Hugo Chávez was the first Venezuelan leader to embrace his Afro-indigenous heritage,
telling an interviewer, “Hate against me has a lot to do with racism. Because of my big mouth, because of my curly hair. And I’m so proud to have this mouth and this hair, because it’s African.
In 1998, Mr. Chavez swept to electoral victory by attacking Venezuela's ''rotten''
white elites, calling himself ''the Indian from Barinas’’ And Many families with a past mired
in poverty saw their fortunes improve during the years between 1958 & the earliest of the Chavez years!
Venezuela's problems are part of a much larger global phenomenon -- pervasive outside
the West yet almost never acknowledged -- of market-dominant
minorities: ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under
market conditions to dominate economically the indigenous majorities around
them. (Chinese in Indonesia, whites in Zimbabwe and Indians in Kenya are other examples.)
The 'destruction of prosperous societies' that I am aware of like those in Venezuela for one
were definitely not caused by what some call 'white supremacy' those prosperous societies were actually created by white authoritarians and were destroyed by an ill equipped non-white majority under new democracies who now after the damage was done some would take back their votes if they could in these states where democracy failed.
In multi-ethnic societies Democracy becomes a toxic cocktail!