Venezuela and Good Intentions

Janis Hernandez

HAVANA TIMES — An old proverb says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This maxim can be applied to those leftwing parties that come to power claiming to represent the people’s interests and, as time passes, become increasingly totalitarian.

Venezuela is a good example of this trend. To those who do not agree with me, I can only say that time will prove me right. Since taking office, President Maduro has set in motion a series of maneuvers that can only lead to absolutism in time.

The enabling laws (special powers) that furnish the leader with so many prerogatives could be a double-edged sword for any truly democratic society.

Maduro claims to speak on behalf of the people, so I find it rather curious that he always does so in the first person. “I’ve decided, I’ve established, I’ve said,” and similar phrases are common in the president’s speeches.

Nowhere in the boring diatribes of the enthusiastic president do we find a “we” or “our government.”

Some of my colleagues had already referred to Maduro’s ill-tempered and threatening tone. Incidentally, that is one of the things he criticizes the opposition for most frequently. It doesn’t seem to bother him when he does it.

In his alleged pleas for peace, we find a marked tendency to define the opposing camps, underscore divisions and highlight differences.

In the name of the “socialism of the 21st century”, a program he inherited from his predecessor Hugo Chavez, he has set in motion a series of projects comprising the so-called “Plan for the Homeland.” The social programs, new economic adjustments and other measures contained in this plan are, in and of themselves, moved by very good intentions.

But we should be careful, as this is a movie many of us have seen before.

In theory, everything always works very well, but, in the long term, all of these “gifts” give rise to many evils: inflation, social parasitism, and the worst thing of all – the subjective debt people come to incur with their generous governments, later collected in the form of their most elementary civil liberties.

This new type of socialism reminds me a lot of the old one. It’s more of the same with one or two changes here and there. And it is always presented behind the veil of “good intentions.”