Hugo Chavez: The Downfall of Venezuela?

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuela

When God created Venezuela as a popular saying goes it gave it the beauty of it’s mountains that shade her, the sun that warms her, the bountiful fruits on her trees, the rich minerals in her mines, and to top it all it gave her its people.

The Venezuelans are proud of their heritage and their culture as any other county is. It is a land of hard workers so enthusiastic sometimes bordering on the extreme. So it is inconceivable to think that they can be so blind as to what the future holds for them.

They have failed to see themselves in the Cuban experience and have fallen for a leader who in his lack of originality has decided to follow the steps of his dying mentor Fidel Castro.  For those familiar with the Cuban dictator, it is clear the similarities of these two men, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.  Even though one has enough charisma, education and personality to give the other a lifetime supply.

 Hugo Chavez will never become what Castro has, yet he is at the helm of a country with a large reserve of oil making him not only very rich but also dangerous to his people and neighboring countries.  There is nothing worse than a fool with money to make things bad for the rest. His ego is fueled not only by the intoxicating nectar of power but also by the other ignorant leaders of the region such as Bolivia’s Ebo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and others. Chavez sees himself as the emancipator of the Americas a modern day Simon Bolivar.

If Venezuelans will only look at Cuba’s history of persecution to those that oppose the system, the systematic dissolution of independent government entities, the taking away of basic civil rights including the freedom of expression and association they will not follow the wrongful path they have taken.

President Chavez has created the same controls as Castro did when he came into power five decades ago. Such as the neighborhood committees, the rapid response brigades, nationalization of the press, and the nationalization of important industrial sectors. The anti American rhetoric seems as a broken record played thousands of times in Cuba.

Such a shallow leader and archaic system needs the threat of an enemy to sustain itself in power and the United States is the perfect culprit for this purpose. Just as Castro has for the length of his endless stay in power Chavez blames the enemy to the north for the reason of his also self called revolution. Today, Manuel Rosales, the mayor ofMaracaibo, the most important oil producing state in Venezuela is in hiding; in fear of his life after he was threaten by Chavez with incarceration for the simple reason that he represents a force to deal with in the democratic process in Venezuela.  When a president openly threatens a democratic elected official with jail time without the proper due process of law, democracy is either dead of dying.

It is sad to say but those cheering like college cheerleaders for the red shirt clad president today, will regret their mistake and lament their ignorance in the future.  The ultimate optimist will argue the future will always be better. But time is running out and unless Venezuela veers back to the democracy it once was it will be lost forever.