Those of us who've had the misfortune of sitting through one of Hugo Chavez' interminable diatribes quietly savored the moment during last week's Ibero-American summit when Spain's King Juan Carlos bluntly asked the Venezuelan president "Why don't you shut up?"
The royal outburst occurred on the final day of the international parley in the Chilean capital of Santiago, at a point when Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was politely asking his South American counterpart to cease referring to Zapatero's right-wing predecessor Jose Maria Aznar as a "fascist." True to form, Chavez kept talking through Zapatero's comments even though the Venezuelan leader's microphone was turned off--at which point the usually courtly monarch could no longer contain himself and uttered the words so many of us in Latin America's foreign press corps have been longing to hear.
Days later, the episode continues to be the talk of the region. In one of his periodic columns for the state-controlled Cuban press, the semi-retired Fidel Castro described the incident as an "ideological Waterloo" for the forces of imperialism in the hemisphere. Spaniards across the political spectrum praised both the king and Zapatero for standing up to the Venezuelan's bombast and his relentless attacks on one of their democratically elected former chiefs of state.
But the question heard 'round the Spanish-speaking world is important for two other reasons. For starters, the confrontation highlighted the sometimes uneasy relationship between Spain and its former colonies. The annual Ibero-American summits have been traditionally dull affairs that are long on rhetoric, short on substance and shorter still on drama. But this year's edition will be remembered not solely for Juan Carlos' verbal challenge to Chavez but also on account of the monarch's abrupt exit from the closing session as Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega was lambasting a Spanish company. The corporation in question, Union Fenosa, acquired Nicaragua's formerly state-owned electricity utility in 2000 and became a favorite whipping boy for Ortega on the campaign trail last year owing to the frequent power outtages that bedevil his constituents. Spanish companies aggressively pursued investment opportunities in Latin America during the height of the privatization frenzy that gripped the region in the 1990s, but as the Union Fenosa case demonstrates, not all of those acquisitions have produced optimal results for the host nations.
The second point is more troubling. Precious few Latin American leaders have taken on Chavez in the nine years since he was first elected president of Venezuela, in part because he has shown himself ready to channel billions of his petrodollars to friendly governments in the neighborhood. Those who have traded barbs with the power-drunk ex-army officer have almost invariably come from the right wing of the political spectrum, like Mexico's former president Vicente Fox. The pusillanimous reluctance of South America's moderate leftist presidents to hold Chavez accountable for the authoritarian drift of his regime has disappointed his critics at home, many of whom bemoan the deafening silence of regional summit participants on the erosion of democratic freedom inside Venezuela. That it would take a 69-year-old European constitutional monarch to face down Chavez and call for a halt to his endless verbiage speaks volumes on its own.
