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Kibbe on Liberty
Ep 368 | Can Another Javier Milei Save Venezuela? | Guest: Ian Vásquez
00:51:51
Will we see a mere continuation of the Maduro regime, which left the country economically devastated, or will we instead see the kind of fundamental reforms that have worked so well for Javier Milei in Argentina?
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. I'm talking with my friend Ian Vasquez of the Cato Institute. He's vice President for International Studies. We're going to talk about Venezuela. We're going to talk about the current regime, which is an extension of the Maduro regime. Who is Maria Carina Machado? The opposition leader. And how does the United States and the Trump administration extract itself without making things worse instead of better? Check it out. Welcome to kibbe on liberty, Ian. Good to see you.
- [01:04]
B
Thanks a lot.
- [01:05]
A
So you and I were talking at a friend's memorial service, Dan Grossman. And as Dan would have wanted at the reception afterwards, we proceeded to get to business. And I've known you for, I don't know how long, but when both of us still had brown hair, I think is one way to measure that.
- [01:27]
B
It means we're wiser now.
- [01:28]
A
Yes.
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B
Doesn't it?
- [01:29]
A
Well, I, you know, I, I like the legitimacy of gray hair because no one ever took me seriously when I was younger.
- [01:36]
B
I dye my gray hair for credibility.
- [01:37]
A
That's right, yeah.
- [01:38]
B
Do you believe me?
- [01:41]
A
I do the same, obviously. But you, you've, you've been involved in Latin and South America forever and you're at the Cato Institute. And I wanted to get your take on the details of what has been going on in Venezuela, who Maria Corina Machado is, who Delsey Rodriguez is the current temporary president in Venezuela. But give people just a little bit of background of your work at Cato, even before that, so that people understand who you are.
- [02:15]
B
Sure. I oversee the international work of the Cato Institute with a focus on liberty, with a focus on economic freedom and reforms around the world. We publish a Human Freedom Index that looks at economic, civil and personal freedoms around the world, where we can tell what the level of freedom is in the world and also within countries and we relate them to human well being. You can see very strong relationship between freedom and well being. And so a lot of our work is looking at things that work in the developing world. If I have a regional expertise, it's in Latin America where we see a lot of good things at work in some countries and a lot of bad things. You know, of course the worst case cases in Latin America are the Cuban dictatorship and what has been the case over the last 26 years, the Venezuelan dictatorship under Chavez and then Maduro.
- [03:18]
A
Yeah. And you're from Peru, is that right?
- [03:23]
B
Yeah.
- [03:25]
A
But it's been a long time since you've lived in Peru.
- [03:28]
B
Right. So I was born in Lima, Peru, and we moved to the United States when I was young, around 8 years old, but I've been going back and forth my whole life, so I'm still very engaged there. We have a lot of friends and a lot of libertarian colleagues. I would say that Peru has in the world one of the most sophisticated set of libertarians and libertarian movement outside of the United States.
- [03:57]
A
Yeah, and I've talked about this, but I've been going to a university in Guatemala, Francisco Marroquin, forever. And it's more, it's more freedom than I think anything that I could find in the United States. It reminds me a little bit of my alma mater, Grove City College, but they actually have a statue of Atlas and the Mises Library and all that stuff. So there's quite a hotbed of freedom and libertarianism and Austrian influences in Latin America.
- [04:28]
B
Absolutely. And that's been the case for several decades.
- [04:34]
A
When is the last time you've been to Venezuela?
- [04:37]
B
The last time I went was, I think it was 2014 and I haven't been able to go back since then. The first time I went was in 1979 when I was a little boy. And I remember being very impressed back then that the price of water was higher than the price of gasoline. So they've had this long obsession with nationalized oil that actually began in the mid-1970s. That was the source of their problems. When I started working at the Cato Institute and doing international work, I started going to Venezuela regularly beginning in the 90s when the rest of Latin America was moving towards economic reforms and doing far reaching things toward economic freedom and liberty. Venezuela was, was different than the rest of Latin America because it had this manna from heaven, this petroleum, which by then had been nationalized and by then had led to a classic case of the natural resource curse, where a country is rich in natural resources, but it ends up being impoverished precisely because that wealth is concentrated in the government's hands. Back then it was a democracy and yet most people, including the political parties, the business elite, certainly the media and other places believed in socialism. So they thought the best thing to do was just to distribute. Of course we know that that doesn't work and it wasn't working. And it started to create all sorts of corruption and dysfunctionalities. And that's where Hugo Chavez comes out of the dissatisfaction. So he, he tries to do a coup, it fails, he goes to jail, they decide to let him go, they have elections, becomes very popular, and then he proceeds to take the country into a hardcore socialist direction, which some people interpret as the break from the democratic past. But I just see that this is a continuation of something that had already been happening over the course of several decades. So in that sense, it's a warning to all democracies that believe that they can make socialist work. When you don't have economic freedom, you end up with no freedoms at all. And that's certainly one lesson from Venezuela.
