CHAVEZ IS NO DICTATOR, SAYS FRANCISCO TORO.

Talented Francisco Toro, always desiring to be an “enfant terrible”, has now opened an argument that he cannot win. Although he opposes Chavez, he always strives to express his opposition in an original manner, not to be confused with what he calls, with some reason, “the mediocre” opposition which exists in Venezuela. He is currently claiming, http://www.caracaschronicles.com/, that Chavez’s regime cannot possibly be defined as a dictatorship because the opposition “can say what it pleases”. To support his argument he says that if Chavez was a dictator Marta Colomina, one of the most vigorous Chavez’s opponents, could not write in a Venezuelan newspaper saying, “Chavez is a dictator”. As far as I can see this is the core of his argument, that the opposition can say what it pleases, although he also says that Chavez is not a dictator because his repression is "selective"rather than widespread. Although it is essentially true that there is much latitude as to what we can say in the press, it is also true that the regime will never hear or, much less, answer the voices of the opposition. To voice dissent in Venezuela has become a one-way exercise and has the same effect on the life of the country as “pissing on cotton”. For ten years now there has been no dialogue between the regime and the opposition, a sure sign of absence of democracy, dialogue being replaced by a loutish and systematic attack by Chavez on political dissenters, one that started as gross verbal punishment and has now escalated to harassment, persecution and prison.
But we cannot define a dictatorship on the basis of one single criterion, just as Toro is trying to do. Political scientists have long defined the characteristics of a dictatorship: lack of transparent elections, pretensions of indefinite permanence in power with the support of the armed forces, disdain for the opposition, lack of institutional checks and balances, decision-making without popular participation and debate, lack of transparency in the management of public assets, lack of accountability about the actions of the government, a politicized armed force at the service of the executive, a systematic alignment with the group of dictatorships left in the planet, organized repression of dissidents with the complicity of a bureaucracy that should exist to guarantee democratic procedures, the imposition of executive decrees and decisions that violate the constitution, the will of one man overriding all normal ways to conduct public business. All of these characteristics are present in the Chavez’s controlled regime. Letting the opposition say what it pleases without paying the smallest attention to these sayings has become, in fact, another characteristic of the dictatorship. By allowing the opposition a one-way exercise of free speech the dictator behaves shrewdly. He acts on the premise that, as it happens in nature, thousands of small tremors will never develop into a major earthquake. The energy that would fuel a major protest if it were constrained is dispersed every day through thousands of individual protests, including “mentadas de madre”. Words, Chavez says, do not break bones. Toro’s column, in fact, represents a good example of the success of Chavez’s strategy. While the need for strong and decisive civic action against the dictator is diluted by exquisite verbal gymnastics about the sex of angels, such as Toro’s, Chavez continues to sail along in his plans of national and regional domination.
We must act and stop playing with words.