Concerns grow about Chávez’s friendship with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust-denier who called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”
Attacks on a Caracas synagogue, the Vatican’s diplomatic compound, and a major cultural center are sparking fears of escalating political violence in the run-up to the February 15th referendum on the removal of term limits.
The attacks came after President Hugo Chávez condemned Israel as “a genocidal government” and expelled its ambassador. Chávez has criticized the Catholic Church for political meddling while the armed Chávista militants who attacked the Ateneo de Caracas cultural centre said that it was used for “ultra-rightist” activities.
“The incident highlights his regime’s increasingly authoritarian bent,” notes The Economist. It quotes Carmen Ramia, the Ateneo’s director: “The first thing totalitarian regimes do is to attack institutions where different schools of thought and ideologies come together.”
“What is troubling about Venezuela is that anti-Semitism is being used as a political tool,” according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League. “It is fostered by the highest levels in the government, trickled down the government apparatus and is left unchallenged by officials in the Chávez regime,” the report said.
Polls suggest that more than 51 percent of voters support a constitutional amendment to end term limits for elected officials. But the government is not taking any chances. The growing student opposition movement has been subjected to close state surveillance and physically attacked by Chávista militants:
Student leaders say Chávez’s offensive against them is a sign of his desperation, since polls show the “yes” and “no” votes in a dead heat. “It’s the government that wants to make us fall into violence, not the other way around,” insists Mejia. “We’re the ones being threatened and harassed.” He points to a phone call between two students that was recorded by the government and broadcast on state-run media, as if to show how closely the opposition was being tracked. More disturbing, however, is the violence allegedly visited on anti-Chávez students by pro-Chávez thugs like La Piedrita, a sort of urban paramilitary group that Chávez has denounced but which the students complain hasn’t been restrained.
Chávez declared a national holiday this week, marked by a outdoor rally at the tomb of Simon Bolivar, to celebrate ten years in power. Companies that failed to recognize the occasion were threatened with fines even though the announcement – made without public notice – was of dubious legality.
Chávez used the occasion to warn that he might not take “no” for an answer if voters reject his attempt to extend his term of office indefinitely in the upcoming referendum. The referendum will take place against a backdrop of economic decline that threatens to undermine the regime’s power base and deplete the oil revenues it has used to buy favor and allies:
Treasury reserves are dwindling, electricity blackouts are becoming commonplace, public security is deteriorating, and the finances of the state-owned oil monopoly, PdVSA, are in apparent disarray. There is little reason to think that the decline will be reversed any time soon.
“Chávez has promised Venezuelans paradise but that paradise, which he calls socialism, depends on oil above $120,” said Alberto Barrera, a Chávez biographer.
The new US administration is looking to its Latin America friends to serve as “a counterweight to governments like those currently in power in Venezuela and Bolivia which pursue policies which do not serve the interests of their people or the region,” said James Steinberg, newly appointed Deputy Secretary of State.
His point appears to be borne out by the empirical evidence. Chávistas and their international sympathizers claim that literacy and education programs have had a transformative effect. But the regime’s health and human development indicators are rather poor, especially given the resources generated by the recent boom in oil prices. Contrary to Chávez’s claims to have eradicated illiteracy, there were more than 1 million illiterate Venezuelans at the end of 2005, and other indicators look no better:
The average share of the budget devoted to health, education and housing under Chávez (25%) is identical to that in the last eight years before his election, and even lower than under Carlos Andrés Pérez, the “neoliberal” president against whom Chávez attempted a coup in 1992.
The new US administration is promising to adopt a more assertive role in the region, countering Chávez’s promotion of authoritarian populism. “For too long, we have ceded the playing field to Chávez,” said Steinberg. “We intend to play a more active role in Latin America with a positive approach that avoids giving undue prominence to President Chávez’ theatrical attempts to dominate the regional agenda.”
Chávez has exploited US inattention to the region “to advance out-moded and anti-American ideologies,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during her nomination hearings. In recent years, Venezuela outspent the US five to one in foreign aid in Latin America, George Washington University professor Cynthia McClintock this week told a US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee.
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