Cubans. Most Venezuelans shudder for the same reason.

Chávez Is Losing His Grip

2010-02-09T21:49:00.002-08:00

Chávez Is Losing His Grip
The end is near for his revolution.
By Mac Margolis
NEWSWEEK
Published Jan 29, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Feb 8, 2010

In his 11-year rule, Venezuelan strong-man Hugo Chávez has outlasted all manner of angry foes, conspirators, and mounting chaos. Until now. As he loses control of a shrinking economy, his Teflon is wearing thin. Chronic blackouts and water shortages are darkening industries and forcing homes to ration electricity and baths. Inflation is 30 percent a year, the worst rate in Latin America, and despite an official price freeze, economists say it could double this year. Crime is soaring, with the murder rate tripling under Chávez. Discontent is rising, too.

Once hailed as a redeemer by the poor, Chávez has seen his approval ratings plunge below 50 percent. A year ago, two thirds of Venezuelans were upbeat about their country. Now the same number see the country in decline, says pollster Luis Vicente León. That may not be enough to topple Chávez, whose mandate ends in 2012. Like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe or Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai, he has twisted the rules of democracy—and controls enough cash, media, guns, and institutional clout to cling to power and crush any perceived threat, no matter how absurd. (Chávez recently banned Sony PlayStations and Barbie dolls as imperialist tools, and denounced Twitter as a vehicle for terrorists.) But the gathering turmoil in this nation of 29 million is like nothing the Bolivarian Republic has ever seen. Chávez's controversial project to build and spread 21st-century socialism may already be over.

The end is unlikely to be pretty. After independent channel RCTV declined to air a presidential speech late last month, Chávez ordered cable operators to drop the popular station's programming. Immediately, protests erupted nationwide, killing two and injuring dozens. Tear gas choked downtown Caracas. Undaunted protestors vowed to keep marching. "Keep this up and you will force me to take radical measures," warned Chávez in a nationwide broadcast.

This was not how the Bolivarian revolution was to play out. When Chávez launched it in 1999, he promised to wrest Venezuela's vast oil wealth from gringos and the rapacious elite to fuel 21st-century socialism, which would turn power over to indigenous people and the forgotten poor. And Venezuela would be just the beginning. With mythic Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar as his patron saint, Chávez set out to export the "Bolivarian alternative"—rejecting neoliberalism and the long shadow of the United States—throughout the hemisphere, and perhaps beyond. For a time, the new bolívarianismo stirred hearts across the Andes and in Central America.
Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua formally signed on to the Chávez pact. Cuba and a few more islands in the Caribbean followed.

Now the ballyhooed Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean has stalled. The first blow was the world economic crisis, which gutted oil prices and depleted the Chávista war chest that proved so useful in showering money on the slums, keeping cronies happy, and buying sympathy abroad. Then Chávez allies began angling to extend their terms in power, as he had. A turning point came in Honduras, where efforts by a Chávez ally, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, to hold an illegal referendum in the hope of extending his mandate ran afoul of the Supreme Court, the Congress, and finally the armed forces, which ousted him at gunpoint. At first the world diplomatic community joined Chávez in decrying what looked like an old-fashioned coup d'état—but most Hondurans wanted no part of Chávismo. Last November they elected a new anti-Chávez president, Porfirio Lobo.

Now a handful of nations, including the U.S. and Costa Rica, have recognized the new government in Honduras, while Zelaya has quietly departed for voluntary exile in the Dominican Republic. Chávez is increasingly isolated in the hemisphere. Even card-carrying lefties like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Peru's Alan García have snubbed Chávez's vision and embraced what Chilean President-elect Sebastián Piñera, a conservative, has called "democracy, rule of law, freedom of expression, alternation of power without caudillismo."

Don't count Chávez out yet. Oil prices are rising, and his opposition is in disarray. But 21st-century socialism has lost its allure. WHOEVER WORKS FOR A REVOLUTION IS PLOWING THE SEA, reads Bolívar's gravestone, reflecting the liberator's despair over his ultimately failed mission. It's a lesson Chávez might keep in mind.

"Terrorist" Twitter Threatens Hugo Chavez's Stranglehold on Media

2010-01-29T17:17:00.004-08:00

By Joseph Abrams

FOXNews.com
Reuters

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is tightening his grip on the country's media. The greatest threat to Hugo Chavez's future just might be the World Wide Web.

Fierce and growing protests over media freedom have left at least two students dead in Venezuela, and graphic images depicting violent tactics employed by the police there have started to flood the Internet.

Police armed with tear gas and rubber bullets have left students bloodied and battered in Caracas and other cities during a week of protests over President Hugo Chavez's tightening gag on the opposition press.

On Sunday, Chavez ordered five cable stations shut down for refusing to broadcast his frequent speeches, setting off nationwide demonstrations in a country already wracked by water shortages, electricity rationing, alarming crime rates and the plummeting value of its currency, the Bolivar.

Student protesters have organized their efforts by planning their demonstrations on Twitter, which is serving as both a public message-board for activists and a storing house for images of the worst of the violence.

Follow news of the protests on Twitter.
#Venezuela #Estudiantes #FreeVenezuela

Elsewhere online, more than 80,000 people have joined a Facebook group, "Chavez estas PONCHAO!" taunting the increasingly unpopular president with a slang term meaning "Chavez, you struck out."

Chavez has fought back by declaring that "using Twitter, the Internet (and) text messaging" to criticize or oppose his increasingly authoritarian regime "is terrorism," a comment that recalls the looming threats of his allies in Iran, whose bloody crackdown on physical and electronic dissent may be blazing a trail for the Latin strongman.

Venezuelan journalist Nelson Bocaranda told El Nuevo Herald that the government has launched an army of Twitter users to bring down online networks and try to infiltrate student groups.

"They are scared by Twitter,'' he told the paper, noting that Chavez fears that the social networking system will allow students to follow the model of Iran and spread their protests by coordinating them online.

As the opposition seethes, Chavez has threatened a "radical" response to student activity, promising to "deepen the revolution" and "impose authority" wherever flashpoints occur.

"There are some attempting to set fire to the country," Chavez said in a televised address on Thursday. "What are they seeking? Death."

University students began their protests on Sunday after government pressure led cable TV services to drop Radio Caracas Television (RCTV), which has long been critical of Chavez's socialist policies.

"We are not going to allow continued shutdowns of media outlets that tell the truth, and we are not going to allow ineptitude and inefficiency to continue," said Nizar El Sakih, a student leader.

Chavez's attempt to silence RCTV set off similar protests in 2007, when it was barred from network broadcasts and put on cable. But that has not deterred viewers, said Michael Shifter, a Latin America analyst at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.

"If he kicks (RCTV) off the regular station and puts them on cable (Venezuelans) are going to watch cable.... If he kicks them off cable they'll find another medium," he said, adding that Chavez has underestimated the thirst for information in his country.

Internet analysts say Twitter, which blossomed before the protests but has exploded since they began, could change the face of politics in Venezuela, where hotly contested elections are approaching in September.

Using Twitter as an example, tech consultant Doug Hanchard wrote on Jan. 12: "The Internet might be what changes ... the political landscape in Venezuela.

"Make no mistake," wrote Hanchard, an adviser who covers the intersection of information technology and government, " Latin American cyberspace will be a busy place this year.

Twitter photo venezuelan protest

2010-01-29T16:44:00.001-08:00

Great link

http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/scitech/2010/01/29/twitter-photos-venezuelan-protests?

Hugo Chavez's presidential Strikeout

2010-01-27T21:50:00.001-08:00

Hugo Chavez's presidential strikeout

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

VENEZUELAN STRONGMAN Hugo Chávez is having a bad month. He's been forced to devalue the currency and impose nationwide power cuts, steps that will worsen a serious recession and Latin America's highest inflation. The U.S.-led humanitarian intervention in Haiti has undercut his propaganda about an evil American "empire." As his baseball-crazy country watches its annual championship series, a new slogan has gone viral: "Chávez -- You Struck Out."

So it should surprise no one that Mr. Chávez has taken new steps to tighten his authoritarian grip. On Sunday, without so much as a hint of due process, his government ordered cable systems to drop six television channels -- including RCTV, the country's oldest and long its most popular station. The alleged offense was failing to broadcast Mr. Chávez's live speeches -- of which there have been more than 140 in the past year alone, lasting up to seven hours each.

This is not the first attack on RCTV, which produces Venezuela's most popular entertainment programming as well as news programs with an opposition bent. In 2007, Mr. Chávez ordered the channel off the public airwaves, also without the due process nominally required by law. That action prompted the birth of a student movement that under the slogans of free speech and democracy helped defeat the caudillo's attempt to rewrite the constitution, and propelled opposition candidates to victory in Caracas and other major cities and states last year.

The students have returned to the streets of Caracas and at least four other cities this week, with violent results -- two were killed and dozens injured in the town of Merida in clashes with security forces and pro-regime thugs. On Tuesday, Mr. Chávez's vice president and defense minister resigned, along with the environment minister. International criticism is raining down on his government, most of it considerably stronger than the milquetoast reaction of the State Department, which observed that "any time the government shuts down an independent network, that is an area of concern."

Mr. Chávez may calculate that all the turmoil is worth it. Later this year, an election for the National Assembly is due, and what is now a rubber-stamp body could fall into the hands of the opposition if the vote is free and fair. The currency devaluation will, at least, allow Mr. Chávez to spend far more in the domestic market in the coming months; the attack on RCTV will eliminate a major opposition platform. The student protests may provide a pretext to arrest key organizers, or even to declare an emergency and put off the elections.

If Mr. Chávez were a right-wing leader or an ally of the United States, Latin American governments and many Democrats in Congress would be mobilizing to stop his latest abuse of power, and to encourage peaceful and democratic opposition. But he is not, and they are mostly silent. The Obama administration, too, has done next to nothing to defend democracy or encourage the opposition in Venezuela. Now -- when Chávez's regime threatens to disintegrate into chaos and violence -- would be a good time to start.

PMBComments | US Senate Committee Staff Weighs in on Insulza's Mess at the OAS

2010-01-27T21:18:00.007-08:00

I think that Insulza has done nothing on the favor of Venezuelans. The situation in Venezuela have gone worse. I want the new Chilean presiden: Mr. Pinera kick him out of the OAS, he also has a strikeout.

vdebate reporter

PMBComments Attached you will find the US Senate report (drafted by Republican Staff of the very important Committee on Foreign Relations) titled "Multilateralism in the Americas: Let's Start by Fixing the OAS" that is the subject of the following Miami Herald and La Nación (Argentina) stories (read below).

OAS.pdf

Not that many people in the world, or even in our hemisphere, care for the OAS, an organization that has become disjointed and inconsistent under the leadership of its seemingly cowered Secretary General El Panzer (1), Jose Miguel Insulza. Nevertheless the study is brief enough to be worth a read by those of us who instinctively believe in the power, or the ultimate need, of multilateral mechanisms.

The conclusions of the report are reasonable and should be implemented ASAP. In addition to the need to focus SERIOUSLY on democracy and human rights, it calls for improved financial controls, and it ends chastising Insulza for his selective actions on behalf of democracy in the region it (highlights - as I have done on previous PMBComments - his repeated blunders in Honduras, his cowardly silence on Nicaragua and Venezuela, and his obsession with playing domestic politics in his native Chile). The report ends with a call to the member states to get their collective act in shape and worry about the kind of leadership that they elect on March 24th. While not calling outright for Mr. Insulza to abandon his hopes for a second term it states that his first term was a real disappointment.

Will this report hurt Insulza as the Miami Herald implies? Who knows? Countries - actually governments - like Brazil, that are die hard supporters of both Hugo Chávez and a weak OAS might actually redouble their efforts to give El Panzer 5 more years to graze in DC. Chileans - outgoing and incoming - might rally around him even though his misdeeds have lessened the country's well deserved influence and moral standing in the region. An then we have Venezuela which seems intent on a now farcical candidacy of its own making (let's remember Insulza was their darling in 2005. many still wonder why that was the case; What did Chávez and his acolytes know about Insulza that gave them comfort to have him at the helm of the OAS?). Putting these, and other considerations and calculations aside, it would benefit the OAS that Insulza does not push his luck and further traumatize the organization by pursuing a reelection he has most definitely not earned. PMB

(1) According to a top Chilean political analyst, Insulza loves the moniker El Panzer, which would seem to denote ruthless strength as in German tank, or armored military force, but in fact the this Congressional report highlights his sloppy management of the organization and his less than forceful resolve when it comes to facing the thugs that are really bullying democracy in the region. You can see the joy when he insults Honduras' Roberto Micheletti, and we have all witnessed his less than muscular response to Hugo Chávez 24/7 shenanigans. There is no panzer there.

Miami Herald
Congressional report could hurt OAS leader's reelection efforts
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

JTAMAYO@ELNUEVOHERALD.COM

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/breaking-news/story/1447097.html

The head of the Organization of American States' campaign to win reelection took a hit Tuesday from a report complaining the OAS has failed to stop elected presidents from eroding democracy in the region.

``Given the challenges described in this report, no reelection should be rushed or rubber stamped,'' the U.S. congressional staff report said. ``Any reelection should involve a deliberative evaluation of the incumbent's first term in office.''

OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, a Chilean socialist whose five-year-term ends in May, has said he wants to be relected, and so far is the only candidate. The 34-nation OAS is scheduled to vote Wednesday on holding the election in March.

But the report's withering criticism of the OAS and his performance may bolster opposition to Insulza's candidacy. Some Obama administration officials view him as too soft on leftists such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

Washington provides 37 percent of the OAS' total budget.

Commissioned by Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the report was written by Carl Meacham, his senior staffer on the committee.

The report noted the OAS acted decisively when a military coup briefly toppled Chávez in 2002 and when Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted and expelled from the country last summer. The organization also is strong on election monitoring, cooperation on counter-drug and counter-terrorism and the protection of human rights.

But the hemispheric body did little as Chávez and Zelaya slowly undermined democracy in their respective countries, the report added, arguing that those maneuverings in essence sparked the efforts to topple the two presidents.

``In both cases the OAS reacted forcefully to the [presidents' ousters] . . . yet it had demonstrably failed to respond to the erosion of democratic institutions by elected presidents that preceded the coups,'' it noted.

The report also said Insulza's strong support for Zelaya following his ouster complicated efforts to resolve the crisis, and that the OAS has failed to act as Chávez cracks down the Venezuelan news media and as Nicaraguans complain of massive fraud in elections last year.

The OAS also faces a $9.6 million budget shortfall in 2011, the report added, and will have to either raise members' contributions or tighten its belt and cut back on activities, the report added.

