Chavez-Vous? Hugo dances with democracy

If the Western media is to be believed, Hugo Chavez is making a strong application for membership of the axis of evil. In the last 48 hours alone, he “seized control” of Venezuelan ports, announced a visit to Iran, nationalised cement companies and called Obama a “poor ignoramus”.

Yet while the media denounce him as a Bolivarian socialist, many US right-wingers might agree with the assessment of Obama. A larger proportion of fiscal conservatives still would also applaud another one of his announcements to reduce government spending by 7 per cent to avoid recession. And his nationalisations are being copied by Western leaders frazzled by the failure of their financial systems.

Chavez may sound like a mass of contradictions but of one thing there is little doubt: he loves power. He has been in power for ten years, won two elections, and last year he won a referendum eliminating term limits which opened a way for him run again as president in 2012 and beyond. Here are the actions of a president-for-life.

As such, he is now keen to eliminate opposition. On Thursday a prosecutor called for the arrest of Manuel Rosales. Rosales is the mayor of Maracaibo, Venezuela's second-largest city, and is a leading opponent of President Chavez. The 56 year old Rosales ran off against Chavez in the 1996 election and lost in a 3:2 margin but established himself as the leader of the Opposition in the process.

The prosecutor Katiuska Plaza said she was seeking the custody order for Rosales on the basis of accusations of corruption levelled in the national assembly (parliament) against him. Rosales could face 3 to 10 years if proven guilty of the charges. Rosales called the charges as “an order from Chavez” and said it was “a way of criminalizing politics and also to crush those of us who have dissident voices in this country”. Rosales was referring to 2007 when Chavez shut down one of those dissident voices when he took over a private TV station. Chavez annexed Telesur in revenge for supporting the 2002 coup against him.

In a strange but absorbing interview, writer Tariq Ali (whom the interviewer Jorge Sotirios called “the thinking woman’s Omar Sharif') defended Chavez's stance on Telesur. Sotirios noted how Ali is no stranger to South America and was once detained in Bolivia for his likeness to Che Guavara’s offsider “Pombo”. Ali said the government takeover of Telesur wouldn’t change the station which has always taken a Latin American view. He says the network is similar to the BBC and the CNN. While the British and American stations defend the “Washington consensus”, they defend the opposition to the “Washington Consensus”. And, says Ali, they are very open about it: “If we act in concert, we can do lot more things for our people, instead of constantly seeing ourselves through a mirror lifted up by the United States.”

But while this is a laudable aim, Chavez’s control of the media is making it easier for him to be always seen in the mirror. In their annual report for 2008 Reporters San Frontieres says Chavez now controls nearly all the country’s broadcasting - a score of radio stations, the state-owned TV stations Venezolana de Televisión, Telesur, Vive TV, Asemblea Nacional and Tves, as well as the national phone company CANTV.

Yet there is still hope. Venezuela still enjoys a vibrant public debate in which anti-government and pro-government media are equally vocal in their criticism and defence of Chavez. One can ask for little more in a democracy – even one where a long-term government is looking to change the rules in their favour; just ask Queensland Labor. The Chavez paradox shows little sign of unravelling.

Venezuelan opposition TV station moves to YouTube

The television station shut down by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is continuing to broadcast daily by moving its operation to YouTube. The Spanish news service EFE is reporting Radio Caracas Television (RCTV) is now airing its news program “El Observador” on YouTube. President Hugo Chavez had ordered RCTV, Venezuela’s oldest television station, to be shut down on 28 May.

El Observador’s YouTube edition has been covering the national student protests against the government’s decision. Meanwhile Caracol, RCTV’s affiliate station in Colombia is also broadcasting the El Observador newscast nightly on its international signal. 800,000 people in Venezuela will be able to continue watching the show in its midnight timeslot.

RCTV was Venezuela’s oldest and most popular television station. It had long been openly critical of the Chavez regime and an outlet for opposition parties. Chavez accused the station of supporting the failed 2002 coup against him and violating broadcast laws. He announced in January this year that his government would not renew the broadcast license for the station when it came up for renewal in May.

In 2002, RCTV was one of four opposition channels that called for protests to overthrow Chavez. When Chavez regained power after an abortive coup, RCTV and the opposition channels played regular programs instead of covering the political crisis. One of RCTV’s newsreaders quit the station for state-financed channel Telesur, saying he moved because he was disgusted with the way “everything was censored” against Chavez during the coup.

