Venezuela Broke My Heart

I saw "democratic socialism" descend into tyranny; it made me question my own beliefs

On a seething summer day of 2016, I was in a police station in Caracas, Venezuela, talking to shirtless prisoners crammed body to body amid a stench of sweat and feces. The cell was designed to hold 36 inmates for three days before they were released or sent to a bigger prison. But with a collapse of the nation’s infrastructure, there were over 150 men who had been nabbed for crimes such as mugging and stabbing and been there months or even years.

Several displayed red-lumpy rashes, a sign of contagious scabies; one coughed from tuberculosis; another was HIV positive. With a medical crisis, they got no treatment, and with a food crisis, they were malnourished. They got water an hour a day, took it in turns to sleep on strung-up sheets and shat in bags. “In these conditions, your mind deteriorates. You have to shut down parts of it to survive,” an inmate told me, wrestling his way through the bodies to speak.

The cell was just one of a series of traumatic scenes I witnessed in Venezuela that summer as the economy was in free fall (GDP shrunk by 80 percent over a decade). I saw people line up for miles for basic foods then loot trucks that showed up. Doctors in dirty hospitals couldn’t perform basic ops as they had no meds. Teachers in the countryside saw malnourished kids fainting in class. Facing such horror, more people would flee Venezuela than the Syrian civil war.

With this chaos, I thought the government of Nicolás Maduro, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, could not last that summer. Yet eight years on, Maduro is still in power and claiming he won yet another election, on July 28. The opposition retorts that Maduro lost by more than 30 points and is supported by various governments including the United States. A defiant Maduro, backed by China and Russia, has cracked down on protests, with as many as 17 killed so far.

The story I wrote in 2016 made this Time front cover with the headline “Venezuela Is Dying.” In response, the Venezuelan pro-government TV show La Hojilla did an hour attacking the piece and me personally. “Who does he work for, the DEA or the narcos?” presenter Mario Silva asked pointing to one of my less-flattering portraits. I got bombarded by attacks on social media and accused of spying for the CIA as well as the cartels.

The experience shook my thinking. Especially as I had actually been sympathetic to Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez, a rockstar of the international left during the 2000s.

Chávez was genuinely popular as he poured oil wealth into the barrios and won elections with big majorities including his last in 2012, which I went to cover. Seeing him in the flesh, he was one of the most charismatic politicians to have walked the earth. His criticism of the Iraq War was proven right, and his fiery language (saying he could “smell sulfur” from George W. Bush) seemed a refreshing challenge to the global power elite.

Yet, I saw with my own eyes how the Bolivarian revolution, as Chávez called it, ended with such misery. Latin America, with its corruption, poverty and violence, is generally tough. But Venezuela showed how things can get even worse. And people went hungry even as Venezuela sits on the biggest proven oil reserves on the planet. The disaster made me visualize other socialist experiments that went wrong from Ethiopia to China.

U.S. celebrities who sung praise for Chávez, like Sean Penn and Michael Moore, quietly moved onto other causes. But some left-wing journalists continue to argue that the Bolivarian revolution is a worthy cause being sabotaged by the CIA. Others say that Maduro is not really a leftist but simply an authoritarian gangster.

I think to understand what has really happened in Venezuela we have to take in several ideas and accept the world is not black and white.

I don’t want to argue here whether life in Venezuela has genuinely been bad or whether Maduro is really a democrat. The evidence is abundant on these issues and I think a journalist who pretends that things are normal and functioning in Caracas is lying to themselves.

But I want to make three observations from the tragedy of Venezuela: 1) The United States has a bad history of interventions in Latin America but you can’t blame the Venezuelan tragedy on Washington. 2) Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolution came out of the left whether you like or not. But 3) Venezuela does not mean all populist leftist leaders are illegitimate and will go the same way.

The United States has a bad history of interventions in Latin America but you can’t blame the Venezuelan tragedy on Washington.

In 1954, Guatemalan officer Carlos Castillo Armas led a few hundred rebels, backed by a naval blockade, aircraft and psy ops, to topple left wing president Jacobo Árbenz. The coup is one of the few the CIA has admitted to organizing with the agency under Allen Dulles seeing Árbenz as opening the door to communists (although he wasn’t one personally) and threatening the interests of the United Fruit Company. It set a blue print for policy in the hemisphere and a lasting belief the CIA was behind any sinister development.

When Marxist Salvador Allende won a presidential election in Chile in 1970, Washington was at it again. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” said Henry Kissinger. “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” After a tumultuous three years including a CIA-financed trucker strike, General Augusto Pinochet bloodily seized power in 1973 and Allende shot himself.

