Chavez from the Imperialistic Perspective

Below is a column from the Sept. 28 Columbus Dispatch. What crap! Fox distortion in Wolfs' clothing!

I wrote the author; he wrote me; I wrote back. So far, that's it. Everything is here in the order of occurrence.

- Uke Man


U.S. need not panic over Chavez and his revolution
Wednesday, September 28, 2005

DOUGLAS SOUTHGATE

Like Middle Eastern despots who insist that extravagant spending on the military and secret police is needed to counter the threat from Israel, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez claims that the dictatorship he is establishing for himself is largely a response to U.S. plans to invade his country. He raised the specter of invasion most recently on Sept. 16, during an interview on ABC’s Nightline.

Chavez clearly has subverted democracy in Latin America’s largest oil-producing nation. Opponents have been purged from all major institutions, including the military-officer corps and the state oil company. And now that the commission for overseeing elections has been packed with the dictator’s cronies, prospects for free and fair voting are dim. This assault on democracy has been facilitated by high oil prices, which have allowed Chavez to ramp up government programs that benefit Venezuela’s poor. After declining or stagnating living standards during the 1980s and 1990s, these programs are a welcome relief.

Chavez is keen to export his "Bolivarian Revolution" throughout the region. Aside from being cozy with a rogue’s gallery of tyrants and U.S. enemies, including Iranian ayatollahs and Saddam Hussein, he has a close friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and hopes to adopt key elements of Cuba’s "people’s democracy," as Chavez insists on calling it. Elsewhere, Chavez sees a kindred spirit in narco-populist Evo Morales, who stands a good chance of becoming president of Bolivia.

So, what is to be done about the leader of Venezuela? The choice is not between assassination and invasion, as TV evangelist Pat Robertson seemed to suggest during a slow-news day in August. Instead, containment is the best solution. In large part, this involves good relations between the United States and Venezuela’s neighbors. Consider Brazil, where President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has signed commercial pacts with Chavez and often shares the stage with him. Lula has been weakened, however, because his party, which has been chagrined by the government’s departures from leftist doctrine, faces serious corruption charges. In Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, who eked out victory in a presidential election in which just 22 percent of registered voters participated, is playing every populist card at hand in hopes of future electoral success.

Leaders such as Lula and Kirchner may applaud Chavez when he promises to "flood the region" with cheap Venezuelan fuel. But embarking on a neo-Marxist crusade against the colossus of the north is unlikely as long as the United States avoids panic and maintains normal commercial and diplomatic ties.

A more active element of the strategy for containing Chavez is to provide aid and technical assistance to Colombia, which, with 25 million people, is Latin America’s third-most-populous nation (after Brazil and Mexico) and where fighting among multiple sides threatens the existence of a national state. A close alliance with Colombia makes many Americans uncomfortable. Especially controversial are the efforts of President Alvaro Uribe, who has grown popular as progress has been made against guerrilla forces, to reach a demobilization agreement with rightwing paramilitary groups.

One obstacle is that the United States wants to extradite some of those paramilitary leaders suspected of dealing drugs. Another concern is that many of them have abused human rights. The solution, applied in a number of nations, is to grant amnesty only to those who confess their crimes. Some are uneasy about this approach, which resembles the nonprosecution of Confederate officers after the Civil War. But if an amnesty is needed so that the Colombian military can concentrate on leftists of the Revolutionay Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, who these days resemble a criminal gang more than anything else, so be it, especially if disintegration of Venezuela’s western neighbor would unleash Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution regionwide.

If Chavez, an ardent FARC sympathizer, is effectively contained, as seems likely, then economic forces will gradually erode his regime. Sooner or later, Venezuela will be in the same position as the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, when two rubles’ worth of natural resources produced socialist output worth one ruble.

Several years may pass before Bolivarian socialism reaches this dead end, but Chavez’s demise is inevitable.

Douglas Southgate, a professor of agricultural economics at Ohio State University, works frequently in Latin America.
southgate . 1 @osu.edu

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Dear Prof. Southgate,

Your column on the situation in Venezuela is academically and intellectually dishonest, fit for sophists pimping for think tanks, but clearly not the product of an academician attempting objectivity. Say what you will, it is stunningly obvious that you are grinding an axe, not shining a light.

Yours - Tom Harker, Ukulele Man

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Thanks for the feedback, Tom, but I'm a little confused about your position. Are you siding with Pat Robinson's call for deposing Chavez? O eres partidario de la Revolucion Bolivariana?

Kind regards, DS


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Well Doug,

My point was that an honest commentator would write from neither Robertson’s nor Chavez’s partisan perspectives. I think you know where I’d stand personally if pressed to state it, and your column clearly shows where you personally do stand.

My point was that the column reflected your personal ideology rather than an attempt at objective exposition. I could run through numerous examples, but I’m sure you know what you are doing. Much of what you said could be applied to the Bush administration as well as to Chavez. Much of what you said is far from established; indeed some of what you say has more evidence against it than for it. Much of what you say depends on the notion that the government of Venezuela serves America first, then its own people. Nevertheless, you plow right on.

If you were writing for a think-tank, I wouldn’t have responded to your column; you’d just be doing your venal job. You, however, were identified as a professor at my alma mater. That seems a conflict of interest to me. Think-tank flacks are what they are, and I would hope that academics were what they are supposed to be. One seeks to manipulate by distorting reality; the other tries to liberate by improving our understanding of reality.

?Esta bien?

Yours - Tom Harker, Ukulele Man