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Down, but not out: Chávez is a man who rarely takes “no” for an answer.

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.