El Comandante
Here's an informative and well balanced piece on the legacy of Hugo Chavez - 'El Comandante' - by David Aaronovitch writing in The Times.
Isn't it good to see someone in public life exposing the weasel words of Ken Livingstone - and to think Ken was the Labour party's candidate for London Mayor.
No wonder he lost to Boris Johnson.
The US was midwife to Comandante Chávez
By David Aaronovitch
Venezuela’s message is that all people desire liberty, dignity and democracy. Treat them as you would be treated
Pablo Neruda is a poet for the young; a poet for love and politics. Sometime in the late 1940s he wrote a poem about how the Americans treated his continent of South America.
The United Fruit Co began: “When the trumpet sounded everything was prepared on earth, and Jehovah gave the world to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other corporations. The United Fruit Company reserved for itself the most juicy piece, the central coast of my world, the delicate waist of America.”
Neruda, a Chilean, described the “dictatorship of flies” that ruled over the countries of the region, making it fertile for the great US companies. And he contrasted the treasured fruit that went back to America in the big ships, to the condition of the miserable workers who grew and picked it: “Meanwhile the Indians fall into the sugared depths of the harbors and are buried in the morning mists; a corpse rolls, a thing without name, a discarded number, a bunch of rotten fruit thrown on the garbage heap.”
Anyone from the political West trying to understand how someone like Hugo Chávez could be elected and re-elected by Venezuela’s voters should read that poem. When the “Comandante” recast all politics and all decisions as being about the war of poor versus rich and patriots against Yanquis, those lines, or something like them, were running through the heads of his listeners.
In the interwar years, the United States conceived an isolationist foreign policy based on its own self-interest. It would not be entangled in foreign alliances, but would work to make the US safer and more prosperous. Isolationism was replaced by war and war by Cold War. When America looked at the developing world it did not see a battle for democracy, but a fight against communism. If Anastasio Somoza was the strong man in Nicaragua and was America’s sonofabitch, then his denial of basic rights to his countrymen was of concern only to bleeding heart liberals. If, in 1954, the elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz was deemed (wrongly) pro-communist, it was the CIA’s job to help plotters to oust him. What came next was their own affair.
That was realpolitik before 1989. Though America did not organise the Chilean coup of 1973, it connived at it, and no South American of Chávez’s generation could or would ever forget the stadium full of peaceful dissidents and the executions that followed.
So, after a period of imprisonment for his own coup attempt in 1992, the charismatic soldier Hugo Chávez won the 1998 presidential election. His promise was to get rid of poverty, indignity and corruption. Chávez nationalised industries, confiscated land and gave it to co-operatives, used oil revenues to fund social programmes and significantly reduced extreme poverty in Venezuela. For those reasons he became a fifth head on the posters of the Left: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Castro, Chávez.
In his own head too. The journalist Rory Carroll recounts how, in edition 351 of Chávez’s interminable TV programme, Alo Presidente! , he walked round part of Caracas where once his hero Simón Bolívar had stayed. The mayor was by his side and an audience of admirers went with him. Suddenly Chávez switched from crooning songs and, pointing to buildings containing high-end shops and employing 2,000 people, ordered the mayor to expropriate them and build a cultural centre. A year later Carroll went to the place. It was boarded up and empty. The shops had gone, the centre had never materialised.
Bit by bit Venezuela has become Zimbabwe with oil: 90 per cent of the co-operatives have failed. Inflation is high, there has just been another devaluation, bureaucracy hampers enterprise and there are food shortages and power cuts. Every time his often badly thought-out and impulsive reforms created opposition, Chávez used anti-Americanism to squelch opponents. They were “agents” of the imperialist enemy. Dissenting judges could be imprisoned, newspapers fined and journalists incarcerated for works of satire. Human rights bodies were prevented from receiving money or help from abroad.
Chávez reverted to the old populist autocrat’s trick of using plebiscites to remove constitutional checks on his power. He abolished term limits, though, ironically, the fates set his greater term limit at almost exactly the same place as the old constitution had.
Round the world, if he discovered a dictator or a pariah calling itself socialist or anti-imperialist, Chávez embraced it. One of the funniest yet most disgraceful interviews given in the wake of his death was by Ken Livingstone on BBC radio yesterday. What, Ken was asked, about Chávez’s predilection for anti-democrats such as Mugabe, Gaddafi, Assad and Lukashenko, of Belarus.
Well, said the former mayor, as if teaching a class in Statesmanship 101 to idiots, “the simple fact is that if you’re a government in power you have to deal with regimes that are pretty unpleasant ... if presidents are only going to meet nice people they’re not going to have a very busy calendar”.
Actually Chávez, having described successive US presidents as “a donkey” and “a clown”, discovered in Assad “one of the liberators of the new world”. In Gaddafi he perceived a Libyan Bolívar, in Mugabe “a true freedom fighter” and Lukashenko’s repressive Belarus was “a model social state like the one we are beginning to create”. Not just filling his calendar, Ken, as you know perfectly well.
Yet Chávez (who, unlike his heroes, executed no one and created no concentration camps) was re-elected in what have rightly been called “free, not entirely fair elections”. Millions of Venezuelans found his rhetoric preferable to becoming again the “thing without name” of Neruda’s poem.
That to me is a lesson. Whatever has happened in Venezuela (and I fear for its immediate future now the Chávistas have been deprived of their icon) might have been different if, for decades before, the US had behaved better. America was unwitting midwife to Chávez, and the abused neocons, I think, are right where the realpolitikers are wrong. Treat people in other lands as you want to be treated in yours; as people desiring and deserving dignity, liberty and democracy. Such a sense of responsibility may not be a sufficient condition for peace and mutual prosperity, but it is a necessary one. The alternative is often to send a desperate people into the arms of those who simply want to rule. And rule. And rule.
