Hugo Chávez and the Limits of Democracy

Under Mr. Chávez, Venezuela is a powerful reminder that elections are necessary but not sufficient for democracy, and that even longstanding democracies can unravel overnight. A government's legitimacy flows not only from the ballot box but also from the way it conducts itself. Accountability and institutional restraints and balances are needed.

WASHINGTON - For decades Venezuela was a backwater, uninteresting to the outside world. It could not compete for international attention with nearby countries where superpowers staged proxy wars, or where military juntas "disappeared" thousands of opponents, or where the economy regularly crashed. Venezuela was stable. Its oil fueled an economy that enjoyed the world's highest growth rate from 1950 to 1980 and it boasted a higher per-capita income than Spain from 1928 to 1984. Venezuela was one of the longest-lived democracies in Latin America.

Venezuela is no longer boring. It has become a nightmare for its people and a threat not just to its neighbors but to the United States and even Europe. A strike in its oil industry has contributed to a rise in gasoline prices at the worst possible time. Hasil Muhammad Rahaham-Alan, a Venezuelan citizen, was detained last month at a London airport as he arrived from Caracas carrying a hand grenade in his luggage. A week later, President Hugo Chávez praised the arrest orders of two opposition leaders who had been instrumental in organizing the strike, saying they "should have been jailed a long time ago." Mr. Chávez has helped to create an environment where stateless international networks whose business is terror, guns or drugs feel at home.

Venezuela has also become a laboratory where the accepted wisdom of the 1990's is being tested - and often discredited. The first tenet to fall is the belief that the United States has almost unlimited influence in South America. As one of its main oil suppliers and a close neighbor has careened out of control, America has been a conspicuously inconsequential bystander.

And it is not just the United States. The United Nations, agencies like the Organization of American States and the International Monetary Fund, or the international press - all have stood by and watched. In the 1990's there was a hope that these institutions could prevent, or at least contain, some of the ugly malignancies that lead nations to self-destruct.

Instead, the most influential foreign influence in Venezuela is from the 1960's: Fidel Castro. The marriage of convenience between Cuba and Venezuela is rooted in the close personal relationship between the two leaders, with Mr. Castro playing the role of mentor to his younger Venezuelan admirer. Cuba desperately needs Venezuelan oil, while the Chávez administration depends on Cuba's experience in staging, managing or repressing political turmoil.

Another belief of the 1990's was that global economic forces would force democratically elected leaders to pursue responsible economic policies. Yet Mr. Chávez, a democratically elected president, has been willing to tolerate international economic isolation - with disastrous results for Venezuela's poor - in exchange for greater power at home.

The 21st century was not supposed to engender a Latin American president with a red beret. Instead of obsessing about luring private capital, he scares it away. Rather than strengthening ties with the United States, he befriends Cuba. Such behavior was supposed to have been made obsolete by the democratization, economic deregulation and globalization of the 1990's.

Venezuela is an improbable country to have fallen into this political abyss. It is vast, wealthy, relatively modern and cosmopolitan, with a strong private sector and a homogeneous mixed-race population with little history of conflict. Democracy was supposed to have prevented its decline into a failed state. Yet once President Chávez gained control over the government, his rule became exclusionary and profoundly undemocratic.

The international community became adept at monitoring elections and ensuring their legitimacy in the 1990's. The Venezuelan experience illustrates the urgency of setting up equally effective mechanisms to validate a government's practices.

The often stealthy transgressions of Mr. Chávez have unleashed a powerful expression of what is perhaps the only trend of the 1990's still visible in Venezuela: civil society. In today's Venezuela millions of once politically indifferent citizens stage almost daily marches and rallies larger than those that forced the early resignations of other democratically presidents around the world.

This is not a traditional opposition movement. It is an inchoate network of people from all social classes and walks of life, who are organized in loosely coordinated units and who do not have any other ambition than to stop a president who has made their country unlivable. Two out of three Venezuelans living under the poverty line oppose President Chávez, according to a Venezuelan survey released in January.

This amorphous movement is new to politics and vulnerable to manipulation by traditional politicians and interest groups. For example, last year a military faction took advantage of a huge but civil anti-Chávez march and staged a coup that ousted the president for almost two days. By rejecting the antidemocratic measures adopted by the would-be new president, the leader of a business association, the movement helped bring about his quick downfall.

Today the Venezuelan opposition consists of several factions, some of which have participated in talks with the government. Yet it is a mistake to equate these formal bodies with the widespread and largely leaderless, self-organizing movement that has emerged in Venezuela. Many foreign observers discount the opposition as mostly rich or middle class, a coup-prone coalition of opportunistic politicians.

