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Latin America's reaction to Venezuela's coup is a triumph of hypocrisy


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By Claudio Campuzano
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

April 21, 2002

Hypocrisy has a great future. Specially among nation leaders and diplomats. And particularly, even though not exclusively, among the Americas' leaders and diplomats.

The movement that deposed — for less that 48 hours, as it turned out — democratically elected President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela had, according to what could be seen in the last few weeks before it happened, a wide base among very different sectors of Venezuelan society. Buy the most concrete thing is that eventually it was military coup that dislodged him from the Miraflores presidential palace.

This rupture of constitutional continuity violated all the agreements, pacts and charters that rightly establish that the hemispheric community of countries finds intolerable that the democratic process be interrupted in this manner.

There is no doubt that Chávez did a lot to generate his own and considerable domestic opposition, but there were constitutional remedies to get rid of him. Let's admit that the possibility of impeaching him didn't look too easy, given his domination of the National Assembly. But this doesn't mean that the signers of so many declarations of principles that expressed that democratic continuity in any nation of the hemisphere is something precious that must be preserved and defended for the good of all should look the other way when this continuity is broken by a military coup.

Nevertheless, the Latin American presidents of the so-called Rio Group (a select gathering of the most important nations) meeting in Costa Rica at the time of the coup deplored the institutional rupture in Venezuela but moderated their condemnation saying it was the crisis of "governability" that country has suffered under Chávez in the last few months that had let to that outcome.

From there the presidents of Chile, Ricardo Lagos; of Costa Rica, Miguel Angel Rodríguez, and of Peru, Alejandro Toledo, speaking for the group entered hypocrisy with the nonsense that because of "lack of information" they avoided stating if the events in Venezuela had been or not a coup — even though they were willing to affirm their view that the process "growing polarization" under Chávez had "generated the interruption of democratic institutionality" in Venezuela.

The president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, widened the diagnosis of the events in Venezuela saying they had developed "as a result of an intense and widespread social reaction to domestic and external polarization, and of erratic economic conduction followed by the government in recent times."

In other words: we are not certain about what happened, but we sure know why it happened.

By now Colombia's president Andrés Pastrana had managed to convey his "support and solidarity" to the president installed in Caracas by the military, Pedro Carmona, hours before he resigned as Chávez returned to power.

And former Salvadoran foreign minister Ricardo Acevedo Peralta was by then saying that Chávez "is getting enough of his own medicine", because from "the very beginning he showed himself in open opposition, in a rather stupid way, to the respect for Western-type human rights and freedoms, and this is what cost him his job."

Note that nobody among these worthy Latin American leaders raised his voice to say what had to be said: "We have erred in not condemning at the proper time the process of deterioration of freedom under president Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, but that doesn't mean we cannot condemn no the constitutional rupture produced by a military coup.

This means that the hypocrisy with which the national leaders in the hemisphere contemplated the degradation of freedoms in Venezuela under Chávez has now been replaced by the hypocrisy of not facing the fact that a military coup is no solution for that wrong.

We have left the United States for the end because, instead of heading with its usual and deplorable "pragmatism" the approval of any change in government in a Latin American country that agreed with is interests, in the case of Chávez's downfall the U.S didn't say anything different from what other nations in the hemisphere said.

"We do hope that Chávez recognizes that the whole world is watching and that he takes advantage of this opportunity to right his own ship, which has been moving, frankly, in the wrong direction for quite a long time," said Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, when the news reached Washington that Chávez was back in power and after the U.S had shown its satisfaction with his ouster.

Indeed, this time the U.S. marched in lockstep with the Latin American nations in first blaming Chávez for provoking his own downfall and only later in condemning the coup. Not a pretty thing to watch, but this is what hemisphere hypocrisy wrought.

This didn't bother Arturo Valenzuela, President Clinton's point man on Western Hemisphere Affairs who wrote this of the Bush administration on the op-ed page of the Washington Post: "The administration was visibly out of step with other hemispheric leaders who condemned the military coup."

This is a lie, Mr. Valenzuela — and you, as director of the Center for Latin American Studies in the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, must know it.

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

April 21, 2002

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