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Radio War Nerd EP #166 — Maduro & Venezuela Regime-Change (Patreon)

Published:
2019-01-28 23:13:06
Imported:
2026-06
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Guest: Ignacio Portes, journalist in Buenos Aires

Recorded: January 25, 2019

Last week, the Trump Administration launched a big public regime-change campaign to remove Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power, and replace him with the opposition leader of Venezuela's National Assembly, Juan Guaidó. The War Nerd recovers from a molar infection in Buenos Aires just in time to discuss the Venezuela crisis with Argentine journalist Ignacio Portes (RWN EP #22 - "War of the Triple Alliance"), who has written some great analyses in the past of where Chavez's political left-populism went right, and how the economics of chavismo — particularly the currency controls — created much of the mess they're in today. We also discuss two decades of US hostility towards Venezuela, from both the White House and the major press — and what to expect if the regime-change operation succeeds in overthrowing Maduro. 

Read Ignacio Portes' articles at nswfcorp and NakedCapitalism. Follow Ignacio Portes on Twitter.

Total time: 2:32:08

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

Shfifty_five

Listening to this during our current Venezuela psyop. Portes works for a paper in Buenos Aires and seems to back the NED/CIA line for this election. His Twitter is pretty damning. Why would he go against the empires line? His career and economic class are dependent on it.

Ryan DiMaria

Hey guys, great episode, I rushed home from work when I got email notification of this post. It's been an arduous week or so relying solely on Mark's Twitter feed for periodic doses of sanity regarding the situation in Venezuela.

Ryan DiMaria

Ignacio is a great guest, lots of insight and a great mind for laying out the story from its roots. His focus on the exchange rate arbitrage scenario playing out (and Mark's apt analogy to the Yeltsin years) was particularly interesting. As a side note, I read an article talking about a similar discrepancy between official and black market currency exchange from last year occurring in, of all places, Iran: <a href="https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-24/irans-rial-hits-all-time-low-and-inflation-soars-147" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-24/irans-rial-hits-all-time-low-and-inflation-soars-147</a> (before you say it: yes, I know it's ZeroHedge, but even a broken doom porn clock is right twice a day, especially when they reference Mark's writings on Naked Capitalism, as they did this past week)

Ryan DiMaria

Anyways, keep fighting the good fight and tell John to brush his teeth and take some vitamin C or something; I'm worried that he'll come down with Lyme disease or necrotising fasciitis or something really serious if he keeps up his regime of contracting two painful illnesses a month.

Michael Jochum

Great show, thanks for the enlightenment, as always

Zhukov

I've noticed up here in Canada the already bad news coverage of Venezuela has gotten a lot worse in the last week or so. CTV News keeps referring to the "Maduro Regime" and refugees fleeing to Colombia for "freedom" as if they're talking about Saddam's Iraq. CBC is playing up the fact that Russia is backing him, saying they should be spending the money they've invested in Venezuela at improving Russia instead. Recently they showed a clip of a Russian broadcaster/journalist talking at a normal volume and described him as "screaming about American interference."

Cade Jameson

Ignacio's account of the double exchange rate and how it enables corruption explains a lot. It's nice to hear an account of Venezuela's internal problems from someone who isn't a foaming-at-the-mouth neocon or fascist. The one thing I didn't find very convincing was Ignacio's contention that the opposition "sensed" some sort of current towards corruption in Chavez's movement early on. What part of the opposition was he talking about? The part that isn't blatantly authoritarian itself? Some insignificant proportion of principled intelligent middle class types who didn't react to Chavez's election immediately with the worst sort of entitled bitter resentment? From the look of things, the opposition's MO has been to provoke crises at every possible opportunity, because they are despised and can't mount a credible challenge with the electorate. Even after winning the parliamentary elections in 2016, they lost the regional elections the following year, and then decided to boycott the presidential race so that they could claim the results were illegitimate. I'm an outsider but it looks like a large section of the population has reason to hate the opposition more than Maduro's government, and from the way they behaved when Chavez was president, the footage I've seen of the violent street protests they've endorsed (that video of the black guy getting burned alive and the rats yelling at him "Chavista, Chavista!" why he was in flames, makes an impression), and their eagerness for foreign intervention, I'm not surprised.

James Christensen

If I won control of a legislature and then the president waved his hand and stripped the legislature of all its powers, I think I would go ahead and declare my country's political system illegitimate too.

