When I interviewed Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan commando leader and presidential candidate, last fall in Caracas, Venezuela, this controversial and obviously charismatic man talked endlessly–indeed, almost to the exclusion of practical matters–about the inspiration of Simon Bolivar, the Venezuelan-born “liberator” of Latin America.
“I am not a communist, not a fascist,” Chavez told me in his apartment overlooking the capital. “I am a Bolivarian, whose ideology exists as an ideology of liberty. He was the author not only of physical independence but of an ideological project–for Latin America, for all the world.”
Was there a model for the way he intended to rescue Venezuela, which by then some were calling a miracle in reverse because of the way corruption had corroded the hope engendered by its huge oil wealth? “A model?” he repeated. “There isn’t any model–certainly not Cuba or the Soviet Union. We don’t copy other models; we invent them.”
By the time the former commando leader came to Washington this week, as President Chavez, the question on everyone’s mind was: What kind of model, if any, was the Chavez administration inventing? Some of his old ideas emerged (with new contours) when Chavez spoke with a group here at the Brookings Institution. “We’re in a process of mutation,” he said during the long peroration. For at least the last 10 years, Chavez explained to a largely sympathetic audience, “our society has staggered from abyss to abyss. We have had no way to regulate society. In Venezuela, what happened was that we had a system with no way to regulate itself, and systems like that end in losses and in collapse. In short,” he emphasized, “we are in the midst of a moral crisis.”
Very well, but what was he doing about Venezuela’s acknowledged plight–and what kind of Venezuela will eventually come out of it? Can a country with Venezuela’s political, economic and moral problems reorganize, re-create and right itself without falling into the excesses of fascism or communism, as most often happens?
Chavez and his multi-ideological (and multicapable) team say they can. Chavez pointed out–with the unmistakable intention of mollifying American fears that he is creating a kind of “direct democracy” authoritarian or even dictatorial state–that his “constitutional assembly,” which is supposed to be rewriting the constitution to usher in a new democratic age, will end exactly on Feb. 4.
One of Chavez’s major diplomats mused this week about the U.S. fears. “America has always had a great distrust for mass democracy,” he said. “For James Madison, it was the `tyranny of the majority,’ it was `liberal democracy’ versus `mass democracy’ or `direct democracy.’ But sometimes direct democracy has to arise in countries where the system no longer is working, in order to counteract the excesses of the traditional representative democracy that the United States enjoys. “Just as the majority should not destroy the minority,” he said, mirroring Chavez’s thinking, “so a tiny and discredited minority should not predominate over the majority of the population.”
The biggest problem for Chavez, at least as long as he maintains his vast popularity, is his sinking economy (unemployment is predicted to reach 50 percent by the end of the year). He and his government have been terribly remiss in not dealing with guarantees for foreign investment sooner. Yet they are at least now drafting foreign investment laws, and there seems to be a growing realism that (unlike former Latin dictators, who almost always cut their countries off from the world) they must be a responsible part of the world.
If Hugo Chavez and his loyal but unruly and disorganized followers can show a way for “formal” or “false” democracies–governments like Venezuela’s or, for that matter, equally troubled Indonesia’s–to be reformed from within, Venezuela could offer some valuable lessons to the world.