by Jason Daniel Baker

Created on: December 03, 2007   Last Updated: March 23, 2010

Hugo 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 regimes 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 even as the ones who start them use rhetoric claiming they want to increase voter participation and return government to the people..

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

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