Farewell to Hugo Chavez

**It seems ridiculous but even I, a student in the UK, like millions around the world, was really affected and upset by the passing of Hugo Chavez last week. The advances of the Bolivarian Revolution that he led as President of Venezuela had a truly profound impact on me in my political development and from being a young activist he was always a bit of a hero of mine.**

Before Chavez’s election to office in 1998, a corrupt political establishment had been in power for 40 years. In the late 1980s following prolonged economic crisis, the government began enacting the neoliberal Washington consensus resulted in spiralling poverty, provoking an uprising in the capital city Caracas in 1989 which ended in the army conducting a bloody massacre of protesters ordered by the government.

This sent shockwaves through the country and sparked the young Colonel Chavez to attempt to overthrow the murderous government in 1992. Though he failed in this endeavour he was propelled to fame as a popular defender of the poor and was elected president six years later, sweeping away the corrupt and entrenched political order that had gone before.

His time in office was hugely successful. The statistics speak for themselves. From when Chavez took office in 1998 all measures of human development have improved dramatically. Poverty fell by 44%, infant mortality was been cut in half, over 1.5 million Venezuelans learned to read and write, eradicating illiteracy by 2005, school enrolment doubled. Not to mention the country’s economic decline that had begun in the 1970s was totally reversed and public debt was halved.

This was all achieved through his socialist policies of exerting democratic control over the economy, particularly the oil industry, and using the proceeds to make huge investments in health services, education and subsidised food markets while enacting agrarian reform and supporting workers’ cooperatives.

These policies flew in the face of what Venezuela, and indeed the rest of Latin America, had gone through for decades where governments religiously followed the diktats of the United States in imposing free-market neoliberalism on the people, more often than not through the barrel of a gun.

Chavez made sure to stand up to American power in the region, even in the face of a US supported coup in 2002, to politically unite this continent into a new power-bloc for regional democracy and development after years of military rule by right wing military dictators supported by Washington.

However most mainstream reporting on Venezuela remains of largely poor quality, following the United States’ attempt to portray him as a pariah dictator. This account totally ignores the fact that he won 4 presidential elections in a row; all of which were declared by international observes, including former US President Jimmy Carter, to be exemplary in their democratic credentials.

As for claims that there is some kind of state stranglehold over the media in Venezuela, 90% of the media remains in private hands and the big media companies support the opposition so fiercely that it is clear to see from watching the news for just 5 minutes in Venezuela that Chavez never had anything near a stranglehold over the airwaves. No “dictator” would allow that kind of vitriol to be directed against them on television.

He will be remembered as a great hero in Latin America and around the world in standing up to US hegemony and neoliberalism and as a defender of the poor and the working class. He has left a strong legacy of socialism and anti imperialism in his country which will not easily be shaken. His deputy, Acting President Nicolas Maduro, is expected to triumph at the upcoming presidential election showing that the Bolivarian Revolution will outlive its Commandante.