April 11, 2002
SEND LAWYERS, GUNS, AND MONEY :
Venezuela Army Gen. Orders Rebellion (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 11, 2002, Filed at 11:12)As top military commanders rebelled against President Hugo Chavez, rebel National Guard troops seized government television and took it off the air late Thursday, the station manager said. Civilians celebrated outside.Earlier Thursday police and armed Chavez supporters fired on a march by 150,000 opposition protesters near the presidential palace. At least 12 people were killed and as many as 110 wounded, officials said.
It seems almost certain that we'll soon be hearing much wailing and gnashing of teeth over this antidemocratic, right-wing coup. Folks will demand immediate elections and the "restoration" of democracy. We couldn't disagree more.
PBS has recently been running a very fine program call Commanding Heights : The Battle for the World Economy, based on a book by Daniel Yergin. It deals with the transition from communism and statism to democracy and more importantly to free markets in the 1980s and 90s by countries like Bolivia, Poland, India, Russia and China. These countries to one degree or another adopted measures such as cutting state expenditures, balancing budgets, selling off state owned businesses, raising interest rates, etc. One of the subtexts that emerges, though it is not ennunciated very well, perhaps because it is so politically incorrect, is that, assuming your country has already been driven into the ground by inept, corrupt, and/or totalitarian rule, you are much better off having a strong government, even a repressive one, impose economic reforms, than you are trying to reform both the political and the economic systems concurrently. This is most clear in the comparison between Yeltsin's Russia and Deng Xiaoping's China.
In Russia, where Gorbachev thought that he could loosen the Party's grip on society in order to gain some breathing room for reform, events quickly spun out of control and the communists were gone long before reform could occur. This left weak governments under Yeltsin trying to outmaneuver the former communists, the "oligarchs", and organized crime. The result is that only with the coming to power of Vladimir Putin, a quasi-fascist figure, has Russia shown any signs of getting its act together.
Meanwhile, in China, the Communist Party retained its stranglehold over government and society, but it relaxed its control of the economic sphere. The result is a burgeoning economy and a growing middle class, which will in all likelihood soon depose the Party. China has less formal freedom than does Russia but it is more nearly a free and functional society, because an authoritarian government was able to ram through reforms, the very reforms that spell its own doom.
There's an important lesson in all this for other nations that have been completely mismanaged--for instance the entire Islamic World, much of Latin America, and all of Africa. As we have seen time and again--from Spain to Chile to Singapore to South Korea to Turkey and so on--the most successful transitions to liberal capitalist democracies have typically required a phase during which an undemocratic government imposes reforms, especially economic reforms, while maintaining the social order. Only then do the preconditions come into existence which allow for the final transition to democracy.
We should not be to hasty to insist that Venezuela's military yield control of the country. The initial order that often only the military of a country (Chavez was an unfortunate example of a left-wing military figure) can impose and sustain is one of the keys to creating a stable democracy. In nation-building, patience is a virtue.
N.B. : see also our review of The Feast of the Goat (2000) (Mario Vargas Llosa 1936-) (Grade: A-)