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The Fragility of Freedom in the Americas · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Roger Reed.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very pleased to welcome Mary Anastasia O'Grady to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Mary writes the Wall Street Journal's weekly America's column and is a member of the journal's editorial board.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: She spent nearly three decades at the journal advocating for economic freedom and democratic values throughout the Western Hemisphere.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Her award-winning column is renowned for its fearless analysis of authoritarian regimes and often flawed U.S.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: policies.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: She is the recipient of the Bastiat Prize for Journalism and of TFAS's Walter Judd Freedom Award.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Mary was also honored this past fall at our Journalism Awards dinner in New York with our Thomas L.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Phillips Career Achievement Award, recognizing her outstanding contributions to journalism.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Mary, welcome to the show.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Roger.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nice to be here.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Mary, you're the tops of those who cover the region in terms of your both reporting and your analysis of things in South, Central, and North America.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: What led you to get this as your beat?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: I have to say that as I was learning more about economics, I became very interested in development economics.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Why countries develop and offer opportunities to their citizens or they don't?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And those people oftentimes emigrate or just live lives of poverty.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I became sort of very interested in the region and why it, you know, a region that's filled with natural resources, great human capital, access to US, and yet the people seem to be left behind.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that sort of naturally attracted me to writing about the region.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I was lucky enough to be hired by the journal.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: We did a lot of special America 250 programming this summer for our students.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: And one thing that was a focus of some of the speakers was how our country founded 250 years ago, got its independence, created a constitution, has generally developed with the rule of law into this great engine of prosperity.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yet the countries of South and Central America settled by Spain rather than by England have many of them have had dozens of constitutions throughout the region.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: They have had difficulty with the rule of law.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: And thus, while there's been some growth and prosperity in some places, it's been inconsistent and spotty.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have a sense of why the United States and Canada at least have prospered so much over 250 years and the rest of the region's fallen behind?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think it's important to point out that there is actually a classical liberal tradition in the Spanish-speaking world.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that dates back to the school of Salamanca, the scholastics in the 17th century, people like Juan de Mariana.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Their names were invoked a lot during the 250th anniversary because those ideas are actually embedded in a lot that John Locke wrote about and the Scottish Enlightenment, so forth.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: This Mexican and the Argentine constitutions in the 19th century were very much based on the U.S.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Constitution.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not like these ideas were foreign or not considered in the region.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think the more troubling question is why didn't they stick?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: The constitutional scholar from the 19th century in Argentina, Alverde, basically used the U.S.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Constitution to write that constitution.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: I forget the year of it, but it's somewhere around 1850s, 1860s.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that worked very well for Argentina until the early 20th century when things started to fall apart.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess that the only explanation for that is really that the populism of voters overwhelmed the protection of property rights and the tenants inside the constitution that should have protected it.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a lot of people talk about Venezuela and they say, well, you know, they had capitalism and then came Chavez and they didn't have capitalism anymore.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, if you look at Venezuela, after the dictatorship, which fell in 1958, they had a 1960 constitution.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that constitution, almost the day after it was abrogated, the politicians started to pick out of that constitution property rights protections.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Always for good, well-meaning reasons, you know, they had to give to this group or that group and so forth.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that when we think about the region, we need to consider that the ideas have been there, but they haven't been able to stick.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: There hasn't been a commitment to them.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, constitutions grow out of the norms and values of the population.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can't take a constitution and plop it down on a country and say, okay, now be like Utah.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: That needs to grow up from what the population believes in, what Detokeville saw when he came to America.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And for whatever reason, that hasn't been there.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then to put on top of that problem, if you wake up one day and find that this is the wrong system, and you decide you want to go back to a property rights regime, a constitution that looks more like ours, there's a lot of losers in that equation.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of people who are going to fight it tooth and nail because they're going to be out of whatever the privilege is that they had gained through the system that you've been using.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's an interesting small little book by Jose Pineta, who was the labor minister in Chile in the 1970s.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, that was during the Pinochet dictatorship.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: But what's interesting about the Pinochet dictatorship is that, you know, he decided he was going to finish off the Soviets who were trying to set up camp basically in Chile.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted to turn Chile into another Cuba.