Fw: Venezuela: Chávez Shaping Country to His Vision

["Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

 July 28, 2000

 Chávez Shaping Country to His Vision
 http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/
 americas/072800venezuela-chavez.html

 By LARRY ROHTER


 CARACAS, Venezuela, July 27 -- He promised a revolution, and he has
 kept his word. Since being swept to power here 18 months ago, Hugo
 Chávez has uprooted every institution, assaulted every elite and
 derided every orthodoxy with the unrelenting combativeness of the army
 paratrooper he used to be.

 The Congress and Supreme Court he called "corrupt" and "worm eaten"
 are gone, and the two political parties that governed for 40 years
 have collapsed. The military's role has been vastly expanded, the
 powerful government oil company he criticized as "a state within the
 state" has been purged and the authority of governors and mayors has
 been curtailed.

 In speech after speech, he has attacked the business, opposition and
 media leaders who have expressed doubts about his methods and
 objectives, calling them "degenerates" and "squealing pigs." When
 Roman Catholic bishops dared suggest that he should be less
 confrontational, he dismissed them as "devils in vestments."

 The centerpiece of Mr. Chávez's plan to transform Venezuela, which has
 been the United States' leading source of imported oil in recent
 years, is a new Constitution he hails as "the most democratic in the
 world." Hand-tailored for him in a Constituent Assembly dominated by
 his leftist Patriotic Pole movement, it enlarges the powers of the
 state while weakening the legislature and judiciary.

 Now the former army colonel, who will be 46 on Friday, seems assured
 of at least six more years in office, thanks to provisions in the new
 charter that extend the presidential term by one year and eliminate a
 ban on immediate re-election. An election scheduled for Sunday to
 "relegitimize" his rule and choose governors and a new Congress is
 expected to hand him a sweeping victory.

 "Oligarchs tremble, because now is when the revolution is going
 forward," he warned recently. "This is going to be delicious: we're
 going to deliver a knockout punch to the counterrevolution."

 For the Latin American left, hungry for a homegrown hero, Mr. Chávez
 is a godsend: a charismatic military man who condemns "savage
 capitalism," embraces Fidel Castro and promises social justice. An
 orator who is by turns spellbinding and funny, Mr. Chávez has gathered
 the poor into a powerful force that is demanding change.

 But for many others, unwilling to forget the unsuccessful coup he led
 eight years ago, Mr. Chávez reawakens memories of the authoritarian
 caudillo -- the classic military strongman with little patience for
 the give-and-take of democracy. To them, his language reeks of class
 hatred and demagoguery, his vituperative attacks foreshadowing even
 greater conflicts to come.

 "His movement is contradictory, and Hugo Chávez is a divided soul,"
 said Teodoro Petkoff, a former guerrilla and government official who
 is now editor of an irreverent new daily newspaper here, Tal Cual. "At
 the same time he is Menshevik and Bolshevik, Girardist and Jacobin,
 Danton and Robespierre."

 In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez seems to be everywhere, his image plastered
 on posters, his voice booming over the airwaves. But the man
 himself -- as well as a clear picture of how he intends to exercise
 the enormous power he has been accumulating -- remains elusive.

 He was elected in a landslide in December 1998 by promising a
 "peaceful social revolution" that would usher in a "golden age."
 So far he has failed to deliver either prosperity or equality: the
 Venezuelan economy shrank by 7 percent last year and more than half
 the work force remains unemployed or is working in the underground
 economy. The well-off, fearful of his declarations, have spirited more
 than $8 billion out of the country, mostly to the United States, since
 he came to power, according to Venezuelan central bank data.

 He has ordered government security forces not to move against
 squatters who invade buildings or farms, and has just backed a measure
 that would expropriate landholdings that the government deems to be
 "idle."

 His followers, drawn from the 80 percent of Venezuelans who live below
 the poverty line, have been kept in a permanent state of agitation.
 His speeches refer to his "plan of battle," the need to "take every
 piece of space by assault" and efforts to "force the adversaries of
 the people into their caves and foxholes," but offer few policy
 specifics.

 "Now brothers, let us unsheath the sword of truth," Mr. Chávez intoned
 in a recent speech. "All of you are warriors, so let us once again
 seek the oracle of war and put on our combat boots. I am certain that
 from today on the popular offensive will be as implacable as ever and
 that the attack will come from all sides because the Venezuelan people
 have clasped their banner and are going on to battle and victory
 again."

