TIME: Why Obama Should Talk to Chavez

[magbana]

Why Obama Should Talk to Chávez
By Tim Padgett
Time
February 18, 2009
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1880479,00.html

Washington started off on the wrong foot with Venezuelan president
President Hugo Chávez shortly after he took office in 1999: Embarking
on his first international tour as head of state, Chávez took a call
from a high-ranking Clinton Administration official, who told the
Venezuelan leader that it would be better for his country's relations
with the U.S. if he avoided visiting Fidel Castro in Cuba. Chávez, a
left-wing nationalist, had yet to develop his gushing friendship with
Castro, but like leaders all over Latin America - even those who
dislike the Cuban leader and his politics - he took umbrage at
Washington's assumption that it could veto his itinerary.

Since then, of course, U.S.-Venezuela relations have plummeted further
than a Lake Maracaibo oil drill. Both sides share the blame. But the
1999 phone call bears significance. If anything, Chavez has lately
supplanted Castro as Washington's priority regional pariah, yet he
celebrated a decade in power this month by winning a democratic
referendum that scraps presidential term limits, allowing him to run
for re-election for as long as he chooses to.

Chávez isn't going anywhere, just as Castro didn't despite almost five
decades of U.S. efforts to isolate him. That fact alone should prompt
President Barack Obama to break with the failed policies of his
predecessors and meet with Chávez ahead of April's Summit of the
Americas in Trinidad. (First item: reinstating each other's
ambassadors, who were expelled from Washington and Caracas last year
after Chávez accused the U.S. envoy of conspiring against him.)
Talking to Chávez is not a popular idea in Washington, given the
Venezuelan leader's strident anti-U.S. histrionics. But it's smarter
than trying to isolate Chávez, which in the long run will bring us
more headaches than headway in the effort to repair Washington's
dismal relations with Latin America.

For one thing, it's a good idea for the U.S. to have a better rapport
with one of its major oil suppliers. Chávez, who said last weekend
he's willing to meet with Obama, likewise seems to realize that his
favorite yanqui enemy, President George W. Bush, is gone, and that a
new relationship might be possible with his major oil customer. And,
as the Castro example demonstrates, it's hard to isolate a Latin
American head of state when the rest of Latin America doesn't sign on
- and most nations in the region are not willing to freeze out Chávez.
He may irritate them, but he also emboldens them, because his
oil-fueled socialist revolution has changed the political conversation
in the Americas. The fact that Venezuela's majority poor have been
enfranchised for the first time has prodded the rest of Latin America
to finally confront its corrosive social inequality. Even officials of
moderate Latin governments say privately they're gratified that
Washington's regional hegemony has been challenged and often blunted
since Chávez took power.

What's more, though they may not admit it, the more moderate Latin
leftists who dominate the region's politics today - including Brazil's
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whom Obama has invited to the
White House in March - know that their own electoral paths were opened
in no small part by Chávez's victory in 1998. So it should have come
as no surprise that many Latin American presidents took issue with
Obama's suggestion, in a Univision interview last month, that the
Venezuelan leader aids terrorists. After all, last summer Chávez all
but disowned Colombia's Marxist FARC guerrillas, declaring
unambiguously that violence no longer had a place in the politics of
the left in Latin America.

Chávez, who draws political oxygen from confrontation with the U.S.,
reacted to Obama's charge by suggesting the new U.S. leader has the
"same stench" as Bush (whom Chávez accuses of backing a failed 2002
coup against him). But anyone who has ever sat down with Chávez knows
he's a more reasonable personality one-on-one than he is with a
microphone in front of 50,000 people. As a result, say Chávez
supporters, Obama should rely on the more dialogue-oriented foreign
policy he promised in dealing with Chávez. (The President did say on
the campaign trail last year that he would be willing to meet with
Chávez.) "It was good for Obama to see the reaction in Latin America"
to the Univision interview, says Chávez's former ambassador to the
U.S., Bernardo Alvarez. "Maybe now he'll consider what he can learn
from a face-to-face with Chávez. He'd see a man with differences, yes,
but also someone looking for the same things politically, like helping
people who've been excluded."

Latin America also sees a certain hypocrisy in the U.S. position. Yes,
Chávez has been a pain in the rear to U.S. oil companies, and he has
cozied up to Iran and staged military maneuvers with Russia in the
Caribbean. But Chávez, unlike U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, at least still
lets U.S. oil firms have stakes in Venezuelan petro projects. And no
one recalls any Venezuelan names on the list of 9/11 hijackers.
Whatever the geopolitical calculus of Washington's coddling of Riyadh,
Latin Americans still see the U.S. giving Saudi Arabia's repressive
monarchy a pass, while a democratically elected government in
Venezuela is reviled. They see the same double standard at work in the
U.S. maintaining an economic embargo on Cuba, but not on China,
despite Beijing's human rights record, if anything, being worse than
Havana's.

Chávez, like Castro, looks set to remain in power for a long time.
But, unlike Castro, he's likely to do so on the basis of a democratic
mandate, as his decisive win in Sunday's referendum suggested. Many
poor Venezuelans see his "Bolivarian" revolution, despite its
polarizing effects on the country, as a safeguard against the looming
economic pain of falling oil prices. Analysts such as John Walsh, a
senior associate at the independent Washington Office on Latin
America, may worry that indefinite re-election would allow Chávez
accumulate excessive power, but he credits Chávez with actually
"restoring a modicum of confidence in Venezuela's election system."

