Editorial: Haiti, Venezuela, Panama and ungovernability

With the support of the Bush administration and the apathy of most of the rest of the world, the duly elected president of Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide, has been forced out of office by a movement led by the resurgent Tonton Macoutes death squads.

It’s not that Aristide did nothing to provoke his own ouster. His sins included repeated failures to hold timely elections. This provided an excuse for an international community that couldn’t be bothered with the chronic pauper state that Haiti has long been to withhold aid. Left without the resources and lacking the will to mobilize the Haitian people against the insidious threat of starvation, Aristide stood by and watched his country sink into ungovernability.

The Haitian example should give pause for reflection about whether there can be any meaningful democracy in conditions of widespread hunger and illiteracy. In this instance these problems have long been aggravated by the destruction of the ecological resources needed to grow the country out of its misery. Haiti is the most extreme case in the Western Hemisphere, but Bolivia and several other parts of the Americas are not so far away from the Haitian fate.

Aristide’s failure is the failure of the international community, one that will not be resolved by French warships or US marines, but by stronger, smarter and much more democratic regional and global organizations.

In Venezuela the Bush administration is also attempting to engineer a right-wing ouster of an elected president. It’s not so easy there, because Venezuela has oil and many other resources that Haiti does not.

However, in his efforts to replace President Hugo Chávez with a junta of discredited oligarchs and reactionary military officers, George W. Bush has had certain advantages. Most notably, pro-coup billionaire media baron Gustavo Cisneros, owner of Venezuela’s largest TV network, the international Spanish-language Univision cable network and a controlling interest in the Latin American part of DirecTV, is an old friend of the Bush family and has close business ties with the relatively small clique that controls most of the major US news media. And forget about an independent mainstream press: supposedly prestigious news organizations like The New York Times get almost all the information they publish from Chávez’s US-funded opponents. Thus the American people are constantly bombarded with the quixotic message that the democratically elected president of Venezuela is an illegitimate dictator.

Of course, Chávez doesn’t help his case by going on TV and making exaggerated gestures that sometimes make him look like an evil cartoon character.

The Bush administration policy now, as when it attempted to orchestrate the April 2002 coup, is to incite strikes and violence on the streets and then concoct an Astroturf “grass roots movement” to “restore order.” The most recent tactic has been a petition drive for a recall election, in which the anti-Chávez forces apparently forged some of the purported signatures they filed with election officials and then staged violent demonstrations to demand that these and other questionable signatures be accepted without scrutiny by election officials.

If enough Venezuelans sign petitions for a recall election, such an election should be held and Chávez should leave gracefully if he loses.

However, what George W. Bush, Gustavo Cisneros and the mainstream corporate media want to conceal from you is that Venezuelan election laws provide that there must be more votes cast to recall an elected official than were cast to elect him or her in the first place for the ouster to be valid. Recent polls --- not the rigged ones done by the opposition papers in Caracas, but surveys taken by respected international pollsters --- suggest that if a recall election is held a majority may vote against Chávez, but not a sufficient one to remove him from office.

Still, even though he may cling to office by proper constitutional means, Chávez will continue to have a problem running a country when his opponents are being paid by foreign interests to make Venezuela ungovernable.

Panamanians should look at Haiti and Venezuela and conclude that this sort of fate does not suit us --- not the foreign intervention, not the paramilitary violence and not the prolonged political crisis that makes orderly government impossible.

This country’s potential for a ruinous crisis is posed by a legitimately elected president who by all rights should be brought to trial for her administration’s rampant corruption at the end of her term, but who may be tempted to add to the protections afforded by a pro-corruption Attorney General and a totally discredited court system by stealing the May 2 election on behalf of her chosen lapdog.

Don’t do it, Mireya.

And if she does try to do it, let’s not make Panama ungovernable. Better that this country’s people and institutions act quickly and decisively to defeat any attack on democracy and then get back to our daily business.

editorial

Haiti, Venezuela, Panama
and ungovernability

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