So to Speak Transcript: Venezuela is a cautionary tale w/ Jim Epstein and Germania Rodriguez Poleo

Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Because Venezuela really went totalitarian after Maduro stole the election in 2024. We’re talking if you were texting against Maduro and someone looked at your phone, you could be sent to jail.

Nico Perrino: Wow.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: And they did that under something called the law against hate. And that was the tool that they really used to go into high gear to just go after anyone who they considered was saying anything remotely. You don’t have to be a politician, a journalist. Just if your neighbor heard you saying something bad about Maduro, they’ll snitch on you, and you go to jail. And then that neighbor gets extra food the next week.

Video: Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

Nico Perrino: You’re listening to So To Speak: The Free Speech Podcast brought to you by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Welcome back to So To Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, where every other week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define your right to free speech. I’m your host, Nico Perrino. At 11:59 p.m. on May 27th, 2007, one of Venezuela’s oldest and most watched television stations went dark.

For more than half a century, Radio Caracas Television broadcast news, sports, comedies, and telenovelas. Its news coverage was also critical of President Hugo Chávez. When RCTV’s broadcast license expired, the government refused to renew it. Minutes later, a state-funded channel took its place. An international human rights court later ruled that the government leveraged its control over the airways to punish RCTV for its editorial stance. What happened to RCTV was not an isolated act.

It was just one step in a longer campaign to silence dissent within the country. Venezuelans learned that speaking out against the government could cost them their jobs, their freedom, and even their safety. A new documentary from Reason Magazine titled Escaping Venezuela tells that larger story through Carlos Mora, who was imprisoned and tortured after helping Venezuelan dissidents escape across the border to Colombia.

Today I am joined by the film’s director Jim Epstein and its narrator Germania Rodríguez Poleo to discuss the film and the broader crackdown on free speech and press rights in Venezuela in recent decades. Jim, Germania, thanks for coming on the show.

Jim Epstein: Thanks, Nico. I love that intro. Very dramatic.

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Jim Epstein: I think Gustavo Dudamel was directing or something.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yeah, it was.

Jim Epstein: I’ve watched that final moment on YouTube when it goes dark, like that tragic –

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Which is why Gustavo Dudamel is now the most famous orchestra director in the world of the New York City Orchestra.

Jim Epstein: And a Venezuelan, yes.

Nico Perrino: Oh wow.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: But we Venezuelans feel some type of way about him because he was there celebrating the closing of RCTV.

Nico Perrino: He was supportive of the closing of RCTV?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: He was directing the orchestra as the new state channel premiered, so you tell me.

Nico Perrino: Oh really?

Jim Epstein: You can certainly find pictures of him with Hugo Chávez online.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Oh yeah.

Jim Epstein: I don't know the exact history, but I know that he didn’t speak out forcefully against the regime is what I think.

Nico Perrino: And did you find that was pretty common amongst Venezuelans? They just kind of wanted to keep their heads low so that folks wouldn’t come after them? I mean, this Carlos guy, he was trying to help people escape Venezuela, was tortured for doing that. Was that a fear among Venezuelans?

Jim Epstein: Well, there was a very motivated opposition to Chávez from the get-go. I mean, it grew and grew. So, this was a very free country. This was a country that had a very large and aggressive and tabloid-y press. And people really spoke their minds. It was extremely vibrant. There was no chill over free speech at the outset of the Chavista reign, which I’m really talking 1988. That’s when Hugo Chávez was elected president, and then he comes into power in 1999, and people didn’t quite know what to expect.

But by, say, 2002, when he was forcibly taking control of the state-owned oil company and acting in very aggressive ways, at that point there was an opposition. It was pretty motivated. And journalists, including Germania’s mother, who were publishing, were not holding back in the things that they were saying about Chávez and what was happening.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Well, but also around that time, I think, one of the first groups that tried to stand up against Chávez was PDVSA executives because he was trying to use the oil company as his personal piggy bank. So, there was some movement against that. There was so many elections.

Jim Epstein: Strikes. There was a week-long strike. Yeah.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: I think the election was before the strikes. It was a reform. It wasn’t a presidential election, but the PDVSA workers who voted against Chávez were fired. And he did so on national TV.

