Venezuela w/ Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hetland, Yoletty Bracho

This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com and by University of California Press, publishers of the book The Middle Class New Deal, restoring upward mobility and the American dream by A. Michelle Dickerson. Regarice and highly readable, this book breaks down the policies that have decimated working families and proposes reforms to reverse this trend. Dickerson issues a clarion call for political leaders to enact a bold agenda like the one that created The Middle Class almost a century ago. Learn more about The Middle Class New Deal at UCPress.edu Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. Today I'm discussing the US military assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro with three people, Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hetland and Yoleti Bracho. This is a wide-ranging discussion that I won't attempt to summarize here. Next week I'll be conducting an interview with Greg Granted in Oslobale, more generally analyzing Donald Trump's brand of US imperialism. Before we get started, dig listeners make this podcast possible by making monthly or annual contributions at patreon.com. If you live in the US, we have books, t-shirts, mugs, hats, tote bags to send you in the mail depending upon how much you contribute. But the real basic reason that we ask you to support us and that you should consider supporting us is because that's how we generate the revenue to pay everyone who puts so much work into this podcast and to do so without putting up a paywall. We want the maximum number of people to listen to every episode and your contributions are what makes that possible. That's PATR-EN.com/theDIG. Click the link in the show notes, help keep this operation up and running strong. And lastly, for smart in-depth analysis of Latin America, check out NACLA Report on the Americas. That's nacla.org. Okay, here's Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hetland and Yoleti Bracho. Alejandro Velasco teaches Latin American history at New York University and is former executive editor of NACLA Report on the Americas. He's the author of "Badio Rising", urban popular politics and the making of modern Venezuela. Gabriel Hetland is a professor of Latin American studies at SUNY Albany. He's the author of "Democracy on the Ground", "Local Politics in Latin America is Left Turn". Yoleti Bracho is professor in political science at the Université de Avignon in France and sits on the editorial board of Contra Top, pardon my French pronunciation as always. Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hetland and Yoleti Bracho, welcome to the DIG. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Hi, thanks. The US has for a long time under multiple presidents been putting intense pressure on Maduro's government in Venezuela and before that on Chávezes. Why over the past year did Trump and his circle so quickly escalate so intensely all the way to this full-on invasion and kidnapping? It seems like it's a sort of over-determined set of maga agendas combining Stephen Miller's desire to create a pretext for mass deportation of Venezuelans, plus Stephen Miller's desire for spectacular military action against cartel targets in Latin America, that alongside Rubios anti-communism, all of that wrapped up with Trump's overwhelming desire to control Venezuela's oil. How do you all see it? Alejandro. It is in fact that kind of convergence of agendas that seem to have aligned at this moment. I think the other factor to consider in terms of an alignment of obinterest is the way in which the expatriate opposition led by Maria Curin and Machado for years and years has been really laying the groundwork for the various narratives that we have seen used by the Trump administration for the last few months to paint not just Maduro but Venezuela in general as this threat to Venezuela. You know, they've been talking about narco terrorism, links to Hezbollah and to Hamas. They've been talking about releasing prisoners from jails and flooding the United States with criminals. Of course, they've been talking about these fentanyl production. All of these narratives that have very little relationship to facts on the ground, those who've been following Venezuela for a while have been hearing from the opposition. In a way, what they have helped to do is to lay the groundwork for the kind of discourse that we've now seen turned into practice. And the other factor of course is the weakness of the Venezuelan government in general and the significant lack of popular support and the erosion of Chavismo, especially grassroots Chavismo under Maduro's government. I think that has made it vulnerable and especially vulnerable to having to seek some kind of a negotiated exit, which was in an area that we had long anticipated. But what was surprising is that for at least up to now, the echelons of Chavismo had remained pretty cohesive under Maduro. And so part of the question I think is going to be at what point did who remains in Venezuela an hour feel like it was more advantageous to give up Maduro and to try to work out some kind of deal with the Trump administration than to remain defined in the face of increasing pressure. Nualeti? Yeah, I also think that there is a variable that is important internationally. Is the far right becoming more and more powerful and this idea that for Donald Trump doing this kind of action today has at least little, I wouldn't say no answer but this little answer from the international communities in general. And in Latin America you see lots of countries today supporting also this kind of action because of the alignment of these new presidents with the Trumpian ideology to say something like that. So yeah, I think there is also an international configuration that allows for this to happen and having less consequences that may be in another time. Gabriel. Yeah, I'll add a few factors I agree with everything you guys are saying. And I mean, I think on one hand this is sort of an unfinished goal of Trump's first term. I mean, they wanted to remove Maduro in that term they didn't end up doing it probably because they felt like the risks were too great and the benefits were unclear. So I think that's a minor factor. But then I think a confluence of different things happening in Trump's second term now. Anti-immigration is one of the big ones as well. And that connects to Venezuela in this sort of mythological way. The idea that Venezuelans are gang members and drug dealers. One of the things that makes me so angry also is because so many Venezuelans are in the US because of Trump's actions in his first term. And then Trump uses that for his own domestic sort of political agenda. So that's just as always infuriating just the the clearest expression of Trump's hypocrisy on that one point. But then back to your question and away from my rant for a second. I think that obviously Marco Rubio is the other expression. And Alejandro has talked about this in many different venues of this sort of desire to destroy the Latin American left in all of its different formulations. And I think all of us are really critical of Maduro and don't see him as a particularly genuine expression. But he's still seeing within the world as some expression of the Latin American left of course. And there's a lineage of Chavez. And so getting rid of Maduro within Venezuela, implementing this sort of regime change agenda certainly fits into that larger goal. And Yoletti was talking about it that there's this whole remaking of Latin America that Trump has been engaged in. He has done it really explicitly in Argentina and Honduras. In Brazil, he sort of, you know, hasn't done a regime change operation, but he's been very actively involved in helping Bolsonaro and trying to undermine Lula. I think it's interesting to note that that doesn't always work. That actually helped Lula in certain ways. So, you know, Trump's machinations don't always have the effect that he wants them to have. But I think those are some of the critical factors. And then the other thing that I think has to be mentioned is the Epstein files. And that is, you know, the domestic sort of desire to distract from your problems. That is clearly something that is at play in things going on with Venezuela. And, you know, every time that there's sort of pressure around the Epstein files, people talk about Venezuela. And certainly the timing of the two does coincide with the boat bombings and the escalation of pressure to release files. And Trump's worry about that. So I think there's other factors, but those are some of the, you know, really main ones. Trump announced that the United States is now governing Venezuela. And is quote, not afraid of boots on the ground. But then astoundingly, it turned out that they're planning on Venezuela and vice president Delcio Rodriguez being the one to carry out the US agenda, essentially governing on the US as behalf. Even as Rodriguez, at least initially, adamantly condemned, Maduro's kidnapping and insisted on the legitimacy of his presidency. Quite notably, Trump's rejected the idea that Maria Corina Machado could lead Venezuela. And these expressed no support for Edmund Gonzales, the opposition candidate who lost an election that many observers said was stolen. And the person who, who Machado says should be put into power immediately. Who is running Venezuela right now? Who might be running it in the months and years ahead? And was there likely collusion between Rodriguez and the Trump administration in carrying this whole thing out? I mean, who knows what's going to happen in a few months or certainly even years. But what does seem at least to me to be the case is that if in fact we're looking at a regime change operation, it's a very sweet generous regime change. It's actually in some ways on precedent that's certainly for Latin America. And so far as yes, there's the decapitation of the government by abduction of Maduro. But the rest of the state remains intact. All of the institutions of the state remain in place. The ministry is remain placed. The major players remain are still there. Nothing has moved. And in fact, one of the things that happened just today is that the new national assembly was sworn into office, which