{"id":76784,"date":"2013-03-11T09:29:58","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T09:29:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=76784"},"modified":"2013-03-14T09:09:19","modified_gmt":"2013-03-14T09:09:19","slug":"hugo-chavez-hero-to-many-villain-to-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/hugo-chavez-hero-to-many-villain-to-others\/","title":{"rendered":"Hugo Ch\u00e1vez: Hero To Many, Villain To Others"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rajan Philips<\/a><\/span> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rajan Philips<\/p><\/div>\n

Hugo Ch\u00e1vez<\/a><\/span>, the controversial revolutionary leader of Venezuela, died last week at the age of 58.\u00a0 He was too young to die at a time when human beings are living much longer than before, and he fell victim to that most capricious of all killer diseases: cancer.\u00a0 Reactions to his death have been as varied as the reactions to his politics.\u00a0 The tumultuous mourning in Venezuela is also burdened by the uncertainty about the country\u2019s future.\u00a0 His influence reached across the Latin American continent and his passing will alter the political dynamic in one of the most fastest growing regions in the world.\u00a0 Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretian (1993-2003), who had worked with Mr. Chavez in the Organization of American States and who attended the funeral service in Caracas, described Mr. Ch\u00e1vez\u00a0 as \u201can unusual and colourful leader\u201d who modeled himself in the revolutionary\u00a0 tradition of Fidel Castro<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

In a rare obituary to be written by the leader of a neighbouring country, the former Brazilian President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva<\/a><\/span> has admiringly and critically assessed the contributions of \u00a0Hugo Ch\u00e1vez to the people of Venezuela and towards \u201cthe integration of Latin America\u201d.\u00a0 According to his Brazilian counterpart few believed as Mr. Ch\u00e1vez did \u201cin the unity of our continent and its diverse peoples \u2014 indigenous Indians, descendants of Europeans and Africans, recent immigrants.\u201d \u00a0Hugo Ch\u00e1vez was a hybrid of all of them \u2013 of Amerindian, Afro-Venezuelan, and Spanish ancestries; he represented and stood for the plurality of his continent and not single-ethnic dominance.<\/p>\n

There was a time when Latin American political events and debates made waves in Sri Lanka\u2019s political and intellectual circles.\u00a0 The names of the iconic Cuban leader, Fidel Castro; the foremost itinerant revolutionary, Che Guvera; the Chilean socialist leader and victim of the 1973 military coup, Salvador Allende; and the peripatetic academic and dependency theorist, Andre Gunder Frank, were all too common among Sri Lankan leftists during the 1960s and 1970s heady days of anti-imperialism.\u00a0 That was the era of the cold war, superpower dominance, neo-colonialism, centre-periphery dichotomy, and third world dependence that encompassed the countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa. \u00a0It is a different world now.<\/p>\n

Political genealogy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hugo Ch\u00e1vez both manifested and embodied the mixed political traditions of his continent and its searching questions in the post-coldwar world of today.\u00a0 His political genealogy had deep and well-founded roots even though sections of the media caricatured him as a theatrical maverick. \u00a0In a society where poverty was common and the Church and the army provided the main avenues for education and mobility, Ch\u00e1vez born to working class teacher-parents took the latter route joining the Military Academy and graduating among\u00a0 the top ten in a class of seventy five.\u00a0 Interestingly, the military curriculum provided for both military training and academic courses taught by civilian professors brought in from civilian universities.\u00a0 A better approach, one might say, than forcing civilian students to undergo military orientation as is being done in Sri Lanka<\/a><\/span>!<\/p>\n

The academic courses shaped\u00a0 Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s intellectual and political development giving him a sense of history and commitment to social justice.\u00a0 He also excelled in poetry, painting and baseball.\u00a0 It was at the military academy, that Ch\u00e1vez began his life-long attachment to the memory and legacy of Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar (1783-1830), a nineteenth century descendant of early Basque aristocratic immigrants, who lead the independence revolution of the South American colonies against imperial Spain.\u00a0 A widely travelled man and a military hero, Bol\u00edvar was a keen follower of the French and American revolutions, an admirer of Washington and Jefferson but a principled opponent of slavery.\u00a0 It was Bol\u00edvar who planted the seeds of democracy in Latin America.\u00a0 But the evolution of constitutional democracy took diametrically different trajectories in the US and Latin America.<\/p>\n

Whereas modernization took full flight in the US, the process has been severely hampered by the persistence of neo-colonial structures even after more than a century and half of independence in Latin America.\u00a0 The Church became a fact of politics in a continent (i.e. South and Central America) that had been carved between the Portuguese and the Spanish empires by the Papal bulls of the 15th<\/sup> and 16th<\/sup> centuries.\u00a0 In every state, the political and economic power became the monopoly of self-perpetuating oligarchies predicated on feudal property rights systems and sustained by military juntas.\u00a0 Sustained industrialization was not realized and national economies came to depend on the extraction and export of the continent\u2019s abundant resources.\u00a0 The structural dependency of the Latin American countries on Western Europe and the US was somewhat preordained by the anomalous situation of Spain and Portugal in Europe.\u00a0 The two were empires overseas but were economic dependencies in Europe, and their colonies were caught in the same dependency trap.\u00a0 Completing the picture was the vast mass of people in poverty in every Latin American country.\u00a0 \u00a0The demographic explosion in postwar twentieth century aggravated the misery of the rural masses causing internal migrations and the creation of urban ghettos.<\/p>\n

