Who lived there when it became one, and remained one for a while? Their ancestors. The population of Venezuela hasn’t changed very much in centuries.

No latin american country seems able to maintain a stable and competent government — post Allende Chile may be the record holder, and it hasn’t been long. Spain can do it, but their colonies can’t, as far as I’m aware.

But they do seem able to maintain civilization. Unless you redefine it.

“And what will succeed it will be even worse.” — always the mark of a realistic analysis.

First, Mr. Hidalgo’s description, while generally correct, does include some unnecessary exaggerations. No, the Venezuelan currency is not worth less than toilet paper. Crime levels are unbelievable, but have been so since well before Chávez became president. The “brutal repression” is true but has to be contextualized, for all sides have militias they do not fully control and chavistas have also been murdered both in the current protests and the many such that have happened in the last ten years. It’s very, very far from “the government is shooting unarmed demonstrators!”.

Second, yes, Venezuelans are generally a mixed-race people, i.e., most people you see on the street will be mestizos, some also with a noticeable black admixture. But there is a very large European minority, because received large numbers of European immigrants, mainly Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, with some Germans and Eastern Europeans, from the 1950s to late 1960s. By “large” I mean figures in the mid or upper hundreds of thousands, at a time when the country as a whole had less than five million people. Because of this, Venezuela has a very large pure white minority, more than enough to maintain “civilization” or a veneer of it if it weren’t for other conditions.

Third, chavismo was made possible by the extraordinary rapacity of the Venezuelans’ previous democracy and capitalism. Here’s a country so corrupt that its elite managed to squander enough money, after the oil crisis of 1973 (which was a boon to Venezuela as an oil exporter), that it still was caught up in the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. Ain’t that an achievement? In any case, I don’t think any neoreactionary here will need to be convinced that Venezuela has been in trouble since about ever.

Fourth, chavismo is an interesting experiment in establishing a traditional socialist revolutionary state through democratic means. It’s a lie to say that Venezuela is a dictatorship unless you include very many qualifications. There are no political prisoners. There isn’t any officially enforced orthodoxy, and most of the press is controlled by opposition interests. The opposition parties are run normally, with official headquarters, permits to make gatherings – such as the ones that began the current series of demonstrations, etc. They contest elections and hold public office, including the largest and most important state of the federation (Miranda).

How, then, do we get the “dictatorship” feeling? Here’s where things get very interesting from a NR point of view. It’s the democracy! The chavista majority – and a majority it still is, even if dwindling – has won national power fair and square. So they just approve and apply the laws they want. I said there are no political prisoners; well, not exactly, but if the country’s legislation is a pile of paper ten miles long, is it surprising that opposition politicians are very easily found to have broken some law, any law, at some point in their lives? If they are arrested, or fined, or harassed, well, it’s just the police and the courts doing their damn job! There is complete freedom of the press, I said, and what I mentioned about the newspapers being opposition organs is true; BUT their readership is very small. After a long process which has taken almost a decade, television and radio is now much more tightly controlled by chavista interests, all very democratically – or isn’t a government entitled to regulate who can use the country’s television and radio spectrum? And if opposition media are found to have broken some law and have to be closed, well, that’s just the system working as it should…

You get the point. If the government of just about any contemporary country really wanted to enforce the laws that exist, the result would be not only a dictatorship, but an almost complete paralysis. So laws must be enforced at the discretion of the authorities – in most cases, the permanent civil service. Some are persecuted for political reasons, but mostly this situation results in corruption and enrichement of officials. But if the Cathedral’s permanent civil service were to fall from effective power, as Venezuela’s did in the first four to five years of Chávez’s rule, then rule enforcement could easily become targeted only against whoever lost the (fully democratic) elections. It’s the endpoint of anarcho-tyranny, right there before us. Venezuela got there really fast because the opposition’s immensely stupid decision not to contest the 2004 elections, giving Chávez 100% of Congress and with it 100% of law-making powers. You can guess how he used it. The opposition finally took notice of its blunder and returned to the elections in 2006; in 2007, it managed to win a national referendum, thereby dooming a new constitutional reform which would quicken the pace of “socialist transformation”.

Chile’s Allende was the first attempt at socialist revolution through democratic means, and we know how it ended. Chavistas are well aware of that precedent, so I think it most unlikely that there will by any Venezuelan Pinochet. The Bolivarian Revolution will fall, but in some other way. And what will succeed it will be even worse.

I’ve been lurking this blog since it became clear that my own politics isn’t really “neoreactionary” as understood by the reactoblogosphere; but bravo for “Progs are still setting the agenda”.

By the way, I am not saying that race doesn’t have anything to do with why Venezuela is a shithole, but it would be much less of a shithole if not for socialism.

Race has everything to do with why they can’t even do socialism properly and crackdown on protesters.

And democracy + race has everything to do with why they turned out socialist. The capitalist virtues of thrift and long term planning are a hard sell to certain populations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKu5sapBD0w

Even if it were true, 40% of Amerindian + African seems to suffice to break civilization. Also note the Amerindians of Venezuela weren’t particularly civilized, unlike their Maya or Inca cousins, which whatever their faults and propensity towards eating children hearts on top of stone pyramids, they had an organized society.

And anyway, there was nothing in Russia, East Germany or North Korea looking even remotely close to the present return to the jungle murder spree in Venezuela today. So it’s not Marxism.