The Swift and Profound Decline of Venezuela: Commodity Shortages, Violent Crimes, Kidnappings, and Black Market Smuggling

Has Venezuelan President Maduro Gone Insane?

September 26, 2015

The Daily Beast - His regional warmongering may be a ploy by a desperate politician, but the successor to Hugo Chavez has grown so erratic some are calling him “the South American Hitler.”

Is Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, once a mild-mannered bus driver, steering the world’s 13th-largest oil producer straight off a cliff?

Within the last few weeks he’s come to the brink of war with not one but two neighboring countries. A dispute last month with Colombia resulted in tens of thousands of refugees scrambling from a border region and caused one local politician to label him “The South American Hitler.” Last week saw Maduro accused of plotting to invade Guyana, his neighbor to the east. 

While experts warn that such risky behavior could destabilize the entire region, Maduro himself accuses Bogotá and Washington of being in league to overthrow him—and also boasts of having spies in the White House.



So just what is Maduro hoping to gain from all of this?

Hand-picked by the late socialist strongman Hugo Chavez as his replacement in 2013, Maduro has overseen the swift and profound decline of Venezuela—from an oil-rich, leftist powerhouse under Chavez to an Orwellian dystopia, complete with the highest inflation rate in the world. When oil prices were high and revenues extravagant, that cushioned the people to some extent from the incompetence of the government. But that buffer is long gone.

Violent crime and kidnappings are so rampant that the State Department just issued a travel alert warning away U.S. citizens. And commodity shortages have become so severe that it’s sometimes impossible to buy a roll of toilet paper in Caracas. 

Like many autocrats, Maduro appears to suffer from an acute case of political paranoia. He has cracked down on opposition leadership—handing out a 14-year-prison sentence to popular opposition leader Leopold Lopez this month over trumped up charges. And he’s repeatedly authorized the use of deadly force against demonstrators he sees as a threat to his regime.
Not is Maduro’s persecution complex limited to domestic affairs. He recently claimed neighboring Colombia and Guyana are waging “economic war” against Venezuela—charges which conveniently justify violating the sovereignty of both nations. 

“If he believes a lot of what he’s saying about the conspiracy theories against him, then he’s not the sanest man in the world,” says Adam Isaacson, a senior associate with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), in an interview with The Daily Beast.

“Internationally there’s no trust of Maduro at all,” Isaacson says. “He says things that aren’t true, and he’s quite erratic.”

Among his strange declarations to the press: claiming to receive advice from the deceased Chavez via a talking bird.

Such is the state of things at the moment, that “one of the main interests of the international community now is to prevent a catastrophic implosion,” says Isaacson, because that could have disastrous implications for the entire region. 

“Something very ugly could happen in the next few months,” he warns.

Something very ugly has already happened along Venezuela’s 1,500-mile border with Colombia, where Maduro’s forces have been involved in attacks on migrants for the last five weeks. 


Because Maduro’s far-left government subsidizes gas and fixes the cost of food and other basic consumer goods, the rugged frontier region is home to a thriving black market smuggling commodities into Colombia, where they can be sold for great profit.  

Despite the relatively small flow of goods across the border, Maduro has chosen to blame these smuggling operations for Venezuela’s chronic shortages. Furthermore, he casts the black market traffickers as the work of right-wing U.S.- and Colombian-backed operatives bent on regime change. In an effort to clamp down on illicit activity, Maduro closed the frontier last month and began targeting any and all Colombian citizens caught on the wrong side of borderline.