Why Nicolás Maduro Clings to Power

It’s difficult to describe the state of Venezuela today without coming across as a little hysterical. Phrases like “zombie movie set” and “post-apocalyptic hellscape” keep turning up in the accounts of recent visitors, who are staggered to see a society reach the levels of decay normally associated with wartime, but without a war.

In an engrossing recent account, The Wall Street Journal’s Anatoly Kurmanaev—who reported out of Caracas from 2013 until a few weeks ago—compared the nation’s state unfavorably with the Siberia of his youth in the 1990s:

Venezuela’s collapse has been far worse than the chaos that I experienced in the post-Soviet meltdown. As a young person, I was still able to get a good education in a public school with subsidized meals and decent free hospital treatment. By contrast, as the recession took hold in Venezuela, the so-called Socialist government made no attempt