The Castro in Caracas: Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, in Fidel's image

National Review, April 7, 2003 by William S. Prillaman

It's a little after midnight in Caracas, and Hugo Chavez has just finished his weekly visit with the Venezuelan people. In tonight's four-hour address, the president has blamed the country's woes on the United States, the international capitalist system, Venezuela's "rotten oligarchy" and "squalid elites," bankers, coup plotters in Miami, "savage neoliberalism," bad weather, and the recent shortage of full moons.

Welcome to the world of Hugo Chavez. It would be easy to dismiss Chavez as a character from a Woody Allen movie if the stakes weren't so high and the consequences so grave. Recent defectors from the presidential palace accuse Chavez of supporting Hezbollah and al-Qaeda activists in Venezuela, and Chavez was one of the few heads of state to denounce the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. In 2000, he became the first Western leader since the Gulf War to pay a state visit to Saddam. ("Imagine what the Pharisees will say when they see me with Saddam Hussein," he gloated.) Chavez has also imported hundreds of Cuban activists -- he calls them "sports instructors" -- to arm his thousands of civilian supporters in the "Bolivarian Circles," a private militia that rivals the national police force.

To understand how South America's oldest democracy fell into this sorry state, one first has to understand Chavez's rise to power. Arrested for leading a bloody military coup in 1992, Chavez was granted a presidential pardon in 1994 and immediately began mapping his own presidential bid. By tapping into widespread frustration with the corrupt two-party system that had misgoverned the country for four decades, Chavez's platform struck a chord with the poor, who compose 80 percent of Venezuela's electorate. He was elected president by a landslide in 1998.

Since then, Chavez has systematically worked to eliminate all checks on his power. Backed by initial approval ratings of nearly 90 percent, he drafted a new constitution (which gave him sweeping decree powers), abolished the senate, and lifted a 40-year-old ban on consecutive re- election. He "unretired" three dozen former coup plotters and placed them in positions of confidence. He even directed public and private schools to begin teaching a "Bolivarian" curriculum -- a hodgepodge of Marxist, nationalist, and jingoistic propaganda. The power grab was striking even by Latin American standards; scholar Maxwell A. Cameron calls it the world's first "slow-motion constitutional coup."

Chavez's constitution includes a "Right to Truthful Information" clause that makes "lying" about the government a federal crime. The administration, of course, determines what constitutes a lie. A separate law -- duly passed by congress, Chavistas note -- allows the president to suspend radio and television broadcasts "when it is deemed convenient to the interests of the nation." Add to that the recurring death threats against journalists. There is no formal censorship, Chavistas crow. But then, there doesn't need to be.

The United States did little to protest these abuses during Chavez's first two years in power. According to Jim Steinberg, deputy national security adviser during the Clinton administration and now director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution: "President Clinton thought that we should try to embrace him [Chavez], that we should work to bring out the best in him and reinforce the positive. Taking the bait of his rhetoric would've only played into his hands."

But Chavez grew bolder over time. In 2001, his Bolivarian Circles began launching illegal land grabs as Chavez looked the other way. Chavez enacted a package of 49 statist economic decrees that targeted the assets of his political enemies, shrinking the economy 15 percent in two years -- a remarkable feat given that the price of oil, Venezuela's main commodity, was soaring to all-time highs. When the U.S. began its military campaign in Afghanistan, Chavez took to the airwaves angrily waving pictures of alleged Afghan civilian casualties. "Mr. Bush," Chavez warned, "you must not respond to terror with more terror." Washington recalled its ambassador in Caracas to signal its displeasure.

All of this was too much for junior military officers, business leaders, and labor bosses, who stumbled into an ill-considered and short-lived coup in April 2002. The coup plotters soon fell into infighting, amassing Chavez-like powers for themselves before they had even decided what to do with Chavez. The Bolivarian Circles took to the streets threatening to unleash a civil war. Military officers had second thoughts, and Chavez was whisked back into power less than 48 hours later.

Since then, Chavez has responded with a mix of guile and vengeance. He has hired a public-relations firm to manage his image in Washington, and has increased international circulation of a government newspaper - - Chavez is the editor, his wife the publisher -- to spread the gospel of the Bolivarian revolution abroad. Chavez, who is of mixed race, has also announced that simple racism is behind Washington's criticism of his government. The message has resonated with the Congressional Black Caucus, which has sent representatives to Caracas three times since the failed April coup. Never one for subtlety, Chavez has also begun to appreciate the benefits of strategic allies abroad. "Chavez isn't clever enough to think of that all by himself," says Brian Latell, a professor at Georgetown University who previously served as the American intelligence community's senior analyst on Latin America. "He's getting that advice from his mentor in Havana. Castro knows how to exploit divisions in the U.S., and now the teacher is training his star pupil."