The interventions went on under Reagan, with the CIA organizing Nicaraguan dissidents to fight the Sandinistas in the eighties unleashing a painful war. When it was uncovered that Contras were involved in cocaine trafficking it made the U.S.A. look even more immoral.

So when a wave of Latin American leftists won power after the Cold War, including Chávez in 1998, people were wary of intervention. Yet after the fall of the Soviet Union, Washington changed priorities, focusing on the Middle East and putting few resources south of the Rio Grande.

Still, when right wing officers attempted a coup against Chávez in 2002, the CIA knew about it, declassified documents show. Yet the agency did not finance the coup, it appears, which is one of the reasons it failed and only radicalized Chávez.

After Chávez died of cancer in 2013, the less charismatic Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader, took over and quickly became more repressive. The United States imposed sanctions from 2014, which have gradually stepped up, although are not total. I believe these are a bad idea that only punish the poor and don’t threaten the government and have also failed in Cuba and Nicaragua.

But while sanctions rattled the economy, the Venezuelan government itself wrecked it. Chávez had begun fixing prices of basic foodstuffs so when private companies couldn’t make profits and stopped producing he poured money into buying them from abroad. As oil prices plummeted under Maduro and the costs shot up, shortages hit.

Chávez also expropriated farms and factories to give to the people. But the “people” usually meant corrupt Chavistas who ran off with the loans and left the properties idle; I snuck onto a sugar plantation that was producing almost nothing. Amazingly for a Caribbean country, Venezuela had so little sugar in 2016 that even Coca Cola suspended bottling. The bolivar currency became so worthless that I changed a couple of hundred dollars for a backpack of cash.

If anything, the sanctions gave Maduro an excuse for failure and an enemy to condemn. He and his diminishing base were in perpetual war with the gringos.

Maduro and the Bolivarian revolution came out of the left, whether you like it or not

An argument made by some is that Maduro is not really a leftist. According to this thinking, an authentic leftist would not order violent crackdowns on protesters such as those in 2017 in which over 100 people were killed.

There is also convincing evidence that the Maduro regime is massively involved in cocaine trafficking. Those in power care more about lining their pockets than revolution.

Yet, I think it is intellectually dishonest to pretend Maduro has nothing to do with socialism. The whole Bolivarian revolution clearly came out of a leftist tradition and had the intention of trying to remodel Venezuelan society along more egalitarian lines. The fact it failed, and Maduro is corrupt and authoritarian, doesn’t change that.

The same thinking can be used with any leftist government that has gone wrong or you don’t like. From Cambodia to the Soviet Union, you can rationalize that it is not really left-wing because it is brutal. But that avoids uncomfortable questions about where socialist revolution can end up.

The reality is that the label of socialist or leftist points to a very broad tent. It can mean the successful social-democracy of Denmark or the cultural revolution of Mao or the Caribbean communism of Cuba. It’s fair to say you like some and dislike others. But they are all related to the left just like the right can range from Reagan to Churchill to Hitler.

But…

Venezuela does not mean all populist leftist leaders are illegitimate and will go the same way

The tyranny of Venezuela echoes across the hemisphere where many other populist leftist leaders have won power, from Brazil to Honduras to Mexico. A literature on populism (or it could be said a literature of anti-populism) argues there is a natural tendency for populist presidents, who pit the people against the elite, to end up authoritarian. Venezuela is cited as an example of where it finishes - in bread lines and exodus.

Anti-populists extend this to the right and claim that conservative populists naturally swing to authoritarianism too. This can lead to the problematic argument they should be denied power at all costs.

This discussion is pertinent to Mexico and the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Opponents argue that AMLO is another Chávez and what he calls the “Fourth Transformation” will go the way of the Bolivarian revolution. In this June’s election, the opposition argued democracy itself was on the ballot. (Electorally that was a spectacular failure as AMLO’s anointed successor Claudia Sheinbaum won a landslide.)

I think this logic is fundamentally flawed. Most of the populist leftists that have come to power in Latin America have not morphed into dictators. The only countries that have gone really authoritarian are Venezuela and Nicaragua. Meanwhile, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil and many others have seen successful changes of power from the populist left to the populist right and back.

AMLO has plenty of flaws but unlike in Venezuela he respected the tradition of ruling for one term. (Although how much he influences Sheinbaum from behind the scenes remains to be seen.)

I think it’s unfair as journalists to condemn politicians who rage against the elites before they have committed any crimes. We have to seek truth and report what we see. And in Venezuela, I genuinely saw pain. The dream of a new type of socialism, democratic and supported by the people, had been authentic and powerful. But it ended in blood and hunger. Which makes the story of Venezuela only more tragic.

Photos 1, 3, 4 by Ioan Grillo

Image 2, Time Magazine

Text copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOut Media 2024