RCTV has been broadcasting in Venezuela for 53 years. It claims 40 per cent of the daily viewing audience with its diet of comedies, soap operas and game shows. In an opinion poll in April 70 per cent opposed the closure, 16 per cent approved and 13 per cent declined to answer. Those opposed were more upset about losing their favourite programmes than any erosion of freedom of speech.

RCTV’s top executive, Marcel Granier said Chavez’s decision is a turn toward totalitarianism. Granier accused Chavez of being "afraid of free thought, of opinion, of criticism." He claimed the closing of the station will affect "more than 200 journalists, 3,000 workers and the entire Venezuelan society”. His station’s supporters banged on pots and pans, blew whistles and played recordings of air raid sirens in protests that rang out in many Caracas neighbourhoods on the night the station was axed.

The station was taken off the air two days after the Chavez-controlled Supreme Court ruled RCTV's broadcasting equipment be made available to the state-funded channel that will replace it. It will join fellow state-run channel Venezolana de Television (VTV) and others. These stations show Hugo Chavez’s socialist revolution as an unmitigated success. VTV’s news diet is reminiscent of the Soviet era with its vignettes of happy peasants, singing children and a nation grateful for subsidised food and free medical care. While it occasionally is critical of government officials, it never attacks the president.

Venezuela's four main independent TV networks (RCTV, Venevision, Globovision and Televen) are owned by high-profile businessmen who all opposed Chavez in the coup. Chavez described the four tycoons as “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”. Two of these stations Venevision and Televen have toned down their criticism of the government in more recent times.
Gustavo Cisneros is the billionaire owner of Venevision TV and numerous joint ventures with multinationals such as Coca-Cola, has been dubbed the Rupert Murdoch of Latin America. In 2002 Chavez described as a "coup-plotter" and a "fascist". However Jimmy Carter helped broker a deal between the two men in 2004. Cisneros removed anti-Chavez news and commentary from Venevision.

With RCTV off the air, that leaves the 24-hour news station Globovision as the only genuine opposition voice in Venezuela. Globovision only reaches 10 per cent of the country’s TV audience. Nevertheless Chavez has now publicly threatened them and CNN claiming they were instigating a “vast destabilisation plan”. On 28 May Communication and information minister William Lara brought a complaint against Globovision accusing it of broadcasting content “inciting violence.” The complaint was that station broadcast footage of the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II at a time when Chavez was criticising Pope Benedict. Lara said this was tantamount to calling for the president’s assassination. The complaint is likely to be the first step in a strategy to eventually take it off the air entirely.

Chavez’s latest move to silence critics has lost him considerable sympathy among Western liberals. NGOs such as Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists have all condemned the moves to silence RCTV and Globovision. The Venezuelan media is now looking dangerously lopsided. “This arbitrary decision thwarts Venezuelans’ right to seek and receive information and represents a setback for democracy in this country,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “Not only has a dissenting voice been silenced but message has been sent to the media as a whole.”

Chavez, the new Bolivar

On May 14 this year, Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, addressed an adoring crowd at the Camden Town Hall, London. The Independent newspaper described the event as a “mixture of a Latin American populist rally, an evangelical meeting and a football match.”

London is the latest stop on his European tour which has taken him to the Vatican and Vienna. In his rambling two hour speech without notes at Camden, he quoted Rosa Luxembourg, Pythagoras, Karl Marx and George Bernard Shaw. He attacked US foreign policy on Iran and Iraq. He claims, not without reason, that the US government are plotting to assassinate him. “I know there are plans to kill me, but I really don't care. It will not stop me,” he said to the crowd.

On August 22, 2005, influential right wing demagogue Pat Robertson openly called for his assassination on television. He told the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “The 700 Club” that “I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war”. He went on to say “It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”

And indeed Chavez would not be first Latin American president that the US has forcibly removed from office. The Monroe Doctrine is not idle theory. In December 1823 US president James Monroe issued a statement of intent to European governments of America’s growing power, “the American continents were no longer open to European colonization, and that any effort to extend European political influence into the New World would be considered by the United States as dangerous to our peace and safety." From then on, this cornerstone of American foreign policy meant they would reserve the right to interfere with domestic affairs in Latin American countries whenever it felt their interests were being threatened.

