HEALTH OF BOLIVAR

 

Venezuela is a study in irony. Unlike its Latin American sister states, this spectacularly beautiful country has had a democratic order since 1958. As speculation mounted about the health of President Hugo Chavez, officially recuperating in Cuba after surgery, it was time to look back at the last 12 years, defined and determined by the man who is now a presence in absence. A saviour to Chavistas, detractors of this self-styled “Pirate of the Caribbean” would say Venezuelan democracy’s end began in Chavez’s 1998 victory — a landslide that led to a “socialist dictatorship” that incrementally curtailed freedoms, nationalised the economy, shackled the private media.


A darling of the international Left, Chavez quickly made himself a political foe of the US. But to understand the Chavistan phenomenon, one must look at the Venezuelan distributive gap, wherein the barrios had remained poor while the middle-class had seen both sides of the oil boom — wealth from the 1970s price hike, poverty from the 1980s price crash. Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution came as a redistributive blessing, with standards of living, health and education improving in the barrios. Yet, Chavez has been neither here nor there, a Castro-lite who was persistently challenged, and last year the opposition made big gains to rob him of his two-thirds majority, but whose ruling by decree has done more damage than merely polarise politics.




Venezuelan irony lies also in the nationalising of oil production: aimed at reversing the “Oil Curse”, it became the oil curse itself. Killing the industry’s ability to manage itself efficiently and make profits, diverting money to social-engineering projects, did help the poor. But as that money dried up and food shortages and high inflation hit, Chavez looked increasingly vulnerable and desperate. That’s the vacuum uncompromising populism and one-man rule sooner or later lead to.