Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has won a clear victory in the referendum to decide whether he should be removed from office. Chavez has been accused by his political opponents of increasingly authoritarian behavior. Nonetheless this week’s vote was made possible because of 1999 constitutional amendments Chavez himself made. The amendments allow for a referendum after the middle of the presidential term if 20 percent of the voters demand it.
A champion of Venezuela’s poor, his administration has seen a polarization of political forces. The country’s wealthy elite, backed by a section of the middle class, has regarded his rule as a potent threat to their power and privilege. Chavez himself has betrayed his military background with a blunt, no-nonsense approach to government. He has been all too ready to confront when a subtler politician might have sought to circumvent political opposition. The unfortunate consequence of this has been that the country has seemed at times to be teetering on the brink of civil conflict. Given the violent protests at the outcome of this referendum, it should be realized that this danger has not yet gone away.
What is most disturbing in all this, however, has been the attitude of the United States which has historically always been prepared to back right-of-center politicians in the region against what it sees as a socialist or communist menace. Thus Washington continues to refuse to have anything to do with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, one of the last of the communist economies. There is also an American suspicion, bordering on antipathy, of the Chavez administration. Even though the respected former US president Jimmy Carter and his fellow international observers concluded that there was no massive electoral fraud as alleged by the opposition, the US was initially extraordinarily grudging in its acceptance of the vote. Here we have a case where Washington appears unwilling to accept a democratically expressed decision because it does not agree with it. What sort of message should Afghans and Iraqis be taking from this obvious double standard?
The evidence thus far is that President Chavez won over 58 percent of the popular vote with something like 42 percent of the electorate voting against him. With no evidence of “massive electoral fraud,” a 16-percent winning margin suggests that Chavez enjoys the confidence of an overwhelming majority of Venezuelans. It should be noted here that Bush won the White House four years ago by the barest sliver of a Florida whisker. Just imagine the screams of outrage that would have emanated from Washington had the Venezuelan government cast doubts on the election result. And how much louder would that outrage have been if the Venezuelans had then contacted the defeated candidate to see if they could offer any assistance in overturning the outcome. Washington’s attitude toward the Chavez victory seems to be yet another example of the total inability of the Bush White House to think through its foreign-policy positions along with their implications and consequences.
