Solidarity With The Venezuelan People

The Venezuelan people have, once more, taken to the streets to resist the authoritarian socialist regime of Nicolas Maduro. They shout, loud and clear, against the corrupt philosophy of Chavismo, that has choked out the free market and snuffed out the voices of a free people. It is at moments like these that I think of what Thomas Jefferson wrote down in the Declaration of Independence, on the right of subjugated persons to overthrow tyranny, “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object envinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Indeed, the long train of abuses have been most vicious. The Council On Foreign Relations records that while Venezuela, a petrostate, had suffered the misuse of oil from poor leadership since 1922, the current crisis can be stemmed directly from the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998. While the socialist policies of Chavismo came in response to real inequality in Venezuela, and by some measures, his “missions" did reduce poverty by 20 percent, they were a short-term gloss over Chavez’s long-term breakdown of the economy. Keith Johnson of Foreign Policy Magazine argues that the core of this breakdown was caused by Chavez’s careless misuse of Venezuela’s oil revenue to fund his social programs. This began with Chavez’s exertion of control over Venezuela’s primary state-owned oil and natural gas company, Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, an area in which he was exceedingly ignorant. Johnson quotes, Pedro Burelli, a former member of PDVSA who left when Chavez took over, “He was ignorant about everything to do with oil, everything to do with geology, engineering, the economics of oil. His was a completely encyclopedic ignorance.” Robert Rapier of Forbes further argues that the stage for disaster was set when Chavez decided to fire 19,000 employees of PDVSA in response to their protests, and replaced them with government loyalists, which, “eliminated a tremendous amount of experience from Venezuela’s oil industry.”

Regardless of their long-term consequences, the short-term reliefs of his socialist policies made Chavez popular enough, that, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, he gradually passed policies that turned Venezuela into a police state without little outcry from his supporters. These acts included: ending term limits, taking control of the Supreme Court, attacking the free press, and nationalizing hundreds of private businesses. That Chavez would go this route was obvious to the observant. As early as 2003, a year after Chavez had been elected into office, Amnesty International warned of the treatment of opposition figures, such as strike leader Carlos Fernandez, who “was arrested by armed police agents in a restaurant in Caracas on charges including ‘rebellion, treason, instigation to commit criminal acts, conspiracy and sabotage.’” Such basic disregards for human freedoms continued to the point, that, even some of his American supporters, like the linguist Noam Chomsky, had to admit that his expansion of executive power was an “assault on democracy.” One such brazen assault was the detainment of Judge Maria Loudres Afiuni, whom, according to The New York Times, was thrown in pre-trial detention for almost three years after ruling that a businessman had been held in prison too long before trial. Further yet, Afiuni was raped while in prison. Such was the authoritarian bullying of Chavez, who was, no doubt, an apt pupil of the anti-American despots he called friends: Fidel Castro (the head of a “revolutionary democracy”), Muammar Gaddafi (“a revolutionary and a martyr”), Robert Mugabe (“freedom fighter”), and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (“my brother”). By contrast, he referred to the democratically elected George W. Bush as “the devil.”

At time of Chavez’s death, Human Rights Watch decried his “authoritarian legacy”, noting that “By his second full term in office, the concentration of power and erosion of human rights protections had given the government free reign to intimidate, censor, and prosecute Venezuelans who criticized the president or thwarted his agenda.” Little did they, or anyone else, suspect, that things would become much, much worse. Under Chavez’s successor, Maduro, the situation imploded to the point of catastrophe. If one were to choose a year that marked this descent into madness, it would be 2014.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre led to Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement. The murder of Emmett Till strongly motivated the Civil Rights Movement. The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi sparked the Tunisian Revolution and the Arab Spring. Likewise, the murder of former Miss Venezuela Monica Spear and the attempted rape of an unknown woman at a San Cristobal University pushed Venezuela to the edge. To many of them, these terrible acts represented the soaring crime wave that the government was incompetent to stem. At a protest in Caracas calling on greater action, the actress Mariangel Ruiz, spoke for the frustrations of many when she said, “Enough of coming onto the street in fear of your life, enough of knowing that a neighbor was killed, that our cousin was killed.” Such violence, however, would prove just natural to the Palacio de Milaflores as it was to the streets. When the students of San Cristobal protested the attempted rape, the police responded by detaining and abusing many of them. This student protest soon spread across the nation, with Venezuelans of many stripes joining, and bringing with them their own greivances. As one student protestor said that the rape attempt was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