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And Pinochet said, I'm going to stop this.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the military dictatorship.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: But alongside of the military dictatorship, as Pineta describes in this little book, was an effort to rewrite a constitution.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Pineta says that they very much use Madison democracy as a pillar of writing that constitution.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we have the 1980 Constitution, which was passed during the Pinochet dictatorship.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: But when Pinochet put that constitution in place, he also agreed that by 1989 there would be an election.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: He allowed the election, he lost the election, he left power.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the constitution has remained.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: In 2019, there was a sort of uprising of the left.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: They went to the streets, they started burning down churches, attacking businesses.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: And out of that grew this agreement that there would be a constituent assembly.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: And they had two of them actually.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they still have the 1980 constitution.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not perfect, but it's an example of a country that actually recognized the mistakes it made.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: It used that period of dictatorship to put this new constitution in place.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And until now, it has survived.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's very difficult to do, especially in a democracy, because as I say, there'd be large segments of the population that would lose and would resist any return to a kind of republic like we would think that the United States has.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Chile is one of them, as you mentioned, that has been going pretty much in the right direction on economic policy.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: We're seeing change now in Argentina.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: I guess recent election in Peru that may be promising.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think there's a chance that, let's say, Argentina will be a role model for a center-right government that's committed to less government, economic freedom, lower taxes, sound currency rather than a corruption that we've seen in other countries?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: One problem that we have to acknowledge is that corruption, you mentioned, you know, you have the left with their redistribution, class warfare, those sorts of things.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Normally, under most of those leftist governments, if they're allowed to continue, they become more and more authoritarian.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: On the right, there has been an effort to do more market-oriented economics.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, I think when people vote, they need to feel like they have something to lose in order to defend, you know, property rights, markets, and so forth.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so one problem that happens in a lot of these countries is a center-right government will be elected.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's not so much corruption.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think there is corruption, and I think both sides have corruption.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: But the right, you know, in the case of Chile, they were able to implement a lot of reforms because it was a dictatorship.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so then as they came out of the dictatorship, people were better off economically, and then they introduced the political reforms.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in the case of some of these other countries, the right gets into power, but they're either not committed to really doing the reforms or they're not able to achieve them because they don't have enough of a mandate.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, these countries have legislatures and they have courts and so forth.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: So they're fighting against that.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Alvaro Rebe in Colombia did an excellent job restoring security and peace in the country.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: But he never did any of the economic reforms that the country needed.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't understand those.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think his mentality was more of a kind of a democratic socialist.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like he looked at the poor and he said, I need to help them.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he didn't think in terms of, you know, the way a libertarian would think about markets and people having agency if you give them property rights and equality under the law and those sorts of things.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: The left was against him in Congress.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't that easy for him to achieve.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, when Javier Millet was elected in Argentina, from day one, I said, Javier Malay does not have an economic problem.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Javier Malay has a political problem because Juan Perone's legacy had been there for so long and they had such an infrastructure in the political economy that, you know, if Javier Malay started breaking their rice bowls, it was almost guaranteed that they were going to resist with everything they had.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, if he was able to wave his arm and say, I want all these changes, Argentina would probably look a lot different today.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think Argentina is making progress.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was a mistake for him not to dollarize.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's remains a big problem in the country.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they brought inflation down from triple digits to like 30%, but imagine we had 30% inflation in this country.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: People would be screaming.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: He's all the time fighting this political problem in Congress because the parentists are still there.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: So he has to build coalitions, he has to make compromises.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's not so easy.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, he only has four years.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, he came up against the midterms.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: He might have lost the midterms if Scott Besson didn't give him a loan and bail him out in that moment.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: And now he's going to be facing, you know, re-election in 2027.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: So he's in a race against time.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: He's on the right track, and I want to see him succeed.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: But I think he, like I said, he has a political challenge, and the left wants power.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: They want to get back in there.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: So their number one goal is to see him fail.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: Which countries in the region have dollarized?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think El Salvador, have they?
