The Chávez Legacy in Venezuela
To be sure, Venezuela had a serious problem with violent crime before Chávez assumed the presidency. But its national murder rate has more than tripled since he took office in 1999, according to the OVV. Telegraph correspondent Nick Allen notes that Venezuela is now experiencing more murders than the United States and the European Union combined. To offer some perspective: The total population of the U.S. and the 27 EU member states (815 million) is roughly 28 times larger than that of Venezuela (29 million). As Venezuelan journalist Francisco Toro explains, “Venezuela’s murder rate is just unheard of among middle-income countries, to say nothing of oil-rich states on the receiving end of massive new petrodollar flows.”
The violence has many causes, including endemic corruption and Venezuela’s increasingly important role in the global cocaine trade. Governed by a regime that has supported narco-terrorists belonging to the Colombian FARC and allowed senior officials to become veritable kingpins, the country is awash in drugs, gangs, and guns. Between 2007 and 2011, Venezuela was the 15th largest arms importer in the world, importing 555 percent more arms than it did over the previous five-year period, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Its Russian-financed weapons buildup has allowed Chávez to equip tens of thousands of pro-government paramilitary fighters with AK-47 assault rifles. These paramilitaries make up the so-called Bolivarian militia, which is tasked with defending the Chávez revolution and intimidating its opponents.
As you might imagine, there have been tensions between the militia and the official Venezuelan armed forces. Chávez’s death would increase these tensions. It would also lead to greater unrest over the “Cubanization” of so many Venezuelan institutions. (In early 2010, several former Chávez loyalists published a letter complaining that institutions such as the military had been “distorted by the incursion of outside elements,” i.e., Cubans.) The disputes over Cubanization could get especially fierce if Castro acolyte Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s designated successor, took power and governed as “a puppet of Havana” (to quote a recent prediction from former Venezuelan oil official Gustavo Coronel).
Maduro currently serves as both vice president and foreign minister. Neither he nor Diosdado Cabello, the head of the National Assembly, has anything close to the charisma, political talents, or cult-like following of Hugo Chávez. Yet both seem determined to maintain the key elements of his revolution, and both showed a complete disregard for the Venezuelan constitution in their statements about postponing the date of Chávez’s inauguration (which was originally scheduled for Thursday, January 10). Whether Maduro and Cabello will eventually find themselves — and their respective pro-Chávez factions — locked in a power struggle remains to be seen.
What about relations between Caracas and Washington? Recent news reports have indicated that U.S. and Venezuelan officials are working to secure a bilateral rapprochement, including a restoration of ambassadors. 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.
The hope of Venezuelan democrats is that Chávez’s death would be followed by a national election in which opposition leader Henrique Capriles emerged victorious. Despite losing to Chávez by 11 percentage points in the country’s October 2012 presidential election, Capriles is still broadly popular, and on December 16 he won election to another term as governor of Miranda, Venezuela’s second-most-populous state.
For now, everything in Venezuela is highly uncertain and highly volatile. That’s just one more unfortunate consequence of Chávez’s autocratic revolution — a revolution that has turned an oil-rich nation into a land of crime, cronyism, and chaos.
(You can read this article in Spanish here.)
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!