Wall Street Journal – Hugo Chávez, a former tank commander turned populist politician who used Venezuela’s oil riches to pursue his vision of socialism and challenge the U.S., died Tuesday from complications related to cancer.
With Mr. Chávez just months into his fourth term, his death plunged Venezuela into political uncertainty. Vice President Nicolás Maduro will succeed Mr. Chávez as interim president, but must hold a new election within 30 days, according to the constitution.
It seems likely Mr. Maduro will face off against opposition governor Henrique Capriles, who lost to Mr. Chávez in October’s presidential election, but retained his governor’s seat during an election in December.
Mr. Chávez’s death is a blow to populist governments in the region, including those of Bolivia and Ecuador, which he led in a perennial campaign against American hegemony. His death could have major economic and political repercussions for Cuba, which receives billions in virtually free oil from Venezuela.
Domestically, Mr. Chávez leaves behind a deeply divided country with an economy in disarray, barely kept afloat by high oil prices.
For almost half his countrymen, Mr. Chávez was anathema, an authoritarian who fueled class hatred as he pursued what he called his Bolivarian Revolution. But for a majority of Venezuelans, Mr. Chávez was a messiah.
He was voted into power in 1998 on a tide of citizen disgust with the corruption of democratically elected politicians who had ruled Venezuela for three decades. He went on to dominate the country, which boasts the world’s largest oil reserves, for the past 14 years, spending billions to create what he called “21st-century socialism.”
A silver-tongued preacher-in-uniform, Mr. Chávez was the latest in a long line of military caudillos, or strongmen, who have left their mark in Latin America since the region gained independence from Spain and Portugal in the 19th century.
After failing to reach power through a military coup in 1992, Mr. Chávez proclaimed himself a democrat. But once in power, he proved difficult to remove. He changed the constitution twice to allow continuous re-election. He also used rhetoric to sharpen class divisions, pitting millions of poor Venezuelans against a prosperous middle and upper class, which he scornfully called “the squalid ones.”
Mr. Chávez expropriated thousands of farms and businesses, and transformed the state oil company into a behemoth that did everything from build houses to distribute food. He saddled Venezuela with high inflation, some $80 billion in foreign debt despite high oil prices, and made it even more dependent on oil.
Mr. Chávez’s biggest achievement, one even his detractors will admit, was to end the social and political exclusion of a large number of Venezuela’s poor. He spent billions of dollars on his “Missions”—well-publicized educational, health and welfare programs aimed at the millions who live in cement-block slums on the hillsides surrounding Caracas and other cities.
Some studies have indicated that the programs have had little effect on reducing poverty or eliminating its structural factors. Crime in the barrios has risen and public schools remain far behind countries with comparable per-capita income.
“He leaves the country in a shambles,” said Moisés Naím, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. “Never has a Latin American leader wasted so much money, misspent so many resources and misused such power. Chávez could have transformed the country, but instead used those resources to build a personality cult, push a failed ideology and decimate the country’s economy.”
Venezuela’s oil billions gave Mr. Chávez a chance to strut on the world’s stage. He delighted in tweaking the U.S., inviting Libya’s late Moammar Gadhafi and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Caracas. He supplied Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with fuel oil as the Syrian leader killed thousands of his own countrymen.
He forged a bond with a leftist crew of Latin American countries, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, that included Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, to counter U.S. influence in the region. A U.S. diplomat called it Mr. Chávez’s “Axis of Annoyance.”
At home, he controlled Venezuela’s court system, its electoral authorities and its congress. He dominated the media, kicking one television channel off the air and intimidating others. He was omnipresent on TV stations as well as radio networks, which he forced to carry his hours-long speeches nearly every week.
Mr. Chávez’s ability to forge a direct, emotional link with Venezuela’s poor through television was central to his political success. Most Sundays, in a trademark half-sermon, half-variety show, the president joked, sang, railed against the U.S., and announced expropriations of businesses ranging from some of the country’s largest companies to a small jewelry shop.
“He was a talker, a dancer, charming—the life of the party,” said Rafael Simón Jiménez, former president of the National Assembly and a childhood friend of Mr. Chávez.
Mr. Chávez was born in 1954 in the dusty town of Sabaleta, in the western state of Barinas, a land of hot and humid plains, known as the llanos, home to Venezuela’s cowboys, a land where the line between history and myth is blurred.
