Unchaining Venezuela: a struggle for democracy
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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. This event has taken a lot of work, six months of it. I'm very happy to bring it to you.

In fact, our speaker seven hours ago didn't have a visa to enter this country. And for this I want to thank him for getting through the customs of this country, which isn't easy. I want to also thank the LSE for hosting this event. I want to thank Pablo, the president of my society for his help. And I want to thank the School of Public Policy for his unparalleled support throughout the entirety of the thing. We've all pushed on because

This is the story where you're going to hear tonight is a great story. It's a very important story. It's a story of the Venezuelan democratic struggle. Leopoldo Lopez has lived through it like no one else has done. And I think he's in the best position to tell you tonight the past, the present and the future of this country. So without further ado, I leave my word, the floor to Professor Velasco.

Thank you, Gaspar. Thank you everyone for being here. My name is Andres Velasco. I'm the Dean of the School of Public Policy. If you have been to an LSE event in the past, the host, that is to say me, begins by saying two things. I am very happy to be here and we're very honored to have our guest here tonight. And one says that somewhat routinely without a great deal of enthusiasm.

Tonight I am going to say it non-routinely and with a lot of conviction and enthusiasm because I am truly, truly very happy to be here and I am particularly honored to have Leopoldo López here with us. If you're here, I probably don't have to tell you who Leopoldo is, but just in case you missed some of the elements of his bio,

He is one of the leading defenders of democracy and dignity in Venezuela. He entered politics pretty young. He was the mayor of Chacao, a district of Caracas. He has been active in opposition against the awful Chavez-Maduro dictatorship for many, many years now. For leading protests on the streets of Caracas in 2014, he was imprisoned.

He was subjected to a show trial and he spent four years in solitary confinement. He was sent home to house arrest. He managed to get out of there. And today he lives in exile in Madrid. You know, this is a time when most people don't trust politicians. This is a time when most of us are not inspired by our political leaders. We're cynical. We look at people in power or people trying to get to power and we say, ah,

more of the same, self-serving, unexciting. But there's occasionally that moment when you see someone and you think, my God, this guy, this woman is a true political leader. He or she is bold. He or she is courageous. He or she gives rise to a great deal of hope. And when I met Leopoldo many years ago,

And the times that I've had the privilege of sharing a meeting with them, sometimes in person, sometimes on Zoom, the times when I had the privilege of hosting Lilian Tintori, his wife, when Leopoldo was in prison. She traveled across the world and she came to Santiago, Chile, which is where I'm from. And I met with her and she told us, the Chilean political world, what Leopoldo was going through.

You know, the feeling I had back then and the feeling I have today is that we are in the presence of an extraordinary political leader and an extraordinary courageous man. So on behalf of the LSE, Leopoldo, I am very, very happy that you're here. We're going to have a conversation tonight. Leopoldo has told me that he doesn't want to make a long, long speech. So we're going to give him the floor. He's going to tell us about democracy in Venezuela.

but also about democracy in the world because more recently he's been involved in trying to put together a, what shall we call it, a society of people around the world trying to defend democracy. And I don't have to tell you that democracy is under siege in lots of places.

beginning with one rather large English speaking country in North America. So there are plenty of reasons why we need to worry about democracy and there are plenty of reasons why we need people fighting for democracy. So Leopoldo, many thanks for that as well. Couple of house speaking notes. Please put your phones on silent, an important thing.

There will be a chance for you to ask Leopoldo some questions, so the format will be

We will give them the floor, then I will seize the microphone again, take the liberty of asking Leopoldo two or three questions, and then we will open it up for people in the room. So again, Leopoldo, on behalf of the London School of Economics, on behalf of the people here, thanks very much for getting that visa, making it from Madrid to here. Thanks very much for joining us, and we look forward to this conversation. Thank you very much again.

Thank you very much. Thanks to all of you for being here. Thanks to Professor Andrés Velasco, who's a great friend and a great Latin American, not just an economist but a thinker of the potential for Latin America, our region. Thanks to Gaspar and the team that invited me. It's a great honor for me to be here. I didn't know what freedom was about until I was in a prison cell in solitary confinement

where somebody else decided when I was going to eat, when I was going to see the light, when I was going to go out. Like you, I studied a lot about freedom, human rights, democracy, economics, before getting involved into politics. But it was all theory until I really understood being in a prison cell, not from what it was, but from what it was not, that I understood what freedom was.

I ended up in prison, where I spent four years in solitary confinement and throughout seven years before I escaped Venezuela, because we were fighting for the freedom of the country, for democracy in Venezuela. In fact, that's what I had been doing for the past 25 years. I had the opportunity of studying in the United States.

a school that you might know, the Kennedy School of Government, where Professor Velasco was there. And then I went back to Venezuela. I was teaching economics in the university and at the same time working in the oil industry, and Chávez came to power. He came to power in 1999 with the proposal of changing everything through changing the Constitution.

the constituent assembly. So I decided to resign my work at the oil company and university and ran for office and I lost. And that was a good experience. It's always good because I truly believe that you don't win, you don't learn as much from winning as you do from losing. So I was unemployed and decided to start a movement, a party of young people who wanted to go into politics at that time in Venezuela.

And that's how I became the mayor of Chacao, which is a central district in Caracas. I was quite young at the time, very enthusiastic, and I wanted to put all of the things that I've learned at the public policy school into practice. And we put together an incredible team: women, men, with devotion, with commitment, with knowledge.

and with no working limits. So we would work from very early in the morning to very late at night, and we transformed that part of the city of Caracas. We made it safe. We did an alignment with New York City at the time. We trained our police officers. Caracas was the most dangerous city in the world at the time, and that part of Caracas was very safe.

We changed the infrastructure, we lowered taxes, it became an attractive place for investors to go, created public spaces, and we transformed it. That became a showcase of what Venezuela could be or at least what the city could be. So after re-election in 2004, in 2008 I was running for higher office to become the governor of Caracas. And I was disqualified to run for office for no reason, well, for political reasons.

I was taken away the possibility of running for office. The last time I was able to run for office was 21 years ago, 2004. So I've been doing politics for more than two decades without having the opportunity to run for office. So yes, you can do politics without having to run for office. And in a place like Venezuela, much more.

So, I was unemployed again in 2008 and decided to create another movement. At that time, it was very clear that Venezuela was going towards an autocracy. There were many signs of this. It was not acknowledged as such by the international community, but it was very clear where Venezuela was going. So, we started a grassroots, nonviolent movement that gathered people all over Venezuela, especially young people.

We trained ourselves in the works of nonviolent action. So we read about the civil rights movement in the U.S., we read about Mandela, we read about all different experiences of how nonviolent action can produce change.

And in the year 2013, 2012, I was running for president. And even though I won a case in the Inter-American Human Rights Court, it was not recognized by Chavez, so I couldn't run. And I was running the campaign of the person who won the primaries.

