[NYTr] The Washington Post's War on Hugo Chavez

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

excerpted from VIO Venezuela News Roundup - Aug. 7, 2006

Summary: 

Over the weekend the Washington Post ran a slew of one-sided opinion pieces
that espoused an overly negative and biased view of President Chavez and
Venezuela.  Considering that Chavez continues to be supported by the
majority of the population it is disturbing that the Post would publish a
series of four articles highlighting the minority opposition view without
adding at least one voice that represents the majority.  The overarching
themes that run throughout the Post's Outlook section suggests that 1)
President Chavez is anti-American, 2) Venezuela is only relevant because of
its use of oil (which is largely misused), 3) President Chavez has taken
control of the judicial and electoral system, and 4) the government is
corrupt.  Recent polls conducted by independent and opposition polling firms
dispell a few of those allegations.  According to the Chilean polling firm,
Latinobarometro, most Venezuelans feel that their country is democratic and
that corruption is being fought against. In fact, Venezuela ranks third
among countries that believe that things have improved in the last two
years.  This may be because Venezuela's electoral system is one of the most
transparent in the world. Its use of electronic voting machines that emit a
paper and electronic trail guarantee a level of security that even most
states in the US lack. Moreover, the National Electoral council (a
bi-partisan body tasked with carrying out elections) will again host
international election observers and perform an audit on more than 50% of
this year's presidential votes.


Washington Post - August 7, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/06/AR2006080600840.html

Chavez's War of Words

By Jackson Diehl

Last week Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held a news conference at
which he launched into a vitriolic denunciation of Israel, "the usurper
Zionist regime," for its bombing of civilians in Lebanon. For a politician
who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and called for Israel's extinction,
it was pretty routine stuff.

Then the visiting head of state standing next to Ahmadinejad piped up. "Do
they want war because they have the devil inside them?" demanded Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez, speaking of the Jewish state. "I say to them from
here, from Iran, once and a thousand times: Murderers! Cowards! Frankly,
their fate has been sealed, from the depths of the people's soul."

No wonder Ahmadinejad had just described Chavez as a "brother and trench
mate." But the Venezuelan wasn't finished. Israel's acts, he said, reminded
him of a time when Simon Bolivar had invoked the story of Cain and Abel to
talk about an enemy. "Bolivar said that day: 'God, if you have justice,
throw a lightning bolt at the monsters,' " Chavez pronounced. "I would say
today: 'God, throw the lightning bolts at the monsters.' Inshallah."

According to BBC Monitoring, Chavez won a round of applause from his Iranian
friends. Curiously, though, his tirade got almost no attention outside
Tehran. In a week during which a movie star was pilloried for a somewhat
milder anti-Semitic outburst (and Mel Gibson at least could say he was
drunk), no one seemed to care about the hate speech of the president of a
large South American country and one of the world's biggest oil exporters --
a man who has been conducting a frenetic campaign to win his government a
two-year term on the United Nations Security Council.

In fact, Chavez's performance was in keeping with the character of an
eight-nation tour that took him from Argentina to Benin. But Israel was not
his main concern. At each stop, the self-styled "Bolivarian revolutionary"
delivered superheated denunciations of the United States and called for a
global coalition to combat "the U.S. imperialist monster."

In Minsk, where he met Belarusan President Alexander Lukashenko, commonly
known as "Europe's last dictator," Chavez said the United States is "a
senseless, blind, stupid giant that understands nothing about human rights,
humaneness, culture, consciousness and awareness."

In Moscow, where he signed a contract for a $1 billion purchase of advanced
SU-30 fighter planes, raising Venezuela's arms buys from Russia to $3
billion in the past 18 months, Chavez said that "the biggest threat in the
world is the U.S. empire." In Hanoi he discoursed at length on the
"pre-animal" depredations of the U.S. military, including the bombing of
Japanese cities in World War II. Then he praised the Vietnamese for their
defeat of "the monster," while warning it "will never give up its plot to
stop and undermine us."

Chavez's next-to-last stop was the poor African country of Mali, where
"imperialism" usually means France, the country's former colonial master.
Never mind: "We must unite, we countries of the South, against the hegemony
of the United States," proclaimed the unlikely visitor to Bamako. "Or we
will all die."

