Venezuelans Fight for Liberty

Despite ongoing evidence of Hugo Chavez’ repression in Venezuela, academics continue to either downplay or embrace Chavez’ anti-capitalist message. Binghamton University Emeritus Professor James Petras compared Chavez to Franklin D. Roosevelt in a 2004 column rebutting “myths” about Chavez’ leadership and the 2004 referendum. Chavez is “closer to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal than Castro’s socialist revolution,” writes Petras. This supposed pragmatic divide, however, has not stopped Chavez from subsidizing the Cuban economy or developing close diplomatic relationships with Fidel Castro or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Petras also appeared on Democracy Now!, supporting Chavez’ gradual expansion of powers. His debate opponent at the CATO Institute, Wesleyan University Professor Francisco Rodríguez, argued that “now what we’re seeing is an enabling law that will allow President Chavez to rule by decree in just about every area of the Venezuelan economy and society.”

Petras, on the other hand, sees Chavez’ expansion of powers as business as usual. “So I think what he’s doing is what a lot of presidents do, is taking—asking and securing fast-track powers to push through an agenda. It’s not very different from what U.S. presidents have done in the past to seek extra powers to deal with emergencies or opportunities to bring about significant changes,” responded Petras.

Two leaders within the Venezuelan student movement, Yon Goicoechea and Gustavo Tovar, heartily disagree.

The Venezuelan student movement played a key role in the December 2007 defeat of Chavez’s constitution referendum. Tovar, author of Students for Liberty, credits Goicoechea and Freddy Guevara for saving the country from an amendment that the movement claims would have excluded half of Venezuelan voters. He described the events leading up to the Chavez’ ultimate defeat, saying

“The leaders of the past was just about to say that Chavez won, the leaders of the past. [Yon and Freddy] said, well, you can say whatever you want to say—we are going to the streets. We know that we won and you will have to do what we want to do because we are supported by the truth. We don’t know what supports you. And that day our history changed.”

Tovar and Goicoechea believe that the future of Venezuela will be free of the Chavez’ repression, whom they consider a leader of the past. “Venezuela as a country cannot be defined just by Hugo Chavez. Hugo Chavez is one man of 26 million men that lives and have the pride to be Venezuelan people,” said Goicoechea. “I am a Venezuelan and I am not less, nor more, than Hugo Chavez. I want you, here in Washington and in the world to define Venezuela because of its possibilities, because of its capabilities, because [of] the future Venezuela has to offer to the world, not by Hugo Chavez,” he declared.

The ultimate goal of the student movement is liberty enshrined around human rights. Tovar defined liberty as “the possibility for a human being to choose and to reach his goals, his dreams” with the only limit being the 30 human rights defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “My role in this movement was to talk as Bono about human rights,” said Tovar, describing how he stopped his academic lecturing about human rights in favor of a more “rock and roll” outreach style.

Political theorists have long held that one of the greatest factors undermining democratic consolidation in developing countries is the ongoing unresponsiveness of the supposedly democratic government. This is why Evelyne Huber (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Dietrich Rueschemeyer (Brown University), and John D. Stephens (UNC Chapel Hill) differentiate between “formal” democracy which provided for “regular free and fair elections, universal suffrage, accountability of the state’s administrative organs…and effective guarantees for freedom of expression” from consolidated democracy, which also incorporates “high levels of participation without systematic differences across social categories…and increasing equality in social and economic outcomes.” Huber et al. argue in their 1997 article, “The Paradoxes of Contemporary Democracy” that Latin American citizens often become “disenchanted” with the lack of real change in facile, unconsolidated democracies with unaccountable government institutions. The decline in mobilization in these countries was partly due to “disenchantment with the failure of democratic rule to bring about significant improvements in the material situation of most citizens,” they write in a 1999 publication.

The speakers echoed this thesis, arguing that Venezuela’s problems stem from ongoing social inequalities and discriminatory policies. “Denying the existence of Hugo Chavez is denying the existence of a half of a population in Venezuela that supports him,” said Goicoechea. He continued, arguing that “the problems of the people in Venezuela is violence, exclusion, poverty, not if you are communist, capitalism, socialist, or liberal. I’m liberal, and I have the right to be liberal, but I wouldn’t be liberal if the liberalism couldn’t understand that all the people have the right to be different.” (Liberalism takes an entirely different meaning in Latin America, where “rightist” leaders are most likely to belong to military oligopolies or end up as repressive despots). Tovar asserted that “That is our main problem. Our main problem is not Mr. Chavez. Our main problem is not his government, his terrible government. Our main problem is our poverty and our social exclusion.”

Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.