The Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and his equally despotic wife are under lock and key in a New York prison, living embodiments of President Trump’s revivification of the Monroe Doctrine. Maduro, the chosen successor of the demagogic leftist tyrant Hugo Chávez, presided over a gangster regime that had reduced its people to hunger and penury, driving a third of Venezuela’s 24 million citizens into exile. Maduro’s regime maintained power through stolen elections, the machinations of the Cuban secret police, and active collaboration with the most unsavory drug cartels.
For a time, Chávez’s so-called Bolivarian socialism bought off the poor with bread and circuses—that is, massive subsidies and assorted free goodies made possible by high oil prices. This was bolstered by the ideological illusions of leftist political elites and Hollywood stars, ranging from Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, and Bernie Sanders to Danny Glover and Sean Penn, who saw another exotic socialist paradise and an avatar of social justice in the making. But over time the Chavista regime revealed itself as yet another nightmare scenario, where political liberty was confiscated, arbitrary power went unchallenged, and food was remarkably scarce. The war on the rich and the entrepreneurial middle classes always turns out to be a war on everyone, including the urban and rural poor.