What to make of all this? One easy explanation is that Chavez has come
unhinged, and his hatred of the United States -- not to mention Jews -- is
pathological. But I find another theory more persuasive: Chavez is betting
that resentment and anger toward the United States has become so entrenched
around the world that by becoming its champion he can make himself a global
leader. First, in his reckoning, Venezuela will brush aside Russia and
France to lead the opposition to U.S. initiatives at the United Nations.
Then, who knows?

This offers an interesting test of just how far other countries are now
willing to go in challenging the U.S. global role. The answer is: not too
far, if Chavez is the alternative. In Argentina, South American governments
swiftly rejected his suggestion of a joint military force. In Belarus, he
got a bear hug from Lukashenko, a diplomatic pariah; but Vietnam's top
leaders, who are hoping to host President Bush in November, appeared
embarrassed by Chavez's rhetoric, which they pointedly did not second.

In Moscow, Chavez's attempt to score a hug was icily evaded by Vladimir
Putin, who, as the Russian newspaper Kommersant sarcastically described it,
literally held the Venezuelan at arm's length. Having pocketed Chavez's cash
and listened to his rant, Putin responded with a single sentence: "The
cooperation between Russia and Venezuela isn't aimed against anyone."

It remains to be seen whether Chavez will get his Security Council seat in a
vote by the General Assembly in October; thanks to some inept diplomacy by
the Bush administration, he just might. But Bush at least managed to win
last week's war of words. Asked by a Fox television interviewer if Chavez
posed a threat to the United States, Bush responded with the cruelest cut
possible for the Bolivarian: "No, I don't view him as a threat."

Neither, it seems, does anyone else.

                                      ***

Washington Post-Outlook - Aug 6, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/04/AR2006080401768.html

The End of Chavez: History's Against Him

By Francis Fukuyama

CARACAS, Venezuela--Early on in Hugo Chavez's political career, the
Venezuelan president attacked my notion that liberal democracy together with
a market economy represents the ultimate evolutionary direction for modern
societies -- the "end of history." When asked what lay beyond the end of
history, he offered a one-word reply: "Chavismo."

The idea that contemporary Venezuela represents a social model superior to
liberal democracy is absurd. In his eight years as president, Chavez has
capitalized on his country's oil wealth to take control of congress, the
courts, trade unions, electoral commissions and the state oil company.
Proposed legislation that would limit foreign funding could soon constrain
nongovernmental organizations as well. And people who signed a recall
petition against Chavez in the run-up to a 2004 referendum on his rule later
found their names posted on the Web site of a pro-Chavez legislator; if they
worked for the government or wanted to do business with it, they were out of
a job and out of luck.

Chavez's success in attracting attention -- cozying up to Fidel Castro's
Cuba, signing an arms deal with Russia, visiting Iran and incessantly
criticizing the United States -- has popularized the notion that Chavismo
embodies a new future for Latin America. By preserving some freedoms,
including a relatively free press and pseudo-democratic elections, Chavez
has developed what some observers call a postmodern dictatorship, neither
fully democratic nor fully totalitarian, a left-wing hybrid that enjoys a
legitimacy never reached in Castro's Cuba or in the Soviet Union.

Latin America has indeed witnessed a turn to this postmodern left in some
countries, including in Bolivia, where Evo Morales, Chavez's kindred spirit,
won the presidency last year. Nonetheless, the dominant trends in the
hemisphere are largely positive: Democracy is strengthening and the
political and economic reforms now being undertaken augur well for the
future. Venezuela is not a model for the region; rather, its path is unique,
the product of a natural resource curse that makes it more comparable to
Iran or Russia than any of its Latin American neighbors. Chavismo is not
Latin America's future -- if anything, it is its past.

How did Venezuela end up at such a pass? The answer is oil, oil, oil.

