Thinkers and political figures
Portrait: Agência Brasil, via Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab) · Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
Hugo Chávez
- Country
- Venezuela
- Era
- 1954–2013
- Tradition
- Bolivarian socialism
Paratrooper who failed at a coup, won the presidency six years later, and used record oil revenues to fund mass social programmes while progressively dismantling the checks on his own power.
Documented positions
Documented positions come from the sources listed. Similarity is this project’s inference from those positions, and is a much weaker claim.
- Redirected oil revenues into the misiones — literacy, subsidised food, primary health care and housing programmes
- Nationalised the oil, steel, cement and telecommunications sectors and expropriated large landholdings
- Rewrote the constitution in 1999 and abolished presidential term limits by referendum in 2009
- Packed the supreme court and used regulatory power against opposition broadcasters
- Built ALBA as a regional alliance explicitly opposed to United States influence in the hemisphere
- Won repeated elections that international observers judged broadly free but conducted on markedly uneven terms
- Failed to diversify the economy away from oil, leaving it exposed to the collapse in prices after his death
Where it sits on each dimension
Wealth and inequality
Evidence: Well documented
The state in the economy
Evidence: Well documented
Personal liberty
Evidence: Well documented
Tradition and change
Evidence: Well documented
Nation and the world
Evidence: Well documented
Power and its limits
Evidence: Well documented
Environment and growth
Evidence: Documented
Dimensions left unscored, for want of evidence: Religion and the state, Crime and punishment
Sources
- Republic of Venezuela, Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela · 1999
- Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold, Dragon in the Tropics: Hugo Chávez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela · Brookings · 2011
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