interestingly some opposition politicians were elected last year. And so and they were there. And they issued condemnations of the violation of Venezuela and sovereignty. And that suggests this kind of schism between a domestic opposition and an expatriate opposition that my de Gordino Machela is going to have to manage. But in terms of who controls Venezuela, I mean on the ground, the elements of state craft remain in the hands of desirulitis and the folks in power there. The question that you're pointing to of course is under what conditions are they in power? And to what extent is the Trump administration's threats of doing to del something worse than happened to Maduro, is it a bluff? Are they in fact, is Trump actually willing to commit troops on the ground to a scenario of longer term involvement and really rebuilding? Or are they willing to play ball with Dead Sea to the extent that Dead Sea and her people have already indicated that they do want to seek some kind of collaboration with the Trump administration and especially having to do with oil rents? Those are big question marks that we have to work with, which is also to say that neither are all the cards in Trump's hands or the Trump administration's hands nor of course are they in the desirulitis hands. Each has some leverage against the other in order to achieve their ends, which is in one hand to stay in power and the other hand as Gabe was mentioning before, to reassert or in fact to assert a new a vision of not just hegemony, really domination of the hemisphere and the part of the Trump administration. For me, this also has consequences about what happens on the ground because I mean, the authoritarian government is still in place and people feel it and it's important. Whatever we think and the condemnation that we can say about these actions, about these actions from the states on Venezuela, obviously there are people in Venezuela who might be somehow happy about the fact that Maduro is not there anymore and one could have thought that in a situation like this, there could have been manifestations of joy, public manifestations of joy. These things could have happened. Well, you have none of that and one of the things that come from the, yeah, what people say from the ground is that they still also are living under the authoritarian government. There are still also still scared about what the consequences of going out and maybe celebrating this situation could have. There are still people who are keeping the screed to avoid repression because, obviously repression happens in Venezuela. And then again, I'm not saying this because I would think that the actions of the United States would be there to actually benefit the Venezuelan people or either or the democracy or the idea of a democratic future for Venezuela. I'm just saying that clearly this also shows that the Trump administration can seem to be able to also get in contact and arrange itself with the authoritarian government if this serves their interests. And this is also for me a big question is that United States samperialism, it's been able, obviously, in history to have good alliances and not only history today alliances with governments that submit their populations to extremely harsh situations. This also could happen in this new environment in Venezuela. This could also mean somehow of like an strengthening of the people in power today. Yeah, Gabriel, Trump has been so brazenly incredibly explicit about US control over Venezuelan oil being a central rationale for the intervention. Is it possible that what's going on basically is that as long as Rodriguez runs the Venezuelan oil industry to Trump's liking along perhaps with severing ties with Cuba, that this might be good enough for Trump. Is that mission accomplished for Trump? Is it possible that we'll see Rodriguez in power sanctions lifted and the sort of professed goals of free elections and political power for for the opposition, all these all these sort of classic liberal interventionist and neo conservative rationales for US intervention. All of that falling to the very bottom of Trump's to-do list or really off that list entirely. Yeah, I think those are exactly the questions. We don't know exactly how some of those things will play out. I think that oil is clearly a very important factor. I would say that we'd all agree it's not the only factor and then Trump's plans to control the Venezuelan oil industry. I mean Miguel Tinker-Sales was saying with Alejandro earlier today on democracy now, it'll take a decade for oil in Venezuela to get anywhere close to where it was in the boom years of Chavez. That's a really long-term project. Trump wants control, meaning he wants American oil companies specifically to control Venezuelan oil, but whether or not that is possible in the short term, I think it's not possible entirely to resurrect the Venezuelan oil industry that quickly. Then what is going to be happening in the next few years would, specifically to your question, which I've been racking my brain around, when would they be willing or would they be willing to lift the sanctions? That has been one of the most devastating factors for Venezuela's economy. There's a lot of reasons for the mess that Venezuela has in economic mismanagement, but the sanctions, I would say, or the number one reason Venezuela has not been able to recover from its economic collapse. And I don't think the Trump administration is going to be inclined to lift them anytime soon because of various factors. I think that Machado and the right-wing opposition, which is very influential abroad outside of Venezuela, and they're going to be talking to you leaders, they're going to be talking to far-right leaders in the U.S. Congress and Florida in particular. And they're going to be really pissed about the idea of just handing the reins of Venezuela from Maduro to Delsey Rodriguez, who was a Madurista, of course, in a long time high-level official there. So it feels like the prospects of doing that are really uncertain, but that just means the mess that Venezuela is in, including economically, is going to continue for quite some time. And then to just quickly go to your earlier question, Dan, I've referred to what's happening now as regime change without a change of regime because it's so weird what's going on that you have this, you know, removal of the leader, but then all of the structures as Alejandro and Yoletti were saying have remained very much intact in many ways, but of course, you know, the Venezuelan state is under constraints, which they always have been for years and years, but it's much more explicit. I mean, the U.S. is now whispering or shouting in their ear, do this, don't do that. And so it's a more sort of explicit degree of U.S. influence and domination over the government within Venezuela. And not totally sure that that would be entirely different than what could have happened under Maduro. I mean, Maduro wanted U.S. oil companies to come to Venezuela. He wanted really good relationships with Trump. So in some sense, what we're seeing now might be what could have happened under Maduro, but it's a dangerous because it's a much more naked form of U.S. imperialism on steroids. And so that just has all sorts of risks for Venezuela, Latin America and the world. Right. I mean, it's a very Trumpian form of regime change in the sense that we know Trump does not have a problem with authoritarianism. I mean, we know that no U.S. President really has given the track record of U.S. alliances throughout the world, but it's crystal clear that Trump not only doesn't have a problem with authoritarianism. He's a big big fan of it and a keen emulator of it. What he does have a problem with is people who don't interpersonally submit to his domination, which I think goes some way in explaining why removing Maduro as the individual for Trump, the Maduro who is dancing and defying him on stage, was the only part of the regime he cared about changing. You all right, please. And it's also the idea that at a point, the Trump administration made Maduro the scarecrow. He's the man that carries the one who's a terrorist, etc. So I think sometimes people would say, well, but Maduro was given enough opportunities to actually concede what the United States were asking. Yeah, but even though at a point he was publicly conceding, it was already impossible because it would have been, I think it would have been impossible for Trump to actually assume that, okay, so now I made a deal with Maduro. It was not some molecule not possible anymore. So I think it was also important to say, hey, we take him out and now the people are there. Yeah, we can actually make deals with them because they're different. Somehow they do not symbolize the same thing, the same scarecrow that Maduro became. Are they hydro? Absolutely. There was a kind of risk to doing nothing. That every day that you have this massive military presence in the Caribbean, shooting boats and killing people with impunity, but the rhetoric was mounting about Amaludo being the head of a transnational cartel and millions of people dying from fentanyl that was shipped from Venezuela. It became untenable to do nothing. In some ways, I think that this was not necessarily Trump's endgame, but certainly for Hexath and Rubio, it was not their endgame, but a significant point towards a different endgame. Which speaks to your question earlier, there's no doubt, of course, that Trump cares not at all about democracy. Not only for the reasons that you mentioned, our colleague David Smiley pointed out that the word "democracy" did not appear a single time in the press conference that Trump gave on Saturday morning. So whatever my get going to Nama Chaloo, another Ex-Bat opposition members might be trying to push the Trump administration towards a democratic transition that's not at all in the radar of Trump. It is absolutely though in the radar of Rubio, not that he cares about democracy, but he cares about other prizes. He cares primarily about Cuba and Austin, the regime there. For him, the question of a transition, it's not just materially involved around whether or not will companies are going to come and be able to restart, as well as oil production to levels that, as Gabe mentioned, were much higher 15 years ago. But it is significantly about