Sad Hints of a Bloody Future

Moisés Naím / NewsWeek

I grew up in Venezuela and, although I now live in Washington, D.C., returned to Caracas for the referendum to recall President Hugo Chavez. Last Monday—the day after the poll—I went to Plaza Altamira, a square in Caracas, where a small crowd of people were protesting against the results of the referendum, claiming it was rigged in favor of Chavez. It was a peaceful and rather small assembly.

The mood was subdued and depressed. The overwhelming majority of the protesters were women, many of them quite poor.

Unexpectedly, a group of government sympathizers showed up and started to throw rocks and bottles demanding that the protesters leave the plaza because ''this country is now all ours." Then from behind this threatening mob a band of armed men roared up on motorcycles and cars and started shooting at the crowd. They were well organized, wore earpieces, seemed trained and were very deliberate in their actions. I was able to clearly see that this was an unprovoked and murderous attack on a peaceful crowd that had gathered mostly to commiserate. Several amateur photographers took pictures of the event and circulated them on the Web. The wounded lady in the pictures, 61-year-old Maritza Ron, died in the hospital a few hours later, and eight others were wounded, some seriously.

I was shocked to see that this could be happening in a country with such a long tradition of peaceful political protest. In the incident I recognized a version of state-sanctioned mob violence that was new to Venezuela. I knew that such brutality was common in the Soviet Union, Cuba, Haiti, Bosnia, China and in many African nations. It was also a common practice of the military juntas during the 1970s and 1980s in other parts of Latin America. And now here it was, in Venezuela—a country that until a few years ago had no tradition of this sort.

The violence is taking place under an official veneer of democracy. I was seeing the worst abuses of communism and dictatorship carried out with the implicit tolerance of a leadership that had been put in power by voters who peacefully waited for hours to exercise their voting rights. According to the latest survey of Latinobarometro, a polling organization, when people throughout Latin America are asked if democracy is preferable to any other kind of government Venezuelans rank almost at the top of the list in their support for democracy.

Until 1992, when the then Leutenant Colonel Chavez staged a military coup that failed, Venezuela had a strong democratic tradition. When horrible human-rights abuses took place in Latin America during the 1970s, the country enjoyed a vibrant democracy. In five of the eight elections of the last 40 years an opposition party won in highly contested races and power was transferred peacefully. Now that the rest of the region is moving in this direction, though, Venezuela seems to be sliding down the opposite path, reliving the sorry experience of the region's harrowing past.

And yet I knew that what I was witnessing in Plaza Altamira was going to be largely invisible and almost irrelevant to the rest of the world. The small dust-up in a Latin American country pales in comparison with the tragedy in Sudan, the chaos in Iraq or even the destruction wreaked that day by Hurricane Charley in Florida. For the rest of the world the little that mattered regarding Venezuela was that a referendum had taken place and that President Chavez was not recalled. While the referendum and its contested outcome are very important for Venezuela, to me the shootings in Altamira are even more important. Not because I was there but because witnessing the self-assured sense of impunity with which these murderous thugs were shooting at a peaceful crowd transported me both to a Latin American past that I thought would never come to Venezuela and to a future where the country would be ruled by the kind of leaders who create conditions where such incidents become unbearably common.

I desperately hope that in this first decade of the 21st century Venezuelans will be treated as citizens with the right to assembly and to express dissenting political opinions, without being gunned down by thugs empowered by their elected leader. Yet, what I witnessed in Altamira and what I know about the proclivities of President Chavez make me fearful that in years to come instead of international election observers what Venezuela will need is the active presence of international human-rights monitors.