José R. Cárdenas

José R. Cárdenas served in several foreign policy positions during the George W. Bush administration (2004-2009), including on the National Security Council staff. He is a consultant with Vision Americas in Washington, DC.

Hugo Chávez’s penchant for labeling anyone who disagrees with him a “golpista” (coup-mongerer) is well-established. This, despite his own history of leading an ill-fated military coup in 1992 against former Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Pérez. But it seems the years since haven’t diminished his ardor for military coups when it suits his purposes — a fact affirmed by recent events in Paraguay.

Paraguay recently saw the sudden impeachment of President Fernando Lugo for “poor performance.” Whatever one thinks of that drastic action, it happened to be consistent with the country’s constitution.

Yet events in Paraguay apparently didn’t pass muster with Hugo Chávez, who ordered his foreign minister, Nicolas Maduro to meet with Paraguay’s military leadership to try and convince them to intervene and forcibly restore President Lugo to office. (In this effort, Maduro, who was in the country as part of a Unasur delegation monitoring the impeachment, was accompanied by Ecuador’s ambassador to Paraguay, who represents another government that routinely identifies opposition as golpistas.)

Infuriated by the meeting, the Paraguayan government withdrew its ambassador from Caracas, citing “the grave evidence of intervention by Venezuelan officials in the internal affairs of Paraguay.” It also ordered a shake-up of the military brass, with new President Federico Franco stating, “We will not tolerate military officers who want to become insubordinate or accept the recommendations of foreign countries.”

On a continent with a long, tortuous history of military involvement in politics, Paraguay stands out. It was not until 1989 that the 35-year reign of General Alfredo Stroessner ended. As a result, there is great sensitivity towards the matter in the country and is why a senior foreign official meeting with the military to encourage their intervention in Paraguayan politics constitutes an outrageously reckless act that threatens not only the internal stability of the country, but has wider regional implications as well.

Yet not only has the regional silence been deafening on Maduro’s meeting, but countries like Brazil and Argentina turned around and effectively rewarded Chávez by granting Venezuela full-membership in Mercosur, the political and economic pact among Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. This fulfilled a key foreign policy objective of Chávez for years that had previously been blocked, ironically, by the Paraguayan Congress. But with Paraguay suspended from the customs union because of the Lugo impeachment, Brazil and Argentina moved instantly to grant Chávez membership. It’s not that Mercosur will bring Venezuela any measurable economic benefits, but to Chávez it is one more key symbol of the legitimacy of his political project and one more instance of Venezuela’s integration with Latin American countries in a union that excludes the United States.

As Brazilian diplomat and former Mercosur representative José Botafogo Goncalves told the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, “Venezuela doesn’t meet the basic requirements to enter Mercosur. Venezuela’s problem is Chávez, who doesn’t like free trade and wants to transform the bloc into a political platform.”

But degrading their own multilateral institutions is one thing; Chávez’s encouraging a military coup in Paraguay is quite another. Lamentably, the continued regional indulgence of Hugo Chávez’s provocations appears to know no bounds. Apparently, there is no action he can take, no matter how reckless or interventionist, that will bring rebuke. Instead, he is rewarded. It is indeed a sad commentary on the current state of Latin American regional leadership.