- [07:04]
A
So I've been looking for somebody that can sort of do a deep dive into the history pre Chavez and things that our government, nation building, manipulating elections, choosing the guy that is our guy in Venezuela has been a thing. And I believe that the guy that nationalized the oil in 76, 77 was our guy. Do you know much about the history of how all of that actually helped Chavez with his narrative about American imperialism?
- [07:39]
B
Well, I mean, this was a president who was certainly allied. I mean, looking back at the history of Latin America at that time, Venezuela was the one country that had been a democracy for a long time. Yes, it was allied with the United States. It got along with all countries at a time when the entire region was mostly military dictatorships. So if you look at the 1970s, it was the freest economy, it was certainly the richest country, and it was actually doing well. It was doing so well in terms of petroleum that they decided to nationalize the oil industry. And that's when things started to go downhill. And you can justif you just look at a graph of economic freedom of Venezuela over time, beginning in the 1970s, it's just a downward trend. And then Chavez comes and it goes down even more, which is why I say he's. He represents more of a continuation than a break.
- [08:45]
A
Yeah. And he wasn't an explicitly radical Marxist when he was running for president, is that right?
- [08:52]
B
I think that he was, but he said that he wasn't because these lie. Yeah. I mean, he was asked, are you going to nationalize anything? No, we don't have. We're not going to do that, are you? So that's clearly part of the communist type of strategy.
- [09:10]
A
Yeah. And over the period of Chavez's reign, he started to show his true stripes more and more and got more radical in terms of currency and land seizures.
- [09:27]
B
He used the outward forms of democracy to eliminate freedoms, including democracy itself. And for a pretty long time, that helped him get cover from people around the world who thought this is just the will of the people. But of course, the repression began pretty early on and he had tremendous luck for most of the time that he was in power before he died in 2000, 2011, 2012, around then, the price of oil was astronomically high. So he was financing these tremendous projects. I mean, during the time that he was in power, they must have received something like a trillion dollars worth of revenues, and nobody knows what happened to it. I mean, it wasn't just corruption. He was financing the left all over Latin America. And I remember at that time traveling with Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate, who's a free marketeer and classical liberal, and others from the region. And just to organize events, you know, we would have to raise money, and it wasn't that easy, but inevitably we would be met with massive protests that were financed by Venezuela. No matter what country we were in, we knew it because all of the placards and the things that they hold up the same. Exactly the same in everywhere that we went.
- [10:57]
A
So that wasn't a secret, like fake revolution.
- [11:01]
B
Yes.
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A
Or engineered protest.
- [11:05]
B
Yeah, it was very. Everything was financed by Chavez at the time. So he had tremendous luck.
- [11:13]
A
So there's been a lot of talk about how Cuba, in particular, one of the primary beneficiaries of the largesse of Venezuela, both with Chavez and Maduro, that they're in trouble right now. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole because I want to get to Maduro's reign and where Maria Carina Machado comes in. But is Cuba in trouble?
- [11:38]
B
Cuba is in big trouble. Cuba is in the worst economic situation it has ever been in since the start of the revolution in 1959. It's gone through really tough periods in the past. Remember with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was its sugar daddy, it was subsidizing that regime billions of dollars worth per year that ended. And it went into what they called a special period, which was basically real austerity and recession and so on, until Chavez came to power and started financing the Cuban regime once again. But of course, that has now come to an end, and things are worse there than they ever have been. Cuba is a perfect example of how everything is fine until you run out of other people's money. And the only way that Cuba has ever been able to. To get along is by taking other people's money. And now they're pretty much out of it. This has been going on now for the past few years. I mean, about a quarter or so of its population left just in the last few years. It's not just Venezuela where you have 8 to 9 million people that have fled. You have a lot of Cubans who have fled because the situation is probably worse. Certainly worse in Cuba than it is in Venezuela. And that's due to the collapse of Venezuelan economy itself, which still was subsidizing Cuba somewhat, but not anywhere on the levels of before. And now with the US intervention, no oil will be flowing there. And that's the way that they were subsidizing Cuba.
