ON HUGO CHAVEZ, A REVOLUTIONARY FOR ALL SEASONS

Hugo Chavez, died March 5, of this year after a long illness. He was vilified for little reason here in the US, but he was an enormously popular leader in Venezuela where he worked diligently to correct long-over due economic disparities between rich and poor. The modern world would be a better place were more leaders to address injustice with Chavez's determination.

Hugo Chavez was often maligned here in the USA, before and after his death. (The New York Post’s crude front page reported his passing with the blazing headline: “Venezuela bully Chavez is dead, Off Hugo”). The Post was simply following a decade long trend of Government and mass media anti-Chavez sentiment. Chavez had been long ago placed on our government’s enemies list, mostly due to his determination to prevent the big US and international oil companies from siphoning off huge profits from Venezuela’s rich oil fields. He also irritated us when he openly befriended some of our “straw dog” enemies. Not to mention thumbing his nose (or worse) at George Bush, whom he famously tagged in a UN speech as “el diablo” for that president's unnecessary, illegal, invasion of Iraq. Chavez did not endear himself to Washington as one of the few national leaders who openly and courageously opposed GWB's tragic act of bloodletting and waste of life and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another bone of contention between the two nations was the 2002 abortive, CIA-instigated attempted right wing coup to overthrow Chavez. After that incident, “el commandante” turned more completely away from the US (what ele could he do?) and relations soured. But the intensity of the US vilification of Chavez issuing from the US propaganda mill and Washington's media echo-chambers was more revealing than the actual allegations (demagoguery, socialism, communist sympathizer, incompetence, etc., etc.). Because, not only did Chavez have the temerity to pull Uncle Sam’s beard when he closed off Venezuela’s oil fields to foreign corporations, but he actually took the money the big oil companies would have stuffed into their own coffers, and had the effrontery to plow those funds back into Venezuela’s own economy! He invested petro dollars in Venezuela’s poor, building his nation's infrastructure, improving its education system, expanding its health care , and modernizing its agriculture. That was just too good of an idea to permit out in the free air to possibly contaminate the minds of leaders of other US “client states” or "dictators”. For US business interests here it was too dangerous and trendy an idea. Helping the poor, improving education, nutrition, health care and and basic social welfare was “socialistic” for Washington. (Perhaps the idea of skimming profits from hugely profitable oil companies might be the way the US could support our own crumbling infrastructure and mend the holes in our shabby social safety net too! That idea would have been exceptionally distasteful to the Bush crowd.)

Nancy Folbre, an economist from University of Mass., Amherst, (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/chavismo-and-human-development-in-venezuela/) writes in the NY Times March 11, 2013 an essay concerning Chavez’s economic achievements. I reproduce much of it below.

“Strong aversion to both his political values and his personal style has often led to dismissive assessments of Venezuela’s economic record since he became president in 1999. But as Mark Weisbrot and Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy Research have carefully documented, the Venezuelan economy experienced significant growth after 2003, when the Chávez government successfully gained control over the national petroleum industry, and fared surprisingly well even after oil prices collapsed in 2008.

Oil revenues were used to finance large public investments in health, education, housing, pensions and food subsidies to the poor. World Bank indicators show a sharp decline in poverty from slightly more than 60 percent in 2003 to slightly more than 30 percent in 2011.

Many projects or “misiones” that Mr. Chávez put into place proved so popular that even Henrique Capriles, his opponent in the last election, promised voters he would maintain and augment them.

While some critics of Mr. Chávez suggest that his policies have not had much impact on other Latin American countries, others contend that they are not that different from those carried out by other social democratic governments in the region, like Brazil’s. The influential Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, past president of Brazil, has lauded Mr. Chávez’s contribution to regional initiatives.

The impact that Mr. Chávez had on other left-leaning governments in the region, especially in Bolivia and Ecuador, certainly represents part of his political legacy.

Economists have not yet developed very good tools for assessing the impact of specific development policies, partly because these are intrinsically difficult to measure. The United Nations collects data on a number of different indexes, including the Human Development Index, which combines information on income, life expectancy and actual and expected years of education.

This index shows Venezuela closely aligned with a regional average that has increased steadily since 1980. But this index is not very sensitive to short-run policy changes; both life expectancy and actual years of schooling are variables that change only gradually as the population ages.

A better indicator of short-run improvements in health is the infant mortality rate. Data collected by the Central Intelligence Agency and aggregated on Index Mundi show significant declines in Venezuela between 2003 and 2012 – but even faster declines in Brazil, Mexico and Peru.

The same database helps explain why Venezuela’s exchange of subsidized oil for Cuban health care may deliver important future benefits. Infant mortality in Cuba, slightly higher than that in the United States in 2003, has now fallen below the United States average.

Mr. Chávez’s track record in increasing school enrollments does stand out among comparable countries. A detailed World Bank database shows that between 2003 and 2011 Venezuela narrowed the gap in gross school enrollments (number of students enrolled compared with those eligible for enrollment) between it and Brazil, Mexico and Peru (the percentage of primary school enrollments held even).

Even more striking are the effects of one particular hallmark of Chavismo: the expansion of free public higher education. Tertiary enrollments increased to about 80 percent in 2009 (the latest year for which data are available) from 40 percent in 2003, far higher levels than those of Brazil, Mexico or Peru.”

Get the picture of why Chavez was on our enemy list and our CIA actively attempted to oust him? The US government would have clearly preferred a more “business friendly" leader (i.e. a dictator of their own) in Venezuela, so we could better control what is considered the largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia. This form of intervention on behalf of our business class has been a normal pattern of our "foreign policy" in South America and elsewhere. It has also caused untold loss of life, economic turmoil, pain and suffering around the world. Will we never learn our lesson? We can count off the failed states, bloody wars and deposed legitimate democratic leaders around the world where we have been manipulating governments for the benefit of a small clique of wealthy industrialists. These special interests, these oligarchs were the very same elements Hugo Chavez had the courage to oppose successfully in Venezuela. We need less blather, less flag waving and obfuscation from our media and more clarity of what forward leaning progressive leaders like Chavez have accomplished, (and perhaps what we can emulate here) and as French Minister of Overseas Territories, Victorin Lurel, stated after attending the Chavez funeral: the world "needs more dictators like Chavez" and this author agrees heartily.

rjk