Chavez: the fraud that keeps giving

I am not going to celebrate Chavez first croaking anniversary tomorrow. I genuinely wish he would be alive today and forced to deal with the mess he has left behind, one of the biggest historical frauds that will have been perpetrated once we can dig freely in what happened since 1992, and even before.


Hugo Chavez has been a fraud all through his life. The only mystery is how come so many people fell for so many years under his schemes. There are counted few like yours truly that never ever gave him the benefit of the doubt, though I admit that for a while in 1999, early 2000 I thought he was not as bad as he was, that he was made worse by the manipulations of the two old crones of  Miquelena and Rangel. By mid 2000 I was convinced that he was the worst curse ever to hit the country, second only, maybe, to Boves. In a way the two old crones was the only fraud Chavez managed to pull on me.

I am not speaking ill of the dead: I wrote enough ill of him when he was alive that I can demand people not to put that sin on me.

Chavez was a fraud before 1992 because he was a traitorous sworn military officer plotting the demise of democracy. Not of AD or COPEI, the demise of democracy, do not get confused.

Chavez was a fraud in 1992 because he failed miserably in his part of the coup and let the ones who succeeded in their task hang high and dry. He was doubly a fraud with them because he had no qualms in grabbing the limelight even though he was a failure in what was possibly the easiest part of the coup to perform.

He was a fraud between 1992 and 1998 because after espousing an abstention attitude and a nationalist approach he switched like a vulgar opportunist to the leftist look and for running in elections that he won under false pretenses. But that would not be the one time he would run for elections under false pretense.

He was a fraud when he called for a new constitution as the constitutional assembly excluded 40% of the country in its debate. Not that it mattered much because he was a fraud with his own followers since in the end he is pretty much the one that wrote the articles of the constitution he really cared about. And he was the biggest fraud about his own constitution since he started violating it within days of its approbation by grabbing control of the judicial branch.

He was a fraud with his political allies as he disposed of them as needed, bringing back one on occasion, thoroughly humiliated and corrupted. He was a fraud with those who elected him as he ditched them electorally as soon as he could, or ditched them altogether as soon as he could. The court that surrounded him in his last year had very, very little left of the court that brought him to power in 1999, so unforgiving he was in his lifetime to any one to whom he had owed favors.

He was a fraud to the prosperity of the country as he offered one and another model when in fact the only thing he ever did was to remove from his path anyone or anything that could have had the faintest chance to cast a shade on him. He was thus an ideological fraud because the only thing he worried about creating was dog like fealty to his persona, ideological coherence being the least of his concerns.

He was a democratic fraud because his speeches on democracy were of the hollowest kind when in reality he was always trying to create a corporation state where his loyalists would be the only ones with access to riches and power not through creation the new but through destruction of what was in front. Robbery became the name of the game.

All of his promises were a fraud because at the end we had become a more divided society, a more dependent society, a less creative society, a poorer society. And a morally miserable society.

But he reserved his two biggest frauds for last.

One was that for a nationalist he had no qualms in surrendering the orientation of the country to a colonial power that was so much inferior in quality than the colonized victim.

The other was that he run for reelection in 2012 knowing full well that he was going to die within months of the vote. To make sure that yet again an election under false pretenses could be carried out he decided late 2010 to destroy the economic independence of the country, starting with the destruction of parliament.

Today, 364 days after his official death, since the fraud on his real death date has not been perpetrated by him, we are paying the price by having a bankrupt country, torn in an awful fraternal division while drug traffickers and corrupt officers do the impossible to retain the meager protection that power can offer. In a way, even after his death Chavez is still committing fraud against us. He promised us a solid leadership to replace him, a leadership so lousy that it revealed itself before his official death to be morally corrupt, a bunch of constitutional violators and now turned into murderous dictators.