Insight to the socio-political turmoil in Venezuela
http://www.reddit.com/r/vzla/comment...ion_breakdown/
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I am a venezuelan student and would try me best to explain the current situation as concisely and understandable as possible.Venezuela is a very rich country because of its oil production. When Chavez was in power he spent a lot of money on programs to help the poor (in reality some of this programs helped and others continue to do so, but also a lot of money was loss in corruption and some of the programs were not actually good but only seemed good), and also on a huge amount ofpropaganda, constant propaganda, usually even through national broadcast. So this is were his popularity comes from, he also would speak for hours on tv every week and was very charismatic.
So he changed the constitution(through vote) and then passed a law that allowed him to make laws without them having to pass through the National Assembly(kind of like congress), so basically what he said became law. Also he started to take over the other powers(judicial,electoral,comunications..), sometimes by vote and sometimes by creating laws that allowed him to directly or indirectly elect whoever he wanted. So there ended up being no independence between the different powers, this means that all of them are in favor of the government. If someone of the goverment is caught doing something bad he wont suffer any consequences (usually).
Chavez's speech was always anti-capitalist and also very pro-poor/ anti-rich and middle class. It was very aggressive at times and hate grew from the lower classes against the higher classes, making the gap between the two even wider. In accordance to his socialist rant he expropiated(took over) a lot of companies (some where being unproductive, but a lot of them where not). This was seen by his supporters as something good for many of the expropiated companies gave them work, however it drove a lot of companies and investers out of the country. Currently many of these companies are either abandoned or very underproductive. These and the whole giving away a lot of money to other left governments, are two of the main reasons for the horrible state of the economy. Ahh and the creation of currency controls as of 2003, after a coup d'etat against Chavez that kept him away from power for only 2 days, and a huge national strike including PDVSA (the national oil company) for a couple of months in 2002. As of today the inflation rates are incredibly high and the price of the dolar in the black market is almost 9 times the official price. In addition there are shortages of basic comodities, for which, of course, the government blames the "capitalists".
Another important thing to consider is the media. Since Chavez took over a lot of new media appeared that supports(and usually is supported by) the government. He used the National Broadcast, which overrides all national tv channels and radio stations, for anything he wanted. This became a pretty common thing. In 2007 RCTV broadcasting license expired. RCTV was a Tv channel that was against the government and had been accused of helping in the 2002 coup, so the government decided not to renew it's license. Since then the restrictions on the media has gotten worse to the point that they won't transmit news that give a bad image of the government. The only Tv channel that still did that was globovision and it faced constant legal action and fines so the channel ended up being sold to a business man that was affiliated to the government in 2013. As of today the mainstream media doesn't transmit any information that does harm to the government.
Insecurity. This is one of the main issues in Venezuela. It was constantly ignored as a problem by the government until a few years ago when it became way to big to be ignored, so missions towards security started with the creation of a new police entity called the National Bolivarian Police. It's effectiveness have been dubious. Insecurity is still a really big issue with many people dying on a daily basis by gunshot and many kidnappings ocuuring all over the country. In addition there are the 'colectivos' which are organized armed civilians in favor of the government which control areas of certain 'barrios', they are heavily armed and the police has no jurisdiction over the areas they control. The main concern is that it is known that if given an order from the government, this groups won't hesitate to act with violence.
