Tomorrow, Americans head to the polls in what was supposed to be a standard, run-of-the-mill midterm election. That was until Zohran Mamdani was elected to lead the country’s largest city. The New York City mayor is doing what all socialists do, which is to make pie-in-the-sky promises. At first, that’s what happens. But given enough time to brew, socialism, both the economic system and the government that uses it, unravels, more often than not, into a brutal dictatorship.
No need to take my word for it. Take a few minutes and listen to our interview with Pedro Burelli, who was born in Venezuela and is a former board member of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. He is recognized as a leading voice for liberty and justice across Latin America and Europe.
In Parts 1, 2, and 3, we looked at the promise of socialism versus the inevitable tyranny that follows, as well as what took place in Venezuela. Drawing from firsthand experience, Burelli reveals whether socialism can ever truly work.
Socialism and the Maduro Reign of Terror
Leesa K. Donner: When we left Part 3 of this series, we were discussing the lack of individual liberty in Venezuela.
Now we move on to Hugo Chávez's handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro. Pedro, can you tell us about the living conditions of the average Venezuelan at the time of Maduro's rise to power?
Pedro Burelli: Well, Hugo Chávez was a very lucky man that he died exactly as his experiment was blowing up. Venezuelans were very unlucky that his replacement was somebody even dumber. Therefore, we had a massive crisis, our country being run by an individual who was incredibly incompetent and highly criminal. As people began to protest incredibly bad living conditions, with the rate of poverty and the percentage of people living in poverty just climbing, with almost no supply of food, really huge problems with electricity and all of that, what he had to do was go into a massive repression scheme. Students came out to protest.
He ended up killing a hundred students, gunning them down. It was an incredible battle when we realized that this man and his system, in order to stay in power, were willing to kill, jail, torture, and, sadly enough, exile, forcing into exile one-third of the population of Venezuela. Nine million people have left Venezuela since Nicolás Maduro arrived in [sic] power in 2013. Nine million people, the largest migration in peacetime in the world. They left because the conditions were unlivable. Security was a disaster. There was no food. There were no jobs. There's no electricity. That was a result of Hugo Chávez, who died right before people could see the results of his crazy experiment in socialism or Cuban-style communism, fueled by bountiful oil that, as soon as it disappeared, the model just collapsed on top of everybody.
LKD: What is the inflation rate about this time?
PB: The inflation rate went to 50,000%.
LKD: Wow.
PB: Fifty thousand percent. The value of money didn't make any sense. The currency kept getting devalued, and what they had to do was take zeros away from the currency because it would devalue so quickly that suddenly $1 was a million Bolivars. Then they took out some zeros. Now $1 is a thousand Bolivars; then they took out more zeros, and I think they took out 13 zeros of our currency. That's hard for an American to understand, but it means that the value of our currency was nothing. People would use the currency to do artwork and would sell it because the money was worth nothing, nothing. Even the highest-denomination bill was worth nothing, and people began to use the dollar.
The country informally could only transact in the dollar because the value of our currency was nothing. The fundamental thing is that this country lost 80% of its gross domestic product in the time of Maduro, 80%. No country in the world, even in war, has had a bigger drop in the size of its economy. Now, the brutality …
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LKD: What about Germany before World War II, in the Weimar Republic?
PB: Much worse than Weimar. The fact is, to maintain a system that's completely flawed, you maintain it through repression. Maduro proved he was willing to do anything, anything: steal elections, torture people, and that is the end.
LKD: Just one question. Did the people have guns? Did they have rifles?
PB: What happened was that this was one-sided. It was a state oppressing the people. It was a state using the powers in the hands of the police, in the hands of informal militias, and in the hands of the military against an unarmed population. The population never took [up] arms. They always went to protest peacefully, and they were always confronted violently. The result was that instead of people going out to fight against it, because people are not violent, they just left the country. We got almost the result of a civil war, which is people running away from a country, but without there being a civil war. But the situation that Maduro took the country to was as bad as anything that has been seen in the world.
It was all in the name of state control, in the name of socialism of the 21st century, as they called it. This is the exact model that one is surprised that people are considering. Maduro is not in a jail in Brooklyn because Donald Trump doesn't like him. He's there because the people of Venezuela couldn't stand him, and there was no means to get him out. He tried to replace normal flows of money with getting involved in narcotics, getting involved in illegal mining, and that's what was making up for the fact that the state was not producing anything. Everything that the state used to produce collapsed.
He was one of the worst cases to prove why socialism and communism always will fail, always. There's not a single case where it has survived more than a couple of decades. It always ends up …
LKD: Right. It turns out that Maduro was more ruthless than Chávez, right?
PB: Much more brutal, much dumber, and he was more desperate because the situation that he got was not oil prices going up, which is what Chávez got, but oil prices going down. As people got really angry, instead of negotiating, instead of coming with [sic] an agreement with the private sector or something, he just became brutal. The biggest damage is that when you have one-third of your population leave the country, that is damage that you almost cannot repair. You lose the best, the brightest, the youth, the trained youth, the professionals, doctors, and engineers, and it will take generations to replace them.
Adiós Venezuela
As the situation in Venezuela deteriorates due to the socialist government, first of Chávez and then the ruthless regime of Maduro, people flee their homeland, taking what little they have and making a run for it. In Part 5 of this Liberty Nation News Special Report: Socialism: A Living Hell, we’ll look at the mass exodus of families who abandon everything in the hopes of getting the hell out of Venezuela.
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Take a sneak peek at the video series that accompanies this report.
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