Leopoldo López: evaluation

Transcript context

…My friend’s from Argentina. As you know, Argentina in the 1920s was one of the wealthier countries in the world, and later it declined rather steeply. There are various excuses. “Well, it was Perón. It was Peronism.” But I wonder if it wasn’t actually inevitable, and Argentina had a lucky streak of a few decades, maybe due to selling meat — refrigerated boxcars — and that was always going to happen to them, even though it had particular prompts. When you think of the history of Venezuela, do you think the decline was inevitable due to the structure of interest groups, the long history of changing constitutions, long history of oligarchy? Or was there actually a path where Venezuela becomes a free, fairly prosperous economy? Well, I think we had, for sure, many lost opportunities along the way. There was an incredible economic growth during the after-war period, which coincided with the democratic period after 1958. Venezuela became a reference, not just for its democratic system, but also because of the economic prosperity that we had at the time. During the 1970s, the oil sector was nationalized. It was nationalized in a very efficient way, but with some folks, it didn’t open up opportunities for Venezuelans to invest in the oil sector, which was the most important sector of our economy. We did not diversify the economy in the way we should have, and some of the windfalls that we had during the 1970s and during other oil shocks were not appropriately taken the best use. The most important oil windfall we had was actually during the Chávez period, between 2004 and 2014. When Chávez came to power, the price of oil was below $15 per barrel, and during that period, it reached $150 per barrel. The increase of oil fiscal income to Venezuela in those 10 years was, in real terms, larger than the entire oil fiscal income between 1922 — which was the date when we started exporting oil — to the year 2000. That extraordinary windfall was stolen, was given away to corrupt practices, was given away in a petrol diplomacy to get the votes and the support of many countries in Latin America, especially the Caribbean. Unfortunately, right after that huge windfall of 10 years — 2004 to 2014 — we opened the gates to the most tragic humanitarian crisis that we have seen in the Western Hemisphere. That led 7,000,000 Venezuelans to flee our country to look for opportunities that were not found in Venezuela, to find food, shelter, medicine, opportunities, and future that were not found. But it was the year after that economic boom ended that this tragedy started. In 1970, you were richer than Spain, Greece, or Israel, which I find remarkable. But do you, today, ever look, say, at Qatar or United Arab Emirates, Dubai, and think the problem actually was democracy, and that here are oil-rich places that have stayed stable, in fact, but through autocratic rule, and that it’s the intermediate situation that doesn’t work?…

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