Alvaro Vargas Llosa Sends Hugo Chavez to Dante's Inferno

[Jcrowley]

Alvaro Vargas Llosa Sends Hugo Chavez to Dante's Inferno
By Stephen Lendman
10/05/06

<snip>

Vargas Llosa is clever enough to disguise his message to make his case in language sounding sensible but which, in fact, is the same old doctrine he disingenuously claims to be against: "failed domestic policies....dysfunctional national and international institutions....unjust terms of trade, and unfair capital flows." It sounds prudent until the mask comes off revealing his real agenda. He decries the notion of government-run efforts to end poverty and inequality and makes no pretense that the only solutions he thinks will work are the same kind of market-based ones that never do. He preaches the gospel of "the entrepreneurial spirit shown by millions of destitute people around the world (and the) success stories" of how they've risen from their impoverishment and prospered. If only he'd tell us where these millions are located and how can he explain the fact that poverty is increasing in most countries, and the dominant entrepreneurial class (the ones that fund his Center) are responsible for it.

In his September 25 article on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (a venue where his views are always welcome), Vargas Llosa joins a growing chorus taking aim at Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. And does he ever in a piece of trash journalism titled Chavez's Inferno in which he begins by saying Hugo Chavez should have held up a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy (many of us read in college) at the UN instead of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival. Vargas Llosa notes in the first part of Dante's work the Italian master takes his readers on a journey through the nine concentric circles of his Inferno representing various types of evil. Dante's description of the underworld, he says, "reads like a script of present-day Venezuela," and in one phrase Vargas Llosa destroys whatever credibility he claims to have. He then confirms it by taking his readers through each of Dante's nine circles consigning parts of Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution (and the Venezuelan President) to each of them without ever explaining the elements in it and how they've improved the lives of most Venezuelans. Vargas Llosa thus portrays a false picture of life in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez making him a likely candidate for a special place in one of the circles he takes us through.

He begins with the first circle for those who lack faith. This for Chavez, he falsely claims, is for the
80% of Venezuelans who lack food and can't afford a basic daily diet. He says it's because since Chavez took office in 1999, the poverty rate either rose (according to one report he cites) or held steady (in another) and in either case shows Chavez's policies don't work. Vargas Llosa conveniently twists the facts ignoring the humanitarian social programs under Chavez that provide low-cost food and cheap or free housing for the needy. He also says nothing about Venezuela's dismal history under the oligarchs he admires before Hugo Chavez became President and the vastly different performance record in the country afterward. If he did, he'd have had to have told readers that in the 28 years prior to Chavez's election under the corrupted corporatists, Venezuelan per capita income fell 35%. It was the worst decline in the region and one of the worst in the world.

Vargas Llosa also fails to mention the poverty rate in the country in 1997 was 61% according to Venezuela's National Statistics Institute (INE), in 1999 it was 50% when Chavez was elected, and at the end of 2005 it stood at 44%. He also ignored the US and Venezuelan oligarch-directed crippling oil strike in 2002-03 that devastated the economy. Once it ended, the economy began to grow impressively, per capita income rose, unemployment fell and the poverty rate declined from a high of 62% in 2003 to a level near 40% today. The Chavez Revolution has been so successful (helped in no small measure by high oil prices) that since 2004 Venezuela had the highest growth rate in the hemisphere. Vargas Llosa clearly has a credibility problem. He poses as a Latin American expert, so either his claim is false or he knows the facts, chooses to suppress them and thus has an even greater problem for his lack of principle and integrity. Maybe the wrong person belongs in Dante's Inferno, but we're only through the first circle.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15228.htm

[Peace Patriot]

1. Schools, teachers, adult literacy programs, a free university education,

access to medical care, community centers, small business loans and grants, the encouragement of small business coops, the encouragement of small family farms and food self-sufficiency for the Venezuela, encouragement of grass roots participation in decision-making (what the community really needs, and how to organize it), low cost housing for Caracas' many shantytown dwellers whose homes regularly slide off the hills in heavy rains, encouragement of indigenous (as oppose to canned, imported, corporate) music, the return of land to the indigenous Indians--these things are bad for the poor?

These seem to me to be visionary programs, laying the basis for economic diversity and economic health, and greatly improving the lives of the poor, and, indeed, of building a strong middle class much the same as it was built here, in the U.S., especially the emphasis on education. Venezuela wiped out illiteracy in the country in five years with the adult literacy programs (which were identified by local people as a need), and has inspired formerly illiterate people to get further training and develop ambitions in the work force and in business.

What the global corporate predators do--whether it's oil, or logging, or other exploitative industries--is they come into an area, focus on extracting the region's resources, and offer what are relatively high paying jobs to a few, with no thought to the long term consequences to the other local people and to the economy and society. This is exactly what the oil giants did in Venezuela. They created a tiny elite of oil professionals, paid them well, and connived with corrupt governments to keep taxes and the government's share of oil revenues low, so that no one else benefited and so that they had to take no responsibility for the country or its society as a whole. The vast population of poor people received no services and no benefit, though the country was awash in oil. Hugo Chavez has changed this equation. He has insisted on the government having 51% ownership of the oil, and receiving fair taxes from those who are greatly profiting, and instead of padding his own pockets and those of a few already well off people, he is using the oil money for long term social and financial development.

This is Dante's Inferno? Maybe for people like the CEO's of Exxon/Mobile, or George Bush, it seems like Hell to have share with others. But not for everybody else.

[Vidar]

2. Bravo Peace Patriot.

[Jcrowley]

3. Excellent post

The ninth and lowest of Dante's circles is for traitors, the worst ones in Dante's world. Surely George Bush would qualify for that level and Vargas Llosa with him based on the above discourse of hateful dishonesty and character assassination. Vargas Llosa makes another choice reserving a spot in all of Dante's nine levels for Hugo Chavez. Here again his comments are garbled. He first mentions Army officers betraying Chavez with three of them, imprisoned for real crimes he won't explain, managing to escape. More likely they were sprung with CIA help, but that's unmentioned in his column. The CIA is an old hand at this kind of business. In 1985 it's operatives bribed prison guards in Venezuela so that world-class terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, on the CIA's payroll, was allowed to "escape" to find sanctuary in El Salvador from where he resumed his CIA service participating in the Contra wars in Nicaragua. No mention is made of this in Vargas Llosa's anti-Chavez diatribe which then ends comparing Dante's center of the earth Cocytus frozen lake, where Satan is held captive, to "Venezuela's Inferno (where) Satan is oil-rich Lake Maracaibo" that he uses metaphorically for the "astronomical wealth squandered by (Chavez's) tyrannical popularism."

[Judi Lynn]

4. Poor, sick bastard. He really needs to involve himself in something

he can do well. Writing right-wing slop doesn't count.

I've seen his garbage before. Here's a brief bio.:

Alvaro Vargas Llosa

Journalist and writer

He is a native of Peru and received his B.S.C. in international history from the London School of Economics.He has been a member of Board of the Miami Herald Publishing Company and op-ed page editor and columnist at the Miami Herald and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, BBC World Service, and Time Magazine. He is the author of the books, one of the most important are Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot (with Carlos Alberto Montaner and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza), and The Manufacturing of Poverty (with Carlos Alberto Montaner and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza). He is Director of Center for Global Prosperity of The Independent Institute.
(snip/)

http://www.ileperu.org/contenido/Curriculum_miembros/staff3_eng.htm



Could he have less character in that dead face?

On edit: I just remembered Carlos Alberto Montaner, one of his co-writers, is a very, VERY right-wingnut looney toon Cuban "exile."