Word: chavez
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Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, President and First Lady-Senator of Argentina, should love Venezuela's Hugo Chavez unequivocally. After all, Chavez is using Venezuela's petroleum riches to shore up Argentina's struggling economy, buying $1 billion of the country's bonds and investing $400 million in a natural gas plant to bolster Buenos Aires' energy needs. Indeed, there used to be a lot of mutual affection among the Latin American leaders, fellow leftists all. Last March, the couple played host to Chavez, and allowed him to use his visit to stage a rally against the U.S. and President Bush...
...Already, every member of the National Assembly is a Chavez ally - which is largely thanks, however, to the opposition's boneheaded boycott of the last parliamentary elections - as is just about every Supreme Court justice. As a result, keeping Chavez in power until 2021 (his stated goal, the 200th anniversary of Venezuelan independence) if not longer could eventually make him, by default, a kind of "democratator," a democratically elected dictator. At the very least, says Jones, "it's bound to set off some alarms about the constructs of democratic government...
...Those bells are louder after Chavez recently revoked the license of an opposition television network, RCTV. The problem wasn't that RCTV was pulled off the air - it loudly encouraged a coup attempt against Chavez in 2002, something the FCC probably wouldn't condone in the U.S. - but that Chavez failed to put the license up for bidding by independent broadcasters. Instead, he used it to create another pro-government network. In an interview with TIME last fall, after he called President Bush "the devil" at the United Nations, Chavez almost gushed about free expression in Venezuela...
...Critics say other constitutional reform proposals - like one that appears to let Caracas suck governing authority from the very states and municipalities Chavez once pledged to empower - are part and parcel of the harder left turn he's taken after his re-election, which has seen the nationalization of utility companies and oil ventures. But backers point to his proposals to reduce laborers' working hours and create new grassroots governing councils as proof of his more egalitarian "21st-century socialism...
...Either way, Chavez can't yet be fingered as the new Fidel Castro. "For one thing," says Jones, "the Venezuelan people would never accept it. Chavez does want to create a more equitable society, even a socialist society, but I think he can only create a mixed economy. He inherited a very capitalist-minded country that has always aped U.S. culture." But nor can Chavez be stroked for leading, as he claimed this week, "a democracy more alive" than any "on this planet." As Escarra stressed, the democrats of the world shouldn't freak out over Chavez. But, Hugo being...