Douglas Schoen - The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chavez and the War Against America

DOUGLAS SCHOEN has been a consultant for the Democratic Party for the past thirty years. A founding partner of Penn, Schoen, and Berland Associates, Inc., he was former President Bill Clintons research and strategic consultant during the 1996 reelection campaign and has worked for major corporations and nineteen heads of state around the world, including Silvio Berlusconi, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, and Ehud Barak. He is the author of five books.

MICHAEL ROWAN has a long history as a successful political consultant both here and in Venezuela, and also as a newspaper columnist in Latin America. In the United States, he has advised winning candidates in twenty-six states; he has also advised presidential and other candidates in thirteen foreign countries, including Governor Manuel Rosales of Venezuela, former President Jaime Paz Zamora of Bolivia, and President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica.

W ho is Hugo Chvez? Why does he hate and seek to destroy the United States? And why do so many otherwise astute observers of foreign affairs discount and even dismiss the danger he poses to our interests?

From a distance, Chvez can appear to be little more than a bumptious foola buffoon the likes of which Third World countries often present to the world. And to be sure, Chvez shares many traits in common with more ordinary backwater big men who pose no threat to America. Chvez used mostly familiar means to gain power, and much of his rhetoric resonates with people born into South Americas troubled mix of extreme poverty, inequality, and racial injustice.

Indeed, many of Chvezs criticisms of his country are true. Although Venezuela has long been one of the regions richer countries, since the coming of the Spanish in 1522 it has operated as a virtual caste system, with European whites at the top, controlling the government and most of the resources, and browned-skinned Indo-Africans on the bottom. It is a toxic arrangement that has helped to produce many a revolutionary over the centuries, including the great Simn Bolvarlegendary liberator of the lands that today comprise Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Panama, Peru, and Ecuador.

Chvez came of age amid this mix of grinding rural poverty, racial isolation, and political and economic turmoil. He naturally sympathizes with those who suffer as he suffered, and he shares their resentments against their oligarchic oppressors in Caracas. Its easy to dismiss Chvezs rantings as the visceral responses of the poor, brown-skinned youth he once was.

But there is moremuch moreto the story than this. Chvez is no simple tribune of the poor. He is a true radical, who imbibed deeply the Marxist and revolutionary ideologies that convulsed Latin America during his formative years in the 1960s and 1970s. And he joins his peoples resentment to a wider hatred of the great republic to the north, which Chvez accuses of arrogance, theft, bullying, and a determination to humiliate him and his people.

Chvezs longtime psychiatrist Edmundo Chirinos (also a leftist writer, former university rector, and presidential candidate) believes that Chvezs anti-American feelings form the very core of his personality: Chvez feels a genuine scorn for oligarchic people, not only in the sense of possessing money but of affectation, through gestures, languageand so in that respect, he exhibits an evident bipolarity, of an affinity for the humble and a rejection of the all-powerful.

By the time he graduated from the Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences in 1975, Chvez had channeled that rage into an ideologically coherent plan to subvert the government of Venezuela and launch a regional and even wider assault on his hated enemy. Some of this thinking was simply a product of his environment. Other elements stem from formative experiences in his life. But perhaps the most important was the influence of key people he met, learned from, and came to admire over the course of his long rise to power.

From his birth in 1954 to his coup dtat attempt in 1992, Chvezs men tal state, formative thoughts, and early behavior were entirely consistent with what was to follow. He would take over Venezuela by whatever means and use its oil wealth to launch a revolution against the superpower, the evil empire, the United States.

Chvezs formative years offer clues to what would come laterprovided one studies them with an open mind, and is willing to look past his buffoonish exterior. History teaches us that the grandiose plans of buffoons sometimes succeed, and their grandiose plans occasionally come to fruition.

Childhood

The man who fancies himself the twenty-first centurys Bolvar was born on July 28, 1954, in the tiny village of Sabaneta. Located in the state of Barinas, it borders Colombia, where the Andes Mountains slope down to the vast savanna. The region has long been famous as a breeding ground for cattle, lawlessness, and rebellion. As in most of the Americas, from the British West Indies to Louisiana, slaves did nearly all of the work until the mid-nineteenth century.

Sabaneta itself is nothing but a few strips of dirt lined with shacks and stores and one little cinema. It was typical of the towns inhabited by Venezuelas poor, brown-skinned, uneducated masses. From an early age, Chvez soaked up the grievances of Venezuelas rural poor and nurtured the resentment that is a by-product of surviving the daily battle against poverty.