Sabers and Utopias by Mario Vargas Llosa

Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Empty the Shelves!

Since shortages and scarcity are affecting Venezuela and increasing popular discontent, President Nicolás Maduro, who may not know much about economics but is a real man of bravado, decided to deal with the problem immediately. He explained to his people that the high inflation the country is suffering (the highest in Latin America by 57 percent) is the product of a plot devised by the United States, the hoarding businessmen, retailers, and opposition parties set on destroying the Bolivarian revolution, or “Twenty-First-Century Socialism.” And, in one stroke of the pen, he ordered that the prices of food and appliances be cut by 50 and even 70 percent, while he simultaneously sent soldiers and combat corps to occupy retail establishments and sent a good number of “conspirators”—in other words, the owners of stores and warehouses—to prison.

The campaign was launched by President Maduro with the slogan “Empty the Shelves!” The order was understood by a good number of the confused as carte blanche for looting, and, especially in Valencia but also in Caracas and other cities, there were attacks and robberies in the midst of extreme chaos. It was pathetic to listen to long-suffering Venezuelan housewives explaining to reporters from official TV how happy they were about those spectacular sales that would, going forward, refresh their refrigerators and kitchens and ensure their families two meals per day.

At the same time that he defeated inflation with a fist to the table, auctioning and confiscating food-product and appliance chains, President Maduro, through the approval of the Enabling Law, ensured for himself the absolute power that for one year would allow him to govern without laws, in the comfortable and efficient manner of dictator. To obtain this attribute, the Venezuelan National Assembly proceeded to withdraw immunity from an opposition deputy, María Mercedes Aranguren, and to replace her with her substitute, Deputy Carlos Flores, who, from day to night (and through generous sinecures) became a Chavist and voted in favor of the aforementioned law. In sum, once the hope these operations created for a public desperate to end corruption had passed, the growing poverty and anarchy in Venezuela will be the very high price the country will have to pay for the irresponsible demagoguery of this time. Without a doubt, contrary to the government’s calculations, it will be translated into a new and more crushing defeat of the government in the next elections, on December 9, which will force it, as occurred with the presidential elections, to undertake a new act of monumental fraud in order to stay in power despite being discredited and despite the ruin into which its wretched country plunges further every day.

Venezuela never had a flourishing agricultural industry commensurate with the enormous agricultural possibilities available to it, but with Chavism its expropriations and invasions, the arbitrary taking of farms, and the suffocating prevailing bureaucratization, agrarian production in certain regions was reduced to a minimum and simply disappeared in others. The result of all of this is that the country must

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