International Venezuela, The Socialist Dystopia, v2: The region's worst humanitarian crisis in decades

Yes really, lets not pretend the whole situation in Venezula since Chavez hasn't been your typical case of the US trying to squash any kind of popularist shift to the left in latin America, its common knowledge it was behind the coup attempt on him. Much of the situation the country is in now ultimately comes down to over a decade or US economic warfare and indeed the mismanagement pre Chavez whoring the country to US interests.

That said of course Maduro really doesn't look up to the job of leading the country the way Chavez was and has allowed himself to be drawn into the US funded violence trying to cover this.

Chavez was lucky he died as he would be facing the same problems.

Blame US all you want but Venezuela had plenty of OIL and no economic sanctions prior to oil price crash and yet they were running down production due to deterioration. In 2007 US was Venezuela biggest trading partner. Whole South America likes to blame US but the truth is that all the countries choose to run towards false promises of socialism and ended far worse than more conservative countries like Chile.

This is Chavez legacy, from his election and on OIL production plummeted and US only applied economic sanctions in 2014 (not sure on this please verify)

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The corruption and bad decisions of Chavez, Cristina, Lula ruined Venezuela, Argentina and Brasil.
 
Chavez was lucky he died as he would be facing the same problems.

Blame US all you want but Venezuela had plenty of OIL and no economic sanctions prior to oil price crash and yet they were running down production due to deterioration. In 2007 US was Venezuela biggest trading partner. Whole South America likes to blame US but the truth is that all the countries choose to run towards false promises of socialism and ended far worse than more conservative countries like Chile.

This is Chavez legacy, from his election and on OIL production plummeted and US only applied economic sanctions in 2014 (not sure on this please verify)

AE3449.jpg


The corruption and bad decisions of Chavez, Cristina, Lula ruined Venezuela, Argentina and Brasil.

Again though Chavez himself inherited a corrupt basketcase economy far too dependant on oil and of course the crash in oil prices was pretty clearly a US tactic though their Saudi allies(who are operating at vast loses overproducing) aimed at them, the Russians and Iranians. US food companies operating in Venezuela have also been accursed of deliberate sabotage of production to help make shortages worse.

The reality is that Chavez did actually make a deeply unequal society in Venezula somewhat better but was no miracle cure for the countries weaknesses and vulnerable to the US aggression that followed. Much of the western world is still drunk on its cold war fantasy though that the media(including many of those that claim to be on the left) is still happly serving up.
 
So basically, it'll have to get to the point where's not enough left to pay off the military leaders for anything to happen.

The money is already worthless there anyway, what is Maduro paying the military with? Chickens?

Venezuela produces oil so they do have hard currency coming in. But it all goes to pay for three things: the interest on the loans that are keeping the regime propped up, the military and the Chavistas' pockets.

It's after covering those three things that there's not much left.

Yes really, lets not pretend the whole situation in Venezula since Chavez hasn't been your typical case of the US trying to squash any kind of popularist shift to the left in latin America, its common knowledge it was behind the coup attempt on him. Much of the situation the country is in now ultimately comes down to over a decade or US economic warfare and indeed the mismanagement pre Chavez whoring the country to US interests.

That said of course Maduro really doesn't look up to the job of leading the country the way Chavez was and has allowed himself to be drawn into the US funded violence trying to cover this.

Every single thing in that post if completely objectively false.
 
So Manduro does look up to the job of leading the country?

The full sentence was "That said of course Maduro really doesn't look up to the job of leading the country the way Chavez was and has allowed himself to be drawn into the US funded violence trying to cover this."

This is bullshit because it presupposes that Hugo Chavez wasn't an incompetent, ego-maniacal piece of shit of a leader who ran his country into the ground.

The only difference between Chavez and Maduro is that the later doesn't have a shit-ton of cash coming in from sky-high oil prices to paper over his thievery and incompetence.

Chavez wasn't up to the task of leading Venezuela any more than Maduro is. He just got lucky with the timing.
 
