TIM DOESCHER: The citizens of Venezuela have seen better days. The once wealthy booming nation is now mired by extreme poverty caused by an out of control, bankrupt government being led by a socialist dictator named Nicolas Maduro. Last week at an event to honor the Venezuelan military, there was an explosion heard around the world.
 

NEWS CLIP: Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is safe this morning after what he calls an assassination attempt on him. The president was speaking during a televised where there was an explosion nearby. Soldiers at the even scattered in panic, as you can see here, while President Maduro claims it was an attempt on his life using explosive drones. Fire officials say it was merely a gas canister that exploded in a building a few blocks away.

DOESCHER: This alleged assassination attempt was immediately questioned and challenged by the international community.

DOESCHER: For most, the idea of an assassination attempt is only understood through the lens of Hollywood movies and history books, but this real-life example begs a deeper dive. When Maduro became president in 2013, he was greeted with majority opposition in the Venezuelan parliament, but through various moves and power grabs, Maduro has since consolidated power, illegally stacked the courts with his own judges, invalidated the parliament, and installed a new one to rewrite the Venezuelan constitution.

While this has been going on, Venezuelans have continued to tumble into extreme poverty and many are leaving the country for better opportunity. To better understand this and further discuss Maduro and his authoritarian, socialist regime, I spoke with Ana Quintana, senior policy analyst for Latin American Issues in the Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies here at the Heritage Foundation. Ana, thank you so much for joining us.

ANA QUINTANA: Thanks for having me.

DOESCHER: Take us back to Maduro's start in leading Venezuela. The former president, Hugo Chavez, died and hand-picks Maduro to take his place. Can you give us a little context and discuss his rise to power and whether or not he's making Hugo Chavez proud?

QUINTANA: Yeah, so Nicholas Maduro, he started off his career as a bus driver. Then, he became a union leader, then he went off to the Soviet Union to become educated and then somehow, he became foreign minister. Then, all of a sudden, when Chavez died, Chavez was like, "Well, he's the most useful idiot to essentially take over and continue my legacy," and he chose Maduro. Chavez died in the spring of 2013 and it was a coronation. It was known who was going to take over. Ever since Maduro's taken over. His rise to power occurred at around the same time as there being a downturn in Venezuela's economy and a natural consequence of these horrible, socialist, economic and domestic policies.

DOESCHER: So, Maduro was vowed to take over exactly where Chavez left off with these socialist, the hard-core socialist agenda.

QUINTANA: Well, that's exactly it. Chavez brought to Latin America what's consider to be 21st-century socialism. Taking inspiration from the Castro regime, from the Cuban government. Cuba's greatest failure was that the regime was never elected. Chavez ... It's like a Trojan horse in Latin America. This is what the 21st-century socialist movement has done. Everybody has become elected. They were free and quasi-free democratic elections, but after that, they became these heavy-handed, leftist authoritarians. You saw that replicated in various countries in the region.

DOESCHER: It's hard to talk about this whole issue without first understanding the economics of the entire situation. You mentioned it briefly, but currently, well over 80% of those residing in Venezuela are below the poverty line. That's a big number. Can you explain where they are right now and how this is affecting the current situation of Maduro's re-election and the assassination attempt? How is the economic situation playing into that?
 

QUINTANA: Yeah. To have an understanding of Venezuela's economy, Venezuela is the most oil-rich nation in the entire world. I think it's 95 or 96% of Venezuela GDP is based upon oil. Venezuela does not have the capacity to refine its own oil, so Venezuela, this is a country where oil is essentially gifted and given free to the people because it's viewed as this natural resource. Chavez comes into power and he's like, "You know what? I'm going to expand the welfare state. I am going to use all this oil wealth to essentially buy off votes and buy off support and buy off the voter base."
 

When Chavez came into power, this is when oil ... At its peak, oil reached about $140 per barrel. Venezuela's budget, in order for things to be even, oil would need to reach $250 per barrel. That's what Chavez gained. Chavez was like, "Oil, it's only going to continue rising. We're going to be able to pressure OPAC. We're going to be able to maintain this line of thinking." In reality, that was not the case. It inversed. Oil prices went down, but also during that time because Venezuela was so busy expanding the welfare state, they never invested in oil infrastructure. Their oil refining capacities went down.
 

