Will ‘The Wall Street Journal’ Denounce Alvaro Uribe?

By Daniel Luban

Reuters reports:

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe stepped closer to re-election on Tuesday when a congressional committee approved a bill aimed at allowing him to run for a third term next May, but a tough vote looms in the full House. The measure, calling for a referendum to change the constitution, had been stalled for weeks in the committee but the government has launched an all-out lobbying effort. Congress already changed the constitution once to allow Uribe, a U.S.-backed conservative, to stand for re-election in 2006.

Although the committee’s approval of the bill on Tuesday was not decisive — as Reuters notes, the real test will be the full House vote — the right’s silence throughout Uribe’s campaign against term limits has been striking. None of the self-styled champions of Latin American democracy in the U.S. — the Wall Street Journal editorial page, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, and so forth — have seen fit to criticize Uribe’s move.

Compare the reaction when Uribe’s left-wing colleagues made similar efforts. In February, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez won a referendum striking down term limits and permitting him to run for office again in 2012. The move was roundly denounced on the right as proof of Chavez’s dictatorial tendencies. “Like his idol, Fidel Castro, who reigned in Cuba for a half-century, Mr. Chávez can now move toward his goal of becoming President for life,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized. Chavez’s previous attempt to abolish term limits was similarly depicted in the press as a “president-for-life bid.”

In June, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya’s attempts to hold a referendum on a constitutional amendment to end term limits — this one non-binding, and thus with no concrete political ramifications — were used to justify the military coup that deposed him. National Review opined that the referendum “would set [Honduras] on the path to Chávez-style authoritarianism” and that the “soldiers who escorted Pres. Manuel Zelaya from his home on Sunday were acting to protect their country’s democracy, not to trample it.” When Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega called for the abolition of term limits in July, Costa Rican rightist Jaime Darenblum took to the Weekly Standard to accuse Ortega of “following the Chavez playbook” and moving “one step closer to creating an autocracy.”

These critics denied any partisan motive, insisting that their only concern was for democratic institutions and constitutional procedure. Mary Anastasia O’Grady, the Wall Street Journal editorial writer who has been the most ardent American defender of the Honduran coup, proclaimed in its wake that “The struggle against chavismo has never been about left-right politics. It is about defending the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators.”

But when Uribe takes identical steps? Not a peep. The message is clear: the term-limits issue is fair game when it can be used to foster hysteria about chavismo and paint every left-of-center Latin American leader as a would-be totalitarian. When the leader in question is a right-wing U.S. ally, however, there is no need to worry about such procedural niceties. An enemy of Hugo Chavez is a friend of ours, regardless of how he stays in power.

The hypocrisy on display is noteworthy, if not particularly surprising. Although they may wax rhapsodic about democracy promotion, American hawks have never really gotten over their soft spot for right-wing Latin American authoritarians. (Recall that the neoconservatives cut their teeth in the 1980s as supporters of Pinochet, the Contras, and any number of other murderous military juntas.) Still, if rightists want their denunciations of Chavez and his allies to be taken seriously, they should try to exercise a little more consistency.

[Cross-posted in slightly expanded form at The Faster Times.]

Daniel Luban

Daniel Luban is a postdoctoral associate at Yale University. He holds a PhD in politics from the University of Chicago and was formerly a correspondent in the Washington bureau of Inter Press Service.

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One Comment

  1. Good article. There is another central difference between Chavez and Uribe. In Venezuela all the opposition parties signed the decree og Pedro Carmona during the military coup that ousted Chavez for 48 hours in 2002. The decree not only desolved the national assembly and abolished the constitution, but also gave the short lived dictator the authority to remove any mayor or state governor out of line with his right wing dictatorship. These parties that formalized their support for the brutal coup, were not punished or excluded from political participation in any way. The media, who was thanked by the coup generals and called “our lethal weapons” continue their Chávez bashing on a daily basis, as no media would have been permitted in any normal country. In contrast, in Uribes Colombia, student leaders flee or get killed, trade unionists are being murdered as in no other country, and the very few critical voices in the media live the country in the world where most journalists are killed. The two times in colombian history that the left has had a chance to win was in 1948 with eliecer gaitan. They shot him before he reached the election. The second time was with the left wing coalition UP. They killed the presidential candidate and between 3000 and 5000 party members in one of Latin Americas most grotesque political asesination campaigns through history.
    The point is: in Colombia the problem isnt if Uribe can or cannot run for a third period. The problem is that either you shut or support Uribe, or you end up in a plastic bag. While in Venezuela the lesson to be learned is that you can support and participate in a military coup, fail, and then continue as if nothing happened. Also reelection in Colombia was fixed by the later confessed bribery of a conservative congress woman who provided the last necessary vote to permit reelection. With no public debate and no direct participation from the people. While Chavez’ reelection depended on a national referendum in which the private media campained with hysterical fear propaganda against reelection, in newspapers radio and TV.

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