The Magazine

Hurricane Hugo

From the August 8, 2005 issue: Venezuela's Hugo Chávez is a threat to more than just his own people.

Aug 8, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 44 • By THOR HALVORSSEN
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Caracas, Venezuela

"IMAGINE OUR JOY at being free and far from a land in which everything threatened us with death." The young refugee's words leap off the tattered clipping from a 1939 edition of La Esfera, a Venezuelan newspaper. "It is such a holy occurrence given that we were expelled from Germany and you have embraced us." The refugee had arrived on one of two steamboats--the Koenigstein and the Caribia--that left Nazi Germany that year with a human cargo that would otherwise have been sentenced to death. The ships eventually docked in Venezuela, and the passengers who disembarked significantly increased the size of Venezuela's Jewish community, which eventually grew to 45,000 people.

Sixty-five years later, an exodus of that community is well underway. The reason is not far to seek. The land that embraced those refugees has become unfriendly. Consider the traumatic morning of November 29, 2004. As parents and school buses delivered children to Colegio Hebraica, a Jewish grade school in Caracas, 25 secret police commandos in combat gear and face masks burst into the main building. Scores of preschoolers were locked in the school as panicked parents tried to retrieve them. The children were eventually freed, but the raid went on.

The government-appointed judge who ordered the raid said the commandos were looking for weapons linked to a bombing that killed Danilo Anderson, a crooked local prosecutor who had made a fortune shaking down the government's political opponents. The raid followed speculation aired on a state-run television station that Anderson's killing was the work of Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency; presumably this guesswork justified the storming of a Jewish elementary school.

The Hebraica raid was not an isolated or random act of state-sponsored anti-Jewish violence. Hostility to Jews has become one of the hallmarks of the Venezuelan government under Hugo Chávez, the radical populist who became president in 1999, and of Chavismo, the neo-fascist ideology named for him. In January, the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor released a "Report on Global Anti-Semitism." The report documents how openly anti-Semitic the Venezuelan government now is. Besides the raid on the Jewish school, it noted that "President Chávez cautioned citizens against following the lead of Jewish citizens in the effort to overturn his referendum victory. Anti-Semitic leaflets also were available to the public in an Interior and Justice Ministry office waiting room."



Chavismo's purpose, however, is not just to create a stable autocracy. At its core is a far-reaching foreign policy that aims to establish a loosely aligned federation of revolutionary republics as a resistance bloc in the Americas. The Chavista worldview sees the globe as a place where the United States, Europe, and Israel must be opposed by militarized one-man regimes.