Venezuela's Chavez Seeks Out New Enemies

Ten years of President Hugo Chávez ruling the roost in Venezuela passed by this weekend but he wasn't in a celebratory mood. Instead, and as has become his custom during the last decade, he was out to create and nail his enemies, and this time it was those inside his own camp. This emerged in a speech on Saturday commemorating the election in late 1998 that first brought him to power early the following year. The highlight of the speech was a remark that he hoped that, in the wake of the elections, the "history of betrayals" was over.

Chávez delivered the speech at the Fuerte Tiuna barracks to an audience of government ministers, state governors, municipal mayors, national and state legislators and the top echelon of his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

A number of PSUV mayors hadn't turned up. Chávez instructed Vice President Ramón Carrizález to call them in again for a reconvened meeting which he said would last from seven in the evening to dawn the next day. It was important everybody attended so that party members followed "the same line and the same vision."

The curiosity about the tone of this speech was that the PSUV actually did well in terms of holding on to power after so many years. The party emerged still in control of 17 out of Venezuela's 22 states – in net terms, the same as before – and hundreds of mayoralties across the country. Most other elected leaders would have considered this good going. Instead, Chávez made it clear he wasn't satisfied with some of his supporters.

Just who he had in mind when he spoke of treachery wasn't hard to work out. Like all big political organizations, the PSUV is rife with personal and political rivalries, and prone to attract opportunistic individuals out to better their own interests by trailing on the party's coat-tails. But most likely for him, the real villains were the small parties on his own side of the political divide – not least Patria Para Todos (PPT) and the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV), both of whom adopted an independent line when it came to picking candidates for the elections. Both put forward their own candidates for governor in several states, PPT in six and the PCV in three others, sometimes in alliance with each other and sometimes in their own right. Either way, these candidates ran against the PSUV as well as the opposition.

All of them were swept aside by the PSUV on the day of the vote. Pundits are still trying to work out whether splitting the pro-Chávez vote contributed to the opposition gaining Carabobo, Miranda and Táchira states. Virtually everywhere else and further down the power chain, the opposition came off second best. The more rational opposition activists concede they didn't make the big dent in Chávez' power base that they'd hoped for. In the meantime, three theories are doing the rounds in terms of explaining Chávez' focus on enemies.

One has it simply that he's out to bolster support for his bid to reform the constitution so that he can run for a third successive term in office. There are suspicions that the re-election issue is merely a ploy to distract attention from a gathering economic crisis. In other words, it's circus instead of bread.

A second suggestion is that Chávez is primarily out to get the PSUV and his powerbase – chavismo – fully under his thumb. There has been talk of chavismo without Chávez, an idea to which he naturally doesn't take. Hence, the emphasis on top-down uniformity of thought and action.

The third idea is that Chávez is a populist and that's simply how things work for them. The reasoning is that a populist needs identifiable enemies in order to function best.

They say that the classic example in modern times is – of all people in the context of making comparisons with Chávez – Margaret Thatcher, the former British conservative premier who brooked no argument when she was in power. Thatcher was blessed with at least two natural enemies with whom she could go to war, in one instance, literally. One was Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, the other, an upstart Argentine dictator called Leopoldo Fortunator Galtieri. She had two tussles with the mineworkers, both times ostensibly about pay and work conditions. In the first of these, the miners prevailed. Thatcher licked her wounds and re-strategized as pundits concluded her time might well be up. Then Galtieri invaded the Falkland Islands. Thatcher went into Churchillian war leader mode, dispatched the task force, the troops got the islands back, and Thatcher began to look impregnable.

Scargill unwisely had another go, but this time she was ready and the miners got badly mauled. Only a few years later, they could do little as the government closed down swathes of coal mines, arguing they were money-losers an efficient, businesslike Britain simply couldn't afford and didn't need.

In the end, it was Thatcher's own Conservative Party that brought her down. Her bossiness and abruptness had simply made her too many enemies. Challenged for the leadership and unable to garner sufficient support to stay on, one senior party official after another told her she simply had to go.

In Caracas, there are those who predict that chavismo will end in tears, too. For some, this may be no more than wishful thinking. But others (and they include a few party insiders very much off the record), say historical factors will come into play sooner or later. The difference with the Thatcher era, they warn, is whether Venezuela has the institutional structures and democratic impulses to ensure that the end comes peacefully whenever it does.

In Britain, they say, Thatcher was eventually pushed out by a combination of the public feeling it was time for a change and a political system that worked, both in and outside her own party. And, they add on an ominous note for Venezuela, for a long time there's been no tradition of violence intruding on politics in Britain.