BETHANY HUTCHENS
Gargoyle staff reporter
Posted Friday, Feb. 2, 2007
Opinions

NEXT YEAR, AS all my friends, family, and people I'm on speaking terms with already know, instead of gathering up my books and heading off to college, I'm packing my bags for Venezuela.

I'll be staying with a host family and attending a local high school for 11 months. I'm very excited! But enough about me. This column isn't about my stay, but about my future host country.

Once I found out where I was going
(Rotary International, the organization that is sending me, does not guarantee placement in your first-choice country), I began extensive research on the culture, politics, economy, and people of Venezuela.

What I found out is slightly worrying. Writing in Insight Guide Venezuela, updated in 2004, Tony Perrottet described Venezuela's economy as being in “a state of crisis.”

Despite the country's huge oil revenues, big Western companies were grabbing most of the money. Poverty and crime were on the rise, and large sections of the capital city, Caracas, were not safe to even set foot in.

This is the problem that the country's controversial president,
Hugo Chavez, is trying to fix. Chavez, who was elected president in 1998, and was re-elected in 2000 and 2006, was a military officer who took part in a failed coup attempt in 1992 against then-President Carlos Andres Perez.

Chavez has already instituted reforms in his own country, such as vaccinations, road building, cheap housing, and adult education. Chavez believes deeply in his “Bolivarian Revolution,” through which he plans to nationalize key industries in Venezuela, including the lucrative oil industry; he is also actively encouraging other poor Latin American countries to do the same.

However, his sweeping changes in his home country are offset by his steady gain in power, beginning with a new constitution in 1999, which extended the presidential term to six years with a two-term limit and gave more power to the president, and culminating in a recent decision to grant Chavez complete power for 18 months.

The U.S. government is openly hostile toward Chavez, who is trying to cut down on Western influences in both the economy and culture of Venezuela. Chavez is also very critical of President George W. Bush. In fact, Chavez famously called Bush the “devil” in a speech to the United Nations in October.

Incoming Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said at his recent confirmation hearings that Chavez has been trying to export a brand of “radical populism.”

“I think that his behavior is threatening to democracies in the region,” said Negroponte, who is the outgoing director of national intelligence and a former ambassador to Honduras.

Given the United States' track record with countries that “threaten the democracy in the region,” this is the most worrying aspect of modern Venezuela. For some reason, the U.S. has it out for left-leaning democratically elected politicians in other countries.

In a creepily similar situation, the CIA staged a coup in Iran in 1953 to oust democratically elected Prime Minister
Mohammed Mossadegh, after he nationalized Iranian oil industries. The U.S. then propped up the Shah of Iran, whose autocratic rule led to the fundamentalist Muslim revolution of 1979 led by
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Many Iranian citizens were imprisoned, tortured, or killed as a direct result of the Shah's rule and the resulting backlashes.

Pretty much the same thing happened in
Guatemala, when the U.S. staged a coup in 1954 after the (once again) democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz tried to seize and nationalize unused lands belonging to the United Fruit Company, a U.S.- based banana company. The resulting chaos and disruption led to the creation of the Guatemalan death squads, which ravaged the country for years after.

Hopefully the CIA will restrain itself in Venezuela, although there have been ominous signs that the U.S. is already planning trouble. A new mission team for Venezuela and Cuba was recently created. CIA chief Michael Hayden has also stated, “The Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela is of prime agency concern.”

As someone who will eventually know, and probably love, a good number of people in Venezuela, I urge the United States to keep to itself on this one. Sure, we all need oil (at least until we wise up and believe in global warming), but are the lives of innocent Venezuelans really worth it? Can't we just let them have what is by right theirs?

Chavez may be power hungry, and he may eventually become a dictator, but as of yet he has not tortured, killed, or harmed any of his people, which is more than what most of the dictators supported by the U.S. over the years could say.