Aiding and Abetting

During the long years of Portugal's fascist dictatorship, the Portuguese Left often decried the support shown the regime by successive American administrative.  In the name of fighting communism, complained the country's socialists, the United States was turning a blind eye to the Salazar regime's human rights abuses.  Modern Portuguese socialists are also turning a blind eye, though for less compelling reasons than Cold War realpolitik, to the crimes of Hugo Chavez.  The would be dictator of Venezuela recently signed a series of bilateral deals with the Portuguese state, and several private companies, to supply a million lap-top computers and technical support for natural gas projects.  The total value of the deals is pegged at $3 billion dollars, a considerable sum for a country whose GDP is about $188 billion (2006). 

That the ignorant bourgeoisie radicals of North America fawn over Chavez, and his mentor Fidel Castro, is somewhat excusable.  This continent has never known dictatorship.  The Salem Witch Trials, the excesses of George III, even the wartime powers of Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt, are petty by comparison to what actual dictatorship looks like.  Power, red in tooth and claw.  It was only in 1974 that a coup d'etat, organized by left-wing junior officers, ended fascist rule and the country's pointless colonial wars.  The event was not only a landmark in Portuguese history, but modern western history.  As Samuel Huntington noted, the April 25th coup began a third wave of global democratization.  Here was a so-called Latin country where the army had helped establish a liberal democracy.  It was a powerful precedent and its creation an act of high bravery and daring. 

The decision of Portugal's current Socialist Prime Minister, Jose Socrates, to cozy up to the regime of Hugo Chavez is a betrayal of that glorious legacy.  Socrates is old enough (he was born in 1957) to remember the Old Portugal.  The Salazar regime was not the worst the twentieth century had to offer, but its nightmares deserve to be left in the past.  Those who can claim no ignorance of the reality of tyranny deserve a special guilt.  Thirty years ago Henry Kissinger accused Mario Soares, the then Socialist leader and the country's first democratically elected PM in fifty years, of being another Kerensky.  Soares turned out to be made of sterner stuff.  Socrates has not.