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