RIP Hugo Chavez

[ashkan]

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The funny thing is, while some people here argue that Chavez didnt help curb poverty, even the western media outlets such as CNN are not denying the fact that he did. They criticize him for almost everything else and have nothing good to say about his government (of course theyre western outlets) but EVEN THEY dont deny the fact that he reduced poverty in a major way!

 

[BuckWild]

The funny thing is, while some people here argue that Chavez didnt help curb poverty, even the western media outlets such as CNN are not denying the fact that he did. They criticize him for almost everything else and have nothing good to say about his government (of course theyre western outlets) but EVEN THEY dont deny the fact that he reduced poverty in a major way!

Give it 10-15 years once the US puts in their guy to run the place. They will make Chavez a saint and wish he did not die.
I am not saying Chavez was a saint but the guy seem to have done more good than bad and you have to judge a person in totality most of the times.

 

[FiReSTaRT]

I think this guy is waiting for you to ask him how much he makes a year!

For starters, the poverty rate reduction was verified by the UN and they wouldn't be pulling those numbers out of their rectum, especially since Venezuela's on the "free" world's ****-list. As for that guy, he's making a lot more now that he has less competition. By the way, I have been robbed at gun point and twice at knife point in Toronto. While there are definitely fewer people living below the poverty line in Venezuela, I never claimed that Chavez completely eliminated it. He just reduced it from a BRUTAL level to a bad level, for which I still think he did a DAMN good job considering what he started with.

 

[ZX600]

For starters, the poverty rate reduction was verified by the UN and they wouldn't be pulling those numbers out of their rectum, especially since Venezuela's on the "free" world's ****-list. As for that guy, he's making a lot more now that he has less competition. By the way, I have been robbed at gun point and twice at knife point in Toronto. While there are definitely fewer people living below the poverty line in Venezuela, I never claimed that Chavez completely eliminated it. He just reduced it from a BRUTAL level to a bad level, for which I still think he did a DAMN good job considering what he started with.

Ok so how did the UN verified the poverty rate (line)?

How can you have an accurate number? how did they "compared prices or minimum necessities with families' resources to determine whether or not they are poor" if said family is not on the map, does not exist?

For sake of argument, let's say that they do exist, they went and got themselves an identification card (cedula), how was their combined family income verified? The only way this is done in Venezuela is through the census (can't think like a Canadian here, the processes and chques and balances do not exist there)

I am not arguing that he didn't do good things for the very poor - As someone mentioned he brought water and electricity to many places that didn't have it for example, but the country is so much worse .. SO MUCH WORSE than before

 

[FiReSTaRT]

I didn't read into the methodology of the UN study so I couldn't tell you exactly how they've done it but in general, they are a credible independent source. By bringing water, electricity, education and roads to areas that didn't have them, he benefited the country immensely. Water/electricity/roads mean that the logistics of setting up a business are a lot easier in many places and that can only benefit the economy. By improving the level of health care and education, he is creating a more productive workforce. You have to look beyond the quarterly statements.

When a clear majority of your population lives below the poverty line, your country's ****. He did what was necessary to take care of that and I wish he had the time to continue.

 

[ZX600]

I didn't read into the methodology of the UN study so I couldn't tell you exactly how they've done it but in general, they are a credible independent source. By bringing water, electricity, education and roads to areas that didn't have them, he benefited the country immensely. Water/electricity/roads mean that the logistics of setting up a business are a lot easier in many places and that can only benefit the economy. By improving the level of health care and education, he is creating a more productive workforce. You have to look beyond the quarterly statements.

When a clear majority of your population lives below the poverty line, your country's ****. He did what was necessary to take care of that and I wish he had the time to continue.

He had 14 years

I am out! this time for real

 

[BuckWild]

He had 14 years

I am out! this time for real

Please tell us who one of the best leaders were from 1900 to present for Venezuela.
Please tell us who you would like to see as the next leader.