He was the second of six sons fathered by a rural schoolteacher and apparatchik of the conservative Christian Democratic Party, Copei. The family struggled economically, and was a matriarchy run by Hugo’s mother, Elena, with whom Mr. Chávez had a difficult relationship, acquaintances say. “He told me she used to lock him up in the closet,” said Nedo Paniz, an early backer of Mr. Chávez.
As children, Hugo and his older brother Adan lived with their grandmother, Rosa Inez, whom Mr. Chávez acknowledged as the most important person in his life. Rosa filled young Hugo’s head with stories about his great-grandfather, a highwayman by the name of Maizanta, whom local historians had cast in the style of a Robin Hood.
Mr. Chávez also drew inspiration from Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century patriot who liberated Venezuela and five other Latin American countries from Spain. Mr. Chávez, like Bolívar, dreamed of uniting Latin America. One of his first acts as president was to change the country’s official name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
As a youth, Mr. Chávez wanted to be a major-league baseball player, said Mr. Jiménez, who was head of the local Communist Youth in the school Mr. Chávez attended in Barinas. Mr. Paniz said Mr. Chávez told him he joined the military after a recruiter said the army had a sports program that could pave the way to the U.S. major leagues.
In 1975, he graduated near the top of his class from Venezuela’s military academy. As president, Mr. Chávez often donned the uniform and red beret of Venezuela’s paratroopers, though he spent his career with the tank division. In government, he showed a persistent distrust of civilians and often relied on army officers to run key ministries.
During his time in the army, Venezuela underwent wrenching change. An oil boom that began under populist President Carlos Andrés Pérez turned into a bust. Popular discontent smoldered.
The military had long been targeted for penetration by would-be revolutionaries who hoped to duplicate military coups by left-wing army officers in Panama and Peru.
Influenced by the writings of people ranging from Gadhafi to revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Mr. Chávez discovered a talent for conspiracy. In 1983, he formed a secret cell with like-minded officers.
By then a captain, Mr. Chávez and three other officers swore an oath under a tree where Bolívar had made camp during the war of independence. Paraphrasing Bolívar’s words, they swore to not to rest until they had “broken the chains of the powerful that oppress us.”
In 1989, Mr. Pérez, in his second term, enacted pro-market reforms. A fuel-price increase announced in February provoked rioting and looting in Caracas, and hundreds of people were killed before order was restored. The “Caracazo,” as it became known, deeply affected the army.
On Feb. 4, 1989, army units under Mr. Chávez’s command moved on Caracas. Mr. Chávez attacked the presidential palace. But Mr. Pérez escaped and broadcast a speech from a television station. Mr. Chávez was soon surrounded.
Mr. Chávez, dressed in red beret and fatigues, was put on television to persuade fellow rebels to surrender. It was his introduction to the national stage, and he seized it with aplomb, invoking Bolívar and telling viewers that his attempts to transform the country had failed “por ahora”—for now.
Convicted of rebellion, Mr. Chávez served two years in prison before his sentence was commuted in 1994. He became a magnet for Venezuelans who craved a strong hand to sweep away endemic corruption.
Mr. Chávez traveled to Cuba for a meeting with Fidel Castro, quickly becoming enthralled with the Cuban leader. While Mr. Chávez saw Mr. Castro as a father figure, Mr. Castro saw Mr. Chávez as a foil through which he could continue challenging the U.S.
In 1998, Mr. Chávez ran for president. He won in a landslide, even carrying Country Club, Caracas’s ritziest suburb.
Months after assuming power, he called a constitutional convention that rewrote Venezuela’s charter to allow re-election. A year later, he ran again and won election under the new constitution.
But Venezuela’s middle class soon began to fear its would-be savior, scared off by Mr. Chávez’s growing class-warfare rhetoric, and attempts to pass laws pushing everything from state control of education to land reform.
In April 2002, as a massive anti-Chávez demonstration headed for the presidential palace, army officers refused the president’s order to fire on the protesters, forced him to resign, and handed power to Pedro Carmona, head of Venezuela’s main business group.
The coup proved short-lived. The president’s supporters in the barrios massed in the streets. Mr. Carmona’s actions, including naming a navy admiral as defense minister and abolishing Mr. Chávez’s 1999 constitution, angered the generals, who brought back Mr. Chávez within 48 hours. Mr. Carmona got the nickname “Pedro the Brief.”
Back in power, Mr. Chávez purged the military and set out to tame Venezuela’s other important power center, state oil company PDVSA. In December, after Mr. Chávez tried to replace the company’s board, employees went on strike, shutting down oil production. Other businesses joined in the strike. But by January 2003, Mr. Chávez had broken the strike.