The country's modern political order was negotiated in a Miami hotel room in
1958 by leaders of its two traditional political parties; the resulting pact
created a viable democracy that provided stability for four decades. But
stable politics did not make for sound economics. With the growth of oil
revenue through the 1970s, Venezuela was relieved of the need to create a
modern non-oil economy. Commodities that the country once exported -- such
as coffee and sugar -- soon withered. And rather than foster social mobility
or strong public institutions, the two political parties bought social peace
by distributing oil rents through subsidies, government jobs and patronage.

Venezuela did not suffer the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, a
trauma that in many ways inoculated countries such as Brazil, Mexico and
Peru from relapsing into the worst forms of economic populism. Instead,
Venezuela experienced a disastrous decline in living standards as oil prices
fell during the 1980s. The country had never been part of the global economy
-- aside from the energy sector -- and had no competitive industries to fall
back on. Chavez and others on the left blame Venezuela's problems on
globalization and "neoliberal" economic policies, but with the brief
exception of the opening attempted by President Carlos Andres Perez in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, the country never truly sought to globalize its
economy.

There is more continuity between the pre-Chavez and Chavez eras than
proponents of either would like to admit. The recent rise in oil prices has
again exempted Venezuela from the laws of economics. The Chavez government
has imposed a blizzard of regulations controlling the exchange of currency,
setting prices, limiting the ability of employers to hire and fire, and
mandating trade and investment deals based on political considerations --
all of which further undermine Venezuela's weak private sector. Yet, because
of its hefty oil revenue, Venezuela's economy has grown sharply over the
past two years. The irrationality of Chavistanomics will not be felt until
oil prices fall.

Venezuela's peculiar history shows why Chavez does not represent the
region's future. Countries such as Brazil, Mexico and Peru, lacking
Venezuela's oil resources, know that they cannot get away with such
dysfunctional policies; they experimented with them and were burned. It is
no accident that postmodern authoritarianism is most successful in oil-rich
countries such as Iran, Russia and Venezuela. While Bolivia's Morales
aspires to be another Chavez, it will soon dawn on him that his country's
natural gas is not a fungible commodity like Venezuelan crude oil. Morales's
only real customer is Brazil, which he has already alienated through his
nationalization of the heavily Brazilian foreign energy investments.

The dominant political forces in Latin America, while bringing to power a
new generation of politicians on the left, run counter to those in
Venezuela. Central banks and finance ministries throughout the region are
much more capable than in the past of maintaining sound monetary and fiscal
policies, and even left-leaning presidents such as Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula
da Silva and Argentina's Nestor Kirchner are not inclined to stray far from
economic orthodoxy.

In contrast to Chavez's politicization of Venezuela's institutions, Mexico
has made its Supreme Court and Federal Electoral Institute politically
independent. Brazil and Colombia have increased the autonomy of local
governments, permitting experiments in budgeting and education; and Brazil
and Mexico have undertaken programs to increase the incomes of the poor
while giving them incentives to keep children in school.

There are already signs of an anti-Chavez backlash. While the Venezuelan
president rails at U.S. interference in Latin politics, he has tried to
promote populist allies such as Ollanta Humala of Peru and Andres Manuel
Lopez Obrador of Mexico. Venezuela's neighbors resent this, and have
punished the Chavista candidates at the polls. Indeed, Chavez may well have
cost Lopez Obrador the Mexican presidency, since the number of votes the
latter lost because of dislike of Venezuelan interference probably exceeded
the small margin by which he lost the election.

Chavez's popularity among Venezuela's poor is based on his social policies.
He has begun innovative initiatives, such as a network of health clinics in
low-income neighborhoods, where Cuban doctors treat the poor. He has created
subsidized food outlets that equalize the prices paid by rich and poor. And
he has attempted to distribute land to peasants. Some of these policies,
such as the clinics, meet pressing social needs and should have been
undertaken long ago; others, such as the food subsidies, will be hard to
sustain absent high oil prices.

A response to Chavismo must recognize that populism is driven by real social
inequalities. Proponents of economic and political liberty in Latin America
are often suspicious of grand social-policy experiments, perceiving them as
a road to bloated welfare states and economic inefficiency. But free trade
alone is unlikely to satisfy the demands of the poor, and democratic
politicians must offer realistic social policies to compete.

