Enrique Krauze: “Maduro is one of the bloodiest dictators Latin America has ever had”

«In the face of the civic battle of the Venezuelan people, who after 25 years of dictatorship are fighting with their lives for freedom, the discouragement of the opposition in Mexico is shameful. The feat led by María Corina Machado should be enough to bring the ‘Pink Tide’ out onto the streets in defense of the institutions of the republic that are slipping out of our hands these days and that will take a generation to recover.»

This is how the article begins Enrique KrauzeAugust 8, in the Mexican newspaper Reforma. Enrique Krauze Kleinbort (Mexico City, September 16, 1947) is a Mexican historian, essayist, editor and intellectual. This is not the first time he has addressed the Venezuelan tragedy without the usual squeamishness of Western intellectuals. On the contrary, he has long since fully understood the circumstance and its protagonists, as reflected in his book “El poder y el delirio” (Power and Delirium) (Tusquets, 2008), a profile of Chávez. We interviewed him via Zoom.

—Why have you supported Venezuela’s democratic cause so closely? In this sense, Vargas Llosa and you are an exception. Recently, a writer, who I imagine is very clever, said that “anyone who was not with Chavez twenty years ago had no heart, but anyone who is with Maduro today has no brain,” as if Chavez’s abuses had not begun the very day he came to power (not to allude to his bloody coup d’état in 1992).

—I had a great Venezuelan friend, the writer Alejandro Rossi, who was a teacher and a close friend. Through him, who was a descendant of General José Antonio Páez, I learned something of the history of Venezuela. Not much more, but that was enough to strengthen my fraternal contact with Venezuela; in addition, of course, to the friends I made throughout the life of the magazine Vuelta (founded in 1976 by Octavio Paz), such as Eugenio Montejo, Francisco Rivera, Guillermo Sucre, Juan Liscano and Teodoro Petkoff, among others. So I had a, let’s say, literary contact with Venezuela, but I did realize, as a democrat, that Chávez constituted a serious danger for Venezuela.

I turned 50 in 1997 and the following year a Chavez came on the scene, whose anti-democratic character I never doubted. I had fought for democracy in Mexico and in Latin America together with Octavio Paz, Daniel Cosío Villegas, Gabriel Zaid… We were about to achieve the democratic transition in Mexico, and I realized that at the same time Venezuela was about to lose its democratic transition, which had been in place since the Pact of Punto Fijo (1958).

Mario Vargas Llosa and I met in 2003 at a conference, I think in Colombia, where I met Américo Martín, with whom I became friends. I began to write about Venezuela when I realized that what was happening there was very serious and I became increasingly interested. As I have said, there was already a precedent for my personal friendship with Alejandro Rossi, but in political terms, it was my closeness to that fantastic, strong, charismatic, endearing character that was Américo Martín that led me to follow the development of Venezuela very closely and perceive in those events an enormous risk to democracy.

In 2005, I attended a populism conference and, with Chavez in mind, I presented my Decalogue of Populismwhere I referred to Chavez as a postmodern populist, “who venerates Castro to the point of seeking to turn Venezuela into an experimental colony of the “new socialism”.” And in December 2007, Américo Martín explained to me, euphoric, that Chavez had not been able to win the constitutional referendum that would have led to a kind of Confederation with Cuba, since among his proposals was that of forming Venezuela as a “socialist State.” The same Sunday of the event, we spoke and Américo told me: “Brother,” because we addressed each other as brothers, “we won.” So, I decided to go to Venezuela.

—A few years later he published his profile of Chávez.

—In 2009, yes. My book “El poder y el delirio” (Power and Delirium) appeared, the result of interviews with ordinary people and with many personalities, including some from the Chávez government. My contact was Andrés Izarra, then Minister of Communication, who arranged for me to have interviews with Aristóbulo Istúriz, until recently Minister of Education, and with Alí Rodríguez Araque, a very prominent figure in the government and a very direct contact with the Castros. I dedicated that book to Alejandro Rossi, who was already very ill, and he was very moved.