The antitheses to status quo inequalities ironically arose within the two main bulwarks of the oligarchical regimes: the Church and the Military.\u00a0 The Latin American Catholic Church became the incubator of Liberation Theology \u2013 the concept first developed in 1971 by the Peruvian<\/a><\/span> priest Gustavo Guti\u00e9rrez<\/a><\/span> and later caught fire throughout the Christian world, even inspiring clerics in Sri Lanka such as Bishop Leo Nanayakara and Fathers Paul Caspersz and Tissa Balasuriya<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 It was the Christian response to the realities of injustice and oppression in society.\u00a0 It was only natural that this reinterpretation of the Christian faith as a call to political action should have been provoked in a continent where, as Father Guti\u00e9rrez himself described at that time, \u201c60% of the population live in\u00a0 a state of poverty, and 82% of those find themselves in extreme poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n

No admirer of \u00a0<\/strong>Pinochet<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

The second antithesis came from Military leaders in countries like Peru and Panama, who supported military intervention to remove corrupt governments of the propertied classes and liberate the majority of the people who were mired in poverty.\u00a0 Hugo Ch\u00e1vez was greatly inspired by the ideas of progressive militarists as well as by the interpretation of the Bible \u00a0to advocate political liberation.\u00a0 He was, however, not an admirer of General Augusto Pinochet, the rightwing Chilean dictator who ousted Allende, and described himself as anti-Pinochet.\u00a0 But Ch\u00e1vez was prepared to emulate Pinochet for different reasons, and in Venezuela it meant freeing the country from the political logjam of the two corrupt and centrist political parties, the Democratic Action Party and the National Convergence Party.\u00a0 In 1992, Ch\u00e1vez led an unsuccessful coup to overthrow the government of the Action Party, and six years later he defeated both parties in the presidential election and became President.\u00a0 He went on to win two more elections and was in power for 14 years until his death.<\/p>\n

Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s espousal of the process of democratic elections was in keeping with the reformist changes in many Latin American countries that saw the fall of military dictatorships and their replacement by elected governments.\u00a0\u00a0 The economy in quite a few Latin American countries, Brazil and Chile in particular, has turned the corner and was beginning to register unprecedented growth.\u00a0 In his first term, Ch\u00e1vez implemented several pro-democratic measures, constitutionally mandated the alleviation of poverty and the allocation of sufficient resources for education and health, and continued the involvement of foreign investment and expertise in the petroleum industry.\u00a0 He travelled abroad visiting Latin American countries as well as US, Canada and Europe.\u00a0 He impressed his audiences with his wit, charm and business savvy.<\/p>\n

Things began to change for the worse and independent observers have noted that the change coincided with steep increases in the global oil prices from the price of $13 a barrel, the lowest since the 1960s, soon after he became President in 1998.\u00a0 Venezuela holds one of the largest oil reserves in the world, and phenomenally higher world oil prices in the next ten years boosted government revenues as never seen before (rising from $20 to $80 billion annually between 1999 and 2008).\u00a0 Ch\u00e1vez opened the coffers to help the poor with sincere but misguided generosity.\u00a0 He spurned western governments and western investments while supplying almost free oil to Cuba, Dominican Republic and Jamaica.\u00a0 He dramatically externalized the traditional anti-American sentiment in Latin politics, taking particular delight in ridiculing Washington. The good times turned sour when the great world recession hit Venezuela and its oil production, without foreign investment and expertise, began to fall.<\/p>\n

After fourteen years of pumping money for the government the petroleum industry now stands gutted, and the government has nothing to show for the additional $700 billion that it received from petroleum exports.\u00a0 The economic maladministration went hand in hand with political authoritarianism.\u00a0 The pro-democratic measures that were introduced in the first term have been wiped off.\u00a0 Mr. Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s wild popularity is only the fa\u00e7ade of a deeply divided country.\u00a0 His people either loved him or hated him. While he did much to improve the lot of the marginalized, they are also the most to suffer from the breakdown of law and order and the rising wave of crimes.\u00a0 His vaguely formulated 21st<\/sup> century socialism would hardly be remembered after him.<\/p>\n

Hugo Ch\u00e1vez was a charismatic political leader whose heart was in the right place in championing the interests of the poor, the weak and the marginalized. \u00a0His political vision was not at all parochial but continental in range.\u00a0 He was bold and right in shaking up what was wrong and rotten with his country but he did not have the wherewithal to deliver in a sustainable way not just on his public promises but more so on the many good things that he probably wanted achieved.\u00a0 The missing medium was the political party whose role it must be to not only project the leader to the country but also to act as a restraint on the leader.\u00a0 Mr. Ch\u00e1vez did change the course of Venezuela\u2019s history, but he failed to achieve it through a proper political organization that would have given his legacy greater credibility and more longevity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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