No he isn't. Maduro is way more radical. Chavez was smart enough to negotiate when he had to.

Your patience in the face of the kind of aggressive stupidity that certain (cough) posters bring to the table is quite impressive, valenz.

All those stats and social rights will be gone in a couple of years because they'll have to find some way to close that massive deficit. The poverty numbers will probably be back to where they were in the early Chavez days.

So I guess we're only 5-10 years away from people blaming budget cuts/neoliberalism/free market reforms/the IMF program/whatev for the poverty in Venezuela.

Meanwhile plenty other South American countries, without Venezuela's massive oil wealth, have done well in creating growth and reducing poverty.

How about, 'when your country makes it to near the top of the CIA / Wall Street's hit list, you tend to run into some problems.'

you'll have to build a better causal chain than that.

Yeah, I guess I would, wouldn't I. Carry on.

The Guardian: Venezuela agents arrest Caracas mayor

It is unfortunate that some can not realize that Chavez was a despot and his entire government is made up of cronies. They are anti-elitist, but only when it comes to others. They say what the poor want to hear and line their pockets all the way to Miami. Bolivarian Socialism has turned Venezuela into a dysfunctional state. It would take years to fix the mess that Chavez's policies have created.

Maduro is playing with fire. The more he tramples on the freedoms and liberties of the Venezuelan people, the more likely they will violently overthrow him and his government.

You are half right there. The psuv is full of corrupt people ( unfortunately ) but Venezuela has been dysfunctional way before Chavez arrived. The media has presented a narrative that makes no sense at all. If Venezuela was so prosperous then why is Chavez elected in the first place ? That question will remain unanswered of course.

Also this discussion is aids because of the left/right paradigm people have that leads them to accept very simplistic narratives of extremely complex phenomenons. The main mistake is thinking that Venezuela is ****ed up based because of their economic policies. The economic policies are obviously sub standard but the real issue is that they divided the country and that the party is rotten with corruption.

Not sure if anyone has linked to this yet but I have thoroughly enjoyed this man's blog for Venezuela updates. He definitely leans very anti-Chavista, which plays into my morbid fascination with watching the entirely predictable failure of terrible economic policies.

http://daniel-venezuela.blogspot.nl/

In my experience, this is true of nearly all political discussions. I am quite guilty of it myself, as my previous post showed.

Valenzuela,

I'm sitting here. Having just finished looking at pictures of another murdered boy in the streets by GNB thugs and I'm angry. I'm very angry. I'm angry at Chavez though he has passed away, and I'm angry at Maduro. I'm angry at his government cronies but mostly I'm angry at people like you.

You are the reason that people are dying in the streets murdered by government thugs. You are the reason that liberty and freedom has died in Venezuela. You and your support of Bolivarian socialism has turned what was once a great country into a giant pile of ****. You and everyone like you that ignored all of Chavez's abuses of power throughout the years are to blame. You let your dream of a socialist paradise blind you to the realities of the world around you. You are an ignorant.

Democracy has officially died in Venezuela and you are partially to blame. Your defending of their policies and their leadership is to blame. I hope you take a good hard look in the mirror and realize what you've done and I hope that God forgives you because I and other Venezuelans will not. Your day of reckoning will come soon enough and I hope it's sooner rather than later.

- Rowcoach

What do you think democracy is? Democracy doesn't come with a list of magic rights and luxuries that you get. It doesn't outlaw the police killing you like a dog in the street. The mob wanted the bus driver, and they get the bus driver. Venezuela has been a turbulent place for a long time. How do you think people like Chavez and Maduro come to power? Democracy won't save them.

Are you suggesting that my posting leads to violence in your country ? That seems absurd at first hand but if you actually show the causality links then I will refrain from posting in the internet in the future.

Not just YOUR posting. The posting of anyone who supported Chavez and PSUV. Yours' and others' defending of his "poverty reduction" programs and antagonism of the U.S as though it somehow balances out the really bad outcomes of his actions and policies is what has eventually led to violence in the country. Venezuela could have been rid of him in the first recall election but nooooo, Venezuela has had to continuisly suffer the destruction of it's democracy thanks to you and others not realizing and coming to grips with the fact that he was a tyrant. A dictator in sheep's clothing making grand promises and never delivering. I hope you realize the errors of your thinking and do whatever you can to denounce Chavismo's policies and everyone associated with it. Otherwise, you are part of the problem. Otherwise, you are part of the reason the government treads upon the freedoms of its people and murders them. If you continue to defend any facet of this government or it's leaders, you are an accomplice to its crimes.

