Those crybabies are same as okc fans that cry foul play when okc is losing.
Chavez won 3 times by large margins even with 90% of venezuelan media opposed him
to be fair, there were international observers allowed in the last election, so there would be no crying from the party that lost. Apparently everyone agreed the election was fair and square (including the opposition)
That's not to say the guy was a saint or his policies were not BS, but at least as far as the democracy goes, it was certainly not a dictatorship
not that it matters now anyways
It took long enough.
I thought he would pass before the New Year.
And it still doesn't mean that people aren't afraid to be found to have voted against him.
I have a hard time believing the fairness of said election, but I will also admit bias in that belief.
Your reluctance to think anybody might think different than you do is well do ented...
That's good to hear, like I said, I really have no opinion or way of knowing either way. My beef was mainly with the implication that the appearance of democracy is proof of a non-tyrannical government.
I find it likely that Chavez was neither as terrible or as great as he's made out to be, depending on who you talk to.
That's always been the case when a government elected by the people in an oil-rich country doesn't wanna do business with America.
On the flip side, you can be an totalitarian monarchy and execute women for stuff like driving cars and doing math, but if you're in an oil rich country and you do business with the right people in America like Saudi Arabia does, you can even fund large scale terrorist attacks against the US and still be considered an ally to democracy.
wasn't big enough of a dictator, here
In the End, Chávez Was an Awful Manager
IN Caracas, Venezuela, you could tell a summit meeting mattered to Hugo Chávez when government workers touched up the city's rubble. Before dignitaries arrived, teams with buckets and brushes would paint bright yellow lines along the route from the airport into the capital, trying to compensate for the roads' dilapidation with flashes of color.
For really big events - say, a visit by Russia's president - workers would make an extra effort, by also painting the rocks and debris that filled potholes.
Seated in their armor-plated cars with tinted windows, the Russians might not have noticed the glistening golden nuggets, but they would surely have recognized the idea of the Potemkin village.
After oil wealth, theatrical flair was the greatest asset of Mr. Chávez, the president of Venezuela since 1999, who died Tuesday from cancer. His dramatic sense of his own significance helped bring him to power as the reincarnation of the liberator Simón Bolívar - he even renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
That same dramatic flair deeply divided Venezuelans as he postured on the world stage and talked of restoring equilibrium between the rich countries and the rest of the world. It now obscures his real legacy, which is far less dramatic than he would have hoped. In fact, it's mundane. Mr. Chávez, in the final analysis, was an awful manager.
The legacy of his 14-year "socialist revolution" is apparent across Venezuela: the decay, dysfunction and blight that afflict the economy and every state ins ution.
The endless debate about whether Mr. Chávez was a dictator or democrat - he was in fact a hybrid, an elected autocrat - distracted attention, at home and abroad, from the more prosaic issue of competence. Mr. Chávez was a brilliant politician and a disastrous ruler. He leaves Venezuela a ruin, and his death plunges its roughly 30 million citizens into profound uncertainty.
Mr. Chávez's failures did more damage than ideology, which was never as extremist as he or his detractors made out, something all too evident in the Venezuela he bequeaths.
The once mighty factories of Ciudad Guayana, an industrial hub by the Orinoco River that M.I.T. and Harvard architects planned in the 1960s, are rusting and wheezing, some shut, others at half-capacity. "The world economic crisis hit us," Rada Gamluch, the director of the aluminum plant Venalum, and a loyal chavista, told me on his balcony overlooking the decay. He corrected himself. "The capitalist crisis hit us."
Actually, it was bungling by Chávez-appointed business directors who tried to impose pseudo-Marxist principles, only to be later replaced by opportunists and crooks, that hit Ciudad Guayana.
Underinvestment and inep ude hit hydropower stations and the electricity grid, causing weekly blackouts that continue to darken cities, fry electrical equipment, silence machinery and require de facto rationing. The government has no shortage of scapegoats: its own workers, the C.I.A. and even cable-gnawing possums.
Reckless money printing and fiscal policies triggered soaring inflation, so much so that the currency, the bolívar, lost 90 percent of its value since Mr. Chávez took office, and was devalued five times over a decade. In another delusion, the currency had been renamed "el bolívar fuerte," the strong bolívar - an Orwellian touch.
Harassment of privately owned farms and chaotic administration of state-backed agricultural cooperatives hit food production, compelling extensive imports, which stacked up so fast thousands of tons rotted at the ports. Mr. Chávez called it "food sovereignty."
Politicization and neglect crippled the state-run oil company PDVSA's core task - drilling - so that production slumped. "It's a pity no one took 20 minutes to explain macroeconomics to him with a pen and paper," Baldo Sanso, a senior executive told me. "Chávez doesn't know how to manage."
Populist subsidies reduced the cost of gasoline to $1 a tank, perhaps the world's lowest price of petrol, but cost the state untold billions in revenue while worsening traffic congestion and air pollution.
Bureaucratic malaise and corruption were so severe that murders tripled to nearly 20,000 a year, while gangs brazenly kidnapped victims from bus stops and highways.
A new elite with government connections, the "boligarchs," manipulated government contracts and the web of price and currency controls to finance their lavish lifestyles. "It's a big deal here when a girl turns 15," a Caracas designer, Giovanni Scutaro, told me. "If the father is with the revolution, he doesn't care about the fabric as long as it's in red. Something simple, $3,000 - more elaborate, $250,000."
