The New Yorker Radio Hour - Nicolás Maduro on the Brink of Dictatorship

Episode Date: December 19, 2017

Nicolás Maduro was an unlikely successor to Venezuela’s popular and charismatic Hugo Chavez. And, since his election, the country has been wracked with devastating food shortages, a breakdown of ordinary services and medical care, and rampant violence. But, as Maduro sees it, the real problem is his political opponents, and he has taken steps to secure control over all the branches of government, in order to establish a de-facto dictatorship. The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson was recently granted a rare interview with the Venezuelan President, who told him of his country’s economic relationships with Russia and China. Anderson tells Dorothy Wickenden that he came away from the conversation with a renewed sense of the need for greater American engagement in Venezuela. “It is going through the sewer on our watch,” Anderson says. Plus, a visit to the library with Cristina Henriquez. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is a group observatory. Straight of the block for West Boulevard and make that right. They didn't break that, but they have pretty good access to those people. They're going to subconsciously mocked that lineage. So that's happening. It seems like an incredible story here on many fronts. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Given the events of this year, we could all be forgiven if we haven't been paying as much attention to what's going on overseas as we should. But if you're following the world news carefully, you already know that what's going on in Venezuela is just this side of apocalyptic. For Venezuelans, of course, most of all,

but it may well have repercussions here in the United States. While oil prices were high, Venezuela's socialist economy under Hugo Chavez seemed to be booming. But Chavez died in 2013, just as oil prices were falling. It was left to his successor, Nicholas Maduro, to deal with the fallout. Now, food shortages are common, medical care and utilities are precarious, crime and violence are rampant. The entire country is a mess. Donald Trump even suggested there might be U.S. military action to bring Venezuela under control. And while he probably didn't mean it, that kind of threat might help drive.

Venezuela toward alliances with Russia and China. The New Yorkers John Lee Anderson has reported from Latin America for decades, and he recently was granted a very rare interview with Nicholas Maduro. John Lee spoke about it with Dorothy Wickenden, who's the executive editor of the New Yorker. He doesn't often give interviews, and he obviously had, he wanted to spin you as an American. So tell us how that conversation went. So I know Maduro. I've known him for nearly a decade.

And I knew Chavez from the beginning of his presidency in 1999. I'm a known person to them. And I've both written for the New Yorker pieces that they liked and that they didn't like. In the course of time, I think they've come to see me as someone who's balanced. I think that what triggered the decision to give me an interview was Trump's threat of military action against Maduro and his regime in early August of this year. We have many options for Venezuela. This is our neighbor. This is, you know, we're all over the world.

And we have troops all over the world in places that are very, very far away. Venezuela is not very far away. And the people are suffering and they're dying. We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option if necessary. It was a mistake. When the mistakes of Trump's government are reckoned with, the declaration and military threat against Venezuela will be noted. It will stay with him all his life.

It's interesting to listen to the two of them. They're almost two sides of the same coin. You've got him on the left and you've got Donald Trump on the right. And each of them is very good at going after his opponents. That's right. That's right. I mean, you know, he says, look, I don't have any problem with Donald Trump. You know, he is what he is.

The American system has finally succumbed to its worst elements, the lobbyists, the business interest, blah, blah, blah, blah. But look, I'm a grown-up in our – and this is a big boy's game in a big world. You know, I'm willing to sit down and talk. There's no reason to go to war, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was bluster, but it was canny bluster. Let's go back just for a moment and talk about him as the, almost as the anointed heir of Chavez, and certainly it's the way that he tries to cast himself.

From a personality and leadership standpoint, Hugo Chavez was, without any doubt, the strongest, most powerful and greatest leader that Venezuela has had since the Liberators. A humble and simple man, a man of the people who, thanks to his military background, his military values and honor, knew how to embody, how to rediscover the ideals of Simone Bolivar. Now, it has to be said, despite that overheated rhetoric,

you know, Chavez was democratically elected. He repeatedly stood for elections, referendums. He changed the country's constitution, according to majority votes and so on. Now, right towards the end, Chavez had been suffering from cancer in December of 2012. He did a live broadcast from Midef, Flores Palace, in the same room where I interviewed Maduro and said, you know, my cancer's back.

I'm going to have to go to Cuba for treatment. If anything should happen to me, I want Nicholas Maduro, who is seated to his left, to be my successor. And he disappeared, you know, he went to Cuba, and within the next few months, he died. He was never seen in the public again. And there was, you know, Nicolas Maduro, his erstwhile foreign minister, very much a kind of a protege, never out front and center alongside this incredibly charismatic figure of Chavez. And but he had to, they had to hold the elections again, which he won with a way for thin majority. So he came to power in 2013, pretty much almost immediately after Chavez done.

