The following article was written by Asdrubal Aguiar and published in local newspaper El Universal on December 28th. Dr. Aguiar is a Professor and former judge of the Interamerican Human Rights Commission. The article is quite long, but it gives a summary of Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan crisis which I think many readers from abroad will like. I will only put the first part in the Home page and a link at the end to the full article.
About Chavez’ dictatorship
The shortsightedness of the European left
By Asdrubal Aguiar
“The weakness and greatness of democracy is that those that reach power thanks to a set of democratic rules may change them”
(Antonio Tabucchi, apud. Domenico Chiappe, Golpe a Golpe,
Caracas, Diario El Universal, 21-12-02)
It is not easy for foreigners living beyond our borders to have all of the elements, which are very complex and grave, that have impacted the severe crisis facing Venezuela today. The truth is that even we, Venezuelans, used to a lifestyle signed by tolerance and also educated in the practice of freedom-so much that our democracy was one of the most recognized and prestigious of the world-are confused by the mistaken and absurd circumstances which are currently governing us.
Certain strata of European public opinion and even, North American, find it unacceptable that sectors of the opposition, no matter how representative they may be, are asking Hugo Chávez to abandon the Presidency without completing his mandate. He, in effect, is exercising it on the basis of democratic elections. And it thus irritates them, that supposedly privileged sectors, encouraged by the media may question an official, who beyond his defects or conflictive personality, is concerned by the lot of the poor and the excluded and whose leadership is being exercised with a capacity never seen before in Latin America.
This posture, that 80% of Venezuelans, not a few times judge as insensible and reductionist, has its source in the simplicity with which we are observed from the outside and under the light of some paradigms that have little to do with the large cultural and political changes that have taken place among us during the course of the last few decades. Latin America, in general, is still being seen as the continent of social injustice. In other words and at the rhythm of a very worn out literature and tied to the ideological boiling of the 60’s and even from before, we are still supposed to be the slavist territory of large agricultural states: White dominating blacks and Indians; and also space fertilized by the “necessary gendarmes” and the gross contradictions: countries fed by enormous natural wealth and tied by Dante-like belts of misery and illiteracy.
Thus, if a Latin American military ex-coupster, transforms like Chavez into President and has autocratic sparks, that would appropriate- according to the restful judgment of some industrialized nations-of our sociological condition of underdeveloped province. And if the man himself, moreover, happens to be elected by the majority vote of his people and assumes the compromise to defend the poor, before being a “gorilla” or a “milico” it would be a revelation: a sort of Messiah, who would have redeemed the sins of his primitive and corrupted fellow citizens.
Thus, when the opposition asks Chávez to resign or that he accept advanced elections, in the face of the dangerous crisis that-due to his actions or omissions- maintains the country at the edge of a possible civil war and when to that effect that opposition argues that such an alternative is proper of democracy, far abroad people only think and conclude what we have said earlier. Those nations do neither notice nor their public opinion, what has been part of their own realities in very similar situations: Richard Nixon, is good to remember, resigned under the pressure of the North American media and in a framework that nobody labeled as antidemocratic. An in the parliamentary Europe specifically, its political and Governing crisis are overcome through early elections, so as to avoid a general crisis of democratic government.
2
Hugo Chávez Frías has, as President of Venezuela, an unquestionable legitimacy of origin. He was elected, despite his illegal swearing in, according to the constitutional rules of the so-called “puntofijismo” (1958-1998), which he has despised and against which he rebelled through the use of weapons. It was a time of errors, but also a time of enormous achievements. The average life span of a Venezuelan was 52 years in 1958, while in 1998 it had reached 73 years, a time when the networks of clean water and sewage which feed the whole country consolidated. Venezuela had in 1955, 3 universities, while at the moment of Hugo Chavez’ election, there were a couple of hundred institutions of higher learning. At the same time the number of hospital beds were 20,100 in 1955 and of the 228 hospitals then in existence opened the way for having 242 medical doctors for each 10,000 inhabitants. General hospitals were elevated to 340 and the strengthening of primary medical assistance gave place to 4,000 walk-in clinics both urban and rural.
Chavez, thus, in the manner of “caudillo” extracted from the pages of our ill-fated XIX century, filled the vacuum of leadership that – in the zero hour- the old political parties were not able to fill or could not fulfill with efficiency. But he was not able to identify and understand, besides the profound political changes that he had to lead and was asked to lead, those assets that the Venezuelan people made inalienable their own, beyond the deviations of the precedent Governments: Its vocation and disposition towards “consensual” decisions and the sacred recognition of its plurality in common mestization.
Chavez, that he did, started his mandate openly and shamelessly violating the rules of Constitutional order that allowed him to gain power. And he has exercised that mandate, with his back and in open contraposition to the rules of the 1999 Constitution: his magnum opus. “The best Constitution in the world”, as he himself usually qualifies it.
It is not by chance that Chavez said once, publicly and textually, in front of the attendees of the International Congress of Agrarian Law last November: “I am the Law, I am the State”
You can find the full article here
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