#
Or was it really good fortune?
#
A classic modern case of the Dutch disease is Venezuela.
#
Large reserves of oil were discovered there more than a century ago in 1914,
#
and a relatively poor country, suddenly sitting on humongous oil reserves, became quite rich as the years went by.
#
But what this also did was that it lowered the incentives for the governments that ran the country
#
to learn the good habits that take a nation towards prosperity.
#
There was so much oil wealth that governments quickly developed patterns of patronage and cronyism.
#
Bad governance and poor economic policies did not have the cost they should have
#
because there was always so much oil wealth floating around.
#
In a situation like this, sooner or later something always has to give.
#
Venezuela is now going through an enormous humanitarian crisis
#
caused by bad economics but enabled by the bonanza of oil.
#
I'll explore some of that in this episode, but before I do, here's a thought.
#
Does the same process by which too much of a good thing can be bad for countries,
#
can it also be bad for individuals?
#
Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
#
The 19th century Venezuelan hero Simon Bolivar once said,
#
To understand revolutions and their participants, we must observe them at close range
#
and judge them at great distance.
#
My guest today is Alexandra Ulmer who spent a few years studying Venezuela at close range
#
as an oil correspondent for Reuters based in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela,
#
but is now based in Bombay at some distance from Venezuela.
#
I asked her to join me on this show to chat not just about Venezuela,
#
but also the craft of news reporting as the title of this episode, Reporting Venezuela, indicates.
#
But before we begin our conversation, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
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Welcome to the scene in The Unseen, Alexandra.
#
Thank you, Amit. It's such a treat to be here.
#
So tell me about how you became a journalist. What drove you towards journalism?
#
I had always had two twin passions. One of them was current affairs and the other one was writing.
#
And for some strange reason, I never really thought to put them together until I was at university
#
and I started working on the school paper.
#
And I remember not being able to sleep the night before my first article,
#
which was something very mundane and interesting, came out.
#
And that's when I knew I was hooked.
#
So where did you go from there?
#
I started as an intern with Reuters in Buenos Aires.
#
I was fascinated with Latin America and wanted to get going there.
#
Then went on to be a stringer for Reuters again in Chile, just on the other side of the Andes,
#
where I did a lot of reporting on economics and mining and learned a lot more about how the world goes around,
#
but was frankly a little bored as a journalist.
#
And then Venezuela came to the fore and about four years ago I moved to Caracas.
#
And what's the food chain of journalism like?
#
Like you begin as an intern, then you're a stringer, then you're a full-fledged reporter.
#
How does the job description change? What are the kind of things that you did on the job?
#
So as an intern in Buenos Aires, I had the best of all worlds.
#
I was able to go out and cover fun, but also fundamental events like the legalization of gay marriage in Argentina.
#
And I wrote soft features on being a vegetarian in Buenos Aires, the meat capital of the world.
#
I've never been as happy as I am in India.
#
Thank you. It's very refreshing after the barbecues of Latin America.
#
I'd trade places with you any day.
#
Well, then if you're a meat lover, Argentina is the place.
#
And as you grow up the food chain as a stringer, I had a lot of responsibilities for somewhat mindless tasks
#
like at the time covering the local stock market, running out to press conferences,
#
learning the ropes, which is essential and is what you build on to become a better journalist.
#
And what are the sort of values that you picked up in any good news organization like Reuters obviously is
#
in terms of the kind of journalism you do? What's the rigor that you have to follow?
#
It's incredibly rigorous. It's a fantastic school of journalism.
#
It's daunting because you're learning on the spot and journalism in that sense is much more of a craft
#
than something you learn within an established school or institution.
#
So you learn to be rigorous with your facts. You learn to check with sources.
#
You learn to question everything. You learn to be fair.
#
Of course, all these issues are deeply philosophical and we can debate them at great length
#
because there's no perfect recipe for it.
#
But especially I think as a foreign news outlet in countries where sometimes the local media is coward
#
or doesn't have the resources to cover something as well as it would have otherwise,
#
you become a frame of reference. So there's great responsibility on having smart, articulate, fair coverage.
#
And one of the very clear demarcations in foreign media is the line between news and opinion,
#
which sometimes gets muddy in India. And you were of course a reporter all along.
#
So how do you sort of get to that level of objectivity where you sort of keep your feelings
#
about what you're reporting out of your reporterage itself?
#
Do you have to make a special effort to do that? Can you go too far?
#
I think you always have to be careful. I think in some ways it's easier when you're not reporting on your own country
#
because you're more detached from the situation. But being fair also entails portraying the situation accurately.
#
One of the old adages in journalism is if one person says it's raining outside,
#
the other person says it's a beautiful, glorious day and you should go to the beach,
#
your job isn't to portray both sides. Your job is to open the curtains and tell readers what's going on.
#
Now that's a clean-cut example. In the real world, it can get muddier than that.
#
But I think trying to find the sweet spot between being fair to the different sides and ideas involved,
#
but also not just being a robot who's throwing out the facts coming from different sides
#
and actually assessing how the situation has evolved, how politicians or whoever's claims stake up
#
to what they've actually done is in essence an essential part of our job.
#
In a sense, like you said, the example you gave is clear-cut, but when it comes to something like covering a country like Venezuela,
#
for example, where the economics is very complicated, the politics is very complicated, society is complicated,
#
then does it involve a case of just having to learn a lot of things before you can even begin to report?
#
I think so, but I think in a place like Venezuela, which essentially has become devoid of fact, it's very difficult to do that.
#
I'll give you an example. Venezuela has rampant corruption.
#
We know that is one of the fundamental reasons this government has been so inept and has basically left Venezuela penniless.
#
For a long time, it was very difficult for us to say that.
#
We knew money was disappearing, but if you don't have the proof, you don't write it if you're a rigorous journalist.
#
Of course, now there are multiple cases across the United States and in Europe where a single businessman has been accused
#
and has pleaded guilty to embezzling, say, a billion dollars.
#
That gives you an idea of the scale of graft we're talking about.
#
But for a long time, it can be frustrating because to be a rigorous reporter, you can't just throw around baseless claims,
#
but that also means you're missing a fundamental part of the story that you're struggling to tell the readers,
#
and I think that's the deepest frustration there can be.
#
Yeah, because there must be times when you absolutely know something but you cannot say it,
#
and you have to kind of get there from other places.
#
So before you went to Venezuela, did you want to go to Venezuela or was it something that writers offered you the opportunity,
#
and then you looked into it and said, huh, that's interesting.
#
No, I had been fascinated by Venezuela. I'd mesmerized for a long time.
#
I had gotten a student grant when I was at university to do a project on political street art there,
#
as one does when one is a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed university student.
