The Daily Signal - Venezuelan Refugee Explains How Socialist Policies Destroyed His Country

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

Two decades ago, Venezuela was a thriving country. Today, Venezuela is ranked 176th on The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, just above North Korea.  How did Venezuela fall from prosperity so quickly? How did socialist policies affect the nation’s economy? Is there any hope for its future?   Jorge Galicia, a refugee from Venezuela and outreach fellow at The Fund for American Studies, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to answer these questions and describe what it was like to grow up in Venezuela.  Also on today’s show, we cover these stories:  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls on the United Nations to remove Russia from its Security Council. Twitter offers entrepreneur Elon Musk a seat on its board of directors after he becomes the social media company's largest shareholder.  Individuals who live in Palm Springs, California, and identify as transgender or nonbinary are eligible to receive up to $900 a month.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, April 6th. I'm Doug Blair. And I'm Virginia Allen. Not long ago, Venezuela was a prosperous country. But today, residents of Venezuela struggled to have enough to even survive. Jorge Galicia was born and raised in Venezuela, and he joins the show today to explain how socialist policies destroyed his nation. He also explains why it is detrimental to the people of Venezuela if the Biden administration

purchases oil from the Maduro regime. But before we get to Virginia's conversation with Jorge Galicia, let's hit our top news stories of the day. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a passionate speech before the United Nations on Tuesday. Zelensky called on the UN to remove Russia from the Security Council in light of evidence that Russia has executed Ukrainian civilians and committed other violent crimes against the Ukrainian people.

Zulinski said he sees two options, either remove Russia from the Security Council or dissolve it altogether, per Yahoo Finance. You can do two things. Either remove Russia as an aggressor and a source of war, so it cannot block decisions about its own aggression, its own war. And then do everything that we can do to establish peace, or does. The other option is please show how we can reform or change, dissolve yourself and work for peace. Or if there is no alternative and no option, then the next option would be dissolve yourself altogether. Russia is currently one of five permanent members of the Security Council, along with the U.S., United Kingdom, France, and China. council members have veto power, which Zelensky argues Russia should not have given his actions in Ukraine.

Zelensky said in his speech that Russia is turning the veto in the UN Security Council into the right to die, and he added that the veto power undermines the whole architecture of global security and allows Russia to go unpunished. Zelensky detailed some of the gruesome reports of ways Russian soldiers brutally tortured and killed Ukrainians. Zelensi again said the Russian military and its leaders must be brought to justice immediately for war crimes in Ukraine. Following news that Elon Musk had purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter, the company announced Tuesday that it would be offering Musk a seat on its board of directors. In a tweet announcing the decision, Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal said, I'm excited to share that we're appointing Elon Musk to our board through conversations with Elon in recent weeks. it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our board.

Former CEO Jack Dorsey agreed, tweeting, I'm really happy Elon is joining the Twitter board. He cares deeply about our world and Twitter's role in it. After the announcement, Musk tweeted out a poll asking if users would be interested in an edit button for tweets, a function that many users had requested. Per CNBC, Musk's term on the board will last until 2024. Individuals who live in Palm Springs, California,

and identify as transgender or non-binary are eligible to receive up to $900 a month. The program provides universal basic income to any resident who identifies as transgender or non-binary. The details of the program are being designed over a six-month period. 20 transgender and non-binary Palm Springs residents are the first recipients of the funds and will receive payments over the next 18 months. The program is funded with taxpayer. dollars. Those backing the financial program say it's a way to support an often marginalized community being the transgender community. Former San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio is openly critical

of the program. He is a Republican and openly gay and says the program is outrageous and discriminatory. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Jorge Galicia as we discuss how socialist policies have led to Venezuela's downfall. If you're tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices, and bigger and bigger government, it's time to partner with the most impactful conservative organization in America. We're the Heritage Foundation, and we're committed to solving the issues America faces. Together, we'll fight back against the rising tide of homegrown socialism, and we'll fight four conservative solutions that are making families more free and more prosperous.

