The Venezuelan Curse (Part 2)

24:39And at least when I was there at the time, it was$2 ,000 a year. As an individual, you have access to this. If you want more than that, you have to take out a special permission. Right. And if you want more than that, how are you going to get it? A black market. Right. It's like the state is saying any Venezuelan can only exchange a certain amount of, what is the currency? Bolivar. What is the plural? Bolivares. Bolivares. Got it. So it's like, if I were going to Europe and I wanted euros, you just go to a Forex, you give a bunch of dollars, you get a bunch of euros. In Venezuela at the time, if I wanted American dollars, there was just an annual limit on what I could get.

25:18The problem being, because people want to buy foreign goods because they want to travel because they have so much money and the country does not make that much goods, they are then just getting the extra dollars on the black market. Yes, exactly. So they implement something called Caribi, Compañero de Divisas. Divisas is currency, right? So this is the entity, the national entity that controls all of the literal dollars and decides who gets access to those dollars. It's such an abusable system. Are you kidding me? And so you have these cards, these Cadivi cards, right? That whenever I would go back to, you know, Venezuela for research or to visit family or whatnot, you know, you would come back with these cards that had a certain amount.

26:09And each one was like, I think they increased it to 2 ,500 at some point, right? And so what would happen? There's all sorts of scams. And let me just preface this by saying, like, the reason why I was making a confession is because this is primarily accessible to the middle classes, people who, you know, have relatives, family abroad, people who are studying abroad, whatever the case might have. So you need actually, you know, access to dollars to travel and the rest of it. So this is a primarily a middle class social program billed as a currency exchange system. Right. But yes, so you'd get this card.

26:42And so I'd go and people would buy the card with a$2 ,500 limit at the official exchange rate. Call it, I don't know, 10 to 1. Yeah. Right. But because the black market dollar is the one that reigns supreme, that black market dollar might have been a thousand to one. Oh. Okay. So I have bought that dollar at 10 to one, but I can sell it at a thousand to one. So what would happen? confession. So people would give me these cards, and then I would come to the States, and I would get, say,$2 ,500 worth of it. And then I'd come back with the cash. They have now the cash that they bought at the official rate, 10 to 1, but they can sell that $2 ,500 in cash at the black market rate for 100 to 1, 1 ,000 to 1.

27:33It is a massive money-making machine that most people in the middle class take advantage of, including me. So you would come back from studying with your allocated$2 ,500, and then how much could you, what was the profit if you sold$2 ,500 back then on the black market? You would have... I mean, it fluctuated over time, right? It might've been 100 to 1, or it might've been 1 ,000 to 1 at the end of the Kadivi era. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm just spilling it all up right now. But so, So, you know, growing up, so we were, my family was a solidly middle-class family that was aspirational, right?

28:12And so my parents put a lot of their money into making sure that my sister and I had really good schooling. But that also meant that, you know, we didn't have, like, a fancy house. We lived in a small apartment. We did travel, but it was, you know, travel not to, like, fancy destinations per se, but it was where we had friends and family. And we also didn't go to, like, fancy restaurants. When I went back and I had access to all this money that I had, you know, one of my things was like, I'm going to go visit all those restaurants that as a kid we never got to go to. Right. Because now I can go there and like eat like a king.

28:47Yeah. And I did. And my understanding is that like this was just happening throughout society. Like you saw a lot of people taking advantage of this. It was like such a huge opportunity that it perverted anyone's desire if they had access to this to do anything else. Yes, but also, and this is, I think, a really crucial part, the influx of petrodollars is such that it could sustain both things at the same time. I didn't feel at the time, and of course, this is kind of ex-post justification, I think. It didn't feel at the time like I'm milking off a corrupt system and this is really problematic.

29:28But like, well, I can do this and social programs are still thriving. Right. Like, you know, public health is still accessible. Like, it's not a zero-sum game. It's additive, right? And so in a weird way, the incentives that are created are less in terms of, and again, this could all be just ex-post justification, but at the time, the incentives are less about, I need to get as much as I can right now because if not, somebody else will get it. It's like, it's just there. Why would I not? But so it's like my view, which I think is a little bit wrong, is that in this socialist country, people were behaving like ravenous, consumerist, capitalist.

30:10It's like what you're saying is, no, actually, there was so much money that no one had to make a choice. You could sort of like just slightly ransack this opportunity, but also see that these social programs for the poor were being funded. and if you weren't thinking too hard about the future, about what happens if the price of oil drops or what happens if the oil industry, which is being run very poorly as a piggy bank, just collapses under that mismanagement as well, it felt for a moment like no contradictions needed to be resolved. Everything was possible because money was nearly infinite. It didn't feel like it was any kind of contradiction.

