A Review of Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela

A Review of Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela by William Neuman (St. Martin’s Press, 2022, 352 pages)

But I must confess. I began Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse with low expectations, precisely because of Neuman’s affiliation with the Times. As readers familiar with my work will know, I have spent years criticizing the Times’ coverage of Venezuela. This coverage is largely accurate but often one-sided to the point of offering a highly partial and frankly misleading portrayal of Venezuelan reality. To wit: Times’ reporters have worked meticulously to uncover the Venezuelan government’s many shortcomings, and to show how these shortcomings have led to tremendous suffering. This is a useful and important task. But the Times has often ignored or downplayed how government policies under Chávez, and to a much lesser degree Maduro, benefited Venezuela’s poor, and paid little to no attention to how U.S. policies have decisively contributed to Venezuelans’ suffering, particularly in recent years.

Things Are Never So Bad suffers from the first of these flaws but, to my pleasant surprise, not the second. As one might expect of a veteran Times’ reporter, Neuman has little positive to say about Chávez or Maduro. Nor is it surprising to see Neuman arguing that Chávez and Maduro are the ones to blame for Venezuela’s crisis: “The responsibility for the disaster in Venezuela lies with Maduro, and Chávez before him. Chavismo has been in power for more than two decades. They own the wreck of Venezuela.” (295). What is surprising is that Neuman is far more attentive than most Times’ (and other mainstream media) reporters to how the U.S. government and Venezuelan opposition have contributed to Venezuela’s dire situation.

The book contains three parts, of which Part Three is by far the most absorbing. Part One provides an account of Chávez’s rise, interspersed with some Venezuelan history, analysis of oil and its centrality to Venezuela’s polity and economy, and descriptions of everyday life in Venezuela after the country entered its recent crisis, circa 2014-2015. Several chapters in Parts One and Two focus on the series of blackouts that gripped Venezuela in March 2019. Neuman’s analysis of Chávez is fairly standard, as this passage on page 81-82 shows: “Chávez was a populist. The point of government for Chávez was staying in government. The point of power was staying in power. It wasn’t using that power to improve lives or make the country better in a lasting way. To the extent that any of those things were attempted, the attempt was made with a clear end in mind: Would it help him stay in power?”

Neuman is correct that Chávez was focused on staying in office. But if this is what makes one a “populist” then it would seem that the label should apply to the vast majority of politicians in office, most of whom think about staying in office or ascending to higher elected positions. Like many critics of Chávez, Neuman’s use of the populist label allows him to avoid the messy but necessary task of sorting through Chávez’s failures and achievements. Neuman is quite attentive to Chávez’s shortcomings, which to be sure were many and significant. But there’s precious little on the dramatic reductions in poverty and inequality and other successes that occurred under Chávez’s watch. By wielding the populist label, Neuman can ignore and minimize Chávez’s achievements, which to the extent they appear at all, are seen as nothing more than byproducts of an all-consuming fixation on “staying in power.”

Part Two focuses on Maduro’s early years in office, with attention to and analysis of the crisis that gripped Venezuela in this time. Neuman’s analysis of the crisis is often sharp and on point, as for instance, with his account of Venezuela’s dysfunctional currency system and how it decisively contributed to the country’s economic calamities. As in Part One, several chapters focus on the March 2019 blackouts. These chapters provide interesting (if somewhat partial) analysis of the blackouts and valuable insights into what it felt like to live through them. Part Two also delves into Venezuela’s slide into full-scale authoritarianism under Maduro and the increasing and often-brutal repression that has characterized Maduro’s time in office. Neuman’s account of José Vicente Haro’s “kidnapping” by Maduro’s Special Action Force (FAES) is gut-wrenching and offers a harrowing and horrifying picture of state repression in action.

While Parts One and Two have plenty of valuable material, Part Three is the strongest and most interesting section of the book. It focuses on the rise and fall of Juan Guaidó, who in January 2019 declared himself president of Venezuela, with full backing and coordination from the U.S. government. Whatever the shortcomings of the rest of the book, the outstanding reporting Neuman provides in this part makes Things Are Never So Bad invaluable for anyone interested in understanding Venezuela today.

Neuman provides a detailed analysis of U.S. policymaking towards Venezuela, beginning with an extended profile of Thomas Shannon, who played a central role in this policymaking between 1996 and 2018. (Shannon held a variety of offices during this time. From 2013-2018 he served in the US State Department, as Counselor from 2013-2016, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2016 until his retirement in 2018.) In comparison to his successors, Shannon favored a decidedly moderate approach towards Venezuela, with Neuman recounting Shannon’s advice to George W. Bush to ignore rather than directly confront Chávez. Shannon also favored diplomacy, which he used to secure the release of Joshua Holt, a U.S. citizen who traveled to Venezuela in June 2016 to get married and was arrested three weeks later on charges of conspiring against the government. Through Shannon’s and others’ help, Holt was freed in 2018.

