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Venezuelanalysis - Dec 29, 2004
www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1342

originally published by The Hindu - Dec 14, 2004
http://www.thehindu.com/2004/12/14/...21409410900.htm

Inside Venezuela, part 1

The Chavez phenomenon and the U.S.

By Siddharth Varadarajan - The Hindu

CARACAS: Shortly after he appeared on national television in October
2001 holding aloft bloody photographs of children killed by the U.S.
bombing of Afghanistan, President Hugo Chavez Frias of Venezuela
received a visit from Donna Hrinak, then Washington's Ambassador to the
oil-rich South American country.

Recalling his meeting with the U.S. envoy at an international conference
here last week, Mr. Chavez said his televised message had simply been
that one could not fight terrorism with terrorism. "But the Ambassador
came to me and demanded, `You must rectify your position.' I replied:
`You are talking to the President of the Bolivarian Republic of
Venezuela. You are dismissed. When you learn what the job of an
Ambassador is, you may come back'."

"As for our position," he thundered before an audience of artists and
intellectuals from around the world, "we did not rectify it. We ratified
it. We condemn 9/11 and the Madrid train bombing, but also the bombing
of cities like Fallujah and the assassination of children." The
"anti-terrorism" of the U.S.-led `war on terror,' he said in reply to a
question, "is simply terrorism. Justice is the only road to peace."

At a time when most countries are vying with each other for a place
under Pax Americana, the Venezuela of Mr. Chavez is an aberration, a
rude and insistent interruption in the otherwise triumphant march
towards the End of History. From the war on terror to free market
economics, privatisation, cutbacks on social expenditure and the
proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, Mr. Chavez opposes the
Washington orthodoxy on just about everything. He has embraced the Cuba
of Fidel Castro, supplying the socialist island petrol in exchange for
doctors, which the urban and rural poor in Venezuela never had access to
despite their country's vast oil wealth. "When Aznar (the former Spanish
Prime Minister) told me not to be friendly with Castro," herecalled: "I
said you have forgotten you are not Ferdinand VII."

But if Mr. Chavez and his supporters he handily won a recall
referendum earlier this year with a plurality of 60 per cent speak out
against the new imperialism of Washington, the Bush administration too
considers the Venezuelan leader an implacable foe. The U.S. resents his
efforts to get Latin America to unite and is afraid his subversive
social and political experiments might prove contagious in a region that
has been impoverished by more than two decades of neo-liberal economic
policies. "In order to defend humanity," Mr. Chavez declared last week,
"we have to go on the offensive. And now is the time to say that another
world is possible."

More than anything else, of course, the U.S. does not like the fact that
an independent-minded leader such as Mr. Chavez is sitting astride one
of the largest oil reservoirs in the world. Indeed, at 2.6 million
barrels a day, Venezuela is currently OPEC's (Organisation of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries) third largest producer of crude, behind
only Saudi Arabia and Iran. And the U.S. is its biggest customer.

In 2002, the U.S. supported a short-lived military coup against Mr.
Chavez, a former paratrooper who was elected President in 2000. The
putsch was defeated by a combination of people's power with thousands
of poor Venezuelans taking to the streets to defend their leader and
infighting within the traditional elites of the country.

Central Intelligence Agency documents recently released under the
Freedom of Information Act reveal that Washington knew of the coup plot
well before it was carried out. And once the coup failed, the U.S. used
the bipartisan Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy to
funnel money to the recall referendum campaign against Mr. Chavez.

Even his bitterest critics concede that Mr. Chavez's `Bolivarian
revolution' which combines elements of Marxism and Christianity with
the military populism so unique to the region makes him virtually
unbeatable politically without intervention from outside. "That's
assuming, of course, that the money he's pouring into unproductive
social programmes doesn't bankrupt the `revolution' first," a
businessman told The Hindu .

For Mr. Chavez, however, it is these social programmes in education,
health and food support which provide the main line of defence against
U.S. intervention.

At the graduation ceremony for Mission Robinson, the country's new adult
literacy programme on which several million dollars are being spent, he
handed out certificates and chatted animatedly with dozens of graduates
for several minutes each.

Many of the men and women were in their 60s and 70s and had just learnt
how to read and write.

"Some people say, hey Chavez, why are we spending so much on adult
literacy and not on physical infrastructure," he said later. "My answer
is that before buildings and highways, we have to build a sovereign
people who can live with dignity."

) Copyright 2000 - 2004 The Hindu

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