MattKennard.com

It’s not often that a dictator loses a referendum, but this is the paradox the American populace has been grappling with this week as the lies fed to them by corporate news networks about Hugo Chavez hit reality in an unseemly head-on collision.

This week Chavez narrowly lost – by 1% – a referendum that would have made it illegal for discrimination at work based on sexual or religious grounds, and, also would have cut the working day for the average Venezualan to a legal maximum of 6 hours.

This isn’t the part of the referendum trumpted in the mainstream media, of course. They focused unendingly on the proposed loosening of the term limits currently imposed on the Venezualen Presidency.

If Chavez had been successful he would have been able to run in elections until 2050 was the scaremongering message. This would have made the Venezualan system on a democratic par with those famous bastions of totalitarianism Britain and Australia. There is no such thing as a term-limit in either of their political systems and if a leader is popular enough then, in theory, he can rule until he dies.

If, in the eyes of the business press, this constitutional change is an attempt by Chavez to realise a dictatorship, then that means that Tony Blair was a dictator too, and all diplomatic support to Prime Minister Gordon Brown should stop immediately as his dictatorship could theoretically continue until 2050, too.

In the embarassing and ignorant hysteria that has gripped the American media Chavez has been compared to Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and even, echoing Donald Rumsfeld’s idiocy, Adolf Hitler. “Mr. Chavez shares much in common with these former dictators who killed and trampled human rights as a means to their own ends,” says Douglas MacKinnon in the Washington Post in one of the stupidest – but not unusual – remarks I’ve ever read.

This whole hate campaign is laughable because Chavez has some of the most stellar democratic credentials in the world. Since being democratically elected in 1998 by a landslide, he went to the Venezualen people again in 1999 and won approval for important constitutional changes. He won another general election in July 2000 when he was elected with 60% of the votes. Later, in December 2000, he won a referendum that called for the state-monitoring of labor union’s elections.

And then, a presidential recall referedum – which was enshrined in Chavez’s 1999 Constitution – was triggered in August 2004 when opposition groups collected signatures from 20% of the electorate, as the Constitution stipulated. The tiring people of Venezuala were at the polls again. And again Chavez won with support of the Venezualan people. 59% of the population voted no to the recall in an election overseen by the best election auditors in the world.

By my reckoning, that counts as three general elections and two referendums in nine years. It is hard to find a more exercised populace in the entire world.

This stands in stark constrast, of course, to George W. Bush, who, and it is now uncontroversial to say this, stole the election in 2000 in a dictatorial putsch more common to a banana republic. And this brief primer also leaves out the most telling part of recent Venezualan history: the coup attempt by right-wing groups in 2002, which tried to use the military to topple the democratically elected President. The journalist Eva Gollinger in her work The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention In Venezuela assiduously documents, through the revelation of previously secret CIA documents, the succour and support the US government gave to this anti-democratic military coup, which briefly succeeded until the hundreds of thousands downtrodden people from Caracas took to the street to demand the release of Chavez who had been incarcerated by the new business junta.

So why the lies and misinformation about Chavez? The answer is simple and deeply rooted in the history of political and economic policies of the United States in the 20th century, and maybe before.

Venezuala under Chavez provides a symbol to the rest of Latin America and even the wider world of what a better, egalitarian society can look like. For the first time in many decades the oil wealth of this nation extremely rich in natural resources has been redirected back to its people, and not, as history has demanded, rapacious foreigners and their elite lackeys in Venezuela. This is a dangerous exmaple to set, and the thirst for this kind of justice is likely to spread. Henry Kissinger, in the analogous example of Chile under socialist Salvador Allende in the 1970s, called this kind of exmaple a “virus that could infect others”.

In the aftermath of his election, Chavez created what he called “Bolivarian Missions” after the great Latin American liberationist from the 19th century. These missions were aimed at reducing the massive and crippling poverty in the barrios around Venezuala. Through them thousands of free medical hospitals were built providing healthcare to many people for the first time, as well as establishing local grassroots committees to abjudicate their affairs. The infant mortality rate fell by 18.2% between 1998 and 2006. Family income amongst the poorest part of Venezualan society grew more than 150% between 2003 and 2006. Many people who couldn’t even write their names, where chalking them up on boards in the barrios. My friend on a visit to the country saw it with his own eyes.

The leftward turn in what American planners contemptuously call “our backyard” is indeed worrying to the forces that have relied on unscrupulous elites to funnel their wealth to the West instead of to their own people. From Chile to Brazil to Bolivia, socialist leaders are vowing to change this tragic history of exploitation.

This can’t be upheld by the American establishment and this is why you see the logical gymnastics of normally rational people as they fulminate about a dictator losing a referendum oblivious to how ridiculous they sound.

This post is tagged hugo chavez, u.s. corporate media, venezuela