“Like Joe Kennedy II, the Trump organisers can plead that if Venezuela wants to spend its money on making life better for its much richer northern neighbour, who are they to say no?”
Recently, Venezuela’s despotic socialist government has been so desperate to avoid another default (which would be the country’s 11th since independence) that it mortgaged its industrial crown jewels, including the United States-based refiner Citgo, to the Russians and the Chinese. (The Citgo brand is especially famous in my hometown of Boston, Massachusetts, where the company’s iconic sign has become a landmark in the environs of Fenway Park, where the Red Sox baseball team plays.)
It is not exactly clear why Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is so desperate to avoid defaulting on the country’s foreign debt that he is starving his own people, much the way Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu did in the 1980s. With such severe shortages of food and basic medicines, there is little doubt that if and when the autocrat is finally deposed, there will be some eerily familiar horror stories.
It is simplistic to portray the Venezuelan tragedy as an apocryphal tale of what happens when a country is taken over by left-wing populists. The right-wing governments of the 1980s and 1990s were also corrupt; and, while national income rose, income distribution was among the most unequal in the world. But it is true that Venezuela’s current horror show is very much a product of two decades of leftwing misgovernment.
There was a time when a contribution such as the one Venezuela made to Trump was a mere pittance in a much larger aid budget. Under its previous president, the charismatic Hugo Chavez, Venezuela spread its oil money far and wide, mostly to support other populist anti-American governments in the region. Chavez even funded heating fuel for some low-income households in the US, a programme made famous by former US representative Joe Kennedy II’s 2006 television ads.
That was back when high and rising oil prices helped to maintain Venezuela’s revenues even as economic mismanagement sent oil production into a downward spiral. Mind you, Venezuela was never nearly as rich as the US, so its aid budget was like giving to the poor by taking from the almost poor.
Now, with oil prices having fallen dramatically since Chavez’s death from cancer in 2013, his successor, who has all the charisma of a lifelong apparatchik, is being forced to get by without the same easy revenues. And while Chavez was also autocratic, he probably won his elections.
Maduro’s election in 2013, by contrast, was a very close affair that many people question; for one thing, the opposition was allowed virtually no television time, even if starry-eyed US academics insisted that Maduro won fair and square. It is understandable that left-leaning scholars found some of the socialist government’s redistribution and education policies appealing, as Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz did when visiting Caracas, the country’s capital, in 2007. But the left’s willingness to overlook the dismantling of democratic institutions in Venezuela is more reminiscent of