Hugo Quotes - page 3
Yes. I also put in the book that I felt Hugo Chavez was the Robert Mugabe of our hemisphere. In other words, this is a case for – where leadership is destroying a country. Zimbabwe used to feed South Africa. Today it's a net importer of food because the rule of an incompetent government destroyed the economy of the country.
George W. Bush
Venezuela's illegitimate regime, one of the Western Hemisphere's most oppressive, presented the Trump Administration an opportunity. But it required steady determination on our part and consistent, all-out, unrelenting pressure. We failed to meet that standard. The President vacillated and wobbled, exacerbating internal Administration disagreements rather than resolving them, and repeatedly impeding our efforts to carry out a policy. We were never confident of success regarding the Venezuelan opposition's efforts to replace Nicholas Maduro, Hugo Chavez's heir. It was almost the opposite. Maduro's opponents acted in January 2019 because they felt this could be their last opportunity for freedom, after years of trying and failing. America responded because it was in our national interest to do so. It still is, and the struggle continues.
John R. Bolton
"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop. [...] We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.” - 22 August 2005, in a broadcast of his Christian Broadcasting Network's program, The 700 Club.
Pat Robertson
Want real socialism? Look at Venezuela, an oil-exporting nation that is now dead broke even as the family of its socialist dictator, Hugo Chavez, reportedly somehow inherited billions at his death in 2013. Redistribution of wealth often seems to involve redistributing most of it to the people on top of the socialist pyramid.
Glenn Reynolds
It is difficult to fathom the level of economic and social degradation occurring today in Venezuela under chavismo, the movement founded by the late leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez, who died of cancer three years ago. What began as a war against the "squalid” oligarchy in order to build what he called "21st-century socialism” - cheered on as he was by many leftists from abroad - has collapsed into an unprecedented heap of misery and conflict.
Unsurprisingly, Chávez was incapable of reinventing socialism as anything other than a prescription for abject failure. Ultimately, all he wound up bequeathing to his people is this century's longest national train wreck.
Hugo Chávez
In his State of the Union address on February 6, 2019, Donald Trump said: We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom-and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair. Trump's ridiculous comment was not considered controversial, because the Western media, including the anti-Trump outlets like the New York Times, have spent many years conveying a lie: that Venezuela had been very prosperous and democratic until Hugo Chávez, and then his successor Nicolás Maduro, came along and ruined everything. If readers believe that, then they may indeed wonder, "Why shouldn't the US government help Venezuelans return to that prosperous state?”.
Hugo Chávez