I visited Venezuela in February of 2020, and saw what two decades of institutional destruction can achieve. I wrote about it at the time: the article was Venezuela is the Eerie Endgame of Modern Politics (and that’s a gift link). It was a haunting, strange visit. Caracas is a once-beautiful city that is now pockmarked by empty office buildings and scarred by neglect. People kept telling me not just about the destruction wrought by bad economic ideas, but also by bad political ideas. Here is an excerpt from my article:
Despite the clear historical echoes, the cause of the crisis in Venezuela is not merely the familiar, fanatical application of Marxist theory. If some elements of recent Venezuelan history sound amazingly like a replay of Soviet history, other elements strongly resemble the more recent histories of Russia, Turkey, and other illiberal nationalist regimes whose leaders slowly chipped away at civil rights, rule of law, democratic norms, and independent courts, eventually turning their democracies into kleptocracies. This process also took place in Venezuela. Like the destruction of the economy, the destruction of the political culture took some time, because there were several decades’ worth of democratic institutions to destroy.
From having once been a democracy, and the most prosperous country in South America, Venezuela has been reduced to the status of the poorest. Venezuela has produced more refugees than Ukraine, and has food and fuel shortages, despite being an oil producer. So many people have tried to change the state. But violence and bribery, plus the support of the world’s autocrats - a major theme of my new book, Autocracy Inc - has helped the regime stay in power: Since 2008, the U.S. Canada, the EU, and many of Venezuela’s South American neighbors have increased sanctions on the country. And yet Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans as well as oil investment from Russia. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers and security technology to the country’s rulers. The Venezuelan regime uses apps and online surveillance technology purchased from China to monitor the public. The international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime well supplied with designer shoes and handbags.
This week, the country suddenly has a new opportunity. The democratic opposition, now well organized and unified, has just won an election. Maduro is once again trying to steal it, but there is reason for optimism. Leopoldo López, one of the leaders of the opposition, now in exile after seven years in prison and house arrest, was in Washington this week and I had the chance to speak to him. I wrote about that too. Here is an excerpt from that article, Venezuela's Dictator Can't Even Lie Well, followed, again, by a gift link to the whole thing. As we were speaking, Leopoldo López’s telephone kept buzzing. The national director of his political movement, Voluntad Popular, had just been arrested in Caracas. López had spoken to Freddy Superlano earlier in the morning. “I know they are coming for me, but I’m not scared,” Superlano had told him. Well, López had responded, “prison is not the end of the world.” López knows about Venezuelan prisons because he spent more than three years in them; three years of house arrest followed. The charges were trumped up. His real crime was first to be elected mayor of Chacao, a part of Caracas; then to become one of Venezuela’s most popular opposition leaders; then to be a leader of mass protests. He finally escaped the country in 2020 and now lives mostly in Spain. But he was in Washington yesterday, two days after Sunday’s dramatic Venezuelan presidential election, and we had a chance to speak. The conversation took place at an extraordinary, almost giddy moment. In the hours after the polls closed, much of the international media had refrained from stating the obvious. “BREAKING,” the Associated Press tweeted on Monday: “Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is declared the winner in the presidential election amid opposition claims of irregularities.” But by yesterday morning, it was absolutely clear that the election was not merely irregular or tainted or disputed—the election had been stolen. The reaction was immediate. Not just marches, not just protests, but assaults on the symbols of the regime, including monuments to Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. “All throughout the country,” López said, “people are tearing down the statues of Chávez. And it’s not just the fact that they are tearing down the statues, it’s the way in which they’re tearing them down—like after the fall of the communist regimes in 1989, we are seeing massive emotional engagement with this. I cannot tell you if it’s going to be days or weeks, but I believe that we are witnessing the end of the dictatorship.”
This is a real change. Also, from Venezuela's Dictator Can't Even Lie Well: The sudden sense of hope, possibility, and optimism that López radiated amid all this is difficult to capture in words. We in the democratic world take regular, orderly political change for granted. In Venezuela, millions of people have worked for years to get to this point, just to experience a moment when change might be possible. López first ran for office in 2000. Machado was a candidate for president the first time back in 2012. Since then, the destruction of the Venezuelan economy has accelerated; the mass exodus of Venezuelans has increased; the hopelessness and cynicism have deepened. Just a tiny shaft of light is enough to cheer even people who gave up long ago.
https://substack.com/redirect/54d74136-e9e2-4f93-833b-71846985babb?j=eyJ1IjoiOG1hOTIifQ.cIj3zdxxgLAE0Kc2Pv6DJk4AEqMTg7YdnfnuGKbdL0Y
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