The former British ambassador to Venezuela remarked, “but Chávez is an incredibly popular figure, isn’t he?” I must admit, I really dislike such arguments. They mean little to me since I belong to that 52% of Venezuelans who are on the receiving end of Chávez’s hatred. So I replied, “give anyone access to the amount of money that Chávez controls, and even a chimpanzee would become incredibly popular.” Laughter ensued, followed by, “well, that’s true.” Look, we’ve had to endure these comments for far too long. Comments that essentially imply the world is willing to turn a blind eye to everything Chávez wants to do, and does, because of the vast sums of money he handles, rendering the decline of Venezuelan democracy utterly irrelevant.
So I went and dug up some figures recently. The statistics cited come from the World Bank and official chavista institutions. Hugo Chávez is a peculiar dictator. A dictator, however, who has not needed to kill or disappear thousands of enemies. He simply buys them off. When that fails, he either kills public figures of his adversaries or uses his courts to charge them with fabricated offenses. No one can touch him. No fortune in Venezuela is large enough to compete with or counter him. Since he took office in Venezuela in 1999, Chávez has enjoyed a GDP of $2 trillion. Give or take, Hugo Chávez is the $2 trillion dictator. He has had more income than the combined total of the previous 8 administrations from 1958 to 1998.
Then one has to listen to nonsense like “the opposition is divided, they keep shooting themselves in the foot, they’re disconnected, they didn’t serve the poor, they’re elitist, oligarchic…” True. Especially elitist and oligarchic compared to the $2 trillion dictator. The pariahs, like Mark Weisbrot from CEPR, argue that poverty has drastically decreased from 54% to 30%. Of course, nobody buys Weisbrot’s propaganda because even a cat knows that Chávez’s figures, which are the source of all Weisbrot’s indefensible arguments, are untrustworthy. Still, let’s give his apologists the benefit of the doubt. Can anyone explain how, after $2 trillion, there are still 30% of Venezuelans living in poverty? Venezuela, it should be noted, is a country with 28 million inhabitants. While we’re at it, regarding the recent flooding situation, can anyone clarify how Chávez’s regime has been able to build only 296,047 houses for the poor since 1999 with $2 trillion, while its predecessors built 2,033,481 houses between 1969 and 1998 with a fraction of that income? To conclude, with less than one-fifteenth of what Chávez has received, Europe was rebuilt after World War II.
Now, let’s hear what Human Rights Watch has to say about the democratic credentials of the $2 trillion dictator…