But we can't do it without you. Please join us at heritage.org. Two decades ago, Venezuela was a thriving country. Today, Freedom House ranks it not free. And the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom ranks it 176th, only coming in freer just above North Korea. So the question is, what happened in Venezuela? How did it get to this point? Well, here with us today to answer that question is a Venezuelan FUG and an outreach fellow at the Fund for American Studies, Jorge Galicia. Jorge, thank you so much for being here. No, thank you, Virginia. Thank you for an invitation. It's a honor.

So I would love to begin by just asking you to share a little bit of your own background. You actually grew up in Venezuela. What do you remember from living there? What was your childhood like in Venezuela? Yeah, that's a good question. I only arrived here to the States like three years ago, so almost my entire life. I spent it there in Venezuela. And, you know, I experienced the whole transition.

When I was a child, my childhood in Venezuela was pretty normal, pretty happy to be honest. I grew up having the latest versions of my favorite video games, good birthday parties every year when I was a child. You know, I could say I'd had a regular middle class life when I was a child in Venezuela. But then in the year 2014, probably, probably that's the year when we saw this huge transition in my life, that thing totally changed. You know, I started to see a lot of different problems in Venezuela. Like, for example, in my house, we stopped having constant water supply, scarcity of food. You needed to do, like, huge lines to get just a piece of bread. You know, electricity started to fail constantly, internet connection started to fail constantly.

Every single aspect of life, of, you know, of life, of living in Venezuela started to decline. And, you know, I went from being a happy kid of a middle-class family to being basically poor, you know. At some point, I even stopped eating as much as I was used to eat because we didn't have enough money to afford a lot of food. And even if we had scarcity in Venezuela was that big, that it was really hard at some point to get what you required. You know, in the year 2017, I actually stopped eating meat for a long period of time. We substitute it with grains and other different stuff that we could afford. But, you know, meat, all kind of meat was unavailable for me for that whole year. So prior to like 2014, you had never experienced hunger or, you know, your family, you know, really struggling to make ends meet.

No, yeah. Before that year, I honestly, neither me or my family imagined that something like that could ever happen to us because, as I said, we had a pretty decent life. We had our troubles as everybody else. But no, no, we had a good house. You know, my mom income was pretty good. I was a kid, but we never struggled that much until 2014. After this year, this is when the crisis actually hit us, you know, because I believe even before that year, a lot of people were already suffering. But in our case, this was the year when everything went south. And yes, I went from being a happy middle class boy to... to being poor, basically.

So take us back. What was happening in Venezuela at that time in the early 2000s? As you got into 2012, 13, 14, what was going on in your country? Yeah, well, you know, 2014, for me, was a year of the collapse. But, you know, everything, the reason of that was happening, you know, decades ago when Hugo Chavez actually took power. You know, he managed to, when he was in power, he managed to confiscate thousands of private industries within Venezuela. He confiscated the industry that used to provide water. He confiscated the industry that used to provide electricity for Venezuelans.

You know, stuff like he did during all these years before. So a lot of people actually saw this coming. You know, it was not surprised for a lot of people. But, well, the consequences of this politics, didn't arrive at least for my family until 2014. And, you know, this is exactly what I've been doing with the fund for American studies. With TIFAS, I've been traveling college campuses to give a historical review of, and to give an answer to that question of how Venezuela became what it is today.

How did we go from being one of the richest places on earth, basically, to one of the poorest nowadays and yeah this is thanks to socialist policies promoted by Hugo Chavez but not only by Hugo Chavez but because before Hugo Chavez we even had we even we started to lay a little bit with this socialist policies and this is something that the American audience need to also understand because you know a lot of progressive people here say something like no what we want to we want to do democratic socialism we don't want to do the kind of authoritarian socialism and Hugo Chavez did, but well, guess what, in Venezuela, at least in 75, this is when the oil industry in Venezuela was nationalized. This is, this was our major first step into socialism

that we ever gave, and this was under a vibrant democracy. So this was already democratic socialism somehow. And this move already paved the way to what we have today. So it is not accurate to say that the decline in Venezuela started with Hugo Chavez. It started actually way decades before. What were the promises that Chavez and the other government officials were making to the Venezuelan people? Well, the main promise, I would say, was equality for all Venezuelans. He promised that everybody could have exactly the same results in life, which is unnatural, of course. He did he also his campaigns were fueled by creating like creating hatred against the rich class, the top 1%. He made believe a lot of Venezuelans to, you know, he made them believe that the reason why they were poor was because there was this rich sector of the society that was taking advantage of them.

