Chávez in Charge

[Say_What]

<clips>

Hugo Chávez is a man in a hurry, and this week's decision by the Venezuelan national assembly to grant him additional powers foreshadows the radical changes that are in the pipeline. President for the past eight years, Chávez has only just begun to scratch the surface of the gigantic revolutionary project that lies ahead. There have been obvious successes. Unprecedented sums of oil money have been diverted towards the country's poor majority, funding education and health programmes, and providing cheap food. The results are already on show. A freshly mobilised and alert population is beginning to flex its muscles, taking part in political decision-making through a myriad local councils and ad-hoc committees operating at many levels. Nothing like this has happened in Latin America since the Cuban Revolution nearly half a century ago. It is riveting stuff.

Yet all this energy and excitement has been channelled through new institutions, financed directly by the oil revenues, and essentially unmonitored. Again, this is a revolution in progress. At the same time, much of the old, pre-revolutionary Venezuela still remains. The country's traditional infrastructure is plagued by bureaucracy and corruption, the twin-headed disease inherited from the Spanish colonial era. Bureaucrats, and that means public servants in every ministry and ancient state entity, exist to ensure that nothing ever gets done, while corruption exists to lubricate their powers of inaction. What is true of the state is true of private industry as well. So this week's "enabling" legislation will give greater powers to the executive at the expense of the legislature, with the hope that Chávez will be able to push through some necessary changes. At some stage, the new institutions and the old bureaucracies will have to be merged.

Is this road to dictatorship or the path to reasonable reform? The nature of the problem is familiar to political scientists, and certainly not new to Latin America. Where should the balance fall between the executive and the legislature? Each country makes its choice, and revolutions provide an opportunity for the balance to be changed.

Allowing the Venezuelan president to issue executive orders is nothing new. It is permitted under the constitution of 1999, as under the previous constitution. Chávez's recent predecessors availed themselves of a similar facility from time to time, notably when dealing with economic and financial matters. Even Thomas Shannon, the US diplomat in charge of Latin America, admitted in an unusually friendly comment that the enabling law was nothing new. "It's something valid under the constitution (and) as with any tool of democracy, it depends on how it is used."

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1951

[oldtimecanuk]

1. My response is this.... You may love or hate Hugo... your choice

My take on what has transpired in Venezuela is that Hugo had to take this stance, in order to prevent a take down of his Goverenment. If only, GWB were Hugo we might not be sitting where we are today, both in the US and in Venezuela. IMHO... Hugo, is the real deal.. and he has shown that many times over... Tell me when GWB has shown it? duh... (Never) You can torch Hugo all you want, but the bottom line is that if the US had not set the policy, Hugo would not be talking about THE DEVIL in the UN.... As a Canadian, that is my Opinion..... Of course, not everyone is going to agree, and I can deal with that as I am sure Hugo can.... I Love you Hugo.... You are a hero to your people....and many in the world don't understand what is going on there.... If I am wrong, then I will be judged for sure.... But I don't think that I am..... Come on, how many leaders of a so called Dictatorship offer free oil to a supposed free country? duh

ww

[Say_What]

2. I agree with you 100%, Hugo is the real deal...

El Mono Bush is a f*ck'n drunken moron.

Viva Venezuela!!

:bounce:

[tom_paine]

3. I am going to respectfully disagree with both of you

First off, some background. I never fully took either side with Chavez for a long time. I listened to what both sides said, convinced the truth lies somewhere between, as it usually does.

However, Chavez has disturbed me by, yes, exhibiting some of the symptoms of modern BushPutinism, which is to say tyranny. He is NOT stupid, on that we agree.

But I don't like his outrageous hyperbole, such as repeatedly calling Bushler "the worst tyrant in the history of the world", which is not just untrue (unless Bushler touches off nuclear WWIII or something) but VERY VERY UNTRUE.

In fact, it is so ridiculous, considering the monstrosity of such as Hitler, Stalin, & Pol Pot to name a few, to make such a statement about Little Boots Bushler, horrible and tyrannical as he is.

So untrue and ridiculous, I would expect Condi Rice, Bushler or Cheney himself to make such a statement.

That's one. The second thing is the tyrannical and dictatorial nature of not only the Enabling Law but his mandatory public service law that is coercive and will probably get worse once it is entrenched.