This is 2013, after Chavez had died and Maduro was the candidate. And in that election, April 2013, Maduro stole his first election by a slim margin. But he lost that election. So in the year of 2014, January of 2014, we decided to call for protest. Maria Corina Machado, myself, and a couple of other people, not many,

not the entire opposition of Venezuela, a group of us, decided to call the Venezuelan people to the streets, massively. Some people told us that people were not going to go out to the streets, but people did, all over the country. Tens of thousands of people went to the streets, and that was the beginning of the ugly phase of the dictatorship of Maduro. There was massive repression. Many people were taken as prisoners. Many people were tortured. Many people were killed.

and I was taken to prison. In fact, there was a warrant for my arrest and I decided to turn myself in. Many people at the time didn't understand. And I did so because I believe, as Martin Luther King said in his letter from the Birmingham prison, he said, "Nonviolent action is about showing the scars, the petrified scars of the system in order to change the consciousness of the people to produce change."

For me, Martin Luther King is the best voice if you want to learn about nonviolent action. And if you want to learn about nonviolent action, I recommend reading his letter from prison. And I turned myself in. I was sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment. My crime, according to the judge, was the art of the speech.

According to the regime, I used my words as a weapon to mobilize the Venezuelan people. And the entire trial was analysis of the speeches I had given in front of the Venezuelan people to call for action against the dictatorship. After four years in solitary confinement, I was sent to house arrest in the middle of another

cycle of protest and I call for protest again. And that took me back to military prison which was going from purgatory to hell.

It was the hardest time that I spent in prison was having gone to my house, meet my wife, my kids. My kids were small at the time, and then back to prison. And then they sent me back to military, to house arrest, and I was able to escape house arrest in April of 2019 in the middle of yet another cycle of protest. In this case, with the military and the police joining the protest.

Things didn't go out the way we wanted, so I had to seek refuge at the Spanish embassy, where I stayed another year and a half. It was the ambassador, his wife, and the special forces, because the embassy was under siege. They shot the electricity, shot the water supply, shot the trash services. Drones were flying over the embassy. And at the end of 2020, I decided to escape Venezuela for different reasons.

One of them, there were marginal returns for me staying. I had not seen my father for seven years. My mother was in a delicate health situation. She was about to have a kidney transplant.

And I decided to escape. I never wanted to escape Venezuela. I never wanted to leave my country. I love my country. That's what I always dream of focusing all of my efforts. I even have a tattoo of the map of Venezuela in my leg. And leaving Venezuela was one of the toughest decisions I made. So I came into exile. And exile is another form of imprisonment. So I had to reinvent myself again. What do I do now?

I continue to be focused in Venezuela, continue to lead our movement, continue to support the people who are in the ground in Venezuela, but I had to figure out what to do. And I had the opportunity of meeting different people.

from different parts of the world who, like myself, had a similar story. People who had been political prisoners, people who had been leading protests in their countries, people who had been forced into exile, people who had been the targets of smear campaigns like atomic bombs in their reputation by the regimes, people who had been target of assassination attempts. So that's how, alongside with Garry Kasparov from Russia,

and Masia Lineyad, a courageous woman from Iran, we started the World Liberty Congress. The World Liberty Congress is something that I thought existed, but it did not exist until we created it. An alliance of freedom fighters, democracy defenders from autocratic countries, people who are committed to the struggle against autocracies.

And this is a huge struggle. It might be the largest issue that we are facing today. When we started this several years ago, this was

I wouldn't say a non-issue, but it was certainly not the issue that was being most spoken about. It was COVID, it was climate change, other issues were top of line. Not autocracy and democracy. Now we know, I believe, now we know that at the core of many of the problems that we are living, that you are studying, that you are figuring out policies to figure out how to solve, at the core, at the root cause of many of those problems, you have autocracy.

Think about autocracy today. Fourteen years ago, 40% of the population in the world was living under some sort of autocratic regime. Today it's 72%. Let me put that in another number. 5.7 billion people in the world today are not living with the rights that you have today here in this country. 5.7 billion.

some sort of autocracy from the most radical, closed autocracies like North Korea to others that we could call electoral autocracies. But autocracies nonetheless. So we created the World Liberty Congress as an alliance of democracy defenders, freedom fighters, not alongside ideological lines. Because this is not about ideology and if you think about it, ideology is not at the core of the alliance of autocrats.

When you see the way that Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and many others align themselves, there is no

ideological alignment. You have the nationalists from Russia, the communists from China, the theocrats from Iran, the kleptocrats from Venezuela. There's no ideology there. What you have there is power and a common enemy. And the common enemy is democracy. The common enemy is freedom. The common enemy is the respect for human rights.

And we decided to create this alliance and to bring different people on board. And let me tell you just what my last week looked like. I decided last week to meet with the African network of the World Liberty Congress in Angola. We had a meeting with 50 leaders from Africa, the leaders of the opposition from Zimbabwe, Uganda, Malawi, and many other countries. We got to the airport. I was able to pass.

My colleagues who came from other African countries, a couple of hours later, they were deported back to their countries. A couple of others made it through, and then in the afternoon we were going to go take a domestic flight, and the police

decided to take our passports away and decided to forbid us from traveling. And they invited us to leave the country. I decided not to communicate while I was in Angola because the Angolan foreign minister is very close with the Venezuelan foreign minister. So I didn't want to shine a light into the opportunity for them to deport me

back to Venezuela, which would be something that the dictatorship would really like to do. And as soon as I left, a couple of hours later, they spoke and they were asking for me to be taken back to Venezuela. Then I went to New York City, where I was with Masih Alinejad. Masih Alinejad is a freedom fighter journalist from Iran who for the past 10 years has been

promoting the campaign against compulsory hijab. At the beginning, they told her that she was crazy, that why, why the hijab? This is something that is so irrelevant. She said, no, this is something that is very relevant to the lives of half of the Iranian people, all of the women. Those who could wear it, who would want to wear it, they should.

But those who don't want to, they should not be obliged and be sent to prison for it. So she was expelled and she became a very strong voice. And the Iranian regime a couple of years ago hired three men from the Russian mob to kill her at her house in Brooklyn.

and one of them was detained and from that detention two other detentions. So she was facing her assassins in a New York federal court, this is a couple of days ago, and it was really shocking to see all of the elements that prove the way in which Iran

through the Revolutionary Guard, hired this man, was instructing this man, and was monitoring her house, her garden, her husband, her kids, and every step that she took. And this is not an isolated case. This is what happened to Alexei Navalny. This is what happened to Karamusa. This is what happened to Captain Ojeda from Venezuela. This happens every day.

transnational repression. Autocrats look to silence the voices of those even beyond their borders, and that's part of the challenges that we have. So the idea that we have from the World Liberty Congress is to, first of all, create

and alignment, create a space where we can learn from each other, we can work together. We are very different skin color, religion, history of our nations, climate. But when we talk about what it means to fight a dictatorship, an autocrat, it's as if we were part from the same movement. It doesn't matter if you're from Hong Kong, where there used to be a hope for freedom at some point. And we have many colleagues from Hong Kong as well that can say, as the Chinese, as the Thai, as many others,

how autocracies go after you. So let me, before going to the questions, a bit on Venezuela. As you know, Venezuela has been struggling for democracy for years. We've been in this fight for more than two decades. We've been in the fight for freedom and democracy, and we have gone through the different approaches. We've gone to elections, we've taken people to the streets, we've negotiated, we've done everything in Venezuela.

