Hurricane Hugo
HALVORSSEN, THOR
Hurricane Hugo Venezuela's Hugo Châvez is a threat to more than just his own people BY THOR HALVORSSEN Caracas, Venezuela "I magine our joy at being free and far from I a land in which...
...Ceresole's structure channels the people's will through the charismatic strongman...
...There is no sign that these alliances proceed from anything other than Chavez's deepest convictions...
...In addition to his ideological alliances, petro-politics, and support for guerrilla terror throughout Latin America, Chavez has begun expanding Venezuela's military capability...
...In March he announced the creation of a two-million man reserve army to defend the revolution "against the American invasion...
...Besides the raid on the Jewish school, it noted that "President Chavez cautioned citizens against following the lead of Jewish citizens in the effort to overturn his referendum victory...
...Of course, the raid was fruitful insofar as it sent a message to the Jewish community...
...Venezuela's Jewish community has been halved over the past six years...
...There is now incontrovertible evidence, for instance, that Chavez has financed, harbored, and supplied weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Colombia's narcoterrorists...
...The land that embraced those refugees has become unfriendly...
...In January, the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor released a "Report on Global Anti-Semitism...
...Less than a month after taking office, Chavez wrote a fan letter to Illich Ramirez Sanchez, the Venezuelan-born terrorist imprisoned at La Santé maximum-security prison outside Paris...
...He then signed petroleum agreements with the Indian government while again indicating his desire to cut off Venezuelan oil exports to the United States...
...Last December, high-ranking FARC terrorist Rodrigo Granda was arrested in Caracas...
...Scores of preschoolers were locked in the school as panicked parents tried to retrieve them...
...Analysts in Venezuela suspect the true purpose of the raid originated in Chavez's eagerness to display solidarity with the Iranian mullahs...
...He described himself as "swimming in the profundities expressed in [Sanchez's] letter," and signed off "with profound faith in the cause and the mission...
...Sixty-five years later, an exodus of that community is well underway...
...Always proceeding with the patina of popular support and the pretense of legality, he has used a constituent assembly to establish a new constitution giving him wide powers...
...He has packed the courts with loyal judges and purged the military of anyone who might oppose his orders...
...The feeling is mutual...
...Thor Halvorssen, a civil liberties advocate, is president of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation...
...Such exposure will ideally arouse international public opinion against Chavez and nurture new leadership inside Venezuela that will provide democratic alternatives to Chavismo...
...In Ceresole's hands, representative democracy mutates into "participatory" systems led by cult-like figures...
...The longer he is in power, the more he can use the oil wells of Venezuela to do so...
...He has signed treaties for "technological cooperation" with the dictators of Libya, Iran, and Syria...
...After winning a Jimmy Carter-endorsed August 2004 referendum marred by accusations of fraud and voter harassment, Chavez revved up his revolutionary project...
...Chavez first ran for president on a reform platform, winning in a landslide...
...Hostility to Jews has become one of the hallmarks of the Venezuelan government under Hugo Chavez, the radical populist who became president in 1999, and of Chavismo, the neo-fascist ideology named for him...
...The first chapter is titled "The Jewish Question and the state of Israel...
...After denying the Holocaust, he explains that the greatest threat to Chavismo comes from the Jews of Venezuela...
...During his visit he embraced Saddam and called him "brother...
...But Venezuela's dramatic political metamorphosis was nonetheless complete by the time Ceresole died in 2003...
...And, as it happened, on the same day Hebraica was raided, Chavez was on a state visit to Iran...
...Bounty hunters kidnapped Granda and drove him to Colombia, where he is now imprisoned and awaiting trial...
...The young refugee's words I leap off the tattered clipping from a 1939 -.A- edition of La Esfera, a Venezuelan newspaper...
...The Chavez government has severely restricted freedom of the press, most recently banning any public or private expression of opposition to the government...
...Just that morning, the Tehran Times had quoted his praise of President Khatami and the Iranian theocracy...
...The refugee had arrived on one of two steamboats—the Koenigstein and the Caribia—that left Nazi Germany that year with a human cargo that would otherwise have been sentenced to death...
...Under Chavez, more than one million Venezuelans have voted with their feet in the largest political exodus in Latin America since the Cuban migrations of the 1960s...
...Anti-Semitic leaflets also were available to the public in an Interior and Justice Ministry office waiting room...
...Venezuela's chief rabbi denounced the raid's "economy of intimidation," noting that "there is not a single Jewish family in Caracas that was not affected...
...Hurricane Hugo Venezuela's Hugo Châvez is a threat to more than just his own people BY THOR HALVORSSEN Caracas, Venezuela "I magine our joy at being free and far from I a land in which everything threatened us I with death...
...Like Yasser Arafat, I now have only the revolutionary's gun since the olive branch has fallen...
...What few understood then was that Chavez planned to revolutionize the country following a plan masterminded by his longtime friend Nor-berto Ceresole, an Argentinian writer infamous for his books denying the Holocaust and his conspiracy theories about Jewish plans to control the planet...
...The government-appointed judge who ordered the raid said the commandos were looking for weapons linked to a bombing that killed Danilo Anderson, a crooked local prosecutor who had made a fortune shaking down the government's political opponents...
...The military hierarchy is incapable, after six years of demoralization, rampant corruption, and regular purges, of restoring any semblance of constitutional order...
...In his acceptance speech Chavez was unequivocal: The "time is right to unite and face the imperialist challenge...
...In the past year he has more than tripled the Venezuelan military budget, purchasing 20 high-performance MiG fighter jets and 100,000 AK-47 machine gun rifles from the Russian government as well as an unprecedented number of helicopter gunships, surface-to-air missiles, and Onyx missiles (which can sink aircraft carriers...
