How One Venezuelan Cardinal Viewed Hugo Chávez

An interview I made back in 2007 with the late Venezuelan Cardinal Rosalio José Castillo Lara. The cardinal was unremitting in his criticisms of the hardline socialist who died yesterday aged 58. Cardinal Castillo once recommended an exorcism be carried out on the “Bolivarian Revolution” leader; Chávez called the cardinal  “a hypocrite, bandit and devil with a cassock.”

9 March 2007

esp_vatican_pope_chavez_sff_fulWhat is your opinion of the situation in Venezuela at present?

CARDINAL CASTILLO LARA: The situation in Venezuela is very particular and unique for the following reason: you have a president who intends to put people again through an experimental form of Communism, one which has completely failed in every country in which it has been tried – and that’s very difficult to understand. He, Chavez, is someone who can be defined as paranoid. He has a rigid aim: to free Latin America from the game of empire, from the empire of the United States. That has no sense because the United States doesn’t oppress anyone. Then there’s the fact that Venezuela has some of the greatest trade links with the United States. It sells oil to the United States and buys many goods from there. In this way, this gentleman has begun to orientate everything to his own aims.

How is he doing this?

The first thing he did was to turn the government into a dictatorial regime. There isn’t a democracy there. It does not exist. Why doesn’t democracy exist? Because all power is in the hands of the president who exercises this power in an arbitrary and despotic fashion. Now you may say he’s been re-elected. But no, it was a fraudulent re-election. The government has a body which is in charge of elections, the National Election Council. This institution has been made totally powerless, it’s neither one thing or the other. Instead, the institute is composed of five members of whom four are Chavisti, they belong to Chavez’s party. Only one was against him. The [electoral] fraud was gigantic because the electoral register, the list of who can vote, who has the right to vote, had to be published so the whole world could see who could vote three months before the election. It would have cleared up many things. Instead the government didn’t want to have it. So then, when there was this election, there were many voters who didn’t vote. Some voted several times and in different ways. So this president we have now is really a fraud. And what’s he doing? He’s wanting to eliminate private property because the sole owner of property has to be the government. In recent years, two thirds of factories, small and medium factories, have closed. He made them close.

He often says that he is a follower of Jesus, that he believes in Christian social justice.

No, no. Chavez is not Christian. He was baptised but he’s not a Catholic in that sense. He – his government – is founded on two things: hatred and lies. He began planting hatred in Venezuela by stirring up a class hatred that did not exist. Hatred of the rich, those who have a little more than you, he manufactured a need to hate them. This hatred is what dominates all his government. I give an example. There is a petroleum company, Pedevesa, that is one of the largest in the world. He expelled, sent away, almost twenty thousand of its workers, employees. Twenty thousand. He didn’t pay these twenty thousand what he should have paid them, what they call social security. He didn’t pay them. He didn’t even return to them the money that they had deposited as savings, money that was theirs. He even took away the houses they had bought.

Yet he says his wish is to help the poor, that his mission to help the poor.

No, he is with the people, those who beg from him, but he hasn’t given them steady work. He has produced a very serious increase in unemployment, very serious, and he gives them around $120 to keep them quiet, but he doesn’t give them employment. He only helps, exclusively, those who support him. Therefore, you could ask, how come he still has support? Because of force, because he is a dictator.

So you’re not optimistic about the future?

No, for the future I’m not optimistic because he [Chavez] can do whatever he wants and there isn’t the possibility for the people to free themselves democratically. Because if there are elections, he makes them fraudulent. So there isn’t the possibility. The only option is that if all the people, all of them, rebel. And this is possible; you can see, in Venezuela’s constitution, Article 350, that says the people of Venezuela will not recognize a government which does two things: It doesn’t function democratically, or that it violates fundamental human rights. This is understood in Venezuela. Therefore the people can legally rebel and they can do so when he begins to take away private property and employment. Then he will start on religion; he wants to remove religious education and replace it because he says education must be ideological.

But you wouldn’t support a coup?

No I don’t think it’s possible because the people are without arms. Instead the government has plenty of arms, because he dreams of a confrontation with the United States. He bought a lot of arms from Russia – 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles – not to defend justice for the people but to fight other movements who are against him.

***

One of the most bizarre press conferences I’ve been to in Rome was when Chavez spoke to reporters – or more like harangued them – at the Parco dei Principi Grand Hotel in Rome. He ranted for about two hours and for the first hour or so, his security officials wouldn’t let us leave.

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