Bernardo Alvarez Herrera "Fact and Fiction in Venezuela: An Update on Venezuela’s Referendum Process" October 30, 2003

Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez Herrera speaks to a crowd at the Women's Faculty Club on October 30.

The Official Perspective on Venezuelan Democracy
Jason Seawright, Department of Political Science

The tenure of Venezuela’s current president, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, has been filled with controversy and conflict. A substantial segment of Venezuela’s citizenry, along with some foreign observers, charge that Chávez is trying to establish a dictatorship and may well be supporting terrorism. Others claim that Chávez is a deeply democratic leader who is doing more for the poor majorities in Venezuela than any other politician in the country’s history. During his recent presentation for the Center for Latin American Studies, Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United States, presented a lucid version of the case in favor of President Chávez. The ambassador emphasized two major themes: the accomplishments of the current Venezuelan president and the credibility of accusations made against the government by the Venezuelan opposition and by the U.S. government.

The Achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution

During his presidential campaign in 1998, Chávez promised to carry out a social and political revolution in Venezuela. He would replace the country’s political institutions, which many felt had become corrupt and ineffective. He would pursue foreign policy with the goal of fulfilling the dream of true political and economic autonomy as articulated by Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan hero of Latin America’s struggles for independence from Spain in the 19th century. Finally, he would use his control of the government to redistribute Venezuela’s oil wealth to benefit the poor.

During his administration, how successful has Chávez been in meeting these goals?

Alvarez Herrera argued that Chávez has been quite successful in two specific areas. First, he has completely remade Venezuela’s political institutions.

Immediately after his election, Chávez called for a constitutional convention, which dissolved the existing governing institutions and replaced them with a new democratic system. While the new institutions maintain the representative characteristics of electoral democracy, the goal was to allow ordinary Venezuelans to participate in government as directly as possible. Hence, in Alvarez Herrera’s words, the new constitution provides “as much representative democracy as necessary and as much participatory democracy as possible.”

Alvarez Herrera also argued that the current Venezuelan government has made great progress toward the goal of redirecting the country’s oil wealth to benefit the poor. He described four different programs the government has implemented in education. First, the government believes that, within a year, it will have completely eliminated adult illiteracy. Second, 350,000 adults have been registered in a high school completion program. Third, a program has been established to help 150,000 poor people afford a university education. Fourth, to encourage literacy among children, the government now provides a free collection of books to all students who complete the sixth grade. The ambassador also listed several social programs that the government has created to help alleviate poverty among the many Venezuelans without a formal job.

In other areas, the current government has clearly not met its goals. For example, official unemployment in Venezuela stands at 17.8 percent and has risen substantially since the beginning of Chávez’s presidency. Alvarez Herrera argued that the government should not be held responsible for these negative outcomes, since they may well have been caused by disruptive actions on the part of the Venezuelan opposition. The ambassador distributed photocopies of a graph (available online at the web address http://www.venezuelanalysis.com) showing that unemployment had declined gradually— except for a series of sharp jumps that coincide with a coup attempt and a series of national strikes staged by the opposition to protest the Chávez government. Hence, according to Alvarez Herrera, these negative results should not count against Chávez’s social and economic record.

Accusations Against the Government

The major accusations that the Venezuelan opposition makes against Chávez’s government are that the administration is dictatorial and seeks to establish a Castroist communist regime in the country. Alvarez Herrera argued against this position, pointing out that Chávez was elected president twice in free and fair elections. He also dismissed as baseless the allegation made by some observers that the government will lose its democratic credentials by repressing current opposition demands for a recall referendum against the president. The government, he claimed, opposed calls for a recall referendum in February of this year because the constitution requires half of a president’s term to elapse before a recall can occur. Now that the constitutional deadline has passed, Alvarez Herrera claims that the government will do nothing to either encourage or prevent a recall referendum.

A second set of accusations against Chávez’s government is that it has supported international terrorism. Members of the Venezuelan opposition, as well as some U.S. politicians, have accused Chávez of providing safe haven to members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the guerrilla army in neighboring Colombia. Alvarez Herrera reviewed several of these accusations, suggesting that they rely either on misunderstandings or lies. More remarkably, some have accused Venezuela of providing training for Al Qaeda terrorists on the vacation hotspot Isla Margarita. The ambassador dismissed these accusations out of hand.

In summary, the ambassador’s message was that Chávez has democratically reformed the political institutions of Venezuela and that he is carrying out much-needed social and economic reforms. Currently, Venezuelan society is deeply divided with respect to both of these claims. Finding a resolution to this polarization will require both sides to show the kind of reasoned moderation that Alvarez Herrera’s displayed during his presentation.

Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez Herrera gave a talked sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies titled "Fact and Fiction in Venezuela: An Update on Venezuela’s Referendum Process" on October 30, 2003.

Ambassador Herrera addressed the recent history of Venezuela, including the political and economic problems both prior to and following the attempted coup in April 2002, as well as arguing that the Chavez administration has made significant progress towards its societal goals in spite of the upheavals.