In four successful elections, the lowest majority Chavez ever got was 54 percent.
by Jim Foulds
In early March Stephen Harper used Hugo Chavez’s death as an opportunity to preach about democracy to Venezuelans. Talk about faceplanting your big mouth in a cow pasture! Harper should have checked with Latinobarometro. Latin America’s largest polling firm found that 84 percent of Venezuelans viewed their democracy positively. Venezuela’s last voter turnout at 81 percent puts Canada and the US to shame.
Hugo Chavez was not perfect. Who is? Always controversial, he made two international mis-steps. His enmity for the USA unwisely drove him to align himself with unsavoury pariahs like Muammar Ghaddafi of Lybia and Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Pretending he smelled the Devil’s sulphur after George Bush spoke at the UN was an imaginative jab, but it distracted from his legitimate complaints about US interference in Latin American affairs.
Chavez was good at understanding the plight of the poor and put eradicating poverty at the heart of his political agenda.
But what Hugo Chavez was good at, transcended all his faults. He was good at understanding the plight of the poor. He put eradicating poverty at the heart of his political agenda. He tackled homelessness with housing, put $300 billion into improving literacy and education, paid wages to100,000 stay-at-home moms, and established a universal health care system. He cut Venezuela’s poverty rate by 50 percent, decreased infant malnutrition by 74 percent and infant mortality by 49 percent. In spite of these expenditures, public debt fell from 45 percent to 20 percent of GDP. For this he got his country’s thanks and deserves the world’s.
He has another lasting legacy. He used Venezuela’s oil to help other South American and Caribbean countries reduce their poverty. Chavez’s leadership showed that the economies of Latin American countries could be for Latin Americans – that they need not be neo-conservative economic colonies of the United States.
For that, even a moderate US President like Obama could not forgive him. Nor could a US sycophant like Harper.
Chavez’s opponents’ claim he tried to establish a dictatorship. The evidence doesn’t support that. In four successful elections, his lowest popular vote was 54 percent. (Harper got a majority with slightly less than 40 percent.) As well, Chavez developed a constitution – ratified in a nation-wide referendum – that insisted that an election take place after the death of a president. There would be no passing of the torch to a brother, son, or hand-picked successor. In this case the transition of power will take place quickly and efficiently before the end of April — an election, voter participation, and a peaceful transition of power. That looks, sounds and acts like a democracy to me.
In four successful elections, Chavez’s lowest popular vote was 54 percent, compared to Harper’s high mark of less than 40 percent. And let’s look at Stephen Harper’s idea of democracy.
Former US President Jimmy Carter, said of the Venezuelan 2012 election. "There’s no doubt in our mind… [Chavez] won fairly and squarely… of the 92 elections we (the Carter Center for Monitoring Elections) have monitored… the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world."
Now let’s look at Stephen Harper’s idea of democracy. He campaigned on making the unelected, undemocratic Senate "equal, elected, and effective." Six years later, he has stuffed it with Conservative hacks like Patrick Brazeau, Mike Duffy, and Pamela Wallin – who have used their privileged positions to rip off the public. A welfare mom in parallel circumstances would have found herself in court on fraud charges. The senators merely had to repay what they "overcharged."
Harper shut down parliament twice and routinely buries deeply divisive legislation in omnibus budget bills — one had 68 laws — making them virtually impossible to debate, amend, or defeat.
Pretending to be from Elections Canada, Harper’s party engaged in robo-calls, that deliberately directed opponents’ voters to the wrong polling stations. His party has been fined $52,000 for breaking election laws, and recently one of his cabinet ministers, Peter Penashue, resigned after accepting illegal campaign donations.
The Harperrites cut off dissenting voices at every turn. They can’t have science showing that industrial pollution could contribute to climate change. So, they silence government scientists, close down the Experimental Lakes Area and throw away decades of research and data. They cancel the long form census, so there’ll be fewer statistics to show the government’s policies aren’t working. They try to hamstring the auditor-general and to emasculate the parliamentary budget officer, whose work might embarrass them. Oh, I almost forgot the excessive police suppression of protestors at the G20 and G8 summit.
That is Harper’s democracy. He talks the talk, but doesn’t walk its difficult path.
Yes, Hugo Chavez may have been pugnacious and bombastic, but I’ll take his strides towards democracy any day over Stephen Harper’s stealthy steps in the other direction. Any old day.
© Copyright 2013 J F Foulds, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca
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