Get Herald RSSVenezuelan president Hugo Chavez is an immensely overblown figure. Leftists tend to lionize him for leading his country toward socialist utopia and thumbing his nose at the United States. Rightists love to lambaste him as an unstable dictator who has devastated Venezuela's economy and put his country at the disposal of some of the world's worst criminals and tyrants.
Chavez deserves nowhere near that much credit, and not quite that much blame. He has attempted to crush his opposition and has done serious harm to his already damaged country as well as the surrounding region. But he remains democratically accountable to a population that distrusts him and is unlikely to allow him to reign indefinitely.
Instead of wasting time and energy butting heads with Chavez, American policymakers should aim to contain his most dangerous stunts and await his downfall.
Chavez was elected president in 1998, promising to radically restructure a social and governmental system that afforded the country's poorest citizens little benefit from its massive wealth - particularly oil revenues from one of the largest crude reserves in the world.
On many counts, Chavez delivered. Since he took office, education, public health and other social services have received a more generous share of Venezuela's bounty. The once-shameful proportion of the population living in extreme poverty has dropped off considerably.
However, stringent price controls have predictably decimated the country's supply of many staple foods. And instead of promoting development and diversification, Chavez has continued to lean on Venezuela's natural-resource wealth - shackling the economy to commodities such as oil, which has lost two-thirds of its value since July.
Even as Chavez has massively ramped up government spending, he has done little to confront public corruption. The accountability organization Transparency International ranks Venezuela 158th worldwide in terms of public officials' perceived rectitude.
Chavez's foreign policy is similarly egregious, granting safe haven to the Lebanese terrorist organization and Iranian client Hezbollah as well as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a guerrilla army responsible for hundreds of murders and kidnappings each year.
The goal of these policies is to afflict the United States and its allies, whom Chavez sees as mortal enemies - and easy political targets, thanks to the long and bloody history of American meddling in Latin-American affairs.
But rhetoric is not Chavez's most powerful electoral weapon. He has also attempted to bludgeon his opposition into submission, wrecking the employment prospects of opposition members by circulating a blacklist of their names and refusing to extend the license of a major television station critical of his government.
By any measure, Chavez is a villain. But the bombast of the American right has over-vilified him, helping to cement his dominance of Venezuela and his influence over Latin-American leftism in a climate where "Yankee imperialism" is still considered a dire threat.
In 2002, a band of Venezuelan businessmen and military officers briefly ousted Chavez, but their coalition collapsed after several days of massive popular protests. The coup received encouragement and possibly support from the Bush administration, and its collapse helped burnish Chavez's anti-imperialist image.
In the years since, the Bush administration has repeatedly branded Chavez a dictator, and in July it reactivated the Navy's Fourth Fleet, which will oversee operations in the Caribbean and has been defunct for decades. This was easily interpreted as a military threat to Venezuela, and it allowed Chavez to stoke fears of a U.S. invasion.
Most partisans in this debate assume Venezuelans are too politically lethargic or inattentive to hold the president responsible for his pernicious policies.
But that's far from the truth. Chavez is still democratically accountable, and while he won re-election in 2006 by a wide margin, in December 2007 voters defeated a constitutional amendment that would have abolished presidential term limits and expanded his powers.
Without such an amendment, he would have to step down in February 2013. Recent polls estimate that he has the support of only a third of the population, and the plummeting price of oil - which dipped below $50 a barrel last week - will make it more difficult for him to maintain the patronage distribution essential to his power.
If Chavez leaves without a fight, the United States can step in with a barrage of aid for Venezuela's poor and incentives for American investors to help develop a sustainable Venezuelan economy. If he clings to power without democratic approval, we can impose sanctions until his allies abandon him and a new and potentially more sensible government takes over.
Until then, we can help Colombia combat the FARC and pursue research into alternative fuels that will further undermine one of the foundations of Chavez's power.
As I write this, Venezuelans are going to the polls in mayoral and gubernatorial elections. They may rebuke Chavez's rule by trouncing his allies, or they may deliver him a limited endorsement. Either way, the United States should abandon Bush's hysterical evaluation of Chavez's rule and handle Venezuela through cautious containment.
William Martin '10 will defeat you.
