AILSA CHANG, HOST:
In some ways, not much has changed in Venezuela. After U.S. special forces removed Nicolás Maduro from the country, the rest of his regime remains in power. Interim President Delcy Rodriguez was vice president to Maduro, who was himself the handpicked successor of Hugo Chavez. But if you listen to President Rodriguez calling for foreign investment in Venezuelan oil, per U.S. demands, that sounds far removed from the socialist and anti-imperialist politics that Hugo Chavez was known for. So let's revisit how we got here.
Javier Corrales is a professor of political science at Amherst College and co-author of "Dragon In The Tropics," a book about the legacy of Hugo Chavez. Welcome.
JAVIER CORRALES: Thank you for having me.
CHANG: So I want to go back to 1998 when Hugo Chavez was first elected. Explain how he first comes to power in Venezuela.
CORRALES: Venezuela was a country that was in crisis. It was a democracy, an oil state. And democratic politics became very corrupt, and the country was unable to come out of an economic crisis. So he bursts into the scene first with a coup that failed but that made him into a folk hero, a populist folk hero who was promising to liberate Venezuelans from politicians and bad economic policies. And then he decides to run democratically, and he became very popular from the very beginning - again, with a discourse that was all politicians are corrupt and inept. And that was his signature movement from the start.
CHANG: And what would you describe as maybe his most key or most meaningful accomplishments while trying to enact this platform?
CORRALES: Politically, he essentially destroyed the old system. He managed to eliminate all the institutions of checks and balance in his country. He formed an alliance with the military. He created a system where nobody could stop him. So his biggest accomplishment was to become a semidictator. Economically, he spent a lot on the poor, but it seems, in retrospect, that the amount of money that went in didn't compensate for the returns. There was, of course, poverty reduction, but not as significant as you would have expected, given how much money went into that process, suggesting that there was a bit of corruption as well.
CHANG: OK. So you have just described Chavez's domestic policies, or most meaningful domestic policies, at the time he was in power. But internationally, how would you characterize U.S.-Venezuela relations under Chavez?
CORRALES: What's so remarkable is that when he came to power, he was not a strong anti-imperialist. One of the things that he does is, very early on, he begins to side more closely with Cuba and with Fidel Castro and with Cuban communism. And you start to see him kind of learning significantly from that playbook. So eventually, he's going to become more radical in his discourse.
CHANG: Exactly. Like, there are examples of Chavez vehemently attacking the U.S. I remember back in 2006, during a speech to the U.N., he called George W. Bush the devil, right? Like, remind us what that was all about.
CORRALES: So he has an opportunity to go to the United Nations, and this is right at the moment when the United States is very aggressively fighting the war on terror after 9/11. So he takes an opportunity at the U.N. to really vilify President Bush...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HUGO CHAVEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
CORRALES: ...And pronounce a very aggressive, anti-imperialist speech using really terrible name-calling.
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CHAVEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
CORRALES: But what is so interesting about him is that, despite this discourse, he never, never stopped selling oil to the United States.
CHANG: Yes.
CORRALES: In so many ways, Venezuelan oil under Hugo Chavez was nationalized, but it was always sold to the United States and to the very same president that Hugo Chavez was criticizing. So a lot of the rhetoric was far more extreme than some of the policies themselves.
CHANG: Yeah. Well, explain what changes, Javier, after Chavez dies in 2013 and Nicolás Maduro takes over. How much do those two leaders share the same worldview at that point?
CORRALES: So Maduro comes in with the idea that he's going to really continue the legacy, but something really major happened - the price of oil drops significantly, No. 1. And No. 2, some of the most important economic policies under Chavez begin to show their negative effects. The nationalizations, for example, lead to a lot of scarcity and inflation.
CHANG: And how does Maduro respond? Does he become even more authoritarian than Chavez?
CORRALES: He becomes more authoritarian. He tries to maintain the same economic policies, and therefore the crisis deepens. With the deepening of the economic crisis, his electoral base shrinks. He begins to lose electoral competitiveness. And rather than introduce correctives, he becomes more and more repressive of the opposition.
CHANG: Well, Maduro has been removed by the U.S., and Delcy Rodriguez, like I mentioned, who was vice president to Maduro, has taken over. And it's still early, but, Javier, so far, do you see Rodriguez's actions as some continuation of the path that Maduro laid out, or is she shifting the trajectory somewhat? What would you say?
CORRALES: It's too early to tell, but what is so incredibly remarkable and historically unprecedented is that when the United States intervenes to remove the troublemakers, they remove them or neutralize them. But what we have seen here is that Maduro is gone, but the Maduro administration has stayed in place. Very strange outcome. We don't have a lot of examples of this. It seems that what we're seeing here is something akin to when a corporation conducts a hostile takeover of another corporation. You may remove the CEO, but you keep the corporation in place with its core business still intact.
CHANG: Right.
CORRALES: This is what we're seeing now, but it could change. It may very well be that it's too early to make a determination of whether we're going to see more continuity or rupture.
CHANG: Well, what about Rodriguez's willingness to solicit foreign investment in Venezuelan oil? How does that strike you?
CORRALES: It may seem odd for a leftist regime to be eager to partner up with the United States, but the truth of the matter is that the Venezuelan regime under Hugo Chavez and Maduro had been partnering up with many international actors to deal with its oil industry. Currently, the oil industry is in such dire straits that the regime has realized that they need a lot of help. So I am not that surprised. This is, after all, an extractivist economy, and they need help reconstructing their industry.
CHANG: Javier Corrales of Amherst College, thank you very much for joining us today.
CORRALES: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much.
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