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As for those Bolivarian Circle "mobs," people living in the US might only wish for them here if they understood what they are and how well they work for the people of Venezuela. These Circles are the heart of Hugo Chavez's participatory democracy meaning, unlike in the US, Venezuelans really have a say in how their country is governed. That right was given to them in Articles 166 and 192 in the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela which the people voted to approve overwhelmingly in a national referendum in December, 1999 and that went into effect one year later. As for Cuban intelligence, the only Cubans in the country, besides the diplomatic ones every country has to conduct normal relations, are the many thousands of doctors and other health workers and teachers who've played a major role in improving the lives of the Venezuelan people. Vargas Llosa disapproves.Dante puts the violent in his seventh circle. For Vargas Llosa it's for Chavez's "imperialism." This staggering misstatement of fact is based on Chavez having purchased "100,000 AK-47s, 53 Mi-35 assault helicopters, fighter jets, transport planes, patrol boats, speed boats and Tucano jets from Russia, Spain and Brazil." No mention is made that most nations buy weapons from abroad or produce their own, and no nation produces and sells more of them than the US in volumes greater than the rest of the world combined. Hugo Chavez denounces imperialism, never attacked another nation or threatened to do it. In contrast, the US is an out-of-control hegemon waging aggressive wars without end for world dominance and is a threat to world peace, security and the ability of the environment to sustain life. Most other nations need whatever weapons they can get and afford just for security and self-defense, especially when they're up against the Bush administration. In the case of Venezuela, Washington already tried and failed three times to oust Hugo Chavez. In light of this and knowing another US attempt to overthrow his government is coming, the action Chavez is taking is prudent but by no means excessive.
Another false claim is that Chavez "is a long-time supporter of FARC, Colombia's terrorist group." No mention is made of the Uribe government in Colombia that has one of the worst documented records in the world of state-directed terrorism against its own people. Also, at the likely direction, funding and insistence of the Bush administration, he's doing it against Venezuelans as well. He's been at it for many months by infiltrating his state-supported paramilitary death squads across the Venezuelan border to commit a growing number of killings and kidnappings that Hugo Chavez has now created civilian and military units to combat. Tachina state on the Colombian border has been particularly hard hit as the number of deaths there rose from 212 in 2002 to 566 last year and over 2,000 since Hugo Chavez became President. Alvaro Uribe and George Bush are widely believed to be behind this as part of a plan to destabilize the Chavez government and create a reason for the US to intervene militarily - supposedly to protect US citizens as happened using those contrived pretexts in the 1980s to justify invading Grenada and Panama. In those cases, the real reasons were to overthrown governments not adhering to the US agenda. The same situation is true in Venezuela because Hugo Chavez refuses to follow the same old neoliberal Washington Consensus policies that don't work and denounces them forthrightly.
"Chavez (also) buys influence through oil," says Vargas Llosa. "It's a form of blackmail: At OPEC Chavez fights for increasing prices, making life hard for poor countries that import oil, and then offers those very nations oil subsidies they have no choice but to accept.....Chavez is denying his nation its wealth from oil....He sponsors 30 countries....to buy their vote for a seat at the U.N. Security Council." Where to begin to debunk this outrageous barrage of unfounded and poisonous inversions of fact. Reverse all the Vargas Llosa claims and therein lies the truth about Hugo Chavez, his dedication to his people, and his enlightened social programs and real participatory democracy people in most other nations might only dream of, if they knew about them, but don't have.
Chavez has also been a champion of his progressive Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA). It's his alternative to the corrupted neoliberal Washington Consensus model based on exploitation, military conquest and domination. He believes in the "social state" benefitting everyone and not just the privileged elite Vargas Llosa pledges fealty to. He even once proposed a put-up-or-shut-up offer to George Bush as part of an effort to normalize relations between the two countries and was turned down flat. He offered to sell discounted oil to the US at $50 a barrel when it was selling on world markets in the $70 range. Had the offer been accepted, it could have lowered the cost of gasoline at the pump as much as $1 dollar a gallon and been a boon to US consumers who were never told about Chavez's generosity.
Vargas Llosa surely knows this but left it out of his column. He also didn't mention that Chavez's generosity was rejected because the Big Oil interests so close to the Bush administration wanted no part of it as lower gas prices would come right out of their bottom line. As for buying votes to win the Latin American seat on the UN Security Council, the nations supporting Venezuela's bid see the Chavez government as the only alternative to the unacceptable other choice - Guatemala with its long history of thuggishness and brutality against its majority indigenous people earning it no right for anything but world condemnation.
Dante's eighth circle is for those who commit fraud which is Chavez's "fraudulent anti-Americanism" for Vargas Llosa. Because Venezuela sells much of its oil to the US and imports billions of dollars in return in goods and services, by Vargas Llosa's strange reasoning that means Hugo Chavez "lusts for....US capitalism." What he "lusts for" is the full development of the "social state" and his desire for forthright dealings with all other nations based on cooperation, solidarity and fairness.
