Chávez dead

[Ed Anger]

And I haven't heard jack shit about the Coupe de Ville.

Stop counting coup.

[Grey Fox]

Viva la revolution!

[fhdz]

Raz, what is the failed coup against Chavez supposed to tell us about Chavez's character?

[mongers]

Yes, which is why I don't get some of the throthing in this thread, it's like they regard him as a idealogical enemy.

Venezuelans voted for him and his policies; their choice to reap the benefits and the downsides.

Well, you could make a fairly convincing argument that his largest base of support does not understand that the policies which have caused their lives to become better are funded in an unsustainable way and that in voting for him they were not aware that an economic crash could send them back into poverty, and maybe worse off than they were before. Still - the argument goes, "so? Isn't that Venezuela's problem and not North America's?" In some ways it is and in some ways it isn't. Globalization has made everyone's problems everyone *else's* problems too, at least indirectly.

Surely people aren't objecting to him because he did things in the non-approved way ?  If so then it's the echo of a doctrine, Monroe or otherwise, that's had it's day, you can't tell a whole continent of different countries, how they should organise themselves. Besides Washington is no longer the pre-eminent power in the region.

I think people are quite right to criticize Chavez for shutting down opposition and creating an almost entirely cronyist government to support those efforts.

Couldn't you make the exact same criticism of the large parts of the American electorate and political establishment for the last 15 or so years ?

And for that matter, UK for the same time period. 

[Admiral Yi]

Jesus Christ mongers.  For a person who accuses others of frothing, you sure say some weird-ass shit.

[fhdz]

Couldn't you make the exact same criticism of the large parts of the American electorate and political establishment for the last 15 or so years ?

No, because our policies haven't helped the poor live better.

In all seriousness, I think the electorate here has more *access* to information than Chavez's electoral base does and has more freedom to pursue such information. Whether we actually choose to do so or not is a different topic, but that's about us as individuals rather than about our elected officials.

[derspiess]

Interesting that criticism of Chavez seems to provoke a reaction from Raz

[Sheilbh]

My interpretation was that he was giving the poor lots of stuff because they were his support for his regime and ultimately his policies were unsustainable and would do nothing for the poor in the long term.  He was blowing his countriy's resources to pay off his peeps for his own personal power.  If I am wrong and things in Venezuela are better than good for Chavez.  I doubt it though nothing he did had not been tried before and shown to be a failure. 

I disagree. I think he was a genuine, believing radical. I think he thought his policies were right for his country and the world and would help the poor. But that he needed to be there to deliver it so he had to stay in power. One striking thing is how little, from what I've read, he personally benefited. Those around him did but from everything I've seen there's very little suggestion that he was in it for corrupt reasons.

Find a left-leaning Latin American head of state since 1945 we didn't try to assassinate, topple or support insurgents troops against covertly or overtly.  We like our Latin American despots right-wing, not left-wing.

Romulo Betancourt springs to mind. Though he was no despot.

As others have noted, I don't think there's any contradiction in saying that his policies lessened poverty/inequality for a huge number of Venezuelans (although it appears those policies are unsustainable and one of Chavez's successors is eventually going to have to deal with the backlash when the economy tanks completely) and in saying he was a power-abusing shithead.

However Latin America's had a good decade. Poverty's significantly declined in most Latin American countries and the continent in general. Frankly given that Venezuela had the oil revenue that she had, in my view it's a failure that it didn't fall more. In addition I don't really rate that as successful if it's not durable. I think there's good reasons to say that this could be a long-term improvement in most of the rest of the continent while I think Venezuela's going to struggle a lot more.
From the Economist, admittedly:

I think people are quite right to criticize Chavez for shutting down opposition and creating an almost entirely cronyist government to support those efforts.

He didn't shut down the opposition and, frankly, they bear some of the blame for what happened. Time after time they fell apart in arguments and made the mind-numbingly stupid and ineffective decision to boycott elections. I think the last Presidential election was the first that the opposition decided to prevent a united front, with a centrist candidate. If they could put aside their internal squabbles earlier then I think they would've been a far more effective force.

What I'd give to have Pirate Scum's take on his figure and legacy...

On many topics but yeah, especially on this.

[fhdz]

Interesting that criticism of Chavez seems to provoke a reaction from Raz

No it isn't; he views you as a right-wing ideologue and thus reacts negatively to whatever criticism you're making. It's not about Chavez. It's about you.

