Remember When Venezuela Was A Haven Of Freedom And Democracy?

-OpEd-

BUENOS AIRES — Before 2000, Venezuela was very different country. It was a country unrelated to the wreck left by 25 years of thuggish socialism. It was a democracy, rather than a Bolivarian Republic. There was no vetting of candidates at elections. The state didn’t kill protesters or systematically violate rights. Millions of Venezuelans didn’t flee the country then.

Venezuela was generous in those days and not only to its people. Then President Carlos Andrés Pérez (often called “CAP”), perhaps Venezuela’s best-known politician of the 1970s and 80s, and Foreign Minister Diego Arria made Venezuela a refuge for journalists, intellectuals, businessmen and people like myself, who had fled from the bloody dictatorships spread across Latin America at that time.

Arria traveled to Chile on the president’s behalf to ask the new military ruler, Augusto Pinochet, to free Orlando Letelier, the former foreign minister and close associate of the country’s late, socialist president, Salvador Allende. He duly took him back to Caracas (although Letelier would later be assassinated in Washington D.C.), making him one of the first of Allende’s ministers and officials to be given asylum there.

Politically color blind

CAP seemed to have a different attitude toward Argentina, where the army led an iron-fisted regime from 1976 to 1982. In 1977, he warmly received in Caracas its president, General Jorge Videla, and seemed to sympathize with the Argentine junta. Some attributed this posture to CAP’s own days as interior minister in the 1960s, when he forcefully suppressed Venezuela’s own leftist guerrillas.

But other events suggest he was not colluding with the Argentine regime. Weeks before Videla’s visit, the Venezuelan senate, in which Pérez’s party had a majority, voted for a declaration condemning the “murders and political detentions” in Argentina. The Venezuelan ambassador in Buenos Aires, Ernesto Santander, kept asking the authorities for information about missing persons, while protecting potential victims.

In Caracas, the protection given to exiles was politically indiscriminate. One day, Arria called me in and said, “We’re forming a commission to advise the president on international affairs. You’ll be in charge of the commission, for which you must hire some talented people but on one condition: They must all be people living here in exile. Those like you, who managed to escape Videla, Pinochet, Stroessner, Banzer, Somoza or Castro.”

He was listing the continent’s litany of dictators — from the left and the right — though Arria refused to classify exiles in terms of their politics. He said he was politically “color blind.” CAP forged a special relationship with Democratic U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who was battling regional dictatorships including Argentina’s, on the diplomatic front.

A spoiled image

Our advisory group prepared reports on the regimes, and Arria would send the “relevant” ones to Carter through his National Security Adviser and Latin American specialist Robert A. Pastor. This showed how CAP worked steadily with the United States on an incipient process to weaken the junta regimes.

The Carter administration stopped military aid and arms sales to governments violating human rights, like Argentina, while Treasury Secretary Werner Blumenthal instructed American directors at the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank not to approve loan requests for Argentina. The State Department explained this was in response to its “systematic” rights abuses and proven record of torture and executions. The military regimes banded together to boost themselves, and could still count on hawkish sympathizers in the U.S. Defense Department.

It was in the 1970s when the intelligence agencies of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay forged Operation Condor, with help from the CIA, to hunt down their opponents wherever they had fled. It was a sinister outfit and CAP was asked to collaborate by handing over certain exiles. He flatly refused.

But when you look at what has come since, suddenly Carlos Andrés Pérez seems exemplary.

CAP’s second presidential term, from 1989 to 1993, spoiled his historical image. Like today, Venezuela lived off exporting crude oil and its revenues were in sharp decline. When CAP left office in 1979, the price of a barrel of oil stood at U.S. dollars , but when he returned in 1989 it had fallen to .

The country had to curb spending out of necessity rather than any conversion to neo-liberal dogmas. But people became angry, which led to riots that were harshly repressed. The worst bout of rioting came to be known as the Caracazo, or Caracas days, duly exploited by the new, “Bolivarian” Left.

There was even a failed coup that threatened CAP’s life, led by an army officer, Hugo Chávez. CAP was finally sacked over corruption charges that included using public funds to aid Nicaragua’s President Violeta Chamorro against the subversion and threats of the former president Daniel Ortega.

It seems this is all people remember of CAP, as if he had done nothing for his country. But when you look at what has come since, at the likes of Ortega and Nicolás Maduro, their electoral shenanigans, the mass repression and the economic mess, not to mention their unbounded love of power and money, suddenly Carlos Andrés Pérez seems exemplary. The history of Latin American democracy may yet revise his status — and even place him on a pedestal.