Since shortages and scarcity are affecting Venezuela and increasing popular discontent, President Nicolás Maduro, who may not know much about economics but is a real man of bravado, decided to deal with the problem immediately. He explained to his people that the high inflation the country is suffering (the highest in Latin America by 57 percent) is the product of a plot devised by the United States, the hoarding businessmen, retailers, and opposition parties set on destroying the Bolivarian revolution, or “Twenty-First-Century Socialism.” And, in one stroke of the pen, he ordered that the prices of food and appliances be cut by 50 and even 70 percent, while he simultaneously sent soldiers and combat corps to occupy retail establishments and sent a good number of “conspirators”—in other words, the owners of stores and warehouses—to prison.
The campaign was launched by President Maduro with the slogan “Empty the Shelves!” The order was understood by a good number of the confused as carte blanche for looting, and, especially in Valencia but also in Caracas and other cities, there were attacks and robberies in the midst of extreme chaos. It was pathetic to listen to long-suffering Venezuelan housewives explaining to reporters from official TV how happy they were about those spectacular sales that would, going forward, refresh their refrigerators and kitchens and ensure their families two meals per day.
At the same time that he defeated inflation with a fist to the table, auctioning and confiscating food-product and appliance chains, President Maduro, through the approval of the Enabling Law, ensured for himself the absolute power that for one year would allow him to govern without laws, in the comfortable and efficient manner of dictator. To obtain this attribute, the Venezuelan National Assembly proceeded to withdraw immunity from an opposition deputy, María Mercedes Aranguren, and to replace her with her substitute, Deputy Carlos Flores, who, from day to night (and through generous sinecures) became a Chavist and voted in favor of the aforementioned law. In sum, once the hope these operations created for a public desperate to end corruption had passed, the growing poverty and anarchy in Venezuela will be the very high price the country will have to pay for the irresponsible demagoguery of this time. Without a doubt, contrary to the government’s calculations, it will be translated into a new and more crushing defeat of the government in the next elections, on December 9, which will force it, as occurred with the presidential elections, to undertake a new act of monumental fraud in order to stay in power despite being discredited and despite the ruin into which its wretched country plunges further every day.
Venezuela never had a flourishing agricultural industry commensurate with the enormous agricultural possibilities available to it, but with Chavism its expropriations and invasions, the arbitrary taking of farms, and the suffocating prevailing bureaucratization, agrarian production in certain regions was reduced to a minimum and simply disappeared in others. The result of all of this is that the country must import almost 95 percent of what it consumes, something that in the time of oil’s apogee was barely noticed. But the revolutionary control instituted by Chávez and Maduro in the industry has radically reduced Venezuelan oil production, while, at the same time, the policy of currency control, one of the most prosperous sources of corruption, has turned from providing dollars to the retailers and businessmen for the import of raw materials and products from abroad into a real nightmare. Only the most government-connected can get dollars, or those who are willing to pay very expensive commissions for them. Others must obtain dollars on the black market, where the dollar is worth ten times the official price. This is the explanation for the out-of-control increase in prices and for generalized scarcity. The brave sales imposed manu militari by Maduro will only serve to accelerate the generalized scarcity—the shelves will, in fact, end up empty—and the black market, which will grow enormously, will only be within reach of the privileged, in other words, those favored by the regime or by the dizzying corruption generated by interventionist policies in the economy. In other words, the policies of Chavist socialism will have contributed to aggravating the economic and social differences it set out to abolish.
At the same time that these things were happening in Venezuela, in Beijing the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was announcing a new economic policy, widening already-existent free markets to ensure a better distribution of resources and allow the participation of private companies, Chinese as well as foreign, in the state’s industries. (It also warned, however, that this economic opening would not have a corresponding political one, since the Communist Party would continue being the supreme arbiter of social life.) It is improbable that the Chinese Communist Party will happily adopt these measures of unequivocal capitalist orientation through ideological conversion. No, it is resigned to them because, loyal to the traditional pragmatism of China’s culture, it has understood that collectivism and economic statism lead to the ruin of countries, and, besides impoverishing them and setting them backward, they multiply social injustices, creating a growing distance between privileged functionaries of the nomenclatura and the average citizens who, besides suffering insecurity and fear, spend their lives waiting in lines and earning miserable salaries without the least equality of opportunities. These elemental truths, which already reached the Soviet Union before its collapse and are beginning to appear, although very shyly, in Cuba, seem out of the intellectual reach and political senses of President Maduro and his economic advisers.
It’s not difficult to foresee, as such, what the immediate future holds for Venezuela, a country that given its copious abundance of resources should have the highest standard of living in Latin America. In light of the worsening shortage and scarcity—which obey the laws of economics and not political ukase—the regime’s next step will be to proceed to the progressive nationalization of stores and businesses that “conspire” against the revolution, speculating and starving its people. The small spaces for private economy will start closing until they disappear and fall into the hands of an inept and corrupt bureaucracy, such that the rationing of products from the family basket, which already exists to a large degree, will start extending like a hydra through all the gaps in the economy until it makes Venezuela a country as state-dominated as Cuba or North Korea. The inevitable corollary of this state hegemony will be the disappearance of the scarce independent communications media that, through enormous sacrifices and courage, still resists governmental harassment.
Will everything that the Chavist revolution has signified in hopes, efforts, and violence be worth it? It is true that the democracy it brought down was inefficient, spendthrift, demagogic, and rather insensitive to great social problems and had thus generated the great discontent of a people who naïvely saw—once again in Latin America’s wretched history—a savior in a charismatic and foul-mouthed caudillo. The result is in plain view: an impoverished, damaged Venezuela, devastated by demagoguery and corruption, full of nouveaux riches with ill-gotten wealth, which, once freedom and good judgment are recovered, will spend many years recovering everything it lost with the collapse of its democracy.
Madrid, November 2013