Venezuela Watch

Chávez Wins Easily in Venezuela, Showing Wide Support

If I'm not mistaken Chavez' term of office is another six years. That will be long enough for him to spend most of the extraordinary petroleum money and to reduce the national oil company to an incompetent haven for his cronies. What will he do when the money runs out? More importantly, what will the unfortunate Venezuela do?

I can totally understand the poor who voted for Chavez. It's easy to call support for the poor "populism" if you can afford food, housing and health care, but if you're actually in their shoes you'll probably view it as genuine help.

Same phenomenon as seen in Nicaragua, really. Nothing to do with left-right, either.

It is worth a little reflection on the several other prominent examples history offers in this area.

Moreover, the support for such authoritarian bullies - when they do succeed in taking power - doesn't always come just from the poor. It is worth a little reflection on the several other prominent examples history offers in this area.

The fact that the UFCO relied so heavily on manipulation of land use rights in order to maintain their market dominance had a number of long term consequences for the region. For the company to maintain its unequal land holdings it often required government concessions. And this in turn meant that the company had to be politically involved in the region even though it was an American company.

UFCO had a mixed record on promoting the development of the nations in which it operated. In Central America, the Company built extensive railroads and ports and provided employment and transportation. UFCO also created numerous schools for the people who lived and worked on Company land. On the other hand, it allowed vast tracts of land under its ownership to remain uncultivated and, in Guatemala and elsewhere, it discouraged the government from building highways, which would lessen the profitable transportation monopoly of the railroads under its control.

The Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was toppled by covert action of the United States government in 1954, after the directors of UFCO had lobbied to convince the Truman and Eisenhower administrations that Colonel Arbenz intended to align Guatemala with the Soviet bloc. Besides the disputed issue of Arbenz's allegiance to Communism, the directors of UFCO may have feared Arbenz's stated intention of purchasing uncultivated land from the company (at the value declared in tax returns) and redistributing it among Native American peasants. The American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was an avowed opponent of Communism whose law firm had represented United Fruit. His brother Allen Dulles was the director of the CIA. The brother of the Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs John Moors Cabot had once been president of United Fruit. (Though, the U.S. had harbored suspicions about Arbenz prior to the Dulles brothers' appointments. [1]) Arbenz's government was overthrown by Guatemalan army officers invading from Honduras, with assistance from the CIA (See Operation PBSUCCESS).

georgeob1 wrote:

It is worth a little reflection on the several other prominent examples history offers in this area.

I'm at a loss. Please elaborate.

old europe wrote:

georgeob1 wrote:

It is worth a little reflection on the several other prominent examples history offers in this area.

I'm at a loss. Please elaborate.

Authoritarian bullies like Chavez, and the many who preceded him, from Cromwell to Robspierre. Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and the South American variants like Vargas, Peron, Stroessner, etc. usually proclaim themselves the due representatives of the people and the downtrodden, but they generally come to power with the aid and complicity of existing institutions or fragments of them (Army, Unions) and the actions of an organized revolutionary cadre. Most have been successful = albeit briefly - in gaining a broad measure of voluntary public support, but they rapidly supplement it with coercion and force. Interestingly most have been successful in duping hopeful foreign observers into belief in their rhetoric for a while, but usually the local poor are among the first to figure out the trufh that they have instead lost their freedom.

A well-known New York Times reporter won a Pulitzer prize for the stories he wrote in the mid 1930s praising the success of the Soviet collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine - while the Ukranian pesants themselves starved by the millions.