Insh’Allah, indeed!

Caracas, Venezuela, December 3 – It is impossible to go far in Venezuela without seeing Hugo Chávez, not least because today is Election Day. Market stalls have been doing a brisk trade in red Chávez scarves, anti-imperialist umbrellas and baseball caps denouncing George W. Bush before today’s presidential election. They are almost out of chávecitos — the battery-operated figures of the Venezuelan President dressed in either a red beret and combat fatigues or suit and presidential sash.

The former paratroop commander, who led a failed military coup in 1992, has been in power for eight years. To supporters, Chávez smashed a corrupt political duopoly that for fifty years stole Venezuela’s oil wealth while the population languished in poverty; distributed that wealth to the country’s poor, curbed the power of the elite, and put the American President in his place. To opponents, Chávez is a dangerous autocrat intent on transforming the country into a dictatorship; he has systematically dismantled the country’s democratic institutions, exercised untrammelled power and used it to persecute his political opponents.

Today, Venezuelan voters are deciding whether Chávez should get another six-year term. Given he has vowed to change the Constitution to allow “indefinite re-election,” today may well be the last chance Venezuelans have to check Chávez’ ambitions.

Manuel Rosales, governor of Zulia State in western Venezuela, is trailing badly in most polls. Thanks to high oil prices, Venezuela has been the fastest-growing economy in Latin America: GDP climbed 10.2 per cent in the latest quarter alone and the economy has boomed.

But not all is rosy. For one, crime has exploded. According to human rights groups and a UNESCO study, Venezuela has the highest rate of gun-related deaths of 57 countries surveyed — far surpassing Brasil, one of the most violent nations in Latin America. The number of homicides in Venezuela climbed 23 percent from January to August of this year alone.

A history of far graver abuses by the police has gone unchecked. Last year, the attorney general’s office said it was investigating 5,520 presumed executions by the police between 2000 and 2005, involving 6,127 victims. Of the police officials implicated, prosecutors have filed charges against 517, and fewer than 100 had been convicted, according to Human Rights Watch.

The highway from the international airport in Maiquetía to Caracas Center is jam-packed with armed gangs rear-ending cars and robbing passengers of their belongings. Carlos Colina, a consultant for Hewlett-Packard, was shot to death on the route in July, one of several incidents that led the United States Embassy in Caracas to issue a warning against traveling on the road after nightfall. Around the same time, burglars shot Walter Rehberger, a consul at the Austrian Embassy, during a break-in. Diplomats were singled out again this month, when thieves broke into the trade office for the Chinese Embassy and stole $14,000. While much of the recent attention has focused on killings among the privileged, the vast majority of homicides in Venezuela occur in the country’s poorest communities — Mr. Chávez’s strongest base.

The Bolivarian Revolution

There is no doubt that high oil prices have helped Hugo Chávez tremendously.

Without petrodollars, how much would he matter? However, oil talks. After the collapse of the wretched Soviet Union, Cuba would be completely bankrupt without the subsidies it received from Moscow. In steps Chávez, who is now Fidel Castro’s hermano; more importantly, Chávez subsidises Cuba’s oil imports.

Exporting the Bolivarian Revolution is serious business. To that end, President Chávez embarked on an international trip in July-August of this year. His eight-nation tour took him from Argentina to Benin. At each stop, the Bolivarian revolutionary delivered superheated denunciations of the United States and called for a global coalition to combat "the U.S. imperialist monster."

In Minsk, where he met Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe's last dictator, Chávez said the United States is "a senseless, blind, stupid giant that understands nothing about human rights, humaneness, culture, consciousness and awareness."

In Moscow, where he signed a contract for a $1 billion purchase of advanced SU-30 fighter planes, raising Venezuela's arms buys from Russia to $3 billion in the past 18 months, Chávez said that "the biggest threat in the world is the U.S. empire."

In Hanoi he discoursed at length on the "pre-animal" depredations of the U.S. military, including the bombing of Japanese cities in World War II. Then he praised the Vietnamese for their defeat of "the monster," while warning it "will never give up its plot to stop and undermine us."

Chávez's next-to-last stop was the poor African country of Mali (!), where "imperialism" usually means France, the country's former colonial master. Never mind: "We must unite, we countries of the South, against the hegemony of the United States," proclaimed the unlikely visitor to Bamako. "Or we will all die."

Chávez's best performance during this trip, however, was in Tehran. In a joint press conference with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Chávez launched into a vitriolic denunciation of Israel, “the usurper Zionist regime.”

“Do they want war because they have the devil inside them?” demanded Chávez. “I say to them from here, from Iran, once and a thousand times: Murderers! Cowards! Frankly, their fate has been sealed, from the depths of the people's soul.” “God, throw the lightning bolts at the monsters. Insh’Allah.”