True. My wife’s friend from college married a Venezuelan (a professor) and it was never good. It is the kind of place where you need to hire a guard if you go away for the weekend, or else your apartment is sure to get broken into.
Both their kids are leaving - they’ve still got American citizenship.
Even when oil was good he didn’t get paid all the time, working for a public university. I’m sure it is worse now.
An update on the situation, the opposition party (to the Chavista regime) was soundly defeated in yesterday’s elections for a new National Assembly, 99 to 46, spin away Hugo.
The current president, Maduro, had pretty much threatened to lead an uprising if that were to happen:
[President Nicolás Maduro said on 31 October that he would govern in a “civilian military union” if the opposition wins the 6 December parliamentary election.
Maduro explained that in such a “hypothetical” and “unlikely” scenario, Venezuela would enter one of its “darkest times” with the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela: PSUV) “forced to defend the Revolution and entering a new phase”.](http://www.janes.com/article/55694/venezuelan-president-s-remarks-over-possible-government-defeat-in-parliamentary-election-increases-risks-of-government-instability-and-violence)
However from what he said after the results were announce either it was all empty bravado or he is pretending to be magnanimous for the moment… for certain values of magnanimity, the guy is already blaming the boogieman for everything.
Nice. Venezuelans really flushed the toilet on the socialists 
Perhaps he was serious about an uprising at first, and if the opposition had won something like a 52% majority he might have tried. But with a defeat as severe as this, his uprising would surely fail, and Maduro would wind up standing before a court trying to convince them to spare his life.
Senor Chavez was never a particularly strong supporter of the democratic side of democratic socialism, and neither is his successor. Squashing the political and media opposition Putin-style has seemed to be the main objective.
Umm… shouldn’t that be that the Chavista regime was defeated?
Privatize != normalize.
When I was in high school in the late 1970s, the swing choir went to a festival there! Most likely, it was in Caracas.
No way would they do that now.
Whooops… you are right, I mangled up the sentence.
It was the opposition that defeated the Chavista regime.
And I used to view Venezuela as the beauty capital of the world. 
And what about those horrible noisemakers imported from Italy? That’s right, I’m talking about the Venezuelan Verrazzano vuvuzelas.
That new Japanese probe is going to test how they sound on an alien world.
That’s right: They’re going to be Venusian Venezuelan Verrazzano vuvuzelas.
You don’t want to imagine what gynecologists do with them…
When hubby and I were still with the oil company, we were flown down to one of the oilfields at Lake Maracaibo. We were helicoptered in and landed on a helipad inside an armed compound where the oil workers stayed. We were not allowed off the property without a guard. What little we saw of the country from the helicopter looked beautiful, but I’ve had no urge to go back for a visit.
Honestly, this sums up my feeling about Jamaica, where the missus & had had our honeymoon. The resort was nice enough, but we were driven past mile after mile of Third World shanty towns to get there. The feeling of poverty was overwhelming, and I really don’t want to go back.
For what it’s worth, Venezuela has the fifth-highest HDI score in Latin America, just a couple of spots behind Trinidad (and in between Panama and Costa Rica).
They certainly have their problems- a lot more in the two years since Maduro took office, crime most importantly- but the premise of this question seems kind of ill-founded.
It’s probably this, in large part, and also that Maduro has in fact not been a very good leader. Most people still consider themselves Chavista, they just really don’t like his successor. People weren’t dissatisfied over nothing. If it was a situation like the failed 2007 referendum, and I’d been the president of Venezuela, I might have taken steps then to roll back democracy- that referendum only failed by two percentage points, after all, and the president was still very popular. This was a very different situation.
It’s probably this, in large part, and also that Maduro has in fact not been a very good leader. Most people still consider themselves Chavista, they just really don’t like his successor. People weren’t dissatisfied over nothing. If it was a situation like the failed 2007 referendum, and I’d been the president of Venezuela, I might have taken steps then to roll back democracy- that referendum only failed by two percentage points, after all, and the president was still very popular. This was a very different situation.