[mongers]

Couldn't you make the exact same criticism of the large parts of the American electorate and political establishment for the last 15 or so years ?

No, because our policies haven't helped the poor live better.

In all seriousness, I think the electorate here has more *access* to information than Chavez's electoral base does and has more freedom to pursue such information. Whether we actually choose to do so or not is a different topic, but that's about us as individuals rather than about our elected officials.

Well yes there is that. 

As to the substance of you post, I think we should wait another 7-8, to the president after next, to see if things has materially changed in Washington, the size of the deficit and what 'policies' the electorate have just voted for.

[fhdz]

He didn't shut down the opposition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15358834
http://en.rsf.org/venezuela-fine-against-opposition-daily-tal-15-02-2007,21026.html
http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/03/08/venezuela-judge-afiuni-united-nations-human-rights-council

There's a lot more where those came from. Dissident media organizations have, one by one, been ousted. Dissidents have been imprisoned without trial *in accordance with* Venezuelan law, not in spite of it.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah. He didn't shut them down - incidentally the use of fines against the media is something that's happening a lot recently in Turkey. They continued to organise and campaign against him and the independent media existed. As I said before he biased the media and intimidated the opposition - but they continued to exist in a meaningful way.

I think this piece by the Guardian correspondent (interestingly in the NYT) is the best I've read:

In the End, an Awful Manager
By RORY CARROLL
Published: March 5, 2013

IN Caracas, Venezuela, you could tell a summit meeting mattered to Hugo Chávez when government workers touched up the city's rubble. Before dignitaries arrived, teams with buckets and brushes would paint bright yellow lines along the route from the airport into the capital, trying to compensate for the roads' dilapidation with flashes of color.

For really big events — say, a visit by Russia's president — workers would make an extra effort, by also painting the rocks and debris that filled potholes.

Seated in their armor-plated cars with tinted windows, the Russians might not have noticed the glistening golden nuggets, but they would surely have recognized the idea of the Potemkin village.

After oil wealth, theatrical flair was the greatest asset of Mr. Chávez, the president of Venezuela since 1999, who died Tuesday from cancer. His dramatic sense of his own significance helped bring him to power as the reincarnation of the liberator Simón Bolívar — he even renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

That same dramatic flair deeply divided Venezuelans as he postured on the world stage and talked of restoring equilibrium between the rich countries and the rest of the world. It now obscures his real legacy, which is far less dramatic than he would have hoped. In fact, it's mundane. Mr. Chávez, in the final analysis, was an awful manager.

The legacy of his 14-year "socialist revolution" is apparent across Venezuela: the decay, dysfunction and blight that afflict the economy and every state institution.

The endless debate about whether Mr. Chávez was a dictator or democrat — he was in fact a hybrid, an elected autocrat — distracted attention, at home and abroad, from the more prosaic issue of competence. Mr. Chávez was a brilliant politician and a disastrous ruler. He leaves Venezuela a ruin, and his death plunges its roughly 30 million citizens into profound uncertainty.

Mr. Chávez's failures did more damage than ideology, which was never as extremist as he or his detractors made out, something all too evident in the Venezuela he bequeaths.

The once mighty factories of Ciudad Guayana, an industrial hub by the Orinoco River that M.I.T. and Harvard architects planned in the 1960s, are rusting and wheezing, some shut, others at half-capacity. "The world economic crisis hit us," Rada Gamluch, the director of the aluminum plant Venalum, and a loyal chavista, told me on his balcony overlooking the decay. He corrected himself. "The capitalist crisis hit us."

Actually, it was bungling by Chávez-appointed business directors who tried to impose pseudo-Marxist principles, only to be later replaced by opportunists and crooks, that hit Ciudad Guayana.

Underinvestment and ineptitude hit hydropower stations and the electricity grid, causing weekly blackouts that continue to darken cities, fry electrical equipment, silence machinery and require de facto rationing. The government has no shortage of scapegoats: its own workers, the C.I.A. and even cable-gnawing possums.

Reckless money printing and fiscal policies triggered soaring inflation, so much so that the currency, the bolívar, lost 90 percent of its value since Mr. Chávez took office, and was devalued five times over a decade. In another delusion, the currency had been renamed "el bolívar fuerte," the strong bolívar — an Orwellian touch.

