WorldCity Business Magazine

Latin America's Robin Hood

by Marcela Sanchez

Washington may be missing the point when it comes to Latin America’s most controversial president.

I am starting to think that Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez can have a calming influence on Latin America.

At a time when record oil prices are becoming an ever-increasing burden, the leader of the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter is offering flexible financing not only to his close ally Cuba, but to most other Caribbean and Latin American nations. Chvez also promises more jobs and revenue in the region with plans to build a $2.5 billion oil refinery in northeastern Brazil and to purchase Argentine oil tankers.

When protesters crippled oil production in Ecuador, South America’s second-largest supplier to the United States, Chvez jumped to the rescue. Responding to requests from Ecuadorian officials, Chvez agreed to cover Ecuador’s oil commitments, helping to calm the global market and to reduce the strike’s fiscal impact on the struggling nation.

By golly, Chvez is a modern-day, Spanish-speaking Robin Hood.

Such a characterization is, of course, heresy in Washington. To listen to Bush administration officials, one would believe that Chvez is the greatest “negative force” against democracy and the free market since the Cold War. He has been accused of supplying weapons to Colombian rebels, of financing Bolivian and Ecuadorian groups seeking to establish “Marxist” states, and of being, with Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s guidance, a “subversive” everywhere else in the region.

The truth is that Chvez is a lot of both. He is the Robin Hood who supports the poor with the money of the rich, and he is the ideologue who pushes an anti-imperialist, socialist agenda.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has chosen to take on the Chvez challenge purely in terms of the latter. In the administration’s rhetoric and in its thinking, Chvez is a Communist, a meddler and, most damning, another Castro. And so Washington serves up decidedly old and desiccated solutions that smell of long-failed anti-Castro strategies.

During Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s recent visit to Latin America, a Pentagon statement reiterated concerns over the “menace” that the Cuba- Venezuela axis poses to the region. Rumsfeld, on his third visit to the region in 10 months, stopped in Paraguay and Peru to shore up support among U.S. allies for what amounts to a policy of Chvez containment.

This kind of one-dimensional thinking blinds U.S. policymakers to the fact that Chvez’s influence in Latin America is not all pernicious and, no matter how much it is hated, may be presenting solutions to Latin America’s real problems in ways that Washington is not.

Latin America today is not in the midst of a Cold War where externally financed leftist rebel movements wage guerrilla warfare against democratic governments. Instead of taking up arms and heading to the mountains, an increasingly frustrated population is taking to the streets and demanding that their elected leaders deliver the goods promised by U.S.-touted reforms.

For all Chvez and Castro would like to take credit that this is their doing, and for all that Bush officials would like to give it to them, the fact is that such popular discontent is more the fault of democracy and free markets than an axis diabolico.

So the onus, in great part, is on Washington to help these countries prove that the U.S. liberal democratic model “is valid … has a human face, and it delivers,” according to John Cope, Latin America expert at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

This is why both Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte and Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo took advantage of Rumsfeld’s visits to send an urgent plea to Washington to do a better job of opening the U.S. market to their products. According to Paraguayan press reports, Duarte told Rumsfeld that “Latin America needs the support of developed nations to strengthen its economies because, without such backing, democracies in the region are at risk of failing.”

The success of democracies in Latin America hinges on the ability of their economies to reduce poverty and inequality, the true source of resentment and instability. Chvez’s impact can go either way at times increasing instability, at times reducing it.

But as long as the Bush administration obsesses solely on the destructive side of Chvez, it will be distracted from the hard work necessary to help Latin American economies succeed. And as long as it avoids that challenge, as long as high oil prices continue, Chvez will be more than happy to offer a hand.