Tag Archives: José R. Cárdenas

Apr
18
2013
Posted by
admin
Comments

ICYMI: Venezuela’s Maduro Fails to Imitate Chávez’ Success

Atlantic Sentinel
April 15, 2013
By Nick Ottens

130414 nicolas maduro ap 605 e1366308092446 ICYMI: Venezuela’s Maduro Fails to Imitate Chávez’ Success

Courtesy of: Associated Press

Acting president Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner in Venezuela’s election on Sunday, defeating the opposition’s candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski by over two hundred thousand votes, according to the state’s election board.

Maduro succeeds the Latin American nation’s fiery socialist leader Hugo Chávez who died of cancer last month after fourteen years in power.

Although Capriles, who won 44 percent of the votes in last year’s election against Chávez and just under 49.1 percent on Sunday, according to the official results, accused the ruling party of fraud and demanded a recount, it is unlikely that Maduro’s victory will be reversed. “We will know what to do if someone raises their insolent voice against the people,” the socialist warned on Sunday night.

Still, Maduro’s unexpectedly narrow win—opinion polls had predicted a landslide—casts doubt on the ruling party’s ability to hold onto power without its popular leader.

Chávez’ protégé lacks the charisma that enabled the deceased former president to win four consecutive elections and influence the politics of neighboring countries, including Bolivia and Ecuador where Presidents Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, respectively, imitated his populist left wing policies.

Risa Grais-Targow, an associate with the Eurasia Group consultancy, expects that Maduro, lacking a base of support of his own, “will struggle to manage internal disputes, especially as social discontent rises in a deteriorating economic environment.”

She writes at Quartz that the new president’s priority will likely be to reverse social discontent, “which means he is unlikely to make needed economic adjustments.”

Foreign exchange and price controls will remain in place. Maduro might pursue even more stringent state controls to “prove his revolutionary credentials,” like pushing an antitrust law through parliament.

The National Assembly is considering a law that would empower the government “to confiscate any business that it deems not acting in the public interest,” writes José R. Cárdenas at Foreign Policy. It would install a panel that decides whether a company has a “decisive domain” over the setting of prices or other market conditions in a particular industry, without stipulating what “decisive domain” means.

In other words, any successful company runs the risk of confiscation at any time by crossing the government’s arbitrary line of being “too successful.” And with the judicial sector also controlled by the government, private companies are left with no outlet to appeal adverse decisions.

Cárdenas predicts that the law will depress private sector production and further tilt the playing field in favor of state owned enterprises which are exempt from it.

Chávez hugely expanded the public sector and nationalized key industries, including oil. But lack of industrial development has forced Venezuela to import refined oil products even if it is the world’s tenth largest petroleum exporter.

The country has also had to cope with energy and food shortages as well as skyrocketing inflation that is projected to top 30 percent this year.

Market reforms are needed to revitalize Venezuela’s economy which the consultancy firm Ecoanalitica projects will expand less than 1 percent this year. Maduro, however, lacks the political credibility and quite probably the will to deviate from the party line and tamper with his predecessor’s legacy.

Significant changes in economic policy are unlikely in the short term even if more Venezuelans than preelection polls suggested apparently agree with Capriles that the current model is “not viable.”

To read this article at the Atlantic Sentinel, please click here.

 
Mar
27
2012
Posted by
admin
Comments

Hugo Chávez and Pope Benedict

DSC 0754 150x150 Hugo Chávez and Pope BenedictJosé 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.

Some have speculated that cancer-stricken Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez may seek an audience with Pope Benedict XVI during the latter’s trip to Cuba this week.  Chávez, who is in Cuba as well for another round of radiation treatments, is said by some to be seeking the Pope’s blessing as the president struggles with his serious illness.

So far, there is no indication such a meeting will take place (nor, for that matter, is one scheduled with Cuban dissidents), but if it does, it would be the height of irony, given the rancor and hostility that have characterized Church-state relations in Venezuela since Chávez came to power.  It also likely reflects less any conversion on Chávez’s part than it does his need for favorable political optics heading into October’s presidential election.

Venezuelan Church leaders have been outspoken in their criticisms of Chávez’s authoritarian creep, but his attacks against Bishops and the Vatican have truly been beyond the pale.

Perhaps Chávez’s most notorious attack was when he called the Church a “tumor” on Venezuelan society following his temporary removal from power in 2002.  Chávez accused the Church of being complicit in his ouster, but Church leaders responded that the massive anti-government strikes and protests were not part of any conspiracy, but the Venezuelan people’s reaction to Chavez’s own radical behavior.

In 2010, following another round of Church criticisms of his polarizing policies, Chávez even attacked Pope Benedict himself, whom he had met in 2006 in the Vatican, saying, “He is not an ambassador of Christ.”  “Christ,” he said, “is in the people.”

Chávez’s troubles with the Church stem from the fact that he can tolerate no domestic challenge to his absolute authority.  Once in power, he went about systematically undermining all alternative poles of authority.  That is why he has sought to displace the Church’s social services with state programs, why he has pressured Catholic media, and tried to undermine Catholic education in Venezuela.  But the Venezuelan Catholic Church, with a few centuries head-start, has proven to be resilient and unintimidated.

Certainly, the Vatican is savvy enough not to allow itself to be used as a political prop for Chávez’s benefit back home.  But if it proves to be the case that Chávez, a man starkly facing his own mortality, was seeking a blessing and some sort of repentance, he ought to be reminded that redemption is not a one-way street; in fact, in involves penance. And there is still time to ensure that October’s elections are conducted freely and openly, with the opposition given a fair opportunity to state their case before the Venezuelan people.

If not, the Pope could always follow the advice of the late Venezuelan Cardinal Rosalio Castillo Lara, another critic of Chávez’s authoritarian ways, who was asked once whether he would ever give Chávez a blessing.  He replied, “More than a blessing: I’d give him an exorcism.”