The students are inspired and ready to press on. The government shows no signs of ceding ground. Yet in this stalemate, the students have already achieved two significant victories. First, they have delivered a message to the government that the formal opposition has failed to convey. Second, and more important, the protesters have revealed to the world the true nature of Venezuela’s regime.
In recent years, the Venezuelan government has been driving its economy into the ground. Despite huge windfalls in oil revenue, unsustainable and ill-advised polices — such as deficit spending along with price and exchange-rate controls — have brought the nation to economic ruin, with consumer goods scarce and inflation rising. The government has refused to admit any wrongdoing and instead blames the country’s business community for these economic ills.
Worse, the regime had grown certain that the Venezuelan people blindly accepted official policy, boosting its self-perception as inevitable and permanent. Maduro, succeeding his political patron Hugo Chávez, has stated that the purpose of his administration is to carry on the work done by Chavez and to “deepen the revolution.”
However, the student protest is the first grass-roots movement in Venezuela to succeed in showing the government that staying the course is unacceptable — that the government itself is to blame for the country’s multiple crises. Rampant crime exists not because of capitalism but because of state policies that engender impunity. The scarcity of goods exists not because of greed but because of state-imposed price controls and monopolies that discourage production. Inflation exists not because retailers want to cheat the public but because of irresponsible fiscal and exchange-rate policies.