OPINION:
Magical realism is a literary style that Latin Americans have used for decades. It is a way of storytelling in which ordinary people experience some inexplicable, almost mystical phenomena. They seamlessly assume a dreamlike kind of logic to what is happening as threads of fantasy are woven into the fabric of their everyday stories that are neither questioned nor explained. In magical realism, some things ’”just are.” Levitating people, eerie premonitions and talking animals are all examples of things that “just happen” in a magical realist world.
Magical realism is more than a literary genre, though. It is a way some people perceive events in their lives. This is especially true in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the socialist disaster flooding our southwest border with migrants and drugs. The regime simply cannot believe the surreal world it sees today. They are giddy at what’s going on.
If not for magical realism, how else, the Venezuelans might ask, could anyone explain what has happened to the United States? How could U.S, officials travel to Caracas to discuss increasing petroleum imports when the U.S. does not recognize the government of Venezuela, and its president, Nicolás Maduro ($15 million), and its speaker of the House equivalent, Diosdado Cabello Rondón ($10 million), remain targets of U.S. narcotics rewards?
In magical realist Venezuela, drug trafficking represents 90% of the regime’s income and is their priority, while petroleum is an afterthought requiring too much thought and planning. Among themselves, the U,S. visit is mocked as naive and a huge sign of how far the United States has fallen. In the bubble of magical realism, unbelievable things happen and disbelief is suspended.
Even more puzzling is how the United States would come to Venezuela, hat in hand, to ask for increased oil imports when everyone in the petroleum industry knows Venezuela’s state-owned oil and natural gas company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), has been decimated by years of mismanagement, neglect and corruption. PDVSA is a shell of its former self, producing less than 25% of what it did 20 years ago. PDVSA used to have some 40,000 employees, producing 3.4 million barrels per day. Now it has about 120,000 employees producing around 700,000 barrels a day. PDVSA refining capability used to be 1.5 million barrels per day. Now it hovers around 200,000 and cannot even meet local demand.
If not for magical realism, then how could the U.S. release two convicted drug traffickers serving 18 years, who just happened to be the nephews of Venezuela’s first lady, simply by concocting some pretext for a prisoner swap that no one finds credible, as they utter some drivel to U.S. officials about increasing petroleum imports as if talking about it makes it so.
For more than a decade, the United States imposed sanctions on Venezuela for its lack of cooperation on narco-trafficking, human rights abuses, and corruption. The embassy was shuttered in 2019 and crippling sanctions on Venezuela’s oil exports virtually unplugged them from important financial markets. Now, we make prisoner swaps freeing drug traffickers and go begging for oil. Disbelief suspended.
What explanation could there be for the Maduro regime besides magical realism when the Biden campaign signaled an “open borders” policy just as they were desperate to rid themselves of millions of Venezuelans? Their socialist experiment failed, although it has been very lucrative for the elites and their acolytes. There hasn’t been a semblance of economic stability and basic services such as education, health care and reliable utilities for years.
The regime recognized it could collapse and their personal fates would be in peril, so something had to be done. The answer was to create a Bolivarian diaspora, which has turned into the largest refugee crisis ever in the Western Hemisphere. Using the blueprint parroted from the 1980 Cuban Mariel Boatlift, they have pushed almost a quarter of Venezuela’s nearly 30 million people out of the country.
Finally, in its magical realist fog, the Maduro regime believes it is on the cusp of accomplishing the long-awaited dream of unifying the diverse nations of Latin America into an all-powerful socialist bloc. The ghosts of Simon Bolivar, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro are guiding events from the grave as the dreamlike unification advocated by the Sao Paulo Forum is amazingly in sight. The Sao Paulo Forum is a coalition of socialist political parties and movements in Latin America and is perhaps the most important political organization in the region today.
Chavez and Castro, along with Luiz Lula da Silva from Brazil, were the intellectual forces behind the forum. Its unspoken goal coincided with Castro’s life’s purpose: to bring the imperio del norte (the imperialist from the north) to its knees. Mr. Lula da Silva has apparently won a runoff for the presidency in Brazil. It will not be long before he joins the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in leading an aggressive, anti-US regional coalition. Ultimately, they will not succeed, but a lot of damage could be done, and the United States appears woefully unprepared to respond.
Magical realism twists life like a funhouse mirror and conjures up a subjective reality capturing a feel for how a mystical world could be. We can avoid reality by living in a world of magical realism, but we cannot avoid its real-world consequences. Venezuela is dumping drugs and its “deplorables” on us, while they scheme with the Chinese, Russians and Cubans to freeze us out of Latin America and conspire to facilitate our global demise. The cold face of logic tells us pigs cannot fly and the Venezuelan government cannot and should not be trusted.
• Ron MacCammon is a retired U.S. military officer who served in Venezuela. He taught international relations and the government and politics of Latin America at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and he has more than 30 years of experience in the region.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.