Spectator's Journal: The Paratrooper President

...The same was true of Venezuelan government...

...While it is true that President Menem has done what he can to provide Chavez with sound advice, the colonel is under no obligation to take it...

...In the aftermath of the coup, his message was a curious melange of left- and right-wing ideas he called "Bolivarianism...

...78 February 1999 • The American Spectator...

...The results, as any visitor will immediately observe, bear no resemblance to either country...

...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL by Mark Falcoff The Paratrooper President Caracas T his ugly, sprawling Andean capital — a bad copy of Los Angeles— is the epicenter of Latin America's latest political crisis...

...Nonplused, Perez began a U-turn in economic policy, selling off the country's antiquated telephone system, and even inviting foreign investors to buy subsidiary branches of the country's state oil monopoly PDVSA, long a sacred cow to nationalists, left and right...

...It has been a case of benevolent drift, with periodic concessions to economic reality which have not gone far enough to remedy the problem, but have been sufficient to undercut Caldera's support in the general population...

...should be as close, productive, and friendly as possible...

...on the grounds that he had attempted to overthrow a legally elected government) thrilled the left, most of whose parties— including the ramshackle Venezuelan Communist party—lined up behind him...

...Theirs was a mandate for vengeance, and a non-negotiable demand for resources...

...It proved too late...

...Democracy is seen not as the rule of law, or impersonal institutions, or the right to redress grievances, or freedom of the press...

...At times Chavez's rhetoric has been bone-chilling: He has spoken of "boiling the politicians' heads in oil...

...Though no doubt an extremely nice person and very beautiful, in no normal country would she emerge as a presidential possibility—at least not at this point in her career...

...The country's vaunted democracy has never been quite what its friends abroad have claimed...

...Chavez has mounted a tiger...

...By some estimates, Venezuelans have experienced a 40-percent drop in living standards...

...It reached something of a zenith in the 197o's when two oil shocks sent the price of petroleum sky-high, allowing even household servants to go on shopping expeditions to Miami, and Caracas supermarkets to stock seventy different kinds of pate, imported daily from France...

...Rather, he has called for the formation of a constituent assembly that will rewrite the Venezuelan constitution, for which purpose he plans to hold a plebiscite shortly after he takes office on February 2. How rearranging the constitutional furniture will alter the country's economic fortunes is hard to say, but Chavez is insistent...

...Outside the building where he spoke, over a million hungry, angry Venezuelans were gathered to proclaim him leader...

...when they fail to do so, democracy is being traduced...

...At the center of the wheel is the president, whose job is essentially to distribute the royalties from oil, the country's number one source of foreign exchange...

...the part about wealth and national resources is wholly false, since it begs the question of how countries with virtually no such resources of their own (Taiwan, South Korea, Japan) have become economic superpowers...

...that relations with the U.S...

...Chavez's response is that if the Congress refuses to authorize a new assembly, he will dissolve the body...

...In the run-up to the election, however, when it appeared victory was in sight, Chavez suddenly moderated his rhetoric and extended his hand to some elements of the Venezuelan establishment, particularly the business community...

...Thus, when the 8z-year-old Caldera steps down on February 2, his legacy will be an overvalued currency, a huge deficit, and a successor who tried to subvert Venezuela's democratic system —the oldest and most entrenched in South America...

...He also promised to use the talents of any capable Venezuelan willing to work with him, an olive branch to the political parties he had so decisively defeated...

...Although Caldera is a vain, silly, and stupid man—and getting more so with advancing years—he is far from solely responsible for Venezuela's political crisis...

...and sentenced to a long prison term, his jail cell became the cynosure of national interest...

...Had Chavez's conviction stood, he would have been ineligible under Venezuela's constitution to run for political office...

...Though Perez had only begun long-overdue economic reforms, and though he had survived Chavez's 1992 coup, the Venezuelans took their revenge anyway, staging an impeachment trial for misuse of government money and forcing him to step down...

...As one businessman said after Chavez's appearance before the chamber of commerce: "Well, on most things we agree, and even on those we disagree there is room for negotiation...

...Two years later, Perez's successor, President Rafael Caldera, convinced that the Chavez threat had passed, pardoned the colonel, in the process restoring to him his civic rights...

...These bizarre ideas are at least understandable in the context of a central misconception shared by some 82 percent of Venezuelans: namely, that their country is the richest in the world...

...Overcome by loyalist forces, then-Lieutenant Colonel Chavez became an instant celebrity by facing the television cameras head-on with the statement, "I am surrendering—for now...

