WHEN WILL HUGO CHAVEZ BE TAKEN OUT?

In the summer of 2001, I was the keynote speaker at an international business conference in Cartagena, Colombia.  Frankly, what I said up at the podium I don’t recall.  What was memorable was the private conversation I had with the collection of Venezuelan business leaders attending the conference.

"As someone who helped bring down the Soviet Union," they asked me, "could you tell us what can we do to bring down Hugo Chavez?"  I told them there was one and only one answer to their question, there was no other.

As a Lt. Colonel in 1992, Chavez led a coup attempt to militarily overthrow the democratically elected government of Carlos Andres Perez.  The attempt collapsed, Chavez was jailed, and when he was interviewed on national television, he announced that yes, he had failed, but only "por ahora," for the moment.

At the end of 1993, an aging incompetent leftist, Rafael Caldera, was elected to the Venezuelan presidency.  Within a month of his inauguration, in March of 1994, Caldera issued a full pardon to Chavez, who had been in jail for only two years. 

Chavez immediately formed a "revolutionary socialist" political party, and with his flamboyant charismatic free-lunch demagoguery, campaigned nonstop to succeed Caldera when his term expired in 1998.  He was elected with 56% of the vote, and quickly moved to change the constitution to extend presidential terms to six years, allow a president to serve for two terms instead of just one, and expand presidential powers.

He was on his way to being president for life, and methodically destroying freedom in Venezuela.  By the time I was in Cartagena, Cuban DGI (Direccion General de Inteligencia) secret police were everywhere setting up spy networks and gangs of thugs to intimidate any Chavez opponent modeled on Castro’s "Committees for the Defense of the Revolution," called  Circulos Bolivarianos.

The men I talked to were watching their country being turned into a Cuban communist dictatorship before their eyes.  But they did not like my answer to their question. 

"The key for you to understand is that Hugo Chavez is like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.  He is not like the leader of a system of oppression, which, if he disappears, would simply replace him with someone else.  Chavez and Mugabe are one-man shows, there is no system behind them, if they disappear they cannot be replaced and their dictatorship collapses.

"So – there is only one solution.  Shoot him.  Put a bullet in his brain, his body in a coffin and dump the coffin in the sea.  There is no other way.  No matter what you do to get him out of power short of this, he will prevent you from doing it by any means necessary. Thinking you can restore freedom, democracy, and prosperity in Venezuela peacefully, politically, and not violently is a complete fantasy.  It will not happen because he will not let you.  For Venezuela to be free, Chavez has to be dead.  Period."

They recoiled.  "But we are not killers," they protested.  "But Chavez is," I responded.  "Please understand that I sympathize with how you feel.  You want to remove him from office, not from his life.  Assassination is a horrible thing, and should be avoided at all costs unless there is absolutely no other alternative.  This is his choice, for he will not give up power any other way.  Your choice, then, is to accept his dictatorship or eliminate it by eliminating him.  Either-or."

But such either-ors do not consider third possibilities, and now, today, there might be one.

Back in 2001, the president of Colombia was a spineless squish named Andres Pastrana.  His way of dealing with the FARC Marxist narco-guerrillas was to give them a protected sanctuary within Colombia the size of Switzerland (18,000 out of 440,000 square miles – Colombia is twice the size of Texas).  So this third way never occurred to me then.

About eight months after I spoke at Cartagena, in April 2002 after anti-Chavez rioting in Caracas and several protestors were gunned down by Chavistas, Venezuelan army generals arrested Chavez and took him to a military prison.  I sent messages to my Venezuelan friends advising them that this was their chance and to do what had to be done – Chavez must not leave that prison alive.

They moved quickly to have the generals name Pedro Carmona, the head of their association Fedecámaras (Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce), as interim president.  And then they got cold feet.  When the generals asked, "President Carmona, what is your decision regarding Mr. Chavez?" he dithered, temporized, and didn’t give the necessary liquidation order.

This gave Chavez’s private army, the Presidential Guard, time to regroup and seize the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas, while Chavistas went on a thuggish rampage.  Carmona capitulated, Chavez was released, and was back in power 36 hours after the coup began.  The Cubanization of Venezuela resumed with a renewed vengeance.

