Venezuela’s stalemate

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the leftist populist who was inaugurated Wednesday as president of Brazil, has been hinting that he doesn’t intend to diverge much from the free-market economic policies that have brought his country eight years of steady growth and stability. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t need to look too far for cautionary lessons.

To the south, Argentina’s corrupt and spineless political elite has spent a year in a futile quest to evade the consequences of its bad financial management during the 1990s, even as the country’s living standard has plummeted.

To the north, an even worse Latin-American nightmare is underway: Venezuela, ruined and riven by the disastrous attempt of populist President Hugo Chavez to remake the country with half-baked socialism, is mired in a political standoff that risks civil war.

Da Silva may have been elected with the votes of Brazilians disillusioned with what Latins describe as the “liberal” economic model of private ownership and free trade; but Brazil’s neighbors are vividly demonstrating how perilous it can be to depart from that model, in the absence of a coherent alternative.

For all the region’s current troubles, nothing approaches the chaos that now afflicts Venezuela. A national strike called by the opposition to Chavez entered its second month Wednesday, with no end in sight. Intended to force the President to resign or agree to early elections, the stoppage has succeeded only in crippling Venezuela’s oil-exporting industry, the world’s fifth largest, which supplies the United States with 15 percent of its imported oil and 10 percent of its gasoline.

World oil prices have risen above $31 a barrel, Venezuelans have had to wait in long lines to fuel their cars, and the government has lost some $1.5 billion in revenue -- and yet the gulf between Chavez and the more than 60 percent of the population that opposes him only grows deeper.

Sadly, neither side is committed to preserving Venezuela’s battered democracy. Chavez, a former coup plotter who was first elected in 1999, helped bring on the crisis with a series of constitutional rewrites and referendums that extended his term to 2007 and concentrated power in his hands; opponents, who include both business and labor leaders, talk of an electoral solution but clearly hope to force the President from office, either through street demonstrations or a military coup.

As the strike drags on, and the risk of violence increases, the crisis is exposing the weakness of institutions and leadership in the American hemisphere.

Last year the much-derided European Union managed to arrest the implosion of Macedonia, another polarized country, with an aggressive and well-coordinated intervention.

But in Venezuela the only help has come from the secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, who has tried to broker a compromise but lacks the resources or the clout to do so on his own.

The Bush administration, distracted by Iraq, has conspicuously stumbled in trying to address Venezuela; other Latin-American nations that could play a role, including Brazil, have been largely passive.

There is not much tradition of collective action in the region, and history has given US intervention a mostly bad reputation. But Venezuelans are stalemated; if nothing is done, a country that is a vital oil supplier and has preserved a democracy through four decades may plunge into anarchy.

If the Bush administration will do nothing, perhaps da Silva can take the lead. The Washington Post

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