Pacific News Service, 19 April 2002

Bush Must Re-Embrace Latin Leaders After Break Over Chávez

by Andrew Reding

EDITOR’S NOTE: President Bush’s clumsy attempts to backtrack after appearing to support last week’s coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may be falling on deaf ears. Latin American leaders, most of whom have joined in an Inter-American Democratic Charter that would suspend any state that violates constitutional democracy, roundly condemned the military takeover. Bush must embrace the sentiments of the Charter in words and actions, writes PNS Associate Editor Andrew Reding, or risk fostering anti-American sentiment.

President Bush’s effort on Thursday to admonish Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez “to embrace those institutions that are fundamental to democracy” is ringing hollow in Latin America. Last week, in the first serious test of the new Inter-American Democratic Charter — which calls on signatories to condemn coups — the Bush administration failed. It first appeared to endorse the military coup in Venezuela, then backed down only after it had become clear that Chavez had regained power.

The White House’s initial flagrant disregard of the Charter is straining relationships with hemispheric allies.

From Mexico to Argentina, headlines and commentaries are condemning the U.S. response.

The Charter, adopted by 34 nations in Lima, Peru, last Sept. 11, calls for suspension of any state in which there is “an unconstitutional alteration of the constitutional regime that seriously impairs the democratic order.”

Consider what happened in Venezuela. The military chiefs seized the elected president of the country and held him incommunicado. They then appointed the head of the country’s most prominent business association as interim president, ignoring the normal order of succession. Then the interim president suspended the constitution, and dissolved the parliament and supreme court. It would be difficult to conjure up a more complete and brazen violation of the constitutional and democratic order.

Rather than defend democracy in Venezuela, the White House said that Chávez got what he deserved. President Bush implied as much again Thursday, when he called on Chávez “to address the reasons why there was so much turmoil on the streets.”

Those actions and that tone sets the United States at odds with every other government in the hemisphere except El Salvador, whose president is from a party that supported death squads in the 1980s.

At news of the coup, 19 Latin American heads of states immediately issued a joint statement, saying, “we condemn the interruption of constitutional order.” Invoking the Democratic Charter, they called for a special session of the OAS General Assembly. Leading the charge was Mexican President Vicente Fox, President Bush’s closest ally in the region.

None of these presidents has much sympathy for Chávez. Most would love to see him removed from office at the ballot box. But they all understand there is something far more important at stake — development of respect for democracy and the rule of law in a region long vulnerable to military overthrows of elected governments.

By aligning himself with a failed coup, President Bush has done incalculable damage to long-term U.S. interests in Latin America. He has made it seem that ensuring a steady supply of Venezuelan oil means more to Washington than the future of constitutional government in Latin America.

Once again, U.S. support for democracy in Latin America is seen as hollow: only in cases where its friends are elected does support materialize. In 1973, the Nixon administration backed the overthrow of the duly elected, but socialist, government of President Salvador Allende in Chile. Now, critics of the United States in Latin America can — with undeniable truth — say that little has changed.

Like Bush himself, Pedro Carmona, the interim president who was backed by the White House, is a former oil executive. Until recently, he headed the country’s most prominent big business lobbying organization. Carmona lent substance to the worst caricatures of the United States — and President Bush in particular — as an ally of wealthy foreign elites with despotic tendencies.

In just one day in power, Carmona suspended the constitution, dismissed Congress and the supreme court, and dispatched security forces to arrest cabinet members and members of Congress. In other words, he did more harm to the constitutional order in one day than Chávez had done in years.

President Bush likes to portray himself as a special friend of Latin America, with frequent photo opportunities with Mexican President Fox, and by showing he can speak Spanish. That may help him win Latino votes at home. But in Latin America itself, his flagrant disregard of the Inter-American Democratic Charter is costing the United States dearly, by making it appear that the United States only values democracy when it serves its political and economic interests.

Andrew Reding directs the Project for Global Democracy and Human Rights of the World Policy Institute in New York.

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