- [13:34]
A
Yeah, so. So back to Chavez and Maduro. Chavez gets cancer and dies. You're saying 2011, 2012. Yeah, Maduro takes over around that time. I thought it was 2014. But by all accounts, Maduro doubles down on the socialist experiment and even at one point hired this, this Spaniard University professor who he referred to as the Jesus Christ of economics, the irony of which is rich. And that's when they started doing things like closing the borders. When mothers were trying to cross into Colombia to get food. Things got really desperate.
- [14:20]
B
Things got bad. I mean, the rise of Maduro coincided with the. Also with the fall of the price of oil. So there again, you see outside money no longer able to sustain the socialist experiment. But at this point, and this had been true now for at least a decade or more, the Cuban regime was really running Venezuela. And the arrangement there is that the Cubans, who excel in intelligence and security for a regime were providing those services first to Chavez and then to Maduro. So they were sort of following a Cuban playbook of taking a harder line when things get tough and also sort of inventing things along the way. So, I mean, at one point they allowed dollars, then another point they didn't allow dollars. And of course repression increased. Things got worse. Overall, things have just been getting worse and worse. At some point, they have looked the other way in terms of dollars again. And so that sort of relieves some, some pressure. That's where they are right now. But they don't have that manna from heaven anymore, and they haven't for a good 10 or more years. And that's just been the reality. So that over the course of the years, of course created all sorts of discontent that led to mass protests, but those were always put down with force in the way that the Cubans have always done in Cuba. And so up until now, up until the last couple of years, those protests and that opposition organization has never been ultimately successful.
- [16:38]
A
Thank you for joining me today on Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty. So we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it. A lot of jailing of political prisoners. And explain the colectivos, these roving gangs that go after the opposition.
- [17:19]
B
So, I mean, you have a regime that's oppressive and it's not just the army and it's not just the police. It is these armed gangs that are financed by the person who is now the interior minister that works to enforce the regime's wishes by force and brutality and intimidate ordinary Venezuelans. So they're the ones that show up to beat the crap out of Venezuelans who protest or gather to protest. They're very feared, they're armed, they're on motorcycles, and they work hand in hand with the regime.
- [18:04]
A
A side note, the Maduro regime was quite diligent about banning gun rights in Venezuela.
- [18:12]
B
Yeah, that's right.
- [18:13]
A
So only the colectivos have the guns.
- [18:16]
B
And it's a problem. I mean, you basically have the regime as the only ones with the guns in Venezuela.
- [18:23]
A
Yeah. So the opposition movement. And I want to narrow down. There's a lot of efforts that have been going on since Maduro took power. But let's talk about Maria Corina Machado and where she fits into that. Before the United States took the action.
- [18:43]
B
It did so from the very first years of the Chavez government. Remember, he came in in 1999. We knew it was bad news, but it just started to get worse very quickly. So early on there was a strong opposition movement with a lot of different leaders and so on. Maria Corina Machado was one of several. And so early on she was part of that. She started in the, in the 2000, early 2000s, mid 2000s, a group called Sumate, which was a group that sort of oversees election results and that kind of thing and gets. It's an activist group, Venezuelans, active in opposing the regime and so on. And so she was very active there. There were other leaders too. There were elections along the way in which the opposition participated. She tried to be the person who was the main opposition leader, but over the years they kept selecting others. And she gave her support to these other guys, but she was always different. And this is one of the reasons, I think, that she's been so successful now in a way that no other opposition politician, politician has been in Venezuela. First, she was always a classical liberal, that is somebody who was promoting free market policies, being very clear about it, and the need to get the Size of the state down and not and reduce and limit the power of the state. The other opposition leaders were against the dictatorship, but their view was kind of like when we're in power, we're going to know how to use the state owned oil monopoly better than the other guys, and that's not going to be a problem. But she was always very clear about it and explained why this is a problem. So her vision of reform was consistent. She was also very good. She was also very savvy and very capable organizer. And just her consistency in this messaging is what I think over the years where other opposition leaders were incapable or unable to have success. Her consistency in her vision and her strategy is what gave her a lot of credibility. And she has now, I'm coming up to 2023, been the only opposition leader that really was able to unite the whole country under her vision, under her leadership. And what you saw in 2023 is a primary where she got over 90% of the vote. That led the government to disqualify her from the presidential elections that were coming up. That's when she endorsed this other person who was little known, Edmundo Gonzalez, for president. And then during the elections, she did something that took the regime completely by surprise and was unexpected, which is she had been working with hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in secret to monitor, oh, some 85% of the election booth sites and then to document the voting tallies and then to show them, just right after the election to show that they won about 70% of the vote. This was a landslide election. And to prove that there was a massive fraud that Maduro then perpetrated. I think that qualifies as the largest, by far, biggest voting fraud in Latin American history. But she had to do this under the most difficult conditions. I mean, with the regime that was spying on them, that was making communication virtually impossible. And I think two things come to mind when that happened. I mean, it was really quite impressive, not just the result, but the ability to do that under those conditions. Part of what happened is that she had to have some level of collaboration from the soldiers who were told not to let that happen. And that showed the weakness of the regime. So this was not just a blow that they lost the election. It was that they really don't have virtually any support within the regime itself.