Four months later, voters in Colombia decided they no longer wanted a pansy to lead them, and installed Alvaro Uribe in Pastrana’s place.  It was the smartest decision Colombians have ever made.

If there is one man on earth that Hugo Chavez hates and fears more than any other, it is Alvaro Uribe.  Singlehandedly, Uribe has thwarted Chavez’s attempt to seize Colombia via aid to FARC, and has what was once the most powerful and richest guerrilla army in the world on the ropes.

In the process, under Uribe the Colombian Army has become a battle-hardened lethally competent military force.  Which is why he, in response to the ever-rising bombast of Chavez threats – such as he’s "ready for combat" with Colombia, would love to jump into Chavez’s briar patch.

One reason is the answer to this trick question:  When was the last time the Venezuelan military fought a war with a foreign army?  It’s a trick question because the answer is never.  Since Venezuela’s independence in 1830 – when Gran Colombia, the country created by Simon Bolivar broke apart with Bolivar’s death – the Venezuelan military has never fought a war with a neighbor or any foreign country, not ever, not once.

If there ever were an all-out war between Colombia and Venezuela, Uribe’s forces would eat Chavez’s alive.  Uribe is fully aware of this, but he’s a very cautious guy.  So he’s hoping to goad Chavez with infuriating pinpricks of annoyance until Chavez’s bullying bluster finally snaps – so that instead of loudmouth threats to invade Colombia, he actually does.  Then Uribe gets to take Caracas.

That’s the end game.  Right now, Uribe is goading Chavez into shutting off trade with Colombia.  It would hurt Colombian exporters short-term, but cause vast damage on the other side.  Venezuelans buy 300 million cubic feet of natural gas a day from Colombia.  Chavez has screwed up food production so much that most of the fresh food Venezuelans eat now is from Colombia.  No gas and no fresh food can make people unhappy really fast.

However Uribe plays it, the game is going to start speeding up now, for two reasons.

The first is he’s running out of his own time.  He might possibly get the constitution changed so he can have a 3^rd term.  But he can’t depend on that and as is, he’s got eight months to go in office, which means eight months to get rid of Chavez.

The second is he’s running out of time in Venezuela.  Because Kennedy failed to knock off Castro in the early years of his dictatorship, it gave Castro time to solidify his rule.  Now the regime is continuing even as Fidel is dying and incapacitated.

The same is true for Chavez.   Since the failure to kill him during the 2002 coup attempt, the Cuban DGI has become entrenched, operating Chavez’s cocaine smuggling operation uniting FARC with Mexican and other drug cartels to get the stuff into the US.  Upwards of 80% of FARC’s cocaine production (the largest in the world) now goes through Venezuela.

There are at least 50,000 DGI and other Cuban government agents now in Venezuela.  They have set up a number of Venezuelan organized crime syndicates which are making enormous amounts of money.  Just as when the Soviet Union collapsed and the KGB took over as a criminal mafia running Russia (Putin of course is KGB), so the day is fast approaching when the DGI/Chavista mafias will take over Venezuela if Chavez himself is taken out.

It is approaching so fast that Caracas is rife with rumors that Chavez is rapidly outliving his usefulness to the DGI/Chavista mafias who want "Chavismo without Chavez."

Thus the time Uribe has to prevent this is running out.  His hair is growing grey thinking how to best take Chavez out and have him replaced by an actual democracy rather than by DGI/Chavista organized crime syndicates.  The sooner he does the first, the better the odds for the second.

One bottom line is that the question is:  who will take Chavez out – there is no more if he will be.  I am going to get my wish in Cartagena.  But as the Chinese warn, be careful what you wish for. 

All of us who worked to rid the world of the Soviet Union and its Evil Empire thought it would be replaced by a pro-West pro-freedom genuine democracy in Russia.  We were naïvely wrong.

It would be nice not to be wrong about a post-Chavez Venezuela.  It’s looking like that depends on who gets to Hugo first.  Let’s hope it’s Señor Uribe.