Again though Chavez himself inherited a corrupt basketcase economy far too dependant on oil and of course the crash in oil prices was pretty clearly a US tactic though their Saudi allies(who are operating at vast loses overproducing) aimed at them, the Russians and Iranians. US food companies operating in Venezuela have also been accursed of deliberate sabotage of production to help make shortages worse.

Prices crashed in 2009, from 1999 to 2007 price constantly rised and yet Venezuela production diminished. There is no problem being dependent on oil if you actually produce it, you have not once mentioned how Chavez destroyed production and how US had no economic sanctions or how the price was a no issue in this 7 years Chavez was the president.

The reality is that Chavez did actually make a deeply unequal society in Venezula somewhat better but was no miracle cure for the countries weaknesses and vulnerable to the US aggression that followed. Much of the western world is still drunk on its cold war fantasy though that the media(including many of those that claim to be on the left) is still happly serving up.

What country are you from?

This is the biggest indicator of Chavez result, lets blame the US for it

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So basically, it'll have to get to the point where's not enough left to pay off the military leaders for anything to happen.

The money is already worthless there anyway, what is Maduro paying the military with? Chickens?
Look...Venezuela has money (not the currency). They have resources...Do you really think the military will hang around this long if they're not getting something out of this? It's pretty much the blueprint of what NoKor is now.
 
Chavez wasn't up to the task of leading Venezuela any more than Maduro is. He just got lucky with the timing.

He was lucky as Lula, he rode the oil high and still managed to produce less oil lol


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Lets not forget that when the glorious opposition actually had some political power tried to use it to push though an amnesty for there own political violence.
 
Lets not forget that when the glorious opposition actually had some political power tried to use it to push though an amnesty for there own political violence.

????

Opposition and power thats two things that don't exist in Venezuela. Nice of you to ignore my last post and just ramble on how everyone but Chavez and Maduro are at falt for Venezuela crisis
 
????

Opposition and power thats two things that don't exist in Venezuela. Nice of you to ignore my last post and just ramble on how everyone but Chavez and Maduro are at falt for Venezuela crisis

No actually, they had a majority in the national assembly and as I said used to to try and push though amntesy for there own links to political violence. Understanding of the situation beyond a simplistic "socialism = bad" doesn't seem to exist in this thread.

They also lets remember have control of quite a large section of the countries media so the idea that this is some north Korean style situation with Chavista's have total state control is highly questionable. Its really a classic situation where confronation breeds the worst on both sides, you can someone like Maduro clumsly going after the media which previously supportied an undemocratic coup.

As I said Chavez wasn't some miracle cure, conditions with the poorest improved significantly under him but you still had a country with high levels of corruption heavily dependant on oil and the big drop in oil prices is very obviously a US tactic looking to destabalise its political rivals who tend to depend on it, its certainly not a sensible economic choice for the Saudi's who are operating at massive loses. Had the right stayed in power things would most likely be pretty terrible there now caught in the oil wars crossfire with the Russians but we wouldn't hear much about it in the western media.
 
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Much of the situation the country is in now ultimately comes down to over a decade or US economic warfare and indeed the mismanagement pre Chavez whoring the country to US interests.

Do yourself a favor and read the same round-table in v1, for we don't have the patience to repeat the same elementary introduction to the catastrophe that is Chavismo.

It was not the fact that he pissed away the boom on the poor, its the fact that he used that oil to literally destroy private industry and commerce, the fact that even when oil was at US$100 a barrel he somehow managed to run a deficit by borrowing money from China tells you all you need to know.

So no, the idea that a corrupt liberal government would face the same deal is not real, a liberal corrupt government would certainly face troubles like Chile, but still would be able to function as a country.

Its not the first time Venezuela has problems due to an oil boom being pissed away, it happened in the 80s and at no point Venezuela was in the condition it is today.

