Leopoldo López: evaluation

Transcript context

…But do they think they’re doing good when they govern — Maduro, Chávez, and their minions? Or is it just cynical? No, I don’t think so. I think that at first, there might have been a lot of people with good intentions. This has been a long process. We are now in year 22 of when this all started, of Chávez winning an election and killing democracy from within, because that’s what happened in Venezuela. At first, he had popular support, and he was able to win several elections, but then democracy was undermined. Then, with Maduro after Chávez’s death, it became very clear that there was a change, a metamorphosis from a system to a clearly criminal structure. Venezuela today is a criminal structure, and I’m not exaggerating. We can go into details to explain why I’m saying this. The fact is that they have articulated a way in which they just oppress the Venezuelan people, taking out all of the freedom. At this point, as you say, concretely, yes, they are cynical; yes, they know they are harming people. They know they have created a humanitarian crisis of dimensions never seen in the Western Hemisphere. They know all this, and they are absolutely cynical about everything that they do and the consequences to the Venezuelan people. Why does there seem to be so much Cuban influence in Venezuela? Cuba is a much smaller country, it’s less powerful, it’s quite broke itself. What explains the magic hold of Cuba on Venezuela? Or is that a cliché that’s wrong?…

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