And the biggest challenge was met last July when against all odds we elected our candidate in primaries, Maria Corina Machado. She was forbidden to run for office the same way I was some years ago. And we were able through a narrow window of opportunity to register a diplomat, 75 years old, completely, completely unknown,

to the Venezuelan people as our candidate. And within three months, he was polling over 70% because of the hope of the people to want change. We had the elections on July 28th, and against all of the machinery of the regime, Edmundo Gonzalez won with more than 70% of the vote. If the Venezuelan people that live outside Venezuela, today more than 10 million people, more than five would have been able to vote, it would have been 90%.

So in the case of Venezuela, it's very clear, especially after July, that we're not talking about a divided nation. Many times the case of Venezuela is looked through the lens of some analysts and some diplomats and some comfortable positions trying to say that this is the dilemma of a polarized nation. No, it's not. No, it's not. This is not a country divided.

This is a country united in the hope of getting rid of the dictatorship and walking towards democracy, freedom, and an open economy. And there was no uncertainty that we were going to win. There was uncertainty of what was going to be the reaction of Maduro. And Maduro did, like the scorpion when he bites the frog, his nature. He stole the election.

Stole the election, even though we had elements to prove that we won in every single voting station in the country. We had the receipts, we had the people that were able to upload through an incredible logistics organization to upload 24 hours after the election, 83% of all of the voting tallies in the country. The results were clear. Even in the military stations, Edmundo Gonzalez won.

And Maduro decided not only to steal the election, but to promote the highest level of repression that we have seen in the country in the past 25 years. We went into the election with 200 political prisoners. Today, there are almost 2,000 political prisoners. People that only committed the crime of being an observer in the election, or people who committed the crime of putting their opinion in social media.

or people who just happened to be at the wrong time and somebody decided to put them into prison. More than 1,800 prisoners. They have not seen their families for months. They have not received information for months. Maduro has shut down all of the free media in the country. There is absolutely no free media, not a single radio station, not a single TV station. The Internet has been blocked.

and Twitter has been, or X, has been censored in the country. The military has taken control of the state with the practices of controlling the rent. Maduro has shifted Venezuela from, it started with Chavez, but it really got deep with Maduro. Many of you might think that Venezuela is an oil economy.

It's no longer an oil economy. Venezuela used to produce, when Chavez came to power, 3.4 million barrels of oil. Today we're producing less than 800,000 barrels of oil. And that decline was not because of sanctions, not because of a war, it was because of corruption and mismanagement.

But the country shifted. The political economy of Venezuela completely shifted from being an oil economy, you can argue the rentist approach to the economy and how that evolved into the type of democracy we had. But what we have today, and this is a really interesting topic for many of you to study, and if any of you is interested, please reach out. Venezuela today is a criminal economy.

It's a criminal economy where the priority is not growth in GDP. The priority is cash flow, because for autocrats, cash flow is the name of the game. It's not GDP. They don't care about growth. They don't care about the people. They don't care about poverty. They don't care about the well-being of the majorities. They care about cash flow. And the cash flow in Venezuela is provided by mainly four pillars:

oil and the extraction of licensed and non-licensed oil that is being paid by crypto and is being sold all the way to China through the deep, dark markets.

Gold extraction that has meant the tremendous impact in the Venezuelan Amazonia that has been destroyed. Many of you might know Angel Falls. Angel Falls is in a national park called Canaima, one of the most beautiful and most diverse places in the planet. And today the regime is promoting extraction of gold and diamond in open mines. That's the second pillar of the criminal economy.

The third is cocaine. As you know, we are neighbors from Colombia, to Colombia. And a good part of the cocaine that goes out of Colombia through the Atlantic or north of the Caribbean goes and passes through Venezuela. And the third is contraband.

There are no ports or airports that can register the goods being brought in or out. It's, again, the criminal economy. And the criminal economy has created a political economy very clearly focused on the power that the military have. In each one of these, oil, gold, cocaine, and contraband, you have the military, you have the party,

You have the members of the party, and you also have the economic enablers, individuals, businesses that present themselves as business people, present themselves as entrepreneurs, but they are just the enablers of the corruption structure that the regime has created. So that's what we are facing. And this is not an endogenous challenge, but it's also a global challenge.

Maduro is still there, mainly because of the support he has received from China financially, from Russia diplomatically and militarily, and with the kleptocratic networks, from Iran in many different ways. Hezbollah is known to be in Venezuela and from other countries.

So, we understand that the challenge to go forward, and I will talk more in the questions about what's to come for Venezuela, it's of course a local challenge for the Venezuelan people. But it is as well a global challenge, and it's a global opportunity for those that believe that freedom and democracy, especially in this moment, in what we are living in 2025, if you believe that freedom and democracy should be a priority,

Venezuela should be a priority because Venezuela could be the one case, the one case that shows that autocrats can be defeated in the 21st century and that that can mean a path to freedom, democracy, and prosperity. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Leopoldo. Thank you, everyone. I think you will agree those were inspiring words.

I have the microphone and I'm not going to give up the microphone just quite yet. So forgive me if I ask our guest two questions, maybe three questions, and then the floor is yours, everyone in the room. So Leopoldo, you are engaged today in a struggle for democracy in Venezuela, but more broadly in the world. And I think it's important to think about the future, but also to learn about the past.

I was double-checking just before you finished speaking, because I wanted to get my dates right. The Maduro-Chavez dictatorship has been in office for almost exactly 26 years. That's a very long time. If you had asked a social scientist at a place like the LSE, if you have a country in which GDP collapses by 80%,

There's no example in world history outside war of a country where GDP fell by four-fifths. So if Venezuela made 100 in output every year, today it makes 20.

where inflation nobody really knows, but it peaked at what? 10,000, 20,000, 50,000? Yeah, 20,000% per year. You know, that's Weimar Republic hyperinflation, where, you know, the minimum wage measured in dollars depends on what exchanges want to measure it, but it's what, $5, $10 a month.

