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Comment by aristus | Hacker News Reader

It's fun to use these situations as proof of one political belief or another, but I suggest looking deeper than "socialism" or "leftism". Chavez tapped a popular anger that was the direct result of mismanagement by the previous 30 years of government that was decidedly not leftist. The mood was so bad that Chavez was forgiven for a coup attempt and allowed to run for president. Think about that for a second. The AD-COPEI regime in power from the 60s to the 90s was so discredited that a literal traitor was elected to replace them.

Venezuela's problem is not political flavor, it's the oil curse itself. I have family there, and it is quite bad. The economy is stuck in several sorts of cleft stick: Saudi Arabia's game of chicken with the rest of OPEC, the mismanagement called out in the article, the hangover of Chavez policies (which were necessary for popular support), and of course the military-narco complex always in the wings.

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Also looks like the Chavist party is busing running around, fingers in the ears and singing la-la-la in a futile effort to deny the actual situation (no, guys, price controls didn't work in the past and they still don't work now). When your politicians try to unsee reality, you're in trouble.

That's because Venezuela is a de-facto narco state at this point. The politicians are denying reality because they make a lot of money by facilitating the global drug trade.

Venezuela is the key link in the global narcotics supply chain: heroin comes in from central Asia and is then smuggled by Mexican cartels into the US, and cocaine comes in from Colombia and Peru to be shipped overseas and ultimately land in Europe.

The Chavist politicians have an active interest in unseeing reality. Reality is that they are screwing over the population in order to stay in power at any cost so they can continue to line their pockets with drug money. That's not the narrative they want to tell, so they change it.

Also the possibility of deportation and prosecution in US (for Narco trafficking), of many leaders in top including Cabello.

Have they broken US law, from Venezuela?

Yes; typically they go after traffickers like this with RICO cases. Their organizations break US law every day, and by being part of the conspiracy to commit those crimes, they are guilty under RICO. All the government has to do is prove that laws were broken, there was a conspiracy of many people to break those laws RICO laws were designed specifically to take down large, loosely connected criminal organizations like this.

I'd love to see a link on this. Preferably one thats not from, say, Breitbart.

https://news.vice.com/article/no-one-in-venezuela-is-talking...

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Vice has a ton of stuff on the global drug problem, and Venezuela is the epicenter of trafficking right now because Caracas is the safest port in the world for traffickers. There's actually a good 30 minute video on Vice that explains the whole supply chain and its links to Boko Haram, ISIS and Islamist extremists in North Africa.

Word! Thanks for that. Forgive my skepticism.

Oh yes, they are thoroughly fucked. But so are the people in general. The "curse" of oil is that it takes relatively few people to run the industry. Perhaps 100,000. The rest of the population is surplus to requirements. In theory you only need to pay off the oil folks, plus protection, to remain in power. In practice...

No, I'm afraid it really is as simple as a madman communist dictator.

I think you also forgot to mention 'terrorist' and 'democracy-hater'. Ah, I miss the Bush jr. era rethoric...

Nope, that's just your projecting. Feel free to make up anything you'd like about me though as long as it soothes you.

Well, I'm glad that's solved. You've convinced me.

Indeed, the problem has not been "socialism" or "populism." The problem has been and continues to be complete and utter idiocy. Finally, after Chavez died, Venezuelans began to see this for themselves, and as mentioned in the article, voted massively for the opposition in the latest parliamentary elections. Unfortunately, the president remains in place and apparently maintains the power to continue the idiocy a bit longer. It is very sad to me to see, especially after the people so emphatically rejected him and his party's policies in the 2015 parliamentary elections.

"Communist" or "people's" speakers in Latin America have had an incredibly powerful voice since the US supported dictatorships of the 60s to 80s. It didn't matter what crimes they perpetrate, they could always count on the population forgiving them.

Now that those people have been in power for a while all over the place, people are waking-up to the fact that they aren't special, and there's no deep truth on their discourse.

the oil curse? come on. natural resources are neither a blessing or curse. norway is a small country with lots of oil and isn't a disaster. i don't know what the problem is but don't blame it on oil.

A curse is literally what economists call these situations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

Another name would be Dutch disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

Imagine having the ability to see and hear the thoughts of everyone around you.

You'd either be a superhero, the best politician, running a sane, stable, healthy 'democracy' where people who were upset had things fixed just the right way - or you'd be a crumbled mess, an incoherent madman.

There's no middle ground. With a singularly outsized ability like that, you simply could not function in a 'normal life.'

Perhaps huge oil revenues are like that - without a stable cultural and political setup to use the resources wisely and for the benefit of the whole community (norway) - perhaps the only other course is a totally connected political mafia that extracts the value of the primary resource for itself and its supporters.

A history of colonialism would set the country up for the second track.

It's a term of art in development economics. Norway is an interesting case because it had a developed economy before petroleum exploitation, but even so a lot of Norwegian policies depend on having a large fiscal buffer based on resource extraction. Developing states without strong social structures generally follow maladaptive development paths when exposed to lots of resource revenues, which is a tragedy in its own right.

Norway has 5 millions of people and crap load of oil money in the piggy bank.

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