Redstate

Killing Venezuela Softly . . . With His Song

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Contra Tyrannum | Featured Stories — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

"Mary Anastasia O'Grady destroys any notion that Venezuela comes even remotely close to achieving the ideals of democracy (read on):

The assault on Venezuelan democracy, which began before Mr. Chávez came to power, has been possible largely because of state corruption. But the Chávez government has taken the concept to a whole new level. In this space last week I cited a report by Gustavo Coronel, a former director of the state oil company. His paper, "Corruption, Mismanagement and Abuse of Power in Hugo Chávez's Venezuela," published by the Cato Institute, deserves a fuller airing.

Mr. Coronel, who was the Venezuelan representative for Transparency International from 1996-2000, has painstakingly traced the "hypercorruption" that is now flourishing as a result of record oil income, poor management, and the "ideological predilections" of a president trying to "play a messianic role in world affairs." In 23 pages he neatly shows that Mr. Chávez, who claims to represent the progressive left, is nothing but an old-fashioned authoritarian otherwise known in Latin America as a caudillo.

The report properly notes that government corruption is "the violation of public interest for personal or partisan gain," a definition that goes beyond graft to "the use and abuse of political power." Chávez corruption includes the 1999 constituent assembly, which was packed with his supporters and given supraconstitutional powers to dissolve the country's democratic institutions and create new ones made up of pro-Chávez actors. "This ended with all Venezuelan political institutions under the control of the government and eliminated effective checks and balances," Mr. Coronel writes. "From that moment on . . . Venezuela ceased to be a democracy."

Since then the government has used its unchecked power to "spend" the country's oil wealth arbitrarily and without any accountability. Using the data from the Center for Economic Research in Caracas, Mr. Coronel identifies $17 billion in Venezuelan "donations to politically friendly countries," various infrastructure projects around the region and weapons purchases. Bolivian President Evo Morales, who famously used street violence to bring down two elected governments, got $30 million on a visit to Caracas in January. "According to the Venezuelan Central Bank," Mr. Coronel writes, "about $22.5 billion has been transferred to accounts abroad by the Chávez government since 2004." Some $12 billion of it, he says, remains unaccounted for.

Mr. Coronel notes that "according to Transparency International 95% of all known public contracts are awarded without bidding." In a country where the state owns the oil and the oil is the economy this means massive politicized fraud. False invoicing and the signing of contracts with "nonexistent suppliers" are among the tricks of the trade and explain why the country is witnessing the "emergence of a new rich 'revolutionary' class."

The politicized Supreme Court, National Electoral Council (CNE) and state-owned oil company PdVSA no longer have any transparency obligations. The CNE, for example, has not allowed an independent audit of the voter registry, which contains almost 17 million names, "a statistical improbabilty" in a country of 26 million, "60% of whom are too young to register." With Chávez carte blanche comes power to destroy political enemies too. After a PdVSA strike to oppose the politicization of the oil company 20,000 skilled employees were fired in violation of Venezuelan labor laws.

Read the whole thing for the depressing details. Of course, anyone who is familiar with those details understands that Venezuela is an autocracy and a corrupt one at that. And in the event that we have forgotten, the cult of personality is alive and well in Venezuela:

The red-clad Chávez dramatically recited from the Lord's Prayer and then borrowed from it for his own prophesy. "Thy kingdom come," he bellowed, and thereafter, "the kingdom of socialism." The ailing Fidel Castro reportedly sent a short message from Havana congratulating Mr. Chávez and noting that "the victory was resounding, crushing and without parallel in the history of our America."

Appropriating the Lord's Prayer for political purposes, eh? Since when did the Almighty speak through Hugo Chávez? Or is this part of that "Christianist" phenomenon I keep hearing about? Oh, and by the way, the Cato study referred to in the O'Grady article can be found here.