Updated: Will a Set-back for Hugo Chavéz be a Victory for Rational Discourse?

Posted by Joshua Holland

Over in Foreign Policy, I'm running a commentary by The Guardian's Seumas Milne about the narrow defeat of Hugo Chavéz' reform package* in Sunday's referendum in Venezuela.

It's well worth reading, but Milne makes one point with which I have to disagree:

Perhaps most significantly for a better international understanding of what is actually going on in Venezuela, yesterday's result must surely discredit the canard that the country is somehow slipping into authoritarian or even dictatorial rule. It is clearly doing nothing of the sort. The referendum was a convincing display of democracy in action - though doubtless if the margin of victory had been the other way round, the US-backed opposition would have cried foul and swathes of the western media would have accused Chávez of imposing a dictatorship.

I visited over half a dozen polling stations yesterday in the state of Vargas north-east of Caracas and in the city itself and the process seemed if anything more impressively run than in Britain - with opposition monitors everywhere declaring themselves satisfied with the transparency and integrity of the process.

It "must surely" nothing.

Yes, the fact that Chavéz put all of his political capital into the referendum -- which was drafted according to the Venezuelan Constitution and followed the electoral laws to a T -- lost by a narrow margin and will respect the results should make it more difficult for his detractors to accuse him of dictatorial tendencies.

We can even take that a step further. The fact that a coalition made up of the Venezuelan subsidiaries of leading U.S. corporations (including Ford, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Bridgestone/ Firestone, Goodyear, Alcoa, Shell, Pfizer, Dupont, Cargill, Coca-Cola, Kraft, Novartis, Unilever, Heinz, Johnson & Johnson, Citibank, Colgate Palmolive, DHL and Owens Illinois) pulled out all the stops to sabotage the referendum with a massive, and at times illegal, propaganda campaign should shift the focus to the consistently anti-democratic maneuvers of the Venezuelan opposition, which was dragged kicking and screaming into the democratic process only after their coup attempt and various strikes failed to destabilize Chavéz' administration.

So to take it a step further: that an opposition that's consistently represented the interests of about 15 percent of Venezuelan society, and is backed and advised by U.S. institutions, used dirty tricks to win by a hair, and that even opposition pollsters concede that Chavéz still has the support of a significant majority of the population despite the referendum results, should at least start a conversation about the degree to which a leftist Latin American government is forced to consolidate power in order to survive.

All of that should happen, but of course won't.

Instead, we're going to be in for some spectacular intellectual contortionism, as Chavéz' respect for the results of the democratic process becomes evidence, somehow, of his truly authoritarian nature.

While I'm not able to predict what those arguments will look like -- I'm not that creative -- I'm confident that we won't see the discourse change. The reasons are two-fold.

First, the assertions that Venezuela is sinking into dictatorship never correlated with any discernible reality. Or, put another way: compare the breathless reporting over Chavéz' attempt to eliminate Venezuela's term limits -- the sky is falling! -- with the commercial media's ho-hum response to the announcement that Colombia's right-wing president, Alvaro Uribe, is considering the exact same move. One difference between the two is that Uribe already changed the Colombian Constitution during his first term to allow him to run for a second. Colombia had had one-term limit for 120 years, but Uribe's maneuvers never prompted the execrable Nora O'Donnell to call him a "dictator."

More than that, however, is that the good leftist (Bachelet, Lula and sometimes Kirchner)/ bad leftist (Chavez, Morales and sometimes Kirchner) dichotomy is an essential narrative that, at its heart, is a reaction to waning neoliberal/U.S. influence across the region. It's a distraction designed to shift the discussion from the fact that decades of failed "reforms" according to the dictates of Washington and Geneva have given way to a new regional paradigm that, so far, has yielded some demonstrable benefits to Latin America's poorest, to the supposed perfidy of the left as demonstrated by wildly exaggerated -- and often fabricated -- evidence of its authoritarianism.

An, thanks to a largely compliant media, the tactic has been wonderfully effective -- with many, many progressives convinced of the truth of the charges -- so it will persist out of necessity.

In the meantime, the good news is that the only audience that really counts continues to be the Venezuelan voters. Regional polls rank Chavéz among the least popular of Latin America's leaders, but Venezuelans -- those who live under his government and see how its policies impact their lives, for better or worse -- continue to support him by large margins.

That tells you much about not only Chavéz' ability to deliver on the lion's shares of the promises he's made, but also to the effectiveness of the disinformation campaign pitted against him. That underlying dynamic isn't going to change just because of a few inconvenient facts.

* For the record, I'm not personally displeased to see the referendum fail. I believe long terms in office breed corruption and should be avoided on principle, and I think it's vitally important for Venezuela that the changes happening there are sustainable beyond any one individual's presidency. However, I don't pretend to know better than the Venezuelan people, and would have supported the outcome either way.