Nothing like an eye wtness report to understand that Maduro had to go. goodbye and good riddence. However then watching an application of US nation building hardly warms my heart. thirty years of theft and even currency distruction and oil producgtion down to 500,000 bbls from 3000,000 bbls. No wonder Canada ships 4,000,000 bbls of equally heavy oil today.
Method is the problem, but this is a lasting global problem. Manny had to go and several others are long past due for regime change. We need a UN REGIME CHANGE protocol that can be enforced. Far too many autocrats hang on until death while blocking both transition and vreforms and no one benefits.
We also need a UN nation building system which can be light. Recall the light hand of mcarthur in japan and how quickly japan got on its feet. Generals at least want to go home and know how to delegate. Remember the British Empire as well and that nothing truly collapsed when they left and wobbles were soon fixed.. Barbarism is today extinct.
So Maduro is out. My wife is from Venezuela. We speak Spanish together.
When Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999 the global oil price was around 10 dollars per barrel and it increased very rapidly thereafter. Venezuela was producing around 3 million barrels per day. The rough math is that the Chavistas stole more than a trillion dollars, the slums in Venezuela are the same, the infrastructure is the same, all the money is gone.
Venezuela had a prospect of going to 10 million barrels a day but the Chavistas managed to run the oil industry into the ground and ended up with a little more than half a million barrels currently.
But that money is enough to buy the loyalty of a couple of hundred thousand soldiers and organized thugs and with that you can keep more that 25m people under the thumb.
The economic mismanagement was epic and at times hilarious if it hadn’t been so sad. Inflation became rampant of course and the Chavistas ignored it as a ploy of speculators. At one point the street value of the largest banknote of 100 Bolivars was less then the 11 US$ cts cost to produce them abroad. The Chavistas refused to print higher denominations all the same. The official exchange rate was so far off the street value that the military started a business of buying gasoline inside Venezuela with soft currency and then drive the barrels over the border to Colombia where they were sold for hard currency. As the CFO of Cargill I was responsible for trying to navigate our business through the mess. Price controls, currency controls, it was impossible. Meanwhile the people in power in Cuba will be worried. They were being propped up by Venezuelan oil money in exchange for their ‘management’ services brokering the always fragile balance of power in Caracas and providing ‘security’ advice. I have mixed feelings about what has come to pass. It couldn’t get any worse, but making it better will require the judicious execution of power. Now that Maduro is gone I do hope we are in for real change, the backup team isn’t any better.
It would clearly have been better if the Venezuelans themselves had gotten rid of the Chavistas but that was not an attainable path.
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