Massive Student Protests in Venezuela
In defiance of President Nicholas Maduro’s ban on public
protest, Venezeulans gathered around the country on Friday to protest creeping
authoritarianism, devastating inflation, and skyrocketing crime. Dozens of
students remain
in jail after the third day of mass
demonstrations, and the government (despite its denials) has blocked
access to Twitter photos, which the opposition had been using to
disseminate images of demonstrations. Three protestors have been killed to date,
and the growing unrest may well amount to a crisis of legitimacy for the late
Hugo Chavez’ successor.
How did it come to this? Like most things in modern Venezuela ,
it goes back to Chavez. At the time of the President’s death, Venezuela
was already experiencing significant
inflation and crime. Chavez managed to balance real reductions in economic
inequality with (for a time) equally real economic growth, but his model
depended on fixing the value of
the Venezuelan currency and raking in profits from the state-owned oil industry. The fixed exchange rate in particular became a huge problem.
It caused
prices of goods to spike, because importers had trouble accessing cheap
dollars with which to buy foreign goods, while simultaneously preventing the
government from letting the official value of currency go up to adjust.
Venezuelans started living by ridiculously high black-market exchange rates,
making it really hard for ordinary Venezuelans to afford basic goods.
“The fixed exchange rate is what has provoked most damage,”
Victor Alvarez, Chavez’ former minister of industry, told reporters.
“”When the price of a currency remains frozen in time, while prices of goods
and services go up … it creates a very harmful phenomenon.” Chavez’ “economic bomb,” as one Venezuelan economist terms
it, went off under Maduro’s Presidency. Venezuela ’s
real inflation rate is an impossibly
high 56 percent, and its scarcity index, which measures how hard it is to
purchase necessities, has hit a record
high. “Venezuelans have for months been struggling to find basic
consumption items including cooking oil, toilet paper, and corn flour,”
Reuters’ Brian Ellsworth reports.
The protestors’ second big complaint, high crime, also
started under Chavez. During Chavez’ 14 years in power, crime rates roughly
quadrupled. The government’s inability to successfully
prosecute criminals, together with economic insecurity and wide availability
of firearms, created an environment ripe for criminal violence. The Maduro government has been unable to stanch the
bleeding. According to the World Economic Forum, Venezuela
is the third-most
crime damaged country in the world. Venezuelan movie theaters have stopped
offering 11 p.m. film screenings
because people
are afraid to be out that late.
All of this came to a head on Wednesday. Previously,
opposition protests had been small
and divided. But on Wednesday, conflict between the police and protestors
left 66 injured, prompting the government to detain over a hundred student
activists and issue
arrest warrants for leading opposition figures. That included the
leader of the opposition, Leopoldo
Lopez, who remains undetained in his home for reasons that are as-yet
unclear. The crackdown, far from quelling the protests, appears to
have accelerated them. Protestors have gathered around the country for the past
three days, and it appears likely that the
demonstrations will continue on Saturday despite the Twitter blackout. “We’re going to stay out in the streets for the same reasons
as yesterday and the day before: inflation, insecurity and a repressive state
that refuses to release our colleagues,” student Marcos Matta said to the
Washington Post’s Andrew
Cawthorne and Diego Ore.
Opinions differ on whether these protests have the potential
to actually unseat the Maduro Government. “There is no sign that the
demonstrations…threaten to oust [Maduro],” Cawthorne and Ore
write. They see no evidence that the military, which briefly overthrew Chavez
during a 2003 protest wave, was interested in deposing Maduro. However, if the Venezuelan government can’t stop the
protests, the picture could change drmatically. “The opposition has made a huge
progress in the past week, as a couple of student protests have reignited the
movement,” Caracas-based analyst David Smilde told
Bloomberg. “If in the coming months the economy gets substantially worse
and the protests continue, Maduro will be in a tough position.”
