Venezuela and the Chavez Legacy

I'm fighting for my own sake and my own goals. Graduating will be a lot faster and cheaper if I just stay in the country. I'm sorry but the Venezuelan people I grew up with are as good as dead as far as I'm concerned. There's nothing left to save.

The Venezuelan government arrested five police officials over deadly jail disaster.

About the fire that broke out, some Colombian reporters of Caracol, I'm sure some of you have heard about the channel, thought of an interesting theory. Basically the government took 2.1 tons of gold to the countries of the middle east in order to get cash, so what the Colombian reporters are saying is that the government caused the fire in the Venezuelan police station in order to create a mess big enough so people wouldn't pay attention to it. I never thought about the idea of it actually being a smokescreen, recently more people involved in the fire died.

The Venezuelan government is also being investigated in yet another corruption case about 2.5 billion dollars wasted involving the Odebrecht company. Holy shit a lot of politicians everywhere got involved in that scandal. I think this is the biggest corruption case there has been...

Also, since It's April 11th, I thought about sharing my article about the 2002 rebellion again:

So the computer system of PDVSA was used in order to steal over 5.200 million dollars. About things heating up in Nicaragua, some protesters recently destroyed an Hugo Chavez monument. I hope they get that socialist scumbag that is Daniel Ortega.

Recently, Venezuelans of Sabaneta did something similar with a Chavez statue. I'll take this as a good omen :)

I know almost nothing about the Venezuela situation other than Chavez seemed like a somewhat decent guy with greviances and questionable friendships before now the country has completely imploded.

Is there a good place to familiarize myself with what happened to what I once considered one of the more stable countries in Latin America's north?

Rationalwiki has a decent summary of him here. Following some Venezuelan bloggers indicates he was always kind of a fishy figure with questionable treatment of women and sexual minorities even before he wore his dictator card openly.

Also had a history of anti-Semitism at that. I've seen debate over whether or not Chavez even counted as a legitimate socialist (which goes into things outside of my expertise) but the gist I've gotten is that he had a couple of fair points and did a couple of good things, but there were a lot of negatives.

There was a time when Leftists like Noam Chomsky idolized Chavez and saw Venezuela as a model of socialism. That Rationalwiki article's juxtaposition of Chomsky quotes about Venezuela from 2009 and 2017 really says it all.

Chomsky, 2009

Chomsky, 2017

Note that the Rationalwiki article has a far longer section dedicated to Chavez's negative points than his positive ones.

edited 22nd Apr '18 11:38:33 PM by M84

A lot of people liked Chavez early on. Nationalizing the oil, standing up to the US, promising prosperity to the people...and then reality came to Venezuela with the bill.

I mean, you would think that it was impossible to fuck up the economy of a petrostate beyond repair, just because even in the worst case, Venezuela will have an easy export commodity that sells for US dollars (if I'm not mistaken, that helped Argentina out of its own economic reset). Yet here we are.

How can a man be so brilliant about linguistics and so stupid regarding politics.

....Actually now that I say it out loud that’s not particularly weird at all.

How chavez got to power is hard to sumirse but I will try by best:

Part of it was that Chavez was REALLY charismtic, he manage to draw thousands in his speeches in ways very few politicians does, the only guy with equal charisma I have ever saw was Obama.

Second to it was Bush era prove perfect for Chavez since it give him the best enemy he could muster, Chavez got tons of suport for being of the few who openly atack bush and is crony for the stupid madmen they were and US sliding into conservatism prove it, this of course have the side efect of energizing the left and creating the new latin left(evo, lula, krishner,etc) which it turn to be a bad idea because they all are corrupt, Crazy or both(specially both).

Between this campain of polarization and using the oil as way to show chavismo have been sucessfull, chavez was pretty much untouchable and he went to the grave with only ONE political defeat in is entire carrier which expand almost 16 years, that is fucking impresive....

But he give the wheels to maduro or lefty trump as I like to call it, and things when to shit.

I would blame it all on the terrible political crisis of the country. Basically after Carlos Andres was impeached no one has truly giving two shits about the country and Chávez was the only politician smart enough like to take advantage of the frustration people had against the political class and use the oil boom to keep a good portion of the population under his hand. The opposition politicians on the other hand were either too inept, scared to get involved in the mess or just as psychopatic as he was. Also for anyone who has any knowledge about Venezuelan history, It's pretty obvious Chávez has always been Castro's puppet to own our oil so he could fund his communist revolutions in Latin America. He tried doing this before back in the early 60's and we pushed the Cuban and Venezuelan communist guerrilla back but Castro never gave up on trying to destroy us.

I know this is a little off topic, but since we are talking about socialism, what do you guys think about Bernie Sanders? I've been following some of his policies recently and despite the fact I was a little paranoid about him because of his socialist image. I was actually impressed by him a little. He calls himself a democratic socialist, but all his policies are social democracy. Since he belongs to the political left, I think if he runs again he could help calm down the "bipartisanship" of the country a little if the different social classes see improvements in the nation.

edited 23rd Apr '18 8:59:08 AM by Malebranche

While your paranoai is understandable you have to get that not all left and right are equal, if anything I find chavismo more like republican party that anything else in term of craziness, that is why I call Maduro a lefty trump, since he share much of is stupidity.