Now, flash forward to 2018, Venezuela is the most oil-rich nation in the entire world, used to be able to extract 3,000,000 barrels of oils per day. It's now below 1,000,000 barrels. Fifty percent of that is being used to service Venezuela debt. Venezuela is not going to reach about 1,000,000% inflation rate by the end of this year. Forty-thousand to 50,000 Venezuelans every single day are fleeing their country. They're refugees into Columbia, Brazil.
 

That 80% number that you referenced of people living in poverty, it's essentially ... We've got to look at extreme poverty number. People who have to give up their children now because they simply can't afford to feed them. Animals that are dying. People who are forced to eat garbage if food is ever even available. It's an incredibly, incredibly dire situation.
 

DOESCHER: They're so reliant on oil, even the U.S. imports eight to nine percent of our oil consumption. That's a big number and for them to be so reliant on that and have such a big social welfare program, that's a recipe for disaster.
 

QUINTANA: They never diversified their economy. It's simple math. They never did it.
 

DOESCHER: In response to Maduro's recent re-election you wrote, "Things look grim for Venezuela." Put grim into perspective for those who don't have prior knowledge to the situation. Why was this election so bad and how is corruption playing a role here?

QUINTANA: We have to consider this that Venezuela's government is not led by politicians. It's led by criminals. The vast majority of the Venezuelan government officials are criminals. Either they're directly involved in drug trafficking or they're involved in some sort of extortion system. They've used that country as a piggy bank. They bled it dry. Because in the meanwhile, while they've expanded the welfare state, they've also used government resources as their own slush fund.
 

So, you have the vice president of Venezuela, for example, who's been designated by the U.S. government as a drug trafficking kingpin for working with Mexican cartels like Los Zetas and Sinaloa cartel. This is somebody who within the last year ... This is something significant the Trump administration has done, they've seized over $500,000,000 of drug-related assets that he's accumulated. Imagine what $500,000,000 could be used for in a country like Venezuela, to feed such impoverished people. That's only one person, then you have these other dozen or even more than that government officials who've been directly involved in that as well.
 

In a way, for the government to consolidate power, because obviously, the economy is doing bad, every indicator that you could look at as to indicate why should we continue voting for these guys, they control the levers of power in the country. So, in the previous election last July, the Venezuela government created what's called a constituent assembly because the congress is controlled by the opposition. The opposition won major control of Congress. What they've done is they just deprived that congress of resources and they created a dual congress with even more power. Coincidentally, every single member of that congress was a hand-picked member of the socialist party.
 

DOESCHER: You're essentially saying it would be like President Trump appointing a new Supreme Court in order to invalidate our current members of Congress and then he went and appointed his own people that would uphold his agenda.
 

QUINTANA: It's essentially the equivalent of President Trump saying, "Congress, you're irrelevant. I'm going to create a dual congress. I'm going to strip you, Congress, the elected congress, of all of your resources. I'm going to strip away the Supreme Court of its power. I'm going to install my own people there. I'm going to create a dual ... " Again, every lever of power is controlled by the government.
 

The military, for example, now runs the food distribution systems in the country because now they traffic in food. They traffic in people's misery. It's incredible.
 

DOESCHER: Since you Hugo Chavez took power in 1999, it's estimated that two to 4,000,000 Venezuelans have left the country. Has Maduro done anything to change this or stop this? Is he even concerned about it?
 

QUINTANA: They want people to leave because that's less of a burden onto them. Originally, when Chavez came into power, the people who would leave were the white-collar, wealthy Venezuelans who did not support him for ideological reasons. Then, you've seen as the economy has worsened, people are leaving with barely the clothes on their backs. They have absolutely nothing. They're living in squalor in these refugee camps simple because there's more of an opportunity elsewhere than there is within their own country.
 

DOESCHER: I even read an article that said people with really good skills and decent jobs in Venezuela are leaving to become busboys in some European countries.
 

