In its December 11, 2017 issue, New Yorker magazine published an article
titled Nicolás
Maduro’s Accelerating Revolution. It is an extraordinary glimpse into the
workings and mind of the leaders of Venezuela’s dictatorial regime. In response
to misinterpretations and misinformation contained in the article, I wrote to
the magazine on December 14th the following essay, to which I have
not received a reply.
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While overall a good portrait of the
confusion, uncertainty and outright political chaos that has led Venezuela to
the condition of economic and social crisis it is in today, there are
foundational facts that should be taken into consideration when reporting
issues that are, to say the least, subject to interpretation.
It is easy to get fooled by a well-greased
propaganda machine, especially in a country where direct and indirect control
of information is overwhelmingly held by a government intent on concentrating
power. In 2015 an overwhelming majority
of Venezuelans rejected the official government candidates to the National
Assembly in one of the elections with the highest turnout in Venezuelan history,
if not the single highest one. The elected supermajority was quickly dealt with
by the regime, unconstitutionally stacking the supreme court with allies which
declared null the results in enough remote districts to 1) take away the
supermajority and 2) declare all proceedings of the National Assembly void on
account of swearing in the elected representatives from those districts. Since
2016 all significant laws passed by the Assembly have been struck down the
Supreme Court, eventually fueling the demonstrations of early 2017. When the New
Yorker article states the Assembly has “consistently foiled [Maduro’s]
initiatives” it is actually the other way around.
This is not inconsequential. The National
Assembly is the government body authorized to pass budgets and issue debt. The
regime has in fact disregarded this authority and worked around to negotiate
debt, using state controlled companies, such as PDVSA, to finance an
unsustainable economy. Furthermore, Russia has been able to circumvent some of
the US sanctions on its own companies and businesses by leveraging Venezuela’s
finances. Most glaring is putting up 49% of CITGO (based in the US but owned by
PDVSA) as collateral for a loan from Russia --effectively representing an
illegal Russian investment in a US company.
The regime’s propaganda machine
continuously touts cries of “economic warfare” to justify the poor state of the
economy and a sector of the population actually believes it, as it says in Mr.
Anderson’s essay. Over 80% of the economy depends directly on the government.
If there is economic warfare, it is the government that has undertaken it,
destroying productive and effective industry by direct means (expropriation)
and indirect ones (corruption breeding byzantine bureaucracies and exchange
rate tiers systems). In an appalling position, the regime will not allow
humanitarian aid as it claims it is not needed and it really is another weapon
in the “economic warfare” by the opposition. It has suggested that spies and
subversive foreign agents would infiltrate the country disguised as
humanitarian workers and that such aid is no only not need, but that it would
influence the people receiving it—a tactic it knows well, as it is what it does
with its own party-loyalty-based welfare distribution programs.
There are many points to be made regarding
statements reported as fact in this long essay, but I will only focus on two.
The first one relates to Chávez supposed hard turn to socialism and Cuba after
a period of ideological flexibility at the beginning of his presidency after
1998. In fact in 1994, shortly after charges against him were dropped and he
was released from prison for attempting to overthrow and assassinate President
Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992, he went to Havana invited and welcomed warmly by
Fidel Castro. At the University of Havana he gave a speech in which he touted
Cuba as the economic model to follow and claimed that all of Latin America
would someday be ruled by Bolivarian Socialism, rooted in a combination of hero
worship for Simón Bolívar mixed in with ideology from Sandino, Che, Mao,
Torrijos, Alvarado and others, as well as Venezuelan figures Simón Rodríguez
and Ezequiel Zamora. Among the affirmations in that speech was “…we said it in the Venezuelan army,
before we were rebellious soldiers, we said it in the classrooms of the
military schools of Venezuela: Cuba is a bastion of Latin-American dignity and
must be seen as such, as such it must be followed, and as such it must be fed.”
He clearly stated in 1994 that since his days in the army he was a believer in
the Cuban socialist model.
The second point to be made has to do
with the events of April 2002. The official story by the regime is that “the
fascist right” led a coup that ousted Chávez on April 11th,
supported by the State Department of the US. Shortly after, on April 13th,
Chávez was reinstated by loyal army forces and “the people.” The actual
unfolding of the events is different. After weeks of social unrest and civic
demonstrations a march was organized to which it is estimated 1 million people
showed up. Some of the marchers decided to go to the presidential palace.
President Chávez called upon his militias and the army to stop them. Militia snipers
shot and killed a dozen demonstrators and wounded many others. The army refused
to follow orders and did not shoot, rather they asked the president to resign
for having given that order (which is on tape) and the casualties by his
militias. He hand-wrote and signed the resignation, was arrested and whisked
away to a military base. There he negotiated his exile to Cuba, asking for
$7MM, but higher ups in the army wanted him tried for the events of the day. Meanwhile,
the ensuing power vacuum was chaotic and diverse opposition elements tried to
piece together a transition coalition with the purpose of calling elections to
be held within six months.
The hesitation, poor planning and worse execution of
this group in a frenzy allowed the loyalists to regroup and Chávez was put back
in power on the 13th by many of the same officers that had asked him
to resign. The general who flew him back to the presidential palace was later
arrested and is still in jail. The chief of police that allowed the protest march
was arrested for murder (of the demonstrators) and is still in jail.
The opposition is in disarray, no doubt. Its
overtures to Trump, to Rajoy, Rubio and others are of the same kind as the ones
to Mujica, Almagro and even former Chavista officials, and relate to the
“bedfellow” theory of politics which, in the current climate of Manichean
politics, may seem inconsistent. The opposition is not one block, and that is a
positive, as it demonstrates its democratic roots. The opposition includes the
ideological spectrum, from radical right wingers, to liberal (in the sense of
libertarian) to social democrats, christian democrats and, for the lack of a
better term, “social-chavistas.” The primary objective of this “gang that
cannot shoot strait” is free and fair elections where their different government
plans and economic and social agendas will be presented to the electorate to
choose. The objective is to oppose the de-facto one party rule imposed by the
Chavez-Maduro regime. But the repressive measures undertaken by the government
have been successful, jailing, nullifying or outright buying opponents and
weakening any conciliation initiative. Maduro’s reiterative “calls for peace”
and his claim to success in “what happened—peace”, is a call for effective
repression, the kind of peace prevalent under totalitarian dictatorship rule. At
the end of the essay Maduro asks the author: “…if I leave this chair, whom
shall we put in it? Who can be president?” That is not for him to decide. That
is what free and fair elections are for.
Carlos J. Rangel
Author, “La Venezuela imposible: Crónicas y
reflexiones sobre democracia y libertad.”
Note: this response was never printed by NYM
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