I think both posts have valid points, but they both seem like caricatures of the two sides:
Venezuela had stop being an upwardly mobile society in the late 80's , and people became tired of
it. Then they elected the idiot Chavez , who has no real ideology, but calls himself a socialist.
But it also true that the measures of the IMF and World Bank are ridiculous and disingenuous:
these are measures that none of the now-developped countries had to go to in their beginnings.
SPONSORED BY:
The Bolivarian Brain Drain
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
SPONSORED BY
Though much has been made of how developing world migrants can mitigate underdevelopment by sending precious savings back home, remittances will not close the widening talent gap that is sapping societies of their ablest hands. "If a 20-something engineer or computer specialist leaves the country, who cares? But in ten years we'll be feeling the loss," says Rául Maestres, a human resources expert in Caracas, whose son and daughter recently left Venezuela -he to work at U.S. architecture firm, she to study advertising in Buenos Aires. "When you think about the opportunities we have lost, you could sit down and cry."
Still there may be a glimmer of revival. Ostracized at home and unwelcome abroad, expatriate communities are trying to turn distance into strength. Using the web, universities and the expatriate grapevine, foreign nationals from the populist countries are talking to each other and building ties with dissidents around the world. Back home opposition movements are making a stand, launching protest marches and candidates in a major city in each country--Guayaquil in Ecuador, Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia, Maracaibo in Venezuela. "We are putting together a web of exiles as a counterbalance to authoritarianism," says Coronel, who is tapping the diaspora for a gathering in Ecuador or Argentina in the next few months. "You could call it a kind of axis of freedom." That may sound optimistic given the stranglehold Chávez and his followers have on their countries. But given the growing numbers and brain power of Latin America's new dissidents, uniting their voices might just make a difference.
© 2009
Discuss