- [23:43]
A
So you know her, right?
- [23:45]
B
Yeah, sure, I've known her, spent time with her. Oh yeah, I've known her for several decades.
- [23:49]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And mine, I don't think I've ever met her, but it's possible that I met her in passing at a Cato event or an Atlas Network event, because she has been attending these forever.
- [24:01]
B
Yeah.
- [24:02]
A
And I'm told that she can, for people watching this show, this is important, not for the rest of the world, but she can actually quote the Austrian economists.
- [24:11]
B
She's a very sophisticated free marketeer and intellectual of liberty. She knows all of the books. She loves the United States for that reason. I mean, her model for Venezuela is liberty. Liberty in terms of personal liberty, civil liberties, limited power, rule of law and free markets. And if you look at their political platform, you see far reaching economic reforms that really would, if they were implemented, make Venezuela a prosperous country. But I wish we had a lot of politicians with that view here in the United States.
- [24:59]
A
Maybe we can import her if it doesn't work out in Venezuela.
- [25:02]
B
Right.
- [25:04]
A
So, and that's important, like I knew of her and I knew a lot of people that knew her well long before any of this happened. So attempts to characterize her as just another sort of, what's the right word? Sort of a social engineer that, that tends to come out of the NGO world where they're just going to do central planning better than that authoritarian guy. She's not one of those.
- [25:32]
B
No, she's different. She's always been different. I remember I invited her to speak some 12, 15 years ago at the Cato Institute at a time when so many people were still defending the Chavez regime there because of all of its social programs and so on. And she spoke just on the social programs and why they don't work, they can't work, why there's a better option, why it's a lot of it is propaganda and a lot of it is used to actually control the population and centralize power. And she was very clear minded about that. And this is at a time when other opposition candidate politicians in Venezuela wouldn't say those kinds of things.
- [26:19]
A
Yeah. So I'm no fan of regime change and American meddling in foreign countries almost always turns out badly, things almost always get worse. But the President has done this, he has extracted Maduro and we'll see what happens there. But I think that night or the night afterwards, he said some things that I want to talk about. This quote, this is classic nation building, regime change, wildly optimistic. We want peace, liberty and justice for the great people of Venezuela. This partnership of Venezuela with the United States of America. We will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent and safe. And then he goes on to say, we, the United States, are going to run this country until we can do an election, a safe and fair election, a safe, proper and judicious transition. That's pretty ambitious stuff. And he proceeded, I don't know, maybe the next day. I didn't pull down the quote, but he basically said, Maria is not ready for primetime. And everything you just told me says if you want somebody to step in with the support of the people and do the kinds of reforms you'd actually have to do in Venezuela, why are they dismissing her?
