Chavez's Charities Aren't What They Seem

By: V. Manuel Rocha, former U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia and Argentina - Hugo Chavez hoped his social-service projects--funded with revenue from the national oil company--would help him win a constitutional referendum. The reality, however, is that Chavez's "missions" are proven disasters--both economically and politically, according to Alvaro Vargas Llosa, director of the Independent Institute's Center on Global Prosperity. Mercal, a mission ostensibly devoted to subsidizing food for the poor, is rife with corruption, with government workers stealing the food and selling it for higher prices on the black market. Barria Adentro, a medical mission supported by Fidel Castro, has lost 60 percent of its Cuban doctors to desertion. "It would seem that many of the Cubans were pursing emigration rather than altruism when they traveled to Venezuela to help Chavez establish Barrio Adentro," writes Vargas Llosa in his latest column for the Washington Post Writers Group. The Chavez administration claimed that Mercal and Barrio Adentro reached 70 percent of Venezuela's poor. But two researchers with no particular axe to grind, Yolanda D'Elia and Luis Francisco Cabezas, found that at its peak in 2004, Barrio Adentro reached no more than 30 percent. "Today, it reaches no more than one in five poor Venezuelans, while six of every 10 citizens supposedly fed by Mercal are not really benefiting from that program." Price controls and inflation have made chicken, meat, eggs, and milk a hard-to-find luxury. Many supermarkets have been forced to close. And Venezuelans have had to turn to stores that do not participate in the Mercal program. Chavez, Vargas Llosa concludes, vastly over promised and vastly under delivered. Also of note, in a recent letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Vargas Llosa criticized an article that underreported the number of executions committed by Che Guevara. "While it is true that he executed hundreds 'from the Batista regime,' he also executed people not connected to the regime," he wrote. "Javier Arzuaga, the Basque chaplain who served at 'La Cabaña' [prison] at the time, told me that among the 800 prisoners there were some journalists, businessmen and merchants." "Mission Not Accomplished, " by Alvaro Vargas Llosa (7/16/08) Spanish Translation "Che Guevara Was No Hero to the Many He Abused," by Alvaro Vargas Llosa (Wall Street Journal, 7/2/08) Spanish Translation Purchase Lessons from the Poor: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit, edited by Alvaro Vargas Llosa. "Lessons from the Poor shows that the mightiest soldiers in the war on poverty are poor people themselves.. .. The message of the book is profoundly hopeful--as governments remove obstacles to entrepreneurship, there is much potential for the poor to lift themselves out of poverty."--William R. Easterly, Professor of Economics and Director, Development Research Institute, New York University Purchase The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty, by Alvaro Vargas Llosa "The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty is a timely and masterful critical piece on the Left's heroic figure and on the Latin America he tried to change but only made worse in the process. Che Guevara has become a myth to many around the world who really do not understand or know who this man was all about. Alvaro Vargas Llosa exposes the real Che with the facts of who he really was. He takes off the beret, the cigar, the façade of the handsome revolutionary figure and exposes the violent, unjust, and arbitrary side of the real Che. More importantly, Vargas Llosa puts his demystification of Che in the context of what has gone wrong with Latin America in the past decades."