Oliver Stone and Sean Penn were probably the most notorious, but Michael Moore and Kevin Spacey also met with him. Hollywood actors would come out loudly proclaiming what a wonderful place Venezuela is. As a result of this, Chavez was the darling of the American liberal establishment for years. Human Development Index, Venezuela still ranks, say, above Brazil.Ĭhavez, a fierce opponent of neoliberalism and imperialism, was very critical of George W. “ ”So, it’s a-I mean, if you look at it, it still has-if you look at, say, the U.N. Venezuela today has the world's worst economic growth, worst inflation, and 9th-worst employment rate - unless Chavez's daughter wants to donate some of that billion-dollar fortune she 'inherited.' Even oil production decreased under his tenure, due to systematic mismanagement of the state oil company. The economy under Chávez more or less collapsed and became inordinately dominated by the oil industry, inflation was consistently high, and Venezuela has one of the highest crime rates in the world. He still holds appeal for lefties who would rather live in a socialist hellhole than a capitalist nightmare the opposite of Putin's fan club. Plus, any decrease in poverty that Chávez might have caused has long been undone.
Arguably the only positive thing going for him were his policies on poverty reduction, but those were largely funded through oil money, which was obtained through the nationalization of the oil industry, which made Venezuela more dependent on oil than it was before, which was problematic for them when the oil crash happened. He had a bit of a messiah complex, assuring others that God would remove all obstacles to his goals for Venezuela. He typified majoritarianism, the idea that democracy is about elections only and that the opposition (those who didn't vote for him) could go fuck themselves. Chávez ran on a cult of personality, diminishing many of the democratic institutions within Venezuela. In many ways, Chávez and the Venezuelan state were one and the same. In 2017, Chávez's chavista successor Nicolás Maduro formed a single-party Constituent Assembly, usurping the powers of the opposition-led National Assembly, finally marking Venezuela's fall into autocracy at the end of a two-decade-long crawl. While Chávez won three elections democratically, the last one in 2012 was considered free but not fair, as the vast media apparatus and other government machinery were controlled by him and deployed in his favor. Although he was democratically elected and didn't make any openly autocratic moves, he engaged in a lot of demagoguery and was seen by opponents as progressively creeping toward dictator status. Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (1954–2013) was the socialist/ populist president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death.
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