Let me be clear--I think he "pandered to the poor" in that he gave them shit that didn't last, here's a chicken, here's some arepa flour, e.g., he slapped up housing (that was better than what they had but was still crap and poorly constructed), and cheap cellphones, but he didn't do much to lift them up in a permanent fashion. He kept them as serfs, making life a bit easier but not transformative. He did a lot of flashy infrastructure improvements, but he didn't dig down to the baseline and find a way to make the country self sufficient beyond the "one thing" (OIL) that fueled their success in more ways than one.
He never developed a decent agricultural base--which should be exploited there--or a tourism base, owing to the fact that VZ has one of the world's highest crime rates and he was unable or unwilling to do anything about that. And then, of course, there's the drug trafficking, which was all over the government from government officials to military/police leaders.
He was sick as a dog, sicker than he admitted, and he suffered from the same dumbassery as Castro (only Castro survived the butchery). Rather than wear "The Bag" he had them cut that 'beisbol' of cancer out of his gut but not do the slashing and radiating to rid himself of it fully, and it grew back again and went to his lymph nodes and killed him. I think up until he got real sick, he thought he'd pull out and find a way to make some money. Then he went into steep decline and NO ONE was minding the store for the longest time. There was no pivoting, no adjusting, no diversification attempts, no nothing, and then when Maduro got in there and grabbed the reins, his bright idea was to sell oil futures to China for pennies on the dollar while stiffing the people who owned the equipment, which then broke down due to lack of maintenance, making it difficult to extract even discount black gold for sale. All the while, Maduro's friends, family and cronies are ripping off the treasury at a rapid rate.
It's just a hot mess up in there. No money, no one will extend them credit, no medicines, no foodstuffs, no toilet paper--it's just a failed state and as a consequence it is HEMORRHAGING the middle class, who are finding even desperate Puerto Rico a better option than staying in VZ.
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