Ordinarily, one arrives at “complicated truths” by adding contradictory and complex elements, by introducing nuance to an overly simplistic version of reality. But Wilpert “complicates” things by eliminating from his account precisely those features of Chávez’s rule that have been condemned by human rights organizations, advocates of a free press, organized labor, and other segments of civil society, both in Venezuela and internationally. The two political criticisms he makes of Chávez’s “effort to transform Venezuela”—that it extended the president’s term of office from five to six years and that it gave the president direct control over military promotions—would strike most readers as something they would on balance oppose, but are hardly the foundation blocks of authoritarian rule. Compare the import of those measures to the following set of facts, not one of which appears in Wilpert’s essay.
Colonel Hugo Chávez, a paratrooper in the Venezuelan Army, first came to public attention in 1992, as the main leader of a failed coup d’état. He and his co-conspirators were tried on charges of treason and imprisoned, but he won a pardon and an early release two years later. Despite initial misgivings about the electoral process Chávez entered the 1998 presidential elections, and won with the support of significant elements of the Venezuelan left and trade union movement. Once in office, his method of governing was that of a military commander, issuing orders and exhortations to the ranks and brooking no dissent. The Chávez record is rife with violations of human rights, disregard for the rule of law, and contempt for democratic norms and processes.
Headstrong and imperious, inexperienced and inept at democratic politics, Chávez soon alienated many of his onetime allies and precipitated needless confrontations with his foes. Conflicts between his supporters and opponents escalated, and growing demonstrations against his regime were violently attacked. In 2003, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), affiliated with the Organization of American States, reported that fifty-five Venezuelans had died in such instances of street violence. After one large and peaceful national demonstration was fired upon by snipers and eighteen protesters killed, all broadcast on national television, the situation dramatically deteriorated. First there was a failed coup d’état led by business leaders, then an unsuccessful general strike led by organized labor.
Working closely with Venezuelan human rights organizations, both Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) have found substantial evidence that the Venezuelan police and National Guard used excessive force against anti-Chávez demonstrators and that detained protesters were ill-treated and tortured. These violations of human rights fit into a disturbing pattern of “disappearances” and extrajudicial killings by “death squads” of off-duty police and National Guard that have been documented by Venezuelan and international human rights organizations. HRW found that a death squad in the state of Portuguesa was responsible for one hundred killings alone between 2000 and 2002; there is evidence of substantial death squad activity in another eight states and the capital of Caracas. Authorities refused to seriously investigate and prosecute either attacks on anti-Chávez protesters or death-squad activity, human rights advocates report.
In this context, Chavista efforts to undermine the independence of the judiciary are particularly ominous. In the last year, Chávez-backed legislation allowed him to pack the Supreme Court with his partisans, putting in place a chief justice who declared that any rulings by lower courts “contrary to the revolution” would be overturned. Judges who released opposition legislators detained without evidence of criminal wrongdoing were removed from office. HRW and AI strongly condemned these moves. Scores of government critics are now being rounded up in political arrests—the most recent case involved a distinguished jurist and former president of the IACHR, Carlos Ayala Corao, who has been implausibly charged with complicity in the failed coup—and a compliant judiciary will ensure that they are denied due process of law in what is increasingly becoming a police state.
No less threatening are Chavista attacks on freedom of the press. Venezuelan media have been polarized between pro-Chávez state outlets and anti-Chávez privately owned outlets, with conscientious journalists who attempt to provide accurate information caught in the middle. On many occasions, journalists and media outlets have been physically attacked by pro- or anti-Chávez mobs; HRW calculates that 130 separate incidents of this sort, predominantly by the pro-Chávez forces, took place from the start of 2002 to February 2003. In an attempt to silence critical media voices, the government has passed new repressive legislation that institutes prior restraint of the press and criminalizes the publication or broadcasting of statements that show a “lack of respect” for government authorities or “insult” government leaders. Media outlets may lose their licenses for publishing such prohibited material, subsequent to action by a national institute controlled by Chávez partisans, and government ministers have begun investigations of the major anti-Chávez television outlets that could result in such license revocations. Criticism of Chávez regime attacks upon the press has come not just from the owners of the private media, as one would expect, but also from such well-known advocates of press freedom and the rights of journalists as Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists (the international federation of journalist unions), HRW, and AI.
But no sector of civil society has come under stronger fire from Chávez than Venezuelan organized labor, the Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV). Chávez began his term in office with the declaration that he would “demolish” the CTV, and that “nothing could prevent its elimination.” He suspended by executive decree all collective bargaining in the public sector and the petroleum industry, where the strength of the CTV lay, and organized a national referendum in 2000 to decide on the leadership and national structure of the Venezuelan union movement. The International Labor Organization (ILO), affiliated with the United Nations, and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the leading international union federation, condemned such a referendum as a violation of freedom of association, which guarantees workers the right to choose democratically their own organizational structure without outside interference from government and business. Only a minority of the Venezuelan population voted in the plebiscite, in stark contrast to earlier referenda establishing a Constituent Assembly and ratifying a new Constitution.
