An Urgent Choice: Revolutionary Incest or Democratic Coexistence...

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Friday, May 02, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel

VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: Talking to a "chavista" light who lives in my neighborhood, I mentioned to him the urgent need our society had to recapture democratic coexistence. I said: " We had it before. Our political discussions rarely ended in violence, much less death. Families did not break apart because of preferences for Betancourt or Caldera. Elections were sport events, a festive occasion.... What is different now...?"

"Plenty" said my friend. "Now we have a revolution ... revolutionaries can not coexist with their ideological enemies, at least until the main objective of the revolution is attained." This objective was defined by him as "Social Justice ... a way for everyone to have an equal share of national wealth."

Well, I said, no one can argue against that ideal, although it is one very difficult to achieve. If we really want to start walking in that direction, the generation of national wealth should be optimized so that there is enough of it to distribute ... if not, we would be rather be producing uniform poverty instead of uniform prosperity ... all national resources should be sensibly developed, productivity maximized, the capacity of the society to produce should be at top efficiency.

For this to take place, I added, every sector of Venezuelan society must participate in the effort ... maximum generation of wealth can not take place in a country deeply divided. Worse, it can not take place in a country where the potentially main generators of wealth have been politically ostracized.

Therefore, I suggested to my friend, "Social Justice" can not be attained unless society can coexist in democracy. In fact, my view was the opposite of what he told me.

This was the end of the discussion, although it should have been the starting point ... because, unless we come to terms rapidly, the country is going to explode in our hands.

Hugo Chavez' revolution of is an incestuous exercise ... as all incest, it is firmly kept within the family. The President preaches incessantly ... to the converted. However, in order to please the converted he has to come down hard on the "oligarchs, squalids, saboteurs, parasitic businessmen and other entomological specimens."

To conserve his flock intact, he has to alienate the dissidents. By doing so, he destroys the possibilities that our society can unite behind the common purpose of creating national wealth and ... then ... striving for a more just society.

Although preaching to the converted gives the preacher an illusory sense of security ... since he only sees approving faces nearby ... this does not help one bit to move the country forward. On the contrary, politics of exclusion are creating the environment for civil rebellion. Deterioration is advancing so rapidly that moral indignation and frustration are overtaking the natural capacity of the people to adjust to the worst situations.

This will not be another Cuba because the economic and social decline taking place under this regime is so abrupt that Venezuelans simply will not become resigned to becoming a society of beggars and buhoneros.

President Chavez can still salvage what is left of his Presidency by bringing his case to the whole nation ... by clearly explaining what he wants to accomplish, and how he proposes to do it. He should be prepared to listen to all sectors of Venezuelan society and to accept criticism and recommendations from all sides. He should have the courage to walk into "enemy territory" to present his case, in good and civilized Spanish. He should explicitly obey the Constitution and stop maneuvering to delay and obstruct constitutional provisions.

The role of a President is to govern for the whole of society and not for a tribe ... if he can not do it, he will be creating the conditions for his own political demise. We have the right to expect a President to behave Presidentially...

• Former Chinese premier Zhou En Lai once said that he did not care what color the cat was, as long as it caught mice.

Similarly, Chavez can keep entertaining his revolutionary fantasies as long as he does not import foreign tyrannies ... as long as he puts everyone in the mood to surge ahead ... as long as he respects dissidence ... as long as his policies can generate employment, his policemen can catch the killers and the robbers ... as long as he punishes his corrupt collaborators and as long as he effectively deals with poverty and mounting garbage in the streets.

The Venezuelan chapter of the Club of Rome has just published a volume on the need to recapture Democratic Coexistence (Venezuela Repeticiones y Rupturas, La Reconquista de la Convivencia Democratica, Caracas, March 2003,). The 19 essays in the volume discuss the need to bring our society back to a civil dialogue, to resolve our political conflicts by mutual agreement, abandoning hate and tear gas as tools of discussion. The volume stresses the urgency to stop the madness into which the country has been captured during the last four years.

Venezuelan society is now at a standstill ... no one is working, no one is dreaming of the future, no one is saving or planning....

We are all surviving on a day to day basis ... and no society can move ahead in this manner.

As Victor Guedez, one of the authors of the essays contained in the Club of Rome volume, says: "If we do not create wealth there will be nothing to distribute."

It's as simple as that!

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 gustavo@vheadline.com