how do we move the needle on a different ideological center for Latin America that is much more aligned with the right. That all, to me, suggests that certainly my deGuerrino Machado completely misread unsurprisingly Trump to see that he was sort of a fellow traveler in this kind of freedom, loving, liberty, loving quest that would eventually give the kind of deals that Trump wanted, where the authority doesn't know there's understood him to be all he wants is oil. And he doesn't care about democracy and that is fine for us. Is part of what's going on here that Machado pissed Trump off by getting the Nobel prize that Trump thought he deserved because the irony here, of course, is that the Nobel committee was clearly trying to play Kate Trump by giving it to Machado, because giving it to Trump would be too much for them, but they wanted to play Kate Trump, give it to Machado, which they thought Trump would celebrate. But Trump seemed very unhappy with any choice that wasn't him. I would say, yes, but I don't know how big a factor that is in what's happening now. I think Trump is definitely pissed that Machado won the prize. He was pretty open about it when it happened. Some of the people in his circle were upset about it as well. And it's possible that he still holds a grudge about that and has this personal thing. But I think that a bigger factor, and I think Alejandro has spoken about this in social media and maybe in other venues as well, is just that putting the opposition, the right wing, the Maria Coding, and Machado opposition in power would have been a much bigger change, a real regime change within Venezuela. And that would have been dangerous, that would have been bloody, that would have been chaotic. That would involve removing military folks that would involve removing major aspects of the Venezuelan state, restructuring it in fundamental ways. You'd have powerful people who still have degrees of power right now, despite the U.S. attack and attempt to control Venezuela in various ways. So I think that that's probably the bigger factor that they were not willing to take the risk of this bigger transition in Venezuela at the moment. Thinking about the people, the Venezuelan people, for me this is conflictive because I am not a fan of the opposition that actually was colliding and helping Trump. I think it is clear the discourse of Maria Coding, Machado, for a long time, was legitimizing the expulsion, the expulsion of Venezuelan migrants and was asking for an intervention. So I put in that on the table. I actually think about the people that actually had hope by following this dissaposition. And that thought somehow that the Trump administration was an ally to their idea of democratic battle. And so this must be feeling also like a really hard treason. And I know it. I mean, it's not that it might be like that. I have people in people that I know, even as well, that everybody is not in the same political position. I have people that I know had their hopes on these actions on the Trumpian intervention. And what an irony, what an irony to feel that the one that you thought was your biggest ally, it's actually, I mean, that does not have your best interest in mind. And yes, of course, because it is really hard to find in Donald Trump and ally for whatever definition of democracy you might have. Yeah, you'll let me on that point, how is Venezuelan society responding though, though Chavez for a long time sustained popular support, it seems clear that a majority have opposed Maduro for quite a while. Some Venezuelans at home in a broad no doubt support is removal. And in polls suggest I think a bit of a divide between Venezuelans inside Venezuela and Venezuelans elsewhere. What's your assessment? How is this invasion seizure of Maduro, bizarre regime change that keeps the regime in place? How is that playing out amongst an extraordinarily diverse, politically, socially, economically populist inside the country and out? Well, you said it is an extremely diverse society, heterogenic positions, political positions. What I see, what I've been talking with people inside and out is that so there is disappointment for some. There is rage for some because I think we might forget that in Venezuela we have also a very nationalist sentiment that is important. And sovereignty, it's still an idea that it's also valuable. And so yeah, the idea of having bombs thrown on the capital of the country, it's I don't think everybody in Venezuela actually agrees with this. And I've heard from people in different sides of the political battle, I've heard people say they attacked us. I mean, it's extremely hard to actually accept the idea that planes and bombs were thrown. I think we sometimes also are forgetting that there are victims. Also because the authoritarian government is still in place, does not give us actual information on this or at least not enough, but there are civilian and military victims. There are people whose houses have been destroyed. And we've been seeing little by little some expressions of, yeah, of sadness of trauma about what has happened. And then again, yeah, on the outside of Venezuela, well, it is true we've seen people on, for example, so I mean, Europe, so in Madrid, there were lots of people celebrating what happened. And yes, I mean, this was obviously going to happen. But at least in my situation in France, in my entourage, I feel that I've been listening to people saying, hey, you know what, two things might be true at the same time. We can both be against the authoritarian government and against the idea that there is an invasion or at least an military action from the United States on Venezuela. And we might also be able to be against the idea that the United States will govern Venezuela. There is no one sentiment. There are lots of answers to this. So it's question. Alejandro? I do think that as you were pointing to, Dan, this primary vector of whether or not you are in Venezuela is a significant marker of distinction between different types of oppositions. Like I was saying before, today the national assembly was a new national assembly period with sworn in and it includes opposition members who have been derided, you know, openly by my decoding and much other and others as, you know, as collaborators, as normalizers, etc. When of course the interests of an opposition domestically is to build a movement that can eventually, you know, take power, especially, you know, I mean, obviously you might make the argument, well, elections happen and they were stolen and that is in fact true. But the alternative, which is exactly what we're seeing now, an armed intervention on Venezuelan soil is beyond the pale even to those in Venezuela who might be keen to support the opposition, right? And the fact that what we have seen from some of the, you know, expatriate opposition leaders, as well as some of the images of, you know, cheering in Miami or, you know, parts of Europe or elsewhere in the world, it really dramatically highlights this dark sense of, okay, we understand why you may have left. Obviously there's, you know, a million reasons why one felt that they had to leave Venezuela. But leaving Venezuela, does that also mean leaving your sense of nationalism, your sense of patriotism, your sense of sovereignty, right? And that has, I think, created this new really deep rift that it's going to be hard to already, of course, is extremely difficult to imagine a kind of reconciliation of Venezuela as in a transition context. And now this is just added so much more fuel to the literal fire of polarization among Venezuelans. And I'll jump in just as quickly say that I feel like the word hope isn't quite appropriate here, but there's something that gives a little room for optimism about this complexity in the sense that it means that Trump and the US Empire can't just do what it wants, that there's going to be a backlash even from opposition sort of movements. And you can even say this in Colombia. I mean, I'm following on Twitter that there's people who are not fans of Gustavo Petro who are defending him against Trump, who's showed a coming after Petro right now. And so I think that this, the desire to dominate Sparks resistance, it's from everyone to some extent, I mean, not every single one period, but widespread resistance even from people who might have thought they were allies with Trump before. So I think that there's, you know, just, this just speaks to the complexity of Trump's project and the limits of US power. And just to add a quick point to that, I mean, somebody else was saying on democracy an hour later this morning that Trump is nothing of not somebody who speaks the wide part loud. And it's true. And it's not just in terms of his speech, it's also in terms of what gets posted on social media. Just now, he posted with an image of himself, big letters in the front, the hemisphere is ours. It is our hemisphere with the hour, oh, you are, you know, in bold and large. There's no question that this is the project. And one has to wonder if there is a risk of backlash to this brazenness, even among those that might otherwise be supportive of various oppositions throughout the hemisphere to say, like, wait a minute. Okay, we can be neoliberal. We might want, you know, to dismantle socialism. But this is, this is literally not literally, but this would be in fact bringing, you know, a Trojan horse into our midst that we would have no way to control. I wonder if there might be a possibility of some kind of overplaying of the imperial hubris that we're seeing now. Yeah, I want to follow up on that both in terms of how that might play out among Venezuelans and also across the region. Because as Gabriel mentioned near the top of the interview, Bolsonaro successfully getting Trump to go after Lula and go after the Supreme Court Chief Justice really backfired and created a lot of nationalist sentiment behind Lula and a lot of derision and anger towards Bolsonaro for basically inviting in imperialist power to backup his side of the political, the domestic political conflict. Do you think we could see similar things play out in Colombia elsewhere across the region? And then how might it play out in Venezuela where even people who oppose Maduro, you know, still come out of a broader Venezuelan political tradition that is