To help his people, Chavez is committed to building a socialist state, but he's done nothing to abolish the basic elements of a capitalist one that includes private and foreign ownership and the right to private profits. What he does insist on is that private businesses, domestic and foreign-owned, operate under fair practice rules. That includes paying their fair share of taxes to the state and for foreign owners in joint state-owned resource ventures agreeing to a minority ownership arrangement of 49% maximum. This is no different than how most developed nations deal with foreign investors, but it's way different from the freewheeling, deregulated, low tax, full or majority ownership arrangements that used to prevail in Venezuela and throughout Latin America for decades. It's also the inverse of the corrupted one-way US Washington Consensus "free market" model based on rule by a dominant corporatocracy and the exploitation of ordinary people to make it work.
Vargas Llosa also makes the absurd claim that Chavez "manipulted the voter registration rolls, adding two million phantom voters, including 30,000 who are 100 years old and citizens named 'Superman.' " Further, "Four out of five members of the Electoral Council are Chavez lackeys." Where does this man come up with this stuff? Vargas Llosa knows the truth but prefers to ignore it and concentrate instead on unfounded and outrageous accusations.
In fact, all elections in which Chavez was a candidate were monitored by the opposition and independent observers who judged them to be free and fair. In addition, there's no evidence whatever of manipulating voter registration rolls or unfairly stacking the Electoral Council. The simple truth, Vargas Llosa ignores, is that Hugo Chavez is so popular he just has to announce he's running, put his name on the ballot, show up on election day (unlike the opposition afraid to run against him), and he's swept to victory overwhelmingly.
Compare that to the way things are under the Bush administration Vargas Llosa won't talk about. The US president's lackeys stack the Congress and court system up to the High Court, and the electoral system is so corrupted and flawed that any notion of a free and fair process is something from another age. It's this way now because increasing numbers of far-right candidates and George Bush are themselves lackeys of the corporate interests and war-profiteers they represent. The result is wars without end and growing repression at home to keep a restive population in line. Growing numbers of voters are getting so fed up with this and their needs being ignored because of it, they'd surely vote the bums out in a really free and fair election. They can't do it because the process is controlled and corrupted by the big corporations running it. Their hand-picked officials decide who gets on and stays on the voter roles and they're in charge of proceedings on election day. Worst of all, corporate-owned and operated electronic voting machines are now widely used and are easily manipulated to rig the outcomes so enough business-friendly candidates win. It's called democracy, American-style.
The ninth and lowest of Dante's circles is for traitors, the worst ones in Dante's world. Surely George Bush would qualify for that level and Vargas Llosa with him based on the above discourse of hateful dishonesty and character assassination. Vargas Llosa makes another choice reserving a spot in all of Dante's nine levels for Hugo Chavez. Here again his comments are garbled. He first mentions Army officers betraying Chavez with three of them, imprisoned for real crimes he won't explain, managing to escape. More likely they were sprung with CIA help, but that's unmentioned in his column. The CIA is an old hand at this kind of business. In 1985 it's operatives bribed prison guards in Venezuela so that world-class terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, on the CIA's payroll, was allowed to "escape" to find sanctuary in El Salvador from where he resumed his CIA service participating in the Contra wars in Nicaragua. No mention is made of this in Vargas Llosa's anti-Chavez diatribe which then ends comparing Dante's center of the earth Cocytus frozen lake, where Satan is held captive, to "Venezuela's Inferno (where) Satan is oil-rich Lake Maracaibo" that he uses metaphorically for the "astronomical wealth squandered by (Chavez's) tyrannical popularism."
Again, the facts on the ground and in the hearts and minds of most Venezuelans belie the outrageous inversions of truth coming from the Director for a Center on Global Prosperity, presumably an intellect, and claiming to be a Latin American scholar and expert. What Vargas Llosa is expert at is black propaganda, gross distortion of truth and shameless lies. Based on what he recounts above, he deserves a special place in in one of the lower circles of Dante's Inferno. For those who know how Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution has benefitted the Venezuelan people, Vargas Llosa has lost all credibility and disgraced himself. He lies exposed as a charlatan and false prophet of right wing imperialism based on market-based solutions that don't work and must be forced on the unwilling from the barrel of a gun. Hugo Chavez has a different world vision that's growing and spreading because his way does work. The Venezuelan people know it, and greater numbers of others are beginning to find it out and want the same benefits for themselves. Those people are fed up with the old order based on exploitation and want no more of it. Someone should explain that to Alvaro Vargas Llosa. He's on the wrong track supporting a failed system, and nothing he says trumpeting the party line will ever change that.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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