And a lot of people unfortunately believed this message. so a lot of, he created a lot of divisions within the country. So yes, you know, he basically decided to, he said that by confiscated private properties and private businesses of these top 1%, you know, Venezuelans were somehow going to improve their life. And of course, this was never the case. So as things started to decline, what, what were you experiencing on a day-to-day basis in Venezuela? Were you ever fearful for your own safety? Were your friends fearful? What were the conversations like that you were having with friends and family in the country as things were declining? Yeah, no. Of course, when this happened, I was still a teenager, you know, but me and my family

did see, you know, where the country was heading to. And I was extremely worried, even despite the fact that I was a teenager, I was so worried about my future. And actually, that's the reason why in the year 2014, when I started to experience all of this chaos around my life and I started to see the decline of my quality life, this is the year when I actually decided to step in and go into political activism. I joined the student movement of my university,

and I also joined a political party name Vente Venezuela. which is a classical liberal political party because I knew that the reason why my life was not doing so good was because of all of these socialist policies. And I decided to step in and try to fight again for recovering our democracy, recovering our republic, our freedoms, because Venezuela, even though it wasn't perfect, we used to have a much better country, right? And I wanted that to be the case again.

but yes because I saw all of these declines in my lifestyle I decided to step in and this actually brought me also some consequences because as you know we have a dictatorship there Maduro does not tolerate really well dissidentcy and well in the year 2017 I got in trouble with police because of my activism actually one of my best friends I cannot I don't know I shouldn't I don't I I cannot say his name for security reasons, but he was captured by police. And in the middle of the night, they broke into his house, without a warrant, without any kind of legality or due process, and they took him away. And, you know, when this happened, I, I panicked because he and I were part of the same team. And I knew that if the police knew about his location, they probably knew about mine as well.

So I needed to disappear. I went into hiding. I spent, like, a long period of time in high. at some religious place in Venezuela. You know, it was a pretty dramatic situation in my life. And this is, again, this is all thanks to all of the consequences that we suffer because of implementing these policies. Do you know what happened to your friend?

Oh yeah. Well, after three months, my friend was thankfully, thanks God released from prison. He spent almost three months in prison. And later, when he was released, he was released, he was under probation, he needed to go to court like every eight days to sign some crazy paper. But then, like I think two years after those events, he managed to escape the country. He escaped through the border to Colombia and now he's living a good life, I would

say, in Uruguay in South America. So I'm happy for him that he is already, you know, free. Yeah. It's good to hear that he's safe. So what was your journey to America? How did you ultimately come to the States? And what was that journey like? I, you know, after my friend was released, you know, people need to understand that in this year, 2017, there were millions of people in the streets of Venezuela protesting and demanding freedom. So, you know, even though I was, of course, persecuted and my friend actually confirmed

to me when we managed to meet again after these events that the police did ask for my, you know, my name did show up in the so-called investigations. But, you know, after he was released, I just decided to resume my ordinary life in Venezuela because there were millions of people doing exactly the same. And I knew I was never like a high-profile leader or something like that. So the police was never spent a lot of time just looking for one guy when there were millions on the streets of Venezuela doing exactly the same, right? However, I did decide to stay away from all of the activism because I really didn't want to go through the same all over again.

You know, especially because I was worried about my family, especially my mom. She's really overprotective and she almost lost her mind during this period of time. But well, thanks to this decision in the year 2018, I managed to finish my law degree in Venezuela. And after that, I applied to participate in a leadership program named Project Arizona, which is a project being held. at Arizona State University. Thanks God, I was elected to do that. And well, thanks to this, I was able to leave Venezuela and come here. And I was actually supposed to go back to Venezuela, but, you know, in the year 2019, thanks to the appearance and the assumption of Juan Guidoas as the legitimate president of Venezuela. And, you know, Venezuela, everybody was talking about

