THE ATLANTIC: Life in Venezuela was deceptively mundane. Then everything collapsed.
THE DISINTEGRATION of a democracy is a deceptively quiet affair. For a while, everything looks the same. Each authoritarian milestone—the first political prisoner, the first closure of an opposition media outlet—is anticipated with fear. Then the milestone goes by, and after a brief period of outrage, life continues as before. You begin to wonder if things will be so bad after all.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the Venezuela of my childhood, during the period when experts and historians warned, on television channels that would later be shut down, that Hugo Chávez was making himself a dictator. They said that his economic mismanagement—the extravagant expenditures, the graft, the attacks on central-bank independence—would cause a severe crisis when oil prices went down.
My family listened to those pundits and believed them, but we didn’t know what to do with that information. My father used to say that living in Venezuela was like driving a car that you know is not being maintained. For now, the car works fine, but one day it will break down. And when it does, the moment to repair the car will have passed.
Substantive change came to Venezuela, but it took time. In 2001, Chávez purged the nationalized oil company of managers and engineers who weren’t politically aligned with him. The company’s embittered ex-employees warned that national oil production would decline, and they were right, but that would take five more years to manifest. Chávez expropriated millions of hectares of farmland, and farmers went on TV to say that a food crisis was approaching. But as long as oil prices were high, supermarket shelves could be filled with imported milk. » | Gisela Salim-Peyer | Tuesday, September 9, 2025
