The Venezuelan Curse (Part 2)

The conclusion to our story about Venezuela. How a country goes from a prosperous democracy to a poverty-ravaged dictatorship. The End (our 2022 episode on Greenland) https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/i-have-a-new-story-for-you The Many Faces of Chavismo - Alejandro Velasco https://nacla.org/chavismo-hugo-chavez-venezuela/ Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse - William Neuman https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57693395-things-are-never-so-bad-that-they-can-t-get-worse

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Hi. Quick note before we start this week. While this episode is about Venezuela, a country that recently found itself the focus of our country's confusing ADHD-inspired imperial ambitions, Greenland has also landed in a similar spot. And very surprisingly, we happen to have reported an hour-long documentary about Greenland. I went to visit there a few years ago to a melting glacier on a trip with climate change activists and crypto people. Our Greenland story contains a lot about Greenland's history, just what the place is like, it's very strange, even ideas about resource extraction there. The story is absolutely one of my favorite things I've ever gotten to work on. If you want to hear it, it's called "The End." We'll throw a

• 0:41PJ Vogt?

  link to it in our show notes. That is Greenland. This week, Venezuela. After this short break.

• 0:49PJ Vogt?

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• 1:35PJ Vogt?

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• 1:42PJ Vogt?

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• 2:27PJ Vogt?

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• 3:11PJ Vogt?

  Hello, Search Engine listeners. This is the final part, part two, of our very fascinating, in my opinion, history of Venezuela, told to us by the platonic ideal of a history professor, Alejandro Velasco. If you've not yet heard part one, please go listen. But if you have, we pick up our story where we last left it. The country's president, Hugo Chavez, star of the TV show Alo Presidente, is in an extremely strong position. The year is 2005.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Now Chavez has control over the military, control over the national oil industry, international credibility, democratic credibility, and control over the Congress, just at the time when oil prices are hitting their peak.

• 4:01PJ Vogt?

  Just an immense amount of power.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  It's complete power, is what it is. It is total power, which eventually will be the Achilles' heel and the reason why Chavez will fail.

• 4:16PJ Vogt?

  So today, we're going to talk about that failure. We're going to chart a series of really heartbreaking mistakes. Chavez will make many of them himself. The US will contribute at some crucial moments as well. And as we follow the story, we'll see a country gripped by the strange amnesia Alejandro Velasco described in episode one. A place that during the boom times seems to almost forget the bust. Forget that everything that rises eventually falls. So to begin, chapter one, The Socialist Oil Company.

• 4:54PJ Vogt?

  Even before Chavez, Venezuela had been engaged in a multi-decade project of nationalizing its oil industry. Petavesa, the state oil company, had begun back in the 1970s. But before Chavez, it's a more complicated picture. You have other foreign oil companies freely operating in Venezuela, and Petavesa itself operates fairly autonomously from the whims of the president. Chavez will change both of those things. One big change he'll make is to tell multinational oil companies like ExxonMobil, they have to give Venezuela a 60% stake in their Venezuelan operations in order to stay in the country. The companies that resist, he expropriates their assets.

• 5:36PJ Vogt?

  The ones that stay are made to understand that their relationship to Venezuela will be very different now. Here's Alejandro.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  So it was a much more contentious nationalization process, not only because of the finances, but because of the implication that now foreign oil companies are no longer partners in Venezuela's oil industry. Now, if anything, we are clients of Venezuela's oil industry and on their terms. And so the ones calling the shots are not just the oil industry executives. It is, in very important ways, the whims of one person, Hugo Chavez.

• 6:13PJ Vogt?

  And so with them out of the picture largely, with the oil industry nationalized, how well does it run as a nationalized industry?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  The major problem is that, once you nationalize, you, of course, take complete ownership over the profits. But unlike in a process of cooperation with private partners or contracting, you now assume all of the risk and all of the investment costs as well, which also imply, of course, maintenance, upkeep, improvements, et cetera, et cetera. Now, again, in context of high oil prices, you can possibly do this. But because of the absence, number one, of accountability, no institutional accountability, and also because of the stated project of, we're going to use literally the oil wealth

• 7:06Speaker 01

  and redistribute it as much as possible into the population, the intensives are set such that the primary focus of the oil industry is not reinvestment in itself, but reinvestment in the nation as a whole. Now, you think... That's not a problem. If it's the nation's oil, shouldn't that be the the end goal of a national oil industry? And I think the answer is yes, but to a point. Not at the sacrifice of the industry itself. And so what happens to the oil industry? Like, how quickly does it fall apart? Um, the decline of the industry had begun as soon as the oil industry shrank in 2002 and 2003.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  And as we talked about, that moment was one marked by the firing of 18,000 longstanding, mostly professional engineering personnel, right? So, for instance, you started to see things. I'll give you one small anecdote. Yeah. So, growing up, every other weekend, we would go to the beach from Caracas. And there was one beach in particular that we liked to go to. And to get to this beach, you had to go through one of the primary oil refineries in Venezuela. And I have a very distinct memory imprinted in my mind of you drove by this refinery, and there was a big placard on the side of the road that said, "Days Since The Last Accident."