``The OAS requires a renewed effort to make it effective and financially solvent in the coming decade,'' Lugar wrote in a letter submitting the report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Insulza, a former interior and foreign minister in Chile's socialist governments, was elected secretary general in 2005 after a string of 17-17 votes against the U.S.-backed candidate, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez.

Washington helped break the stalemate by throwing its support behind Insulza after he publicly promised to make the OAS a strong protector of democracy in the region, specifically mentioning Venezuela and Cuba.

His reelection prospects were complicated earlier this month when Chileans elected center-right candidate Sebastian Piñera as their next president. Without his own country's endorsement, Insulza's chances for reelections would be diminished.

Piñera has not yet said whether he will support Insulza, who campaigned for the center-left candidate in the presidential race, Eduardo Frei.

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1225979

La OEA, en la mira del Congreso de EE.UU.

Críticas a Insulza en un informe republicano
Martes 26 de enero de 2010 Publicado en edición impresa

WASHINGTON (De nuestra corresponsal).- La crisis de Honduras parece haber sido el disparador. Pero lo cierto es que, tras meses de marchas y contramarchas, la habilidad de la Organización de los Estados Americanos (OEA) para intervenir en crisis institucionales está en la mira en esta ciudad. Parte del descontento apunta contra su titular, el chileno José Miguel Insulza.

"La OEA tiene que resolver una cuestión crucial de liderazgo. El secretario Insulza no ha cumplido con las promesas que hizo al asumir y, por la salud de la institución, es conveniente que los países miembros consideren las condiciones que debe tener su titular y no den por garantizada ninguna reelección", dice un durísimo informe del Congreso norteamericano.

Titulado "Multilateralismo en América. Empecemos por arreglar la OEA", el documento , al que tuvo acceso LA NACION, fue elaborado por la oficina del senador republicano Richard Lugar, uno de los hombres más influyentes en la Comisión de Relaciones Exteriores del cuerpo.

De 27 páginas, el informe, sumamente crítico sobre la situación de la OEA y la gestión de su actual titular, será formalmente difundido en los próximos días.

Si bien destaca la trascendencia de la organización americana, el documento pone en duda su eficacia a la hora de trabajar en la promoción de la democracia en la región.

"Tiende a reaccionar cuando hay una situación clara de golpe de Estado, pero no cuando hay un deterioro gradual de la democracia por culpa de gobiernos que abusan de sus poderes constitucionales", subraya.

También señala la grave crisis financiera que atraviesa la organización, con dinero siempre insuficiente, lo que se traduce en incapacidad real para operar. Estados Unidos es el país que carga con la mayor parte del sostén económico de la entidad. Y a la luz de los refuerzos presupuestarios que deberían hacerse, el impacto del informe podría ser crucial.

La nota es especialmente crítica en lo que se refiere al manejo de la organización y de su secretario general en la reciente crisis de Honduras, donde, entre otros puntos, reprocha la falta de capacidad para lograr "un compromiso" entre las dos partes en juego. Y el hecho de que esa incapacidad motivara la intervención de otros actores internacionales.

En el tramo final, el texto carga especialmente contra Insulza, a quien cuestiona por haber estado "más atento al destino político de Chile", con una situación especialmente complicada en lo personal por haberse manifestado "públicamente" a favor del derrotado aspirante Eduardo Frei.

En el informe se acusa a Insulza de aplicar una "política selectiva de defensa de la democracia", en referencia a las situaciones en Venezuela y Honduras. "La asociación del secretario general con el abortado intento de retorno del presidente Manuel Zelaya, el 5 de julio, dañó seriamente la imagen de la OEA como un agente honesto", afirma.

"Desafortunadamente, la OEA está fallando en su misión. Hoy por hoy, si más gobiernos del hemisferio se vuelven poco democráticos, la OEA será aún menos capaz de reforzar, colectivamente, los procedimientos para reforzar la democracia", afirma el texto, que lleva como carta de presentación una nota firmada por el senador Lugar.

Hugo Chavez calls using twitter "terrorism"

2010-01-27T18:34:00.003-08:00

http://devilsexcrement.com/2010/01/27/hugo-chavez-calls-using-twitter-terrorism/

Hugo Chavez calls using Twitter “terrorism”
January 27, 2010

For a man intent into taking Venezuelan into the Dark Ages, it was a remarkable admission that modernity can be a threat to Hugo Chavez and his fake revolution. As students used the Internet and its tools like Twitter as wel as other modern tools like SMS messaging to mobilize and communicate strategy instantly, Hugo Chavez made his second attack on the Internet in a single week, calling the rumors and use of this technology “terrorism”:

A week ago Chavez had said that his supporters had to watch out for the Internet and tonight he came on TV wearing a suit, rather than his usual red garb and began reading messages (which were too long to be from Twitter), calling it terrorism (right at the end, minute 3:50 or so)

Can Chavez really expect that his trusted friend and confidant resigns as Vice-President and Minister of Defense for “personal reasons” (and his wife as Minister of the Environment) and there will be no rumors?

Chavez repeated again his wish, which the opposition has paid absolutely no attention to, that to get rid of him his opponents had to call for a recall referendum, a tool that would not only be distracting, but quite difficult to achieve as the recall votes would have to exceed the number of votes he got in his Presidential reelection in 2006. (Chavez has made such a call four times in the last three weeks and seems frustrated by the lack of even a response) This would be difficult given the resources of the Government as well as the difficulty of mobilizing the voters at this time. The opposition wants to concentrate in the legislative elections in September, letting Chavez ride the harvest of his own incompetence until 2012 when his term expires.

The truth is that it is the Government has the weapons in this fight and is the one that has sponsored the violence against the students, who in turn have managed to use peaceful means to stop the violence like today at Government’s TV station VTV. But it was the Tupamaros who caused most of the violence in Merida, aided by the local law enforcement agencies. And it was Chavez who was seen mingling with Lina Ron in his Saturday rally, a woman that has led armed attacks on marches and was imprisoned in January 2009 for leading a violent attack against Globovision. Chavez can’t attack the opposition on the protests as the students have led the protests and do not respond to the political leaders of the opposition parties.

In the end it is ironic how Chavez evokes the fundamentalism of his Iranians buddies, who have also referred to the Internet and Twitter as terrorists, which is mocked in this hilarious cartoon below:

But in the end, besides feeling the threat from a weapon Chavez does not control or understand totally, maybe his key problem is that he could never make adequate use of it. For a man accustomed to uninterrupted speeches of six to eight hours, it must be simply impossible to even consider the possibility of communicating anything in 140 characters.

Cadafe's thermoelectric power plants running at fifth of capacity

2010-01-26T17:29:00.002-08:00

Source:

http://devilsexcrement.com/2010/01/26/cadafes-thermoelectric-power-plants-running-at-a-fifth-of-capacity/

Cadafe’s Thermoelectric power plants running at a fifth of capacity
January 26, 2010
Today’s El Nacional has this table compiled from the country’s Electric Corporation which shows the performance of the different thermoelectric power plants managed by CADAFE:

As you can see, of the total generation capacity of 4,507 MW installed, barely 941 MW or 20.9 % of the installed capacity, demonstrating that the problems we are having have little to do with the level of the Guri dam or the atmospheric phenomenon El Niño, but have more to do with the sheer incompetence and the lack of investment in maintenance of “Er Niño Chávez” and the people he has surrounded himself with, mostly mediocre military who can not tell the difference between a MW and a MHz.

But the sheer incompetence of the robolution can bee seen right there in that table, the Josefa Camejo plant in Falcón State was started and built by the Chávez administration, but it only produces a fraction of its potential because someone forgot to build the associated transmission lines. Thus, the plant produces too much for the nearby cities and is not part of the interconnected system, running at a lower capacity. Way to go Hugo!

The remarkable thing is that Chávez continues to blame the problem on the Guri dam and on the projects for hydroelectric power plants that he stopped in order to favor thermoelectric projects that either don’t exist and/or work as well as the table above shows.

Another day of abuse of power, censorship and resentment by Chavez

2010-01-24T10:04:00.002-08:00

Another day of abuse of power, censorship and resentment by Chavez and his cronies. Another day in which the rights of Venezuelans have been trampled upon.
And some still dare call this a democracy.

http://devilsexcrement.com/2010/01/24/government-shuts-down-rctv-cable-programming/

Government shuts down RCTV cable programming
January 24, 2010

In an act of revenge, censorship and just sheer personal vendetta, the Venezuelan Government shut down the cable signal of RCTV tonight, because the broadcasting company refused to carry Chavez’ “cadenas”, which force all TV stations to carry Chavez’ speeches whenever he so desires. (Today, he forced a few minutes of “cadena” while holding a rally for his party PSUV in Caracas, in a clear illegal act of abuse of power and Government resources)

Recall that RCTV had been shut down as a local broadcaster and its equipment confiscated in 2007, when Chavez “decided” he had to shut down the TV station locally. Its equimpent and property has yet to be returned to its rightful owners, while another Government media outlet uses it in its programming (Even if very few people watch it!)

A couple of months ago the Government issued a decree taylor made for RCTV International which managed to keep afloat via cable TV and satellite TV. According to this decree, if 70% or more of the programming was made in Venezuela, the cable system and satellite system would have to carry Chavez’ speeches.

As I arrived back at home tonight at midnight, I was surprised to hear a loud pot banging in my nighborhood as I entered my home, RCTV’s signal had been shutdown at midnight and Twitter was very active talking about the news (#freemediave).

Another day of abuse of power, censorship and resentment by Chavez and his cronies. Another day in which the rights of Venezuelans have been trampled upon.

And some still dare call this a democracy.

Gandhi: Whenever I despair

2010-01-22T07:55:00.001-08:00

In all the countries where the are little Human rights, we should think:

GANDHI: Whenever I despair, I remember that the way of truth and love has always won. There may be tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they may seem invincible, but in the end, they always fail. Think of it: always.

Justice fallen into the wrong hands

2010-01-22T07:48:00.002-08:00

"In other words, the processes being administered by the Chinese leadership against its dissidents, by the Iranian regime against its protesters, or by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela against the opposition, should no longer be described as trials. "

The very grammar of justice has fallen into the wrong hands.

By ROBERT AMSTERDAM
Human rights are under attack, and language is the weapon. The very grammar of justice has fallen into the wrong hands, instrumentalized in the elaborate and sensational theaters of due process. A trial without any rights of defense is still called a "trial," a conviction ordered down from an autocratic president rather than a judge is still called a "conviction," and there continues to exist an overwhelming and damaging perception that the law and courts work just fine—an assumption eagerly embraced by the financial community looking to toss heaps of capital into subprime judicial environments.

When Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian political prisoner whose case I am involved in, was put on trial for the first time in 2004, the government applied all its media powers to project the language of justice: They held him in shackles, placed him in a cage on television, and put on a good show trial where a judge pretends to listen to the defense as though the verdict would not arrive via a call from the Kremlin. This is what the Russians call "telephone justice."

It looks like a trial; to detached observers it might even smell something like due process; but underneath all the familiar language, there is the rot of corruption, political fiat and arbitrariness. We have seen it with China's 11-year sentence handed down to the dissident Liu Xiaobo, which was met by stone silence in the White House. We can read the borrowed grammar in the mysterious death of Dr. Ramin Pourandarjani in Iran, who was arrested after testifying before parliament that he refused pressure to sign false death certificates of fatally tortured protesters. Even the Burmese junta has become a master of bureaucratic process, extending Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest after a sham trial.

In another case I am involved with in Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez goes on national television to attack a recently released political prisoner, Eligio Cedeño, and then demand a 30-year sentence for the judge who ordered his conditional release, which was supported by international expert opinion. Chávez called both Mr. Cedeño and the judge "bandits," despite the fact that neither of these individuals had committed any crime nor ever been convicted of any offense. For these countries' leaders, it is much more important that the media adopt their narrative and language to portray their enemies as criminals than it is to administer actual justice or prove a real case.

When the vocabulary of criminal justice is hijacked, we rarely can get the media to present an unbiased account of events that considers the fact that the charges may be incoherent, or the evidence nonexistent, or that the procedural games of prosecutors might be completely outside the law. For these governments, the application of the charge is more of a goal than any conviction, because they can count upon their authority to erase the presumption of innocence in a trial. They know that by simply labeling dissidents or dissenters as criminals, the public will come to see them as such.

Once someone is charged, very few observers are interested in the possible motivations of those bringing the charges. All processes are deemed regular and included within the same grammar, whether or not the investigation has been independent or the prosecution politically motivated.

My self-help remedy is a very simple one. I propose that journalists reconsider their liberal use of the word "trial," unless it is used to describe a process of relative equality of arms between defense and prosecution, before a fair and independent tribunal as envisioned by a plethora of international conventions and treaties. In other words, the processes being administered by the Chinese leadership against its dissidents, by the Iranian regime against its protesters, or by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela against the opposition, should no longer be described as trials. I say this because the presumption of innocence is also enshrined in these same conventions. This concept alone is something that autocratic leaders, in particular, fail to comprehend and regularly abuse.

So why should we provide these leaders with the presumption of regularity by trusting that their institutions operate in an independent and legitimate manner? Why should we not claw back the vocabulary and grammar of human rights, so that we become less fixated on a given government's narrative of events and more focused on their motivation for bringing the charges described?

Stokley Carmichael, the famous 1960s civil-rights activist, once wrote, "We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which allow ourselves to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms will be accepted. This is the first need of a free people, and the first right refused by every oppressor."

In human rights, language is everything, and it's time that we take it back.

Mr. Amsterdam is an international lawyer specializing in the politics of business and the rule of law in emerging markets.

Chavez Watch II

2010-01-22T07:42:00.001-08:00

Chavez is the worst president Venezuelans have had. He is destroying the fragil Venezuelan economy........ I am so glad that the new Chilean government won't follow Chavez thinking.

vdebate reporter

Chávez Watch II
BY Jaime Daremblum
January 21, 2010 12:00 AM

In case you were wondering what U.S. military forces are doing in Haiti, allow Hugo Chávez to explain: “I read that 3,000 soldiers are arriving, Marines armed as if they were going to war,” the Venezuelan leader said Sunday on his national TV show. “They are occupying Haiti undercover.”

It gets worse. Chávez has also accused the U.S. military of causing the Haitian earthquake by testing a weapon. Really. We’ve come to expect such risible comments from Chávez, but that doesn’t make them any less outrageous.

Given the deteriorating situation in Venezuela, the buffoonish autocrat should be more humble. His country has been rationing water, electricity, and health care services. Its government finances are a mess, its public health system is falling apart, its physical infrastructure is crumbling, its capital city (Caracas) is the most dangerous in Latin America, and its inflation rate is surging. (Morgan Stanley projects that Venezuelan inflation will hit 45 percent this year. That would be its highest level in 14 years.)

