As someone who lived in Venezuela during Chavez's regime things were anything but "Kosher" and "Happy".
These are EVIL individuals who only want to make themselves rich at the expense of an entire nation.
Maduro is barely holding on to power. Maduro would desperately want the Chavez era.
Point being: Maduro is not creating this crises opportunistically, he's and idiot, and doesn't know how to manage things after the oil crash.
The problem with socialism the way I see it is that at some point there will always be a guy who wants to concentrate all the power to himself, like Chavez, Fidel, Mao, Stalin, etc. and then leave a big mess behind after they leave or after they have been in power for several years.
I am absolutely sure that Maduro, while incompetent, is in the same kind of problems Chavez would be, and is pushing the same agenda Chavez would have. Let's not get confused by personality cult here.
If you lived in Venezuela right around the time when Chavez died, you would remember vividly how you were able to access those Cadivi dollars, no matter how bad and annoying the system was with the three/four stupid folders they made you fill. Importers could buy stuff with their black market dollars and then replenish their stash when Cadivi finally payed them. As soon as Maduro took power he dismantled Cadivi and it has been next to impossible to get dollars at the official exchange rate. In my opinion that is the root of all problems, and yes, I do believe that under Chavez that would not have happened even if he was foolish enough to establish that exchange control for so long in the first place.
Hell, think about it, if tomorrow they really start offering dollars at whatever conversion rate, let's say 2000 but coming from the Central Bank, I can bet you everything I have this whole problem goes away immediately. There is an inherent quality at just being able to go to your bank to exchange currency instead of exchanging on a pool of people you know.
The thing with free rides is that, no matter how high or 'great' they sound on paper, they eventually end, and you see the real problems.
> "Importers could buy stuff with their black market dollars and then replenish their stash when Cadivi finally payed them."
Sounds just great. A 'great' working economy, working around arbitrage and fantasies. I don't need to have 'political biases' to see that Chavez, whose agenda crippled the entire private sector and killed every other possibility of economic growth that didn't depend on oil, would be in exactly the same position as Maduro.
But yes, we both agree that the person that started this whole craziness was Chavez. But I still disagree with you regarding what Chavez, or any other politician for that matter would have done in his shoes. I believe Maduro's main flaw is this attitude of not doing anything while the whole structure is crumbling. In my life, I have never seen any other politician like him unless we are talking about some of these government secretaries that end up being governors or mayors when the actual elected person starts slacking for whatever reason.
95% of the issue is oil prices.
Chavez would be strung up just as bad as Maduro right now if he were not already dead.
The 'free money' stopped flowing, and the system fell apart.
At the current prices, countries like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela can still turn a profit on their production, as opposed to the UK with their deposits on the North Sea or the US/Canada with shale oil.
But of course, there is always the question of who created Maduro, and Chavez is fully responsible for that disaster.
Chavez was able to paper over his incompetence.
Maduro can't.
So the plebes revolt.