Venezuelan opposition may be country’s last hope Chaining the strongman

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.

— from John Philpot Curran’s speech on the right of election of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, 1790.

We are coming up on the eighth week of the general strike in Venezuela. And — blessings abound — the Organization of American States and former United States president James Carter have stepped in to mediate between the government, headed by Hugo Chavez Frias, and opposition groups in business, the labour movement, and the armed forces.

Here is a thumbnail of the story so far: in 1998, Venezuelan voters elected Chavez — the leader of an unsuccessful 1992 coup d’tat — to the presidency. He had run promising to clean up political corruption, claiming that the two principal political parties, the Social Christians and the Democratic Action Party, had been dividing the spoils of government between them. The charge was almost certainly true, and crony capitalism is the simplest explanation for the dangerously uneven distribution of wealth in Venezuela.

But more than that, it is always easy to believe stories of corruption when you’re poor, and among the poor Chavez found receptive ears for his story. His anti-Western and anti-internationalist rhetoric took in the leftist intellectuals, whose discernment in politics is generally pretty coarse. Chavez took about 56% of the vote.

The business community, used to the comfortable way of dealing with the governing elites, had been worried, but suspended judgment on the new president. Chavez made the right noises to placate them; all the same, he went about the task of gutting Venezuelan democracy. Using presidential powers, he dissolved the legislature, then held plebiscites on constitutional changes that, in the end, had the effect of making the president an old-style South American strongman. At the same time, he developed strong ties with Cuba, mainland China, and repressive regimes in the Middle East. There is evidence, not all of it reliable, that he supported Colombian and Middle Eastern terrorist groups; but even if he didn’t, his political bedfellows are of the next worst kind.

Venezuelans didn’t turn out heavily for the elections or the plebiscites, and now they are paying for the indolence that (in Curran’s phrase) saw their rights become prey to the active. Even as Chavez began to politicize the economy, most Venezuelans still held their tongues. Chavez was no worse at managing the economy than his predecessors had been, in crude macroeconomic terms — as long as he had the advantage of a rising oil price. But even that has blown up in Chavez’s — and Venezuela’s — face. Inflation has ballooned to more than 20% and the gross domestic product is estimated to be shrinking by 10% annually.

It is hard not to be sympathetic with the protestors and strikers that want him gone. In the mining industry, we have seen the effects of politicization at Corporacion Venezolana de Guyana, which has become the most unreliable partner since Sigit Harjojudanto’s deal with Bre-X. Meanwhile, in the oil industry, where state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) had a reputation as a highly professional and apolitical oil producer, a revolving-door presidency at the company — five Chavez appointees in four years — put the company’s independence on the line, and management and employees were united in insisting the government stop interfering.

Thus came the April protests, when anti-government demonstrators were fired on by Chavez supporters, the “Bolivarian Circles,” who had been armed by the government. If it was not clear before that Chavez had stepped over the line, surely the events of April 11 made it so.

Now Venezuela faces the consequences: a government that has armed its own political goon squads, at the same time as it disarmed the civil police and parts of the armed forces it suspected might be more loyal to the constitution than to the caudillo. And the “Chilean” watershed has been reached: it is now the moderate voices, not the reactionary ones, that are calling for the military to intervene.

Yet Chavez is in the presidential palace at Miramar fair and square; he was elected, twice, and his actions to secure more and more executive power were approved by the electors — or more precisely, by the electors that turned out to vote. He can be recalled by the voters as early as August; there is reason to think they will do it, as long as they can resist the intimidation of the Circles.

Chavez has been a thoroughgoing mismanager, but anyone in an open Western society can tell you mismanagement is not exclusively the province of Venezuelan demagogues. Mismanagement alone is not reason to destroy whatever rule of law is left in the country. But things have come to a point where resistance, by the military, the civil service, and state employees, is one of the few checks left on presidential power. The general strikers, and the dissidents in the military that protest daily at the Plaza Altamira, are the de facto opposition, lacking only a legislative roof over their heads. (It is significant that since 1958, the only political role the Venezuelan armed forces have ever played is in restoring legitimately elected politicians to power.)

Opposition to Chavez even took the form of a prank by two disc jockeys, Enrique Santos and Joe Ferrero at WXDJ-FM, a Spanish-language radio station in Miami. Dubbing from tapes of a genuine phone call between Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Mexican President Vicente Fox — one that the Cuban government had released publicly — Santos and Ferrero led Chavez’s staff, and finally the president himself, to believe Castro was calling. Chavez hung up when the two shock-jocks started abusing him in their own voices.

Agreed, it’s not hard to be taken in by prank phone calls, but Chavez even manages to look more absurd in his order to destroy all stocks of the current Bs. 50,000 bank note, which bears a picture of former president Jose Maria Vargas, who gave his name to Vargas state, north of Caracas. In 1999, landslides in the state killed some 30,000 Venezuelans — and it seems that Chavez and Diego Castellanos, president of the central bank, have concluded the notes bearing Vargas’s image, rather than pore pressure in unconsolidated sediments, are the source of the state’s bad luck. So the old notes were recalled — but new ones couldn’t be printed in time, and the old ones had to be returned to circulation.

Such is policy in today’s Venezuela, where Chavez rules by whim on his good days and pure superstition on his bad ones. It will be better when he is gone; but he won’t let himself be eased out. With much luck, continued pressure can push him out, legally, constitutionally, and without violence. Anyone with interests in Venezuela should pray for luck.