Literally within a month. So Maduro took power in 2003. with, you know, a real question mark hanging over his legitimacy. You know, Chavez had a huge and devoted following, almost feverish following. Maduro was always a little bit, you know, he was definitely a deputy, and now suddenly he was trying to fill Chavez's shoes. He did so awkwardly at best in that period, and he was ridiculed for it. You know, he said at one point that Chavez had come to him in the form of a little bird. And then a year later, the oil prices, which had been at an all-time high in the world for, you know, the previous several years, bringing in a trillion dollars to Venezuela, start to plummet.

And they go from $120 to something like 30, you know. It's just the bottom fell out. And compounding matters. In December of 2015, they have legislative elections for their National Assembly, what we would call the Congress. And the opposition for the first time in all of the years of the United States. Chavismo, in other words, since 1999, took a majority. Things reached ahead early this year when the Supreme Court announced that it was wanted to dissolve the National Assembly.

The country erupted in protests and demonstrations which lasted from March until the end of July. In the course of that time, Maduro began talking about a constituent assembly which would replace the National Assembly. That both compounded the situation of volatility and polarization, caused even greater violence to erupt on the streets. Every day you had National Guardsmen battling it out with young protesters. Some of them throwing Molotov cocktails for the most part, throwing rocks or yelling. They were shooting tear gas and live ammunition.

There were deaths every day. And, you know, Maduro insisted on this constituent assembly. The opposition said this was a, you know, this was a hijacking of and an end to the democracy that he was seeking dictatorial powers to get rid of the National Assembly and replace it with this parallel structure. And that effectively killed off the National Assembly and represented the end of any sort of checks and balances on Maduro's power. John Lee, is this what a country looks like when a dictatorship forms,

essentially when democracy dies? Something like this, maybe. But it's not only Venezuela. We're seeing this around the world where, you know, we started calling them authoritarian democracies when we saw this trend by presidents in getting constitutional assemblies to perpetuate term limits or get rid of them. So you have a trend around the world towards authoritarianism. And in Venezuela, you had a very effective dictatorship in the 40s and 50s that military dictatorship,

all of the big public works projects were done then. And then you had 40 years of laissez-affaire democracy and a lot of corruption preceding Chavez. There's not a deep-seated faith or time on the ground experience with effective democracy. There's not a notion, there's not a real understanding of democracy. So to ascribe what's taking place in Venezuela as an end to democracy and a beginning of dictatorship, I don't think quite defines it either. It's a mixture of democratic rhetoric and revolutionary intent and dictatorial DNA in a way. They say there's a dictatorship in Venezuela, a strange dictatorship where people have broad liberties, where the people go out to vote at least once a year, where the people choose their leaders freely with direct voting. secret voting, where there is an educational system that is open, diverse.

Venezuela has a democratic society in revolution. But he told you he's been really lenient toward the opposition. That's right, no, and he says that they need to, in the future, they need to act with more firmness. If in the United States, the political opposition movements to the government, government to the system were to launch a campaign like the one the Venezuelan opposition led against the Venezuelan democratic government this year, all would be sent to the electric chair. No one would be saved. Because nations have norms, rules, laws, and all nations have a right to defend themselves.

Right, so this is Maduro the tough guy. He's saying, look, you know, we had to go through a lot of pain and violence this year, attempted coups, and the people who were burned, like they were burned by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. You know, there was a Chavista kid who was burned to death in one of these things. He said, that's not going to happen again in Venezuela. And if the opposition tries to create these kinds of disturbances again, they're going to be hurt very badly, much worse than they were this time. Well, and now his face with sanctions.

How worried is he about that? Well, they're worried about the sanctions. It's limiting their ability to maneuver. But not only did Maduro tell me that, you know, whatever the Americans do to us, there are still countries out there that want to do business with us and have friendly relations with us. And he named Russia, China, and India. Fortunately, Venezuela has good relations with very powerful countries like China, Russia, India.

And we have been able to grow investments in the oil field, in the energy field, with the most important energy industries in the world. And an American official separately also said to me that, you know, this is a paraphrasing of what he said. He said, you know, we don't have any tools in the tool chest anymore to do. deal with Venezuela because, you know, Russia appears to want to continue to bail them out, and China may too. This is not the Venezuela of 99. It's not the Venezuela of 2002. The Venezuela of 2017 is a Venezuela that stands on its own two feet.

This has been a situation that's actually been in the making for, you know, the better part of the past 17 years, a little longer. And so now, in lieu of a decent and healthy American relationship, yes, you have Russia, you have China. The real question here is, what does the U.S. do about that? Because Venezuela was the model American democracy in the region for decades, because it has gone off the cliff. We're also allowing countries with whom we compete and in some cases have hostile relationships, namely Russia and China, to pick up the slack and to gain influence where we are rescinding our own. You have an increasingly hostile government there, and you have a hostile government here without a middleman playing any significant role that could bring the two parts together.

I think it's worrisome. We don't need a Venezuela to become like Cuba was in 1961 or 62. We should be engaging with Venezuela because it is going through the sewer on our watch. And it's right here. So right now, it's a good opportunity to tackle this problem. We're still buying Venezuela's oil. In a sense, we're keeping it alive while hurling invective at it. John Lee, you talked to him for a long time.

