[Viewpoint] Rebuilding democracy

Home > Opinion > Columns

print dictionary print

[Viewpoint] Rebuilding democracy

Excitement, anxious youthful faces, the sense of a nation’s best and brightest coming together for a noble cause: the scene took place at an office building in Caracas, Venezuela, last month. But, as a Chilean, it may as well have been Santiago in October 1988. The campaign headquarters of opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles feels and looks a lot like the headquarters of the “No” campaign against Chile’s military dictator of a quarter-century ago, Augusto Pinochet.

Back then, very few people outside Chile thought that a ruthless dictator could be removed through the ballot box. But the democratic opposition prevailed in the 1988 plebiscite, and Pinochet had to go.

Today, many in the global chattering classes are similarly skeptical that Venezuela’s political opposition can unseat the demagogic populist Hugo Chavez in the country’s presidential election on Oct. 7. After all, Chavez, who has governed Venezuela since 1999 and is in his third presidential term, maintains an iron grip over much of the country’s media and keeps an open wallet to pay for popular support. But the buzz in Caracas suggests otherwise. Capriles has mounted an impressive campaign. He still trails Chavez in most polls, but the distance seems to be narrowing.

Of course, Capriles faces formidable obstacles. In a recent report, Human Rights Watch documented the accumulation of executive power and the erosion of human-rights protections in Venezuela. “For years, President Chavez and his followers have been building a system in which the government has free rein to threaten and punish Venezuelans who interfere with their political agenda,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, the group’s Americas director. “Today that system is firmly entrenched, and the risks for judges, journalists and rights defenders are greater than they’ve ever been under Chavez.”

Venezuela’s oldest private television channel, RCTV, was arbitrarily removed from the public airwaves in 2007, and has since been driven off cable TV. Other independent radio and television stations have been regulated or coerced off the air as well. Of the country’s main media outlets, only Globovision remains critical of Chavez and carries the opposition’s message.

Venezuelans are bombarded by Chavez’s endless speeches on a nearly daily basis. According to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, this year Chavez has already clocked 75 hours and 20 minutes in public addresses, which the country’s radio and television stations are forced to broadcast. To that one must add January’s state of the nation address, which went on for a record nine hours and 49 minutes Chavez’s personal record.

With little media access, the Capriles camp has been forced into an old-fashioned campaign mode. Capriles, 40, walks his way through an average of four Venezuelan towns a day. The reception seems more appropriate for a rock star than for a presidential hopeful: the candidate’s shirt often gets torn in a melee of enthusiasm.

To build all of that popular support, Capriles has positioned himself politically far away not only from Chavez, but also from the business elite and the traditional parties that ran Venezuela before Chavez. His center-left message emphasizes two issues: jobs and crime. He did not have to carry out too many surveys of voters to arrive at those priorities.

The official unemployment rate today is 7.9 percent, but youth unemployment and underemployment are much higher. This is not surprising, given Venezuela’s mediocre growth performance. Since 1999 and despite very high oil prices the economy has grown by only 3.2 percent per year on average. During this period, Latin America as a whole has recorded 4 percent average annual growth, pulled by fast-growing countries like Peru. The crime problem is even worse. Venezuela’s murder rate 67 per 100,000 people is among the world’s highest, and five times what it was before Chavez came to power. By contrast, the murder rate in Brazil is 26 per 100,000, and “only” 18 in Mexico, despite all of that country’s drug-related violence.

Venezuelans deserve better than this. And they may get it if Capriles can unseat Chavez in October. He faces an uphill battle. But so did the democratic forces battling Pinochet. Those who underestimated the power of people’s yearning for freedom and a better life were wrong in 1988. With a bit of luck, they may be wrong again in 2012.

* The author, a former finance minister of Chile, is a visiting professor at Columbia University.

by Andres Velasco
Log in to Twitter or Facebook account to connect
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
help-image Social comment?
s
lock icon

To write comments, please log in to one of the accounts.

Standards Board Policy (0/250자)