Alvaro
Vargas Llosa Sends
Hugo Chavez To Dante's Inferno
By Stephen Lendman
06 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Alvaro
Vargas Llosa is no stranger to those who know his writings and affilation
with the conservative Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent
Institute in Oakland, CA. Vargas Llosa is Director of the Center and
in that role is a vocal champion of essentially the same predatory market-based
policies, known not to work, that growing numbers of people around the
world are resisting more than ever - especially in Peru-born Vargas
Llosa's Latin America.
Vargas Llosa is a member
in good standing of the privileged elite and preaches the false gospel
that everyone can have the same benefits he's gotten, but it's up to
them to get them on their own. Simply put, that means market-based policies
are always the solution (even though they consistently fail when corrupted
by corporate predators making all the rules), and it's the fault of
the poor for their own misery.
Vargas Llosa is clever enough
to disguise his message to make his case in language sounding sensible
but which, in fact, is the same old doctrine he disingenuously claims
to be against: "failed domestic policies....dysfunctional national
and international institutions....unjust terms of trade, and unfair
capital flows." It sounds prudent until the mask comes off revealing
his real agenda. He decries the notion of government-run efforts to
end poverty and inequality and makes no pretense that the only solutions
he thinks will work are the same kind of market-based ones that never
do. He preaches the gospel of "the entrepreneurial spirit shown
by millions of destitute people around the world (and the) success stories"
of how they've risen from their impoverishment and prospered. If only
he'd tell us where these millions are located and how can he explain
the fact that poverty is increasing in most countries, and the dominant
entrepreneurial class (the ones that fund his Center) are responsible
for it.
In his September 25 article
on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (a venue where his
views are always welcome), Vargas Llosa joins a growing chorus taking
aim at Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. And does he ever in a piece
of trash journalism titled Chavez's Inferno in which he begins by saying
Hugo Chavez should have held up a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy (many
of us read in college) at the UN instead of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony
or Survival. Vargas Llosa notes in the first part of Dante's work the
Italian master takes his readers on a journey through the nine concentric
circles of his Inferno representing various types of evil. Dante's description
of the underworld, he says, "reads like a script of present-day
Venezuela," and in one phrase Vargas Llosa destroys whatever credibility
he claims to have. He then confirms it by taking his readers through
each of Dante's nine circles consigning parts of Chavez's Bolivarian
Revolution (and the Venezuelan President) to each of them without ever
exlaining the elements in it and how they've improved the lives of most
Venezuelans. Vargas Llosa thus portrays a false picture of life in Venezuela
under Hugo Chavez making him a likely candidate for a special place
in one of the circles he takes us through.
He begins with the first
circle for those who lack faith. This for Chavez, he falsely claims,
is for the 80% of Venezuelans who lack food and can't afford a basic
daily diet. He says it's because since Chavez took office in 1999, the
poverty rate either rose (according to one report he cites) or held
steady (in another) and in either case shows Chavez's policies don't
work. Vargas Llosa conveniently twists the facts ignoring the humanitarian
social programs under Chavez that provide low-cost food and cheap or
free housing for the needy. He also says nothing about Venezuela's dismal
history under the oligarchs he admires before Hugo Chavez became President
and the vastly different performance record in the country afterward.
If he did, he'd have had to have told readers that in the 28 years prior
to Chavez's election under the corrupted corporatists, Venezuelan per
capita income fell 35%. It was the worst decline in the region and one
of the worst in the world.
Vargas Llosa also fails to
mention the poverty rate in the country in 1997 was 61% according to
Venezuela's National Statistics Institute (INE), in 1999 it was 50%
when Chavez was elected, and at the end of 2005 it stood at 44%. He
also ignored the US and Venezuelan oligarch-directed crippling oil strike
in 2002-03 that devastated the economy. Once it ended, the economy began
to grow impressively, per capita income rose, unemployment fell and
the poverty rate declined from a high of 62% in 2003 to a level near
40% today. The Chavez Revolution has been so successful (helped in no
small measure by high oil prices) that since 2004 Venezuela had the
highest growth rate in the hemisphere. Vargas Llosa clearly has a credibility
problem. He poses as a Latin American expert, so either his claim is
false or he knows the facts, chooses to suppress them and thus has an
even greater problem for his lack of principle and integrity. Maybe
the wrong person belongs in Dante's Inferno, but we're only through
the firstcircle.