- [27:57]
B
Well, that's a good question. I think that it's a strategic mistake for two reasons. Because for the time being, the US Government has chosen to work with the regime. It's decapitated the regime, but its partner is the regime, which is hated. It's hated by Venezuelans and has zero legitimacy, instead of with Maria Corina Machado, who has legitimacy. The this isn't a question of going into a country and then looking around for the different political leaders and having to choose one that you like or don't like. The Venezuelan people already made that choice. And this is a person whose values are completely consistent with US values, who if put in charge and were able to implement what she wants to do, would be doing things that are consistent with US Foreign policy goals and who has shown that she's very capable and a savvy person who's also very capable at organizing and running things, even in the face of very difficult conditions. So I think that any attempt for the United States to try to run another country is free fraught. I think it would be much better to have a transition being run or in collaboration with Maria Corina Machado and her people and let the Venezuelans run the country. They're already in a position to do so. And I would add they have a plan and they've been thinking about this for years, about what that transition would look like. They have a plan for the first 100 hours. They have the plan for the first 100 days with regard to public services, with regard to security, with regard to telecommunications, with regard to border issues, with regard to all sorts of things that an incoming government in a transition has to deal with right away. And then in the next hundred days, in addition to their governing platform, about what to do about the different areas of public policy, including the big one, oil, which she wants to privatize and open up the competition completely, open it up completely to the free market, which would mean obviously that the US Oil companies could come in and invest as they, as they wish on a competitive basis. All of that sounds much better to me than Dealing with a corrupt regime and hoping that they will willingly go along with the transition because I don't expect that to happen. Maybe they're playing ball right now, but I don't think that the current arrangement is sustainable.
- [31:06]
A
Yeah, tell us about Delsey Rodriguez and who she is. And she is the person in charge right now.
- [31:15]
B
Delsey Rodriguez was the Vice President of Maduro. And let me just say this is a regime that hasn't just ruined the economy and ruin the country. This is a regime that has been accused of human rights abuses and crimes against humanity by the United nations, by the Organization of American States, by international human rights groups and so on. And these are well documented crimes and so on, run by true believer communists. Del C. Rodriguez is one of them. And she is working alongside the other people in charge of the regime. The Interior Minister, Dios Dado Cabello, who's probably the worst of them all and probably the biggest criminal, and the Minister of Defense, also one of these true believers who has blood on their hands. Delsey was, was the Vice President. The New York Times called her a moderate, which is absolutely not true. That's laughable. Maybe you could call her more technocratic than the other guys. That might be because at one point she was the one, I think, that facilitated the return of dollarization, people using dollars and so on and that kind of thing. But we're not talking about people who, who are interested at all in a transition to democracy. So we shouldn't expect that they're going to be dealing in good faith. They're going to be doing as little as possible to meet the demands of the United States. And if I were Delsey, I would be very nervous because even if the US Government wants to deal with her, the moment that we move closer to anything that looks like a transition, the other guys in charge, the guys that have the guns, the Interior Minister and the Minister of Defense are going to get nervous and there's no way they're going to let that happen. There's going to be a coup, there's going to be infighting. It could get bloody. So I just don't see right now there's no reason why any of these guys trust each other other. It's a very unstable situation.
- [33:39]
A
At Kibbee on liberty. Freedom is a lifestyle 24 7, something you live and breathe and wear every day. If that describes you, you need the very best liberty swag in the market today, just like this shirt I happen to be wearing. Go to freethepeople.org kol and check out Our exciting merch. You too can love, love liberty and look cool. Colin Powell, who I've now quoted twice, and perhaps this will be the last time I ever do. But when the first Bush administration was pushing to do regime change in Iraq, something that his son would have to do later, Colin Powell famously argued, you break it, you own it. And I feel like that's where the Trump administration is right now. They broke it and there's a tremendous amount of chaos and things could get much worse.
- [34:37]
B
Michael Kirk I think that if they continue to go sort of work with this regime as it is, things can and probably will get worse. The administration has said that the there will be a transition. And so that certainly is something that would make these guys very, very nervous. I think that it's one thing to make the argument that, well, right now, immediately after the intervention, you have to work with the guys that have the guns and can keep some sort of stability. That's fine. But it doesn't explain why they would not at all be working with Maria Corina Machado in thinking through the transition and thinking through what to do with the current regime and in communicating with them and planning that out. Even if she is not in Venezuela and is outside of Venezuela, it doesn't explain why Trump would be saying negative things about her that aren't true. And I think that, you know, we've seen him also do that with Zelenskyy, so he could change his mind and maybe it's some part of a strategy or something. I don't think that I understand that part, but I think that it would be smarter for the United States to start working immediately with Maria Corina and her team on a transition and on governance based on legitimacy and based, quite frankly, on policies that I think should be very welcomed by the United States.
- [36:20]
A
Yeah, it strikes me as the non interventionist guy that the lightest touch would be the best and she is probably the best chance to get to something that's better, not worse.
