Was Hugo Chavez Truly Socialist?

The 21st century socialism is an idea that came over in 1996 and took relevance when the president elected for Venezuela in 1999, called Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias, started talking about it in a speech in 2005, referring to the way it would benefit the country and the way that it would improve the economy levels by that time. This variety of socialism grew up with foundation in Carl Marx theory but taking into consideration the changes that have gone through the world in the last century. The four main pillars of this ideology are developed based on the regional democratic development, the economy of equivalence, the participatory democracy and grassroots organizations. Moreover, the 21st century socialism opposes the law of supply and demand and it sustains that capitalism is an ideology that distorts the meaning of the economy in its nature. Nowadays it is inquisitive the way that this system took Venezuela to the worst economic and social situation that the country has passed through in almost a hundred years. However, as it was explained in the beginning, the person who released this ideology was the former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. While he was in office, there were many polemics unleashed in terms of democracy and his speech against capitalism because of the richness that his family professed and the exclusion of much Venezuelans that were against him. Now realizing that his speech and his actions were not sufficiently consistent with his lifestyle, Was Hugo Chavez a truly socialist? …show more content…
“Structural fractures, crises, the state and the emergence of Chavez”, Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution: Populism and democracy in a globalized age. New York: Manchester University Press, 2009. 31-52.