Venezuela during this year is a little bit similar to what's going on right now with Ukraine. And, well, So I started to receive also a lot of attention in Arizona, media invitations to speak about what's going on, students' groups at ASU wanted to know more. So I resumed my activism while I was here in the States, and I know for a fact that if I return to Venezuela under various these circumstances, my life is going to be in danger. And I decided to claim asylum. Is your family still in Venezuela? Half of them are, yeah. My mom is still there. My grandma, my cousin, my uncle, yeah.

half of them are. My dad and sisters, they live here in Miami, but, you know, my mom, my grandma, almost everybody else is still there. Okay. So as you travel around and speak to college students on campuses and various locations, what is your response to young people or really any American who might say, well, but, you know, what happened in Venezuela isn't representative of socialism and it's pure form. You can't really claim that that's socialism. What do you say to that? Well, I believe that what's going on in Venezuela is the most pure version of socialism.

We have, well, probably surpassed by Cuba, of course, but in our Western hemisphere, I don't think we have seen a better example of socialism than the one we saw in Venezuela. Like Hugo Chavez literally confiscated thousands of private industries within Venezuela. he confiscated, well, even before Hugo Chavez, we nationalized our oil industry. It is almost completely operated by the state. And you have to understand that more than 90% of our revenues as a country come from the oil industry. So the government was already controlling more than 90% of all of our revenue, right, as a nation.

So, yes, Venezuela is a really good example of socialism. and it is a really good example to explain why socialism actually doesn't work, right? And a lot of people like to talk about, I don't know, Norway or Sweden, but these are not actual examples of socialists. Actually, you have free market principles operating in the economies of all of these great countries. Even they actually have sometimes freer economies than the United States itself or at some cases, right? So it is not true to say that Venezuela is not a real example of socialism.

I'm sorry, but Hugo Chavez claimed to be a socialist, and everything he did was inspired by the Marxist doctrine, and now we're paying the consequences. What is the end goal of socialism? Well, that depends on who you ask. A lot of people who actually believe in this doctrine might say that, you know, they want to create a much equality. society, but I am not entirely convinced that people, especially politicians that promote this

doctrine actually believe in this. I believe that many of these people, what they really want to is to control society, to gain unlimited power and to gain just status and position. I believe this is all they want. Because at least, look, in Venezuela, do you believe that this chaos was like because of failure because they didn't know what they were doing. I don't think you can't, how you managed to fail that constantly every single year and get these horrible results and not, at some point, if you really have good intentions, at some point you might say like, hey, I think we're doing something wrong, we better change this or that, but no, they just went forward into the system.

So I think their goals was actually to make us poorer so they can control our control society easier. For example, in the year 2017, we had this problem because we were inviting society to join protesters to join the demonstrations. But the problem is, like, majority of Venezuelans were so miserable, so poor that they couldn't afford to spend a single day in, you know, going into a demonstration against the government or doing any kind of activism because they needed to spend that day doing a huge, line to get a, I don't know, a piece of bread or sometimes if the regime finds out that you are supporting demonstrations, they are going to stop delivering, I don't know, some medicine or something that you, I mean, they make you dependent on governments that you can, they can control you. And I feel like this was the end goal of Maduro and Hugo Chavez at the end. They wanted to controls in the easiest way possible.

And do you ever worry that what you saw happen so rapidly in Venezuela could happen in other Western countries even in the United States? Yeah, this is what I talk about in these presentations that I'm giving. It's not like I feel like the United States is condemned to be exactly like Venezuela, but I do see a lot of similarities. The biggest one I find is, you know, the levels of spending here in America and how hard it is for this country to actually try to bring back fiscal responsibility, right, to try to eventually balance the budget. I feel in Venezuela we struggle a lot with this same issue, especially during 75. You know, in 75, this is when the old industry was nationalized.

Venezuela started to receive a bunch of new resources. I mean, the government started to receive a bunch of new resources because of the nationalization. And they started to spend like crazy creating social programs, subsidies, all kind of different stuff, free help free, college for everybody, healthcare, free for everybody. I mean, they really started, at some point, Venezuela was called Venezuela Saudi for all of the revenue and all of the, the, the, the, the,

the expenses that we were having during this time, right? And, well, during these five years, 75 until the 80s, Venezuelans were used to this idea of living out of government assistance, but then when we started to see a decline in the oil prices, and this is when our problems began, because the government didn't find a way to stop spending as much as they were used to, and they started to bring money out of nowhere, were borrowed more money out of the international market, raised taxes.