Venezuela gave me close friends. Simón Alberto Consalvi, Germán Carrera Damas, Elías Pino Iturrieta, Inés Quintero… gave me their perspectives on what was happening. And I was passionate, because I felt that something very serious for Latin America and for the world was happening in Venezuela, a kind of gigantic deception, a historic deception, an act of sleight of hand, of bewitchment. Something similar to what had happened at other times in Argentina, in Italy, in Germany, where an entire people fell in love with a leader… And I have always been suspicious of charismatic and messianic leaders. But, to complete the answer to your question about my closeness to Venezuela, I would like to point out that a couple of years ago I made a documentary with the filmmaker Carlos Oteyza.

Some great Venezuelan friends have died, others are still there, and I feel Venezuelan in my heart. That is why, when I see the battle that María Corina Machado is fighting, I am deeply moved. I am, however, anguished at not being able to do anything more, because I have nothing but my pen and my voice, which is very little.

—Why this distrust, in a continent where the opposite occurs?

—That is a personal fact. Because a good part of my family died in the Holocaust, which was caused by the bewitchment of a man over a people. My grandfather told me: “A million children sacrificed! Explain that to me. No one can explain it.” But neither can the eight million Venezuelans who have left their country, the debacle and everything that you know and have suffered firsthand, be explained in proportion.

In that book, in “El poder y el delirio” (The Power and the Delirium), there is a picture of what I saw coming. Ali Rodriguez Araque told me: “We are going to create a communal State. We are going to achieve what neither China nor Cuba could.” I asked him how they would do it and he replied that oil was going to reach 250 dollars a barrel. I asked him how he knew that and he replied that he knew it and that was it.

Of course he didn’t know: the price of oil fell. And, as I explained in a later article in the New York Review, Chavez was to blame for that decline, by destroying Venezuela’s oil industry (in addition, of course, to destroying the industry in general, polarizing the country, poisoning Venezuela and ravaging democracy and coexistence).

—What is your opinion of Chávez now, after some time and his death?

—I maintain the perception contained in my book. Chávez was a military man bewitched by the paternal figure of Fidel Castro, who was, indeed, a truly Machiavellian figure; and he understood perfectly that he could manipulate Hugo Chávez’s vanity. This was central. Hugo Chávez cannot be explained without Fidel Castro, for whom he had a filial love. Chávez was, ideologically, a fanatic and that is why he became a caricature of Castro, at whose feet Castro placed nothing less than the resources of Venezuela and the country itself. Chávez handed Venezuela over to Fidel Castro. And Maduro is a caricature of the caricature.

—And personally, how would you say Chávez was?

—Histrionic. He had a historical vision of history and had read Plekhanov. A hero-worshipper, who saw himself as one of them and who saw Castro as a god; and who, at a given moment, saw himself as the chosen one of God to monopolize all the power of Venezuela and be the historical heir of Fidel Castro in the socialism of the 21st century. Until the true God of history, with a small G, which is chance, crossed his path. Illness, pride, I don’t know.

—How do you think it will be recorded in history?

—History is being written as we speak. The present, of immense sorrow, the gigantic tragic history of Cuba, is putting Fidel Castro in his place. Not just in oblivion, but in his place. He is the one who caused this, but in that case the ideologues always have the pretext that Cuba was the object of harassment. But this cannot be said of Venezuela, in any way: Venezuela is a country blessed by God with the resources it has; the United States has always continued to buy a lot of oil… No. The destruction of Venezuela is the work of Hugo Chavez and Maduro and those who have been around them.

We have just seen the Venezuelan people tearing down statues of Chavez. I believe that history will be more severe with Chavez every day, because people take time to understand, but they do end up understanding. Keeping all distance, the Italian people adored Mussolini and ended up hanging him; and the German people idolized Hitler, who caused a hundred million deaths, but the German people will find it difficult to stop being democratic and I do not see in the next 400 years, if this world exists, statues of Hitler anywhere in Germany. Likewise, Chavez, who believed that he would pass into immortality together with Bolivar. The truth is that Bolivar will continue in the extraordinary place that he has in history and Hugo Chavez will pass, not into oblivion but into disgrace.

—And Nicolás Maduro?

—A man who has committed crimes against humanity will pass through. A criminal. Chavez also committed crimes and I don’t know if he was less bloodthirsty than Maduro, but Maduro, it can be said from now on, is one of the most bloodthirsty, brutal, primitive dictators that Latin America has had. He must have more dead than Videla and Pinochet.

@MilagrosSocorro