Following the referendum, the CTV held a one-member, one-vote secret ballot to choose its new leadership, in a national election observed and found to be free and fair by unionists from Europe and throughout the Americas. A new, broader leadership was elected, consisting not only of the traditional CTV leadership from the social democratic Accion Democratica (AD) party but also of other leading parties of the Venezuelan left—the new left and democratic socialist Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and Causa Radical, and the far-left Bandera Roja, among others. A few pro-Chávez leaders were elected. Chávez refused to accept the results of the election. Instead, Chávez proposed legislation outlawing collective bargaining and strikes in the public sector and the petroleum industry and established a series of rival “Bolivarian” unions under his control, the latest version of which is known as the Union Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT). The international labor movement—the ILO, the ICFTU, the regional Latin American union federation known as the Organizacion Regional Interamericanca de Trabajadores (ORIT), together with the AFL-CIO and European trade union movements—have condemned the Chávez administration’s violations of freedom of association and its campaign against Venezuelan organized labor and have provided solidarity support to the CTV.
Supporters of Chávez respond to criticisms of his record in each of these areas by attempting to discredit the motives and bona fides of the organizations and individuals making them. Such a strategy may suffice to raise some doubts on a single issue, but when these issues are taken together, one is asked to believe that all of the leading human rights organizations, advocates of a free press, and organized labor unions, in Venezuela and internationally, are unprincipled and wrong about the nature of Chávez’s rule.
Although much of Wilpert’s account of Chávez’s rule is marred by extraordinary errors of omission, he engages in one error of commission. Chávez, Wilpert says, has united the Venezuelan left behind him. In fact, the Venezuelan left has been fiercely divided over Chávez, with the democratic left going into opposition and most of the authoritarian, Leninist left being among his strongest backers. The social democratic AD, the Venezuelan member party of the Socialist International, has always been opposed to Chávez; after support for his initial electoral campaign, the democratic socialist MAS and La Causa Radical and the far-left Bandera Roja went into opposition. By contrast, the Stalinist Venezuelan Communist Party and various Trotskyist sects, along with pro-Chávez minority splinters from MAS and Causa Radical, are leading forces in Chávez’s ruling coalition. Whether or not Wilpert is correct that Chávez does not intend to institute a communist-style regime, it is clear that Chavistas on the authoritarian left, in Venezuela and abroad, see him as a second coming of Fidel Castro, an anti-imperialist populist who will increasingly take on a Marxist-Leninist hue.
Although democrats of the left knowledgeable about the record of the Chávez government will understand the need to oppose it and stand in solidarity with Venezuelan democrats, we need to be discerning about the various forces in the opposition. Some of these figures are no more democratic then Chávez himself, and their actions have cost the opposition dearly. The failed coup launched by sectors of the business and military was more than a colossal political blunder. It was a betrayal of the fundamental democratic principle that a duly elected president may only be removed from office by constitutional means, through the election of a successor or impeachment.
By the time the opposition finally fought Chávez on the ground on which it should have met him from the first—a referendum vote of the Venezuelan people—it lacked the moral authority and the political credibility to win that battle. Divided and demoralized, it lost. Unfortunately, the entire opposition—and not just the business and military elements that organized the attempted coup—paid the price for that betrayal of democratic principle. Even though the CTV leadership condemned the coup before it was clear that it would fail, for example, Chavistas have continually insinuated that it was really supportive. In order to save the Venezuelan democracy that Chávez has done so much harm, the opposition will have to prove itself anew to be the voice of the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people. And to do so, it must be led by unimpeachable democrats.
Fidelity to democratic principle also requires that supporters of democracy in Venezuela hold our own governments accountable for their actions. Considerable circumstantial evidence suggests that highly placed American officials had foreknowledge of the failed coup in Venezuela. The New York Times and the UK Guardian have reported numerous meetings between Otto Reich, undersecretary of state for Latin America, and the leaders of the coup, including chief plotter Pedro Carmona Estanga, in the months leading up to the coup. Although one can only speculate on what was said behind closed doors, it is clear, at a minimum, that American officials took no positive steps to prevent the launching of the coup. And that must be completely unacceptable to American democrats. In a context where so many elements employ double standards—Chavistas opposed to coups against, but not by, Chávez, and anti-Chávez forces in the business and military opposed to coups by, but not against, Chávez—it is imperative that democrats, in the United States as well as in Venezuela, speak clearly and employ a single standard: democracy and human rights must be respected by all. Some truths are not all that complicated.
Amnesty International, “Venezuela: Human Rights under Threat.” 2004. [www.amnestyusa.org/countries/venezuela/reports.do]
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, “Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Venezuela,” 2003. [www.cidh.oas.org/countryrep/Venezuela2003eng/toc.htm]
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, “Internationally Recognized Core Labor Standards in Venezuela,” 2002. [www.icftu.org/www/pdf/venezuelacls2002.pdf]
International Federation of Journalists, “Missing Link in Venezuela’s Political Crisis: How Media and Government Failed a Test of Journalism and Democracy,” 2002. [www.ifj.org/pdfs/venezuelajuly02.pdf]
Human Rights Watch, “Caught in the Crossfire: Freedom of Expression in Venezuela,” 2003. [www.hrw.org/reports/2003/venezuela/]; and “Rigging the Rule of Law: Judicial Independence under Siege in Venezuela,” 2004. [www.hrw.org/reports/2004/venezuela0604/]
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