JHR Weekly Rights Watch – The Concordian

JHR: Chavez will be remembered despite ‘dictatorship’

Despite a two-year battle with cancer and a conspicuously long absence from the public eye, the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez last week still came as a shock. Always a polarizing figure, the debate about how to define him — as a demagogical dictator or as a revolutionary — was renewed with his passing. The answer, however, isn’t so black and white.

After leading a failed coup in 1992 and spending two years in jail, Chavez won his first election in 1998 with an astonishing approval rating of 80 per cent. This would dramatically decline over the next four years, however, in reaction to his early heavy-handed governance. He rewrote the constitution, giving the president control over all three branches of government, the right to rule by decree and the right to rule in perpetuity when claiming two-thirds of the vote.

According to Human Rights Watch, Chavez consolidated power within the Supreme Court by appointing justices who supported his mandate and punished others, effectively curtailing any check on presidential power. Media that offended the government or served to “ferment anxiety in the public,” were harshly reprimanded. Members of both the press and the judicial system were victims of unlawful arrest and detention.

Obviously repressive in defense of his regime, Chavez did leave Venezuela better off than he found it in some ways. The Guardian’s Datablog shows extreme poverty was reduced from 23 per cent to eight per cent and unemployment halved to just over seven per cent. Gross domestic product per capita and agricultural output both increased. The worst failure of Chavez was one he admitted to — crime. The country boasts the ugly prize of the highest violent crime rate in South America.

Records aside, the prevailing image of Chavez the dictator was mostly earned from his open rejection of the ruling ideology. A devout socialist, he decried capitalism as “the way of the devil and exploitation.” Coming from a poor background, the plight of the proletariat was always part of his campaigns and policies. Outside the country, he refused free trade agreements with the United States, opting instead for Latin American organizations, Mercosur and ALBA.

In 2008, Chavez handed Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, a chronicle of U.S.-backed insurgency throughout Latin America. By that point, Chavez was clearly aware that his policies of land expropriation, resource nationalization and social programs for the poor were exactly what had antagonized American interventions throughout Central and South America previously.

Indeed, an updated version of Galeano’s book would have to feature Chavez himself. After a 2002 coup attempt that at first seemed internal, The Observer revealed it had been orchestrated by the Bush administration with the help of the same people who had been involved in the Reagan-era insurgencies in Central America. Chavez was considered a problem that needed to be rectified, a man who was sewing ideas that America refused to swallow in the new millennium, just as they refused before.

Though that was over a decade ago, the dominant sentiment still remains. Time magazine’s Tim Padgett provided just such an example in his Chavez retrospective, describing a leader who was “reckless and arrogant,” “a vulgar populist” and a “blowhard.” Petty name-calling aside, his most accurate sentence was this: “history isn’t likely to remember Chavez as fondly as his followers will.”

And that is exactly the point. What America or the rest of the world thought of Chavez is ultimately irrelevant. In fact, Chavez turned his attempted vilification into a battle of Biblical proportions — he became the little guy fighting the good fight against the American boogie man that had forcibly impressed itself on the autonomous nations of Latin America for decades.

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans flooded the streets to commemorate not just the death of a man, but the death of a larger than life symbol of defiance against the dominant powers that so often win without even facing a battle.

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Article corrected on 14/03/2013

The flag of Guatemala. Image via Flickr.

The trial of former Guatemalan President, Efrain Rios Montt, for murder and crimes against humanity has people talking. As Amy Ross pointed out in her opinion piece for Al-Jazeera, this is the first time that any former head of state has been prosecuted by their own national court.

Considering Guatemala’s history of ignoring corruption, the trial seems quite meaningful. In Montt’s case, being an ousted dictator didn’t mean exile or imprisonment. Quite the contrary, after being removed from power in a coup in 1983, Montt maintained relationships with those in power and was President of the Guatemalan Congress for several years.

This surreal scenario highlights just how corrupt Guatemalan government and authority has been in the past, where a General can seize power, commit mass murder, and simply re-enter the political realm without any punishment. In fact, Montt was granted prosecutorial amnesty in 2007 that only ran out in 2011.

However, considering that Montt, now 86, is well past his 50 year heyday in military and politics, the timing makes this seems more like a case of an old man who has worn out his connections being served up as an example by a ‘new’ generation.

Most of Montt’s notoriety stems from his brief 14-month rule from 1982 to 1983 in the midst of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. After forcing his way into power through a military junta, he began a campaign of violence and intimidation. Ostensibly posed as a counter-insurgency war against the Marxist Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity guerillas, he was funded and supported by the Reagan administration.

This brief foray into dictatorial power saw 70,000 civilians murdered or disappeared, with hundreds of thousands being displaced. Through his indiscriminate “Beans and Guns” campaign, a with us or against us approach, many innocents were swept up, particularly members of the Mayan population. As many as 15,000 were murdered and some 600 Mayan villages destroyed in his attempt to rout the perceived communist threat.

Montt was only one of a series of brutal dictators in this period, and like the rest, he was vicious with the Mayans. Rigoberta Menchu, Quiche Maya and former presidential candidate, wrote in her book of the horrific torture and forced labour Mayans were subjected to for years. Though she fled the country in 1982, her region of Quiche in the Ixil Triangle was heavily affected by Montt’s policies. And one of the leading men on the ground was current President, Otto Perez Molina.

In 2011, Molina, also a former General and National Director of Military Intelligence (D-2), was elected under his promise of tackling crime and corruption with la mano dura, or iron fist. While other parties presented plans for fighting poverty and eliminating illiteracy, his Partido Patriota (Patriotic Party) garnered support mainly through a flashy campaign that provided little in the way of specifics. Despite years of past dictators, Guatemalans seemed to embrace the notion of another severe, military ruler.

In 1982, Molina was chosen by the Montt government to serve in the ‘anti-terrorist’ campaign. Though government reports say he was stationed elsewhere at this time, there is video evidence of Molina giving an interview in that area, albeit under a different name. At the spot where he was interviewed, military documents reveal an encounter that left four adults dead and 30 apprehended.

This was not an isolated incident. Amongst other known crimes perpetrated by Molina, Rightsaction.org points out that while National Director of D-2, Molina authorized the use of psychological and physical torture on Mayan resistance leader, Efrain Bámaca.

Guatemala has not left its past behind. In fact, its past is parading around as the face of the future. Until that reality is confronted head on and serious measures taken to break with the main players in its violent history, the trial of Efrain Rios Montt remains symbolic.