HRW is pretty ridiculous with regard to Chavez, not because there’s nothing to criticize, but because of the absurdly disproportionate way they have targeted Venezuela.

Even taking at face value all of their claims (which one shouldn’t), their main attack is:

“• Assault on Judicial Independence
• Assault on Press Freedoms
• Rejection of Human Rights Scrutiny
• Embracing Abusive Governments”

This kind of list hardly rises to placing Venezuela anywhere near the top of the list of human rights abusers, even in the Western hemisphere, let alone the world. Yet HRW has in the past written hysterical reports of hundreds of pages about Venezuela while devoting nowhere near as much time or energy to dozens of governments with far worse records. Some perspective is much needed. Chavez had no secret prisons, no torture centers, no indefinite detentions, no assassinations without due process, started no wars of aggression and killed nobody. Yet HRW somehow finds far less time to wring their hands about governments that do any and all of those things than about the far more grave human rights abuse of elected representatives constitutionally passing a law that changes the size and structure of the supreme court. Moreover, they ignore the clear advances in human rights under Chavez, such as regards articles 21-27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in particular.

There’s a reason why large majorities of Venezuelans repeatedly re-elected Chavez, and why democratic governments across the region from Equador, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, etc., have considered Venezuela and Chavez a great inspiration and ally. HRW’s selective and distorted version of Chavez’s “Legacy” - essentially indistinguishable from the talking points of the partisan Venezuelan opposition that the voters have repeatedly rejected - will not shed any light on the reasons.