#
And I'd spent two weeks in the country and had been reading obsessively ever since,
#
but I was very deterred by the security situation there and never thought I could actually live there
#
because it was too dangerous and scared me.
#
I went there as a student in 2011 and moved there in 2014 after going for a bull stint
#
and seeing that I could live there despite the crime concerns.
#
So when you started reporting in Venezuela, how easy was access?
#
Well, access on the street to people was wonderfully easy.
#
I mean, Venezuelans are expansive, fun, Caribbean, people who love to chat.
#
So after Chile, which is a much kind of more dour, closed society,
#
it was a treat for me to just go out and be able to interview people in the supermarket lines
#
and have them genuinely tell me about their lives and their sufferings because they wanted to.
#
They wanted to be heard, and that's the way they are.
#
Conversely, the government is fairly shut off.
#
At the time, we still had the occasional press conference.
#
Sometimes they would answer questions, but it was a kind of situation where GDP, inflation,
#
crime data, emigration data, none of that was being published anymore.
#
As you mentioned at the start of the podcast, I covered oil,
#
and that meant covering the big omnipresent state oil company.
#
I spent four years in Venezuela, and I genuinely don't think they ever answered one of my questions.
#
When you're writing a story, you send in a request for comment by phone or by email
#
to give the person concerned a chance to respond, and I never got a single answer to my emails.
#
I mean, it's that kind of black hole situation you're talking about.
#
So it forces you to be a kind of creative, enterprising reporter to get to the stories,
#
but it always means you're missing a significant chunk of data and the government's side.
#
At the end of the day, it's self-defeating for the government because they don't speak out, right?
#
Of course, this trust towards the media is an attitude that really came out much earlier
#
from the time Chavez took over, because like a lot of populists,
#
he kind of looked at the media as part of the elites who were antagonistic to him,
#
and he tried to sort of control communications and all of that,
#
parallels of which we see in many other countries.
#
So tell me a little bit about how Venezuela got here starting from before Maduro,
#
like when Maduro was president, starting from maybe even before Chavez.
#
Like a lot of people lay the blame quite correctly for what's going on to the bad economic policies
#
in Chavez's time, which have continued with Maduro.
#
But Venezuela was both oil rich and in deep trouble a lot before that.
#
It's been a turbulent history. Tell me a little bit about that.
#
Absolutely. I mean, it's been a cycle of booms and busts basically due to the oil barrel.
#
So Venezuela was by some metrics one of the richest countries in Latin America
#
where this elite that was filthy rich would travel to Miami and famously say,
#
give me two of everything, it's so cheap.
#
Of course, that fueled a lot of inequality and discontent
#
and a sense that the political establishment was basically two political parties
#
that would rotate power through democratic elections,
#
but rotate power amongst themselves wasn't representative.
#
And there had been sporadic violence and turbulence in the country for a long time.
#
Chavez, who came from a poor family from the Savannah lowlands,
#
really spoke to the people who felt marginalized by the system.
#
And because of it, as well as an oil rich country, there's this idea that we are a rich country.
#
We should not be poor. This something has gone wrong and someone is to blame for it.
#
And Chavez diagnosed that problem brilliantly, as many populists do, and was elected in 1998.
#
There was immediate, violent opposition to him from the elite in media and politics, etc.
#
And that culminated in a series of marches in 2002 that led to a brief coup against him
#
where he was deposed for three days.
#
It remains a very complex, fiercely argued about episode about exactly what happened to him.
#
Ultimately, he was reinstated by military loyalists.
#
And after that, some would say would became much more paranoid about any attempts against him
#
and clamp down much more on institutions, the press, and any opposition he could see.
#
In fact, there are memorable reports that during the coup, he chatted with a hero of his, Fidel Castro, on the phone.
#
And Castro told him that, you know, whatever you do, you don't surrender.
#
And it's interesting to me how, you know, obviously from 58 to 98, you had this sort of kleptocracy,
#
this oligarchy of these two parties, which kind of controlled the economy in the system of patronage
#
where the oil wealth was sort of, and which was also incredibly corrupt.
#
And Chavez detected that correctly and got to power.
#
But what I always find kind of interesting is that for the first five or six years of his time,
#
he professed himself to be non-ideological, where he said, I'm not a communist, I'm not a capitalist.
#
Even though, I mean, he had communist influences.
#
He was a big fan of Marx and various other communist thinkers right from his student days.
#
You know, he said, I believe in the third way, which was, you know, perhaps a reference to Tony Blair's third way.
#
But after 2002 and then 2004, what seemed to happen is that he hardened enormously
#
and spoke about 21st century socialism and went in all the directions that he went in.
#
So do you think that sort of change in direction came from political imperatives?
#
That's a very interesting question.
#
I undoubtedly think that he felt very vulnerable after the coup and after being reinstated.
#
And his instinct was to try to therefore control whatever he could.
#
And the influence of Fidel Castro and other politicians led to him pushing for much more control over the economy, especially.
#
And he enacted a series of policies that would really be the downfall of Venezuela ultimately,
#
namely imposing currency controls in 2003, which is what led to the mind boggling distortions we see today in Venezuela
#
that are to blame for much of the current crisis.
#
And yes, I think he's a dominating personality and he was a dominating politician.
#
He was a dominating president and his instinct was to control.
#
And that kind of became verse A because he's got Castro advising him on one side and on the other side.
#
I mean, the reason I sort of thought of that was when I was kind of reading through all of this,
#
one parallel that came to mind was our own earlier Prime Minister Indira Gandhi,
#
who took over the Congress party in the mid 60s,
#
but she was fighting against the established order in her own party.
#
And to distinguish herself from them, she took this populist socialist line
#
and did a lot of things which were economically disastrous,
#
but which if you understand the political imperatives and a need to create a brand for herself
#
and distinguish yourself from them, kind of made sense.
#
And you know, the other part of, I mean, a lot about Chavez reminds me of Narendra Modi as well.
#
And the other part of his rise to power and what happened when he got there was
#
it's kind of like a dog chasing a car and catching the car and not knowing what to do
#
because he was incredibly good at campaigning. He had no idea whatsoever of how to govern.
#
Interesting analogy. Yes, I mean, Chavez at heart was a showman, right?
#
And he had the whole country or much of the country behind him.
#
The masses loved him. It was like religious fervor going to his rallies.
#
It was unlike anyone, anything anyone had seen before.
#
And when you had that kind of unquestioning love,
#
kind of his worst instincts were unleashed, right?
#
And Venezuela was a democracy, but it didn't have entirely solid institutions.
