Too many leaders around the world keep a Che Guevara shirt in their closet. Therefore whenever Venezuela’s tragedy is framed in terms of socialism… like well fed Pavlov dogs, many of them react instinctively with a: “then it cannot just be so bad”.
That makes it harder for us who need to get rid of the current odious regime and urgently build a better future.
The truth is that Venezuela lives under the yoke of immense natural resource revenues, which are centralized and managed by some few redistribution profiteers.
Some years those revenues have signified 97% of our entire nation’s exports, something that would negate a free capitalistic market anywhere.
What we need, in order to at last live in a nation, and not in somebody else’s business, is oil revenue sharing.
“Socialism…then it cannot just be so bad”? During the corrupt, inept and human rights violating regimes of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s poorest 40% got less than 15% of what they would have received had oil revenues been shared out equally to all.