A social scientist in a place like this might have said, "Okay, yeah, these guys will last 10 years, 12 years, there'll be repression. China will put in some cash, Iran will put in some thugs." But ultimately, these regimes collapsed out of their own weight, their own mistakes, you know, the suffering of the people. Nonetheless, in my country, another thug lasted nearly 18 years. In your country, two thugs have lasted 26. What is it about autocracy?

above and beyond repression that makes these regimes so long-lived. And what lessons can we learn as we try to fight them and get rid of them? Well, that's the question that everybody is wanting to answer at this point. But I can tell you that we were very lonely for many years in our struggle for democracy, for many years.

Chavez came into power in 1999, and it was not until 2014, 15 years after, that there was a recognition that Venezuela was not a democracy. And this had tremendous implications because Venezuela was engaging with the world with red carpet, literally red carpet. When Chavez came to Madrid, he was received with red carpet much in the same way with many other countries. So it took a long time for that recognition.

And the world engaged in a very pragmatic way, especially in the case of Venezuela being an oil economy. Oil played a big part. Not oil, not the quantity of oil, but the price of oil. Venezuela was positioned to be the most prosperous country of Latin America in the 21st century, for sure.

We had a hike in the prices from $15 per barrel to $100 per barrel, and that sustained period of high prices lasted for 10 years until 2014. And if we would have produced the same amount of oil, but we, the, the, the,

forward-looking that we had in the 1990s was that Venezuela was positioned to produce six million barrels of oil in 2010. If that had been the case, Venezuela would have been a completely different country. So at some point somebody, I hope, writes a book about what 1999 meant for Venezuela because we were at that moment at a juncture of

of becoming what we are now, one of the poorest country only compared to Haiti in the region. Venezuela today is Haiti with an enclave of the Arab Emirates, where you have clouds of prosperity, but the entire country is living under some sort of, under high poverty. And unfortunately, I think that the second element was high oil prices that created this mirage for many years.

And a third element is the fact that the 21st century has become the century of autocracy. And it was right in front of us and it was not really seen as a real and clear present danger until very recently.

One of the reasons why Maduro is still in power, as I said, is because of the lifeline that China, Russia, and Iran gave to Chavez and then Maduro for many years. And this is a lifeline that translates into hard currency. The Chinese lend Maduro more than $20 billion in revolving credits.

The Russian military made good business with Venezuela. Venezuela completely shifted from being NATO fed or NATO military equipment to becoming completely Russian.

So, I think that that also created the conditions. But the reality is that this is a question that I believe many social scientists should be thinking about now. Because the 21st century has been, as I said, the century of autocracy. For the last 20 years, according to Freedom House, according to VDEM, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, for the past 19 consecutive years, there has been less freedom year by year.

There has not been a single transition to democracy from autocracy that has been able to be sustained in the past 25 years. Not a single one. There were some opportunities. Egypt was an opportunity. Tunisia was an opportunity. Bolivia was an opportunity. But they all went back to autocratic regimes. So there's not been a single one. Maybe Bangladesh could be an opportunity that is yet to be seen. So that's the century in which we're living.

Very different from what happened in the 1990s. The 1990s was the golden age of transitions. And so this is a very different circumstance now. Let me follow up on that briefly. One would like to think that when an autocrat or an autocrat wannabe begins to trample on individual rights, people take to the streets and complain. And eventually they do. But in the examples that you've mentioned and some others, what strikes me

And this is not a question about Venezuela, it's a question about the world. What strikes me as very remarkable is how complacent people are vis-a-vis governments which used to be democratic and begin to move away. Let me give you a couple of examples. In India,

I think it is not controversial to say that the current government has not exactly been an example of respect for democratic freedoms. Last time I checked, Mr. Modi has a 72% approval rate. You would have thought that Indians were furious. Well, 72% of Indians are not so furious. Let me give you another example. Mexico. I think you would agree with me that the outgoing president of Mexico,

put Mexican democracy against the wall, modified the constitution, made the Supreme Court elected, which is an absolute travesty of democracy, etc., etc., etc. Nonetheless, his appointed successor got 62% of the vote and is now the president. You could also cite Israel, you could also cite Turkey, Hungary, at some point Poland,

Why is it that this beautiful thing called democracy, which makes people live better and be freer, why are people so blasé when bad guys step on democracy and weaken it? Well, I think, as you say, the

The path to many autocrats is the path of democracy. They are elected. That was the case of Venezuela. The path to the autocratic regime in Venezuela was not one that came through a military crew. It came through elections. People elected Chavez and people elected those practices, and that's been much in the same way in many of the cases that you mentioned. So I think that democracy is no longer the sexy idea

idea that we had during the 1990s or even during the Cold War. The Cold War was very easy, it was bipolar, it was communism, capitalism, it was two blocks, it was quite simple to understand the world in that perspective. Then came the 1990s and there was the hope, end of history, as Fukuyama said, that everything was meant to go at some point or another to a democratic state with market economy.

of course we now know that that didn't happen. And I think that the disenchantment with democracy as such has a lot to do with the incapacity of democracy to deliver to the people. If we look at democracies in the U.S. or democracies in Europe, the disenchantment comes from the people expecting more and not getting

not having their expectations being met for different reasons. Maybe the population has grown too large to satisfy the needs of all, or maybe there are other conditions. I believe that also the way in which the communication today, it's much more fertile for manipulation, for false promises. And that's what we had in Venezuela. Chavez came to power saying that they were going to be, change everything with the change of the Constitution.

And then he was very lucky to have high prices of oil, as I said. So he sent the country into a mirage while the private sector was being destroyed, while there were being, you know, companies' land being expropriated. There were no respect for property rights.

the idea was that this model, this tropical Caribbean experiment was delivering, and it was not. It was just creating the idea because it was not sustainable. So I think that the challenge comes from delivering. When I was in graduate school during the 1990s,

that was a time, you know, the wall had just fell, 1989, and the idea, I was at the Kennedy School, and

And everyone wanted to be engaged in building democracy and building market economy. You had professors going to Latin America, to Southeast Asia, going to all parts of the world, promoting to Russia, promoting these ideas. Everybody was so excited to contribute to the building of this new stage of the world that was going to be open, free, democratic.

But things didn't turn out that way. And of course, there are many reasons. Those are some that come to mind. Yeah, I was a postdoc at the Kennedy School in the 1990s. Yeah, we were all so optimistic. It seems a little naive. Maybe not. I don't know. Two quick questions on Venezuela, and we open it up to the floor. I think after the stolen election, the most recent stolen election, one thing that became reasonably obvious is that

what other countries in the region do vis-a-vis Venezuela is going to matter a lot for the future of Venezuelan economy, Venezuelan democracy, sorry, not economy. And given that Latin America has a lot more governments of the left than of the right, what the Latin American left does vis-a-vis Venezuela will matter a lot. And when it comes to Venezuela, there's three lefts.

