TIGblogs - Dennis Dames

By David Roberts

There's been some perverse wishful thinking floating around in recent weeks on the part of some of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's detractors following his cancer operation in Cuba and ongoing chemotherapy.

Although no one will actually say it, the hope among some of Chávez's fiercest and most passionate critics is clearly that his health problems - he himself has said he's engaged in the fight of his life - will leave him "incapacitated," or even dead, but in either case unable to continue in office.

The idea, however, that Chávez's demise will result in the sudden death of the left-wing/Bolivarian movement he instigated, and which has spread to several other Latin American countries in recent years - including Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador - is naïve to put it mildly.

Of course, Chávez's charisma - along with his petrodollars - has been key to the rise of leftist governments in the region, but that hasn't been the main cause. The polarization of the region has more fundamental roots, such as dissatisfaction with the Washington consensus and liberal capitalism's failure - despite its successes in certain respects - to solve problems of severe poverty and deprivation in Latin America in spite of enjoying years of monopoly following the end of the Cold War. Put simply, too many people were never invited to the party that some have enjoyed in recent years, and have seen, rightly or wrongly, Chávez's ideals as an alternative.

If Chávez were to leave the scene, his leftist allies would certainly suffer in the short term, especially if the new leader in Caracas were from the opposition. In the longer term, however, it is clearly to the benefit of the Bolivarian bloc members to be less dependent on Venezuelan handouts, and to develop better fundamentals to their own economies.

To a certain extent, we've been seeing the waning of Chávez's influence in the region anyway in the last year or so, even while he remains in power. Ecuador under President Rafael Correa, for example, has broken ranks with Chávez on several issues, following a more moderate albeit still left-leaning stance, while some governments that Chávez saw as potential allies, such as Fernando Lugo's Paraguay and El Salvador under Mauricio Funes, went their own way. And that's not to mention the ousting of Chávez ally Manuel Zelaya in Honduras a couple of years ago.

Perhaps the latest sign of Chávez's diminishing clout is the ending of the "Evo checks" scheme under which Caracas donated funds to Bolivia and its president, Evo Morales, personally handed out checks to municipal governments, supposedly to develop infrastructure and other projects. Those petrodollars are apparently not so easily dispensable now that Venezuela is facing severe economic problems of its own, and that's with oil still at close to US$100 a barrel.

So love him or loathe him, the big question now is will Hugo Chávez be fit enough to run for a third term in next year's elections? We will of course have to wait and see, but it's at the ballot box that his opponents should be thinking of beating him, and not by even furtively wishing him the worst of health. A word of advice to the detractors - don't write him off just yet.

bnamericas

Caribbean Blog International

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