Tribute to Hugo Chavez

Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez

It is often said that some leaders are made while others are born. For Hugo Chavez, the departed President of Venezuela, it can be said that he was made as he rose as a military academy student to become the President of the oil-rich country.

Born on July 28, 1954, in Sabaneta, Venezuela, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was the son of schoolteachers. Before becoming known for his reform efforts and strong opinions as president of Venezuela (1999-2013), he attended the Daniel O’Leary High School in the city of Barinas before going to the Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences in the capital, Caracas where, he later said, he found his true vocation.

In 1992, Chávez, along with other disenchanted members of the military, attempted to overthrow the government of Carlos Andres Perez. The coup failed, and Chávez subsequently spent two years in prison before being pardoned having larnt his lesson. He then started the Movement of the Fifth Republic, a revolutionary political party. Chávez ran for president in 1998, campaigning against government corruption and promising economic reforms.

As president, Chávez encountered challenges both at home and abroad. His efforts to tighten his hold on the state-run oil company in 2002 stirred up controversy and led to numerous protests, and he found himself removed from power briefly in April 2002 by military leaders. The protests continued after his return to power, leading to a referendum on whether Chávez should remain president. The referendum vote was held in August 2004, and a majority of voters decided to let Chávez complete his term in office.

Since his election in 1998, the administration of Chávez proposed and enacted democratic socialist economic policies. Domestic policies included redistribution of wealth, land reform, and democratisation of economic activity via workplace self-management and creation of worker-owned cooperatives.  Internationally, the Chávez administration attempted to increase its autonomy from the United States and European governments by increasing control over domestic oil production and promoting economic and political integration with other Latin American nations.

Venezuela is a major producer of oil, which remains the keystone of its economy. Venezuela’s crude oil production was 2.949 million barrels a day when Chávez took office in 1999 and in 2007 it rose to 3.12 million barrels a day, while oil prices increased 660 per cent from 1998 to 2008, leading to a significant increase in earnings. The state income from oil revenues “increased from 51 per cent of total income in 2000 to 56 per cent 2006″; however, oil exports “have grown from 77 per cent in 1997 to 89 per cent in 2006″.

 Though some economists view “this dependence on oil as one of the chief problems that faced the Chávez government”, the people benefited a lot from his government and they have a lot to show for their oil money unlike Nigeria.

For instance, according to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then, data from the World Bank noted that under Chavez’s brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its “extreme poverty” rate fell from 23.4 per cent in 1999 to 8.5 per cent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America. Additionally, as Mark Weisbrot points out, “College enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.”

In June 2010,  Weisbrot wrote that jobs were much less scarce then than when Chávez took office, with unemployment at eight per cent in 2009 compared with 15 per cent in 1999. He also stated that the number of front-line doctors had increased tenfold in the public sector and that enrolment in higher education had doubled, noting that these statistics were backed up by the UN and the World Bank.