• 8:31Speaker 01

  And it was something like, you know, years' worth of days. Yeah. And then I remember going back there years later during this time, and the placard was gone. So, like, many accidents would happen. Yeah. And some of these would be deadly. Of course, it's hard, in part because of the visibility of the oil industry in Venezuela. It's not something that's out of sight. It's quite plain. When an accident happens, you know about it, right? And so, you know, you started to see, like, explosions in refineries. You started to see leaks in the lake, things that hadn't really happened before, or at least we didn't know about. Yeah. And so that's contriving to give a sense that the kind of, you know, high level of professionalism and expertise is no longer there.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  But it really begins to kind of kick into overdrive right around 2008 and 2009. Again, the mission of PES has shifted dramatically, and it's also, of course, now grown massively in size. We talked about how You know, the entire oil industry before the strike was around 42,000 people and almost half of them were fired summarily. By 2007, 2008, because of the incorporation of all of these like social programs within the scope and the remit of the oil industry, now the oil industry employed directly or indirectly hundreds of thousands of people, right? And so if you send your kid to school, you get this amount of money. If you yourself go to school to learn how to, you know, do whatever, you get this amount

• 10:01Speaker 01

  of money, right? So everyone is tapping into the state quite directly in this moment. And the reinvestments into the oil industry become secondary.

• 10:11PJ Vogt?

  We're going to come back to the oil company, to Petavesa, later, to see what happened to the state-owned, state-run oil company when prices inevitably began to fall. But in our story, it's still 2008, prices are high, and the bus time is unimaginable. The best estimates I've seen put the total value of oil revenues that came into Chavez's government during those boom years at around $1 trillion. A trillion dollars in revenue flowing into a country whose population is a bit higher than the state of Florida's. As one academic put it, quote, "the largest resource windfall in the history of Latin America." And Chavez's power meant that he would get to direct that cash wherever he thought appropriate.

• 10:56PJ Vogt?

  Which brings us to chapter two, pipe dreams. Alejandro said there are many examples from these years of wild, blank check government infrastructure ideas, but there was a specific story he wanted to share.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  I'll tell you one that brings together this domestic component of trying to refashion the nation now under socialist lines, beginning in 2006, 2007, with larger hemispheric ambitions. So in 2006, 2007, there are now an array of leftist presidents elected throughout Latin America, some of them neighboring Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, all the way down to Chile. And again, this is a region that is very rich in natural resources, one of them being gas, natural gas. And so the idea in terms of refashioning solidarity and alliances, no longer just around

• 11:54Speaker 01

  material interests, but around a shared purpose of political and ideological solidarity, is made manifest in a project to build a continental gas pipeline that is going to stretch all the way down to Argentina and go all the way up to Venezuela. And then from there, gas can be exported elsewhere. And all the various countries that have natural gas will just pipe their gas into this pipeline and then ship it off to the benefit of the entire continent.

• 12:31PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so it's gonna, it's gonna be a national gas pipeline going through the continent. And the idea is that it's like, the same way countries are internally sharing their natural resources, it's like, it's towards a more communal idea of this as an export from the region to the rest of the world.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's an effort to create a united Latin America, which is Bolivarian in nature, right? It goes all the way back to Bolivar's ideas of a Gran Colombia, of, you know, Latin American nations that come together as a confederacy of nations. Obviously, there's tragedy involved in the billions of dollars that were spent in these kinds of projects. But there's also kind of, you know, dark humor in the idea of the jokes tell themselves. Like, the pipe dream literally is a pipe dream, right? This, you know, pipe that, I remember in A Lo Preciante, this like Sunday TV talk show that Chavez had, where he would bring out maps and then he would show these maps of the continent and tell you exactly where the pipeline was gonna go.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  And they'd explain the geography and like, well, we can't go through here because the terrain does not lend itself to, so we have to go through here. But we're gonna preserve nature, don't worry about that, nature's gonna be fine. Of course, environmentalists were sounding the alarm all along. But as you were watching this, on the one hand, you had this idea of, as an historian of Venezuela... This is exactly the magical thinking that has for so long put us in really precarious moments when we feel that the future is limitless.

• 14:08PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  This is it, like, we're watching it. And, and, and yet, at the same time, you're like, wow, that's pretty fucking awesome.

• 14:15PJ Vogt?

  Like, maybe this time, maybe.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, as, as I look back upon that moment, I'm like, wow, I, I can read all about the magical state, but here I am, feeling the enchantment of it.

• 14:29PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Right? That the grandiosity of it, like, in a kind of weird asymptotic relationship, the bigger the design, the bigger the ambition, the more seductive it is.

• 14:40PJ Vogt?

  Because there's just something intoxicating about, maybe it's impossible, but what if it's not?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yes. Maybe this is the time.

• 14:49PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Right? Economic principles be damned, geography be damned, history be damned, maybe this is the moment.

• 14:59PJ Vogt?

  Huh. And it's like, in a place where there's been so much disappointment, the way you revive people's capacity for hope isn't through smaller promises, it's through bigger promises.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:10PJ Vogt?

  What ends up happening to the gas pipeline? Like, why was this utopian infrastructure project not completed?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  In the same way that many of these projects end up being not completed, it dies with a whimper, not a bang. Very soon, they realize the actual, practical impossibility of the project. The amount to spend to upkeep was far larger than any potential profit that it could return. And so, for as many shows as I remember Chava's bringing out the map and telling us exactly where the pipeline was going to go, I remember no shows where they said, and now it's no longer going to happen.

• 15:51PJ Vogt?

  I see. Yeah. It just, big promises, and then, once it gets hard, just like quietly, just like make other big promises.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:00PJ Vogt?

  There were a lot of projects like this, like, just billions of dollars spent on...