- [36:35]
B
The other thing that I should mention is that things are so bad in Venezuela that nobody supports the current situation. It's kind of like you've heard people say, well, this is Libya, Iraq, when the United States went in. It is not. This is much closer to eastern Europe in 1989 where the regime collapsed. And absolutely everybody welcomed that collapse. Venezuela is at that point, and it includes, as was the case in Eastern Europe, people in all parts of government, including at very high levels of government, who if they were given a signal, because right now they're afraid they would Defect immediately. Right now there are hundreds of of generals and military people in jail. They get the worst treatment because they were suspected of not supporting the regime. And that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be challenges and some security issues and so on. But I think that Venezuela is much closer to eastern Europe in 1989 than it is an Iraqi type scenario.
- [37:54]
A
So I have this theory that's based on other experiences and not necessarily corroborated by the facts in this case. But when about the time that Trump said that Maria Machado was not ready for prime time, there was this long piece, I think, in the New York Times with unnamed sources telling this story about how she was utterly unprepared for all of this. And my theory is that the deep state operatives who have been mucking around in Latin America my entire life and proceeding that don't want her vis a vis someone that they would consider an asset that they could control because that's their model. Right. I want to control this person. I don't necessarily want all of these high minded things. President Trump was talking about freedom and liberty and prosperity for the Venezuelan people.
- [38:51]
B
I think that could be part of it. I think that obviously when you're a political leader that has been so successful, she may have generated opposition from mediocrities that have. There's been over the years a lot of collaborationists with the regime who have come out well ahead. They stand to lose big on this. But they present themselves as promoters of democracy and of whatever, a better society, etc. But they're defenders ultimately of the regime. That's part of it. The other part that I see is why the New York Times would run this is, this is just speculation. Of course, you know, the New York Times has called her the Margaret Thatcher of Venezuela. And I think that for a lot of the writers at the New York Times, they don't necessarily like that.
- [39:51]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I certainly remember Jimmy Carter swooning all over Hugo Chavez, but I would assume that the New York Times was doing exactly the same thing at the time.
- [40:01]
B
Yeah, there's been, you know, all sorts of unfortunate coverage of the regime. And I think that still, unfortunately in the op ed pages, people who shouldn't have any credibility and who have an angle are saying things that are, I think, misinformed or not misinformed, just providing an inaccurate picture probably because of some self interest.
- [40:32]
A
Yeah. So let's. I know you don't do politics and I try not to do politics, but let's think about the politics of this Just for a minute, because you said that Venezuela certainly doesn't have to become Afghanistan or Iraq, particularly in terms of US Responsibility. Afghanistan was an utter disaster in terms of lost lives and lost treasure. We seem to all agree on that now. You know, 20, whatever years later, it strikes me that if this blows up in the President's face as he goes into the midterm elections, it is a political liability. So the question for him, not that he's watching, but maybe I do believe that lots of well meaning folks that are pro Trump and pro Maga are watching this show. What is a reasonable, graceful exit strategy that actually produces a better outcome for the Venezuelan people, as the President has said he would like to see?
- [41:42]
B
Well, I mean, I think that it's reasonable to right now insist on the freeing of all political prisoners. The regime said it was going to do so, but it's barely. There's probably about a thousand political prisoners.
- [41:58]
A
It's a token. Yeah.
- [41:59]
B
And they've only released over the course of many days, a few at a time. So it's under 50. I think that the United States should insist on that, should insist on freedom of expression. And instead what we've seen is increased repression. We're clearly not running the country and I think that that doesn't look good. And to the extent that they continue to fail to meet those, I think that that provides a good enough signal for everybody to say, hey, this isn't working out. Let's try another attack. And. And so that's just one scenario under which you could do so. But I can envision others where repression or infighting gets much more serious as the United States starts talking about the need for actual transition.
- [42:55]
A
Yeah. Okay. Anything I didn't cover that you want to put out there?
