Score another lamentable election victory for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The fiery, anti-U.S. revolutionary now has another six-year term to continue with the plans he launched after his first election in 1998 to dismantle Venezuela’s free-market economy and pursue his anachronistic socialist agenda.
Not long ago, American leaders would’ve had good reason to be concerned about the national security implications of another Chavez term. Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest proven reserves of oil and is a major petroleum exporter to the United States. Chavez has repeatedly rankled U.S. leaders by providing support for leftist Colombian guerrillas and sponsoring socialist political campaigns in Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua.
Yet his so-called Bolivarian revolution has proved hollow. Chavez’s Latin American political allies have found that, without the same kind of oil income Venezuela enjoys, revolutionary socialism is almost impossible to sustain.
Chavez has survived politically by boosting state spending ― 30 percent this year ― while subsidizing basic consumer goods, fuel and housing. Meanwhile, inflation raged at more than 26 percent in 2011, according to International Monetary Fund estimates. Venezuela’s major regional neighbors, adhering to free-market principles, have seen their own inflation rates drop below 7 percent.
Venezuela’s per capita murder rate is third- or fourth-highest in the world, dwarfing the rates of countries such as Mexico, Iraq or Afghanistan that normally garner the big homicide-rate headlines. Even worse, most murder victims in Venezuela are poor, young males ― the very people he claims to be helping.
To his credit, poverty rates have declined since Chavez took office, although 35 percent of Venezuelans still qualify as poor. Petty crime rates have skyrocketed. If Chavez’s revolution has been so successful in redistributing wealth to Venezuela’s poor, why are so many turning to crime? The trend is particularly curious given that the rest of the region has seen crime rates decline.
Chavez’s opposition has tried repeatedly to stop the president through elections and referendums, but it’s never been able to muster the necessary voting muscle. His continuation in power for another six-year term will no doubt rob Venezuela of the economic growth opportunities that are spurring job creation and investment elsewhere in the region. Venezuela’s professional class of lawyers, doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs have fled the country in droves.
The more U.S. and other regional leaders ignore him, the less his bluster seems to resonate. For all his antics and rhetoric, Chavez should increasingly be dismissed for what he is ― a toothless tiger.
(The Dallas Morning News)
(MCT Information Services)
