Leopoldo López: evaluation

Transcript context

…If I’m trying to mentally model the governments of Chávez and Maduro, to what extent did the people in those governments actually believe their own rhetoric? When they throw you in jail, do they actually think, “Well, this is for the good of Venezuela”? Or is it just purely cynical and a power grab and about corruption and the money? What’s the balance there? Well, in terms of people’s perception of what was happening in Venezuela, I can give you an interesting framework of what happened over the past years. Up until 2014, when we called for massive street protests against Maduro because he had stolen the presidential election six months before that, most Venezuelans thought of our country as a democracy. And it was much in the same way that Venezuela was perceived outside: It was a democracy with all sorts of adjectives. I think, personally, when you start putting adjectives in front of democracy, the democracy is having problems. So it was perceived as a democracy in decline, as a fractured democracy. Others spoke about a competitive autocracy, all sorts of ways not to call things by their name, that it was really a dictatorship. When we called for street protest in 2014, and the regime violently repressed thousands of people, there were thousands of people thrown into detention, hundreds of people thrown into prison, thousands of people that were injured, and some that were murdered. Dozens of people were murdered by the regime. The perceptions started to change. After 2014, it became very clear for the Venezuelan people that we were facing a dictatorship. And Maduro, at the time, had 8 out of every 10 Venezuelans against, and that pattern has sustained ever since. But do they think they’re doing good when they govern — Maduro, Chávez, and their minions? Or is it just cynical?…

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