IT JUST LUBES THE SKIDS:

The End of Chávez: History's Against Him (Francis Fukuyama, August 6, 2006, Washington Post)

Early on in Hugo Chávez's political career, the Venezuelan president attacked my notion that liberal democracy together with a market economy represents the ultimate evolutionary direction for modern societies -- the "end of history." When asked what lay beyond the end of history, he offered a one-word reply: "Chavismo."

The idea that contemporary Venezuela represents a social model superior to liberal democracy is absurd. In his eight years as president, Chávez has capitalized on his country's oil wealth to take control of congress, the courts, trade unions, electoral commissions and the state oil company. Proposed legislation that would limit foreign funding could soon constrain nongovernmental organizations as well. And people who signed a recall petition against Chávez in the run-up to a 2004 referendum on his rule later found their names posted on the Web site of a pro-Chávez legislator; if they worked for the government or wanted to do business with it, they were out of a job and out of luck.

Chávez's success in attracting attention -- cozying up to Fidel Castro's Cuba, signing an arms deal with Russia, visiting Iran and incessantly criticizing the United States -- has popularized the notion that Chavismo embodies a new future for Latin America. By preserving some freedoms, including a relatively free press and pseudo-democratic elections, Chávez has developed what some observers call a postmodern dictatorship, neither fully democratic nor fully totalitarian, a left-wing hybrid that enjoys a legitimacy never reached in Castro's Cuba or in the Soviet Union.

Latin America has indeed witnessed a turn to this postmodern left in some countries, including in Bolivia, where Evo Morales, Chávez's kindred spirit, won the presidency last year. Nonetheless, the dominant trends in the hemisphere are largely positive: Democracy is strengthening and the political and economic reforms now being undertaken augur well for the future. Venezuela is not a model for the region; rather, its path is unique, the product of a natural resource curse that makes it more comparable to Iran or Russia than any of its Latin American neighbors. Chavismo is not Latin America's future -- if anything, it is its past.

How did Venezuela end up at such a pass? The answer is oil, oil, oil.

Denying dictators the ability to rely on its revenues is jjust one of the many goods that follows from breaking our own dependence on oil.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 6, 2006 3:50 PM