A lot of these countries would be better off with more interference from the U.S. rather than less. They're a mess. Unfortunately, the problems are so deep seated in the very fabric of their societies that I don't know what will help at this stage. Any aid you give them gets stolen by their blood sucking upper classes. If you try to start a business there or you want to do trade, their hands are out for bribes and kick backs before your plane lands. Corruption has been endemic there since Cortez and Pizarro. All they ever wanted to do was steal anything that wasn't nailed down.
Any so called "reformer" or Socialist messiah winds up making things even worse because they too are corrupt, and in addition they don't have the faintest clue how to get these economies up and running. Communism/socialism may be the most destructive ideology ever to be imagined, perhaps worse than fascism.
How'd Chavez and Socialism work out for Venezuela?
Venezuela is falling apart:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/05/venezuela-is-falling-apart/481755/
Read it and weep. Shutting down a factory over toilet paper, or rioting because you want a two day work week. TWO DAYS! Yeah, you'll compete on world markets that way, for sure.
"
But why? It’s not that the country lacked money. Sitting atop the world’s largest reserves of oil at the tail end of a frenzied oil boom, the government led first by Chavez and, since 2013, by Maduro, received over a trillion dollars in oil revenues over the last 17 years. It faced virtually no institutional constraints on how to spend that unprecedented bonanza. It’s true that oil prices have since fallen—a risk many people foresaw, and one that the government made no provision for—but that can hardly explain what’s happened: Venezuela’s garish implosion began well before the price of oil plummeted. Back in 2014, when oil was still trading north of $100 per barrel, Venezuelans were already facing acute shortages of basic things like bread or toiletries.The real culprit is
chavismo, the ruling philosophy named for Chavez and carried forward by Maduro, and its truly breathtaking propensity for
mismanagement(the government plowed state money arbitrarily into foolish investments);
institutional destruction (as Chavez and then Maduro became more authoritarian and crippled the country’s democratic institutions);
nonsense policy-making (like price and currency controls); and plain
thievery (as corruption has proliferated among unaccountable officials and their friends and families)."
Or how about the poor Sandinistas, those heroes of the left? How'd they do? They did so well that tens and tens of thousands of Central Americans have illegally immigrated to the big, bad, U.S. Sometimes I think half of Central America has come to the northeast.
That's how well socialism has worked out in Latin America, and how well their managerial and government classes are managing things there. I'm absolutely underwhelmed with how well they're doing on their own.
Plus, a lot of these countries actually asked the U.S. to intervene in order to prevent Spain and Portugal from taking them over again. That's how much they appreciated the way they'd been governed. Compare that to the British colonies. Yes, in the case of the U.S. they fought for their independence, but the fundamentals established by the British were sound. As a Brit yourself, I presume, you should be proud of that, yes?
@Bicicleur,
That's all it ever is: excuses, excuses, excuses. They're sitting on top of all these natural resources and they have no clue what to do with them.
