September 8, 2017 Reading Time: 3 minutes

"18 years of failure. No more socialism."

The dream of a workers paradise in Venezuela, based on the 21st-century socialism of Hugo Chávez, has long since come and gone. Perhaps the jig was up when hyperinflation hit and locals began robbing zoos to avoid starvation.

Despite a historic exodus, however, most Venezuelans do not have the capacity to leave, while others have chosen to stay and make the best of the tragic situation. Millions of these people have taken to the streets in mass protests, to no avail. Not only has the Chavista regime not budged — in power since 1999 — it has taken hundreds of political prisoners and murdered hundreds of protesters in recent years.

Some of these people are engaging in the perilous and daunting task of opposing the regime and advocating free enterprise. Leonardo Brito, a blogger and the director of the Bastiat Society Venezuela, wants to rekindle the Venezuela that in the mid-20th century was one of Latin America’s freest and most prosperous economies.

Leonardo Brito explains the Venezuelan nightmare to members of the Bastiat Society in Charleston, South Carolina.

Brito is under no illusion about the uphill climb he faces (pictured above in orange, explaining the situation to Bastiat Society members in Charleston, South Carolina). With the dissolution of the elected National Assembly and the attorney general in exile, there is not even a veneer of democracy in Venezuela. Akin to the Cuban Communist Party’s totalitarian monopoly on power, only Chavista loyalists have a place in the new “Constituent Assembly.”

Therefore he rules out a new political party as a worthwhile exercise, which would be antagonized by the regime as some sort of CIA coup d’état. The first necessary task, he explains, is accepting responsibility for the mess and acknowledging that Venezuelans have a socialist mindset.

The big problem we have in Venezuela is that everybody is socialist. Even the opposition in Venezuela is socialist.… They always talk about freedom and liberty, but it’s all about freedom of speech, freedom of religion. They really believe in the redistribution of wealth.

The opportunity we have, he continues, is that people are now “open to new ideas: what can we do about the country?” This longing for some alternative has offered fertile ground for the Bastiat Society, even if people do not know what the alternative is; they have never heard of Fredéric Bastiat or Milton Friedman: “People want to hear something new; people want to listen.”

In particular, Brito identifies government education as a root problem that must be opposed and avoided: “This all started in the schools. Socialism starts in the schools in Venezuela.”

If people can understand the illegitimacy of the regime and see through its socialist doublespeak, as its policies collapse and destroy more lives by the day, they will then take their livelihoods into their own hands and engage in civil disobedience and informal enterprises. Perhaps then, once there is a great enough ideological opposition to the regime, a political party will be worthwhile activity.

Unless the ideas battle is won, Brito says the cycle will repeat itself: “We will have socialism again: ‘Okay, that wasn’t real socialism, so let’s try [it] again.'”

Fergus Hodgson

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