The second level is for those
unable to control their lust. For Chavez, says Vargas Llosa, it's for
those "unable to control their homicidal instincts (because) His
government has degraded social coexistence so much (there were) more
homicides in Venezuela (during the Chavez years) than there have been
deaths in any single armed conflict around the world in recent years."
Is this man living on another planet? Readers need to pause for breathe
to recover their senses after such an absurdity. Aside from the hundreds
to thousands of monthly deaths in obvious places like Iraq, Afghanistan,
Darfur, and the Congo where hot conflicts rage, just across the border
in Colombia scores of people or more are being murdered or displaced
monthly by President Alvaro Uribe's thuggish military enforcers (armed
by the US) and paramilitary hired assassins in service to the corporate
interests (getting similar help) plus the many other murders George
Bush's favorite Latin American president is responsible for inside Venezuel
which Vargas Llosa wants to blame on Hugo Chavez who's trying to stop
them.
On to circle three which
Dante has for gluttons who leave us with no food. Vargas Llosa says
it's for Chavez's "corrupt authorities who leave Venezuelans with
no wealth." Here he says nothing intelligible other than to mouth
disconnected thoughts with no explanation and blame it on Plan Bolivar
2000 that was the first of the new Bolivarian social missions under
which 40,000 Venezuelan soldiers were involved helping the country's
poor unlike in the US where its military marauds to kill them around
the world and does a good job of it. Under this Chavez plan, the Venezuelan
military distributes food to the poor, assists in education and conducts
mass-vaccinations. It also provides transportation for thousands of
poor and sick people who can't afford the travel cost to get to where
help is available. Vargas Llosa called this plan corrupt and also leveled
a broadside against the state-owned oil company and all the social missions
and their budgets he falsely claims are controlled "personally"
by Hugo Chavezhidden from public view.
All that's true in this garbled
paragraph is that corruption is systemic and a serious problem in Venezuela,
but it's the result of rule by the oligarchs for decades who always
stole from the people to enrich themselves. Vargas Llosa fails to explain
Hugo Chavez has fought to change this system of privilege, has made
important strides reducing it, but still has far to go to claim success.
As for the social programs known as Misiones, the've been a huge success
and the main reason Chavez is beloved by the great majority of his people.
Since 1999, Hugo Chavez not only reduced poverty in Venezuela, he's
greatly improved the living standards of his people from the non-cash
benefits these programs provide. They include free quality health and
dental care for all, free education to the highest level, housing assistance,
subsidized food, land reform, job training, micro-credit and lots more.
Vargas Llosa thinks these programs are a bad idea and ending them all
would be good for the people. He prefers how thigs are done in the US
under a system where people can have anything they want - as long as
they can pay for it. Vargas Llosa is sinking lower into Dante's Inferno.
The fourth circle of the
Inferno is for misers. "In Chavez's Inferno," that level is
for "bureaucrats who claim to provide social services but use funds
to pay people to attend rallies or bust up opposition gatherings."
Vargas Llosa has a bad habit of inventing a single example from his
strange imagination to make his claim while ignoring the vast amount
of information that would refute it. He pays no attention to how the
vital services Venezuelans now receive make all the difference in the
world to them because they never had them before and wouldn't now if
it weren't for Hugo Chavez. Vargas Llosa ignores this because if he
explained it, his argument evaporates just like his credibility is doing.
Just one of many important
improvements under Chavez is his education program. It's free to the
highest level for all Venezuelans and virtually eliminated illiteracy
in the country. Cuba under Fidel Castro, achieved the same success under
his world-class educational system free for all Cubans. Compare that
to the "free market" US economy Vargas Llosa champions where
the US Department of Education reports about a 20% level of functional
illiteracy and vast numbers more close to it. It's especially out of
control in the inner cities where the rates are astronomically high
according to reliable studies and important writings from authors and
experts like Jonathan Kozol.
Look also at the state of
health care delivery in the US where despite the huge expenditure of
$2 trillion annually on it nearly 47 million people in the country have
no health insurance and many millions more have too little. As a result,
these people are denied the vital care they can't get when they need
it most. In Hugo Chavez's Venezuela (and in Fidel Castro's Cuba) virtually
everyone gets free high quality health care. Vargas Llosa is unimpressed
by these kinds of government-run programs that work and undistubed by
the "free market" ones that don't even exist or work poorly
when they do.
