Gisela Salim-Peyer writes:

The disintegration of a democracy is a deceptively quiet affair. For a while, everything looks the same. Each authoritarian milestone—the first political prisoner, the first closure of an opposition media outlet—is anticipated with fear. Then the milestone goes by, and after a brief period of outrage, life continues as before. You begin to wonder if things will be so bad after all.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the Venezuela of my childhood, during the period when experts and historians warned, on television channels that would later be shut down, that Hugo Chávez was making himself a dictator. They said that his economic mismanagement—the extravagant expenditures, the graft, the attacks on central-bank independence—would cause a severe crisis when oil prices went down.

My family listened to those pundits and believed them, but we didn’t know what to do with that information. My father used to say that living in Venezuela was like driving a car that you know is not being maintained. For now, the car works fine, but one day it will break down. And when it does, the moment to repair the car will have passed.

Substantive change came to Venezuela, but it took time. In 2001, Chávez purged the nationalized oil company of managers and engineers who weren’t politically aligned with him. The company’s embittered ex-employees warned that national oil production would decline, and they were right, but that would take five more years to manifest. Chávez expropriated millions of hectares of farmland, and farmers went on TV to say that a food crisis was approaching. But as long as oil prices were high, supermarket shelves could be filled with imported milk.

In those years, the 2000s, the most immediate changes concerned only names and symbols. The way we kept time changed: Chávez turned the clock back 30 minutes because the scheme of hourly divisions should not be dictated by the imperial United States. The name of the country changed: Venezuela became the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, after the independence hero Simón Bolívar. And Chávez added a star to the Venezuelan flag to recognize the province of Guyana, because that’s what Bolívar would have wanted.

By the beginning of the 2010s, the crisis was coming, we were sure. Maybe it had already begun. In the meantime, what did we do? Some of the rich talked about a “plan B”—moving to Miami or Madrid. Those who had savings tried to convert them to U.S. dollars. On every national holiday, my grandmother made a point of waving the old version of the flag, challenging the police to fine her. She used to say that when democracy returned to Venezuela, the first thing the new government should do was remove the star Chávez added—Guyana be damned—arguing that Chávez should not have gotten to decide what was on the flag.

Another activity that kept adults around me busy was debate. Up until inflation reached 1 million percent, the question of whether the criteria had been met to use the word hyperinflation preoccupied many Venezuelan scholars. And also: Could we say that Venezuela had become Communist, like Cuba? That Chávez was like Fidel Castro? Cuban exiles in Venezuela certainly saw many parallels between the two men’s leadership and sartorial styles. Both leaders wore military green and deployed the rhetoric of class warfare. But academics pointed out that Chávez’s repressive methods were not as suffocating as Castro’s were: We didn’t have to worry that our next-door neighbors were spying on us—at least not yet.

Chávez died in 2013. Then the long-feared effects of his policies began to roll out, one by one. Just because the pundits had warned the public about the inevitability of an economic crisis didn’t mean we were ready for it when it happened. [Continue reading…]