[Reader-list] Fwd: Chavez ,Clowns and Empires

[Ravi Sundaram]

I have mixed feelings about Chavez, but this is a good read below. It
captures the complexity of Latin American responses to him

Ravi

What We See in Hugo Chávez

By LUISA VALENZUELA

Buenos Aires
THE fervent welcome that greeted President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela during
his visit to Argentina a week ago was inexplicable to some Argentines and
left others indignant. Many here tend to mistrust populism and
demagoguery, finding them redolent of Peronism. But even among the wary, a
window of hope has opened, with Mr. Chávez as its symbol.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since Juan Perón’s time. And it
was the expansive waters of our own broad river that defined the vectors
of force last weekend. For once, the tensions in the American hemisphere
flowed on an east-west axis along the Río de la Plata — which means “River
of Silver” and by extension, very appropriately in this case, “River of
Money.”

The struggle was about energy, both concrete and metaphorical, and equally
combustible in both forms. Across the river in Uruguay’s capital,
Montevideo, the presence of President George W. Bush caused red-hot
passions to flare, along with sizable protests like those he faced in
Brazil. In Buenos Aires, my city, on the opposite bank of that river of
money, red abounded as well, though in our case it had a very different
connotation. Red was the color of President Chávez’s jacket and of many of
the flags brought by the masses who flooded into a stadium to hear the
president of Venezuela speak.

Unlike the homogenous rallies of Peronist times, the 30,000 people in this
crowd came from very diverse backgrounds. In Argentina, the economic
crisis of December 2001 significantly altered not only our social dynamic
but our semantics. We no longer talk about the “pueblo” — which means town
or village as well as people. Now we talk about the “gente,” which also
means people, but with a different nuance, derived as it is from the Latin
gens meaning race, clan or breed.

The new vocabulary transcends distinctions of class: the middle classes
have now merged with the poor to demand their rights. Hence many students
and professionals were in attendance that day, not necessarily attracted
by the figure of President Chávez himself so much as by the
anti-imperialist opportunity he symbolized. We Argentines, who once
imagined ourselves more sophisticated, or more European, than the citizens
of neighboring states, were brought closer to the rest of the continent by
our impoverishment, and we find ourselves more open to the idea of
pan-Latin American solidarity.
Perhaps last week’s crowd also recognized the part that President Chávez’s
monetary aid played in our recuperation of that illusion known as
“national identity.” For Argentina had virtually disappeared as an
autonomous country during the presidency of Carlos Menem from 1989 to
1999, the era of our “carnal relations” with the United States, which took
the form of spurious privatizations and a fictitious exchange rate.

While many in Argentina would, nevertheless, not hesitate to call the
Venezuelan president a clown or a madman, it’s worth keeping in mind that
a very heady dose of megalomania is a prerequisite for even dreaming of
confronting a rival as overwhelmingly powerful as the United States —
which is also led by a president viewed, in many quarters, as a clown and
a madman.

President Chávez’s weapons of seduction are his superabundance of
petrodollars and his obsession with a shared Latin American project. His
plan is to realize the dream of Simón Bolívar, the old utopian vision of
Latin American integration that today seems more viable than ever before.

It may be that President Bush chose to venture into these forgotten
Southern latitudes to counter that vision. In Brazil, he tried to draw
attention to the production of ethanol, an ecologically correct rival to
petroleum that nonetheless depletes the earth. And in Uruguay, all Mr.
Bush seemed to be trying to do was irritate the other governments of South
America by promoting a Free Trade Area of the Americas project in
opposition to Mercosur, the southern common market formed in 1991 by
Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and, somewhat later, Venezuela.

These things sometimes backfire. President Bush found himself repudiated
on one bank of the Plata while President Chávez was getting ovations on
the opposite one: each contender in his corner and the moral triumph to
the last man left standing, as in a boxing ring.

Some Argentines severely criticized President Nestor Kirchner for
providing his Venezuelan counterpart with such a platform, complaining
that President Chávez bought and paid for his visit by showering Argentina
with dollars and benefits. Not so. The bargain seems fair — oil in
exchange for agricultural technology and experts — and since he came to
power, President Kirchner has made his country the platform for several
other presidents from the Americas: Fidel Castro, Michelle Bachelet, Evo
Morales and President Chávez himself, on previous occasions.

Two major Argentine characteristics are in play here: intrinsic distrust
and the need for immediate gratification. Mr. Chávez awakens both of these
inclinations, and it’s interesting to see them balance each other out. The
dream of a single-currency Latin American Union, modeled on the European
Union, to create, insofar as possible, a buffer against the hegemony of
the United States no longer seems so impossible.

I’m no political analyst; I have delved into politics only as a fiction
writer. But I’m an optimist by nature, and the feeling of empowerment that
President Chávez instills, and that various South American governments are
endorsing, strikes me as a good engine for further progress — a means of
upgrading ourselves from the status of someone’s backyard into that of a
truly autonomous region, beyond Mr. Chávez, Mr. Bush and every other form
of demagoguery.

Luisa Valenzuela is the author of “Black Novel With Argentines” and “The
Lizard’s Tail.”

This article was translated by Esther Allen from the Spanish.NYtimes 17/3/07