It is not a pleasant start to the new year for Venezuela’s populist strongman Hugo Chavez.  With oil prices in decline there simply is not enough money for him to toss around for his pet domestic projects and to fund his rogues gallery abroad.  Economic trouble at home and rising crime are denting his popularity.

Then he commenced the year with a devaluation of the currency.   One suggested rationale was that it gave him more money to spend domestically to buy goodwill before the Presidential election (something his buddy Iran’s Ahmadinejad tried to do before rigging the elections).

But there are natural effects to such a move.  As Venezuelans worried that imports would double in price (and Venezuela is heavily reliant on them) they started shopping furiously.  So the next diktat went out to store owners warning them not to raise prices.  Now inevitably comes the next phase of nationalizing banks and supermarkets.

Venezuela is yet another country to be cursed with natural resources.  It makes it too easy for corrupt leaders to siphon off the money (Nigeria, Indonesia, Chad) or to blow it on populist largess (Saudi Arabia, Venezuela).  It is easy to sympathize with Chavez’s assertion that the oil wealth has been used to enrich a few, because it is true.  But rather than using the wealth to create sustainable avenues for growth in the future, he has squandered it on populist subsidies and quixotic support to Cuba and other dictatorships to tweak Uncle Sam’s nose.  Venezuela is now facing the effects of his mismanagement.  But with no viable opponent to his regime in sight yet, Venezuela’s caudillo is likely to be re-elected in the elections this fall.

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• The New York Times on the difficulties on reporting a natural disaster and getting reporters on the ground (beyond twitter which continues to emerge as a suprising news source, though one that is hard to vet for accuracy).  See link.  Foreign Policy summarizes Haiti’s misery over the last 50 years.  The only country to win its freedom though a slave rebellion has been a failed state for some time now.  The earthquake removes what little government was left.
• Newsweek takes a look at China’s love affair with rogue states. See link.  At least one can say that the Chinese actions are motivated by genuine self interest – preventing a collapsed state on its border (Myanmar and North Korea), locking up natural resources (Iran and Sudan) and trying to prevent another example of street protests toppling a regime (Iran). Contrast that with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez who squanders his country’s wealth in strategic alliances with rogue states, quixotic socialist largess to Cuba and a military buildup against Columbia primarily to stick his finger in the eye of the United States.
• Another one from Newsweek commending the mainstream media for doing its job during the Harry Reid controversy and not allowing the ridiculous Republican talking point of equivalence with the Trent Lott comments to stand. Its not often I join in to give a nod to traditional media.

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Noticed this link on Yglesias with the odd praises of Chavez for characters ranging from terrorist Carlos the Jackal, to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe to Uganda’s notorious Idi Amin.  Now that George W. Bush no longer occupies the White House the parade of American liberals legitimizing the populist Venezuelan demagogue by flying into Caracas seems to have died down a bit.  It is not easy for public figures to admit they were naive and taken in by a foreign authoritarian dictator.  But by largely remaining silent in face of Hugo Chavez’s erratic behavior, his evisceration of democratic institutions, his embrace of thugs and tyrants around the world largely because they are anti-American, and repeatedly trying to fund similar populist coups in Latin America they are guilty of the same hypocrisy that they alleged occurred under the Bush administration.

The tragedy of Hugo Chavez is that Venezuela’s creaky democracy had fallen prey to its bumbling elites and needed a jolt of popular legitimacy.  But instead of producing a Solon, Venezuela provided a Catiline with no respect for the rule of law and unwilling to learn from the failures of the command economy that ruined the Communist bloc.  One cannot criticize the bumbling elites who preceded Chavez without recognizing the failure of the so called Bolivarian Revolution to reach its proclaimed goals.

Hugo Chavez appears to be beating the war drums to divert attention from his failures at home.  Its not clear what triggered the latest bellicose rhetoric from Latin America’s top blow hard, but its time Venezuelan voters gave him the message previously delivered by Spain’s King Juan Carlos (whose democratic credentials are far superior).