There is the Venezuelan, I mean the Latin American left of dictatorship, Nicaragua, Cuba, and those guys will say whatever Maduro tells them to say. Not very interesting, not very hopeful. Then you have the oddities of the Latin American left, the president of my country, Boric, maybe the Frente Amplio in Uruguay, who've been very clear, very, very clear, Venezuela is a dictatorship, and if you're a person of the left, that is not something you tolerate.

Problem is, Uruguay and Chile are two lovely countries, but we're small. We don't have a lot of political weight internationally. So the fight is really going to be in three countries: Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. The three have countries, I mean, governments of the left. The three are democratic, maybe imperfectly democratic, but democratic. None of the three has really lifted a finger to make sure that Venezuelans are free to elect their own leaders.

So imagine that I could open that door and wheel Lula into this room, or Claudia, or Pedro, and you sat them down in the front row and you said, "Ladies and gentlemen, let me explain to you that to be proper Democrats of the left, you have to help me get rid of Maduro." What would be your argument?

The argument to them to support? Yeah. Well, first, to be on the side of democracy and not on the side of dictatorship. No, of course. I mean, I would tell them to be very clear, even to Boric, who has been very good

I would say you need to go one step and recognize that the Venezuelan people express themselves and we won the election because Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, they have said it but not in a way that is... In a pretty wimpy way, let's be honest. That is not very committed. And to recognize the will of the Venezuelan people that already expressed in the most...

the most difficult, but the only path that could secure a legitimate, constitutional, and peaceful transition to democracy, which is respecting the will of the people of the elections of July 28th.

90% of Venezuelans, as I said before. This is not a divided country. This is not an issue of, well, you know, there are some, the country could be polarized and the country could come into an internal conflict. No. The reality is that if you call yourself a Democrat,

The basic rule is to respect the will of the people, and that is not happening with a level of commitment. We would expect the OAS to be on top of the case of Venezuela, exerting more diplomatic pressure, more recognition, and to stop recognizing the dictatorship. We would ask very clearly

stop recognizing Maduro, stop doing business with Maduro, stop giving Maduro opportunities to have cash flow, stop looking for ways to make Maduro comfortable, which is what many of these governments do. And I would also ask for the commitment to the struggle of the Venezuelan people today, the reality of those who fight for democracy in Venezuela,

has changed dramatically over the past eight months. For the first time, politics is completely banned. There is no possibility. I never thought that we were going to get to this point. But today you cannot have a meeting of 10, 20, 15 people openly talking about politics anywhere in Venezuela.

All of the political dynamic is left to the digital opportunities that we have, to Zoom calls and to different... So it's become a clandestine reality for those who want democracy, much in the same way that you had in Argentina, that you had in your own country, Chile. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, back to the event. Okay, so Colombians, Mexicans and Brazilians in the room, please tweet that to see if your governments finally get the message and do the right thing. They haven't yet, regrettably. Last question from me has to do with the elephant in the room, or shall I say the dinosaur in the room, or the dinosaur in the White House. Pick your favourite metaphor.

So what does Trump mean for Venezuelan democracy? There are two stories, and I want to know which one in your mind is the right one, or maybe neither one. There's a third one. One story says Trump is going to get tough on Venezuela, reimpose the sanctions, punish all the Venezuelans who've been engaged in drug dealing, and that will eventually bring the regime down. There are reasons to be skeptical, but people are saying that.

Other people are saying, oh, no, no, no, that's never going to happen. Trump is really not worried about democracy. Trump is worried about two things, migration and oil. So it could well be that Trump says, I strike a deal with Maludo. He keeps his migrants. He takes...

People in the United States today, I don't have to ship them to El Salvador. I ship them back to Caracas. In addition, Maduro gives us some cheap oil and we're friends. Democracy. Oh, what the hell is that? Democracy. I've dealt with migration. I've dealt with oil. Trump is a happy man.

So is it going to be hypothesis number one? Is it going to be hypothesis number two? Or some other thing that I can think of? - Well, in the two months of the second Trump administration, we've seen both. We've seen the-- - Yeah, the Mexicans are saying the same thing about tariffs. - Only two months. So we saw a coming together during the first weeks through a hostage release

from Venezuela to the US and

and an idea of getting closer to the regime. But then two weeks ago, the oil licenses were revoked. And let me explain this, what does this mean, these oil licenses. 2019 sanctions were imposed to Venezuela by the Trump administration, and they were imposed in different sectors, gold, finance, and oil. And for the oil sector, what that meant was that the oil was not going to be sold to U.S. markets,

given the financial restrictions, was not going to be paid through the SWIFT system. So that created a new market, selling the Venezuelan oil through the corrupt market going all the way up to China at 30 to 40 percent discount and being paid in crypto. And this created a huge scandal that a year and a half ago

Maduro imprisoned 100 of the people from his regime, including the minister of oil, because $22 billion were missing. And they were being paid. This is oil that was paid by crypto, and that money was lost. Nothing changed. They put 100 people in prison and put other people in the positions that they were to do the same thing. So then came the Biden administration,

and gave a license to Chevron, the American oil giant that has been in Venezuela for many years and has been in many other autocratic countries. So they know how to work around autocratic regimes.

And this license extended to other oil companies, to Repsol, to Reliance from India, and to others. And that license was revoked two weeks ago, and this will have a tremendous impact, and that's the status where we are now. However, the Wall Street Journal published an article today saying that the Trump White House is considering to again give the oil license to Maduro because of what you say

the emphasis in migration. What do I think? What do I hope? I hope that sanctions are staying, and I know that this is a controversial issue, and it is in Venezuela, because it has tremendous consequences. But I believe that as long as Maduro has cash flow, it will be very difficult to create the, to make changes within the regime.

And cash flow is the condiment for the stability of Maduro. Again, not GDP, cash flow and the way it's distributed. So I hope that the sanctions are kept, but I hope that this is not a policy of a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. There is no one policy that will allow

the transition to democracy. There needs to be many things put in place, not only the oil sector, but also to go after the enablers, the enablers of Maduro. They are in Madrid. They are in London. They are in many of the cities. They are laundering billions of dollars for Maduro. They are selling the oil shipments, and they are not

being targeted not only by the U.S., but also by the U.K. or other European countries. So I would hope that this becomes a target

of democratic governments to go after the cash flow and inhibit the cash flow. I also believe that those responsible for having committed the fraud should be sanctioned. I believe that those who are torturing, killing, and have unlawfully detained thousands of Venezuelans should be sanctioned. If there is no pressure, it will be a more difficult scenario for change to happen. We understand

that the Venezuelan people have the main responsibility. And we have shown once and again, the case of Venezuela is one that should be studied in the way in which the Venezuelan people and the Venezuelan democratic leadership has been able to reorganize ourselves through different cycles. If you think of Venezuela, if you follow the news about Venezuela, every three years

we have a challenge, a real challenge to the dictatorship. This is not the same in other autocratic countries. So the Venezuelan civil society, the Venezuelan democratic leadership has been alive and has been leading. It's not an easy path to go because in every cycle,

there is frustration. People get excited about the possibility for change, and when that doesn't happen, that takes us to a cycle of frustration, a cycle of fear, a cycle of disengagement. We are at that moment now to recreate an upward cycle internally in Venezuela.

