Leopoldo López: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let’s wind the clock back to 1959. President Betancourt is elected. Let’s say that’s you in 1959. What is it you would do differently to stop the way history has unfolded in Venezuela? Well, I think Betancourt, when democracy started, did a very important job in establishing democracy. I’ll give you a bit of context. Venezuela has mainly been a military dictatorship for most of our history, or an autocracy. And the first time we had a real democracy was in 1947, when there was the direct election of a constituent assembly, and that was Betancourt at the time. Then that government was thrown away by a military coup in 1948, and we had 10 years of dictatorship. Then, when democracy came, there was the writing of a very progressive — in democratic terms — constitution. We had 40 years of an elected democracy. In my view, the first 20 years were very positive for Venezuela, but then, in the last 20 years, Betancourt was no longer the president, and there was a decline. Many of the reforms that needed to take place didn’t happen. Also, at the very end, there was a lot of influence by the media, and there was this public opinion that everything had to change in Venezuela. And they created this sense of revenge, of vengeance because of some of the economic situations that Venezuela had lived after the 1980s, and that’s what brought Chávez to power. 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?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.