Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

Those of us who grew up in the South America of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s know all too well about how fragile democracy is. The maximum outward manifestation of the death of a democracy is that culminating moment when tanks roll out of the military bases and onto the streets, elected leaders are exiled or jailed, constitutional guarantees are suspended, and repression of the citizenry is installed as the governing norm. But this is seldom a surprise first sign of the collapse of freedom and democracy. Quite often democratic institutions are in such a debilitated state that a dictatorial takeover is almost a foregone conclusion. Other times these institutions have been so infiltrated by populist and/or other autocratic elements that a coup per se is rendered completely unnecessary and redundant. In these cases, democracy merely whimpers and dies in the chokehold of a political elite or dictator, with no one mounting any sort of vigorous defense until it’s too late. And many time...

Since its independence in the early 1800s, Venezuela has had, like many of its South American neighbors, a checkered history of pendulum swings between democracy and despotism. Also like many of its neighbors, however, it has had a history of democratic vocation that has led its people to repeatedly seek a resurgence of democratic vigor every time authoritarianism has reared its head. Protests in Caracas But unlike other major democracies in the region, petroleum-rich Venezuela is currently experiencing a deepening autocratic trend that has not only accompanied but also fueled the economic and social crisis set off in that country by a worldwide nose-dive in crude prices since 2014. In this sense, the greatest threat to Venezuelan democracy has been the lack of diversity of its economy. But both the boom and bust in oil revenues has played into the hands of that nation’s self-style “Bolivarian” authoritarians, in the first case permitting the implementation of far left populis...