Word: vez
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Haiman El Troudi has a job that most post-Cold War Marxists can only dream about. As the director of the Miranda Center in Caracas, a policy research think tank set up two years ago by the government of left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, El Troudi formulates socialist strategies that actually get put into practice. Some of them, like an epic campaign to create "socially oriented" industrial cooperative factories, will be put to a national referendum this Sunday, when Venezuelans vote on a raft of constitutional reforms that Chavez says will create a model of "21st-century...
Given how profoundly Chávez has altered hemispheric politics in recent years, it's not surprising that he seems to be leading the so-called democratator trend in the region. In Bolivia and Ecuador, left-wing Presidents and Chávez allies Evo Morales and Rafael Correa are hammering out new Constitutions that would let them run for re-election indefinitely. In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega, hoping to relive the broad Marxist powers he enjoyed as President in the 1980s, is ruling virtually by decree. In Argentina, many suspect that the leftist husband-and-wife team of outgoing President Nestor Kirchner...
...Chávez backers of course reject the democratator label. "Yes, the intent of socialism is that the collective interest predominate over individual interests," says Haiman El Troudi, director of the Miranda Center in Caracas, a policy research think tank set up by the government. "But if our agenda were Stalinist we would have imposed it by now. Instead we're subjecting these reforms to an election - totalitarian states don't do that." Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela's ambassador to the U.S., concurs: "We're trying to create institutionality in Latin America precisely because its present institutions don't function...
...Venezuela's street protesters have anything to do with it. This week thousands of students braved police tear gas to demonstrate against the socialist proposals. "This is a country divided in two" over Chávez, says Stalin González, a student at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas. "We're against the reforms because they don't [promote] reconciliation" between the country's left and right. Responding to Chávez's claims that the students are simply tools of the "oligarchy," Ricardo Sánchez, 24, another Central student, insists the movement also includes "the working...
Even some of Chávez's allies want to put the brakes on the President's radical train. Many reform proposals, they argue, are less about empowering the people than about concentrating power in the hands of Chávez. Among the initiatives: eliminating presidential term limits; putting the now autonomous Central Bank under the President's control; and the creation of regional vice presidents. Provincial leaders like Ramón Martínez, Governor of eastern Sucre state and himself a socialist, consider the latter idea a lavish centralization of federal authority, as well as a betrayal of Chávez...