Most of the attention in foreign policy coverage right now is either on the troop increase in Afghanistan, the tension in Israel, or the situation in Pakistan. However, on Sunday something happened to the South in Venezuela that must be paid attention to. From the AP:
Venezuela’s elections chief says President Hugo Chavez has won a referendum to eliminate term limits, paving the way for him to run again in 2012.
National Electoral Council chief Tibisay Lucena says with 94 percent of the vote counted, 54 percent have backed the president’s proposal. That trend is irreversible.
Firecrackers exploded as pro-Chavez caravans circled the city with horns blaring after the announcement Sunday night. Chavez appeared on the balcony of his presidential palace to sing the national anthem.
This is not the first attention that has been paid to the situation in Venezuela. People with far more intimate experiences with the nation reveal more details. From Michael Rowan, a Democratic political consultant who spent 13 years in the South American nation:
Since 2004, Chavez has had the capability to rig the elections. That capability includes control over the voting roll, the electronic voting machines, and the centralized count, none of which has been independently audited in five years (while the roll increased from 10 million to 17 million names); direct or indirect employment of five million jobs; direct threats to fire employees who do not vote for him; using billions of dollars of government funds to buy votes — openly; using, sometimes with plausible deniability, the police, military, and roving gangs to intimidate or murder opposition or media nuisances; and restricting freedom of speech and assembly of the few remaining opposition groups, e.g., gassing the students or denying their permits to march.
Certainly such consolidation of power, left or right, must be resisted, particularly given the over violent but microcosmic nature of the oppression. Even more alarming is how Chavez has thrust his nation into the Middle Eastern situation and by such inspired his followers to view Jews as the oppresors. From the Washington Post:
Then there is the assault on Venezuela’s Jewish community — which seems to have replaced George W. Bush as Mr. Chávez’s favorite foil. After Israel’s offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip last month, the caudillo expelled Israel’s ambassador and described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide.” Then Mr. Chávez turned on Venezuela’s Jews. “Let’s hope that the Venezuelan Jewish community will declare itself against this barbarity,” Mr. Chávezbellowed on a government-controlled television channel. “Don’t Jews repudiate the Holocaust? And this is precisely what we’re witnessing.”
Government media quickly took up the chorus. One television host close to Mr. Chávez blamed opposition demonstrations on two students he said had Jewish last names. On a pro-government Web site, another commentator demanded that citizens “publicly challenge every Jew that you find in the street, shopping center or park” and called for a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, seizures of Jewish-owned property and a demonstration at Caracas’s largest synagogue. On Jan. 30 the synagogue was duly attacked by a group of thugs, who spray-painted “Jews get out” on the walls and confiscated a registry of members. Mr. Chávez denied responsibility; days later, the attorney general’s office said that 11 people detained in connection with the attack included five police officers and a police intelligence operative.
Rowan is extremely alarmed by the lack of MSM attention, but more importantly the lack of a strong official response. By tolerating such actions, we stand to do more damage to our international standing as the guardian and protector of pure democracy than our pre-emptive takedown of the equally oppressive Hussein regime in Iraq:
By accepting the results of sham elections because of fear or cowardice in the face of an oil bully, the U.S. is showing to the world that it does not know or care what democracy is, according to its own Founders. No achievement in prosperity will counterbalance that fatal flaw. While the media (the New York Times is typical) accepts Chavez as a legitimate democrat and while the U.S. government looks the other way, the fundamental raison d’etre of America itself is put at risk. This story is not about Venezuela and Chavez, or Zimbabwe and Mugabe, it has always been about democracy — our democracy. What America is risking here is itself. How President Obama comes down on this issue is profoundly important.
With our economy in the throes of an unprecedented economic crisis and still under the spell of a leftist and astoundingly popular political movement (though certainly democratically elected and legitimate in every sense), it might be tempting for us to ignore these events. However, we recall what happened after World War I in Europe when economic and political disaster made obsessive authoritarians so tantalizing, leading to an explosive conflict. With the near collapse of the Mexican government and other left-leaning governments in South America consolidating around Chavez, we must be forever vigilant in our stand against authoritarians of any ideological stripe.
