Veneconomía (2015) | Forbidden To Be Resigned

In Venezuela, the events that fuel the economic, political crisis are entwined together like a huge tornado that sweeps everything up in its path.

The friends and foes that objectively and concernedly analyze the critical and devastating situation in Venezuela are in agreement on this point. Two of them, banker Oscar García Mendoza and Jesuit Luis Ugalde agree that the nation’s situation is untenable.

Oscar Garcia Mendoza sums it up in his article “Resignation”: “education, infrastructure, healthcare, the industry, rule of law, justice, everything, absolutely everything in Venezuela is being destroyed, dashed on the rocks.”

And Ugalde, in an interview by Alonso Moleiro for Prodavinci, stated: Objectively, as things stand, “the country seems unviable. There is no way out with this regime nor with the opposition, as it is. The economic and social facts reflect the impossibility of the situation and the escalating social unrest.”

Time is up to correct the course, because as Ugalde says: “if the patient is in the emergency room, you have to treat him then and there. Afterwards, you can deal with his diet and decide if he will walk.” The emergency will not rise in 2019; it happened in 2014 and it’s happening now in 2015.”

As Garcia Mendoza points out: “the more time goes on the worse the condition of the nation, the worse the education of its population, its health, its competitive skills, its infrastructure…”

The solution lies in what VenEconomía has been steadily proposing: the restoration of the rule of law and justice; rectification of economic policies, respect for private property, dismantling of controls; the return to respecting civil and political freedoms. In sum, the return to democracy.

Ugalde said as much to Moleiro, that one of the viable solutions is for the government to correct its present course, because “currently there is no charisma or money, our debts are due tomorrow, and there’s a general feeling of disappointment among the population”, and that if the regime really “wants to change, rectify, regain legitimacy, it must begin by recognizing that with this model there will be no investments or loans or trust, nor can this impasse be resolved.”

This year there are several windows of opportunity according to Ugalde, and neither rules out the other: One would be based on two political events that are impending in 2015: Parliamentary elections and the terrible tribulation of the nation “due to a government that does not know what to do and has been dragging its feet.”

“There’s nothing here to enclose in parentheses with respect to the situation this year: there are elections, which are a lever, a fundamental public power in a critical year with a deeply discredited government that doles out an increasing supply of terror. It’s not a choice between “this will fly but the other won’t.” These are options that are linked together, that reinforce each other.”

The other alternative suggested by Ugalde during the Moleiro interview is two-fold: either the current regime radically changes its strategy and improves the situation or it is replaced. I see no other.” And if, as it’s likely given the precedents, this regime cannot make a radical change, rectification must come about from “a civilian change adopted within constitutional mechanisms, at least agreed to “by the same political actors.”

It isn’t feasible or acceptable to resign ourselves to the growing crisis, because as Garcia Mendoza so aptly puts it: “resignation is a delusional form of hope.”

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