#
And when Chavez was in power from 1999 to 2013, he had plenty of time to dig away at them.
#
But I think, yes, his instinct was always to campaign and he would always boast
#
we've had more elections than anywhere else in the world.
#
How can you criticize us for not being a democracy?
#
But that's what he reveled in, right? And that's what he loved, not the day to day nitty gritty.
#
And that tendency was exacerbated by the fact that during 10 years of his governance, you had an oil bonanza.
#
You didn't have to worry about the nitty gritty. The oil money was just gushing in.
#
And this happened because 9-11 happened and therefore the oil spigot slowed down in the Middle East
#
and Venezuela was suddenly, you know, much in demand.
#
And also he kind of revived the OPEC at this time, right?
#
Yes, yes. He was instrumental in that.
#
And I think the fact that the oil prices shut up was the saving grace.
#
I mean, politics is also about luck and Chavez was an incredibly lucky politician.
#
Obviously, you don't want to be morbid.
#
But for instance, he also happened to die right before the economy took a turn for the worst.
#
So even his exit was perfectly timed in terms of his legacy in the eyes of his supporters, right?
#
In fact, just looking through his career, I mean, there are various parts where he got so lucky.
#
For example, he almost didn't get through into the army because he failed his chemistry exam, right?
#
And had that not happened, the subsequent events wouldn't have worked out the way they did.
#
That while in the army for years, he wanted to overthrow the government,
#
not because he had anything against the government or any particular precedent, but he just wanted to get to power.
#
And he was planning a coup as administrations changed one by one.
#
He is single-mindedly planning a coup for the sake of power itself.
#
And, you know, even when he, you know, he attempted a coup in 1992 and he failed,
#
and he would have disappeared into oblivion and into prison.
#
He had the powers that be, not decided to put him on television,
#
so he could tell his co-conspirators to surrender.
#
And he suddenly became a media star after that.
#
Absolutely. I mean, he capitalized on those few minutes on television and said,
#
we failed for now, which became the slogan that everyone repeated.
#
And then he was pardoned, of course, and got out and became a political figure in his own right.
#
So, yes, from the chemistry exam to being pardoned, the stars aligned for him.
#
And it's interesting how, you know, people close to him talk about
#
how his personality changed so suddenly at two different parts of his life.
#
One is, once he comes on television and he becomes a superstar,
#
and he literally becomes a sex symbol, women everywhere are dying to have his baby, so to say, as one biographer put it.
#
And the other, when he actually comes to power, that, you know, when he comes to power
#
and he enters Mira Flores, I think, the presidential palace,
#
he just becomes a completely different person, and his allies from the period before that
#
eventually all get disillusioned one by one and move on.
#
And he ends up surrounding himself with yes men.
#
And he ends up surrounding himself with yes men.
#
And, you know, if you look at Maduro today, just reading the biographies of Chavez,
#
the one thing that kind of struck me is that the only extraordinary thing about Maduro
#
is that he never said no to Chavez, that he would just, he was almost like, you know,
#
like, again, Indira Gandhi said about a former president of ours, Gyanis El Singh,
#
before he became president, that if I ask him to clean my toilets, he will.
#
And you get the same kind of sense about sort of Chavez and Maduro.
#
And that's really the reason Maduro kind of got to power to begin with.
#
Yes. I mean, he describes himself as the son of Chavez.
#
He stakes his entire legacy on Chavez.
#
Right. So again, extraordinary luck for Maduro as well.
#
Tell me a little bit about the confluence of oil and politics through the decades in Venezuela.
#
Like, obviously, they discover oil, they're very lucky.
#
Then they come to these deals where, for example, these foreign companies first come
#
and they start taking the oil and then they have these 50-50 arrangements where they share 50% of the profits with the state.
#
And then that tilts further to the state.
#
And then it's Venezuela which actually forms OPEC.
#
So all the power goes to the sort of – that actually pushes for the formation of OPEC.
#
So all the power goes to the states rather than the companies.
#
And then gradually that, in the mid-70s, leads to the formation of the state oil company, PVDSA.
#
So tell me a little bit about the role oil played in politics through the decades.
#
Yes. Well, oil is indistinguishable from Venezuela.
#
And the Venezuelan economy has always been hugely dependent on oil.
#
You mentioned the Dutch disease and that impeded Venezuela from having enough efficient industry and agriculture,
#
although it did have those sectors in the 70s and 80s.
#
But Chavez's big criticism was that the foreign companies were getting too sweet a deal in Venezuela under the former governments.
#
And so very quickly, when he comes to power, he understands that PVDSA, the state oil company, will be crucial to his fortunes.
#
And in fact, the lead up to the coup, there's a strike by PVDSA workers and engineers against Chavez.
#
So they bring the oil industry to a standstill, which again shocks the oil market and completely attacks the Venezuelan economy.
#
And ultimately, as we know, Chavez prevails and he absolutely purges the state oil company.
#
And so all these engineers who supported the opposition and walked off their jobs are fired.
#
There's huge turnover. A lot of these people incidentally ended up immigrating to Colombia or Canada
#
and helping basically create the Colombian oil industry, so benefiting other countries.
#
And gradually, over time, PVDSA becomes a fiefdom for Chavismo.
#
For a long time, it maintains operational capacity, even though it's highly indebted, inefficient and corrupt,
#
but it still kind of has the veneer of a functional company.
#
But throughout my time there, you just saw it close off.
#
And in the last year, Maduro put a general in charge of the state oil company
#
because the military is absolutely the other kind of crucial part to understanding Venezuela.
#
And generals have been sweetened by all these deals that Maduro has offered them, you know, mining stakes,
#
control over imports and the oil industry, which is the crown jewel,
#
as a way of rewarding them for their loyalty and ensuring that they continue to be loyal to him.
#
And it's led to an exodus of your low-level workers who are already unable to eat three square meals a day
#
because they're just earning a handful of dollars a month.
#
Of course, you know, any engineer or chemist has fled because they're not earning anything more.
#
They're often working in dangerous refineries that haven't had proper maintenance work in years and are a big threat.
#
And it's also actually very dangerous out in the oil fields because Venezuela,
#
large parts of Venezuela are essentially lawless.
#
And you're very exposed to theft and gangs looking to rob copper or rob you in the oil installations.
#
So the whole industry is completely unraveled, which is a huge threat for Maduro,
#
given that more than 90 percent of the country comes from oil now
#
because all the other industries have fallen by the wayside.
#
And now, with the new sanctions from the Trump administration, it's getting even harder for him to export oil.
#
So yet again, oil will be one of the big deciding factors in what happens in Venezuela.
#
And this process was, like, it's common to all populists, really,
#
that they attack the institutions in their countries which are supposed to act as checks and balances.
