Expat Literature: Roots of the Venezuelan Crisis

Journalists, Bankers, and a daughter of Caracas

One of the few blessings of dictatorship is that merciless regimes often inspire a redemptive literature. No apartheid: no Alan Paton. No Lenin: No Zhivago.

We have at least the first stirrings out of Venezuela, a country where I lived and reported in the late 1970s, when it was, at least superficially, a thriving and functioning democracy. In that era, ten political parties vied for the Presidency, and a boisterous press blanketed the political scene.

Then, it all came apart. In 1998, after four decades of democratic rule (and a collapse in oil prices) Venezuelans elected Hugo Chavez, a populist army officer previously imprisoned for having launched a failed coup.

Chavez was the country’s ninth democratically elected President; he was the first not from either of the two principal, and moderate-tending, political parties. Under Chavez’s leftwing “Bolivarian Revolution,” democracy was eviscerated and living standards collapsed. Today, Venezuela is a wreck of a country, its finances broken, its democratic norms twisted out of recognition by Chavez and, since his death, by his handpicked successor, Nicolas Maduro. It’s also a humanitarian disaster, according to Human Rights Watch, with millions unable to obtain basic healthcare and adequate nutrition. The sorriest testimony, as per the UN Refugee Agency, is that 5.4 million Venezuelans, nearly a fifth of the population, have fled the country—more than half a million to the United States.

Of course, it didn’t truly happen overnight. Venezuelans voted for Chavez because he represented a rebuke to the system, and the system wasn’t working for them. The corruption eating at Venezuelan democracy was evident, though underappreciated, even in the 1970s, when the country was basking in oil wealth (and was a major supplier to the United States). On one of my first assignments, covering politics for an English-language newspaper, I was dispatched to the beautiful National Congress, which stood astride a courtyard decked with palms. From the pressbox, I was struggling to understand the speech of a Venezuelan senator. Desperate not to miss the story, I pleaded with a local reporter, who was furiously typing. “What is he saying?” He turned to me with sad eyes and, never ceasing his tapping, replied, “Pura mentira” (“pure lies”).

But that sort of candor would not appear in print. Members of the press were regularly paid off by the government (a practice I witnessed) and their newspapers—subsidized by lavish state advertising—observed an unwritten rule of restraint.

Thomas Lander, a nineteenth century journalist and liberal politician, branded his country “a nation of accomplices.” He was referring to the unseen complictness of local elites in maintaining the status quo. To a people betrayed by a revolution gone bad, such as Venezuelans today, Lander’s phrase evokes a search for the guilty—the “accomplices” responsible for Chavez and Maduro. But it’s important to remember that Lander, of course, never saw Chavez. To believe Lander is to believe that the roots of the crisis in Venezuela, now on its 26th Constitution, predate the regime and perhaps even the twentieth century.

An alternate view sees the Venezuelan tragedy as a combination of human failing and bad luck of the sort that has stricken nations, unpredictably, through time. The Venezuelan diaspora does not yet have a Solzhenitsyn, but various books and programs have begun to explore both the country’s collapse and its painful history.

In the next edition we’ll feature an interview with Moises Naim, MIT-trained former director of the Venezuelan central bank, now a Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and an internationally syndicated columnist. These wonky credentials notwithstanding, Naim has published his first work of fiction, Two Spies in Caracas, a novelized and entertaining treatment of the Chavez era. Suffice to say it is rather more accessible than the essays he dashes off for Foreign Affairs (you might even read it on the beach).

Today we’ll peak at a smattering of expat writing and journalism that has flowered in Chavez’s wake. For anyone seeking a vivid picture of the Venezuelan conflict, A La Calle, (“To the Street”), a documentary film shot secretly over three years with hidden cameras, depicts the passion of protesters against the Maduro regime, which has responded with violence and torture. It also depicts the struggle of an ordinary sanitation worker to find food for his family. In an interview with NPR, its co-director, Nelson Navarrete, evoked an F. Scott Fitzgerald-like sense of a lost generation.  Navarrete, today living in Los Angeles, said that outside of a war zone, Venezuela has the greatest proportion of emigres in the world. “[In] my generation, almost everybody … is out.”