• 16:06PJ Vogt?

  Like, ideas that sounded great, but either were not well executed, or maybe could never have been well executed. What was Chavez's understanding of this? Like, how much did he understand the waste that he was presiding over? How much did he believe the promises he was making?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously, I don't know, because I'm not in Chavez's head. But, you know, at least from everything that one has access to, both in his public pronouncements, and what he wrote, and speeches that he gave, and interviews, et cetera. He was a true believer. And I think that inspired, among his supporters, a sense of confidence.

• 16:52PJ Vogt?

  There's a book I read that really describes what life in Venezuela felt like under the spell of this confidence. It's called "Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse." The writer, journalist William Newman, actually interviews a former information minister for Chavez. Part of this information minister's responsibility was Chavez's TV show, "Al Presidente." The information minister describes how, when Chavez appeared on TV, they were constantly looking for good news he could take credit for on air, which often meant faking stuff. Pretending a factory was ready to start production when it wasn't. Sprucing up a derelict farm so it was ready for prime time. According to this information minister, Chavez himself often didn't know that the victories he was presenting were gussied up or fake.

• 17:37PJ Vogt?

  The writer tells one insane story about yet another infrastructure project. This was the Bolivarian cable train, a transit project, which was still under construction. But Chavez wanted it completed in time for an election. He wanted to ride the train himself on live TV. The European engineering firm, who had been doing the construction, said this was not possible, at least not on Chavez's timeline. One of his ministers went back to them and said, quote, "No European engineer is going to tell the people of Venezuela what can and cannot be done."

• 18:09PJ Vogt?

  Perhaps recognizing the implication here, that they were at risk of losing significant amounts of government money in contracts, the engineers changed their tack. They agreed, for $1 million, to help create a fake train ride for Venezuelan TV. The solution was to attach a thin wire to the train, run the wire down the tracks to a winch they'd hidden, one of those devices that turns a wire, like you'd use to pull a Jeep out of a ditch. The train couldn't actually run, but with this winch, the idea was that they could fake it.

• 18:41PJ Vogt?

  So here's what Venezuelan TV viewers saw that day. Their president, standing on a train platform, the train in the background, extolling the virtues of Venezuelan socialism.

• 18:56PJ Vogt?

  Chavez is saying, "This is only possible in socialism, the kingdom of God on earth, the kingdom of Christ on earth." And then, he tells the crowd to applaud, because here's the train.

• 19:08PJ Vogt?

  The train, though, is barely moving. And so Chavez has to just keep vamping to kill time.

• 19:25PJ Vogt?

  Chavez is saying, "It's going slowly because this is just a test run. The real Bolivarian cable train, when it launches, will go much faster, 50 kilometers per hour." The train, meanwhile, finally arrives at the station.

• 19:46PJ Vogt?

  My Spanish is terrible, but even I can feel the effects of the political charisma of this president selling me gleefully on his somewhat dubious train project. Eight days after this TV appearance, Chavez would go on to win the election handily. It was later calculated that just this section of railway track, less than a mile, cost the country $440 million. At the end of Chavez's time in power, he'd leave Venezuela with its external debts quadrupled, to about $150 billion.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Alejandro's is part of the reason that a lot of Venezuelans missed what was going on. It wasn't just that there was so much money that you could hide the waste. It was also that Chavez had many projects whose results were actually quite tangible. Governments subsidized gasoline, pennies per liter. Free apartments and free houses that Chavez would give away to citizens on TV. Cuban doctors brought in to give people better healthcare. Another project, for instance, Chavez funded this continental program to remove cataracts from people's eyes. And so people would travel from all over the continent. They would, you know, send Venezuelan planes or they would charter planes. Oh, it's not just Venezuelans.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  It's like people, oh, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, you know, Central America, Caribbean. This was a continental project for people, certainly Venezuela, for people to come from elsewhere and have their cataracts removed, right? And I think about it a little bit more, that there was something about the metaphor of seeing and of visibility that was important to Chavez, you know, removing the cataracts so you can see clearly, right? The idea is that you live under conditions of misery only because you're unable to see the realities of the world. And if you just think differently and see differently, if you see people coming from all over the continent and being benefited in their health, if you know that you now have access to doctors that you didn't have before, sure, they're Cuban, but you have

• 21:44Speaker 01

  access to health. Like, that is the promise of a different world, and it is made real. All the rest of it, we don't have to worry about, because who does? We have so much wealth coming in that it's not a problem.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Chapter 3. The People's Black Market.

• 22:11PJ Vogt?

  One of the other dynamics I've read about, and I'm curious, it seems like it's tied to this moment, but correct me if I'm wrong, is that just the fact that there's this gusher of money coming from the state, it creates this incentive structure, which is like, you're almost a sucker if you're not mainly thinking about how to capture that money. Like, any other way you would apply your time or thinking or work would be silly when like, this volcano of cash is coming from the government.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  That is such a good point, and let me,

• 22:43Speaker 01

  let me confess something to you.