QUINTANA: Oh, my God. It's become even worse than that. Throughout Latin America, there is now this massive spike in Venezuelan prostitutes because these women who used to be doctors for example, who used to be well-trained professionals have nothing else to sell or to give. Women are now sterilizing themselves so they don't get pregnant because they simply just can't afford to have children. It's a very tragic situation, and it's not just a Venezuela problem either. This is a problem that's spreading throughout all of Latin America.
 

DOESCHER: Let's move on to the assassination attempt that was reported last week. Last week, they reported that assassination attempt took place at a Maduro speech, and they have since arrested six people who they are saying are alleged responsible. What's your read on this "assassination attempt?" Is it an assassination attempt or is it more business as usual?
 

QUINTANA: The "assassination attempt" took place ... There was two drones that had explosives and the explosives went off in the midst of this big national guardsman rally. It was incredible to see the national guard, which is supposed to be Maduro's pride and jewel, the backbone of their security system, they run scurrying away 'cause they were horrified at hearing these explosions go off. They didn't even protect the president.

There's conflicting information coming out from this. People think that this might have been a self-sabotage, an attack they did onto themselves in order to gain more sympathy and to justify continued crackdowns against any divisions within the military or any opponents within their government. Also, just because any time that Maduro is feeling international pressure just even pressure from within, he always deflects to, "Well, it's the Americans. The Americans are trying to kill me." Or, "It's the Colombians," or whomever. He's going to close his eyes, spin around, and pick an enemy.
 

DOESCHER: Straw man.
 

QUINTANA: That's exactly what they do because he has nothing else to fall back on. It's really incredible though. I would say if people could Google this, the day of the attack as the military then finally runs to guard Maduro, his wife, who's standing right behind him, is laughing. If your husband is being "attacked", if there is an assassination attempt, you're not going to laugh. So, there's something odd happening.
 

DOESCHER: Let's move on to solutions. You said that the U.S. should hold the Maduro regime accountable for human rights violations and build an international coalition of partners to outline concrete steps to fix this problem. What should be the U.S. response to this? What are we doing and what could we do more of? I know that's a lot of questions there, but it's sequential here.
 

QUINTANA: Yeah. I think this is one area that the Trump administration has done a fantastic job and nobody's paying attention to this. Ever since Trump has come into office, they've implemented this incredibly strong and muscular policy towards the Venezuelan government. Under the previous administration, all of this was going on. Everybody knew about the government's criminality, the government's erosion of human rights, their violation of human rights, but they did absolutely nothing because Obama was too fixated on warming relations with Cuba.
 

Then, on the Trump administration side, they have sanctioned ... By sanctioned, I mean they've put individual human right's based sanctions and criminal-based sanctions onto Venezuela government officials meaning they're no longer allowed to travel to the United States, any money they have in the United States that's illicit, they cannot touch that money. It's significant. Again, it's over 70-something government officials.
 

They've also been working with our international allies in Mexico, especially the Mexican government has really stepped up on this. I think, the United States can't go at this alone. This is not just a U.S. problem. This is a regional problem. It's becoming an international problem. Venezuela is now pouring out more refugees in other countries in the Middle East. Venezuela has a Narco dictatorship governing the country. There's just so many different layers here.
 

I think what we could see more of is our international partners, particularly the EU, really need to step up. They've implemented some sanctions here and there, but I think obviously because the EU needs EU consensus, all countries need to agree on something before anything moves forward which is absurd. I think, so that needs to happen. Also, I think we need to see more countries cooperating on finding this illicit money that's circulating through the region. Panama is a major money-laundering hub, so is Switzerland. Find this illicit money and seize it because these guys, they only behave this way because they know that there's no accountability. They know that they have a fallback.
 

DOESCHER: One year from now, what would be your rosiest scenario if you had it all your way?

QUINTANA: For the Venezuelan people to actually have a legitimate opportunity to vote for their leadership because there has not been a real opportunity, a real unimpeded and un-manipulated opportunity for them to vote for the future of their country. That I think is the best-case scenario, but honestly, Venezuela is going to be a crisis ... It's a multi-generational crisis. It took 20 years to break and it's going to take even longer than that to fix.
 

DOESCHER: Ana, thank you so much for being on today.