#
And again, one of the things that Chavez did when he came to power is that he put military officers everywhere.
#
So, you know, this whole trend of so even in the PDVSA after the strike happened and he laid off all the employees or whatever,
#
he then put military officers in charge and completely changed the way the institution worked
#
in terms of sort of doing what people call petro diplomacy,
#
where he would, you know, offer sweet deals to neighboring countries which had the communist leaders he was friendly with to get them on his side
#
and a large chunk of petrodollars therefore started going into this kind of diplomacy
#
and doing special favors to people and so on and so forth.
#
Exactly. Cuba has been one of the big recipients of this petro diplomacy.
#
You know, Venezuela still sends oil to Cuba and Cuba, quote unquote, repays Venezuela
#
by sending doctors and other security personnel to the country
#
in what Maduro's critics say is a grossly unfair trade-off
#
and especially because it's fairly well known that Cuba then resells a lot of the oil it receives from Venezuela for profit.
#
Which is a marvelously capitalistic thing for Cuba to do.
#
And let's talk about what happened to the currency, for example.
#
So, you know, one of the books you recommended I read before we do this podcast was Crude Nation by Raul Galegos
#
and that starts off with this fascinating chapter on how there are four currency rates
#
like three different official currency rates for the dollars and then there's another one which is black market
#
and the top rate is like you pay a handful of bolivars for a dollar and then you increasingly play more and more bolivars
#
and obviously your cronies and people you favor get them at the cheapest rate
#
and there's a whole industry where you're sort of, you know, buying dollars in the cheap and selling dollars in the black market for far more money.
#
When you landed up there, how was it? How did you manage?
#
Well, it's an extraordinary system that you end up being very agile in
#
because you're always jumping between different currency systems.
#
But when I arrived, first of all, your bank card doesn't work.
#
No foreign cards work. You could take money out but at an extraordinarily unfavorable rate.
#
So you'd be getting a dollar out, effectively getting what's worth a dollar on the black market
#
but spending maybe $50 for it in your bank account.
#
So what someone like me or others get is a middleman, right,
#
who you wire money to from your bank account abroad to his bank account abroad
#
and then he wires bolivars from his account to your account in Venezuela.
#
And that allows you to navigate the system.
#
But it creates an enormous amount of distortions.
#
So, for instance, for a long time foreign airlines priced their airfare in local currency but at the pegged official rate.
#
So that meant people could fly literally from Caracas to London
#
for the equivalent of $40 if they were buying their currency on the black market, right?
#
So it was a free-for-all. It was this bizarre distorted party that people were taking care of.
#
Of course, someone has to pick up the bill.
#
And foreign airlines are now owed a total of about $4 billion
#
because the Venezuelan government never then reimbursed them as promised.
#
So that's the kind of distorted magical realism side of it.
#
The real world impact of it is that nothing worked, right?
#
Because what you're supposed to trust, which is money, which has a certain value and creates trust and creates your chain,
#
was completely distorted. So things just didn't function, right?
#
Importers wouldn't import because they wouldn't have access to the official currency
#
because that was reserved for croonies and so had to go to the black market, right,
#
if they could afford it and then pass that cost on to customers.
#
If not, they folded shop.
#
So that was really the death boat of the Venezuelan economy, the incredible distortions in the currency.
#
And then this differing access to the dollar then creates different classes of people, right?
#
Absolutely. I mean, the Venezuelans have a lot of vernacular for what has happened in the last 10 years,
#
and there's an expression which is boliburgues.
#
So it's a play on burguesia, so the bourgeoisie, and boli being bolivariano,
#
which is this kind of following that Chávez created based on Simon Bolívar.
#
So basically, these are the new rich, those who benefited from the government's largesse.
#
The other term for them is enchufados, so those who are plugged in.
#
That's essentially what they are. They're plugged into the system, so they get dollars at a preferential rate.
#
Their companies can be signed into the system to import food and get the juicy government contracts, etc., etc.
#
And on that note of juicy government contracts, we'll take a quick commercial break,
#
which I promise you will be filled by a private party.
#
On Geek Fruit, Tejas Dinkaranjanam talk about Netflix's latest series, Russian Doll,
#
and why you should finish watching it right away.
#
On Ganatantar, the hosts unpack how political violence works in India,
#
and why the absence of large-scale communal riots does not necessarily indicate social harmony.
#
On Dalle Harate, the hosts are joined by Ramaprasad, who translated the Amarush Shataka,
#
a collection of love poems from Sanskrit to Kannada.
#
He talks about the immortal nature of this work.
#
On Football, the hosts discuss the Kepa and Sari incidents, along with everything that happened in the Premier League.
#
On the Habit Coach podcast, Ashton guides you through starting a sugarless life,
#
and the importance of substituting sugar with stevia.
#
In the season finale of our Hindi show, Cinemaya,
#
Swati Bakshi is in conversation with Alankrita Srivastava,
#
who discusses her journey from journalism to filmmaking and everything in between.
#
And with that, let's continue with your show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Alexandra Ulmer about Venezuela.
#
I mean, the other thing everybody sort of notices about Venezuela is mad inflation.
#
You know, now it's at crazy levels, but even under Chavez, it was at like 60% a year, and it would balloon.
#
And one of the things that I realized was, one, that inflation has been a common part of Venezuela for decades,
#
not just a Chavez issue.
#
And two, there's a quality which people often consider a cultural quality,
#
but which really seemed to me to come out of economic imperatives,
#
in the sense that people often say that so-and-so kind of people or so-and-so culture, they are good savers.
#
They like to save, as if that's a cultural value.
#
But what inflation did to Venezuela was because inflation was so high,
#
it just made no rational sense to save.
#
And Venezuelans would, I mean, taking debt makes, I mean, just to give an illustration of this,
#
you could buy a house today at regular EMIs, and a year later,
#
your EMIs would really be as much as you are paying to buy a loaf of bread.
#
So the moment, whatever debt you can get, people would take it, you know,
#
so even the poorest people would take debt and buy flat-screen TVs and whatever,
#
and spend it on consumer goods.
#
And it's not because of materialism gone mad or consumerism or anything like that.
#
It's just that those are the economic incentives.
#
So it's like culture being driven by economics.
#
And Latin Americans, historically, have not been considered good savers,
#
but that's because almost every country has had some kind of spate of inflation.
#
Venezuela has pushed it to a whole other level, right?
#
We're looking at 2 million percent, even though, as I mentioned,
#
we don't have official government data.
#
It's wild, and it's really the only thing people talk about
#
because it is such a disorienting and life-destroying phenomenon.
