Venezuela: To Solve a Tinderbox

By Benjamin Welton

“The desire for utopia is, arguably, as urgent and as necessary as the desire for history.”
–Eugene Thacker[1]

The problem with this desire, of course, is the unchangeable fact that utopia can never be achieved. Utopia and history are “fabrications…products of human intellectual labor, forged and re-forged with all the solidity and assurance of fact”.[1] In sum, the stupidity of trying to immanentize the eschaton will repeat itself again and again.

Mass democracy only makes this process worse. Politicians cannot reach office in the modern world without promising voters the moon, the sun, and the stars. Whereas central governments and their bureaucracies also work towards ensuring the expansion of their own power, every politician seeking to control these forces will invariably be co-opted or crushed by them. No democratic figure can stop democratic tyranny.

For instance, consider Venezuela. Once one of the most prosperous nations in Latin America, the country is now a third-world hellhole. The country’s currency, the bolivar soberano, reached a peak inflation rate of over 2.5 million percent in January 2019. The socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro has become synonymous with food shortages[2], toilet paper shortages[3], and street protests that feature government troops running over protesters with armored cars. Less known, but no less important, is the fact that Venezuela is a narco state where former Vice President Tareck El Aissami was recently indicted in a New York court for being one of South America’s largest dope pushers.[4] Added to this horror show is the long arm of Castroite malevolence from Cuba. Luis Miquilena, the former Minister of Justice under Hugo Chavez, described his country as being under Cuban occupation in 2016:

“[The Cubans] have introduced in Venezuela a true army of occupation. The Cubans run the maritime ports, airports, communications, the most essential issues in Venezuela. We are in the hands of a foreign country. This is the darkest period in our history!”[5]

Conditions will only get worse in Venezuela, and not just because Maduro and his United Socialist Party refuse to step down. Juan Guaidó, the leader of the opposition movement and the man favored by the Trump administration, offers Venezuela no hope and no salvation. Guaidó’s attempt at a military coup against Maduro fizzled out and barely got past the planning stage.[6] Now that Russian troops are in Venezuela to prop up Maduro[7], the probability of an American-backed coup grows slimmer by the day.

Guaidó is the leader of the Popular Will party, which believes in social democracy, progress, and majoritarian democracy.[8] Therefore, if given power in Caracas, Guaidó will not solve Venezuela’s problems. The country is suffering not just because it has a left-wing autocrat in power. Rather, the country’s suffering stems from its belief in democracy and the republican form of governance. Unless these models are overturned, Venezuela will continue to descend into disorder and hopelessness.

From Monarchy to Tyranny

Before discussing potential alternatives to democracy in Venezuela, it is worthwhile to briefly discuss Venezuela’s history in order to see how the country was doomed from the start.

Christopher Columbus became the first European to reach Venezuelan shores in 1498. A year later, the Spanish explorer Alonso de Ojeda named the area Venezuela, or “Little Venice” due to the prevalence of rivers and native huts that utilized stilts in order to keep the water at bay. The first permanent Spanish settlement in Venezuela was founded in 1521. But in the grand scheme of things, Venezuela was not a terribly important colony to the Spanish Habsburgs. Mexico was the jewel of the Castilian empire, while the Viceroyalty of Peru (which included Peru, parts of Chile, and Ecuador) was arguably the second most important possession.

Venezuela’s position as an imperial afterthought became clear when Emperor Charles V sold a huge swath of Venezuela’s coastline to the Welser family in 1528 in order to pay off his debt to the German bankers. Renamed Klein-Venedig (“Little Venice”), Prince Bartholomeus Welser, some industrious German miners and merchants, and 4,000 African slaves attempted to turn Klein-Venedig into a prosperous colony with abundant gold, sugar, and other resources.[9] This did not happen, and the Welser family left after twenty years. The only memorable fact about the German colony in Venezuela is the story of Ambrosius Ehinger, the Bavarian Catholic conquistador and colonial governor who set out to find El Dorado.

