“Venezuela got ready”, Chavista leaders repeat around.
Part of the middle class and the few visitors who go to Caracas accept this phrase, propagated by the regime, as normal. Since the acceptance of the dollar as the country’s “informal” currency, restaurants, clothing stores and luxury cars have reopened, while towers began to rise in the east of the city. There are even so-called “socialist casinos”, which also work in dollars. The most popular is in the recently renovated and mythical hotel Humboldt, at the top of the emblematic Ávila.
The speech that “Venezuela se arrumado” (“Venezuela se arregló”, in Spanish), is obviously a liar. It would be possible to enumerate several facts that dismantle the sentence.
According to Provea (Venezuelan Program for Education and Action in Human Rights), last year 1,414 people were victims of extrajudicial executions, most of them by the FAES (Forças de Ações Especiais, an elite group of the police) and the Conas (Comando Nacional Anti-extortion and Kidnapping, linked to the Bolivarian National Guard). The majority of the population lacks food and medicines, nearly 7 million Venezuelans have already left the country, according to UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), while nature and man suffer from the dilapidation of the so-called “Mine Arch” , exploited without law or regulation that guarantees the health of those who bet their lives there.
Even so, the catchphrase has been used frequently as part of a diplomacy that intends to make up the situation in which Venezuelans live, creating a discourse in which a kind of improvement is seen: the last elections, full of irregularities, but, finally, elections with the participation of the opposition, the fact that the dollar has created bubbles of wealth and ostentation, such as the one in the Las Mercedes neighborhood of Caracas, at a time when there is a prospect of easing the sanctions imposed by the US on the country, in exchange for oil.
The latter is just a hypothesis for now, but it has already animated the dictatorship. After all, the US, which still officially recognizes opposition leader Juan Guaidó as president, has shown signs of wanting an economic rapprochement with the country’s dictator, after the invasion of Ukraine began and the possibility that the Americans needed the Venezuelan oil.
Countries like Argentina and Mexico buy this discourse, whose leaders, Alberto Fernández and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, assumed a certain defense of the regime, and other allies of the regional left, who preferred, for example, the resumption of UNASUR, instead of forums like the Summit of the Americas, emptied
a this year by the refusal of the US to invite countries considered dictatorships (Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua), as well as those of Central America (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala), with whom the northern country experiences friction due to illegal immigration.
In a conversation with the Americas Quarterly podcast, the editor of Caracas Chronicles, Raúl Stolk said that the Venezuelan capital is much more beautiful than it was a few years ago, and that there are no more blackouts and so many kidnappings in the city. “But are things better? Of course not. There is much more inequality. If there are some who can eat in these expensive restaurants and buy Ferraris, the vast majority are even poorer. But it is certain that since 2019, when the regime allowed the use of of dollars in the popular economy, a certain enthusiasm took hold of the middle class, whose life seems to have normalized, although it is a superficial normalization”, he said. “On the other hand, people got tired of so many demonstrations, so many acts, which were intense in 2014, 2017 and 2019, with the suggestion of change that Guaidó represented. Now the disconnection with politics is total for those who are not in the consumerist bubble. The concern is to survive”, he adds.
The rain of dollars in the country comes in different forms. With so many people leaving, especially after 2014, remittances increased. Full of travel sanctions, Chavista employees and businessmen decide to spend and even invest within their own country. The illegal trade in different products also benefits a significant number of people. Those who can leave the country and bring products and coins also do so.
The regime also takes advantage, in a way, of the country’s media abandonment. While there were protests, Guaidó taking people to the streets, the international community seemed more worried than today. Even the major media are tired of the Venezuelan issue. In a way, this reinforces the thesis that “Venezuela got ready.”
For most Venezuelans, however, there is no housekeeping at all. Most of the population lives on subsidies, assistance grants of a maximum of US$ 4, minimum wages of US$ 2 and CLAP boxes (food selectively distributed by the government). The economy has shrunk by more than 80% since Maduro took over in 2013, and the bolivar has been devoured by hyperinflation.
The path to a real economic, political and institutional recovery will take longer and it will not be enough to dollarize the country.
