The Bolivar obsession

Washington Post:

President Hugo Chávez begins his 10th year in office with inflation in Venezuela the highest in Latin America, food shortages prompting rioting, crime growing and the populist leader's own popularity sliding.

But among Chávez's new priorities is proving that Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century hero who is the inspiration for his movement, was slain by corrupt oligarchs and did not succumb to tuberculosis. Historians from Caracas to London agree that the great liberator died in his bed in Santa Marta, Colombia, fevered, sick and broken, on Dec. 17, 1830.

Now, as Venezuela's official Gazette recorded on Jan. 28, Ch¿vez has convened a high commission, led by his vice president and composed of nine cabinet ministers and the attorney general. Their job is to exhume Bol¿var's remains, which lie in a sarcophagus at the National Pantheon in downtown Caracas, and carry out the necessary scientific tests to confirm Chávez's contention -- that treacherous assassins murdered Bol¿var.

"This commission has been created because the executive considers it to be of great historical and cultural value to clarify important doubts regarding the death of the Liberator," the Venezuela's official Gazette said.

The president's latest focus on Bolívar, the Caracas-born aristocrat whose rebel armies freed from Spanish rule what would become six Latin American countries, is understandable. Bolívar is so revered by Chávez that he calls his transformation of Venezuela a Bol¿varian Revolution, has renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and has reportedly left a chair empty at meetings to honor "the Liberator."

Chávez's version of Bolívar also fits the president's ideology. Bolívar, Chávez said, was a socialist like himself, stridently opposed to the United States and determined to build a classless society. And because Bol¿var's dream of uniting Latin America would have been a blow to oligarchs and imperialists, Ch¿vez said, the corrupt high classes in Bogota and Caracas conspired to kill him.

"Some say he was very ill and knew he was going to die, and he wanted to die by the side of the sea and he died happy, and Colombia was happy and Venezuela was happy," Chávez said in a long speech Dec. 17, the anniversary of Bolívar's death, standing next to the Liberator's remains. "How the oligarchs fooled us, the ones here, the ones there. How the historians who falsified history fooled us."

In Venezuela, though, even some of Chávez's most ardent followers say he may be taking an obsession with Bolívar too far.

"This doesn't make any sense," said Alberto Mueller Rojas, a retired general who serves as an adviser to the president on international affairs and military matters. "Why should I care? Bol¿var died. If they killed him, they killed him. If he died of tuberculosis, he died of tuberculosis. In this day and age, this doesn't have any significance."

...

Chavez obsession is based on attempt to justify his objective of dominating south America. He wants to use a historic figure to justify his own vision of what south America should be. In some ways he is creating a mythical basis for his ambitions, in much the same way Hitler did for Nazi Germany. He appears to be having a harder time selling it two his own followers a this point and his management of the economy and the squandering of the oil wealth is making him weaker. His coco leaf addiction and his corrupt facilitating of the transport of cocaine also raises questions about his vision for the country.