#
It destroys your salary.
#
It's as if you walked into a supermarket tomorrow
#
and a sack of rice was priced at 18,000 rupees.
#
How can you talk about anything else?
#
It's everything you thought was stable that is being cut out from under you.
#
And what's particularly fascinating about this spate of hyperinflation
#
is that it seems to be the first one of the digital age.
#
So the Venezuelan government can't even print enough physical money
#
to keep up with the money it's creating in general.
#
So there's a perennial shortage of bills.
#
So prices are going up all the time, but no one has any physical money,
#
which is insane because it's not the kind of wheelbarrow image
#
you have of hyperinflation, right?
#
So what does that mean?
#
That means every ATM you walk in front of has tens of people
#
queuing up at any given time, hoping to get a few bills out,
#
even though the maximum is about $2 that you can take out of the ATM.
#
Which you can't buy anything with.
#
You can't buy anything with that, especially when prices are changing every day.
#
So you use your bank card.
#
Wait, there's a catch there too.
#
Venezuela hasn't invested in its telecom system and has fixed prices for years.
#
So they're completely oversaturated.
#
And so point of sales collapse all the time.
#
They're also rolling blackouts because ditto, no investment, no maintenance.
#
So the power grid is incredibly shaky.
#
Your phones, same issue.
#
So there literally were times where I could not pay for something.
#
I obviously had the money in my account.
#
I wanted to pay for it, but nothing worked.
#
The power system was down.
#
The point of sale didn't work.
#
And there's just no way to conduct a very basic economic transaction.
#
And just for my listeners' benefit, to talk about the monetary basis of inflation,
#
what inflation is typically caused by is when the money supply goes up relative to the goods and services available.
#
So what happens is when a government decides that it needs to up its spending or payback its debts or whatever,
#
and it starts printing money, the amount of money relative to goods and services just goes up.
#
And therefore you have more money chasing the same number of goods.
#
So obviously supply and demand, the goods and services out there become more expensive.
#
And if you just keep indiscriminately printing money,
#
this just gets worse and worse till it spirals to unmanageable proportions.
#
Till what you used to buy a house with, one year later you buy a loaf of bread with that,
#
and the poor are most hurt by it.
#
But what kind of surprises me is that despite a lot of this happening for even the early,
#
since the start of Chavez's regime in a sense,
#
he had popular support for a much longer time than you would have.
#
I mean, is that because people disconnect what is happening to them from the economic policies that a government carries out?
#
I think what Chavez did masterfully was control the narrative as most successful politicians do.
#
So he said that all the economic woes were to do with an economic war being waged against him and Maduro's government.
#
So the evil businessmen are stockpiling goods,
#
the evil businessmen are upping prices in a speculative manner to ruin your life, etc.
#
And hyperinflation is an abstract concept and it's not that easy to understand.
#
And if the government dominates the airwaves and you don't have a background in economics
#
or perhaps not a background in anything because you weren't able to pursue your education,
#
it's actually much easier to blame a speculator.
#
And once the situation became really difficult in Venezuela
#
and we had those hundreds of people banging on supermarket doors demanding food,
#
which happened all the time, you had the creation of these men called bachaceros,
#
which is actually a name that derives from a little ant that can carry a lot on its back.
#
It's just lovely poetry, but in practice was terrible.
#
So these men who queue up buy up products that they then resell at a heightened price,
#
because not everyone can stand in line all day waiting for food.
#
They have to get to work and some of them do have disposable income to pay more.
#
So it's a lot easier if you're poor, stuck in line for hours, waiting to buy a pack of pasta,
#
and you see these bachaceros slip in line in front of you, threaten you, buy up the products,
#
and then you see those same products on your street corner the next day for five times the price.
#
Well, who's to blame? The bachaceros, right?
#
Of course, bachaceros don't exist in countries where you have enough supply and you don't have controls,
#
but that's harder to remember when you're in the thick of it and you want to survive.
#
I'm speaking more about Maduro's time in this essence, but I think in Chávez it was similar.
#
He dominated the narrative and there was an incredibly polarized country, right, where it was us against them.
#
No, and also one thing all these guys fell prey to, not just Maduro and Chávez,
#
but even before that is the temptation of price controls, like you referred to magical realism earlier,
#
and price controls really are magical thinking, that if you fix the price of something, that's where it will stay.
#
But as we know, price controls lead to shortages, and then when you have shortages,
#
obviously the black market gets involved, as you mentioned.
#
And a lot of the problem in Venezuela was, the way I understood it, was driven not just by the rampant inflation,
#
but also then because inflation put the prices of goods out of reach of many people.
#
Chávez and then Maduro reacted by imposing price controls,
#
which completely changed the incentives for manufacturers who wouldn't manufacture anymore,
#
and the domestic manufacturing industry died anyway, and therefore goods became extremely scarce.
#
Exactly. It created a negative food bag loop, where inflation would be up,
#
the government would panic and decide to take corrective measures.
#
So Maduro would come on TV, as he does almost every day, because that's how he governs through the television,
#
and announce a 35% wage increase to tackle hyperinflation, for instance,
#
which meant that in turn, everyone had to increase the prices of the goods or services they were offering.
#
Because the wage increase came from basically sprinting money.
#
Exactly. And then the shop owners have to pay their employees more, right?
#
And so then they even had, they still do, have a superintendence of fair prices.
#
They have inspectors that are sent out, often with a state TV camera trailing behind them,
#
and they inspect the evil businessman and find them, arrest them, or whatever,
#
if they feel like they're price gouging.
#
And so, of course, how does your business survive in those conditions?
#
And you have to raise prices, and yet at the same time, and another trend that I noticed,
#
which again became much worse under Chávez, was expropriations, where the government would just say,
#
okay, these private businesses are cannibals, and we're just going to take them over,
#
and one of this even happened live on television, where he went to the square in Caracas,
#
and he asked the mayor of that area with him that, you know, what is that shop?
#
And he points to one building, and those are the jewelry stores, and he says, expropriate them.
#
And before the show is over, the guy has bought the papers, and he signed them.
#
And then in the middle of the night, the store owners come to take the jewelry and cardboard boxes.
#
And then the reporter who wrote about this says that a year later, there was absolutely,
#
I think this was Rory Gallagher and his book, Commandante, that a year later,
#
the building is just empty, and there's absolutely nothing there, and it's all gone to waste.
#
Right. So I think you're hitting on a very important point there because, yes,
#
there were flawed policies in the Maduro government and the Chávez government,
#
and yes, there was a lot of corruption.
#
But one of the main characteristics of their governance was just incompetence, right?
#
Because there are ways of nationalizing, compensating whoever was nationalized,
#
and putting together a structure to keep that going.
