“The advantage of being poor is that you can always get rich,” wrote Venezuelan novelist Miguel Bonnefoy in Black sugar (Rivages, 2017), a book that looks like a treasure hunt and smells of rum. But the story, as is often the case, is cut short, caught up by fate, and dreams of enrichment turn into a tropical nightmare, similar to the one the Venezuelan people have been living for more than two decades. The Bolivarian revolution of Comandante Chavez has been there, with its share of ideological harangues and social promises, falsely kept by taking money from abundant oil at random.
Damn oil. The one that kept all the illusions alive, when, in the mid-1970s, per capita income in Venezuela was at the top of Latin American countries, boosted by the quadrupling of the price of crude oil. The surge would be short-lived: the reversal of the price of a barrel in the 1980s caused the beginning of the troubles, with the arrival of the IMF in Caracas, a vast austerity program and two attempted coups organized by Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement 200. The military man would finally be elected president in 1998, triggering the Chavista era, the last stage before the fall of the country. This was the time when all that remained of communists and anti-imperialists in the world, from the South American continent to North Korea, via China and Iran, gave thanks to the new Lider maximo of the Caribbean. The French revolutionaries were not left out, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon praising, upon Chavez’s death in March 2013, “the inexhaustible ideal of humanist hope”, and explaining that Chavez “did not only advance the human condition of Venezuelans, he advanced democracy considerably”.
Absurd words as they describe the exact opposite of the reality of Venezuela, under the rule for a quarter of a century of Chavez and then Maduro, the one endured by its 28 million inhabitants, not to mention the 8 million who have gone into exile. But Mélenchon and his henchmen do not talk about that. Of the flouted democracy, of the recent presidential election stolen by the Maduro clan, of the police repression, not a word. Venezuela is a political and economic shipwreck that the leader of LFI has chosen not to comment on. In ten years, the country’s GDP has melted by more than 75%; its debt is close to 150 billion dollars. Fraud, corruption, hyperinflation and underinvestment are the sad fruits of the Bolivarian revolution: we have seen better performances. Take South Korea, whose per capita income equaled that of Venezuela in 1989. Since then, the young Asian democracy, betting on the rules of capitalism, has transformed itself into an indisputable model of success. Its inhabitants have an income 10 times higher than that of Venezuelans. Life is better in the Land of the Morning Calm than in the dictatorship born of the great revolutionary evenings. But perhaps Jean-Luc Mélenchon prefers the mirage of North Korea?