Dante's fifth circle is for
those succumbing to wrath. This for Chavez, says Vargas Llosa, is for
"political persecution (and) Venezuela's human rights record is
atrocious." This man must love going to bad movies and watching
TV soap operas as he seems to prefer pulp fiction to fact. As evidence
of his preposterous claim, he cites the killing of 12 people in April,
2002 who "were protesting near the government palace." Vargas
Llosa never explains the street violence that took place then came from
his favorite US president's instigated, funded and directed coup to
topple the democratically elected Chavez government. It was committed
by CIA hired thugs and assassins who did it trying to blame Hugo Chavez
unjustly who was a victim of it and not a perpetrator.
Vargas Llosa also falsely
claims there are political prisoners, including former officials, imprisoned
because they spoke out against President Chavez. This is another outrageous
lie as the opposition freely denounces Hugo Chavez daily including over
the dominant corporate-run media where the criticism and vitriol are
intense all the time. Try finding any of that in the US corporate media
that love whatever George Bush does and suppress most all dissent against
his policies and crimes. In contrast, there's a thriving free press
in Venezuela because Hugo Chavez does nothing to curtail or suppress
it other than to counter the oligarchs' lies and hostility with his
own forceful responses and, above all else, by his extraordinary social
programs and participatory democracy that speak loudly for themselves.
Dante places heretics in
circle six. In Chavez's Venezuela, this level is for heretic journalists,
says Vargas Llosa "who try to tell the truth." He doesn't
explain these "heretics" work for the corporate-run media
and are paid flacks for their failed policies most Venezuelans want
no more of. He goes on to falsely claim Chavez tries to "gag"
them, "withdraw radio and TV licenses (and) Government-controlled
mobs called Bolivarian Circles, formed with the help of Cuban intelligence,
harass journalists." With this kind of black propaganda, Vargas
Llosa is heading for the depths of one of Dante's lowest circles (we've
yet to get to) reserved for those the Italian master feels are the worst
ones. The truth, as already stated and Vargas Llosa ignores, is that
the dominant corporate-run media and journalists in their employ spew
their vitriol daily against the Chavez government unobstructed.
As for those Bolivarian Circle
"mobs," people living in the US might only wish for them here
if they understood what they are and how well they work for the people
of Venezuela. These Circles are the heart of Hugo Chavez's participatory
democracy meaning, unlike in the US, Venezuelans really have a say in
how their country is governed. That right was given to them in Articles
166 and 192 in the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
which the people voted to approve overwhelmingly in a national referendum
in December, 1999 and that went into effect one year later. As for Cuban
intelligence, the only Cubans in the country, besides the diplomatic
ones every country has to conduct normal relations, are the many thousands
of doctors and other health workers and teachers who've played a major
role in improving the lives of the Venezuelan people. Vargas Llosa disapproves.
Dante puts the violent in
his seventh circle. For Vargas Llosa it's for Chavez's "imperialism."
This staggering misstatement of fact is based on Chavez having purchased
"100,000 AK-47s, 53 Mi-35 assault helicopters, fighter jets, transport
planes, patrol boats, speed boats and Tucano jets from Russia, Spain
and Brazil." No mention is made that most nations buy weapons from
abroad or produce their own, and no nation produces and sells more of
them than the US in volumes greater than the rest of the world combined.
Hugo Chavez denounces imperialism, never attacked another nation or
threatened to do it. In contrast, the US is an out-of-control hegemon
waging aggressive wars without end for world dominance and is a threat
to world peace, security and the ability of the environment to sustain
life. Most other nations need whatever weapons they can get and afford
just for security and self-defense, especially when they're up against
the Bush administration. In the case of Venezuela, Washington already
trie and failed three times to oust Hugo Chavez. In light of this and
knowing another US attempt to overthrow his government is coming, the
action Chavez is taking is prudent but by no means excessive.
