Gongol.com Archives: July 2024
July 28, 2024
It's close to an iron law of human affairs that the more appalling the behavior of a strongman regime while in power, the harder they will cling to power. And the more desperately they cling to power, the more dreadful onlookers should assume their behavior has been. ■ Venezuela's regime -- a continuation of the Hugo Chavez bloc that took power in 1999 -- is politically illiberal and economically incompetent. It takes some remarkable mismanagement to chase 7.7 million people out of a country of 31.2 million, and to take the world's largest oil reserves and turn them into an economy that has contracted by 70% in about a decade. ■ But that regime is claiming it has won a presidential election, even though things look so corrupt that nearby countries like Costa Rica and Chile are effectively disputing the claimed results. Pre-election opinion polls made it fairly clear the opposition would win. ■ People get tired even of good governments after a while. (Even Winston Churchill got the boot shortly after victory in World War II.) Bad ones last for even shorter. The known truth about Venezuela's government is atrocious. What the regime is trying to keep from being held accountable for doing is likely even worse.