• 22:45PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  So, um, you know, we tend to think rightly, this is, we have lots of evidence, that most of the social programs that Chavez implemented were directed at the poor or working classes. That is true.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  But one of the more expensive social programs that Chavez implemented was not a social program at all, but that benefited almost exclusively the middle class. And so, the way that it worked is this. After the oil industry strike in 2002, 2003, Venezuela is under a liquidity crisis. It doesn't have dollars coming in. And so, if you're a country that relies on this revenue that is traded internationally in the dollar, and that's what you use to then pay, you know, your state employees, services, et cetera. And the way that you do that is by converting dollars into your national currency. And then there's also this fear of the economy tanking,

• 23:45Speaker 01

  and people are just sending their dollars abroad because they feel like it's a safe currency. What do you do? You implement currency controls, right? And so, that's what Venezuela does beginning in 2003 to forestall this capital flight that is happening as a result of the oil industry strike, compounded by the lack of influx of resources that are coming in. That is a perfectly both fine, legitimate, and in fact, necessary financial economic tool in a moment of crisis. But when the crisis abates, they didn't remove the currency controls. They kept them. Now, why is that a problem? Because what a currency control does is say, you only have access to this amount of dollars,

• 24:30Speaker 01

  for instance, in a given calendar month or calendar year. And at least when I was there at the time, it was $2,000 a year. As an individual, you have access to this. If you want more than that, you have to take out a special permission.

• 24:44PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And if you want more than that, how are you gonna get it? A black market.

• 24:50PJ Vogt?

  Right. It's like, the state is saying, any Venezuelan can only exchange a certain amount of, what is the currency?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Bolivar.

• 24:58PJ Vogt?

  What is the plural?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Bolivares.

• 25:00PJ Vogt?

  Bolivares. So, so it's like, if I were going to Europe and I wanted euros, you just go to a Forex, you give them a bunch of dollars, you get a bunch of euros. In Venezuela at the time, if I wanted American dollars, there was just a annual limit on what I could get. The problem being, people, because people wanna buy foreign goods, because they wanna travel, because they have so much money, and the country does not make that much, like, goods, they are then just getting the extra dollars on the black market.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So, they implement something called carivi. Compañero de la de visas. De visas is currency, right? So this is the entity, the national entity, that controls all of the literal dollars and decides who gets access to those dollars.

• 25:46PJ Vogt?

  It's such an abusable system.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Are you kidding me? And so, you have these cards, these carivi cards, right? That whenever I would go back to, you know, Venezuela for research, or to visit family or whatnot, you know, you would come back with these cards that had a certain amount. And each one was like, I think they increased it to 2,500 at some point, right? And so, what would happen? There's all sorts of scams. And, I mean, just preface this by saying, like, the reason why I was making a confession.

• 26:16PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Is because this is primarily accessible to the middle classes. People who, you know, have relatives, family abroad, people who are studying abroad, whatever the case might have. So you need, actually, you know, access to dollars, to travel and the rest of it. So this is a primarily, a middle-class social program, built as a currency exchange system, right? But yes, so you'd get this card. And so I'd go and people would buy the card with a $2,500 limit at the official exchange rate. Call it, I don't know, 10 to 1.

• 26:47PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Right. But because the black market dollar is the one that reigns supreme, that black market dollar might have been 1,000 to 1.

• 26:55PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Okay, so I had bought that dollar at 10 to 1, but I can sell it at 1,000 to 1. So what would happen? Confession. So people would give me these cards.

• 27:07PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  And then I would come to the States and I would get, say, 2,500 bucks worth of it. And then I'd come back with the cash. They have now the cash that they bought at the official rate, 10 to 1, but they can sell that $2,500 in cash at the black market rate for 100 to 1, 1,000 to 1. It is a massive money-making machine that most people in the middle class take advantage of, including me.

• 27:36PJ Vogt?

  So you would come back from studying with your allocated 2,500 bucks? And then how much could you, what was the profit if you sold 2,500 bucks back then on the black market? You would have?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  I mean, it fluctuated over time, right? It might have been 100 to 1, or it might have been 1,000 to 1 at like the end of the Gadhivi era.

• 27:53PJ Vogt?

  That's crazy.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean,

• 27:57Speaker 01

  I guess I'm just like spilling it all open right now. But so, you know, growing up, so we were, my family was a solidly middle-class family that was aspirational, right? And so my parents put a lot of their money into making sure that my sister and I had really good schooling. But that also meant that, um, you know, we didn't have like a really fancy house. We lived in a small apartment. We did travel, but it was, you know, travel not to like fancy destinations per se, but it was where we could friends and family. And we also didn't go to like fancy restaurants. When I went back and I had access to all this money that I had, you know, one of my things was like, I'm going to go visit all those restaurants that as a kid we never got to go to.

• 28:39PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Because now I can go there and like eat like a king.

• 28:41PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  And I did.

• 28:43PJ Vogt?

  And my understanding is that like this was just happening throughout society. Like you saw, you saw a lot of people taking advantage of this. It was like such a huge opportunity that it perverted anyone's desire if they had access to this to do anything else.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yes, but, but, but also, and this is, I think, a really crucial part. The influx of petrodollars is such that it could sustain both things at the same time. I didn't feel at the time, and of course, this is kind of ex post justification, I think. It didn't feel at the time like I'm milking off a corrupt system and this is really problematic. But like, well, I can do this and social programs are still thriving.

• 29:27PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Like, you know, public health is still accessible. Like it's not a zero sum game. It's additive, right? And so in a weird way, the incentives that are created are less in terms of, and again, this could all be just ex post justification, but at the time, the incentives are less about, I need to get as much as I can right now because if not, somebody else will get it. It's like, it's just there. Why would I not?

• 29:53PJ Vogt?

