"Dictator" Chavez?

I’m not a big fan of Hugo Chavez, I think he’s an ignorant goon, but he was elected by an *overwhelming* majority of the vote in elections that were judged free and democratic by impartial third-party observer. Polls of the general Venezuelan population by impartial U.S. polling organizations (as vs. local polling organizations owned by the Venezuelan equivalent of the neo-cons, the former ruling class pissed that a “peasant” got elected instead of one of their own) find that his support is still well over 60%. Calling him a "dictator" is like calling Jack Daniels “soda water” — it just ain’t correct. Not that this will stop the wealthy elite who run the American press from calling Chavez a "dictator", of course. They're upset that their counterparts in Venezuela are no longer allowed to run the place. "Mob rule" (i.e., rule by the majority) is abhorent to them, and thus all the anti-democratic rhetoric regarding Venezuela coming out of the American press, which might as well be the Soviet press insofar as its "reporting" goes.

In the end, Chavez is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is a diseased U.S. foreign policy which supports true dictatorial regimes such as the white-skinned former ruling class in Venezuela (which disenfranchised the dark-skinned majority and ran the place as their own personal banana republic) because they’re “pro-American”, and opposes any attempts at democracy in “sensitive” locations like Venezuela because “they might elect a government hostile to America”. When you do this, you *guarantee* that when the people eventually *do* get to vote for the President of their choice, they’re going to vote for someone anti-American. If we had a sane foreign policy, Chavez would just be a disgraced former army sergeant bitterly eking out a living on a tiny subsistence farm on the edge of the jungle. We made Chavez, in the end, through our own interventionism in Venezuelan affairs.

Oh, and for the hoity-toity effete of the former ruling class upset that they had to wade through a sea of their former slaves to vote in the last election, and their thousands of college-age children "rioting" in the streets (kinda like the College Republicans "rioting") — cry me a river. The Indios of Venezuelan were treated like the blacks of the American South. They were Venezuela’s niggers, disenfranchised, often murdered when they tried to register to vote, and relegated to the worst jobs on the margins of society. They were slaves in all but name. And the United States supported that treatment of them for many decades because the whiter-skinned ruling elite was “pro-American”. So now the white minority population of Venezuela is rioting in the streets because the dark-skinned majority is now taking back some of the nation's wealth that the white population stole over the years? Oh wah! What you dish out is what you get back, in the end. I have no sympathy. None. Zero. Zilch.

-- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin