Perils of Chavez, and others to follow

www.berkshireeagle.com62671143303,00.html Article Last Updated: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 - 5:16:07 AM MST

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is an unusual kind of socialist. He offers all of the usual anti-capitalist boiler plate but is currently in the process of breaking a strike, which is usually the province of the cruel industrialists that socialists detest. Like Fidel Castro, he wants to foment revolution throughout the Western hemisphere, and unlike Mr. Castro he has the economic muscle to cause trouble outside his borders. He should concern Washington and the international community more than he has.

Yesterday, striking leaders of the nationalized oil industry acknowledge that daily production had exceeded 1 million barrels for the first time in nearly two months, indicating that Mr. Chavez was beating back the strike. The strike was called 57 days ago to pressure the president to call a referendum on his increasingly unpopular totalitarian regime, but strike-induced fuel and food shortages are now working against the president's opponents and playing into the hands of Mr. Chavez. The Chavez government is also using the strike to downsize the state-run company and remove dissenters, actions usually associated with right-leaning industrialists.

Poverty and the injustice of a right-wing regime paved the way for the election of Mr. Chavez in 1998 and now the nation appears to be stuck with him -- he doesn't face re-election until 2007. Sunday, Mr. Chavez called upon the nation's leftist ideologues to battle capitalism, an open invitation to internal strife that will disguise the reality that Mr. Chavez's socialist policies, the kind which have failed around the globe, are primarily to blame for his country's ongoing misery. Venezuela is the world's fifth-largest exporter of oil, and if the country dissolves into chaos while war erupts in Iraq the world economy could suffer a brutal jolt.

There has been a tendency among Washington and its Western allies over the decades to lump all leftist leaders together, but this weekend there came a reminder that it is shortsighted to do so. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leftist whose anti-poverty programs do not include deriding capitalism, appeared be-fore the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and urged the world's politicians and business leaders gathered there to invest in an international anti-poverty fund and promote trade in underdeveloped countries. The Brazilian president pointed out that eliminating hunger takes a weapon away from political demagogues, and promoting trade helps provide the economic stability that prevents political turmoil.

This is good advice. An economic program built along these lines could have prevented the rise of President Chavez, whose rule may prove far more costly to the world economy than the modest amount of capital needed to perhaps prevent Venezuela from becoming susceptible to his simplistic messages. The World Economic Forum should adopt the ideas offered by President da Silva to enable more men like him, and fewer like President Chavez, to come to power.