a nationalist one in its a nationalism that in so many ways revolve is around control over oil in particular. And Trump has been so explicit about controlling Venezuela's oil being a central rationale here, this whole absurd idea that that Venezuela stole oil from from the US and now is going to get re compensated now that the US is in control. Yeah, I think this rational specifically what you're saying about oil. It's an extremely important point because I don't think Venezuela's in this I would say in general, I don't want to say everyone but at least in general, I don't think Venezuelans would agree with the idea that Venezuelan oil is property of the state of the United States. Sorry. For example, when Trump says something like the Venezuelan oil industry is actually we built it. It's actually the United States that built it. This is extremely hard to hear because yes, of course, the beginning of the oil companies and the oil extraction in Venezuela. Well, it also was yeah, a dynamic in which the United States was obviously involved. But from the beginning, where the workers who are actually doing the work, you know, who are, it's decided to Venezuelan people. And the oil industry was nationalized in the 70s. Not, I mean, it's been a while. This became a central part of the national mythology, you know, of the contemporary construction of Venezuela. It's extremely linked to the idea that oil belongs to every Venezuelan. And I think this is, yeah, this is one of the limits. I mean, when you say you're going to get back to the oil, you're going to get back to the industry. That's when you're actually attacking the Venezuelans. And the one of the main objects in which Venezuelans take pride and build a national sentiment. So yeah, I think this is one of the main examples of how this is course has a limit. And these actions have a limit because they actually go and attack people that yeah, might people arise, but actually agree on some things. Trump says that the US built Venezuela's oil industry, but a core feature of mid 20th century Venezuelan politics was identifying that as the colonial looting of Venezuela's national resources and why Venezuela played the catalyst role in launching OPEC in 1960 in a decade later, nationalizing oil. And then obviously it has all this other significance, you know, throughout Venezuela in history. Alejandro? Absolutely. I mean, the one of the interesting points here, as we've been talking about sort of this this riff in Fisher between an expat opposition and an domestic opposition, of course, the first wave of people who left Venezuela in the early 2000s and the early years of Chavez were oil workers that had been fired after they participated in oil industry strike in the winter of 2002, 2003. They shut down the oil industry because they understood that this was the center of the political struggle. The survival or lack thereof of the Chavezda project was going to rely on who controls the oil industry, which they had done for the previous 30 years after the nationalization, up that with which they were extremely proud. The idea that the Beto Vesa was this extremely well-run company that was on par with all the global multinational oil companies was this sense of national pride, right? And so to go from there, you know, no, none of that mattered. It was all hours anyway to begin with whatever you think you might have done between 1976 and when Chavez in re-nationalizing oil industry in 2007, that was for not has to strike at some kind of deep core of capability, right? It's, you think about those cartoons of Uncle Sam in the early 20th century scolding the rattle, you know, rousing, you know, children embodying Latin America. And that has to at some core level I imagine strike at the sense of not even nationalism, just like pride that even those folks have in the oil industry. So to me, it's what I'm suggesting that I wonder to what extent this might be overplaying the kind of imperial hubris that might have the potential of bad firing. I would add that one of the arguments that I've heard in the venues in France that I've been doing this time is yeah, well, but the old industry was given to the Chinese and the Russian. Well, I don't think that Venezuelan people are agree with that either. I mean, the idea is that we're not discussing about changing an imperialism for another or just discuss. I mean, at least the Venezuelan people, I don't think that's our goal. So yeah, I think this is a limit that we must have in mind, yeah. And Chavez's re-nationalization was relatively modest as many kind of pink tide, quote unquote, nationalizations have been in the sense is that in the sense that it was if I remember correctly, forcing foreign multinational oil companies to enter into joint ventures with pedevesa, which was important because there was a commodities boom and Chavez, dependent on the oil wealth to fund all these social programs, a key part of his agenda. But when those forced joint ventures, when the companies took those to the investor arbitration boards and those boards ruled against Chavez, Venezuela under Chavez promptly compensated those firms, like nothing illegal, like under international business law happened. Well, not only that, but like some of these cases were actually litigated in courts in the US. And US courts found that the claims of some of these companies like ExxonMobil or others were way inflated. The mobile case, they were claiming $6 billion in losses. And ultimately, what the court ruled was that it was only $1.6 billion and then they paid. And so, there I think sort of, and this maybe, in fact, probably is what Trump and company are referring to when they say, oh, they took our oil, they took our property, etc. They are pointing to some of those that we're not willing to comply with. Venezuelan, as Jonathan will mention, you know, Venezuelan sense of our resources, right? It is so deeply inscribed in our sense of self. And yeah, so thinking about it in those terms, you have to can imagine that this might be the one issue that might cut across an extremely wide, I'm, you know, polarized, your landscape in Minus 1 politics. Gabriel. Yeah. And, you know, there was evidence, right? When Trump was making these statements, I think in the last month or two, you know, there was Venezuelans quoted in US newspapers from the opposition saying they disagreed with Trump statements. They were saying that, you know, the oil is not the United States. So I think that that has absolutely played out already. You know, there's evidence of that. And then the other thing going back to, you know, the point about imperial overreach, I think smart leftists and progressive politicians in Latin America and Colombia and elsewhere, you know, thinking of Colombia for a second, they'll say to the conservative candidates, the right candidates, do you agree that Gustavo Petro needs to watch his ass? And that'll just play, you know, they'll just ask them that and look like fools if they say yes. And if they don't, then they're kind of, you know, defending Gustavo Petro despite their best efforts. So, you know, smart people can do that in Venezuela and elsewhere also. So there's these dynamics are just going to be more interesting and complicated than Trump thinks. Hi, this is Olufemi O. Tywo and you're listening to the dig. You can support the podcast at patreon.com. 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I've been reading equator and I love it. This work needs your support. Join the community. Digital memberships start at just $6 a month. Find the essential voices you've been missing at equator.org. I want to circle back and get a little deeper into something that we've touched on a few times, which is the Venezuelan opposition. What are the various currents that make up the opposition today inside the country end out? And what should we understand about how those various political currents rising and falling power and influence over the years got the opposition to the place where it is today? So the first thing that the opposition, it's regularly said, as a singular item and the idea is that there are oppositions in plural. And this is one of the first things because I think we have all seen and have heard the idea of the opposition. It's extremely important to say, "Hey, this is more complex than we are used to listen to." And in my research, in my research in Venezuela and on the ground, what I find extremely important to go back to and to study is that one of the components of this plural opposition is actually people that came from Chavismo and became opposition. These people are on the ground. They are extremely followed and surveyed and repressed because it is extremely hard for the "socialist" government to see people who were actually the people that they used to work with, the people that they used to sometimes even govern with saying that they oppose this government, accusing it because of its authoritarian way of governing. But at the same time, this former Chavista and then now a position part of the political spectrum in Venezuela is extremely weak because it is hard to build something as a resistance when you have somehow to fight the idea that you're not legitimate to be in a position because you come from this Chavista background. I can jump in for a second and I'm really curious to hear what you say, Alejandro. But in my research, I've looked at a couple of factions under Chavista going back 15 years or so within the broadly defined right-wing opposition and taking Yoletti's point is fundamentally important that that's not the entire opposition at all. There were two factions, at least, within the center-right opposition. There was one that was represented by parties like Pudemiro Husticia which really accepted the legitimacy of Chavismo and Chavez and initially of Maduro as well. We're willing to play on the terrain of Chavismo and even initiate reforms that were on the style of Chavismo doing participatory budgeting in some cases and things like that that typically right-wing parties don't actually do. They did some of those things and then there was a more far-right, intransigent rejection as faction led by the Apolo Lopez and Machado who always rejected any legitimacy of Chavez or Maduro and always wanted to get rid of the government, have some form of