Anatomy of Totalitarianism

Venezuelan Contemporary Myths and our Struggle for Freedom

(Text read on January 31st, 2025, at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine, in Paris. The original text is in Spanish, this is a quick translation).

On July 28, 2024, the largest fraud in Latin American history was perpetrated. This was carried out by the now dictator Nicolás Maduro and his henchmen. In this context, it's worth asking how we got here and what paths of struggle remain for Venezuelans. However, Venezuela is a forgetful country, historically priapic, incapable of remembering events that happened just a few years ago. We must then begin by providing some context to the claims I intend to make here and dismantle some myths that we have inscribed in the country's unconscious.

Myth No. 1: "Venezuela is a rich country"

Nothing could be further from the truth. Venezuela was a rich country, the richest in Latin America in terms of GDP and per capita wealth, in the 1970s. That is, fifty years ago. The debacle began when Caldera and Carlos Andrés nationalized oil, giving the government access to a virtually unlimited source of resources. This is when the soul of the country began to corrode, when oil started flowing through the streets and filing politicians' pockets until it corrupted each and every Venezuelan. Oil is not a blessing, it's a curse, in which all countries that suffer the misfortune of black gold, Algeria, Nigeria, Iran, etc., end up implementing clientelist systems of corruption that bleed the country dry. Only Norway, which has done everything possible to isolate the black poison from the country's income, can boast of having efficient management. In that sense, Venezuela is not original at all: another country where oil revenue is an impediment to our development. Why? For the same reason that 70% of lottery winners end up bankrupt a few years later: if overnight, you multiply your income by a hundred thousand, well, you'll end up behaving like a reggaeton artist in a strip club, throwing bills at a girl who pretends to like you.

Myth No. 2: "Things were good before Chávez"

I'm old enough to remember the shamelessness and corruption of Jaime Lusinchi in the eighties. Don't you remember when Blanca Ibáñez was giving promotions to the military? Or when Lusinchi traveled to Spain with his mistress and, when the King refused to receive him with her, he rented an entire hotel and filled it with his riffraff in a spending spree never seen before? Or RECADI, does no one remember RECADI? No: Venezuela was not a panacea where everything was fine before Chávez. Now, the usual plugged-in people were having a blast and it's true that we were still living the aftereffects of a semi-functional country, which could invest in education and culture. It was the little we had left, the manifestations of a middle and upper class that wanted to pretend everything was fine, that we were a "developing country," as they told us in school, when the reality was that we were a country on the path to underdevelopment, falling apart little by little with the AD-COPEI rot.

Myth No. 3: "At the beginning, Chávez did well"

This is a myth well anchored in the psyche of foreigners: Chávez started well, but then it was [insert your favorite villain here: the US, the CIA, the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, the World Bank, the Wizard of Oz...] who ruined it. Poor Chávez, who divided Venezuela's poverty in two (you've heard that one before). The reality is that there was an unprecedented oil boom between 2004 and 2014, so it was impossible for our economy not to improve. However, if we compare Venezuela's economic figures with those of Iran, Nigeria, Algeria or any other oil country during that period, Venezuela was the country with the worst numbers. We grew less, we were the ones who least increased international reserves and who lifted the fewest people out of poverty. Applauding this management is like giving a participation trophy to a child who comes last in the competition and telling him he did great. No: Chávez ruined us. If there's no money now, it's largely because, instead of increasing international reserves during a boom to then spend them when oil prices fall, Chávez did the opposite: he accelerated spending, used the money to buy elections and conduct petro-politics, bankrupted national companies with cheap imports to then nationalize them and left us a bloodless country, with galloping inflation and empty national coffers.

Myth No. 4: "Chávez was a democrat"

It's easy to say you accept election results when you're the one who won them. Chávez agreed with elections as long as they declared him the winner, but the cracks in the seams began to show very early. Chávez rejected the verdict against the 2002 coup d'état and passed the Supreme Court reform in 2004, increasing the number of judges from 20 to 32, appointing the new judges himself. Chávez reformed the Banking Law in 2009 to grab "a little billion dolars," as he said, and paved the way for the looting of what little was left at the end of the oil boom. Chávez disregarded the results of the 2007 referendum and passed the reform anyway. He also called the opposition's victory in the 2008 regional elections a "shitty victory" and stole the Mayor's office from Antonio Ledezma. Later, Maduro disregarded the Assembly we voted for in 2015 and created a parallel Assembly and finally stole the elections in 2024. These are just chosen examples, we could talk about the Tascón List and many other things, you get the idea.