- [43:03]
B
Well, I think that this is really important for Latin America. I mean, we have a moment in Latin America where the left has been completely discredited. The intervention in Venezuela by the United States has been wildly popular. This is unusual in Latin America. Why? Because Venezuela has gotten such a horrible image. The left has really tarnished its image in the region that there's a consensus that these guys will never leave unless it's by force. And you know, every other option has been tried by Venezuelans and it hasn't worked. So this has been popular. Whether we think it's a good idea or not. It's been popular and it's coming at a time when country after country is rejecting the left and electing center right or right candidates. First in Argentina with Milei. But we've also seen that in Paraguay and Bolivia and Chile. And so this is an important development to get right, partially because for the past 25 years it has been the source of so much of Latin America's troubles. You know, the left in Latin America is not a social democratic left like in Europe. It is hardcore far left communists who create trouble everywhere they go, including violence and breaking rules and so on and spreading corruption. So it would be very salutary for Latin America if a government that comes in can do so based on the principles of freedom and limited government. That is the moment that Latin America is living right now. And this is a great opportunity to be able to do that.
- [45:14]
A
I know that that a lot of these countries certainly have their own national identity. How important is Javier Milei's success? Is Argentina just different than the rest of Latin America? And is he just different, or does he inspire people trying to actually do the same thing in their country?
- [45:33]
B
Oh, it's very important. It's very important. Because remember that Milei isn't just a guy who came from opposing the left and opposing socialism and Peronism in Argentina. This is a guy who explicitly said that whole system, that whole way of thinking is absolutely rotten. He's not a guy that comes in on the opposition and is competing with the left on their own terms. He's rejecting the whole thing.
- [46:06]
A
Thing.
- [46:07]
B
And that has caught the attention of all of Latin America because we really haven't seen a politician like that. Plus, he's actually implementing. He's explicitly libertarian. He's actually implementing libertarian policies that are succeeding. So he's showing that these policies work and that politically the libertarian message is viable. Sweet. So a lot of politicians in other countries have gotten onto that. And I do think that it's opened up the debate and opened up the eyes of Latin Americans, not just young and many Argentinians. Today it's very popular to be libertarian in Argentina right now, especially among the young, but in other countries as well. And that matters.
- [46:53]
A
Yeah, it's kind of a Ron Paul vibe. Millet very much tapped into the youth.
- [46:59]
B
Yes, that's absolutely right.
- [47:01]
A
So is it fair? Is Maria Corina Machado ideologically similar to Milei? Is she that radical? Is she.
- [47:11]
B
Her style is different than his, but her beliefs are pretty much very closely aligned. They're both sophisticated classical liberals. They both understand the importance of individual liberty and why you have to limit the power of the state, which has been the problem in Latin America since the time that the Spanish arrived.
- [47:44]
A
But does she have a dog named after Murray? Rothbard?
- [47:47]
B
No, she doesn't. And so, like I say, her style is different, but of course they both admire each other. And I organized a conference a year and almost two years ago in Argentina, shortly after Milei came to power and he spoke, and I invited her to speak too. She couldn't leave Venezuela at the time. She was. She was in hiding in Venezuela, which I think we forgot to mention, that since around 2014, she has not been allowed to leave the country. And then certainly since the elections that she won and the repression that followed, she's had to be in hiding. She's come out very courageously a few times and led massive crowds where at one point she was abducted and escaped. But anyway, so she sent a nice video message for our conference and for President Milei and the Foreign Minister at the time, this was very important. They really do admire each other. Milei went to the awarding of the Peace Prize in Oslo and it just shows you that there's something really important for freedom going on in Latin America. Her style might be different, but they pretty much see eye to eye on the big policy questions.
- [49:17]
A
Is that conference something that's archived@cato.org yeah.
- [49:21]
B
You can go to the Cato YouTube channel, or you can go to the Cato webpage and see the conference, which I'm trying to remember the title, title of the conference, but it was about Argentina and liberty in Argentina and beyond. And we say beyond because what's going on in Argentina, I think is much more important to everybody, much more important than just to Argentinians. It's important to Latin Americans and I would say important to the. The rest of the world, because Milei is the only political leader in the world who is explicitly making libertarian arguments about reducing the size of the state, about free trade, etc. Etc. And I think that he's become an international leader, not just a regional leader. And I think that that's important, especially since he's being successful at it.
- [50:23]
A
Okay, we mentioned Cato.org, what else would you recommend for people who want to read more, watch more, consume more about these issues?
- [50:31]
B
Well, if you read Spanish, you can go to our Spanish language website, which is elcato.org and then of course, there are great newspapers and websites in the region, also in Spanish. I think that you can go to Maria Corina's own website and social media. Her party is called Vente Venezuela and you can see what they're thinking at any time.
- [51:08]
A
Okay, thank you, Ian.
- [51:09]
B
Thanks a lot.
- [51:12]
A
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