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Nobody can figure out where president Hugo Chavez is taking Venezuela. Not Venezuelans. Not other Latin American countries. Not the United States, either. And not, as far as one can see, Chavez himself.
Through a number of domestic actions, the development of relations with an odd mixture of foreign states and his eccentric statements on world events he has been acquiring a public profile that baffles all experts. Assuming that he is not about to declare war on neighbors or any distant countries-that much seems to be clear, if nothing else because he doesn't have the resources-the paramount question is what good he expects to come out for his country of his contentious attitude.
Since he won office in a landslide election in 1998, six years after staging a failed coup bid, the pugnacious former paratrooper has worked hard to forge close ties with states like Cuba, Libya, Iraq and Iran that are blacklisted by Washington as "sponsors of terrorism," even though the United States is Venezuela's main trading partner and its traditional source of foreign investment. He has signed an agreement with Moscow that gives Russia a foothold in the hemisphere for establishing a small-arms factory that will manufacture AK-47s, the weapon of choice of leftist guerrillas, something that has irked neighboring Colombia, where the government has been fighting for decades the most powerful guerrilla movement in the continent. He upset all the other Latin American countries with his pointed reservations about the final communiqué of the Quebec Summit of the Americas last April.
And that's only abroad.
Invoking Venezuela's 19th-century independence hero Simon Bolivar, Chavez had promised a "peaceful revolution" in his oil-dependent country to tackle widespread poverty and end the power of what he says are corrupt, entrenched oligarchies. But high levels of violent crime, poverty and unemployment still plague Venezuela, despite its wealth of oil reserves.
Chavez's popularity, which was in the high seventies when elected, has plummeted below 50 percent according to recent polls. Lately, his endless speeches on national television are greeted in Caracas, the nation's capital, with the din of "cacerolazos," the beating of pots and pans, a type of protest that has become traditional in Latin America since they were first used in the seventies in Chile against Marxist president Salvador Allende.
Most of the media, small opposition parties, the Roman Catholic Church and anti-government unions recently intensified their verbal attacks on Chavez and his ministers, accusing them of intolerable incompetence, authoritarianism and corruption.
The outburst of criticism prompted Venezuela's armed forces chiefs to issue an unusual public statement backing Chavez. But the declaration, aimed at dispelling nagging coup rumors, only increased speculation about simmering military discontent.
Chavez, who routinely dismisses his critics as "squalid counterrevolutionaries," said last week the debate was a sign Venezuela had a "lively, dynamic" democracy. But many observers see the president's confrontational style as a threat to the nation's stability and his own rule.
"Chavez practices 'bumper car' politics ... breaking bridges, trashing consensus. ... That's causing problems," said Teodoro Petkoff, a former leftist guerrilla member who edits the opposition daily TalCual.
In his latest example of "bumper car" politics, Chavez upset the U.S. administration earlier this month when, in a nationally televised address, holding what were purportedly photographs of children that had died as a result of U.S. bombings, called for an end to 'the killing of innocents in Afghanistan," saying civilian casualties caused by the U.S. bombing campaign were "unacceptable."
To show its displeasure, the United States recalled ambassador Donna Hrinak to Washington for a few days of "consultations". On her return, Chavez said: "I think this is a signal, at least this is how we interpret it, that they consider this deadlock, this impasse, that evolved out of my good-faith comments as a thing of the past . . . and we consider we have the best possible relations with the government and people of the United States."
Chavez rejects charges that his government has been lukewarm in its condemnation of the Sept. 11 on the United States attacks and ambiguous in its support for the U.S. anti-terror war. But right after he had said this, Chavez's vice president, Adina Bastidas, came forward saying that terrorism's roots could be found in the social, economic, political and technical inequalities of the world.
"There is terrorism of the oppressed because there is also terrorism of the oppressors," she said at forum ironically billed as Dialogue of Civilizations. "It is a perverse and regrettable sub-product of WASP [White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant] domination, which becomes unbearable for the most radical and violent of those who are dominated, and leads them to desperate, destructive and murdering outbursts," she added, blaming "the dominant ideology at the summit of power of the great monopoly, great finance, great war industry, geat oil, the Internet, Microsoft, CNN, the great media, the kings of western civilization or, more appropriately, WASPS."
Chavez rejected a vote of censure of his vice president's words proposed by other participants in the Latin American and Caribbean Encounter on the Dialogue of Civilizations.
"Those who are asking for this censure vote are those who did not want to have a dialogue and wanted to impose their ideas," Chavez said.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com