Another NPR program, Throughline, searches for the historical origins of the Venezuelan crisis. “El Libertador and Venezuela’s Rise and Fall” (produced in 2019 and recently rebroadcast) tells the parallel stories of Chavez and Simon Bolivar, the brooding son of an aristocrat who led Venezuela to independence from Spain in 1821, but failed to achieve his dream of a united South America.

“Libertador” is notable in two respects. First, it isn’t often that mainstream radio devotes an hour to the politics of a South American republic. The show succeeds by focusing on two charismatic personalities, Chavez and Bolivar. Second, by casting both leaders as idealists whose regimes were ruined by personal ambition, “Libertador” tacitly suggests that a consistent tendency to strongman rule has undermined Venezuelan politics. One criticism is that coupling Chavez with the South American George Washington inflates the importance of Chavez. Nonetheless, for newcomers especially, “Libertador” is an engaging introduction to the Venezuelan present and past.

Finally, When Time Stopped, (2020), a debut book from Ariana Neumann, is barely about Venezuela at all. It’s a riveting account of the author’s efforts to piece together her late father’s past. When Neumann was a child in Caracas, her father, Hans, was a wealthy industrialist who owned the Caracas Daily Journal (my employer). His accent hinted at central European roots, but Ariana knew nothing about his early life. As she now has unearthed in rich detail, during World War II, her father, a young Jew in Czechoslovakia, adopted a false identity and lived in plain sight of the Nazi high command. When Time Stopped tells the riveting story of Hans’ and his family’s struggle to survive.

Ariana Neumann, author of When Time Stopped

Why include it here? Reading Neumann’s painstakingly researched history, I could not escape the sense of an historical echo. Her father had grown up in comfortable circumstances in a civilized society, although increasingly menaced by its German neighbor. Ultimately, his world was destroyed. Ariana Neumann had been a child of privilege in bustling Caracas. Political convulsion ended any semblance of her old life and she, too, felt compelled to emigrate.

From London, Neumann told me, “It is incredibly ironic that Venezuela is the place that welcomed so many refugees … not only Jews but Italians and Spaniards who were fleeing not only Mussolini and Franco but who also came to earn a living and now find it impossible to live at all, due to the lack of income and social [stability]. I find it heartbreaking.”

Prewar, the Neumanns had been prosperous manufacturers of industrial paint. Twenty-five family members were murdered during the Holocaust, but Hans and his brother survived. They reestablished the business after the war, but a Communist coup plunged Czechoslovakia into a second darkness.  

Hans emigrated to Caracas in 1949. Remarkably, he resurrected his business, but political storms trailed him there as well. Venezuela was run by the military dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez. Communist insurrection inspired violent demonstrations, and the family factory was torched. However, in 1958, the dictatorship was toppled by a democratic movement that set up a constitutional government.

Ariana grew up amid uncommon stability. With the oil industry booming, “It was the right time to set up a business and be a migrant. There was a constitution. There was a safety net. I remember the great pride Venezuelans had -- in all of Latin America we were the one exception, the one stable democracy.”

It was also (if I may intrude) an optimistic and happy place. Joking and laughter were as common on the street as the ubiquitous arepas hawked by vendors and consumed by all, or the annoying buzz of motorcycles breezing past on the sidewalk, when deemed expedient, to steer clear of traffic. There may be no official index of cheerfulness, but count it among Venezuela’s saddest losses.

After Chavez’s election, Hans co-founded Tal Cual, a leading opposition newspaper. His daughter says he was already worried about the country’s direction and wanted to add a dissenting voice from the left (his cofounder was a former revolutionary). However, she adds, “I don’t think my father would have ever imagined it would come to this. Venezuela was a place of such promise and potential.”

Through the lens of the migratory Neumanns, the Venezuelan tragedy seems more random that Lander would have styled it—Prague one day, Caracas the next. Ms. Neumann noted that even the United States has had a brush with political instability. Mr. Naim, a political economist, fingers the cause more precisely.

Next: Two Spies in Caracas.