Life isn’t much fun these days in the world’s socialist paradise. If you had to choose a country you didn’t want to live in, Venezuela would be near the top of the list. Corrupt, dysfunctional, bankrupt, crime-ridden, drug-infested, short of practically every basic commodity, it can’t keep the lights on, keep the government running or brew its own beer. Last weekend six army officers were arrested for stealing goats from a farm because they were hungry.
Venezuela has become the basket case of the western hemisphere, a case study on how not to run a country and a living example of what happens when a left-wing government is let loose with utopian economics. The cruel irony is that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — 298 billion barrels —the raw material on which to build a pleasant and prosperous nation. Yet it recently began importing oil from the U.S., a country it has spent a decade deriding as a mortal enemy.
It’s a bitter fate for those who must endure it, but a telling one for anybody tempted to embrace the illusory idealism of left-wing economic theory. Seventeen years ago Hugo Chavez came to power armed with vast oil resources and a populist program based on redistribution of wealth from the richest to the poorest.
Chavez died three years ago, having brought the country to the brink of collapse while steadily increasing his own dictatorial powers. The self-proclaimed defender of the masses, a student of Karl Marx and admirer of Fidel Castro (and personal favourite of Naomi Klein), Chavez ended up an ally of Iraq, Iran and Libya and an implacable foe of the U.S., which he accused of backing a coup aimed at removing him from office.
While the country skidded towards penury, his daughter, Maria Gabriela, amassed a fortune valued at $4.2 billion, safely spirited away in foreign banks.
During his years in power he was championed by people like Klein on the radical left for his proclaimed attachment to the poor and disadvantaged. But his government’s economic schemes only managed to empty the treasury while frightening away foreign firms and drying up investment. He seized assets without compensation, nationalized foreign firms, and set off an exodus of scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs and others, who took their drive, education and skills with them. He fired 19,000 people from the national oil company, even though oil exports produced 95% of foreign earnings. Chavez used the money to subsidize everything from schools to health clinics to gasoline, which was great while it lasted, but when revenue from oil exports began to dry up Chavez’s successors were forced into draconian cuts to supplies and services that become harsher by the week.
Now the country is among the most violent and crime-ridden in the world. Shopping malls, grocery stores and food trucks are targets of mass looting attacks. Four-hour blackouts are a daily occurrence, and the government recently put public employees on a two-day work week to save energy. (Electrical, not theirs). Schools operate on a four-day week. Many people use the empty days to stand in line for food. A fingerprint system is employed to enforce rationing. Diapers, car parts and medicine are scarce, the biggest beer company announced it will shut down for lack of foreign exchange to buy imported barley, and inflation is so out-of-control the government can’t afford the cost of repeatedly printing up new bills.
Venezuelans are understandably tired of the socialist miracle. In a December election, the ruling party lost control of the legislative assembly for the first time since 1999. A petition to force the recall of President Nicolas Maduro has garnered almost two million signatures, more than nine times the required number. The signatures are to be validated and a ruling on whether the refendum can proceed is due next week. But Maduro is unlikely to go easily, and the government already claims efforts to oust it are part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. If the referendum isn’t held by the end of this year, power would shift to Maduro’s vice-president.
Appalled by the level of the crisis, Pope Francis recently wrote a personal letter to Maduro lamenting the impact on Venezuela’s 30 million people. Contents of the letter were not disclosed, but prayer may be all the hope left for a country that was supposed to be saved by socialism.
