It is shameful to see a delegation of the terrifying Grupo de Puebla “supervise” the Venezuelan elections that authoritarian leader Maduro wants to manipulate again.

The Puebla Group “supervising” elections is like Pablo Escobar overseeing the fight against drug trafficking. This infamous organization defends all communist murderous dictatorships and looks to the other side when human rights and freedom of expression are attacked in socialist regimes.

There is no comparison to the economic disaster that Venezuela’s 21st-century socialism has caused. As José Guerra, an economist at the Venezuelan Observatory of Finance, explains in his brilliant book “25 Years of Chavista Governments,” over the past quarter-century, Venezuela’s gross domestic product has plummeted by more than 55%, while the region’s GDP has grown by 25%, per capita income has dropped to less than half, poverty has increased 2.8 times, extreme poverty has multiplied by five, and the real minimum wage has sunk by 99%. 21st Century Socialism led the Venezuelan economy to the utmost misery, with the applause of the global left. Let us not forget, moreover, that Chavism wasted the enormous oil income it received during the years of high crude prices, sinking the economy despite receiving more than a trillion dollars of oil revenue between 1999 and 2014.

Nine million Venezuelans have been condemned to emigrate; poverty levels exceed 80 percent, according to the National Survey of Living Conditions/Encovi; and Chavism has destroyed the national currency, the bolivar, with a monstrous collapse of purchasing power. In the last 14 years, 14 zeros of the currency’s nominal value have been removed.

You may have read the lie that Venezuela’s problem is the inexistent US blockade. It’s completely false. In Venezuela, there is no blockade and it has bilateral agreements with more than 50 nations, including the major world powers. The United States is one of its main trading partners, along with China, Russia, Turkey, Spain, India, the Netherlands, and Brazil, among others, according to government data. Furthermore, Venezuela has received soft loans and financial support from China and Russia in excess of $78 billion since 2014, according to the US CRS. Moreover, Venezuela has been the largest beneficiary of soft loans and debt restructuring in the entire region since 2013. Indeed, the first person to acknowledge that there is no blockade is dictator Maduro, who boasts of the dead-cat bounce of the economy and its rising exports. Hilarious.

There is no blockade in Venezuela. The only blockade is that which socialism imposes on impoverished citizens. There are only sanctions on the leaders who have robbed the Venezuelan people with full hands and have demolished the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, which has gone from being the most efficient in the world before chavism to a decapitalized and indebted company on the brink of bankruptcy.

Monetary destruction and confiscation of private property, as well as rampant corruption, are trade marks of socialist regimes. Chavism is no different. They stole 3.4 million hectares of land, confiscated more than 523,000 apartments, and expropriated 1087 businesses. In addition, 62% of the expropriations were abandoned, and 95% were directly stolen.

Chavism has closed more than 40 national and regional newspapers, almost forty radios, and blocked the broadcast of more than thirty television stations, including the Spanish-language CNN or Antena 3. In addition, Chavism holds more than 260 political prisoners, according to the Criminal Forum.

Venezuela is the most unsafe country in the region, with more than 330,000 violent deaths in 20 years of the Chavista regime, according to the Observatory for Violence. The NGO Provea published that Maduro’s government killed more than 9,400 people between 2013 and 2023, institutionalizing murder, according to the NGO.

Hyperinflation, misery, and repression. A murderous dictatorship was perpetuated with the support of the Sao Paulo Forum and the terrifying Puebla Group, which also whitewashed the Castrista and Nicaraguan dictatorships. That is the legacy of Chavism, which the left has applauded for years and continues to support. This is the same left that has the temerity to tell you that they defend democracy, progress, and freedom of expression.

This caviar left that remains silent in the face of murder and misery in Venezuela and Cuba is the same that voices concerns about the rise of the extreme right while looking to the other side when faced with evidence of the socialist terror regime.

Sanctions did not destroy Venezuela. Socialism did. In times of high oil prices, squandering the record oil revenues, and implementing a regime of terror, misery, and confiscation where political leaders become obscenely rich, stealing the nation’s wealth just like they do in Cuba, Nicaragua, and other socialist regimes.