We would love to say that the future of the Venezuelan democracy is only in the hands of Venezuela, but the reality, the global reality is that it's not, that it depends in a great way what the democratic countries could do to see the case of Venezuela finally being transformed in transition into democracy. So we do expect, not just from the White House, but also from Europe,

much more than statements of we are very concerned about this or that. Those statements come out weekly, but they don't do anything. We need action, and action can be taken within the parameters of international law, within the parameters of the internal laws of the countries by the tools that they have and the means that they can impose if there is will to make change in Venezuela.

Very true and very well said. Thank you very much Leopoldo. If you're an LSE student and you're a crypto advocate, take note. Crypto is being used to finance the dictatorship in Venezuela and other nasty activities around the world as well. Okay, the floor is open. Unlike Maduro, I'm going to take questions from all sides. I'm going to begin over here. There was a hand. Okay, sir, right there in the yellow.

Please say who you are and please in non-Caribbean fashion keep your questions brief. I'm John, I've been a visitor to the LSE for lectures and the wonderful concerts for 30 years. My question is does the opposition support the sale of the Citgo Petroleum Company in the US to pay the expropriation debts of the Chavez and Maduro governments? Do you think

that the US judicial decision to enforce this sale will be ratified by the Trump administration. - Sorry, the sale of what? - No, no, I got it, I got it. - You got it? You got it? Okay. I'm gonna take three at a time and then we're gonna pass it. The woman in the black in the back there, please. Yes, you. Thank you. - Hello, thank you so much for coming. I'm in my third year and I'm a history student.

And you said that organized crime is huge in Venezuela. Organized crime attracts young people especially for economic opportunity that might not be available elsewhere. So how did your past political movements attract young people to political hope instead of quick money? Thank you. One question from over there. I see one hand right there. Yes, please. Thank you.

Hello, hi. My name is Gayatri. I am an alumni of LSE. So I wanted to ask you a question about the role of social media in mobilizing for and against democracies. Either can it be used as a force of good for mobilizing pro-democracy movements overall, globally, especially harnessing the diaspora? Or has it sort of gone down the way of having a lot of misinformation and

and a lot of conspiracy theories going around that weaken democracies overall, and what's the case in Venezuela specifically. Thank you so much. - Thank you.

Great. Yeah, Flores, yours. Yeah, so if you're interested in the crypto side of the way in which things have changed in Venezuela, I wrote a paper on this for the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. It's called Crypto Adoption in Venezuela, Two Sides of the Coin. So we take a deep dive into the way in which the regime used crypto to launder money and evade sanctions, and it's really interesting to, if you're interested in this, just to see how

how they did it but also i speak about or i write about the the positive use of crypto in venezuela which has been also very important if so if anyone is interested in this uh also please let me know with respect to the first question uh is the venezuelan opposition in support of the sale of sitco in in the u.s well uh let me just give you a very brief context sitco is a u.s company

owned by the government of Venezuela. It was bought in different stages during the 1980s, 1990s, in order to allocate the heavy crude in Venezuela into the southern refineries of the U.S. And it became one of the largest retailers of gasoline in the U.S. It had at one point more stations, gas stations, than McDonald's, 17,000 gas stations. It was very, very big.

So Chavez decided to put Zitco as a collateral for part of the process of getting more debt.

And that put the company into a very dire situation. Then there has been more than 40 cases of corruption associated to CITGO during the Chavez and then Maduro administration. In 2019, the interim government of Juan Guaidó, that was recognized by the United States, took the challenge of administrating CITGO.

And so for the past five years, CITGO has been saved by the fact that it's been managed by professionals. Actually, CITGO compared to its industry-level companies in the U.S. has been outperforming other private companies.

So, for the past five years, the management of CITCO has been quite impressive. However, the company is today prey of many of the debt holders of Venezuela, and that has taken the company to a very long, tedious legal process that is in the process of being sold to those debt holders in Venezuela, not because of the Venezuelan opposition decision by any means,

but because of the legal process that the company was thrown into, because of the mismanagement of Chavez and then Maduro. Your question about organized crime. In Venezuela, the state is organized crime.

So it's much like Russia in that respect. It's not that the state coexists with organized crime organizations that are independent. It's the state that is the structure of organized crime. The way they think, the way they act, the way they do business, the way they engage nationally and internationally is through the logic of organized crime. And yes, many young people have been

have been attracted to many of the bands, of the criminal bands associated with the regime. However, many of the young people, Venezuela, I don't know if you're aware of this, but Venezuela today is the largest migration crisis in the planet.

the largest. Yesterday I was talking to a scholar in the field, a researcher in the field, and the number of Venezuelans that have left the country is close to 10 million people.

of a population of 30 million people. So we've lost a third of the population of our country and 85% of that over the past 10 years. So it's been massive, massive. There's no comparison. I mean, you can only compare, Syria only gets close to what has been the migration crisis in Venezuela. So many of the young people have left Venezuela. Actually, I was...

looking at the population distribution of Venezuela, the most recent information, and we are becoming an older country. The people in Venezuela, below 20 years old, is less than 10% today. So it's...

IT'S A REAL CRISIS THAT WE ARE LIVING IN TERMS OF THE POPULATION. SO HOW DO WE GET SUPPORT? AND THAT LINKS TO THE THIRD QUESTION, YOU KNOW, HOW TO MOBILIZE YOUNG PEOPLE. WELL, WHAT WE DID IN OUR MOVEMENT WAS PRIMARILY A MOVEMENT OF YOUNG PEOPLE. I REMEMBER I WAS JUST ABOUT 30 WHEN I STARTED THAT MOVEMENT.

Most of the people that were with me were in their early 20s, and many people told me that we were crazy starting a movement with young people. But young people are idealistic.

If you can get young people into a challenge, one we are facing in Venezuela, which is an ideal. We are fighting for an ideal, for something that we know can happen, which is freedom, something that we know can change our lives, which is rule of law. If you ask any Venezuelan about freedom, they will give you a personal experience. And do the experiment. There might be many Venezuelans that cross your path in one way or another. Ask them.

What does freedom mean to you? And they will not talk about theory. They will talk about something that happened to them. Even they lost their job, or they had to separate themselves from their families, or they had to leave the country, or they were prey of the regime in some way, that they were abused, or there's something, something personal

That will be their answer of what freedom means. So that's how you mobilize people, with ideas. You mobilize people with the idea of changing things in a radical way. And in the case of Venezuela, the most radical change is what's needed. And I think those were the two second questions. Thanks very much, Leopoldo. I'm going to take one question from upstairs to the ecumenical woman right in the front.