...Imagine the United States run by two parties wholly in thrall to the National Education Association (NEA), the Association of Federal, State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the Rainbow Coalition...

...Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Venezuela's newpresident is that the centerpiece of his political program is not economic at all...

...Overnight Irene became "just another politician" beholden to the same people who had stolen Venezuelans' free lunch, and her standing in the polls took a nosedive...

...rather, it is synonymous with government goodies...

...the currency continues to be ridiculously overvalued—forcing interest rates so high as to put many middle-sized and smaller companies out of business...

...That's what you mean by a good neighborhood, it's not one in which everybody is so moral but it's one in which there are no obvious signs of irresponsibility...

...AcciOn Democratica, the country's oldest and most important party, decided in the final days of the race that Salas was its only hope of blocking Chavez, and unceremoniously dumped its own nominee, Luis Alfaro Ucero...

...Senorita Sdez's administration was notable for clean streets, efficient police services, and other un-Venezuelan luxuries...

...that the country needed to put an end to wasteful bureaucracies...

...These were precisely the things most Venezuelans wanted to hear, and the more the country's traditional political class took fright, the better Chavez looked...

...of "a million men in arms" ready to defend his ballot box victory...

...The best thing that can be said for Caldera's stewardship these past five years is that there has been no violence...

...H ugo Chavez Frias is Venezuela's man of mystery...

...Hence, if everybody is not living well it is the fault of the politicians, who have stolen what is rightfully the people's...

...Salas Romer is a kind of Irene writ large: He privatized Valencia's port works and other public services, and generated thousands of new jobs...

...of dissolving the Congress and purging the Supreme Court and the Council of Magistracy, and so on...

...There were rumors of connections with Quaddafi and the Colombian guerrilla groups, and of gangs (Unidades de la Defensa del Voto) armed with weapons taken from government arsenals during the 1992 uprising...

...In this environment, politics has become a dangerous, nasty business...

...So much so, in fact, that COPEI, presumably to rescue her candidacy, withdrew her nomination in the final weeks of the campaign...

...He criticized privatization of assets belonging to the state oil company, called for "collective democracy" (whatever that is), joined the leftish Sao Paulo Group (a collection ofunregenerate populist-statist Latin politicians which includes such charmless luminaries as Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva, Mexico's Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, and Jorge Castaneda, Jr...

...This is no small matter in a country where 30 percent of the urban population works for the public sector, and where business traditionally has been insulated from competition by sweetheart government deals...

...The country was spared riots or another military coup only because a man on a white horse (Chavez) was on the horizon, criscrossing the country, meeting with every fire chief and parish priest...

...On December 6, 1998, buffeted by nearly 20 years of economic decline, Venezuelans finally turned against their traditional political parties and elected Hugo Chavez Frias, a 44-year-old former paratrooper with no previous political experience, to a five-year presidential term...

...58 February /999 • The American Spectator This wealth allowed Venezuelan business to operate with huge margins for corruption and inefficiency...

...That much said, purveyors of best-case scenarios were given plenty of material on election eve at Chavez's lengthy press conference in the Ateneo de Caracas, where the candidate's performance was nothing less than brilliant...

...The part about the politicians is half-true...

...The price of oil started to plummet in the early 1980's, yet AcciOn Democratica president Carlos Andres Perez was re-elected in 1988 largely on the memory of his first presidency, which had coincided with the boom years of the first oil shock...

...With Irene in definitive eclipse, the political establishment focused its hopes on Henrique Salas Romer, governor of the state of Carabobo, whose capital, Valencia, is a major economic powerhouse...

...If that's the case, it's likely that there's a degree of virtue there too...

...In recent years Venezuela has spent as large a percentage of its gross national product on education as the United States, and as large a share of the same on health care as France...

...The joke was on him: The morning after taking office in 1989, Perez was forced to decree an increase in gasoline prices...

...Oil, gold, diamonds, bauxite...

...There was even some talk of Chavez becoming Venezuela's version of Carlos Menem or Alberto Fujimori (the Argentine and Peruvian presidents, respectively, who campaigned on populist platforms and then proceeded to privatize everything in sight...

...While it would be best if more of us learned and practiced Aristotelian habits of virtue, "it's important," Mansfield reminds us, "to live in a society or neighborhood where appearances are maintained...

...Nobody really knows who he is or what he thinks, since he has changed his rhetoric and demeanor at least twice during the last six years...

...He was an official observer at the Venezuelan elections as part of a delegation from the International Republican Institute...

...When the 77-yearold Alfaro Ucero balked, he was stripped of his party membership—this after more than fifty years of patiently working and waiting for the nomination...

