Populism in Latin America - A must read article!

Regular readers of my blog know that I love The Economist. My love affair with it is simply because their articles are not simplistic, they don't paint things as black and white, or as good or bad. In addition, they obviously do their research and leave the reader to make their own conclusion. In short they provide you with the various view points and information and allow the reader (you and I) to draw our own conclusions. Such journalism is hard to come by since most, if not all, is simply a soap box for the writer to express their view point while ignoring or distorting the side that they disagree with, or it is simply sound bits with no substance or little context on the events being reported.

Here is an excerpt from an article that puts into perspective populism in Latin America. I highly recommend reading the whole article:

"Populism is full of contradictions. It is above all anti-elitist, but creates new elites. It claims to favour ordinary people against oligarchs. But as Messrs Dornbusch and Edwards pointed out, “at the end of every populist experiment real wages are lower than they were at the beginning.” Populism brought mass politics to Latin America, but its relationship to democracy is ambivalent. Populists crusade against corruption, but often engender more."

Can this be any clearer or close to reality to what is going on in Venezuela?