How did we get here?

However, the worst aspect of the Chávez-Maduro regime is the destruction of the rule of law. Not only did Chávez squander a fortune and steal colossal sums from the public treasury, but he also destroyed our democratic institutions and established a system of repression and terror. Nevertheless, Chávez was not a classic dictator like Videla or Trujillo. Since Chávez enjoyed electoral capital and had access to oil money after his banking reforms, he was able to paint his politics in a pseudo-democratic light. Chávez wasn't an autocrat, they said, the people voted for this, and you're just a classist who doesn't want the people to improve, a typical LFI argument, for example [NDLR: La France Insoumise, an extreme left pro-Chavez French political party]. However, this illusion of a socialist revolution where people escaped poverty thanks to a consumption boom (which created an inflationary spiral) and the government won elections (and when it didn't win, it tied them, as my grandmother used to say*), masked the sad reality that Venezuelans were losing more and more freedoms.

The first part of Chávez's administration could be characterized as competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way, 2002). In this system, formal institutions play along with power, and the government represses selectively to show the population who's in charge. It's not the all-out repression of a 1970s military dictatorship, where all dissent is imprisoned without consideration. In competitive authoritarianism, some radio stations are chosen to be closed, others not, to justify that it's not censorship, it's just that "their license wasn't renewed". In competitive authoritarianism, not all journalists are imprisoned, just some. Critics aren't jailed, but Raúl Isaías Baduel and his son, who protested his imprisonment, are locked up. Judges can act, but if they act wrongly, look at what happened to Judge Afiuni, who was raped in prison while attorney general Luisa Ortega Díaz lambasted her and made sure she suffered (Diaz, whom today has the gall to call herself a human rights defender and lives in Spain).

Where are we?

This system worked until Chavismo-Madurismo began to be unpopular, losing elections and running out of money. After Chávez's death in 2013, Nicolás Maduro tried to apply the same recipe, now with a bankrupt country and a better-organized opposition. His reaction has been to increase repression and human rights violations. However, by this point, the international community was beginning to see through the mask: when Maduro neutralized the assembly won by the opposition in 2015, the international community imposed sanctions on the most relevant figures of Chavismo. Now that he has lost the 2024 presidential elections, the international reaction has been worse.

We can affirm, without ambiguity, that on July 28, 2024, there was electoral fraud. We have already explained the reasons for this statement in journalistic articles and other interventions, so we are not going to relitigate the point here. The truth is that a regime without political capital (lost elections) with an economy in shambles and fierce international pressure; can only maintain power by force, increasing repression. We are living through dark times: Venezuela is evolving, from an authoritarian model to a totalitarian model.

Before, there was room for some dissent and disagreement. In totalitarian systems, all opposition must be eliminated, the state proposes total control of all vital aspects of citizens' lives. Maduro's current objective is clear: to dominate even the private lives of Venezuelans, to keep his hand on everything.

This is what we are experiencing: a government that reads citizens' private WhatsApp messages and arbitrarily detains them if they express the wrong thought. This is the dystopia we face.

Where are we headed?

What options do Venezuelans have left to regain their freedom? Unfortunately, in the face of a totalitarian system that seeks to crush us, absolutely any method of struggle is legitimate. We can’t hesitate: Maduro must go, by any means necessary. There is no more room for discussions, debates, negotiations. The only motto is: Maduro out, now.

In a system of competitive authoritarianism, we could have talked about negotiating a transition or figuring out how to pass laws in the assembly. In a totalitarian system, this is not enough. When Maduro stole the elections, he opened the door to all types of resistance. And yes, I am saying that all means are legitimate, including violent means. Now, I am not making an apology for violence or inciting the military to go up in arms. I am deeply pacifist, and I'm not the one who's going to plant bombs. But I'm also not going to tell someone who chooses that route that they're wrong.

From the moment Maduro crowned himself and stole the presidency, violent resistance is legitimate. I repeat: it's not what I want, nor what I preach, but from a political philosophy point of view, it is a completely legitimate action.

Maduro must go, and we Venezuelans must do everything we can to achieve this. It's time to assume our civic responsibility.

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*Si no las gana, la empata: typical Venezuelan saying.