Chávez has always been more concerned with cultivating his ideological allies abroad than with tackling Venezuela’s domestic economic troubles (which own disastrous policies created). He is now planning to visit Nicaragua and give $130 million to his close friend Daniel Ortega, another radical leftist who is busy trying to turn his own country into a mini-Venezuela. The money will reportedly be spent on agribusiness. However, considering Chávez’s track record of announcing grand investments that never materialize, not to mention Venezuela’s shaky finances, Ortega may ultimately be disappointed.

Jaime Daremblum, who served as Costa Rica’s ambassador to the United States from 1998 to 2004, is director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the Hudson Institute.

The Chavez Spiral

2010-01-12T00:36:00.001-08:00

Commentary
The Chavez Spiral
Roger Noriega, 01.11.10, 3:21 PM ET
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez is losing altitude fast. Since his election in 2008 he's proved a deft manager of chaos--an oil strike, fierce political opposition, an army rebellion, food shortages, etc. He has been kept aloft by doling out oil revenues to satisfy the poor majority that forms his loyal base, to blunt the effects of economic mismanagement and to buy off the military and collaborating oligarchs, who reap the benefits of government sweetheart deals.

With petroleum prices down around $71 a barrel from a high of $147 the Venezuelan government is struggling to make up for the revenue shortfall to save programs that placate the poor by providing cheap food, fuel and other government giveaways. Making matters worse, the once mighty Venezuelan petroleum industry has been laid low by politicization, corruption and mismanagement; rather than producing 3.3 million barrels per day, industry analysts believe the production is closer to 2.3 million. Instead of maximizing profits by producing its quota, Venezuela's state-run oil fields are either underperforming or have collapsed altogether. Refining capacity also is in steep decline so Venezuela must import gasoline to meet internal needs--buying it at the market rate, selling it to domestic consumers at the much lower subsidized price and eating the difference.

Since late November, the Venezuelan state has had to intervene in about 10 banks, several of which were operated by Chavista cronies. These banks were favored by the regime to handle billions in Venezuelan government deposits. According to published accounts, these alleged crooked bankers were supposed to squirrel away these billions for Chávez, his family, government ministers, loyal military officers and other accomplices of his criminal regime. Instead, they stole and squandered the funds and came under the watchful eye of international regulators who have begun to freeze accounts in foreign banks. Chávez has moved in to scrape what is left of the cash and control the damage to the banking sector.

These related crises are mounting; the economy shrank 3% last year, inflation has risen to at least 25% today and the regime is running out of band-aids.

On Saturday, Chávez was forced to order a drastic devaluation in the national currency, which he hopes will relieve the government's budget woes. Under his plan, some basic necessities are supposed to remain available at a lower exchange rate, with other goods becoming twice as expensive. Critics say this dual system invites corruption and distorts the marketplace, while inflation is expected to rise another 3% to 5% and consumers will find it increasingly difficult to obtain imported goods.

Adding to the economic crisis is a drastic shortage of electricity. Last month Chávez ordered a rationing scheme after the state-run power company predicted a "national collapse" in April. He blames the crisis on a drought that has sapped the country's hydroelectric plant in the Guri Dam on the Caroní River. The problem is petroleum-fueled generators are failing too, with turbines lacking adequate fuel or shut down in disrepair. The electricity shortage is the result of gross mismanagement and underinvestment in the power sector to meet demand that has grown by 40% since 2002. Some experts say an $18 billion, multiyear modernization is required just to meet current needs.

The Venezuelan people also are enduring routine food shortages due to price controls that have discouraged domestic production and Chávez's repeated interruptions in trade with neighboring Colombia, upon which Venezuelans are increasingly dependent for consumer goods. With the blackouts disrupting domestic production and the currency devaluation, Venezuelans can expect increasing scarcity of the basic necessities of life.

As for life itself, Caracas has become by far the most dangerous city in South America; In September 2008 Foreign Policy magazine listed it among the "murder capitals of the world," noting that the homicide rate had grown by 67% since Chávez took power, even according to suspect official statistics. Chávez governs through cronyism and corruption to reward his friends and harass his opponents. His regime also conspires with drug traffickers who fuel criminal gangs that prey on innocent Venezuelans. This culture of lawlessness has gutted the police force and courts and undermined the quality of life of every citizen, rich or poor.

In the past, Chávez has been able to throw money at problems--to placate a restless public, suborn the military, turn out loyal mobs or overwhelm an opposition campaign. However, it is impossible to rebuild massive power generators, a professional police force, honest courts, crumbling roads and bridges from one day to the next. It also would take years to restore private food production and transportation capacity, even if the regime were to reverse its relentless hostility to the free market.

Although the Venezuelan people have found life increasingly unbearable, many of them have come to depend on the patronage of a strong state or remain suspicious of the traditional political leaders who have yet to present a viable alternative to Chávez.

While the regime scrambles to deal with the crises of its own making, this would be an opportune time for the democratic opposition to issue a pledge to restore Venezuela:

--The rule of law must return, beginning with an offensive against crime, the professionalization of the police and the courts and accountability of the state before the people.

--International giveaways to Chávez's client states must end, and funds should be returned to the Venezuelan people.

--Billions in stolen revenues must be recovered, which shall be used to rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure and to restore the oil industry.

--Collusion with drug traffickers, terrorist groups and criminal gangs that are waging war against Venezuelans and their neighbors must stop.

--Military and other security officials must be loyal to the nation rather than a destructive political project.

--Cubans, Iranians and other foreigners who are exploiting Venezuela must leave the country.

--No young Venezuelan should lose his or her life to wage war with Colombia, and peaceful ties will be cultivated with all democratic nations.

--A government of national unity, reconciliation and reconstruction must be built upon free and honest elections, beginning with election of a new National Assembly this year.

The only thing worse than a dictator is an incompetent one. Every day, more Venezuelans must recognize that that the current systemic crisis is unbearable, unsustainable and, if they say so, unnecessary. Chávez's engines are sputtering--the only question is whether Venezuelans are prepared to crash and burn with his regime.

Roger F. Noriega, a senior State Department official from 2001 to 2005, is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and managing director of Vision Americas LLC, which represents foreign and domestic clients.

Hugo Chavez, FARC and now.... AlQaida?

2009-12-01T17:51:00.003-08:00

Gustavo Coronel is an excellent writer and he knows Venezuelans problem very well. You can check his blog at:

http://lasarmasdecoronel.blogspot.com/

vdebate reporter

Hugo Chavez, FARC and now... Al Qaida?
Un Boeing 727, de Venezuela, llevaba cocaína a Mali.

A report in the UK Guardian speculates that the drug traffic passing through Mali seems to be more and more controlled by Al Qaida, possibly in association with the Colombian FARC. This is interesting, as the Boeing 727 carrying cocaine that recently landed and subsequently crashed on take-off in Mali was Venezuelan. This suggests the possibility that the Venezuelan regime of Hugo Chavez could be linking forces with Al Qaida, in a similar manner to its already existing links with the FARC. Says the report (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/29/drugs-cocaine-africa-al-qaida) :
“Professor Stephen Ellis of Amsterdam's Free University, an expert on west Africa's drugs trade, said that several reports suggested that the airstrip was in a region controlled by the group known as "al-Qaida in the land of the Islamic Maghreb". Previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, it was responsible for a spate of car bombings in Algeria in 2007 that left dozens dead, including at least 11 UN staff.
"Until now, there is no evidence they have had a direct interest in the drug trade," said Ellis. "But if the airstrip was controlled by al-Qaida, it suggests there is direct contact between them and Latin American drug interests."
The Home Office estimates that 50% of the cocaine that enters the UK comes from west Africa. Two years ago the government put the figure at under 30%.
Like manufacturers taking advantage of cheaper labour by moving their plants abroad, the major Colombian drugs gangs have exploited west Africa's political instability, poorly funded law enforcement agencies, endemic corruption and porous borders. But a link with terrorist networks would add a new dimension.
It is not only al-Qaida that may be involved. A briefing prepared for the US Congress speculated that west Africa's substantial Lebanese trading community – strong supporters of Hezbollah – have been buying the drug from the paramilitary group Farc, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia”. .

By Gustavo Coronel

Threats to Press Freedom in Venezuela

2009-11-18T17:22:00.003-08:00

Hi everyone:

Here a document vdebate created November, 13th 2009

Threats Press Freedom Venezuela document - pdf

US condemns Cuba over blogger beatings

2009-11-09T22:09:00.001-08:00

US condemns Cuba over blogger beatings
(AFP) – 2 hours ago

WASHINGTON — The United States said it "strongly deplores" the forcible detention and beating last week of three Cuban bloggers on their way to a peaceful march in Havana.

Award-winning blogger Yoani Sanchez, whose online reports chronicle the dark side of everyday life in communist Cuba, was detained and beaten along with two fellow bloggers by Cuban secret police on November 6.

"We have expressed to the Cuban government our deep concern with the assaults," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said in a statement.

"The US government strongly deplores the assault on bloggers Yoani Sanchez, Orlando Luis Pardo, and Claudia Cadelo.

Sanchez, who writes the blog "Generation Y," told AFP last week: "(The government agents) beat me and then they shoved me into a car head first. They did not give me any explanation at any time, but it is clear their goal was to stop us from taking part in the march."

Three agents in street clothes had snatched them off the street in the Havana district of Vedado.

Sanchez, winner of the Maria Moors Cabot 2009 award and Ortega y Gasset Prize awarded by Madrid's El Pais newspaper, said she was not seriously injured and was released half an hour after the arrest.

"Clearly, the beating hurts even more a day later; I am still really affected by all of this, but it is not going to stop me from writing my blog," she added.

Kelly said the United States called on Cuba "to ensure the full respect of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all its citizens."

Washington has repeatedly urged action by Cuba to move forward on free speech and greater respect for human rights before lifting the US embargo on the island.

Cuban authorities say Sanchez and all other political dissidents are "mercenaries" in the pay of the United States and other western countries.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.

Press Violations - Venezuela

2009-11-07T11:51:00.001-08:00

Venezuela

VENEZUELA
Report to the Midyear Meeting
Caracas, Venezuela
March 28 - 30, 2008

The previous report noted that Venezuelans were strongly opposed to a package of constitutional amendments proposed by President Hugo Chávez as a way of perpetuating his hold on power.
The report denounced the government’s intentions to get rid of the independent media, assault and intimidate journalists, eliminate freedom of speech, and undermine the right to inform and be informed.
In a referendum held on December 2, 2007, the majority of the Venezuelan people decisively rejected the proposed constitutional change — and along with it the government’s authoritarian policies and its attempt to remove all term limits on the presidency.
Nevertheless, the president’s control of all three branches of government has led to troubling interpretations of the Constitution, such as Ruling 1013 of 2001 (curtailing freedom of speech) and Ruling 1942 of 2003 (denying the validity of international human rights accords).
The Law on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television, which was passed a few years ago, allows the government to control the content of broadcast media outlets.
The Venezuelan Penal Code has been amended five times in the past seven years. Previous reports submitted to the IAPA by Venezuela, including at the latest General Assembly, denounced the fact that these amendments make it a crime to be a dissident or to “insult” government officials, as this is a serious threat to freedom of speech. A few days ago, the regime proposed amendments to 22 additional articles in the code.
In early 2007 the National Assembly passed what is known as an “enabling law,” valid for up to 18 months, which grants the president legislative powers on certain matters and allows him to pass laws by decree.
Even though his package of proposed constitutional amendments was defeated on December 2, President Chávez indicates he intends to decree measures into law that were rejected by the people in the referendum.
The Casa Arturo Uslar Pietri Foundation obtained some documents used in the Ministry of Education’s curriculum for Venezuelan teachers, which define a basic pillar of the government’s entire education system as “the recognition of accurate, timely reporting from the alternative and mass media, which are tools for reinforcing a proactive, participatory democracy in which all of society is involved.”
According to the foundation’s specialists, “this lamentable dogma imposed by the government on the educational system is at the core of education from preschool through high school, and this obviously damages our youth by attempting to discredit freedom of speech and envelop our future society in a terrible silence.”
May 27 will mark one year since Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) was shut down and its broadcasting equipment seized by the government. The president had announced his politically motivated decision to shut down RCTV, the free, over-the-air broadcast station that was the country’s longest-running and most widely viewed channel. This closure was opposed by the vast majority of the Venezuelan people.
Meanwhile, we continue to see court cases and rulings, administrative penalties pursued by the regime, and harassment targeting the Globovisión news channel.
Failure to provide foreign currency in a timely manner for the importation of newsprint has been a persistent problem, even though newspapers are legally entitled to it under the exchange control system. This is jeopardizing the newspapers’ circulation.
The Chávez administration has repeatedly refused to disclose information to media outlets not under his control. Independent journalists are also denied access to government sources and events controlled by government entities.
The administration resorts to the reprehensible method of discriminating in the placement of its large volume of advertising as a way of pressuring and penalizing self-respecting media outlets that do not engage in self-censorship. Media outlets that unconditionally support the government are lavished with funds, as a way of bolstering what the regime describes as “the entire communications apparatus of the revolutionary process.”
Another clear case of discrimination concerns advertising by Venezuela’s largest communications company, CanTV, and its cellular phone subsidiary, Movilnet, both of which were nationalized last year by the Chávez administration. For years these companies had advertised heavily in the newspaper Correo del Caroní. But with the precision that typifies the regime’s threats and attacks, all advertising from these companies ceased the day after they were nationalized. Other media outlets, especially those controlled by the government, ran large color ads that day with the telling slogan, “Ahora CanTV es de todos” (“CanTV belongs to everyone now”).
The government now controls 85% of all television stations, 3,000 community radio stations, and 100 Web sites, according to a study directed by Adolfo Herrera, dean of the School of Communications at the Central University of Venezuela.
Last year the Ministry of Communication and Information spent 3,465,000 bolívares to “strengthen alternative and community media outlets,” more than 1.5 million bolívares on equipment and accessories, and 152 million bolívares on “training for Venezuelan professionals by Cuban experts.”
Communications specialists said in February that “the government’s takeover of the media to further its authoritarian political aims, the reduction of space for expressing a variety of ideas, and multiple restrictions on free speech are just some of the steps taken by the executive branch in the field of communications during the first nine years of the rule of Hugo Chávez.”
According to a research study by the Commission on Political Participation and Election Campaign Financing, 69% of all programming on government-controlled radio and television stations prior to the December 2 referendum was in favor of the constitutional amendments proposed by the Chávez regime.
Other significant developments:
Acts of judicial terrorism against journalists — through lawsuits, prosecution and persecution — have aroused even more anger and made professionals even more determined to uphold their commitment to inform, investigate and denounce.
On November 4, 2005, journalist Patricia Poleo was ordered to be taken into custody for allegedly “masterminding” the killing of a prosecutor. Under the charges Poleo would have been forced to remain in jail while the case was under investigation. She was convinced by her friends and colleagues to leave the country to escape torture, pressures and abuses.
The government’s supporters — some out of conviction, others for convenience — devote themselves to denying the truth, concealing actual events, and attempting to break the ethical resistance of honest journalists and media outlets, in order to keep unfiltered news from reaching the people and to keep the people from realizing the historical failure of totalitarianism.
The National Union of Press Workers issued a statement on February 28 expressing its “condemnation and rejection of the flagrant harassment of media outlets and their employees by pro-government forces.”
Journalists Beatriz Adrián and Diana Carolina Ruiz of Globovisión and Francia Sánchez of RCTV Internacional were assaulted on October 16, 2007, while covering a session of the National Assembly at the Teresa Carreño Theater.
On November 11, 2007, reporter Jorge Eliécer Patiño and photographer Luis Barrios of the newspaper Diario de los Llanos in the state of Barinas were beaten by police while covering a demonstration at a university.
Police officers and civilians assaulted journalist Elvis Rivas of RCTV Internacional during a student protest in the state of Mérida on November 9.
Gustavo Azócar, a journalist and on-air host for Televisora Regional del Táchira, was assaulted on camera during his morning program on November 20 by a ruling-party member of the National Assembly.
News photographer José Cohen suffered a head wound while covering a peaceful student demonstration that was repressed by the Metropolitan Police and the National Guard on November 29. Cohen received 10 stitches for the wound.
On December 5, President Chávez called Hernán Lugo García, a reporter for El Nacional newspaper, “excrement” for his article on Chávez’s defeat in the referendum.
Cameraman Carlos Toro was hit and assistant Larry Arvelo suffered bruises and injuries caused by police while covering an accident for Globovisión

Pro-government activists attacked journalist Ramón Antonio Pérez during a rally of the Copei party in Plaza Bolivar in Caracas.

