Is Chávez Running Scared?

It happened in Cancún where 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries were meeting. At a private lunch, the group witnessed an unseemly encounter between Alvaro Uribe and Hugo Chávez. Speaking off the record as is customary in these gatherings, Uribe called on Chávez to end Venezuela’s hindrance of trade relations with Colombia.

Since the 2008 Colombian attack on a FARC base in Ecuador, Chávez has kept bilateral commercial ties in check. Politics aside, Venezuela and Colombia had been major partners in trade. Uribe had the temerity to compare Chávez’s measures to the U.S. embargo on Cuba. Comandante Hugo shot back that Colombian paramilitaries had threatened his life and headed for the door in a tizzy. Uribe retorted: “Be a man!” Chávez snapped back: “Go to hell!”

Hugo Chávez is not a normal president. While repeatedly winning elections, he has no intention of ever ceding the office. That’s what we used to call a dictator. Only now gutting democracy from within and stacking the deck in favor of forever power is simply a matter of a country’s internal affairs.

At the Cancún summit, participants agreed to create a new organization that includes Latin America and the Caribbean but not the United States and Canada. There’s nothing wrong with that yet the effort is off to a limping start. Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, the new Honduran president, wasn’t invited, an egregious absence but one deemed necessary to avoid spoiling the party with the divisions over Manuel Zelaya’s ouster last June.

Monday’s spectacle is a reminder that the region’s quandary won’t be solved by merely keeping the Americans and the Canadians out of the fledgling forum. For Chávez and his allies, Honduras is an issue because the coup against Zelaya and Lobo’s resounding victory in November pulled the plug on the Chavista model. Gutting democracy from within was finally stopped in its tracks.

In Caracas, Chávez is close to liquidating Venezuelan democracy. After winning voter consent for lifting the two-term limit on the presidency and other elected posts in February 2009, he stepped up the pace of his Bolivarian revolution.

• In March, Chávez further clamped down the private sector, particularly producers of price-controlled basic food items. He ordered the seizure of domestic and foreign rice-processing plants for not meeting output quotas while warning producers of cooking oil, corn flour and toilet paper to put out or face the consequences.
• Chávez lost no time in implementing his “geometry of power,” that is, a recentralization of administrative control over harbors, airports and roads which conveniently wrested resources from the opposition-governed states. In April, Chávez stripped the Caracas mayoralty of most powers by literally parachuting in a loyalist to head the newly created Capital District. Led by Chávez appointees with authority over all elected officials, four other administrative regions were also established
• The electoral system was modified on a largely winner-take-all basis rather than the proportional representation that would have benefited the opposition in the September 2010 parliamentary elections.
• An education law strengthened state control over education at the expense of local governments, school authorities, parents and, of course, children. It proclaimed the primacy of a “new political culture based on popular power.” Private schools and universities are obviously the target.

Not all is going Chávez’s way. At the end of 2009, a banking scandal shook Chavismo with the arrest of some Boligarchs, pro-government businessmen. Chavistas, the opposition and ordinary citizens alike are asking Chávez to account for the past decade’s $950 billion in oil revenues. Ministers have resigned and, most recently, the Chavista governor of Lara. Nearly two thirds of Venezuelans don’t want Chávez to seek reelection. Lean economic years are now the norm.

A few weeks ago, Fidel Castro dispatched Ramiro Valdés to Caracas to help with electricity shortages even though repression is his true vocation. After Cancún, Chávez flew to Havana. All eyes are on the Sept. 26 election which will bring opposition deputies into the National Assembly. Even with loaded dice, Chávez may be running scared. What to do to preserve power? That’s all that has ever mattered.