Actually, Chavez was bad.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Actually, Chavez was bad.

Yossarian-22: Oct 26, 2014

He did set up an oligarchy centered around himself, but I still can't stand the insistence from people that he was a "dictator" when he won free and fair elections. He was a corrupt democratically elected leader much like the right wing version of that we have in America rn

# ¿ Mar 6, 2017 18:40

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 08:49

Yossarian-22: Oct 26, 2014

GlyphGryph posted:

And...? It's possible to support bad people who are better than their alternatives while fully admitting they are bad people. There's a reason I voted for Hillary in the general, after all, and it's not because "Trump is bad, therefore Hillary is actually really good!"

He actively undermined political opposition and worked to dismantle the rule of law and remove checks on his power. I do agree he was not truly a dictator (at least no more than Putin is) but he operated much like Trump is doing know to pave the way for a future dictatorship, and towards the end of his life he was getting awfully close to full dictator status./

And three years after his death, the country is definitely a full on dictatorship that has banned it's own legislative body, given huge chunks of the civil services to the military, and indefinitely postponed elections while making GBS threads on the constitution.

If Chavez wasn't a dictator, he certainly made becoming one incredibly easy - and if he had lived until today, based on his past actions, the only thing that would have changed is the guy on top right now.

Observers pretty much universally agreed that Venezuelan elections were free and fair whereas Russian ones do not get the same universal recognition (although let's be honest: Putin would've won them anyway).

Again though, not like there aren't democrats with authoritarian tendencies. See: Trump, Erdogan, etc.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2017 20:02

Yossarian-22: Oct 26, 2014

GlyphGryph posted:

At first? Maybe. We know they aren't free and fair now, though - when do the observers universally agree it switched from one to the other?

Because it seems to me to have turned on a dime the moment the PSUV thought it might lose (they started straight up nullifying election results that would have given power in the Assembly to the opposition coalition in 2015).

And if your elections are only free and fair so long as you vote for the right person, and any results to the contrary will be ignored or opposed... your elections aren't actually free and fair.

We don't know if Venezuela's elections were ever free and fair, because we don't have an example of Chavez actually losing them and recognizing the results, which is sort of a really big part of an election being free and fair. We know that the moment his party DID lose one they refused to recognize it, and the people who did so were largely many of the same people who Chavez had been putting into power for a while, which sort of retroactively casts those previous elections in a rather bad light, imo.

And now thanks to Chavez's hand picked successors there aren't any elections at all.

I think we still ought to recognize the fact that Chavez DID energize the poor of Venezuela by being a populist and basically abusing the fruits of his oil money. He won free elections consistently with around 60% of the vote for that reason. And this should give us pause wrt left wing populists in general

I'd say that Maduro ending the recall effort against him and banning opposition parties from regional elections is tantamount to an unfree political system though. PSUV actually did pretty badly in the most recent election and lost tons of ground so things are still nominally somewhat democratic

# ¿ Mar 7, 2017 18:15

Yossarian-22: Oct 26, 2014

GlyphGryph posted:

The refused to recognize the results of the election and destroyed the entire legislative branch of government when the branch said "no, actually, we think we will recognize the results".

So not so much?

In terms of votes, they lost the recent election. In terms of results, they simply said "it doesn't count" whenever that mattered and continued to hold all the power. There's no possible way to describe that as Democratic.

Have they destroyed the legislative branch since getting destroyed in 2015? I'm not up to date atm

# ¿ Mar 7, 2017 18:55

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Actually, Chavez was bad.