Hugo, we hardly knew ye

When Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez eliminated his term limits in 2009, he probably expected to hold onto power for a little longer than three years.

But life is unpredictable, and after a 14-year reign of power, the fiery man in the red beret and jumpsuit who drew the ire of President George W. Bush and the adulation of Hollywood dupe Sean Penn is dead of cancer.

Chávez prided himself on his vision of “21st-century socialism” for Venezuela, but his strategy of handouts, class warfare and media censorship came straight from the playbooks of the worst despots of the last century.

Chávez cast himself as a man of the people, determined to pull many Venezuelans out of poverty. He did, but not before he tanked Venezuela’s economy and stripped away political freedoms.

True, Chávez cut the percentage of families in poverty in half between 1995 and 2009.

He also halved the unemployment rate.

And he provided poor Venezuelans with free education and health care through his “Bolivarian Missions” program.

But it will take a growing economy to help Venezuelans sustain themselves and prosper. Here, Chávez failed miserably to deliver.

The country is experiencing a shortage of rudimentary consumer goods and grappling with a massive deficit and currency devaluation. Last year, Venezuela experienced a whopping 27 percent increase in inflation.

Chávez expropriated oil businesses left and right, creating an unfriendly environment for foreign investors.

His reliance on a nationalized oil industry for funding everything from social programs to the military has made Venezuela dangerously dependent on a finite and unstable source of income.

Chávez’s Venezuela is still a capitalist country — the state just owns more of the capital and is terrible at managing it.

What Venezuela’s poor have in food, education and healthcare, they utterly lack in physical security.

Since Chávez took office, Venezuela’s murder rate skyrocketed and is now one of the world’s highest. The vast majority of victims are low-income city dwellers.

Chávez routinely intimidated journalists and broadcasters to avert not only political opposition but also embarrassment. For instance, his attorney general imposed an injunction requiring reports on water quality to be based on a “truthful technical report backed by a competent institution.”

There’s nothing like chilling the speech of those who inform you whether or not the water is safe to drink.  

Chávez was no man of the people. He was just another tyrannical, phony strongman.

His bombastic personality and cartoonish military garb made him look like a caricature of a 20th-century Latin American revolutionary, much less the poster boy of whatever “21st-century socialism” is supposed to be.

Let’s appreciate for a brief moment the fact that Chávez gave poor Venezuelans a leg up with his social programs. But he set them up with a country that cannot give them much more than that.

He used them as pawns in his short-lived, so-called revolution.

We can’t predict Venezuela’s political trajectory at this early stage, but let’s hope that in the post-Chávez era, Venezuelans find a leader who respects democratic processes, values press freedom and cares about the long-term prosperity of the people.

­— danoconn@indiana.edu