crossposted from an entry in a blog my coworkers and I have, Americas, Americans
Chavez and me
The upcoming referendum on the rule of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela presents an interesting quandry for the progressive/liberal community in the United States, as this post from MyDD seems to show.
I was disgusted when I saw it at first -- the final thought, "A victory for Chavez is a defeat for Bush," particularly upset me. The implication is that, as a card carrying member of the Anybody But Bush crowd, a good progressive should support the Chavez government in its attempts to win the election. I'm not going to go into the whole history of the recall effort, or Venezuelan history for that matter, but clearly Venezuela is now a country so polarized that it makes the Bush/ABB divisions seem like a polite disagreement.
Of course, the term "recall" immediately brings to mind California and the Gropernator. Add to that the Bush administration's (I'd say half-hearted) support of a 2002 businessman's coup that briefly overthrew the democratically elected Chavez, and progressive sympathies seem certainly warranted. However, Hugo Chavez is not a man worthy of anyone's sympathies. He finds himself in a difficult situation, his political life, and perhaps life in general, possibly nearing an end, but it is a situation that he has brought entirely upon himself. By relying so much on the masses of poor Venezuelans to maintain his tenous claim to legitimacy, he is injecting into the population critically high amounts of the poisoinous rhetoric of class warfare, which Latin America has seen for too many decades now, darkening the horizons of his country's once bright future.
If you have seen Michael Moore's Farhenheight 9/11 you probably remember the opening scenes, those which centered on then Vice President Al Gore, in his role as President of the Senate, certifying the dubious electoral results that left him jobless (the first of many) and GWB the leader of a then free world. The audience is meant to think, "The horror! How could this be! How could he do this! He's ignoring the well-voiced opposition of the Congressional Black Caucus, who actually want to help him!" That scene, however, has for me a much more powerful message: despite extreme duress under which US democracy found itself, it held strong. The defeated candidate remained defeated, even when he certainly could've manipulated the democratic "rules of the game" to his benefit, to at least drag out the certification of the election and certainly to delegitimize his victorious opponent. For that, we are all better off -- the world's most influential democracy continued to function, and despite the destruction that Bush has caused, the higher ideals of the American Republic have remained, allowing us, this November, to see to it that our voices are heard and the country continues to move forward.
This is not the case in Venezuela. Chavez will do anything he can to manipulate the courts, the congress, and the electorate, to further his "Bolivarian Revolution" -- a nice name given to a process which has resulted in the disenfranchisement of a huge portion of the population. My heart is a revolutionary heart, I think, and a term like that, combined with rhetoric about giving the poor access to food, jobs, healthcare, any kind of better life, certainly stirs me. In fact, when Chavez won the election in 1999, and then when he won the ensuing battle with the old congress, I was truly hopeful. But all he has brought to Venezuela is renewed class warfare, economic stagnation (the surging demand for oil, of which Venezuela is the US's third largest supplier, has mitigated it, at least statistically, a bit), and, above all, a very, very uncertain future.
I think that the opposition to Chavez, a confusing, multifaceted blob of everything from corrupt oilmen to truly inspiring and principaled young leaders, has done a bad job at showing why they're the right choice for Venezuela. I don't want to endorse their cause by any means -- I'm not Venezuelan, I've never been there, and what I hear in New York is so filtered and processed I don't think I can base any real opinions on it. However, I can say, please don't tell me a vote for Chavez is a vote against Bush. Chavez may spew vitriol against Bush, but he probably will against Kerry too. He's throwing democracy out the window in favor of his one-party dictatorship-in-the-making. He encourages violence and suppresses independent thought. If he defeats the recall, he might just break the back of democracy in the country he professes to love so much.