No, it wouldnt because all the industry that was not oil was still existing. Chavez literally used billions to eminent domain industries and ran them into the ground, he didnt just created government industries, he literally bought thousands of factories and then ran them into the ground. Coupled with strict currency control also drove many other industries into the ground.

The problem with Venezuela is not that they dont have money, the problem with Venezuela is that they dont have an industry, they literally cant make anything now.

You keep saying tax breaks for the rich and other shit, well THAT ALREADY HAPPENED, Just read about Venezuela during the 80s oil glut, it was incredibly hard, but they still had a functioning economy.

But in the 70s, instead of buying industries and destroying others, the populists used that money to steal and to create white elephant projects. Chavez goal was turning Venezuela into Cuba and he succeeded. Venezuela crisis is paramount to the 90s crisis of Cuba.

1) Once upon a time, Venezuela were able to manufacture many of their essential needs. They exported what they have in excess, produce essential items that they need with their domestic industries, and import the high-end stuffs that they can't make themselves.

2)
Chavez nationalized and destroyed all those manufacturing industries with draconian price caps that costs businesses much more to produce a product than they can make selling it. Manufacturing plants closed one after another, and Venezuela became reliant on imports to get EVERYTHING they need, using the windfall from oil sale, including all the basic essential items they were once able to make for themselves, like say, food and toilet papers. Why going through the effort of making it when you have the money to import it, right?

Consider this: Venezuela's agriculture industry was a net exporter of foodstuff before the oil boom. Now over two-thirds of Venezuela's food supplies today are imported from other countries, such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, and the American Imperialists that Chavez and Maduro hates so much. In fact, about half of that imported food supply actually came from the United States. The few farms still functional in Venezuela are operating with ancient agricultural technologies and methods from, you guess it, before the oil boom. Even with the best harvests, Venezuela can no longer produce enough food to feed more than 1/3 of their population.

3) Oil price may be plummeting, but the real mortal wound is self-inflicted: Venezuela's rapidly-dropping oil production rate that is now a record 13-year low, thanks to failing machinery and equipment that have never been replaced since the glorious Socialist revolution, because Chavez just assumes they will run forever without fresh investments.

Now, the Bolivares aren't worth the paper they're printed on thanks to hyper inflation, and the Venezuela doesn't have the money to import all those basic things that they needs anymore, and they are fucked because their farm lands lays barren and their factories are just hunk of rusted metal incapable of producing anything but rats.
 
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That's all the same one eyed commentary I'v heard a million times before, no need to try and "educate" me on it.

Oil definitely allowed Chavez to make some easier choices I'd agree and he didn't do enough to both clamp down on corruption, disversify the econcomy and indeed perhaps more tellingly didn't actually combat a lot of core inequalities. However pretty much all the negative effects listed really come down to that massive dropoff in prices that's limited the countries ability to subsidise industry and indeed to invest in its own oil production(although US embargo's own oil industry tech existed before that I believe). Maduro is obviously in a weaker position but is basically the worse side of Chavez, far too dependant on the political conflict rather than taking any kind of positive action, which really was more his role under Chavez anyway as I understand it.

Look back further than Chavez and you will see a basketcase econcomy with massive falls in GDP at points since the 1980's, depending largerly on oil prices. The difference is now that were seeing this dependence used as a weapon by the US to try and get in politicans more favourable to US corporations that backs them up at home.

Venezula pre Chavez was basically a small middle class fantasy around Caracas for those with there hands in corrupt industry/politics whilst much of the country was in poverty. A lot of those people did a runner when the gravey train dried up for them(although it didn't dry up for many more who make up a lot of the current opposition) and make up a good percentage of the more vocal anti Chavista Venezulians in the west.
 
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US paranoia...

Yet you don't address that homicides pre Chavez were bad, 19/100K, and that in his first years it doubled to 40/100k and that today is past 100/100k.

That probably due to US killing people?