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: The very first country, of course, was Panama, because we were kind of helped give birth to Panama, if you will.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so dollarization is a country that uses the dollar as its legal currency.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Most countries that have it, the dollar becomes the currency that everyone uses.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: After Panama, then there's Ecuador.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: El Salvador dollarized long before Naeb Bukele came along.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: And El Salvador dollarized at a much different time than Ecuador.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Ecuador was in a crisis, a very big crisis.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until Jamil Mawad had his back against the wall, and he really had no more options that he said, okay, I dollarized.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the Ecuadorians love dollarization because their earnings and their savings are protected.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they basically don't have that concern of constant devaluation and depreciation of their currency.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: El Salvador is the same way.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you think Malay didn't go with dollarization?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a short-term cost?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I think that there might have been he was worried that there would be a big contraction in the economy.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when Mexico devalued their currency in 1994, December 94, there was a big contraction because all of a sudden the currency was worth significantly less.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in order to dollarize in Argentina, he would have had to do it at a rate which would have been a devaluation and then dollarization.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: So he wanted to do the devaluation slowly so that people wouldn't feel it so much.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's going to turn out to be a disadvantage for him because he's still fighting inflation.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And if they had done it and just bit the bullet at the time, it's very helpful for investors because no one wants to put$100,000 into a country by buying the local currency and then two months later find out that the local currency is devalued.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it really helps to have the dollar as the uh local currency.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: We run a program in Chile every January.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Jose Pinheira, who you referenced earlier, is a regular speaker at that program.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: They had an election this year that was encouraging in that they elected someone of the center right to succeed someone from the left as their president.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: Anything to report on the early months of Jose Antonio Cass's administration?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's comforting to see Chile returning to something that's kind of even if it was someone from the left, but moderate left, it would have been okay.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, not great, because I don't think the left has the right ideas for growth.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: But what was troubling about Chile in 2019 was that it was really the political class on the left seemed to be going the way of like American listeners might recognize it if I say like the Democratic Socialists of America.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, really crazy left-wing stuff.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And they got control of the first constituent assembly, which is why it was voted against by the population when it went to referendum.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was so insane.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: So Cost has returned.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, the left is fighting him on things like taxes and equality and, you know, class warfare and all of those things.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, as I was saying before, I think that when people feel like the system has benefited them, they have something to lose by not defending the system that brought them these things.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think Cost has been pretty good at explaining that to the public.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's also a very big believer in choice in education, which is a big thing for Chileans.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: They have some choice in education.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the former government and the very hard left wanted to take that away.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: I remember that there was a education minister who once said that children who were able to take advantage of choice in education were like children who were given roller skates while all the other children were just walking along in their shoes.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And rather than talk about giving the children with the shoes roller skates, he said, we need to take the roller skates away from the children who are going faster.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: That didn't fly for most Chilean parents.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: So some encouraging signs in Chile and Argentina.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Peru had an election recently, and are you hopeful there that we'll see some positive change?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Peru has some very big problems.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: To start with, the Chinese are really moving into Peru in a big way.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: They've built the port of Chiang Kai.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: They own uh, I think the largest mining company in the country.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: They're importing a lot of Chinese into the country.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm told that one of the reasons why they're doing that is that once they get Peruvian passports, they apply for U.S.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: citizenship using their Peruvian passports as Peruvians, not as Chinese.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've been not successful in trying to figure out whether these people are pawns of Beijing or they're just people who want opportunity.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously the U.S.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: is the place people want to be.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that's not clear.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: But Keiko Fujimori, who is the new president, she'll be inaugurated in about a week, faces a couple of big problems.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: The most immediate one, which has nothing to do with economics per se, I mean, not in her control, is the El Nino, which will be coming soon.