military coup or popular uprising. Often this was a total fantasy and then there was this leftist opposition to the government. I don't think under Chavez, that was a major expression. In the very beginning of Chavez, it was an expression and then under the height of Chavez's years in power that they were incorporated within the Chavista movement but then they have taken on an expression, an organized expression. But again, as you'll let you say, they're pretty weak more recently. I think what we're going to see now is that the the Machado far-right wing has been sidelined by Trump as we've been talking about. It'll be interesting to see what the more moderate factions, the so-called collaborators, the people like Enrique Capriles who ran against Maduro and Chavez in 2012 against Chavez in this last election and then Maduro in 2013 and has been a more moderate opposition leader who has continued to engage with the Maduro regime throughout its time, has not taken the most intransigent instances, has stayed in Venezuela unlike a lot of opposition leaders who have left. So I think that these are really important questions to see how do they relate. I think it's almost too early to say exactly what will happen but it's fascinating that Machado has been sidelined. What I would expect is that there's going to be a lot of the Machado wing of the opposition is going to be intensely active outside of Venezuela and probably much less so in Venezuela for some period of time. But I don't know exactly how all that will look. I just would like to add that this also speaks about the divide that Alejandro was talking about before is that the idea of inside and outside opposition and the fact is that yeah, obviously lots of people on the traditional opposition that's how I call them in Venezuela have left the country also because they were pushed to live. I mean it was not possible for them to stay in a safe manner in Venezuela. But there is also another side of this is that some opposition leaders have actually taken strategy, internationalization of the conflict. The fact is that this has also had lots of consequences for people from Venezuela going migrating, going outside because they also the Venezuelan migrants have become also the scarecrow in many situations in Spain. This is extremely important in all Latin American, in Latin American, this is important. And the fact is that first in some of this strategy of taking the Venezuelan conflict into the international level, we've also seen people from this opposition become entangled with corruption and we come in you know, entangled with the United States administration and then not necessarily answering to the mandate that some of the Venezuelan people have given them. I actually think that today what we're also seeing is that it's a backfire of this strategy, the internationalization of the Venezuelan conflict. It's also and specifically the one that says that going into alliance with the United States would have been the good idea or the good strategy to bring back democracy, let's say in Venezuela, it's backfiring right now. And it also hasn't been good for Venezuelan migrants. So just something that we should underline for listeners who don't know Gabriel, you mentioned Boudich and him being on his way out as president of Chile and what's key is that far right candidate cast won the presidency in substantial part on a staunchly anti-Venezuelan migrant agenda. And that has been true for the right wing across the whole region and of course in the United States, where so many Venezuelan migrants who either started out right wing or were kind of had their politically political subjectivities converted right words due to their experience in Venezuela, arrive in the US, love Donald Trump only to surprisingly and terrifyingly find themselves the find themselves central targets of Trump's deportation agenda. Well listen, yes, I think that there are a couple of things to bring to the table. And as Joletti and I from Venezuela, I'm sorry, I gave to just think out of this for one second. We've had to contend with this over years, which is that for those of us who come from and left analysis but are from Venezuela, when it comes to Venezuelans abroad, but there's a deep racism and classism that marks the opposition abroad, at least the mainstream of it, which of course also has to be layered on top of understanding that Venezuelan migration has happened in waves over the last 15, 20 years and those waves closely correlate to class. And so one of the, as you said, terrifying dimensions of certainly in the United States, but also in places like Spain and elsewhere in the world where you find large contingents of Venezuelan expatriates or migrants is the degree to which there's zero solidarity among Venezuelans themselves. I mean, here in New York, we're embassies. And we had a massive influx of Venezuelan migrants from the border beginning in 2021, 2022. And who were the people who were helping them? Were there large numbers of Venezuelans who had already been here for years from representing different class strata, often much lighter skin? No, it was solidarity groups that already, many of them working class people of color in New York City migrants themselves who were supporting their arrival. So I don't think you can discount whether it's in the United States or elsewhere that these these fishers in terms of the oppositions that on Joletti rightly points to have a deep new class and raise dimension to them. And how that translates into, for instance, you know, my recording on Machado being able to marshal political support domestically in Venezuela for the kind of electoral victory that the opposition had last July, I think has to be understood in the context of not supporting the Machado project so much as rejecting the Madurista regime. And how those two align obviously is not an easy question. But even among all of us study and work with popular sector communities in Venezuela, the ones that I work with that I've been in touch with over the past few days, of course, they remind me as they always do that the level of corruption in the Maduro government is astounding that the level of concentration of power that the erosion of a Chavista kind of vision for truly integrated grassroots sectors within the state has been really dramatically eroded. And as a result, they can no longer give their support to Maduro. That means voting for an opposition and seeing how things align there. But that's all to suggest that, you know, again, taken into consideration the various, you know, fissures among the opposition, class and race is a really big component. Taking about what Alejandro is saying, yes, I think it is extremely important to see the complexity of the Venezuelan people obviously goes and it's visible in its in Venezuelan migration. And I think one of the things that has been hard in my years outside of Venezuela is that being what we would call a non-white woman from Venezuela and also a left-wing person, it's not easy to actually go into the Venezuelan diaspora with this identities and all combined in one person. Obviously, I'm not the only one, but this is my case. And the thing is that, well, I've actually seen that with time and with the conflict in Venezuela getting worse and worse, some initiatives of solidarity, some initiatives of links between the Venezuela and diaspora have emerged. But they, yeah, they always meet this limit, which is actually logical. They always meet this limit of if we were not going to be able to be close in our home country, it is not necessarily easy or necessarily positive to bring non-natural links between us outside. And what I'm trying to say is that there were, at a point, a few discourses about, well, we have to get together with all Venezuelan, but yeah, but there is a political divide that it's also there. And it's actually important to, even though we have this nationality in common, it is also important to actually think about what is the project that we have for this Venezuelan identity, what is the project that we have for the Venezuelan future. And yeah, we don't always align. And I guess this is politics. And this is also the idea is that it is important for us of Venezuelans outside and inside to be able to go back to doing politics as citizens and also as Venezuelans in a manner in which we're not menaced by the United States imperialism. And in a manner in which the authoritarian government does not, yeah, impetus from actually exursing our political power. We haven't talked so much about the drug war pretext for all of this. That Venezuela is responsible allegedly for hundreds of thousands of ventrinal related overdose deaths in the United States. And I think maybe we haven't talked about it much because it's so absolutely fanciful. The Trump administration has charged that Maduro runs the cartel de los soles, which is in fact not an actual cartel, but a colloquial term that refers to links between drug traffickers and corrupt official and military figures. And from everything I've read, some cocaine is trafficked through Venezuela. No fentanyl is trafficked from there, from there at all. And the share of cocaine passing through was really, really rather small. And then of course, Trump just pardoned Honduras, former Honduras president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted in a US court of drug traffic gang offenses that by all reasonable accounts he committed. What in reality is the relationship between Venezuela and officialdom slash military brass on the one hand and drug traffickers on the other. And what do you make of the way that the drug war pretext has been invoked from from the get go from the boat strikes to the military assault and seizure of Maduro Gabriel. I think that there are some links. So as you said that there's some cocaine. I've heard something like 13% of the South American cocaine come through Venezuela. And most of that goes to Europe. So I don't know if that figure is exactly correct, but it strikes me as roughly correct. Again, no fentanyl comes. So the idea that Venezuela is a major source of drugs, and particular the lethal fentanyl is just total BS. There's no truth to that whatsoever. There is some truth to the fact that Venezuela is a traffic route for drugs and cocaine specifically. And that drug