I just want to add to the the article of Nick Cohen, published on The observer on 6th December 2009, if he thinks Venezuela is shifting to authoritarianism under Hugo Chavez, he has too many thinks to understand, specially regarding the undemocratic behaviour of the Venezuelan opposition in the last 10 years. That irrational opposition had made incredibly hard for Chavez to balance all the weighs in a democratic system, when in front of him there is the most irrational opposition of the planet, able to put a country on the verge of collapse just for the shake of their privileges over the sacrifices of overwhelming majorities. Now that Chavez has revert that situation, he is a "dictator". When Nick Cohen said “what development economists call "the curse of oil" – the freedom of manoeuvre that oil wealth gives to brutish regimes – leaves dictators free to ignore what would otherwise be an economic imperative to attend to their people's demands for education, development and, in time, representative government", he seems to ignore that those very development economists deny all achievements on precisely the very subject he claims to be the important ones. Under all parameter the Chavez's government has put all the efforts to fulfil his duties on people's demands for education and development. However, it not just because economic imperative, but social justice, and is there where the development economists lost the track of Chavez, and with them Nick Cohen. One additional point, Nick Cohen seems reluctant to register a new democratic political system that is under construction in Latin America, it's call participative democracy and he dismissed it as just "populism”. The old representative democracy is unable to secure social justice in a society moving towards a highly educated stage where everybody have access to information technology, highly politicized, asking for an active role in the decision making processes. Chavez government and others in the region are leading this new constitutional democratic system, in which each one is responsible and is able to respond. It is popular, because everybody like it, but is not that irresponsible populism we see in the past. So regarding the anti-green backlash we must pay more attention to the new political systems that can address systemic problems like climate change with more democratic solutions, not just the same free market liberal-elitist-representative approach.