 Given his two decades in the army, it is hardly surprising that
 Mr.Chávez's public declarations have a martial tone or that he has
 brought large numbers of former military officers into his government.

 "Von Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by other
 means, but it also works the other way around," he said in an
 interview. "Whether it be war or some other kind of challenge, you are
 always talking about struggle, battles, advances and retreats."

 But he also draws heavily on religious imagery, comparing himself to
 Jesus and his opponents to the demons of the apocalypse. When Roman
 Catholic bishops sent him a letter last spring cautioning him that it
 was false to suggest that "God has blessed one political project"
 above others, he responded with a 20-page letter that read like a
 papal encyclical, complete with biblical citations.

 Mr. Chávez leavens his aggressive remarks with jokes, proverbs, bits
 of popular songs, asides to his wife, Marisabel, and anecdotes about
 friends, his boyhood and his days as a baseball player. His opponents
 say they find his performances coarse and clownish, but his folksy
 approach has helped cement his ties to ordinary Venezuelans. "He is
 one of us," said Beatriz Tovar Mendieta, a washerwoman here. "We've
 never had another president like that before."

 Mr. Chávez is also more closely identified with the masses in terms of
 the ethnic or racial divide that characterizes Venezuela. The
 predecessors he attacks as members of a "rotten oligarchic elite" are
 typical "mantuanos," as people with European features and pretensions
 are called here.

 In contrast, Mr. Chavez is a typical "pardo," or brown-skinned person,
 with traces of Indian blood, "curly hair, Chinese-looking eyes, a
 thick mouth and an aquiline nose," in the words of one of his
 biographers, Ángela Zago. In speeches, the president has been known to
 underline his resemblance to his followers by referring to himself as
 "the Indian from Barinas."

 William Lara, who met the president when both were studying political
 science in a postgraduate course a decade ago and is now one of his
 closest political advisers, said: "Like Hugo Chávez I am from the
 plains, which is a place that has very few trees. So when a plainsman
 sees a tree, his first impulse is to look behind it to see if someone
 is waiting there to ambush him. Hugo Chávez has that characteristic."

 Combined with that self-reliance is a distrust of and disdain for
 technocrats that leads him to rely on his own instincts more than
 advice from experts. "You need to take an aspirin, but they prescribe
 Viagra," Mr. Chávez complained in a recent speech.

 Complex Attitude Toward U.S.

 Mr. Chávez's relationship with the United States is no less
 complicated. Aside from a passion for baseball that works its way into
 almost every speech, he is a fan of American movies and television,
 referring to them almost as frequently as he adorns his speeches with
 quotations from Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Walt Whitman.

 But when floods and mudslides inundated the Caribbean coast last
 December, killing thousands, Mr. Chávez refused help from an American
 military team. Their presence, he said, would offend Venezuela's
sovereignty, even though he allowed in doctors from Cuba, relief
 workers from Spain and Mexico and aid from China and Pakistan.
>
 He personally takes responsibility for the dramatic rise in oil prices
 and record gasoline prices in the United States. On the campaign trail
 here, he reminds voters it was his government's decision to lower
 production and adhere to OPEC quotas that has resulted in a
 quadrupling of the price of a barrel of Venezuelan crude since he took
 office 18 months ago.

 Not only has Venezuela often been the leading source of oil for the
 United States, but the country's minister of energy, Alí Rodríguez, is
 now OPEC president. In recent speeches, Mr. Chávez has bragged to
 Venezuelans about telephone calls from President Clinton asking for
 relief on oil prices, but he has also made it clear that he does not
 intend to give any ground.

 Once the election is over, Mr. Chávez plans a Mideast tour to discuss
 with "our Arab brothers," as he calls them, an OPEC heads of state
 meeting scheduled here in late September. Although he plans stops in
 Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Mr. Chávez seems bent on tweaking Washington
 by visiting Iraq, Iran and Libya, and inviting their leaders to the
 conference.

 "Imagine what the pharisees will say when they see me with Saddam
 Hussein," Mr. Chávez said with a big grin in a recent speech.