trafficking has infiltrated within the Venezuelan state. I don't have all the details on that. And to be very curious if you'll let your Alejandro has that more so. But what I can say, I think is that this mythology of the drugs, it serves one purpose just to sort of rally a degree of domestic support in the US and say there's this boogie man. And we're going to go after it. And I think that Trump and various Trump officials, Stephen Miller and others have sort of used that to whip up a frenzy around Venezuela. Not particularly successfully, I might add, if you look at polls of US residents, Americans in the American sense, there's not a strong majority support for any of Trump's actions for the boat bombings or for the recent invasion, the capture of Maduro for the US running Venezuela. There's various degrees of pluralities opposed to that and majorities opposed. And for like 94% in a recent Washington poll, Washington post poll are opposed to the US deciding the future government of Venezuela and just 6% in favor of that. So there's that. I think the other factor that I would point to is that I think that the total lack of reality, the total bullshit, if you want to say it that way, of the drug trade is actually something that sometimes Trump officials feel proud of in a sense. It's like we can say anything we want, we can have no pretense, whatsoever. We're just going to dominate. So this is what Alejandro referred to earlier that I've had an argument that they've abandoned any pretense at a hegemonic project. I don't think this is entirely true of Trumpism, but I think that there's a significant degree of truth to the-- They barely tried to manufacture consent for this thing. It's exactly. I mean, as they said, the word democracy didn't appear in the press conference once. They don't have any evidence. They haven't tried to show any evidence for any of the boats that are allegedly smuggling drugs. And so I think that they don't care. They don't give a damn if they're saying things that are true. They just want to dominate. And in fact, there's expressions where they just want to dominate without having to justify it to anyone, anywhere with any evidence. And I think that we can see that with the total lack of any empirical basis for the drug rumors and the drug trade. That's an expression of this will to dominate and just do whatever the hell we want, to whoever we want. And I think it has a backlash in the US. I mean, you can see them going after Senator Mark Kelly and they want to strip his pension because he dared to criticize some of the things Trump said. So I think there's also this, you know, so-called boomerang effect where some of the imperial things come back to the US. But, you know, there's a lot more to say about the actual, there is some empirical reality of drugs in Venezuela that I haven't touched on a whole lot. And I mean, I think that's so key. The flimsiness of the rationale being a feature rather than a bug that indexes their ability to act with impunity, exercise power and domination without consent with impunity. Another thing I think that might be going on is that there's this crazy dynamic happening where the military action is framed as not requiring congressional approval because it's actually a law enforcement action. And then these alleged drug boats, which conventionally would be dealt with as a law with through law enforcement are in fact not law enforcement actions. They're not murder. They are the US militarily defending itself against aggressors. So like the toll, I think it's also the drug war, which over the decades has witnessed the militarization of American police as we've seen plan Colombia and like the militarization of the drug war brought the drug war in so many ways for so many decades has blurred the line between law enforcement and military action and whether intentional or not, it seems like perhaps that is that is conducive to the sort of legalistic disinformation underway. There's another layer to this, which is, I mean, I completely agree and I think that the way that that gave frame that as a, you know, it is just pure power in its most naked formulation without increasingly any sense of requiring even pretense. And the pretense as it becomes flimsy just shifts to something else. I mean, part of what we saw over the weekend in terms of the attack on Venezuela and the shift of attention away from from the boats is that Congress was asking too many questions. They were just getting pesky. So all right, we'll just do something else. And then now we're going to put them in the position of having to say defend Maduro or defend US troops, which of course is a complete fabrication and not in any way having any condition in fact. But the other part of it, though, is I think so much of this and we saw a little bit reflected in the Trump press conference has a kind of lethal and disgusting, but farcical dimension to it. My undergraduate mentor, Deborah Levinson, Astral, historian of Central American Guatemala, talked about serious, farce. What is a serious farce? And here you see a kind of gamification of a foreign policy. You see Trump talking about like, oh, it looked like a movie, Hegseth, you know, posting stuff where he personifies some kind of like superhero figure in the social media accounts and bringing back all of these cartoonish tropes that render more farcical the idea of first a strategy as tragedy second, the second time as far. And so I do wonder to what extent, you know, we risk as analysts making too much sense of what's going on and in fact, seeing it just for what it is, which is the naked exercise of power in its most root form with a cartoonish childish and yet because of that absolutely lethal and dangerous consequences attached to it. I'm talking about this image about the cartoonish side of this situation or at least the images that we have. I'm thinking about so we have some accounts of soldiers that Venezuelan soldiers that were in the sites of the strikes and that well, they were doing what I think were asked to do try to defend, you know, the the Venezuelan sites attacked. And when you when you see this young man, very young black men, bats and hospitals trying to make sense of what happened and trying to give an account of what they were able or not to do, I'm thinking also about the the G.I. the green goji I, this very big white, very well-equipped man who is supposedly confronting in an equal but obviously very unequal way this even as well as Armada. And I'm also thinking about the symbolic of this domination. I mean, this is also a very military and very violent expression of what it is to the idea of imperialism is also the idea of one model of a man of a white man of somebody from the not global north, constraining and exerting complete power as you were saying on those people from the global south, on those bodies, on those territories. And I think these images are also becoming extremely hard to see, extremely dramatic to to think about. I wanted to just jump in and you know, you're pointing to something I wanted to mention earlier that for Hegseth, this was about warriors, this was about men taking action and doing it really well. And so he talked about that, you know, in sort of Jubiland almost, he was almost like orgasmic in his language and adulation of what was going on. We'll see the cultural theorists will be able to analyze the cultural sexual dimensions of that amazing, astonishing press conference. But that was clearly an element. And the other thing that has come to my mind as I see the images of the bombings of Caracas is that in some sense the ground for this has been prepared by video games and also by Jack Ryan. I mean they explicitly had the whole series about taking out the corrupt Venezuelan leader. And so I wonder if there's some, you know, people in the Trump administration who watch those things and want to enact this fantasy that is deep in their psyche in some sense. And it just, you know, the images are so strikingly similar to some of the things that we have seen in, you know, video games and popular culture in the US that it's hard to ignore the resemblance. Or the combination of, I've said before, you know, link game drugs with weapons of mass destruction, which fits so well into terrorism, which puts a well into the pattern of like, "Sekadio movies," right? I mean, it's just such a strange, fact, you know, life borrowing from fiction and we're sort of in this bizarre world where it's hard to parse reality from what's not. No, I mean, I mean, it also adds that this is, so again, in a venue that it was before, there was this French man that was a big supporter of Donald Trump and its ideology, which I found amazing, but whatever. And he was actually rejecting the idea of any moral criticism of the actions that the United States took. He was extremely clear. No, our question is not about the Venezuelan people is about our interest and this is okay. And so those images, all these, all of what we're talking about, these symbolism, these images, these way of exerting power, these men, these warriors, it's okay because there is no morality to have behind public policy or international policy. And this might be the new order. This might be the new political international order. And this is affecting today Venezuelan lives, extremely directly, but this might not be the only thing that it will affect. This might not be the only, the only people that this will affect. I think it's already affecting people in the United States. I'm not a big, the United States scholar, but yeah, following the news about what happens in the States about public policy, health policy, etc., etc., you see that the Trumpian way of governing is already having a very hard consequences on the people from its country. Then what limits he could have into exerting the same kind of power outside of this country, of his country. Right. No, and Trump doing whatever he wants, regardless of the law or the democratic will, whether domestically or internationally, it's all part of one big project that is bad and scary. I want to, I want to close by, by stepping back and putting this all in some historical context to what extent did Maduro mark a continuation of Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution and to what degree did he represent a