I still am not on the "Chavez is a devil" category, neither obviously am I in the "Chavez is a saint" category. But I have come to see Chavez as somewhat more Bush-like (as I said, stupidity not being the characteristic I am speaking of) than I'd first thought.

Go ahead and flame away, but time will tell how much Chavez is just consolidating his authoritarian power or genuinely a friend to the Common People.

You must prepare yourself at least for the possibility that Chavez is just another left-wing authoritarian masquerading as Friend of the People. ALL authoritarians, both left- and right-wing, suck.

We shall see...

[Say_What]

4. Well, let's ee... it's been eight years and none of the hyperbole has come true...

regarding the enabling law, you might want to look at the Venezuelan Constitution. Other Venezuelan presidents have been given that power--that right is provided in their Constitution. Chavez himself has been given the authority of the enabling law three other times during his eight years in office. Concerning law-decrees, Venezuelan Constitution provides the following:

Law-decrees can be rescinded by popular vote, laws can be submitted to a referendum if at least 5% of registered voters request such a referendum (Article 74) Additionally, any law can be submitted for referendum providing at least 10% of the voters request it.

http://www.embavenez-us.org/constitution/title_III.htm

Should they feel it necessary, the National Assembly may also modify or rescind law-decrees.

Law-decrees can be reviewed by the Supreme Court at any time for constitutionality (Article 336)

http://www.embavenez-us.org/index.php?pagina=constitution/title_VIII.htm&titulo=Government

You're entitled to have any opinion you like, but familiarize yourself with Venezuelan law before preaching to us about the *tyrannical and dictatorial nature of the Enabling Law*.

[tom_paine]

5. Oh, I am prepared for the possibility that I am wrong.

Are you repared for the possibility that you are?

As I said, I don't believe Chavez a devil. And if life under Little Boots Bushler these past six years has taught us anything, it is in the face of a determined authoritarian (and if it does not have sufficient principled defenders, as well) a nation's Constitution may bear little resemblence to the reality of the situation.

Again, I am making no assertions, merely pointing out the possibility for abuse, just as I will reiterate the creepy similarity of childish hyperbole in Bushler's post-9/11 blather about evil-doers and smoke 'em out to Chavez childish hyperbole about Bush being the worst tyrant in the history of the world or smelling of sulfur.

Again, Chavez's quips were smarter, but that Chavez is smarter and more articulate than Little Boots Bushler is a given. The issue is: Are both Bushler and Chavez authoritarians who are more similar than we or they would like to admit? I don't know the answer to that one, and only time will tell.

And thank you for the websites. As I believe I said, I am not very well informed on the situation.

I am always interested in learning more about what I don't know. But I honestly don't think I'll find anything in the text of the Venezuelan Constitution that will reverse my growing alarm that perhaps Chavez is an authoritarian.

As to the hyperbole coming true, I have sat back and listened to hyperbole from both sides of the Chavez debate (and not that hyperbole is always necessarily bad), but I lend no creed whatsoever to Bushevik/Right-Wing hyperbole so that is irrelevant. Bushveik hyperbole is pretty much by definition almost universally false or misleading by omission.

[Say_What]

6. "Bushveik hyperbole is pretty much by definition almost universally false or misleading by omission"

If you believe that statement, then you would know that the corporate owned international/MSM media has an anti-Chavez campaign in place that's been going on for some time. The USSA couldn't kill Chavez or take him out in a coup so they're now doing the next step: 'discredit and demonize' at every turn--bring up the d word as often as possible. The headlines today read just like those during the Allende years--another democratically elected leader that the US stopped at nothing to take down. Search the NYTs archives for the headlines during that time period and see for yourself.

BTW, ALL humans are subject to becoming extremes of right or left--anyone that can think and analyze a situation understands that. But since I am very aware that there is an anti-Chavez campaign by the media just as there was against Allende and others, I take all of what I read in MSM with a grain of salt. I'd rather find out the facts before jumping to conclusions based on regurgitated propaganda.