Mr. Chávez fired some 19,000 PDVSA employees. The company never recovered. Neither did Venezuela’s oil production, which was 2.6 million barrels a day in 2011, down from 3.2 million in 1998. Since then, Mr. Chávez has forced private oil companies to reduce their stakes in joint ventures with PDVSA and pay substantially higher taxes, a lead followed by other oil-producing nations from Ecuador to Russia.
In 2004, Mr. Chávez won a recall referendum. In the aftermath of the poll, a government congressman released the computerized list of the 2.4 million Venezuelans who had signed the recall petition. Many lost jobs, loans and access to social programs, casting a deeper shadow on the country’s battered democracy.
But the steady rise in oil prices that began in 2003 gave Mr. Chávez the windfall he needed to cement his popularity. By 2006, flush with oil money, he won a re-election in a landslide, repeating the feat in 2012.
Redneck's Revenge
Venezuela Expels U.S. Embassy Officials
I’m sure Sean Penn and Jimmy Carter are rushing their black suits out the dry cleaners so they can be ready for the National Day of Mourning. I mean, it’s not all that usual, but I never understood why so many noted Americans had a hardS-on for dictators. I guess the best explanation would be self-loathing.
Speaking of dictators, has the sequester cost 170 million jobs yet? Yeah. If the bad news doesn’t show up, make some. You’re in the government, it should be 2nd nature.
I can almost excuse the entertainment types because they have no anchor in reality. They deal in fantasy and why come out of character now, Spicoli? Jimmy Carter is another animal altogether and there’s no excuse for his gushing praise, save for the fact he never met a dictator he didn’t want to go down on.
I especially like the way Chavez communicated with those politically opposed to his regime with bullets and machetes. His thugs had a nice habit of killing indiscriminately to curb opposition, but he wasn’t above putting the average news station out of business if they didn’t toe the commie line.
I’m sure those are the types of things that just make our resident Ivy League Prick green with envy. Yeah, “I’m not a dicatator.”
But I play one on TV.
Motherfkr.
I’m sure you can’t believe all you read about what goes on in these places. Some followers get a bit enthusiastic and suddenly its Chavez chopping down opponents with “bullets and machetes”. We are also hearing stories about US special forces engaging in torture and murder. It happens but it doesn’t mean it is “policy”.
I’m wonderin’ who we’re going to point the Orbital Cancer Beam Weapon at next.
AA -- We have more than our share of ex-Venezuelans in these parts. I’m sure the Brown Shirts didn’t have a ‘policy directive’ from Hitler either, they were just free-lancing, the way goons will. Sending a legion of red ants to the opposition’s picnic is a time-tested formula that Chavez employed many times. Sometimes not every problem in your country is someone else’s fault, sometimes you’re just a socialistic fck-up. Is Venezuela in great shape? No. Is it in passable order? No. Chavez tried to bring up the poor by lowering everyone else, and they beat feet, especially when they had the wherewithal to leave. It’s hard to give to the Takers when your Makers are gone, going back to Thatcher’s famous line: “The problem with socialism is you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
Sean Penn will have to get used to be someone else’s Useful Idiot. Self-loathing rich people will have to find some other dictators to validate (talk to Rodman). Jimmy Carter….oh who cares? Jimmy can go fck himself.
I don’t understand why y’all so opposed to Chavez. He was anti-American government, as we all are, so he’s kind of on our side. The main problem in South America is that they just don’t have enough Nordic/Germanic/Celtic types to overcome the pitfalls of socialism. Incidentally the US is rapidly going this way too and thus socialism will become a total f*#k up there also. Societies with majorities of these people are just fantastic places to live, like Norway, Germany, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand. With low crime and great prosperity and opportunities for practically every member of society.
So we can look at Chavez and see a kindred spirit and someone who actively sought to raise his people up a step or two. Bravo Chavez! Unfortunately the raw material he has to work with seems just not up to the task. If all his people were Englishman or Germans or Swedes or a combination of these people like, um, let me see, early North America, I’m sure he could have achieved much.
Only the Aryans can do socialism as i often say. This is because it requires a goodly dollop of nobility and intelligence and the right genes, the wherewithal if you will. If it were allowed to carry on in a totally unrestricted way it would have dominated the planet and all the others would be its subjects (just as it was in the 19th century) and we could go on and be masters of the Universe, bhuhahahaha. Instead we plunge headlong into a ‘Planet of the Apes’ scenario.
