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April
17, 2002 8:45 a.m.
Victory
Hugo
A
post-mortem on Venezuela.
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 riticizing
losers is easy — and it sure isn't hard to run off a list of what
Venezuelan coup leaders did wrong in their botched ouster of Hugo Chavez.
The momentary regime of Pedro Carmona shut down congress and the supreme
court and moved to fire elected officials around the country — all
very unpopular actions. It even screwed up the little things, such as
not making sure Carmona's cabinet "looked like Venezeula" (to
coin a phrase). According to the Wall Street Journal's Marc Lifsher,
whose reporting on Venezuela has been invaluable, the pictures of the
nearly all-white Carmona government did not sit well with the public.
There's really no
dispute that the removal of Chavez would be a good thing for Venezuela
and the United States. It is notable that the American Left, even with
its low standards, has not adopted Chavez's cause in recent years. He
may be Fidel Castro's best buddy on the mainland, but he's also seen as
a corrupt demagogue who is not to be trusted.
What the American
Left is starting to do, however, is use the incident as a tool for attacking
the Bush administration. The Council
on Hemispheric Affairs already is proclaiming that the CIA must have
been involved because, well, isn't the CIA always involved? It also accuses
the State Department's Latin American chief Otto Reich — who remains
an obsession among the anti-anti-Communist set — of playing "dirty
tricks" against Chavez.
New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman was more thoughtful in taking
a similar tack yesterday, though he was equally wrong. He attacked the
Bush administration for its "foolish" and "stupid"
response to the coup. Although Chavez is an unsavory anti-American, said
Krugman, the United States must not allow "realpolitik" to trump
the imperatives of our "shared democratic values." He continues:
"Latin America has become a region of democracies — and these
democracies seem remarkably robust."
This assumes too
much. It is essential to remember that Chavez brought this coup upon himself,
through his own autocratic actions, just as the state department said
he did in an announcement last week. Chavez may have been elected, but
that does not make Venezuelan democracy "remarkably robust."
Quite the contrary. Civil society there has been in decline for quite
a while, and it recently took a nosedive thanks to the misrule of Chavez.
The coup occurred precisely because Venezuelan democracy is anything but
healthy. (And it may be less healthy throughout South America than Krugman
would have us believe; one of the reasons so many regional leaders condemned
the coup is because they wanted to send a message about insubordination
to their own militaries.)
This is not to say
the coup was a necessary course of action, even from the standpoint of
those who think Chavez must go. As Stephen Johnson of the Heritage Foundation
points out, there were efforts already underway to remove Chavez from
office through the devices of Venezuela's own constitution. It is possible
to believe that his days were numbered without have to resort to extra-legal
methods.
The coup went so
badly that it's hard not to wonder whether Chavez didn't have a hand in
it. He moves from a weakened position to a strengthened one. Let's be
clear, however, in labeling this conspiracy theory as totally speculative.
The enemies of the Bush administration won't be nearly so generous. Wednesday's
New
York Times, for instance, reports that Otto Reich urged Carmona
not to dissolve the National Assembly, a claim the Times darkly
interprets as "rais[ing] questions as to whether Mr. Reich or other
officials were stage-managing the takeover by Mr. Carmona."
Except that Carmona
apparently wasn't letting himself be stage-managed. But that doesn't matter.
The Left now will make a determined effort to see the hand of Otto Reich
behind it all — as if wishing would make it so.
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