Georgetown Promotes Former Chávez-Regime Official after Sidelining Ilya Shapiro

G eorgetown University recently promoted Angelo Rivero Santos, a former official in the regime of Venezuela’s late socialist dictator Hugo Chávez, to the role of interim director of its Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS). Between 2006 and 2013, Rivero Santos held various positions in the Venezuelan embassy in the United States, eventually serving twice as acting ambassador for the Chávez regime. “As of today, I am humbled to follow in the footsteps of those that have served as Directors of CLAS in the past by serving as your interim-Director for the academic year 2022–2023,” Rivero Santos wrote in a July 1 statement to the university department.

This is the same university that stirred controversy in January for placing Ilya Shapiro, who was set to lead its law school’s Center for the Constitution, on administrative leave during a four-month “investigation” for three tweets in which he questioned President Biden’s reliance on racial and gender preferences in promising to nominate a black woman — to the exclusion of all other possible nominees — to replace Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer. In the end, the law school reluctantly retained Shapiro, though it legitimized the tactics and concerns of the woke mob attacking him. Shapiro resigned days later, citing his belief that the school had “yielded to the progressive mob, abandoned free speech, and created a hostile environment.”

To sum up: At Georgetown, writing three poorly worded tweets can result in cancellation, but working in a regime hostile to human rights can result in a promotion. Shapiro’s worst offense was that some students claimed he had hurt their feelings. Meanwhile, Rivero Santos was complicit in a government’s destruction of its country. Georgetown has not responded to National Review’s request for comment on this issue.

In 2007, while it was nationalizing the country’s oil projects, the Chávez regime proposed 69 alterations to the Venezuelan constitution. The two most controversial measures would have abolished presidential term limits and allowed the government to declare indefinite states of emergency allowing it to detain citizens without charging them with crimes. Critics blasted the proposals as a step toward dictatorship, but Rivero Santos, then serving as deputy chief of mission in the embassy, carried water for the regime. He wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, “Venezuela Knows What It’s Doing,” defending the reforms, pointing out that the president would need to face regular elections and claiming that the state-of-emergency declarations maintained “key due-process rights.” Despite the propaganda from the regime, the Venezuelan people narrowly voted down the proposed reforms in a public referendum, though they later accepted them in another vote.

In 2008, Human Rights Watch published a 230-page report detailing the abuses of the Chávez regime. Chávez had used a failed 2002 coup against him as an excuse to diminish his country’s democracy, the report alleged. The report also charged the government with political takeover of the judiciary, blacklisting and discriminating against political opponents, and undermining freedom of the press. Chávez responded to the report by expelling the leaders of Human Rights Watch’s Americas division for alleged illegal meddling in the country’s affairs.

The publishing of the report did not dissuade Rivero Santos from participating in the regime; he rose to his first stint as acting ambassador around the same time the report was released. In August 2010, Human Rights Watch met with Rivero Santos to express its concern that the Chávez government was undertaking an “apparent campaign of harassment against Carlos Correa, a human rights defender and director of the Venezuelan NGO Espacio Público.” Correa was assaulted in the entrance to Venezuela’s National Assembly months later.

In 2012, Washington Post editorial-page editor Jackson Diehl wrote a column, “Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez Faces an Uprising at the Ballot Box,” on the upcoming Venezuelan election. He recounted Chávez’s antisemitic smear campaign targeting opposition leader Henrique Capriles Radonski, a devout Catholic whose grandmother was a Polish Holocaust survivor. The attack on Capriles was posted at a government-run website and entitled “The Enemy Is Zionism.” It called Zionism “an ideology of terror” and claimed that Zionists owned “the majority of the financial institutions of the planet” and controlled “almost 80 percent of the world economy and virtually all of the communications industry, in addition to maintaining decision-making positions within the U.S. Department of State and European powers.” Diehl also saw the regime’s social spending binge in the leadup to the election as a political move to buy the public’s support. In a Washington Post op-ed, “Under Hugo Chávez, a Better Venezuela,” Rivero Santos, then in his second stint as acting ambassador, responded to Diehl: “Today’s political opposition in Venezuela is the same one that failed citizens in the past. . . .  Social spending under Mr. Chávez is not a campaign tactic but a steadfast policy of investing in human development.”

Chávez would go on to defeat Capriles in 2012, but Chavez died of cancer the next year. By the end of his time in power, he had ushered in massive inflation, food shortages, and skyrocketing crime rates. Unfortunately for the Venezuelan people, Chávez’s death did not bring any relief. His hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro, compounded the failures of the socialist regime, turning the country into a living hell. To Rivero Santos’s credit, he did not perform any meaningful service under Maduro; he left the government shortly after Chávez’s death to become an assistant professor at Georgetown. Still, he was by Chávez’s side throughout his regime’s failures and human-rights abuses, which paved the way for the even greater catastrophe of the Maduro regime. Shapiro’s much-criticized tweets do not measure up to the Chavez wrongdoings with which Rivero Santos is associated, and Georgetown is following a clear double standard in promoting him.