It is difficult to find in Venezuela today neutral and dispassionate views about the government of President Hugo Chavez. For many he marks a return to the demagogic populism that plunged various Latin American countries into economic chaos in the past. For others, however, he is developing a novel response to globalisation, one that defends Venezuela's national interests and helps channel benefits to the poor.
In his style, the former colonel who led an unsuccessful coup attempt against President Carlos Andres Perez in February 1992 and who was elected Venezeula's president at the end of 1998, seems determined to offend. In his weekly radio show, Alo, Presidente - whose 100th programme in mid- March lasted six hours and 34 minutes - he pokes fun at the rich and the middle classes while listening with sympathy to the phone calls of the poor and phoning his ministers on air asking them to resolve problems.
Not surprisingly, this has turned the country's elite against him, with the media waging nothing short of a campaign to get rid of him. For example, when President Chavez proposed the creation of an International Humanitarian Fund at the recent UN conference on development funding in Mexico, Venezuela's main newspapers rubbished the proposal.
In what can only be regarded as a major achievement, he has managed to unite the country's employers' organisation, the trade union confederation and the Catholic Church in a pact to demand his resignation. He even has the state oil company, PDVSA, up in arms against him over his appointment of a director.
When I put it to a close Chavez collaborator that his hostile rhetoric was partly responsible for his woes, she responded that "once a military, always a military".
Yet his style masks the substance of his policies. After a decade of economic decline, high inflation and soaring poverty, Venezuela under his rule has begun to grow again. Data from the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) estimate its growth of 2.8 per cent in 2001 as the third highest in the region and project this to continue for the current year.
With careful macroeconomic management, inflation has begun to decline and the country's currency, the bolivar, after a recent devaluation, has now begun appreciating against the dollar. Officials at the UN Development Programme in Caracas say that for the first time in over a decade poverty is at last showing signs of decreasing.
The secret of President Chavez's success is his oil policy. Since oil provides some 80 per cent of the country's export earnings, his decision to resurrect the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries and to co-ordinate controls over oil production in order to raise prices, has seen the price of a barrel rise from US$8.43 in February 1999 to $23.34 in January 2000. In recent weeks it has been hovering around $21.
Mr Chavez's policy has transformed the country's prospects and reversed his predecessor's attempts to privatise the huge and efficient PDVSA oil company.
For some commentators, this policy marks a novel attempt to manage globalisation for the benefit of poorer countries. As Colombian historian, Prof Medofilo Medina, who has written a book on Chavez, puts it: "Venezuela has broken in an original way from the convention that issues of world importance are left to the competence of the leaders and officials of countries belonging to the financial and industrial centres of the world, and to transnational technocrats.' For this reason, he characterizes the current process in Venezuela as 'the last revolution of the 20th century".
Instead of a unipolar world dominated by the economic needs of the US, President Chavez seeks a multipolar world. Towards this end, he has fostered close relations with China, maintains an active diplomacy with oil states Iraq, Iran and Libya, and has taken over the leadership of the Group of 77, a large grouping of developing countries. To ensure the benefits of his oil policy to other countries, Venezuela recently signed an agreement with a number of small Central American countries and Cuba to provide them with oil on concessional terms.
Internally, he has completely redesigned the country's political institutions, founding a Fifth Republic in which "citizens' power" is given constitutional recognition and institutional form alongside the traditional division of executive, legislative and judicial powers. I was informed by people working among the poor, including some foreign missionaries, that the "Bolivarian circles" which the President encourages people to establish at local level and register with the Vice-President's office have given the poor a new sense of participation in public affairs.
The redesign of the state has, however, involved a close collaboration with the armed forces from whose ranks many functionaries come and who are intimately involved in executing social and development policies. One senior political scientist traced this "civic-military alliance" back to the work of Venezuela's left-wing guerrillas in the 1960s who, though defeated by the military, planted the seeds of more radical social analysis among middle-ranking officers at the time. One of those was Hugo Chavez.
Though he has alienated Venezuela's elites and the hostile rhetoric of the US is hardening by the day, it is difficult to see how President Chavez can be overthrown as long as he can count on solid military support. But questions are also being asked about the channeling of state social and development funds through the military without any clear mechanisms of accountability.
This may be bypassing the country's bureaucracy and traditional political parties, widely discredited for their corruption, but it is feared that it opens new possibilities for corruption. Since the President's electoral success means he controls the country's executive, legislature and organs of state, the lack of institutional checks to his power is making it difficult for his critics to ensure transparency.
Under President Chavez, Venezuela has broken with the dominance of neo-liberal economic policies throughout Latin America. Indeed. He regularly denounces "savage neoliberalism" for its impact on the poor.
But, apart from Fidel Castro, he has few friends in the region. However, this could change dramatically if the Workers Party wins Brazil's presidential elections later this year. Currently this looks likely.
While polls show he is losing popular support among his own people, these are not regarded as reliable, and there is much anecdotal evidence that he maintains widespread support among the poor. Indeed, for all their criticisms, the opposition has so far failed to develop a political party with any strength or support base. Media dismissals of Chavez, both nationally and internationally, are largely missing what is an ambiguous and contradictory but highly significant and unique political experiment.
DCU lecturer, Peadar Kirby, is a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Chile, in Santiago, where he is writing a book, Latin America in a Globalized World,
to be published next year.