Venezuela’s food and medicine shortages in … historical perspective

In 1999, when Chávez took the presidency, Venezuela was not just a country with gaping social inequality — it was a country in a process of terminal social disintegration.

If we don’t accept this as a premise and pretend that Venezuela before Chávez was a “prosperous” and “peaceful” country, and that Chávez and then Maduro led it to ruin out of sheer malice and incompetence, then Chávez, Maduro, and the process the former started cannot be explained at all.

What Venezuela started in 1999 was a process of progressive social change. Yes, progressive! Social progress never follows a tidy recipe. It never goes on a straight line. And there is no guarantee that it will succeed, that it will not get derailed, or even betrayed. Why? Because social change is carried out by actual people. Not just “average” people, but actually the people who have been for centuries at the very bottom of the social order — crushed by it.

This is a whole lot of baggage to carry. And theirs is a gigantic effort to dump that baggage, to liberate themselves, to — politically speaking — pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. (And even this metaphor doesn’t feel right, because a lot of these people are literally barefoot.)

But this is what social progress is really about. It requires that people traumatized, damaged by centuries of poverty, powerlessness, and ignorance, people uneducated and miseducated by the social order, made believe by their masters to be worthless — that these people take matters in their own hands, that they take history’s center stage without permission.

The process will necessarily reflect the limitations of the people who carry it out. The leaders of these people are not going to be engendered in a pristine laboratory, assembled in an aseptic robot factory. They are not likely to come from those trained in Harvard or Yale or Oxford. Their leaders will emerge out of this wretched mass of people aggrieved by centuries of oppression — and the stamp of that bloody legacy will show.

In a profoundly classist and racist society like Venezuela circa 1990s, Chávez was an army officer that started as a rank-and-file soldier. Joining the army has been a path out of extreme poverty for many rural Venezuelans. Chávez was of African and (likely) Caribbean (Indian) descent. Maduro, a mestizo, was a bus driver from the barrios not so long ago, who then became the leader of the bus-drivers’ union.

Of course, it is an understatement to say that these masses and leaders are going to make blunders — small and big. But on which moral grounds do we stand to judge them harshly, especially when we haven’t used that same standard in judging their oppressors? And shouldn’t we actually be harsher in judging the oppressors, the wealthy and powerful elites whose failures led to these insurgencies? Should we not expect more from those who have more wealth and power?

But that is not all. Social change never happens in a vacuum, without resistance. On the contrary, the elites that have traditionally owned the country, with foreign support and complicity, will respond — and how! Venezuela has immense reserves of oil, gas, and other valuable natural resources. Much is at stake. As expected, the displaced elite is bent to derail the process and regain full power.

They have attempted coups, sabotage, capital strikes, assassinations, instability. They have used elections and, when the outcomes have not pleased them, they have denounced them. Their methods need not exhibit logical consistency nor subject themselves to moral scruple. There is no ethical code they won’t violate to maintain their privileges. And they will be supported by those who shape up public opinion in the world. The only way to “prevent” their reaction is by giving up to their designs.

Food and medicine shortages? Poverty is shortages as a permanent state. Inequality means chronic shortages for the poor and surpluses for the rich. So, shortages in Venezuela did not start in 2015 or even 1999. Shortages in Venezuela began in 1522.

Regime change under the auspices of Donald Trump, if it succeeds, is not going to end the shortages for most people in Venezuela. If anything, it will make them worse. If we want to preview Venezuela after a Donal Trump’s sponsored regime change, we have to look at Libya or Iraq.

We need to oppose U.S. intervention in Venezuela. Let the people of Venezuela decide as a sovereign nation.