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Democracy under threat

By Richard Gott
The Guardian UK
December 06, 2005

Page 2

The complaints are nonsense. The opposition still owns most of the newspapers and television stations. The judiciary has been comprehensively reformed after the scandals of the previous decade when half the judges were found to be corrupt or incompetent. Elections have been endlessly vetted and human rights have been extended to the great mass of the people.

Washington continues to perceive the Chávez government, in Shannon's words, as "a threat to regional stability". The Americans dislike his revolutionary rhetoric, his friendship with Fidel Castro, his outspoken hostility to neo-liberal economics, his decision to buy weapons from a non-US supplier such as Spain and his support for radical movements in Latin America, such as the Movement Toward Socialism of Evo Morales, expected to win the presidential election in Bolivia later this month. Yet the US has few allies in the continent today, and the most important countries - Argentina, Brazil, and even Chile - are enlisted in the Chávez camp. Its alliance with the discredited Venezuelan opposition will gain it few new friends.

Almost everyone in Venezuela - including Chávez - recognises that the government would benefit from an intelligent and constructive opposition, and some within that opposition were once anxious to provide the electorate with a choice. Others, now in a majority, look towards an insurrectionary or violent outcome.

Yet Chávez is not a dictator as the Americans claim. He is a democratic revolutionary who has always had a magical capacity to turn the political mistakes of others to his own advantage. Now with an overwhelming majority in the new assembly, he will be able to adjust those clauses in the rapidly drafted ,yet generally admirable, constitution of 1999 that have been found inadequate (including the one that would prevent him from standing for a third term). There is every sign that he will win the presidential election next year and, who knows, the one in December 2012. The foolish action of the opposition will have been of immense assistance in that task.

· Richard Gott's Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution is published in paperback by Verso

rwgott@aol.com

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