Social policy is, unfortunately, difficult to get right: Unless it creates
incentives for the poor to help themselves, it can become an entitlement
that breeds dependence and out-of-control fiscal deficits. In Brazil, Lula's
government took over a program of income transfers to the poor but in the
process weakened enforcement procedures obliging parents to keep their
children in school. And market policies are no panacea: Even Chile, which
has extensive high-quality private education, saw huge student protests this
spring because of the low quality of its publicly funded schools.

Democratic governments in Latin America must also work patiently at
enhancing the quality of their public institutions -- improving simple
things such as issuing business licenses, enforcing property claims and
controlling crime. There is no cookie-cutter solution; it often requires
local-level experiments, such as the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre's
"participatory budgeting" initiative from the early 1990s, which opened the
budget process to civil-society groups and forced politicians to show where
the money was going. Bad public administration saps economic growth and
delegitimizes democratic institutions, paving the way for violent swings and
backlash.

Last December, a bridge on the road connecting the Venezuelan capital to its
international airport collapsed, diverting traffic into the mountains and
stretching a 45-minute journey into one lasting several hours. A two-lane
emergency highway now bears this traffic; renovation of the bridge is still
months away. The bridge epitomizes what is happening to Venezuela today: As
Chavez jets to Minsk, Moscow and Tehran in search of influence and prestige,
the country's infrastructure is collapsing.

The postmodern authoritarianism of Chavez's Venezuela is durable only while
oil prices remain high. Yet it presents a distinct challenge from that of
totalitarianism because it allows for democratic choice and caters to real
social needs. At a recent conference of business leaders here, I witnessed
many speakers openly criticize Chavez; their remarks were cited in the
mainstream media. There is no police state in Venezuela -- at least not yet.

Chavismo remains a threat. But it need not embody Latin America's future,
not if the region's democrats can reduce economic inequities through
innovative social policy and nimble public institutions. Of course, such
developments would not mark the end of history. Just the end of Chavismo.

[Francis Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at the
School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.]

                                   ***

Washington Post-Outlook - August 6, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/04/AR2006080401767.html

Hugo Chavez: the Next Castro?

By Ibsen Martinez

CARACAS, Venezuela--The democratic opposition in Cuba and abroad looks to
the island's new day, without Fidel Castro at the helm, as a moment of
transition. But Castro and his regime's apparatchiks refer instead to a
"succession," as though living in a monarchy. Nearly 200 years after Latin
American nations began winning independence from imperial Spain, and on a
continent that has produced so many wondrous novels about deteriorating
despots succumbing to the perils of absolute power, it seems we still can't
let go of our kings.

The only problem with succession planning, of course, is that dead dictators
can rarely stick around to supervise their elaborate designs. Today, things
in Havana seem to be developing much as the ailing Castro desires, with
younger brother Ra=FAl assuming control. Nevertheless, the Shakespearean
logic of royal successions suggests that more than one duke of Gloucester
will try to crown himself Richard III. The extraordinary difference in this
case is that not all the dukes vying to succeed Castro can be found in Cuba.
To the south, across the Caribbean, another duke has emerged: Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez.

Indeed, Chavez is the piper leading the most strident anti-Americanism to
parade through Latin America since the Bay of Pigs invasion, and his ascent
has done much to shape the popular belief that radical left-wing governments
modeled after his own will soon dominate the region. But does Chavez really
have what it takes to assume Castro's place as the leader of Latin American
anti-imperialism? Will he become a permanent pebble in Washington's shoe, as
persistent and vexing as Castro, for decades to come?

Certainly, Chavez seems to believe so. However, he is missing much more than
the charisma of the receding Cuban leader. He lacks the essential ingredient
to take Fidel's place: legitimacy. Castro, for all his faults, earned his
anti-American and anti-imperialist stripes. Chavez, awash in petrodollars,
is too embedded in the very global system he purports to reject.

Castro sets a high bar for any regional successor, all the more evident now
at the moment of his political death.