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's going to hit in September.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And most of the climate specialists say that the El Nino is going to be very bad this year.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: The country is sort of divided.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: So in the north, I think you would get floods, and that can be devastating for these, especially rural populations.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And in the south, you would get drought, and that can be devastating for people who live in the rural areas.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the immediate thing that she's going to have to think about and show that the government is doing something about helping people who are caught in the El Nina.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: The other really big problem in Peru is organized crime.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Peru has always had a problem with corruption, but it got much worse after COVID.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of Venezuelans went to Peru.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then they started practicing the same kind of organized crime they practice in other parts of the region and in Venezuela.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And extortion has become a very big problem, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: And she may have won her election on a pledge to address the security problem.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so that'll be something that she has to take seriously.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, people have complaining about this for years, but she needs to show that she has a plan and a strategy to take it on.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the big problems is that within the national police and the prosecutor's office, there's a lot of corruption.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, people are not even protected.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: If they would go to the prosecutor and complain, they're not protected.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: If she expresses this strategy that she has and takes it seriously, I think she could have success.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: The country, economically speaking, is growing.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty open.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Her father, when he was president, opened the economy.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not terribly pessimistic about it, but you know, the election was sort of 50-50.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And as I was saying before, if these governments on the right don't produce results, you know, you can bet the left is sitting there licking their chops.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Four years isn't very long.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's why, I mean, even though I I feel generally optimistic about Argentina, I'm always thinking about what can go wrong.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: The fundamental problem, it's a problem here and everywhere, is that there's a division of worldview and uh envy plays a big part.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, people think that redistribution is going to solve their problems, and it's a very seductive line of reasoning from politicians.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you can bet that if the pie doesn't grow, the left is going to be there waiting to come back into power.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: Another country that had a very close election was Colombia, dealing with the situation of crime in the country.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: You wrote a column about that recently.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that election settled?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's interesting in Colombia is that the institutions have held up surprisingly well.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't think they would.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm very worried about the drug money getting into the courts and that sort of thing.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: But the institutions have held up for the most part.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Colombia's electoral authority recounted the votes.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: They did the scrutiny of the vote count and so forth.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: They went through all the legal challenges of the presidential candidate who lost and the current president, Gustavo Petro, and they said no, he lost.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that the country institutionally is on track to inaugurate the new president on August 7th.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think the problem is going to be that these guys who lost, Gustavo Petro and his allies, are going to continue to try to delegitimize the president.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: He has two big things he has to do.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: On the security front, he has to reestablish security across the country, the way Alvaro Uribe did during his presidency.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: So not just in Bogota or in Medin, the big cities, but in throughout the country where these illegal armed groups have just flourished under Petra.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: He basically took a very benign approach, I mean that's being kind, but let's say he took a benign approach to the growing of coca.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so that boomed under his presidency.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And he also said that he wanted to recreate the surrender agreement, the amnesty agreement that Juan Manuel Santos did with the FARC in 2016 that the country voted against and then Santos put it through anyway.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: He had told me, don't worry, it's going to be up to the people.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: If they vote against the agreement, then it's dead.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they voted against the agreement and he kept it alive and he pushed it through Congress.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: When Pacho came along he said I want to do the same agreement for another terrorist group called ELN.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: They sort of stepped into the breach of the FARC.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: The FARC never dissolved.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: It just got different leadership and they kept calling it the dissident FARC, but it's really the FARC, it's just without the leaders who were given amnesty.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: So those groups really flourished and lots of other illegal armed groups grew up and they're very violent.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: The government of Colombia says that they're active in 70% of the municipalities in Colombia.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that will be sort of job one for Abelardo de la Espieya.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other thing is he's got to get the economy going because you know Petro basically shut down oil and gas and that's really important to Colombia.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: So he's got to restart that and do other things to attract capital and investment to the country by basically making investors feel that their investments are secure and they'll do well in Colombia.