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| April 27, 2009 4:00 AM
What Chávez Has Wrought
The authoritarian socialist has brought Venezuela food shortages and massive inflation.
By Duncan Currie
In December 2007, a group of paramilitary fighters armed with machine guns ransacked and vandalized a farm in northwest Venezuela. It was not the first time that government-backed thugs had paid a visit to this property. The owner of the farm, Diego Arria, is a prominent opponent of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, the radical leftist. “It was a strong message,” Arria says of the December 2007 attack. (He was not at the farm when it occurred.) “The government has a lot of groups like that.”
Throughout his long career, Arria, now 70 years old, has held a variety of high-level political posts, including governor of Caracas, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations, assistant U.N. secretary general, and special adviser to U.N. chief Kofi Annan. In 1978, Arria made an unsuccessful bid for the Venezuelan presidency as an independent candidate. Shortly after that election, he founded a Caracas-based newspaper called El Diario de Caracas. More recently, he served as a campaign strategist for Manuel Rosales, who opposed Chávez in the 2006 presidential election.
Arria now works as a consultant in New York City, but he still spends a considerable amount of time at his Venezuelan farm.
“I know they are tapping my phones,” Arria says of Venezuelan authorities. “There is a climate of intimidation.” Government intimidation was especially fierce during the weeks prior to a February 15 referendum on political term limits. That referendum was a big triumph for Chávez: Voters cleared the way for him to seek reelection in 2012 and beyond.
Chávez, a former paratrooper, has now been in office for a decade. As Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports, two hallmarks of the Chávez presidency have been political discrimination and “an open disregard for the principle of separation of powers enshrined in the 1999 constitution — and, specifically, the notion that an independent judiciary is indispensable for protecting fundamental rights.” (Implementing a new constitution in 1999 — to replace the 1961 constitution — represented Chávez’s “first major achievement.”)
Chávez has also “undermined freedom of expression through a variety of measures aimed at reshaping media content and control,” HRW notes. Some of his tactics have been indirect. For example, Arria tells me, the Chávez regime has taken over many private companies that were advertising in opposition newspapers. Other companies have refrained from buying ad space in these same papers, fearing the repercussions.
Besides choking Venezuela’s democratic institutions and crippling its independent media, Chávez has also compiled a record of economic malpractice, which he dubs “Bolivarian socialism.” Venezuela is now dealing with food scarcities and severe double-digit inflation. According to some estimates, the annual inflation rate may reach 40 percent this year. As the Wall Street Journal reported in early March, private food companies in Venezuela “are straining under strict price controls aimed at slowing down high inflation set off by Mr. Chávez’s non-stop spending. The controls have led to shortages of staples like milk and rice.” These food shortages have also been driven by government land seizures. Chávez recently expropriated a rice-processing facility owned by Cargill, the U.S.-based multinational.
When oil prices were booming, says Arria, Chávez squandered “the greatest wealth the country ever had.” He wasted billions on an arms buildup that boosted the repressive capacity of the state but did nothing to address Venezuela’s real economic and social needs. “We are living with a military regime,” Arria complains. “Without the armed forces, Chávez would not exist.”
For several months now, lower oil prices have been draining the Venezuelan economy. Venezuela is also coping with an explosion of violent crime. As Jeremy Morgan of the Latin American Herald Tribune reports, a recent poll found that 86 percent of Venezuelans think crime is their country’s biggest problem. Small wonder that Venezuela has seen a spike in emigration. “We never had a brain drain in Venezuela” until the Chávez years, Arria observes. The exodus has included many Venezuelan Jews, who have been alarmed by a rising tide of anti-Semitism and also by the budding alliance between Chávez and Iran.
So is there any good news from Venezuela? Yes, says Arria. For one thing, the number of private civic groups is growing. For another, the new mayor of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, has emerged as a popular critic of Chávez. Ledezma denounces the Chávez regime as “absolutely authoritarian” and has called for “a permanent civic protest.” Not surprisingly, the government is trying to curb his power.
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