  But so it's like, my view, which I think is a little bit wrong, is that in this socialist country, people were behaving like ravenous, consumerist capitalists. It's like what you're saying is no, actually, there was so much money that no one had to make a choice. You could sort of like just slightly ransack this opportunity, but also see that these social programs for the poor are being funded. And if you weren't thinking too hard about the future, about what happens if the price of oil drops, or what happens if the oil industry, which is being run very poorly as a piggy bank, just collapses under that mismanagement as well. It felt for a moment like no contradictions needed to be resolved. Everything was possible because money was nearly infinite.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  It didn't feel like it was a, any kind of contradiction.

• 30:42PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. I mean, it's like the problem sometimes of. Populist leadership is that it sort of says everything is simple and you don't have to make trade offs. Like, and sometimes that can be true for a little bit, but it's never true in the long run.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Right. The problem in it as well is that it lasted for long enough to feel like it could go on forever. Right? So previous oil booms lasted maybe four or five years and then the party was over. This seemed to keep going and going and going until it didn't.

• 31:20PJ Vogt?

  After the break, the bust.

• 31:39PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by the new book from Michael Lewis, Blockers. For 30 years, Michael Lewis has written about the people behind the stories in character driven bestsellers like The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Fifth Risk. Now, in his new book, Blockers, Michael Lewis tells the story of six civil servants who devoted their lives to public service that matters. One kept Americans' most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands. Another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods. Another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis. There was also a security guard. In the new Washington, these federal employees discovered that their high standards were their greatest liability.

• 32:22PJ Vogt?

  If these public servants can't survive in government today, what does that say about us? I am so excited that this new book is out. Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors. I read everything he writes and I'm very excited for this one. Blockers by Michael Lewis, available wherever books are sold. Learn more at blockersbook.com.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Welcome back to the show. Chapter four, downward spiral. In December of 2012, Hugo Chavez announces on television that he is ill. The plan was for him to go to Cuba to treat his cancer. It wasn't the first time this had happened. But this time, he made sure to say that while he expected he'd be fine, should anything happen, he wanted his deputy, Nicolás Maduro, to take over.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Si algo ocurriera, repito, que me inhabilitara de alguna manera, yo Nicolás Maduro no solo en esa situación debe concluir como manda la Constitución el periodo, sino que mi opinión firme, plena como la luz.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  This was the last time Chavez would appear on Venezuelan TV. Just a few months later, March 2013, a visibly distraught Maduro appears to tell the nation that Chavez is dead.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Recibimos la información más dura y trágica que podamos transmitir a nuestro pueblo. A las 4:25 de la tarde de hoy 5 de marzo ha fallecido el comandante presidente Hugo Chavez Fría.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Chavez had just won the presidency in 2012, won it again by a significant margin, with a very powerful opposition at the time, I should say. And so he, when he dies, is actually very, very popular. His funeral is attended by heads of states from many nations. And I feel like I can say this with some authority as a Venezuelan, this is so classic Venezuelan. Initially, when he dies, like, you know what we have to do? We have to embalm him like Lenin. So he, oh, yeah, yeah. So he's preserved for posterity. And they talked about it for so long.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  That they missed the window for embalming him. And so, so they couldn't embalm him. So they did the next best thing, which was build very quickly is this kind of mausoleum in a place that overlooks the presidential palace in Caracas. What follows from that initial, you know, week or so of, or more than weeks of, of just frenzy and, and trauma and collective sense of loss, especially from his supporters, but also, I think importantly, of his opposition, for whom the idea of Chavez no longer being in the picture, yes, I'm sure they dreamed of it, fantasized about it, but suddenly now

• 35:28Speaker 01

  it was here, it was disconcerting to say the least, right? Especially more so after Nicolas Maduro, when he won snap elections just a month after Chavez's death with only a 1.4% majority, contrasting that to what had been Chavez's, you know, 13, 14% majority just a few months before. It was quite evident that not only Maduro did not carry the amount of popularity that could hold over or carry over from Chavez, but that the entire political system that Chavez had built was now exposed to be very precarious.

• 36:08PJ Vogt?

  Maduro, Chavez's handpicked successor, a former union leader, he not only lacked his mentor's charisma, he also just lacked the levels of popular support Chavez had had. It's actually something you see in the US, the much less charismatic vice president being offered as the former president's new replacement. Despite all that, Maduro's opposition realized he'd still be hard to ever beat in an election because Maduro, like Chavez, controlled the state's resources and because like Chavez, he could strategically hand them out to gain supporters at election time. He made moves like sending troops into Venezuela's version of Best Buy, detaining the managers and forcing the stores to sell electronics at rock bottom prices.

• 36:53PJ Vogt?

  Seeing maneuvers like this, some contingent of the opposition decided that the real way to unseat Maduro would be either through insurrection or, at a minimum, widespread protests.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  And so the opposition, they staged a series of protests, really significant street demonstrations in 2014, which incur the wrath of the state, especially its police forces. What it does is it convinces the sector of the opposition that Maduro's government is now only driven by one thing alone, and that is to stay in power. And that's the primary dynamic that we're going to see take over all of what eventually becomes Maduroismo, especially when, in 2014, oil prices collapsed.

• 37:40PJ Vogt?

  So now he can no longer give stuff away in the same way?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Not only in the same way, in no way.

• 37:45PJ Vogt?

