Venezuela: Lots of beautiful women; one ugly dictatorship

NPR had a story this morning about the opponents of Hugo Chávez coming together to put up a single candidate to face the dictator in October's scheduled presidential election.

The opposition to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has tried everything to end his long rule: huge protests, a coup and an oil strike. Nothing has worked, but now opposition leaders have coalesced into a united and focused movement that is preparing to choose one candidate to run against the president, posing the strongest electoral challenge to Chávez's populist rule.

If an autocrat is popular, as Chávez was in 2006 when oil prices were skyrocketing, and he was able to buy off the electorate, he can hold an honest poll, albeit one where Hugo controls the media, he controls the message, and he employs the people who will count the votes.

This year, with inflation up and employment down, Chávez is less popular. But with all the power in his hands, he will again win election, even if he needs to cheat to do so.

Venezuela is a country of stark contrasts: rich and poor; good and evil; ugly and beautiful. More than in any country on earth, good looks mean a lot to the Venezuelan people.



Since 1979, a Miss Venezuela has gone on to win the Miss Universe title 6 times. Many others have finished in the top 3. Six wins is more than any other country over that period. Perhaps the distinction is not a true measure of how many beautiful women Venezuela has. But certainly it shows how important pageants are to the Venezuelans.

Maritza Sayalero of Caracas won the global beauty prize 33 years ago. She was Venezuela's first Miss Universe. Since that time, no one from large countries like Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Spain, Japan or China has put on the Miss Universe crown. Yet five more Venezuelans have. The only country to come close is little Puerto Rico with four champions. The U.S. has had three since Miss Sayalero took the tiara.

A recent article in OPEN Magazine (from India) explains "How they do it in Venezuela":

(Venezuela) has won 17 beauty queen titles over the past 30 years. News reports there insist that the annual Miss Venezuela pageant is often the most watched TV show on the day it airs, and most girls grow up dreaming of the crown. For a Miss Venezuela aspirant, such ambitions could start at the tender age of 13, when her parents gift the pre-adolescent girl her first cosmetic makeover. Or even at age 7, when she is enrolled at a beauty academy, where she will be taught the difference between a high street bag and a Chanel one, and where she will learn that the only fork she needs to use is the salad one. Breast implants, nose jobs and tummy tucks typically come a little later—post adolescence, for that is when they are rather more effective. ...

Once a girl is chosen to compete in the Miss Venezuela contest, the drill gets stricter still. Under the guidance of Osmel Sousa, president of the Miss Venezuela Organization, the first step involves taking stock of the girl’s flaws, and then getting down to fixing them. This includes using hair stylists, make-up artists, physical trainers, speech and acting coaches, dental surgeons and dance and walking instructors. Plastic surgeons use their scalpel on whatever cannot be moulded through diet and exercise. And though most Venezuelan beauty contestants are tightlipped about the work done on them, Sousa had famously remarked in 2008, “This isn’t a nature contest. It’s a beauty contest, and science exists to help perfect beauty. There is nothing wrong with that.”

Yet for all that success in the world of pulchritude, Venezuela has one ugly government. In 1999, when Hugo Chávez won the presidency of his country in a free and fair election, Venezuela was a democracy. But Chávez is no democrat. In the last 13 years, a few weeks of which he was out of power during a failed coup, he has turned his country into a socialist police state, with all the power in his own beastly hands.

It is true that Venezuela still has elections. Saddam Hussein's Iraq held elections, too. The votes in Venezuela no longer matter. If the autocrat cannot win an honest vote, he can cheat and no one can stop him:

Certainly "elections" can't be expected to matter much. Mr. Chávez now controls the entire electoral process, from voter rolls to tallying totals after the polls have closed. Under enormous public pressure he accepted defeat in his 2007 bid for constitutional reforms designed to make him president for life. But so what? That loss allowed him to maintain the guise of democracy, and now he has decided that there will be another referendum on the same question in February. Presumably Venezuela will repeat this exercise until the right answer is produced.

All police states hold "elections." But they also specialize in combining the state's monopoly use of force with a monopoly in economic power and information control. Together these three weapons easily quash dissent. Venezuela is a prime example.

In a fashion not too different from how Moammar Ghaddafi concentrated power in his own hands in Libya, Chávez has given titles only to sycophants whose ultimate loyalty is to him. Ten years ago, Lt. Colonel Chávez purged all officers above the rank of second lieutenant from his armed forces. He has replaced all of them with lackeys loyal to him. Those men have subsequently become his eyes and ears in every government agency, every ministry, every courthouse. If anyone speaks his mind against the president, Chávez will find out and eliminate him.

The Venezuelan government is now a military government. Mr. Chávez purged the armed forces leadership in 2002 and replaced fired officers with those loyal to his socialist cause. Like their counterparts in Cuba, these elevated comandantes are well compensated. Lack of transparency makes it impossible to know just how much they get paid for their loyalty, but it is safe to say that they have not been left out of the oil fiesta that compliant chavistas have enjoyed over the past decade. Even if the resource pool shrinks this year, neither their importance nor their rewards are likely to diminish.

Mr. Chávez has also taken over the Metropolitan Police in Caracas, imported Cuban intelligence agents, and armed his own Bolivarian militias, whose job it is to act as neighborhood enforcers. Should Venezuelans decide that they are tired of one-man rule, chavismo has enough weapons on hand to convince them otherwise.

The way Hugo Chávez controls the message in his country--there is no freedom of the press and no more freedom of thought in the country's educational system--is Orwellian. Chávez as Big Brother is on TV all day for many days. His words loom over the public, workers and school children. They have mass rallies spreading the Chavismo thoughts. Chávez learned propaganda from his socialist forebearers: Mao, Kim, Stalin.

One measure that Mr. Chávez relies on heavily is control of the narrative. In government schools children are indoctrinated in Bolivarian thought. Meanwhile the state has stripped the media of its independence and now dominates all free television in the country. This allows the government to marinate the poor in Mr. Chávez's antimarket dogma. His captive audiences are told repeatedly that hardship of every sort -- including headline inflation of 31% last year -- is the result of profit makers, middlemen and consumerism.

The Orwellian screen is also used to stir up nationalist sentiment against foreign devils, like the U.S., Colombia and Israel. The audience has witnessed violence in Gaza through the lens of Hamas, and last week Mr. Chávez made a show of expelling the Israeli ambassador from Caracas.

The only group able to stand up to the Chávez dictatorship has been the owners of private businesses. However, Chávez has moved hard to cripple that opposition:

The most effective police-state tool remains Mr. Chávez's control over the economy. The state freely expropriates whatever it wants -- a shopping center in Caracas is Mr. Chávez's latest announced taking -- and economic freedom is dead. Moreover, the state has imposed strict capital controls, making saving or trading in hard currency impossible. Analysts are predicting another large devaluation of the bolivar in the not-too-distant future. The private sector has been wiped out, except for those who have thrown in their lot with the tyrant.

I am not counting on it, but perhaps the only chance the people of Venezuela will have to get rid of their dictator is if he dies in the next few years from cancer. Barring that, Chavismo as a force of ugliness will live on.