Another false claim is that
Chavez "is a long-time supporter of FARC, Colombia's terrorist
group." No mention is made of the Uribe government in Colombia
that has one of the worst documented records in the world of state-directed
terrorism against its own people. Also, at the likely direction, funding
and insistence of the Bush administration, he's doing it against Venezuelans
as well. He's been at it for many months by infiltrating his state-supported
paramilitary death squads across the Venezuelan border to commit a growing
number of killings and kidnappings that Hugo Chavez has now created
civilian and military units to combat. Tachina state on the Colombian
border has been particularly hard hit as the number of deaths there
rose from 212 in 2002 to 566 last year and over 2,000 since Hugo Chavez
became President. Alvaro Uribe and George Bush are widely believed to
be behind this as part of a plan to destabilize the Chavez government
and create a reason for the US to intervene militarily - supposedlyto
protect US citizens as happened using those contrived pretexts in the
1980s to justify invading Grenada and Panama. In those cases, the real
reasons were to overthrown governments not adhering to the US agenda.
The same situation is true in Venezuela because Hugo Chavez refuses
to follow the same old neoliberal Washington Consensus policies that
don't work and denounces them forthrightly.
One more claim was that Hugo
Chavez supports Evo Morales in Bolivia politically and financially as
well as the opposition in Peru and Mexico which "was a major factor
in both men's recent defeats." Chavez does support Evo Morales
and lent political support to Ollanta Humala and Lopez Obrador in Peru
and Mexico respectively. Those candidates' defeats, however, had nothing
to do with that support and everything to do with both elections having
been stolen by the dominant parties of Alan Garcia and Felipe Calderon
(with plenty of US help) who both pledge their allegiance to the corporate
interests of their countries and to Washington and its corrupted business-as-usual
policies.
"Chavez (also) buys
influence through oil," says Vargas Llosa. "It's a form of
blackmail: At OPEC Chavez fights for increasing prices, making life
hard for poor countries that import oil, and then offers those very
nations oil subsidies they have no choice but to accept.....Chavez is
denying his nation its wealth from oil....He sponsors 30 countries....to
buy their vote for a seat at the U.N. Security Council." Where
to begin to debunk this outrageous barrage of unfounded and poisonous
inversions of fact. Reverse all the Vargas Llosa claims and therein
lies the truth about Hugo Chavez, his dedication to his people, and
his enlightened social programs and real participatory democracy people
in most other nations might only dream of, if they knew about them,
but don't have.
Chavez has also been a champion
of his progressive Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA). It's
his alternative to the corrupted neoliberal Washington Consensus model
based on exploitation, military conquest and domination. He believes
in the "social state" benefitting everyone and not just the
privileged elite Vargas Llosa pledges fealty to. He even once proposed
a put-up-or-shut-up offer to George Bush as part of an effort to normalize
relations between the two countries and was turned down flat. He offered
to sell discounted oil to the US at $50 a barrel when it was selling
on world markets in the $70 range. Had the offer been accepted, it could
have lowered the cost of gasoline at the pump as much as $1 dollar a
gallon and been a boon to US consumers who were never told about Chavez's
generosity.
Vargas Llosa surely knows
this but left it out of his column. He also didn't mention that Chavez's
generosity was rejected because the Big Oil interests so close to the
Bush administration wanted no part of it as lower gas prices would come
right out of their bottom line. As for buying votes to win the Latin
American seat on the UN Security Council, the nations supporting Venezuela's
bid see the Chavez government as the only alternative to the unacceptable
other choice - Guatemala with its long history of thuggishness and brutality
against its majority indigenous people earning it no right for anything
but world condemnation.
Dante's eighth circle is
for those who commit fraud which is Chavez's "fraudulent anti-Americanism"
for Vargas Llosa. Because Venezuela sells much of its oil to the US
and imports billions of dollars in return in goods and services, by
Vargas Llosa's strange reasoning that means Hugo Chavez "lusts
for....US capitalism." What he "lusts for" is the full
development of the "social state" and his desire for forthright
dealings with all other nations based on cooperation, solidarity and
fairness.
To help his people, Chavez
is committed to building a socialist state, but he's done nothing to
abolish the basic elements of a capitalist one that includes private
and foreign ownership and the right to private profits. What he does
insist on is that private businesses, domestic and foreign-owned, operate
under fair practice rules. That includes paying their fair share of
taxes to the state and for foreign owners in joint state-owned resource
ventures agreeing to a minority ownership arrangement of 49% maximum.
