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Venezuela is living through its own internal misfortunes as a result of ideological excesses, ignorance of economics, factional power struggles and a long-term obsession the idea that everything can be solved with oil wealth as if it were manna from heaven. For Venezuela, the future is unpredictable.
In Bolivia and Ecuador, despite the fact that local and regional elections are certainly not equivalent to national ones, where Evo Morales’s and Rafael Correa’s popularity weighs heavily, recent results indicate that the governing party’s clout is diminishing while the opposition is rebuilding (sub-national elections were held in Ecuador in February 2014 and in Bolivia in March 2015). In both countries, as in Venezuela, regional and local governments provide a counterweight to the overhwelming power of central governments and their parties notwithstanding the latter's legitimacy stemming from control of massive public spending (sustained by exceptional raw material prices) which has allowed them to win favor and popularity through patronage and propaganda.