A pro-government group assaulted journalist Hugo Morales who was taking pictures of attacks on university students on January 22, 2008.

Journalist María Teresa Guedez of the daily La Calle, photographer Clemente Espinoza, of the daily El Carabobeño, and the cameraman of RCTV Internacional were injured when violent pro-government groups entered and destroyed the Carabobo state Legislative Council on February 12 of this year.

The wife of journalist José Rafael Ramírez announced that she was on a hunger strike on February 14 and chained herself to the courthouse doors of Aragua state to protest what she called “judicial abuses” of her husband. Ramírez has been held in La Planta Prison in Caracas for the past month, and during this time he has been on hunger strike. Twice he has been taken to the military hospital in a near-death state, only to be revived with intravenous fluids and returned to prison. This is a violation of his right to remain free while on trial.

Pro-government activists insulted journalist Rafael Fuenmayor of Globovisión and accused him of “destabilizing the Chavez government” because he asked questions that displeased the pro-government group that took over the headquarters of the Caracas archdiocese last February 27.

Journalists were not allowed to attend a regular session of the National Assembly’s Finance Committee on February 29.

Journalists of the major newspapers of Carabobo state were beaten by pro-government groups while covering a meeting to support peace on the 6th of this month in Valencia.

Two journalists of Argentina’s Canal 5, Melina Fleiderman and Andrés Montes de Oca, special correspondents covering the tour of President Cristina Kirchner, were detained by the National Guard near Miraflores Palace when they tried to record a demonstration against Chávez nearby.

The National Press Workers Union says: “It is increasingly difficult for private sector journalists to do their work within a framework of respect for their work and within ethical and professional parameters. In a good number of agencies the immediate supervisors of the press secretaries are military personnel who do not know the basic principles of the practice of journalism, neither the law, nor the Code of Ethics. When they have objections they take reprisals.”

On May 27, the government closed down RCTV television and used military force to seize its offices and transmission equipment.

The television company has taken various legal actions, but none has had a favorable result.

On March 26, the Political-Administrative Branch of the Supreme Court denied RCTV’s request on November 29, 2007 for an injunction which would have allowed it to return to over-the-air broadcasting.,

RCTV said that the procedural technicalities cited in the decision not to consider the allegations in its petition were not applicable in that case, and said it regretted “that the Supreme Court has once again lost the opportunity to repair the serious damage that taking our channel off the air has done to the Venezuelan people.”

RCTV explained that this was not the definitive ruing in the case and said it will continue its effort to have the Supreme Court’s final decision reestablish the rule of law and restore on-the-air broadcasting to the channel.

The news channel Globovisión still faces lawsuits, more administrative sanctions and other harassment by the regime.

The chief of state has insulted and threatened Globovisión.

The government continues to systematically deny the possibility of expanding to on-air broadcasting in an effort to try to restrict the spread of its messages, news and free opinion.

The general director of the channel, Alberto Federico Ravell, said in October of 2007 the suspension ordered by the National Electoral Council of some brief reports about a constitutional amendment that the council thought might cause “electoral abstention” was censorship.

On January 31, Globovisión rejected a demand by the government agency Conatel against brief testimonial reports called “You Saw It,” which the government did not like.

Globovisión reported on February 8 that it was harassed by SENIAT. Officials showed up unannounced in the afternoon demanding that books be handed over immediately and requesting extensive tax information.

The Media Committee of the National Assembly said it “supports all legal actions that social and political organizations take against Globovisión.”

On February 11, with the slogan, “Now it is Globovisión’s turn,” pro-government individuals asked the national Attorney General’s Office to investigate the channel, allegedly for “offending Chávez and distorting news.” Three days later, pro-Chávez groups gathered outside Globovisión to protest news they said was against President Chávez, and painted graffiti attacking the channel’s executives.

On February 16, Globovisión complained to the Public Prosecutor’s Office about attacks by pro-government individuals against it.

The Communications and Information Ministry urged Globovisión on February 19 to “respect the president and the people,” saying the government does not intend to close the channel.

Pro-Chávez activist leaders declared that Globovisión was “a target of the revolution,” and asserted that “anyone can decide to place a bomb at Globovisión.” On the same day, February 27, they held a protest vigil in front of the station and painted slogans on its walls.

Two days later, the assembly of the government party considered actions against Globovisión, and proposed revoking its license.

On February 4, the interior and justice minister accused the Venezuelan media of “collaborating with the enemy” and committing “treason to the homeland” by reporting about the movement of tanks and troops toward the Colombian border which the president had ordered publicly on television.

In addition, on November 28, the Venezuelan Press Bloc issued a statement reporting a serious delay by the currency exchange control agency, CADIVI, in delivering foreign currency to pay providers of newsprint abroad.

The daily Correo de Caroni did not circulate for three days beginning December 12 because it did not receive newsprint from its supplier, the DIPALCA company. The government had not delivered the foreign currency in time.

The publisher of the daily El Regional of Zulia, Gilberto Urdaneta, also reported that his newspaper had enough newsprint for only 22 days for the same reason.

The newspapers El Impulso, Nuevo País, the magazine Zeta and other publications reported on that date that inventories of newsprint were low, which threatens their circulation in the short term, because of government delays in releasing controlled currencies.

Venezuelan newspapers live in uncertainty about the stock of newsprint and other supplies for the press that are not made in the country, since imports must be authorized by the government office that controls currency exchange.

On February 11, the Carabobo state culture secretary threatened the dailies El Carabobeño and Noti-Tarde with bombings, saying that they should “see themselves in the mirror of RCTV and Globovisión.” The official threatened that they could “see their doors close,” adding that they should “be very careful with what you publish tomorrow.”

This violent warning from the government was a reaction to the companies’ support for the “Arturo Michelena” art biennial which traditionally has been sponsored for many years by the Valencia Ateneo.

The administration considers free cultural activities contradictory to the political and ideological action the Chávez government promotes.

After this report was presented at the Midyear Meeting, Marcos Hernández, president of the Venezuelan pro-government NGO Journalists for the Truth, threatened to initiate a court case against the Venezuelan Press Bloc for having said that it would attempt to regain RCTV’s frequency. He also threatened the IAPA gathering, saying that if Venezuela is attacked at this meeting “we’ll know what to do.”

Accelerating the Bolivarian Revolution

2009-11-07T09:16:00.002-08:00

Accelerating the Bolivarian Revolution - New Crisis Group briefing
Essential reading.

INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP - NEW BRIEFING

Venezuela: Accelerating the Bolivarian Revolution

Bogotá/Brussels, 5 November 2009: Against the spirit of the constitution, President Hugo Chávez is accelerating his “Bolivarian Revolution” by implementing radical laws that affect basic rights and liberties and thwart the political opposition’s fair chances in the December 2010 legislative elections.
Venezuela: Accelerating the Bolivarian Revolution,* the latest update briefing from the International Crisis Group, examines how in 2009 the Chávez government has progressively abandoned core liberal democracy principles guaranteed under the Inter-American Democratic Charter and the American Convention on Human Rights. The executive has increased its power and provoked unrest internally by further politicising the armed forces and the oil sector.
It is exercising mounting influence over the electoral authorities, the legislative and judicial branches of power and other state entities.

“The December 2010 legislative elections promise to further polarise an already seriously divided country”, says Nicolás Letts, Crisis Group’s Colombia/Andes Analyst. “Unresolved social and mounting economic problems are generating tensions that exacerbate the risk of political violence”.

The government’s lack of capacity to correct serious deficiencies in the management of the state is provoking increasing social protest. The continued targeting of the political opposition and the mass media, coupled with growing economic, security and social problems, are deepening discontent. The opposition, which continues to be divided, is challenging Chávez through democratic means. However, it may in the future look to more violent alternatives for confronting him, if his government continues to shut off space for participation and restrict critics from expressing their views through democratic mechanisms.

Society at large is experiencing critical levels of insecurity and stark deficiencies in basic public services.

Tense relations with Colombia may take a toll on the president’s popularity at home.

While Chávez’s bellicose rhetoric towards Colombia is unlikely to elicit an armed reaction, it does
stimulate the potential for mounting trouble along the border. “Ten years of ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ have failed to produce significant and sustainable improvements in the living conditions of the poorer segments of society”, says Markus Schultze-Kraft, Crisis Group’s Latin America Program Director. “Chávez has proved to be a poor manager, with difficulties to administer the vast state apparatus he has created and cater for citizens’ legitimate demands”.

*Read the full Crisis Group briefing on our website:
http://www.crisisgroup.org
Contacts: Andrew Stroehlein (Brussels) +32 (0) 2 541 1635
Kimberly Abbott (Washington) +1 202 785 1602
To contact Crisis Group media please click here

The International Crisis Group (Crisis Group) is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organisation covering some 60 crisis-affected countries and territories across four continents, working through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict.

The ideas that keep Hugo Chavez in power, and their disastrous consequences

2009-11-07T08:48:00.003-08:00

Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com)

The Shah of Venezuela. The ideas that keep Hugo Chavez in power, and their disastrous consequences.

Enrique Krauze . April 1, 2009 12:00 am

I
The sacralization of history is an ancient practice in Latin America. In the region's Catholic countries, stories of the past, with their heroes and their villains, became instant paraphrases of the Holy Story, complete with martyrologies, holy days, and iconic representations of secular saints. But in Venezuela, where the presence of the church has been less rich and influential than in Mexico, Peru, or Ecuador, the transference of the sacred to the profane has been more intense, perhaps because of the lack of "competition" with strictly religious inspirations such as the Virgin of Guadalupe or the patron saints of Mexican towns. Venezuela's civic worship is unusual also in that it is monotheistic, which is to say, it has centered on the passion story of a man elevated to godhood. That man is Simon Bolivar.

In addition to parades, speeches, ceremonies, competitions, inaugurations, commemorations, unveilings of monuments, official publications, and other formal events in veneration of Bolivar that successive Venezuelan governments (oligarchic, civil, military, dictatorships) have produced, there arose a spontaneous and enduring popular cult of Bolivar already in 1842, just twelve years after his death. It was stoked by a kind of collective penitence for the sin of letting Bolivar die on Colombian soil. And so the liberator came to be relentlessly exalted by the same nation that, by rejecting his project for a Gran Colombia (which would have unified Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama), caused him to be ostracized. This Caribbean version of Moses and Monotheism was nicely codified by the Cardinal of Caracas in 1980, who declared from the seat of his diocese that all of Venezuela's misfortunes, the countless civil wars and the dictatorships of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all sprang from the "treason" that was originally committed against Bolivar.

Official, popular, manufactured, spontaneous, classical, romantic, nationalist, internationalist, military, civil, religious, mythic, Venezuelan, Andean, Ibero-American, Pan-American, universal: the cult of Bolivar became the common bond of Venezuelans, the sacrament of their society. Other sanctified heroes shared the altar, but they stood in Bolivar's shadow, and they were not always beloved: Francisco de Miranda, an early champion of independence; Antonio Jose de Sucre, Bolivar's loyal grand marshal; and General Jose Antonio Paez (Bolivar's right hand in war, his adversary in peace, and the founder of the Republic of Venezuela). Even in scholarly circles his immaculate image prevailed until the 1960s. When, in 1916, a young doctor dared to suggest that Bolivar was probably an epileptic, the censure of this act of "patriotic atheism" against the Bolivarian faith--an "august, admirable, sublime religion"--was harsh. "How is it possible," it was said, "that a Venezuelan should ascend to the empyrean to remove Bolivar from Caesar's side, and relegate him to the inferno, beside Caligula?"

From a very young age, Hugo Chavez revered Simon Bolivar. And not just Bolivar. In his modest childhood in the small western plains city of Barinas, Chavez also intensely admired Chavez--that is, Chavez "El Latigo," or The Whip, a famous pitcher who was killed in a plane crash after a brief career in the major leagues. According to his own telling of his life story, when he entered the Military Academy in 1971, at the age of seventeen, Chavez visited the tomb of El Latigo to ask forgiveness, because new heroes were demanding his attention: Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Chavez was always a hero-worshipper. His personal pantheon included Ezequiel Zamora (the popular leader in the Federal War in the mid-nineteenth century) and his own great-grandfather, a bandit-rebel whose hazy career dated to the beginning of the twentieth century.

In Chavez's fevered imagination, the interesting thing about this past populated with heroes was that they spoke directly to him and ended up being reincarnated in him. "Let me tell you something I've never told anyone," he confessed to several friends. "I'm the reincarnation of Ezequiel Zamora." (Some say he has always feared he would come to the same end: betrayed and shot in the head.) With his contemporary heroes, too, Chavez needed direct contact, a laying on of hands. In an interview in 2005, he recalled his first encounters with Fidel. "My God, I want to meet Fidel when I get out and I'm free to talk," he prayed in prison, after his failed coup attempt in February 1992, "to tell him who I am and what I think." Their first meeting took place in Havana in December 1994. Castro stood waiting for him in person at the foot of the steps of his airplane. From then on, Chavez came to see him "as a father," and his children saw him as a grandfather.

