A Warning From Venezuela
The Democratic Convention begins today, and I will probably watch some of the events even though I have an August 31 deadline for an anthology chapter. As one of the people who called for a reassessment following President Biden’s debate performance in June, I feel energized by the new ticket and its focus on freedom and the future.
During this time, I also paid attention to the events in Venezuela, where the opposition had gathered significant support, enjoyed 2-1 leads in pre-election polling, and looked forward to the end of despotic rule that had bankrupted the country and driven a quarter of the population into exile. Hundreds of thousands of those discontented Venezuelans have ended up in the United States, helping to drive the immigration debates that have roiled U.S. politics. The current president, Nicolás Maduro, was the handpicked successor to Hugo Chávez, a socialist who was elected president by a double-digit margin in 1998.
A picture book depicting life for impoverished Venezuelans in the 1980s.
Chávez was an outsized personality, a former army officer who led a failed coup in 1992 and who, once elected, would survive an attempted coup against his government in 2002. He campaigned on promises to use Venezuela’s oil wealth to improve the lives of ordinary people. The country’s great disparities of wealth meant that vast numbers of Venezuelans lived in poverty, in slums without sewage and running water or other basic amenities. An award-winning children’s book from the 1980s, The Streets Are Free by Kurusa (the pen name of Venezuelan anthropologist Monika Doppert), tells the story of a group of children from the slums who ask the government to build them a playground and when they’re ignored, they pitch in to build it themselves. The picture book is based on a true story and offers insight into why so many Venezuelans supported Chávez until his death from cancer in 2013.
Despite his help for ordinary Venezuelans, whose lives did improve when more of the country’s oil wealth was redirected their way, Chávez abused his power. He rewarded friends and punished opponents. He dissolved opposition parties and took control of the media. He supported and promulgated bizarre conspiracy theories. And when oil prices fell, social programs suffered because the economy was dependent on one nonrenewable commodity. Chávez also removed presidential term limits from the Venezuelan constitution to make himself president for life, and when that life turned out to be shorter than expected, he designated the thuggish Maduro, his vice-president, as his successor.
Venezuelans living in the New York City area protest the compromised election.
With the powers granted to him by his more popular predecessor, the unlikeable and unpopular Maduro has cemented his rule through corruption, autocracy, and terror. Gone are the social benefits. Opposition leaders, one after the other, have tried to challenge him through their base in the legislative branch or with economic elites, and one after the other they’ve been defeated and forced into exile. The 2024 election seemed like the best opportunity to dislodge Maduro — polls up to the election, including exit polling — showed the opposition candidate winning by a 2-1 margin. But in the end, Maduro and his allies manufactured a result — a 51-46 victory — unconfirmed by any hard evidence from polling places.
And so Maduro remains — a lesson to all of us in the U.S. as our own election approaches. The lesson is, once an autocrat gets into office via a free and fair election the first time, it is very hard to get him (or his handpicked successor) out. He will move quickly to change the rules — end term limits, take over the judiciary and the media, count the votes his way, and persecute opponents with the goal of driving them into exile. Many of these autocrats have already shown their willingness to destroy the constitutional system through attempted coups, like Chávez in 1992 and Trump on January 6, 2021.
Right now, Trump is halfway there, with a Supreme Court doing his bidding, election officials threatening not to certify results, and major traditional and social media outlets under the control of his supporters. It’s also disappointing to see other media outlets, ostensibly not under his control, giving him a free pass while holding his opponents to the higher standards to which all political leaders should be held. In December 2016, I examined all of the countries that went from democracy to dictatorship in the 20th century — some due to coups but others as a result of the people electing a would-be autocrat — and found that it took an average of 21 years for those countries to get their democracies back.
The record of the 21st century, in which technology plays a greater role in crushing opposition, is even bleaker. Putin has ruled Russia with an iron fist since 1999, leaving death and destruction of internal minorities and foreign neighbors in his wake. His ally Lukashenko in Belarus has ruled since 1994, making him Europe’s longest dictator still in power. Orbán in Hungary — the autocrat favored by the Trump/Vance ticket — gained power in 2010 and shows no sign of leaving despite pressure from the rest of the European Union. Turkey’s Erdoğa was elected in 2003, and, according to an exile friend of my late husband, “will have to die for us to be rid of him.” And now the Chávez/Maduro dictatorship, in power for 26 years and counting, pushes ever-larger numbers of Venezuelans to flee to other lands, in despair of changing conditions inside their home.
If you want to learn more about the connections among all these dictators, and their warning for the United States, I suggest reading Anne Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy, Inc. And do whatever you can to make sure it doesn’t happen here.
