Sean Penn lamented that he “lost a friend” when Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chávez died yesterday. Sean, you’re not alone: So did the world’s dictators.
Hugo Chávez championed Venezuela’s poor and America’s adversaries – an irresistible combination in the eyes of what’s left of the Cold War left. Chávez , in fact, seemed positively nostalgic for the old East-West conflict.
When democracy spread across Latin America and Cuba looked like a communist relic, Chávez cast himself as Fidel Castro’s understudy and kept his creaking regime afloat with Venezuelan petrodollars. When most of the rest of the world had tossed socialism into history’s dustbin, Chávez proclaimed a “Bolivarian” socialism as he nationalized industries and expropriated assets held by foreign investors.
And it wasn’t just Castro; Chávez made a habit of personally befriending the world’s worst dictators, presumably because they were the enemy of his enemy – the United States. Or maybe he simply admired them for brooking no domestic opposition, while he had to put up with an independent media, elections and the other tedious trappings of democracy. Whatever the reason, it was incongruous to see this self-styled tribune of the people getting chummy with the likes of Saddam Hussein, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and his “brother” Muammar Qaddafi.
The tributes from Chávez’s despotic friends are pouring in. The most bizarre one came fittingly from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who expressed “no doubt that Chávez will return to Earth” on Judgment Day, along with Jesus and Imam Mahdi. Helpfully, he also called Chávez’s death “suspicious,” echoing claims by Chávez’s lackey and successor, Nicolas Maduro, that Washington had given him cancer, and, for good measure, is plotting a coup in Venezuela.
Chávez no doubt has his good points; for a balanced assessment of his long reign, see this piece by Moises Naim. But he was no friend to democracy. While he enjoyed genuine support in Venezuela’s barrios, greased as well with liberal applications of his country’s oil wealth, Chávez took no chances when it came to holding onto power. He muzzled the media, got a docile legislature to approve constitutional changes concentrating power in his hands and banned foreign contributions to human rights and civil society organizations. He tried to sabotage a neighboring democracy, Columbia, by secretly funding the vicious narco-terrorist FARC insurgency.
Chávez undeniably had entertainment value. For some on the left, he was a throwback to the good old days of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-American solidarity. But no real liberal will join the despots in mourning his passing.
