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Beginning Of End For Hugo Chavez

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By EDWARD SCHUMACHER-MATOS

Washington Post Writers Group

Published: February 13, 2009

BOSTON - The beginning of the end is setting in for Hugo Chavez.

The authoritarian Venezuelan president is holding a referendum Sunday on a constitutional change that would allow him to run for president indefinitely. Pollsters say Chavez leads slightly, but the election is mostly irrelevant. Barring an oil miracle, the former army paratrooper is slowly imploding on the spike of his economic mismanagement and corruption, like any of a number of populist strongmen before him.

Oil prices may recover some from their current lows of around $40 a barrel, but not soon and not anywhere near the more than $80 a barrel that Chavez needs to stave off an inevitable major currency devaluation that will further stoke rampaging inflation and food shortages. His is a chronicle of a political death foretold, an old story that ended in the 1980s in most of Latin America but that Chavez and too many Venezuelans chose to revisit.

There is a lesson here for the new Obama administration. It should not engage Chavez in public quarreling, and certainly not work privately inside Venezuela against him. Both approaches are fool's errands, ones that leftover Cold War warriors foisted on the first administration of George W. Bush. The clever Chavez verbally made Bush into a laughingstock south of the border, and badly damaged hemispheric trust in the U.S. when it seemed to endorse a 2002 coup against Chavez that later failed.

Obama should merely ignore Chavez and let Venezuelans take care of him.

Much is made of how Chavez is a troublemaker and has enlisted Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Cuba in an anti-American leftist alliance. Who cares? None of these small countries is a threat, nor wants to be. There is no Soviet Union to use them as a platform, and Chinese dabbling in the hemisphere is purely commercial.

In 10 years as president, he has been a poster boy for "illiberal democracy," using majority votes from mostly the poor and uneducated to gut the Congress and the courts, shut down independent television and nationalize many industries.

Chavez lost a similar referendum 14 months ago. For this coming vote, he has resorted to 1930s fascist tactics of fomenting insecurity - and then rising in the polls. His supporters have openly thrown tear-gas bombs at the homes of opponents (and even the Vatican mission), attacked demonstrators and singled out opposition student leaders as Jewish, creating a climate in which a synagogue was desecrated two weeks ago.

Now Chavez campaigns as the alternative to this chaos.

With oil largesse, Chavez built schools and hospitals for the poor and led the country in a consumption boom. But crime and corruption boomed, too, and he built nothing economically sustainable.

Inflation is running at 31 percent, by far the highest in Latin America, and is expected to hit 45 percent this year. The official exchange rate is 2.15 bolivares to the dollar, but the black market is at more than 5 bolivares.

The government has enough reserves for the next year to continue subsidizing food prices, but that has caused food shortages. And the government is so far behind on payments to oil contractors that many have stopped working, cutting back production from the goose that lays the golden eggs.

This is a familiar picture that has led to chaos and coups. Chavez's opponents, many of them young, say they want to defeat him fairly in the next scheduled elections in 2012. They may not have the luxury of his lasting that long.

Edward Schumacher-Matos' columns are distributed by The Washington Post Writers Group.

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