The New Yorker: Chavèz não é tão mau como o pintam…

Este artigo de Jon Lee Anderson, publicado na The New Yorker, integra bem a hagiografia mundial de textos sobre o combatente da Revolução Bolivariana na América do Sul. Foca ângulos interessantes da personalidade do " continuador " de Fidel de Castro. Mostra limites e falhanços. Mas fica-se atónito ao pensarmos no desperdício colossal de fundos no combate à miséria e ao analfabetismo. De qualquer dos modos, Chavèz colocou em sentido as multinacionais petrolíferas e aumentou para 33,3 por cento as taxas de exploração, que eram de 1 por cento nos macabros tempos de Andrèas Perez, o social democrata corrupto.

Chavèz tem tentado plataformas de entendimento com a Rússia de Poutin e o Irão. Investiu somas colossais num sistema soviético de defesa anti-aérea; e teceu fortes relações económicas e sociais com Cuba e a Argentina de Cristina Kirchner, a quem dá generosamente somas de dinheiro colossais. Cuba destacou para a Venezuela milhares de quadros- médicos, professors e agentes sociais e desportivos. Mais de 15 mil doentes venezuelanos são operados nos hospitais de Cuba, por ano.

FAR

A few years ago, when Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, said that he wanted a new jet to replace the nearly thirty-year-old Boeing bequeathed to him by his predecessor, his critics raised an outcry. But Chávez went ahead with his plans. His new plane, which cost sixty-five million dollars, is a gleaming white Airbus A-319, with a white leather interior, seating for sixty passengers, and a private compartment. The folding seat-back trays have gold-colored hinges, and there is plenty of legroom.

Chávez has spent more than a year altogether on trips abroad since taking office, in February, 1999, and so the jet is a kind of second home. His seat bears an embossed leather Presidential seal. Paintings of nineteenth-century Latin-American independence heroes hang on the walls, including a prominent one of Simón Bolívar, known as El Libertador. Bolívar led military campaigns to free large parts of South America from Spanish rule, and in 1819 he helped create a vast nation called Gran Colombia, which encompassed the present-day republics of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama. But political rivalries and internecine warfare frustrated Bolívar’s dream of a United States of South America, and Gran Colombia fell apart soon after his death, in 1830.