The contested legacy of Hugo Chávez

What happened

Venezuelans lined the streets in an outpouring of public grief this week after President Hugo Chávez died at age 58 after a long battle with cancer. Schools closed for a week as his body lay in state at the Military Academy in Caracas, where crowds of weeping supporters gathered to sing the national anthem, hold up photos of their fallen hero, and take photos of his casket. “Everything changed for us poor with Chávez,” said retired laborer Gregorio Torres. “I’m here to give him the last adios.” In Florida’s Venezuelan expat communities, in contrast, people danced in the streets, chanting “Venezuela libre!”

The government announced that Vice President Nicolás Maduro, whom Chávez recently named his successor, would act as interim president. Maduro is expected to win elections to be held within the next 30 days, and has indicated that he will follow in Chávez’s footsteps as a socialist, anti-American firebrand. This week he expelled two U.S. diplomats, saying that “scientific proof” will show that Chávez was poisoned by “the historical enemies of our heartland.”

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What the editorials said

Chávez was easily “the most popular leader ever known” in our country, saidEl Nacional (Venezuela), but he presided over the “erosion of democracy.” He stacked the courts with his cronies, extended his term in office, and rigged elections by limiting media coverage for the opposition while he held forth on television for hours on end. So was Chávez “a fanatical dictator or the messiah of the downtrodden”? asked La Nación (Argentina). Maybe both. After failing to pull off a coup in 1992, the army colonel roared to victory in the 1998 presidential election by pledging to raise up the poor and redistribute the nation’s wealth. He used his “mammoth propaganda machine” to promote himself. At the U.N. in 2006, he even dared to call President George W. Bush “el diablo.’’ After Bush spoke, Chávez approached the lectern, crossed himself, and said the podium “still smells of sulfur.”

Yet the U.S. “avoided taking the bait,” said USA Today. Chávez tried to set himself up as the leader of the hemisphere’s anti-American leftists, exporting his far-left dogma to Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, and arming Colombian rebels. But except for some “tacit support for a failed coup that briefly deposed Chávez in 2002,” the U.S. ignored his provocations. Indeed, it continued to buy oil from him: Venezuela is the fourth-largest supplier of foreign oil to the U.S.

These petrodollars kept him in power, but they didn’t help his people, said The Wall Street Journal. After 14 years of chavismo, violent crime is rampant. Food and medicine shortages are now routine, prices are more than 20 times higher than in 1999, and production at the state oil company has fallen by a staggering 1 million barrels a day. The lesson for Venezuelans is clear: “Beware charismatic demagogues peddling socialist policies.”

What the columnists said

Don’t be so quick to call Chávez’s economic policies a failure, said David Sirota in Salon.com. In his first decade in office, “both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved,” while the number of Venezuelans in extreme poverty fell from nearly 25 percent to less than 10 percent. Millions of people got health care. And yes, huge industries were nationalized. The Chávez brand of economics has been vilified not because it failed, but because it “looks like a threat to corporate capitalism.”

The Latin American Left will certainly feel his absence, said Juan Forero in The Washington Post. Chávez provided cheap oil to prospective allies to “build an alliance to counter U.S. influence.” He propped up Cuba and bought up Argentine bonds. Yet by the end of his rule, the Organization of American States’ human-rights body had condemned him for his incessant assaults on free expression and democracy.

And that will be his legacy, said Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual (Venezuela). Chávez has left us with a culture common to “totalitarian police states”—one awash in “suspicion and fear.” Already, his presumed successor, Maduro, has announced that the government is tracking the leader of the opposition, Henrique Capriles. What does the future hold? I have “an icy feeling down the spine.”