#
But this was just Chávez on TV saying, expropriate them.
#
And there was no follow-up, and there was no attempt to really create a structure.
#
So this happened in factories, in farms, jewelry stores, just deserted, abandoned.
#
And it's just so wasteful and heartbreaking.
#
So is it then the case of sinking allowed that it's not even happening for ideological reasons,
#
which would be bad enough, but just out of Chávez's showmanship, you know,
#
to create those kinds of optics and to feed into his narrative that, you know,
#
private guy bad, and I'm your savior, and I'm going to save you all?
#
You know, I had the distinct impression that everything at a certain point in Venezuela
#
was just being governed, it was governance through television.
#
That's not only because I had the unfortunate luck of being a journalist there,
#
meaning I had to watch state TV day in, day out, which killed my neurons.
#
But Maduro comes on television every day to speak, just like Chávez did.
#
And that becomes, you know, a proxy for governance, you know, a flawed one, of course.
#
That becomes the be-all, end-all, controlling the narrative.
#
And how did kind of, like Chávez, it seems to me, like you pointed out,
#
he kind of died, treated by doctors in Cuba.
#
He died before the oil prices fell.
#
And, you know, but Maduro effectively was following out exactly the same kind of policies
#
and what has happened to Maduro, I imagine, would have happened to Chávez.
#
But what was the kind of change that, I mean, and those are the years where you entered the story.
#
And, you know, 2014 onwards, you've been there.
#
And so what really happened?
#
Take me through these last five years.
#
So Maduro is very narrowly elected in a very controversial vote
#
where the opposition still maintains it actually won.
#
We're talking about the actual numbers around the whole vote, of course.
#
As in they're talking about the elections were rigged, basically.
#
Yeah, they were tweaked.
#
That's what the opposition claims.
#
Undeniably, the government used its state to its advantage,
#
so busing people in, changing voting centers, all sorts of dirty tricks.
#
But there's still a question as to whether the actual numbers were tweaked.
#
So he gets elected with, you know, very slim majority and little credibility.
#
As you said, he was a yes man to Chávez, a former bus driver and union leader
#
who, you know, didn't have any grand vision of his own,
#
was at the time seen as quite a conciliatory figure,
#
was able to negotiate and had been a fairly decent foreign minister
#
in terms of his approach to other heads of states,
#
but, you know, not cut out to be a president.
#
So he takes on the approach of Chávez was loved,
#
I was designated to be his successor, therefore I shall not tweak any of his policies.
#
And he stands firm, you know, backing these increasingly ludicrous
#
and destructive policies as Venezuela's economy utterly unravels.
#
And there starts to be increasing pressure for, look, you have to devalue,
#
you have to let private investment in, you have to start to lift the currency controls,
#
you have to increase gasoline prices.
#
Venezuela is the cheapest gasoline price in the world.
#
Another one of the wild distortions of this magical realist place.
#
But Maduro does not do any of that.
#
So progressively the situation just spirals entirely out of control.
#
When I arrived in 2014, there were odd shortages, right?
#
I'd go to the supermarket and I'd ask for coffee and they'd say, oh no, we don't have any.
#
And then I remember once the security guard said, well, come back tomorrow,
#
I think we're going to get a shipment tomorrow, you know, in kind of a conspiratorial whisper.
#
Okay, so I came back the next day and I got my coffee, right?
#
But over time, it became far more critical.
#
And that's when you really started having people getting malnourished,
#
people dying of preventable diseases, you know, like diphtheria returned
#
because there was a shortage of vaccines and the whole health system disintegrated.
#
Cancer patients couldn't find their oncological medicine anymore.
#
Even people who had successfully overcome things like gotten a transplant for a failed organ
#
and were living and happy suddenly couldn't find the medicine they needed
#
to help stop their organ from being rejected.
#
So just the humanitarian crisis balloons.
#
And Maduro and his acolytes just dig in, essentially ignore reality.
#
They both ignore it and blame it on the opposition
#
without ever kind of acknowledging how dramatic it's gotten.
#
They undeniably live in a bubble.
#
They limit, you know, their outside interaction with the people.
#
Everything is very choreographed and stage managed.
#
And, you know, it's gotten to a point of no return
#
where it's so difficult to reform the economy now unless you have a major bailout
#
because anything you would touch could be dynamite, right?
#
If you lift currency controls now or something,
#
it could just completely destabilize and wreck the country in the short term.
#
And they don't have the economic know-how or the wherewithal to do that.
#
He's just dug himself into a complete hole.
#
And I believe there's a refugee crisis out of Venezuela
#
which people have compared to Syria and said it's actually worse.
#
And anyone who can get out somehow anyhow is getting out
#
because it's just not feasible anymore.
#
Oh, yes. I mean, the initial wave happened during the Chavez era
#
when wealthy people, especially businessmen, said,
#
this is not smelling right, I'm getting out.
#
But they left, you know, they took a plane, they had their money,
#
they settled in Miami or Madrid and continued being doctors or engineers.
#
It was sad, of course, but their life went on and they're doing well.
#
But what happened under the Maduro government
#
is the poor people suffered the worst.
#
The poor and the middle class that got thrown into poverty
#
because of hyperinflation and the general economic situation.
#
And initially, a lot of them left by bus or short-haul flight
#
to the rest of Latin America.
#
But increasingly, what we're seeing is dirt poor people
#
just walking across Latin America to as far as they can,
#
as far as their money will carry them.
#
How does the international community deal with this?
#
Because there's also awareness over time
#
of interfering with other countries' private matters.
#
And this is also a complicated area for someone like the US
#
to sort of do something about because there is also this narrative
#
about how Chavez and Maduro after him are these great saviours of communism
#
and these neo-liberals are, you know, constantly interfering
#
A narrative pushed to a large extent by Chavez himself
#
and quite masterfully pushed, but obviously utterly untrue.
#
So how does the international community then deal with that?
#
They have to be wary of responding, but at the same time,
#
when there is such a massive humanitarian crisis going on,
#
it's hard to also say we'll do nothing.
#
Yes, I think that was a big quandary, especially for Latin America,
#
where sensitivities to US involvement are so high.
#
And for most of Chavez's governance,
#
much of the rest of South America was also ruled by the left wing.
#
It was very cozy with Chavez and, in some instances,
#
possibly benefited from his oil largesse or just private funds for campaigns.
#
So there's very muted criticism of him.
#
Over time, that left, that pink tide, as it was called,
#
has ebbed over Latin America with the commodities price crash.
#
So now actually you have a string of right-wing governments.
