During his visit to Cartagena for his talk at the Hay Festival, Leopoldo Martínez, founder of IQ Latino, spoke with journalist NTN24’s Andrea Bernal about the crisis of democracy in Latin America, in the United States and in Europe; the Venezuelan situation; and Donald Trump, his immigration policies and their possible effect on this year’s elections in the United States
Martínez, a lawyer, a former Venezuelan congressman and a member of the Democratic Party’s national executive in the United States, recently published his book 94 paradojas para pensar el siglo XXI,, a compilation of the articles he published in 2017 and 2018 in the series Tendencias, which also can be read as short essays.
The crisis of democracy
Martinez has analyzed the contradictions of these times in the world, starting with those at the heart of the democratic systems.
There is a paradox in his very own journey: Martinez left Venezuela for the United States in the first decade of the 2000’s and did not imagine that he would witness a democratic crisis as the one that is now underway in the country that received him.
“Democracy on the surface is working but it is also being undermined,” says Martinez.
The discontent in countries like Chile, Ecuador, Colombia is real, in his opinion.
“The usual suspects in all these crises are there. There’s always going to be the one who goes fishing in troubled waters. But the reasons for this unrest go beyond the opportunism of political actors. Not reading what is happening is dangerous. I’m worried that we’ll fall into polarization to avoid discussing these issues.”
This polarization that shuns clarity and reflection is precisely a distinctive feature of these times, Martínez believes, the result of living “in the world of the desired lie or post-truth.”
Leopoldo Martinez widens his sight and observes that this shaking of the world’s democracies is powered by what he calls two anxieties: that of conservative sectors that resist changes that extend the enjoyment of human rights to forgotten groups and that of sectors disadvantaged by the economy.
“The appearance is that we are going towards a better world in terms of the economy, in terms of human rights, in the media with the digital revolution. It seemed that we were entering a society that was bringing us very positive things. But at the same time, underlying those trends, things were happening that we missed out on and that were producing great social anxiety in conservative sectors of society and great economic anxiety in less advantaged sectors of society.”
That’s why, in his opinion, “forms of populism” have emerged on the right and on the left that, he says, “use democracy” to gain power and then undermine it. “And we enter a society of growing expectations around these leaders who don’t solve problems, but rush into offering things that are not achievable and not sustainable when they begin to be implemented.”
These extreme populisms are strengthened precisely by polarization.
Here comes one of the paradoxes Martinez has encountered: while it was thought that social media and the “digital revolution” would produce more informed and more participatory societies, the “industry of lies and fake news” has been created and has grown. “And something much more serious, which is the ability to manipulate and influence public opinion through social media, where those who have been masters, those who have optimized the management of these communication strategies through social media, are the Russians,” says Leopoldo Martinez.
Hence the sum of the two anxieties with this “psychosocial management” through social media by one only country is the current equation.
The United States
The United States, the country where Leopoldo Martinez has an active political participation, is a very clear example of what he explains. Specifically, “the right-wing populism of Donald Trump.”
“The conquest of equality in marriage in the United States produced a discomfort in very conservative and reactionary sectors of society. The problem of immigration also produced this in sectors that blame the Latino, the Hispanic for their economic tragedy, when it really has nothing to do with it. The populist discourse blames the Latino, China, Mexico for a reality that has to do with computers, robotics, economic transitions to new realities.”
Martínez means the tendency of industries to rely more on technology than on human resources and, based on these technological changes, to the reconfiguration of skills in the workplace, while universities continue to educate under previous paradigms.
Martinez puts on the table a figure that debunks the myths about Latinos in the United States: 70% of them, he says, are U.S.-born citizens. “They didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. The United States is an Ibero-American country. Half of the territory was part of Spain. Tejas, the independence of Tejas–it’s not Texas–was achieved by Mexicans who allied themselves with Sam Houston to free themselves from the Santana dictatorship. The United States is intertwined with the Hispanic community.”
Martínez keeps on with facts: the migration of undocumented Mexicans to the U.S. has decreased as a result of the Free Trade Agreement between the two countries; Mexicans are returning home “because there are jobs thanks to NAFTA.”
There are about 11.5 million undocumented Hispanics living in the United States, approximately 3.5 million of whom are so-called Dreamers who have also gone to college. And those undocumented immigrants, Martínez continues, “pay $23 billion in federal taxes and $9 billion in payroll taxes that they will not be able to recover in social services because their social security numbers are false, provided by the employer who commits the fraud.”
With this argument, Martinez wants to demonstrate that Latinos are not a public charge, “not even the undocumented.”
“And what did Donald Trump say? Not only did he say that Latinos were part of the drama, but that Mexico and NAFTA were to blame for the drama, when thanks to the economic growth that NAFTA generated in Mexico, they are being returned to Mexico.”
Leopoldo Martinez reminds us that those who are currently migrating more to the United States are Venezuelans and citizens of the countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America, who flee from violence. ” This violence has to do with the drug cartels (…), criminal industries that exist because the United States consumes”.
“The United States cannot close its eyes to this. And it is much more unacceptable to grab a mother and a son, sometimes a little 3 year old, separate them and imprison them in parallel deportation proceedings (…), in order to exalt these groups that believe that Latinos are the problem. What did Donald Trump say? A big lie. Who believed it? Who wanted to believe it based on his drama. What empowered it? The social media.”
