Is socialism to blame for the downfall of Venezuela? - THE SIREN CALL OF 'FREE STUFF' LEADS TO MISERY AND DEATH
Daniel Milán, Lives in Venezuela
Answered Jul 15 · Upvoted by Edward Alejandro Medina, lives in Venezuela (1986-present)
Is socialism to blame for the downfall of Venezuela?
As a Venezuelan, I’d say no. However, first we’d have to talk about what socialism really is.
I’m not going to do that though, because I’m no expert. Also, I trust that you know how to use google or wikipedia (or quora!) and see what true socialism is supposed to be. Let’s just say that, in order to make a truly socialist country you’d need a bunch of zombies and robots, because real human beings were not meant for “socialism”.
Now, the word socialism is sure to stir things up wherever it is mentioned. Defenders of socialism will point to the map and show you the miraculous Northern Sea, whose magic water splashes into the coasts of Scandinavian countries (please ignore the UK) to give their inhabitants superhuman powers that make them able to survive socialism. The only thing is, that’s not real socialism. They have socialist practices, sure, but they still have markets and you can still make money there. Companies like IKEA and Mojang are from those places, and if they were real socialist countries their compatriots would all have free furniture and Minecraft (guess what - they don’t).
Now, critics of socialism will usually point at Venezuela to say that socialism is impossible and that anyone who tries is going to fail. I wholeheartedly agree. But socialism didn’t kill Venezuela.
We, the Venezuelans, did.
Let’s talk about a bit of history here.
Kukenán-tepui, located in the Canaima national park. Just a glimpse of the beauty of our land. Photo from google.
Venezuela is beautiful country surrounded by the gorgeous Caribbean sea, with lots of natural resources (every resource you can think of) and breathtaking nature: from the Médanos of Coro, to the Angel Falls and everything in between, we were blessed among the blessed in this beautiful continent called America. OK, this is actually geography - sorry about that. Now, to the history.
Our people are the descendants of the native Americans, the Spanish “conquistadores”, and the Negroes who came here as slaves. Add to that the influx of immigrants from Italy, Portugal, Spain (again), Lebanon, Syria (we’ve had them for longer than any of you, ha!), Germany and a bunch of countries all over the world. Seriously, this country was the place to go to in the mid 20th century. Oh, I forgot to mention that we also received a lot of Jewish people, but they mainly stayed in the capital, so I’ve never met a Jew in my life.
Now, these immigrants were awesome. I know this because I’m the son of one of those guys. The people who came here only had one thing in mind: get rich. Well, except my dad; he was OK just having a salary that let him buy a house and raise his three kids. But most immigrants actually saw this land as the land of opportunity (sorry, USA, you weren’t the only one) and really worked hard to raise big companies from nowhere.
Industry boomed. Oil was all over the place. Cities like Maracaibo, Punto Fijo and Maturín were the centers of the oil production and refining. And who got the most benefit? The multinational companies operating here (Shell, Creole) and the immigrants who put up their own companies that would be contracted by the big two.
Now, at this point this may start to sound like some anti-immigration narrative, but trust me, it’s not. I’m only giving honor where honor is due. We have plenty of stories here of Italian immigrants who would eat nothing but bread and Pepsicola, buying a wheelbarrow here, a welding machine there, and little by little start forming their own successful firms. I have nothing but respect and admiration for these people.
However, for native Venezuelans (that is, the mix that resulted from natives, Spaniards and blacks) things were different. People here liked easy stuff. We still do. People will prefer to get a job in some place were they get their “quince y último” (a reference to the days in which they get paid) than starting their own business. I’m not saying that all companies here are owned by immigrants though; there are big and small companies property of Venezuelans, but they are the exception, rather than the norm, I’m afraid.
When you have a country with the biggest oil reserves in the world [1] andplenty of natural resources it’s the most normal thing to sit in your couch and say “why work? We have everything figured out!”. Well, yeah, about that…
I’ll tell you a bit about my hometown. It’s called Ojeda City (Ciudad Ojeda; it feels so weird calling it a “city”) and it has been for a long time a hub for oil industry. Lots and lots of businesses here dealing with oil, chemicals, plastics, asphalt and stuff like that. It’s pretty safe to say that we have been a big source of income for the Country.
Now, what was the big dream people had here? Everybody, and I mean, every-freaking-body wanted to work in the oil industry. When I was a kid, I remember my grandparents talking about PDVSA like it was the greatest thing ever. I was lucky to have to uncles working there (never got anything from them, though) and my cousin’s expectations were to work there when he’d grow up. This was the case in almost every household here: almost everyone would have at least one relative working in the mighty, glorious, PDVSA where you earned a hefty paycheck, where you would get a promotion if you worked your butt off (like in the movies!!!) and where you had something amazing called “comisariato”.
The comisariato was the place where PDVSA workers went to get their food and consumables for free. You could get anything there: Corn Flakes, sausages, glass cups, disposable razors, toilet paper; pretty much anything you needed to live a healthy life. The only “bad” thing was that… Well, it was only for the PDVSA workers. You might start seeing where I’m going with this.
Besides the hard-working middle class, we have always had a pretty big lower class. Those who can’t get a good job or happen to have vices like drinking, drugs and the like are usually stuck in the barrios. There they try to stay alive: some working, some stealing, some begging. This part of the Venezuelan society was pretty big in the nineties, and it’s even bigger today.
The way the society was built, it meant that public schools and hospitals were for the poor. The rich people could always afford private clinics and schools. They could afford sending their kids overseas to study in other universities. Poor people, on the other hand, could only stay here and study in a public school, then a public high school, then (if they hadn’t become slackers/thiefs/gangsters/alcoholics/addicts) a public college.
