The Chávez Legacy in Venezuela
Updated March 5: Hugo Chavez reported dead today. Jamie Daremblum reported on Chavez’s Legacy in Venezuela in January for PJ Media.
Shortly after Hugo Chávez won his first election as Venezuelan president in December 1998, a lawyer from the western state of Barinas, which was then governed by Chávez’s father, delivered a prescient warning to Newsweek magazine: “Venezuelans are dreaming of a savior, but Chávez is a dictator. People don’t know what they are getting.”
More than 14 years later, a cancer-stricken Chávez is reportedly near death, but his autocratic legacy is very much alive.
Venezuela long ago ceased to be a real democracy: The ruling regime effectively controls the Supreme Court (which in 2004 was expanded and packed with Chávez allies), the National Assembly (which in 2010 granted Chávez the authority to rule by decree for 18 months), and the National Electoral Council (which repeatedly allowed Chávez supporters to violate election laws and rules during the country’s 2012 presidential campaign), not to mention the armed forces and the federal police.
For that matter, Venezuela long ago ceased to be a country with real press freedom or real economic freedom. Besides imposing a series of draconian restrictions on media content, the Chávez government has “blocked critical coverage, closed broadcasters, sued reporters for defamation, excluded those it deems unfriendly from official events, and harassed — with the help of government allies and state-run media — critical journalists,” as the Committee to Protect Journalists detailed in an August 2012 report. It is a regime that seizes not only television and radio stations, but also banks, oil facilities, cement plants, food factories, sugar plantations, and much else.
Between 1999 (when Chávez took office) and 2012, Venezuela’s score in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom dropped by 32 percent. The only countries with a lower overall score in the 2012 index were Eritrea, Libya, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and North Korea. Not a single country scored lower than Venezuela for property rights. Meanwhile, in the Ease of Doing Business Index that the World Bank released on October 23, Venezuela placed well behind Zimbabwe and ahead of only the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, the Republic of Congo, Chad, and the Central African Republic. (Cuba, Libya, and North Korea were not ranked.)
Please remember that Venezuela is endowed with enormous petroleum reserves and once had a decent-sized middle class. But the madness of Bolivarian socialism has wrecked the state-run oil company and prompted a huge middle-class exodus, especially among Venezuelan Jews. (A year ago, Matthew Fishbane of Tablet magazine reported that “nearly half of Venezuela’s Jewish community has fled from the social and economic chaos that [Chávez] has unleashed and from the uncomfortable feeling that they were being specifically targeted by the regime.”) Venezuelans of all stripes began scrambling for the exits following Chávez’s reelection victory on October 7: According to Bloomberg News, “Traffic to MeQuieroIr.com, a Venezuelan website that provides information to people looking to emigrate, tripled to 180,000 visits the day after Chávez won by a 11-percentage-point margin.”
Plagued by high inflation, food shortages, power outages, and mounting debt, Venezuela has become one of the most economically dysfunctional nations in the Western Hemisphere. It has also become one of the most murderous. According to the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence (OVV), the country suffered no fewer than 21,692 homicides in 2012, up from 19,336 in 2011. Its national murder rate (73 per 100,000) is among the highest anywhere in the world, and easily the highest in South America. The homicide rate in Caracas is much, much steeper — the OVV has estimated that it was 200 per 100,000 in 2011 — making Venezuela’s capital arguably the most dangerous city on earth. (In one especially embarrassing incident in August 2010, a Hong Kong baseball player participating in the Women’s Baseball World Cup at a Caracas stadium was wounded in the leg by a stray bullet.)










What does this make, the two hundredth failure of socialism/communism/collectivism? I am utterly shocked, SHOCKED I tell you. So weird that it followed the same pattern as its predecessors. Never could have predicted that. From what the reds in my history classes tell me, these failures stem from improper implementation of a glorious economic philosophy, not from some inherent flaw in the philosophy itself and its inability to cope with the agency of free-minded individuals who, as Nozick said, “upset patterns”, and require nothing less than a totalitarian state to curb their “selfish” pursuits. So what I’m saying in all this is that we as Americans are smart enough to pull it off properly and succeed where others have failed. Who’s with me?!!
No one in their right mind is with you, unless you forgot your /sarc tag…
Why does this sound like something left/liberal Democrats nevertheless envy and seek?
Because it is and they aren’t really liberal democrats, they’re Marxists posing as something else.
While we’re on the subject of labels, a thought occurred to me last night. We (conservatives) are concerned with the moderate
Republicans attempting to water down conservative positions on abortion and other social issues along with gun rights, etc. Given their conservative positions on fiscal and monetary matters along with liberal views on the above named subjects, aren’t they in reality Democrats? Blue dog Democrats, perhaps, but Democrats just the same. Let’s start calling them out for what they really are.
