What Chavez Has Wrought

In December 2007, a group of paramilitary fighters armed with machine guns ransacked and vandalized a farm in northwest Venezuela. It was not the first time that government-backed thugs had paid a visit to this property. The owner of the farm, Diego Arria, is a prominent opponent of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, the radical leftist. “It was a strong message,” Arria says of the December 2007 attack. (He was not at the farm when it occurred.) “The government has a lot of groups like that.”

Throughout his long career, Arria, now 70 years old, has held a variety of high-level political posts, including governor of Caracas, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations, assistant U.N. secretary general, and special adviser to U.N. chief Kofi Annan. In 1978, Arria made an unsuccessful bid for the Venezuelan presidency as an independent candidate. Shortly after that election, he founded a Caracas-based newspaper called El Diario de Caracas. More recently, he served as a campaign strategist for Manuel Rosales, who opposed Chávez in the 2006 presidential election.