Venezuela Is the Next
Zimbabwe
As inflation rages, Nicolás Maduro seizes
private farms and companies, arresting businessmen for 'speculation.'
By Leopoldo Martinez in the Wall Street Journal
Venezuelans went to
the polls on Dec. 8 to elect more than 300 mayors and over 2,000 city council
members in a nationwide ballot. Though the opposition coalition made some
important gains in the cities, the ruling socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro
managed to edge out its rivals in the popular vote (49% to 43%). I now fear
that my country is one step closer to becoming a full-fledged dictatorship
along the lines of Zimbabwe in Africa.
Less than a year after
Hugo
Chávez succumbed to cancer,
Venezuela is now mired in a crisis unprecedented during the 14 years of the
so-called "Bolivarian revolution." Chávez was certainly a ruthless
authoritarian; I know this from firsthand experience. Between 2000 and 2005, I
was an elected opposition representative challenging the comandante's
agenda in the National Assembly.
I was forced to leave
after Chávez officials tried to remove my parliamentary immunity by fabricating
allegations of my involvement in a U.S.-backed conspiracy.
Now Mr. Maduro, whom I
knew well in parliament as a more conciliatory figure, is rapidly accelerating
the late president's economic and social policies to their deadliest
conclusion.
This is happening
because Mr. Maduro, who served as Chávez's foreign minister from 2006-13, has
ties with Cuba's ruling Communists that stretch back to the 1980s, when he
trained in Havana as a labor-union organizer. Having entered Chávez's trusted
circle with the support of the Cubans, Mr. Maduro emerged as Chávez's
handpicked successor and came to power in April, defeating the opposition
candidate, Henrique
Capriles, by a razor thin
margin of 1.5%. Despite thousands of allegations of voter fraud, the regime
refused a recount.
Seven months later,
the responsibility for Venezuela's present crisis lies squarely with Mr.
Maduro. According to his government's own figures, inflation currently stands
at 54%, the highest in the Americas. Much as Chávez did, Mr. Maduro has
plundered Venezuela's oil industry, which accounts for 95% of export earnings,
by providing billions of dollars in oil subsidies to Cuba and other regime
allies. Despite the regime's much trumpeted commitment to wealth
redistribution, the country is plagued by shortages of basic goods like cooking
oil, milk and corn flour, while concerns over a government debt default have led
Standard & Poor's to downgrade the country's credit rating to B-. Amid the
deepening misery, barely a week goes by without some fresh conspiracy charge
leveled at the United States.
To understand where
Venezuela is headed, look to Zimbabwe. Like Venezuela, which sits atop the
world's largest oil reserves, Zimbabwe is rich in natural resources including
minerals, diamonds and platinum. And like Venezuela under Chávez and Mr.
Maduro, Zimbabwe has been ruined by the 33-year dictatorship of Robert Mugabe.
Mr. Maduro is now
busily borrowing from Mugabe's playbook. In November, he forced an Enabling Act
through the National Assembly that permits him to rule by decree, giving him
the power to arrest anyone deemed to threaten the "security and defense of
the nation."
He has also declared
war on private property rights. Hundreds of businessmen have been detained in
recent weeks on vague charges of "usury" and "speculation."
Dozens of businesses have been forcibly nationalized to prevent them from pricing
goods at the black-market rate for U.S. dollars, currently 10 times the
official rate.
All this is
disturbingly reminiscent of 2007 in Zimbabwe, when Mugabe launched
"Operation Reduce Prices," a political witch-hunt which asserted that
private businesses were behind the country's economic woes. Under the gaze of
the police and the army, crowds looted electronics stores in downtown Harare,
in a similar manner to the Venezuelans who ransacked Daka Electronics stores
last month. These actions only exacerbated Zimbabwe's grave financial crisis,
and we can expect the same outcome in Venezuela.
Land seizures, another
hallmark of the Mugabe regime, are now a feature of Venezuelan politics as
well. Since 2000, more than 4,000 commercial farmers in Zimbabwe have been
dispossessed. In Venezuela, according to a recent report by Antonio Canova, a
prominent Caracas lawyer, more than 2,300 properties were seized by Chávez
between 2000 and 2010. Mr. Maduro is building on this shameful record, by
relying on a law which states that anyone unable to produce title deeds dating
to the earliest records—which would include the vast majority of
property-holders—is liable to have their property seized.
Against this backdrop,
the opposition wanted the municipal elections to be a national referendum on
Mr. Maduro's government. By issuing a decree that slashed the prices of plasma
screen TVs and other consumer goods, Mr. Maduro pulled off a last-minute
electoral boost.
Like Mugabe, who
retained power in elections in 2008 and 2013 that were widely slammed as
fraudulent, Mr. Maduro now rules with virtually no checks on his actions.
However, as Mr. Capriles has pointed out, the municipal elections have left
Venezuelans split dangerously down the middle. With Mr. Maduro committed to the
struggle against those he calls "bourgeois parasites," the crisis can
only deepen over the short-term.
Mr. Martinez, an
opposition member of the Venezuelan National Assembly from 2000-05, is the CEO
of the Center for Democracy and Development in the Americas in Washington, D.C.
Poster's comments:
1) What do you
propose to do if this calamity should even continue or come to pass?
2) We know what
we did, and are doing, in Zimbabwe.
3) Doing
nothing is one obvious course of action.
4) Doing something is probably in international and
national interests. Plus charitable interests are appealed to, also.
5) Timing and
affordability are considerations, too.
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