Venezuela's Loss

Hugo Chavez

Last week, on March 5th, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez died of an unspecified cancer. He had been president since 1998. Chavez was a very controversial figure in the U.S. One might even go as far as to say he was hated and feared. It was always unclear to me why Chavez had such a bad reputation here. Ever since he became president Venezuela has been slowly recovering from crippling poverty that had been present for decades. Venezuela is an oil rich country, but until Chavez became president all the profits from this industry went to the wealthy elite of the country. Furthermore, the Venezuelan government had been constantly fighting wars with obscure leftist guerilla groups as well as taking advantage of many native tribes in the country.
Chavez was an army officer as a young man, and while he was stationed at posts in trival territories he became aware of the natives' plight. He was also influenced politically by revolutionaries such as Che Guevara. In the mid-nineties Chavez attempted a coup against the corrupt govenrment. It failed and Chavez was briefly imprisoned. Despite being almost unknown to the Venezuelan public in 1998, Chavez managed to win the presidential election, defeating the dominant party's candidate. In office, Chavez pursued policies such as legislation to protect indigenous tribes and a national health care system. These don't sound like things a ruthless dictator would do, but still he was portrayed that way in the U.S. This might be because Chavez was vocally opposed to American influence, and many times publicly embarassed U.S. A more likely reason, however, is that Chavez nationalized the Venezuelan oil fields. This meant that the price of oil imported from Venezuela rose. Meanwhile, Chavez was selling oil at lower prices to the Cuban government in exchange for educated doctors and teachers. Doing this was good for his country no matter how much we hated it because it put money in the pockets of his people who had lived in poverty their whole lives. I beleive that Hugo Chavez was not some kind of demon, but that he was an admirable leader and a hero to the poor and working classes.