 Indeed, his foreign policy has shown a fascination with rogue elements
 around the world. One peculiar example is his correspondence with
 Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the Venezuelan-born former guerrilla known as
 Carlos the Jackal, who was convicted of murder and kidnappings across
 Europe and once organized an attack on OPEC ministers.

 In addition, Mr. Chávez has cited the government of Col. Muammar
 el-Qaddafi in Libya as a model for participatory democracy. He has
 also repeatedly praised Mr. Castro's rule in Cuba, much to the
 distress of Venezuelans still resentful of Cuban support for past
 guerrilla movements here, saying both nations are "swimming together
 toward the same sea of happiness."

 Mr. Chavez abruptly withdrew Venezuela from annual American-sponsored
 joint naval maneuvers and just this week accused the United States of
 trying to install a missile base in neighboring Guyana. But perhaps
 most immediately troubling to Washington is his decision to ban
 American drug surveillance flights from using Venezuelan airspace.

 For now, the American response has been restrained, arguing, no doubt
 with an eye on oil supplies, that forbearance and dialogue are the
 best way to avoid further radicalization of the situation here.

 But Republican members of Congress are clamoring for sanctions against
 Venezuela, and the United States ambassador who has been carrying out
 the wait-and-see policy here is to be succeeded next month by Donna
 Jean Hrinak, who as ambassador to the Dominican Republic took a hard
 line against that country's wily authoritarian president, Joaquín
 Balaguer.


 'A Tough Little Kid'

 Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was born in Sabaneta de Barinas, a small town
 in the vast, sparsely-populated savannah that is Venezuela's
 equivalent of the Great Plains. As teachers in the local elementary
 school, his parents, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez and Helena Frías, had
> social but not material status.

 "We grew up there selling bananas and sowing corn" and when students
 finished the sixth grade "we had to go somewhere else, to the state
 capital, if we were going to continue our studies," Mr. Chávez
 recalled in an autobiography.

 The new student in the capital was first ridiculed as a country
 bumpkin but he soon stood out for his ability to recite poems and
 speeches at local festivals and for his athletic prowess. Baseball is
 the national pastime here, and Mr. Chávez excelled as both a
 left-handed pitcher and a power-hitting first baseman.

 "He was a tough little kid, mischievous, a real talker and dreamer,
 but as tenacious as hell," José (Tintán) López, Mr. Chávez's baseball
 coach, said in an interview. "Even when he was 7 or 8, he could put
 the ball where he wanted and wasn't afraid to come in on a batter with
 his fastball."

 Indirectly, it was baseball that led to Mr. Chávez's military career.
 His plan was to qualify for the army's team and capture the attention
 of major league scouts.

 But he soon developed arm trouble and his ambitions shifted.

 "When I met some officers and read a bit of history, I felt something
 stirring inside me," he has said.

 He drew inspiration from Latin American military leaders like Juan
 Velasco of Peru, Juan Perón of Argentina and Omar Torrijos of
 Panama -- men who used their power to shake up the status quo, not
reinforce it.
>
After graduation he was assigned to a succession of posts: an armored
 unit, antiguerrilla duty along the Colombian border, a military ethics
> instructor, paratrooper training and eventually staff duty at the
 Ministry of Defense. But there was also a conspiratorial side he was
 careful to keep hidden from his superiors.

 "We were a group of four or five captains who used to jog together in
 the afternoons, and one day in 1983 Chávez suggested we swear an oath
 to fight against corruption and for the welfare of our country,"
 recalled Jesús Urdaneta Hernández, a former classmate and friend who
 recently broke with the president. "From that moment on, we began to
 study the problems of Venezuela in a systematic way, and as time
 passed we got more and more young officers to join us."

 A Two-Year Term in Prison

> After world oil prices collapsed in the early 1980's, neither of the
 country's two political parties proved able to govern effectively or
 honestly in a situation that called for belt-tightening. In 1989, a
 popular uprising against an International Monetary Fund austerity
 program resulted in the deaths of several hundred people and convinced
 Mr. Chávez and his co-conspirators that the system could no longer
 function.

 On Feb. 4, 1992, Mr. Chávez, Francisco Arias Cárdenas, then his
 closest comrade-in-arms but now his challenger in Sunday's vote, and
 other officers attacked the presidential palace. It was a bloody
 failure, resulting in the deaths of more than a score of soldiers. But
> most Venezuelans caught their first glance of their future leader
 then, and Mr. Chávez has described the episode as the turning point in
his life.

