The devil’s excrement
“Oil is the devil’s excrement. You will see that within ten or twenty years from now, oil will brings us devastation!”This statement was said by Juan Pablo Alfonzo; a prominent Venezuelan diplomat, politician and lawyer primarily responsible for the inception and creation of OPEC along with the first Saudi oil minister, Abdullah Al-Turaifi. So, was Alfonzo a fortune teller predicting the future of his country when describing the ‘black gold’ oil as the ‘Devil’s excrement’?
Venezuela used to be Latin America’s richest country until the late 1970s. It used to be the happiest. A weekly flight left from Paris to the Caracas airport. The people enjoyed luxurious lifestyle that they thought would never end. What happened to Venezuela and its people now? Fearful mafia groups’ business in kidnapping people and demanding ransoms is flourishing. Long queues of people stand in line to purchase a can of milk or eggs with a currency that is degrading on daily basis.
Inflation rates have exceeded 400 percent, new notes are being printed without economic reserves, hospitals lack transfusion bags and sanitizers and crime is prevailing on the streets of a city that used to be the happiest in the continent. Can we blame the late socialist president Chaves for today’s Venezuela? Chaves was a stubborn fighter who started his presidency by building houses for the poor and nationalizing many private financial establishments belonging to the capitalists who had been looting the country with hopes of achieving sort of social justice in his country.
However, neither him nor his successor, Maduro managed to turn the country into socialism like that Castro made in Cuba. He wanted socialism through ballots and referendums and private establishments continued occupying a large portion of economic activities. So, what happened and who is to blame? The United States and its followers imposed economic embargo on the Venezuelan regime when it wanted to make independent political and economic decisions.
The Venezuelan people sufferings did not start with Chaves or with the international US-led financial war against it. Financial corruption snakes that kept changing with each regime were not the only reason, either. All this takes us back to Alfonzo’s prophecy about the Devil’s Excrement. It was the prime ailment as the state got addicted to oil and relied on it as the sole source of national income. The Venezuelan wound opened wide with the oil prices fall in 2014 and, along with corruption and the US economic war, this only added more salt to the wound.
So, will we ever learn any lesson from the bitter Venezuelan experience? Our countries are not richer than Venezuela in natural resources. Our people are not more aware or educated. Our regimes are not as democratic as, or even close to, that in Venezuela. The only two differences are that we are still faithful allies to the US and the fact that, while the Venezuelan people are currently facing facts and dealing with them, we are still afraid of facing such facts and insist on carrying on with long economic and political leaves. We will never sober up and our children will pay for it when they find themselves surrounded by devil’s excrements. —Translated by Kuwait Times