  So oil prices collapsed, and under Maduro, it's like, it's really just like repression, repression, repression.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  And it creates a kind of vicious cycle where if people protest and we feel like we need to resort to repression to quell those protests in order to stay in power, that increases the incentives for me to remain in power, right? Because the exit costs are really high. If I am ousted or if I'm removed from the presidency, I might be susceptible to a trial or to ending up in jail, et cetera, et cetera, right? So, of course, at the same time, that increases the incentives of those who say like, well, the only way that we're going to get rid of this government is to protest or take more radical action. And so you have this increasing, it's just like a ratchet, we're just like constantly ratcheting

• 38:32Speaker 01

  up the stakes of protest, repression, repression increases exit costs, exit costs increases the amount of determination you have to get that government out of power, which in turn increases repression, which in turn increases exit costs, et cetera, et cetera. You go down this spiral of repression, protest, exit costs, repeat.

• 38:54PJ Vogt?

  And so it's like, you have like political prisoners, you have people like routinely disappearing. This is also the point, in my understanding, where just mass migration out of Venezuela begins. Like, people who can leave, or were they already leaving?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  They had been leaving in different waves in the past, right? And anecdotally, and I just want to make sure that I emphasize that it's anecdotal. There's a strong correlation between class, race, and migration waves in Venezuela, such that the earlier waves, going back to even early days of Chavez, is primarily wealthier, professional, cosmopolitan elites. And then, over time, different political events that entrenched Chavez further in power, the elections in 2006, leads to another wave where some people, again, sort of going down the class ladder, make the calculation, "Well, there's really nothing left for me here, so I'm going to leave." Then in 2012, another wave of migrants.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Then in 2014, after these repressive protests, another wave of migration, right? But each one of these waves is going a little bit lower in the class hierarchy, such that by the time you get into the deepest fray of economic crisis, which really begins in earnest around 2016, and then kicks into overdrive in 2017 with the US sectoral sanctions against the oil industry, which had long been seen by Venezuelan observers and Venezuelans themselves as the kind of, the red line that we didn't know the US dared cross. The sectoral sanctions as the tool to try to just bring the economy to its knees and therefore affect regime change.

• 40:36PJ Vogt?

  Because even at a, with oil prices now at a low, the country can still sell oil. The US wants the, like, global oil market to be, for there to be as much supply as possible. So, the regime in Venezuela, the people in Venezuela, just didn't think the US would do oil sanctions. But then, in Trump's first term, they do it.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  They do.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Under the executive order, US persons are prohibited from engaging in specified dealings involving the government of Venezuela and its instrumentality. This includes state-owned oil company Pedavis.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  These prohibitions extend to transactions or activities.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  There's a vast literature on whether or not sanctions are effective to lead to political change and vast consensus in the literature, not unanimity consensus is that they don't. The logic behind this kind of sanctions are meant to induce collective changes. So the greater the pain that is felt collectively, the logic goes, people will blame not the sanctions, but the people who are preventing the political change that are making the sanctions possible, right? In this case, the leadership of the country, right? And so the United States bets on a groundswell of opposition that will rise up. They can't come to Washington and protest, but they can go to Caracas and protest. And that's the idea.

• 42:01PJ Vogt?

  The problem being that oftentimes if you look at what really happens with sanctions is the domestic leadership does a pretty good job of actually focusing rage at the United States and just using repression to keep people in line.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And in the government, like Maduro certainly, but Chavismo more broadly, which had long railed against the United States kind of bullying and power. This fits like, as we say in Venezuela, anillo al dedo, like a ring in the finger. It's like a perfectly matching reality to a longstanding narrative. We've long cried about the wolf and the wolf is finally here.

• 42:36PJ Vogt?

  And so people are starving, crime is up, the misery part of the equation works, but it doesn't lead to political change. Is this the point though where you just see like massive amounts of migration, not just among upper and middle classes, but everybody?

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yes. And you start to see it in ways that, you know, as a Venezuelan, I think I would say are previously unthinkable.

• 43:04PJ Vogt?

  Meaning what?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Whole families walking hundreds, thousands of miles across Venezuela and then later extremely treacherous terrain, in some ways not knowing where they're going, just knowing that they can't stay. You know, those images around 2017, 18 especially, were really difficult to watch.

• 43:39PJ Vogt?

  You can understand how bad things got by looking at migration rates, by looking at crime or GDP. Or you can just look at what's left of what had been for years, the country's economic engine, Petavesa, the state oil company. William Newman, the journalist, recounts in his book, a 2018 reporting trip where he saw the shambles Petavesa was in. Maduro, at this point, had appointed a loyalist general with no oil experience to run Petavesa, the head of the company's finances, Maduro's wife's nephew. Newman goes to visit some of the facilities. This is what he writes, quote, "Petavesa wasn't an oil company anymore. It was a junkyard. Thousands of employees had stopped going to work

• 44:23PJ Vogt?

  or fled the country because the wages Petavesa paid had become worthless. All the installations I visited were in ruins. Thieves stole the motors from pumpjacks and tore transformers off poles to remove the copper inside. Workers had no tools. Vehicles were broken down. The company had stopped giving workers the meals required by their contracts. At one storage facility, a leaking tank spewed a lake of black crude." End quote. Which brings us almost to today. The country in deep poverty, from mismanagement, from a drop in oil prices, from US sanctions. And Maduro locked in the cycle that Alejandro just described. Brutal repression, the fear of consequences, and so more brutal repression.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  You have an increased presence of police and state repressive apparatuses, which are very powerfully in 2017, 2018, going to be used by the Maduro government to mask an operation against crime.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  But in fact, it couldn't be used to exact political control over popular sectors. So there's an operation called the FIES, which are essentially meant to deploy much in the same way, I should say, and I'm happy to be, you know, taken to task by this for maybe once, much like we're seeing ICE right now, just militarized police forces going into popular sector communities with seemingly total impunity. And there, the numbers of extrajudicial killings that we know of are extremely high. They're up in the, you know, tens of thousands of Venezuelans killed over several years' time.

