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“Chavez‘s lieutenants have been insisting for months that the Venezuelan president would be making a full recovery from his cancer-related operations and that Venezuelans had no cause for alarm — but they’ve been getting notably less vociferous about the whole thing recently, and that charade is officially over. … So, what’s next for Venezuela now that their corrupt, destructive, America-hating, socialist leader is no more? Either Vice President Nicolas Maduro or National Assembly leader Diosdado Cabello will become interim president for thirty days while the country engineers a special election — and without Chavez to figurehead his ‘Chavismo‘ movement, the outcome isn’t necessarily a sure thing.” –HotAir’s Erika Johnsen
“[Chavez] was also in the end an awful manager, who has left Venezuela in ruins. Mind you, Venezuela had long-since been enfeebled and besotted by the curse of nationalized oil and corrupt governments, so it was already in terrible shape when Chavez took over. But he pushed his nation far deeper into indolence and dependency. He never grasped that wealth emerges from labor productivity, not from the ground, and after blowing a trillion dollars in oil windfalls like a personal charity/slush fund, he has left Venezuela much poorer. … For the destitute and deeply uneducated Venezuelans who live on hunger wages and handouts, Chavez must have seemed like some sort of angel elevated from among their own — and he practically was. That was the best thing about him. The worst was that in the long run, he has left Venezuela’s poor, and their progeny, most ruined of all.” –Mario Loyola, Director of the Center for Tenth Amendment Studies
“During his 14 years in power, Chavez made a career out of trashing capitalism and the United States and fomenting unrest and chaos throughout South America. He polarized Venezuela through divisiveness and fear mongering and ascended to power using a brew of boorishness, thuggery, racism and class envy cloaked in nationalistic and socialist rhetoric. … Throughout his reign, ‘El Comandante’ pursued his dream of a socialist United States of South America, to be ruled, presumably, by him. He idolized Fidel Castro and sought to emulate every leftist dictator since Lenin by casting himself as the noble David in opposition to the United States as the world’s capitalist Goliath. While his sycophants hyperbolized him as the most gifted in a long line of Latin American revolutionaries, he cloaked himself in the typical trappings of a grandiose dictator. His image and slogans are plastered all over Venezuela and he carefully and ruthlessly placed himself at the center of a Hitlerian personality cult, often declaring, ‘I am Venezuela,’ and delighting when his followers chanted ‘I am Chavez.’ … Chavez was a master at promoting deadly sins such as greed, anger and jealousy as badges of honor to be worn proudly by ‘the people’ in their struggle against the specter of capitalism.” –columnist John A. Huettner
