Venezuela Burning

Sometimes art imitates life. “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!” So said Michael Corleone to his older brother just after gripping his face and delivering a kiss of death. The infamous scene was based on the real life events of January 1, 1959. The occasion? A New Year’s celebration in downtown Havana and the moment in history when Fidel Castro overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Bautista. The chillingly memorable scene from the 1974 classic Godfather II foretells the retribution for Fredo Corleone’s ultimate deceit.

At other points in time, life imitates art. So it was with an inaugural speech on February 2, 1999, some 40 years after Bautista fled Castro and Cuba, when Venezuelan President Huge Chavez betrayed his predecessor, Rafael Caldera. Caldera had granted Chavez amnesty and released him from prison in March 1994 following Chavez’s incarceration stemming from a failed 1992 coup attempt sanctioned by none other than Fidel Castro himself. Now it was the traitor doing the kissing.

It is fitting that Caldera, who died in December 2009, did not live to see the Venezuela of today, a sad failed state reflective of the very man he helped bring to power. After all, Caldera had publically defended the unsuccessful coup attempt. In his words, “We cannot ask people with hunger to immolate themselves for a democracy that has not been able to give them enough to eat.” Those words, spoken February 4, 1992, would help to elect Caldera to a second term as Venezuela’s president in 1994. It had been 20 since the end of his first presidential term.

Today Venezuelan children are dying of hunger. Premature babies perish as electrical outages snuff the incubators critical to their survival. Those wracked with disease cannot receive the treatment they must have to battle their ailments; diabetics and cancer patients die unnecessarily every day. In the worst cases, as has been documented by numerous media outlets, hospitals have become menaces in and of themselves with operating theatres unfit for use. Patients die in pools of their own blood.

Such is the inconceivable reality of the politically-divided, drought-ridden country that rests upon the world’s largest oil and iron ore reserves. How has Venezuela spiraled so far out of control in the wake of the commodities supercycle that built modern-day China, one that filled the coffers of resource-rich exporters worldwide?