Brian Wilson: Venezuela is a tragedy, not an opportunity to score domestic political points

Anti-government activists build a barricade in Venezuela's third city, Valencia. Picture: AFP

If the worst allegation the Tories have to throw at Jeremy Corbyn is that he has condemned violence from all sides, rather than kneeling on an imbalanced stool of penitence, they must be running surprisingly low on ammunition.

Let’s get the easy bits out the way first. Venezuela is a political and economic basket case, urgently in need of help, while President Nicolas Madura is hopeless and the sooner he goes, the better. At that point, the opportunistic political interest in Venezuela ends and the serious questions begin.

I visited Venezuela quite a lot during the Hugo Chavez years and found two obvious lessons. First, there were exceptionally good reasons for his election and, second, a long spoon was advisable because it would all end in grief. This was a bitterly divided country between very wealthy haves and extremely poor have-nots, which usually has a predictable outcome.

Initially, I went as Energy Minister because Venezuela is one of the world’s leading oil producers and many British companies were involved. Most of the activity is offshore, which made it attractive to our North Sea supply chain, while the world’s biggest reserves are thought to lie in the Orinoco Belt.

Shortly before my first visit, the coastal region of Vargas, north of Caracas, was hit by floods which cruelly exposed the lack of infrastructure and pitiful shacks in which the poor lived. Up to 30,000 people died and the inescapable question was how a country with so much wealth for so long could have done so little to avert such a disaster?

Another impression was of Caracas, a city of near-permanent gridlock, huge queues at filling stations with air pollution to match. Venezuela had long made the classic mistake for any oil-producing state of selling the stuff for next to nothing to its own people. Once that expectation is created, it is nigh well impossible to escape from it. In the 1970s and ’80s, Venezuela emerged from US-sponsored dictatorship to establish democratic credentials. A collapse in oil prices put an end to that brief era which was followed by a renewed period of gross corruption, economic chaos and acceptance of IMF intervention, grinding the faces of the poor even deeper into the mud. All of that led to Chavez being elected, as a Bolivarian populist – anti-colonialist and pro-social justice.

Venezuela has had an oil industry for over 100 years. The revenues were astronomical but, even in the 1920s, it was noted that “much of what was gained was absorbed in corruption, and the effect on the rest of the economy was to make Venezuela entirely dependent on petroleum”. That process never stopped, with catastrophic consequences whenever the oil price slumped.

My later contacts with Venezuela were in support of the Scotch whisky industry for whom it was, until recently, the fifth biggest market in the world, which hints at its own story. At one point, Chavez took to denouncing Scotch as “the drink of the oligarchs” and incited his people to drink fine Venezuelan rum instead – a preference which I discreetly shared!

We put together a strategy to position Scotch as the product of sturdy Scottish peasants and unionised distillery workers. Whether this succeeded, or Chavez simply lost interest, we will never know but the Venezuelans’ favourite brands were soon back on the shelves and as recently as 2012, it was a market worth more than £100 million to the industry.

Today, it isn’t in the top 25, most of the “oligarchs” having cleared off to Miami and the remaining population unable to afford their favourite tipple. Where politics failed, economic collapse has succeeded and they are drinking rum. The problem is there is not much food to go with it, as virtually everything has to be imported and there’s no money to pay for it.

On top of all this, there is the “given” of American destabilisation. In 2002, they were up to their neck in a botched coup attempt against Chavez and that made it difficult for them to try the same trick twice. The other consideration was that until around 2012 they needed Venezuelan oil, a factor now greatly reduced by the growth of their own shale industry.

In a rational world, the Maduro government would seek a diplomatic truce. The game is up. Internal dissent is driven by hunger rather than ideology. The oil price will not be rising any time soon. There is justified international condemnation of the movement towards authoritarianism. Far better to salvage compromise from a position of power than continue the downwards spiral.

Over the past 30 years, South America has largely shaken off the dictatorships which characterised it for so long. The US uses “influence” rather than force to keep its backyard in check. In most countries of the continent, a “third way” between Cuban-style revolution and the brutality of right-wing dictators has evolved. That is the space Venezuela needs to be helped towards.

Those who gloat over its tragedy, in pursuit of a domestic political point, should be called on to answer questions as well as asking them. Which of Chavez’s predecessors do they identify with? Do they see no problem in the history which produced him? Have they checked out whether the current Venezuelan opposition is any better? Or do they care for none of that – in the present as in the past?

Venezuela is a basket case, but one which for a brief period offered hope. For those who can suppress prejudices, was there ever a more humane transaction in the world of oil trading than Venezuela sending oil to Cuba who paid in doctors and teachers, so that at least some of the lame walked, the blind saw, the babies lived and the children of the illiterate poor could read and write?

It was far from perfect but then most countries and regimes are. Believing that better outcomes are possible than those bequeathed by a spectacularly unjust and corrupt history may be over-optimistic. It is certainly not wicked.