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Foreign Policy: Why do you think Venezuelans rejected Hugo Chávez’s proposed changes to the constitution?
Andres Oppenheimer: Conflict fatigue. About 40 percent of the Venezuelan population was opposing Chávez to begin with, and many of the others who supported Chávez were tired of his habit of picking fights—daily—with anybody who came across him. If it wasn’t the Catholic Church, it was the businesspeople; if it wasn’t the businesspeople, it was the students; if it wasn’t the students, it was the United States; if it wasn’t the United States, it was the king of Spain; if it wasn’t the king of Spain, it was the president of Colombia. And the Chávez supporters just got fed up with this polarization.
FP: How much of a factor was his failure to make good on his promises to cut poverty?
AO: There’s no question that many Venezuelans thought it a bit of a contradiction for Chávez to be talking about creating a socialist state when there were shortages of basics foodstuffs such as milk in Venezuelan stores. And there was also a lot of resentment among Chávez supporters for him to be spending billions of dollars helping what he calls “alternative Bolivarian movements” throughout Latin America. A lot of people sent him a message saying, “Why don’t you focus on your own country?”
FP: In your book, Saving the Americas: The Dangerous Decline of Latin America . . . and What the U.S. Must Do, you describe how and why Latin America, including Venezuela, has been so unsuccessful at fighting poverty. What was Chávez’s response to your argument?
AO: I wrote the book to find out why poverty has been reduced by half across the world during the past 25 years and why this phenomenon has happened almost everywhere but Latin America. That’s why I went to China, to India, to Ireland, to the Czech Republic, to Poland, among other places. One of the main things I discovered is that [economic development] doesn’t have anything to do with ideology. The real difference between countries today is not how Chávez would like us to believe that there are “Right” countries and “Left” countries, but rather between countries that are drawing investments and countries that are scaring investments away. And the country that is attracting the most investment in the developing world is a communist country, China. That drove [Chavistas] crazy. That’s why Chávez spent one of his speeches lashing out against me.
In Beijing, they are putting out a red carpet for foreign investors, whereas in Latin America, many presidents are going out to the balcony and yelling against foreign investors. [In my book], I tell the story of when I arrived in China, and the first thing I read in the [local] paper was that the entire Chinese government was celebrating the arrival of the board of directors of McDonald’s, who were there to announce the opening of 400 restaurants in China. I had just come from Venezuela, where the Chávez government had just suspended McDonald’s restaurants for three days for some phony tax investigation and the government was taking pride in “teaching foreign capitalists a lesson.”
FP: Do you think this rejection at the polls will harm his reputation and popularity in the region?
AO: Chávez’s reputation in the region has never been very high. In the region when he’s polled, he scores at the very bottom of the list, alongside President Bush, and only second-to-last before Fidel Castro. He has strong support among very vocal, radical, leftist support groups, but his base is not widespread. I think it will embolden opposition forces in Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia who will now feel that there’s nothing irreversible about radical leftist leaders who win democratic elections and try to erode democracy from within.
Chávez is down, but not out by any means. He still controls the presidency, Congress, the military, 20 of 22 governorships, and much of the media. If this is a boxing match, he lost the round but by no means did he lose the match itself.
FP: You’ve spent a good deal of time comparing Latin America to the rest of the world. One easy comparison I see is between Chávez and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both are semiauthoritarians who are ruling petrostates; both are hostile to the United States. Yet on the same day, they had very different electoral results. What do you make of this?
AO: Well Chávez’s concession was not a trial of his democratic instincts, although one has to be happy that he conceded. He delayed the announcement for about seven hours in Venezuela, and according to a government-sanctioned monitoring group, the opposition victory was larger than officially reported. Venezuelan press reports today are talking about the fact the military high command told Chávez to accept his defeat. So we shouldn’t rush to celebrate Chávez’s sudden conversion into a Jeffersonian democrat.
In Putin’s case, he uses the same methods Chávez uses in Venezuela: massive uses of public resources; control of much of the media. There’s not such a huge difference. [But] Putin may be focusing more on Russia and the Russian people than Chávez is focusing on the Venezuelan people. A lot of Chávez supporters resented the fact that he spends most of his time in Saudi Arabia and Iran, talking about the world revolution when they want bread and butter.
FP: You’ve written about the much-discussed wave of neopopulism in Latin America and said it is misunderstood. What do you think an election result like this says about this so-called populist wave, if anything?
AO: Well, that’s the key question. Of course I’m worried about Chávez, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa scaring away investments and making the countries poor, but that’s not the key issue in Latin America; because if you put all these countries together—Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua—they barely amount to 8 or 9 percent of Latin America’s GDP. U.S. officials and we in the press love to write about Chávez because he screams and yells and is colorful and insults everybody and he makes great copy. But the real story of Latin America is being written elsewhere: in Mexico; in Brazil; in Colombia; in Chile.
What really worries me about Latin America’s future is that we’re falling behind in education, science, technology, and research and development. If you look at all the international standardized tests for kids, Latin America has among the lowest scores in the world. When you look at the London Times’s ranking of the world’s 200 best universities, this year only three Latin American universities are among the world’s [top] 200 and they’re all between 195 and 200. This is scandalous. And it’s because, when the rest of the developing world is moving rapidly to create more skilled workforces, Latin America is talking ideology. Look at Chávez. He speaks to the nation every day in front of a huge painting of Simón Bolívar. He changed the country to name it after Simón Bolívar. In every speech, he cites Bolívar as inspiration for every single measure he takes. The trouble is that Bolívar died in 1830—four years before the invention of the telephone and 150 years before the invention of the Internet.
FP: Do you think then that a lot of people who are agitating for democratic ideals would be better off if they channeled all of their anger and resentment toward Chávez and people like him into issues like education?
AO: When it comes to his opponents in the United States, I think Washington should bypass Chávez. Instead of focusing on Chávez and responding to him, Washington should build bridges with Brazil, with Mexico, with Colombia, with Chile, with Peru and simply ignore Chávez. If Washington is really serious and really worried about Chávez, the thing it should do is be serious about reducing America’s dependence on imported oil. The United States is financing Chávez. We buy $34 billion a year worth of Venezuelan oil. That’s what keeps Chávez alive. Ironically, the United States is financing Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution.
Andrés Oppenheimer is the author of “The Oppenheimer Report,” a prize-winning column on Latin American affairs in the Miami Herald, and Saving the Americas: The Dangerous Decline of Latin America . . . and What the U.S. Must Do (New York: Random House, 2007).