30:47Yeah. I mean, it's like the problem sometimes of populist leadership is that it sort of says everything is simple and you don't have to make trade-offs. And sometimes that can be true for a little bit, but it's never true in the long run. Right. The problem in Venezuela is that it lasted for long enough to feel like it could go on forever, right? So previous oil booms lasted maybe four or five years, and then the party was over. This seemed to keep going and going and going until it didn't.

31:25After the break, the bust.

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34:03Welcome back to the show. Chapter 4, Downward Spiral. In December of 2012, Hugo Chavez announces on television that he is ill. The plan was for him to go to Cuba to treat his cancer. It wasn't the first time this had happened. But this time, he made sure to say that while he expected he'd be fine, should anything happen, he wanted his deputy, Nicolas Maduro, to take over.

34:52This was the last time Chavez would appear on Venezuelan TV. Just a few months later, March 2013, a visibly distraught Maduro appears to tell the nation that Chavez is dead.

35:21Chavez had just won the presidency in 2012, won it again by a significant margin, with a very powerful opposition at the time, I should say. And so he, when he dies, is actually very, very popular. His funeral is attended by heads of states from many nations. And I feel like I can say this with some authority as a Venezuelan. This is a classic Venezuelan. Initially, when he dies, like, you know what we have to do? we have to embalm him like Lenin. Whoa. So he, oh yeah, yeah. So he's preserved for posterity. And they talked about it for so long that they missed the window for embalming him. And so they couldn't embalm him.

36:03So they did the next best thing, which was build very quickly as this kind of mausoleum in a place that overlooks the presidential palace in Caracas. Mm-hmm.

36:41Right. Especially more so after Nicolás Maduro, when he won snap elections just a month after Chávez's death with only a 1.4 % majority. Contrasting that to what had been Chávez's, you know, 13, 14 % majority just a few months before, it was quite evident that not only Maduro did not carry the amount of popularity that could hold over or carry over from Chávez, but that the entire political system that Chavez had built was now exposed to be very precarious. Maduro, Chavez's handpicked successor, a former union leader, he not only lacked his mentor's charisma, he also just lacked the levels of popular support Chavez had had.

37:30It's actually something you see in the U.S., the much less charismatic vice president being offered as the former president's new replacement. Despite all that, Maduro's opposition realized he'd still be hard to ever beat in an election. Because Maduro, like Chavez, controlled the state's resources. And because, like Chavez, he could strategically hand them out to gain supporters at election time. He made moves like sending troops into Venezuela's version of Best Buy, detaining the managers, and forcing the stores to sell electronics at rock-bottom prices. Seeing maneuvers like this, some contingent of the opposition decided that the real way to unseat Maduro would be either through insurrection or, at a minimum, widespread protests.

38:14And so the opposition, they stage a series of protests, really significant street demonstrations in 2014, which incur the wrath of the state, especially its police forces. But what it does is it convinces the sector of the opposition that Maduro's government is now only driven by one thing alone, and that is to stay in power. And that's the primary dynamic that we're going to see take over all of what eventually becomes madurismo, especially when in 2014 oil prices collapse. So now he can no longer give stuff away in the same way. Not only in the same way, in no way. So oil prices collapse, and under Maduro, it's really just like repression, repression, repression.

39:02And it creates a kind of vicious cycle where if people protest and we feel like we need to resort to repression to quell those protests in order to stay in power, that increases the incentives for me to remain in power, right? Because the exit costs are really high. If I am ousted or if I'm removed from the presidency, I might be susceptible to a trial or to ending up in jail, et cetera, et cetera, right? So, of course, at the same time, that increases the incentives of those who say, like, well, the only way that we're going to get rid of this government is to protest or take more radical action.

39:37And so you have this increasing—it's like a ratchet. We're just, like, constantly ratcheting up the stakes of protest, repression. Repression increases exit costs. Exit costs increases the amount of determination you have to get that government out of power, which in turn increases repression, which in turn increases exit costs, et cetera, et cetera. You go down this spiral of repression, protest, exit costs, repeat. And so it's like you have political prisoners, you have people routinely disappearing. This is also the point in my understanding where just mass migration out of Venezuela begins.