Was there any point at which he was actually honest with you about what is really going on in Venezuela? Well, I think right at the end of our talk, you know, I asked him, I said, do you want a one-party state like Cuba? Is that what you want? Is that what you want in this revolution? He said, no, I want a democratic country with an opposition, but an opposition that doesn't take its orders from Washington. He said, yeah, they all want me to leave, but who would sit in this chair? If I get up, who sits here? And, you know, he's got a point, actually. You can find John Lee Anderson's reporting on Nicholas Maduro

and the State of Democracy in Venezuela, such as it is at New YorkerRadio.org. We also heard from Dorothy Wickendon of the New Yorker. We're going to wrap things up today with a trip to the library in the company of Christina Enriquez. She's best known for the novel, The Book of Unknown Americans,

and she's published a number of stories in The New Yorker. Enriquez was born in Delaware and spent summers growing up in Panama. But she came of age as a writer in Chicago, or strictly speaking, just a little west of the Chicago City line. We are in front of the Hinsdale Public Library. It's a red brick building with sort of, I guess you would call this, a portico maybe. It's a very sort of picturesque little place.

and usually there's a line of people waiting outside to get in in the morning and there's these steps that go up to the front door and I walk in the front door and it used to be that I would get a study room when I was here so I would come to the information desk. They kind of know me now so they would see me coming and they would just not even have to ask and say oh you need a study room which was sort of great

so you come in and there's just a big open space there is a shelf right in front of you with books that are on hold. Those are all the books that you can get through inner library alone, which is magical. And then there's a new fiction shelf over to your right. And then on your left, there's the checkout desk. Sometimes I came on Thursday and I just watched people. There's a guy I know. I recognize him.

He's always using the computer here. You know, there's another guy who comes in and I know where he likes to sit, which is back in a corner in a particular spot. and I realized it because I tried to sit there one time, and then he came back and looked at me. And so I leave it alone now on purpose, even though it's a really great spot. I tried to write a story about him one time.

But maybe he recognizes me the way I recognize him. There's the crazy lady who tried to steal my seat one time. That's what he might think. So if the study rooms are booked, this is where I go into the quiet reading room. Is that work? And then I just sit in here. You can't talk.

You can hear the trains from town, but that's about it. There was a girl in here the other day who I thought was violating the rule she got on her phone. And I at first was sort of giving her angry looks, you know, like, what are you doing? And then all of a sudden she said, how long ago? And I sort of just instantly realized that somebody had died. and she had just missed it. She maybe had been in a hospital room and had left and had missed it. And then she started crying.

And then I was like feeling very bad about my angry look. So I got up and I came out of the room and got tissues off of the information desk. And I just went back in and put the tissues down next to her. So we'll go back down to the fiction, which is sort of my bread and butter. the place that makes me the most excited. I mean, I love this, because look, you look down here and I'm like, oh, here's this Alice Monroe book that I also have on my shelf at home, and here's Nami Moon's book, and she's a Chicago author. So it feels, you know, like you're seeing friends when you walk down the shelves

and the aisles, and you see all the books. So I just like doing that. There's something nourishing. Oh, here's Maley Maloy, Liars and Saints. That's a good book. Sometimes I feel weirdly like the universe is speaking to me, like that I find the things that I was meant to find at that moment, but like I needed in my life and didn't realize I needed, especially in terms of writing. Well, let's find Juno Diaz. That's one of my favorites.

So we have to find D. And we'll turn around. Let's see. Juno Diaz, this is how you lose her. which is a good one. My favorite Juno Diaz book is Drown, which is his first short story collection. I think part of the reason that I've loved certain authors

is because they've given me permission to do something I didn't know I was allowed to do. You can just write the way you would talk. GRI through H-O-L, I guess that means I'll be over here. Sometimes I'm next to Ernest Hemingway. Aha. The Book of Unknown Americans. There it is.

In hardcover with the library dust jacket, which has that satisfying crinkle. For a long time when I lived here, the librarians were the only people who knew my name. They were the only friends that I had in this town. There was a librarian who used to work here named Michaela, who I just loved. And I remember after the Book of Americans was on a few lists,

she said something about it. And then I was so nerdy because there was a list. that she didn't say. She was like, oh, it was on the Washington Post, and it was a New York Times notable book of the year. And then she sort of stopped talking, and I jumped in, like, I was a little boastful about it. And I was like, and it was an Amazon top 10 book of the year.

I wanted to, like, impress her because, like, the librarians to me are the heroes. They're my heroes. Yeah, what would we do without them? Your attention, please. The library will be closed. 15 minutes. If you need to call for a ride, please do so at this time. Thank you. Christina Enriquez, at the Public Library in Hinsdale, Illinois, just outside of Chicago.

And that's it for today. Thanks for listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Please join us next week for some holiday surprises. See you then. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riann and Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Vrelman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix,

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