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the language he uses but you know he has to make that happen in real life.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now let's move over to Venezuela.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of course the United States went in and took out Maduro in a pretty seamless operation uh but we left in place his government led by his number two Delcy Rodriguez.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of us are surprised that we haven't done more to promote human rights in the country recently with the earthquake they've had, there's been this devastation and the government seems to have blocked even some rescue efforts.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: Where are we now with Venezuela?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think if they were given a magic wand and they could make anything that they wanted happen, they would want human rights.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: They would want new elections to restore democratic structures like the Congress and impartial courts and those sorts of things.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: But the question is how can they achieve that?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think President Trump went in, took out Maduro but was not willing to do anything beyond that.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the regime knows that.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: So in the initial days after this incredible military operation where they extracted Maduro the Venezuelan regime was kind of in shock and pretty impressed by everything that the US had pulled off but as time went on they kind of thought huh he's not coming back.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: He's not going to risk American lives and bring boots on the ground and those sorts of things.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we can kind of stick it out here and I think that's their strategy.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now supposedly there are a lot of U.S.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: advisors on the ground in Venezuela CIA and different security experts and so forth trying to dismantle the infrastructure of the regime.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: But you have to keep in mind that the regime is at the same time trying to resist that, you know, make sure that somehow they hang on to power.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't have enough inside information to know who's winning in that sort of game at the 50 yard line back and forth.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I can tell you that there are a couple of signs that are troubling one of them is that a very well-known enforcer of the dictatorship by the name of Diazado Cabello is still in his job.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a guy who basically has a lot of control over the military not maybe not entirely but a big portion of the military.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he also has control over the what they call the colectivos which are basically a paramilitary.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: They dress in civilian clothes but they ride around on motorcycles and they are sort of enforcers of the regime in poor neighborhoods and around the country.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: He also is in charge of the sort of secret police and that sort of thing.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: So until he's taken out I feel like it's going to be very hard for Dulcy Rodriguez, even if she wants to go along with Trump to basically start doing the kinds of things she has to do.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the clearest signs of the fact that they're not cooperating is the fact that there are still more than 300 I mean the last time I looked almost 400 political prisoners who have not been released.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think when we first went in there was close to a thousand.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: So they've let a lot go, but there's still a lot who are still in there.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I get some of them family members writing to me and there's no reason these people should still be in prison except that the regime is trying to show that it still has, you know, the upper hand and it can decide.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen documents where particularly political leaders there was one from Sulia in the north who had to sign a paper that basically said that he would keep his mouth shut and stay out of politics even though he was allowed to get out of prison.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: But then you hear reports that it's slowly changing and people are complaining.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now the earthquake could go one of two ways.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean earthquakes around the region have ended dictatorships.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean Somoza in Nicaragua famously fell because of the earthquake in the 70s.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: So you know she is not getting good grades from the public on her handling of the earthquake.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: But it remains that most of the people who don't like her, who don't like the dictatorship, who want a different government probably would vote for Maria Corina Machado, don't have weapons, don't have resources, don't have even access to jobs and food.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean a lot of them are dependent on remittances sent back to Venezuela.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: So they're in a very weak position even if they number large numbers in opposition to the regime.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I what I've said all along and I think it remains the case is that until someone inside the system decides to break with her and say no more of this kind of a Yeltsin figure if you think about what happened in in the Soviet Union.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: Until that happens and some dissident group of military police people with guns people with weapons rise up against her, I think it's going to be very hard to dismantle the regime.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: But the handling of the earthquake is disgraceful.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it's it's just terrible the obstacles that they created and it looks to me like Diazado Cabello was also protecting some of the loot that his drug trafficking had been collecting in that part of the country.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: One more country I'd like to ask you about and then we'll wrap things up with a final question but that's Cuba.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: You had a column about Cuba calling on the international community to do more to help bring an end to the dictatorship there.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's just such a sad situation that's gone on so long for the Cuban people.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Five years ago as you noted there was an uprising in the streets that was cracked down brutally by the regime.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: I found some hope in your column I think but you know I keep thinking there's hope there and then nothing changes.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: But could you s kind of summarize your thoughts then on Cuba?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: It used to puzzle me how could anybody anybody anywhere defend the kind of things that the regime does to these people I mean between the starvation the hunger the deprivation it's really confusing to me.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean you know you have these people in the UN who are always talking about human rights and so forth and yet you see what goes on in Cuba and it's it's no secret.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: How could this possibly be happening?