This is no different than how most developed nations deal with foreign
investors, but it's way different from the freewheeling, deregulated,
low tax, full or majority ownership arrangements that used to prevail
in Venezuela and throughout Latin America for decades. It's also the
inverse of the corrupted one-way US Washington Consensus "free
market" model based on rule by a dominant corporatocracy and the
exploitation of ordinary people to make it work.
Vargas Llosa also makes the
absurd claim that Chavez "manipulted the voter registration rolls,
adding two million phantom voters, including 30,000 who are 100 years
old and citizens named 'Superman.' " Further, "Four out of
five members of the Electoral Council are Chavez lackeys." Where
does this man come up with this stuff? Vargas Llosa knows the truth
but prefers to ignore it and concentrate instead on unfounded and outrageous
accusations.
In fact, all elections in
which Chavez was a candidate were monitored by the opposition and independent
observers who judged them to be free and fair. In addition, there's
no evidence whatever of manipulating voter registration rolls or unfairly
stacking the Electoral Council. The simple truth, Vargas Llosa ignores,
is that Hugo Chavez is so popular he just has to announce he's running,
put his name on the ballot, show up on election day (unlike the opposition
afraid to run against him), and he's swept to victory overwhelmingly.
Compare that to the way things
are under the Bush administration Vargas Llosa won't talk about. The
US president's lackeys stack the Congress and court system up to the
High Court, and the electoral system is so corrupted and flawed that
any notion of a free and fair process is something from another age.
It's this way now because increasing numbers of far-right candidates
and George Bush are themselves lackeys of the corporate interests and
war-profiteers they represent. The result is wars without end and growing
repression at home to keep a restive population in line. Growing numbers
of voters are getting so fed up with this and their needs being ignored
because of it, they'd surely vote the bums out in a really free and
fair election. They can't do it because the process is controlled and
corrupted by the big corporations running it. Their hand-picked officials
decide who gets on and stays on the voter roles and they're in charge
of proceedings on election day. Worst of all, corporate-owned and oprated
electronic voting machines are now widely used and are easily manipulated
to rig the outcomes so enough business-friendly candidates win. It's
called democracy, American-style.
The ninth and lowest of Dante's
circles is for traitors, the worst ones in Dante's world. Surely George
Bush would qualify for that level and Vargas Llosa with him based on
the above discourse of hateful dishonesty and character assassination.
Vargas Llosa makes another choice reserving a spot in all of Dante's
nine levels for Hugo Chavez. Here again his comments are garbled. He
first mentions Army officers betraying Chavez with three of them, imprisoned
for real crimes he won't explain, managing to escape. More likely they
were sprung with CIA help, but that's unmentioned in his column. The
CIA is an old hand at this kind of business. In 1985 it's operatives
bribed prison guards in Venezuela so that world-class terrorist Luis
Posada Carriles, on the CIA's payroll, was allowed to "escape"
to find sanctuary in El Salvador from where he resumed his CIA service
participating in the Contra wars in Nicaragua. No mention is made of
this in Vargas Llosa's anti-Chavez diatribe which then ends comparing
Date's center of the earth Cocytus frozen lake, where Satan is held
captive, to "Venezuela's Inferno (where) Satan is oil-rich Lake
Maracaibo" that he uses metaphorically for the "astronomical
wealth squandered by (Chavez's) tyrannical popularism."
Again, the facts on the ground
and in the hearts and minds of most Venezuelans belie the outrageous
inversions of truth coming from the Director for a Center on Global
Prosperity, presumably an intellect, and claiming to be a Latin American
scholar and expert. What Vargas Llosa is expert at is black propaganda,
gross distortion of truth and shameless lies. Based on what he recounts
above, he deserves a special place in in one of the lower circles of
Dante's Inferno. For those who know how Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution
has benefitted the Venezuelan people, Vargas Llosa has lost all credibility
and disgraced himself. He lies exposed as a charlatan and false prophet
of right wing imperialism based on market-based solutions that don't
work and must be forced on the unwilling from the barrel of a gun. Hugo
Chavez has a different world vision that's growing and spreading because
his way does work. The Venezuelan people know it, and greater numbers
of others are beginning to find it out and want the sme benefits for
themselves. Those people are fed up with the old order based on exploitation
and want no more of it. Someone should explain that to Alvaro Vargas
Llosa. He's on the wrong track supporting a failed system, and nothing
he says trumpeting the party line will ever change that.
Stephen Lendman lives
in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Comment
On This Article