For more than a decade, Hugo Chávez seemed to have invented a new future for his country. But the collapse in oil prices has put it all at risk
Venezuela is a country that many observers have trouble analysing without projecting their own political passions. Leftwing sympathisers of Latin American “Bolivarian revolutions” embraced Hugo Chávez, who ran the country from 1999 to 2013, as all but a global hero for the destitute – eagerly glossing over his concentration of power and policies of crushing dissent. Rightwing critics never saw “Chavismo” as anything else but another version of third-world despotism – overlooking the root causes of its popular appeal in a country of deep social inequalities and complex ethnic dynamics. But if there is one thing they might agree on now, it is that Venezuelans urgently need change if growing desperation is not to turn into uncontrollable chaos. Food and medicine shortages have taken on such dramatic dimensions that a whole country seems to hover on the edge of collapse.
Venezuela’s mounting crisis took a new political turn on Monday when the national electoral council announced that the opposition to president Nicolás Maduro – the man Chávez anointed as his successor before dying of cancer in 2013 – had collected enough signatures for the complex process leading to a recall referendum. The opposition, who hold him responsible for the country’s economic disaster and are hoping a referendum will bring an end to 17 years of Chavismo socialism, still faces an uphill battle, not least because Mr Maduro could still prevent or stall the referendum.