[Judi Lynn]

7. You're so right. Very few people have bothered to learn how much control

over the media our own right-wing has taken going back a very long time, and no where more conspicuously than Chile, against Allende, using "El Mercurio (Chile's New York Times parallel) which was financed by massive infusion of US taxpayers' money to owner Augustin Edwards:

II. FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND THE PRESS

Public Debate and the Print Media Prior to 1970:

~snip~
On February 14, 1971, Press Day, Allende announced the formation of Operation Truth, a commission of journalists to counteract the “curtain of lies” allegedly spread by the opposition press and picked up by the international wire services.64 In a speech on March 31, 1971, Allende said, “I have tolerated this only because I want to teach a moral attitude, because the people cannot be touched by these epithets from mercenaries in the pay of foreign money.”65 The president’s indignation at opposition press distortion was matched by the anger of opposition parliamentarians at being portrayed as seditious conspirators because they disagreed with UP policies. Senate President Patricio Aylwin accused Allende on television of remaining silent about the excesses of the official press. The government-owned La Nación reported Aylwin’s speech in an article titled “Conspirators speak in national broadcast.” La Nación said it was part of a “campaign of terror” against the UP.66 In April 1971 left-wing journalists formed an association to defend the government against what they denounced as the phony objectivity of the establishment press. El Mercurio denounced the initiative as totalitarian and said it was “aimed at ensuring that only one version of what is happening in Chile prevails, the official one.”67

Under the Nixon administration, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) channeled funds to the anti-Allende press both before and after the 1970 elections, as part of a covert plan to prevent Allende’s election and subsequently to destabilize his government. The CIA funded anti-Allende publications, produced and disseminated in the press articles forecasting economic collapse, and maintained agents in the major newspapers, such as El Mercurio. According to the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the “Church Committee”), the CIA disbursed more than 12 million dollars on press intervention between 1963 and 1973.68

As the violence and unrest increased, the government used states of emergency to force privately owned radio stations to broadcast government information, despite judicial decisions finding these actions unconstitutional. Stations that refused to do so were taken off the air, and others were closed for broadcasting calls to participate in protests and strike activity.

With the increasing polarization of the press, reporting standards lapsed notably on both sides, as did any pretense at objectivity. Numerous suits for contempt of authority under the Law of State Security were lodged both by the executive branch and its parliamentary opponents. President Allende filed charges against Sepa and its editor Rafael Otero on several occasions, as well as against the editor of the Mercurio-owned La Segunda. Patricio Aylwin, then president of the Senate, sued a journalist of La Nación for a comment on a Senate debate he considered offensive to the Senate’s honor, and several parliamentarians sued the editor of Puro Chile for defamation.69

The National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, established by President Patricio Aylwin almost two decades later to investigate human rights violations committed by the military government, passed a harsh judgment on the role of the press in this era. It found that the deterioration of press standards had contributed to the breakdown of the political consensus and the outbreak of open violence:

Finally, in describing the final phase of the 1970-1973 crisis, we cannot ignore the role of the media. Some media, especially certain widely read newspapers on both sides, went to incredible lengths to destroy the reputations of theiradversaries, and to that end they were willing to make use of all weapons. Since on both sides political enemies were being presented as contemptible, it seemed just, if not necessary, to wipe them out physically, and on a number of occasions there were open calls for that to happen.70

The military government was to use the same argument to justify repression of the pro-UP press that followed the military coup, conveniently forgetting the aggressive anti-Allende campaign in the right-wing press. The papers that had attacked the Allende government using the methods described by the commission quietly ceased publication after the coup, and some of their most outspoken journalists were appointed to government posts.71 As we note below, pro-Allende journalists were imprisoned, tortured, exiled, and some were executed or “disappeared” after their newspapers had been forcibly closed.
(snip/...)

http://www.hrw.org/reports98/chile/Chilerpt-03.htm

[Say_What]

10. El Mercurio File--Secret Documents Shine New Light on How the CIA Used a Newspaper to Foment a Coup

El Mercurio and the “curtain of lies” is a perfect example of what's happening today. Here's more:

<clips>

The El Mercurio File
Secret Documents Shine New Light on How the CIA Used a Newspaper to Foment a Coup

September 11, a day of infamy in the U.S., is also a dark day in the history of Chile. This 9/11 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. Although former U.S. officials such as Henry Kissinger have insisted that Washington had no involvement in the military takeover, and was trying only to preserve democracy in Chile, CIA and White House records, analyzed here for the first time, show how the CIA used Chilean media to undermine the democratically elected government of Socialist Salvador Allende, an operation that "played a significant role in setting the stage for the military coup of 11 September 1973." From these documents emerges the story of the agency's main propaganda project — authorized at the highest level of the U.S. government — which relied upon Chile's leading newspaper, El Mercurio, and its well-connected owner, Agustín Edwards. In Chile, the aged Edwards remains an influential media power, and here in the U.S., covert action has again been unleashed and executive-branch secrecy is on the rise. The story behind 9/11/73 continues to echo.