Like the other Spanish settlements in the New World, Venezuela had a hierarchical structure that reserved the highest positions for Spanish government officials, the Roman Catholic clergy, and local white landowners known as criollos. From this criollo milieu would come the nation’s foremost hero, Simón Bolívar. Born in Caracas, Bolívar came from a wealthy landowning family. However, when Bolívar was just three years old, his father died. This meant that the young Bolívar was reared by an uncle and a tutor, the latter of which was a firm believer in the Enlightenment, specifically the French philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. Rousseau articulated the idea that humanity is born as a blank slate, and it is only social influences that make humans turn to prejudice and authority. Rousseau became the celebrated philosopher of equality, even if, like British fascist Oswald Mosley once suggested, Rousseau meant “equality of opportunity” rather than the preposterous “equality of man.”[10]

Bolívar drank deeply from the witch’s brew of 18th-century liberalism. When he returned to his native soil after a sojourn in revolutionary Europe, Bolívar became one of the leaders of the criollo rebellion against the Spanish crown. Beginning in 1816, Bolívar landed with a body of rebel troops at the port of La Boca. This was accomplished with help and weapons from Haitian president Alexandre Pétion, himself the head of a radical Jacobin republic that was born following the wholesale rape and murder of the French whites of the island.[11] The Bolívar of the early stage of the revolution was no Caesar, and even Karl Marx found it prudent to call out the Venezuelans’ cowardice.[12]

Bolívar’s rebellion of the early 19th century only succeeded thanks to the financial instability of post-Napoleonic Spain, the liberalism of King Ferdinand VII, and elite anger over the imposition of new taxes. Much like the radical Sons of Liberty rebellion against the British crown, Bolívar’s illegitimate rebellion against sovereign Spanish authority is Venezuela’s first and most awful sin. Had Venezuela and Latin America remained within Spain’s dominion, then the American “Colossus of the North,” which is the eternal bogeyman of Latin American leftists, could have been held in check by a much stronger Madrid than the one that the United States steamrolled in 1898.

Bolívar’s rebellion promised too much to too many. For the elite criollos, he was one of their own and his state would put their interests above those of the Spanish crown and the Catholic Church. For the indigenous tribes and the descendants of African slaves, Bolívar seemed to hold the promise of full emancipation, though this was never Bolívar’s intention.[13] This has never changed, and today Bolívar remains a populist symbol open to flexible interpretation. Bolívar, despite his white skin and Spanish ancestry, is often upheld as the great hero of mestizo and mulatto power. Despite being a military officer with elitist views, Latin American leftists believe so much in Bolívar as a symbol of proletarian and peasant revolution that the term “Bolivarianism” denotes a political ideology that encompasses populism, socialism, Marxism, anti-Americanism, and pan-Latin American unity.[14] It should not be surprising that Hugo Chavez called his left-wing takeover of Caracas the “Bolivarian Revolution” and renamed the Fifth Republic of Venezuela as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

It was not a given that Venezuela would follow the path from Enlightenment liberalism to socialist demagoguery. In fact, for a time, Venezuela was one of the more stable and prosperous nations in the Western Hemisphere. The apex of Venezuela civilization coincided with the reign of military dictator Juan Vincente Gómez. From 1908 until 1935, Gómez, an army officer and a full-blooded Amerindian from the Andes, either directly ruled the nation as its president or controlled power behind the scenes. Gómez’s strongman regime had the intellectual support of Venezuelan intellectuals, most notably Laureano Vallenilla Lanz. Lanz, a member of Venezuela’s Positivist school, believed in “mechanical solidarity” and the power of the state (backed up by education) to make the citizens intelligent, rational, and, essentially liberal.[15] Lanz believed that Gómez was the necessary Caesar to bring average Venezuelans up from their state of semi-barbarism.

Everything changed for the country when oil was discovered in 1914. Once flush with petrodollars, Gómez’s regime instituted free-market reforms, including “allowing market actors, domestic and foreign, to freely exploit newly discovered oil deposits.”[16] The caudillo system established by Gómez lasted until 1958. At that point, another military politician, General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, was overthrown by a coalition of Marxists and left-wing military officers. The man who rose to power following this coup was the social democrat and former communist Rómulo Betancourt. Betancourt established the Fourth Venezuelan Republic, instituted a constitution in 1961, and created the Punto Fijo Pact. This agreement between the country’s two major parties, the Christian Democrats and Democratic Action, formalized a new economic order that reserved an activist position for the central government. Long before Chavez came to power in the late 1990s, the centralization and bureaucratization of the Fourth Republic saw the devaluation of the Venezuelan currency, a failed land reform effort that increased squatting at the cost of weakened property rights, and the nationalization of the country’s oil industry in 1976.[16]

