“Socialism of the 21st Century”: Venezuela's Populist Propaganda

This piece originally appeared in the Latin American Herald Tribune on May 10.

Class struggles and oil-based growth have helped populists like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to export their “ideologies” and increase their power at the regional level. Chávez, as well as Rafael Correa from Ecuador, Daniel Ortega from Nicaragua, and others, have been using a socialist revolution to frame their fight for power in the region. Their “Socialism of the 21st Century” is just populist propaganda. The political character of Chávez and his regime is state-capitalist, fascist, and specifically populist. This “New” Socialism, instead of advancing towards something new, is repeating the worst faults of the most perverse authoritarian models of the 20th century.

If we take Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci views, a socialist regime must focus on empowering the working class and civil society to achieve power. According to Gramsci, civil society -- rather than the economy -- is the motor of history, for this is where the meaning and values that can sustain or transform society are created.

In the “Socialism of the 21st Century” model, the basic function of populist leadership is to prevent the working class from developing a full understanding of their role in society with false rhetoric. Chávez, like other populists, makes a rhetorical claim to represent the ‘people’ against the ‘elites,’ in order to pre-empt the development of class-consciousness and instead maintain the majority of the population surviving from the governmental “charity”.

Chávez’s regime persecutes civil society and at the same time created a new elite caste, which is corrupt, arrogant, and rich. This new caste of leaders (with their families and close partners), within the huge government bureaucracy, is worse than all the rich classes from the past. The new elite are getting richer and richer, supposedly on behalf of the people. For Chávez and his accomplices, it is not a matter of empowering the lower classes or even engaging in a class struggle. The key for the regime is to keep working-class struggles under control and to create a false social-revolution.

False socialism promoted by Chavez, Ortega and Correa, according to Bernard-Henri Levy (Left in Dark Times: A Stand against the New Barbarism), is sick because it adopts the worst features such as fascination with nationalisms, anti-U.S., anti-liberalism, anti-Semitism, and a fascination with radical Islamism.

The extreme Left sees in people like Chávez the money that they need and the false discourse to maintain false dogmas. The result is a false progressivism without progress. In this case, social-revolution has been the flag used by a group of neo-populists to gain power in Latin America and impose a new tyranny with false social goals.

While Chávez from Venezuela, Correa from Ecuador and Ortega from Nicaragua were democratically elected, they have ruled by decree, modified the law to fulfill their desires, concentrated power in the executive branch of government, eliminated any form of accountability, manipulated the elections which no longer can be considered free, and greatly enhanced the role of the military as their chief power base.

They have violated human rights and eliminated the rule of law and any democratic principle or institution. Instead of seeing new socialists, we are witnessing the resurgence of radical populists in Latin America. The nationalist and anti-imperialist rhetoric of Chávez, Correa, and Ortega is a rebirth of a radical-nationalistic populism from the past. We cannot call those countries democracies.

Eduardo Galeano, one of Chavez’s favorite authors, wrote in Open Veins of Latin America (1973): “The ghosts of all the revolutions that have been strangled or betrayed through Latin America’s tortured history emerge in the new experiments, as if the present had been foreseen and begotten by the contradictions of the past”. Chavez and Ortega just betrayed their own revolutions.

What Galeano (1973) wrote about Venezuela years ago applies to the false socialist regime of Chávez: “nationalization of basic resources doesn’t in itself imply redistribution of income for the majority’s benefit, nor does necessarily endanger the power and privileges of the dominant minority. In Venezuela the economy of waste and extravagance continues intact."

Chavez “extravagance” is just one of the ghosts hunting his fake revolution, it is just a matter of time and the right democratic wave for his sand-built regime to fall.

The Rise (and Fall?) of Ridiculous Leaders

This piece originally appeared in the Latin American Herald Tribune on March 22.

“The devil came here yesterday, and it smells of sulfur here still.” Who can forget these infamous words by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York referring to US President Bush.

“There must be a United Nations inquiry into the assassination of John F. Kennedy” said Libya’s Dictator Muammar Gaddafi at the same forum only three years later. He went on to demand 7.7 trillion dollars in reparations for Africa, and opined that he would be happy if President Barack Obama stayed president of the United States for life.

In 2010 it was Iranian dictator Mahmood Ahjadinejad’s turn as he revived September 11 conspiracy theories and announced that Iran – the world’s most significant sponsor of terrorism – would be holding a global conference in Tehran on how to combat terrorism.