For the better part of two years, a group of editors, journalism students, and human rights lawyers in Santiago, Chile, have been gathering evidence against their country's leading media mogul, Agustín Edwards, to, at minimum, have him expelled from the press guild, the Academy of Chilean Journalists. The editor of the leftist magazine Punto Final, Manuel Cabieses, has filed a formal petition accusing Edwards of violating the academy's code of ethics by conspiring with the Nixon White House and the CIA between 1970 and 1973 to foment the military coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, thirty years ago this month.

"Doonie," as Edwards is known to his closest friends, is the patriarch of the press - a Chilean Rupert Murdoch. His media empire encompasses Chile's renowned national newspaper, El Mercurio, a second national paper, Ultimas Noticias, and Santiago's leading afternoon paper, La Segunda, along with a dozen smaller regional journals. In September 1970, when Chileans narrowly elected Allende, a Socialist, to the presidency, Edwards was widely considered to be the richest man in Chile — and the individual with the most to lose financially from Allende's election.

The ethics charges against Edwards are likely to receive a boost from a careful analysis of formerly secret U.S. documents that shed considerable new light on CIA covert media operations in Chile. Since 1975, when a special congressional committee chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church issued its report, Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973, it has been no secret that the CIA provided significant funding to El Mercurio, put reporters and editors on its payroll, and used the paper, in the committee's words, as "the most important channel for anti-Allende propaganda." But with the declassification of thousands of CIA and White House records at the end of the Clinton administration, the history of the "El Mercurio Project" emerges in far greater detail. Among the key revelations in the documents:

* Even before Allende was inaugurated as president of Chile, Edwards came to Washington and discussed with the CIA the "timing for possible military action" to prevent Allende from taking office.
* President Nixon directly authorized massive funding to the newspaper. The White House approved close to $2 million dollars - a significant sum when turned into Chilean currency on the black market.
* Secret CIA cables from mid-1973 identified El Mercurio as among the "most militant parts of the opposition" pushing for military intervention to overthrow Allende.
* In the aftermath of the coup, the CIA continued to covertly finance media operations in order to influence Chilean public opinion in favor of the new military regime, despite General Pinochet's brutal repression.

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/5/chile-kornbluh.asp

[tom_paine]

8. Just because the Busheviks are evil, doesn't automatically make Chavez good

I am very familiar with the Bushevik assistance in the murder of Allende and tens of thousands of others by Pinochet.

And if you think I have based my views on propaganda, then you have not read a single thing I said in this thread.

However, I will say this illustrates a problem with both extremes, both "Chavez is saint" and "Chavez is devil", and there is a certain arrogance that is off-putting, to say the least.

It seems to me that you automatically assume that, since I have a slightly negative view of Chavez (and in spite of my repeated openness to learning more, I already know quite a bit on the topic) that I MUST have formed that opinion from "regurgitated propaganda", since "Chavez is a saint".

The funny thing is that, if I brought up the positives that I still think Chavez has to a "Chavez is devil" advocate, they would likely say the same thing to me as you did, with a certain level of arrogance, also.

And I have also said repeatedly in this thread and elsewhere that the jury is still out on Chavez. Time and only time will tell. Not regurgitated Bushevik propaganda, not Chavista propaganda (don't kid yourself and say such does not exist), but HISTORY and Chavez' own actions will speak quite loudly on their own. Nothing more and nothing less.

We will have to agree to disagree.

[Say_What]

9. Nobody said Chavez is a saint. What we've said all along is LOOK AT THE FACTS and

not the propaganda.

Anyone who wants to know what is happening in Venezuela with Chavez has only to look at the US role during the Allende years in Chile. It is the same thing for the same reasons.