He gave foreign aid in heating oil to the wealthiest nation on earth. That has to be third world Socialism’s finest hour.
He he heh
We all know what happened to Cuba. We don’t need another missile base south of our borders. Instability is the socialist stock in trade. It invites elements (Iran, China) closer to our shores, shortening our reaction times.
Combine that with a moron in the White House that parks 5 nuke carriers right next to each other in Newport News. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2013/02/the_truth_behind_the_aircraft.shtml Even this article, which purports to explain the whole thing as a result of the sequester, is crap. One hit and we’re down to 6 carriers. Why are we risking such things for a 2.2% cut in the budget? Because Obama’s an irritating little prick who digs bad news.
And if the sequester doesn’t deliver the hurt he promised, everyone will know he’s a vacuous gas bag of crap and it will be harder to scare everyone the next time he needs us to jump through his fucking hoops.
Everywhere socialism is tried, it fails. Socialists then tell us it was the wrong “kind” of socialism, as if there was one that worked. Failure is fundamental to its make-up. As Churchill once noted: “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
RT -- I have prepared the short list for the Cancer Beam. To whom do I send it?
Hold off on that ……. I hear Darpa is working on one with a wide flood beam.
Right now I’m starting to wonder if Kim Jong-un is strung out on SSRIs.
We need tougher background checks for nuclear armed dictators.
Everywhere socialism is tried, it fails.
One could argue that certain people do their darnedest to make it fail. By the same taken one could say that Libertarianism has failed to gain a foothold anywhere.
Its kind of unreasonable to expect the people of Venezuela to be capable of becoming ardent followers of Adam Smith (Aryan..ok Scottish) or for the entrancing spells of that wicked witch Rand to work in the Andes and Amazon.
The people of Chile privatized their Social Security system back in the ’80s, the CATO Institute holds conferences on the Scottish Enlightenment in China. Adam Smith is read around the globe. It’s not that the ideas contained in libertarianism are rejected everywhere, it’s just hard to gain a foothold in a political world that promises everything to everyone when your philosophy is to take over the world so you can leave everyone alone.
And oh yes, sabotage, I forgot sabotage. Socialism doesn’t work because ‘certain people’ (maybe the ones paying for everything?) ‘make it fail’. I forgot that one, but I really like the “wrong” socialism, because it holds out that universal hope that cutting the end off your tie and sewing it on the other end will make it longer. Somewhere.
North Korea threatening a pre-emptive nuke strike on the US either comes under murderous ideation or suicidal ideation. One of those. Both are on the warning label, but alas, perhaps Jung Un can’t read the box? It might be in English. Either way, he’s going to get a lot of people killed, and no doubt China’s aware of what he’s capable of better than anyone. The last thing they need right now is 10 to 50 mushroom clouds on the appendix known as North Korea. It’s bad for business.
ROFLMAO -- After dealing with liberal mind-melders all day, I think I found a laugh or three…
Met a guy here in Cali. that said he threatened to beat up his wife. He was charged with a terrorist threat. He said he was just talking shit but it didn’t help in court.
If you can judge anyone by their default facial expression Kim Jong-un looks like the same sick bastard his father was.
And oh yes, sabotage, I forgot sabotage.
I was thinking more along the lines of assassinations, trade embargoes, sanctions, covert military action and the arming and training of paramilitary organizations. Also the occasional total war and massive night time aerial bombardment of civilian centers. Plus defoliation, invasion, missile strikes, bribery and downright dirty deeds.
The people of Chile privatized their Social Security system back in the ’80s
The people? I thought they were ruled by a dictator in the ’80s. Actually dictatorship and then a transition into a healthy mix of capitalism/socialism is often a sensible course to follow. Its not one or the other. Total libertarianism would be an absolute nightmare as is total socialism -- its got to be a bit of a blend.
ɯsıןɐıɔos/ɯsıןɐʇıdɐɔ ɟo xıɯ ʎɥʇןɐǝɥ
ɥǝɐןʇɥʎ ɯıx oɟ ɔɐdıʇɐןısɯ\soɔıɐןısɯ
ǝsɹnoɔ ǝןqısuǝs
ɹǝɥʇo ǝɥʇ ɹo ǝuo ʇou
Dang! No matter how I look at that….
DW!!! How’d you do that? Dang! I’m having trouble swallowing.