Consider his superlative permanence in power: 47 years. That is 17 more
years than Mexico's Porfirio Diaz, 12 more than Paraguay's Alfredo
Stroessner and 11 more than Spain's Francisco Franco. Even North Korea's Kim
Il Sung -- the gold standard of aged despots -- totaled only 46 years in
power. To match Castro, Chavez would have to remain in office, without
interruption, until 2045, past his 90th birthday.

Such prolonged rule is possible only in a totalitarian dictatorship that
leaves no space for dissent. In Castro's case, the Cold War helped him win
absolute control over Cuban society. With a powerful and ever-present enemy
so close, Castro could always manipulate the fear of an imminent invasion to
militarize Cuban life. Any opposition was more than political -- it was
treasonous. Castro thus governed unencumbered by domestic adversaries.

Chavez, by contrast, lives in a post-Cold War world, his conspiracy theories
about the CIA notwithstanding. And in an era of democratic consolidation in
Latin America, he has much less room to suppress the opposition at home, no
matter how hard he may try.

Despite Castro's unquestioned power base, however, his capacity to disrupt
his Latin neighbors, or even to predispose them against los Yanquis , has
long been overestimated by his sympathizers, including Chavez. Castro's
anti-American credentials date to the 1960s, when the Cuban revolution,
still imbued with childlike optimism, openly backed leftist guerrilla
movements emerging throughout the continent. But one by one, they failed.
Indeed, the dictator's supporting role in the Soviet Union's military
adventures in Africa during the 1980s came about only after his efforts to
spark uprisings closer to home faltered -- a sort of revolutionary
diversification strategy. Despite much rhetoric to the contrary, "exporting
the revolution" ceased to be a priority for Castro long ago. After the
Soviet collapse, survival became more important.

His regional appeal lingered, but in a half-hearted, nostalgic kind of way.
Since the late 1980s, Castro has always been the star attraction at the
inaugurations of democratically elected presidents throughout Latin America.
His presence was a cheap and harmless way for other Latin American leaders
to display a modicum of independence from the United States. Yet, as soon as
the crazy uncle boarded his flight back to Havana, his erstwhile hosts
quickly adopted the pro-market economic policies pushed by Washington and
the International Monetary Fund. Castro -- whether wiser or simply older, or
both -- looked the other way.

Chavez seems not to understand this hypocritical undertone to our region's
anti-Americanism. Recall the Summit of the Americas last November in Mar del
Plata, Argentina, where he proclaimed the death of the Free Trade Area of
the Americas, a long moribund initiative begun by President George H.W.
Bush. Though Chavez garnered great press -- not to mention fun photo ops
with Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona -- many of the Latin American
governments that he aspires to lead on his anti-imperialist crusade
preferred to keep quietly negotiating trade preferences with the United
States.

The rest of the region seems to have internalized the key historical lesson
of our long and contradictory relationship with the United States: One
rarely crosses Washington without eventually suffering the consequences.
Porfirio Diaz's oft-quoted comment "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so
close to the United States" applies to Latin America as a whole. Chavez may
seek to lead, but few may opt to follow.

In two centuries of U.S.-Latin American cohabitation on this continent, few
leaders have been as consistent champions of anti-Americanism as Castro. His
charisma, at home and abroad, surely played a role. But the longtime U.S.
trade embargo against the impoverished island also gave Castro the political
and (paradoxically) moral legitimacy of a proud Caribbean David standing up
to the menacing northern Goliath. Poverty, in a perverse way, legitimizes
anti-imperialism and its modern-day variants, anti-Americanism and
anti-globalism. It also helps explain why even Castro's bitter enemies
recognize and respect his unbreakable attitude -- one that is the basis of
the feelings he inspires among many of the region's residents.

Chavez, to put it mildly, does not inspire such emotions. Despite his
integrationist rhetoric and efforts to buy allies (such as by acquiring big
chunks of Argentine debt), he has become a divisive force, succeeding only
in winning new enemies -- or at least losing friends -- throughout Latin
America. His ties with fellow lefty head of state Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
of Brazil deteriorated severely, for example, after Chavez encouraged
Bolivian President Evo Morales to nationalize energy holdings, thus
jeopardizing the investments of Brazil's state-owned oil company in Bolivia.
True to himself, Chavez probably will make the mistake of seeking to broker,
in his antagonistic and backhanded way, the coming internal battles in Cuba.

