Chavitude

This NY Times article - snagged here from the IHT - does some more framing of Chávez, the Boss. As I've now repeated ad nauseum, information coming into the US about the Chávez government has to be taken with a grain of salt. I'm not out to defend Chávez, but I do know first-hand that there are good and smart people in the government who are well-meaning and trying to transform poverty and other problems in the country. The American press gets its talking points from the Bush administration or the Venezuelan opposition - note that we never see a government official or Chávez himself interviewed, but, rather, elites from the opposition. I'd simply like to see a fair accounting of who Chávez is, and what the good forces in his government are trying to do.

Note, for instance, that we never see video of Chávez in the US except in his most clownish moments - of which he has plenty. We do not see, for example, Chávez analyzing a nationally known poem in such a way that it brought a professor friend of mine in the opposition camp to tears. We do not see his eloquent speeches about the dignity and citizenship of the poor.

In the linked article, we get another repeat of the administration / opposition frame. Note the first paragraph.

CARACAS: President Hugo Chávez is spending billions of dollars of his country's oil windfall on pet projects abroad, aimed at setting up his leftist government as a political counterpoint to the Bush administration in the region.

Read the rest of the article. Nowhere does it say that Chávez-sponsored projects around the world are a "political counterpoint to the Bush administration." Chávez knows Bush is gone in a couple of years. He dislikes the man ("Chávez frequently derides President George W. Bush and his top aides. In March, he called Bush a "donkey," a "drunkard" and a "coward," daring him to invade the country"). After all, the Bush administration supported the 2002 coup in Venezuela that left people dead in the streets. Would you like the man? But Chávez is not fool enough to think in the same short terms as the Bush administration does. The point, however, is that the scene is set in the article in the most navel-gazing of ways - Chávista politics is all about countering Bush.

What has Chávez done? Cutting and pasting the dastardly deeds mentioned in the article:

With Venezuela's oil revenues rising 32 percent last year, Chávez has been subsidizing diverse items like samba parades in Brazil, eye surgery for poor Mexicans and even heating fuel for poor American families from Maine to Philadelphia. By some estimates, the spending now surpasses the nearly $2 billion that Washington allocates annually for development programs and the drug war in western South America...

His government has purchased $2.5 billion in Argentine debt, the Venezuelan finance minister, Nelson Merentes, recently said, and was selling oil at cut-rate prices to 13 Caribbean countries and buying a big stake in Uruguayan gas stations. Some projects are as ambitious as the planned $3 billion purchase of 36 Brazilian oil tankers. Others are as modest as the $3.8 million in aid to four African countries...

There is little doubt, however, that the spending has won Chávez stature and support abroad. For Argentina, the debt purchases helped President Néstor Kirchner, Venezuela's left-leaning ally, to pay off that country's $9.8 billion debt to the International Monetary Fund, ending Argentina's stormy relationship with the lending agency.

In Cuba, Venezuela has supplied nearly 100,000 barrels of cut-rate oil a day - a deal Cuba repays with doctors and other services - making Chávez a benefactor on a par with the Soviet Union, which once bankrolled Castro's economy.

Now here's the first cite of the article, from the Heritage Foundation, that sets the scene:

He is fast rising as the next Fidel Castro, a hero to the masses who is intent on opposing every move the United States makes, but with an important advantage.

"He's managed to do what Fidel Castro never could," said Stephen Johnson, a scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. "Castro never had an independent source of income the way Chávez does.

Chávez is a friend of Castro, but everyone knows this is not another Castro-type government. The Chávez government, it was told to me time and again by government members at the ministry level, is seeking a social justice basis upon which to build capitalist investment. Many Northern economists have argued just such a route as a sound means of developing an economy. But here we have the common identification of Chávez as another Castro with which most articles of this sort begin.

Here are more assessments in the article, all by Americans like Negroponte or by the Venezuelan opposition:

The Center of Economic Investigations, an economic consulting firm in Caracas, estimated recently that Chávez had spent more than $25 billion abroad since taking office in 1999, about $3.6 billion a year. First Justice, a leading opposition party, put the figure at $16 billion, based on Chávez's own declarations...

Critics see the spending as a reckless exercise in populist decadence intended to burnish Chávez's image while embarrassing the Bush administration, his principal obsession since American officials gave tacit support to a failed coup against him in 2002.

Chávez is "spending considerable sums involving himself in the political and economic life of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, this despite the very real economic development and social needs of his own country," said John Negroponte, the American director of national intelligence, in February at a congressional hearing in Washington.

Antonio Ledezma, an opposition leader and one of the president's more determined foes, said the policy's aim was to build "a political platform with an international reach."

Then the article goes largely anonymous in its sources, or anecdotal:

With the price of Venezuelan crude rising fivefold since Chávez was first elected in 1998, the spending has not hurt international reserves or Venezuela's credit worthiness. Oil analysts say the sustainability of that situation depends on the flow of revenues, the price of oil and the amount of crude Venezuela's oil industry is able to produce. Still, with Venezuela's expenditures opaque, there was increased speculation about how long the huge outlays would continue.

"From a fiscal perspective," said Michelle Billig, director of political risk at the Pira Energy Group, a New York consulting firm, "there's a lot of concern over the lack of savings and what an expansionary fiscal policy could do to their macroeconomic outlook should there be a downturn in prices or supply."

Critics who have questioned Venezuela's spending are roundly denounced by the government, which says its focus remains on providing for Venezuela's poor. Indeed, Venezuela plans this year to deposit $10 billion into a fund for social programs, Chávez said in February, up from $8 billion in 2005.

There's the primer. Look at the projects. Yes, Chávez is after a Bolivarian solidarity in South America. And, yes, this is an attempt at building a regional economy, just as North America (remember NAFTA?) and the European Union are attempting. He just might make a real dent in progress towards such an economy. But the only way it can occur - absolutely the only way for South America - is by helping the poor out of poverty. One element that is crucial is education, another is decent healthcare, another is jobs. The Chávista program is an attempt to do these things, long-neglected by the opposition when it was in power. One must remember that Venezuela's economy was run into the ground over the 1970s-1990s by those who yell loudest in the opposition today. Those are the ones who get the interviews in the American press crying foul about Chávez's economic programs and development policies.

When you read an article on Chávez, please keep these points in mind if you're interested at all in understanding the man and the politics of the country, as well as Venezuela's geopolitical position. It is mostly public ignorance in the US, such as in the leadup to the Iraq War, bred and propagated in the American press at the level of platitudes and tit-for-tat rather than genuine analysis.