40 The Americas The Economist November 13th 2021
created an army loyal to himself, not Vene
zuela. Mr Maduro gets help from Cuban
spies to find and purge potentially trouble
some officers. “Believe me, he can be total
ly ruthless if he needs to be,” says a former
government official.
Dozens of officers have been locked up.
Some have allegedly been tortured. Last
month General Raúl Baduel died in a de
tention centre run by the security services.
A former defence minister, who helped re
instate Chávez as president after the coup
plot in 2002, he began to disagree with his
former boss in 2007. For most of the rest of
his life he was imprisoned on unproven
corruption charges, despite pleas from his
family for mercy. His daughter says he was
murdered. (The government says he died
of covid19.)
Officers who support the regime tend to
prosper. Under Mr Maduro, the armed
forces have informal control of gold and
diamondmining, for reasons no one can
quite explain. Venezuela’s oil industry is
not as lucrative as it used to be, thanks to
sanctions and mismanagement, but the re
gime has other ways to reward loyalty. One
is to grant cronies permission to build
homes in national parks. Officers and offi
cials are thought to be among the owners
of lavish mansions that have sprouted in
areas supposedly offlimits to construc
tion, including the Caribbean archipelago
of Los Roques and the supposedly protect
ed mountain above Caracas.
Some speculated that when Mr Maduro
wrecked the economy, it would provoke a
mass uprising against his regime. It did
not. Many of the angriest and most ener
getic Venezuelans fled abroad, and now
send home cash that helps their relatives
survive. Those who stayed have become
increasingly dependent upon the state. If
they were to rebel, they fear it would let
them starve. In 2016 Mr Maduro introduced
bimonthly handouts of food. To qualify,
recipients need to have an identity card
which party loyalists often inspect on elec
tion days. The message is clear: with loyal
ty comes food.
Perhaps Mr Maduro’s most surprising
move has been his embrace of the usdol
lar. Having previously denounced the cur
rency as an imperialist tool, he now says
“thank God” it exists. The change hap
pened in 2019, during a sixday power cut
which made electronic payments impossi
ble. That forced people to accept the dollar,
technically in breach of the law. Since then,
the regime has abandoned price controls
and a fixed exchange rate and instead em
braced the greenback. As of June around
70% of transactions were carried out in
dollars. The policy has reduced annual in
flation from a peak of over 2,000,000% in
2019 to under 2,000%, which by Mr Madu
ro’s standards is a success.
The use of dollars has helped simplifythe sending of remittances. It has also
made life for middleclass folk slightly
more tolerable. Across the country, casinos
are being reopened. In the relatively
wealthy bubble of eastern Caracas hard
currency stores sell everything from de
signer skiwear to organic maple syrup.
Cynics call the process pax bodegónica, or
peace through delicatessens.
Unlike, say, Saudi Arabia or Afghani
stan, Venezuela still pretends it is a democ
racy.Atthestartofthe24daycampaigning
periodbeforetheelectionsthismonthMr
Maduro implored people to participate.Voting was “the best demonstration of love
for Venezuelan democracy”. But his regime
has also shown that, when it is at risk of
losing an election, it will cheat, ignore the
results, or both.
The tactic has not only enabled the re
gime to survive. It also appears to have con
vinced a lot of Venezuelans that democracy
does not work. In a survey in October by
the Andrés Bello Catholic University in Ca
racas, just half of respondents said democ
racywastheirpreferredform of govern
ment,a fallof 18 percentage points since
MrMadurotookoffice.nHowtobea dictator(2)A family affair
M
onths beforethe polls in Nicaragua
on November 7th the outcome was all
too clear. Daniel Ortega, a former guerrilla,
won his fourth consecutive term as presi
dent after jailing most of his potential op
ponents and forcing others into exile. With
his vicepresident, Rosario Murillo, who is
also his wife, he will rule the country of
6.6m for an unbroken twodecade stretch.
“The election had no legitimacy,” says
María Lilly Delgado, a journalist. Hard men
from the ruling Sandinista party, who had
gone from house to house telling people to
vote, hung out at polling booths, menac
ingly. President Joe Biden denounced the
poll as “a pantomime”. Several countries
have refused to recognise the result. One
organisation reckons that 80% of Nicara
guans boycotted the vote.
In the runup to the election the regimeacted with a brazenness not seen in Latin
America since the 1970s and 1980s, an era of
military dictatorships. Since May it has ar
rested at least seven potential presidential
candidates and scores of other critics, in
cluding former Sandinista comrades,
charging them with vague offences such as
“undermining sovereignty”. They include
Cristiana Chamorra, the daughter of Viole
ta Chamorra (to whom Mr Ortega lost in
1990 after his first stint in power). At the
time of her arrest she was the most popular
opposition politician, and might have won
the election, had it been fair.
The regime spreads disinformation. On
November 1st Facebook said that, in the
month before, it had shut down a “troll
farm” of more than 1,000 fake social media
accounts operated by state employees.
Most media are controlled by the children
of the Ortegas or their allies. Independent
journalists are mostly in exile.
All this is the culmination of years of
creeping authoritarianism. Mr Ortega
looks more and more like Anastasio Somo
za, the widely loathed dictator the Sandi
nistas overthrew in 1979. In 2000 he
changed the law so that the presidency can
be won with as little as 35% of the vote. This
let him return to power in 2007. He subse
quently increased his control over the po
lice, armed forces and the courts.
Since 2018 the regime has relied more
on brute force, says a political scientist
(who, like many Nicaraguans, did not want
to be named in this article). That year thou
sands of young people took to the streets to
protest against proposed changes to wel
fare payments. Police and proregime
thugs opened fire on them. More than 300
people died. Many more were locked up.
Political prisoners are deprived of food andDaniel Ortega steals the election in Nicaragua