As a young , idealistic activist in Venezuela, Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias led two unsuccessful 1992 coup attempts against then-President Carlos Andres Perez, who was perceived as having broken promises to the people to resist neoliberal economic policies being pushed by the United States (US) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Chavez was freed two years later after Perez was impeached for his conduct as President, and his popularity rose until he won the presidency himself in 1998. Several anti-Chavez demonstrations, recall referenda and coup attempts by ideological foes would ensue, most famously the April 11-April 14, 2002 attempt by businessman Pedro Carmona in which Chavez agreed to be detained, and then saw popular support force Carmona to release Chavez and surrender. All of the subsequent coup attempts, referenda and other anti-Chavez actions would fail (with the exceptions of a few significant Constitutional ballot measures), apparently due to the underestimation of the people’s support and the charisma of “Chavismo”. Thus, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was established and strengthened, a reference to Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), who opposed Spanish colonial powers and is widely revered across Latin America.

Critics assailed Chavez for his Socialist politics as well as what were considered increasingly autocratic policies (apparently in an effort to ensure that the Bolivarian Revolution would endure), accusing him and his administration of cronyism and nepotism as he successfully won third and fourth terms as President, the last one in 2012.

Hugo Chavez fell ill in mid-2011, went to Cuba for medical treatment, and finally died of complications from advanced colon cancer on March 5, 2013, in Caracas, at the young age of 58. On April 14, 2013, a new election was held according to the Constitution, and Vice President Nicolas Maduro (pictured above, left) was elected President.

Maduro is considered to be less charismatic than Chavez was, as well as perhaps a less capable administrator, though many of the economic and social problems that beset Venezuela today were not of his making. According to an article about the Venezuelan crisis on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_Venezuela),

A socioeconomic and political crisis began in Venezuela in 2010 under the presidency of Hugo Chávez and has continued into the current presidency of Nicolás Maduro. The current situation is the worst economic crisis in Venezuela’s history and among the worst crises experienced in the Americas, with hyperinflation, soaring hunger, disease, crime and death rates, and massive emigration from the country. Observers and economists have stated that the crisis is not the result of a conflict or natural disaster but the consequences of populist policies that began under the Chávez administration’s Bolivarian Revolution, with the Brookings Institution stating that “Venezuela has really become the poster child for how the combination of corruption, economic mismanagement, and undemocratic governance can lead to widespread suffering”.

The research site also blames “a drop in oil production from lack of maintenance and investment” as well as stating that “Political corruption, chronic shortages of food and medicine, closure of companies, unemployment, deterioration of productivity, authoritarianism, human rights violations, gross economic mismanagement and high dependence on oil have also contributed to the worsening crisis.” It goes on to note that

The contraction of national and per capita GDPs in Venezuela between 2013 and 2017 was more severe than that of the United States during the Great Depression, or of Russia, Cuba, and Albania following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

By 2017 hunger had escalated to the point where nearly 75% of the population had lost an average of over 8 kg (over 19 lbs) in weight, almost 90% of the population was living in poverty, and more than half did not have enough income to meet their basic food needs. From the beginning of the crisis to 2017, more than 2.3 million Venezuelans have left the country. Venezuela led the world in murder rates, with 90 per 100,000 people killed in 2015 (compared to 5.35 per 100,000 in the US or 1.68 per 100,000 in Canada) making it one of the most violent countries in the world.

The administration of President Chavez had brought the country’s oil income to bear in the provision of public services, especially to poor citizens, which included free medical clinics, food and housing subsidies, improving literacy and raising the general standard of living.

But Venezuela’s heavy dependence on oil for its income, as well as continuous efforts to destabilize his Socialist government by the United States through the support of coup attempts and widespread infiltration of Venezuelan civil society by US-based neoliberal organizations, ultimately helped bring Venezuela to the precipice of economic collapse. During Chavez’s terms, several of his efforts certainly did not succeed: policies meant to strengthen food security through price controls led to food shortages and ultimately hyperinflation, a housing crisis became worse, and crime in Venezuela increased sharply, possibly due to political conflict in the country. Estimates are that over two million Venezuelans have fled the country, and there has been an explosion in suicides. Accusations of corruption were regularly lodged against the Chavez administration by political foes (who usually were themselves accused of being connected to elites and not with the people), who claimed he used bribery and intimidation to score large electoral victories despite alleged low popularity among the populace.

After a May 2017 Constituent Assembly election was widely criticized by Western and other international observers, an election was held in 2018 in which Maduro was re-elected as President. The election was disputed, and in January 2019 the National Assembly of Venezuela declared the results invalid and named Juan Guaido (pictured above, right) the acting President. National protests were organized against Maduro by Guaido and the National Assembly. The United States, which has imposed one sanction or another against Venezuela over the years, including 2015 sanctions under the Obama administration, announced further sanctions against Venezuela and have threatened to seize its oil companies that operate in the US under Citgo. In response, Maduro severed diplomatic ties to the US and ordered US diplomats out of the country.

Slowly, the international community is responding to this crisis. Western nations, including the United States, Canada, several European nations and right-wing governments in South America from the Lima Group of the Organization of American States (OAS) have supported the protests and backed Guaido in calling for Maduro’s ouster, while a number of CARICOM (Caribbean Community) countries have joined Cuba, Russia and several left-leaning Latin American countries in supporting Maduro, and have met with OAS and United Nations officials to try to resolve the crisis. Mexico and others have urged a peaceful resolution to a situation that threatens to explode in violence.