Curli Linds G

The impression I got was that Venezuela's only options are a racist rightwing oligarchy or an incompetent leftwing oligarchy

Cade Jameson

That's the point when a lot of people who had been supportive of Chavez became merely defensive against foreign intervention--myself included. The opposition, however, have been crying foul since Chavez was first elected; and when you have been questioning the results of internationally monitored elections, plotting coups, and staging crises for foreign interventions for years, it's a lot harder to pretend that you care about niceties like democracy and rule of law. It's the same plotters leading things as far as I can tell. Now they could support some sort of internationally brokered power-sharing agreement that would open the door to a resumption of the democratic process (as suggested by AMLO, Jeffrey Sachs, etc.), but they'd rather seize power in a foreign backed coup so that they can shape the political process in such a way that they never have to lose power again.

James Christensen

I absolutely agree that having the US play kingmaker is a horrible idea. I'm just cautious about defining the opposition as an artificially inflated fringe. As best I can make out the government and the opposition both have at least a couple million committed partisans. I don't know which faction has more genuine mass support- I'm not sure that anybody does.

Mohamed Dalmar

I think this was very unfair to maduro. Was I dreaming or did he say Guaidó had some legitimacy? He has none, the opposition has received millions from a country openly trying to sabotage Venezuela and they’re lucky maduro even let them participate in 2015 considering Obama’s (the oppositions de facto leader) position on Venezuela. In 2018 maduro asked the UN to come observe the election but the opposition said no and trump threatened to sanction people who participated in the election, they declared it bogus before it even started. Honestly maduro has been too nice, you know of any other “dictators” that would’ve let this Guaidó character live this long? Economically, he tried to stop this black market currency exchange and he couldn’t. The fact that this guest didn’t mention the website “dolartoday” is crazy too, here’s a quote from npr about it in 2014 “And this is where it gets really weird: Venezuela's economy — what people all over the country are buying and selling pegged to the dollar — is determined through a murky website run out of Miami.” Now npr puts their bs spin on it but economist Mark Weisbrot explains it better, it’s a weapon of economic warfare, this website was run by a former colonel who took part in the Chávez coup and who openly supports the opposition while living in the US. No mention of big business in Venezuela participating with the US in sabotage either. Then there’s the sanctions that came afterwards which make recovery impossible, I don’t see a need to maduro bash, the problem here is America not Chavismo. I agree with you guys on Syria and I get the necessity of condemning assad when we talk about that war because he was so bad pre regime change attempt, but maduro is no assad and he’s actually been way too nice and not repressive enough considering the circumstances (still allows pro opposition press for example). I think he should’ve went full Castro as soon as Obama declared a “national emergency” over the “unusual and extraordinary threat to national security” posed by Venezuela in early 2015. If maduro was even half as crazy as people say he is he would’ve started killing the opposition en masse years ago for being foreign agents. Your guest gave a very New York Times-y analysis of this. Here’s the 2 links about the exchange rate and dolartoday <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/03/24/293874845/short-on-dollars-venezuela-tries-to-halt-black-market-trading" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/03/24/293874845/short-on-dollars-venezuela-tries-to-halt-black-market-trading</a> <a href="http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/venezuela-dismantling-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/venezuela-dismantling-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction</a> And here’s Obama’s “national emergency” executive order <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/03/09/letter-declaration-national-emergency-respect-venezuela" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/03/09/letter-declaration-national-emergency-respect-venezuela</a> And here’s a vice article about the opposition being funded by the us from 2014 <a href="https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/av44kg/does-the-uss-funding-of-the-venezuelan-opposition-matter" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/av44kg/does-the-uss-funding-of-the-venezuelan-opposition-matter</a>

Mohamed Dalmar

I’d like to know who Ignacio thinks is a good world leader and who he thinks would’ve handled that level of American interference that calmly. He Maduro bashes but I bet come November 2020 he’ll be singing that “lesser evil” tune and telling people to take it easy on some Hillary style democrat who’s way more of a goon than maduro LOL

Jimothy Realname

Yeah, the mask has really fallen off. I hope one day we can throw the shackles of the Yanqui puppet government.

Charles

I wonder how much China's oil interests in the region factor into all of this. As for Trump, I suspect a lack of interest on his part. It may be that intervention in Venezuela is ramping up, in part, because he doesn't care enough to fight those with plans for the place. Alternatively, this whole thing could have been sold to him as a way of limiting Chinese influence though how much influence they actually have I do not know.

