Venezuelans, it became extremely clear, wanted Chavez to continue, loved as he is by the overwhelming majority of the population. Chavez — the undisputed boss of the Latin American Left, steering openly against the neoliberal tide not just Venezuela, but a huge chunk of the South American political wheel, along with Cuba’s Fidel and Raul Castro, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Brazil’s Lula de Silva, among others — had handed over a transparent defeat to his opponent, the right-wing business tycoon Henrique Capriles Radonski, by a substantial margin: Chavez got 55.41 percent of the votes, while Capriles received about 44.24 percent, with an 80 percent voter turn out.

Perhaps the most vilified and lied about political figure in contemporary history, Hugo Chavez’s rise and rise and mind-bogglingly efficient and egalitarian governance of Venezuela has laid the seeds of what the son of the soil himself calls ‘Socialism of the Twenty-first Century.’ Since 1999, when Chavez swept to power after defeating Henrinque Salas Romer, a Yale University-educated economist representing the moneyed elites of Venezuela and the vested western interests in the largest oil exporting nation in the world, a socio-economic revolution has been occurring in the country, that has now spawned similar left-wing, pro-people governments in neighbouring countries such as Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, etc., unfairly deemed ‘populist’ in the Chavez-bashing western media, the smear-campaign spearheaded by none other than The New York Times itself. However, the “transformation of Latin America,” as observed by the Guardian journalist Seumas Milne, “is one of the decisive changes reshaping the global order” and Hugo Chavez is undoubtedly the architect of the Latin American revolution, also known as the Bolivarian revolution, after the famous 19th century revolutionary leader and Chavez’s personal hero, Simon Bolivar.

Beyond the negative propaganda and the acid rain of malignancy that have been showered on Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan President’s staggering achievements speak for themselves. This include nationalisation of several crucial industries, particularly oil; redistribution of wealth and power; investing in free education from daycare to the university level; free healthcare and importing of thousands of doctors from Cuba in return for cheap oil to the US-embargo stricken Caribbean country; redistribution of agricultural land and restructuring of other sickly industries to gradually lift the burden of revenue generation from just oil exports; establishment of social security and pension systems for the retired and elderly; amongst a string of others. Chavez, along with his loyal political allies and followers, has singlehandedly transformed the fabric of Venezuelan socio-political structure, much to the chagrin of the US petrochemical companies and other neo-imperial, neo-liberal governments that had hitherto counted on Venezuela to be the pawn of their greedy machinations.

What Chavez has decisively demonstrated is that there are definite alternatives to Western capitalism as economic models for the 21st century, something that the financially and morally grieving European Union could take a lesson or two from. Despite the claims that Chavez has been squandering the money earned from the Venezuelan oil reserves, the opposite is in fact true. Chavez has not only rerouted parts of the oil earnings to the people of Venezuela, by investing in the infrastructure and creating a strong welfare state, but the president has been slowly strengthening allied industries and also ties with fellow Latin American countries to emerge as a redoubtable power bloc on their own. Much has been spoken about in the academic and policy circles about the ‘South-South’ cooperation, and while the emerging economies of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) get all the positive attention in the world media reviews, Venezuela, shrouded behind a massive smokescreen of misinformation and media disparagement, has been quietly marching ahead with a four percent growth rate annually and sharply reducing the poverty and inequality level within just the last 14 years of Chavez’ rule.

Perhaps the most evident support for Chavez within Venezuela was displayed when the 2002 US-backed military coup against Chavez failed dramatically, and the anti-people elites of Venezuela, along with their American string-masters, were left as baffled and befuddled as the observers of exit polls of the elections of 1999. The coup, led by the business tycoon Pedro Carmona, lasted only two days, as people rushed to the streets and demanded that their beloved and democratically elected President be returned to power. More than a decade later, the latest October 7 victory for Chavez is not only a reiteration of his immense contribution to the reengineering of the Venezuelan politics and economy, but also the reinforcement of faith in the processes and functioning of a real democracy.

Much has been said about the potential rigging of election results in Venezuela that brought Chavez back to power. In the words of the Nobel Laureate former American President Jimmy Carter, “As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we have monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” Though coming from the horse’s mouth, this clear testimony to Chavez’s fair and transparent victory has by far remained unmentioned except in the radical left press and some centrist newspapers in the West. So much so, that talks of “assassinating” the “dictator” Chavez have been doing rounds, as if USA could repeat a Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Husain in the oil-rich, self-sufficient, non-interfering and peace-loving Venezuela, whose leader is not an autocrat ruling by the force of his thumb but a statesman from whom Barack Obama can learn a lot.

Indeed Venezuelan economy is a model for others to emulate, with its significantly low debts, high oil reserves (about 500 billion barrels of oil annually) and remarkable social welfare programmes, making the government both “genuinely progressive and popular.” While Venezuela is lucky to be sitting on an ocean of oil, thus freeing it of immediate financial worries, Chavez’s undisputed contribution has been to direct the wealth to the poor and dispossessed, thus bridging the income gap to a good extent, and bringing a huge chunk of the population out of poverty. Chavez represents the poor, the non-white, and dis-enfranchised and therefore, his support-base is simply enormous.

Chavez’s open criticism of US neoliberal policies and their exploitative foreign policy has been a big thorn in the throats of western politicos and media commentators. His intense friendship with Fidel Castro and dreams of consolidating a larger “Venecuba” has been irritating the practitioners of reckless capitalism that in fact resulted in the financial meltdown of 2008. It was Venezuela, along with Brazil, that held their grounds when the world order was razed to the ground everywhere else, particularly in USA and Europe that are shuddering under the impact of the crisis. It was because of Venezuela’s increasing self-distancing from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the repositories of global capital, and because of its founding the Bank of the South to facilitate South American economic transactions extraneous to the strangling control of USA, and solidify the South Bloc as well as his efforts to make OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) more open and equal, that Chavez kept Venezuela from feeling the aftershocks of the financial tsunami that engulfed the rest of the world.

Despite claims of unsustainability, the Venezuelan economy has been never in a “pinker” state of health. It’s robust, it’s growing and it’s helping its masses lead a better life. Chavez’s followers and political loyalists have been experimenting successfully to give a new face to the twenty-first century. Instead of betting on Chavez’s “absolute incapacity” to return to office, because of his illness and despite the postponement of the swearing in of the fourth-time victorious President-elect (Chavez in an earlier referendum had nullified the previous constitutional requirement that set the limit of presidential terms to two), the world must actively desire to see Chavez in action once again, as eagerly, in not more desperately, as they waited for Barack Obama to win a second term. For before Chavez’s crowning glories, Obama’s “historic” scoring points look too feeble to even merit comparison. (IPA Service)