While she gets a microphone, one empirical observation: Europeans worry about getting too many refugees. There are two and a quarter million Venezuelans in Colombia, one million in Peru nearly, one million in Chile near, one million in Brazil. And one million in the US and almost 800,000 in Spain. Exactly. Those are big numbers. The floor is yours.

Hola, senor. I can't tell you how much this means for me. My family's Peruvian, but they have lived in Venezuela for 40 years. My first protest at eight months old was in Caracas against Chavez, and right now my grandparents are in Caracas. This is actually a question from them, coming from inside the house, if you will. What are... From my abuelo, actually.

What are the next steps for mobilization for this next election and what strategies are left after all this time to get Maduro to respect the will of the people? Thank you very much, sir. Thank you. Thank you. And say hello to your grandparents. Felicidades, abuela. Okay, we'll take three again over here somewhere. No, from that block. Oh, here, the gentleman with the beard. I believe I know who he is.

Hi there. Professor, the floor is yours. Omar Hamad Gallego, formerly here at the LSE. All regimes need the army, right? All regimes need the weapons to retain power. And it's still not clear to me how or rather why the military hasn't really revolted

at some point, you know, why is it that they have stayed loyal to him, right? I guess the families of the soldiers have also suffered. I think you've mentioned that the tallies from the last elections, right, that the votes in favor of Edmundo Gonzalez came from the, you know, we're from also areas where the barracks are. So why is it that the military hasn't revolted yet? Thank you. One last question from over here. Yes, in the white t-shirt there. Yes, there we go.

Thank you. My question is... Can you say your name, please, and affiliation? My name's Farah. I'm a third-year international relations student here at LSE. And my question is, you say around 90% of Venezuelans are united against the autocratic regime. Do you think that this...

unification can go beyond their sentiments of anti-autocratic regimes. And my question is because you see cases like Egypt and Tunisia where the majority of the population were united against the autocratic regime.

And then a few years later, you go democratic backsliding and towards more autocracy. So I guess what would be the way in order for Venezuela, should it get rid of the regime to sustain a democracy? Thank you.

No, thank you. Thank you. Very good questions, all of them. So again, thanks to your grandparents in Venezuela. What are the next steps? They ask. There are elections being called for, regional and municipal elections by Maduro for next May, and we will not participate. Some people will participate, but the people won't. So the people are very clear. I just saw a recent poll. Seventy percent of the people will not participate in a regional election, and it's very simple.

If they stole a presidential election, of course they're going to steal a local and regional election. And everybody is very clear that today in the context of Venezuela, the mayors or the governors have really little impact in the lives of the Venezuelan people. People are very clear that the gate that needs to be opened is the gate to get rid of the dictatorship.

Everything else, everything else, it comes through that first stage. If we don't get rid of the dictatorship, we cannot dream about better education, better water supply, better economy, better productivity, better universities. The necessary condition for everything else is freedom and democracy. And how to mobilize? Well, I have been in this fight since the very beginning, since day one. And I have experienced the cycles.

And we are in the process of building a new cycle. And when you're in the bottom part of that cycle, there are some people that are not believers. But that's a moment when you need the believers. That's a moment when you need leadership. That's a moment when you need to continue, when you need to step up and stand up again and to continue. And I...

And I think we will see another cycle. And I hope that this cycle includes not just the pressure from the inside, but also the commitment and the pressure from democratic countries. Your question about the military. Well, in the case of Venezuela, the military has gone through radical changes since Chavez came to power.

He was mentored by Fidel Castro in how to manage the military. And a couple of very important lessons were taught by Castro to Chavez at the time. One of them was to create an archipelago of the armed forces and get rid of the line of command, of the unity of the armed forces, because they no longer exist only to defend the territory and the sovereignty, but they exist now.

to prevent those in power to leave power. And they understand that being the military one of the main pillars, they need to break and fracture the lines of command. So that has evolved to a very anarchic

military that we have today in Venezuela. But that's not the only reason. The second is that the military are the focus of the highest levels of repression from the regime. There was a very famous case of a captain who was in prison. I was in a military prison for four years. His name was Ojeda. He was in prison at the same time I was in Ramo Verde. I knew him.

And he went to Chile, your country, and he was active in his commitment to freedom for Venezuela. And the Maduro regime sent a squad to kidnap and murder him. And they kidnapped him, they cut him into pieces, and they buried him.

He had left some security cameras in his apartment, and the Chilean government has been very professional in going after this case to the detail of making it very clear that this was a killing that was ordered by the regime itself. What will it take for the military to take a different position?

Well, I think impunity is not one of them. Impunity is not one of them. I was in house arrest in 2019, and I had the opportunity

to talk directly to many of the people in the military and the police to do something against Maduro. It's a long story, but long story short, I was in house arrest and I was contacted by a high-ranking general and I said, if you are who you are and if you have the power that you have, just allow me to meet people in my house. So for three weeks, I met Maduro

the head of the political police, the head of the national police, the commanders of the National Guard and the army that were in charge of the security of the administrative buildings and the National Assembly in Venezuela, and the head of one of the most dangerous and feared hit squads of Maduro, El Faes. I met with them, and I asked all of them, why are you here talking to me?

And after giving me their patriotic approach to what was happening in Venezuela, they all said,

Because of the pressure we have from our families because of sanctions some of them were already sanctioned and they wanted the sanctions to be lifted others They were being threatened to be sanctioned and didn't want the sanctions to be imposed on them. So I have a first-hand experience in listening to people active in very high ranking positions from the military telling me that the

THE PRESSURE OF SANCTIONS IS SOMETHING THAT CAN MOVE BEHAVIOR. AND I THINK THIS IS SOMETHING THAT SHOULD BE A PRIORITY, IDENTIFYING THE INDIVIDUALS THAT ARE MORE SUCCESSFUL, SUCCESSFUL TO PRESSURE, AND FIGURING OUT WAYS IN WHICH DIFFERENT TYPES OF PRESSURE COULD BE INFLICTED. WITHOUT PRESSURE,

there won't be a change. Without internal movements of the people, it's more difficult to change. Without commitment from democratic countries, it's much more difficult to change. Again, there is no silver bullet. There is many things that should be done at the same time with the same objective. What was the last question? How to evade? Can you tell me the last?

- Oh, autocracy is in Morocco and Tunisia, right? - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the transition. - And Egypt. - Yeah, no, that's an excellent question. It's an excellent question. I had,

I've had really good conversations with my friends from Egypt and how frustrated they are that they were able not once but twice to take down the autocrats and, you know, once came the Muslim Brotherhood and then came al-Selassie. And the situation, of course, is not better for those who wanted more democracy. So it is one of the biggest challenges is how to think of the day after, how to think the day after to be –

and to be democratic, because as you very well say, many different people with different ideologies, different positions can be against the regime.