So the vibrant Venezuela economy that we used to have basically came to an end and started to decline during the 80s. So again, what we're seeing right now in Venezuela is just a continuation process from the 80s until today. Because we never find a way to actually say we cannot afford this living anymore because it was politically not viable to just cut spending. Actually, at some point, in 89, Carlos Andres Perez, you know, a president of Venezuela, he did try to make some reforms that were actually pointing in the good direction. He tried to cut a lot of the subsidies and reduce a lot of the social programs. But the backlash from the population was so big that thousands of Venezuelans went to the street to protest, to rally against the government, to loot private businesses.

The chaos was so big that even the police was participating with the looters. So the government was forced to send military forces and a lot of people died. It was a really horrible scenario. And again, this is all because people really got used to this idea of, you know, just extending the hand and receiving something out of government, right? And I'm fearful that something like that might be already happening here. You know, all of this, you know, we hear a lot of Republicans complaining about the levels of spending and the deficit and that's okay.

but whenever they reach power, they realize that, well, it is not that simple to just start cutting things here and there, right? Because when they control the federal government, the spending keeps rising, the deficit keeps rising. So I don't know. I'm fearful that we might be already in that point where this is just a snowball that we can no longer stop and when it's going to be the end, right? Yeah. What do you think of President Joe Biden's approach to the Maduro regime? Well, I'm extremely worried about that situation. You know, Venezuela's war really hopeful about seeing some sort of liberation process under

the trauma administration, all of the sanctions we saw, all of the diplomatic pressure we saw. Actually, it did some minor, we saw some minor results, some members of the regime abandoned Maduro, some members of the military also abandoned Maduro. Of course, it was not near enough, but we were experiencing some kind of changes within Venezuela. But now it feels like all of these hard rhetoric against the dictatorship in Venezuela is now completely gone. We don't see the same pressure that we were seeing before under the Trump administration. And now all of these talks that we are seeing between Washington,

and Caracas to try to lift sanctions against the Venezuelan industry, something that completely, if that ever happens, my heart is going to be broken because I know that we're not going to get rid of Maduro anytime soon without American support. And if Maduro start to receive, if he started receiving, you know, revenue coming from these oil industries, he's going to be, again, stronger than ever. And this money is not going to go to, I don't know, to regular Venezuelans to help them improve their ordinary lack. This is just going to go to the military, to acquire new equipment, to make it easier to repress society even for the right.

So I'm deeply concerned. I hope this talks, I mean, I hope that we don't see any kind of new deal within the American states and the Venezuelan dictatorship because I feel that that's going to. to be the end for our cause. And my dream is to return to Venezuela. Even though I love America, I love all of the experiences I have here in this beautiful country, I don't feel yet like this is actually my home. My home is still there in Venezuela,

and I want to be able to eventually return. And I don't feel like I'm heading to a situation where that's going to be possible with this new administration, right? How can we follow follow your work, Jorge. You are on the forefront of this issue and we want to keep up with what you're doing. Well, yeah. You can always follow me on social media. That's going to be at Jorge Galicia 95 on Twitter and Instagram. And listen, if you have a request, if you are in need of some speaker to speak about these very same issues, you know, I'm available. This is my work with

the Fund for American Studies. They are going to send me whenever I'm requested basically for free. They're going to cover all of the expenses of my travel and fees or whatever and all you need to do is find me an audience and a good place to speak and a projector and stuff like this and that's going to be it. So I'm more than happy to contribute with the debate whenever you need me. Of course I usually speak at colleges but I could to speak in anywhere where these kind of messages needed. So, yeah. Excellent. All right. Thank you so much for your time.

We truly appreciate it. Thank you, Virginia. It was an honor. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. As always, you can find the Daily Signal podcast on your listening app of choice. That's including Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave us a review at a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and spread the word. others to subscribe. Thanks so much for listening and we'll be back with you all tomorrow.

The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. The executive producers are Rob Blewey and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Doug Blair. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney and John Pop. For more information, please visitdailySignal.com.