In more recent times, leaders such as Salvador Allende and Manuel Noriega have been ousted from power through overt or covert American involvement. Allende was the first democratically elected Marxist leader in the world when he won the Chilean presidential election in 1970. His regime and life were brought to a spectacular end on September 11, 1973 when General Pinochet led a military coup and bombed the presidential palace with the implicit backing of US State Secretary, Henry Kissinger. Noriega was a CIA operative in the 1970s and de facto military leader of Panama in the 1980s. His relationship with his ex-bosses turned sour in 1989 and the Americans invaded in “Operation Just Cause.” Noriega was arrested and imprisoned in Florida for drug trafficking.

Chavez is a major problem for America because of its large dependence on Venezuelan oil in the middle of a supply crisis. So the US is now trying to turn Chavez into another Noriega. They have accused him of supporting and supplying weapons to the FARC, Colombia's largest revolutionary guerrilla movement. FARC is also accused of drug smuggling and terrorist activities. US newspapers such as the New York Times are fanning the links between Chavez, FARC and drugs in a similar manner to the way Noriega was demonised prior to the 1989 invasion.

Hugo Chavez will be fifty years old on July, 28 this year. He was the second son of schoolteachers in the town of Sabaneta in the Western state of Barinas. His father is now the governor of that state. At 17, Chavez joined the Venezuelan academy of Military Sciences where he achieved Master’s degrees in military science and engineering. Chavez remained in the army and gradually worked his way through the ranks to become lieutenant colonel.

While a student, he developed his key philosophy: Bolivarianism. It is named for the greatest of South America’s generals and fellow Venezuelan Simon Bolivar. Bolivar proclaimed Venezuelan independence from Spain in 1810. He fought running battles with the Spanish over the next 11 years before emerging as president of the original republic of Colombia (now Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela). He also took Peru and upper Peru was renamed Bolivia in his honour. Chavez saw Bolivarianism as promoting the unification of Latin America. As president he changed the constitution and name of the country in 1999 to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Chavez first came to national prominence in 1992. Venezuela was undergoing a crisis under neo-liberal Carlos Andres Perez who was serving his second term as leader. Venezuela’s economic stability was under threat when the Arab countries raised their oil production quotas to aid the collapse of the oil-dependent Soviet Union. Prices plummeted and Venezuela had to introduce austerity measures. Chavez and fellow army officer Francisco Arias Cardenas founded the MBR-200 (Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionaro 200) and plotted to overthrow the government. The coup of February 4 failed. Chavez only had the loyalty of 10% of the armed forces and failed to take the national TV station. Perez eluded capture and Chavez surrendered. He was sent to prison but many poor Venezuelans saw him as a victim who had stood up against government corruption. Perez was ousted in 1993 and Chavez was pardoned by the new president Rafael Caldera in 1994. In 1998 Chavez campaigned for the presidency and gained significant support from Venezuela’s two largest banks. He won the December election with 56% of the popular vote.

He immediately got to work on his sweeping changes which included road building, housing construction and mass vaccination. He also halted planned privatisations of the national social security system, the aluminium industry and the oil sector. He lobbied OPEC to reduce oil production to increase revenues. He was re-elected with an increased majority in 2000. In 2002 his reform of the state oil company precipitated a military coup.

He was replaced and arrested on April 11, 2002. This event sparked massive pro-Chavez protests and universal condemnation from the rest of South America. Chavez was restored to the leadership in triumph two days later. Only then did the US condemn the coup. The British Sunday broadsheet, The Observer, reported that the coup was linked to three senior US government officials, national security adviser Elliot Abrams, special envoy Otto Reich and intelligence chief John Negroponte.

Internal opposition to Chavez continues to be fierce. In 2004, Sumate (Spanish for “Join in”), a shadowy volunteer civil association funded by the US State Department collected millions of signatures and activated the 1999 Constitution's presidential recall provision. Chavez survived this with a 60% ‘no’ vote against the measure.

Chavez continues to use Venezuela's increasing oil revenues to focus on expanding social programs. Economic activity has also picked up markedly, reaching double-digit growth in 2004. He has forged links with Argentina’s president Kirchner, China’s Jintao, Cuba’s Castro and Iran’s Admadinejad. He ordered US troops and Christian missions out of his country in 2005 and gave away almost seven thousand square kilometres of land to Amazonian tribes. He has denounced US foreign policy but was the first leader to offer assistance to America after Cyclone Katrina. He told AP "We place at the disposition of the people of the United States in the event of shortages we have drinking water, food, we can provide fuel”. His offer was turned down.

Chavez continues to polarise world opinion. It is probably too early to judge his impact on his country. But he remains a refreshing different voice on the world scene. It is no wonder the crowd at Camden Town Hall gave him a superstar reception.