Reply #103: First hand reports of what it's like to live in Venezuela today [View All]

[Bucky]

The Venezuelan ex-pats I know are not from the oil baron set. They're young professionals, all but one of whom came from working class origins. But they got educated and were working toward bettering themselves with their careers. They're a pretty progressive bunch, but tend to paint Chavez and Bush with the same brush. When Chavez took over, like many many other middle class Venezuelans, they stomached it for a while, then got the hell out. They loathe Chavez & what he's doing to that country.

They say street crime in Caracas and Maracaibo has gotten tons worse in the last few years. The way they describe it, it's worse than any US city I've been to. I feel relatively safe walking down any street in Houston, in the day time, even in ones that my more uptight friends say they're scared of. Getting robbed in broad daylight on crowded streets, by my friends' description, is a common occurance. One very dear friend describes four different instances when she was mugged. She's a fairly demure girl in her 20s, but was so blasé about the whole experience that the last time it happened she had the presense of mind to ask her muggers to give her her national ID card and her cell phone back.

Now, on the one hand, I tend to be suspicious of most people's accounts of being mugged. Everyone knows you pick up cool points from being the victim of a street crime. But the number of people who relate these kinds of events suggests to me that Maracaibo is not the sort of town you'd want to visit. This is the sign of a corrupt society where basic human civilities are breaking down. In the past, other Venezuelan regimes have dealt with crime in a pretty brutal fashion. When the lid comes off a history like that, some chaos is inevitable. But my Venezuelan friends universally say it's getting much worse under Chavez. And the anecdotal evidence of all those young professionals running out of the country is not a good sign.

I won't say Chavez is evil, per se, but he is scaring off a lot of talented people his country would be better off retaining. He's a bit of a little Castro: long on rhetoric, strong on poserish confrontations with Uncle Sam, and very weak on allowing open, honest criticism. He can deliver improvements in health care to the poor millions in his country because that's the sort of thing a militaristic organization does well. But the housing problem is apparently getting worse, because housing is something that command economies do poorly.

He's a mixed bag. The problem is that he doesn't have to be. He's divisive, but he doesn't have to be quite as divisive as he is. He's an Elmer Gantry, basically. There certainly is some basic good behind what he's attempting, but eventually he's gonna burn himself out. In Latin American history there are two traditional ways for men like Chavez to leave office: on a plane to Paris with a suitcase full of money and a name full of shame or going down in a hail of bullets. Neither prospect sounds very good for my friends' homeland.
.