At the time the meme spreading in Western news was of "inflation spiralling out of control" in venezuela. this snippet from the IMF could have backed that up. The fact that the 2009 prediction for year 2012 was a full 25-30% higher inflation than actually occurred should tell you something.
IMF is a politicized institution. You just don't make "mistakes" of that magnitude especially when they're out of line with the last 10 years of data.
Inflation in Venezuela spikes up during recessions (probably due to their economy being largely an oil export one), to make the prediction of ever-growing inflation, you'd have to assume oil prices weren't going to recover after 2008 (the main source of Venezuelan revenues). Nobody was predicting oil prices to constantly drop from 2009 - 2014, so it makes no sense to assume Venezuela wouldn't recover.
Also (i've been following this story since 2006) every time inflation hits around 30% in venezuela they report it worldwide (with the implication that it's going to get higher), but no news when it drops again. Which seems deceitful since it never got BELOW 35% in the previous government, and it's never gone ABOVE that under Chavez. I can only think that if the transition had gone the other way (socialist => conservative) they would be highlighting the lower inflation as selling point.
Hell inflation in 1996 was 99.9% and no western media was proclaiming doom and gloom even then, because they were loyal little fascists selling cheap oil while letting their citizens starve in ghettos.
One interesting thing is one of Chavez's election promises - adhering to OPEC quotas. Before that, the previous administration were undercutting OPEC prices and exceeding the agreed quotas, whilst having EXTREMELY low taxes on extraction. Which American oil companies liked VERY much. Chavez promised, and delivered on adhering to OPEC agreements, and increasing extraction taxes (which have paid for expanding hospitals, schools and universities).
All the dubious nations Chavez is accused of being "buddies" with (evidence being diplomatic meetings) are fellow members of OPEC. The previous leaders had the same meetings, but nothing sinister was ever reported about THAT. Funny that most of the countries on America's "hit list" are OPEC nations. I'm sure it's just a coincidence though.
This is the real thing America is butthurt over:
At the time of Chávez's election, OPEC had lost much of its influence compared to when it was first created. A combination of OPEC members, including Venezuela, regularly ignoring quotas and non-OPEC countries such as Mexico and Russia beginning to expand on their own petroleum industries resulted in record low oil prices to which hurt the Venezuelan economy. One of Hugo Chávez's main goals as president was to combat this problem by re-strengthening OPEC and getting countries to once again abide by their quotas. Chávez personally visited many of the leaders of oil producing nations around the world, and in 2000, he hosted the first summit of the heads-of-state of OPEC in 25 years (the 2nd ever).[2] Goals of this meeting, held in Caracas, included recuperating the credibility of Venezuela in OPEC, defending oil prices, consolidating relations between Venezuela and the Arab/Islamic world, and to strengthen OPEC in general.