The once-great nation of Venezuela hardly looks like a state anymore, far less a great one. This week government forces finally caught up with Oscar Pérez—the former action-movie star and police officer who led a ragtag band of pro-democracy protesters. He and six of his confederates were killed in an apartment outside Caracas on January 15. The news shocked Venezuelans and discouraged the country’s democratic friends in both hemispheres. Pérez had used his Instagram account and a helicopter bearing pro-democracy banners to urge Venezuelans to retake their government. Venezuelans cheered his exploits but mostly didn’t heed his call to action.
It’s a metaphor for Venezuela’s opposition. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
Nicolás Maduro, the protégé and heir of Hugo Chávez, has accomplished the remarkable feat of making Venezuela more unlivable than it was under his predecessor. Vast numbers of its working-aged citizens are unemployed, inflation may soon reach 13,000 percent, starvation is rampant, and hospitals have neither medicine nor equipment to treat the diseased and dying. Across the country, bands of starving looters are apt to attack anyone or anything that looks like it might have food or money.
In the 18 years of its existence, the “Bolivarian” government of Venezuela has destroyed the country’s economy and crushed its people’s voices. Perhaps only a fifth of the country supports Maduro, but he and his Stalinist supporters face little opposition. These Chavistas, defenders of the Chávez-Maduro movement known as “Chavismo,” control the courts, the central bank, the state oil company, and what passes for a legislative body—a constituent assembly newly created by Maduro and packed with his loyalists. Mayors and other officials are either unblinkingly loyal or replaced. Vocal critics are hounded into silence, imprisoned, or murdered.
Venezuela stands as the greatest contemporary reminder of a lesson often forgotten in liberal democracies: that socialism ruins whatever it touches and requires a police state to protect its powerbrokers. Many young progressives think they see socialism in Europe, but what they see are welfare states financed by market economies. The Chavistas’ “socialism” is the real thing: The state owns and runs everything. Chavismo would have collapsed long ago if it weren’t for the intermittent influxes of oil money that strengthen the regime sufficiently to buy off the opposition and brutalize any dissidents.
The regime holds elections, but not for the purpose of discerning the people’s will. It holds elections in order to give the well-meaning naïfs of the U.N. and other transnational bodies the impression that Venezuela is still a democracy—a democracy in the throes of an authoritarian fever, perhaps, but still a democracy. It’s a calculated lie. The Chavistas manipulate the country’s election system for their own purposes. Stuffing the ballot box is commonplace. Voters in areas where support for the opposition is strongest are told their voting stations are 15 or 20 miles away.
The Maduro government is what Raúl Gallegos, contemporary Venezuela’s most insightful chronicler, calls a “deniable dictatorship.” Like many another totalitarian regime, it wants the benefits of being thought of as a democracy—prestige, alliances with powerful and wealthy nations, foreign investment—but also wants total control of the apparatus of the state. The Chavistas do not view the two as incompatible. The one is simply a means to the other—a simple but highly effective form of duplicity best described by Leszek Kolakowski, the great historian of Marxism, in his 1978 essay “Genocide and Ideology.”
So, much Western policymaking is premised on the mistaken belief that the Chavistas actually want to abide by democratic norms and would bring about democratic reforms if only they could. Hence the recent suggestion from regional and European foreign policy mavens that the United States should offer to lift economic sanctions if the country restores the democratically elected national assembly (the one Maduro dismissed last summer) or if the government formulates a new nonpartisan electoral council. The Maduro government might consider making these or similar changes, but only to buy time until the next power-grab.
What is to be done?
In 2017, President Trump signed an executive order barring U.S. banks from financing new Venezuelan debt, and the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the E.U. have sanctioned an assortment of government officials accused of human-rights abuses. These are defensible policies, but they may do nothing to loosen Maduro’s hold. The country is already a nightmare and the opposition, such as it is, fractured and lethargic. As long as he can finance his police state with oil revenues, Maduro will stay in power.
A few high-level politicians—Florida senator Bill Nelson, Argentina’s president Mauricio Macri—have proposed an outright embargo on U.S. imports of Venezuelan oil. That would destroy what’s left of Venezuela’s economy and very likely hasten Maduro’s fall. But it would wreak some havoc on the U.S. economy, too. Louisiana and Texas are home to Venezuela-connected refineries; the U.S. government would in effect be shutting down domestic companies and raising the price of gas in order to topple a foreign dictator.
In August, President Trump spoke mysteriously of a “military option” to stop the Maduro regime and restore democracy. But if the administration isn’t even talking about sanctioning Venezuela’s oil exports, it certainly isn’t considering regime change. Venezuela has a capable army; the risks of a military intervention would be far greater than those of overthrowing, say, Manuel Noriega in 1989.
The reality is that the Chavistas must be deprived of their oil. Otherwise Maduro stays, and Venezuela’s nightmare continues. If the Trump administration wants to rid the Americas of their most odious regime, it will have to embargo Venezuelan oil. Announce the decision six months in advance: Maduro and his cronies step down peacefully or the U.S. deprives them of their only real source of money. In the meantime, strengthen the opposition with clandestine funding and overt encouragement.
Whether a professedly but inconsistently nationalist U.S. administration has the will to face down this neighborhood tormentor is anybody’s guess. If it does, the oppressed around the world will watch and learn.
