Venezuela’s democratic façade has completely crumbled

[Sgent]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/hugo-chavezs-long-con/2016/07/01/26e8b690-3f8c-11e6-80bc-d06711fd2125_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-c%3Ahomepage%2Fstory#comments

Not long ago, the regime that Hugo Chávez founded was an object of fascination for progressives worldwide, attracting its share of another-world-is-possible solidarity activists. Today, as the country sinks deeper into the Western Hemisphere’s most intractable political and economic crisis, the time has come to ask some hard questions about how this regime — so obviously thuggish in hindsight — could have conned so many international observers for so long.

...

Step one was his deft manipulation of elections. Chávez realized early that, as long as he kept holding and winning elections, nobody outside Venezuela would ask too many questions about what he did with his power in the interim. And so he mastered the paradoxical art of destroying democracy one election at a time.

Venezuelans have gone to the polls 19 times since 1999, and chavismo has won 17 of those votes. The regime has won by stacking the election authorities with malleable pro-government officials, by enmeshing its supporters in a web of lavishly petro-financed patronage and by intimidating and marginalizing its opponents. It worked for more than a decade — until it didn’t work anymore.

...

The key was the torrent of oil dollars that poured into the country during the long oil boom of 2003 to 2014, complemented by massive debt now estimated at $185 billion. (Argentina defaulted on a $100 billion debt.) An enormous import-led consumption boom created an illusion of harmony even as the economy crumbled just out of sight.

[scscholar]

1. i was just there in May, and none of this is true (ntxt)

[Tarheel_Dem]

2. None of it is true? If not, why are people looting & standing in long lines for basic necessities?

[DetlefK]

3. These are false-flag shoppers to make Maduro look bad.

Also the reports how Venezuela's currency-policy destroyed trade? False-flag shopkeepers.

People who go into hospitals and can't get treatment because the hospital has run out of supplies? False-flag wounded.

It's one huge neoliberal nazi-conspiracy of the banking-cabal that runs everything. They are everywhere, they control everything, and every time something bad happens in the world, it's their fault. Oh, sure, it may look like there are other, simpler explanations, but that's what they want you to think!!!

[sufrommich]

6. Lol.

Well done.

[Tarheel_Dem]

8. I can't believe that someone who "visited in May" came to the conclusion that everything's just....

peachy in VZ, and that everything being reported by reputable news sources is flat out wrong. The mind boggles.

[Igel]

4. Two things can be true at once.

I visited a different society in 1990. It was by cruise ship. Pretty much everybody chose to go on guided tours. They came back each of the two days in that city saying how wonderful things were. They saw stores with stuff in them. Happy people. The men and women dressed well, the women with jewelry, and went on official government buses with official government guides. They spent $600 per person per day, if they took the cheapest tours, and this was 26 years ago.

I spoke the language but had never been there. I refused to allow money to be spent on tours. My parents came with me (sigh). My mother had been openly supporting this country because it was progressive, pro-women, pro-social benefits. We took public transit, we stood in line with locals for entry, we ate at restaurants for locals and shopped at stores for locals. We saw empty stores, long lines for stores with things, and a lot of stressed and unhappy people. My mother dressed like the other prosperous women, and I told her to strip off her jewelry--she was wearing a year's average salary on her neck, ears, and fingers, and had 4 months' average salary in cash in her purse--we would have no perks. We spent $25 per day for the three of us.

We were in the country's "2nd capital". If we'd gone to a regional capital it would have been worse, if we'd gone to a city where governmental authority wasn't centered it would have been far worse. One snapshot, one video, one set of impressions couldn't do it. My mother turned on the country as far as her ideology, but I said that if we'd gone to a couple of areas it would have been a different matter--the stores would have been better supplied.

It's like being in the US. I live in a food desert. It's working class, okay houses. It has a crime right I wish were lower; half a dozen people get shot within a mile or two of where I live every year. I could go south a ways and see really ratty areas. One area when I was looking for apts. had cheap rentals, but the police reports listed breakins, rapes, shootings on every block on a consistent basis, and if you want to buy fresh food, good luck. I could go north a ways and look at the really well maintained houses and the stores where I can buy $100 bottles of wine off the shelf and I can choose between a dozen apples (plus the organic wall o' apple), a variety of radishes and cabbages and string beans, as well as snails, oysters, various types of clams, various types of salmon, etc., etc., etc. So if I see a report on American neighborhoods, which one do I see?

If I say it's all like the really nice area, I'm overlooking some real social problems. If I look at just the distressed areas, I'm ignoring that most Americans are doing fairly well. What I see in a limited report is most emphatically not all there is. But when I learned Russian in the late '70s all the Russian news reports said only "America is hell." One needs perspective on this. At the same time, middle-class and upper-class lifestyles aren't news, so one also has to have no just perspective but understand that we have a negative news bias and so much news is going to be negative. (Even a lot of positive news that people saw about Venezuela was spun as negative--they have it so good, why can't we have nice things?)

Go to Caracas and stay in decent areas, you see what's reported. If you're middle class, you find what you need, but it's a bit harder and costs a bit more. If you're upper class and have hard currency, it's easier to pay. If you're working class or poor, then you have a much harder time. Power centers will be better provisioned than podunk towns.

[Marengo]

5. Details would help strengthen your argument.

[COLGATE4]

7. When I asked him/her if during his/her time there (s)he had

gotten out and seen the barrios, this was his/her answer:

scscholar (2,100 posts)
6. None of my company's employees threre spoke Spanish..

so you're question is meaningless. They all spoke Portuguese. Admittedly since I was working for a chain of restaurants that provided food to employees, I didn't see the entire picture, but I did not see any food shortage

So no, I don't think you're going to get any more details.