"What are his grievances? Why are the people of Venezuela so open to his viewpoints?"
Easy enough to figure out, you already have most of the pieces. For the rest, go to the Wikipedia and look him up.
en.wikipedia.org
I used to have a couple of papers by Stratfor from 2002. I will try to find them.
Part of it is historical, the US has rarely behaved decently in Central and South America. But there is some more recent stuff. Venezuela, like so many third world countries, had gotten themselves into a bad economic situation and turned to the IMF for help. The IMF, per usual, imposed strict austerity measures. Note, the IMF is usually right with their measures. But they aren't going to be popular. Chavez's predecessor, Perez, fully supported the measures, or at least didn't openly oppose them. Plus, he was encouraging ties between the US and Venezuela, I am sure the Venezuelans saw it as sucking up. So the US got closely identified with the ruling regime. including the corruption, nepotism, exploitation of the poor and all of the things that are so common in that part of the world. Any way, Chavez led a coup attempt, failed, got arrested and then later pardoned. He then started a party and was elected in 1998. He then made a lot of sweeping changes, including changing the way their government operates. This didn't sit well with the previous power structure, and possibly even rightly so(frankly I never was interested to dig up all the details). Suffice it to say that in 2002 there was a coup attempt against Chavez, the trigger being his talk about nationalizing the oil industry. Looking at the Wikipedia, Chavez actually had negotiated stepping down, but the agreement was violated. So he wound up in jail. In a fit of stupidity, the Bush administration fell all over themselves to hail the toppling of Chavez and welcome the new leaders. However, like often happens when a coup is attempted by a popular leader, the lower ranks in the military mounted a counter-coup and Chavez was back in. It was strongly rumored that it was the wealthy and the techno-elite that were responsible for the coup and the US backed them in their coup attempt, financially and otherwise. True or false, it certainly could look that way. And Chavez encouraged that interpretation.
I personally don't know enough about Venezuela to have much of an opinion about exactly what happened and is going on. I do know that we did exactly the wrong thing in supporting the coup. It gave credibility to the rumors because we have, in fact, done things like that in Central and South America. So even if we were completely innocent, it is a reasonable suspicion that we weren't. So now Chavez is stronger than ever and has had his image burnished in the eyes of the average Venezuelan.
At this point in time it doesn't matter if Chavez is a raving lunatic or the most selfless member of his generation. He is a leader of an oil rich country with a population that doesn't like us and we have given them plenty of reasons to have that attitude. |
