NY Times

Web Link

Good riddance.

Analyst estimates Chávez’s family fortune at around $2 billion

Criminal Justice International Associates (CJIA), a risk assessment and global analysis firm in Miami, estimated in a recent report that the Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has “amassed a fortune” similar to that of the Castro brothers in Cuba.

According to Jerry Brewer, president of CJIA, “the personal fortune of the Castro brothers has been estimated at a combined value of around $2 billion.”

“The Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has amassed a fortune of a similar scale since the arrival of Chávez to the presidency in 1999,” said Brewer in an analysis published in their website.

Brewer said that Cuba is receiving about $5 billion per year from the Venezuelan treasury and in oil shipments and other resources.

“We believe that organized bolivarian criminal groups within the Chávez administration have subtracted around $100 billion out of the nearly $1 trillion in oil income made by PDVSA since 1999.”

CJIA....A Global Threat Mitigation Firm.

That's got to be on minds of all of us in San Mateo County.

Criminal Justice International Associates (of MIAMI, no less) is the source of "reliable" information on this topic? Excuse me? Sorry, nobody home, you're going to have to do better than that. And please keep in mind that not everything you read on the internet is reliable. Please.

Ok, I'll play.

Any of these sources more credible?

Web Link

Web Link

In case you've finished those and would like some more information:

Amnesty International 2012 report
Web Link

Freedom house 2013 report
Web Link

Washington Post
Web Link

Bye Bye

There ARE two sides, of course.

1. "Just to get it out of the way, I’ll state the obvious: with respect to many policies, Chavez was no saint. He, for instance, amassed a troubling record when it came to protecting human rights and basic democratic freedoms (though as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy notes, “Venezuela is recognized by many scholars to be more democratic than it was in the pre-Chávez era”)."

2. "...according to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved.
Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez’s brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its “extreme poverty” rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America.
Additionally, ... “college enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.”"

Web Link

He was democratically elected three times for a reason (and despite what Fox tells you, it wasn't voter fraud.)

He brought food, medicine and education to the worst slums in the world.

Oil can do that, of course. Now we'll see if it remains to help the citizens, or if the oligarchs take it back.