Venezuela under Hugo Chavez - Essay Example

Venezuela under Hugo Chavez Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was the Venezuelan President and a politician. He served as a president from 1999 to 2013, when he died. He was renowned and spearheaded the fifth republic movement since its establishment in 1997 up to 2007. It did combine with a number of other parties leading to establishment of United Socialist Party of Venezuela, which he led up to 2012 (Economist, 2). Born into a working-class household in Sabaneta, Barinas, Chávez came to be a career military officer, and when he became discontented with the political system in Venezuela, he established the private Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement during the early 1980s to toil towards conquering the government. He directed the movement in an unproductive coup overthrow against the Democratic Action government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was the president in 1992. This led to the imprisonment of Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (Feinberg, 1). Later on, after he was released, he formed a socialist political party two years later, it was called the Fifth Republic Movement, and he was voted president of Venezuela in 1998. In 2000, he was re-elected and during this second term he presented the system of communal groups, Bolivarian Missions, and employee-managed companies, along with a land reform program, which was municipalizing main industries. In 2006, he was re-elected again with more than 60% of the votes. After emerging victorious in his fourth tenure as president in October 2012, defeating Henrique Capriles, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was sworn on 10th January 2013. However, the Venezuela National Assembly decided to postpone the inaugural ceremony to give him time to enable him recuperate from medical treatment in Cuba, which resulted from a cancer return that was initially identified in June 2011. On 5th March 2013, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías passed away in Caracas at 58 years. During the duration Venezuela was under Hugo Chávez, it was not a democratic country, though Chávez was not a dictator, he crushed the democracy of the Venezuelan nation. In a period when South America was swiftly moving towards the far-left demagoguery from its ancient binaries of far-right, Chávez was still holding Venezuela back in the past, both politically and economically. Under the decade of Chávez, while other nations like Peru and Brazil became representations of equality and success, Venezuela appeared to go back to the bad ancient days. It is true that the polls were usually well-conducted and fair under his regime. He even freely accepted defeat in one referendum aimed at consolidating his power. However, during his fourteen years, every single institution of democracy such as the opposition, the media, and the courts were destroyed, in a traditional-style to form a party-run economy and state (Panizza and Miorelli, 42). Corrales and Penfold, (110), claimed that by the time he was running his second term in office, the concentration of authority and destruction of human rights defense had given the regime free rein to prosecute, censor, and intimidate Venezuelans who disapproved the president or dissatisfied his political agenda. In a sequence of comprehensive investigation reports printed over the last period, the appreciated rights association has documented the incarceration of human rights activist, the crushing of the independence of the judiciary, the crushing of opposition parties and silencing and banishment of opponents, and the large-scale intimidation and censorship of the media. During a period of when such abuses and excesses of power were vanishing in numerous South American nations, Venezuela stood almost alone in its level of demagoguery. The authoritarianism prolonged in the economy (Cole, 499). While Chávez did not, divergent from popular myth, take over the oil industry, it has been owned by the government since 1976, and he simply devastated its output and productivity by stuffing it with associates and failing to preserve its infrastructure, he was able to trash majority of the non-oil economy. Saunders, (1). in a nation that should be among the great exporters of agricultural products in the Americas, Chávez turned farming into a non-feasible business by controlling prices and subdivided consumption, and transformed large tracks of profitable agricultural land back into sustenance-level peasant farmers. Consequently, his nation became deeply dependent on food imports and grieved from grave food shortages. Ahead of that, in some way one of the biggest oil exporters, during a long period of petroleum boom, was able to accumulate an economic debt of twenty percent. That joined with a yearly inflation rate of thirty percent, is the outcome of an authoritarian, instead of liberal methodology to the economy. Chávez used a huge amount of cash from oil to bail out the underprivileged or poor. Some argue that this sounds convincing and that poverty reduced sharply during his 14 years in office. However, this is persuasive until you take a look at the adjacent countries with left-wing regimes that did not bother with political or economic authoritarianism. Chavez’s outline was clearly extremely ambitious. In fact, it was near without doubt excessively ambitious. This is for the reason that, while the proportion of the poor did increase by certain metrics under the regime of Chavez, even those motivated to be ideologically concerned for him accept that he left Venezuela not as good as he found it, even for the underprivileged (Figueroa, 206). Throughout the Chávez years, disparity lessened a little bit in Venezuela, returning to the level in 1990. This decrease can be accredited, completely to the oil money. However, according to CARACAS, (1), disparity dropped far more sharply in those nations: Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil that were governed by social democratic regimes that maintained strong democratic institutions and open market economies. These nations despite them having lesser resource incomes, they attained the sort of outcome on equality and poverty that Chávez could only dream of while also constructing an institutional heritage that will withstand them through the forthcoming. And that, at long last, is the definitive disapproval of the approach that Chávez used. His approach was all about immediate spending, with no deliberation to the long-term savings. Once the money he used to spend that came from the oil stopped flowing them there will be nothing left but an institution that is broken and full of debts (Mainwaring, 956). Work cited CARACAS, The Economist online |. "The Economist." Venezuela after Chávez (2013): 1. WEB. . Cole, N. S. “Hugo Chavez and President Bush’s Credibility Gap: The Struggle Against US  Democracy Promotion.” International Political Science Review 2007: 493–507. Web. Corrales, Javier, and Michael Penfold-Becerra. "Venezuela: crowding out the opposition." Journal of Democracy 18.2 (2007): 99-113. Economist, The. "The Economist." Hugo Chávez’s rotten legacy (2013): 6. WEB. . Feinberg, Richard. “Dragon in the Tropics: Hugo Chavez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela.” Foreign Affairs 2011. Web. Figueroa, Víctor M. “The Bolivarian Government of Hugo Chávez: Democratic Alternative for Latin America?” Critical Sociology 2006: 187–211. Web. Mainwaring, Scott. "From representative democracy to participatory competitive authoritarianism: Hugo Chavez and Venezuelan politics." Perspectives on Politics 10.04 (2012): 955-967. Panizza, Francisco, and Romina Miorelli. “Populism and Democracy in Latin America.” Ethics & International Affairs 2009: 39–46. Web. Saunders, Doug. "THE GLOBE AND MAIL." Hugo Chavez wasn’t a dictator, but he crushed democracy (2013): 1. WEB. . Read More