Doombuggy says:
I’m not sure where you are getting your info, but when someone uses terms like “standard of living has exploded”, I’m suspect.
I’ve got several native acquaintances, and they paint a bleaker picture. Chavez himself may be an earnest fellow, but he is surrounded by corruption that countenances a lot of crime, which signals the usual suspects. Leaders are supposed to enforce the rule of law, you know, but I realize you don’t have any good examples from which to learn this.
Oilfield technicians opposed Chavez, and he blackballed them from employment. Many emigrated. Chavez rode high on the run up in oil prices, but his wells deteriorated from the lack of maintenance from losing all those trained people. His solution was to bring in the Chinese to start servicing the wells. Not good governance.
The oilfield workers were part of a capital strike in 2004 or so when the employers locked out their workers. The national oil company workers hated Chavez because they had run that industry as a personal fiefdom with most of the rewards going into their own pockets as opposed to the whole country. The oil company shut down its office and locked out its workers.
All of the workers basically went on strike and said we are not coming back until Chavez leaves. Industry, especially the oil industry, was crippled, so Chavez forced the oil industry to re-open, fired those who had shut down the industry, fired most of the workers who had gone out on permanent strike and set about replacing the entire state oil company with loyal and patriotic citizens. If the oilworkers were blackballed for sabotaging the nation’s oil industry, that was the right thing to do.
He had a good project. The oilfield workers were against his good project. What was he supposed to do? His project is going to go forward whether these idiots like it or not.
If there was no alternative but to have those dissident oilfield workers take off, then there was nothing else to be done but bring in Chinese or whoever.
All of the previous rightwing government were all horribly corrupt, and the opposition is insanely corrupt. Venezuelan politics is corrupt. No one has presented any evidence that the Chavistas are any more corrupt than any other Venezuelan political class.
I do not agree that “the cause of all the street crime lies in the fact that the government is corrupt.” This is a lie. They are trying to pin the blame for street crime on the state. A politician takes a bribe, Jose in the slums sees him do that, so he decides to go murder the guy a few streets over. Make sense? Of course not. See how the opposition makes stuff up?
I do not believe that the wells have deteriorated from lack of trained workers either. The opposition keeps saying that, but I am not aware of a lot of evidence that it is true.
I reject this argument about deteriorating oil infrastructure. Every year Chavez has been in office, he has spent much more on upkeep of the oil industry than was spent before in any year under the rightwing regimes.
Your Venezuelan friends are all members of the elite and just about everything they tell you is going to be a lie. They hate him because their picnic days of ripping off the country are over.
It is a proven fact that the standard of living for the vast majority of low income and poor people has gone through the roof, and actually this is starting to cause a lot of problems such as electricity blackouts.
The opposition represents the Right that was in power for decades before Chavez. They gave everything to 20% of the population and didn’t give one dime to 80% of the population. People remember that. The 80% that got screwed remembers very well who these opposition people were. They were the same people who screwed them for all those long years. They would have to be crazy to welcome back their oppressors.
If real wages have declined for everyone, Chavez would have been voted out of office long ago.
FACT: he has dramatically bettered the lives of the poor and low income majority of Venezuelans. They can see these differences with their own eyes, and that is why Chavistas keep getting re-elected over and over again.
The opposition lies and says they are the majority. They are wrong. They have always been a minority, and they probably always will be. The majority is with Chavez, and they will be as long as the Chavista project continues to better the majority. The opposition project is designed to better a minority and screw the majority. Most folks know this, and that is why the opposition always lies about Venezuela.