Chávez is creating a political abyss

www.iht.com Moisés Naím Thursday, March 6, 2003 The Venezuelan nightmare   WASHINGTON For decades Venezuela was a backwater, uninteresting to the outside world. It could not compete for international attention with nearby countries where superpowers staged proxy wars, or where military juntas "disappeared" thousands of opponents, or where the economies regularly crashed. Venezuela was stable. Its oil fueled an economy that enjoyed the world's highest growth rate from 1950 to 1980 and it boasted a higher per-capita income than Spain from 1928 to 1984. Venezuela was one of the longest-lived democracies in Latin America.Venezuela is no longer boring. It has become a nightmare for its people and a threat not just to its neighbors but to the United States and even Europe. A strike in its oil industry has contributed to a rise in gasoline prices at the worst possible time. Hasil Mohammed Rahaham-Alan, a Venezuelan citizen, was detained last month at a London airport as he arrived from Caracas carrying a hand grenade in his luggage. A week later, President Hugo Chávez praised the arrest orders of two opposition leaders who had been instrumental in organizing the strike, saying they "should have been jailed a long time ago." Chávez has helped to create an environment where stateless international networks whose business is terror, guns or drugs feel at home. Venezuela has also become a laboratory where the accepted wisdom of the 1990s is being tested - and often discredited. The first tenet to fall was the belief that the United States has almost unlimited influence in South America. As one of its main oil suppliers and a close neighbor has careened out of control, America has been a conspicuously inconsequential bystander. And it is not just the United States. The United Nations, agencies like the Organization of American States and the International Monetary Fund, or the international press - all have stood by and watched. Another belief of the 1990s was that global economic forces would force democratically elected leaders to pursue responsible economic policies. Yet Chávez, a democratically elected president, has been willing to tolerate international economic isolation - with disastrous results for Venezuela's poor - in exchange for greater power at home. The 21st century was not supposed to engender a Latin American president with a red beret. Instead of obsessing about luring private capital, he scares it away. Rather than strengthening ties with the United States, he befriends Cuba. Such behavior was supposed to have been made obsolete by the democratization, economic deregulation and globalization of the 1990s. Venezuela is an improbable country to have fallen into this political abyss. It is vast, wealthy, relatively modern and cosmopolitan, with a strong private sector and a homogeneous mixed-race population with little history of conflict. Democracy was supposed to have prevented its decline into a failed state. Yet once Chávez gained control over the government, his rule became exclusionary and profoundly undemocratic. Under Chávez, Venezuela is a powerful reminder that elections are necessary but not sufficient for democracy, and that even longstanding democracies can unravel overnight. A government's legitimacy flows not only from the ballot box but also from the way it conducts itself. Accountability and institutional restraints and balances are needed. The international community became adept at monitoring elections and ensuring their legitimacy in the 1990s. The Venezuelan experience illustrates the urgency of setting up equally effective mechanisms to validate a government's practices. The often stealthy transgressions of Chávez have unleashed a powerful expression of what is perhaps the only trend of the 1990s still visible in Venezuela: civil society. In today's Venezuela millions of once politically indifferent citizens stage almost daily marches and rallies. This is not a traditional opposition movement. It is an inchoate network of people from all social classes and walks of life, who are organized in loosely coordinated units and who do not have any other ambition than to stop a president who has made their country unlivable. For too many years they have been mere inhabitants of their own country. Now they demand to be citizens, and feel they have the right to oust through democratic means a president who has wrought havoc on their country. Even though the constitution allows for early elections, and even though Chávez has promised that he will abide by this provision, the great majority of Venezuelans don't believe him. They are convinced that in August, when the constitution contemplates a referendum on the president, the government will resort to delaying tactics and dirty tricks. With international attention elsewhere, Chávez will use his power to forestall an election and ignore the constitution. Venezuela's citizens have been heroically peaceful and civil in their quest. All they ask is that they be given a chance to vote. The world should do its best to ensure that they have that opportunity. The writer, Venezuela's minister of trade and industry from 1989 to 1990, is editor of Foreign Policy magazine.