Of course Chavez won...
WHAT WILL VENEZUELA LOOK LIKE ON DEC. 4? By Georgie Anne Geyer
Thu Nov 30, 8:03 PM ET
CARACAS, Venezuela -- Most Venezuelans, those who love the country's mercurial President Hugo Chavez and those who hate him, are impassionedly watching Sunday's crucial presidential elections.
Will Chavez win a third term? Will his up-and-coming competitor Manuel Rosales really give him a run for his money? Is it possible that Chavez's "Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution" could be overturned this late in the game? Is this Berlin in the 1930s -- or just another slightly nutty Latin interlude?
But the smartest people are asking a different question. They are asking not what will happen on Dec. 3, but what will happen on Dec. 4.
A popularly re-elected Chavez might move to make constitutional changes that would keep him in power forever, put the word "socialist" into the country's ever-evolving name, and turn his "resource nationalism," in which commodity wealth makes it possible to play populist revolution without any cost, into a permanent maneuver that would seriously nationalize land, real estate and businesses.
Chavez will almost surely continue his "axis of oil," with what he sees as a "great political partnership" between Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela, alongside the planned formation of a Latin American bloc against the gringos of El Norte. And he will go ahead with forming Telesur, a news network for Latin America with a similar anti-American message to that of Al Jazeera in the Middle East.
"He's crossed his Rubicon a long time ago," a leading analyst here told me. "He will use these elections, his third, to get everything he wants. He'll continue going in the direction he's going -- to be Fidel's spiritual successor. In his mind, he's a titan striding the world. If he had gotten the seat on the Security Council, it would have been, 'I'm president of the world.'"
But he didn't get the U.N. Security Council seat he was fighting for this fall, when he made his infamous (and highly debatable) accusation that President Bush was the "devil." Because of American opposition, but also because of a growing distrust of Chavez in the world and in Latin America, Panama got the seat. (The Venezuelans countered by congratulating Panama and claiming that its centrist government was the "most revolutionary country in the world.")
And he has faced an unexpectedly robust campaign challenge from Rosales, a highly attractive candidate who, as a governor, made the city of Maracaibo into a little paradise. Venezuela stands as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, with out-of-control public violence (90,000 people have died violently since 1998). And Latin America, while it has seen far-left Chavez-inspired movements take power in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador, is still split between those movements and a far larger lineup of more traditional democracies friendly to the United States.
All of this, of course, is made possible by Venezuela's incredible oil wealth. Planning Minister Jorge Giordani was recently quoted as saying that oil revenues soared from $9.84 billion in 2003 to $33.5 billion in 2006. Chavez has used this wealth to woo China, Russia and Iran, giving Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the country's "Liberator Medal" and stating, with his special touch, that "the distance between our countries may be far, but our hearts are close."
In the Cuban revolution that Chavez so admires, everything was clear: Castro immediately got rid of the upper and middle classes, all private businesses and all democratic forces. "Revolutionary" Venezuela is very different: Every fact is immediately presented with a contradiction; every move of Chavez's wears a veil of complex weaves.
Chavez hates the United States and has forced American oil companies to accept 51 percent Venezuelan ownership; but he has not moved against American businesses, who at this point are nervously holding on. Trade with the U.S. still constitutes more than half of the country's trade. He depends upon oil, but has invested nothing in exploration and is using Petroleos de Venezuela, the formerly first-rate national oil company, as a cash cow to pay the poor.
As for the Venezuelan people, they will probably re-elect Chavez and his "Fifth Republic Movement" on Sunday. The most recent Zogby International poll showed him winning 60 percent of the votes, compared to 31 percent for Rosales, plus a few random percentages for other electoral adventurers. Yet, the polls also show that the Venezuelan people want better relations with and still greatly admire the United States.
Chavez wants to convert Mercosur, the economic grouping of Southern Cone countries, into a Latin American anti-American bloc, but there seems little enthusiasm, even among Latin governments, for that. As for China, at a recent conference at the Hudson Institute in Washington, specialists largely pooh-poohed the idea of China-in-Latin America as a great threat to the U.S. They noted that Chavez continuously praised Mao Tse-tung to the Chinese, even going so far as to say that Mao and Chavez's hero, Simon Bolivar, would have thought alike -- apparently not realizing that this Chinese government is anti-Mao.
The Chinese in Venezuela have received the same authoritarian/critical treatment as the Americans, and Chinese-funded projects like the building of 20,000 homes and a railroad line have barely begun. China, said Pedro Burelli, former executive of the Venezuelan oil company, "is treated the same as Exxon." As for Cuba, Chavez is in many ways less following Cuba's model than appropriating Cuba by opening companies and banks there.
In the U.S., the American military last spring held its first "war gaming" against a consortium of Russia, China -- and Venezuela -- but American diplomats insist that Washington is playing it very cool with Venezuela and not looking for confrontations.
When we ask the key question about whether Hugo Chavez's curious and imprecise Venezuela is a "model" in, or for, Latin America, we have to consider those and many more profound contradictions. It is, and it isn't. As one leading Venezuelan businessman told me the other day, "What's next? I'm concerned, but I have no idea." |