...The title of Ceresole's 1999 book on Chavez and Venezuela, Caudillo, Ejército, Pueblo ("Leader, Army, People"), eerily recalls the German national socialist maxim, "One People, One Country, One Leader...
...Chavismo's purpose, however, is not just to create a stable autocracy...
...Consider the traumatic morning of November 29, 2004...
...The Hebraica raid was not an isolated or random act of state-sponsored anti-Jewish violence...
...Chavez had traveled to Iran by way of Tripoli, where he described himself as "bathed in honor" after receiving the fantastically named Muammar Qaddafi Prize for Human Rights...
...the military functions as the central political body...
...he has concentrated his power, and he has disabled the democratic opposition...
...The raid on Colegio Hebraica was a significant shift in the politics of intimidation...
...Popularly known as "Carlos the Jackal," Sanchez began his long, bloody career by shooting Joseph Sieff, a Jewish businessman in London...
...The Chavista worldview sees the globe as a place where the United States, Europe, and Israel must be opposed by militarized one-man regimes...
...Predictably, the storming of Hebraica turned up nothing and the police publicly acknowledged that the search had been "unfruitful...
...Iran and Libya have hundreds of millions invested in Venezuela...
...This spring, Chavez defended Iran's nuclear development program after warmly receiving their president in Venezuela and signing new "technological" treaties...
...A self-described Communist and fascist, Ceresole became an expert in national socialism after designing Juan Domingo Peron's electoral platform in Argentina...
...Significantly, Chavez was the only foreign leader to visit Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf war...
...The report documents how openly anti-Semitic the Venezuelan government now is...
...When Menges spoke, the price of oil had briefly dipped below $10 per barrel...
...Most important for now is persistent public exposure of Chávez's increasing militarism, assaults on democracy, human rights abuses, and free speech violations, as well as his involvement with terrorist groups in South America and terror sponsors in the Middle East...
...tellingly, Chavez praises the "participatory democracy" of Libya, Syria, Iran, and Cuba...
...That expression of solidarity is chilling...
...But Chavez's ambitions extend beyond the Americas...
...Many of the children and grandchildren of those who arrived on the Koenigstein and Caribia have now left the country...
...At its core is a far-reaching foreign policy that aims to establish a loosely aligned federation of revolutionary republics as a resistance bloc in the Americas...
...After retiring to the Sudan, he was captured and sent to France to stand trial for murdering two Parisian police officers...
...The raid followed speculation aired on a state-run television station that Anderson's killing was the work of Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency...
...Fortunately, there are no exit restrictions—yet...
...He has numerous business interests in those countries, and has publicly described the terror-sponsors who rule them as his "partners" and "friends...
...The reason is not far to seek...
...In Nicaragua, Chavez has funded Daniel Ortega's Sandinista party...
...Ceresole's roadmap for Venezuela suffered some setbacks, including a 2002 coup that displaced Chavez for 48 hours and a national strike that almost toppled the government...
...Any effective response to Chavismo will have to be, in part, international...
...By the end of his trip, Chavez had signed agreements with President Hu Jintao granting the China National Petroleum Corporation control of 15 Venezuelan oil fields, thereby securing for China a billion barrels of Venezuelan crude...
...Since then, oil prices have quintupled, making the Chavez government the richest in Venezuelan history and vastly multiplying the damage it can do...
...in Bolivia, he funds Evo Morales, the leader of the coca-growers' movement...
...During the last six years, Chavez has restructured Venezuela's institutions and policies to extend his rule...
...As parents and school buses delivered children to Colegio Hebraica, a Jewish grade school in Caracas, 25 secret police commandos in combat gear and face masks burst into the main building...
...Many of us have children in the school, grandchildren, great-grandchildren—or friends...
...In an interview with Voice of America in 1999, the late Constantine Menges of the Hudson Institute predicted that "Chavez will stir up revolution and violence throughout Latin America...
...Yet Chavez addressed Sanchez as "Distinguished Compatriot" and lavished praise on him...
...Shortly after, Chavez declared himself a Marxist-Leninist in a speech in Calcutta...
...He committed terrorist bombings in France, hijacked airliners, and kidnapped the OPEC ministers in Vienna...
...When the letter was leaked, Chavez dismissed all criticism and said he was simply expressing solidarity with a fellow Venezuelan...
...Granda had been living in baronial splendor under the protection—and at the expense—of the Chavez government...
...Days after the arrest, El Salvador president Antonio Saca announced plans to investigate ties between Chavez and his country's FMLN terrorist organization...
...Days afterward, Chavez accused Washington of unleashing "real terrorism" in Iraq and called for a "jihad" on American imperialism...
...presumably this guesswork justified the storming of a Jewish elementary school...
...From Iran, Chavez traveled to China, where he announced that China would replace the United States as the principal beneficiary of Venezuelan oil...
...The children were eventually freed, but the raid went on...
...The Venezuelan opposition is a loose-knit, underfunded network of individuals and small organizations powerless to offer much more than moral opposition to Chavismo...
...Appearing on Al Jazeera, he described President Bush's foreign policy as vigilante violence: "It is not a war on terrorism, it is terrorism itself...
...The ships eventually docked in Venezuela, and the passengers who disembarked significantly increased the size of Venezuela's Jewish community, which eventually grew to 45,000 people...
...An attack on the school is the most effective way of jolting the entire Jewish population...
...It is such a holy occurrence given that we were expelled from Germany and you have embraced us...
Vol. 10 • August 2005 • No. 44
