Hugo Chavez: Juan Peron for the 21st Century

Peter Hitchens is wrong to compare Hugo Chavez to Fidel Castro, for Chavez doesn’t resemble Castro at all. Instead Hugo Chavez resembles another Latin American leader of the 20th Century, Juan Peron the Argentine dictator of the 40s and 50s who made a pathetic comeback in the early 1970s.
Like Peron, Chavez is a professional soldier turned radical politician, like Peron Chavez is a soldier who has fought no battles, killed no enemies and never seen enemy gunfire. Instead his military career is based upon his ability to impress his fellow officers in the mess. Like many Latin American soldiers who found army pay too low Chavez set his sights on the greener pastures of politics.
Like Peron, Chavez tells his audience what they want to hear that their troubles are caused by the evil CIA and the Jewish capitalists from New York. Like Peron he cooks up questionable social programs and share the wealth schemes that will put a lot of money in the pockets of his political supporters. Since former private Fidel Castro of the Red Army is a popular figure among the Latin American poor and the editorial staff at the New York Times Chavez fawns over him. Whether Chavez actually gives a damn about Fidel is anybody’s guess, Fidel is popular so Comrade Hugo likes him, much as Juan Peron liked Mussolini and Hitler (who were far more popular among average Latins than Stalin in the 1940s note you won’t hear this from Che loving Americanleftists but it’s true) until the threat of US Marines marching on the presidential palace changed his mind. Juan wisely seeing that Stalin had no navy and possibility of reaching him, remained anti Communist and Anti American.
In the year 2008, spouting the Communist line is little more than rhetoric, this isn’t 1978 when such a stance would have quickly invited the presence of the Red Army. Comrade Hugo knows all such rhetoric will get him these days is a little support in the shanty towns and a good write up in the Manchester Guardian. So Comrade Hugo plays the good Communist, all the better to steal the oil proceeds with.
So what should America do about Hugo Chavez, the best course would be simply to ignore him. The man is a fool and sooner or later even the Reddest Venezuelan radical will be sick of him and be glad to see him on the plane to Havana. Especially when proves an embarrassment to their cause. My guess the left will drop friend Hugo when the inevitable articles about the billions of dollars in oil money that Comrade Chavez has been quietly stashing in overseas banks while attacking Capitalist greed appear in the world’s media. When that happens Hugo Chavez will be like Juan Peron a very bad joke.
Of course there is a very dark side to Hugo Chavez and ilk. Americans remember the comic opera Juan Peron and his first wife Evita put on in the early 1950s. They don’t remember Juan’s second coming in the 1970s, in that era Peron fearing leftist students ordered the army to murder them it did. The slaughter went on for ten years culminating in the Falklands War in which untrained Argentine draftees were marched into battle against the highly trained soldiers of the British Army, the Argentines lost but their society had been soaked in blood.
My guess is that Hugo Chavez’s debacle will end when he is either murdered or driven out by some sort of military coup. Chavez’s policies are eerily similar to another South American demagogue, Salvatore Allende the self styled Marxist president of Chile who was murdered by his own army in a bloody coup on September 11, 1973. Alende was murdered because Chile’s middle class feared his socialist excesses and his flirtation with the Eastern Bloc (East German and Cuban advisors were already in Chile the Red Army wasn’t far behind). Eventually the Chilean Army led by Augusto Pinochet (an officer who had no noticeable politics before Allende’s excesses) overthrew and murdered Alende and launched a wave of terror worthy of the Communists. Untold thousands were dragged away and shot because of politics. Pinochet stuck around for years and launched capitalist reforms that laid the ground work for a stable Chilean democracy. Pinochet succeeded largely because he had tacit American support, the US had no desire to see the Red Army on the South American continent which was the logical result of Allende’s policies.
Now political conditions in the US today would prevent any sort of US support for a Pinochet style coup in Venezuelan even though that would be fairly easy to organize and carry out. Vast numbers of average Venezuelans would quietly turn their backs and keep their mouths shut if somebody would put a bullet in their leader’s brain and declare himself presidente. No modern CIA officer would give plotters against Chavez any sort of aid out of fear of a 60 Minutes expose. No US president today would do as Richard Nixon did and sign off on an anti Chavez coup out of fear of the New York Times Editorial Page.
Does this mean we are stuck with Chavez? No, the Venezuelans who are fed up with Chavez and want to get rid of him will sooner or later go over to the Chinese embassy, there they’ll find the support they need for their coup. The Chinese officials sick and tired of the buffoon shaking them down for bribe money while quoting Noam Chomsky will gladly give the locals all the money and support they need. If they need expertise at staging a coup I’m sure there are plenty of ex CIA operatives now working as consultants who would gladly sign onto the enterprise. So my guess is we’ll see the spectacle of Hugo Chavez killed or driven out by a junta of conservative Venezuelan soldiers and businessmen backed by the Chinese Communist Party.
On that day American power and influence in Latin America will be dead and Hugo Chavez will get what he deserves. Indeed his first move will probably be to run to Washington and scream for American aid to fight the Chinese menace, hopefully nobody will listen to the fool. Unfortunately the American conservatives who today attack Uncle Hugo will probably embrace him as a patriot and demand American tax dollars to support his cause. Hopefully they’ll see through Hugo as what he is a bad joke like his mentor Juan Peron, unfortunately our political elite probably won’t see that until they’ve been burned by him.