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: And finally at some point over the last 30 years I stumbled upon the realization that being in favor of the regime is a way to be against the United States.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is really perpetually defending what's going on in Cuba is basically saying we don't want the US to prevail and what it wants because it wants Cuba to return to being a free country.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we're not going to side with the U.S.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they use these ridiculous arguments about sovereignty and so forth.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm worried about is that without some outside help, some kind of help from the outside like South Africa got when it ended apartheid, it's going to be very hard for the Cuban people to be liberated because the small number of people in the regime still make money.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazingly poor and hungry and there's no medicine you can't get aspirin you can't get toilet paper.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean they depend almost entirely on their family and friends in the diaspora.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: But unless you have some outside help I don't see how they're going to free themselves.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason is because this small number of people who are basically you know the military conglomerate that Marco Rubio has been talking about called Gaeza, which is an acronym for this conglomerate, it makes money.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean when people send dollars to the island they take the dollars they give them worthless pesos they put the dollars in their offshore bank accounts in Panama and in other offshore havens and they own the gas stations and they own the retail markets they own the internet and they own the island.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: So they make money even though these people are incredibly poor.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so they don't want to give that up and then they also have the problem the potential of being held accountable for their crimes against humanity if they were to you know flee and go into um some kind of exile in the unless they went to like Moscow or maybe they'd be safe in Turkey, I'm not sure.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: But they want to continue to enjoy the fruits of the system and they don't really have a motivation for leaving.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I think the one thing that could change that is if someone from inside the system says I don't want Cubans to live this way anymore and was like a Yeltsin like figure and led some segment of the military to rebel, that might work.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: The Americans could easily tip over the regime.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean they're they're sort of pathetic at this point.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: But if we did that we would own it and we would have to try to stand up a new government and I'm not against that but I think we need to go into it with our eyes open and have a plan about how we're going to do that because it's not so easy.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah it's something I know our Secretary of state cares a lot about so we'll see.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's a benefit in these times.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well last thing Mary it was nine years ago today that Joe Rago died in his sleep uh he was a colleague of yours at the Wall Street Journal, a great journalist and no doubt a great colleague and friend.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we're honored at the Fund for American Studies to have the Joseph Rago fellowships for excellence in journalism and have young people get those opportunities to work at the Wall Street Journal and be mentored by people like you and your colleagues.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: Could you tell me what Joe was like because I know you knew Joe very well.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: Joe and I sat almost next to each other there was space between us which is not usual in the the big newsroom but but we sat on one side of the office and most people sat on the other side so I was lucky enough to sit near him and you know what can I say?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean he was incredibly talented and also insightful and I always appreciated that especially because he was younger than I am.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was always encouraged by seeing a young person who had the kind of insight that he had um at such a young age and then the capacity to write and as an opinion writer.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: But there was another thing about him that always seemed so special to me and that is that he was you know as he was at the journal for a longer period of time it became very apparent that he was going to be rising.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: He was so accomplished at such a young age it was clear he was going somewhere.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: And yet he was very generous with his time and his knowledge to all people who worked there.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know so it would have been easy for him to sort of fluff off people who were you know not moving as fast as he was but he was never like that.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: He was always as I say generous in spirit and uh that was one thing that always impressed me about him and um it made me miss him a lot after he passed away.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah I mean that generosity extended beyond you know his colleagues there because he we uh I know we'd invite him to could you come down to Philadelphia and speak to some journalism students and he'd get on a train and come down and speak and yeah and his parents are really lovely people.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yes they are well I I uh time went fast I didn't get a chance to talk to you about a few other topics such as our trade relations with the in the within the hemisphere and other things very that you write about but uh I appreciate having you as a guest it's an honor to have someone who is as knowledgeable as anyone I think writing today about this hemisphere and the the politics the economics and the uh security concerns I just think it's a shame that we don't spend more time paying attention to what's happening in our own hemisphere.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: We're so often focused on other parts hot spots around the world but what happens south of our border among our neighbors northsouth both is is just so vital to our own security and our own economic prosperity.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well thank you for having me it's been fun to talk to you about the region.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much Mario Grady appreciate you joining us thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: If you have a comment or question please drop us an email at podcast at tfas.org and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host Roger Reim and until next time show courage in things large and small