Nico Perrino: I know. That’s in the documentary where he calls these people out by name and says, “Thank you for your service.”

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Correct.

Nico Perrino: And salutes them and says that they are essentially thieves.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: And these were the people that were trying to tell the country, “Hey, he’s trying to take over PDVSA.” So, I think that did give a chill to citizens. Like, at least if you’re a state worker, you better stay quiet.

Nico Perrino: First they came for the oil executives. Pretty easy to probably go after.

Jim Epstein: And all the top engineers.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Right.

Jim Epstein: I believe it was about 15,000 people that Chávez let go. He transformed so many of the institutions in Venezuela, basically putting in political figureheads, Chavistas, people who were promoted within the organizations because they wore red and they went to marches. So, it was a real assault on expertise. It actually took years for oil output to fully decline, but the oil infrastructure slowly decayed. It wasn’t being renewed. And by the time of Chávez’s death around 2013, it was in a pretty bad state.

And the country with more oil in the ground than any other nation, the largest oil reserves – could be Saudi Arabia, particularly with the oil bonanza that happened – ended up extremely poor. I saw a statistic recently: Venezuela’s oil output is less than the state of Utah. It was one US state. One US state has higher oil output than all of Venezuela.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: They didn’t have one oil rig left. And this is what the documentary tries to explain because a lot of first-worlders, as I call them, don’t care about the Venezuela issue because they think this is just a third-world country that was always poor. Why do we care? Another Latin country. Another African country. But Venezuela was different in the region because of PDVSA, because of the oil industry. And 30 years later, they don’t have one oil rig left.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, richest country, as you say in the documentary, in South America. Is this statistic true? Because I think it’s in the documentary, 25% of the country’s population has left.

Jim Epstein: Yeah, eight million people.

Nico Perrino: That’s incredible.

Jim Epstein: Yeah.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: It has to be way more, too, by the way, because the number is eight million, but that doesn’t count, for example, the grandchildren and the children of European migrants who left Venezuela, but they’re really not counted as migrants because they’re using their European passports. So, that’s way more than eight million.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. I was familiar with a little bit of the story that you tell in this documentary because my sister, she went to the University of Tampa, and her roommate was Venezuelan. Constantly sending things back home to Venezuela that we would take for granted we could get at any convenience store in abundance here in the United States. Toilet paper, sanitary pads, razors, the things that one of the characters in your documentary talks about shipping out to Venezuela.

Jim Epstein: Yeah, yeah.

Nico Perrino: So, let’s start actually at the top. I know we’ve kind of just gotten right into it. But Jim, as you know, I’m a documentary filmmaker myself. One of the things I love hearing about is the process of making a film, the inspiration for a film.

Jim Epstein: And the struggle.

Nico Perrino: And the struggle. The struggle. I still – as listeners know – have PTSD from making Mighty Ira back in 2020 and all the licensing and headaches that come along with that.

Jim Epstein: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: But you have translations in your film. You’re doing a film about a country, as you were saying before we got on, that you couldn’t go to. Talk about 1.) Why you were inspired to make this film, and 2.) The challenges of making it.

Jim Epstein: Yeah. I mean, I think I was inspired because even at that time when I began the project, Venezuela was not as front and center in the news as it is today, but this huge migration was happening, and there were stories of starvation. It was really driven by curiosity as to what were the policies that caused this. I had studied Latin American history in college. When I started the project, I spoke some Spanish, although I had to eventually really brush up on my Spanish to do the project. But it was just fascination.

Nico Perrino: Was this supposed to be a documentary short? Because I know Reason does a lot of those.

Jim Epstein: No.

Nico Perrino: So, it was always going to be a feature?

Jim Epstein: I was like, “Yeah, I would like to do a feature on this.” And then it’s kind of the thing with a project like this. It’s like once you’re in, you’re sort of in, and then you don’t want to disappoint all the people that have given you your time. But it’s like making a documentary, for me, at least, is like building a prison cell for myself that I have to find a way out of. It’s very difficult. I made so many mistakes.

Nico Perrino: Because it’s not like writing a book. There’s like visual components that come along with it too.