But Shannon’s moderation and diplomacy ran up against a wall in the Trump administration, which was dominated by figures like John Bolton, who in his role as National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019 favored a maximalist approach towards Venezuela centered on ratcheting up the pressure as much as possible. Neuman concurs with Shannon that this approach was based more on fantasy than fact, with the officials driving it having extremely little knowledge of Venezuela. (It is worth noting that while Shannon shows some real understanding of Venezuela, his perspective is still unabashedly imperialist. Like the Trump officials he criticizes, Shannon is wholeheartedly committed to the idea that the United States has the right to intervene in Venezuelan affairs. The question is merely the strategic one of how to best do this. Neuman’s book is similar in giving little thought to whether the United States has any right at all to intervene in Venezuelan affairs.

Neuman’s analysis of Juan Guaidó’s rise and fall is invaluable. Neuman leaves no doubt that Guaidó was more a product of the Trump administration than of Venezuela’s opposition, which was caught entirely off guard by Guaidó’s January 23, 2019, self-declaration as president. Neuman skillfully shows that Guaidó and his U.S. backers repeatedly made ridiculous assumptions based in fantasy rather than reality. They thought Maduro would crumble almost immediately after Guaidó declared himself president. This, of course, did not come to pass. Rather, it set the stage for a series of imperial misadventures over the coming year and beyond. (In an October 8, 2022, New York Times’ op-ed, Neuman shows that the Biden administration is continuing many of the same mistakes found in the Trump administration.)

The first of these was the U.S.-engineered attempt to invade Venezuelan territory and deliver “humanitarian assistance” over the Cúcuta Colombian-Venezuelan border. The delusional thinking was that this would induce thousands of soldiers to defect to Guaidó’s cause, leaving Maduro without military support. When this failed, Guaidó tried to spark a military uprising. Neuman is correct in calling the April 30, 2019, attempt a “nolpe” rather than a golpe, since it failed utterly to attract any domestic support.

The most delusional of Guaidó’s attempts to overthrow Maduro was the “Screw Up at Macuto,” as it was dubbed by Venezuelans. The plot involved a maritime invasion of Venezuela, engineered by J.J. Rendón, a Venezuelan political consultant based in Miami, who put Guaidó in touch with Jordan Goudreau, a Canadian-born U.S. Army veteran who offered the services of the company he founded in 2016, Silvercorp USA. Guaidó signed a contract authorizing Goudreau to coordinate an invasion that would remove Maduro and “install” Guaidó into the presidency.

The end result was a B-grade movie in which Venezuelan forces easily captured the would-be invaded as they floundered off the coast of Venezuela in May 2020. All this, of course, directly confirmed Maduro’s assertions that Guaidó was a U.S. lackey. So too did Guaidó’s repeated invocations for the United States to invade Venezuela and his fervent support for brutal U.S. sanctions.

Another strength of Part Three is Neuman’s clear-eyed analysis of U.S. sanctions. Neuman details the debates within the Trump administration over the U.S. employment of oil sanctions that some officials called “the doomsday scenario” which should be used only if Venezuela was on the verge of collapse. Instead, the sanctions were implemented in August 2017 and then tightened in January 2019. The result, predicted by U.S. officials, was immense suffering for the Venezuelan people. For his part, Maduro was likely strengthened since he could point, with clear evidence, to the United States as the main source of Venezuelans’ woes.

While Neuman does not back away from analyzing the impact of U.S. sanctions, including on Venezuela’s oil sector, the book would have done better to pay attention to the role that earlier U.S. sanctions played in Venezuela’s collapse. Like others, Neuman draws a clear line between sanctions on individual Venezuelan officials and Venezuela’s oil sector. This is all well and good analytically, and there is little doubt oil sanctions were profoundly more damaging to Venezuela. But the earlier sanctions, begun in 2015 under Obama, in fact played a central role in Venezuela’s crisis. This is because of over- compliance by U.S. and other foreign corporations, who steered clear of Venezuela for many years before oil sanctions took hold for fear of running afoul of the U.S. government. Neuman’s willingness to acknowledge the debilitating impact of U.S. sanctions is nonetheless a welcome departure from the tendency of many critics of Chávez and Maduro to minimize or outright ignore them.

Things Are Never So Bad is an imperfect book. At times it rankles. At other times it misses the mark. But Neuman has done some fine reporting and he shows courage in directing his attention towards the profoundly foolish and damaging actions of Guaidó and the U.S. government. For this the book deserves a wide audience.