 

[BLUE_KAWI]

[h=1]Viva Hugo Chavez: respect his ideals not Western Oil Pigs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mJCkHM7L9A[/h]

 

[FiReSTaRT]

He had 14 years

I am out! this time for real

The other guys had close to 150 years to take it where it was before Hugo took over and it sure wasn't getting any better under their management.

 

[gwelfmike]

Besides ZX600, has anybody been in Venezuela in the last few years?

I have been there twice in the last two years, and my wife is trying to get out of there.

With daily blackouts because the infastructure is in such poor shape because no money was put into it. When you cannot go out at night because the crime rate is so high it is just too risky.

Would you put up with your government leader broadcasting his propaganda everyweek, and every televison network has to air it or risk loosing the licence.

What would happen if lets say our Prime Minister headed off to another country for medical treatment?

When my wife first visited me here, she could not understand a few things, like, why I actually spoke to the police. There is little if any military presence. Why I did not have iron bars over my windows.

She worked as a director at a major company that was "Nationalized", the following day, the President, VP, and a bunch of other excutives were shown the door, by the military, and replaced by a bunch of incompetent, yet loyal supports of Chavez. Within a year the company went from three lines of production to one, with constant breakdowns, shortages and sabotage.

Is one system better than the other, theortically yes. But we do not live in a theortical world.

 

[regder]

I don't know enough about Chavez and Venezuela to form an opinion. I spoke to a few people that have lived there, or have family living there and they all say about the same as what's been posted above by the people that are intimately familiar with the country, mostly negative.

Seems the majority of people outside of Venezuela like him strictly because of his anti-US/Western Gov. position. Enemy of my enemy is my friend I guess...

 

[ZX600]

CNN PRODUCER NOTE Pancho49 says he started writing this essay in December when there were rumors that Hugo Chavez had died and posted it in the comments on his obituary when news of the Venezuelan president's death broke. He says he's been very active in the discussions about Venezuela and says he was "always shocked at how most people either defend Chavez 100% or they attack him 100%, without seeing the good and bad things he has done and thinking for themselves." This is a personal opinion and not all claims have been confirmed by CNN.

UPDATE: As this iReport got so much attention, we took a closer look at the sources and statistics he’s citing in his argument and offered a fact check.
- davidw, CNN iReport producer


Rest in peace, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. As a Venezuelan, I didn't agree with most of your policies and politics, but I do not rejoice in your death and I do respect the pain of your family and supporters.
In 1998, when you campaigned for the presidency -and promised to end corruption- despite my disappointment with the traditional parties, I did not support you because you had led a coup against president Carlos Andres Pérez. I didn't like Pérez, but he was elected by our people and attempting to overthrow him was proof that you did not respect the will of Venezuelans.

I didn't oppose 100% of what you did. I was grateful, for example, that you placed the issue of poverty on the table and you put the spotlight on millions of Venezuelans that until then had been excluded. I knew that the Cuban doctors in the slums were unprepared and unequipped, but I understood that they meant the world to the mother that knocks on their door at 3am. I was also happy of the way most Venezuelans started to care about politics again (some because they supported you; others because they opposed you). The anti-politic feeling we saw in the 90's was precisely what got you elected. And I also kept in mind that a majority of Venezuelans did support you, so you certainly had a right to be in office.

These are my 10 reasons why I will not miss you:
1. Your authoritarian manner (which reflected a flaw probably most Venezuelans have), and your inability to engage in an honest dialogue with anyone that opposed you. Even from your death bed, you had a Supreme Court justice fired because she didn't agree with your politics.

2. Your disrespect for the rule of law and your contribution to a climate of impunity in Venezuela. In 1999, you re-wrote the Constitution to fit your needs, and yet you violated it almost on a daily basis. With this example, it is no surprise that crime exploded in Venezuela. In 14 years, our homicide rate more than tripled from 22/100K to 74/100K. While judges were busy trying to prove their political allegiance to you, only 11% of homicides led to a conviction.

3. Your empty promises and the way you manipulated many Venezuelans to think you were really working for them. In 14 years you built less public housing than any president before you did in their 5 year periods. Hospitals today have no resources, and if you go there in an emergency you must bring with you everything from medicines to surgical gloves and masks. The truth is that you were better at blowing your own trumpet than at getting things done.