These people aren’t RINOs. Either in name or in fact. They are fiscally conservative (and not much of that) Democrats. Look at the “elite” leadership of the Republican Party. McConnell, Kyle, McCain, Boehner and all the others. Do they really speak for me, you or the rest of us? I don’t think so. They ought to be shown the door and invited to leave our ranks. Let them go to the other side of the aisle and sow their divisions in THOSE ranks.
It’s already happened here. I figured that out back in 2008.
Only one thing stands in the way of full-on totalitarianism in the US.
It’s all up to YOU.
Narco cartels importing guns? Noooo. So, if they condiscate all our guns, wouldn’t those same narco cartels just import new, illegal ones because of our shockingly open and porous borders?
Venezuala is a nation blessed with enormous resources. Great wealth in oil. Another stark lesson how Marxism utterly destroys a nation.
Many Americans are anxious that the U.S.government is going down the same horrifying path.
There are quite a few people who consider Venezuela’s oil resources a curse, not a blessing. One Venezuelan statesman called oil “the Devil’s excrement”.
The reason is that the oil revenue provides a huge pot of unearned wealth for disposal by the political class. Throughout Venezuela, and long before Chavez, politics in Venezuela was in large part about getting some of the oil money.
For decades, giveaways funded by the oil bonanza have been SOP. Gasoline is almost free (one can buy a full tank of gas for less than the cost of a cup of ketchup at a food stand). That’s great for the wealthy – Venezuela has been a huge market for Hummers and other giant cars. Horse racing is subsidized, too.
Chavez got and kept power by promising to “spread the wealth” to poor Venezuelans through his “Misiones” (which are mostly wasteful and incompetent). But under Chavez, the old subsidies have also continued, and the politically connected “Boli-bourgeoisie” have reaped billions in crony dealings (especially in foreign currency transactions). With oil near $100/barrel, there was plenty of money to squander.
One might call this the terminal state of a long-standing disease.
Two points -
1. Once again, non-Moslem countries are perfectly capable of electing tyrants.
2. Left, Right, whatever, the evil always attack the jews. They’ve (we’ve!) been convenient since Pharoh accused us of being potential fifth columnists. It’s why Israel exisit, althoguh israel just concentrated the impulse.
Hugo, where are your pals Danny Glover and Sean Penn and Harry Bellafonte when you need them? So sad, I hope they arrive soon to hold your blood encrusted hands as you fade into the trash heap of socialist history.
Chavismo is class warfare on steroids.
All those murders happen for a reason. Gangsters fighing for oonrol of illegal activity I suppose.
Poor Hugo! Doomed to a lingering and (I hope) excruciating death. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving Marxist thug.
Jaime Daremblum’s article is excellent, as ever, but I do part company with him over this bit:
“But it is hard to see how Washington could enjoy any type of “normal” relationship with a regime that shelters drug kingpins, brutalizes political opponents, confiscates private property, stockpiles Russian weaponry, threatens its neighbors, and helps Iran evade global sanctions.”
In the pre-Obama world, I’d have agreed with that, but Obama seems all too happy to turn a blind eye to constitutional abuses in America’s backyard. When the ex-president of Honduras tried to extend his incumbency, Obama actually condemned Honduras for enforcing the constitution. Conversely, when Daniel Ortega illegally got away with assuming the Nicaraguan presidency again, Obama raised no objection.
Given the obvious contempt in which Obama holds your own Constitution, combined with the repeated attacks on the very concept of a constitution by Obama’s creatures, I think you should be worried that Obama thinks of Chavez as some kind of template (although I doubt if he’d put himself through Cuban medical treatment).
I have liberal friends who point out that Chavez has helped the historically-neglected poor, and maybe he has, but my response is: why just once–ONCE!–can’t there be a regime that helps the poor without having to also impose the cult of the Glorious Leader, whose defense-of-the-revolution committees beat people for telling the wrong sort of jokes, and who brutalize not just opponents of the regime, but the opponents’ families, and their friends, and the friends of their friends, etc?
The current situation is an echo of Stalin’s death, where everyone was so chronically and thoroughly terrified that it took them weeks to admit the monster was even ill, much less dead.
Himilco: your question is very valid but the interest in the welfare of the poor is just an excuse to get to power. Judas was also interested in the poor, remember? or at least that was his excuse to steal from the alms bag. Communists only care about themselves and as soon as they have used the poor to get to the halls of power, they start behaving like the worse aristocracy (a kakistocracy, the rule of the worst.) Then they enslave and degrade the poor with gusto destroying the culture as they move forward like locusts leaving nothing but desolation behind them. Mankind did not learn with the Soviet Union. Before becoming communists a nation has to become a collection of envious, stupid, lazy, cowardly bastards. So communism is at the same time the sin and the punishment. Cuba, Venezuela, and now the U.S. will suffer for decades the choices they made. If there have been real men among them they would have fought tooth and nail for their freedoms. Enjoy your serfdom, suckers!