The corruption of the Fourth Republic allowed Chavez, who had been nothing less than a left-wing radical in a military uniform, to tap into populist anger and win the 1998 Venezuelan presidential election. Henrique Salas Römer and the center-right liberalism of his Project Venezuela party proved to be no match for the Chavez’s Fifth Republic Movement and its message of bread, revolution, and racial grievance harvesting.[17] This, in a nutshell, is how Venezuela fell apart.

Solution 1: Dictatorship of the Caudillo and Anarcho-Bonapartist Variety

The most practical solution for Venezuela is the institution of a military junta. Such governments have existed in every Latin American country, including Venezuela. Several examples are worth mentioning. Arguably the most successful Latin American dictator of all time was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. Suggesting that Venezuela needs a Pinochet is not novel. As Richard Jack Rail said in an article for the American Thinker, the 1973 coup in Chile removed the Marxist government of Salvador Allende and replaced it with an economically viable state:

“Pinochet took out that government and ruled in a no-nonsense manner. He was responsible for human rights violations that occurred on his watch, and there were many. He was also responsible for putting Chile’s economy on a sound footing for the first time in its history. On a continent where failing economies are the norm, Chile has only a 6.4% poverty rate.”[18]

It is important to remember, especially since left-wing academics are so found of bemoaning the removal of Allende, that Chile’s legislators actually voted for Pinochet and the other members of the junta to remove Allende from power. This legitimate and legal act was done because of Allende’s centralized economy, his close relationship with Castro’s Cuba, and his use of land reform as part of a greater plan to turn Chile into a Marxist state. Pinochet’s government reversed course and, thanks to the so-called “Chicago Boys[19],” free-market reforms were introduced and the private economy flourished. While communists and other left-wingers received helicopter rides courtesy of the Chilean military, Chile was on its way to becoming a stable and prosperous nation. Today, unlike the majority of Latin American countries, Chile enjoys a fast-growing economy, a shrinking central government debt, and First World crime and safety rates. None of this would have been possible if not for Pinochet, who unlike most military dictators, stepped down from power in 1990 following a national plebiscite in 1988.

Besides Pinochet, other dictators who promoted stability in otherwise chaotic Latin American states include Alberto Fujimori of Peru, who defeated a communist insurgency all the while improving Peru’s usually dormant economy; Hugo Bánzer Suárez of Bolivia, who temporarily improved the Bolivian economy during the 1970s[20]; and the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985, which ousted the far-left democrat João Goulart and replaced him with a stable and prosperous dictatorship that remains popular in Brazil today.[21] In almost every instance, right-leaning military dictatorships proved beneficial in Latin American states.

During the tenure of these regimes, the usually anarchic governance, wanton murder, and financial instability of the usual mob of left-wing populists were suppressed and replaced with law and order, privatization reforms, and policies aimed to maximize individual freedom. As strange as it may sound to liberals, the individual – his genius, his skills, his uniqueness – can only flourish in a hierarchical society based around authority, private property rights, and decentralized power.

In ochlocratic societies, it is necessary to create authoritarian dictatorships. Today’s Venezuela would benefit if a new constitution put in place a commissary dictatorship. First outlined by Carl Schmitt, a commissary dictatorship is a dictatorship of a state of emergency:

“From the historical development of the regulation concerning the state of emergency it is obvious that essentially two types of dictatorship exist: namely a dictatorship that, despite all its extra-legal authorization, remains within the prescriptions of a constitutional order and in which the dictator is constitutionally mandated (commissary dictatorship); and on the other hand a dictatorship in which the whole existing legal order is rendered obsolete and a completely new order is intended (sovereign dictatorship).”[22]

Contemporary Venezuela would benefit from either type of dictatorship so long as that dictatorship is right-wing and dedicated to removing left-wing populism from Latin American life. For a commissary dictatorship to work, Maduro would have to be removed by right-wing military officers, who would in turn remove all socialists from power while simultaneously keeping in place the country’s constitution (with certain amendments) and the National Assembly. This junta would maintain power in Venezuela until that point in time when crime has been reduced to manageable levels, the currency has stabilized, and the socialist virus has been contained.