40:14like people who can leave, or were they already leaving? They had been leaving in different waves in the past, right? And anecdotally, and I just want to make sure that I emphasize that it's anecdotal, there's a strong correlation between class, race, and migration waves in Venezuela, such that the earlier waves, going back to even early days of Chavez, is primarily wealthier, professional, cosmopolitan elites. And then over time, different political events that entrenched Chavez further in power, the elections in 2006, leads to another wave where some people, again, sort of going down the class ladder, make the calculation, well, there's really nothing left for me here, so I'm going to leave.

41:00Then in 2012, another wave of migrants. Then in 2014, after these repressive protests, another wave of migration, right? But each one of these waves is going a little bit lower in the class hierarchy, such that by the time you get into the deepest fray of economic crisis, which really begins in earnest around 2016 and then kicks into overdrive in 2017 with the U.S. sectoral sanctions against the oil industry, which had long been seen by Venezuelan observers and Venezuelans themselves as the kind of the red line that we didn't know the U.S. dared cross. the sectoral sanctions as the tool to try to just bring the economy to its knees and therefore affect regime change.

41:46Because even with oil prices now at a low, the country can still sell oil. The U.S. wants the global oil market for there to be as much supply as possible. So the regime in Venezuela, people in Venezuela just didn't think the U.S. would do oil sanctions. But then in Trump's first term, they do it. They do. Under the executive order, U.S. persons are prohibited from engaging in specified dealings involving the government of Venezuela and its instrumentalities. This includes state-owned oil company Pedevisa. These prohibitions extend to transactions or activities. There's a vast literature on whether or not sanctions are effective to lead to political change.

42:32and vast consensus in the literature, not unanimity, consensus is that they don't. The logic behind this kind of sanctions are meant to induce collective changes. So the greater the pain that is felt collectively, the logic goes, people will blame not the sanctions, but the people who are preventing the political change that are making the sanctions possible, right? In this case, the leadership of the country, right? And so the United States bets on a groundswell of opposition that will rise up. They can't come to Washington and protest, but they can go to Caracas and protest. And that's the idea.

43:11The problem being that oftentimes, if you look at what really happens with sanctions, is the domestic leadership does a pretty good job of actually focusing rage at the United States and just using repression to keep people in line. Absolutely. And in the government, like Maduro certainly, but Chavismos more broadly, which had long railed against the United States kind of bullying and power, this fits like, as we say in Venezuela, anillo al dedo, like a ring in the finger. It's like a perfectly matching reality to a longstanding narrative. We've long cried about the wolf and the wolf is finally here.

43:46And so people are starving, crime is up, the misery part of the equation works, but it doesn't lead to political change. Is this the point, though, where you just see, like, massive amounts of migration, not just among upper and middle classes, but everybody? Yes, and you start to see it in ways that,

44:08you know, as a Venice one, I think I would say are previously unthinkable. Meaning what?

44:19whole families walking hundreds, thousands of miles across Venezuela, and then later, extremely treacherous terrain. In some ways, not knowing where they're going, just knowing that they can't stay. Those images around 2017, 18 especially, were really difficult to watch.

44:48You can understand how bad things got by looking at migration rates, by looking at crime or GDP. Or you can just look at what's left of what had been for years the country's economic engine, Pedevesa, the state oil company. William Newman, the journalist, recounts in his book a 2018 reporting trip where he saw the shambles Pedevesa was in. Maduro, at this point, had appointed a loyalist general with no oil experience to run Pedevesa, the head of the company's finances, Maduro's wife's nephew. Newman goes to visit some of the facilities. This is what he writes, quote, Pedevesa wasn't an oil company anymore.

45:29It was a junkyard. Thousands of employees had stopped going to work or fled the country because the wages Pedevesa paid had become worthless. All the installations I visited were in ruins. Thieves stole the motors from pump jacks and tore transformers off poles to remove the copper inside. Workers had no tools. Vehicles were broken down. The company had stopped giving workers the meals required by their contracts. At one storage facility, a leaking tank spewed a lake of black crude. End quote. Which brings us almost to today. The country in deep poverty, from mismanagement, from a drop in oil prices, from U.S.

46:07sanctions. And Maduro locked in the cycle that Alejandro just described. Brutal repression, the fear of consequences, and so more brutal repression.

46:24You have an increased presence of police and state repressive apparatuses, which are very powerfully in 2017, 2018, going to be used by the Maduro government to mask an operation against crime, but in fact, it couldn't be used to exact political control over popular sectors. So there's an operation called the FIAS, which are essentially meant to deploy, much in the same way, I should say, and I'm happy to be taken to task by this firm anyone wants, much like we're seeing ICE right now, just militarized police forces going into popular sector communities with seemingly total impunity. And there, the numbers of extrajudicial killings that we know of are extremely high.

