The big picture

Amazing how quickly foreign news gets relegated if has nothing ostensibly to do with the homeland when editors are too short-sighted to understand global dynamics.  At the top of the bulletin, we have the Foreign Secretaary's decision to send armoured cars and body armour to the Syrian rebels, after his ill-concealed irritation in Rome at America's hesitancy to the crisis.  Let's dig a little deeper into this pledge.  Most of these 'armoured cars' are probably obsolete Snatch Landrovers which were acknowledged to be death traps in Afghanistan (and much maligned compared to the American Bradley) and were replaced.  Although the Free Syrian Army is unlikely to have to contend with IEDs, these mothballed hand-me-downs raises questions about the quality of the body armour.

The big story which did headline on BBC radio last night at 10pm is the death of Hugo Chavez, yet it took until halfway into BBC One's 1pm bulletin before being mentioned.  Venzuela could be regarded as 'a faraway country of which we know little'.  Yet it is one of the biggest oil producers in the world and with the personality cult that Chavez created, there is a chance that it might be plunged into instability.  Oil being a fungible asset means that countries don't need to directly deal with an oil-producer to be affected by chaos in the country.  If Venzuela (whose industry was admittedly mismanaged) goes largely off-stream, oil prices will rise (if the rest of OPEC can't match the shortfall) and affect the global economy.
Although Chavez corralled and cowed political opposition in his country, as one book on semi-authoritariansim has it, he was a symptom, not a cuase, of the decline of democracy.  This is true of both his abortive coup attempt and his election success (of course, he would have not been able to run for office had he served his full jail term for the coup instead of being pardoned early by the then president).  Neo-liberal economic policies hollowed out pluralism by eviscertaing the middle classes.  In the 1960s, 30% of the population lived below the poverty line.  By the 1990s, this had flipped to a mirror image, with 70% of people below the poverty line, the neo-liberal tonic to solve the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s proving toxic.
The left-wing leaders around South America that also rose on throwing off the shackles of the Washington Consensus will mourn the loss of one of their foremost stalwarts, who, for all his faults, did reduce poverty in Venezuela.  Cuba will be expecially worried, given that Venezuela under Chavez was a belated post-Soviet saviour for its economy.  Raul Castro might have to speed up his reforms.