Ricardo Hausmann Is Taking Milton Friedman's Lessons to Venezuela
Published on
Friday, February 08, 2019
by Common Dreams
Will the legacy of putting neoliberal academic theories over the people win again?
by Tanya Rawal-Jindia
For a few years now, there has been a tendency to compare Donald Trump to Richard Nixon, but the more urgent comparison in the face of the Venezuelan crisis is one between two well-pedigreed economists: Milton Friedman and Ricardo Hausmann.
Under Nixon’s reign, Milton Friedman was the “intellectual” who started to gain excessive power. Friedman was a trained economist, earning a doctorate at Columbia University, with teaching and research stints at the Universities of Chicago and Stanford.
And under Trump, we have another trained economist: Ricardo Hausmann. He received his doctorate from Cornell University and is the director for the Center of International Development at Harvard University.
For years now, Ricardo Hausmann has been suggesting that the solution for Venezuela’s socialist “crisis” is a U.S. invasion or “intervention.”
What we are seeing in Venezuela is not a sudden rise in the people demanding new leadership by Juan Guiadó, a man they just heard of in late January 2019. Rather, this “crisis”—a word that reinforces the illusion of an abrupt disaster—is a careful and hyper-theorized plan that was concocted in the office of a Harvard University professor. A year ago, Hausmann posted on his own blog a solution that asks the National Assembly to impeach Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. His expert suggestion is that “the Assembly could constitutionally appoint a new government, which in turn could request military assistance from a coalition of the willing, including Latin American, North American, and European countries.”
Direct violations of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter aside, Hausmann openly compares his plan to the U.S. “liberating” Panama in 1989. Do Americans really want to be asked for reparations in 20 years for Venezuela? Currently, the United States is facing such demands for Panamanians with support from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Thousands of lives were lost in Panama, countless lives ruined. And Hausmann is asking the United States to repeat this devastation.
Last year was not the first time Hausmann openly spoke of destabilizing Venezuela. In 2014, after Hausmann advocated for Venezuela to default on its loans, the economist was called out by President Maduro for attempting to destabilize Venezuela. It was at this time that Hausmann was given the nickname “academic hitman” by Maduro, who planned to bring legal action against the Harvard professor for speaking on behalf of the agencies that were supporting his well-funded and pro-International Monetary Fund (IMF) research.
Hausmann has been referred to as the informal mentor to Juan Guiadó. Indirect might be a better word to describe the mentorship, as there is a middleman between Hausmann and Guiadó: Leopoldo López, the leader of Popular Will. It is through Hausmann’s mentorship of López (who brought Guiadó under his wing and “plotted” his rise to lead the coup) that Hausmann’s plans are now coming to action. And, as with Milton Friedman in his time, the relationship between López and Hausmann gives us further insight into the use of academic capital to assert its will and, in turn, gain power.
In 2014, when Maduro arrested López for inciting violence in Caracas, Hausmann got Harvard University to rally behind the anti-socialist agitator and give him an honorary degree from the prestigious institution.
It is this ongoing attempt to bring Venezuela to its knees through the strategic use of highbrow higher education and the formal education of economists that conjures up memories of Friedman’s role with Chile. Friedman was able to successfully implement a neoliberal system in Chile by way of Chilean economist Sergio de Castro—whom Friedman trained in a way that Hausmann’s training of López echoes.
More:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/08/ricardo-hausmann-taking-milton-friedmans-lessons-venezuela
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