47:14They're up in the tens of thousands of Venezuelans killed over several years' time. And are they killing, is it like they're killing protesters? They're just killing people? Like they just want, they're like everyone's scared and desperate. And the only way we're going to keep social control is if their fear of being murdered exceeds their fear of stepping out of line? Yes, exactly. It's, you know, the justifications are not just, you know, hard to come by. It's that they're not even provided as a premise. The broad justification is to tampen crime. And the dynamic you previously described, which is like the more repression, the more Maduro has to stay in power because he understands that if he loses power, he could end up in jail.

47:59all, it just perpetuates itself over and over. And also becomes manifest because now the repression has reached a level that is in the sights of the International Criminal Court, which opens an investigation into crimes against humanity, right? And so, again, this ratcheting up of repression in order to stay in power now has reached the levels where, you know, an international body, not just the United States, but an international body is taking notice and saying, this far exceeds anything that could plausibly be called law enforcement. So by like 2017, 2018, 2019, it sounds like the vision you're describing of life in the country is pretty close to hell.

48:44It's just like poverty, repression, fear, people walking out if they can walk out, like as bad as it's ever been. As bad as it's ever been. The level of economic collapse and of migration that Venezuela experiences during this time is greater than at any other point in Latin American history, and it's comparable globally only to countries that have experienced civil war. It is unprecedented, not just for Venezuela, but the region and the world. the other strange dynamic of this moment is that of course the government has a perverse incentive for people to leave why you have fewer mouths to feed and fewer potential protesters to repress right the most it the people who are unhappy go and you're left with right yeah and so you know This isn't like, say, communist regimes in the 20th century at the tail end of the Soviet Union trying to force people to stay.

49:53There's a strong incentive for the government to allow folks to leave for the reasons that I mentioned. But then there's the other reason, which is people abroad can send money back in the form of remittances. And so it creates this kind of, and this is what we find beginning around 2020, 2021, where there is as low and as catastrophic as the economic collapse was in those deep years of darkness. There is a sense of economic recovery, not because things are vastly improved, but because they're minimally improved. There's a term in Wall Street, a dead cat bounce. Like, a thing that is sufficiently crashed will rise up a tiny bit from the bottom.

50:38And that is what was experienced.

50:45Of course, this grim status quo, life in Venezuela getting marginally more livable as most desperate people flee for a better life elsewhere, there was one politician who did not appreciate that equilibrium. Which brings us to our last chapter. After one more short break, Donald Trump. Thank you.

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53:46Welcome back to the show. Chapter 5, Donald Trump. Today, the Supreme Court allowed, for now, the Trump administration to strip legal protections for nearly 350 ,000 Venezuelans currently living in the U.S. under a program that had protected them from deportation. The court's decision... After talking to Alejandro, I found myself reflecting on the past year of headlines I'd seen without ever really absorbing. The stories about Trump's increased obsession with Venezuelan migrants, stories about Trump deporting as many Venezuelans as possible from the United States. Andri Hernández Romero was among the 238 Venezuelans deported without court hearings under the Alien Enemies Act to an infamous mega prison in El Salvador.

54:29I remembered also the Trump administration's, at the time, very confusing strategy of suddenly launching drone strikes on Venezuelan boats that they alleged were smuggling cocaine. President Trump says American forces destroyed what he described as a Venezuelan drug boat headed for the United States. The U.S. military has attacked a second boat in the waters of Venezuela. He said yesterday that 11 people on board were killed. And finally, the most recent news. U.S. President Donald Trump launched his most aggressive foreign military action yet, attacking Venezuela, capturing its president, Nicolas Maduro, on Saturday, and promising to put the South American country under temporary U.S.

55:11control. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition. Donald Trump putting himself in charge of the resource that had already caused so much damage here in Venezuela. We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure. and start making money for the country. Listening to Trump explain how easy it was going to be to control Venezuela's oil, to build his own magical vision of the future, I wondered how much of the history he knew.

55:55I wondered if he knew any.

56:01It's not a particularly deep or insightful thought, but the thing that struck me hearing that history really was just its pace. Venezuela, a country that decade to decade could completely shift from prosperous democracy to authoritarianism to wherever it was we were now. My country, the United States, is currently embroiled in its own confusing spasms of history. Quite different, but these days, I can't hear a story of another place without looking for some vision of us in its reflection. So I found myself, despite myself, asking Alejandro to compare the pace of change here to the pace of change there.

