Opinion piece by Alek Boyd published in El País.
The great fortune of Hugo Chávez was that he governed during an era when oil prices averaged around 100 dollars a barrel. His popularity weathered the tests of time not due to his charisma or oratory skills, but because he had complete discretion over an enormous amount of public funds, which he spent as, where, and whenever he liked. In this regard, he was unique—there are few members in the club of petro-dictators, and none as wasteful as Chávez, whose administration saw more revenue in Venezuela than the 40 years before him, according to World Bank figures.
The waste of public funds in Venezuela will be studied for many years because it is hard to explain how a country with less than 30 million inhabitants could squander a fortune over 15 times greater than needed for the reconstruction of Europe after WWII, and find itself in the miserable impoverishment that Venezuela is today.
I will provide two examples, one of negligence and another of unjustified waste. According to statistics from the Venezuelan Chamber of Construction and the Venezuelan Real Estate Chamber, between 1969 and 1998, 2,033,481 homes were built:
– 655,699 between 1969 and 1978
– 759,632 between 1979 and 1988
– 618,150 between 1989 and 1998
How many homes did the Chávez regime construct between 1999 and 2010?
– 296,047 habitable units
In other words, chavismo built (up to 2010) only 14% of the homes constructed in previous decades by governments with significantly smaller budgets. It is worth noting that the combined gross domestic product of democratic governments prior to the caudillo was approximately 1.6 trillion dollars; the gross domestic product of the Chávez regime until 2011 was about 1.8 trillion dollars, not counting internal and external debts incurred. The accompanying graph highlights the undeniable failure in this aspect.
The figures show that chavismo has utterly failed to use the revenues received to address the housing deficit in the country. So, what was the money spent on? Let’s move to an example of unjustified waste that offers no benefit to the population: spending on weaponry.
According to figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), between 1999 and 2013, chavismo acquired arms valued at 80.158 billion Bolívares, while data from the same source indicate that spending up until 1999 was just 2.444 billion Bolívares. The only place Venezuela was in a state of war—which would explain such absurd waste—was in Chávez’s clouded mind. Venezuela’s international reserves from 1999-2013 remained—barring exceptional spikes—between 15,000 and 30,000 million dollars. Despite this, chavismo had no qualms about allocating such amounts to military purchases, turning Venezuela, perhaps uniquely in the region, into the largest buyer and importer of arms despite not having experienced any form of internal or external armed conflict in over a century. Why such a squandering? How many houses for low-income families could have been built with those 80.158 billion Bolívares?