17 May 2018, Venezuela, Caracas: A follower attends Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's final campaign speech. Rayner Pena/Press Association. All rights reserved.
If there’s such a thing as a ‘nation non grata’, Venezuela in its current political configuration would be near the top of the list on both sides of the North Atlantic. From the moment when Hugo Chavez first won the presidency in 1998 – he was twice re-elected and died in office in 2013 – western governments and the media viewed him with a combination of alarm and contempt. Charismatic, left-wing, deeply hostile to neoliberalism, Chavez made clear that his aim was to transform Venezuela’s social, economic and political landscape. At the core of his domestic programme lay a determination to provide the two-thirds of the population then living below the UN official poverty line with access to health care, education and the prospect of a dignified life. Revenues from oil during a period of high world prices furnished the necessary funds and, as UN Human Development Reports show, the programme achieved some, at least, of its initial objectives.
Internationally, Chavez aimed to reduce if not eliminate what he felt to be the economic and the political domination of his country by the United States; and he collaborated with other like-minded governments in Latin America to achieve the same at continental level. He called his political programme, the Bolivarian Revolution and even changed the country’s formal name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela – in honour of Simón Bolívar, the great 19th century leader of South America’s independence from Spain. Romantic certainly, but a permanent reminder that independence – the right of a nation to choose its own destiny lay, and continues to lie, at the heart of the “Chavista” project.
