Chavez Leading Latins Down Path to Fascism?

Gigi Geyer has written the following article about Hugo Chavez that makes him sound more like Benito Mussolini than Fidel Castro:
"I am sitting in the Centro Tolon in downtown Caracas at an "elegantissimo" Japanese sushi restaurant named Shoge. The tablecloths are immaculately white, the glassware virtually gleams, the waiters linger. My lunch for two persons is going to cost me $110!

"Looking out over the skyscrapers, you could easily think you were in one of the richest cities in the world. After all, Venezuela is the seventh-largest consumer of Scotch whisky globally, business is booming, and, as the locals put it, "Money is sloshing around everywhere."

"But wasn't this supposed to be a revolution? Isn't this the Bolivarian-socialist-Venezuelan (it does get a little long) new-style state of President Hugo Chavez, who has shaken up the hemisphere -- and the United States -- since his first election in 1998? At that time, he told me in a long interview, "We don't COPY other models; we INVENT them."

"But one is damnably hard-pressed to characterize this newly invented revolution -- or even to find it, for you see its handmaidens remarkably little in Caracas, even on the eve of the important Dec. 3 presidential elections.

"On the one hand, the mysterious Chavez now controls everything: the government itself, the judiciary, the army, the police, the education and health systems. He seems to be many men; he will appear on his television show "Alo, Presidente!" (the longest performance went eight hours and 20 minutes, putting him on a par with his hero, Fidel Castro) as a doctor, a Bolivian peasant, or a Venezuelan businessman, depending upon the political mood.

"Pedro Burelli, one of the former chiefs of Petroleos de Venezuela, the state oil company that for the last three years has been completely dominated by Chavez's hacks, says that Chavez can be at least five different people -- and that his aides have different names for the characters. I have seen him go from a most charming and amenable man to a dark paranoid seeking out enemies wherever they may be.
Ideology? Teodoro Petkoff, one of Venezuela's most prominent writers, told me of Chavez: "Eight years ago, he had a firm but diffuse feeling for democratic society, but it was not accompanied by a social form. He has changed much. Today, he is very authoritarian/militaristic, a mixture of Stalinism and fascism. In his language of forming the 'Socialism of the 21st Century,' I believe he has in his head a mixture of Cuba and 'Mein Kampf.'

"He believes in the value of propaganda. With the 'popular' classes, he produces identity and belonging, but it is clearly manipulative. In the beginning he was very sincere, but now he has changed greatly. This is really a regime 'caudillista' -- of the strongman, of the great caudillos of independence. All decisions depend upon him, and all public power is under him."

"Like so many dictators -- probably Argentina's famous Juan Peron of the 1930s is the closest model for Chavez -- he sleeps in different places every night and has eight rings of mostly Cuban guards around him. There are little-known lists of enemies -- his "Lista Tascon" of a half-million people, and the "Lista Maisanta" -- and these folks will never get a cent of government benefits and may be open to repression. There are the private militias formed within the army but loyal only to him; and above all, there are the "misiones," or missions to the 80 percent of the population that is poor. They are paid $200 a week to go to one or two hours of classes, 20,000 never seen or heard Cuban doctors care for them, and ironically, these formerly impoverished and forgotten Venezuelans now constitute one of the basic building blocks of the new consumption.
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Edmond Saade, leading pollster and head of the Ven-Am Chamber of Commerce, notes that mass consumption went up 20 percent between 2003 and 2004; 19 percent between 2004 and 2005; and now 13 percent to 15 percent between 2005 and 2006.

"Meanwhile, the missions are costing the country $80 billion a year, while Chavez gives Cuba 100,000 barrels of oil a day plus transfer payments of $3 billion, a serious input into Cuba's $20 billion GDP. But with oil earnings of $150 million a day, Chavez can do a lot of buying of loyalty abroad -- and he does, from Iran to China and across Latin America.

"On the other hand, even as he was blasting President Bush as "the devil" in the United Nations earlier this fall (an action that was not appreciated here), and even as the regime has confiscated 4,000 apartments and is threatening landowners, business is booming, especially with the United States, with its $36 billion worth of Venezuelan exports a year. American businesses do not seem nervous here, and it is clear that Chavez, in contrast to his Cuban friend Fidel, insists upon being seen in the world as an elected president. (In fact, Castro has told him to be elected -- and to keep foreign businesses.)

If you look at Chavez's speeches, Douglas Bravo, a former Marxist guerrilla comandante who has broken with Chavez, said recently in an interview with the newspaper El Nacional, "This is a revolutionary government. But if you look at what it has accomplished, it is a neoliberal government."

Venezuela's long-term problem is not, however, political or even economic. It is cultural. Less than one-half of 1 percent of Venezuelans work in the oil industry, which produces 85 percent of foreign exchange and 50 percent of the country's GDP, and so the country has never had to develop a work ethic. In reality, Chavez's regime is different from the past only because he is distributing wealth to the poor. Despite his unpalatable methods, that is not to be despised; but the bigger problem is that there is still no real reinvestment, in either the poor people or the economy.

Now, THAT would be a real revolution for Latin America.

My two cents: Carlos Andres Perez tried real capitalism for a short time in the '90s, but the Venezuelans may not be ready for more than narcotic socialism. Unlike its hard-working neighbor Colombia, the Vees allow manana to run the country, along with the bipolar manic-depressive caudillo cacique and his clique at the top.