I only started paying attention to Hugo Chavez and Venezuela at the time of the 2002 coup. At the time, I was deeply engaged with the Canada Colombia Solidarity Campaign. Friends I was making were on the run, living underground, trying to work in a context of disappearances and massacres, assassinations and torture, in a country that was being reshaped by a massive military program called Plan Colombia. We believed at the time that Plan Colombia was not just about Colombia, but about the whole hemisphere and very specifically about Venezuela, its oil wealth, and its uncooperative government. But I didn't know much about that government or think much about it other than that it was up to Venezuelans to decide, and it seemed to me that they had decided.
In the 48 hours or so that the 2002 coup lasted, I interviewed some Venezuelan activists who had gone underground, and they gave me some readings (Richard Gott, Juli Buxton to start). I looked at the data. When Chavez was restored, I started following Venezuela closely. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised became my favourite documentary. And over the next 11 years, with two visits to Venezuela, I saw so much to admire. Everywhere I went in Venezuela, as I heard the language, saw the people, saw the physical landscape, I was reminded of Colombia. But the everyday paranoia and fear of the regime that I could feel in Colombia didn't exist in Venezuela. While Colombia was living through this nightmare of displacement and violence in its US-sponsored counterinsurgency, Chavez's Venezuela was actually making real progress for its people. That Colombian nightmare was always in the back of my mind whenever I heard about Venezuela, that if the US had their way, Venezuelans would be living that nightmare too.
The welfare and the democratization, the regional and international diplomacy, are all huge achievements, a tremendous legacy. But for many of these years I have thought of Chavez's legacy in terms of avoided losses. Thousands of people *not* massacred, millions *not* displaced, thousands *not* dying from preventable diseases, tens of thousands of opportunities for education *not* wasted, for fourteen years. Almost a generation.
Greg Grandin, in his article On The Legacy of Hugo Chavez, wrote something that I really felt: