Venezuela: Without Liberals, There Is No Liberalism

The Venezuelan economy evolved from a growth miracle (1920–1957) to a growth disaster (1960 to the present). This paper describes the institutional collapse behind this reversal of fortunes. To cast light on Venezuela’s U-turn we provide a brief historical account, and we discuss the role played by educational organizations, the media and culture, and political and entrepreneurial elites in the destruction of liberal institutions. We also describe the most prominent liberal reactions to the pervasive institutional decay endured by the country. Finally, a major lesson emerges from this case study: illiberal mindsets coupled with the absence of leadership bring dire consequences for the people’s standard of living.

That is the abstract of a new article by Hugo J. Faria and Leonor Filardo in the new number of Econ Journal Watch. 

There is also this article on classical liberalism in Guatemala. 

Venezuela is what China was in the early 1980s, in some respects

This excerpt from this book shows that the current ¨reforms¨ in Venezuela are very similar to those implemented in China in the early 1980s 

In the summer of 1982 eight private businessmen, all in different businesses, were charged with ¨profiteering¨ and arrested -- though one was able to escape and remained at large for eight months. Those ¨economic criminals¨did nothing more than profit from private undertakings. By the end of 1982, more than 16,000 cases of economic crimes had been filed nationwide, and more than 30,000 people were arrested. 

Deng Xiaoping started to eliminate those measures. Xiaoping´s China then, and Venezuela now, move in the opposite direction. 

The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela

From the paper: "The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela’s Maisanta" 

In 2004, the Hugo Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters who had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to household survey respondents to measure the economic effects of being identified as a Chávez political opponent. We find that voters who were identified as Chávez opponents experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.3 percentage point drop in employment rates after the voter list was released.