• 46:09PJ Vogt?

  And are they killing, is it like they're killing protesters? They're just killing people like they just want, they're like, everyone's scared and desperate. And the only way we're going to keep social control is if their fear of being murdered exceeds their fear of stepping out of line?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. It's, um, you know, the, the justifications are not just, you know, hard to come by. It's that they're not even provided as a premise. The broad justification is to tampen crime.

• 46:39PJ Vogt?

  And the dynamic you previously described, which is like the more repression, the more Maduro has to stay in power because he understands that if he loses power, he could end up in jail. It just perpetuates itself over and over.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  And also becomes manifest because now the repression has reached a level that is in the sights of the International Criminal Court, which opens an investigation into crimes against humanity. Right? And so again, this ratcheting up of repression in order to stay in power now has reached the levels where, you know, an international body, not just the United States, but an international body is taking notice and saying this far exceeds anything that could plausibly be called law enforcement.

• 47:25PJ Vogt?

  So by like 2017, 2018, 2019, it sounds like the vision you're describing of life in the country is pretty close to hell. It's just like poverty, repression, fear, people walking out if they can walk out, like as bad as it's ever been.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  As bad as it's ever been. The level of economic collapse and of migration that Venezuela experiences during this time is greater than at any other point in Latin American history, and it's comparable globally only to countries that have experienced civil war. It is unprecedented, not just for Venezuela, but the region and the world. The other strange dynamic of this moment is that, of course, the government has a perverse incentive for people to leave.

• 48:16PJ Vogt?

  Why?

• 48:17Speaker 01

  You have fewer mouths to feed and fewer potential protesters to repress.

• 48:23PJ Vogt?

  Right. The most, the people who are unhappy go and you're left with, right.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, you know, this isn't like, say, communist regimes in the 20th century at the tail end of the Soviet Union, trying to force people to stay. There's a strong incentive for the government to allow folks to leave for the reasons that I mentioned. But then there's the other reason, which is people abroad can send money back in the form of remittances.

• 48:55PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And so it creates this kind of, and this is what we find beginning around 2020, 2021, where there is as low and as catastrophic as the economic collapse was in those, you know, deep years of darkness, there is a sense of economic recovery, not because things are vastly improved, but because they're minimally improved.

• 49:18PJ Vogt?

  There's a term in like Wall Street, a dead cat bounce, like a thing that is sufficiently crashed will rise up a tiny bit from the bottom.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  And that is what was experienced.

• 49:35PJ Vogt?

  Of course, this grim status quo, life in Venezuela getting marginally more livable as the most desperate people flee for a better life elsewhere, there was one politician who did not appreciate that equilibrium.

• 49:49PJ Vogt?

  Which brings us to our last chapter. After one more short break, Donald Trump.

• 50:15PJ Vogt?

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• 50:57PJ Vogt?

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• 51:18PJ Vogt?

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• 52:02PJ Vogt?

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• 52:16PJ Vogt?

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• 53:01PJ Vogt?

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• 53:33PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 53:36PJ Vogt?

  Chapter 5, Donald Trump.

• 53:39Speaker 04

  Today, the Supreme Court allowed, for now, the Trump administration to strip legal protections for nearly 350,000 Venezuelans currently living in the US under a program that had protected them from deportation. The court's decision-

• 53:53PJ Vogt?

  After talking to Alejandro, I found myself reflecting on the past year of headlines I'd seen without ever really absorbing. The stories about Trump's increased obsession with Venezuelan migrants, stories about Trump deporting as many Venezuelans as possible from the United States.

• 54:07Speaker 05

  Andri Hernandez Romero was among the 238 Venezuelans deported without court hearings under the Alien Enemies Act to an infamous mega-prison in El Salvador.

• 54:15PJ Vogt?

  I remembered also the Trump administration's, at the time, very confusing strategy of suddenly launching drone strikes on Venezuelan boats that they alleged were smuggling cocaine.

• 54:25Speaker 06

  President Trump says American forces destroyed what he described as a Venezuelan drug boat headed for the United States.

• 54:33Speaker 07

  The US military has attacked a second boat in the waters of Venezuela.

• 54:37Speaker 06

  He said yesterday that 11 people on board were killed.

• 54:41PJ Vogt?

  And finally, the most recent news.

• 54:43Speaker 07

  US President Donald Trump launched his most aggressive foreign military action yet, attacking Venezuela, capturing its president, Nicolas Maduro, on Saturday, and promising to put the South American country under temporary US control.

• 54:59Speaker 08

  So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.

• 55:08PJ Vogt?

  Donald Trump putting himself in charge of the resource that had already caused so much damage here in Venezuela.

• 55:14Speaker 08

  We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.

• 55:32PJ Vogt?

  Listening to Trump explain how easy it was going to be to control Venezuela's oil, to build his own magical vision of the future, I wondered how much of the history he knew. I wondered if he knew any.

• 55:48PJ Vogt?