4. The astounding level of corruption of your government. There was corruption before you got elected, but normally a government's scandals weren't made public until they handed power to the opposing party. Now we've heard about millions and millions of dollars vanishing in front of everybody's eyes, and your only reaction was to attack the media that revealed the corruption. The only politicians accused of corruption have been from parties that oppose you, and mostly on trumped up charges. For example, Leopoldo Lopez was never condemned by the courts but you still prevented him for running for office. His crime? Using money from the wrong budget allocation to pay for the salaries of teachers and firemen -because your government withheld the appropriate funds.

5. The opportunities you missed. When you took office, the price of oil was $9.30, and in 2008 it reached $126.33. There was so much good you could have done with that money! And yet you decided to throw it away on corruption and buying elections and weapons. If you had used these resources well, 10.7% of Venezuelans would not be in extreme poverty.

6. Your attacks on private property and entrepreneurship. You nationalized hundreds of private companies, and pushed hundreds more towards bankruptcy. Not because you were a communist or a socialist, but simply because you wanted no one left with any power to oppose you. If everyone was a public employee, you could force them to attend your political rallies, and the opposition would not get any funding.

7. Your hypocrisy on freedom and human rights. You shut down more than 30 radio and television stations for being critical of your government, you denied access to foreign currency for newspapers to buy printing paper (regular citizens can't access foreign currency unless you authorize it), you imprisoned people without trial for years, you imprisoned people for crimes of opinion, you fired tens of thousands of public employees for signing a petition for a recall referendum and you denied them access to public services and even ID cards and passports.

8. Your hypocrisy on the issue of Venezuela's sovereignty. You kicked out the Americans but then you pulled down your pants for the Cubans, Russians, Chinese and Iranians. We have Cuban officers giving orders in the Venezuelan army. Chinese oil companies work with a higher margin of profit than any Western companies did. And you made it clear that your alliances would be with governments that massacre their own people.

9. Your hypocrisy on the issue of violence. You said this was a peaceful revolution but you allowed illegal armed groups like Tupamaros, La Piedrita and FBLN to operate. You gave them weapons. You had the Russians set up a Kalashnikov plant in Venezuela. You were critical of American wars but yet you gave weapons to the Colombian guerrilla, whose only agenda is murder and drug-dealing.

10. Your hypocrisy on democracy. Your favorite insult for the opposition parties in Venezuela was "coupists", but you forgot you organized a coup in 1992, and the military that was loyal to you suggested they would support a coup in your favor if the opposition ever won the presidential elections. There was no democracy in your political party: you chose each of the candidates for the National Assembly and for city and state governments. When the opposition won the referendum that would have allowed you to change the Constitution in 2007, you disavowed the results and you figured out a way to change the articles and allow yourself to be reelected as many times as you wanted. You manipulated the elections in 2010 to make sure the opposition didn't get more than a third of seats in Parliament even though they got 51% of the popular vote. Your democracy was made of paper, you made sure there were no meaningful checks and balances and all institutions were your puppets.

So no, Hugo I will not miss you. Rest in peace now, while we try to rebuild the mess of a country that you left us.

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-937093

 

[adv_round]

You realize iReport is like us here, in Romper room, talking whatever we want... just hosted by CNN. You shouldn't take any of it too seriously.

Regarding general sentiment of expats: You would never hear pro-Castro talk in Miami, nothing unusual about that... It's no proof all Cubans share their opinion...

 

[ZX600]

You realize iReport is like us here, in Romper room, talking whatever we want... just hosted by CNN. You shouldn't take any of it too seriously.

Regarding general sentiment of expats: You would never hear pro-Castro talk in Miami, nothing unusual about that... It's no proof all Cubans share their opinion...

It was fact checked by CNN - I will give CNN more credit than us here at the romper room

It isn't the opinion of an expat, all 10 are FACTS - Doesn't matter who wrote them, who Ireported them or even who posted them here on the GTAM romper room, facts are facts

 

[awyala]

Damn it, you making me go back on my word, but this is a good comment

Let me ask you how are people able to calculate the poverty rate if we don't even know how many people are currently living in Venezuela, Why?

