VENEZUELAN PRESIDENT UNNERVES MANY WITH CURIOUS STYLE
by Georgie Ann Geyer
WASHINGTON -- All through Latin American history, the region's most romantic concepts were to be found in phrases such as "Revolution now!" or "Liberation or Death!" Mere humans, despite their foibles, were moved to great acts when called forth by such dramatic words.
Yet, this week, two immeasurably different and jarringly incongruous words were on nervous tongues everywhere, with Latin commentators calling the situation everything from "pre-French revolutionary" to a "de facto coup" in the making.
All the more amazing since the new words are the dull and consummately uninspiring "constituent assembly."
One can look at the situation and still not understand what is going on in the southern hemisphere. Yes, Venezuela is holding the election for a constituent assembly on Sunday, July 25, in which l3l members of the future assembly will be elected from among politicians, civic leaders, folksingers, gays, doctors, a sports announcer and street vendors.
True, such an election is unprecedented. Yes, the newly elected assembly will then meet for some months to construct a new constitution. True, the country's attractive but quirky president, Hugo Chavez, has a bit oddly named himself "Commander of the Constitutional Assembly."
But, in fact, Venezuela has had no fewer than 25 constitutions since its independence l88 years ago. And most of the issues to be dealt with -- such as rewriting the constitution to make political parties more responsible,overhauling the state's insanely bloated public sector and addressing questions revolving around regulation of the economy -- are of broad concern to voters, as shown in polls. What, then, is going on?
Essentially, we are seeing the country that has been considered for four decades the prime example of democracy in the hemisphere trying to pry itself loose from two decades of horrendously corrupt and only formally democratic two-party rule. But there are also issues, floating like warning specters in the background, that worry people, such as the Chavez idea of impeaching politicians by popular referendum or types of "revolutionary tribunals."
The constituent assembly is President Chavez' vehicle for politically and socially restructuring the entire country, and, another problem: Nobody really knows how far he is ready to go. In fact, people still aren't sure who Comandante Hugo Chavez, transmogrified since trying violently to overthrow the government in l992 to a president with vast popularity, really is.
When I interviewed him last November just before his election, my first impression of candidate Chavez was that he was a kind of "naif" or Rousseauian innocent. He spoke in depth that day about his fervent belief in the patriotic and sacrificial precepts of Bolivarianism, and how he would apply them to the "new Venezuela." Since then, he has indeed done just that, and much of it is good in that it has begun to restore a lost sense of morality and service to a nation bordering on the decadent.
What unnerves many is his focus on the military, which he himself came out of and which he reveres. Since the overthrow of the old dictatorships in l957, the Venezuelan military has been totally apolitical, but Chavez has unquestionably begun to politicize it, appointing dozens of officers to the highest government posts, promoting 34 co-officers from the l992 coup and extending obligatory military training in schools and the use of miltiary tribunals to process civilians.
There is a sense in the concepts he admires that he may be steering the country toward some type of "direct democracy" a la Fidel Castro (in place of the representative democracy of the traditional political parties) or a new authoritarian model based upon a union of president, military and "the people."
In Latin societies, such a trilogy has the ominous ring of Argentina's Jose Peron, Italy's Benito Mussolini and Spain's Juan Antonio Primo de Rivera: authoritarian dictatorships without notably happy practical outcomes.
Yet President Chavez seems to be much more complicated than that. Venezuela's Teodoro Petkoff, former Marxist guerrilla leader turned planning minister, says that Chavez "has an authoritarian temperament but a democratic orientation." Knowledgeable foreign diplomats in Caracas say they are watching what he does and not what he says, and so far he has not done anything really radical or extreme. "He's a populist, but not a demagogue," was the way one diplomat described him to me. The United States is wisely stepping back and giving him room, not making early judgments.
In fact, his style is rather curious. It is a kind of rope-a-dope tactic. Chavez pushes all the time, daring the old do-nothing congress, challenging people with new ideas, punching, then drawing back to see how people respond. This has all the indicators of a man trying to reform the country, not take it over.
Meanwhile, his challenge is not only to Venezuela but to all of Latin America. In fact, all of Latin America's democracies, with the notable exception of Costa Rica, are formal democracies. To reconstitute and reform them, without lapsing into some form of authoritarian dictatorship, is clearly the next step in the welcome ongoing transformation of the hemisphere.
COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
uexpress.com |
