Despotism Piggybacks on Populism

One can protest, of course, that less than half the population voted, or that the just-elected constitutional assembly received a vague and amorphous mandate to draft a new constitution. But neither objection can alter the fact that after almost six months in office, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s supporters obtained 90% of the vote in July’s elections and won 119 of 128 seats in the new deliberative chamber.

Chavez now has a totally free hand to push through his reforms--whatever they may be--as well as to determine the exact status and scope of the constitutional assembly. He already essentially strong-armed the sitting Congress into adjournment to avoid jurisdictional conflicts. He has called for elections in December--on the basis of the new constitution, to be written and approved by referendum in three months--to elect a new Congress, new state governors and a new Supreme Court. In those elections, members of the military will have the right to vote--crucial in a country whose popular president is a former colonel who led a failed military coup in 1992.

For his first year in office, this is not a meager slate of legislative-institutional changes. There is undoubtedly a large dose of a creeping, legal but nonetheless frightening, militarization in all of this.

The concerns many sectors of the Venezuelan opposition have expressed in regard to Chavez--his heavy-handedness, rhetorical confusion, economic mumbo-jumbo and even anti-Semitism--are entirely valid. It is also true that if not for the resurgence of oil prices and the ensuing strength of Venezuelan reserves as well as the shrinking current account deficit, the hard currency economy would be in much worse shape than it is.

Chavez has not begun to confront the economic challenges he faces, or explained how to achieve his multiple and often conflicting aims. And some of his decisions, such as the effort to lower domestic interest rates virtually by decree, have obviously made markets nervous, leading partly to what Inter-American Development Bank chief economist and former Venezuelan cabinet minister Ricardo Haussman has called an “investment strike.”

But there also may be something deeper and more enigmatic to read in the Venezuelan events. It might be too easy to dismiss Chavez’s election last December and his landslide victory in the constitutional assembly as a simple reaction against corruption by a frustrated population beguiled by a classic Latin American populist demagogue. To begin with, the label “classic Latin American populist demagogue” attached to political leaders such as Juan Peron of Argentina, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of Mexico, Joao Goulart of Brazil and many others are either unfair, superficial or downright false.

Populism in Latin America has always had its raison d’etre: the ancestral, abysmal and maddeningly unmovable inequality of practically every society in the region. Constant redistribution efforts in the area stem from this basic fact. Their excesses or mistakes are no reason to abandon them, but rather to correct them.

Second, Venezuela today has the longest-standing, functioning representative democracy in Latin America (though Colombia could contest this claim). Since 1959, essentially free and fair elections have been held, a strong and vibrant labor movement and civil society have flourished, and a free and strong press has held an open and vigorous debate on national issues.

Venezuelan voters are not neophytes. They are in many ways more sophisticated and experienced than other electorates in the region. The country’s intelligentsia is as cosmopolitan and influential locally as its peers in the rest of Latin America. So, writing the voters off as hopelessly manipulated simpletons is not an adequate explanation.

Finally, corruption in Latin America, while nearly constant, has tended to provoke outrage and rejection only when associated with incompetent governments unable to deliver the goods. The old Argentine adage “Muy mujeriego y ladron pero queremos a Peron” (“He may be a womanizer and a thief but we still want Peron”) derives from Peron’s ability to deliver the goods, at least for a while.

Chavez may have no idea where he is going; his authoritarianism may represent a threat to Venezuelan democracy; his emergence may be totally irrelevant to other nations in the region. But the situation in Venezuela may also be a sign of things to come elsewhere in the hemisphere: a peculiar, disquieting but popular and logical reaction to an intolerable status quo.