The Venezuelans have great reason to protest. Life has become intolerable. Rebellion is their right. Keith Johnson of Foreign Policy provided a nightmarish snapshot into the fruits of Maduro’s socialism:

“ Venezuela’s murder rate, meanwhile, now surpasses that of Honduras and El Salvador, which formerly had the world’s highest levels, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory. Blackouts are a near-daily occurrence, and many people live without running water. According to media reports, schoolchildren and oil workers have begun passing out from hunger, and sick Venezuelans have scoured veterinary offices for medicine. Malaria, measles, and diphtheria have returned with a vengeance, and the millions of Venezuelans fleeing the country — more than 4 million, according to the International Crisis Group — are spreading the diseases across the region, as well as straining resources and goodwill.”

Yet those who seek out the solutions to this crisis are often the ones who are most punished. Opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez was arrested during the 2014 protests, and charged with “arson and conspiracy.” One year later, Human Rights Watch verified claims from Lopez’s prosecutor, Franklin Nieves, that the evidence against Lopez was either “non-existent or fabricated.” His unjust imprisonment only worked to make him the most popular politician in Venezuela, as his favorability poll rose to 50% while Maduro’s dropped to 30%. Lopez’s wife, Lillian Tintori, became the Ensaf Haidar of Latin America, campaigning fiercely for his release and raising awareness of the issues he fought for. Tintori once defiantly wrote in The Washington Post that, “Government officials may have locked up his body, but they can’t lock up his mind, nor can it silence the millions of Venezuelans who yearn to be free.” After some years in house arrest, Lopez was apparently freed by dissenting members of the military in April of this year. According to Dany Bahar, a Venezuelan economist at the Brookings Institution, the circumstances of Lopez’s release, “really said something about the fact that there is a clear break in the military.” A glimmer of hope.

There are other ignoble acts to add to Maduro’s record. First is drug trafficking. Juan Carlos Sosa, a Venezuelan attorney, has called the reigning regime “the biggest drug cartel in the Western hemisphere” and accused the dictator of “using the entire Venezuelan state to operate as a drug cartel.” The “Narcosobrinos affair” revealed that this trafficking was very close to home, indeed, as Maduro’s nephews were caught in Florida trying to traffic 800 kilos of cocaine. Next is killing and torture. Amnesty International found this year that Maduro sent his national police into poor areas to carry out extrajudicial killings as “a method of social control.” Of course, these murders are carried just as much in the daylight as they are in the darkness. In April of this year, a video surfaced which showed an armed vehicle running over nonviolent protesters and assaulting others with water cannons. That’s not all. Venezuelan dissident, Villca Fernandez, was imprisoned at El Helicoide from 2016 to 2018, and he spoke of horrors reminiscent of Syria’s Sednaya or Iran’s Evin. He described seeing “electricity applied to prisoners on their testicles, on the ankles and behind the ears” and lacking sleep due to the “fears that one of the rats, which were so big they looked more like cats, would come up and bite you.” Of course, journalists who try to challenge Maduro on these things are silenced. Univision’s Jorge Ramos asked a few too many questions about political prisoners and Maduro had his team detained for a few hours. By far, among the most painful offenses, was watching Maduro eat enjoy steaks at the restaurant of the celebrity chef “Salt Bae.” It is often wrongly said that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but it can truthfully be said that Maduro feasted while his people starved.

I can already hear the reactionary cries of “coup" and “regime change” from the Left, with the usual context-free comparisons to Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, for good measure. These are the whines of a broken record, a secular variant of Ayatollah Khamenei’s depiction of America as “The Great Satan.” In this reverse American exceptionalism, all that is evil in the world revolves around America’s actions, and any government that stands against the will of Washington is merely misunderstood. Those who would dare to rise up against an anti-American or left-wing government are deprived of all agency. They must be paid off by the CIA, the unwitting pawns of American imperialism, native informants to the West.

