A generation ago, Jared Diamond argued in his bestselling book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies that the most important factor in explaining why one society flourishes and another deteriorates is the accident of geography. Natural resources and climate, not political culture or worldview, determine the success or failure of civilizations. For a great many learned people in Europe and North America, it was a seductive thesis. But the present state of two South American neighbors—Colombia and Venezuela—makes it awfully hard to take Diamond’s view seriously.
On Tuesday Colombia inaugurated a new president, Iván Duque, a young conservative who won office in June by promising pro-growth policies and vowing to take a tougher stance against gangs and drug cartels.
Duque has major challenges ahead of him. The chief division in Colombian politics remains that between the urban elites and the rural poor. Marxist-communist ideals still prevail among large numbers of the poor, and although the country’s two largest revolutionary groups—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the National Liberation Army, or ELN—have declined in strength, both continue to operate.
Duque’s predecessor, the center-left Juan Manuel Santos, persuaded the FARC to disarm in part by offering immunity or leniency for past crimes and guaranteeing the group seats in the Colombian congress—this despite the fact that the FARC’s leaders are responsible for innumerable murders and kidnappings. This agreement earned Santos a Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, but it was never popular with ordinary Colombians and now appears in danger of falling apart. Duque has promised to modify it substantially. The ELN, meanwhile, was never part of the agreement and fights on.
Resurgent drug cartels pose another problem for the incoming administration. The decline of the FARC has seen the coca industry rebound, along with the related cartels and gangs. Duque faces a problem to which there are few solutions that don’t involve armed conflict.
Real as these challenges are, though, they haven’t stopped Colombia’s economic progress. Foreign direct investment continues to increase; growth is at a respectable 3 percent; and unemployment, at around 9 percent, is manageable. Bogotá and Medellín, once crime-ridden, are economic boomtowns that are no less safe than similarly sized cities of North America.
President Duque sees economic growth not primarily as a means to fund more government programs, but as itself the key to alleviating Colombia’s political and social animosities. He’s right. Colombia’s greatest challenge is to include the nation’s rural poor majority in the next decade’s prosperity. Duque plans to deregulate the country’s agribusiness, coal, and oil industries; cut the country’s business taxes; and simplify the tax code. He believes in the rising tide.
Twenty years ago, Colombia was a failed state. Thanks to the remarkable efforts of Alvaro Uribe (president 2002-2010) and his successor Juan Manuel Santos, a country with limited natural resources is on the path to peace and prosperity. Venezuela, Colombia’s near neighbor, is blessed geographically with the world’s largest oil reserves and the eighth largest natural gas reserves. Yet a country rich in hydrocarbons is poor by every other measure.
The Venezuelan government no longer publishes economic figures because they would only acknowledge the truth that there is no economy. The country is in permanent recession. President Nicolás Maduro’s solution to inflation, which tops 110 percent every month, has been to remove five zeros from the country’s worthless currency—really. Nobody knows what the unemployment rate is, but most young men can only find a living by bartering or stealing. Bands of starving Venezuelans—people on what’s grimly termed the “Maduro diet”—roam the streets looking for shops to loot or trash cans to rummage.
Venezuela consistently has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Strikes and protests are commonplace—this week the nurses went on strike to protest the lack of medical supplies; next week it will be utility workers or miners. Maduro’s regime deals with protesters—pro-democracy protesters especially—by beating, imprisoning, or murdering them.
The causes of the Venezuelan catastrophe are wholly internal. Chavismo, the warped ideology of Maduro and his allies—named for its founder and Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez—is totalitarian in its aims and brutal in its means. The state dictates all and exists exclusively for the protection of its chavista rulers. Maduro controls the major institutions of government—the attorney general’s office, the election council, the court system, and a new lawmaking body called the constituent assembly, created by the president as a rubber stamp for his intentions. How easily does ordinary socialism—state ownership of the means of production—become the ruling party’s ownership of everything.
Oil is only one reason Maduro’s government hasn’t collapsed. The chavistas use the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, to buy off the military and other state officials. When the price of crude oil collapsed in 2014 and 2015, the government nearly did so, too, but it held on because the starved and dispirited Venezuelan populace lacked the will to overthrow it.
Which brings us to the August 4 assassination attempt. It seems to have been carried out with explosives strapped to a pair of small drones during a speech by the dictator. No one knows if it was a genuine assassination attempt, but the likelihood is that it was staged to supply a pretext for imprisoning Maduro’s enemies. He has openly blamed several people, including two opposition leaders, Juan Requesens and Julio Borges, each of whom now has another reason to fear for his life.
On August 8, U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley visited the Colombian town of Cúcuta, along the border with Venezuela, to announce $9 million in U.S. aid to help the thousands of starving Venezuelans fleeing westward in search of food and basic medical care. We wish the hip urban progressives of the United States, many of whom once touted Chavez-style statism, could be there, too, to witness what state control of the private sector has done to a once prosperous nation. Emaciated Venezuelans aren’t fleeing war. They’re not fleeing a country that lacks fertile topography and vast resources—Venezuela has both. Nor are they fleeing the devastation of a natural disaster. They’re fleeing socialism.
