A discussion of Chavez and Venezuela

I'm picking up on a previous discussion about Hugo Chavez with readers Brunowe and Drone. It started on this post and continued here.

Brunowe raised important concerns: human rights issues, the independence of the Venezuelan judiciary, freedom of expression and, most important of all, the Chavez' government's commitment to democracy more broadly.

He sourced those charges to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for the HR issues, and FreedomHouse for the rest.

I'll to respond to the specifics in a sec, but first I want to talk about the broader context in which all of these issues are playing out.Four points, all of which aren't terribly controversial. First, Venezuela is a country that has long been ruled by a very small, light-skinned elite that controls a lion's share of the nation's wealth and land. Two, Chavez is challenging not only their power and control over the nation's wealth, but also Washington's and that of the international investment community. His policies fly in the face of neoliberal orthodoxy. Third, few would deny with a straight face that there isn't a concerted campaign to discredit him by a well-funded and media-savvy opposition. And, finally, that opposition has shown unambiguously that it is happy to use undemocratic means to achieve its goals, including violent means.

I would argue that we wouldn't be discussing Chavez' bona fides as a small 'd' democrat if not for the fact that the business community both here and to our South are trying to discredit him. Chavez may be many things, but he's proven that he respects the democratic process time and again. When the left wins in fair elections in Latin America, it is standard operating procedure to accuse them of being undemocratic. When Evo Morales came in third in the 2000 elections in Bolivia, Otto Reich, a neo-fascist Cold Warrior from the Reagan "dirty wars" era, accused him of representing democratically-elected "anti-democratic" forces. Same with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The charge is standard issue.

I submit that if Chavez were a leader with mainstream economic policies who enjoyed the electoral victories that he's had, and treated the opposition as he has, nobody would ever dream of accusing him of being anything less than a democrat. After all, the opposition in Venezuela aren't in hiding or working underground, the court found against the government several times on matters during the 2004 recall referendum and the commercial media are virulently anti-Chavez. If Chavez is intimidating the media and oppressing the opposition, he's downright incompetent about it.

Which brings me to Brunowe's main source. Freedom House, put simply, is a voice of the Venezuelan opposition. While it's bipartisan, it represents the views of the U.S. "strategic class" and its board includes former CIA director James Woolsey, considered an intellectual leader of the neoconservative movement, Reagan Paleocons like Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Democratic hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski. It receives about half of its funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, which also funds the Venezuelan opposition - a direct conflict of interest. The rest of its revenues come from foundations, including Soros, but also Scaife and Bradley, funders of much of the right's infrastructure. It is, clearly, not ideologically neutral. Holly Sklar described it as a "conservative research, publishing, networking, and selective human rights organization."

Which is not to say that information found there is false, but that it needs to be examined critically and in context.

So let's talk about court-packing in context. That's a topic of hot debate among Chavez supporters as well as critics, and I'll say right from the start that I'm on the fence. Some argue, correctly, that the court was packed with justices who would support the government specifically because of the actions of the opposition. They say that while the government will have support on Chavez' reforms, it's still an independent judiciary.