Outside View: Venezuela a year after

By Larry Birns and Manuel Rueda <a href=www.upi.com>UPI Outside View Commentary From the International Desk Published 4/14/2003 5:38 PM

WASHINGTON, April 14 (UPI) -- A year ago, Venezuela's democracy narrowly survived a major test as rightist sectors of the middle-class-led opposition joined with several ranking military officers to briefly overthrow President Hugo Chavez, taking advantage of an ongoing popular protest that was peacefully calling upon him to resign.

Prior to last April's failed coup, Venezuela's opposition has had a list of both valid grievances and skeptical critiques on Chavez's commitment to democracy. These included a set of decrees issued by Chavez in November 2001 that critics maintained had undermined local authorities as well as the National Assembly's jurisdiction over projects small and large. These decrees allowed the president to appoint his political allies to senior posts at the national oil company, PDVSA, that could compromise that venerable institution's meritocracy.

At the time of the attempted coup, Chavez's narrow survival was mainly due to his close ties to certain factions of the military. Business federation head Pedro Carmona comedically declared himself the country's new leader. But he was unable to secure support from key senior officers and enlisted personnel at the air force base at Maracay and at other garrison sites in the interior, which declared that they would not recognize his rump government.

But ultimately, it was Venezuelans' high regard for non-violent solutions that allowed Chavez to return. Broad participation in the repeated protest marches that made up the opposition's core strategy preceding the coup indicated Chavez's rule had lost much of its popular support. But Carmona did not have sufficient elite backing or support of the poor to neutralize pro-Chavez generals in the country's interior.

This was the case even though Chavez was repeatedly being assailed by the media, particularly the country's four major television stations.

Since then, the opposition has continued to seek to bring down Chavez, most notably by the now-ended two-month general strike that paralyzed the government's main source of income, the national oil industry.

Venezuela's privately owned media once again joined the effort by churning out one-sided anti-Chavez coverage.

Once again, the opposition was inspired by a valid list of complaints against Chavez's commitment to plebiscitary democracy and its own interpretation of the rule of law. In recent months, it has mobilized around such issues as the inflammatory militarization of the Caracas metropolitan police, edicts that could restrict freedom of speech and the government's allegedly lax stance against Colombian rebels building staging sites on Venezuelan territory.

The opposition has provided a distinct service to the nation in reminding the government that democratic legitimacy goes much further than respecting electoral results. But, with the decline in the effectiveness of the now-disbanded general strike, even the most anti-government sector must realize that lasting changes in Venezuelan society should come about through an electoral solution and not by destroying the national economy.

The anti-Chavez movement has been rendered less effective because an abiding hatred for Chavez appears to be its only unifying credo. As a result, schisms are breaking out as various likely opposition presidential candidates jockey for the race, if a proposed referendum on Chavez's rule in August actually materializes.

The tough task of establishing a referendum date on Chavez's recall still lies ahead. Yet it should be remembered: none of the admittedly frustrating negotiations on mending Venezuela's democratic procedures could have been possible if the Bush administration had been successful in backing Carmona's White House-approved script to oust a constitutionally elected president, which would have all but guaranteed bloody class-warfare.

In that scenario, Venezuela's democracy would have been most likely engulfed in political violence, akin to that being witnessed in neighboring Colombia.

No one can deny that Venezuela's democracy still requires a fibrillater. But the slow rehabilitation of the country's democratic institutions and the population's almost visceral respect for non-violent solutions to political differences have at least given it an opportunity to confirm its heritage and move on. This is a lesson that hopefully Washington will take to heart.

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-- Larry Birns is director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, an independent, non-profit, tax-exempt research and information organization. Manuel Rueda is a research associate at COHA. They can be contacted at: coha@coha.org.

-- Outside View commentaries are written for UPI by outside writers on subjects of public interest.