#
Still, there was wariness about confronting him directly,
#
but the fact that so many migrants and refugees were spilling
#
into Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Chile,
#
and because the situation has deteriorated in terms of human rights
#
and democracy so much in Venezuela, those countries have spoken out.
#
But there is still this unease with having the US lead the charge.
#
And for a long time, at least under Obama,
#
the US administration was pushing Mexico or Brazil,
#
regional powerhouses, to lead, to avoid having the US be at the forefront
#
because the US has had such track record of supporting dictators
#
or even coups in Latin America during the Cold War.
#
And there's a huge amount of resentment against the United States for that.
#
And that helps explain the rise of people like Chavez.
#
I think now, because Latin America is dominated by the right
#
and because there's so much sense of such urgency,
#
they're all behind Trump.
#
And a lot of the resentment, of course, is justified.
#
And it takes me back to the old story about when Chavez comes to power,
#
shortly after he comes to power, there's a massive earthquake
#
where millions get affected.
#
And the US offers to send aid.
#
Venezuela agrees the aid is on its way.
#
And then in the middle of the night, Chavez calls the minister concerned.
#
And he says, tell them to go back.
#
And the minister says, no, no, but they're already on their way.
#
And we need the help. We can't do anything about it.
#
And he says, no, no, I don't want the Americans here because...
#
And he gets paranoid about they'll snoop on us and blah, blah, blah.
#
And he gets them to go back.
#
And there is speculation that maybe he spoke to Castro overnight
#
and Castro told him to do that, but whatever the case may be.
#
But the interesting thing through the Chavez years was
#
that although he kept ranting about George W. Bush
#
in very funny and amusing ways.
#
I'm not going to quote any of that, but some great quotes, if you Google it.
#
Although he kept ranting about the imperialists and the neoliberals
#
and the Americans and so on, when it came to oil, it was business as usual.
#
Venezuela was super efficient in supplying oil to the US,
#
which was the biggest buyer.
#
And everything there went smoothly.
#
Yes, and bilateral relationship had ebbs and flows
#
and the Chavez would kick out the US ambassador and vice versa and Maduro likewise.
#
But the oil kept flowing, right?
#
And the US was, depending on what metric you use,
#
the biggest cash paying consumer, right?
#
Because over time, Venezuela ended up mortgaging its oil to Russia and China
#
to pay back loans that they were receiving.
#
So the US was of crucial importance.
#
Those flows are not changing because of sanctions.
#
And India actually is, I think, becoming or has become the number one
#
cash buyer of Venezuelan oil.
#
Ouch, is this something we should feel bad about?
#
Well, I mean, India's private company is importing, right?
#
So it's a different calculation.
#
And everything leads to believe that Venezuela is offering nice discounts.
#
Yeah, and money is fungible.
#
What's the politics in Venezuela like right now?
#
One interesting sort of turning point in Venezuelan politics,
#
which is easy to identify, and you mentioned it in our conversation
#
before the podcast, was obviously the 2005 elections
#
when there was this where somebody reported that voting is no longer anonymous.
#
You can find out who's kind of voted.
#
And because of this, the entire opposition decided to boycott the elections.
#
And Chavez basically swept the assembly seats, obviously,
#
because his party was the only contender there.
#
Did that have a long-term impact?
#
Did the opposition recover from that and come back strongly?
#
And what's the situation today?
#
So the Venezuelan opposition has long been elitist, very quarrelsome,
#
dominated by a smattering of parties that no one's ever heard of abroad
#
but who love to fight amongst themselves.
#
And their boycott of 2005 vote essentially annulled them from the political scene
#
and gave Chavez complete blank check to do whatever he wanted
#
because his party controlled the National Assembly.
#
It also fit into this repeated – the opposition would repeatedly cry wolf
#
when it wasn't necessary, right?
#
I mean, I think Chavez was clearly problematic for institutions from the start,
#
but the opposition would be wildly exaggerating what was happening
#
and lose credibility in the process.
#
So by boycotting the elections and saying this wasn't a democracy
#
and Chavez is a dictator, when I think a lot of political scientists would say he wasn't,
#
he had autocratic tendency, but it wasn't a dictatorship,
#
they actually facilitated his road to creating a much more authoritarian government.
#
Over time, the opposition has done some soul-searching,
#
and Enrique Capriles, who was a two-time presidential candidate for the opposition,
#
actually said, no, we cannot demonize Chavistas, Chavez supporters.
#
We must talk to them, understand why they voted Chavez,
#
and show them why we're the path forward.
#
So he actually did crisscross the country, go into the slums and the poor villages
#
and talk to people and won over a lot of them.
#
Not enough to win the election.
#
Again, we don't know exactly what happened.
#
But he changed the narrative and kind of shook up
#
what used to be kind of a bastion of the wealthy Caracas old families.
#
But in the last few years, the government crackdown on the opposition
#
has been much more ferocious.
#
So, you know, you have exiled politicians in Washington and Colombia, in Europe,
#
others who are in jail or under house arrest,
#
or even one, Freddy Guevara, who's holed up in the Chilean embassy
#
and has been holed up there for months, if not a year, not by now.
#
So they've completely chopped up the opposition and annulled political parties,
#
annulled any kind of political movement they tried to create to unseat Maduro.
#
And so it's very hard for them to articulate themselves now.
#
So where do things stand now, as of today?
#
Well, it's been a whirlwind since January.
#
So Maduro was sworn in for his second term in January
#
after a very, again, a decried election
#
where all the Western powers said this was a fraudulent vote.
#
And everyone kind of expected it to be game over after that.
#
But then this new kind of fresh-faced opposition leader, Juan Guaidó,
#
who had just become the head of the Venezuelan Congress,
#
which is still led by the opposition.
#
And incidentally, he became head of the Congress
#
because most of the people or many of the leaders in his party
#
are either in exile, in prison, or holed up in the embassy.
#
So he was kind of the last person standing.
#
And no one expected him to become the face of the rejuvenated opposition.
#
So Juan Guaidó's 35 swore himself in,
#
citing the constitution, his constitutional right to do that,
#
and declared himself president.
#
And that just set in motion a whole chain of events.
#
The U.S. supported him.
#
Other European countries and Latin American countries
#
It sparked a huge wave of protests.
#
And we thought the Venezuelan people were kind of broken, right?
#
Immigration was the way out.
#
Everyone has just lost hope that anything could ever change.
#
And almost overnight, it seems,
#
people took to the street with renewed hope.
#
There was hope in the U.S. and amongst the opposition
#
that the military would immediately defect and support Guaidó.
#
The military in Venezuela is essentially an extension of the government.
#
It has control over whatever lucrative business is left in the country.
