(MAURICIO LIMA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Dressed Up as a Liberator - 22/03/2913 - NYT weekly
by ROGER COHEN
LONDON — Hugo Chávez, a 21st-century socialist god destined to loom over
his country the way his 20th-century communist predecessors from Moscow
to Beijing do, was a self-styled man of the people. He rose to power in
Venezuela, and won election after election there, as the embodiment of
the humble mestizo challenging the entrenched privilege of the bourgeois
oligarchy.
The inefficiency of the Chávez regime was prodigious — he contrived
to leave his country’s finances in a shambles despite riding soaring oil
revenues — and he enriched his revolutionary coterie through sweet
deals, but his attachment to the cause of “el pueblo” (not least their
health and education) remained the core of his appeal.
And yet this man of the left and the people could scarcely find a
dictator he did not find seductive. He was a strong supporter of Bashar
al-Assad, the Syrian despot whose ruthlessness has cost the lives of
70,000 of his own people. He backed Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya to the
last. He sided with Robert Mugabe in his despoilment of the Zimbabwean
people. When millions of Iranians rose in 2009 to protest a stolen
presidential election, Chávez stood firmly with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as
the uprising was suppressed with great brutality. Given a choice between
British liberalism and Belarussian repression, Chávez did not hesitate.
Of course, Chávez was also the staunch ally of Fidel Castro, his
Latin American mentor, but with Castro he at least shared socialist
ideas as well as a web of economic interests, including an original
oil-for-doctors exchange. With other dictatorial buddies he had little
in common, at least on the surface.
But of course there was a unifying ideology at work here that
outweighed Chávez’s professed embrace of popular will: A shared
determination to confront and resist the United States and its allies in
all their manifestations. Chávez was the anti-American ideologue par
excellence. I once listened to him for hours in Caracas as he wove an
endless but intermittently spellbinding speech around the theme of the
predatory cowboy up north.
