Hugo Chavez’s legacy: the good, the bad and the ugly

The deceased Venezuelan leader leaves behind a mixed legacy. If his enemies are to be believed, Hugo Chavez was a tyrannical caudillo who terrorised his people at home and propped up dictatorships abroad. For his devotees, Chavez represented a push back against American domination and neo-liberalism. The truth is more complicated.

The deceased Venezuelan leader leaves behind a mixed legacy.

If his enemies are to be believed, Hugo Chavez was a tyrannical caudillo who terrorised his people at home and propped up dictatorships abroad. For his devotees, Chavez represented a push back against American domination and neo-liberalism.

The truth is more complicated.

The good

Under Chavez’s rule, wealth was redistributed and the living standards of the country’s poorest were raised to an extent previously unknown. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) found that from 2002 to 2010, poverty in Venezuela was reduced by 20.8 percent, dropping from 48.6 percent to 27.8 percent, while extreme poverty decreased from 22.2 percent to 10.7 percent.

Chavez also made impressive inroads in terms of closing the gap between Venezuela’s rich and poor. According to the ECLAC report, Venezuela has Latin America’s lowest Gini coefficient at 0.394. The closer the Gini coefficient is to zero, the closer a country is to total socio-economic equality.

The bad

Hugo Chavez has in the past drawn strong criticism from human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – organisations which can hardly be dismissed as agents of neo-liberalism.

In its 2011 annual report, Amnesty described Venezuela as a country where “those critical of the government were prosecuted on politically motivated charges in what appeared to be an attempt to silence them”.

Human Rights Watch said the “accumulation of power in Venezuela” under Chavez had allowed the government “to intimidate, censor, and prosecute critics and perceived opponents in a wide range of cases involving the judiciary, the media, and civil society”.

The ugly

Under Chavez Venezuela forged some pretty unsavory alliances – including the Castro dictatorship in Cuba and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chavez was also an opponent of the Arab Spring, supporting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi until the end and siding with Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war.

Cuba is the country which has more than any other felt the direct influence of Hugo Chavez. By providing the regime of Fidel and later Raul Castro with subsidised oil at a rate of roughly 105,000 cut-rate barrels a day – about half of Cuba’s energy needs for petroleum – Chavez ensures that the Castro dictatorship retains its grip on power.

As the Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez has written: “It was precisely the rise to power of Hugo Chavez in 1999 that was the key element to the walking back of reforms”.

35 Responses to “Hugo Chavez’s legacy: the good, the bad and the ugly”

  1. Mick

    The Left set out to provoke a reaction, get it and then blame the victim.

    It’s a substitute for winning arguments by logic.

  2. Hegemony OrBust

    Thing is, James, when you look at “the good”, a little hole forms. This hole is called “underlying trends”…to wit:- poverty actually *went up* for the period 1998 to 2004, to 60%.

    But hey, poverty did eventually go down, didn’t it? A full 29% from it’s 1998 figure. Most impressive.

    It also did in Peru (53% in 2002 to 28% in 2011). Brazil (slightly lesser, 37% to 21%). Latin America as a whole: 44% to 28%.

    You’ll note that, really, Chavez’s legacy is – despite Venezuela being awash
    in billions, perhaps trillions, of petro-dollars,- he managed to get poverty levels down to 1.4% below the regional average. Now, call me a bit of a perfectionist stick-in-the-mud, but I think that regional context, combined with the fact the Venezuelan economy appears to be a basket case (unemployment 8.2%, inflation in the high 20s, interest rates in the mid teens, Government debt and personal debt increasing, 3 devaluations in 10 years, the agricultural sector, to coin a phrase *withering on the vine* to such an extent that Venezuela imports 80% of it’s food and no economy outside of the oil, average GDP growth over the past 10 year oil boom – when oil prices hit 100 dollars a barrel – slightly more than the UK’s average growth in the same period), combined with the political repression, the massive crime rate (which is, actually, worse than Mexico’s) and the fact that he’s rumoured to have salted away a £2 billion dollar fortune for him and his family…

    Well, it makes Ahmadinajad look like one of his *lesser* crimes, actually.

    I wish the Left would stop with the Bonapartism, I really do. The man was incompetent, and – even allowing that his support for the poor was genuine, rather than motivated by the wish to get a power-bloc (I think it was genuine by the way) – horribly authoritarian and with some nasty political allies.

  3. korm67

    I apologise she didn’t murder shanty town protestors; she
    murdered industry manufacturing and community!

  4. Ceannaire

    Do you even know what Human Rights Watch was set up for? It was set up explicitly to “monitor” the human rights situation in the USSR. It was quite explicitly an imperialist organisation. Now that the USSR is gone, it’s branched out to attack others who don’t kowtow before the US empire.

  5. ann b

    this sundays observer Hector abad a columbian writer
    gave a very jaundiced opinion of the whole of the left in latin america , yet Seumas Milne in the guadrian feb 19 , was far more objective and worth a read.I think the Latin countries have a lot to show us . don’ be so quick to judge
    ann bennett

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