Table of Contents
Tom Hunter
No Minister
We have to re-invent socialism. It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition.
– Hugo Chavez
Waking up to great news.
I see the squealing from the left is already here, complete with Yes-But-I-Forget-My-Own-History types like Obama guru David Axelrod…
It tracks…
As to what comes next, it’s probably this woman who becomes president, first as interim until elections can be held, Maria Corina Machado, who also happens to be the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
In case you don’t know who she is, a brief background:
She’s a former engineer, who was on track to become Venezuela’s president, leading the Unitary Democratic Platform (PUD) in 2024 until Maduro banned her from running. At which point she threw her support behind Edmundo González Urrutia and encouraged her followers to do the same. It worked. In the July 2024 election, despite Maduro’s attempts to prevent people from voting for González, he won the election. Every independent and international organization involved said so, even the Biden administration!
Even Latin American leftist academic, Paul Buchanan, who specialises in foreign policy, acknowledged Maduro’s defeat, albeit in a pained, grudging manner, in his post Choosing the lesser evil. When I say pained and academic this is what I mean:
This framing poses a dilemma for political scientists. The discipline tends to prioritise regime type over left-right politics. That is to say, the discipline’s ideological preference is for democracy over dictatorship rather than the policy content of either type of regime. This is an obvious normative bias, one that is readily defended due to the fact that, despite all its limitations and contemporary flaws, empirically democracy does a better job at protecting basic human rights than any other regime type.
Although lengthy it’s worth your attention as he details the background of both Chavez/Maduro and the PUD:
Truth be told, the country is ruled by thieves posing as anti-imperialist revolutionaries. In this they resemble Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua or Putin’s Russia more than post-Castro Cuba or Xi Jin-ping’s PRC. In short, the situation is dire. Under Maduro Venezuela has become a failed State.
…
The curse of Venezuela is that the PUD-led opposition is not a choirboy’s convention either. Besides the failed 2002 coup against Chavez and the 2018 drone attack against Maduro during a parade and its member’s history of dubious commitment to democratic practice (Gonzalez’s admirable personal traits as an academic and diplomat as well as his middle class roots notwithstanding), the current opposition has significant ties to Venezuelan ex-pats linked to rightwing Cuban and Nicaraguan exiles, who in turn have attracted the support of conservative groups in the US and other Latin American countries…
Unlike the case of a lot of contested elections, all these people really had no choice, because, although the votes were never fully tallied, they stopped counting around 80 per cent when González was in the lead with nearly 70 per cent of the vote. But Maduro simply stopped the counting and declared himself the winner.
When I first joined No Minister in 2019, I wrote several pieces about Venezuela because of what Chavez’s socialism had already wrecked in the nation (that year’s election was also a fraud, although not as blatant as 2024) with massive, nationwide power cuts, The lamps are going out:
By the end of that year, in a magnificent burst of cynical hypocrisy, Maduro was actually celebrating the “dollarization” of the Venezuelan economy as the local currency had collapsed, along with the oil and power industries. Further embarrassment followed in 2020 when a Venezuelan warship, the Naiguatá, unwisely rammed a German cruise liner, Sink the Naiguatá!
All while he enjoyed this…
Look at Maduro in that clip. Well-fed. Huge jowels. Fancy suit. A big cigar for the classic caudillo as he sits down to eat the finest steak served by a famous Turkish chef. Is Maduro not the very picture of a capitalist pig that the left constantly portray as their enemies? Does that look like someone who knows how to run a country, including its electrical and oil industries? Or does it look like the classic uncaring, troughing member of the upper-crust who dines well, while his people starve? It only needs Squealer to complete the picture.
But after that there seemed no point writing about the nation as it congealed into a corrupted, security state status quo, likely to live on for decades as so many communist nations have.
However, the second term of Trump began to offer possibilities not glimpsed in his first, as when the US rescued five opposition party workers who’d been trapped in the Brazilian embassy:
What I didn’t know was that Maduro went after the opposition party workers, because being trounced 70 per cent to 30 per cent in open vote counting means you’ve got traitors in your midst who know you’ll cheat but are going to make it impossible to do it in secret.
He got something like 1000 dumped into his prison cells, but five managed to get into the Argentinian embassy which promptly granted them asylum. Maduro then threw the Argentinian diplomats out, and Argentina got Brazil to take care of the embassy. Then Maduro threw them out, and the hostages were left behind, desperately waiting for some kind of help, trapped for 15 months without water or electricity in a state of siege.
That operation, conducted under the noses of his security forces, should have told Maduro to be gone then, but, with nowhere else to go where he could live his fabulous lifestyle and being a rather stupid man, he decided to stick it out and taunt Trump.
Big mistake! But now Maduro is gone and there is hope for the nation.
Let us also hope that Iran and Cuba, who very much have survived (barely) with supplies of cheap Venezuelan oil, are next on the chopping block.
This article was originally published by No Minister.
