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Add to FavoritesHugo Chavez in Venezuela: A "People's" Dictatorship?
Other than an Eddie Fisher look-a-like contest (Sorry Eddie) I don't see what kind of truly Democratic race Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez might win. But this has not stopped him from staging a referendum to allow his supporters to endow him with broad and sweeping new legislative powers over the pretty understandable objections of his opponents.
Cooler heads prevailed and he lost but for how long? This individual might be refered to as an extrovert by some but as a madman by most others given his embrace of the respective rejimes in Cuba and Iran.
Those who already refer to Chavez as a left-wing extremist will not have a full understanding of the term unless Chavez eventually gets the broad mandate he failed to win this time and has had a chance to use it. Venezuela has vast oil reserves and can make a huge impact upon the world price of oil.
If the people vote to give Chavez new powers then why are so many concerned about it becoming a dictatorship? It is probably because they know from historical precedent that it is very often how dictatorships start.
Salazar asked for special powers in Portugal in the early 1930s. Flash forward almost 40 years and he was still in power.
How about Adolf Hitler? A bit of legislation called "The Enabling Act" in response to a fire set at the Reichstag supposedly by Marxist agitators was passed to help him curb their excesses. The vast majority of historians suggest the event was staged though German Marxists (who understandably fought and then perplexingly collaborated with Nazis for years) are amongst the most violent of all of them. I actually think both explanations are plausible and that neither really matter. Hitler used it to try to legitimize what was essentially a military junta with corporate backing.
You can go all the way back to ancient Rome and Caesar Augustus to see one of the most definitive examples of power grabs. Augustus made a symbolic show of handing power over to the senate. In return the senate made a more substantial move in handing power back to him. To some it looked as though the opposite had happened.
In each of these cases one guy made the decisions where at one point many had. They grabbed more power by pretending to ask for it and then there was no way anyone could question them.
Hugo Chavez is merely re-inventing the wheel in Venezuela and blaming foreign pressures (correctly but conveniently). Chavez has said that U.S. President George W.Bush is Satan, a comparison, which I happen to think flatters just the first two of them. But at least Bush has had congress to impede his more sinister efforts.
Will Chavez have that? No, because dictators don't.
Do we really need to see Chavez exterminating and jailing politics before we call him a dictator or can we go by the fact that he is making decisions for people without fair, periodic consultations?
We did not wait for Joerg Haider to implement his agenda in Austria before we spoke up.
Learn more about this author, Jordan Sackhoff.
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No
Hugo Chavez has been elected time and again, as has his party in Venezuela. These elections are certified by international observers, and the sore losers in the opposition have done things like boycott the election and then claim they were shafted it was their own choice to abandon the electoral process, just as it was their own choice to overthrow the government, install Pedro Carmona (however briefly), and flood the corporate media with staged propaganda. It is untenable for Westerners or anyone else to declare any elected politician we don't like a dictator.
Our elections in 2000 and 2004 would not come close to being as legitimate as those in Venezuela's recent history. Exit polls in U.S. elections did not match official results. Exit polls are recognized the world over as the gold standard as to whether an election is legitimate. Chavez wins elections with a wide margin, and the argument disputing his legitimacy is much weaker than that against our recent presidential elections.
When Chavez proposed a slate of reforms in a referendum, the very close vote was not the margin of victory he wanted, so he declared defeat before the results were finally in. Defeat. Is that what a dictator would do? No he did it because even if he was to win the close vote, he didn't want to enact the reforms unless a clear sizeable majority favored them. And that is the story throughout his career in democratic politics: a clear majority comprised of Venezuela's underclass elects Chavez and his party over and over again.
After eternal enforced inequality, for the first time the poor get medical care, education, and food far beyond their previous attainment. And that is the crux as to why we must constantly ask is Chavez a dictator. The bottom line is you can not help poor people. That is the ultimate and cardinal sin in the eyes of American politicians and media. That is why John Edwards was the media's bete noir and constant target. Chavez has sinned by helping the poor therefore he must be a dictator. Worse yet, he helps the poor in the U.S. with discounted heating oil throughout the Northeast during the winters. Worse still, he offered (rebuffed) support for Katrina victims.
If Chavez just stuck to the script of the proper American puppet of a U.S. client state, he would get the same treatment Carmona received after becoming a 48-hour dictator in the wake of the coup: enthusiastic public support from the top echelons of our federal government. But because he has committed the ultimate sin of helping the poor, we have to call him a dictator and nod vapidly as Pat Robertson calls for his assassination on a religious family values show, the 700 club.
The only credible argument that he is dictatorial is that in the referendum that failed (and whose failure he accepted quite un-dictatorially) contained provisions to remove presidential term limits. Anti-Chavez opponents will view this as de facto autocratic. The fact is people in a democracy CAN disagree about the validity of term limits. I think the argument for them is stronger than against, but it is the right of free people in a democracy to vote their belief on this and every other issue. Had they voted to overturn term limits, which they did not, the West should have accepted this outcome and ceased meddling in their sovereignty.
Learn more about this author, David Moglen.
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