Somebody should create a new international award for economic incompetence -- the Lebon Prize, or Nobel spelled backward -- and give it to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Whatever you think of his politics -- and he has some redeeming points, such as having given a voice to the large masses of poverty-ridden Venezuelans who were largely ignored by a corrupt political class -- Chavez can claim the dubious achievement of having increaseed Venezuela's poverty despite the country's biggest oil boom in recent decades.
In March, Venezuela's official National Institute of Statistics (INE) had reported that poverty rose by 10 percent during Chavez' first five years in office. Several international institutions have reported equally negative figures.
The INE said that poverty in Venezuela rose from 43 percent to 53percent between 1999 and December 2004. Subsequently, Chavez lashed out against the INE, saying that it reflected the international "neoliberal" standards of measuring poverty, which he said were not suitable for a "socialist" country such as Venezuela.
But now, other international organizations -- including the United Nations and the World Bank -- are painting a similar picture of Venezuela's social involution. As strange as it sounds, they say poverty is rising in Venezuela despite the fact that world oil prices have soared from $8 a barrel when Chavez took office in 1999 to about $62 a barrel today. That's no minor detail; 80% of Venezuela's foreign income comes from its oil exports....
So why is it then that Chavez is so popular in Venezuela, you may be asking. The latest polls show that the leftist president is likely to win, hands down, upcoming legislative elections and the 2006 presidential election.
Many opposition leaders say the polls are controlled by the government, or reflect widespread intimidation, and that Chavez won the 2004 referendum thanks to fraud. But while the rules were bent to favor Chavez, there is no smoking gun yet to contradict Carter Center and Organization of American States election observer's assessment that Chavez won the actual vote.
Chavez may still be ahead in opinion polls because, with a nearly eight-fold increase in his country's oil income, he is giving out tons of money in monthly cash bonuses for the poor, and in subsidized food for the working class through the government's popular Mercal supermarkets.
Sure his fiery anti-capitalist rhetoric has caused massive capital flight, the closing of more than 7,000 private companies, hundreds of thousands of layoffs and higher poverty rates.
But it would be a mistake to conclude that growing poverty will hurt Chavez politically. On the contrary, the more the poor depend on his financial largess, the more political control he has over them. As long as our potential "Lebon Prize" winner is awash in petrodollars, poverty may even play in his favor.
-- Andres Oppenheimer, Latin America Correspondent for the
Miami Herald
Chavez: Think Oil, Not Lettuce
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Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh
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