President Chavez' bedside manners
www.vheadline.com Posted: Sunday, February 23, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel
VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: During his four years in the Presidency, Hugo Chavez has traveled abroad for about 5 solid months and talked some 600 hours to enthusiastic, reluctant, indignant or amused audiences in Venezuela and abroad.
In these 600 or more hours of largely improvised speeches, he has developed a dialect which combines military terminology with religious and folkloric expressions, all freely spiced with vulgar terms and 'machista' turns of phrase. Words are, however, just part of his personality as a speaker.
The other components are dress and body movements:
- When going to talk to the military, he wears his combat outfit and red beret, disguised as the paratrooper he used to be some 30 pounds ago.
- When he faces the crowds, which come to listen to him from all parts of the country in government paid buses ... hundreds of buses which park in immense lines and patiently wait until the end of the speech to transport the people back home ... he dresses in a pale brownish Nehru-like jacket, a couple of sizes too big to hide the anti-bullet vest.
- When he goes to visit the apprehensive Queen of England, he wears Armani suits and his very expensive wrist watch which, if sold, would feed one street child for no less than one year.
In more informal settings he likes to wear a jacket with the colors and stars of the Venezuelan flag.
His body movements are also important ... one of his favorite gestures is to hit the palm of his right hand with his left fist, not once but in staccato fashion, to send his followers a message of continuous aggression against the enemies of the revolution. His mouth twists slightly from left to right in an involuntary tic which appears, according to some clinical observers, every time he is telling a lie. His body sways slightly in tune with his words as if to hypnotize the audience ... he suspends the words in mid-sentence to add to the suspense in the crowd.
If someone took pains to rank the words utilized by Chavez in his contacts with the public there is little doubt that "traitors", "coupsters", "terrorists" and "saboteurs" would be at the top of the list ... he describes the petroleum managers and technicians fired by his government as traitors and saboteurs ... he uses the word bandit to define Carlos Fernandez, the recently arrested president of Fedecamaras.
The words that would be at the bottom of the list would be "economy", "plans", "programs" and "employment." His adversaries are 'squalids' and 'oligarchs.' The main commercial TV stations are the 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.' ... the judges whose sentencing might go against the government are 'plastas' or 'turds.' When a spokesman from a foreign government says something that he interprets as criticism, he reacts violently to say that "Venezuela is an independent country" ... But he loves it when Fidel Castro speaks in his favor. In the eyes of Chavez, foreign intervention exists only when there is some criticism of his actions. Women should be glad to "expect what he is going to give them," as he once promised his wife on national TV.
The words of Chavez are designed to create conflict, to try to browbeat his "enemies" into despair. He delights in choosing the moments when people are watching an important sports event or soap opera, to go on a mandatory broadcast, to announce that he is structuring a Commission to study, say, the sexual habits of Orinoco crocodiles or to talk nostalgically about his childhood in Barinas, when he earned his living selling sweets.
When I read commentaries from readers living in Europe or Australia or Canada or in Salt Lake City telling us who live here about how wonderful Chavez is, I wish I could give them the complete speeches by the President and ask them to hear them, instead of watching their favorite TV program or a game between Manchester United and Real Madrid. Their ''Chavismo' would not last a week... If Dante had written his "Divine Comedy" today he would certainly have included Chavez' TV speeches in national "cadenas" in one special circle of his imaginary hell.
I apologize in advance for my frivolity, which is one of the means of escape I have from the horrible reality of my country.
As Bernard Shaw used to say: "Life is too tragic to take it seriously." However, all I have said so far illustrates, I hope, the attitudes with which Chavez faces his job as President. To be a real President, Chavez would require a vocabulary with the words 'employment' and 'programs' and 'economy' that he does not know, and abandon his vocabulary with the words 'traitor', 'coupster' and 'terrorist' that he uses all the time to define dissenters.
To be a real President, he would have to inspire Venezuelans to unite, behind a common national vision ... to move forward and to convert Venezuelan society from filthy to clean, from vulgar to civilized, from being made up of beggars to being made up of producers.
To be a real President he should concentrate in the main tasks of fighting corruption, generating employment, promoting private investment, improving education and health services, curbing criminality, protecting the commercial nature of PDVSA.
In short, he would have to be doing the very opposite of what he has been doing.
His bedside manners have transformed the seriously ill patient into a terminal case ... in fact, I suspect that, besides being the physician in charge, he is also the owner of the funeral parlor...
Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983. In 1998, he was presidential election campaign manager for Henrique Salas Romer and now lives in retirement on the Caribbean island of Margarita where he runs a leading Hotel-Resort. You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email ppcvicep@telcel.net.ve