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Why Venezuela has Voted Again for Their 'Negro e Indio' President
Published In Baltimore Chronicle
Monday, August 16, 2004
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There's so much BS and baloney thrown around about Venezuela that I may be violating some rule of US journalism by
providing some facts. Let's begin with this: 77% of Venezuela's farmland is owned by 3% of the population, the
'hacendados.'
I met one of these farmlords in Caracas at an anti-Chavez protest march. Oddest demonstration I've ever seen: frosted
blondes in high heels clutching designer bags, screeching, "Chavez - dic-ta-dor!" The plantation owner griped about the
"socialismo" of Chavez, then jumped into his Jaguar convertible.
That week, Chavez himself handed me a copy of the "socialist" manifesto that so rattled the man in the Jag. It was a new
law passed by Venezuela's Congress which gave land to the landless. The Chavez law transferred only fields from the
giant haciendas which had been left unused and abandoned.
This land reform, by the way, was promoted to Venezuela in the 1960s by that Lefty radical, John F. Kennedy. Venezuela's
dictator of the time agreed to hand out land, but forgot to give peasants title to their property.
But Chavez won't forget, because the mirror reminds him. What the affable president sees in his reflection, beyond the
ribbons of office, is a "negro e indio" -- a "Black and Indian" man, dark as a cola nut, same as the landless and, until
now, the hopeless. For the first time in Venezuela's history, the 80% Black-Indian population elected a man with skin
darker than the man in the Jaguar.
So why, with a huge majority of the electorate behind him, twice in elections and today with a nearly two-to-one
landslide victory in a recall referendum, is Hugo Chavez in hot water with our democracy-promoting White House?
Maybe it's the oil. Lots of it. Chavez sits atop a reserve of crude that rivals Iraq's. And it's not his presidency of
Venezuela that drives the White House bananas, it was his presidency of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries, OPEC. While in control of the OPEC secretariat, Chavez cut a deal with our maximum leader of the time, Bill
Clinton, on the price of oil. It was a 'Goldilocks' plan. The price would not be too low, not too high; just right, kept
between $20 and $30 a barrel.
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