Western analysts have largely blamed the country’s economic troubles on a combination of mismanagement, corruption and what economists termed “Dutch disease” (a term coined by The Economist in 1977 and developed as an economic model in 1982, inspired by a situation in which The Netherlands’ heavy dependence on natural gas as its major export led to the collapse of other sectors of the economy), which they say Maduro has failed, like Chavez before him, to anticipate and manage. Again, from Wikipedia:

According to analysts, the economic woes Venezuela continued to suffer through under President Nicolás Maduro would have occurred even were Chávez still in power. In early 2013, shortly after Chávez’s death, Foreign Policy stated that whoever succeeded Chávez would “inherit one of the most dysfunctional economies in the Americas—and just as the bill for the deceased leader’s policies comes due”.

Maduro has been criticized for only concentrating on public opinion, instead of tending to practical issues which economists have warned about, or creating ideas to improve Venezuela’s economic prospects.

By 2014, Venezuela had entered an economic recession and by 2016, the country had an inflation rate of 800%, the highest rate in its history. The International Monetary Fund expect[ed] inflation in Venezuela to be 1,000,000% for 2018.

While Western analysts blamed the country’s economic troubles on a failure to deal effectively with this “Dutch disease”, the fate of the Venezuelan economy can also be seen as the result of the more infamous “resource curse”, in which nations that possess an abundant natural resource often find themselves impoverished, often due to the malicious actions of foreign powers whose aggressive, invasive and often warlike actions are geared toward stripping the country of its natural wealth and thus impoverishing the populace.

Examples of the “resource curse” can be found in Afrikan countries such as South Africa (diamonds), Nigeria (oil) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (diamonds, gold, oil and tantalum powder used to synthesize coltan for cell phones). A famous example of a South American “resource curse” was Chile in the 1970s, when the lust for the country’s copper mines (among other resources) led the Richard Nixon administration in the US to support the overthrow and murder of Chilean President Salvador Allende (another Socialist leader) on September 11, 1973, after two previous coup attempts had failed. The resultant dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet lasted for the next 17 years, marked by thousands of murders, disappearances and a few high-profile assassinations, most notably that of Orlando Letelier and his American assistant Ronni Karpen Moffitt by a car bomb in downtown Washington, DC on September 21, 1976.

The parallel to Venezuela’s situation is seen when one examines the history of coup attempts against Chavez (and subsequent attempts on Maduro’s life) and the country’s economic collapse in the context of similar implosions of Latin American and Afrikan nations that opposed US influence. See the web sites Mint Press News, “Make The Economy Scream” (https://www.mintpressnews.com/make-the-economy-scream-on-economic-terrorism/163027/); Chile and the United States: Declassified Documents Relating to the Military Coup, September 11, 1973 by Peter Kornbluh for the National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 8, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm; “Make The Economy Scream: Secret Documents Show Nixon, Kissinger Role Backing 1973 Chile Coup”, https://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/10/40_years_after_chiles_9_11; and “Make The Economy Scream, This Time in Venezuela” (failedevolution.blogspot.com/2018/05/make-economy-scream-this-time-in.html), as well as doing a search for that quote, to see how economic destabilization was used to set up countries for conquest while apportioning blame to the victims of the economic machinations, with Chile in 1973 as the most famous case. This is not to definitively state that Venezuela’s problems are due to malicious Western interference alone, but one must consider the historical evidence.

Articles on the History and Background of Venezuela’s Economic and Political Crisis

Kirk Semple wrote an article in The New York Times titled “Echoes of the Past in Venezuela Crisis, but Heard More Lightly” (Jan. 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/world/americas/venezuela-latin-america.html); and Luc Cohen penned a piece titled “How Venezuela got here: a timeline of the political crisis” (Reuters, January 29, 2029, https://news.yahoo.com/venezuela-got-timeline-political-crisis-015722552.html), that provides a brief timeline of the crisis in Venezuela from the death of former President Hugo Chavez in March 2013 to the imposition of sanctions by the US in January 2019, with references to detailed reports on specific events.

Wikipedia’s rather detailed discussion of “Dutch disease” can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease, while their explanation of the “resource curse”, which perhaps de-emphasizes the role of imperialism, can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse.

Who Is Juan Guaido?

There are several articles that have been written about the 35-year-old National Assembly member who has declared himself the new President of Venezuela.

Ana Vanessa Herrero and Nicholas Casey wrote the article “Who Is Juan Guaidó? Venezuela’s Young Opposition Leader” for The New York Times on January 22, 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/world/americas/juan-guaido-facts-history-bio.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer).

Nicole Chavez and Rafael Romo of CNN wrote “Who is Venezuela’s Juan Guaido?” on January 24, 2019 (https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/23/americas/juan-guaido-venezuela/index.html).

Scott Smith and Christine Armario reported on the Venezuelan government’s barring Guaido from leaving the country, which sparked denunciations from the US and led US National Security Adviser John Bolton to threaten reprisals if any harm comes to Guaido. Their article for Time and the Associated Press, “Venezuela Bars Opposition Leader Juan Guaido From Leaving the Country”, can be found at http://time.com/5516132/venezuela-juan-guaido-barred-leaving/.

And Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal for Telesur wrote a penetrating and critical look at Guaido that explores his organization Popular Will, the use of “guarimbas” in street protests that have led to violence, and the involvement of foreign organizations like Otpor (a Serbian political organization), Stratfor (an American geopoliticalm intelligence platform and publisher) and the National Endowment for Democracy (US) in their article, “The Making of Juan Guaido: US Regime Change Laboratory At Work” (https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/The-Making-of-Juan-Guaido-US-Regime-Change-Laboratory-At-Work-20190129-0021.html).

We will share some of the international community’s responses, including statements from CARICOM, OAS, Socialist organizations from Israel and Pakistan, and a group of 70 human rights and political activists in a companion piece.