As a cost-cutting measure, we went without the Wall Street Journal for a few years. What I missed most during that time was Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s column about the Americas. She writes about things that I don’t know where to find elsewhere.
I liked Monday’s column about Hugo Chávez’s worst nightmare.
It’s about a student leader, Yon Goicoechea:
Mr. Goicoechea is the retiring secretary general of the university students’ movement in Venezuela. Under his leadership, hundreds of thousands of young people have come together to confront the strongman’s unchecked power. It is the first time in a decade of Chávez rule that a countervailing force, legitimate in the eyes of society, has successfully managed to challenge the president’s authority.
There are lessons in what he says that conservatives in the U.S. ought to take to heart if they ever expect to defeat Leviathan. Conservatives have won some electoral victories, but even while doing so the welfare-state has only grown. Here are clues as to how to make real progress, say, in health care:
Mr. Goicoechea takes a different stance, stressing reconciliation. He speaks about understanding the grievances of the disenfranchised, and looking for common ground that can give rise to solutions. The student leader says that two ideals hold his movement together: liberty and democracy, both of which he says have been absent in Venezuela for a long time. “Populism is not democracy.”
I ask him if he wants to restore the country’s institutions. “No, we want to build institutions. To say that we are restoring institutions would be to say that we had democracy before President Chávez, and I don’t think so. We may have had an independent Supreme Court, but the poor had no access.”
Mr. Goicoechea sees the current state of affairs as a continuation of the past, with different players. “Mr. Chávez says that his government serves the lower-income classes, but the reality is that the system still only serves those in the middle and high-income classes.” That resonates with people.
Ensuring access to legal institutions, so that all Venezuelans are guaranteed the protections of the state, is for Mr. Goicoechea the path to “social justice.” As an example he cites Petare, a notoriously poor Caracas barrio. “Private property rights protection does not exist there,” he says. “No one owns their own land, even though the laws say that you earn that right if you live there for a certain number of years. We will have a true revolution in Venezuela when we have strong, liberal institutions that defend the rights of the people.”