Venezuela's Chavez is a hit on one campus in India

NEW DELHI -- I happened to be giving a talk at the Jawaharlal Nehru University here the day that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced the nationalization of key industries. I thought the news would help me make the case that Chavez is destroying Venezuela's economy. How wrong I was!
Far from applauding, the professors and students at the School of International Studies -- a major recruiting ground for foreign service officials -- were looking at me with a mixture of anthropological curiosity and disbelief. It was obvious that, for most of them, Chavez was a hero.
Granted, JNU, as this university is known, is the most politicized of all major Indian public universities. My volunteer guide, Ravi Kumar, a doctoral student doing his thesis on Cuba, told me that about 60 percent of all students at the school are "Marxist." But this is not the case in most other Indian universities, especially in the technical colleges where students are busy studying to get well-paid jobs in the booming information technology industry, he said.
"How many of you think Chavez is doing a lot of good for Venezuela?" I asked my audience. Most of the students raised their hands.
"Why do you think that?" I asked. A doctoral student named Jagpal, who is doing his thesis on Venezuela, said that Chavez had put an end to a corrupt economic and political elite, and had focused the government's attention on the poor.
Long-term poverty
I said that I agreed with him if he phrased it that way. But the problem is that -- rhetoric aside -- Chavez is condemning the poor to long-term poverty. In a world where even communist countries like China and Vietnam are competing to attract investments, create new industries and increase exports, Chavez is scaring away investments, driving industries to close down and lay off workers, and making a growing number of people dependent on government handouts.
Instead of using Venezuela's unprecedented oil windfall to diversify the economy and build new industries, Chavez is simply giving away monthly cash bonuses to the poor, I continued. As the saying goes, that's bread for today, hunger for tomorrow.
Not true, the doctoral student specializing on Venezuela interrupted. Poverty is declining dramatically under Chavez, he argued. I asked where was he getting his information, and he told me he happened to have two books on Venezuela with him. Both turned out to be virtual odes to Chavez, one of them written by Aleida Guevara, "Che" Guevara's Cuban daughter.
Well, Chavez's record on poverty is very debatable, I responded. According to Venezuela's government-run National Statistics Institute, poverty in Venezuela actually rose during Chavez's first four years in office, from 43 percent to 54 percent of the population. Since 2004, poverty has decreased to 34 percent -- a dubious achievement if one considers that Venezuela gets most of its income from oil, and oil prices have soared from 8 a barrel when Chavez took office to 70 a barrel last year.
Why does he keep winning elections? It's partly because of his cash handouts to the poor, and partly because of political intimidation, I told my incredulous Indian audience.
Maisanta list
The Chavez government has compiled a list of 12.4 million opponents -- the so-called Maisanta list -- which is routinely used to reject people when they apply for government jobs, a business license or a passport. The Organization of American States' human rights commission is reportedly investigating 780 cases of political discrimination in Venezuela.
Professor Abdul Nafei, head of NJU's Latin American program, said only half-jokingly that many of his students are pro-Chavez out of self interest: students' first priority is to defend free education, a cause that finds its most ardent champions in Chavez and Castro. "As soon as they graduate, they leave Marxism behind," Nafei added with a smile.
My conclusion: Maybe so. But, as I told my JNU student friends, I find their pro-Chavez stand somewhat ironic: Few of them would support anti-investment policies in India.
They know that India -- much like China -- has reduced poverty dramatically since it started pursuing market-friendly policies. That's exactly the opposite of what Chavez is doing at home, and the reason why his narcissist-Leninist model will end up hurting the poor.
Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.