Somehow, I wasn't really surprised when someone who attempted to take over the country via military coup previously but failed, turned out to be another totalitarian leader and a populist using multiple measures that from time to time, have been proven to either not work or just make things worse.

edited 23rd Apr '18 9:26:45 AM by AngelusNox

Trust me, I don't judge blindly by the right and left divide, I judge politicians by their actions. One of my favorite politicians is Betancourt who was a socialist himself.

My own political leaning is in fact, Centrism.

edited 23rd Apr '18 9:30:12 AM by Malebranche

I'm not a fan of Bernie Sanders. The man's got some good ideas and he votes reliably enough, but he's not so good at actually explaining how he'd get shit done. He's also too quick to throw shade at the Democratic Party and relies too much on his "outsider" status as an Independent. He exploits anti-Establishment feelings to maintain popularity. He's convinced that he's the only one who knows how to fix things and thus feels no need to make alliances or cooperate with mainstream Democratic officials. He's a horrible judge of character and competence who will accept anyone who endorses him, even blatant racists, sexists, and homophobes. He's got a checkered past that too few have bothered to actually investigate that's full of iffy behavior and words. He's enabled a particularly toxic Vocal Minority of purity seekers, the so-called "Unicorn Brigade". He's remarkably tone-deaf on matters of race and gender relations, and is too eager to dismiss them as "identity politics". There's a reason Bernie Bros are stereotyped as white dudes who only care about "whites-only" socialism.

edited 23rd Apr '18 9:34:30 AM by M84

Im social democratic or center left, more close to obama and hilary than the putrid left we have here in latin america.

In fact my experience have show some things: like that thread about comunism and facism that people are faaaaaar to likey to give a pass to comunist or hard left that it should, how polarization can in fact fuck a country and seen US is almost made a study case in how to deal with a autoritarian.

That and of course the main one: the gringos dosent know how to deal with a populist, which is funny for me for some reason.

Bernie Sanders' ideas took a bit of root among the more youthful social-democrat members of my country. Basically the socialist hipsters in colleges. One thing is for certain in latin american politics though: they cannot, will not, and some would argue, should not, take examples or say good words about any U.S politican even if they are good. No politician on election will say 'we could follow the example of Obama/Trump/Sanders' because in latin america, that is political suicide.

There is an incredible stigma that's festered for a long time on the common population against the U.S (with...good reason, I'd say), a deeply seated resentment. It's taken hold of our identity's marrow to the point that any politician that would publicly speak well of any U.S move, politican, or words, would be out of the race and relevancy faster than the laws of physics would thing possible..

The hipocresy is that we will still consume and depend entirely on the U.S, but the moment it comes to showing recognition in the slightest we're rabidly anti-U.S, politically speaking. So, most people will try (sometimes desperately) to build a 'unique latin american' identity: hence why you never hear Maduro say anything about European socialism or russian communism despite, you know, being the basis of his government, no. They prefer to bring regional heroes like Bolivar, or whomever to rally a national identity, since people are awfully hurt by the consequences of colonization. Again, for good reason.

It is why largely anti gringo tirades are popular, and grotesquely effective, in Latin America.

That Trump ended up elected kinda doesn't help.

edited 23rd Apr '18 12:19:43 PM by Aszur

Yeah, basically many communists caudillos like Castro and Chávez are something like radical nationalists, that take advantage of the idiosyncracy, lack of identity and resentment of their people in order to reach power in the nation.

One of the things that called my attention about Bernie is that I've seen something like economic and Socialist nationalism as part of his policies, although I don't see it as something radical like the caudillos over here. That left wing nationalism is kind of common here in Latin America, but It's kind of weird or even funny to see it from an actual US politician.

edited 23rd Apr '18 1:20:19 PM by Malebranche

From studying a history class on Modern Latin America, and learning about all the US has done, I'm not surprised.

The general pattern is that Latin America has zero issues with Americans as people, or American culture. The US government, though, is an entirely different story to Latin Americans.

Eh, our relation with American people is...complex.

Sometimes we love them, so much that we wanna marry our family to them and become white too.

Other days, we want take over America and take back the honor of Latin America. With guns. The civilians won't be spared.

And other days we just treat them as everyone else.

The Venezuelan congress rejected the repression against the people protesting in Nicaragua and called out Daniel Ortega for being Maduro's friend. First time in a long time they are saying things the way they should!

Well, there are some days you want to restore the Aztecs/Inca/Mayan empire...or Gran Colombia.

edited 23rd Apr '18 2:37:50 PM by TheWildWestPyro

That was Number 2 "Restore the honor of Latin America. With Guns"

Although I'm sure the very last thing Bolivia and Paraguay want to do is fight each other again, if they want to restore not only their honor but their former borders.

edited 23rd Apr '18 3:39:32 PM by TheWildWestPyro

Somethng both Cuba and Venezuela have in comon is the lack of pre-colony histoy, I mean peru have the incas, mexico the azte, they have a sort of identity before the spanish that they can grab and mantain.

So, what identity used Venezuela and Cuba? the rebellion.

Really, in venezuela case that is why we nearly defiy Bolivar, and most of our rethroic is a constant fight against everyone else.

It kinda helps US have become too conservative, allow us to used it as a puching bag.