And they aren’t Colombia, decade’s old foot bridges, or US invasion fantasies.1 They are, more to the point, the internal management of Venezuela’s infrastructure and the mismanagement of its oil wealth.
Via the LAT: Outages dim Chavez popularity:
Power outages in this sugar-growing region now last from a few minutes to four hours and are just one symptom of deteriorating conditions in an oil-rich but politically unsettled country. Others are regular cutoffs of running water, even in Caracas hospitals. So are double-digit inflation, rising crime and a sinking economy.
And the government’s failure to pay its employees — be they healthcare workers in San Cristobal in the west or professors in Caracas — has become another rallying point for unrest, with numerous groups taking their complaints to the streets this week.
Several crises have appeared to converge recently in Venezuela, highlighting the effect of declining oil revenue and what Chavez’s critics say is a failure to invest adequately in public works since he took office in 1999.
As I believe I noted in a recent post, it is worth nothing that a major condition within Venezuelan politics that made possible Chávez’s victory in the 1998 presidential elections (and the collapse by that point of the old political order, which included what had been considered a well institutionalized part system) was the fact that the population had, in large measure, lost all faith in the dominate political parties’ ability to management Venezuela’s resources. How could a country as rich in oil as Venezuelan could find itself having so much poverty? Chávez promised to fix this problem, and did engage in various redistributive policies. But, as I have also pointed on several occasions, despite his rhetoric there has been no coherent ideological program being deployed. Instead, it has been a combination of populism focused on placating key sectors in the population, ad hocery, and cronyism for the purposes of consolidating power.
Blaming the current situation on the oligarchs, the Colombians or the Yanquis will only be a sustainable strategy for so long.
To wit:
Owing partly to the decline in public services, the public’s confidence in Chavez is flagging, according to a new public opinion survey released this week by pollster Alfredo Keller. Only 35% of those polled said they would vote for Chavez-aligned candidates in September’s legislative elections, compared with 46% saying they favor opposition candidates.
The number of respondents pointing to public services as the biggest problems they face grew to 19% this month from 5% in August, Keller said.
On a more ominous note, two-thirds of 1,200 poll respondents believe that a popular uprising against Chavez is a possibility in this deeply polarized nation, Keller said.
"The public thinks the government isn’t doing its job," Keller said, adding that rampant crime is the biggest public preoccupation. Caracas police reported 40 slayings over a 36-hour period last weekend.
Beyond public services and public safety, the economy is doing quite poorly:
Venezuela’s central bank reported that the nation’s total output of goods and services declined 4.5% over the quarter ended Sept. 30 when compared with the gross domestic product of the previous three months. Unemployment in October rose to 8.1%, according to official figures, a 1.4-percentage-point bump from a year ago.
"The worsening trend is clear and contrasts with most of the region. The . . . economic decline was worse than anyone expected," Monaldi said.
Chavez responded to the economic news by saying that the measurement being used is an old capitalist method and that new forms should be used to measure economies in socialist transition. He didn’t offer any specifics, however.
Darn those capitalists statisticians!
Sphere: Related Content- And yes, as some defenders of Chávez might point out: a country has a right to prepare defend against perceived threats and the US has invaded a couple of countries within the last decade. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the US has any interest in invading Venezuela nor is there any evidence to suggest that the basing deal with Colombia isn’t exactly what it appears to be: a deal to aid in US anti-drug efforts, which are problematic enough by themselves without inventing new problems into existence. [↩]