Chavez has also heaped scorn upon Latin American governments that seek to
improve their citizens' economic prospects by quietly negotiating free-trade
agreements with Washington. Yet Venezuela's president enjoys the benefits of
his own informal trade agreement with the United States; after all,
Venezuela is one of the most dependable oil suppliers to the United States.
In the first five months of 2006 alone, Venezuela exported nearly 1.2
million barrels of crude oil per day to the United States, putting it in
fourth place after Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. With a wallet full of
petrodollars, Chavez can fund an arms buildup and social programs at home
while trying to export his Bolivarian ideals throughout the region.

Unlike Castro, Chavez has found the profitable path to anti-imperialism. But
it is a devil's bargain for Chavez, because such riches only erode the
legitimacy he needs to lead a crusade against Washington. For how can you
claim the anti-American and anti-globalization mantle when you so obviously
benefit from both America and globalization? Chavez's Venezuela feels less
vanguard than throwback -- the textbook case of a populist Latin American
petrostate degenerating into an illiberal democracy, militarist as well as
corrupt.

Absent Fidel, it is reasonable to expect that other leaders in the region
may also aspire to become the new voice of whatever latent opposition to the
United States remains. Chavez has neither the temperament nor the skill to
beat out Lula, or Peru's Alan Garcia, or even Mexico's conservative Felipe
Calderon -- why not? -- for that role.

As quaint or misguided as it may sound today, true anti-imperialist
leadership in Latin America still requires old-fashioned guts and
commitment. Much of the mythology surrounding Latin America's crusader par
excellence, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, resides in the fact that, even through
the manner of his death, he stuck to his guns. Castro, also true to his
rhetoric, nationalized the Standard Oil affiliate in Cuba after the Bay of
Pigs fiasco and stood up to the U.S. embargo for decades. But Chavez, his
anti-American bluster notwithstanding, is still dealing with the Chevron
Corporation.

[Ibsen Martinez, a playwright and novelist, is a columnist for the
Venezuelan daily El Nacional.

***

Washington Post - August 6, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/04/AR2006080401747.html

Danger, Danger, George Bush

Compiled by Rachel Dry

President Bush said last week that Hugo Chavez does not pose a military
threat to the United States, but that doesn't mean the Venezuelan president
hasn't lobbed his share of fighting words in Washington's direction.

Chavez favors Hitler analogies when describing Bush -- or "Mr. Danger," as
Chavez has dubbed him -- and has offered literacy lessons to Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice. Perhaps operating under the sticks-and-stones school
of diplomacy, the State Department hasn't generally responded to the
insults, though Rice, in congressional testimony last February, did describe
Venezuela as "one of the biggest problems" in the Western Hemisphere. If not
the biggest, perhaps the loudest.

"The imperialist, mass-murdering, fascist attitude of the president of the
United States doesn't have limits. I think Hitler could be a nursery baby
next toGeorge W. Bush."-- at a rally in Caracas,

***

Washington Post-Outlook - August 6, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/04/AR2006080401766.html

Washington's Cold War Echoes

By Julia E. Sweig

The journalist Scotty Reston once said that Americans will do anything for
Latin America except read about it. After years of neither reading nor doing
much about the region, Washington is gazing south once more, roused by the
petrodiplomacy and anti-American rhetoric of Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez.

Latin America has long been the road where the United States test-drives its
policies of the moment -- be they wars against communism, drugs or terrorism
-- before taking them global. In particular, Washington has often fixated on
personalities, such as Cuba's Fidel Castro or Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, as
the sources of the region's maladies.

Enter Chavez, Washington's Latin bad guy du jour. By flirting with rogue
regimes from Pyongyang to Tehran, giving Havana an economic and political
boost, and seeking to export his oil-fueled, left-wing "Bolivarian
revolution" throughout the region, Chavez has played into Washington's worst
fears about what happens when its traditional subordinates run loose.

