Ross Clark Ross Clark

Hugo Chavez is as much to blame for Venezuela’s woes as Nicolas Maduro

Hugo Chavez’s apologists are at it again. Venezuela’s little local economic difficulties are nothing to do with him, you’ll understand. It’s his successor, Nicolas Maduro who’s to blame. Chavez was a good guy, who lifted people out of poverty and made a more equal country. Jeremy Corbyn is right to hold him up as a hero.

Nowhere was this narrative spun more strongly than on yesterday’s Today programme. In an item which sounded as if it might have been edited by Corbyn central command, we were told that Hugo Chavez used his country’s oil wealth to ‘reduce inequality and improve the lives of the poorest citizens’. Chavez’s former oil minister was then interviewed, and claimed that Maduro was a ‘traitor of the Chavez legacy’. Interviewer Justin Webb did nothing to question this claim.

Nicolas Maduro is no traitor of Hugo Chavez. If anything Chavez’s chosen successor has done his mentor proud – and continued the reforms which Chavez himself would have continued had he not succumbed to cancer in 2013. The only difference is that while Chavez’s debilitating influence on the Venezuelan economy was masked by a high oil price, his successor has not been so lucky. It is fortunate for Chavez’s legacy that he died just in time before global oil prices collapsed and exposed an economy in which business incentives had been destroyed and foreign investors repelled.

It is true that Chavez did not inherit a healthy economy. In 1970, Venezuela was one of the 20 richest countries in the world with a GDP per head higher than that of Spain. Falling oil prices in the 1980s put paid to that, and while economic liberalisation by then President Carlos Andres Perez in 1989 led to a short upswing, Venezuela continued to suffer high inflation and poor growth throughout the 1990s.

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