...As long as oil prices were high, this was an almost unique political system—one virtually free of the obligation to make difficult or stressful choices...

...Many imagine that what Chavez has in mind—here, clearly borrowing from the example of Menem and Fujimori—is a constitutional change allowing consecutive presidential terms, a de facto Chavez dictatorship...

...To the extent that the powers that be deliver, that is democracy...

...They will be looking for their checks in the mail...

...The result was rioting in Caracas that claimed at least three hundred lives before the army succeeded in restoring order...

...His critics point out that Venezuelan law makes no provision for plebiscites or for amending the constitution in this way...

...It speaks volumes about the quality of government services in Venezuela that any elected official who actually spends tax money on its intended purpose is seen as a miracle worker...

...Much of what Chavez said was true —that the country did not need 3o ministries, but could get along with ten or 11...

...We should assume the cold view of a pathologist, hope this latest batch of numbers does indicate a renewal, and, in the meantime, maintain faith in the dynamism of the American experiment to confront adversity...

...When people in his own party raised objections, the former president simply walked out and formed his own temporary coalition —the Convergence—and won the race with a plurality of votes...

...Oil prices have not rebounded...

...The spectacle of Venezuela's two major parties behaving like panic-stricken passengers on the Titanic opened the road for Chavez, and during the last month of the campaign it was only a question of by what margin he would win...

...Court-martialed MARK FALCOFF is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...it remains to be seen whether he will be able to ride it...

...But even Chavez, for all his charisma, cannot avoid the fact that of late the Venezuelan presidency has been the graveyard of political reputations...

...During the campaign Perez did little to dissuade voters from the delusion that merely reelecting him would restore prosperity...

...When government authorities prohibited the broadcast of a taped jailhouse interview in which he outlined his turgid, contradictory political and economic ideas, the contraband cassette became an instant bestseller at newsstands and cigarette kiosks...

...Drawing over-confident conclusions about the proximity of a neo-Victorian age does not bring us any closer to it...

...That the State Department artlessly refused him a visa to visit the U.S...

...But instead of running on her own independent ticket, she opted to accept the nomination of COPEI...

...Among other things, this would allow him to circumvent the current inconvenience that his own party, the Fifth Republic Movement, is only the second plurality in the House...

...One thing that any half-competent observer of Western civilization can see for certain is that we are now less able to assert truths, or distinguish right from wrong...

...We have everything," a hotel waitress explained...

...and went off to Cuba to pay his respects to the island's aging Communist caudillo...

...the Congress elected at the same time was divided into four roughly equal parts, none capable of mustering a working majority...

...And despite a flood of literature on the topic and vague hopes for religious revivals, no one has convincingly explained how we will return to a pointwhere we are more comfortable acknowledging the existence of certain truths...

...Chavez first came to Venezuelan and international attention nearly seven years ago, when he participated in an abortive coup and assassination plot against President Carlos Andres Perez...

...Yet the first beneficiary of this new mood was not Colonel Chavez but a former Miss Universe, Irene Saez Conde, mayor of the Chacao district of Caracas...

...In the 1993 elections it was the turn of Perez's opposite number in COPEI, former President Rafael Caldera, to assure the Venezuelans that their problems were the result of the wrong peoplein power—no need, no need at all, Caldera purred, for any serious changes in economic policy...

...Perez's and Caldera's failure to restore effortless prosperity led Venezuelans to conclude that the problem was not one of this party or that, but parties and politicians in general...

...This kind of politics over the years has nurtured a curious distortion of the democratic ideal—or rather, the average Venezuelan's notion of democracy bears little resemblance to that of citizens in more mature systems...

...Somebody is bound to be disappointed with the choices Chavez makes in the next few years...

...As recently as six months before the elections she was leading in the polls with (Continued on page 78) The American Spectator • February 1999 59 Spectator's Journal/Falcoff (Continued from page 59) almost 3o percent, a sufficient number to elect her under Venezuela's first-past-thepost system...

...He proved himself an able, energetic, and efficient administrator, and was so popular in his state that his son was handily elected to replace him when his term expired...

...He'll put a corrupt democracy to its ultimate test...

...Since 1958 Venezuela had been governed alternately by two political parties, AcciOn Democratica and the Christian Social Party (COPEI), under complicated arrangements which assured that even the loser in any election received a generous share of government patronage...

...Wishful thinking became the order of the day in the swanky streets of Venezuela's Chacao, Country Club, and Altamira suburbs—that is, among those who weren't shipping their money, families, and furniture to Florida...