In assessing Chavez’s “legacy,” the global bourgeois media cite the “divisions” that plague Venezuelan society and, in the words of Business Week, an economy in “shambles.” But, Chavez and his comrades would have been abject failures – and been tossed from office – had they not drawn lines between the oppressed majority and the privileged exploiters. Division is good and necessary. Consequently, the economy has succeeded in reducing the proportion of households in poverty from 44 percent in 1998 to 27 percent in 2011. Chavez has served the people.
Just before Chavez’s last electoral victory, former Brazilian president Lula da Silva, a product of the post-1998 wave of leftist triumphs at the polls, said: “A victory for Chávez is not just a victory for the people of Venezuela but also a victory for all the people of Latin America … this victory will strike another blow against imperialism.”
Last week, as Chavez was fading, the opposition leader, Henrique Capriles Radonski, traveled to New York, Miami and Washington – presumably, to get his marching orders. Washington hopes that Venezuelan socialism cannot survive without Chavez. In their state of desperate decay, the imperialists are willing to throw whole regions of the world into chaos rather than be eclipsed by new alignments of trade and international relations. Venezuelans have every reason to expect a renewed U.S. campaign of destabilization, in the wake of their leader’s passing.
Chavez tried to give Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. On election night, 2008, at a rally in Caracas, Chavez spoke this way of the president-elect:
“We are not asking him to be a revolutionary, to be a socialist – no. We just want the black man who is about to be the U.S. president to have enough stature for the times the world is living through.
“I send an overture to the black man, from us here, who are of Indigenous, black, Caribbean, South American race. I am ready to sit down and talk … I hope we can, and I hope we can enter a new stage.”
But the Black man in the White House is smelling like sulphur, just like his predecessor.