departure? I think, I think this is an important thing to discuss. Some on the left react to any critical or honest discussion of Maduro or other governments that the US is targeting with the charge that all criticism legitimates US imperialism. And I find that really simplistic. And more specifically when it comes to Venezuela, as someone who spent time there during the peak of Chavez's power and popularity, including in El Vente Triestanero, Barrio Popular, that was at the center of Chavista popular politics. Because of all this, I think it's really important to distinguish Chavez and Chavez Moe to the degree that we can from being entirely conflated with Maduro's government and what's emerged since Chavez's death. So to what degree is, is Maduro a direct continuation of Chavez's project and to what degree does his, did his governance mark a break? I can jump in to start and I think we'll all have big thoughts on this. I mean, I think that there's definitely continuities and there's some major ruptures. I mean, I think if you're thinking politically, you know, under Chavez, there certainly were some autocratic tendencies, there were some authoritarian sort of moves, but they were relatively constrained. And I don't know that we can say that there aren't authoritarian tendencies, even in the US before Trump. And even in many sort of actually existing democracies. So whether or not Venezuela under Chavez was any worse on some of those fronts, I think is a very open question, but there was profound real sort of popular democracy under Chavez, which was very contradictory and, you know, unfully, it wasn't fully formed. It had a dynamism and all sorts of problems to it, but there was real genuine expressions of popular power and factories, but also in governance. I mean, there's a lot of real sort of participatory democracy that was happening under Chavez. And despite all the contradictions, all the problems, all the inadequacies, it was really amazing to see that and to be around that. And there also was a significant degree of electoral democracy. I mean, the opposition was able to contest elections. There was some major ruptures even under Chavez. I mean, there's a series of elections that were not respected and Chavez would create some parallel governments, but by and large, there was respect for sort of pluralism and respect for political freedoms. And under Maduro, that existed for a couple of years in the beginning of Maduro. I'd say through the 2015 parliamentary election, which I was down in Venezuela sort of observing and immediately was recognized that they had lost the election, although they didn't fully recognize the extent of the opposition's victory. But in the years after that, there was a beginning with sort of authoritarian turn, I would say. I mean, within Venezuela under Maduro, like 2016, 2017, 2018, and then a real consolidation of a fairly brutal and repressive form of authoritarianism, to an extent that you did not see at all under Chavez. There was not massive repression of popular movements in particular. There wasn't massive repression of the opposition. There was some, for sure. But that was some big differences. And then, and I'm simplifying it a little. I think there's more points to be said on this. Economically, I think that there's also some important differences and some continuities, of course. One clear continuity is the incredible dependence on oil. But that's a structural feature that goes back decades and decades in Venezuela. And it worsened under Chavez, the amount of oil dependency under Chavez. At the end of his term, the end of his life was higher than it was in the beginning of his term. So it was 14 years in office that got worse. There was significant corruption that was happening under Chavez. Alejandro has written wonderfully about all of this sort of weird to use a word wonderful with corruption. But your analysis has been so spot on and useful to me that a lot of the social reforms that were good under Chavez and Chavez were fueled by a sort of mismanagement of the oil sector and creation of parallel structures within the state that were useful for bypassing degrees of opposition, but created this huge nests of corruption that ended up exploding under Madudo and getting worse and worse. So I think that there's some real differences economically between Chavez and Madudo. I think there was more of a real socialist project even within the state under Chavez. But a lot of the problems that exploded under Madudo were birthed in the Chavez era and sort of came to fruition. And then of course the sanctions were something that bit in a way that they existed to some extent under Chavez, but they were profoundly more damaging under the Madudo years. So I'd say that those are some of the things, but again, this is certainly a bit of a oversimplification of things. Yeah. And before we hear from Alejandro and Yoleti, we haven't, we keep touching on the sanctions, but just to emphasize that research has found that the sanctions are responsible for, I believe, at least half of Venezuela's economic crisis and the Washington Post had some very interesting reporting that the Trump administration was explicitly warned by many, many, many, many people that imposing these overwhelming sanctions on Venezuela would crash the economy to such an extent that it would spur massive out migration of Venezuelans, including to the United States. Just want to underline that because we hadn't touched on that yet. Yeah. And I'll make one last comment just before passing it over that the sanctions, I think, are even more important than saying that they're responsible for half. I think the origins of the Venezuelan crisis certainly have a lot to do with currency policy and oil dependency and all series of factors that are complicated and, you know, some of the decisions around that also have to do with imperialism. I mean, the currency policy that ended up being really devastating economically was response to the 2002 coup and then the oil strike and the sort of capital flight that was happening in the years after that. And so we can't disentangle internal and external factors, but Francisco Rodriguez has a really thorough book that shows that the imposition of sanctions and what he calls the broader toxicification of the Venezuelan economy meant that a relatively normal economic crisis that he distributes pretty wholly to the government. And I'd say I agree, you know, in large part that the government was, you know, very responsible in many ways, but it was a sanction that made it impossible to recover. And he shows that, you know, Colombia and Venezuela, the oil industry experienced similar declines for a number of years, but then sanctions hit Venezuela, but not Colombia. And Colombia's oil industry did okay in the years after while Venezuela didn't. So I think we can't underestimate the profound implications and consequences of the sanctions, not necessarily the origin of the economic crisis, but is just an utterly huge, huge, huge factor in the incredible magnitude, you know, 75% of Venezuela's economy being gone over a nine-year period of time. Alejandro. I think absolutely, as Gabe pointed out, we can think about the continuities and ruptures between Chávez and Maluru and Shulid, but there's a different, or there's another set of continuities and ruptures that we should consider, which is to what extent the Chávez represent a break from the past of the prior governments that you took over. And you know, I think that obviously there's the danger of overemphasizing the primacy of oil in Venezuela, but there's also a danger of not playing it up significantly. And of course, what Chávez never did, even though at some point that the project of Chávez was as it had been in previous governments in Venezuela to diversify sources of revenue, it never achieved that. And in fact, the deeper concentration of imports based on an oil economy that then undermined the productive apparatus of the state via either public or privately owned companies made it extremely vulnerable to shocks as we began to see, you know, in 2014 and onwards, which then of course coincided as you engage, well, mentioned with the sectoral sanctions beginning in 2017 to really just collapse the Venezuelan economy. So I think it's important to realize that we're talking about continuities and ruptures. Chávez and Maluru had that tremendous Achilles heel that it did not mark the departure from the model of oil dependency that had also very severely hampered the prior regimes that it ostensibly was set up to stand against, right? But taking that or putting that where it should be, your question about what are the continuities and ruptures between Maluru and between Chávez and Maluru, I think laid out some really important ones. I think what I'd like to highlight just to add is it's also I think important not to assume that Chávezmo was one thing at any given time. I mean, the history of Chávezmo is a 26 year project. And then of course before that, with the rise of the Bolivarian vision that really was the first iteration of what we now call Chávezmo, has been one of change, an adaptation, the kind of over determined idea from some either on the right or on the left that you can draw a straight line from Chávez to Maluru for better or worse, really misses the extent to which Chávez in particular, and then of course later Maluru, what they had in common was the idea that the state needs to be secured if anything is going to be achieved that is different for the population than had been there before. So control over the state is the absolute essence of Chávezmo throughout, but that was going to manifest differently depending on what the obstacles were at any given moment, and the opportunities were in any given moment, right? And I think what Maluru faced was of course no opportunities, all only obstacles beginning with his election in 2013, which was by a razor thin margin, and that already undermined his credibility or his legitimacy, especially with the opposition, which saw an opportunity, as Gave mentioned, to oust them first with street protests and demonstrations in 2014, and then, electorally in 2015, with taking over the national assembly, right? But again, I think part of what we have to understand to the question about continuity or change or