Harassment of privately owned farms and chaotic administration of state-backed agricultural cooperatives hit food production, compelling extensive imports, which stacked up so fast thousands of tons rotted at the ports. Mr. Chávez called it "food sovereignty."

Politicization and neglect crippled the state-run oil company PDVSA's core task — drilling — so that production slumped. "It's a pity no one took 20 minutes to explain macroeconomics to him with a pen and paper," Baldo Sanso, a senior executive told me. "Chávez doesn't know how to manage."

Populist subsidies reduced the cost of gasoline to $1 a tank, perhaps the world's lowest price of petrol, but cost the state untold billions in revenue while worsening traffic congestion and air pollution.

Bureaucratic malaise and corruption were so severe that murders tripled to nearly 20,000 a year, while gangs brazenly kidnapped victims from bus stops and highways.

A new elite with government connections, the "boligarchs," manipulated government contracts and the web of price and currency controls to finance their lavish lifestyles. "It's a big deal here when a girl turns 15," a Caracas designer, Giovanni Scutaro, told me. "If the father is with the revolution, he doesn't care about the fabric as long as it's in red. Something simple, $3,000 — more elaborate, $250,000."

Mr. Chávez summoned journalists to Miraflores, the presidential palace, to extol his achievements. But even the building betrayed the nation's anomie, with its cracked facade, missing tiles, a whiff of urine from the gardens. The president's private elevator, a minister confided, leaked when it rained.

Mr. Chávez's political genius was to turn this record into a stage from which to mount four more election victories. An unprecedented oil bounty — $1 trillion — made him chief patron amid withering nongovernment alternatives.

He spent extravagantly on health clinics, schools, subsidies and giveaways, including entirely new houses. Those employed in multiplying bureaucracies — officials lost track of fleeting ministries — voted for him to secure their jobs.

His elections were not fair — Mr. Chávez rigged rules in his favor, hijacked state resources, disqualified some opponents, emasculated others — but they were free.

As Venezuela atrophied, he found some refuge in blaming others, notably the "squealing pigs" and "vampires" of the private sector whom he accused of hoarding and speculating. Soldiers arrested butchers for overpricing.

His own supporters increasingly blamed those around him: by 2011 you could see graffiti with the slogan "bajo el gobierno, viva Chávez" — "down with the government, long live Chávez."

The comandante, as he was known to loyalists, used his extraordinary energy and charisma to dominate airwaves with marathon speeches (four hours was short). He might blow kisses, mobilize troops, denounce the United States, ride a bike, a tank, a helicopter — anything to keep attention focused on him, not his performance.

Distraction came in numerous forms: denouncing assassination plots; a farcical nuclear deal with Russia (eventually abandoned); exhuming Bolívar's remains to see if he was murdered; praising or assailing guests.

I experienced the power of his performance firsthand in 2007 when, as The Guardian's Latin America correspondent, I appeared on his weekly show, "Alo Presidente," in an episode held on a beach. Invited to ask a question, I asked whether abolishing term limits risked authoritarianism.

The host paused and glowered before casting the impertinence out to sea and making it a pretext to lambaste European hypocrisy, media, monarchy, the Royal Navy, slavery, genocide and colonialism.

"In the name of the Latin American people I demand that the British government return the Malvinas Islands to the Argentine people," he exclaimed. Then, after another riff on colonialism: "It is better to die fighting than to be a slave!"

On and on it went. Christopher Columbus. Queen Elizabeth. George Bush. In vain I responded that I was Irish and republican, and that European monarchy was irrelevant to my question, which he had dodged. This provoked another tirade.

It was theater. As the cameras were packed away, and we all prepared to return to Caracas, the president shook my hand, shrugged and smiled. I had been a useful fall guy. No hard feelings. It was just a show.

Rory Carroll, a correspondent for The Guardian, is the author of "Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela."

[fhdz]

Yes, that's a good article.

[Admiral Yi]

I think it's very instructive to compare Venezuela to Brazil, which has a handout program similar to Venezuela's.

And yes, good article.

[Razgovory]

Raz, what is the failed coup against Chavez supposed to tell us about Chavez's character?

I never said anything of the sort.   Chavez is bad because he attempted to launch a coup.  Someone one launches a coup against him nobody seems to be that paticularly concerned.