"I view him as a threat of undermining democracy," President Bush said last
week. The U.S. Southern Command in Miami has persuaded the Pentagon to
regard Venezuela as a threat worthy of war planning. Members of Congress
fret openly about what the United States will do if oil supplies from
Venezuela are cut off. And the State Department counterterrorism office is
assessing whether Venezuela is soft on terrorism by selling visas in the
Middle East or providing a haven for the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia.

Yet the prospect of Chavez supplanting the ailing Castro as the new Latin
threat of the post-Cold War world is vastly overblown -- and the notion that
he could drive the rest of the region toward the left is even more so.
Unfortunately, though, the people who still set the tone for Washington's
Latin America policy have barely changed since the Cold War. For most of the
Bush administration, day-to-day affairs of the region have been left to
former staffers from the office of archconservative former senator Jesse
Helms (R-N.C.); architects of the Nicaraguan contra war of the 1980s; Hill
veterans of the Castro's-head-at-any-cost clique; or, because of the Cuban
vote, the White House political machine.

These operatives still rely on their old Cold War Rolodexes to understand
Latin America, without recognizing that the region's address book has
changed. With the military largely confined to the barracks, with polls and
ballots the rule, and with women, Afro-Latinos, indigenous leaders and
former guerrillas now in elected office, the region looks nothing like it
did at the height of the Cold War. Sure, Washington will breathe a
collective groan if Sandinista leader Ortega returns to power in the
Nicaraguan presidential election this year, and Chavez is striving to replay
Castro's old anti-imperialist rhetoric.

But the new generation reaching power today -- including Michelle Bachelet
in Chile, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil,
Evo Morales in Bolivia, Tabare Vazquez in Uruguay and Manuel Zelaya in
Honduras -- reflects not Washington's wishes or nightmares, but the unique
historic, ethnic and class conditions of their countries.

These leaders seek to redress persistent poverty, income inequality, weak
institutions and rampant crime -- the real reasons behind the region's
political polarization and its penchant for populism -- amid fierce
pressures from both global markets and democratic electorates. They are not
cookie-cutter Fidelistas, but neither do they necessarily regard their
interests as wed to those of the United States.

The diversity of views from the region has not been matched by the thinking
in official Washington, which is barely considering the critical questions
it should be asking about Latin America. Why are voters electing a rainbow
of left-leaning heads of state? Beyond oil, threats and political theater,
how should the United States manage its relationship with Venezuela and
Chavez?

And, setting aside the size and shape of a fence that some politicians
fantasize might keep Mexicans away, why do so many Latin American countries
have difficulty creating the social contract -- the jobs, security,
enforceable laws, investment and hope -- that could help keep millions more
of their people gainfully employed at home?

My entrance to this world came in the 1980s during one of Washington's bouts
of interest in the region, when I was among a group of college
undergraduates visiting Cuba for a week. We flew on a charter from a hidden
Miami International Airport terminal, the kind that appears only for
travelers to Cuba and only in the middle of the night. With Secretary of
State Alexander Haig's warnings of Cuba as the source of Communist
instability, the invasion of Grenada and the counterinsurgency wars in El
Salvador and Nicaragua, the island seemed a logical place to discover how it
felt to be under the thumb of the American empire.

We took the standard solidarity tour: cutting sugar cane, visiting clinics
and glimpsing the beginnings of the UNESCO-financed restoration of Old
Havana's colonial architecture. Our hotel, the Riviera -- barely changed
since the 1950s when mobster Meyer Lansky ran its casinos -- teemed with
Angolans, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans on leave from their wars. The
international schools were filled with teenagers from Central America,
Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico; years later, they
would fill the ranks of their countries' political parties, cabinets and
legislatures. Because of the investments it made decades ago in such public
diplomacy, Cuba built a vast network of friends and contacts throughout the
region to draw upon.

Of course, these Cuban initiatives atrophied when the Cold War ended and
Moscow's subsidies dried up. But over the past few years, an oil-rich Chavez
has taken on this role. He has provided Castro with key financial and
political support; young people from poor countries throughout the region
are once again going to college in Cuba, and the combination of Cuban
know-how and Venezuelan cash is helping to send Cuban doctors to treat the
region's most impoverished. And Chavez has also sought (with mixed success)
to help elect like-minded (read: anti-American) heads of state in Bolivia,
Nicaragua and Peru.

