By: Ricardo Abud
Any discourse that promises the recovery of Venezuela in the near future is, at best, ignorance and at worst, another form of manipulation.
The country is not facing a temporary crisis that can be resolved with a change of government, an investment agreement, or a favorable oil price cycle. It is facing a decades-long structural collapse that has simultaneously destroyed three things that cannot be rebuilt quickly: physical capital, human capital, and institutional trust.
Physical capital is the most visible and the most compelling evidence. The electrical, oil, water, transportation, and telecommunications infrastructure is not just damaged; it is destroyed on a scale that demands massive, sustained investment over decades. No budgetary patch can solve what requires complete reconstruction. Power plants cannot be restored with political will alone. Refineries cannot be restarted with speeches. Drinking water systems cannot be rehabilitated by decree. All of this requires real money, real technology, real time, and, above all, real institutions capable of executing projects without stealing what is entrusted to them. None of these four conditions exist in Venezuela today on the scale that reconstruction demands.
Human capital is the most silent and the most difficult damage to reverse. In the last decade, Venezuela has lost a proportion of its active, educated, and technically skilled population unprecedented in Latin American history outside of contexts of open warfare. The doctors, engineers, technicians, teachers, researchers, and entrepreneurs who left cannot be replaced by repatriation programs. A person who built their life in another country, started a family, developed a career, and put down roots, doesn't return simply because someone asks them to. They return, if they return at all, when the country's material and institutional conditions offer something concrete and sustainable, and that moment is not imminent under any realistic scenario.
Institutional trust is perhaps the deepest wound because it is what makes all other recoveries possible. Without credible institutions, there is no serious foreign investment. Without investment, there is no infrastructure reconstruction. Without infrastructure, there is no productive economy. Without a productive economy, there is no reason for talent to return. The cycle is closed and vicious, and breaking it requires decades of consistent institutional behavior that generates accumulated credibility. That credibility cannot be decreed, announced at a summit, or produced in a single presidential term.
What makes the current moment particularly dangerous is that the Venezuelan political sphere, both from the government and the opposition, continues to operate with a rhetoric of solutions that does not correspond to the true magnitude of the problem. There is talk of recovery plans, of investments that will arrive, of agreements that will change the landscape, of elections that will usher in a new era. All of this may or may not have political relevance, but none of these processes addresses the root of the problem: Venezuela needs a reconstruction of the state on a scale that no current Venezuelan political actor has the technical, financial, or institutional capacity to lead alone.
Countries that have experienced comparable collapses—and examples exist, though none are identical—took between twenty and forty years to stabilize at levels that could be considered respectable. And they achieved this under conditions that Venezuela lacks today: broad and sustained political agreements, structured international cooperation without humiliating conditionalities, leadership capable of postponing immediate political gain in favor of long-term reconstruction, and populations that had not been fragmented by mass emigration or poisoned by two decades of radical polarization.
The honesty that Venezuela needs, and that almost no one offers, is this: the suffering its people are experiencing today has no quick solution. It has no solution with this government, nor would it have one with the next. It has no solution with expensive oil or enthusiastic foreign investment. It has no solution with any leader currently on the Venezuelan political scene promising that things will change during their term. The accumulated damage is too deep, too widespread, and too systemic to respond to short-term fixes.
Recognizing that is neither pessimism nor surrender. It is the only honest starting point from which to begin building something lasting. Everything else is, once again, an illusion.
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EXCLUSIONARY THAN BEING POOR
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