President Maduro of Venezuela has been kidnapped by the Trump administration and taken to New York to be charged for drug smuggling.
Will this cause a major change in the disaster that is Venezuela right now? The short answer is: No.
The long answer is more complex. There seems to be a lot of confusion about the reason for the collapse of Venezuela over the past twenty years, with many blaming it on socialism or communism or on the nationalization of the Venezuelan oil industry. That, however, ignores the real issue in Venezuela: A civil war between the Blanco minority and the Indio majority.
The Blancos are those who can trace their ancestry back to Spain. Historically they ran everything in Venezuela and monopolized both political and economic power in the country, sneering at the Indio majority as uncouth savages who couldn’t be trusted with any responsibility. Most importantly, they monoplized education in Venezuela — you needed an address in order to sign up for school (just as in the United States), and they didn’t assign addresses to Indio neighborhoods. No address, no school. No school, no opportunities in the modern economy other than as manual laborers.
When Hugo Chavez, an Indio, came to power the Blancos essentially went on strike because they refused to work for an Indio who they considered little more than a clever monkey. Chavez responded by firing the striking Blancos, who, due to the Blanco monopoly on education, were most of the talent in their oil industry. He figured this would incentivize the Blancos to come crawling back begging for their jobs back and they’d go back to work. That didn’t happen. Talent in the oil industry is fungible — there is always a demand for talented petroleum engineers and rig operators out there. That talent simply left Venezuela and went to work elsewhere. The end result was a slow economic collapse that had nothing to do with socialism, nationalization of the oil industry (which happened in 1976), or Communism. Oil was the basis of Venezuelan’s economy, and as the oil industry collapsed due to lack of talent and lack of investment, so did the economy. Chavez did not seem to understand this, and did not take action to hire talent from elsewhere to take the place of the talent that left. The end result was economic disaster.
The reaction of Maduro when he came to power after Chavez’s death was to blame the Blancos for the collapse and further persecute the Blanco minority, causing most of the talent in other parts of Venezuela’s economy to flee the country and causing further economic collapse. The end result is a massive refugee crisis where almost 1/3rd of Venezuela’s population has fled the country, causing massive destabilization of South America as they deal with the refugees as well as the election of right-wing governments in Ecuador and Chile and installation of a right wing government in Peru as they try to deal with millions of desperate refugees turning to crime in order to find sustenance.
There is no argument that Maduro was an utter disaster for Venezuela. The country is better off with him gone. But unless the civil war between Blancos and Indios in Venezuela is resolved, no administration is going to be able to rebuild the country into something resembling a prosperous democracy. And if you think Trump has a plan for this, you’re demented. Right now he left the government alone — Maduro’s Vice President has now assumed power. But that isn’t going to fix Venezuela — and neither would installing another Blanco government at U.S. gunpoint. It’s going to take a lot to fix Venezuela, and that isn’t going to happen until the civil war between Blancos and Indios is resolved and they work together to solve those problems.
— Badtux the Geopolitics Penguin
Badtux the Snarky Penguin 