Posted on 03/17/2002 9:45:56 AM PST by Sawdring
Business and Economics Editor Published 3/13/2002 8:16 PM
QUERETARO, Mexico, March 13 (UPI) -- An uneasy calm returns to Venezuela. Beneath it, like water running underground, a host of separate currents are undermining the shaky reign of President Hugo Chávez.
A week ago Guaicaipuro Lameda, ex-General, ex-head of the state-run oil company, PdVSA, ex-admirer of Chávez, said that the government's economic policies were condemning the country to worsening poverty and challenged the planning minister, Giordani, to a public debate.
In Venezuela the planning ministry, it should be said, is more important than it sounds. The planning minister holds central responsibility for economic policy. Unsurprisingly Jorge Giordani, an academic who has long been close to Chávez, and who has bumbled his way through three years in the key job, did not leap at this chance to debate policy with the highly-competent and convincing Lameda, a man who may well play a role again in Venezuelan government--when Chávez is gone.
Meanwhile at PdVSA, the company from which Chávez fired Lameda--for competence, presumably--all is not well. PdVSA's workers are refusing to accept Chávez's appointees, on the grounds that they are not competent to run the company: the key company in the Venezuelan economy, since the country depends so much, too much, on oil.
What Chávez wants to do, it is clear, is use PdVSA as a source of cash to bolster government finances. Before he won power in 1998 one of his economic policy advisors told this correspondent that the intention was to double PdVSA's contribution to the Treasury so that the government could invest more in its preferred projects. What this ignored was that PdVSA itself needed to invest if Venezuela is to continue as a major oil producer. Three years into his presidency, Chávez appears not to have understood that his plans for PdVSA would not milk the cash cow but starve it. Lameda, a man who had been close to Chávez, was simply unwilling to go along with a disastrous policy.
While Chávez's yes men provoke rebellion at PdVSA, the little rebellions against him on the part of some individual military officers have ceased. In the past few weeks, no new officer has gathered the press so as to avail them of his frank opinion of Chávez. It may be that Chávez's opponents in the military have decided that this sort of stunt could be over-played and that now was the time to wait for other developments.
Chávez, for his part, says he cannot end up like Salvador Allende--the Chilean president deposed in 1973 in a military coup--because unlike the civilian Allende he has the military on his side. It is not only when he talks of his hero Simón Bolívar and of implementing his plans for Latin America that the president can be guilty of dreaming.
But it is true that if an uprising, of the military or of the population as a whole, were to take place against Chávez now, no obvious successor nor grouping stands ready to take power. The old political parties remain discredited. Indeed it was their negative image which helped create the vacuum into which Chávez surged in the late 1990s. The opposition to Chávez is divided. If it forms some sort of united front and shows Venezuelans that there is an alternative to Chávez, it is all more likely that a collective push will come, and ease him from power.
Chávez's opponents may be wise to bide their time for other reasons. Chávez still has support, mainly among Venezuela's poor. It would be wiser to allow Chávez to fail utterly and dismay all but his most fanatical supporters before removing him. For, now, a dislodged Chávez carries a threat. One Venezuelan journalist alleged Sunday in a leading newspaper, El Universal, that Chávez is using his friends in Colombia's guerrilla groups to train his followers in guerrilla warfare. This opens up the obscene possibility that a deposed Chávez might bring insurgency to Venezuela.
Better, then, that Chávez be utterly discredited before he loses power. What might help to do that is another phenomenon that is at present against him: the weather.
Seventy percent of Venezuela's electricity comes from hydropower. But lack of rain has reduced the water in the Guri dam, which supplies 70 percent of the nation's electricity, to critical levels.
The crisis, of course, is not just man-made. It reflects a failure since 1998 to go through with privatizations in the electricity sector and lack of investment in the fuel-powered electricity generation that Venezuela has as a stand-by. The U.S. Department of Energy, in a briefing, describes the electric power sector in Venezuela as "characterized by under-investment, heavy state control, controlled tariff rates, and frequent shortages....Serious under-investment in the power sector have resulted in shortages and a need for private investment, at an estimated cost of $6 billion over the next five years."
Electricity, in other words, is in the sort of mess that Chávez appears to be planning for PdVSA.
Electricity shortages in some months' time could be the final current that brings the farcical but unfunny reign of Chávez to an end.
-0-
Comments to icampbell@upi.com.
Copyright © 2002 United Press International
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.