Chavez is a trailblazer. His biography cannot be covered in this article but it is worth mentioning his achievements in the period since he was elected president in 1999. Chavez faced three problems: poverty, food shortages and extreme social inequality. In 1999, 85 percent of Venezuela’s 25 million people lived in poverty, including 42 percent who survived on a dollar a day. Meanwhile, just two people – Gustavo Cisneros and Lorenzo Mendoza – together possessed a combined fortune of $8.3 billion, or more than 10 percent of GDP.
Since 1920, when the United States started exploiting Venezuela’s oil deposits, Venezuela’s leaders began neglecting agriculture. They were inspired by profits from oil sales that allowed them to import 70 percent of the country’s food.
Chavez decided to change this. United Nations statistics show that he reduced poverty to 24 percent and abject poverty to 7.2 percent. In 1998, about 250,000 schoolchildren received a free breakfast, while by 2010 a total of 4 million children received a free breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Venezuela’s minimum wage became one of the highest in Latin America. In 1999, 3.5 million Venezuelans had access to healthcare services, compared with 20 million now. The country now also has more than 2.5 million university students.
Of course, there are still many problems, especially with food production – because agriculture requires considerable physical labor and financial support and the results do not appear overnight.
Chavez’s strategy of “21st century Socialism” is not easy to implement, particularly in the face of an incessant, aggressive campaign by the Venezuelan media. These attacks intensified after it was confirmed that the country has the world’s biggest oil reserves – 296.5 billion barrels.