No doubt some protesters fit this ugly profile. Nor is there any doubt that the Venezuelan opposition is clumsy and prone to blunders. Still, it has helped millions of Venezuelans awaken to the fact that for too many years they have been mere inhabitants of their own country. Now they demand to be citizens, and feel they have the right to oust through democratic means a president who has wrought havoc on their country.

It is a measure of Venezuela's toxic political climate that even though the constitution allows for early elections, and even though President Chávez has promised that he will abide by this provision, the great majority of Venezuelans don't believe him. They are convinced that in August, when the constitution contemplates a referendum on the president, the government will resort to delaying tactics and dirty tricks. With international attention elsewhere, Mr. Chávez will use his power to forestall an election and ignore the constitution.

Venezuela's citizens have been heroically peaceful and civil in their quest. All they ask is that they be given a chance to vote. The world should do its best to ensure that they have that opportunity.

Moisés Naím, minister of trade and industry of Venezuela from 1989 to 1990, is editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

***Instead, the most influential foreign influence in Venezuela is from the 1960's: Fidel Castro. The marriage of convenience between Cuba and Venezuela is rooted in the close personal relationship between the two leaders, with Mr. Castro playing the role of mentor to his younger Venezuelan admirer. Cuba desperately needs Venezuelan oil, while the Chávez administration depends on Cuba's experience in staging, managing or repressing political turmoil. ***

Maria Rosa Gutierrez is loaded on a stretcher into the back of a taxi in front of the gate of the Perez de Leon Hospital in Caracas, Venezuela, Tuesday, March 4, 2002. Gutierrez was be transported to another hospital to have a thorax x-ray taken, since the Perez de Leon hospital is lacking the large plates for such x-rays. The hospital's only ambulance was not available because it had taken a more critical patient to another hospital. Hospital shortages have become severe since President Hugo Chavez suspended dollar sales Jan. 22 to stop a drastic devaluation of the Venezuelan bolivar. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano) - Mar 05 11:55 PM ET

Cristopher Rodriguez, 20, left, holds his brother Wilmer, 18, right, at the emergency room of the Perez de Leon Hospital in Caracas, Venezuela, Friday, Feb. 28, 2002. Wilmer was shot in the leg and the hand during a drive-by shooting and will need an operation. But Wilmer, like many patients who arrived at the hospital, has no money and will have to wait for his relatives to come up with the money--in the middle of the night--for medicine and supplies that the hospital is lacking. Hospital shortages have become severe since President Hugo Chavez suspended dollar sales Jan. 22 to stop a drastic devaluation of the Venezuelan bolivar.(AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

Hugo Chavez - Venezuela

Fidel Castro - Cuba

When Saddam is gone and the terrorist financing disrupted, will that clear the way to finally get rid of Castro? Do you think we are going to have to actively clean out the Caribbean and the infested portions of South America? I suppose the drug cartels are the other source of funding for Chavez and for the Maoist groups in Peru and Colombia and elsewhere? Is China complicit in all this, as well?

Too bad we can't design a vaccine against communism, isn't it? But we have a timeshare on Bonaire (60 miles off Caracas) and there were economic problems in Venezuela back in the 90's, IIRC. Is the article missing something? It is the NYT, after all.

From Venezuela, A Counterplot*** As Washington prepares a high-stakes military venture in the Persian Gulf, a growing physical threat is being posed by Iraq, Libya and Iran to the soft underbelly of the United States. Hundreds and possibly thousands of agents from rogue Arab nations are working hard to help President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela take control of South America's largest oil industry and create al-Qaeda-friendly terrorist bases just two hours' flying time from Miami.

Arab advisers now are reinforcing a sizable contingent of Cubans in efforts to reorganize Venezuela's security services, assimilate its industries based on totalitarian models and repress a popular opposition movement. "What happens in Venezuela may affect how you fight a war in Iraq," Gen. James Hill of U.S. Southern Command is reported recently to have told his colleague at U.S. Central Command, Gen. Tommy Franks.

"Chavez is planning to coordinate an anti-American strategy with terrorist states," says Venezuela's former ambassador to Libya, Julio Cesar Pineda, who reveals correspondence between the Venezuelan president and Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi about the need to "solidify" ties between liberation movements in the Middle East and Latin America and use oil as an economic weapon.

Exhorting his countrymen to return to their "Arab roots," Chavez has paid state visits to Libya, Iraq and Iran and signed a series of mutual-cooperation treaties with the rogue governments whose operatives now are flooding into Venezuela. There they can blend into an ethnic Arab community estimated at half-a-million.***

Democracy is not freedom. Freedom is freedom. Democracy is only a tool, like a gun, that can be used to secure it or steal it.

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