Last year in Febraury in Chile 27 of 28 students councils of the biggest University voted to send a letter to support the Maduro goverment. The only student council that didnt vote for that was the one that was presided by me. Afterwards I actively campained and argued for the chilean social movement to distance itself from Maduro goverment.

I will reply tommorrow when you have 24 hours to digest what I just wrote.

That's great Valenzuela. I'm glad you did that. But going over the thread, you have repeatedly defended some of Chavez's worst actions and neglected many of his others. It's not just Maduro. It was Chavez. Chavez is to blame for the situation Venezuela faces today.

If you admit that you were wrong in defending him in the belief that he was in fact helping the poor, then I will take back what I said. But if you don't and you still believe that Chavez was good and it is only because of Maduro that Venezuela is in the situation it is today, then I stand by what I said 100%.

It didn't take a genius to figure out where Venezuela was headed in the first years of Chavez's presidency. Chavez never hid his love of Castro, Marx, Engels, and Che Guevara. All communists. The suppression of free speech and the PSUV's political opposition did not start with Maduro. The eradication of Democracy, Liberty, and Freedom in Venezuela did not start with Maduro. It started with Chavez.

Now, I will grant you that the Presidents in Venezuela before Chavez were not saints. They were not beacons for Democracy either. But that does not excuse the crimes of Chavez and his cronies including Maduro.

The thing is that I dont really have a strong opinion on what is going in Venezuela, I used to but I have changed my mind. I only have access to information that has been manipulated by either right wing media or by Telesur so I dont have too much to work with.

When I made those posts back in 2011 I was preety much a radical leftist and now Im basically a moderate one so my views have changed since. I havent read my posts but I probably disagree with most of what is written there.

I do however still think the following things:

1) Venezuela was not like you said, a great country. It was certainly not great for the 70% that was on poverty while having an elite that went to vacations to Miami. That is basically what the right refuses to acknowledge. Populism is not the cause of your problems but the consequence. Unless venezuelans realize what made Chavez elected president in the first place you wont solve the problem (unless your plan is basically winning a civil war).

2) Venezuela did in fact see its poverty reduced under the first decade of the PSUV. Maybe it was just because oil price were too high or maybe the policies are awful in the long run but suggesting it didnt its just ridicoulous.

Those are basically two points that I stand by.

Venezuela was an awful place for the poor venezuelans in the 90s + Poverty was reduced in the 00s.

Im going to try to explain why is it important that you acknowledge what is written above.

The problem is that if you dont acknowledge that poverty was in fact reduced when United Nations and a series of other serious institutions are telling us exactly the oppossite thing is that when you tell us that Chavez is basically destroying the judiciary system we have to be skeptical. You already told us that poverty has gone up when every single institution told us otherwise. Now I ask you is it reasonable for us to believe United Nations and Cepal over random venezuelans who live in Miami? I think it is.
Now I ask you again is it reasonable for us to be skeptical of other accusations made by the venezuelan right where already other accusations are clearly being contradicted by the organisms I mentioned above? You basically cried wolf too many times.
Of course now we know that the entire process is a complete joke specially after Maduro is offering Leopoldo Lopez as an exchange prisioner and they still havent shown any evidence at all for the crimes he is being accussed of.


The main problem you and the most rampant opposition of the venezuelan left has is that you dont make any attempt at all to understand the supporters Maduro has. If you keep blaming only the left you wont solve the problem at all unless your plan is winning a civil war which unfortunaly seems to be the plan of some of the venezuelan right. If you understand why Maduro has the support he has then chances are that you will have a peaceful and prosperous country in the future, unfortunaly that wont happen and the trainwreck will continue.
The main paradox is that by attacking everything that Chavez did you are just polarizing the venezuelan society even more!! You are the one that is giving PSUV something to work with not me!!!


Finally I think you are wrong with regards to Maduro = Chavez but that is based on what some friends whose opinions I respect have told me( they are left leaning but against the PSUV). Their opinion was that Chavez actually understood the venezuelan society well enough to keep things at some kind of equilibrum while Maduro didnt which lead to the widespread violence. Of course they may be wrong but Im just throwing it out there. I still think that his economic policies were preety bad although it is not because of lol socialism or whatever easy narrative people want to believe.

I think this really good post.

Giving money and opportunity to poor people is a good way to make them less poor. And a hugely corrupt elite is massively damaging and one of the main reasons populist movements grow.

