How did a movement started by a one-time hero of the American left end in an authoritarian dictatorship? Before Nicólas Maduro, Venezuela was led by Hugo Chávez, who was buddies with Danny Glover and Sean Penn. Chávez had lunch in New York with Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, who also once traveled to Venezuela to praise Chávez’s economic policies. He was Oliver Stone’s guest at the Venice Film Festival, where he flirted with a photographer on the red carpet and stayed up late sharing a bottle and a half of tequila with Michael Moore.
Human Rights Watch called attention to Chávez’s authoritarian tendencies back in 2008, but many intellectuals on the left were so drawn by his willingness to turn Venezuela into a laboratory for their most radical ideas that they looked the other way. “What’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela [is that] I can see how a better world is being created,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist Noam Chomsky said at a public event with Chávez in 2009.
When Chávez died of cancer in 2013, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Yale historian Greg Grandin wrote an adoring obituary in The Nation, musing that perhaps the Venezuelan leader’s biggest failing was that he hadn’t been “authoritarian enough” in pursuing his agenda. Grandin’s wish for more authoritarianism was granted when Maduro took power.
But did Chávez’s policies lead to Maduro’s dictatorship?
The New York Times‘ Andes Bureau Chief Julie Turkewitz published a recent essay titled “What Happened to Venezuela’s Democracy?” which offers a muddled explanation of the nation’s unraveling. And it assiduously avoids calling Chávez what he was: a socialist.
Turkewitz describes Chávez (quoting various observers) as intent on bringing “‘democracy closer to the people,'” a populist, “‘a hegemon,'” engaged in “‘a con,'” and drawn into a “competitive authoritarianism.” When Maduro took over, he was intent on finding a way to “consolidate power,” Turkewitz explains. She acknowledges that Chávez called himself a socialist but implies that he was misusing the term. Another recent Times article (co-authored by Turkewitz) tepidly describes Chávez’s movement as “socialist-inspired.”
Accepting that Chávez was a socialist is vital for understanding the underlying cause of the Venezuelan tragedy because it is an ideology that tends to lead to authoritarianism, as F.A. Hayek warned back in 1944.
The socialist transformation of Venezuela traces back to the 1973 election of President Carlos Andrés Pérez. In 1970, Venezuela had been one of the 20 wealthiest countries in the world measured by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita; Pérez turned the country “into a socialist nightmare of price controls, import substitutions, and protectionism,” as the Venezuelan journalist Carlos Ball wrote in a 1992 analysis of the country’s troubles in Reason.
Pérez nationalized the oil industry, which would finance a dramatic expansion of state control over the economy. His government spent more in five years than it had in its prior 143 years of independence. Pérez “made the central bank a cash cow for the treasury,” Ball observed, “decreed nationwide salary increases, and enforced central planning. His policies created widespread corruption, since every private endeavor suddenly required multiple permits and licenses from a burgeoning bureaucratic state.”
By the late 1980s, the economy had contracted, inflation was soaring, and the once “vibrant nation with emerging entrepreneurial talent” was thoroughly “derail[ed],” Ball writes. The political and economic crisis was fertile ground for Chávez, who first appeared on the public stage in 1992 after leading a failed coup.
Turkewitz characterizes Chávez as a “messianic leader” (quoting the analyst Phil Gunson), but he was also a cold warrior and Fidel Castro’s heir apparent. The Cuban Communist dictator saw in Chávez a way to fulfill his longstanding desire to tap Venezuelan oil wealth to shore up his regime and to extend his revolutionary project to the South American mainland. For his part, Chávez was determined to prove that the world had drawn the wrong lesson from the collapse of Eastern European communism; Chávez believed that Castro, who he referred to as a father figure, had successfully created socialism’s “new man.” He set out to prove that Castro’s revolution in Cuba had worked.
Chávez attributed Cuba’s dire poverty entirely to the U.S. embargo. He was thus a textbook socialist of a variety best described in the 1986 book, Third World Ideology and Western Reality, by the Venezuelan journalist and commentator Carlos Rangel.
As Rangel explains, by the early 20th century, Karl Marx’s theory that a communist revolution would occur when the proletariat toppled the bourgeoisie had failed to come to pass; “Third World ideology,” as Rangel calls it, came to the “rescue.” In this new framework, which was sketched out in a 1916 pamphlet by Vladimir Lenin, imperialist countries took the place of the bourgeoise and the oppressed peoples of the world took the place of the proletariat. Class conflict was left behind, and Marxism was transformed into an ideology of liberating the people from the oppressive forces of American imperialism.