It is the result of such myopic thinking that we see the perversity of leftists who downplay or defend some of the most intolerable abuses of state power in Latin America. CodePink, which calls itself a “peace movement”, will protest, not the tyranny of Maduro, but the American calls for his removal. The left-wing Democracy Now, to self-proclaimed voice of the people, will run softball interviews with Venezuela’s Foreign Minister. Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept will run pieces decrying U.S. intervention, but say little of the interventions already underway by Cuba and Russia. Stalinist cowards like Journalist Max Blumenthal and Filmmaker Boots Riley, will openly mock those starving in the streets of Venezuela as a means to whitewash dictatorship. Blumenthal starred in a Russian propaganda video juggling apples at a pre-selected Caracas market, while Riley tweeted about the suspicious manner in which malnourished Venezuelans eat from the trash. If any of these privileged apologists had suffered under Trump a quarter of what Venezuelans had suffered under Maduro, they would have torched the White House by now.

Yes, I am cognizant of the revolutions in France and Egypt that were hijacked by the self-serving tyrants like Maxmilien Robespierre and Abdul Fatah El-Sisi. The same course of events could very well happen here, but this hardly makes the Venezuelan cause any less just. In any case, such fears from Venezuela’s true president, Juan Guaido, are mostly unfounded. Given that Maduro only won through a fake election, Diego Zambrano of LawFare has argued that, “Juan Guaidó fulfilled his constitutional role as president of the National Assembly and assumed on an interim basis the presidency of Venezuela on Jan. 23.” Guaido did not circumvent the democratic process like Robespierre or El-Sisi, but took power by every letter of the law. Nor is he a radical ideologue. Guaido is a member of the social-democratic party Popular Will, whose manifesto calls for the state to give “universal access to health, education, and public services of quality.” Far from being a fascist, Guaido has been a member of Socialist International since 2014. Any “democratic socialist” who chooses Maduro over Guaido reveals to the public just how democratic they truly are.

I am also aware that the hypocrisy isn’t exclusive to the Left. Trump may publicly condemn the cruelty of Maduro, but he will also defend arms sales to Saudi Arabia’s Muhammad Bin Salman. Or take the appointment of Elliott Abrams to oversee democracy Venezuela, a man who played a central role in Reagan’s support for right-wing death squads in Latin America. There is no shortage of hypocrisy here. Yet one who decides their politics, not from independent thought, but in pure reaction to the positions of their opponents, has neither brain nor principle. If that is your ethic, keep it. I want no part. Is hypocrisy only to be answered with more hypocrisy? Leftists that protest the excesses of Trump but are mealy-mouthed on the tyranny of Maduro, are little more than self-serving scolds. They don’t care about Venezuela’s freedom. Only their own. These leftists just love to cosplay as Resistance fighters against Nazi Germany, but they’d just as likely be writing propaganda for Der Strumer. Their betrayal of Venezuela is a violation of the creed of Martin Luther King Jr, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

One has to commend the leadership of Republican Senator Marco Rubio in this area. The New York Times has said, “Perhaps no other individual outside Venezuela has been more critical in challenging President Nicolas Maduro.” His stance has been so strong, in fact, that a former Venezuelan military chief, Diosdado Cabello, has ordered his assassination. I may not agree with all of his positions, but he led on the issue when it counted, more so than some Democrats. Take Minnesota Senator Ilhan Omar, who blamed U.S. sanctions for leading to the crisis and smeared the democratic uprising as a “far-right opposition.” Thankfully, there are Democrats who think differently, like former Vice President Joe Biden, who said, “ The U.S. must stand with the National Assembly & Guaidó in their efforts to restore democracy through legitimate, internationally monitored elections.” Even so, we cannot wait on our leaders to be the men and women we want them to be.

As American citizens, we have a responsibility to stand up for the liberties of oppressed peoples everywhere. We must stand with the Venezuelan people and support their struggle however we can. As we celebrate our independence every Fourth of July, let us work until the day when we can celebrate everyone’s independence. No one is truly free until we all are free. America can only be first when democracy is first.

Si se puede.