Chavez enabling law
Friday, Feb 02,
2007
By Richard Gott
The Guardian
The
Hugo Chávez is a man in a
hurry, and this week's decision
by the Venezuelan national assembly to grant him additional powers
foreshadows the radical changes that are in the pipeline. President for the past
eight years, Chávez has only just begun to scratch the surface of the gigantic
revolutionary project that lies ahead. There have been obvious successes.
Unprecedented sums of oil money have been diverted towards the country's poor
majority, funding education and health programmes, and providing cheap food. The
results are already on show. A freshly mobilised and alert population is
beginning to flex its muscles, taking part in political decision-making through
a myriad local councils and ad-hoc committees operating at many levels. Nothing
like this has happened in
Yet all this energy and
excitement has been channelled through new institutions, financed directly by
the oil revenues, and essentially unmonitored. Again, this is a revolution in
progress. At the same time, much of the old, pre-revolutionary
Is this road to dictatorship
or the path to reasonable reform? The nature of the problem is familiar to
political scientists, and certainly not new to
Allowing the Venezuelan
president to issue executive orders is nothing new. It is permitted under the
constitution of 1999, as under the previous constitution. Chávez's recent
predecessors availed themselves of a similar facility from time to time, notably
when dealing with economic and financial matters. Even Thomas Shannon, the
So what is important here is
a change in the nature of government rather than a madcap scheme to seize
private assets, soak the rich, and nationalise everything in sight by
presidential decree. Perhaps the most significant of the planned reforms is the
provision of finance and teeth to the "communal councils" springing up in their
thousands all over the country. The future "socialist democracy" of
For most of the past eight
years, Chávez has moved ahead in response to the actions of others. The
attempted coup d'etat of 2002, the oil strike of 2003, and the recall referendum
of 2004 all led to an acceleration of the revolutionary process. Now he is
advancing under his own steam. We know that he wants to retain the commanding
heights of the economy, the traditional ambition of Latin American nationalists
as well as old-fashioned social democrats. That means oil and gas and
electricity, and telecommunications. We know that he hopes to extend the land
reform, the essential first step towards rural development. We know too that he
wants to improve tax collection and to do something about gross inequality, the
untackled evil throughout Latin America except in
Yet the Venezuelan future is
still interestingly uncertain and opaque, for the simple reason that Chávez is
not a dictator and has never shown the slightest sign of wanting to become one.
He has no blueprint that he seeks to impose on the country. He wants to extend
press
freedom, for example, not to reduce it, and, while curbing the power
to make money of irresponsible press barons like Marcel Granier of RCTV, he has
also put state funds into the development of community radio and television
stations, as well as more ambitious projects like Vive, the new cultural
channel, and Telesur, the international news channel. These new lines of
communication already provide fresh opportunities for popular participation, the
ultimate safeguard of his regime and the source of all future programmes and
policies.
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