'A Perfect Storm': The Failure of Venezuela's New President

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/venezuela-president-maduro-faces-economic-distress-and-protests-a-955820.html



He was hand-picked by Hugo Chávez, but Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has lost control of the country's economy. Vast protests have been the result, but the government in Caracas has shown no signs of bending.

'A Perfect Storm': The Failure of Venezuela's New President
By Jens Glüsing
February 26, 2014 – 04:11 PM

The smell of smoke wafts over Caracas. A group of young women have built a barricade of wooden pallets and garbage bags and lit it on fire on the main street running through Bello Monte, a middle-class quarter of the Venezuelan capital.

A petite university student named Elisabeth Camacho fiddles with a gas canister and clutches a stick bristling with nails. She is wearing a white T-shirt and a baseball cap in Venezuela's national colors, a kind of uniform worn by many of the demonstrators. She appears relaxed and ignores the curses coming from drivers struggling to turn their cars around. "We demand security," she says. "The government needs to finally stop the violence."

Students have been protesting in Caracas for days, building barricades on city streets and occupying squares. The movement began two weeks ago in San Cristóbal, in the state of Táchira near the border with Colombia. In just a few days, it spread across the entire country.

The students are protesting against inflation, shortages and corruption. Mostly, though, they are taking to the streets in opposition to the violence meted out by the country's paramilitary shock troops. "We are going to protest until the government disarms the colectivos," says Camacho.

[MADem]

1. That article is a must-read for anyone wanting to get up to speed on what's happening in VZ.

This is right on the money:

Indeed, Maduro behaves a lot like a mustachioed Chávez, but lacks his foreruner's humor and, especially, his aplomb. He often seems tense; he picks at his shirt and stumbles over his words.

Chávez died just under one year ago, but began grooming Maduro as his crown prince a few months prior, largely due to the former-bus-driver-turned-cabinet-minister's obedience. No one was as obedient as Maduro, a former bus driver that Chávez made into a government minister. It was a terrible decision for the country: What Maduro lacks in charisma, he makes up for in radicalism. He has ruined the country's economy and has often turned to Cuba, his closest ally, for guidance. And he has attempted to silence the opposition with a campaign of pure terror. Recently, though, it has begun looking as though he will have difficulty regaining the upper hand over the protests.

When Maduro's term began, hopes had been high that he would be able to reconcile his divided country. He sought out contact with the US and gave the impression that he was willing to open a dialogue with opposition politicians. But last week, he expelled three American diplomats, claiming they had supported "the opposition fascists."

Recently, he has encroached on the freedom of expression to a greater degree than even Chávez did. He arranged the purchase of Venezuela's last remaining critical television station and has unleashed his supporters on the "fascist broadcaster" CNN and on other foreign journalists. A "deputy minister for social networks" has been charged with monitoring what Venezuelans post on Twitter and elsewhere while the two largest government-critical newspapers have had trouble publishing due to a paper shortage.