You probably from some political party with romantized views of Chavez. He was the hope but turned into a corrupt dictator that bankrupt his own country for personal gains, always hiding behind the speech of helping the poor, giving out a few bucks a month, still in poverty but somehow loyal to govt, all while burning down the economy.

We have seen countless times in LA this method.

I'm very curious to know where you are from if you dont mind
 
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The Venezuelan oil industry is on a cliff’s edge.
President Trump could tip it over.

By Rachelle Krygier and Anthony Faiola | February 25, 2018

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A sculpture depicting an oil derrick resting in an open hand is seen outside the PDVSA building ahead of government debt meetings in Caracas, Venezuela, on Nov. 13, 2017.

PUNTA DE MATA, Venezuela — The Trump administration is threatening to embargo Venezuelan oil, a potentially ruinous blow to the Saudi Arabia of South America. But here in the home of the world’s largest crude reserves, Venezuela is killing its largest industry all on its own.

Speculators once joked that all it took to strike oil on the vast plains of eastern Venezuela was a guy with a shovel. These days, the socialist government cannot seem to make the industry work. This vast extraction site near the eastern town of Punta de Mata, which once churned out 400,000 barrels of oil a day, is now a tableau of hungry, idle workers and broken rigs.

The site about 180 miles east of Caracas, the capital, has been partly paralyzed since last summer. Of its 30 drills, only six work, in large part because of a lack of maintenance and spare parts. With time on their hands, many oil workers are functioning as security guards.

And with good reason. In decline for the better part of 15 years, Venezuela’s oil industry has entered a free fall in recent months, contributing to the nation’s economic and social chaos. The crude-heavy countryside is a lawless, bandit-ridden land. Three hours south of this industrial town, a gang of thieves recently raided another drilling site run by PDVSA, the state-owned oil giant. They tied up work crews and stole their cellphones before swiping air conditioners and kitchen appliances from company trailers.

“PDVSA is in ruins,” said Luis Centeno, a rig operator and union leader at the Punta de Mata site. He lazed in the morning sun near a pack of skeletal dogs and a broken rig lying on its side. “It’s dying.”

In Venezuela, corruption, a lack of investment and a flight of expertise in the all-important oil sector have finally come to a head.

Last month, according to a report from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Venezuela’s plummeting oil production hit a three-decade low of 1.6 million barrels a day, a 20 percent drop from January 2017 and less than half of what it was in the 1990s. Venezuela’s headache is also the world’s problem. The sharp fall in output here, experts say, is exacerbating the global rise in oil prices, which has meant higher prices at gas pumps in the United States and elsewhere. In Venezuela, chronic production problems have forced the government to start importing gasoline.

“Venezuela has been driving up oil prices through its incompetence,” said Russ Dallen, managing partner of Caracas Capital, a Venezuela-based investment bank.

The state oil company is run by Manuel Quevedo, a military general with no industry experience, after a purge last fall of executives seen as not wholly loyal to President Nicolás Maduro. Quevedo says he is acting to halt the fall in production. But for Venezuela, a bad situation could soon become much worse.

Maduro — the anointed successor of leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013 — is pushing forward with his bid for a second six-year term in April. The opposition considers the snap election the culmination of a carefully orchestrated power grab.

Last year, after elections that strengthened Maduro’s socialists but were criticized for numerous irregularities, the Trump administration slapped sanctions on officials, including Maduro, and strictly limited the government’s access to the U.S. financial system.

During his trip to Latin America this month, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggested that the “nuclear option” could be imminent — in other words, restrictions on U.S. imports of Venezuelan oil, as well as exports of diluents this nation needs to make its sludgy, super-heavy crude more salable.

A senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivities, said that a study is underway by U.S. executive departments — including State, Energy and Treasury — to assess the potential effects of such oil restrictions. If Maduro does not change course on the April vote, or pledge himself to a transparent election with foreign monitors, an embargo of some kind is highly likely, the official said.

Maduro, in a response to a question at a news conference in Caracas, was defiant.

