In one.
The shame is that a leftist agenda will now be crushed by an inevitably reactionary response and discredited. But governments, when they have the cash, love to spend.
The way politics are done in South America and specially in this case, Venezuela, is not what you usually understand as left or right policies. It does have some of those ideas as a "core", but is basically populism. What helped Chavez become what he became was the oil bonanza, He rose to power during a very though time for Venezuela's economy, the recesion was stron in the late 90's and we were requesting help from the monetary fund as it was quite fucked up. Chavez took all that disenchantment from the masses and spoke what they wanted to hear, he gained power and proposed some decent ideas, then the oil boom came and a second bonanza for the country started. Too much money and too much power was given to Chavez, not because he was doing it right, already back in 2001 much of the country was at unrest with many of the policies he was making law with every single power behind him (Justice and parliament). As it's been mentioned in this thread, too much power corrupts and abolute power absolutely corrupts. The Opposition in Venezuela was and still is more worried about who is going to do what "when they come out of power" than actually proposing a plan and go all the way through it, and the regular Venezuelan on the street thinks that inminently everything will go to shit because the situation is unsustainable (but it's been so for years) and hope that the army rises up and take the government from power, which would be the worst case scenario.
Fast forward 17 years (I cannot believe that a bit more than half my life has been spent under these bunch of fuckwits) and the oil boom is well over and I don't think there will be anything like that again in the future, they never saved any money (unless you consider the bank account of those in power and their families, like chavez daughter with 2 billion dollars) or invested it in anything productive (many projects were supposed to be taken, but nothing of it exists to this day and the money "misteriously" disappeared), many companies and factories were taken from their owners to be handled by the government and now something like 5% of them are still productive, they gave their money to many politicians and countries all over the continent to buy their support, they gave a bag of food and some money to the poorest here to buy votes on every campaign, they basically created a monster and now there is rampant insecurity in the streets, no medicines and no food. The government doesn't want to discuss our problems or find solutions, the parliament tries to do something but is blocked by the government, the situation is getting out of control and the ones who suffer the most are the common Venezuelans. What has been the next step to solve the situation? food is going to be controlled by pro government communal organizations who will distribute it (the food with controlled prices) and it won't be sold in supermarkets anymore, and! with a rationing card per house. Just another opportunity for corruption. That's why there are riots reported every day in different cities and people just stealing what they can because they are simply hungry.
Now, I do believe in a society when people work for a common good, I admire countries who have developed social services of quality for their inhabitants, people paying their fair share of taxes to help everyone and have a society that actually works and moves a country forward, I believe in that and I would love to see it in my country and not people benefiting themselves at the expense of the mayority.
Venezuela is not socialism, it never was.
