The following is an email exchange that I recently had with Quentin Lewis, who blogs at When Elvis Died.

Here it is:

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 8:34 AM, Quentin Lewis wrote:

Hey man,

What’s this shit about Human Rights Watch issuing a negative report on Chavez, and him expelling their officers? Do you have a good read on any of this? I tried to find out more information, but it’s hard to wade through the bourgeois “Chavez hates freedom” bullshit.

Quentin

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 2:33 PM, William Stodden wrote:

I would say a good site to check for news on LA, and especially Cuban allies is Presna Latina. It is like the Cuban AP. It is generally more credible than some sources reporting about Latin America. Their primary weakness is that they neglect to write stories that are negative about LA, and primarily Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia.

That said, PL doesn’t have anything about this report in it that I found. I haven’t read the whole report, but here is the whole 200+ page pdf link from HRW:

http://hrw.org/reports/2008/venezuela0908/venezuela0908web.pdf

Glancing at it briefly, I will say it confirms my belief that human rights, as we think of them, is a industrialized northwestern construction. I have been very critical of Chavez, not for the same reasons that Marxists are (for example, I believe that his economic reforms are even handed and very good. Many Marxists say that this is not socialism, it doesn’t go far enough etc.) My critique is that Chavez is playing right into the comments that northerners use against him. He is acting more and more like a super-constitutional dictator, and not a democrat, socialist, Liberal or otherwise. It is actually very disappointing to me that he couldn’t find a balance between socialist restructuring of the Venezuelan society and acting like a populist thug. I mean he could have done it democratically, but I fear he is building a cult of personality, and unlike Castro, his reforms will not last past the time he leaves office, which now it looks like that will probably not happen any time soon.

As to the report itself, it posits the norms of “human rights” on a society where these things are incompatible. While it blasts Chavez for interfering with the secret ballot in labor organization (a system I think it used by anti-union forces to crush unions into powder) or suppression of the opposition, they assume that conditions in Venezuela are and should be like every other liberal democracy. IN a liberal democracy, a free and fair opposition is absolutely essential. But Chavez is not, nor has he ever been trying to create a liberal democracy in Venezuela. He is working to build a socialist society there, and so he needs to be careful, because the “opposition” are the people who are not loyal to the regime. If they get back into power, it won’t just be a change of government like it is here (The Dem’s as opposition are loyal to the regime, that is our Constitution and its institutions, but not to the government, run by Bush and co, for example.) The opposition wants to not only replace Chavez, but obliterate any gains he actually has made for the people of Venezuela.

The report posits the opposition as if they are not trying to overthrow the regime in Venezuela. I would be a bit more sympathetic to the report’s findings if the opposition were actually nonetheless committed to socialism in Venezuela, though they are not supportive of Chavez, but this isn’t the case. The opposition are the rightwingers and capitalists that used to rule and have found themselves in the out group. They were and still are a minority, while the people Chavez caters to are the majority and the new in-group. And there never was real liberal democracy in Venezuela. The pre-Chavez democracy they had was fatally broken and resembled a Kleptocracy.

If Venezuela is or was a liberal democracy, then the concerns that have been raised by the HRW’s report would be valid. They may be accurate, but they are not valid criticisms, because they must be viewed as a product of their authors, and those are Northern liberals. Not necessarily anti-Chavez folks, per se, and this would be an unfair criticism of HRW, but they are definitely individuals that produced a normative report and pass it off without noting their bias. That is my judgment based on the little bit of the report that I read, and my understanding of the background of the situation.

If you do read their report, keep in mind that they are biased toward liberalism, and that situation does not, nor has it ever existed in the vast majority of Latin America.

Serenely,
Doc

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 4:41 PM, Quentin Lewis wrote:

Doc,

Thanks for the analysis…though I know little about them, I guess I had been thinking of HRW as a fairly progressive organization….I’ll certainly judge them a little more critically from now on. But I think you’re right about the idealistic bourgeois overtones of the term “human rights”, which only makes sense if your rights are neutered of their material conditions, as they are in liberal democracies like ours. I’m reminded of when Marx talks about the concept of freedom in “Capital” and how important it is in democracies, but that what it really means is nothing more than the freedom of the worker to sell his labor power and the freedom of the capitalist to buy it.

I never bother anymore to read any news item from western sources about Venezuela for exactly these reasons, and I guess I shouldn’t have been so taken in with this one. It always makes me laugh to see elite western liberals and conservatives unite in their condemnation of Chavez whenever the government would crack down on newspapers or something…nothing like a good old red scare to unite seeming political “opposites”. As long as he keeps giving land back to the poor dark-skinned people from whom it was violently taken, I’ll give him a lot more leeway to censor whatever the hell he wants.

Cheers,
Quentin

As a short commentary:
I have been rather critical of Chavez lately. But as I mentioned, I am not critical for the reason many others are. I am not saying he should act more like a liberal. Nor am I saying that he is not going far enough. But he could bring in socialism democratically. He had the political capital to do it. But he opted to take the traditional route. In this case, I have to say I support his ends, but not his means.

Tags: Chavez, Human Rights Watch, Liberal democracy, socialism, Venezuela