A response to an article published in The Times, 9 May

I was appalled to read in your newspaper the hysterical and mendacious article ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner with Red Ken’ by Aleksander Boyd.

Mr Boyd has been linked to threats of violence against people working and writing on Venezuelan related issues for the past few years. He has also organised disruptive protest actions that have undermined public security and he has published libellous and inflammatory articles on Islam, Middle Eastern and South American politics.

It is heartening to see that through your newspaper he has found a pacific manner of channelling his grievances, but unfortunate that you have allowed your newspaper to be used in this way. Moreover, Mr Boyd has a particular grievance with the GLA, which is why the thrust of this article was critical of Mayor Ken Livingstone.

The article itself contains a number of factual inaccuracies and / or deliberate misinterpretation of the facts.

Paragraph 1: that President Chavez called Prime Minister Blair an ‘ally of Hitler’. To place this statement in context, Chavez was compared to Adolf Hitler by the US Secretary of State for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, during a visit to Paraguay. President Chavez rejected the comparison and countered that if any individual were comparable to Hitler, it would be President Bush. This discourse is indeed unfortunate, but Mr Boyd needs to place it in context.

Paragraph 4: ‘Once an island of stability in a region ravaged by coups d’état and dictatorships, Venezuela under President Chávez has become the source of instability in Latin America’. This is a complete misreading of Venezuela’s contemporary politics. While the country was indeed stable during the 1960s and 1970s, Venezuela’s political system went into a well documented decline in the 1980s and this persisted throughout the 1990s. There were ongoing protests, riots and acts of civil disobedience during this period - so profound was popular hostility to the established two-party system that President Chavez displaced in the elections of 1998.  Boyd goes on to state that: ‘The Chávez administration has, for instance, a cosy relationship with the FARC’ and other ‘narco-terrorist’ groups. While the US State Department has made this claim, it has presented no evidence to substantiate it. Similarly, during an adjournment debate on Venezuela in the House of Commons, minister Kim Howells noted that the UK also had no intelligence supporting these allegations. Moreover, it should be noted that the FARC was permitted to maintain an unofficial embassy in Venezuela during the tenure of President Chavez’s predecessors – President Rafael Caldera and Carlos Andres Perez. This has now been closed down.

Equally, there is no evidence that Chavez has provided financial support to presidential candidates such as Ollanta Humalla in Peru or Evo Morales in Bolivia. If this is ultimately proved to be true, it would raise an important debate as to the role of foreign financing of parties, candidates and political organisations. Might I suggest that such a debate begins with an exploration of the role of the US quasi governmental organisation the National Endowment for Democracy, which has been financing anti-government groups in Venezuela since President Chavez was first elected. Moreover, the NED and other US institutions continue to channel substantial resources to centre right organisations in South America. Arguably, had the US not been engaged in such activities (and unrepresentative right-of-centre presidents elected because of their artificially inflated financial capacity), political tensions in many South American countries – and anti-American sentiment - would not have escalated to the point they have to day.

The article goes on to state that ‘Señor Chávez, though democratically elected in 1998, has appointed more than 80 military officers to his Government. The most recent case is the appointment of Colonel Francisco Arias Cárdenas, a comrade in the failed coup of 1992, as Venezuela’s new representative to the UN.’ This ignores two important issues. Firstly, that President Chavez did not have a pool of civilian officials to draw upon to implement his government’s program. He did not trust the state institutions that he inherited (because these were heavily politicised by the outgoing regime, in line with the foundational agreements of the 1958 pact). This suspicion was reinforced by the 2002 coup attempt, the general strike of that same year and the 2003 lock out organised by managers of the oil company, PDVSA. On Arias Cardenas – Mr Cardenas was a bitter critic of President Chavez and stood against him in the 2000 presidential election. That they have now been reconciled demonstrates the capacity of President Chavez for pragmatism.

Mr Boyd provides a particularly problematic interpretation of the EU and OAS positions on election transparency in the country. As the final reports of both bodies show (the OAS report released only last week) there was no evidence of fraud in the December election – just as the Carter Centre found no evidence of fraud in the 2004 recall referendum against President Chavez or in any of the previous election processes held since 1998. By contrast, extensive fraud was recorded in elections during the mid-1990s and these have been documented in my own publication, The Failure of Political Reform in Venezuela.

There are certainly important questions to be raised about election administration in Venezuela, but fraud in favour of President Chavez is not one of those issues. It is to be noted that the organisation most active in promoting claims of fraud is Sumate, which receives financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy. 

It is correct that owing to the opposition boycott of the December 2005 legislative elections, the National Assembly is controlled by the Chavistas. It is worth re-iterating the word ‘boycott’ – the opposition did not participate despite the national election administration conceding a number of opposition demands, including a manual count of half of all ballots cast. The OAS also emphasised to the opposition that the election administration was ‘clean’ and not positioned to conduct fraud. Moreover, the opposition was not expected to gain more than 15% of the vote, so strategically they considered that their leverage outside the system was higher than within it – much to the detriment of institutional stability in Venezuela.

In terms of President Chavez’s human rights record, while there have certainly been problems relating to impunity and abuses, three things are to be noted. Firstly, that this has been an ongoing problem in the country since the late 1980s – as has been documented by international human rights organisations. Secondly, human rights abuses have been committed by elements within the security sector – however, the police were not under the control of the Chavistas until the 2004 regional elections. Until that point, the 400 plus municipal and regional police forces were controlled by opposition dominated regional and municipal assemblies. The army as a source of abuses, was also not fully controlled by the government until very recently (the 2002 coup attempt did lead to something of a purge). Finally – and unfortunately, some human rights groups have found themselves to be vulnerable to political manipulation, particularly in the US. 

To end, I think it is absolutely disgraceful that any comparison can be made or published between Chavez and the suicide bombings in London of July 7th. Those of us working for the peaceful resolution of differences believe it is vitally important that the UK and the US are pro-active in engaging with President Chavez and that the international community must unite to respect election outcomes – even when they do not serve our own ends – and not actively destabilise democratically elected regimes. To this end, we have been subject to e mail abuse and threats from Mr Boyd. 
 
Dr Julia Buxton, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford