MIAMI — Venezuelans will head to the polls April 14 to elect a successor to the late President Hugo Chavez. While Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s handpicked candidate, is favored to win, it’s not as clear who will inherit the populist’s mantle
MIAMI — Venezuelans will head to the polls April 14 to elect a successor to the late President Hugo Chavez. While Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s handpicked candidate, is favored to win, it’s not as clear who will inherit the populist’s mantle as the ideological leader of the Latin left.
With his strident anti-Americanism and insistence on Latin American unity, Chavez championed the poor and thwarted a U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas at the same time he pushed regional alliances and hemispheric trade block as a counterweight to what he perceived as too much U.S. influence in the region.
And there seems to be a desire among the Latin left to keep those efforts alive.
When Chavez died March 5, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez, President Jose Mujica of Uruguay and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, for example, released a joint statement saying the best tribute to Chavez “would be to preserve his legacy, activism and commitment to the regional integration project.”
But with the Venezuelan economy in rickety shape and rampant crime plaguing the country, keeping Chavez’s dream alive in Venezuela — let alone the rest of the continent — may prove daunting.
While those who jetted to Caracas to pay their respects included a who’s who of the Latin left — among them Cuba’s Raul Castro, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and Rafael Correa of Ecuador — there’s no clear favorite as to who might fill Chavez’s role.
Interim President Maduro, who served as Chavez’s foreign minister, may try. He has well-established contacts around the region and is expected to try to keep up Venezuela’s role as oil benefactor if he wins.
But analysts say he won’t be able to cast nearly as long a shadow as Chavez, whose charisma — as well as generosity with Venezuela’s oil wealth — helped cement his role in leftist Latin American politics and economics.
“I would think that Maduro would seek to maintain the leadership role based on his past relationships, but the question is for how long?” said Diana Villiers Negroponte, a Latin American researcher at the Brookings Institution.
Going forward, she said, there will be increased pressure on Venezuela to sell its oil at market prices. While Negroponte expects a Maduro presidency would maintain its preferential oil arrangement with Cuba, she said other nations that benefited from oil diplomacy “may get haircuts.”
In addition, analysts say, Chavez’s influence in the region also had been on the wane as the Venezuelan model isn’t really seen as much of an alternative. The system benefited the poor but was plagued with operating inefficiencies that resulted in high inflation, food shortages, a recent devaluation and a continuing exodus of the wealthy classes.
“A number of Latin American countries didn’t share Chavez’s approach but took advantage of it” and its ability to send a message to the United States, said Kurt Weyland, a professor of government at the University of Texas-Austin.