The day he came to visit Grandma's little house in Sabaneta, he had to stoop. It's a low door, and he's a giant. I saw it with my own eyes, didn't I? And I remarked on it to [my brother] Adan.
Seeing him there, as if it was a dream: "this is like something out of a Garcia Marquez novel." In other words, forty years after the first time I heard the name Fidel Castro, there he was in the house where we were raised.... My God!

Garcia Marquez, indeed. During the fifteen years in which he patiently plotted his revolutionary conspiracy, forging his mystical links between his own genealogy and the nation's heroes, Hugo Chavez made himself into a kind of creature of magical realism. He would be the redemption, the climax, the supreme text prophesied by other texts, of the Sacred Writ of Venezuelan history.

Chavez the cadet was a celebrant of the Bolivarian passion story. In 1974, as testified in his writings collected in 1992 under the title Un brazalete tricolor , or A Three-Colored Armband, his outbursts of lyricism about the liberator went beyond the reverential imagery (pictorial, verbal, sculptural) of neoclassical history, beyond the romantic and patriotic equation of Bolivar with Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon, beyond even the grandiloquent official images of "the apotheosis of the demigod of South America." In that year the inflamed cadet wrote an encomium for the hero that began with this curious sentence: "On June 23, on the eve of the anniversary of the great Battle ... of Carabobo, Simon Bolivar gave birth to the nation." As the Venezuelan historian Elias Pino Iturrieta has explained, Bolivar was, for young Chavez, God the Father, and the nation was the Virgin, and the Christ child was the army of liberation, which, in a leap across the centuries, was the same army to which Chavez belonged. In 1978, this florid notion would produce a natural corollary: that the Bolivarian army would return to the historical scene to restore the honor "of the humiliated mother," and bring continuity to the independence movement, and complete the work:

It [the army] is your child, Venezuela--and it gathers the people of the nation to its breast to instruct them and teach them to love and defend you ... It's your seed, Motherland.... It's your reflection, country of heroes ... your glorious reflection. As the years go by, our Army must be the inevitable projection of our country's social, economic, political, and cultural development.

On December 17, 1983, the anniversary of Bolivar's death, Chavez gave a provocative speech that earned him a reprimand from his superiors and was soon followed by the staging of a scene that has become famous in Venezuela: the oath of the Saman de Guerre. He urged four of his friends to put on a theatrical performance in which he connected his revolutionary project to the memory of the national hero. Under a very old tree, the Saman de Guerre, beneath which, according to legend, Bolivar once sat to rest, he repeated the oath that Bolivar took in 1805, in the presence of his mentor Simon Rodriguez, at Rome's Monte Sacro: "I swear by the God of my fathers, I swear by my country, I swear on my honor, that my soul will not be at peace nor my arm at rest until I see the chains broken that bind us and bind the nation under the powerful." In this way, 1805 became 1983. Chavez changed only two words: instead of "the powerful, " Bolivar's oration had made reference only to "Spanish power."

In the military exercises that he led, Chavez ordered his subordinates to begin the day with a thought selected at random from a book of Bolivar's sayings, and he repeated these phrases like quotations from a timeless and all-purpose gospel. His revolutionary movement had the same initials as Bolivar. In the first interview that he gave after his coup, gazing out from prison at the National Pantheon under whose main altar the remains of his hero rest, the Comandante uttered these words: "Bolivar and I led a coup d'etat. Bolivar and I want the country to change." Those were not metaphors. The Comandante was speaking in earnest.

Upon leaving prison in 1994, roused by the historic imagery incarnated in him, Chavez threw himself into the political activism that five years later would lead him to the presidency by the electoral route. But something disconcerting began to happen at meetings: an empty chair would be set at the head of the table, and Chavez would sit and stare at it. Only he could hear the voice of his invisible guest, the miraculous participant in his convocations. The empty chair of Bolivar the Liberator became a commonplace in Chavez's delirious universe.

This admiration for Bolivar was genuine, but the management of the myth was cunning and carefully considered. In interviews from the period, Chavez referred to the "mystification" of which "Bolivar the man" was the object. He then proclaimed himself "a revolutionary first and a Bolivarian second." Yet his revolution needed an "ideology," and he needed one, too. "But time is short. " What to do? At the very least there had to be an "ideological banner." He found it in his own cult of the hero. The Nicaraguan revolutionaries had adopted the figure of Augusto Cesar Sandino, the legendary nationalist guerrilla of the 1920s. In Mexico, Subcomandante Marcos had recently invoked Emiliano Zapata with great success. But Bolivar meant much more to the nation of Venezuela: he was more than a hero, he was a demigod. Without mincing words, Chavez declared: "If the myth of Bolivar helps to get people and ideas moving, that's good...."

In Latin America , poets are prophets. In February 1999, when he took office, Chavez quoted a famous line from Pablo Neruda, and made it the linchpin of his address, and built around it the most impressive theological-political performance ever seen in Latin America. In this sermon, an extremely long text larded with Bolivar quotations applied to the present day, full of religious shadings and grandiloquent turns that were extreme even by the permissive standards of Latin American rhetoric, Chavez heralded (in the Christian sense) his arrival in power as something greater than just an electoral or political or even historical triumph. It was still more: a parousia , the return to life of the dead and of the nation, the resurrection announced by the apostle Pablo (Neruda): "It is Bolivar coming back to life every hundred years. He awakes every hundred years when the people awake."

Later in the same speech, Chavez returned to the old idea of a primal deicidal guilt, tying it to his country's overwhelming poverty, and decreeing a new historical truth: the republic that was born in 1830 by "betraying the Condor" (another of Bolivar's holy names) had brought down upon itself a curse that lasted nearly 170 years. The complexities of Venezuela's republican past--which, despite wars and dictatorships, had also known periods of true civic freedom and material progress--disappeared completely, tossed out along with the electoral democracy that against all odds had been working quite well since 1959. For Chavez, that "ruinous political model" had to die. And so Venezuela was now contemplating the greatest of miracles--the "return of the Condor," the "resurrection ... that is nothing less than the continuation of the social revolution under the bright guiding light of Bolivar."

This was the promulgation of a new Bolivar, a revolutionary Bolivar, even a socialist Bolivar. The first civic rite of this "national re-founding" was a baptism of the nation blessed by the presence of Bolivar incarnate, "our infinite Father," "genius of America," "shining star," "shaper of republics," "truly great hero of our times," "true owner of this process." In dedication to him, Chavez declared, the Republic of Venezuela would add the word "Bolivarian" to its name, and the new constitution would be "based on the doctrine of Bolivar," omniscient, eternal, infallible.

From then on, the ceremonies of the cult of Bolivar--in official propaganda, in the media, in the marketplace--would become increasingly lurid. The Chavista masses would gather in the plazas of Caracas to stage the scene of the oath of the Saman de Guerre. They would chant " Alerta, alerta, alerta, Bolivar's sword is crossing Latin America! Bolivar lives, Bolivar is alive!" They would hear Bolivar, in a kind of collective parapsychological trance, speaking his opinion across the centuries on every subject: oil, the workers' movement, the social revolution, the virtues of socialism. They would begin to shop for "Bolivarian" plantains and rice, and buy "Bolivarian" chickens, and cut their hair at "Bolivarian" barbershops. "We have boldly sought a new frame of reference," explained Chavez, in interviews he gave in the 1990s. "Original and all our own: Bolivarianism."

Chavez's unquestionable "boldness" has been the subject of a number of anthropological studies that attempt to explain its success. Some anthropologists attribute it to the thaumaturgical nature of the Bolivarian cult in certain segments of Venezuelan society. Pino Iturrieta has collected incredible accounts of these secret and magical Bolivars: the Bolivar possessed by the spirit of a supernatural being gifted with powers of healing and salvation, called Yankay; the Bolivar of popular legend, the purported son of a black slave woman from the cocoa plantations; the Bolivar of liberation theology, who died poor and promises redemption for the dispossessed; the syncretistic Bolivar of Venezuela's old African religions, who occupies the center of a "Liberationist Court" presided over by Queen Maria Lionza, Venezuela's main female saint, worshiped by those who seek love, health, money, luck. In animist ceremonies, the shamans invoke Bolivar to curse "political parties," to bring equality, peace, and liberation, to "bless the neighborhood guerrillas and proclaim a kingdom of happIness ruled by the military."

Imbued with these fantastic strains of popular religiosity, and exploiting them for his cause, Chavez has continued to play the role of magician and thaumaturg, messiah and saint--but his most audacious move was to promote the Bolivarian cult by setting himself in the place of High Priest, in this way availing himself of Bolivar's charisma. In the history of Christianity, Pino Iturrieta found a fitting metaphor for what Chavez accomplished: "Now a tropical Constantine has imposed the complete identification of a people with a national god."

II.
To what political tradition does Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian delirium belong? According to his own version, his destiny was revealed to him around 1977, when he read a book. It was, of all books, The Role of the Individual in History by Georgi Plekhanov. He has more than once told the story of his great moment of inspiration, his epiphany before the text: "I read Plekhanov a long time ago, when I belonged to an anti-guerrilla unit in the mountains ... and it made a deep impression on me. I remember that it was a wonderful starry night in the mountains and I read it in my tent by the light of a flashlight." Again and again he turned to it "in search of ideas [about] the role of the individual in historical processes." He still has in his possession the "little book that survived storms and the years; the same little book with the same little underlinings a person makes, and the same little arrows and the same cover I used as camouflage so that my superiors wouldn't say 'what are you doing reading that?' I read it all over the place, in secret, with a flashlight at night."

"He read everything," said Herma Marksman, his mistress in the 1980s, "but he especially liked the stories of great leaders." The stories--and the theories, too. In an interview in 1995, Chavez remarked that "we men can situate ourselves ... in leading roles that speed or slow the process, give it a small personal touch.... But I think that history is the product of the collective being of the people. And I feel myself absolutely given over to that collective being." In colloquial terms, he has often referred to himself as a mere "instrument of the collective being." This is a highly idiosyncratic use of Plekhanov, but with it Chavez crafted his argument for the rule of the caudillo: "If they [the caudillos] develop a real awareness, they become removed from themselves and view the process from a distance. If they devote their lives, their efforts, to use their 'mythical' power to collectivize ... then the presence of the caudillo can be justified."

This theory of the individual in history, which is really a theory of the great man in history, explained his admiration for Castro. Although at the time he still wondered whether it was "a curse or a spreading virus" for the historical process to rely on a single man, on his visit to Cuba in 1995 Chavez was deeply moved by the way the people identified with the leader, the "collective" with the caudillo. A woman at a restaurant in the east of the island recognized Chavez and hugged him: "You talked to the chief, you talked to Fidel." For Chavez, "that is the people's message, I get everything I need straight from the people, the people on the street." This "message" that he regards as "all-important" is not the people speaking on behalf of the people, but the people speaking on behalf of the leader. Where was Plekhanov in all this? Chavez had no doubt: it was sufficient for the leader sincerely to declare himself the humble servant of the collective, and for the collective sincerely to accept him as its leader, for "the role of the individual in history" to be fulfilled.

In practice, though, what was the "collective"? Did it have significant parts, or was it a homogeneous whole? And were those parts free to form judgments? Could they disagree with the caudillo? Was there a way of measuring how well the caudillo served the "collective"? Could the "collective" choose another caudillo, or no caudillo at all? These questions did not occur to the ambitious soldier. The important thing was the mystical union of the many and the one, the dissolving of the collective in the leader. That was why it seemed natural and even desirable to Chavez that Castro had "enormous influence over the island": "generations have gotten used to Fidel doing everything. Without Fidel they would be lost. He's everything to them." Castro was an example of the lofty way in which caudillos "are detached from their person, they view the process from a distance and devote their lives to collectivizing through the use of their 'mythical' power." Castro had the historical right to be "everything": he was, after all, a hero--the great hero of Latin America.

Chavez also proposed to "detach himself," in the same way that Castro had detached himself for almost fifty years. For he was a hero, too--maybe not a conquering hero, a triumphant and legendary guerrilla like Fidel, but still a soldier with the heart of a guerrilla. He, too, proposed to "[collectivize] through the use of [his] mythical power": "The body of the nation is in pieces. The hands over here, the legs over there, the head on the other side of the mountains, the body of what we call the collective. Now, to go through life and get something done about putting that body back together, joining the hands to the arms and bringing it to life, giving the people, the collective, an engine, I think that's a life worth living." He had no idea, of course, that with this corporeal metaphor he was reviving one of the oldest conceits of absolute monarchical power. His mistress noted that a "messianic glow" had descended upon her lover. According to another revolutionary friend, Chavez "was convinced that he was carrying out an earthly mission guided by a superhuman force." His faint protests against such grandiosity hardly refuted this notion: "I don't believe in messiahs or caudillos, although people say that's what I am, I don't know whether I am or not, maybe there's a little bit of that in me.... "

President Chavez has been an assiduous reader of Plekhanov, but perhaps not the best reader. I suspect that he does not know much about Plekhanov's place in history. Georgi V. Plekhanov, who was born in Gudalovka, Russia, in 1856 and died in exile in 1918, was considered the father of Russian Marxism. He wrote his book around 1898, during the honeymoon period of his relationship with his disciple Lenin, with whom he edited the journal Iskra. Originally a Bakunian populist, Plekhanov fled czarist Russia in 1880, taking refuge in Geneva. He would not set foot on Russian soil again until 1917. It was he who coined the term "dialectical materialism." Plekhanov believed that there were immutable laws of history, and he thought that if Russia followed the same trajectory as the countries of Western Europe, it would emerge from feudalism into a state of mature capitalism, which was the necessary condition for its inevitable evolution into the salvific dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1889 he made his first appearance at the Congress of the Second International. In 1895, Lenin traveled to Switzerland to meet him.

Following the lead of Thomas Carlyle, Plekhanov believed in the existence of "great men" as initiators or originators. "This is a very apt description," he wrote. "A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others, and desires things more strongly than others." In this sense, the great man is a hero "not ... in the sense that he can stop, or change, the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course." The leader is the supreme instrument of history's search for its conclusion. His freedom consists in his ability to choose a course of action in accordance with the fixed laws of historical progress:

[I]f I know in what direction social relations are changing owing to given changes in the social-economic process of production, I also know in what direction social mentality is changing; consequently, I am able to influence it. Influencing social mentality means influencing historical events. Hence, in a certain sense, I can make history, and there is no need for me to wait while "it is being made."

