From Succession to Survival: How Venezuela’s Crisis Was Already Visible in 2013
- Jan 4
- 3 min read
By Ahmed Fathi
New York, NY: In April 2013, I sat before the cameras of RT Arabic discussing Venezuela at a moment of uneasy transition. Hugo Chávez was gone, Nicolás Maduro had won by a razor-thin margin, and the country was standing at the edge of a defining question: what comes after charisma? I wasn’t offering a prophecy—I was offering a reading. More than a decade later, I return to that interview not totally predictions, but to put them to the test of time—what I got right, what I got wrong, and what no one could reasonably foresee.
I said then that a narrow victory does not produce solid legitimacy. That proved decisively true. What appeared in 2013 as a political split later became an existential divide: one country, two competing claims to legitimacy, and a society trapped between them with little horizon. Polarization was not a passing phase; it became the architecture of governance. What seemed fragile hardened—not into collapse, but into calcification.
I was also right to distinguish between Chávez and Maduro. I said plainly that Maduro lacked his predecessor’s charisma and would not inherit the street so easily. That hasn’t changed. What did change was how he compensated: security, institutions, and time. Here lay my first real collision with reality. I expected weakness; I underestimated how effectively weakness can be converted into enforced resilience.
Economically, the warning lights were already flashing in 2013. I cautioned about the erosion of the oil sector, corruption, and an administration that piled up slogans while postponing reform. What followed—financial collapse, runaway inflation, and mass migration—was less surprising than it was devastating. The market imposed its logic, but not in the clean, textbook way economists imagine.
There was no “transition” so much as a harsh adaptation: a shadow economy, de facto dollarization, and political survival atop social wreckage.
Where did I get it wrong? On time. In 2013, the question seemed reasonable: would Maduro finish his term? Reality taught a harder lesson. Systems willing to harden can last far longer than analysts expect. I did not fully account for how control manufactures durability, nor how time itself becomes a governing tool when alternatives are blocked.
I also underweighted the military—not as a coup-maker, but as a stabilizing pillar through alignment. The absence of a classic rupture did not signal neutrality; it signaled integration. Power didn’t need to be seized because it was already shared.
Like many others, I underestimated how quickly Venezuela’s internal crisis would be internationalized. What began as a domestic legitimacy problem evolved into a geopolitical standoff: sanctions, competing recognitions, stop-start negotiations, and moments of escalation that thrust Venezuela back into global headlines in ways few imagined in 2013.
Revisiting that interview today is not about keeping score. It’s a reminder of the purpose of analytical journalism: to see direction, not just detail. I got the structure right—weak legitimacy, a post-charismatic leader, an eroding economic base. I got the tempo wrong—how long such a system could endure, and how far it would go to do so.
Venezuela did not fall overnight. It descended—slowly, deliberately—step by step since that uneasy spring more than a decade ago. Those who listen closely to beginnings often understand endings, even when they arrive farther and harsher than expected.