International news coverage this morning was dominated by news that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has won a narrow 54-46% victory in a national referendum approving the abolition of term limits for elected officials. The hard left are, predictably, cock-a-hoop at the victory of a "democrat" and "champion of the poor".
Less well publicised, however, is Chávez's decision on Sunday to expel Spanish Partido Popular MEP Luis Herrero, a guest of the opposition Un Nuevo Tiempo party, from the country.
According to the Miami Herald, Herrero was "shoved into a car, accompanied by about seven plainclothes policemen, driven to the airport and put on the next flight out" of Venezeula after describing Chávez as a "dictator" and voicing fears that he would engage in electoral fraud in order to rig the referendum in his favour.
Herrero's case is not an isolated one. In September, two representatives of Human Rights Watch were surrounded by twenty military police and forcibly deported from the country for launching this insightful report into Chávez's habitual abuses of civil society, the media, courts and organised labor. On a daily basis, numerous opposition members are beaten and their families intimidated for their refusal to blindly support Chávez and his crony-dominated government.
Chávez - and his naive supporters - may conceal his actions behind fig leaves of democracy but, in practice, his brand of personality politics and ruthless suppression of political opponents appears to be more closely modelled on the management style of Juan Perón than a more genuine (if occasionally misjudged) sincerity to reduce poverty such as that shown by the Lula government in Brazil.
Chávez may well have won the right to stand for another term but let's hope that - as with our own Labour Party - his fourth term eludes him.
