Hugo Chávez

Goodbye, Presidente

A stimulating biography of a great showman, and bad president, who died aged 58 this week

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Readers' comments



DAULATRAM in reply to emer1983

"Unspeakable poverty", you say. Well, why are the people so poor? Why did the looting rich before Chavez do nothing for them?
Class warfare, you say. Who started it? The rich or the poor?
Rising oil prices, you say. Why not? Is that a crime? You want falling oil prices?
If state control of the press is all it takes to win elections, why do dictatorships exist which hold no multi-party elections? And you lie. Venezuela has a vast and violently anti-Chavez press operating freely.

DAULATRAM in reply to emer1983

The old rich elite in Venezuela that looted Venezuela and hates Chavez is plenty good at thuggery and cheating and tried hard to fool people with their propaganda. They have huge press and media resources pumping out anti-Chavez lies 24 hours a day. They still failed. As for naivete, if the Venezuelan poor are naive that is their decision. I prefer to have them make up their own minds as to what is good for them, not you.

President Jimmy Carter declared that Venezuela has the best election process in the world.

Thete is no freedom of media in the West either. The media is monopolised by hard right propagandists who ruthlessly keep the people underinformed. They cannot keep control in any other way. Venezuela if it ever suppressed freedom is only following the Western way. There are no free elections in the West because the media is controlled by the very rich


Venezuela is resource abundant, has a fantastic climate. Yet for all its wealth it struggles to provide for the basic needs of it's citizens. That said,the people of Venezuela loved Chavez because he wasn't one of the corrupt elite, or at least he didn't come from this background. And for a time, even at the cost of Chavez running the country into the ground they were happy to vote for some who cared about them and did genuinely want the best for them. So...Of course Chavez was terrible at manaing the country but most people there would prefer an incompetent leader who loved them than the corrupt, self serving interests who do not. Poor Venezuelans will mourn their loss and the the wealthy are officially back in business.

Spookpadda in reply to Wanna KnowStuff

At the least Chavez, like Fidel, deserves objective and insightful obituaries, neither fawning "leave him be"s nor villification. Guevara was an educated and intelligent man, a well-read, well-reasoned humanist. His youthful death was a tragedy for humanity and latin America. But he was also a committed puritanical zealot who shot non-combatant villagers, in cold blood, for talking, under similar threats, with establishment troops - there's the logical endpoint of revolutionary justice for you. Robespierre had it right. Shrill ideologues must eventually make everyone traitors. Chavez was well down that route but had a lot further to travel.

femi in reply to Wanna KnowStuff

More than that. The US, and its sidekick the UK, know which side their bread is buttered, they would always pursue that which is in their own strategic interest to the detriment of anything or anyone who stands in their way. Mugabe is not sufficiently important to dispose of which is why they have let him continue with his madness. Bloody Africans , why waste time and other resources on them anyway.

* By the way I am African.

He was eccentric; leave him alone. Some stuff was bad, like the Mugabe thing, but if Mugabe was so bad, the US and its allies would surely have disposed of Mugabe, like they tried with Al-Q. Don't forget it was the US that created and sustains the Ayatollahs.


Surely this obituary is way way below the standards expected from the Econonist. More like the stuff spewed out by the right wing gutter press. What an occasion to vent your spleen against the majority of the Venezuelans and progressives. As long as such nutty rightwing sentiments persist, we shall always look out for a Chavez to stand up for the great unwashed. What an abusive obituary. Me thinks this offensive obituary should be pulled.

Terence Hale

Hugo Chávez. Goodbye, Presidente. Not knowing the details of President Chávez illness but as a patient he was relatively young which leads me to the question; can political opponent’s user cancer as a weapon? Known medically as a malignant neoplasm cancer can be induced by giving someone such. We have seen such with poisoning of Mr. Litvinenko with probably with polonium-210. Cancer induction with biotechnological tools is possible.


I really do stand by initial comment in response to Connect The Dot's post. Get a good history textbook.

Connect The Dots

In the Shiny, Gleaming Kingdom of Oz,
Behind a curtain was a buffoon with a megaphone.
All Fear: Oz, The Great and Powerful!
Sometimes small spunky dog could be more helpful than 'great men'.

Farewell Hugo Chav-OZ

Inshai in reply to 6pidMrQGcj

Colonialist will always be imperialist,even in rags wil dream about lost thrones.... Mr Chavez left a legacy for Venezuela to follow and act upon for this land of treasure,young blood...a model Nation for neighbours to immulate.....

happyfish18 in reply to Jaynassar

What do you Economist neoliberal paper have to say about Chavezism corruption and incompetency when None of the banksters in West who had committed economic frauds by robbing the majority pigs of their livelihoods and who are still wrecked in pains of austerity has been sentenced to jail?


The neoliberal West has now promised to support or grant the poor South the Democratic majority values like Brotherhood insurgency, Fuedal theocracy, corrupt Gulf autocratism etc. so long as they would allow the MNCs to control the resources and buy expensive weaponry from them. The neoliberals hate him not because he is mismanaging the economy but Chavez had committed the cardinal neoliberal Sin by delivering some of the imperialist spoils to his people.


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