This week we talk about Chávez, Maduro, and Bolivarianism.

We also discuss authoritarianism, Potemkin elections, and the Venezuelan refugee crisis.

Recommended Book: Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen

Transcript

Venezuela, a country with a population of about 30.5 million people, has lost something like 7 to 9 million people, depending on which numbers you use, to a refugee crisis that began about a decade ago, in 2014, and which has since become the largest ever in the Americas, and one of the top ten all-time biggest outflows of people from a region in recorded history—just under the outpouring of people from Bangladesh into mostly India, which I mentioned in last week's episode, during the country's war of independence from Pakistan, and just above the number of people who have fled Syria over the course of its now 13-year-long civil war.

That means Venezuela has lost around a quarter of its total population in the span of just ten years.

The spark that lit the fire of Venezuela's refugee crisis wasn't a civil war, but a political movement called the Bolivarian Revolution, which is named after Simón Bolívar, who is renowned and respected throughout the region for leading the area's independence movement against Spain.

This revolution was kicked-off by a soldier-turned-polician named Hugo Chávez who has long worked to implement what he calls Bolivarianism across the Americas, which calls for a nationalistic, socialistic state of affairs in which hispanic governments would work together, these governments would own most vital aspects of industry and the economy, according to a social model, it calls for self-sufficiency driven by that state-owned nature—the government reining in the purported excesses of capitalism-oriented competition, basically, and it calls for the elimination of corruption and the expulsion and exclusion of what it calls colonialist forces, alongside the equitable distribution of resources to the people.

It's a riff on other socialist and communist models that have been tried, basically, with a South American twist, but it has many of the same implications for day-to-day realities, including the supposition that everything is owned and run by The People, though generally what that means in practice is a pseudo- or full-on police state, meant to keep those outside, enemy forces—which are blamed for anything that goes wrong—from meddling in local affairs, and it also tends to mean a lot of self-enrichment at the top, those in charge of the police state apparatus, and all the state-owned businesses giving a lot of handouts to their friends and family, and generally becoming quite wealthy while the rest of the population becomes increasingly disempowered and impoverished.

This isn't the way these sorts of models necessarily have to go, of course, and it's not the way they're meant to go according to their own ideals and tenets, but historically this combination of claimed goals seems to lead in that direction, and in Venezuela's case we've seen that same trend play out once more, the Bolivarian Revolution putting Chávez at the top of a system predicated largely on oil wealth, which allowed Chávez to reinforce his hold on power, the reinforcement including the jailing, threatening, and harassing of political opponents, and keeping the main opposition party mostly out of power, despite their widespread popularity.

In 2013, Chávez's Vice President, Nicolás Maduro, stepped into the role of acting president when Chávez had to step aside due to cancer complications. He then won an election that was triggered by Chávez's death by less than 1.5% of the vote, though his opponent claims there were irregularities. The National Election Council carried out an investigation and said that the vote was legit, and Maduro became president later that year.

The seeming illegitimacy of that election, though, remains a huge point of contention between the political forces in Venezuela, and in the years since, the government has engaged in what's often euphemistically called "democratic backsliding," which means those in charge are implementing increasingly authoritarian policies in order to maintain control and keep themselves at the top, at the expense of democratic norms and values, like fair and free elections.

All of which has been bad for morale and for locals' sense of power within their own governmental system, but this has all been maintainable to a certain degree because Venezuela is sitting on the world's largest known oil reserves, and has thus able to just keep pumping oil, and expanding their own pumping capabilities, and that has allowed them to fail across a lot of other metrics of success, but still keep things afloat, the average person doing just well enough that they had something to lose if they stepped too far out of line—challenging the government in some way, for instance.

This increasing mono-focus on oil and similar raw materials, like gold, though, became a huge issue when a series of what are generally considered to be hamfisted policy decisions—including abundant and generous fuel subsidies for citizens and local businesses—that left them with wild levels of inflation that led to an intentional devaluation of the country's currency, as part of an effort to address that inflation, but which ultimately just ended up making things worse.

The government also took out a bunch of debt to help increase their oil-pumping capacity, and that combination of debt, a weak currency, and a local economy that had done away with basically everything else except oil left them without everyday fundamentals, including food, alongside issues like burgeoning disease rates, child mortality rates, high levels of crime and corruption, and a whole lot of violence, politically motivated and otherwise.

As of mid-2024, nearly 82% of Venezuela's population lives in poverty, and 53% of the population lives in extreme poverty, unable to afford enough food, and slowly starving to death.

Maduro seems to have won another election in 2018, though that vote is even more widely considered to be a farce than the one in 2013, and though outside governments like the US supported the ascension of opposition candidate Juan Guaidó, who seems to have actually won, that support didn't lead to any real change within Venezuela—though it did lead to more sanctions by the US and its allies against the Venezuelan government and many higher-ups within that government, of which there were already quite a few, and the weight of these sanctions on their oil industry in particular have made it very difficult to Venezuela to openly sell their oil on the international market at full price, which has further deteriorated their economic situation.

There was some hubbub within the Trump administration in 2020 that a military option, like a full-on naval blockade, to keep under-the-table oil deals that dodge US sanctions from occurring, might be on the table, as Maduro was proving resilient to other, less forceful attempts to dethrone him, like the aforementioned sanctions.

But nothing came of that, and a few years later the Biden administration offered to ease sanctions on Maduro's government, and to begin the process of normalizing relations between the two countries, if Maduro agreed to have a fair and free election, letting Venezuelans decide whether to keep him or not, but in an actual election, not rigged election, this time.

What I'd like to talk about today is how that election played out, and the local and international response to its results.

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Some of that promised loosening of sanctions began well before the election, which took place at the tail-end of July 2024—and that allowed Venezuela to reap some profits from selling oil, gas, and gold that would have otherwise been tricky to get onto the global market.

But while Maduro made a few gestures at allowing things to be free and fair, and released some political prisoners, as demanded, he figured out a way to justify keeping his main opposition, a woman named María Corina Machado, who has been incredibly popular with Venezuelans, from being on the ballot. So she picked someone to basically serve as a stand-in for her and her party, a man named Edmundo González.

Official numbers released by the government indicate that Maduro won about 52% of the vote, and will thus remain in office.

According to data and analysis from outside watchdog groups, however, the voter numbers released by the government are highly suspect, the numbers giving every indication that they were falsified.

Evidence, including two-thirds of the tally sheets that the electronic voting machines printed out after polls closed on Election Day, provided by González's opposition alliance to some of those watchdog groups and to journalistic entities like the New York Times and Associated Press, suggest that Maduro probably only got something like 31% of the vote, while González, and through him, Machado and her party, received around 66%—a landslide victory, if those numbers are even close to accurate, and there's additional evidence that they are, as that's very similar to the results tallied by an independent exit poll on Election Day.

Despite that evidence, the Venezuelan election authority has confirmed Maduro's reelection, saying that González only garnered 43% of the vote, and the governments of Venezuela's allies, like Russia, China, and Iran, have also recognized the results as valid—though to be clear, China, Russia, and Iran are all renowned for their Potempkin elections that have all the trappings of a democratic act, but which are largely ceremonial and always predetermined to some degree, even if they claim to take the will of the people into account. So this is