rupture is that the one thing that the last 26 years have had in common, whether Chávez or Maluru, is Chávezmo's ability to adapt. And in that way, what we saw over the past weekend, and we saw today with a swearing and of the El Ciro de Riga is another iteration of that adaptation, right? Chávezmo, as infinitely adaptable. I mean, or should you think about the closest parallel to this in Latin America would be Bidonismo, right? The Nurgentina, which is just infinitely adaptable. And in some ways, Chávezmo is showing itself to be that as well, right? So yes, we can talk about the long deray of Chávezmo, but I feel like it's really important to highlight that its primary hallmark has been adaptation in order to remain in power. Do let me. Well, I think Alejandro and Gabriel have made already extremely important points. Well, taken some of some ideas from Alejandro's work that I've tried to continue in a different historical period. So the relationship between the working class and the state in Venezuela has historically been conditioned to demand of organization from the state from top down. And so it this means that the state styles working class organizations or grassroots organizations how they have to organize and which administrative kind of configuration they have to take to be legitimate interlocutors to the state. And so this historically took the form of Junta de Vecinos, Junta de Promejores, etc. etc. And then later on during the Chavista period, this became a common-elred council and then communas. And yes, these were participatory devices that were built in between this what was presented as a revolutionary project. But in the core of this, it is still the state that is telling grassroots organization and people and working class people how you have to organize to actually be able to talk to me and to ask for access to public wealth. So I think this is an important continuity between before and after Chavism and that the revolutionary discourse might have been so important that maybe sometimes it didn't let us to actually see what the continuity was in participatory public policy. I don't want to say that the participatory policy within Chavism was not extremely big and much more developed. I just want to say that in the core of what it represented about this conditioning of the relationship between working class and the state, I think there is an important continuity there that we have to take into account. But then again, talking about ruptures, obviously the the way in which we think the temporalities of Chavism through this through its history, the ruptures each analyst might see them in different moments. In my research during my field work in Venezuela, I was in during my PhD research in Venezuela between 2014 and 2015. And so this is moment in which the opposition wins the National Assembly as Alejandro was saying before. And at this moment in time, I think two important things happen that are one is much more visible than the other. When Chavism loses the National Assembly, it then builds up this assembly constituent. Constituent assembly. Thank you. That it's supposed to write a new constitution and we know that it didn't happen that this new assembly was just there to be a parallel institution to the first assembly that was lost. And so this is seen as a rupture in which we see Chavismo not recognizing an election that they lost. In the same period, the Madurista government is purging a part of the Chavismo that it's historically linked to social movements that was in there. And at this moment in time, it is there is a rupture because these people, I mean these these compounds of Chavismo are actually taken outside of the government and slowly they become Chavista opposition. For me, this is an important rupture. This is one of the moments in which the big Chavista coalition it's breaking down in two because and specifically it is taking out the government, the Maduro government is taking out this popular component that was supposed to be at the core of the Chavista Revolutionary Project and of the Chavista project of governing the state because let's take into account that the idea of governing the state taken control of the state, as Alejandro said, was not only taken control, was taken control with the support of popular organizations and actually giving part of the state to be governed to this popular organization. And at this moment, they're taking out. This is a big rupture. And at this moment, we see a process that it's been studied by a few scholars me with colleagues, we've been trying to study this process of bear with me. The institutionalization of participation, this meant that the participatory structures as where they were as communal councils and communes, they become much smaller structures that are serving also the purpose of distributing food, but the political part of these structures, the political strength that they were supposed to build within working class populations, it's totally left out and they actually become structures of repression and actually yeah and and then again, I think another important part of the of the ruptures and of the crisis that we've been seeing from the Maduro government, even though this dynamic also obviously started before is what one could call the patrimonialization of the state, meaning that yes, of course, the idea of the Bolivarian revolution was take back the state and to distribute wealth, that at least in the discourse was the main idea. But then we've seen more and more and during the crisis, it's been it's become much more important. This idea of the state becoming somehow like a private structure from which we can take wealth. And so people in power are using state structures to enrich themselves. And this is a dynamic that was not at this at the beginning of the project was not the thing that was supposed to be built. And when you're saying that Gabriel, when you're saying that sanctions have this very high role in the Venezuelan crisis, I mean, I completely agree with you, but then again, I think that this privatization of Venezuelan state wealth by people who are governing became at a point a way of governing. And suddenly the working people's rights and syndicators, the things that were at a moment at the core of the of these popular support of Chavismo were taken completely outside. And one of the one of the ideas that I think it's important to say about Venezuela today is that if you want to see really hardcore capitalism at its core, well, go to Venezuela. People are completely unprotected, no health, no social security. And this has been built by those who still claim themselves as being a being socialist, still claim themselves as being anti-empire imperialists, but that by these processes of taking out the political components of participation and suddenly privatizing the state, it's like they have taken the whole project out and has they have taken from the Venezuelan people. The will that the mandate that the Venezuelan people once gave them. These are for me extremely important ruptures between what happened before with Chavismo and in the most recent years. I wanted to jump in and just comment, I mean, one of the things you're saying, Galethi is almost that Venezuela prefigures what's happening in the US under Trump. We also see this sort of patrimonialization and privatization of the US state to sort of extreme degree that we haven't seen in a long time at least. And then the other thing I just wanted to jump on was your point about the continuity and the sort of complications of participation and the way in which the state really thwarted a lot of participation, which I fully agree with, but I think there's another complicated dynamic in the heart of the sort of Chavez, not Modoro, but the Chavez era. So thinking like 2007 to 2011 or so when I was doing my research in Venezuela. And it was the fact that the participatory rhetoric and the socialist rhetoric was a tool that popular sectors used against intermediate state officials who were trying to thwart their participation. So there was this fascinating really important dynamic that was going on that and Chavez actually supported the popular sectors in a number of ways, although he also undermined them at the same time. So he was a very complicated figure. But you know, I think that that dynamic in some localities and some expressions could really reach pretty significant heights that I'm not sure we've reached in too many other historical contexts. I think the degree of actual popular power in Venezuela at the height of Chavismo is really extraordinary and worth recognizing even though it was contradictory, even in that moment. And it wasn't everywhere. It was very fragmented and only in certain places. So and then the other thing I want to just sort of quote Alejandro Fanboy of the whole show, Dan, that I'm learning so much from Yulah Eti and Alejandro. It's great to listen to the other guests and just learn a ton about Venezuela over the last 25 years. Well Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hettland and Yoletti Bracho, thank you all very much. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thank you so much Dan. Thank you. That was Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hettland and Yoletti Bracho. Alejandro Velasco teaches Latin American history at New York University and his former executive editor at NACLA report on the Americas. He's the author of Body O Rising, Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela. Gabriel Hettland is a professor of Latin American studies at SUNY Albany. He's the author of Democracy on the Ground, Local Politics in Latin America's Left Turn. Yoletti Bracho is professor in political science at the University of the Avenue in France and sits on the editorial board of ContraTop, pardon my French pronunciation. Thank you for listening to the dig from Jacobin Magazine. As Marx once said, after noting the inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization, while other podcasts suddenly interpret it in the world in various ways, our point is to change it. We're posting new episodes most weeks. The dig was produced by Alex Lewis, our associate producer is Jackson Roach, Music by Jeffrey Brotsky. Our operations manager is Sylvia Outwood. 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