With regard to October 27 being the centenary of the birth of Carlos Andrés Pérez, those of us who knew him and accompanied him in his management are reliving the days of folly and political myopia that put an end to his second administration to open the doors to destructive populism. Those were the days when the leadership of Venezuela preferred to make democracy collapse rather than assume the responsibility of abandoning rent-seeking in order to join in the creation of wealth and the deepening of democracy.
Those were the days when Latin America seemed to have come of age. With the sole exception of Cuba, the entire continent flew the flags of democracy and all nations had put their houses in order after the cyclone of debt that engulfed the region in the 1970s and 1980s. For the first time in their entire history, the nations of Latin America had almost simultaneously placed development above ambitions for power. And they all shared a vision of the transformative power of free trade.
In this context, Carlos Andrés Pérez devoted himself to the task of inserting Venezuela into the Latin American transforming current. It was the agenda of rationality. The reason indicated that development was unattainable without fiscal discipline; defense of the rule of law; economic freedom, substantial improvement of public services and competition.
This agenda, however, was a declaration of war against the vested interests around the political institutions of Venezuela. Heiresses of the Spanish Middle Ages promoted throughout the independent life the creation by the state of artificial monopolies to facilitate the extraction of rent. And the entire society derived its livelihood from rentier operations.
Hence, a program that promoted the creation of wealth and made room for economic competition was seen as a projectile launched against the waterline of a system through which businessmen did not compete; politicians did not work; the military didn’t fight and the universities didn’t produce concepts worthy of being cited in the world’s citation indexes.
Carlos Andres Perez’s program sought to put an end to the medieval culture of rent-seeking and plant in its place the plants of individual freedom and the creation of wealth.
The counteroffensive of the vested interests was not long in coming.
Taking advantage of the disappointment that the people felt with democracy as a consequence of the lack of economic progress that had characterized the lost decade and the expansion of corruption, the institutional leaders of Venezuela behind the project of getting rid of the leader who promoted the change. And to the extent that this popular unwillingness surfaced in the polls, the elites began to use the argument to create a true goal that placed the people of Venezuela as the protagonist of the counter-reform. It was essential to preserve the status quo that prevailed before the debt crisis because it guaranteed control of the economy and, by doing so, political power.
And we begin to observe unnatural alliances. The Communist Party of Venezuela, for example, opposing the financial reform that sought to place banking under the control of effective regulatory bodies. The Venezuelan businessmen who for years had raised the flags of free trade opposing the country’s entry into the GATT. Both united in denouncing government corruption that could never be proven because it was a cabinet populated by young talent without ties to political parties and without any interest in a political career after the government experience that was seen in Weberian terms.
And those sands brought the mud that we live in today because they opened the door to two enemies of freedom. A domestic one represented by the interests of rentiers who preferred to open the door to populism to expand freedom. Another foreigner who for many years had contemplated the idea of using Venezuela as a financing platform for his revolutionary delirium, and between the two of them they managed to defeat Carlos Andres Perez and bury Venezuela.
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