He is an authoritarien and the country went to shit. Venezuela is not a nice place to live in. Maduro is a corrupt dictator, trump aswell and the current opposition to maduro most likely will just be an authoritarian and fascist pupped goverment that will act in the USAs interest. So yeah multible things can be true at once, just because a nation is opposed to the american empire does not mean that it is automaticallly good. Its quite sad to see that some terminally online leftist just automaticly replace siding with the imperialist systems that there born into( USA, EU Australia etc.) And just replace that with other imperial powers like russia and china. Like why?? How about not bootlicking authoritarians?

The country went to shit before Chavez died as a result of many backing away from trade as a result of US demands as well as a slew of bad policy choices that turned them from a food exporting nation to one that imported food which collapsed the economy. Chavez and Maduro instituted price controls which have harmed the agricultural economy significantly which further harmed things. That being said while their results were bad their intentions were good which is not going to be true of whatever puppet government the USA would install.

The results are usually bad when you don’t kowtow to the imperial core, but they’re also likely to be even worse for the majority of people if you do. That’s why monopoly capitalism has to be fought, if we ever want better outcomes to even be possible.

The fact is price controls are terrible policy and have never worked because we cannot predict the future needs of the market. Unless we magically get vastly better AI that runs the entire economy it is unlikely price controls will ever work so when Chavez instituted them it lead to a collapse of the agriculture sector leading to hunger issues. Some of the economic problems were self created because many leftists have zero formal economic backgrounds and thus have trouble separating reasons for factual historical failures of specific leftist policies, like price controls or rent control being extremely problematic historically speaking, vs what is merely capitalist propaganda eg “capitalism is the only system that works” which isn’t true historically speaking.