Chavez Consolidating Power

While not specifically baseball-related, MLB has to be watching political developments in Venezuela incredibly closely these days. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez remains incredibly powerful due to widespread support among his country’s poorer citizens.  This is thanks in large part to his emphasis on improving by leaps and bounds his country’s social services since his election in 1998. As a pair of headlines this week show, Chavez has been incredibly aggressive with that power recently.

Today’s BBC reports on a political demonstration in Caracas protesting the closure of one of the country’s TV stations. Chavez claims the station supported the failed coup that temporarily ousted him and suspended the country’s legislature in 2002. Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a story on Chavez’s program of land seizure and redistribution, a program lauded by poor Venezuelans using the newly-seized farmland for subsistence farming, but criticized by land-owners and economists.

When I interviewed Peter Bjarkman back in March, he briefly mentioned the possibility of the Venezuelan Government, as part of its march towards socialism, taking control of the contracts signed by the country’s amateur baseball players, and negotiating on those players’ behalves. While any vestiges of a state economy are troubling, government control of baseball contracts could actually potentially benefit amateur baseball players. Attempts by Latin American governments to set limits on the percentage of signing bonuses trainers are allowed to take have been met with indifference. Of course, relying on a government moving towards socialism to treat these kids fairly has its own set of problems.

It is doubtful that Venezuela will ever entirely embrace the isolation that Cuba experiences under Fidel Castro. If Chavez were to cut off the pipeline between Venezuela and Major League Baseball, he would have a serious PR problem on his hands, as Venezuelans take an incredible amount of pride in seeing players like Johan Santana succeed in the majors. For the time being, however, Major League Baseball’s second largest source of international talent is getting more volatile by the day. If this continues, baseball will almost certainly feel its effects somewhere down the road.