A big thing we had here in Venezuela was public colleges. This was supposed to be the big leveling tool. No matter how poor you were, you could go to a public college and become a doctor, nurse, lawyer, engineer, teacher, physicist, chemist, or whatever you wanted. I studied in one such college (LUZ) without being too poor myself. I met people from many different places, coming from far away cities just to get education here. In fact, I saw people who had plenty of money there, studying in the public college, where we had free bus rides and free lunch. What I didn’t see, though, was poor people.
In fact, I also studied at a private college as well (Uniojeda). My parents paid for my education, like they had always done, but I soon noticed that almost everyone else there was poor. Funny, huh? The explanation is that the state-level government provided scholarships for poor people, as long as they got “good grades” (which was a load of BS, since “good grades” to them meant “not failing miserably”).
It was always shocking to me seeing a lot of poor people in the private college and a bunch of rich kids in the public one. But after giving it a thought, it all made sense. Public colleges only selected the best students from each school. For any given city, there are dozens of small private high schools, but only a handful of public ones (here in my city we have only one), so you’d get more students from the private sector. Furthermore, the best students in the public high schools usually came from private middle schools, where education is better, which meant that the selected students from the public high schools were usually wealthy, or at least middle class. So it was the people with the money who had the upper hand when trying to get a seat in a public, government paid college. Ironic, isn’t it?
I always stood out because of my good grades, in both schools. The most abysmal difference, though, was in Uniojeda, the private school. It wasn’t even a contest. The teachers were extremely condescending, making everything easy for those kids, and yet you’d see people failing their tests. When I went to study with them I was dumbfounded by how little they knew. “How could they possibly choose an engineering career if they can’t even solve an equation?!?”, I’d ask myself frustratingly. But then it occurred to me: this guys are taking free education not for the education part, but for the free part.
Manuel Rosales, former governor of the state of Zulia, saying hi to the young people who will get the opportunity of their lives studying in private colleges. Photo from google.
You see, in order to get accepted in a public university you needed good grades. No matter where you came from, you had to have good grades, or forget it. However, in order to get a scholarship to study in a private school, you only needed to graduate high school, no matter your grades. Also, if you had friends in the party (UNT, Un Nuevo Tiempo; the party of Manuel Rosales and wife) you could get a full scholarship even if you were as dumb as a stick (no offense to sticks). By the way, I feel like I must mention that UNT is an opposition party, not endorsed by the socialist revolutionary government at all.
When Chávez won, terrible stuff happened. One such thing was that, in 2002, the oil workers decided to go on strike. Oh man, you don’t imagine the bloodbath. Thousands of people lost their precious jobs in PDVSA. Dozens of people killed themselves because they couldn’t tolerate the lost (I wish I was making this up). Hundreds more left the country. I’m talking about the people who had years upon years of experience behind the wheel of that monster called PDVSA. Unfortunately, some people saw PDVSA as a real monster - as the real culprit of the inequality in Venezuela.
Some protesters holding signs that say “Out with the PDVSA conspirators” and “Out with the putschist payroll of PDVSA” (hey, it’s not my fault that you guys don’t have an easier word for “golpista”). Photo from google.
Remember how I talked before about the comisariato? Remember how I told you that, thanks to being born in a country with lots of natural resources, we liked to do things the easy way? Remember how I talked about kids going to free college only because it’s free?
Well, if you put two and two together, you get what happened next: the winning blow of Chávez. Now, “PDVSA es de todos!”, which means, PDVSA belongs to everyone, which, sadly, means that it belongs to the government.
After the massive layoffs, people started to get hired into PDVSA without asking. The people from the barrios started getting jobs they would have never dreamed of having. And this, like a dream, turned out to be too good to be true.
The first thing they did was to eliminate the comisariato because it was unfair that only the PDVSA workers could have access to it. They later tried to replace it with something called PDVAL, which failed.
This is PDVAL today. Notice the lack of food. Actually, if you try going there today it’s likely that you’ll find it closed. Photo from google.
So, what else happened to PDVSA? Basically, it’s like what happened to my sister-in-law’s brother-in-law. Let’s call him John. He liked to gamble and drink, so he started selling everything, just so he could have money to gamble and drink. He sold the fridge, the TV, the mattress, and even the door to his house. When he ran out of things to sell, he went to the company where he worked (which, incidentally, is PDVSA! What are the odds?) and started stealing things from there, until one day he got caught and now he is in jail, where he will most likely be sodomized into hell and back. Poor John.
Well, the story of PDVSA is about the same. Production began falling since 2002 until this day. The people who were put at the head of the company failed to do their jobs correctly and preferred to enjoy the benefits and steal from the company. Now PDVSA is bankrupt and is debt with the USA, the Chinese and the Russians. Which is basically like being in jail, you know, because if PDVSA fails to pay, it’s gonna get it from the behind.
So, in the end, it was our fault. Sure, I never voted for Chavez, nor for Maduro, but I’m one of those people who likes to do things the easy way, who likes free stuff whenever possible.
Having this crisis is just the consequence of a string of events together with the perfect socioeconomic nutritional soup that made the corrupt bacteria proliferate in the country. And after the country is completely decomposed, there’s nowhere else to go but out.
If you read it all the way here, thank you! I spent half of my day writing this answer. If you liked it please upvote. And if you want to support this young Venezuelan struggling to make a living in one of the poorest countries in the world, please follow me! (I’d also be happy if somebody sent me $10 *wink* *wink* but following is free)
Footnotes
[1] List of countries by proven oil reserves - Wikipedia |