Plekhanov's concept of the "individual's role in history" might have been inspired by Hegel, who in his Philosophy of History speaks of "world-historical men." These beings with an essential role in the development of Spirit, these visionary agents of History, are followed by their inferiors, who "feel the irresistible power of their own inner Spirit thus embodied." From this metaphysical-authoritarian premise Hegel concluded that the ordinary rules of ethics were not applicable to great men. "Heroic coercion," he noted in his Philosophy of Right , "is justified coercion." The moral equivalence of might and right was also a key doctrine of Carlyle's: "Might and Right," he wrote in 1839, "so frightfully discrepant at first, are ever in the long run one and the same."

Lenin certainly agreed. But Plekhanov did not agree; and this was the irreparable difference between them. Against the backdrop of the Second International in Brussels in 1903, the disagreement between the two grew deeper, and led finally to a break. Lenin assumed absolute leadership of the movement, with the support of the group that would be known as the "Bolsheviks." "This is the cloth from which Robespierres are cut," thundered Plekhanov, who would accuse them of "mistaking the dictatorship of the proletariat for a dictatorship over the proletariat." Shortly afterward he gave up the editorship of Iskra , leaving it in Lenin's hands. His final article was a prophetic j'accuse titled "Centralism or Bonapartism":

Let us imagine that the Central Committee, recognized by all of us, had the right, still under consideration, of "liquidation." The following could then occur. A congress is convened, the Central Committee "liquidates" the elements with which it is displeased, selects at the same time the creatures with which it is pleased, and with them makes up all the committees, thus guaranteeing itself without further ado an entirely submissive majority at the congress. The congress composed of the creatures of the Central Committee affably shouts "Hurrah!," approves all its acts, good or bad, and applauds all its projects and initiatives. In such a case, the party would really have neither a majority nor a minority, because we should have put into practice the political ideal of the Shah of Persia.

Over the following years, Plekhanov grew more and more isolated, perplexed by the new phenomenon of absolute power concentrated in a vanguard party, itself commanded by a person beyond appeal, a "Shah of Persia." This phenomenon struck him as contrary to the laws of history. That was why he called Lenin the "alchemist of the revolution" and considered him a "demagogue from head to toe. " But such a concentration of power in a leader also seemed to him an assault on the humanist principles of socialism. In The Role of the Individual in History , Plekhanov declared that "it is not only for 'initiators,' not only for 'great' men that a broad field of activity is open. It is open for all those who have eyes to see, ears to hear and hearts to love their neighbours. The concept great is a relative concept. In the ethical sense every man is great who, to use the Biblical phrase, 'lays down his life for his friend.'" Plekhanov did not find this variety of greatness in Lenin.

In the standard manuals of MarxistLeninist theory, Plekhanov was a wrong-headed dissident. According to Lenin, the attitude of his old ally was "the height of vulgarity and baseness." Outside of that petrified orthodoxy, which lives today only in Cuba, Plekhanov is remembered as the first leading intellectual before Trotsky to warn against the horror of Marxism-Leninism. He supported Kerensky, just months before his death. Of Lenin, he said in his Political Testament that "not understanding the true goal of that maximalist fanatic was my greatest mistake."

If Plekhanov had lived until the end of the twentieth century, chances are that his view of Castro would have been exactly the same as his view of Lenin. He would have criticized the caudillo who is "everything" and denounced the Shah of Cuba. The Plekhanov who fought for humanist values, the Plekhanov who refused to subordinate society to its leader and represented the classic Marxist critique of the dictatorial spirit of Lenin and Leninism, is not the Plekhanov whom Comandante Chavez has been reading for thirty years. He may consider himself a Plekhanovist, but Plekhanov, it is certain, would not have been a Chavista. He would have despised the Shah of Venezuela.

And judging by his political writings, Plekhanov's teacher would not have been a Chavista either. In Marx's famous attack on Bonapartism, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , there is an unexpectedly direct connection to President Chavez's epic script. In London, around 1857, Marx received a request from his New York editor, Charles A. Dana, to write an article on Simon Bolivar for The New American Cyclopaedia . Although military affairs were Engels's specialty, and although he felt a strong distaste for what he regarded as the backward and barbarous countries of Hispanic America, Marx accepted the assignment. He wrote hastily, with his usual sarcasm, drawing on just a few sources, all hostile to the liberator. The final version of his biographical sketch made Dana uncomfortable, though he published it anyway in 1858.

In Marx's account, Bolivar is pictured as a yokel, a hypocrite, a clod, a womanizer, a traitor, a fickle friend, a wastrel, an aristocrat putting on republican airs, a liar, a climber who surrounded himself with the show of a court and whose few military successes were owed to the Irish and Hannoverian mercenaries whom he hired as advisers. That Marx's animosity toward Bolivar was almost personal is clear. In a letter to Engels he repeats his damning conclusions, calling Bolivar "the most dastardly, most miserable and meanest of blackguards," and compares him to Soulouque, the flamboyant Haitian caudillo who in 1852 had himself crowned emperor under the name Faustino I.

Marx's assault on Bolivar has always been a nightmare for the Latin American left. How to explain it? And what to do now that President Chavez has decreed Bolivar a prophet of "twentieth century socialism"? In 2007 a book was published in Caracas called El Bolivar de Marx , or Marx's Bolivar , which consists of side-by-side texts by serious Venezuelan writers of opposing views--the liberal historian Ines Quintero and the Marxist philosopher Vladimir Acosta, who conduct an elegant debate on the subject of Marx's portrait of Bolivar.

Quintero offers a history of the reception of Marx's text in Latin America, where the left has striven to understand it, to critique it, to play it down. Unfortunately, it has not sufficed to show that Marx's portrait of Bolivar is marred by factual errors, questionable psychological interpretations, sarcastic racist remarks, and hasty judgments. Uncomfortable and disturbing questions have always lingered. The orthodox proSoviet faction of the 1930s believed that the text was, of course, untouchable. After Stalin, a weak retraction came from the same Soviet camp: the infallible Marx had erred in this instance, because his sources were limited and biased. By then, several prominent leaders of the Latin American left had attempted to rehabilitate Bolivar for the left. And it was high time: for decades Bolivar had been the almost exclusive idol of the right, which claimed for its cause not only his deeds as liberator but also his growing conviction--amply documented in various acts, declarations, and constitutions (especially the Constitution of Bolivia of 1826, in which he proclaimed himself president for life)--that only dictatorship could bring order to the anarchic, violent, and ungovernable nations of Hispanic America.

Bolivar's dictatorial convictions, which were plain and strong by the last decade of his life, are what Marx condemned him for most vehemently. Between the lines of his piece on Bolivar one hears a clear echo of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte : "The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and red republicans ... the thunder from the platform, the lightning bolts of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, libert?, egalit?, fraternit? ... all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of one man...." In his incisive essay on the text, Vladimir Acosta acknowledges this link. He notes also that by condemning Bolivar, Marx launched an assault not only on Bonapartism but also on Hegel. "An inveterate polemicist," says Acosta, "Marx turns his theoretical and political hatred of the Hegelian state and his empirical hatred of the Bonapartism incarnated in Napoleon III into personal hatred of Bolivar."

In Marx's article, there are direct and indirect allusions to Bolivar's authoritarianism. The word "dictatorship" appears in several places. At one point Marx makes scornful reference to Bolivar as the "Napoleon of the retreat. " And when he describes Bolivar's activities in Bolivia, the country that would bear his name, Marx writes:

Here, where Sucre's bayonets were supreme, Bolivar gave full scope to his propensities for arbitrary power, by introducing the "Bolivian Code," an imitation of the Code Napoleon. It was
his plan to transplant that code from Bolivia to Peru, and from Peru to Colombia.... What he really aimed at was the erection of the whole of South America into one federative republic, with himself as its dictator ... thus giving full scope to his dreams of attaching half a world to his name....

As Quintero documents, this authoritarian side of Bolivar had not just served as an ideological inspiration for the Latin American and Venezuelan right, but also for Italian and Spanish fascism. Both Mussolini and Franco identified themselves with Bolivar's Caesarism. And with their national hero expropriated by such forces of reaction, the Venezuelan left had a great need to rehabilitate him--but given its own authoritarian history, it did not have much to say on this point, and could only continue to cite the errors in the text or its Europeanist slant. Then a new apologetic strategy was found to re-claim the hero under the rubric of Ibero-Americanism, and gradually introduce an anti-imperialist Bolivar. The next step came with the rise to power of Hugo Chavez: "the Return of the Condor."

Up to this point, both Acosta and Quintero honor the empirical truth. But when they refer to the present day, and to the use that Chavez's regime makes of history, their views radically diverge, nicely reflecting the intellectual war that is now tearing Venezuela apart. Acosta explains Marx's reasons for attacking Bolivar, but he does not explain his own reasons for adopting Chavez's Bolivarian narrative. His omission leads him into contradiction. After justifying Bolivar's concentration of power in himself as a wartime imperative, Acosta maintains that historians "on the Right" have denied Bolivar his historicity--and then he immediately goes on to deny Bolivar the same protection by affirming Chavez's appropriation of the liberator. Acosta calls it a way of "rescuing for the people" the "human political greatness and enduring Ibero-American significance of Bolivar." He fails to note the resemblance between his president's "Bolivarian" project and the ahistorical and "sacralizing" perspective for which he takes the "rightists" to task.

In response, Ines Quintero cites a speech by President Chavez in which he scolds those who take Marx's Capital as gospel, divorced from its circumstances--"you have to realize, kid," said Chavez, "that this was written over there in 18something ... you have to realize that the world has changed"--and thereby exposes the contradiction implicit in the use that Chavez has tried to make of Bolivar as a prophet of twenty-first century socialism. Quintero provides concrete evidence of the "arbitrary, selective, and anachronistic use of Bolivar's discourse, heedless of the circumstances and historic specificity of his life."

This dispute between Acosta and Quintero is not academic. Acosta understands the use that Chavez makes of Bolivar, and defends it. In his rather Hegelian eyes, it is an objective and historic renewal of an old and interrupted process of continental liberation. For Quintero, the scandal is not just the ahistorical, fraudulent, and self-interested use that Chavez makes of Bolivar to justify his own power, but something more subtle: the growing political use to which he is put. "If Bolivar serves to justify the 'socialism of the twenty-first century,' he can just as usefully endorse the end of the democratic transfer of power and the installment of a dictatorial regime, based on the claim that the example and the word of the father of the nation are simply being heeded."

III.
'I don't know anything about Marxism, I never read El Capital , I'm not a Marxist or an anti-Marxist," Hugo Chavez said in 1995. He was telling the truth. Chavez was never, in any strict sense, a Marxist, nor was he familiar with the prickly side of Marx, or with his critique of power. Marx criticized the subordination of civil society to a single leader. He criticized the smothering of freedoms and political institutions, the "terrible parasitical organism" of the state, the cult of personality, demagoguery, and plebiscitary rule. And as if that were not enough, he criticized the political use of the past: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.... In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury its dead." Point by point, Marx's critique might have been written in response to Chavez's plan for Venezuela.

But if he does not hail from a socialist or Marxist tradition, what are Chavez's ideological and historical origins? Whether he knows it or not, Chavez is the grotesque progeny not of Plekhanov or Marx, but of Thomas Carlyle. It was Carlyle's historical and political doctrine, condensed in 1841 in the series of lectures published as On Heroes and Hero-Worship , that envisioned and legitimated charismatic power in the twentieth century, the same power that Chavez, for all his outlandishness, represents so skillfully in the twenty-first century. The wishes of his progressive post-Marxist admirers notwithstanding, Chavez comes from a more anachronistic tradition of ideas that does not see history in terms of the struggle of classes or masses, or of races or nations, but of heroes who guide the "people," who incarnate them and redeem them. There is a name for this tradition. It is fascism.

Bolivarian Venezuela and its maximum leader have a number of reasons to recognize themselves in Carlyle, and to forget all of Chavez's nonsense about Plekhanov and Marx. Unlike Marx, Carlyle admired Bolivar. In 1843, lamenting the lack of biographies of "the Washington of Colombia," Carlyle wrote this shining vignette about the national hero:

Melancholy lithographs represent to us a long-faced square-browed man: of stern, considerate, consciously considerate aspect, mildly aquiline form of nose, with terrible angularity of jaw, and dark deep eyes, somewhat too close together (for which latter circumstance we earnestly hope the lithograph alone is to blame); his is Liberator Bolivar, a man of much hard fighting, hard riding, of manifold achievements, distresses, heroisms and histrionisms in this world; a many-counselled, much-enduring man, now dead and gone; of whom, except that melancholy lithograph, the cultivated European public knows as good as nothing. Yet did he not fly hither and thither, often in the most desperate manner, with wild cavalry clad in blankets, with War of Liberation "to the death"? ....With such cavalry, and artillery and infantryto match, Bolivar has ridden, fighting all the way, through torrid deserts, hot mud-swamps, through ice-chasms beyond the curve of perpetual frost--more miles than Ulysses ever sailed; let the coming Homers take note of it.

He has marched over the Andes, more than once, a feat analogous to Hannibal's, and seemed to think little of it. Often beaten, banished from the firm land, he always returned again, truculently fought again. He gained in the Cumana regions the "immortal victory" of Carabobo and several others; under him was gained the finishing "immortal victory" of Ayacucho in Peru, where Old Spain, for the last time, burnt powder in those latitudes and then fled without return.

He was Dictator, Liberator, almost Emperor, if he had lived. Some three times over did he in solemn Columbian parliament lay down his Dictatorship with Washington eloquence, and as often, on pressing request, take it up again, being a man indispensable. Thrice, or at least twice,
did he, in different places, painfully construct a Free Constitution; consisting of "two chambers, and a supreme governor for life with liberty to name his successor," the reasonablest democratic constitution you could well construct; and twice, or at least once, did the people, on trial, declare it disagreeable. He was, of old, well known in Paris; in the dissolute, the philosophico-political, and other circles there. He has shone in many a gay Parisian soiree, this Simon Bolivar; and in his later years, in autumn 1825, he rode triumphant into Potosi and the fabulous Inca cities, with clouds of feathered Indians somersaulting and war-whooping around him,and "as the famed Cerro, metalliferous Mountain, came in sight, the bells all pealed out, and there was a thunder of artillery," says General Miller. If this is not a Ulysses, Polytlas and Polymetis, a much-enduring and many-counselled man, where was there one? Truly a Ulysses whose history were worth its ink, had the Homer that could do it made his appearance!