#
Plan B was to try to force in humanitarian aid.
#
So we had a standoff at the Colombian border a few days ago
#
where the opposition tried to drive in these trucks full with food,
#
and the Venezuelan soldiers blocked them,
#
and there were confrontation, tear gas, Molotov cocktails, etc.
#
There was a number of defections, an increasing number of defections,
#
from rank-and-file soldiers.
#
So I think we're at about over 500 now,
#
which is interesting, and it's increasing every day.
#
It's not a groundswell, and we're not talking about the big fish,
#
but it's something to monitor.
#
Guaidó left Venezuela to see the aid through from Colombia
#
and is now in Brazil, meeting the president there.
#
He's vowed to come back to Venezuela,
#
but Maduro has said there was a travel ban on you.
#
If you return, you shall be detained.
#
So there's a big question there and possibly a looming confrontation.
#
It seems like the political scientist A.O. Hirschman once said
#
that if you're dissatisfied with the government, you have three options,
#
which are you comply, you complain, or you leave.
#
And when I first heard that quote, I thought, okay, no one's going to leave.
#
But now what's happening is that there are people who have simply no option.
#
They cannot comply because they do not have food,
#
and there's no point complaining, so they're leaving.
#
And this is, again, like you said, as opposed to the poor,
#
so it's a kind of a ludicrous situation.
#
Going forward for Venezuela then, given the state of the politics
#
and the state of the economy, what's a best-case scenario
#
and what's a worst-case scenario in your view?
#
It's kind of difficult for me to pine as a journalist,
#
but I would say that because a majority of people seem to want elections
#
and there are some significant doubts about the previous election,
#
the ideal scenario for many people would probably be to hold fair and just elections
#
where the people can actually express their desire.
#
That is highly unlikely to happen.
#
There are many worst-case scenarios.
#
It's hard to say which is worst,
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Venezuela's constantly defied expectations of how bad it can get,
#
and unfortunately I have no – I have no – I know it can get worse.
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I think what's most worried me is how lawless it can become.
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In many ways, of course, the government is autocratic,
#
but it also doesn't have control over many of the factions that rule the country,
#
the gangs, the crime rings, and then just the kind of isolated rural areas
#
where there's no state, there's no infrastructure, there are no services,
#
and just nothing works.
#
You can't make a phone call.
#
You can't transfer money.
#
You can't get on the internet.
#
You can't wash your clothes.
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You can't turn on the light switch.
#
I mean, we're just talking about a complete collapse in every single way.
#
Sounds like Afghanistan at its worst with the exception that this is a country
#
that has enough oil to last it for more than 300 years.
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This country should be insanely rich.
#
Absolutely, and it's also a tropical country.
#
The vegetation is somewhat similar to Mumbai, actually.
#
So it's so incongruent to see people who are famished
#
who show you their ID cards and you can't recognize them
#
because they were so plump four years ago and now are just a shadow of themselves.
#
And they're climbing up trees to try to get mangoes, right?
#
Because this is a bountiful country.
#
And thank God, because otherwise people would have been in even more dire straits.
#
And I'm not excusing hunger in deserts or in Siberia or what have you,
#
but it's just so shocking to see that in a country that is actually very fertile
#
and where bananas and mangoes and coconuts are growing wildly on every corner.
#
Blessed by nature and cursed by humans.
#
So this has been a very illuminating episode,
#
but I'm going to end it by asking a question that kind of takes a step back.
#
I mean, in the current times that we live in,
#
there obviously is an upsurge of populism all across the world.
#
In fact, you know, just reading the biographies of Chavez,
#
it struck me in how many ways he's common to the likes of Modi, Erdogan, Urban.
#
I mean, there are so many commonalities.
#
And one phrase I came across again and again, which I thought was a lovely phrase,
#
So tell me a little bit about Chavismo and tell me a little bit about Chavismo,
#
not just in a Venezuelan context, but Chavismo in a global context.
#
And do you think, you know, why do you think it's there
#
and what can be done about it by people who are concerned about it?
#
To be fair, I think Chavismo at its best and at its heart was a dream of a people
#
to have justice, to reap the rewards of this bountiful country,
#
and to right past wrongs.
#
But that's a rhetorical thing.
#
Yes. Yes. But people really fervently believe that.
#
And as I mentioned, they kind of believe it as a religion.
#
So I remember speaking to a social worker who says,
#
how can I unteach my children? This is what I believe.
#
It's like a religion for me.
#
It's so deeply ingrained that it's almost like seveoring part of yourself
#
to stop believing or to finally face the writing on the wall.
#
What it turned out to be is an obscene level of patronage, cronyism,
#
and perhaps a massive money laundering and drug trading operation.
#
Like all religions are false religions.
#
Well, I think, yes, in its essence.
#
Sorry, that's my view. I want to…
#
I mean, it's strayed so dramatically from the rhetoric of Chavez in the early days
#
that it's absolutely shocking.
#
I've wrestled for a long time with what the global implications are for this
#
because Venezuela is such a one-off, it seems, in many ways.
#
Of course, it's a cautionary tale in terms of squandering oil wealth
#
or following for populist sellers of dreams.
#
But it's also pushed things to such an extreme
#
that it's sometimes hard to extrapolate.
#
But yes, I think certain themes, certain boring but fundamental themes
#
like fiscal responsibility and the importance of institutions come to mind.
#
As trite as that is, you never realize their value more than when all of that is crumbling.
#
Alexandra, thank you so much for coming on the show.
#
I really enjoyed talking to you.
#
Hey Amit, what do you think about starting a dating podcast?
#
To be honest, I think that idea is kind of garbage.
#
Sure, just like dating then.
#
Oh, we could call it dating as garbage.
#
We could talk to people about their sad dating lives.
#
Okay, I'm not so sure about that.
#
And we can discuss our terrible sex lives.
#
Okay, definitely not that.
#
We could talk about how there's no such thing as love
#
and it's all a load of crap
#
and nothing can ever truly bring meaning to our lives.
#
Okay, you might need some help there.
#
Alright, it's a yes then.
#
The most engaging and the most useful conversations you may have in your life are likely to be with your most challenging customers.
#
Hi, I'm Ambi Parmeshwaran
#
and on this podcast, I will take you through my book,
#
Sponge, Leadership Lessons I Learned From My Clients.
#
Packed with real stories about real people,
#
but most of all packed with the innumerable lessons I soaked up from some of the most iconic business leaders
#
like Radhan Tata, Azim Premji, S. Ramadurai, Karsanbhai Patel, M. Dhamodaran, Dr. Kurian and many more.
#
Don't forget to tune in to the Sponge Podcast. Keep sponging to keep learning.
