Carine Hajjar devotes her Washington Post column today to an attempt to set the record straight for young Americans about the situation in Venezuela:
One of my first memories of celebrating New Year’s was in Caracas, Venezuela, on a family visit. That trip is a flicker of scenes, as most early memories are. A packed church, a grove of fruit trees, a busy city with mountains in the background, impossible-looking birds with rainbow feathers.
The Venezuela I perceived was one of abundance, even without knowing I was standing on top of the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Oil production at that time was well over 2.5 million barrels a day, and poverty was falling as the popular president Hugo Chávez distributed profits from the nationalized energy industry to the poor.
The short version is that the political-economic model initiated under Chávez, heavily reliant on oil revenues, lacking institutional checks and balances, and prone to rent-seeking, proved unsustainable and collapsed into economic and political crises that have left Venezuela among the most impoverished nations in the region.
Here’s what happened in Venezuela:
- Hugo Chavez was elected freely by Venezuelans in the hope that he would redistribute Venezuela’s oil wealth from oil companies and rich Venezuelans to the poor.
- He did for a while.
- He also redistributed Venezuela’s oil wealth lavishly to himself, his family, and his cronies.
- Elections became less free and fair over time, with democratic backsliding intensifying under Maduro, contributing to international responses including sanctions.
- Institutional design failures and policy choices by Venezuelan leaders were the primary drivers of the collapse and Venezuelans chose that.
Economic sanctions were imposed in response to institutional collapse, corruption, and democratic backsliding in Venezuela not the origin of those phenomena.
The decisive mistake young Americans make is treating U.S. sanctions as a primary cause of Venezuela’s collapse. In reality, sanctions were a response to a regime that had already dismantled democratic institutions, hollowed out its oil sector through patronage and corruption, and converted elections into managed authoritarianism. The system Chávez created did not merely fail because of bad leaders; it reliably selected for them. Once institutional constraints were removed, elite capture and economic collapse were not aberrations. They were the predictable equilibrium.
Sadly, I don’t think her target audience will pay much attention.
No system that concentrates power, eliminates feedback, and rewards loyalty over competence can be saved by good intentions or external excuses. That is true whether that system is run by Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chavez, Joe Biden, or Donald Trump.
I think that only Venezuelans can solve Venezuela’s problems. Whether they’re ready to do that I don’t know. The bad guys are still in charge and I doubt they will relinquish power peacefully. The Trump Administration’s “running things” probably won’t help, either.