The more thoroughgoing sovereign dictatorship model could only work if all voting was outlawed, the constitution was rendered null and void, and all power were invested in a royal sovereign. Put bluntly, a dictatorship that installed a king would be the preferable option in Venezuela (and the United States as well). However, given the Western Hemisphere’s unthinking hostility to monarchy, the chances of this happening are slim. The closest our hemisphere could come to feudal monarchy would be anarcho-Bonapartism. While jokingly defined in an article by blogger Dr. Piotr Stolarski, anarcho-Bonapartism, serious or not, would be preferable to democracy. He writes,

“Anarcho-Bonapartism envisages a society of struggle, overthrowing unjust systems of power (including oligarchic democracy) and capital by peaceful means of resistance, followed by the shocking embrace of a reloaded (elected) benevolent dictatorship. There is a dialectical and communicative relationship between the anarchist self-organised masses and their caudillo.”[23]

My personal version of anarcho-Bonapartism in both Venezuela and the United States would embrace Fritz Pendleton’s “gentle oppression[24]” in the form of a strongman who does not have to sully his brain with thoughts of elections, campaigning, or special interests. Supporting this dictatorship would be a decentralized cadre of local leaders and military officers who exercise authority at the state and municipal level. Useless central planning and government departments would be abolished and replaced by private initiatives, local patrons, or non-state institutions such as the various churches and fraternal organizations.

As for the dictator in place in Caracas or D.C., their plate would be considerably smaller than the one currently enjoyed by President Donald Trump. An anarcho-Bonapartist leader would only concern himself with foreign affairs and domestic security. Everything else would be in the hands of local property owners and local leaders. The only occasional voting would be in the form of a national plebiscite, and the only issues up for a vote would run the gamut from minor to insignificant.

Solution #2: Secession and Breakup

The simplest solution to the Venezuela tinderbox would be secession. José Niño believes that the first portion of Venezuela that could justifiably secede is the state of Zulia. Described as “fiercely independent and regionalist,” Zulia has already been denounced by the socialists in Caracas because of its potential for secession.[25] Other Venezuelan states, including Táchira and Mérida, could also break away from the Leviathan in Caracas.

Any secession movement in the modern world must deal with the fact that military force would be necessary. These breakaway states would immediately be occupied by the army of the central government, and like the Confederate States of America, would face technological superiority. The secessionists must be prepared to lose lives.

The other problem with secession in Venezuela (and indeed any state in the Western Hemisphere) is race. According to 2019 figures, Venezuela is 50 percent mestizo, 42.5 percent European (white), 3.5 percent African, and 2.5 percent indigenous. Chavez, Maduro, and their brand of left-wing populist socialism has a strong constituency among Venezuela’s African and mestizo community. The armed fist of the Maduro regime, the Bolivarian Militia, is dominated by Venezuela’s mestizo majority, with blacks and mulattos making up the second largest portion. In general, the Maduro regime can count on the urban poor of the country as loyal adherents. All of this means that any breakaway state in Venezuela must either enjoy racial or cultural homogeneity, or be mostly free of urban poverty. If not, then that secessionist state faces the likelihood of an insurgency within their new state that would receive funding and support from Caracas as well as pro-Maduro states like Russia, Cuba, Syria, and China.

Any secessionist movement in Venezuela must get the backing of the United States, and not just tacitly. A secessionist state in Venezuela would need weapons, military advisors, American air support, and some American troops on the ground. Basically, any secessionist movement would produce a Syrian situation in the Western Hemisphere. Depending on the American government in power at the time, the secessionists would either get the cold shoulder or be treated like the Kurds: militarily provided for, but still without complete American support for an independent state.

Conclusion

There is no easy solution to the mess in Venezuela. The answers offered so far are not answers at all. A direct US invasion would only place Guaidó in power, and his social democratic policies would do nothing to alleviate Venezuela’s economic and social catastrophe. No plebiscite or election would change Venezuela’s situation. Continued street protests without co-opting the upper echelon of the military are pointless. Leaving Maduro in power and hoping that his “Bolivarian” socialists willingly abandon power is stupid and dangerous.