This was Chávez’s creed, and he set out to turn Venezuela into a command-and-control economy in the service of man’s liberation from the capitalist values of the U.S. empire.
Chávez converted Venezuela’s government-run trade schools into ideological reeducation programs for studying the work of Che Guevara and other socialist thinkers. He seized the ownership of large companies from private individuals and transferred control to the rank and file, so that work would no longer erode their humanity. He nationalized banks, food processors, oil drills, the phone company, vacation homes, a gold-mining outfit, millions of acres of farmland, supermarkets, stores, and industrial manufacturers. He discussed Marxist theory for hours on his television show.
Chávez mandated that the companies he expropriated adopt worker control on the factory floor so that the rank and file would no longer feel alienated from the fruit of their own labor. The result was to displace competent managers and technicians with political operatives promoted for going to government rallies and wearing the movement’s signature red T-shirts. Productive factories turned to mob rule. Gunfights broke out on the factory floor. Production collapsed.
After Chávez’s death, Maduro continued to pay lip service to socialism—and to blame the United States for all of Venezuela’s problems—but he had no real ideological fervor. “The Terminal Stage of Communism Is a Mafia,” as Martin Gurri recently observed about post-Castro Cuba, and the same insight applies perfectly to Venezuela.
But did Chávez’s policies lead to Maduro’s criminality? Turkewitz answers that question by meekly observing that Chávez had veered authoritarian and Maduro continued down the same path.
The connection can be found in Hayek’s 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, the classic analysis of how even well-intentioned socialism can lead to totalitarianism. To create a socialist state, you need to force people to do unsavory things, observed Hayek. “Socialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.” The “readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power.” Under collectivism, “a man must be prepared to break every moral rule.”
Over his 14 years in office, Chávez became increasingly authoritarian because turning Venezuela into a socialist paradise wasn’t working out as he had planned. Over time, Marxism “gains virulence since its faithful tend to attribute the previous failures of their pseudoreligion to lack of fervor, devotion and human sacrifices,” Rangel wrote.
After Chávez was nearly removed from office in a 2002 military revolt, he accepted help from Cuba to train a secret military counterintelligence force that serves today as the most brutal enforcer of Maduro’s will. He destroyed the free press because it was sowing doubt about the effectiveness of his policies, undermining his ability to liberate the populace from its capitalist values. He coopted the independent judiciary because it stood in his way.
Expropriating property and enforcing price controls requires a particular mettle. In a 2007 episode of his television show, Chávez described how his administration dealt with farmers who refused to sell their cattle. “Fine—we’ll come in with the National Guard, load the cattle onto a truck, and send it to the slaughterhouse ourselves,” Chávez told the audience. “That’s what we’d do the first time….If it happened again,…we’ll expropriate the farm!” The audience cheered. “We’ll hand it over to the community councils—to the people—so they can produce their own food!”
The most famous victim of Chávez’s expropriations was a farmer named Franklin Brito, who turned down compensation for his land and went on a hunger strike instead, prompting Chávez’s Communications Minister Andrés Izarra to tweet: “Franklin Brito smells like formaldehyde.”
For her essay in the Times, Turkewitz interviewed Izarra, who is now one of the most vocal members of a community of former Chávez officials who oppose Maduro. Turkewitz quotes his bland observation that Chávez’s goal was “to bring ‘democracy closer to the people.'” She doesn’t mention that Izarra was a doctrinaire socialist who thrived under Chávez because of his own authoritarian tendencies.
In 2007, Izarra backed Chávez’s decision to shut down Radio Caracas Television, the nation’s most important television network, telling the Times at the time that the station’s demise was representative of how “the oligarchy that once controlled Venezuela is finally coming apart.” The goal, he said in a different interview, was “to make it so that socialist ideas and collectivist values and solidarity prevail over capitalist values.” In 2008, he defended Chávez’s decision to expel Human Rights Watch from the country, accusing the organization of being a cover for planned U.S. interference.
As Yale’s Greg Grandin understood when writing his obit of Chávez for The Nation, it’s much easier to remake society if you’re an authoritarian unphased when a farmer is willing to die in defense of his property. (Franklin Brito starved to death in 2010.) Nicólas Maduro was a rising star under Chávez because he was a ruthless henchman. He did whatever the boss wanted, and then when the boss died, he became the boss.
Bland observations that Chávez was merely a “messiah” or a “populist” dishonor the victims of the Venezuelan tragedy. At the very least, we can learn something useful from the destruction of their country.
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