Journalist Andrea Bernal asked Martinez if that argument still serves to lead Trump to presidential reelection. Martinez responded that it might rather cost him the reelection.
“I see him having a problem with the working class. There has been a lot of awareness in the country about how absurd it is that the nation’s dean of human rights is imprisoning mothers and children at the border. There have been many things that have shaken the fabric of the United States,” he said.
According to Martinez’s analysis, the fact that in an economy that remains stable (although he says that stability is still the result of the economic well-being inherited from the Barack Obama administration) the president “has only a 42 percent approval rating in the polls” speaks of a “huge possibility of beating him.”
“In states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, people have already realized that the minimum wage did not go up and that the public health system has deteriorated because of Trump’s reforms. And people are wondering, well maybe it wasn’t the Latinos or China or the agreement with Mexico that was the problem.”
Venezuela
Leopoldo Martínez reaffirms his analysis of Venezuela, which is, in his opinion trapped in a “militarist kleptocracy”. “The struggle against a regime like that is long, it is difficult, it is tenacious.”
Martínez sees differences between Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. In his opinion, Chávez is indeed responsible for Venezuela’s current drift, but he was “a populist, charismatic leader who had all the ingredients of the authoritarianism that is present today”, who ruled an oil-producing country with a barrel of oil that was close to $100 and with great power of communication. Maduro, on the other hand, does not have at his disposal a high price of oil and does not have the charisma or the power of communication of Chávez. So, he is sustained by the “marriage he has made with the Armed Forces”.
“More than a problem of democratic crisis, there is a kleptocratic and authoritarian system that is sustained by very powerful interests that gravitate around the corruption that exists not only in drug trafficking but in all areas.”
About Juan Guaidó, Martínez says he embodies “a feeling, a hope”.
“It could have been Pedro Gonzalez. It is the desire of all Venezuela, the one in the country and the one outside it.” But he warns: “The important thing is that we do not let ourselves be trapped by that other scenario of the desired lie, another post-truth scenario, and to live in a bubble where we convince ourselves that we are always doing the right thing, because a very powerful and legitimate reason accompanies us, which is to recover democracy.”
In that bubble Martinez is talking about, there are expectations that the way out of the situation will take only hours, days or months and, “the most dangerous thing”: that there is something from outside that can substitute the work that Venezuela has to do itself as a country.”
A healthy future for Venezuela, he says, is impossible “if we don’t acknowledge each other.”
“Any attempt to build a Venezuela that is based on nostalgia for what we were or on the vision of a country that one or another sector has will fail. Maduro is not going to get anywhere with what he is doing, he is going to continue impoverishing Venezuela (…) Guaidó cannot get ahead either if there is not a great negotiation that allows it.”
In Martínez’s opinion, pressure from the international community in favor of Venezuela is important to induce the country to an “electoral and peaceful” solution. “But anything the international community can do will never replace the effort that all Venezuelans have to make to find a new proposal for the country. This is the most important. This is what we have to achieve. We cannot get caught up in the prejudices and expectations that political discourse has created.”
In the conversation, journalist Bernal mentions that U.S. authorities have called the Venezuelan regime a “narco-dictatorship”. She asks Martinez if it is possible to negotiate with criminals.
“There’s the problem of adjectives,” he answers. “I don’t think any regime is totally monolithic. They have tones, varieties, and personalities with different expectations. It’s a question of knowing how to navigate the contradictions that the regime has (…) There are possibilities there that have to be found.”
He refers not only to the dialogue between the leaderships but also to the “social dialogue” between regular people. It is necessary, he says, to create conditions for encounters to happen between Venezuelans who supported Chávez and who may have voted for Maduro “and the immense majority of Venezuelans who want change in the country.”
Leopoldo Martínez thinks the individual sanctions by the United States against officials of the Venezuelan regime are important because they produce “a modification of behavior” in them, but, on the other hand, the economic sanctions “have opened opportunities for China, Russia and Turkey to take advantage of the opacity in which the Venezuelan economy finds itself. And the government is still there to this day. We cannot blindly trust that this is enough. Something has to happen inside Venezuela for things to change.”
“Change in Venezuela has to be through elections. Any person who uses a television camera to propose an exit that does not go through the electoral process in Venezuela again is deceiving Venezuelans,” he concludes.
Trump’s contradictions with Venezuela
Leopoldo Martinez goes back to facts to show the contradiction between the speech of Trump and his government on Venezuela, ” in order to agitate the electoral sectors of Miami, and the reality: there are 150 thousand Venezuelans who migrated to the United States and who do not have a defined migratory situation. That is why “they are desperate”. Martinez insists that they need a Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to allow them to settle in the country, as in the past happened with nationals from Nicaragua, Honduras and Cuba.”
“The drama of the United States, and this is one of the paradoxes, is that it has ended up practicing an asylum policy that not only goes against an entire tradition of the United States but against all its commitments in terms of human rights. What they do to Central Americans on the southern border or what they do to 72,000 Venezuelans who still don’t have an answer about their asylum and the case of more than 600 deportations of Venezuelans is a great contradiction.”
Photo: Screenshot from the interview