“Venezuela has an international market for its oil, and we would substitute the United States with other countries,” he said. “It would be sad, very sad, if such a mistake is made. It would cost Donald Trump his career, that’s what I can tell you.”

Many Latin American nations fear that an embargo could worsen Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis and disrupt regional oil supplies. Still, support has grown in the region for tougher measures.

Oil revenue accounts for 90 percent of the government’s hard currency. About 40 percent of Venezuela’s production goes to China and Russia to repay loans or is gifted to chief ally Cuba. That has made Venezuela’s nemesis — the United States — its single-largest cash buyer.

A U.S. embargo “would put PDVSA further into the hands of Russia and China, which will control its cash flow,” said Francisco Monaldi, an expert on Venezuelan energy at Rice University.

PDVSA is so broke that creditors have been seizing shipments of Venezuelan oil off the coast of Curacao and other Caribbean islands. Should the U.S. government cut off Venezuela, that action could bring the country closer to a large-scale debt default that could turn the nation into an economic pariah. With less to lose, experts say, Maduro could potentially kick out the Western oil companies that still do business here, seizing their assets.

Venezuela reported to OPEC that its production had improved to 1.77 million barrels a day in January, up from 1.62 million in December. But an analysis published by OPEC, drawing on secondary sources — including the U.S. Energy Information Administration — showed a further erosion in January, to 1.6 million barrels a day.

PDVSA’s decay started years ago, with most experts seeing a tipping point in late 2002, almost four years after Chávez rose to power. Oil executives and workers at PDVSA challenged Chávez’s moves to politicize the company and joined a general strike. Chávez fired half of the company’s staff and hired new workers. Under Chávez’s direction, the company’s profit was redirected to social programs, and foreign oil interests were partly nationalized.

The drop in global oil prices in recent years brought the crisis at the company to a head.

The oil ministry could not provide immediate comment. But Maduro, in a news conference, accused corrupt officials of sabotaging the company.

“Venezuela suffered a decrease in oil production provoked by a plan to leave the country with no resources, [orchestrated] by managers of PDVSA who are now behind bars,” Maduro said. He added, “We will, respecting OPEC quotas, recover PDVSA’s production.”

For now, PDVSA is on its knees. Guillermo Morillo, a former PDVSA manager who is working on a recovery plan for the company, said it would take as much as $100 billion in investment to bring production back to 2009 levels.

Production in eastern states, the country’s oil heartland, plunged 34 percent last year alone, according to PDVSA’s official numbers and estimates from experts.

In the city of Morichal, about 350 miles east of Caracas, dozens of nonfunctioning drills and rusting loading machines stood idle on a recent day at one of PDVSA’s main oil-extraction plants in the Orinoco oil belt. Nearby, a washed-out sign carried the barely discernible word “homeland” with a fading image of Maduro.

A PDVSA mechanic sat on the stoop of a concrete hut wearing his uniform — a red jumpsuit — after half a day of work at a nearby rig.

His weekly wage, worth about a quarter of a dollar on the black market, is not enough to pay for three meals a day. So, he sometimes skips lunch. His job has become nearly impossible, said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of government reprisals. With hyperinflation here running at 13,000 percent annually and the local currency, the bolívar, nearly worthless, imported spare parts and tools have become luxuries that PDVSA cannot afford.

Without them, the man said, accidents have become “a day-to-day thing.” Recently, he said, a driver in an old company truck was hauling a rig through a nearby street when the truck stalled, overturning near a river and leaving the driver with broken arms and ribs.

“Our work conditions have become inhumane,” he said. “If we continue like this one more year, we will die.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...6deb18cca19_story.html?utm_term=.72570e6b011a
 
Hope Trumps creates the embargo to put an end to Maduro

“Venezuela has an international market for its oil, and we would substitute the United States with other countries,” he said. “It would be sad, very sad, if such a mistake is made. It would cost Donald Trump his career, that’s what I can tell you.”

LOL
 
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