This Homeric notion of Bolivar, and the comparison of him to Washington (which Castro curiously reprised in a speech before Chavez), should earn Carlyle a Bolivarian statue in Caracas. But aside from this text on Bolivar, the relevance of Carlyle to the Bolivarian regime, and to the thinking of its maximum leader, lies in the concept of the hero as a central actor in history. Revolutions, Carlyle insisted, require a hero to give new meaning to collective life. On the subject of his transcendent faith in great men (which was inspired by Fichte, who maintained that the "Divine Idea" manifests itself in a few individuals), Carlyle coined his famous phrase: "'Hero-worship' becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at present. ... No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men." And in Sartor Resartus he summed up his philosophy of history: "Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History; to which inspired Texts your numerous talented men, and your innumberable untalented men, are the better or worse exegetic Commentaries. ..."

In speech after speech by the maximum leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, the motifs that once represented Bolivar have been used to represent Chavez's greatest hero: himself. Chavez, too, believes in modern Latin American history as a Sacred Text populated by heroes on a holy and urgent mission, for which they are gifted with divine fire. In our time, they were Che and Fidel. Since he was a young man, Chavez has believed that the life story of his country--at least until his arrival, or the "national resurrection"--was Bolivar's life story. And in his self-apotheosizing inaugural address in 1999, one more life story was inscribed in the Sacred Text: his own.

The Comandante has believed all this with a tenacity and a fervor perhaps unprecedented in Latin American political history. In one of his first interviews after he was released from prison, he explained that "at a given moment, we men can situate ourselves in leading roles that speed or slow the process, give it a small personal touch, a distinctive touch. But I think that history is the product of the collective being of the people. And I feel myself absolutely given over to that collective being." So spoke Comandante Chavez in the antechambers of power. His dream was to give "a small personal touch, a distinctive touch" to the revolutionary process.

From the end of the nineteenth century, Carlyle was much quoted in Latin America. The positivist historical schools invoked him to justify the strongmen that the region--supposedly "ungovernable" by means of "Anglo-Saxon" democracy--needed to get ahead. In his famous work, Democracias latinas de Am?rica , or Latin Democracies of America , which appeared in 1900, the Peruvian historian Francisco Garcia Calderon found the heroic key to Latin American political history in Carlyle: he praised the dictators--the Argentinian Rozas, the Mexican Porfirio Diaz, the Ecuadorian Garcia Moreno--and saw them as incarnations of the history of their respective countries. Twenty years later, the Venezuelan sociologist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz published Cesarismo democratico, or Democratic Caesarism, a celebrated book in which he presented the theory of the "necessary gendarme," with reference to the Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gomez, called "Carlyle's man" by the historian Jose Gil Fortoul. In the 1920s, another Venezuelan, the poet Jose Antonio Ramos Sucre, presented the Carlylean cult of the hero--indeed, the military hero--together with the cult of Bolivar.

But in the 1930s a new political dimension was added to the cult of the hero. It was Jorge Luis Borges who discovered a troubling key to Latin America in Carlyle. In 1917, as a young man, Borges learned German, inspired by Carlyle's Germanophilia. More than thirty years later, re-reading the last lecture in On Heroes and Hero-Worship , he noted that "Carlyle reasons like a South American dictator in his defense of the dissolution of the English parliament by Cromwell's musketeers." Borges was referring to the passage in which Carlyle describes how, in 1653, after the beheading of King Charles I, the Puritan revolutionary Oliver Cromwell--Carlyle's favorite hero--loses patience with Parliament, made up of "blind pedants" with their "constitution-formulas" and "right of Election," and finally dissolves it to become, with the "power of God, " the Lord Protector of England.

Borges read Carlyle with Latin American eyes, detecting Cromwell's resemblance to our anti-democratic prototypes: caudillos, revolutionaries, dictators. What is so remarkable is that the connection that Borges observed has its flipside in reality: Carlyle was himself inspired by Latin America. In the years in which he compiled the unpublished speeches of Cromwell, Carlyle bemoaned the fact that the nineteenth century had not produced a leader like that "great, earnest, sincere soul who always prayed before his great undertakings." "Our age shouted itself hoarse," Carlyle wrote, "bringing about confusion and catastrophe because no great man did heed our call." Then suddenly, around 1843, Carlyle stopped shouting himself hoarse, because he discovered by chance, in a remote South American country, a "hero" worthy of the name, a "savior of his age" a "phoenix of resurrection": Jose Gaspar Rodriguez Francia, the dictator of Paraguay.

The stirring example of Francia struck him so forcefully that he interrupted his work to undertake--based on a few reports by German travelers--the biography of that "one veracious man." Carlyle wrote just one biography of a contemporary: that of Doctor Francia. He called him the "Cromwell of South America," a "man sent by Heaven," a "fierce condor." He admired his firm and spiritual rule, his "Divine Offices in Paraguay," his severity, his scorn for the intellectual forms and political institutions of eighteenth-century rationalism: "Tawny-visaged, lean, inexorable Dr. Francia; claps you an embargo on all that [ballot boxes, registration courts, bursts of parliamentary eloquence]; says to constitutional liberty, in the most tyrannous manner, Hitherto, and no farther." Above all, Carlyle applauded the tyrant's desire to perpetuate himself: "My lease of Paraguay ... is for life," Francia had said. Through him, Carlyle declared, "Oliver Cromwell, dead two-hundred years ... now first begins to speak." A South American dictator had given Carlyle new faith in the present and future possibility of heroes.

In Carlyle's historical theology, Borges thought that he had found Carlyle's legacy to the twentieth century: a political theory that led men to prostrate themselves before the "God-intoxicated," before those beings "inspired" by God, before the "kings" by natural law, because they embodied the only hope of a new reality that could do away with the surrounding "shams." From the presumption that the hero is not just another leading player or a consequence of history but its cause, Borges extracted a political corollary: "once the divine mission of the hero has been postulated, it is inevitable that we judge him (and that he judge himself) free of human obligations.... It is also inevitable that every political adventurer believe himself a hero and that he reason that his excesses are irrefutable proof that he is one."

The date of Borges's text on Carlyle, a prologue to a translation of On Heroes and Hero-Worship , is significant: it was written in 1949. Four years after the end of World War II, Carlyle's theory seemed at last to divulge its ultimate meaning: "his contemporaries did not understand it," Borges wrote, "but now it may be summed up in a single household word: Nazism." And Borges was not alone in this observation. The same conclusion was reached by Chesterton, in The End of the Armistice , and by Russell, in "The Ancestry of Fascism," among others. (In 1981, Hugh Trevor-Roper also took up the argument in an essay on Carlyle's thought.) For Borges, not only Germany but also Russia and Italy had "drunk to the dregs" the "universal panacea" that he characterized as the "unconditional surrender of power to strong and silent men. " Correcting only for the fact that Evita--like Chavez, who erected a statue to her--was not exactly silent, Borges might have been able to add to his Carlylean list the Argentina of Peron. By 1949, though, he confessed that his love for the hero had become a deep hatred. The results of dictatorship, fascist or populist, were the same: "servility, fear, brutality, mental indigence, and treachery."

In his cult of Bolivar, at once sincere and calculated, and in his idolatry of history, Comandante Chavez is part of this intellectual lineage. In his political theology and in his political action, he is Carlyle's bloated and buffoonish son. The protagonist of his regime is not at all "the collective." As is evident to everyone in every corner of Venezuela, the protagonist of his regime is the "hero," the man himself, Hugo Chavez.

IV.

Is Chavez, then, a classical fascist? Even before he assumed power, Chavez defended the need for a charismatic leader: "The caudillo is the representative of a mass group with which he identifies, and he is recognized by that group without any formal or legal legitimizing process." And "this can only be called a revolution," he said in his inaugural address. As "a revolutionary first and a Bolivarian second," he preached the need to wipe clean the slate of the past from the time of Bolivar's death to his own rise, and he equated military dictatorship with "stinking democracy." For him, all of Venezuela's military regimes before his own were "essentially the same" as the democratic governments of Romulo Betancourt or Rafael Caldera: on horseback or in a Mercedes Benz, they all represented "the same prevailing economic and political thinking, the same denial of the people's right to take the leading role in their destiny." The revolution that he stood for would bury the "ruinous political model ... of the last forty years" and put the people back in charge of their fate. And how would they take charge of it? In the person of the leader, of course.

Those were the "bad" militaries. He represented the "good" ones. Nearly as important to Chavez as his revolutionary faith in a caudillo has been the matter of his military identity: "Our movement was born in the barracks. That's a factor we can never forget, it was born there and its roots are there." From the beginning it was clear that he adored military parades, and that he regarded the country and the society as military structures, orderly and hierarchical. As for the political value of myth, symbol, and ritual: "If the Bolivar myth helps to quicken people and ideas in accordance with a revolutionary process, well, the process will tell, because if [the myth] is good for anything, it should be for the transformation of a people, not their exploitation." The theological-political staging of the Bolivarian "resurrection" has been the ongoing spectacle of his rule, from his rise to power until the present day.

On the subject of liberal democracy, his opinions have always been sweeping: "Liberal democracy is no good, its time has passed, new models must be invented, new formulas.... Democracy is like a rotten mango: it has to be taken as seed and sowed." Regarding the opposition parties represented in parliament, Chavez went so far as to exclaim, at a rally before he was first elected, that "we, you and I, are going to roll the [social-democratic opposition] up in a giant ball of ... I can't say what because it's rude." And the crowd responded: "Of shit!" Years later he would declare that "the opposition will never return to power, by fair means or foul." On his visit to Cuba in 1999, he suggested that his presidency would last "twenty to forty years." And among the sixty-nine articles of his constitutional reform rejected by plebiscite in 2007 was the possibility of indefinite re-election, ensuring that his lease over Venezuela would be for life. Now, with the recent referendum, which many constitutional lawyers thought illegal, he may have achieved this tyrannical goal.

In devising his Bolivarian ideology, Chavez might not have read Carlyle, but he certainly read his "great friend," the Argentinian sociologist Norberto Ceresole. He met Ceresole after he was released from prison, traveled with him around Venezuela, and for many years the professor was a close advisor. Ceresole, who was born in 1943 and died in 2003, moved easily between the Soviet left and the neo-Nazi right. He was an advisor to Juan Velasco Alvarado; a member of the Montoneros, a Peronist guerrilla group; a spokesman for Peron during his exile in Madrid; a leader of the Carapintadas, an ultra-right military movement; a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a professor at the Soviet Military Academy; a representative of Hezbollah in Madrid; a neo-Nazi militant and a vociferous Holocaust denier. Ceresole was the author of several books of geopolitics explicitly inspired by the Nazi general Karl Haushofer. And this brings us to another element of classical fascism that Hugo Chavez has not hesitated to exploit: anti-Semitism.

In his book Terrorismo fundamentalista judio , or Jewish Fundamentalist Terrorism, which was published in 1996, while he was associated with Chavez, Ceresole revived the theory of an international Jewish conspiracy actively set on seizing control of Latin America. Ceresole predicted that war would break out between Iran and the Washington-LondonTel Aviv axis. Unable to fight the battle alone, Iran would call to its aid a "large and powerful State" which "of course will be the German State." Then "Berlin will rise from its ashes and we will see the Phoenix soar." In its final apotheosis, Chavez's friend and favored intellectual predicted, the "German Empire" will ally itself with Russia, Japan, and the Muslim world. And in this replay of World War II, Latin America would free itself of the traditional historical encumbrance of "Anglo-America," and of its secret encumbrance, the "globalizing Jews" who have infiltrated the political structures of the region. Backed by "Eurasia," Latin America would expand its Lebensraum with a supranational army. (In 1995, Chavez declared that "we are studying the whole approach that Norberto Ceresole sets out in his studies and work.")

Chavez's mentor Ceresole would have been pleased by the invocation of a fascist lineage for his Comandante. In his work Caudillo, ejercito, pueblo: La Venezuela del Comandante Chavez, or The Caudillo, the Army and the People: The Venezuela of Comandante Chavez, which was published in 1999, Ceresole wrote:

"In Venezuela, the change will be channeled through one man, one "physical person," not an abstract idea or a party.... The people of Venezuela created a caudillo. The nucleus of power today lies precisely in the relationship established between the leader and the masses. The unique and differential nature of the Venezuelan process cannot be distorted or misinterpreted. What we have here is a people issuing an order to a chief, a caudillo, a military leader. "

This prophet of the "German Phoenix" and enemy of the infamous "Jews" Karl Marx and Adam Smith would have been untroubled by another feature of Chavez's dictatorial rule: the persecution of the Jewish community of Venezuela. In the Chavez years, and most nastily in recent months, the Venezuelan Jewish community has been the scapegoat of the theories that Chavez absorbed from Ceresole. Its schools and its institutions have been repeatedly raided by the police, and its members have been harassed by Chavista television, radio, press, Internet sites, and even by the President himself. The Jews of Venezuela have been denounced as the instigators of the coup attempt against Chavez in 2002. The theory of a "worldwide Jewish conspiracy" has become a commonplace in Venezuela. In the weeks leading up to the recent referendum, the old Mariperez Synagogue in Caracas was violently assaulted; the building was defaced and the computers that store information on the Jewish community of Venezuela were stolen. It is no coincidence that the Islamic Republic of Iran has found a staunch ally in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. It is also no coincidence that in the Chavez years nearly 25 percent of the Jewish community--fifteen thousand people--should have decided to emigrate.

V.

'The history of the world," wrote Carlyle, "is but the biography of great men." "The history of Venezuela," Comandante Chavez suggested in 1999, "was the biography of Bolivar," as interpreted by his prophet on earth, Hugo Chavez. Ten years later, the Comandante might say that the history of Venezuela is but his own biography, the biography of Hugo Chavez.

Chavez's omnipotence is owed to his omnipresence. (The two qualities are often linked in deities.) Just watch him any Sunday on his show " Alo presidente "--its minimum duration is five hours--live from the palace of Miraflores. Presiding over his silent, acquiescent ministers, all dressed in red, the Comandante tells stories from his life, and yammers on about romantic adventures, gastric ailments, baseball games; he also sings, dances, recites, prays, laughs. In these sessions Chavez dictates electoral strategies, huge transfers of fiscal resources, petroleum subsidies, social initiatives, troop movements, diplomatic ruptures, busIness expropriations, cabinet changes. All of this has struck some American journalists--and movie people, such as Oliver Stone and Sean Penn--as folksy and authentic and even patriotic.

Chavez does not act like the president of Venezuela; he acts like its owner. He is the proprietor of his public office, the CEO of state enterprises that answer to no laws of transparency and accountability, the big and indiscriminate spender of oil revenues (between 1999 and 2008 he spent, on average, $122 million per day), the supreme leader of a Legislative Assembly and Tribunal of Justice that is supposed to serve as a check and a balance, the head of an attorney general's office that is supposed to oversee his actions, the comptroller of electoral organs that are supposed to be autonomous, the caudillo of official candidates who have no other ideology than his strange "twenty-first-century socialism" and no other loyalty than that which they owe him personally. But above all Chavez is the commander-in-chief of a media campaign that, in his mind, is the equivalent of a great and interminable military battle. Those who are not with him are "against Venezuela," are "imperialists," " pitiyanquis " (little Yankees), "filth."

