Please, No Excuses for Maduro

In the early days after the Russian revolution, leftists would visit the country in order to view this experiment in collectivist society. They would be welcomed, given the grand tour of appropriate Potemkin displays, be suitably impressed, and return exclaiming they had seen the future. They had seen a future all right, but it was a grim one, led by one of history's great monsters, not quite the utopia they had imagined.

Similarly, some on the left today seem to see the Maduro regime in Venezuela through Potemkin eyes. Maduro is no Stalin but he and his predecessor have nonetheless led his nation into a state of collapse.

Venezuela was run for decades by centrist parties that increasingly lost touch with voters and, despite the country's vast oil wealth, failed to create an equitable society. In 1992 an army lieutenant colonel, Hugo Chavez, attempted a military coup. It failed and Chavez went to jail but many Venezuelans saw him as a charismatic alternative to the ruling classes. Pardoned after two years, he returned to politics and won the presidency in 1998.

Initially, he showed promise as a democratic reformer, instituting neighbourhood councils and expanding access to basic necessities for the poor. Improving the lives of the poor was, however, only one of his ambitions. Exploiting the country's oil wealth, he sought to develop regional alliances, including with Cuba, to create a political and economic counter to the U.S. On his TV show he entertained for hours, boasting about his revolution, ranting against the business elites and the Americans, and announcing decrees. (He would have loved Twitter.) He also embarked on a binge of nationalization, seizing private businesses, factories and large commercial farms.

His reforms initially showed great promise. He directed a much higher percentage of oil revenue to housing, education, and health care for the poor and cut the poverty rate in half.

He exploited his resulting popularity to win every election for 15 years. When he died in 2013 his vice president, Nicholas Maduro, won the ensuing election to replace him as president. Things had already turned sour. The rot that had set in well before Chavez came to power—cronyism, corruption, excessive dependence on oil—had grown worse. When the oil price began to wobble in 2008, the army was put in charge of food distribution and chaos resulted: supermarkets emptied, people went hungry, and food ended up on the black market. Today, food supply is a military fiefdom. Management of the nationalized enterprises was incompetent, businesses failed, and abandoned farms and factories now litter the countryside. Price controls introduced by Chavez to make basic goods more affordable to the poor resulted in the local businesses producing them unable to make them profitably and merchants couldn't afford to import them.

Nor have Chavez's reforms lasted. Temporary improvements in poverty, literacy and income equality are now reversing. Crime has soared, starting at the top. Maduro and his generals are thought to be involved in the drug trade while the streets are plagued by gangs armed by the government and deputized as "defenders of the revolution."

Democracy has suffered along with the economy. When the opposition won a solid majority of congress in 2015, Maduro responded by refusing to recognize any of its decisions and then in effect created his own legislature. He held an election for a Constituent Assembly, which the opposition boycotted on constitutional grounds, that is officially tasked with rewriting the constitution but in practice functions as a parallel legislature with no checks on its power. During the 2018 presidential election, many candidates were barred from running and others were jailed or fled the country. As for media freedom, Reporters Without Borders ranks Venezuela 148th out of 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index and states "Maduro persists in trying to silence independent media outlets and keep news coverage under constant control." Venezuelans are now voting with their feet. An estimated four million have fled the country.

The initial optimism one might have had about Chavez creating a more compassionate, equitable society was soon challenged by his follies. His boasting about his accomplishments and ranting about his enemies. His attempt to establish a regional bloc like some latter-day Simon Bolivar. His Marxist flirtations despite the miserable failure of the Soviet example. His provocation of the United States, the world's most powerful nation. All of these were symptomatic of a strongman answering to his ego, not a democratic leader answering to the best interests of his people. Maduro was his logical heir. And now, as always, the people are paying a terrible price.