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.
1. President Perez was a mass-murderer, and Chavez's coup against him actually is what made him popular in the first place. The army coup leaders in 1992 were opposed to the current government because that government was ordering troops to fire on peaceful demonstrators. A little context is always nice
:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CaracazoThe lack of context given about this basic fact pretty much discredits the writer, as a whole.
I knew that the Cuban doctors in the slums were unprepared and unequipped
Bullshit, Cuban doctors are some of the best-trained in Latin America, if not the best outside advanced-nations. They brought the infant-mortality rate way down. Very nit-picking tone, and sounds like playing on xeno-phobia. The cuban doctors program multiplied the total number of medical professionals in Venezuela by about 12 times, according to Mark Weisbrot of the CEPR.
Also, the "in the slums" line suggests the writer is biased against the poor people who make up a large segment of the Venezuelan citizenry. Those people got exactly ZERO health-care coverage before 1999.
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,
factually incorrect, they had a referendum on constitutional change, which passed. then an election of delegates to a constitutional convention, who drafted the new constitution, THEN another referendum at which the public voted on the new constitution.
Plus, the new 1999 constitution actually wrote that further constitutiuonal changes require a referendum. Previous to this, the constitution could be changed by a decree of congress without a public vote.
You won't find ANY reference to a referendum before Chavez came into office, because they were 100% initiated by Chavez. Also, the 1999 constitution is what created "recall elections" for the president and other officials. e.g. look up the recall election in 2006 which tried to oust Chavez. That wouldn't have been possible AT ALL before the 1999 constitution.
So, the constitutional changes actually limited the powers of the government and gave more say to the people in how future laws are formed.
http://venezuelanalysis.com/indicators/2009Among the highlights:
The current economic expansion began when the government got control over the national oil company in the first quarter of 2003. Since then, real (inflationadjusted) GDP has nearly doubled, growing by 94.7 percent in 5.25 years, or 13.5 percent annually.
Most of this growth has been in the nonoil sector of the economy, and the private sector has grown faster than the public sector.
During the current economic expansion, the poverty rate has been cut by more than half, from 54 percent of households in the first half of 2003 to 26 percent at the end of 2008. Extreme poverty has fallen even more, by 72 percent. These poverty rates measure only cash income, and does take into account increased access to health care or education.
Over the entire decade, the percentage of households in poverty has been reduced by 39 percent, and extreme poverty by more than half.
Inequality, as measured by the Gini index, has also fallen substantially. The index has fallen to 41 in 2008, from 48.1 in 2003 and 47 in 1999. This represents a large reduction in inequality.
Real (inflationadjusted) social spending per person more than tripled from 1998-2006.
From 1998-2006, infant mortality has fallen by more than onethird. The number of primary care physicians in the public sector increased 12fold from 1999-2007, providing health care to millions of Venezuelans who previously did not have access.
There have been substantial gains in education, especially higher education, where gross enrollment rates more than doubled from 1999/2000 to 2007/2008.
The labor market also improved substantially over the last decade, with unemployment dropping from 11.3 percent to 7.8 percent. During the current expansion it has fallen by more than half. Other labor market indicators also show substantial gains.
Over the past decade, the number of social security beneficiaries has more than doubled.
Over the decade, the government's total public debt has fallen from 30.7 to 14.3 percent of GDP. The foreign public debt has fallen even more, from 25.6 to 9.8 percent of GDP.
Inflation is about where it was 10 years ago, ending the year at 31.4 percent. However it has been falling over the last half year (as measured by threemonth averages) and is likely to continue declining this year in the face of strong deflationary pressures worldwide.
Your hypocrisy on democracy. Your favorite insult for the opposition parties in Venezuela was "coupists",
Well, you will get that insult when you
actually lead a coup, then the same names are the leaders in the opposition parties after the coup as the guys who signed the coup-declaration...
And yet you decided to throw it away on corruption and buying elections and weapons.
^ This is where you really know the guy is full of shit. Arms spending actually fell as a percentage of GDP since Chavez came to power.
If you had used these resources well, 10.7% of Venezuelans would not be in extreme poverty.
Hmmm. what about the 25+% lving in extreme poverty BEFORE Chavez came to power?
you denied access to foreign currency for newspapers to buy printing paper (regular citizens can't access foreign currency unless you authorize it),
This is complete bullshit. You can buy as much foreign money as you like on the unregulated market. But the exchange-rate is
subsidized if you go to the government-run market, e.g. you get better than market rate worth of US Dollars for your Venezuelan money.
Like about 5-times higher Because of this, people were scamming the system by exchanging all the bolivars to dollars, selling the dollars on the black market then buying more dollars. So they put a "per person" quota on how much you can exchange per year like this. So the exchange rate is subsidized, but there's a quota per person (the system would break without the quota due to scamming).
Go look up the articles, people bitching about the subsidized rates existing, then bitching that they can't get more of the subsidized dollars.
You shut down more than 30 radio and television stations
Well, a little context again:
The head of Venezuela's Conatel telecommunications agency, Diosdado Cabello, said the radio broadcasters were among a group of 240 stations that recently failed to update their registrations, let their concessions expire or possessed licenses that had been granted to an individual who is now deceased.
Plus, the only TV channel named in the news reports is RCTV who openly coordinated the 2002 coup (in which opposition supporters were quite clearly shot and killed by
their own side to justify the coup - the coup generals
pre-recorded their outrage to the shootings several hours before it occured). It's discussed on this video from SBS News Australia, 5 minutes in (watch at least 1 minute):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Uqx_mkhPs
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Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread (Read 1293991 times)