Venezuela: Drifting Towards Civil War

"I am no Mussolini," insisted Venezuela's beleagured President Nicolas Maduro on television early this month, but if things go on this way he could end up like Mussolini. That would be very unfortunate for him, and also for Venezuela.

The daily street protests against Maduro's rule are now in their second month, and around forty people have already been killed, most of them by the police. "Molotov cocktails" (fire-bombs) are old hat; the new fashion is for "poopootovs" - containers of human or animal excrement that are thrown at the security forces. Nobody knows when it will all end, but most people fear that it will end badly.

It didn't begin all that badly. Hugo Chavez, a radical former army officer who had led a failed coup attempt in 1992, was elected to the presidency quite legitimately in 1998. Venezuela was the richest country in South America because of its oil wealth, but most of the 31 million Venezuelans were very poor, and Chavez proposed to change that.

He had strong popular support - majorities of around 60 percent in the 2002 and 2006 elections, and still 55 percent even in 2012 - and he had lots of money to give to the poor. But he died of cancer in 2013, and his successor, a former bus driver called Nicolas Maduro, got barely 50 percent of the vote in a special election later that year. He has not had a quiet moment since.

The problem is money. Chavez ran up massive deficits to finance his spending on health, education and housing, which really did transform the lives of many of Venezuela's poor, but the bills only came in after he died. The world price of oil collapsed, Venezuela's income did too, and everything went sour.

Now Venezuela has the highest inflation in the world (700 percent this year), and...