Joe For Oil

You keep stating declining poverty. But you can say that about most places in the world since 1999.

He has made the country as a whole worse off. Venezuala's GDP since 1999 has significantly lagged behind the rest of Latin America. People living below the poverty line (As the UN measures it) has declined during that time for Venezuala, but no more than it has for Latin America as a whole, and less than it did it for the capitalistic countries in Latin America, such as Peru and Brazil, which have seen their poverty rates decline to a much greater degree, and have seen their economies take off compared to Venezuala's.

He has destroyed his country's economy, really. Before Chavez, Venezuela had an export industry that included all kinds of non-oil products. Today, oil represents 96 percent of its exports. Business has fled his country, if they could before everything they had was expropriated by his thugs and stolen out from under them. He drove away virtually all domestic and foreign investment -- at a time when that investment money has been flowing into Latin America at record levels. Brazil, for example, has been drawing tens of billions of dollars of investment every year, which has been dramatically remaking the country. Venezuela, on the other hand, has bled companies, which had to flee to Panama and Columbia. On top of it, its currency is a mess. Inflation has been through the roof. Prices have gone up on average 23 percent a year (that isn't a typo) since Chavez took over, compared to less than 5 percent for Latin America as a whole. At the same time, he enforces strict price controls, so the economy is a mishmash of black markets and shortages. Related to that is the fact that the new currency introduced in 2008 has lost 2/3 of its value. It reduces the value of whatever wages people earn and increases the cost of imports -- the inflation we have been seeing and will continue to see because he has created a mess that can't be quickly fixed by someone else. Poverty rates have declined, but more people across the board are living subsidence lives and it will get worse because of the currency problem -- which is how Jon Lee Anderson ends up writing a story like that.

And then there is the violence. You posted that a crazy murder rate in Venezuela is vexing somehow. Who exactly is vexed, and why? Everything I just typed has created a crime-ridden society, in which people are economically struggling. They can't use the country's own currency for anything, because its not worth the paper it is printed on and price controls make every transaction (when there aren't shortages) into a black market mine field that is controlled by some corrupt thug operating only with the approval of Chavez. That is why the murder rate is so high.