Hugo Chavez buys the right to preside over Marxist stagflation until 2049

All hail, President-for-Life Chavez. Hugo Chavez, the calorifically challenged Venezuelan Marxist bully boy, has won a referendum amending the constitution to allow him to stand repeatedly for re-election as president, rather than being restricted to two terms in office as was previously required. President Chav lost a similar referendum 14 months ago but, on the model of the European Union, he compelled the electorate to vote again until it came up with the right answer.
Warm congratulations were immediately sent to President Chav by Fidel Castro's life-support machine - the twinkling-eyed Cuban mass-murderer has long been Hugo's idol and mentor. Elected dictatorship does not come cheap. Chavez spent a mind-boggling $12 billion on his referendum campaign which, with his control of most of the media, gave him a considerable advantage. The President has announced his modest ambition to rule until 2049, by which time he hopes to have developed a fully Marxist economy.
He is getting there: Venezuela is heading into stagflation, with GDP forecast to fall by up to 2.5 per cent this year, while inflation is expected to rise above 35 per cent. Venezuela had a growth rate of 10.3 per cent in 2005, which slumped to 4.9 per cent in 2008. In the last quarter of 2008 the economy grew by just 2 per cent, compared with 8.5 per cent in the corresponding quarter of 2007.
Venezuela's exports are 93 per cent oil-based, at a time of reduced world demand and falling prices. Chavez' more extravagant plans were bullishly predicated on an eventual oil price of close to $200 a barrel; today it is under $40. The OPEC output cut agreement reduces Venezuela's output by 12 per cent. The investment plan trumpeted by Chavez last June to stimulate the economy has failed. Now there is another in the pipeline.
Hugo Chavez, along with similar loonie-left demagogues such as Morales in Bolivia, represents the phenomenon characterised by Alvaro Vargas Llosa, the insightful Peruvian commentator, as "The return of the Latin-American idiot." The wilful self-delusion of the West in its bogus romanticisation of the sadistic murderer Che Guevara is more reprehensible than the illusions of impoverished Latin-American voters.
They are about to learn the hard way that Red rhetoric does not feed people, in the era of a troubled globalised economy, and that putting a disproportionate percentage of the population on the state payroll produces the same results as in the Soviet Union.