Gengeros

Sad to see your interview you and your guest have resorted to the same old first world smear of Maduro being a "dictator". You brought up the National Assembly, but ignore the fact that the Assembly hasn't passed a single bill since taking over in 2015. Nor do you take into account the Constituent Assembly is 90% non-white, Latino, Afro-Venezuelan cabinet representing the people of Venezuela, unlike the National Assembly. The truth of the matter Maduro is helping his nation and every single year since 1998, the Chavismo movement has seen expansion of social programs for the people of Venezuela. The problem with Venezuela is Maduro hasn't abolished bourgeois democracy. Maduro should have gotten rid of the capitalist class inside Venezuela by engaging in Marxist revolution and establishing a socialist state.

Jeffrey Martin

I have to second much of what Cade and Mohamed say. So many of the left of centre criticisms of Chavismo and Maduro have just felt off, like a soloist in a symphony coming up a half tone flat. Yes, there has been corruption, but no more, and quite probably a good bit less, than under the preceding neoliberal quasi-juntas. Yes, there has been mismanagement, but how does one quantify the magnitude of this relative to legally adroit looting under every neoliberal regime, both outside of Venezuela, and in Venezuela prior to Chavismo, ie., how does one so easily determine that the sort of mismanagement and corruption one sees now is worse than the formally legal looting that is the essence of neoliberalism? Why are the failings of Chavismo foregrounded, and the deliberate exchange-rate manipulations of the Right, the artificial shortages created by the very bourgeois interests integral to the opposition, passed over in silence?

Jeffrey Martin

The situation in Venezuela would be like an alternate timeline in the US, in which Sanders managed to defeat the DNC rigging in 2016, went on to defeat Trump, only to be sandbagged by a do-nothing rightwing Congress- and virtually all of it, GOP and Dem, is rightwing. Imagine, then, that the Congress began conspiring with its donorist elite to shut down whole sectors of the economy, creating shortages, throwing people out of work and into destitution, as well as openly inviting the intervention of, say, the neoliberal EU to overthrow Sanders, rig the economic and legal architecture of the country to preclude, for generations, the sort of reforms his coalition seeks, impose sanctions on the Sanders admin and its officials, freeze the accounts of the executive branch to prevent governance, & etc. Suppose, further, that the Sanders admin then attempted to declare a national emergency, in part buttressed by the provable claims that many GOP Congresspeople had been elected by means of fraud and voter suppression, casting doubt upon the legal validity of any acts of that Congress, to which the Right reacted by mounting violent street riots in which lefties and minorities were routinely lynched - and that the EU then responded by declaring some neoliberal Dem grifter like Beto president, with the admonishment that the"voices of the people must be heard." Would it, in those circumstances, make sense to foreground the policy missteps of the Sanders admin, the possible corruption of some of its officials? I submit that it would not, and that the impulse to do precisely that would be of a whole with the Trotskyism of some Leftists, which holds that any foreign regime failing to perfectly reflect some abstract ideal of horizontal democracy and anti-nationalism/internationalism is illegitimate and deserves to be overthrown, in practice always by the US. Oh, for a Left with balls, that would put an end to these self-flagellating struggle sessions, would stop engaging in self-harm, always to the advantage of the Right. The Right keeps winning *because it doesn't do this*.

Ellen Harold

It would also have been interesting to hear a commentary from someone who had recently been in Venezuela, rather than Argentina.

Cade Jameson

I'm thinking mostly about the organized opposition -- the people running the main coalition of opposition parties who represent the pre-Chavez political system and who have been conspiring with Washington; but there are also vile elements in the street -- nasty middle class backlash stuff (of course I wouldn't apply that to everyone protesting the government in the current crisis). I learned a lot from listening to this. A lot of Chavistas have become critical of Maduro, but it was nice to have the currency issue explained clearly. I just don't buy this idea that there was an authoritarian streak early on with Chavez--at least not anything that compares with the opposition's rhetoric, and the contempt they displayed for democratic process. Right after Chavez first entered office he put in place a constitution that enabled citizens to remove the president in a recall referendum, which the opposition attempted to use against him in 2004 (they had the ability to use it in 2002 but went forward with a coup instead). What kind of dictator puts in place such a democratic constitution?

Craig Moore

I panicked slightly when Mark said right at the end that you were recording your last show.

LeScourge

Thank you - it was a very good recap of Venezuela's recent history. Good job as usual.

LeScourge

Not to be the peanut gallery - since it's not that easy to put a show together that pleases everyone, but yes, that's a good point. I would have also like to hear more about the middle class's perspective from the 90s to today. But don't let that take away from a good show.

