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AS THE CASH-FATTED lords of the GOP rehearsed their diversityspeak for convention week, a political reckoning of a very different order was winding up a few thousand miles to the south, in Venezuela. With overwhelming popular support, charismatic populist President Hugo Ch�vez locked in the final pieces of his "peaceful revolution," completely revamping the political playing field in his oil-rich but desperately poor nation. By the time final vote counts rolled in from Venezuela's twenty-three states, Ch�vez's Fifth Republic Movement captured governorships in fourteen of them, and Ch�vez handily dispatched his nearest rival (and former ally) Francisco Arias with fifty-nine percent of the vote. Fifth Republic candidates also won sixty percent of the seats in the new Venezuelan congress, which assures Ch�vez the power basically to legislate by fiat over his next six-year term in office. Whatever the seers of the feverishly globalizing political order had in mind when they began crowing about the Third Way, it clearly wasn't Hugo Ch�vez.

Just what Ch�vez has in mind remains a subject of considerable debate. On paper, he bears discomfitting resemblance to Latin America's sorry parade of strongmen past, who, from Per�n to Fujimori, begin their careers as full-throated champions of the forgotten masses, only to sink into the predictable squalor of corruption, repression, and citizen bloodshed. And many of the particulars of the "peaceful revolution" point to an ominous-sounding consolidation of executive power. Ch�vez's new constitution � which last week's vote was explicitly charged to "relegitimize" � abolished Venezuela's standing Assembly and replaced it with a unicameral house (presumably a far more efficient vessel for performing the great leader's bidding) while securing the president an unprecedented pair of six-year terms in office. If he maintains anything like his current level of popular appeal, Ch�vez will likely remain a thorn in the side of neoliberal development policies until 2012.

In other respects, however, Ch�vez would be hard-pressed to meet the inherited profile of the South American strongman � one of the points brought home in a thoughtful collection of essays in the May/June edition of the NACLA report on the Americas. For one thing, the Organization of American States exerts considerable power in waylaying antidemocratic ambitions in the region � as the perpetrators of this spring's short-lived coup in Ecuador learned to their grief. And for another, Ch�vez, for all his distressing quasi-messianic self-regard and tub-thumping rhetoric demonizing the region's "oligarchs" of oil and land, seems to have some actual respect for democratic procedure. When his political opponents publicized charges of corruption in his government, he launched an official investigation, and cooperated fully. He has authorized impartial investigations into civilian allegations of military looting and misconduct in the wake of last December's catastrophic flooding. He has also alienated important sectors of the military by mustering soldiers for such mundane civic duties as street cleaning and tending produce stands. (All this in spite of the still-troubling consideration that he has appointed more active-service members of the military to government posts than any president has since 1958.)

But with all the essential pieces of Venezuela's political process realigned in Ch�vez's favor, the fortunes of Chavismo will stand or fall on Ch�vez's yet-to-be-tested promises of economic reform. Even though it is the leading exporter of oil to the United States, Venezuela is suffering a crippling recession; last year, the economy shrank by seven percent, and unemployment hovers around fifteen percent. Eighty percent of its citizens live in poverty; a 1997 study found that sixty-seven percent of Venezuelans earn less than two dollars a day. Among the lesser known, but potentially far more explosive, provisions of Ch�vez's 1999 overhaul of the constitution are measures restricting the privatization of social security and state-run oil enterprises, extending labor benefits to the self-employed and housewives, and endorsing "retroactive" severance pay to the laid off. In this regard Chavismo bespeaks something larger than the person of Ch�vez himself � a rapidly spreading disenchantment with the often punitive regime of neoliberal economics in the region, which roll back longstanding state safety nets and typically reward a tiny sliver of investors little inclined (as the traditional mandate of Venezuelan politics has it) to "sow the oil." Among the recent symptoms of this mood are the forced retirement of the PRI overlords in Mexico, who saw more than seventy years of one-party rule collapse in the June presidential vote, and seem headed for more reversals in the state of Chiapas next month; and the recent meltdown of both economic and political order in Ecuador. And so as the Republican festivities wind down in the Keystone State and the last of the convention speakers call out the last bit of comforting scripture quotes to the assembled faithful, we should cast back in our memories for that bit of the homily about reaping what you sow.


Chris Lehmann is an editor at the Washington Post.

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