56:42It's just like a crazy sweep of change. I mean, Americans right now feel like our country has suddenly violently changed. But relative to Venezuela, it's like, not. Oh, no, no. I mean, I think the fear, and I would submit the legitimate rightful fear, is that many of the warning signs are present, but weirdly enveloped under a very different rubric and discourse. It's not socialism. it's not anti-imperialism it's the opposite it's like hyper capitalism crony capitalism and um a new form of imperialism but the mechanics are similar it's the militarization of policing it is the patrimonialization of the state such that the only thing that matters is what you can extract from the state and whether you have access to it and so the kind of nakedness of that project, I think, I suspect, as an historian, is occasioning a sense of shock such that, can it really be this crass?

57:48And that sense of crassness then creates a little bit of a delay in terms of response. I experienced this since the attack on Venezuela, where so many of the quiet parts were being said out loud, that as an historian of Latin America, who is trained to read subtext, who is trained to read between the lines, who is trained to read behind the blacked out parts of the classified CIA documents. Suddenly, I'm being told all of that. And my first instance is, well, maybe there's something else behind this, rather than the thing itself. It can't just be the American president saying, we're going to the country to take the oil.

58:37It can't just be that. Or it can't just be Stephen Miller saying, no, no, no, the continent is ours. How dare they sell their natural resources to China? Or it can't just be Marco Rubio saying, the left is over in Latin America for centuries to come. Or it can't just be Pete Hexas saying, you're next, whoever next might happen to be. It all feels so contrary to instinct that the reaction, at least to my part, and I think more generally we might be sensing this, is somewhat of a delay. People are shocked because they can't believe what they're seeing, and so they react more slowly. That's my sense.

59:17Yeah, I mean, I find it, that is how I have felt. And it has just made me want to understand the story of Venezuela better, at least. I think, like, I did not feel, I was not a buyer for the grand promise of the Trump administration, like, getting involved. Understanding the history of Venezuela, I think I feel more pessimistic than I was, and I was pessimistic before. It just feels like, you know, there's this temptation, I think, in America, for understandable reasons, when I talk to my fellow relatively uninformed friends about the country, it's like, we channel, the arguments end up being, were the problems problems of socialism?

1:00:04Were the problems problems of imperialism? When you really hear the story, sure, I think you could make arguments for both, but, like, it more sounds like a resource curse. it sounds like while wealth can be helpful, immense sudden growth of anything really risks being destructive. But if you understand it as a country where the rise and fall of the price of oil has encouraged very, very short-term leadership, having Trump, who engages in that kind of leadership anyway, take control and explicitly not on a project of democracy building or like without even the pretense of anything, but we would like to further ravage this, not even for short-term Venezuelan gain, but for American gain.

1:00:53It really sounds dire. Yeah, it is absolutely dire. And I mean, there are many surprising turns in Venezuela since the attack on Saturday the 3rd. But certainly one of the most surprising is that the entire regime has remained in place. Right. He arrested Maduro and his wife, or whatever. He went to the country with helicopters and took them. But it wasn't everyone around them is in charge. It's not like we're putting in a pro-democracy person or a member of the opposition. They're just like leaving the exact structure intact, but putting the U.S. at the top of it. Yes, and also with the complete support, it seems like, of the United States.

1:01:42So, at least again in the public pronouncements of Trump and others and his administration, the direct and loud sidelining of the opposition in favor of the remaining regime, which is again exactly the same as it was before, is certainly a type of regime change that I've never seen or read about. And so we, I think, are at the cusp of reference that don't quite make sense on the surface, but that are laying bare a much scarier reality about the near and distant future for us in Venezuela and in the United States and the world. I do think that what I would most hope for, especially in this moment, for people in the United States to think about when it comes to Venezuela, is to resist the easy narrative of it's this or that.

1:02:47This person is a hero, that person is a devil. And that explains everything. leaning into complexity when it comes to Venezuela, I think is the first step towards understanding it, even if actual understanding it may not come about very easily. That sounds like a good mission. It sounds like not where our country is most easily resting right now, but it sounds like the right approach. Thank you for explaining this immensely complex country. Thank you.

1:03:25Alejandro Velasco. He's an associate professor of history at New York University. We've included a link to a great piece of analysis he's written on Chavismo in our show notes. Go check it out. Separately, I also recommend William Newman's book, which I've referenced a few times in the story. Things are never so bad that they can't get worse. A title I can now not use for my memoir. God damn it.

1:04:00Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinamanini. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Special thanks this week to Miguel Santiago Colon. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. This episode was fact-checked by Piper Dumont. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Shuff. If you'd like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and bonus episodes, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode at searchengine.show.

1:04:38Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.

1:05:14We'll see you next time.

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