‘Escaping Venezuela:’ The Chávez documentary nobody else would make

By Oliver Bateman
Real Clear Wire

Carlos Mora ran a textile factory with 150 employees in a Venezuelan border town. Today he works as a handyman on the outskirts of Miami, sharing a small apartment with the family he extracted from that failed state one person at a time.

His story anchors “Escaping Venezuela,” a 74-minute documentary from Reason that premiered at the IFC Center in Manhattan earlier this month. The premiere followed a preview screening at the Cato Institute on Sept. 30 and a July run at the Anthem Film Festival. The film opens with the Jan. 3 capture of Nicolás Maduro by U.S. special forces, then rewinds through the 27 years that preceded it. It is an unremittingly bleak story about the two ways a resource-rich petrostate – that could’ve been a model for South American peers – fell by the wayside: first gradually, then rapidly, and now completely. 

Amazingly, this is not a story that has received a lot of coverage, at least in the left-leaning documentary space, where aspects of Venezuela’s fall have even been lionized by famous filmmakers like Oliver Stone. To learn why, I spoke with director Jim Epstein, Reason’s executive editor, and narrator Germania Rodríguez Poleo, a Venezuelan-American journalist whose mother, Patricia Poleo, was accused of terrorism by the government of Hugo Chávez and forced into exile when Germania was 11.

Epstein found his subject by accident, after filming a Reason segment about a Miami nonprofit that hands out donated goods to Venezuelan arrivals out of a storage unit and asking the woman running it to post a casting call on social media. “Nelsey, who’s Carlos’ wife, answered our ad,” he said. “Other than that it was blind luck. I had no idea that Carlos was such a great character, such a big personality who could help carry a film about what had happened in his country.”

‘The middle class is what has been completely destroyed’

“I don’t think they were ultra rich,” Epstein said of the Moras. “Their textile factory had 150 employees. I’ve seen photos of their house and it’s very nice. They had done great. They had a successful business.”

Rodríguez Poleo put them “between middle class and upper middle class,” and added: “This middle class really is what has been completely destroyed.”

Venezuela’s central bank, under Chavista control, set the exchange rate and decided who could convert bolívares to dollars, which is where the business started to die. “You could not exchange dollars and import foreign goods without their permission,” Epstein said. “They were not able to get the imported items they needed for their factory.” 

Price controls created a smuggling trade in subsidized goods across the Colombian border that pulled his workers off the floor, while subsidized textile imports undercut whatever the factory still managed to produce.

Mora used the business’s border logistics to move dissident judges, journalists, and others out of the country. He was captured, imprisoned, and tortured. The family’s savings, held in bolívares, were reduced to almost by nothing by hyper-inflation. “Really it’s another way of saying it was stolen by a corrupt group of people,” Epstein said. “Venezuelans who were able to have U.S. bank accounts and keep money in dollars were able to survive financially, and that was not them.”

Rodríguez Poleo said she still cries at every screening. “His story shows how the economy was ruined by these policies, how he lost his business. Then it shows him as a Venezuelan who tried to stand up to the dictatorship. Then he gets caught and tortured and leaves and has to deal with the immigration issue with his daughter being stuck at the border. Now you’re nobody. You’ve got to start from the bottom.”

‘A real impact on the American left’

The film reflects on the intense admiration Hugo Chávez received from the American left during the 2000s, a puzzling phenomenon that those of us who were in left-leaning spaces like graduate programs in the humanities can surely recall. Chávez appeared on the red carpet at the 2009 Venice Film Festival as the subject of Oliver Stone’s “South of the Border,” which Epstein called “truly a dreadful film.” 

Danny Glover called Chávez a brother and accepted Venezuelan state money to produce two films that were never finished. Sean Penn, whose fanboyish lefty Rolling Stone profile of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán (which he wrote for free) famously led to the elusive drug lord’s arrest, also stayed close to Chávez until his 2013 death. 

Epstein reserves “a darker place in my heart” for an earlier picture. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” shot by two Irish filmmakers who were inside Miraflores Palace during the 2002 coup attempt, “played at a lot of art houses. It played in Venezuela on state TV. Chávez loved it. It’s not like millions of Americans saw that film, but that film had a real impact on the American left in terms of depicting Chávez as a free speech hero, among other things. ‘South of the Border’ attempts to just copy what that film says.”

The free-speech-hero framing survived the 2007 shutdown of RCTV, the country’s oldest private broadcaster, for airing programming that was critical of Venezuela’s socialist government. “One of the things I learned through the film,” Rodríguez Poleo said, “was that The Guardian defended the shutting down of RCTV.”

Epstein tied the Chávez cult to anti-war sentiment related to the Iraq war. Chávez called George W. Bush “the devil” from the U.N. podium in 2006, shipped discounted heating oil to the South Bronx through Citgo, and brought activist Cindy Sheehan on his radio show. “The enemy of our enemy is our friend,” Epstein said. “American activists who didn’t know much about Venezuela weren’t following the authoritarian things he was doing in the country.”

Rodríguez Poleo went further. “Chávez was more charismatic, funnier and smarter than Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.” Her theory on why he never became a dorm-room poster: “He was not white and handsome like Che and Fidel.”

‘If it was a right-wing dictatorship, we would be having a different conversation’

Asked whether any documentary of note had taken a critical look at “Chavismo” in the years since, Epstein came up with two. HBO Max’s “A La Calle” has “unbelievable footage” of the 2017 street protests but includes “a whole interlude where they talk to a Chavista and it’s very respectful. I wasn’t such a fan of that.” “A Dangerous Assignment,” a PBS “Frontline” documentary directed by Juan Ravell, co-founder of the Venezuelan satire site El Chigüire Bipolar, he recommends without reservation.

“Documentary filmmaking is kind of a left thing,” he said.

“If it was a right-wing dictatorship, we would be having a different conversation. I try to talk about the tragedy in Venezuela and first-world progressives want to talk about Pinochet because he was U.S.-backed. The three dictatorships that we have in Latin America are left-wing dictatorships, in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Our tragedy is not the one that they like to hear,” Rodríguez Poleo said.

Chavismo spent lavishly to build its own cinematic legacy. “Escaping Venezuela” includes clips from a feature Chávez financed that portrays shopkeepers during the 1989 Caracazo riots as hoarders and price gougers. Epstein said he could have pulled “20 different clips” from it.

“We have not had the resources to tell our story,” Rodríguez Poleo said. “We don’t have access to Oliver Stone. We don’t have $15 million to give to Danny Glover.”

Both rejected the newer line that Chávez built something and Maduro wrecked it. “The timing is unfortunate in the sense that Chávez dies just right around when the oil boom ends,” Epstein said. “Oil was just covering up the hollowing out of the economy by Chávez. Maduro gets handed this catastrophe.”

Rodríguez Poleo called the revisionism “another dangerous situation” and points out that the American government played a major role in propping up the regime. “Through most of that dictatorship, the United States has been the biggest funder of the government because they never stopped buying oil. Chávez died before the [crap] hit the fan, thanks to the United States continuing to buy all that oil.”

“A lot of the things you’ll see in the documentary about how authoritarian populists attack democracy can come from either side,” she said. “Polarization is one of the main factors of why Venezuela ended up where it ended up.”

Mora, in the film, has a one-word summary of the entire socialist project, charismatic though its architect might have been: palabras, palabras, palabras. Nothing more than words. Thanks to “Escaping Venezuela,” we now have a bracing visual account of the impact of that rhetoric on the people whose livelihoods were destroyed by it.