“What kind of person,” he mused, “could have that kind of money?” By contrast, his elderly neighbors-formerly middle-class people, living on fixed pensions with no access to dollars-look thin and wasted. One academic I met described how shocked he was to see a woman reach into her handbag and pull out $3,000 in cash to buy a designer coat. Members of the Chavista-Madurista elite do indeed have such access, and the new dollarization of the Venezuelan economy has suddenly allowed them to flaunt their money. Now they are again available-but only to those who have access to foreign currency. Imported goods like these had disappeared in recent years as hyperinflation rendered the Venezuelan bolívar almost worthless, and as international sanctions and Venezuela’s own import controls disrupted trade. Just around the corner stood one of the shiny new hard currency stores, where people with dollars can buy things like Cheerios or large bottles of Heinz ketchup. Raffalli and I met in a deceptively chic restaurant in Altamira, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Caracas. During her long career, Raffalli has worked all over the world, never imagining that her skills would be necessary in Venezuela, which has large oil reserves and was long a middle-income country. O ne of the three was Susana Raffalli, a widely recognized Venezuelan expert in nutrition and food security. During the course of ordinary conversations with me, three people burst into tears while talking about their life and their country. I spent a few days there earlier this month, on an academic invitation. In reality, the country offers no comfort for youthful Marxists or self-styled anti-imperialists-or for fans of Donald Trump. If it symbolizes anything at all, it is the distorting power of symbols. It is a real place, full of real people who are undergoing an unprecedented and in some ways very eerie crisis. Even now, the idea of Venezuela inspires defensiveness and anger wherever dedicated Marxists still gather, whether they are Code Pink activists vowing to “protect” the Venezuelan embassy in Washington from the Venezuelan opposition or French Marxists who refuse to call Maduro a dictator.Īnd yet-Venezuela is not an idea. Iglesias has long been suspected of taking Venezuelan money, though he denies it. Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left leader of the British Labour Party, was photographed with Chávez and has described his regime in Venezuela as an “inspiration to all of us fighting back against austerity and neoliberal economics.” Chávez’s rhetoric also helped inspire the Spanish Marxist Pablo Iglesias to create Podemos, Spain’s far-left party. More than a decade ago, Hans Modrow, one of the last East German Communist Party leaders and now an elder statesman of the far-left Die Linke party, told me that Chávez’s “Bolivarian socialism” represented his greatest hope: that Marxist ideas-which had driven East Germany into bankruptcy-might succeed, finally, in Latin America. Regardless of what actually happens there, Venezuela-especially when it was run by Maduro’s predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez-has long been a symbolic cause for the Marxist left as well. Trump is not the only world leader to cite Venezuela for self-serving ends. Read: How an elaborate plan to topple Venezuela’s president went wrong To their credit, members of Congress gave a bipartisan standing ovation to Guaidó nevertheless. Trump, who has never been to Venezuela or shown any prior interest in it-or, for that matter, shown any interest in freedom anywhere else -presumably knows that the country matters to some voters in South Florida. President Donald Trump welcomed Guaidó as living evidence that his own administration was “standing up for freedom in our hemisphere” and had “reversed the failed policies of the previous administration” he called Venezuela’s current leader, Nicolás Maduro, an illegitimate ruler whose “grip on tyranny will be smashed and broken.” He gave no details of how that would happen. Venezuela’s main opposition leader-the man who is recognized by that country’s National Assembly, millions of his fellow citizens, and several dozen foreign countries as the rightful president of Venezuela-was one of the special guests at the State of the Union address. L ast month, Juan Guaidó appeared in Washington in the role of political totem.
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