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 News from Around the Americas | November 2005 
Chavez's TV Drama Touches Off Fox Fight
 Oakland Ross - Toronta Star
| | Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez gestures as he hosts his weekly live television show, 'Hello President' at the presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela. Chavez has strengthened alliances across Latin America through generous oil deals, and now he is extending them for the first time to the U.S., selling discounted heating oil to tens of thousands of poor Americans in Boston and New York. (AP Photo/Leslie Mazoch, File)
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A weekly television show is probably not the best place to conduct foreign policy, but Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez likes to make his own rules.
Plus, he has a weekly television show.
The program is called Alo, Presidente ("Hello, President") and it dominates the Venezuelan airwaves every Sunday, as South America's most voluble and least predictable leader takes phone calls, talks politics, screens videos, muses about his alimentary system, and pretty much does whatever he likes.
Now, more or less as a result, the Venezuelan government and the leaders of Mexico are locked in a rancorous diplomatic dispute that has led to a mutual withdrawal of ambassadors, while exposing a broad ideological rift that divides a clutch of Latin American neighbours and erstwhile friends.
Looking south from Washington, the government of U.S. President George W. Bush cannot be happy.
"I think the United States is really concerned," says Eduardo del Buey, executive director of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas, an Ottawa think-tank. "They're realizing they are fairly isolated in the region, and they've got to start paying closer attention."
And to think that the latest chapter in this drama started with just three little words.
Cachorro del imperio.
In Spanish, it means "the empire's puppy," and it's the label Chavez pinned to the lapel of Mexican President Vicente Fox after a meeting of hemispheric leaders earlier this month in the Argentine resort town of Mar del Plata.
The Venezuelan was upset that Fox had tried to rekindle interest in a free-trade agreement uniting all the Americas — a goal dear to Washington — even though the subject was not on the summit agenda.
A few days later, while serving as host for his weekly TV extravaganza from the Ayacucho Room of Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Chavez expanded upon the insult.
The Venezuelan leader warned Fox not to "mess around" with a guy named Hugo Chavez or he might just get "poked."
The Mexican government demanded an apology. Instead, Chavez yanked Venezuela's ambassador from Mexico City.
Pretty soon, both countries' envoys were packing their bags.
Some might call it a tempest in a tequila bottle, but this contretemps goes deeper than that, for Chavez is not just lobbing invective at Mexico City. With increasing assurance, he has been thumbing his nose at the United States and its globalizing vision for the region — and he is no longer alone. Long friendly with Cuba's Fidel Castro, the famously bumptious Venezuelan now has a bevy of left-of-centre governments to cosy up to in other Latin American countries, including Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.
Mexico may also be preparing for an abrupt leftward shift in elections set for 2006.
Right now, the leading contender for the Mexican presidency is a Fox opponent — a populist former mayor of Mexico City named Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who, like many other Latin American politicians these days, is more than a little disgruntled with Washington's prescription for a new world order.
Suddenly, the planet's sole superpower seems to be losing its grip in a part of the world that has traditionally been considered a U.S. backyard.
"The Americans have their hands in too many places," says Gustavo Indart, a Latin America specialist at the University of Toronto.
"If they were not in Iraq, they would never have permitted what is happening in Venezuela," he says.
Since winning the presidency in 1998, Chavez has set his oil-rich country on a radically new course, aimed at reversing centuries of elitist rule, while shifting benefits in health care, education and other services toward the long-ignored majority.
Pugnacious and populist, Chavez possesses a big, booming personality that frequently gets him into trouble.
His enemies tend to portray him as loco — crazy — but such epithets dangerously undervalue the man.
"He is not an idiot," Indart says. "He has a very clear project that is not only for Venezuela. It goes beyond Venezuela. He has the means to do it, too. He has so much oil."
A former military officer who once led a failed coup attempt, Chavez is evidently built for survival.
During his five years in the presidential palace, he has survived a coup attempt, not to mention a hard-fought referendum aimed at curtailing his rule.
While flummoxing his opponents, Chavez has also steadily expanded his power.
He has stacked the Venezuelan Supreme Court with supporters, established a worrisome network of militant partisans, known as Bolivarian Circles, bolstered his popularity among the poor, and increasingly projected his influence beyond his country's borders.
No one seriously doubts that he will prevail easily in presidential elections next year.
Constitutionally barred from seeking re-election himself, Fox can only dream of such good fortune.
"I'd say President Fox is the odd man out in Latin America," del Buey says.
Since the former Coca Cola executive won the Mexican presidency in 1998 — ending seven decades of political domination by the Institutional Revolutionary Party — Mexico has toed the U.S. line on globalization as closely as any territory in Latin America, but the results have been mixed at best.
Exports and foreign investment are up, but countless manufacturing jobs have fled to Asia. Meanwhile, the gap between Mexico's rich and its poor remains as wide as any on the planet, and poverty has barely been reduced.
"If there's been a reduction in poverty, it hasn't been enough to make anybody happy," says Judith Teichman of the U of T's Munk Centre for International Studies.
Fox has made important gains in other areas. He won passage of a freedom-of-information statute and a law promoting financial transparency in government — major achievements in a country long infamous for secrecy and corruption.
Venezuela under Chavez has moved in the opposite direction, curbing the press and centralizing power in the presidency.
And yet it is Chavez, not Fox, who now seems to embody the new political realities of a region whose sympathies are shifting toward economic populism and away from globalizing yanquis.
Whether the yanquis are watching — that's another question.
"The key is that the U.S. is just not paying attention," Teichman says. "I don't think they are aware of the extent of the disillusionment in Latin America."
Maybe Bush should start tuning into Alo, Presidente on Sundays, to hear Chavez hold forth.
In Venezuela, the show goes out on every single channel, so you can't miss him. |
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