Hugo Turner

looking at the comments i can tell I’m probably going to hate this Interview as I strongly opose these endless series of coup attempts and economic warfare against Venezuela for daring to try to improve the lives of it’s people. You should have on Dan Kovalik or someone from Venezuela Analysis. However on the subject of movies on cold war nazis I recommend “The Odessa File.”

Charles

No one advanced a "pro-coup" line. I'd listen to the show.

Sean Atkinson

I think you guys should really listen to your fellow podcasters Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal for some insight. Ignacio Portes's condescencion and snickering towards the Venezuelan majorities was really hard to take.

Sean Atkinson

I agree he should listen, but the tone of the interviewee was definitely pro-coup and to me quite patrician. Actually, I am pretty sure at the beginning of the interview Portes did say that Guaido's position had "some legitimacy".

JoR

Interviewing a journalist or anyone isn't a full endorsement of their views. I really didn't feel like Ignacio was “pro intervention” either. Calling out the mistakes of Maduro and the military does not equal him fully being in favor of a US intervention. Same with the war nerds coverage on Syria. Both John, Mark and guests like Joshua Landis are open and honest about assad and his government and their mistakes and killings, of which there are many. However they're all adament about how a US intervention of any sort would be a disaster. I think it's clear that John and Mark have the same view on Venezuela, and if Ignacio doesn't, that's fine, because John and Mark made it clear that that's how they view it. If anything, it's good to have interviews where the interviewee disagrees somewhat with the hosts (but again I did not get this impression while listening).

JD

Left leaning people in the US know that our security state and political establishment is utterly impervious to whatever we may say to them when it comes to foreign policy. So instead of yelling at the powers that be, we prefer to yell at each other. At least that way we know we can provoke a reaction.

Ellen Harold

Maybe the US left doesn’t punch back at hippie punching because there is no left in this country.

Animals in Motion

A good interview in some parts, but that about the last election isn't right. The opposition boycotted the election, so it's not like PSUV and Maduro forbad the opposition to take place in elections.

Sam Morris

This interview was a dud for me. Ignacio repeated a lot of the same talking points used by the right to legitimize intervention in Venezuela, and neither John nor Mark challenged him at all. It's impossible to decouple what's happening in Venezuela from the campaign of destabilization, economic warfare and sanctions that the US has engaged in practically since the Chavista movement took power. It really irritates me when purported leftists engage in left-bashing without acknowledging that not once in history has a leftist state been allowed to exist unimpeded and un-interfered with by global capital. Venezuela would probably look very different today if the US hadn't been trying to destroy its revolution for the past 20 years, and any analysis that doesn't mention this is bad in my opinion.

Tariq

It seems like a lot of the crisis is blamed on “mismanagement,” which is certainly part of the cause, without considering the effects of sanctions, constantly playing up every crisis by the right wing opposition, etc. And saying that Guaido has legitimacy is a bit odd considering that his party didn’t even participate in the last election afaik. Further, it can’t be downplayed just how much the right and racist middle class is motivated revenge and classist resentment

James

I like Norton and Blumenthal but I think they are a bit too quick to forgive the Maduro government for its mistakes. My views (shaped by my visit to Venezuela when Chavez was still alive) leaned towards the view Ben and Max have been pushing, but Ignacio has convinced me they are being a bit too forgiving of the Maduro government. Ignacio speaks the language and lives in South America, and it sounds to me like he has a formal education in economics. Apropos of nothing, I trust Mark's views on Russia more than anyone else I have ever come across, including my friends who live in Russia.

Thomas

First: I oppose US involvement in Venezuela. Period. But: A) The first economic sanctions against Venezuela were only imposed in 2017 after Maduro's use of the courts to negate the opposition's success in the parliamentary elections. B) The Venezuelan government extensive brought the economic collapse on its self by the foreign borrowing, money printing, and currency controls. There are few fundamental "truths" in macroeconomics, but borrowing too much while printing money and setting currency exchange rates resulting in hyperinflation is one of them.

Thomas

Sanctions didn't really start until 2017 after Maduro used the Court to nullify the parliamentary elections. Inflation was already 800% at the start of 2017.

Liam

The collapse of the Venezuelan state has three parts. First, policies which increased the sensitivity to financial crises, the effect of such subsidies is to create the rapid depletion of the resource in the event of a shortage, and the cause of inflation is the shortage of essential resources. Second is a credit crunch, which deprived the state and private sectors of their working capital. Third is the inappropriate response of the state to the crisis itself. Currency and capital controls help with the second problem but make the first one worse (see Argentina for an example of the benefits and limitations).