Those three friends share the same megalomania and the same approach to power.

The eccentricities of these ridiculous leaders are well known. Muammar Gaddafi travels with a voluptuous blond nurse, is afraid of heights and tall buildings, and sleeps in a roving convoy that drives through the desert protected by only women bodyguards.

Hugo Chavez appeared on a stage wearing a huge Mexican “sombrero” and sang “rancheras” for a full hour in a misguided attempt to apologize to the Mexican people for a slight from his famously undisciplined tongue. “Condi Rice seems to be obsessed with me,” he once told a crowd of 700,000 people in downtown Caracas. “Maybe I should propose marriage to her, maybe that would fix things” he said to the jeering mob, “no, let another make a sacrifice for the country; ask me anything else, but don’t ask me that.” One day a communist revolutionary the next day a self proclaimed savior of the poor and latter a democrat persecuted by the “evil empire”.

In a recent conference on climate change Bolivia’s President Evo Morales confidently stated that eating genetically modified chicken makes people gay, and bald. He appeared in front of his own parliament promoting the use of coca and admitting that he used coca leaves and paste.

In a recent kerfuffle with his police, Ecuador’s President Correa waded through a mob of hundreds of armed, angry officers to stand framed in a window and yelled, “…if you want to kill the president, here he is. Kill him,” and ripped open his shirt with a flourish to reveal his bare chest. “I prefer to be dead sooner than lose my life,” he shouted self-importantly to the armed crowd.

Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s President, violated his stepdaughter.

Birds of a feather, as they say. It’s no surprise at all that Chavez, Ortega, Castro, and Morales have all been the recipients of the highly coveted Muammar Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights. This important trophy, with its corresponding $250,000 award, is given to “international personalities, bodies or organizations that have distinctively contributed to rendering an outstanding human service and has achieved great actions in defending human rights, protecting the causes of freedom and supporting peace everywhere in the world.”

It is a shame for the Western Hemisphere that the automatic and stronger supporters of the Gaddafi’s bloody tyranny are these three stooges.

The risible antics of these barmy leaders could be passed off as fodder for Saturday Night Live -- maybe a spoof featuring Tina Fey -- if these men weren’t at the same time so dangerous. As I write this, Libya’s Gaddafi is using weaponry of war against his own people in a desperate attempt to retain power.

Mahmood Ahmadinejad, after torturing and murdering thousands of Iranians after the fraudulent election of 2009 could be only months away from a nuclear weapon to call his very own.

Hugo Chavez has held onto power for twelve years, converting his tropical Caribbean paradise into a safe haven for drug dealers, terrorists and criminals while sitting back as they murdered 150,000 Venezuelans in senseless acts of turf warfare. He turned a progressive oil country (with undoubted social and economical disparities) into a banana republic. He talked about his revolution but instead of a “jasmine” one he has been implementing a banana revolution in Venezuela and exporting his authoritarianism to Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador and other countries.

So far, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua – all Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) member countries – are the only countries willing to defend Gaddafi’s carnage. Not even Iran, who can barely contain its pleasure at a competitor’s demise; or Russia who must fear losing an important arms client, are coming to the defense of the Butcher of Tripoli.

I had hoped that after the slaughter of the twentieth century an exhausted world would be unwilling to watch again – this time in High Definition – the plight of countless millions demanding that we come to their aid.

Apparently, I was wrong.

While the international community debated whether or not Libya should lose its seat in the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Gaddafi regrouped and hired African mercenaries who are attempting to retake areas lost to the rebels.

While the United Nations Security Council votes to open an investigation by the International Criminal Court into war crimes – Gaddafi’s military continues to commit them. In the Western Hemisphere, not a single word from the Organization of American States in support for democracy in Libya and the end of the criminal massacre at the hands of Gaddafi and not a single critic from the heads of the countries in the region or the ones responsible for the Western Hemisphere’s policies in the Department of State or the National Security Council.

It is time for the timidity of the Obama Administration to cease. They sat on the sideline while Ahmadinejad tortured thousands. They say nothing while Chavez harbors terrorists, persecutes civil society, closes down TV stations, supports drug traffic and sells gasoline and uranium to Iran in violation of international sanctions.

President Obama famously said from Cairo University, “I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.” It is time for the Obama Administration to stand up for those beliefs, and help free the world from its ridiculous, dangerous leaders.