Third time for ever?

Chavez has been compared with Fidel and Lula. Think instead of Peron

When all the votes are counted, it could well be that two out of every three Venezuelan voters have opted to re-elect Hugo Chavez to a third term as president. He will take office in 2007 and govern till 2012. Here is a political leader who has won three direct presidential elections, all with impressive pluralities in his favour. Why should one doubt, as this article does, that he is a democrat who will provide a democratic future for Venezuela? Is Chavez a model for the rest of Latin America? What does his electoral victory mean for the rest of the world?

There are solid reasons why Chavez has been re-elected with such a thumping majority. He has ploughed back a significant proportion of Venezuela8217;s windfall petroleum earnings into the social sector. A series of mass political campaigns, characteristically called 8216;Bolivarian Missions8217;, have strengthened Chavez8217;s domestic power base. After the strike and lockout of 2002, he has worked hard to consolidate his position within the organised labour movement by launching an alternate trade union confederation, the National Union of Workers UNT.

Another important group backing Chavez are the Venezuelan armed forces. Chavez8217;s military career was by all reckoning a very unusual one. A lieutenant-colonel in the paratroopers, Chavez gained an influence out of all proportion to his military rank during his stint as an instructor in the Military Academy of Venezuela. It is there that he refined his left-nationalist 8220;Bolivarian8221; ideology. It was from his post in the military academy that Chavez launched the failed coup of February 1992, which made him a national and regional celebrity.

During his presidency, Chavez has snapped the traditional military ties between Venezuela and the US, not least by shifting arms purchases to Brazilian, Chinese, Russian and Spanish companies. He has also launched a 8216;citizens8217; militia8217; under a programme called Mission Miranda. Whether the Venezuelan military will be willing to live with a partisan militia of 1.5 million armed persons could turn out to be a crucial political question for the future.

Easily the most spectacular aspect of Chavez8217;s presidency has been his foreign policy. Venezuela8217;s outspoken anti-US, anti-hegemony, anti-globalisation stance has won many supporters and admirers across the world. Chavez is helped, of course, by Venezuela8217;s petro-power. With proven oil reserves of 75 billion bbl and natural gas reserves of 4.191 trillion cu, Venezuela is able to punch well above its weight class in world politics.

Nevertheless, it is important to keep Venezuela8217;s global and regional influence in perspective. A country of 25 million people cannot, by itself, contest the huge preponderance in capabilities that is the backbone of US hegemony. A critical element in Venezuela8217;s foreign policy in recent years has therefore been to construct anti-US coalitions.

At the global level, Chavez has sought allies far and wide, ranging from Hu Jintao in China to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. Within the western hemisphere, Chavez has built strong links with a host of leftist and left-leaning leaders: Cuba8217;s Fidel Castro, Bolivia8217;s Evo Morales, Argentina8217;s Nestor Kirchner, Brazil8217;s Lula de Silva and, now, Nicaragua8217;s Daniel Ortega are the most prominent members of a growing club.

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As Latin America approaches a post-Fidel future, it is tempting for many to believe that Chavez will fill those mythically large boots. The reality is rather different. The only credible challenger to US hegemony in the western hemisphere for the last several years has been Brazil. The basic question is a simple one: will there be one regional integration process in the Americas or two? As Brazil slowly builds its capabilities to emerge as the first great power from the southern hemisphere, it also emerges, self-evidently, as the only country that has the heft to challenge the inevitability of a Washington-driven Free Trade Area of the Americas FTAA.

Thus, Chavez8217;s biggest challenge isn8217;t external. It8217;s domestic. What is he going to do with his massive electoral mandate? Is he going to further amend the constitution, as many observers suspect, to ensure that he can have another run for the presidency in 2012? Chavez has been clubbed with Fidel and compared with Lula. He actually reminds one of another not-so-forgotten Latin American caudillo, Argentina8217;s Juan Domingo Peron.

The parallels are eerily similar. Peron was a charismatic colonel who came to public attention through a military coup, but quickly consolidated his political power to handsomely win a democratic election. He built his own personal power base around a military-labour alliance. He aggressively promoted his own labour confederation. He used Argentina8217;s windfall agrarian export earnings during the Second World War to buy and build domestic and foreign support. He vocally and publicly took on the US. He amended the constitution to stay in power democratically. He launched his own ideology 8212; Justicialism 8212; and promoted it using all the instruments of state power that he single-handedly controlled. And although he was democratically elected and enjoyed massive popular support, his inability to tolerate dissent led Peron to set up the apparatus of a police state.

Therein lies the authoritarian temptation that could also spell Chavez8217;s doom in the coming years. Ultimately, Peron8217;s megalomania was his undoing. The Argentine military could not countenance the establishment of a partisan militia as a rival armed force. When Peron decided to take on the influence of the Catholic Church, the final nail in the coffin of his regime was hammered in. Chavez is perhaps lucky in that respect 8212; there is no Venezuelan Evita.

The writer teaches international politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University