Can Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez become a Latin American Deng Xiaoping? | Venezuela

A.After years of political and social upheaval, hunger and despair, the Great Helmsman leaves and is replaced by a Frankish economic reformer who catapults a traumatized country into a new era of prosperity and growth..

That’s what happened in China half a century ago. croissant loving communist Deng Xiaoping became the paramount leader following Chairman Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, setting in motion one of the greatest economic booms in history.

Some believe this may also be an apt description of the situation in Venezuela today. “Big Timonel”Nicolás Maduro was ousted and replaced by Sorbonne-educated vice president Delcy Rodríguez.

In his first speech after replacing the dictator, Rodríguez hinted at plans to launch his own period of “reform and opening-up”; just as Deng did after the heart attack that ended Mao’s life and his disastrous Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976.

“Where Chavismo had to fix [itself]In a speech reminiscent of Deng’s 1978 call for Chinese communists to “liberate their minds” after a decade of bloodshed and uprising, Rodríguez said:

Declaring the start of a “new chapter” in Venezuela, Rodríguez called for a renewal of oil laws to help foreign companies access the world’s largest proven reserves and promised closer ties with Washington despite the “hijacking” of Maduro.

“Venezuela has the right to establish relations with China, Russia, Cuba, Iran … and the United States,” said Maduro’s deputy, whom some have begun to call “Delxiaoping”.

Critics see efforts Portraying Rodríguez as Latina Deng as a campaign of distortion to conceal his role in helping Maduro destroy Venezuelan democracy and his responsibility to Sebin, the feared intelligence agency, while he was vice president.

“They’re trying to make it more palatable. Delcy now goes through the process of washing her face” Andrés Izarra, a former minister in exile during the reign of Maduro and his mentor Hugo Chavez, said:

But sinologists say they understand why leaders of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela may look to the Chinese Communist Party for inspiration as they try to put years of social and economic chaos behind them without losing political control.

“The Deng Xiaoping reform era is a very interesting model for Venezuela,” said Orville Schell, Arthur Ross director of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations in New York. “They need to open up to the outside world and stimulate the economy… If [Rodríguez] “If he has the brains, he will reform economically because my God, he needs to pump the oil industry back up and flood his government with some funds.”

Venezuela’s interim leader is expected to make an official visit to the United States soon – the first by a Venezuelan president in more than 25 years – but he is unlikely to attend a rodeo in Texas Wearing a 10 gallon cowboy hat, As Deng did in 1979 to signal Beijing’s desire to engage with the world.

But China’s authoritarian experience shows that anyone who expects economic reforms in Venezuela to be accompanied by a political thaw will be greatly disappointed.

Schell, Deng briefly He flirted with political reforms in the 80s.

“There were village elections, even some higher-level district elections were allowed… Broadcasting improved. Media suddenly opened up. Universities were much freer and there was almost nothing you couldn’t talk about,” he said.

But deep down, Deng adhered to the party’s “four basic principles” philosophy, which insisted that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” could not be opposed. “The basic structure of politics has not changed,” Schell said.

All hopes for democratic change evaporated in June 1989 when Deng ordered troops to clear protesters from Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were killed.

Schell also said he suspected Venezuela’s current leaders would be reluctant to cede power and predicted that Rodriguez, who does not appear to be a “Jeffersonian Democrat,” would “tread very carefully.”” When it comes to political reform. “They are elites and they don’t want to give up their privileges… just like the Chinese Communist Party. They didn’t want to give up their privileges and move to a multi-party system. [system]where they actually have to compete politically.

“Venezuela is not China, but autocracies have some common characteristics,” Schell added.

Maduro’s heirs have given clear signals that they want to follow in the footsteps of Deng, whose economic pragmatism was reflected in the statement: “It does not matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

Long before Maduro’s kidnapping, he and close allies had visited China repeatedly to understand how it had become the world’s second-largest economy and helped millions of people escape poverty after decades of famine and violent political extremism.

Rafael Lacava, one of Maduro’s leading envoys, during a trip to Shanghai in 2023. he told the landlords: “We are in a period of economic transition, and this transition resembles the Chinese model… We firmly believe that this is the model we should follow in the coming years.”

These visits resulted in the establishment of five special economic zones in Venezuela. Areas established by Deng to attract foreign investment In Southeast China in the 1980s.

Phil Gunson, an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Caracas, said Chavista intellectuals have been pondering the need for Deng-style change for several years. Rodríguez, who was made responsible for Venezuela’s oil industry and economy after becoming vice president in 2018, was one of the most important advocates of this idea, along with his brother Jorge.

“They had been looking for controlled economic reform for some time,” Gunson said, noting how Rodríguez managed a modest economic recovery by partially dollarizing the economy and courting business leaders and foreign investors. He has traveled frequently to China since becoming Maduro’s foreign minister in 2014.

A key goal now was to revitalize Venezuela’s battered oil industry by reversing Chavez’s 2007 nationalization in order to attract tens of billions of dollars of foreign investment. “It was one thing to exclude foreign companies at the height of the commodity boom, when oil was $120 a barrel. But now that figure is less than half, and there is an urgent need for foreign investment at home.” [state oil company] Gunson said PDVSA could not revive the oil industry alone.

Ricardo Hausmann, a Venezuelan economist and former minister who directs Harvard’s Growth Lab, said it was possible that a Chinese-style economic opening could be the “game plan” of Rodríguez’s new regime, which Donald Trump unexpectedly supported while sidelining the opposition movement led by Nobel peace laureate María Corina Machado.

But Hausmann said he believed such an effort would fail, doubting that foreign investors and oil companies would risk their money in a place that ExxonMobil’s CEO recently called “uninvestable.”

If the strategy is successful, the long-term consequences for Venezuelan democracy could be dire.

Frank Dikötter, author of several books about China, said that the Great Helmsman’s heirs used the “socialist modernity” pioneered by Deng to “build an economy that gave them sufficient influence to enforce and develop limits on democracy … they had much greater control over all aspects of life.”

Today, under the rule of Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao, the east Asian country is the world’s No. 2 economy but also its largest and most advanced surveillance state.

Schell said he suspects Trump decided to dump Machado because he was happy for Venezuela to become an economically prosperous autocracy as long as he obeyed Washington. “That’s why he didn’t bring Machado back. He doesn’t want someone with a Nobel Prize and a bunch of vague ideas about democracy.”