Washington has made little effort to compete. When not focused on terrorism
and Iraq, U.S. policymakers still rely on Latin America's traditional
economic and political elites, who are disconnected from the region's new
realities. These are usually the English-speaking wealthy set, those who
send their kids to school in the United States or Europe, keep their money
in Miami banks and have learned to manipulate U.S. fears and desires.

The Colombian government's mastery of Washington is a case in point. Since
1998, Colombian Presidents Andres Pastrana and Alvaro Uribe persuaded a
Democratic and Republican White House and several sessions of Congress to
appropriate billions of dollars for Colombia. Until Sept. 11, 2001,
Colombia's talking points with the White House, Congress and the media
focused mainly on drugs. Within weeks of the attacks, however, Colombia
pivoted, asking its public relations firm in town to change the storyboards
to represent its objectives as combating terrorists. Washington followed
suit, shifting into an all-encompassing fight against terrorism, in which
Latin America became but one more front, with the Colombian government as a
model ally. Today, Colombia receives the lion's share of U.S. foreign
assistance for Latin America.

Unfortunately, Colombia's human rights climate remains disproportionately
cruel to journalists, trade unionists and Afro-Colombians -- the same people
whom America's democracy programs ought to support. No matter; the Bush
administration listens to and rewards those who confirm its worldview,
reinforcing the green-zoning of U.S. foreign policy.

The irony of U.S.-Latin American relations is that, while the rise of Chavez
and the region's tilt to the left makes Washington fret that it is losing
the region politically, Washington has already begun losing Latin America
economically.

Growing trade and investment initiatives from Asia and Europe are providing
the region with alternatives to the United States's historic dominance. For
example, the Chilean economy -- long touted as a regional model for poverty
reduction and pro-market policies -- already exports more to Asia than to
all of the Americas, including the United States. China is becoming an
increasingly important partner for Latin America, both as a source of
investment and an important customer for commodities such as soy, wheat,
steel and oil. Agricultural exports from Brazil to the United States account
for only 18 percent of Brazil's total, with 43 percent destined for emerging
markets, including East Asia and India. And a number of Latin American
countries, including Mexico, have reached trade deals with the European
Union and Japan, while others have joined the main trade bloc of Asia and
the Pacific.

Sure, in addition to the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and
Mexico, the United States is gradually piecing together bilateral trade
agreements with Central America, Chile, and soon with Colombia and Peru. But
Latin America's integration into the world economy, independent of the
United States, suggests that many Latin Americans now see little incentive
to endure unconditionally Washington's mix of attention and indifference.

This shift entails real costs for the United States. Despite the
caricatures, Latin America offers us far more than cocaine and a border
headache. Including Canada and Mexico, the hemisphere accounts for nearly 50
percent of U.S. energy imports. About 28 million Latin Americans live and
work in the United States with varying shades of legal status. They fill
jobs in the booming service sector and send home billions of dollars,
helping to stabilize their own countries. Even Latin American media is
increasingly part of the U.S. cross-cultural zeitgeist, and Miami rather
than Buenos Aires or Mexico City is the new corporate nexus of
Spanish-language media and music.

The energy, demographic, labor, language, cultural and trade ties between
the United States and Latin America will accelerate regardless of the
ideology of those in the White House or in presidential palaces throughout
the region. But for the United States to fashion new thinking that reflects
these dynamics, it will have to exorcise the ghosts of the Cold War.

In another era, Scotty Reston was right. His insight surely helps explain
why Latin America has long been treated like a vocational school for U.S.
foreign policy, with the true Washington heavyweights too busy tending to
important affairs elsewhere in the world. But however unpleasant the
ideological dissonance of the moment, the truth is that we are stuck with
one another. Recognizing that may help Washington conjure an approach to the
region that bypasses the rhetoric of Chavez and addresses the conditions
that help him thrive.

[Julia E. Sweig is director of Latin America studies at the Council on
Foreign Relations and author of "Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making
Enemies in the Anti-American Century" (PublicAffairs).]