Misunderstanding Chavez

It’s not often that a dictator loses a referendum, but this is the paradox thatthe American populace has been grappling with this week as the lies fed to them by corporate news networks about Hugo Chavez hit reality in an unseemly head-on collision.

This week Chavez narrowly lost—by one percent—a referendum that would have made it illegal for workplace discrimination on sexual or religious grounds, and would have cut the working day for the average Venezuelan to a legal maximum of six hours.

This isn’t the part of the referendum trumpeted in the mainstream media, of course. They focused unendingly on the proposed loosening of the term limits currently imposed on the Venezuelan presidency.

The scaremongering message was that if Chavez had been successful he would have been able to run in elections until 2050. This would have put the Venezuelan system on famous bastions of totalitarianism like Britain and Australia. There is no such thing as a term-limit in either of their political systems, and if a leader is popular enough, in theory he can rule until he dies.

If, in the eyes of the business press, this constitutional change is an attempt by Chavez to realize a dictatorship, then that means that Tony Blair was a dictator too, and all diplomatic support to Prime Minister Gordon Brown should stop immediately—his dictatorship could theoretically continue until 2050 too.

In the embarrassing and ignorant hysteria that has gripped the American media, Chavez has been compared to Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and even, echoing Donald Rumsfeld’s idiocy, Adolf Hitler. “Mr. Chavez shares much in common with these former dictators who killed and trampled human rights as a means to their own ends,” says Douglas MacKinnon in the Washington Post in one of the stupidest—but not unusual—remarks I’ve ever read.

This whole campaign is laughable because Chavez has some of the most stellar democratic credentials in the world. Since being democratically elected in 1998 by a landslide, he went to the Venezuelan people again in 1999 and won approval for important constitutional changes. He won another general election in July 2000 when he was elected with 60 percent of the vote. Later, in December 2000, he won a referendum that called for the state-monitoring of labor union elections.

And then, a presidential recall referendum—which was enshrined in Chavez’s 1999 Constitution—was triggered in August 2004 when opposition groups collected signatures from 20 percent of the electorate, as the Constitution stipulated. The tired people of Venezuela were at the polls again. And again Chavez won their support. Fifty-nine percent of the population voted no to the recall in an election overseen by the best election auditors in the world.

By my reckoning, that counts as three general elections and two referendums in nine years. It is hard to find a more exercised populace in the entire world.

This stands in stark contrast, of course, to George W. Bush, who (and it is now non-controversial to say this), stole the election in 2000. And this brief primer also leaves out the most telling part of recent Venezuelan history: the coup attempt by right-wing groups in 2002, which tried to use the military to topple the democratically elected president. As journalist Eva Gollinger assiduously documents through the revelation of previously secret CIA documents in her work The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention In Venezuela, the U.S. government gave succor and support to this anti-democratic military coup. It briefly succeeded until hundreds of thousands of people from Caracas took to the street to demand the release of Chavez, who had been incarcerated by the new business junta.

So why the misinformation about Chavez? The answer is simple, and deeply rooted in the history of the United States’ political and economic policies in the 20th century, and maybe before. Venezuela under Chavez provides a symbol to the rest of Latin America and even the wider world of what a better, egalitarian society can look like. For the first time in many decades the oil wealth of this nation extremely rich in natural resources has been redirected back to its people, and not rapacious foreigners and their elite lackeys in Venezuela. This is a dangerous example to set, and the thirst for this kind of justice is likely to spread. Henry Kissinger, in the analogous example of Chile under socialist Salvador Allende in the 1970s, called this kind of example a “virus that could infect others.”

In the aftermath of his election, Chavez created what he called “Bolivarian Missions” after the great Latin American liberationist from the 19th century, Simon Bolivar. These missions were aimed at reducing the massive and crippling poverty in the barrios around Venezuela. Through them thousands of free medical hospitals were built providing healthcare to many people for the first time, and establishing local grassroots committees to adjudicate their affairs. The infant mortality rate fell by 18.2 percent between 1998 and 2006. Family income amongst the poorest part of Venezuelan society grew more than 150 percent between 2003 and 2006. Many people who couldn’t even write their names were chalking them up on boards in the barrios.

The leftward turn in what American planners contemptuously call “our backyard” is indeed worrying to the forces that have relied on unscrupulous elites to funnel their wealth to the West instead of to their own people. From Chile to Brazil to Bolivia, socialist leaders are vowing to change this tragic history of exploitation. This leads to the logical gymnastics of normally rational people, as they fulminate about a dictator losing a referendum, oblivious to how ridiculous they sound.

The author is a student in the Graduate School of Journalism.