By Matthew Boomer
Friday, August 11, 2017
Venezuela’s self-destruction has embarrassed
more celebrities than has National
Enquirer. Our glitterati’s favorite socialist paradise has, like so many
similar experiments, become a murderous den of oppression and privation, and
none will speak on its behalf. However, Venezuela’s collapse has dashed
fantasies far older and more sincere than Sean Penn’s.
Hugo Chávez’s election in Venezuela realized a dream that
festered in left-wing hearts for decades: a revolutionary socialist regime,
with the sovereignty and resources to fulfill decades’ worth of pledges from
left-wing populist leaders in Latin America. During the Cold War, dictators who
gained and maintained power through coup d’état and state terror, often abetted
by the U.S. government, frequently thwarted such movements. The depth of evil
these dictators reached and the misery they created are not to be understated.
They undermined the case for capitalism and American power as positive forces
in the world, giving defenders of socialism the world over something to point
at and say, “But what about…?”
Men like Chávez were cast as the antidote. His triumph
was a rebuke not only of Venezuela’s own ancien
régime, but also of Pinochet, Rios Montt, and the rest of the Latin
American tinpot rogues’ gallery. He was to avenge the sufferings of Oscar
Romero and Rigoberta Menchú, fulfill the stolen potential of Jacobo Árbenz and
Salvador Allende, and improve on the flawed, illiberal experiments of Fidel
Castro and the Sandinistas. The constraints on civil liberties that undergirded
his power were necessary evils to ward off the authoritarian specter.
We were told Central and South American nations would
never choose to adopt free markets to the same extent as their individualistic
northern counterpart. With communitarian traditions rooted in its Catholicism
and indigenous heritage, Latin America would embrace democratic socialism. I
remember sitting in college classes and learning about how Chávez and similar,
though less violent populists such as Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Bolivia’s Evo
Morales, and Brazil’s Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff were forging hope by
harnessing popular energy into governments that would direct economies toward
social justice.
It Wasn’t Supposed
to Turn Out This Way
Fissures are forming for each of these regimes. Morales,
in defiance of the constitution and a popular referendum, is moving to abrogate
term limits for his office; Correa’s successors are locked in a battle over
corruption that has left the government in chaos; da Silva is entering his
sixth corruption trial; and Rousseff has been impeached. But it is Venezuela,
the nation Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro have led into fire and ruin,
which fully captures just how fatal are the conceits of democratic socialism in
Latin America.
The terror and repression Chavismo swore to deposit in the dustbin of history have reemerged
in its defense, with hit squads intimidating and massacring dissidents while
Maduro swats down checks on his power. The equality it promised exists only in
the cruelest of terms: equality of want, equality of desperation, equality of
misery. A country endowed with bountiful resources has spent and collectivized
its way into such abject poverty that it cannot provide its people with food
and toilet paper.
Chávez’s personal legacy retains some of its man-of-the-people
sheen in some circles, since his Bolivarian regime reached its tipping point
under his less inspiring successor and his erstwhile defenders are still ready
to make
idiots of themselves for him. Nevertheless, his country’s collapse is the
fruit of the state-led development path he set out on.
Endowed with massive oil reserves, Venezuela had
periodically suffered from Dutch
disease since it nationalized petroleum production in the 1970s, with its
state-run enterprises engaging in corruption on a massive scale and becoming
symbols of injustice as other sectors crumbled around them. Chávez promised to
direct these companies’ profits toward social and political revolution, funding
public works and alleviating poverty. He would be the anti-Pinochet, ending
Venezuela’s existence as a fount of resources for the West and directing its
economy toward the common good.
It Seems Power
Does Corrupt After All
Hugo Chávez, however, proved himself far less interested
in the collective than in Hugo Chávez. His management of the oil industry
quickly became geared toward preserving his power, as he dismissed vital and
experienced workers for political reasons and diverted resources away from
innovation to fund image-burnishing social programs. At the height of oil price
spikes in the mid-to-late 2000s, this worked for Chávez, and even as his
governing style became more and more oppressive his sympathizers saw him as a
hero. The curtain started pulling back when oil prices fell, and now
bureaucratic mismanagement has run the Venezuelan oil industry into the ground,
and the dependence they fostered has brought the entire economy down with it.
Today, the government that swore to empower its people
tortures artists and activists. Quality of life evaporates as mortality rates
rise, jobs disappear, and basic utilities like power and water become
unavailable. Initiatives to provide everyday necessities for poor neighbors get
people jailed for hoarding. Basic governance becomes impossible as a carousel
of suspected rivals—most recently attorney general Luisa Ortega, who was
removed last weekend—are purged, leaving Maduro a gaggle of sycophants for him
to fiddle with as the country burns.
For advocates of freer markets and smaller governments,
this failure was predictable: even an economic culture with communitarian
impulses is more likely to flourish within a framework of liberty, and there is
no man or group of men smart enough to build a healthy economy on the
management of a single resource. Despite this, Venezuela’s death spiral has
blindsided the Left and, tragically, its own people, who were sold one of the
oldest lies in history: hand awesome power to one man and he will in turn
empower all.
A funny thing about that man Pinochet: while his
terroristic rule earned him a much-deserved reputation as a monster, the
free-market policies he implemented became the undoing of his tyranny. Chile
became wealthy enough for its people to organize a political opposition that
ousted him, and it has since become a stable, functioning democracy.
Capitalism helped Chile go from a poor dictatorship to a
prosperous democracy; socialism has turned Venezuela from a prosperous
democracy to a poor dictatorship. Democratic socialism in Venezuela, and
throughout Latin America, promised to bring an end to oppression and poverty,
but now the falseness of that promise has been laid bare for the world to see.
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