At the same time you should make it easy to work and do business if you want your country to be wealthy.

too often it seems you have to choose one or the other, but it's really both.

I'm sure some of the statistics are true. Chavez gave away a lot of money and had many social programs. I saw some of them. Before I understood economics, I even thought some were good! But what were the costs? Oil was at over $100 a barrel for many of those years and what do we have to show for it now?

What good is reducing poverty if as soon as the oil money dries up, the people fall back into it? How does runaway inflation help reduce poverty? The Chavista government lied about so much, how am I to believe them on statistics about poverty?

Yeah some of my family and friends are elites. I'm not gonna lie about that. But many are not. I haven't just stayed in their nice houses in Caracas visiting for a week. I have traveled from Maracaibo to the island of Margarita by car. I've seen the poverty many Venezuelans live in first hand. I've visited them in their homes. I have seen the ranchos in the rural areas first hand many times.

I have been told that stopping the car at night at a desolate red light is dangerous. I have seen government infrastructure take years to build. I have seen vibrant groceries rivaling the ones in the U.S become barren.

What good is giving the masses fish if you have not taught them how to fish?

I do blame the Venezuelans that voted for Chavez. I understand they loved the free money giveaway and when your destitute, anyone helping you seems like a savior but they continued to support Chavez as he dismantled their freedoms. The opposition realized that Chavez won for good reasons many many years ago and did not offer neoliberal policies as an alternative. Manuel Rosales even offered a debit card to every Venezuelan that the government would credit every month as one of his policies to appeal to the masses.

How am I to believe election results when the opposition can have 500,000 person rallies while the government forces govt workers to attend theirs? You have been fed lies. You have been tricked by smoke and mirrors.

Did Chavez cheat on all his elections? Certainly he did not. But I'm willing to bet that on some of them he did. And if he didn't outright cheat, he used up government resources as his own which would have been scandalous in any developed country.

Chavez was a disaster. The sooner people realize it. The better.

Democracy means immigrants can't vote even though they pay taxes.

The stats are accepted by United Nations if it was that easy to lie about them then North Korea and China would have awesome stats but they dont. Also now Cepal is telling us that poverty in Venezuela is going up again.

The reason that poverty went down isnt because Chavez policies were good but because the policies before him were simply awful. The old policy was basically give oil away to foreign intrests and **** the poor. The new policy is to have a corrupt and inefficient state take charge of the oil. I dont know if the new policy was better because of oil prices or not but they did seem to work in reducing poverty.

I dont think this is the place to discuss neoliberal policies, I personally think they are sub-optimal and people conveniently forget that the asian economies that have developed had a lot of state intervention specially in South Korea. However there is a fallacy about teaching people to fish and giving them fish which is basically right wing rhetoric to morally justify having to pay less taxes. It seems reasonable but its not really, if you are a 60 year old women and you have had reasonable health care for the first time in your life you are not going to stop voting for the corrupt bus driver if the other side is proposing getting rid of that health care because they will teach you to fish instead. Some goverments social programs are good and help redistribute health, you should basically find the right balance between those programs and not destrying the incentive to produce wealth. The thing is that the venezuelan elite doesnt seem intrested in finding a balance they just want their privileges back.

Even then teaching people to fish requires the goverment spending money, you need to spend on education and make an effort so that everybody has some access to somewhat similar education otherwise the lower classes lose intrest and the country as a whole suffers.
Plus the biggest mistake is not recognizing that small businesses actually benefit from a more egalitarian society because if the money is on few hands then the consumption levels go down because rich people dont consume most of their outcomes while poor people do.

You're making some false assumptions.

First and foremost, that the only alternative to Chavez and Maduro are elitists who would instill neo-liberal policies neglecting the poor.

Secondly, teaching a man to fish does not at all mean paying less taxes. It means enabling people to create and grow their own wealth. Not be dependent on the government for it.

Does that mean that their shouldn't be social programs to help the poor? No. What it means is that the focus of government should be establishing Rule of Law, Private Property Rights, and a Free Market. All of which Chavez and Maduro have done their best to destroy.

Look at any successful country in the world and you will find these factors in common. Sure many will have social programs. And it's definitely a good thing to have a safety net for those citizens that fall on hard times or can't take care of themselves. Or free education to increase human capital which is the fuel for a successful economy. But it does not matter how much you give to the poor if their is no rule of law and if they do not have a choice in most of their economic decisions.