Chávez, an earthy llanero, or Venezuelan plainsman, can be a maddening
and bullying ideologue. (As far as the rest of the world was
concerned, so was Bush.) And so are all the other anti-U.S. strongmen
out there, from North Korea to Iran, with whom Obama believes he
should grit his teeth and engage in the interest of U.S. security. To
avoid doing in Latin America what he deems sensible in the Middle East
and Asia would repeat Washington's careless habit of treating the
continent in ways that helped give rise to the Castros and Chávezes in
the first place. The best way to disarm Chávez is to give him fewer
"imperialist" targets to rail at. As the anti-Bush, Obama has an
advantage in that game, and he should use it. He'll find that thawing
relations with Chávez before he goes to Trinidad will do a lot to
break the ice with the rest of the hemisphere once he gets there.

[EFerrari]

1. "He may irritate them, but he also emboldens them".

The paternalism is amazing, isn't it? Heaven forfend that the people be "emboldened" to administer their own nations.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Only the drunkest, and most brain dead among us can believe a President

can be taken at gun-point in a coup arranged by another country's President and NOT be ticked off at that President. Even the fools in the media who gibber that Chavez is "anti-American" can't be that stupid, so it stands to reason they are serving the interests of a bunch of sociopaths who should have been restrained long ago at the home for the criminally insane, rather than running our country's foreign affairs.

With just ONE lucky break, one brave President who is willing to take on the choir of psychopathic neo-cons, neo-liberals, one President who would bother to do the MORAL thing, make MORAL decisions instead would get us on a higher track than we've ever followed. What a provident, enlightened idea for moving into the new century. It's the only way to REALLY earn the respect of the rest of the world.

Hoping this man will be courageous and decent enough to make that choice. We know what happens without a good leader at the helm, already, unfortunately.

[Peace Patriot]

3. You gotta admire the people of Venezuela, Chavez and other members of his

government, the other presidents of South America and their extraordinary, historic unity on the sovereignty of South American countries and resistance to "divide and conquer" tactics--in particular Lula da Silva, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Fernando Lugo, Tabare Vasquez and Michele Batchelet--and also venezuelanalysis.com, axisoflogic.com, BoRev.net and a host of other alternative information sources, for this "tongue in cheek" but still very important Time magazine editorial.

Time magazine is really pulling our legs that they have any interest whatsoever in democracy and social justice in Latin America or anywhere else. Their buds at the World Bank/IMF, Dyncorp and other "war on drugs" profiteers, and Exxon Mobil, Bechtel, et al, are getting the fuck booted out of South America, and so Time magazine is now demanding that our government kissy-face their way back in. That's the real content of this editorial, hidden in the black holes between its curdling paragraphs of grudging admission that, hey, Hugo Chavez ain't going anywhere, despite every fucking kind of plot, including several assassination plots, by their Bushwhack and corpo/fascist friends.

Time and other corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies--including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Pukes--have been colluding in plots to topple Chavez, get him killed and destroy democracy in Venezuela the entire time Chavez has been in office, with relentless psyops and propaganda. They have promulgated lie after lie, such that their scribbles on Chavez and Venezuela read like they were copied and pasted directly from the Bushwhack State Department and from the fascist oil elite opposition in Venezuela, with utter contempt for the facts and zero journalistic standards.

Well, they've lost. And democracy and social justice have won! Credit the victors--the people of Venezuela and the others on my list above--for their courage, tenacity and vision.

As for President Obama, I hope he fires whoever set up that Univision interview and fed him that script--and gets educated on the reality of democratic people power that now rules most South American countries, as it should. I want the U.S. to back off. I want a truly peaceful and socially just U.S. policy in Latin America. Obama can cause them a lot of grief, short of war--for instance, USAID money to the fascists in El Salvador, and, of course, $6 BILLION in military aid to the narco thugs running Colombia for a U.S. proxy war against union organizers and others. But I am also still very, very worried that, a) Obama--even if he is well-intentioned--doesn't have the power to implement a truly peaceful and just U.S. foreign policy--due to our Bushwhack-controlled voting machines and the lethal power of the corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies here; and b) the Bushwhacks now have billion of dollars stolen from us, private armies created by our tax dollars, and operatives planted in our government and in other countries, to conduct private wars, with U.S. military support if they can get it (i.e., Obama's own "Bay of Pigs") or without it.

So, will a new Obama policy in Latin America be hypocritical--that is, putting on a nice face, while U.S. and/or private Bushwhack covert activities go forward? Do our corpo/fascists--of which Time magazine is a representative--REALLY intend to back off, or are they just biding their time? Does Obama have the power--or, indeed, the intention--to acknowledge true democracy in South America, and respect it? What script will he be following, and why--for whose benefit? I think Obama--despite his dissing of Chavez--is largely an unknown, on this matter. His background--and his impressive first book--would seem to point to a man with deep affinities in favor of democracy and in particular with the struggles of people of color for civil and human rights, as they have manifested in South America. But what he really intends, and what he has the power to do, I don't know. Will the U.S. truly, at long last, stop viewing Latin America as our corpo/fascists' back yard, and learn to respectfully cooperate with countries that are, right now, far, far better democracies than our own, or is this going to be a continual struggle possibly including outright war? I don't know. I can only admire the people and institutions in Latin America who have made it very clear that they will no longer put up with interference, whatever form it takes.