> After surrendering, he was paraded in front of television cameras,
wearing the bright red military beret that he and his followers today
 wear as the symbol of their movement, to call on the last holdout
 units to lay down their arms.

 "For now, comrades, the objectives that we established have
 unfortunately not been achieved in the capital," the young army
 colonel said, with a touch of bravado that resonated deeply among
 ordinary people. Then he was bundled off to jail

 By Mr. Chávez's own account, the two-plus years he spent there were
 devoted largely to reading and debating. In an interview last year,
 Mr. Chávez described himself as "a promiscuous reader," with a reading
 list that included Camus, Cicero, Martin Luther King, Mao,
 Montesquieu, Neruda, Nietzche, Ortega y Gasset, Rousseau, Alvin
 Toffler and Walt Whitman, to name a few.

 Visitors of all political persuasions were allowed to see him,
 including some of the most influential members of what is now his
 government. Among them were two veterans of the left who would become
 his mentors: Luis Miquilena, now head of the Congress, and José
 Vicente Rangel, his foreign minister.

 After Mr. Chávez was freed in 1994, Mr. Miquilena and other admirers
 decided he needed to travel abroad because he knew little of the
 world.

 Because of his role in the attempted overthrow of a democratically
 elected government, the United States refused to grant him a visa, a
 policy that remained in effect until he was elected president. But he
 traveled throughout Latin America, and on one trip he met an obscure
 Argentine sociologist named Norberto Ceresole.

 Mr. Ceresole's language can be murky, but in essence he envisions
 political leadership as an almost mystical bond between the masses and
 a charismatic figure. Such a "post-democratic" relationship eliminates
> the need for political parties, he argues, because the military can
 more reliably serve as a sort of conveyor belt between the leader and
 the led.

 To critics, such notions are little more than warmed-over fascism.
 Mr. Ceresole also denies the Holocaust and calls for third world
 coalitions to counter the power of the United States.

 Just after Mr. Chávez was elected, Mr. Ceresole visited Venezuela and
 proudly described the president-elect as "my disciple." Mr. Chávez was
 clearly irritated by the remarks and, according to Mr. Urdaneta, then
 his secret police chief, ordered the Argentine to leave.

 Nevertheless, many Venezuelans remain convinced that Mr. Ceresole's
> ideas influence Mr. Chávez's government.

> As he was discovering Mr. Ceresole, Mr. Chávez made his first trip to
Havana, where he was welcomed by Mr. Castro. At a 1994 news conference
> there, Mr. Chávez, clearly dazzled by having been treated almost as a
 head of state, was full of admiration for Mr. Castro and the Cuban
 revolution.

 He has continued to visit Havana as president, even playing baseball
 with Mr. Castro last year, and has offered Cuba economic aid.

 To Mr. Chávez's critics, the president's fascination with two figures
 as ideologically divergent as Mr. Castro and Mr. Ceresole indicates he
 has no core beliefs of his own, only a set of postures that he tailors
 for his audiences.

 "On Wall Street, he talks about the wonders of capitalism, in China he
 quotes from Chairman Mao, and in England, he praises Tony Blair and
 the Third Way" said Mr. Urdaneta. "He wants to be on good terms with
 everybody, so he says what people want to hear. We will only see the
 true Hugo Chávez emerge after this election."

 A Time to Deliver

 That chapter will open after the vote on Sunday when pressure to
 deliver results can only mount.

 But "there doesn't seem to be a coherent plan," said Robert Bottome,
 editor of Veneconomía, the leading business newsletter here. "The
 formal economy is being more and more destroyed, and I don't think it
 is deliberate. It's just that he doesn't understand, he doesn't know
 what he's doing."

 And even as the hour of his greatest triumph draws closer, Mr. Chávez
 has passed up an opportunity to be magnanimous or conciliatory.
 Instead, he has stepped up attacks on all who question his vision or
 recoil at the conflict he says he relishes.

 "There is no third way here," he said recently. "No, here there is
 only revolution and counterrevolution, and we are going to annihilate
 the counterrevolution."


 Copyright 2000 The New York Times