While it is the easiest option, secession would lead to more bloodshed in a civil war, and there would be no guarantee of success. A dictatorship, whether commissary or sovereign, is the only real option. Some son of the Venezuelan soil must take power in the country and, using emergency powers, enact sweeping reforms in order to break the stranglehold of Maduro’s Fifth Venezuelan Republic. Yes, the enactment of this dictatorship must be done by force; there is no other way. A dictatorship is needed in Venezuela in order to establish law and order. A dictatorship is needed also to destroy the mechanisms of left-wing populism and Bolivarian socialism. They should be replaced by decentralized, but still authoritarian power centers that all ultimately answer to a single military government. Until the Venezuelan military is ready to make such a radical decision, the continued devolution of their once-great society will continue unabated.

References

  1. Thacker, Eugene, in Cioran, E.M. (2015). History and Utopia. The Arcade. p. vii.
  2. “Venezuela’s Bread Wars: With Food Scarce, Government Accuses Bakers Of Hoarding”. NPR. 7 Apr. 2017.
  3. Kass, John (2016, Feb. 25). “Venezuelan toilet paper shortage an unwelcome symptom of socialism”. Chicago Tribune.
  4. Neumeister, Larry (2019, Mar. 8). “Ex-Venezuelan vice president accused of aiding drug dealers”. Associated Press.
  5. Fontova, Humberto (2019, Feb. 2). “Venezuela Desperately Needs a Pinochet”. Townhall.
  6. Goodman, Joshua; Torchia, Christopher (2019, May 1). “How the Venezuelan ‘coup’ didn’t get beyond street demonstrations supporting Juan Guaido”. USA Today/Associated Press.
  7. “Russian army helping Venezuela amid US ‘threats’: Moscow’s ambassador”. France24. 24 May 2019.
  8. Filer, Joey (2019, Feb. 12). “Venezuela’s Standoff is Socialist vs. Socialist”. OZY.
  9. Radeska, Tijana (2016, Nov. 3). “Venezuela was a German colony for almost twenty years and was called Klein-Venedig (Little Venice)”. The Vintage News.
  10. Mosley, Oswald (2018). “The Ideology of Fascism”, in Essays on Fascism. Black House Publishing. p. 10.
  11. Stoddard, T. Lothrop (1914). The French Revolution in San Domingo. Houghton Mifflin Company. p. 349.
  12. Marino, Angela (2018). The Symbol That Keeps Performing: Three Populist Turns of the Horse of Bolívar. Northwestern University Press. p. 148.
  13. Ibid., p. 149–50.
  14. Swaminathan, Anthony (2017, Jan. 16). “Bolivarianism: A Fanfare for the Common Man?”. Berkeley Political Review.
  15. Vallenilla, Nikita Harwich (1990, May). “Venezuelan Positivism and Modernity”, in The Hispanic American Historical Review. p. 337.
  16. Niño, José (2017, May 4). “Venezuela Before Chavez: A Prelude to Socialist Failure”. Mises Institute.
  17. Weathersbee, Tonyaa J. (2013, Mar. 6). “Why the Black and Poor Loved Hugo Chávez”. The Root.
  18. Rail, Richard Jack (2019, May 9). “A Pinochet Could Help Venezuela”. American Thinker.
  19. Opazo, Tania (2016, Jan. 12). “The Boys Who Got to Remake an Economy”. Slate Business.
  20. “And you, general?” The Economist. 5 Nov. 1998.
  21. “Fury as Bolsonaro orders Brazil army to mark 55th anniversary of military coup”. The Guardian. 27 Mar. 2019.
  22. Schmitt, Carl (2014). Dictatorship. Polity. p. 35.
  23. Stolarski, Piotr (2012, Mar. 4). “Defining Anarcho-Bonapartism”. Christian Existentialist Medley.
  24. Pendleton, Fritz (2017, May 8). “Authority as National Sanity”. Social Matter.
  25. Niño, José (2017, Nov. 7). “Secession – Not Military Intervention – Can Help Venezuela”. Mises Institute.

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