Venezuela, the Failed State on Our Doorstep
By MARSHALL BILLINGSLEA | National Review | May 9, 2021
How Maduro’s regime is hanging on, two years after an uprising against it — and what Biden should do about it.
Two years ago, on April 30, 2019, the Venezuelan people took to the streets to reclaim their democracy from the illegitimate rule of Nicolás Maduro. Yet for now, Maduro still clings to power. In so doing, he has driven what was once the wealthiest country in Latin America — with the world’s largest proven oil reserves, its second-largest gold deposits, and one of the highest literacy rates in the region — into abject, grinding poverty.
Venezuela has an institutionalized kleptocracy the likes of which the world has never seen before, and it is now a failed state. As such, it poses a direct threat to the United States, whether from trafficking in drugs, colluding with multiple terrorist groups such as Lebanese Hezbollah, or hosting Russian nuclear bombers. Moreover, as Venezuela’s constitutionally appointed interim president, Juan Guaidó, told me during a recent event at the Hudson Institute, Iran has now set up operations in Venezuela “to establish a base in the Americas to import foreign conflicts into American territory.”
The security implications for the United States couldn’t be clearer. But the Biden administration has yet to articulate a clear policy on Venezuela and has taken no real steps other than to conduct a muddled, hyperpartisan background briefing in March suggesting that U.S. sanctions were ineffective and may be hurting the Venezuelan people.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The sanctions imposed on Maduro and his cronies by the U.S., the E.U., and the Lima Group (ten Latin American nations plus Canada) have dented their kleptocratic enterprise. Maduro is to blame for the suffering in Venezuela, not our financial countermeasures.
The size and variety of corruption schemes employed by the regime is dizzying. Over the past two decades, the late Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro and their cronies plundered at least $300 billion from state assets (according to several of Chávez’s own former ministers). At the same time, they racked up a massive amount of debt; experts place the amount owed to creditors at more than $150 billion. The situation is so bad that the International Monetary Fund recently made clear that the Maduro regime is cut off from receiving its $5 billion in special drawing rights, because the IMF knows that Maduro will simply steal the money.
