By Jackson Diehl
Monday, March 10, 2008; A15

Latin American nations and the Bush administration spent the past week loudly arguing over what censure, if any, Colombia should face for a bombing raid that killed one of the top leaders of the FARC terrorist group at a jungle camp in Ecuador. More quietly, they are just beginning to consider a far more serious and potentially explosive question: What to do about the revelation that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez forged a strategic alliance with the FARC aimed at Colombia’s democratic government.

First reports of the documents recovered from laptops at the FARC camp spoke of promises by Chávez to deliver up to $300 million to a group renowned for kidnapping, drug trafficking and massacres of civilians; they also showed that Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa was prepared to remove from his own army officers who objected to the FARC’s Ecuadoran bases.

But in their totality, the hundreds of pages of documents so far made public by Colombia paint an even more chilling picture. The raid appears to have preempted a breathtakingly ambitious “strategic plan” agreed on by Chávez and the FARC with the initial goal of gaining international recognition for a movement designated a terrorist organization by both the United States and Europe. Chávez then intended to force Colombian President Álvaro Uribe to negotiate a political settlement with the FARC, and to promote a candidate allied with Chávez and the FARC to take power from Uribe.

All this is laid out in a series of three e-mails sent in February to the FARC’s top leaders by Iván Márquez and Rodrigo Granda, envoys who held a series of secret meetings with Chávez. Judging from the memos, Chávez did most of the talking: He outlined a five-stage plan for undermining Uribe’s government, beginning with the release of several of the scores of hostages the FARC is holding.

The first e-mail, dated Feb. 8, discusses the money: It says that Chávez, whom they call “angel,” “has the first 50 [million] available and has a plan to get us the remaining 200 in the course of the year.” Chávez proposed sending the first “packet” of money “through the black market in order to avoid problems.” He said more could be arranged by giving the FARC a quota of petroleum to sell abroad or gasoline to retail in Colombia or Venezuela.

Chávez then got to the plans that most interested him. He wanted the FARC to propose collecting all of its hostages in the open, possibly in Venezuela, for a proposed exchange for 500 FARC prisoners in Colombian jails. Chávez said he would travel to the area for a meeting with the FARC’s top leader, Manuel Marulanda, and said the presidents of Ecuador, Nicaragua and Bolivia would accompany him. Meanwhile, Chávez said he would set up a new diplomatic group, composed of those countries and the FARC, plus Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, for the purpose of recognizing the FARC as a legitimate “belligerent” in Colombia and forcing Uribe into releasing its prisoners.

In “the early morning hours,” the FARC envoys recounted in a Feb. 9 e-mail, Chávez reached the subject of whether the release of Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian presidential candidate who is the FARC’s best-known hostage, would complicate his plan to back a pro-FARC alternative to Uribe. “He invites the FARC to participate in a few sessions of analysis he has laid out for following the Colombian political situation,” the e-mail concluded.

Assuming these documents are authentic – and it’s hard to believe that the cerebral and calculating Uribe would knowingly hand over forgeries to the world media and the Organization of American States – both the Bush administration and Latin American governments will have fateful decisions to make about Chávez. His reported actions are, first of all, a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373, passed in September 2001, which prohibits all states from providing financing or havens to terrorist organizations. More directly, the Colombian evidence would be more than enough to justify a State Department decision to cite Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism. Once cited, Venezuela would be subject to a number of automatic sanctions, some of which could complicate its continuing export of oil to the United States. A cutoff would temporarily inconvenience Americans – and cripple Venezuela, which could have trouble selling its heavy oil in other markets.

For now, the Bush administration appears anxious to avoid this kind of confrontation. U.S. intelligence agencies are analyzing the Colombian evidence; officials say they will share any conclusions with key Latin American governments. Yet those governments have mostly shrunk from confronting Chávez in the past, and some have quietly urged Bush to take him on. If the president decides to ignore clear evidence that Venezuela has funded and conspired with an officially designated terrorist organization, he will flout what has been his first principle since Sept. 11, 2001.

The Washington Post, November 15, 2007

A constitutional ‘reform’ could complete Venezuela’s transformation into a dictatorship.

A24

TENS OF thousands of Venezuelan students marched to the Supreme Court in Caracas last week to protest the new “socialist” constitutional reform that President Hugo Chavez is preparing to impose on the country. On their return, students from the Central University of Venezuela were fired on by gunmen who roared onto the campus on motorcycles. Nine were hurt; university officials later identified the shooters as members of government-sponsored paramilitary groups. That’s just one example of the ugly climate of intimidation Mr. Chavez is creating in advance of a Dec. 2 referendum that he expects will formally confirm him as de facto president for life and give him powers rivaling those of his mentor, Fidel Castro.

