The Op-Ed Assassination of Hugo Chávez

Separation of powers

In addition to ignoring the Venezuelan government's popular mandate to carry out its policies, columnists ignore the Venezuelan National Assembly's role in formulating major political legislation, such as the recent expansion of the Supreme Court and the Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television. U.S. op-ed pages erroneously portray Chávez as the author of all such legislation. For example, Oppenheimer (Miami Herald, 6/5/05) contended that Chávez "single-handedly packed his country's Supreme Court with loyalists."

In reality, the expansion of Venezuela's five-chamber Supreme Court was first debated and then approved by the National Assembly. Pro-government legislators argued that the existing number of judges could not adequately handle their caseloads (Venezuelanalysis.com, 5/27/04). Venezuelan legal expert Carlos Escarrá had pointed out that the court's constitutional and political chambers were backlogged with thousands of cases (Venezuelanalysis.com, 5/17/04).

In contrast to the U.S. system, in which the president makes judicial appointments and the Senate votes on whether to confirm them, Venezuela's National Assembly selects Supreme Court magistrates. In the process of expanding the court, the Assembly selected 17 new justices from a list of 157 candidates pre-selected by a committee made up of representatives of the offices of the human rights ombudsman, the attorney general and the comptroller general (Radio Nacional de Venezuela, 12/13/04). Only in propaganda can this process be described as Chávez having "single-handedly packed" Venezuela's court.

Columnists who attack the "stacking" of Venezuela's Supreme Court also neglect to explain the political context within which the National Assembly voted to increase the number of magistrates. Among U.S. op-ed writers, only the progressive U.S. economist Mark Weisbrot (Miami Herald, 12/20/04) pointed out that Venezuela's Supreme Court had refused to prosecute military officers who temporarily overthrew the elected government in April 2002.

In light of the court's failure to defend the country's democratic institutions against violent attempts to subvert them, Weisbrot argued that it was not unreasonable for the National Assembly to expand the Court (Christian Science Monitor, 8/11/04). "If you had a Supreme Court in the U.S. that ruled that the people who participated in a military coup could not be prosecuted, Congress would impeach those justices," Weisbrot contends.

U.S. commentaries are also inaccurate in asserting that Venezuela's media law was simply "pushed through" the National Assembly by Chávez. Venezuelan legislators not only deliberated about the law, but also held in-depth studies of other countries' communication laws in drafting it. Among the communication laws from which legislators drew inspiration were those of England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Argentina, Mexico and the United States.

When the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress passes a piece of legislation and George W. Bush signs it into law, one scarcely finds U.S. commentaries asserting that the president "pushed" the legislation through a "compliant" congress. However, when Venezuela's democratically elected National Assembly undertakes a similarly complex process of devising legislation that Chávez subsequently signs into law, U.S. commentaries portray the country's legislative process as if it were stage-managed by Chávez.

In a rare commentary that took a sympathetic approach to the Chávez government, then Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer (who was fired by the Times in December) summed up the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy (1/25/05):

“The fact is...that when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy.”