WHEN IS A DICTATOR A DICTATOR?

www.msnbc.com Glenn Reynolds does get it:        Hugo Chavez of Venezuela — after failing in a coup attempt some years ago — was legitimately elected president of Venezuela. But many now consider him a dictator. Is that fair?                Well, yes. Many dictators were originally elected (look at Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe — whom few besides Jacques Chirac would deny is a dictator today — or Peru’s Alberto Fujimori) and, in fact, the original source of the term is with the Roman Dictator, an “elected magistrate” who gave dictators a bad name by abusing the powers of that office. Amusingly, though some on the left call President Bush a “dictator” they seem inclined to dispute the term’s application to Chavez, whose friendliness to Fidel Castro apparently establishes his democratic bona fides.                As far as I’m concerned, though, a dictator is as a dictator does, and by that standard Chavez is looking pretty dictatorial lately. According to reports in the New York Times, Chavez opponents are being assassinated:                Venezuela was still reeling today after the weekend killings of three dissident soldiers and a protester opposed to President Hugo Chávez, and the police and grieving relatives split over whether the killings were politically motivated.        According to police investigations, about 12 armed men kidnapped the four victims on Saturday night as they were leaving a protest. They were bound and gagged, and some were tortured before the gunmen executed them, the police said.                Meanwhile, according to an Associated Press report, other opposition leaders are being arrested by secret police. And even some of Chavez’s former allies have been subjected to abduction, rape and torture.                Partly because the war is distracting people, and partly because human-rights abuses by Friends of Fidel seem to inspire less indignation among many in the human-rights community, Chavez’s behavior isn’t getting the attention it probably deserves. But it’s being covered by bloggers. Two Venezuelan weblogs worth keeping tabs on are The Devil’s Excrement, by Miguel Octavio, and Caracas Chronicles, by a former New York Times stringer who quit his position so that he could report more extensively on his weblog.                If you follow the news from Venezuela, I think you’ll probably conclude that Chavez is, indeed, a dictator, one whose people have been demonstrating against him in numbers that dwarf the recent antiwar protests in the United States, but with far less media attention.