In a story headlined “Little Reaction In Oil Market To Chavez Death”, Pamela Sampson, a business reporter for the Associated Press, offers her take on the legacy of the Venezuelan president:
Chavez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.
Fair’s Jim Naureck, who pointed out the bizarre angle, has this to say:
That’s right: Chavez squandered his nation’s oil money on healthcare, education and nutrition when he could have been building the world’s tallest building or his own branch of the Louvre. What kind of monster has priorities like that?
Going through the coverage of Chavez’s death, one of the starkest things to my eyes is how few people have been prepared to admit that they didn’t like him simply because he was a Marxist. Even the right-wing press chooses to attack him on whether his massive social programs, up to and including nationalisation of the country’s oil stock, worked, and on the extent of his commitment to liberal democracy. It seems likely that in earlier years they would have just taken it for granted that he was on the far left and therefore bad.
Of course, at times, those attacks fall flat. Regardless of the efficacy of Chavez’s social programs—and it remains to be seen how their long-term effect compares to the increase in living standards other Latin American countries saw from simple growth alone—they were probably better for the Venezuelan poor than building the Burj Khalifa was for poor people in the UAE.
Content from our partners
Related
