I looked it up and he got 62.84% of the votes with an 85% voter turnout. What are you alluding too?
Up until '07-08 one could be pretty sure he (and the movement he heads) was winning fair for the circumstances (if at times because the opposition stupidly failed to show up) and even lost some constitutional-amendment referenda.
The last couple of years, however, his party has been reverting to more traditional LatinAm styles of “campaigning” (such as shutting down media outlets that attack him) and in the most recent local elections he made a public comment about “the tanks rolling” if opposition candidates who won state governorships tried to, well, oppose. That tends to make it, um, challenging to be a challenger.
This betrays an insecurity about his reforms’ ability to endure without the leader himself being personally in charge, which is usually a bad sign. That’s not necessarily a clue of nefarious intentions; the party may just recognize they don’t have anyone else charismatic and competent enough to hold it together – but it means that they’re stuck with someone who has always been a hyperbolic loose cannon. A popular hyperbolic lose cannon, though, the masses love that he socks it to the upper crusts (who earned well that scorn) and the Great Powers.
The economic-growth aspect (which in turn paid for the social improvements) was exclusively fueled by the upward trend in oil prices that peaked and reverted as the recession hit. Little or no diversification, which is not helped at all by a tendency to nationalize any succesful enterprise. Ever since the peak and plateau, he has been having to do some serious domestic retrenching, having committed to a lot of longterm programs under the premise that the oil money would flow abundantly forever.
(In fairness, just about any policy that would help the oil wealth actually better the lot of the underclasses would have been a huge deal for them, and it is a foul stain on the pre-Chavez political class that they failed to do something about that.)
That he can no longer keep pumping domestic improvements means that he gets to crank up the (always present and not entirely sprung from nowhere) talk of external threats to keep his followers excited and cohesive. But in this case it’s particularly ridiculous, since as mentioned the NA’s are not a suitable invasion staging base (that would be the island ***I’m ***sitting at right now, but we’d have to un-mothball the closed bases first and you don’t do that overnight – and the US military and intelligence already have the capability to do monitoring/surveillance from here anyway).
And even the most ignorant peasants in Venezuela are probably aware of all of that, the Caribbean being so close by. Who does he think he’s fooling?
Well, I don’t know. I always used Curacao as a base when I played Sid Meier’s Pirates!, and I did conquer Maracaibo for Holland a few times. 
People who believe what they want to believe. As is usually the case.
Given what the USA/CIA did seven years ago he’s probably feeling a little twitchy given the USA could do with a little success story, it has recent previous in these invasion/overthrow matters and there are currently 250 Air Force personnel on the islands, which are themselves within territorial waters.
Crazy guy, crazy ideas.
Yes, I suppose I should retract some of my original snark; he was indeed initially genuinely democratically elected. But…
This, combined with the (now successful) push to remove term limits and attempts to constitutionally broaden his powers.
I’m not saying he has no cause to dislike the US* et alia *but (in a reversal of the usual saying) just because people are out to get you doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid.
Y’know, communist dictatorships just ain’t what they used to be these days.
Netherlands Antilles has its own territorial waters. The line is the mid point. Venezuela has no claims to those islands.
I don’t think Chavez, given his own past coup attempt history, has any business being upset about being on the other end of a coup.
And on that same topic, I don’t think any evidence has ever been presented that the US had anything to do with the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela. I know that Chavez has claimed the US was involved, but anyone can say, proving is something else.
I should hope so! Go Netherlands!
Ahem.
For the record: our minister of the exterior has apparently asked for a “clarification of the unfounded accusations”. As far the Dutch government is concerned, the american presence on the Antilles is purely due to drug prevention. Why we would need the US for that, I don’t know, but that’s the official line, and I don’t see any reason to doubt it - given the the US seems to be the largest actor in the war on drugs in South America.
While you’re looking up stats why don’t you look up Saddam’s and then research how he dealt with opposition.
Kids, can you say “false equivalency”?
What an idiot. We can hit him from Texas.
Correct, Sadam compares more closely to Fidel Castro. Hugo Chavez today compares more closely to Batista, who first came to power in Cuba in a coup in 1993, but was later legitimately elected, only to later overthrow the Cuban government again.
Has anyone told Raul or Fidel?
Chavez is well on his way to making himself a dictator for life.
Plus the Netherlands is a member of NATO. If he attacked the Netherlands Antilles the USA would be obligated to go to war against Venezuela.
It looks like President Chavez (at the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark), made the remark “it still smells like sulfur”, referring to President Obama.
He must smell sulphur almost everywhere he goes. (Couldn’t we make it smell like methane for him and give him a break?)
You mean by farting in his (Chavez) general direction?
