Venezuela enters post-Chavez era.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
President Hugo Chavez, the American statesman with the greatest political impact in the last quarter century, died on March 5 in Venezuela. "Controversial, loved and hated, eclectic," wrote Uruguayan political analyst and Sen. Constanza Moreira. His death opened the door to a new electoral process that could lead to the definitive consolidation of the Revolucion Bolivariana or to its demise.
Chavez entered politics in February 1992, after leading a failed coup attempt, the only one in the region against the neoliberal economic policies that battered South American societies in the 1990s (NotiSur, March 11, 1992). For his part in the attempted coup, he was jailed and demonized, accused of being dictatorial, authoritarian, a demagogue (NotiSur, April 29, 1994). Nevertheless, few have as meticulously observed with regularity and transparency the first commandment of the democratic creed: elections carried without fail, out come hell or high water, despite internal problems--a precept as valid for the US and France as for Iraq and Libya.
For those attempting to minimize his democratic credentials, it is worth noting that, since 1998, he submitted to the electoral will of the people 14 times, winning all but one of those elections. The last time was in October 2012, when he soundly defeated Henrique Capriles, the single candidate for a unified opposition that included traditional and new parties, major national and international media, business chambers, and the Catholic Church, as well as blatant interference from powerful outside propaganda machines (NotiSur, Oct. 19, 2012).
Since he first appeared on the Latin American political stage, Chavez was an enigma. He spoke of "21st century socialism" when global capitalism celebrated the fall of "real socialism" and the Berlin Wall. He did not have adversaries but enemies. From the beginning, the right saw him as someone to destroy. The left and progressives were slow to figure out that the Venezuelan was one of their own.
The first to recognize it was Cuba's then President Fidel Castro.
Chavez's heterodoxy made room for everything. He was capable of weaving into the same sentence Karl Marx and the Apostles, liberation theologians and the Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, the greats of recent African history and American liberators from the early 18th century. "Chavez challenged the limits of the possible at a time when the possible was almost a dogma," wrote an analyst for the Argentine...
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