Mr. Chavez’s apologists like to dismiss the Venezuelan forces opposing his deconstruction of democracy – which include the Catholic Church, the private business community and labor unions as well as students – as a corrupt elite. So it’s worth noting what some of Mr. Chavez’s long-standing allies are saying about his constitutional changes. The political party Podemos, whose members ran for parliament on a pro-Chavez platform, call it “a constitutional fraud.” Mr. Chavez’s recently retired defense minister, Gen. Raul Isaías Baduel, said it was an “undemocratic imposition” and that its approval would amount to “a coup.”

In fact, Mr. Chavez’s rewrite would complete his transformation into an autocrat. It would lengthen his presidential term from six to seven years and remove the current limit of two terms, allowing him to serve indefinitely. He would have broad powers to seize property, to dispose of Venezuela’s foreign exchange reserves, to impose central government rule on local jurisdictions and to declare indefinite states of emergency under which due process and freedom of information would be suspended. As a populist sop, one provision would reduce the workday from eight to six hours; that benefit, the state’s control over national television and the voting process, and the apparent intention of many Venezuelans to stay away from the polls are expected to deliver the necessary ratification.

The strength and courage of the resistance to Mr. Chavez is nevertheless growing. Despite the attacks by government goons, students have continued to march by the thousands. Bloggers have posted photos and videos of the government-sponsored violence. Opposition leaders have continued to speak out despite being labeled “traitors” by Mr. Chavez and harassed with death threats. Venezuela is on the verge of succumbing to a dictatorship that will isolate and retard the country, maybe for decades. It’s encouraging that so many of its people aren’t prepared to give up their freedom without a fight.

Venezuela, often described as the region’s most stable and successful democracy, is now in a political quagmire testing the endurance and stability of its system. What have been the forces pushing the country into crisis? How democratic is Venezuela today?

Venezuela’s elected president, Hugo Chávez, won free democratic elections with 56 percent of the votes in December 1998 and was reelected with 60 percent of the votes in December 2000. In spite of these unquestionable electoral results, his popularity has been collapsing since July 2001, driving opposition to the streets in protest against a government they consider illegitimate. Last April 11, thousands marched to the presidential palace demanding his resignation in a climactic development after a series of civic protests. Late that evening, after a bloody afternoon, President Chávez’s resignation was announced by his highest ranking general. A transitional government was formed but was immediately rejected by the same people who had marched the day before. They, together with Chávez followers, considered it unconstitutional. After 48 hours, President Chávez was back in office. And yet the crisis continues, political unrest increases, and polarization deepens. Venezuela’s democracy confronts one of its greatest challenges in history.

There are two basic paradigms to analyze the current political situation in Venezuela:

Paradigm 1: the Chávez government is just another chapter in Latin American history in which a leftist, popular president is confronted by a selfish elite unwilling to give up its historic privileges for the benefit of the majority.

Paradigm 2: Chávez is an authoritarian revolutionary who is being constrained by a traditionally democratic civil society.

In other words, is the conflict being triggered by self-interested groups cornering a popular president or is there a majority fighting to save democracy from President Chávez’s authoritarian desires? As often happens, reality has more nuances than any particular form of interpreting facts. Though I think that paradigm two is a better description of what is happening in Venezuela today, it falls short of explaining what caused Chávez’s initial popularity and his electoral success. Therefore, if there is truth to both positions, what happened in the process to change so dramatically the country’s mood?

THE REVOLUTIONARY MOOD

Here is where the nuances begin. In 1998, angry and frustrated with traditional political parties, citizens rejected everything that “looked, sounded or smelled” like an old politician. Venezuelans in a “revolutionary mood” knew what they didn’t want so Chávez based his campaign on their anger and hate. The angrier he sounded, the higher he went in the polls. In fact, Chávez got a negative mandate. He was elected to eliminate traditional political parties, to eradicate a corrupted leadership and to destroy the ancien regime. Unfortunately, not too many people worried about what would come next.

Another less obvious cause for this revolutionary mood could be the country’s economic performance and its political interpretation. From 1977–1998, per capita income in Venezuela fell to 1950 levels. Corruption was seen as the underlying cause of the economic mess, hence the attack on the political class.

Chávez postponed the economic agenda and barged ahead with a radical political reform. He destroyed the old leadership and changed the constitution. The idea of electing a Constituent Assembly to give birth to a new leadership was attractive and popular at the time. Also, since the writing of the constitution promised to be open and participatory, transparency was not an issue then.

Through these constitutional changes, Chávez accumulated more power than any other democratic president in the history of the country. But Venezuelans were still in their “revolutionary mood” so they did not worry about the creeping dangers of the emerging authoritarianism and the lack of checks and balances which emerged in the process.

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