  It's not a particularly deep or insightful thought, but the thing that struck me, hearing that history, really was just its pace. Venezuela, a country that, decade to decade, could completely shift from prosperous democracy to authoritarianism to wherever it was we were now. My country, the United States, is currently embroiled in its own confusing spasms of history. Quite different, but these days, I can't hear a story of another place without looking for some vision of us in its reflection. So I found myself, despite myself, asking Alejandro to compare the pace of change here to the pace of change there. It's just like a crazy sweep of change.

• 56:32PJ Vogt?

  I mean, Americans right now feel like our country has suddenly violently changed, but relative to Venezuela, it's like, not.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no. I mean, I think the fear, and I would submit the legitimate rightful fear, is that many of the warning signs are present, but weirdly enveloped under a very different rubric and discourse. It's not socialism. It's not anti-imperialism. It's the opposite. It's like hyper-capitalism, conicapitalism, and a new form of imperialism. But the mechanics are similar. It's the militarization of policing. It is the patrimonialization of the state, such that the only thing that matters is what you can extract from the state and whether you have access to it. And so the kind of nakedness of that project,

• 57:22Speaker 01

  I think, I suspect, as an historian, is occasioning a sense of shock, such that, can it really be this crass? And that sense of crassness then creates a little bit of a delay in terms of response. I experienced this since the attack on Venezuela, where so many of the quiet parts were being said out loud, that as an historian of Latin America, who is trained to read subtext...

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Who is trained to read between the lines, who is trained to read behind the blacked out parts of declassified CIA documents. Suddenly, I'm being told all of that. And my first instinct is, well, maybe there's something else behind this, rather than the thing itself.

• 58:20PJ Vogt?

  It can't just be the American president saying, we're going to the country to take the oil.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  It can't just be that. Or it can't just be Stephen Miller saying, no, no, the continent is ours. How dare they sell their natural resources to China. Or it can't just be Marco Rubio saying, the left is over in Latin America for centuries to come. Or it can't just be Pete Hegseth saying, you're next, whoever next might happen to be. Like, it all feels so contrary to instinct that the reaction, at least to my part, and I think more generally, we might be sensing this, is somewhat of a delay.

• 58:58PJ Vogt?

  People are shocked because they can't believe what they're seeing, and they react more slowly.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  That's my sense.

• 59:04PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, I mean, I find that is how I have felt, and it has just made me want to understand the story of Venezuela better, at least. I think like, I did not feel, I was not a buyer for the grand promise of Trump administration, like, getting involved. Understanding the history of Venezuela, I think I feel more pessimistic than I was, and I was pessimistic before. It just feels like, you know, there's this temptation, I think, in America, for understandable reasons, when I talk to my fellow relatively uninformed

• 59:44PJ Vogt?

  friends about the country, it's like, we channel, the arguments end up being, were the problems problems of socialism, were the problems problems of imperialism. When you really hear the story, sure, I think you could make arguments for both, but like, it more sounds like a resource curse. It sounds like While wealth can be helpful, immense sudden growth of anything really risks being destructive. But if you understand it as a country where the rise and fall of the price of oil has encouraged very, very short term leadership, having Trump, who engages in that kind of leadership anyway, take control and is explicitly not

• 1:00:26PJ Vogt?

  on a project of democracy building or like without even the pretense of anything. But we would like to further ravage this, not even for short term Venezuelan gain, but for American gain. It really sounds dire.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is absolutely dire. And I mean, there are many surprising turns in Venezuela since the attack on Saturday, the third, but certainly one of the most surprising is that the entire regime has remained in place.

• 1:00:59PJ Vogt?

  Right. He arrested Maduro and his wife. Or whatever. He went to the country with helicopters and took them. But it wasn't everyone around them is in charge. It's not like we're putting in a pro democracy person or a member of the opposition. They're just like leaving the exact structure intact, but putting the US at the top of it.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Yes. And also with the complete support, it seems like of the United States. So at least again, in the public pronouncements of Trump and others and his administration, the direct and loud sidelining of the opposition in favor of the remaining regime, which is again, exactly the same as it was before, is certainly a type of regime change that I've never seen or read about. And so we, I think, are at the cusp of reference that don't quite make sense on the surface, but that are laying bare a much scarier

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  reality about the near and distant future for us in Venezuela and in the United States and the world.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  I do think that what I would most hope for, especially in this moment, for people in the United States to think about when it comes to Venezuela is to resist the easy narrative of it's this or that. This person is a hero, that person is a devil. And that explains everything. Leaning into complexity when it comes to Venezuela, I think, is the first step towards understanding it, even if actual understanding it may not come about very easily.

• 1:02:51PJ Vogt?

  This sounds like a good mission. It sounds like not where our country is most easily resting right now, but it sounds like the right approach. Thank you for explaining this immensely complex country.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:03:11PJ Vogt?

  Alejandro Velasco. He's an associate professor of history at New York University. We've included a link to a great piece of analysis he's written on Chavismo in our show notes. Go check it out. Separately, I also recommend William Newman's book, which I've referenced a few times in the story. Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse, a title I can now not use for my memoir. Goddamn it.

• 1:03:47PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our associate producer. Special thanks this week to Miguel Santiago Colon. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. This episode was fact-checked by Piper Dumont. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Shuff. If you'd like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and bonus episodes, please consider signing up for incognito mode at searchengine.show. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.

• 1:05:01PJ Vogt?

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