Jackson: I don't want to hear it, Dubya

In less than one month, Venezuelans will go to the polls to decide whether one Hugo Chávez Frias keeps his job.

George W. Bush would be busy stuffing ballot boxes if he could, but since he can’t he’s doing what he can, which is sending a ton of money to the anti-Chávez forces. Some of this is done more or less openly, through the National Endowment for Democracy. If experience is any guide, we won’t know most of what Uncle Sam is doing until long after the fact.

Before this latest move to intervene in Venezuelan affairs, Bush backed a coup attempt, and when the coup failed, he supported a big business general lockout and a partially effective oil workers’ strike that trashed Venezuela’s economy.

But why?

People in the Bush administration like to call Chávez a dictator. That seems like a rather extreme characterization to me. Especially so, considering its source.

After all, Chávez was elected by a strong majority of the Venezuelan people, while Bush didn’t even muster a plurality of Americans. And it’s Bush, not Chávez, who has made a name for himself by having hundreds of innocent people jailed without charges and then attempted to deny them recourse to the law. It’s the Bush administration, not the Chávez administration, that produced those “legal” memos about how national and international laws against torture can be ignored. Bush, not Chávez, is the commander-in-chief of troops who have killed or arrested a number of journalists.

Within Venezuela this controversy is a three-ring power struggle among the aristocratic families who were thrown out of power, Chávez and his Bolivarians who threw them out of power and are now tenaciously trying to cling to office, and a far left that despises both Chávez and the former power elites. From the international perspective, the real argument between the United States and Venezuela arises because certain business interests who would like to dominate the entire hemisphere through a Free Trade Area of the Americas patterned after NAFTA can’t control Chávez. Ordinarily a Latin American country can be bent under the multinational elites’ economic and political pressures, but because it has oil these powerful forces are having a hard time starving Venezuela into submission on the Chávez issue.

Meanwhile in Caracas, all sorts of pollsters are very busy these days. Most of them don’t deserve to be called pollsters. George H. W. Bush’s golfing and fishing buddy, billionaire Venezuelan broadcasting baron Gustavo Cisneros, is part of a crowd of “respectable mainstream” news media owners who hire purported pollsters who use a variety of ludicrous techniques --- like just not polling in the pro-Chávez neighborhoods --- to “prove” that Venezuelans want Chávez out and the old oligarchy back in. Chávez himself seems to be playing the spurious poll game, and on the basis of some very questionable data he’s predicting a landslide in his favor.

However, the serious independent pollsters are on the scene now, and the trend they have been reporting is a shrinking plurality for recall, a big chunk of undecideds and a certain amount of momentum in Chávez’s favor.

What becomes of the undecideds will be a fascinating tale for politics junkies like me, but the historically safest assumption is that almost all of these are anti-Chávez voters who don’t want anybody putting them on any list of opponents of the government.

Figured that way, it looks like a majority would vote to recall Chávez, but that majority may not be as big as the one that put the man in the presidential palace in the first place. Under the Venezuelan constitution, that would mean that Hugo Chávez would serve out the rest of his term in office.

Anything might happen in these last weeks before the referendum, but now even Venezuelan opposition figures and the most rabidly anti-Chávez elements of the multinational corporate media are admitting that the votes just might not be there to oust the president they really hate.

So, what if some 52 percent of the voters who go to the polls cast their ballots to recall Chávez, but the opposition mobilizes substantially less than the 3.8 million votes needed to remove the guy?

Cisneros and friends would surely cry foul and whine about how unfair the rules are. Considering that these people blamed Chávez when the Donald Trump organization judged the Venezuelan Miss Universe contestant chosen by the Gustavo Cisneros organization insufficiently foxy to make it to the pageant’s final round, that’s a given. In such hallowed venues as the Union Club and the El Panama America editorial offices, they might even find a few Panamanians to whine along with them.

But such a complaint should under no circumstances be heard from anybody in the Bush administration.

THEY didn’t get the most votes. Although they eventually “won” Florida on the strength of a single black vote --- that of Clarence Thomas --- the only way they came close in that state was by illegally removing thousands of voters from the rolls, the great majority of whom were black, on the basis of fraudulent claims that these people were convicted felons.

So if Chávez hangs onto his office with just a minority of the vote, but a big enough one to defeat the recall, I really don’t want to hear one peep of protest about it from Dubya. The man has nothing whatsoever to teach Venezuela in particular or Latin America in general about democratic principles.

Also in this section:
Leis, Never an evil without its cause
Singer, The EU, MERCOSUR and the FTAA
Bush, Progress in the War on Terror
Kerry, A new era of responsibility
Amnesty International, Contempt for human rights at Guantanamo
Grant, Trinidad's dirty little secret
Jackson, I don't want to hear it, George
Bernal, An appeal against the absurd

opinion

One argument we’d better not hear