Tag Archives: Jackson Diehl

Feb
21
2012
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ICYMI: Chavez faces an Uprising at the Ballot Box

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez faces an uprising at the ballot box
The Washington Post
By Jackson Diehl
February 19, 2011

On Feb. 12, Henrique Capriles Radonski, a 39-year-old Venezuelan state governor, won a primary election to become the opposition’s candidate against Hugo Chavez in October’s presidential election. He won 1.8 million of an astonishing 3 million votes – double the turnout predicted by most analysts.

The next day, Capriles, a devout Catholic, was greeted by a commentary on the government-run Web site of Venezuelan National Radio titled “The Enemy Is Zionism.” Capriles, it explained, is the descendant of Jews. (In fact, his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor who emigrated from Poland to Venezuela.)

“In order to understand the interests embodied” by Capriles, the commentary declared, “it’s important to know what is Zionism, the Israeli ideology that he sneakily represents. . . . It is, without doubt, an ideology of terror, of the most putrefied sentiments of humanity; its supposedly patriotic impetus is based in greed.” And so on.

“Zionism,” it concludes, “is owner of the majority of the financial institutions of the planet, controls almost 80 percent of the world economy and virtually all of the communications industry, in addition to maintaining decision-making positions within the U.S. Department of State and European powers.”

Thus began the latest – and what will surely be the ugliest – political campaign by Chavez, a ruler who has served as a friend in need to Moammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – and who now is facing his own homegrown democratic uprising. But Venezuela’s spring differs from those of Libya, Syria or Iran: Instead of pouring into the streets, Venezuelans – fed up with the chaos and violence of Chavez’s 13 years in power – are marching to the polls and trying to restore the country’s crippled and compromised institutions.

The opposition Capriles now heads has learned lessons that might benefit some of the revolutionaries of the Middle East. It tried and failed to oust Chavez with mass demonstrations and strikes; it foolishly boycotted elections it believed would be unfair; it indulged in endless internal quarrels. The result was the entrenchment of a strongman who has thoroughly wrecked what was once Latin America’s richest country and who now presides over the highest inflation and murder rates in the Western Hemisphere, shortages of basic goods and power, and a drug-trafficking industry whose kingpins include the defense minister.

Click here to read more.

 
Oct
31
2011
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ICYMI: Obama’s policy on Venezuela leaves Chavez’s victims paying price

Obama’s policy on Venezuela leaves Chavez’s victims paying price

The Washington Post
October 30, 2011
By Jackson Diehl

In May 2010, Nelson Mezerhane got the phone call that made him realize he could never return to Venezuela. The then-67-year-old businessman, a co-owner of Globovision, the country’s only independent television network, was in Boca Raton, Fla., where he had taken his family out of concern for their security.

The call was from Hugo Chavez. “Where are you? When are you coming back?” the caudillo began, according to an account Mezerhane gave me. Then Chavez got down to business: “I need for you to fix this Globovision. This cannot go on like this. Fix it or take the consequences.”

For nearly six years Mezerhane and his business partner had been under intense pressure to stifle Globovision’s critical coverage of Chavez, or else sell the network. Mezerhane had been imprisoned on bogus charges – the prosecutor who brought them said so before fleeing Venezuela – and he had been publicly accused of everything from plotting to assassinate the president with an F-16 warplane to working for the CIA. But Mezerhane refused to buckle. “Shut it down,” he challenged Chavez over the phone.

Chavez did not do that: His closure of another independent TV station had triggered a huge domestic and international backlash. But a couple of weeks later, his security forces raided and seized Mezerhane’s bank; in August 2010, they invaded his home. That same month, Mezerhane, like thousands of other Venezuelans fleeing the Chavez regime, filed an asylum request in Miami with the Citizenship and Immigration Services office of the Department of Homeland Security. And there our story begins.

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May
28
2010
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Hugo Chávez’s implosion continues in Venezuela

The Washington Posts’s Jackson Diehl just published a must-read column in which he proves with numbers and bullet-proof arguments that the “the implosion of Chavez’s self-styled “Bolivarian socialism” is accelerating”.

In his piece, “Hugo Chavez’s implosion continues in Venezuela”, Diehl writes:

“Figures reported Tuesday by the Chavez-controlled central bank portrayed an economy that is completely out of sync with the rest of the region — and perhaps unique in the world in the degree of its current distress. Gross national product fell by 5.8 percent in the first quarter, while inflation remained at 30 percent. Private investment plummeted by 27.9 percent as capital continued to flee the country.

Private economists suspect the economic contraction is even worse than what the official figures concede. But let’s assume they are correct. Venezuela’s crash compares with quarterly growth rates of 8 percent in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. It comfortably exceeds the collapse of Greece, which contracted by 3 percent in the first quarter.

Inflation in Caracas is triple the next highest rate in Latin America (Argentina) and is more than double that of the next worst economy (Pakistan) among the 56 tracked by the Economist’s website. Even Zimbabwe, which used to be considered the world’s economic basket case, looks good compared to Venezuela: it is expecting 6 percent growth this year, while inflation is under 5 percent.

In short, economic recovery is taking hold across the world — except in Chavez’s Venezuela.

When I pointed out back in January that Chavez’s revolution was collapsing, a chorus of left-wing bloggers rose up in protest.

The extremists among them claim that Venezuela is actually doing better than the rest of the world, because (loony version) Chavez is destroying evil capitalism or because (slightly less loony version) Venezuela’s implosion is irrelevant to the rest of the region.”

You can read here the entire piece.

Related columns:

Peter M. Burelli on Jackson’s Diehl column (PMBComments, May 27, 2010)

Hugo Chávez’s revolution crumbled (Jackson Diehl, Washington Post, January 25, 2010)