Chavez: From bad to worse

By Susan Reimer - The Miami Herald

It's come to this in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela: The president is pleading with people to save water by limiting their daily cleansing routine to a 3-minute “communist shower.”

Really. This is just the latest indication of how badly Chavez continues to mismanage the economy of energy-rich Venezuela, which should be one of the most prosperous nations in the world.

Instead of offering Venezuela's 27 million people a better life, Chavez “Bolivarian socialism” has squandered the nation's wealth on military armament, populist schemes and the creation of a patronage state, a prescription for ruin and misery.

As a result, the deterioration of basic services that has characterized his prolonged tenure at Miraflores Palace is becoming impossible to deny. Today, water rationing and power shortages have become recurring features of daily life.

There is a direct correlation between Chavez's oversized regional ambitions and the gradual impoverishment of basic services. He has gone on an arms-buying spree around the world, purchasing $4 billion in weaponry from Russia alone in recent years, meanwhile neglecting maintenance of the infrastructure that provides water and electricity.

At the moment, the president seems content to vent his own frustration on the very people who are suffering from his misguided policies. “Some people sing in the bath for half an hour,” he told a recent cabinet session, broadcast live. “What kind of communism is that? Three minutes is more than enough!”

It's tempting to laugh this off as mere foolishness, Chavez being Chavez, but no one should underestimate the lengths to which Venezuela's leader is willing to go to promote his own self-interest.

At the moment, he is trying to distract Venezuelans from their discontent — reflected in his falling popularity ratings — by escalating tensions with Colombia and rushing troops to their common border.

The surest way to improve matters is for Chavez to put a stop to his bellicose rhetoric and reach out to Colombia to break the diplomatic freeze that has kept the two countries at dagger points for months. Sadly, however, things are bound to get worse insofar as the deterioration of daily life and basic services. It will take years to repair the damage caused by Chavez's neglect and his wasteful socialistic policies — if the “president-for-life” ever gets around to it.