Bolivar wanted to be president for life, but he declined the throne. He was present at the coronation of Napoleon, watched his rise and fall, and always detested monarchies. Chavez, by contrast, acts like a patrimonialist monarch. He has distributed posts, privileges, and money to his family. He has capriciously disposed of billions of dollars. He has headed a continental movement controlling--through the supply of oil at preferential prices and conditions--a number of Latin American countries (Bolivia, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Honduras, and Ecuador a bit less, and probably soon El Salvador) that now behave like his vice-royalties. He has dreamed of forging, along with his "Iranian and Arab brothers," the new hegemonic power of his time. And his kingdom is not only of this world: "Christ was communist," he has said repeatedly, to taunt the Catholic Church and the evangelical community.

How has this coarse megalomaniac managed to bestride the globe? His defenders explain it by the success of his social programs and the economic growth of recent years, noting the corruption of the regimes that preceded him and arguing that Chavez was democratically elected, which gives him a mandate that legitimates all his actions. And the social programs implemented through the different "missions" (subsidized food, free medical assistance, literacy training, and education) did in fact have a strong period of growth between 2004 and 2006. But by 2007 they were in decline, and their loss of credibility was perceptible: empty shelves in stores as well as problems of supply, staff, and quality in both medical and educational services. Wanting to bypass the state in his social and political outreach, Chavez made an inefficient, corrupt, and dependent bureaucratic monster of PDVSA, the oil company that in its day was world-class, and the ultimate result was the weakening of formal institutions before new ones could be consolidated.

The growth of per capita income in Venezuela--14.6 percent between 1999 and 2006--was attributable to oil revenues, but since 2007 income has fallen substantially due to inflation, which reached 31 percent in 2008 and was the second highest in the world after Zimbabwe. As for corruption, its magnitude is hard to measure given the system's total opacity. But there is external evidence: based on numbers from the Central Bank of Venezuela itself, of the $22.5 billion that left the country between 2004 and 2008, $12 billion were never accounted for. Something similar happened at PDVSA, with $5 billion vanishing in 2005. On the Corruption Perceptions Index released in 2008 by Transparency International, Venezuela was rated 158 out of 180.

The Chavista project--the unprecedented increase in public employment, the transfer of resources to allied countries, whether as direct handouts or oil-bill subsidies, the expropriation of strategic assets such as electricity, telecommunications, iron and steel, aluminum and cement--went hand in hand with the deliberate exclusion of private enterprise, which, unsurprisingly, reduced investment to historic lows. But the effect of this weakening of the means of production was postponed because the gap in supply was filled by unparalleled imports of consumer goods. Meanwhile PDVSA, stripped since 2003 of one-third of its professional workforce, saw its production and exports fall in 2008 by 34 percent and 50 percent, respectively. What was propping up the edifice? A single brick: the price of a barrel. Venezuela was immersed in the magical realism of an economy that produced less and consumed more, thanks to the exponential increase in oil prices, which between 2002 and 2008 went up by a multiple of seven, from $20 to $140 per barrel. In mid-2008, Chavez's ministers considered it "impossible" for the price to come down for the time being. The Comandante boasted that he could take the price to $250. He could do anything.

The price of oil supported this fiction until a few months ago. But the key to Chavez's enthronement lies not in his erratic record of economic development or in the arguable success of his social programs, but in the press's handling of his colossal persona. His takeover of the Bolivar myth is complete. All the fantastic strains of popular religiosity in Venezuela, its folk political theology, are now centered in him. Of course, demigods do not share power. That is why, from the moment he became president by the electoral route, Chavez has used democracy to undermine democracy. After achieving the unconditional subordination of all the constitutional powers, he has taken numerous measures to undermine all independent sources of power and to crush the opposition.

After the recall referendum in 2004, he introduced what the distinguished left-wing journalist Teodoro Petkoff has called "political apartheid"--job discrimination against, and the political harassment of, more than 2.3 million people who voted against him. In May 2007 he closed down RCTV, the main independent TV station. In 2008, he disqualified hundreds of possible opposition candidates from mayoral and gubernatorial elections. After the opposition's surprising gains in those elections, and knowing that the global economic crisis would soon reach Venezuela, Chavez decided to bet everything on another referendum, which was contrived to legalize the possibility of running an unlimited number of times for the office of president. The electoral process that culminated in the vote on February 15, like all such ballots since Chavez has been in office, was thoroughly unequal. On one side was the opposition, without economic resources, exhausted after years of intense protests; and, on the other side, Chavez, with all the economic and propagandistic power of the state and hundreds of thousands of state employees working illegally for his cause. In the weeks leading up to the vote, the abuse of power was not hidden. Indeed, the government seemed to have an interest in flaunting it as an instrument of intimidation. Having closed, harassed, or fined the few media outlets that opposed him, Chavez devoted the impressive media network that he has assembled (three hundred radio stations, subsidized papers, five TV stations in the capital alone) to relentless propaganda for him and his regime. The opposition, barred from these outlets and slandered in them, was left with only a single television station and another cable station (which Chavez in all likelihood will soon shut down). Public employees passed out flyers in favor of the president's perpetual re-election: "Chavez loves us, and you pay love back with love."

Chavez won the referendum. Finally he got what he wanted. Now, like Doctor Francia and Doctor Castro, "his lease of Venezuela can be for life." But will it be? The grip of great men on history is never as firm as fascism teaches them to believe.

The first limit on Chavez's perpetuity will be economic. The bad news from the real world has reached his kingdom of fantasy. In 2009, the revenue from oil exports may be less than one-third of what it was in 2008. The government will be able to postpone the inevitable reduction in spending for a few months by dipping into the country's international reserves, but the sharpness of the fall will make a significant reduction in spending inevitable. Personal income will shrink significantly, eroded by galloping inflation. A possible way out would be the restoration of private business activity, but the country no longer has at its disposal that dynamic engine of growth, since it became dependent as never before on revenue that was thought to be inexhaustible. Public employees and recipients of direct benefits through the missions will see their buying power wane. The client-citizen base will lose its reason to believe. Supporters will remain loyal only for ideological reasons, or out of fear of losing the little they have. And on the international stage, fair-weather allies, won over by multimillion-dollar handouts, will distance themselves from Chavez as the money dries up.

The second limit on Chavez's ambition lies in the opposition. There is an active and vibrant civil society in Venezuela. Six million people voted for Chavez, split between loyalists and client-citizens; but five million abstained, and another five million voted against him. These are the results of a still perdurable institutional and legal democratic framework that was several generations in the making. The opposition is a dissident mass made up of elements from a wide social spectrum: workers, housewives, union leaders, small-and medium-size business owners, intellectuals, academics, artists, writers, priests, journalists, and a significant segment of the poor. Students in particular have been in the vanguard of this fight. For them, the idea that this caudillo will govern their children and grandchildren is unthinkable.

The third factor that may hurt Chavez is regional geopolitics. A few days before the recent referendum, Fidel Castro--the "father of Chavez"--compared Chavez to Bolivar and spoke of the "return of the Condor." But Raul Castro, Chavez's "uncle," may not concur with such a heroic interpretation of his "nephew." The establishment of friendly relations between Cuba, Brazil, and Chile, leading to the thawing of Cuba's relations with the United States (including, of course, the urgent lifting of the embargo), would isolate Chavez. In such circumstances, his approach to power would seem increasingly solipsistic and anachronistic.

But finally Chavez will most likely be brought down by himself. Faced with the economic crisis, and the pressure from the opposition, and the hostile geopolitical context, will he harden his policies and radicalize his positions, or will he come to his senses? What seems most likely, I think, is that he will move toward a Cuban model, with Iran playing the role of the Soviet Union. If Bolivar was the hero of the nineteenth century and Castro of the twentieth, Chavez will seek the same glory in the twenty-first. He will let tensions build to the breaking point. He will, as some socialists used to say, sharpen the contradictions. And then Venezuela, as so many times in its history, will be plunged into blood.

Enrique Krauze is the editor of Letras Libres and the author of Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810-1996 (Harper Perennial). This essay was translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.

Source URL: http://www.tnr.com/article/books/the-shah-venezuela

Friend in low places

2009-09-16T20:07:00.004-07:00

I agree with this statement:

"Although this seems far-fetched perhaps the world should start to take him a little more seriously"

Vdebate reporter

Friends in low places

Sep 15th 2009 CARACAS
From Economist.com

Hugo Chávez dreams of forging a new world order
Shutterstock/AFP

THE mountains and jungles of South America are not ideal terrain for tank warfare. So it is hard to envisage what role Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, has in mind for the dozens of Russian tanks on his latest military shopping list. The strategic purpose of a recent tour that took him to some of the world’s least salubrious regimes is, however, easier to discern. And it led America’s State Department to give warning on Monday September 14th of a “serious challenge to stability” in the region.

Venezuela’s increasingly autocratic leader returned on Friday from a trip that took him to Libya, Iran, Algeria, Syria, Turkmenistan, Belarus and Russia, though he also found time for a visit Spain and the Venice film festival. On his jaunt he was decorated by Libya’s leader, Muammar Qaddafi, and embraced by Aleksandr Lukashenko, president of Belarus.

Apart from discussing weapons and oil with the Russians, he also courted condemnation by inviting Sudan’s pariah president, Omar al-Bashir, to Caracas, and breezily announced a nuclear co-operation deal with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president. Since the latter revelation was made to Le Figaro, a French newspaper, it fell to the French foreign ministry to issue a curt reminder of UN Security Council resolution 1737. This explicitly forbids the export by Iran of material from its controversial nuclear programme, which Mr Chávez supports.

The trip did much to bolster Mr Chávez’s well-earned reputation for outrageous statements. But there is method to his madness. The foreign-policy section of Venezuela’s “First Socialist Plan—2007-2013” (dubbed the “Simón Bolívar National Project”) assigns an “integral political alliance” with Iran, Syria, Belarus and Russia the highest priority outside the Latin American and Caribbean region. The rationale for this curious hotchpotch of alliances is the “common anti-imperialist interests” of those five countries—the imperialist in question being America.

Among the scheme’s aims is the strengthening of national defence and sovereignty. Not only the tanks but sophisticated anti-aircraft systems make up the order to Russia. Mr Chávez, a former lieutenant-colonel in Venezuela’s army, says these weapons will make it “very difficult for foreign aircraft to come and bomb us”. Having already spent at least $4.4 billion on Russian weapons, he has now secured an additional $2.2 billion credit-line from that country to lavish on more military hardware. Three submarines are among other possible purchases, press reports say.

In pursuit of his goal to “break North American imperialist hegemony”, the Venezuelan president has deployed to the full his prime asset—the country’s oil reserves. Thus Iran was promised 20,000 barrels of petrol a day, in potential defiance of sanctions advocated by America and despite Venezuela’s current problems supplying its own markets with fuel. Russia’s national oil consortium was also assigned a patch of the Orinoco heavy oil belt.

Closer to home, Mr Chávez’s strategic plans have come a little unstuck. He has so far failed in his quest for admittance to the Mercosur trade block. ALBA, his alliance of like-minded governments, lost a member after a coup in Honduras just over six weeks ago. And he has failed to secure regional condemnation of Colombia’s decision to allow American troops to deploy in seven military bases in the country.

Undaunted, he continues to pursue “greater world leadership”. If attention is what he is seeking, he finally seems to have got it. Last week Robert Morgenthau, a veteran New York district attorney, gave warning that Venezuela’s alliance with Iran was a threat to American interests. Bank accounts in Andorra supposedly belonging to individuals close to Mr Chávez have been frozen, reportedly because of the American Treasury Department’s suspicions of links to terrorism.

Mr Chávez is determined to play in the big leagues. His avowed calculation is that by helping to stir up trouble for America in many places simultaneously, he can bring about the collapse of “the empire”. The regimes he is so assiduously cultivating are, by this account, the nucleus of a new world order. Although this seems far-fetched perhaps the world should start to take him a little more seriously.

Strong earthquake rocks Venezuela

2009-09-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

CARACAS (Reuters) - A strong 6.4 magnitude earthquake shook major oil exporter Venezuela on Saturday, causing panic in the capital, Caracas, and injuring at least seven people when houses in the countryside collapsed.
The quake, the strongest in the South American nation in years, hit at about 3:40 p.m. local time (2010 GMT), authorities said. It also knocked out power in several regions.
The head of Venezuela's emergency services, Luis Diaz Curbelo, said the quake was felt across the country, but the northwestern state of Falcon was the hardest hit with seven people hurt and some buildings damaged.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the epicenter was 23 miles north-northeast of Puerto Cabello, one of the OPEC nation's main oil ports. It was below the sea at a depth of 6.2 miles.
There was no damage to any oil installation, a source at state oil company PDVSA said.
In Caracas several people were slightly hurt when thousands of shoppers stampeded out of one of the city's largest malls. In the countryside, the walls of some houses made from mud and straw bricks collapsed.
Television reported aftershocks in some regions.
One of Venezuela's main oil refineries, El Palito, and a petrochemicals complex are located in the region where the tremor was felt most strongly.
The quake also hit the country's oil heartland of Zulia, where buildings wobbled in state capital Maracaibo.
PUBLIC PANIC
As in other cities and towns, Caracas residents fled high-rise buildings and streamed into the streets.
"I was having my hair cut when suddenly the chair started wobbling," said Caracas resident Andrea Reyna, who evacuated a hairdressing salon along with a dozen others.
"It was very strong, really frightening. The whole shop rattled. Now I can't get through to my children on the phone to see if they're OK."
Residents of apartment blocks gathered in public spaces in case of aftershocks.
"You never know. I'm not taking any risks," said Juan Fernando Lopez, standing next to a swimming pool with his three children outside one upmarket apartment block.
Cellular telephone networks jammed with the flood of calls after the tremor. A Reuters witness said power was out in one part of Caracas, and media reports said other regions were without electricity.
But Hipolito Izquierdo, head of the national electricity company, said on state television that "the electricity service is normal everywhere in the nation."
Quakes registering magnitude 6.0 or higher are considered capable of severe damage. Earlier the USGS reported said the temblor was a magnitude 7.0 quake.
"The security forces are working to gather reports of damage, in actions to recover any services, electricity, telephones, gas or water that may have failed because of the earthquake," said Jesse Chacon, minister of light industry and a close aide to President Hugo Chavez.