VenEconomy: The Totalitarian Temptation From the Editors of VenEconomy Latin American Herald Tribune November 7, 2014
Last week, the NGO Cedice Libertad, in alliance with the Liberal Network for Latin America (Relial) and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, commemorated the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with the “International Forum: The Totalitarian Temptation,” which had Mauricio Rojas, a former member of Chile’s Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) that got away from Marxism forever, PhD in Economics, Assistant Professor at the University of Lund (Sweden) and former member of the Parliament of Sweden, as special guest. He was joined by Antonio Sánchez García as a commentator, a writer, essayist, professor of contemporary philosophy at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), and a convinced Chilean-Venezuelan democrat who opposes any advance of a totalitarian regime in Venezuela and Latin America.
The lectures, among other topics, had to do with the presence of “caudillismo” in Latin America with all its pledges and temptations for magical solutions to the problems of the population, and the reason why many countries fall into these temptations as they end up with terrible dictatorships all the time. Dictatorships that, on the one hand, drag many idealists into them, who in most cases become terrible oppressors of their peoples. And on the other, plunge countries into rancor and division, where the sense of community and civic friendship is lost, while resources are squandered instead of being invested in the development of the country, as has been the case of Cuba and now Venezuela.
To Rojas, Venezuela has lost today that sense of coexistence that it possessed back in the 70s; it also has (incredibly) squandered its oil revenues, while its rulers have forgotten about the poorest.
VenEconomy wonders why this is happening. What is the reason for Venezuela to have fallen into this temptation?
What led Venezuelans to allow their country being torn apart by the totalitarian ambitions of a few elites that took power? Why did it become a divided country, one without rule of law, where political adversaries are referred to as susceptible enemies for being morally – and even physically – annihilated? Why did it lose today, as seen before with other countries where totalitarianism ruled, its sense of coexistence? Why the State with the greatest natural wealth in all Latin America ended up in such a state of misery and scarcity? What happened in Venezuela so that its citizens had allowed the squandering of more than $800 billion in oil revenues over the past 16 years, while poverty was hitting the middle class hard at the same time and corruption spread its tentacles like never before?
The short answer of Rojas was: democratic institutions were destroyed, civility was radically undermined and the most elementary bases to sustain a society no longer exist.
Rojas also brought up the subject of the way out of this: rebuild those bases with a civic and patriotic sense; rebuild the rule of law; rescue the public institutions; recover transparency; the democratic sector must “raise a strong social policy to develop human capital, strengthen the productive capacities and distribute the opportunities.”
In addition he said that “it is important to use the oil revenues in a way that doesn’t destroy the country, in a way that encourages an open and competitive economy, top human capital and in a way that allows the people generating wealth, because if not, even with money, this will still be an underdeveloped country. Being rich doesn’t necessarily mean being developed.”
It’s a task that looks daunting, even when the public authorities are under the yoke of the State, and nonsense, impudence and impunity are the rule, but not impossible.
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