Because most "Barrios" poor neighborhoods are currently so dangerous that the census people won't even go there, yes the census is a manual process where someone walks to your house and asks you various questions, there is no fancy email or mail system there like we have here.

Would you go in here to ask people questions? lol good luck coming back

The census in Venezuela like in most countries is controlled by the government and so are the results

"
THE CURRENT POVERTY MEASURE The current poverty measure has a set of lines, or thresholds, that are compared with families' resources to determine whether or not they are poor. The thresholds differ by the number of adults and children in a family and, for some family types, by the age of the family head. The resources are families' annual before-tax money income.
Source : http://www.nap.edu/html/poverty/summary.html

I think this guy is waiting for you to ask him how much he makes a year!

Wow Google Streets get in every nook and cranny!

 

[FiReSTaRT]

With daily blackouts because the infastructure is in such poor shape because no money was put into it. When you cannot go out at night because the crime rate is so high it is just too risky.

Try to fix Toronto's roads in 15 years He inherited a ******** and has done a lot more to improve it than the guys before him. Do you realize that the poverty rate was 55% when he came into power? Who lets the country get to that point? I never claimed that he created a utopian society, only that he made great strides in fixing a lot of what's wrong.

What would happen if lets say our Prime Minister headed off to another country for medical treatment?

The guys before him didn't exactly leave an abundance of highly trained medical specialists, while Cuban medical training is among the best in the world. Nothing wrong with giving your head of government the best medical treatment you can. A good doctor takes more than 15 years to train.

She worked as a director at a major company that was "Nationalized", the following day, the President, VP, and a bunch of other excutives were shown the door, by the military, and replaced by a bunch of incompetent, yet loyal supports of Chavez. Within a year the company went from three lines of production to one, with constant breakdowns, shortages and sabotage.

Well, that explains it.

Is one system better than the other, theortically yes. But we do not live in a theortical world.

Bottom line - over here we will mostly hear the voices of Venezuelan expats and many of them come from the elites and middle classes that lost out in the transition and got partially replaced. Very few people who move to Canada are happy with their old country. The situation in Venezuela is still bad, but considering what Chavez started with, he's a miracle worker.

 

[mmmnaked]

He was elected democratically 3 times, and each successive election saw his popularity rise. 63% the third time around... name a US or Canadian leader who managed to get that kind of approval? Nixon and Roosevelt didn't even reach that kind of popularity.

And when the rich pooled their resources and ousted him to install a puppet of their own, Chavez worked his way back into power.

What we (the west) think is meaningless. The man was elected democratically and his country is no doubt in better shape now than it was 15 years ago. But we only want democracy if the guy we like gets elected.

 

[Kool]

He was elected democratically 3 times, and each successive election saw his popularity rise. 63% the third time around... name a US or Canadian leader who managed to get that kind of approval? Nixon and Roosevelt didn't even reach that kind of popularity.

And when the rich pooled their resources and ousted him to install a puppet of their own, Chavez worked his way back into power.

What we (the west) think is meaningless. The man was elected democratically and his country is no doubt in better shape now than it was 15 years ago. But we only want democracy if the guy we like gets elected.

all my posts are serious; internet is serious business

Your joking of course....lmao....democratically elected....good one...lol.

 

[mmmnaked]

Excellent argument, you're a scholar.

Clearly western governments have it much better... US, Canada, various European countries... beacons of true democracy in all its glorious awesomeness. Picking guy A or guy B by a 51% vote is what its all about. Our elections are the real deal, Venezuela was all rigged. For 15 years. 3 times. Even after el Presidente was ousted by the rich elite and then clawed back into power with support of the people.

 

[Kool]

Hell no...I don't wanna debate with you if you think he was just a misunderstood dictator.

all my posts are serious; internet is serious business

But I would read what ZX600 has stated...he kinda has some insight.

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