It’s 3 a.m. and Hugo Chávez is safe and asleep.
The finger-waving Venezuelan leader is being chased down once again by finger-waving congressional Republicans. This time, their goal is to go a different route, calling for a designation of Venezuela as an “official state sponsor of terrorism.” With that, we have this year’s edition of the far right’s incredibly dim-witted move on Latin American policy.
“It would be a total tragedy if that were to happen,” said Ian Brillembourg, an anti-Chávez political junkie who is a native of Venezuela and studies at the Anderson School of Management. “If that motion is to pass, you are dooming millions of Venezuelans that do not share Chávez’ beliefs.”
Say what you want about the extravagant Chávez, who launches into endless diatribes on his state-owned television station and has a laundry list of accusers ranging from Amnesty International to Reporters Without Borders. On this occasion, however, the push for such draconian designation is a mirror image of the same name-calling politics for which Chávez is famous.
About a year and a half ago, his “Bush is the devil” speech in the United Nations general assembly demonstrated not only his fiery tongue, but also his ability to play with the culture of our hype-hungry media machinery.
Congressman Connie Mack, a Republican from Florida’s 14th district, is leading the charge to play the same game, calling for a harsher policy against a “sworn enemy of the United States.”
“(Chávez) is using his vast oil wealth to fund terrorism in his own backyard,” Mack said in a press release. That backyard is a Latin America where left-leaning rulers now control the majority of governments.
In addition, that backyard is the key foreign policy area for the hundreds of thousands of Florida Cubans who make up Mack’s constituency. This move to be fiercely anti-Chávez could be seen as an election-year ploy for an electorate that does not hold Latin American leftists in a good light thanks to famed bearded grandpa Fidel Castro.
“The last two U.S. presidential elections were determined by the votes of a few hundred thousand right-wing Cuban Americans (by no means all of them) in Florida,” commented Mark Weisbrot, codirector of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, in an article for The San Diego Union-Tribune. “These voters hate Venezuela, and we can expect that many politicians will pander to them.”
A similar crowd seems to be forming with Venezuelan Bruins. “I have not met a single pro-Chávez Venezuelan in Los Angeles,” said George Torres, a second-year computer science and engineering student, who hails from Venezuela.
His family left the country at the beginning of Chávez’ presidency.
If Congressman Mack is a panderer, the wily Chávez is not too far behind. But the financial power he has accrued through oil revenues is not as much a sin as it is a natural cause of our policies with him. Multinational corporations such as Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Valero and Halliburton, as well as the U.S. Navy, can all be counted among Venezuela’s oil clients.
With all this economic intertwining, the politicos want to simplify the relationship by calling Chávez a terrorist.
“The Bush administration, which is attempting to isolate Venezuela, has actually accomplished the opposite ““ Washington is more isolated than ever before in Latin America,” Weisbrot wrote.
In the end, Venezuelans do not need someone like Mack to inspire a democratic yearning. Brillembourg, who says he is optimistic fellow Venezuelans will change directions in the future, described his admiration for the “heaven-sent student movement that was able to galvanize the opposition to defeat Chávez” in the 2007 constitutional referendum that would have given Chávez the ability to be continually reelected.
While Venezuelans in Los Angeles are cautious about demonizing the country as a whole, Republicans in Congress want to manufacture the image of the next axis of evil. The GOP’s policy remains to pit you against Chávez at all costs, even without any significant reassurance. Think about it. Hugo Chávez wants to attack you. He is hiding under your bed. He goes on Juicy Campus and talks smack about your frat.
When we reduce the complexities of foreign policy to a black and white, us vs. them mentality, we lose the opportunity to establish a mutually beneficiary relationship.
And that’s how you make sure Hugo Chávez stays safe and asleep.
E-mail Ramos at mramos@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.