As the Venezuelan crisis mounts the last presentation made by
Professor David Smilde at WOLA, the Washington Office for
Latin America, showed less of a bias in favor of the
Venezuelan regime. Please see:
I
have no doubt Professor Smilde is trying to be impartial but he still
clings to the idea that the Venezuelan government is just a bad
government, still not accepting that it is a corrupt, inept and
murderous regime. Every one of these adjectives can be sufficiently
documented.
In
his presentation Professor Smilde made much emphasis on the economic
side of the Venezuelan problem. He was right in saying that basic
foodstuffs, medicines and other are scarce. But he explained it as a
problem of the government’s own creation, of dramatic economic
mismanagement. He makes it sound as if the government always had good
intentions but erred in its policies. Of course, this is not the case.
The government is consciously, ideologically driven into actions that
are ruining the country. It is not a matter of having good intentions
but applying the wrong policies. It is a matter of ideological
perversity.
Professor
Smilde says that Maduro tries to follow Chavez’s model but lacks his
charisma. This would seem to suggest that Chavez had it right. The
reality is that Chavez’s model was already extremely harmful to the
nation. Chavez’s model ran the country into the ground. Even when he was
very ill, this corrupt leader had the perversity of running for
president for the next six years, when he already knew he would not live
for six more months. His campaign consumed billions of dollars, as
admitted by former finance minister Jorge Giordani. . This is a fact
that Professor Smilde glosses over.
Professor
Smilde says that Maduro is ruining the Chavez’s legacy, one he defines
as reformist and popular. He correctly says that Maduro’s popularity is
now very low (currently is running below 20%). However, if I understood
him correctly, he added that the regime can still turn things around,
that the coming elections are not yet pre-determined. Chavismo, he says,
is not over.
He
talks about the coming legislative elections but does not mention that
the elections will be monitored by the same corrupt officers, illegally
selected.
One
comment made by professor Smilde is unacceptable to democratic
Venezuelans. He says that the chances for a succesful dialogue in
Venezuela promoted by UNASUR have been compromised by the issuing of
sanctions by the U.S. against members of the Venezuelan government.
This is absurd. Smilde should know that UNASUR is run by Ernesto
Samper, a man who became president of Colombia thanks to the drug
cartels and is now an unconditional supporter of Nicolas Maduro. The
dialogue they promote is a mechanism for maintaining Maduro in power.
For
WOLA the Venezuelan situation still belongs into the realm of
conventional political science. The reality is that it belongs into the
criminal realm of human rights violations and failed states.
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