PDVSA spokesperson addresses The Yale Globalist (Vawter/TYG)

Bruni has spent years conducting research on Santa Barbara, a rural community that she said is in many ways typical of rural communities under Chávez. In recent years, Santa Barbara has seen its share of white elephants: a large outdoor music venue, a sports arena, and a baseball field have been built—but all remain largely unused. Meanwhile, an unfinished sewage system has left the town a “dust bowl” without running water.

This pattern of poorly-planned projects repeats itself across many of the villages Bruni has visited. One town was to experiment in ethanol production, but nobody received instruction on how to operate the equipment imported from Argentina. Another village had a few dozen computers, but no Internet access. “A lot of what the government does is give gifts. They have a donation budget which is really, really big,” she said. The government in fact often gives money to specific families to generate employment.

Though such “gifts” are rarely implemented effectively, the money put into these gift funds is supposed to serve as reparation for desperate poverty and the wealth gap in society, but some argue that it is spent mostly to curry political favor. Ramon Velasquez of El Nacionál, one of the most widely read newspapers in Venezuela, told the Globalist that Chávez is taking credit for the economic boom but failing to make intelligent long-term domestic policy decisions. “You’re always going to hear ‘Bush is a donkey, Bush is a donkey’ but never about crime,” he said. “Chávez is in a revolution and he is only thinking about Castro and Evo Morales and not crime and domestic issues.” He also lamented the difficulty in getting details, budgets, and data about the programs that do exist, as there is a complete lack of data on the success of the projects.

PDVSA’s Vierma disagreed with Velasquez. “There are some things that can’t be measured with numbers. I don’t like international organizations that come in and count male/female data,” doing massive surveys to evaluate certain programs. “We are starting to define our own parameters to measure how effective we are,” he assured. Whatever these may be, the lack of numerical data casts doubt onto the effectiveness of expensive social programs.

Daniel Aleman, owner of the newspaper El Carabobeño, explained how he sees Chávez’s hold on the electorate: the poor get more from Chávez’s handouts than they have ever gotten from the government before. “It’s like he says they’ll get a house. They know they might not get it. But they know they won’t get it from anyone else.” Marginal improvements are all that Chávez needs to find support.

A Mixed Verdict Among the Masses

One example of the marginal improvements that mark many of Chávez’s projects are companies that, under pressure from the government, reorganize as cooperatives. Cooperatives are small groups of people in the same trade who split costs and business and share their profits. They have existed in Venezuela for years. Since Chávez’s rise, though, their numbers have snowballed. When Chávez was elected, there were 762 operating cooperatives in Venezuela. Now, there are around 70,000. New contract laws that favor small cooperatives for government bids have allowed thousands of businesses to reformat their operations in the preferred cooperative format.