Mr. Chávez summoned journalists to Miraflores, the presidential palace, to extol his achievements. But even the building betrayed the nation's anomie, with its cracked facade, missing tiles, a whiff of urine from the gardens. The president's private elevator, a minister confided, leaked when it rained.
Mr. Chávez's political genius was to turn this record into a stage from which to mount four more election victories. An unprecedented oil bounty - $1 trillion - made him chief patron amid withering nongovernment alternatives.
He spent extravagantly on health clinics, schools, subsidies and giveaways, including entirely new houses. Those employed in multiplying bureaucracies - officials lost track of fleeting ministries - voted for him to secure their jobs.
His elections were not fair - Mr. Chávez rigged rules in his favor, hijacked state resources, disqualified some opponents, emasculated others - but they were free.
As Venezuela atrophied, he found some refuge in blaming others, notably the "squealing pigs" and "vampires" of the private sector whom he accused of hoarding and speculating. Soldiers arrested butchers for overpricing.
His own supporters increasingly blamed those around him: by 2011 you could see graffiti with the slogan "bajo el gobierno, viva Chávez" - "down with the government, long live Chávez."
The comandante, as he was known to loyalists, used his extraordinary energy and charisma to dominate airwaves with marathon speeches (four hours was short). He might blow kisses, mobilize troops, denounce the United States, ride a bike, a tank, a helicopter - anything to keep attention focused on him, not his performance.
Distraction came in numerous forms: denouncing assassination plots; a farcical nuclear deal with Russia (eventually abandoned); exhuming Bolívar's remains to see if he was murdered; praising or assailing guests.
I experienced the power of his performance firsthand in 2007 when, as The Guardian's Latin America correspondent, I appeared on his weekly show, "Alo Presidente," in an episode held on a beach. Invited to ask a question, I asked whether abolishing term limits risked authoritarianism.
The host paused and glowered before casting the impertinence out to sea and making it a pretext to lambaste European hypocrisy, media, monarchy, the Royal Navy, slavery, genocide and colonialism.
"In the name of the Latin American people I demand that the British government return the Malvinas Islands to the Argentine people," he exclaimed. Then, after another riff on colonialism: "It is better to die fighting than to be a slave!"
On and on it went. Christopher Columbus. Queen Elizabeth. George Bush. In vain I responded that I was Irish and republican, and that European monarchy was irrelevant to my question, which he had dodged. This provoked another tirade.
It was theater. As the cameras were packed away, and we all prepared to return to Caracas, the president shook my hand, shrugged and smiled. I had been a useful fall guy. No hard feelings. It was just a show.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;js...ub=Contributor
Official Hugo Chavez fan page
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
ironically, venezuela probably has freer elections than the US. when only a millionaire backed by hundreds of millions s ed out by corporate interests can succesfully run for pres...how free can that election really be ?
agree. in south america pretty much anyone can become president. this has been proven fact by Chavez, Peruvian current president, Evo Morales, and Ecuadorian president, oh and Paraguayan president. Most of these were born from , many imprisoned by their governments and many won with 90% opposition from their country's rich owned mass media.
In US, not only you have to sell your soul to 1 of 2 lone political parties. But you have to be the chosen one by the mass media. It's pretty pathetic, and they call this an ideal democracy
Mujica, Uruguay's president, prefers to live at his own old, small home instead of the presidential palace. He flies economy and he's always relatively accessible. True story.
from an aljazerra reader:
Chavez unsubtly spat in the face of neoliberalism. It's the only reason why people (generally Americans) know more about his excesses than they do about the torturous theocracies of the Saudis or Bahrainis and the only reason we are talking about his human rights record on the day of his death.
Meanwhile back in reality....
-inflation adjusted GDP grew 97% from 2003 to 2009
-lots of growth in non-oil sectors, more private sector growth than public
-the poverty rate has been cut in half (from nearly 2/3 of the country to 1/3), extreme poverty cut by 70%
-pension eligibility has reportedly tripled and pensions themselves quadrupled
-Foreign corporations do plenty of business in this country painted as unfriendly to free markets. Don't worry, they have Starbucks. lol
Above all, these gains don't take into account the universalization of healthcare and a literacy rate that will soon be near-universal. Ask yourselves, would a despot educate and heal his population if he was more concerned about power for its own sake, as Obama, Cameron and their corporate clients would have us believe?
CARACAS, Venezuela — In an unexpectedly close race, Venezuelans narrowly voted to continue Hugo Chávez’s revolution, electing his handpicked political heir, Nicolás Maduro, to serve the remainder of his six-year term as president, officials said late Sunday.
But the thin margin of victory could complicate the task of governing for Mr. Maduro, emboldening the political opposition and possibly undermining Mr. Maduro’s stature within Mr. Chávez’s movement.His opponent, Henrique Capriles Radonski, refused to recognize the results, citing irregularities in the voting and calling for a recount.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/wo...avez.html?_r=0Mr. Maduro, the acting president, narrowly defeated Mr. Capriles, a state governor who ran strongly against Mr. Chávez in October. Election authorities said that with more than 99 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Maduro had 50.6 percent to Mr. Capriles’s 49.1 percent. More than 78 percent of registered voters cast ballots.
“These are the irreversible results that the Venezuelan people have decided with this electoral process,” Tibisay Lucena, the head of the electoral council, said as she read the result on national television late Sunday.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
