Posted on 02/12/2003 2:05:11 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has made a habit of saying the first thing that comes into his head.
His choice of words -- often politically extreme and insulting -- make him sound like a totalitarian hot head.
But until recently no one took him too seriously. His bark seemed a lot worse than his bite.
In fact, early on in Chavez's four-year-old administration, the U.S. ambassador, John Maisto, famously asserted that it was actions, not words, that mattered.
It became known as the "Maisto doctrine." The ambassador was later picked by the Bush administration to head the Western Hemisphere Affairs section at the National Security Council, giving him overall direction of U.S. policy in Latin America.
But now Maisto is the one eating his words.
While Chavez still has a tendency to shoot his mouth off, there is no longer any doubting his intentions.
After surviving a two-month-long strike led by the political opposition, Chavez has given notice that he plans to accelerate his so-called "Bolivarian revolution."
Last month he announced exchange controls that he says will be used to suffocate his enemies in the import-driven private sector. "No one can buy a single dollar in Venezuela without the permission of the revolutionary government," he told a crowd of cheering supporters. "Not a single dollar more for the coupmongers or the terrorists," he added, using his favorite two words to describe his opponents.
At the same time, the government filed legal complaints against the four main private television stations as a first step toward muzzling the opposition-dominated media. Chavez has also proposed adding 10 judges to the Supreme Court in order to quash any last vestige of independence.
Critics say Chavez is in the final stages of turning Venezuela into a Cuban-style communist state. They add it's taken a long time for the world -- including the United States -- to wake up to that fact.
"The U.S. has greatly underestimated the situation in Venezuela and what's coming in the next few years," said Alberto Garrido, one of Venezuela's top political consultants and the author of several books on Chavez. "It's all there in writing, it's just that no one has read it."
In one of his books, titled The Secret Story of the Bolivarian Revolution, Garrido used previously unpublished documents and interviews with Chavez's political mentors to paint a disturbing picture of a movement with deeper and more radical roots than anyone realized.
It's a stunningly detailed account of a clandestine revolutionary movement that, like Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida, worked secretly under the noses of authorities for decades, recruiting military officers and training civilians for an assault on power.
Garrido and others believe Chavez is hell-bent on exploiting the country's state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, or PdVSA, to finance his revolutionary project.
"Chavez believes that oil is the weapon that is going to bring down the capitalist system," he said.
The fate of Chavez has major implications for both the United States and Cuba, which depend heavily on Venezuela for oil. The strike has slashed Venezuelan oil output to barely one-third of its normal levels.
Some observers liken Venezuela's situation to two other former major oil producers: Libya and Iran. Both countries witnessed a dramatic cutback in oil production after revolutionary episodes in 1969 and 1979, respectively.
Throughout his presidency Chavez has battled PdVSA's management, trying to destroy the autonomy that many say was the secret to the company's much-vaunted efficiency.
Before the strike Chavez's efforts to wrest control of PdVSA had failed. But when oil company executives threw their weight behind the opposition strike in December, they miscalculated badly.
Two months later, thousands of PdVSA's top managers have been fired and Chavez is firmly in control. It remains to be seen if the new, inexperienced managers can bring back production to normal levels.
Either way, the United States faces a difficult choice. Does it place support for democracy above or below its need to secure oil supplies? While Washington may not like Chavez, he has pledged to continue to supply the United States with oil.
It was in the name of democracy -- and to prevent what it feared was the spread of Cuban-inspired communism -- that the Reagan administration became deeply involved in Central America in the 1980s. But the world has moved on since the Cold War. Now the White House is fighting a new enemy: terrorism.
Meanwhile, no one in Washington seems to be paying much attention to the spread of left-wing ideas -- not to mention anti-Americanism -- in its own back yard.
-- David Adams may be contacted at adams@sptimes.com.
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***Strictly adhering to the rules of the Venezuelan Constitutition for calling a referendum, the opposition and the electoral authorities - known by its Spanish initials CNE - had scheduled a vote for February 2. Chavez, doing everything in his power, was determined to stop it: From having his supporters shoot at the opposition, then sabotaging the electoral commission, not offering funding or army protection, an even ordering an unconstitutional decision in the Supreme Court -- a ruling which the head of the Supreme Court's electoral court called "a travesty" and "purely political". Supreme Court judge Alberto Martini Urdaneta publicly called for the Chavez-ordered ruling to be overturned, pointing out not just clear political bias, but also that the ruling violated basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and that it suspended the rights of the citizens to participate in free and democratic elections.[1]
To gain time, Chavez publicly declared that the current board of directors of the electoral commission, the CNE, "is not even qualified to oversee the vote of the ugliest cat on the corner," and that no election - says he - can go forward until all its members are replaced.[2]
" - This is troubling," says an international diplomat, "since the same board, with the same people, was qualified to oversee all the previous elections; those called by Chavez himself when he wanted to. But now their replacements are suddenly needed."
Chavez party deputees, a majority on the selection committee, have an absolute veto in picking the new members of the CNE board. They have announced that it will take them months to reach the decision, and that possibly the new board will not be installed until April 2003.
This will give Chavez some of the time he needs to intimidate the opposition into either not campaigning in the next election, or else at least campaigning a lot less. The death threats have already started, and so have the deaths. In a show of state sponsored violence, Chavez has armed organized groups of supporters who, led by locally elected party officials, attack pro-democracy activists. Amateur video abound of small groups of violent Chavez supporters shooting at much larger groups of opposition marchers, causing dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded in the last year.
If this is not enough to keep the opposition at home, money is. The opposition, a ragtag movement of volunteer grassroots groups, has no powerful source of funding. They are up against the the well-financed MVR party, backed with four years of oil billions and not observing the rules for campaign financing. Chavez, treating state coffers as a private piggy-bank, draws indiscriminately on governments funds for party use and for his own political campaigning.[3] - How To Steal An Election: Chavez Preparing Massive Vote Fraud for Q3/2003
By Wednesday morning, Gutiérrez, who led a botched coup attempt in 2000, was pledging strong cooperation with the United States on a variety of issues, including a bitter dispute over $200 million that foreign oil companies operating in Ecuador claim is owed to them. ''The president of Ecuador wants to become the best friend and the best ally of the United States in the permanent and implacable fight against drug trafficking, terrorism, reducing poverty and strengthening democracy,'' Gutiérrez said.
U.S. officials said the welcome given Gutiérrez reflects their growing concern about turmoil in Latin America and their wish that Gutiérrez does not follow in the troublesome footsteps of another former army officer, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, whose rule is plunging his country into civil conflict. ''He's gotten a great showing,'' a senior State Department official said, speaking of the Gutiérrez visit. ``I frankly think it's because people are concerned about Latin America.''
Analysts said wariness in Washington about Gutiérrez, his coup-plotting past and his leftist campaign rhetoric has lifted as U.S. officials see his economic approach and such corruption-fighting proposals as one to put all state contracts on the Internet. ''Washington wants to see this man succeed,'' said Steve Johnson, a Latin America policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in the capital. Ecuador has struggled with instability. When Gutiérrez came to office Jan. 15, after winning a surprisingly strong popular vote, he became the sixth president since 1996. [End]
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