But then when it comes to the transition, there is the biggest challenge, which is how to make that sustainable, that transition to sustainable. In my view, democracy plays a huge role. In my view, a sustainable and stable transition to democracy requires the legitimacy of the people. Without the legitimacy of the people, it will be a much harder challenge.

So going quickly to an election that will give legitimacy to the transition government or to the next government that will take the challenge of running the country, for me, is the rule number one for a stable transition. And then the transition needs to deliver, needs to deliver to the people.

So, of all of the problems, because everything will be a priority in Venezuela, everything. I mean, it's a country that has collapsed. We are undergoing what is called a complex humanitarian crisis, which is a technical term for saying that the country has collapsed.

No running water, no electricity, no healthcare system, no social security, no roads, no gasoline. I mean, just you name it. So identifying the priority, because giving something a priority is not what you choose. It's what you decide not to prioritize. That's the real challenge in terms of public policy of deciding what is your priority.

And so in that list of the things that you are not going to choose, you need to, or a transition government will need to choose something that will be able to deliver in the short term stability for the people. And I think macroeconomic stability will be, of course, a priority to make that happen. But it's again, one of the issues that I hope places like this

and many others are studying how to provide the key to stable transitions to democracy. It didn't happen for different reasons in Bolivia, where there was a transition. And again came the mass regime, and now they have many political prisoners, and it's become also an autocratic country. So what happened in Egypt, what happened in Tunisia, what happened in Bolivia are the most recent cases of failed transitions, and we need to learn from that.

- Thank you, Leopoldo. I think we have time for one more round of questions. I'm gonna take a Venezuelan colleague and friend and student here as the first questioner. Dale. - Well, as you said, I'm from the SPP. I'm from Venezuela, Ricardo Ensecre. I think it's easy for most of us to think about the recent failures and frustrations, but I tend to think more about the early years of chavismo. So is there anything

that you would do differently or think that should be done differently or was it something that... From the early days of Chavez, you mean? Yeah, or was it always out of our hands? Right. If we could rewind the film, what might we change? I'll take a question over there. The woman... Oh, no, no woman. It's a man. I wasn't quite sure whose hand it was. It is your hand. You've got the microphone. Yes. There you go.

- So my name is Luis Vicente, I'm Spanish and I know I'm an external visitor. So I wanted to come back on the point around external relationships and how you approach the different countries around the world to help you or to help Venezuela become a democracy, right? How do you convince Europe to be tougher with sanctions? How do you convince North America to be tougher with sanctions?

Is there only the democratic play or can you offer something else other than democracy? - And over here, all the way back there.

I'm an OSCE PPE student. I'm wondering, would you be willing to start a revolution? We can see you. Why don't you get up and come a little bit further so that we can actually know who's speaking. I can see you, but Leopoldo probably can't. There we go. So I'm an OSCE PPE student. I'm just wondering, what's your next plan? Are you willing to start a revolution or just keep protesting and asking the foreign aid? And if you want to do a revolution or something, what's your next plan? Thank you.

Oh, thank you. So you asked me what would be done different in the early Chavez years. I think many things. I mean, I think that Chavez was able to bring hope to the people for change, but he decided to very early to destroy the pillars of democracy. So the very first thing he did was to draft a new constitution that became – that the

the Venezuelan state became more presidential. He gave more power to the president. He changed the institutions, changed the people who were running the institutions, put his lawyers, his friends to run the institutions. So very early in the Chavez years, the pillars for the destruction of the democracy were already being bombed. So I will do

that differently. And of course, having taken advantage of that window of 10 years, not 204 to 214, where the oil prices were very high, and Venezuela unfortunately was not positioned, or Chavez decided not to position Venezuela to really take the best of the advantage for that. Venezuela was set to be producing

as I said, six million barrels of oil. But what do you need for that? You need a lot of investment. What do you need for a lot of investment? You need rule of law. You need clear rules of engagement. And that didn't happen. At the same time, there was expropriations. There were attacks on the rule of law, on property rights. So, of course, that was not...

what happened. And he decided to nationalize or renationalize some of the oil contracts in Venezuela. So we went from 3.4 to 600,000 barrels of oil at the lowest.

and that's an opportunity, I think, like no others. I think that very few countries will be able to look back and say this is such a window of a missed opportunity like the one we had in Venezuela.

It's not an issue of being from the right or from the left. It's about being at the core democratic. And what does it mean to be at the core democratic? It means that you abide to the will of the people. That means free and fair elections. It means that you promote and respect human rights. And it means that you rule through the rule of law. I mean, that's a core of democracy. Then you can have your left or right subtleties. But at the core, that's what it is.

And if that had been the case in Venezuela during the early years of the 2000s, we would have been in a very different country right now. But it was all about power. It was all about staying in power. It was about controlling the society. We never thought that that was something that could happen to the Venezuelan people. But today, the level of social control is – and the level of repression in Venezuela is higher than Cuba.

And I remember the early 2000s, Cuban telling us, you know, Venezuela is on the path to Cuba. And it was a very hard thought to follow. And I think that – I didn't even thought that that was an exaggeration of our Cuban friends that were telling us that. And today Venezuela is certainly worse than Cuba in many ways. And the last question – I'm sorry, I didn't get what was the last question.

My last question is, what's your action next? Would you be willing to take a revolution or are you still waiting for the aid from different democratic countries? Well, we've taken revolution. I mean, we've taken the people to the streets not once but hundreds of times. Are we willing to do that again? Yes, of course we are. And of course that will happen and you will see it happen. Maybe your question is, are you willing to take up arms and go and promote a violent struggle in Venezuela? And the answer for that is no.

The answer for that is that if we look at the research, transitions through violent means are not as probable as transitions through maybe longer and more patience needed means of transitioning through the will of a people and democracy. That doesn't mean that we will not challenge face to face the regime. And I think that more challenge is going to happen.

I think that nonviolent action is not necessarily doing yoga in the street. Nonviolent action, it's a lot more than that. And nonviolent action requires the organization of millions of people, requires leadership, it requires commitment, and we'll still have that. So the Venezuelan people have been in the process of a democratic revolution, a process of resistance against the regime for years, and we continue and we will continue to be on that path. Until when? Until we get freedom.

Well, grant me one thing. I said you will be inspired, and I think we all have been inspired. Thank you, Leopoldo, for that. Thank you, Gaspar and Paulo. I know you worked very, very hard to bring him here until four hours ago. We didn't know if he would make it. He did. We're grateful for that. I think all that remains to say, Leopoldo, is that we are impressed.

We are admiring of what you and many other Venezuelans are doing. I suppose after 2001, September 11, we were all New Yorkers. After Putin invaded Ukraine, we all felt like we all ought to be Ukrainians. We listened to you and we say long live Venezuela. Buena suerte.

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