Dotini
Chavez was adored by the smallfolk, and implacably opposed by the lordly.
Who would you follow, someone who tells you that you have to work hard to get a car, a place to live, be able to afford holding up a family and that everything you want in life comes from the same hard work. Or someone who says you don't need to do anything, if you're poor I'll subsidize you, if your wife is pregnant, I'll subsidize you, if you go to jail, I'll subsidize you, if you don't have a job, I'll subsidize you, and the more kids you have, I'll subsidize you more and more. If you don't have a house, I'll give you a house. If you don't have a car/motorcycle, I'll give you one. Oh, and if by any chance I can't, you can blame it on the rich people and freely take it from them. People are easily maleable.
What Chavez did was promise riches for the poor, When he couldn't deliver, he blamed the better parts of society, claiming he has tried and tried and the rich part of the country (working in conjuction with the CIA, of course) didn't let him, so they are the enemy. We used to be a happy place, and indeed we are right now because we have an awesome climate and beach/mountains pretty closeby. But the amount of racial, social and financial tension Chavez created won't go away even after his death.
For the longest time in Venezuela, even if you were born poor, you could work hard and get an education and a decent job and live decently. Chavez made this difference look like the people with money are to blame because you don't have a car or a place to live in or money... when in reality, 75% of the workforce makes minimum wage, aside that most cities were planned for about 500% less people than they currently have.
In truth, everyone who works for the government benefitted immensely, including himself. The companies he took over (and by taking over in theory it means buying them off at the current market price, which none of the owners has been paid yet) failed to work. For instance: yes, he took over concrete and rebar makers and used them to build houses for the poor, but the materials they used to save a buck are so cheap that the first time it rained, they all crumbled. He aklso built new housing by taking over buildings that were either abandoned, or empty... which yes, makes a lot of sense. The only trouble is that when you put 500 families to live in an overcrowded place and don't put parking lots and don't condition the area for more people, chaos ensues. And that's just what happened here, you take an already congested area and throw in 500 families, you'll have a helhole pretty quickly.
Venezuela for the most part doesn't have a proper urban planning. So you'll often have three office buildings followed by a favela, followed by three living buildings, followed by a supermarket; it's all mixed up. So if you live in a good area, chances are you have a favela pretty closeby, and if on top of that you throw in a building full of increasingly needy families and to top it all off, make the building as unsafe as possible that it will propbably crumble within the year, you have adistaster in your hands.
The money part is even more preposterous, but equally true. Thankfully the company I work in doesn't need that many foreign products (advertising), but I have friends who work in the importing business. This is going to sound odd, and most people I tell it to won't believe me, but you need permission from the government to receive dollars to be able to pay for imported goods. The government is extremely slow and corrupt at giving these permissions, with at least an 18 month waiting list. This translates into two things:
1) People who can't wait are forced to buy dollars off the black market, which is what most of them do. A 'government issued' dollar costs 6.30 Bolivars, while a black market dollar costs between 20 and 30 bolivars, depending on how much you buy. It's such a profitable market that government officials actually sells the money through the black market and obviously make a bigger profit, thus why it's so hard to get them officialy.
2) People who can wait or simply can't afford to buy them off the black market wait in excess of a year to receive the permission to receive the money to buy goods.
We bought an iMac at work for roughly $3,000 last year. Yesterday we got a new one because we really needed one. The price? $12,500
This simply isn't consistent with a democracy or a happy place.
EDIT: I'm endlessly editing this post so I don't double post, sorry.
Human Rights Watch left Venezuela a long time ago and since then has been calling attention to it. There's a crapload of political prisoners here, many of whom have cancer and are as terminally ill as Chavez was. You want to take a guess at how many are receiving treatment and/or have been allowed in hospitals? I'll give you a hint, the number starts with zero. I posted a link to two posts I made a long time ago here, if you can stand it, click on them and look, then tell me again how fair this government was/is.
