Today
Venezuela is gripped by a crisis of extraordinary proportions, as all
that Chávez helped create is collapsing. To understand how it got to
this point – to understand Chávez’s spectacular rise and his country’s
equally spectacular breakdown – it helps to know something about where
he came from.
''By the end of the last century,
Venezuela’s old constitutional order, which for four decades had rotated
power between two ideologically indistinguishable parties, was close to
collapse. The crisis had started decades earlier, in 1983, when the
bottom fell out of the world oil market. Then, as now, Venezuela derived
most of its state revenue from the export of petroleum. By that point,
the country had become heavily urban: 16 of its 19 million people lived
in cities, a significant majority below the poverty line, with many in
extreme poverty. Most of these urban poor resided in shanty towns
sprawling up along the mountain walls that encircle Caracas, where the
better-off live. In 1989, the government tried to solve the crisis of
cheap oil with IMF-brokered austerity, which drove the poor down into
the city, where they rioted and looted for three days. According to some
observers, the military killed more than a thousand people, though the
number is disputed and there has never been an official tally. The
Caracazo, as the uprising became known, marked the beginning of
increasingly focused opposition throughout most of Latin America to
post-1970s economic orthodoxy, which held that high interest rates,
balanced budgets, low tariffs, privatised industries, weakened labour
laws and reduced social spending were the keys to development. Brazil,
Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile and El Salvador would all
eventually come to elect governments trying to find a way out of the
neoliberal straitjacket..''
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