Jim Epstein: Right.

Nico Perrino: And then if you want to put it on the streaming platforms, there are requirements that the streaming platforms have that aren’t required to just throw something up on YouTube.

Jim Epstein: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: It just gets complicated.

Jim Epstein: I mean, my background is in television, and I’ve worked at Reason now for about 15 years. So, I’ve made longer-format documentaries for YouTube, but they might be 20, 30. I did one project that was about 40 minutes. I made a lot of rookie mistakes. I didn’t know clearly which story I wanted to tell.

So, I probably made five documentaries. I thought I was making a Russian novel, basically going in all kinds of directions. And I learned through the process that it has to be one story. My wonderful editor Danielle Thompson suffered through a lot of this with me. Just things that we tried and tried and tried and it didn’t work, so we pulled it out. Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Well, that’s the risk when you’re making any sort of creative product is that there’s always a struggle involved in it. And the struggle can be uncomfortable. And there’s always this instinct that, “Maybe I just settle for this, but I know it’s not quite right. Maybe I just settle.”

Jim Epstein: Right.

Nico Perrino: It takes a lot of courage to go back and say, “No, this isn't working. Let’s start again and try and get it right.” And then to cut it until it bleeds. You have, I imagine, so much footage on the cutting room floor.

Jim Epstein: So much footage.

Nico Perrino: To get it down to that tight 71 minutes that you did and to have it be as powerful as it was, it’s a pretty incredible achievement.

Jim Epstein: I mean, some of my favorite moments. The cliché is kill your babies. I mean, with reluctance. At one point, since you’ve seen the film, you know that we go to an apartment building in Mexico where a lot of Venezuelans are waiting at the border trying to get out, including the protagonist’s daughter. And that was my connection. For a long time, I thought that apartment building was my story. That all these people had amazing, interesting stories. That this is the heart and soul of the documentary.

We’re going to go to this apartment building. We’re going to meet all these people. So, I shot tons of footage. I have a whole other storyline with a family that was there, and I followed them and their reunion in Wichita, Kansas. I mean, it’s heartbreaking, and they’re a lovely family, and it’s great stuff. But then, in putting the documentary, it’s like they’re not the main story. The story has to be about Carlos and his family, who also have a powerful story. But you have to choose, and that was really difficult.

Nico Perrino: And Carlos is the main character of the story. He’s someone who really helped people escape Venezuela, his family as well, at great risk to themselves.

Jim Epstein: Exactly. And I chose his story in part, well, he’s a larger-than-life character who can sort of narrate the history of Venezuela through his own eyes, but also he had been involved in this sort of underground railroad and had been tortured and imprisoned. That became the center of the documentary. I would say, in terms of settling, deadlines are really essential.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, they’re helpful.

Jim Epstein: I sort of suffered with that for a long time in that this was a slow burn. I’d work on it a little on the weekends or late at night and was never kind of getting it done. And then the US went in and captured Nicolás Maduro, and Venezuela was at the center of the news. And I thought, “Oh god, I have to finish. This is my moment. I've got to finish this project.”

Nico Perrino: I imagine that had to rework the storyline a little bit as well.

Jim Epstein: Not that much. I put on a fresh top.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. I’ve watched it twice. I watched it just before we’re recording now, and I watched it a week or two ago. But it feels natural, I guess, for anyone checking it out.

Jim Epstein: Thank you. I had one question of “Did you start this documentary before January?” I really like that question because I was like, “Yeah, I did.”

Nico Perrino: I want to come back to that capture, but before we do, I want to ask Germania, how did you come to be involved in this, and what is your backstory? Because you’ve lived this.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yes. So, I come from a family of journalists. My mom was really one of the first journalists who had to flee Venezuela during the Hugo Chávez regime back when the world was still saying that Chávez was great and was proving that socialism could work.

Nico Perrino: And were people allowed to freely go?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Oh no. My mom fled on a boat. She was accused of terrorism, but normal people could leave at this time. Again, this is 2005, when nobody would have said outside of Venezuela that it was a dictatorship or a regime. Hollywood celebrities, as you see in the film, were praising Chávez. Oliver Stone was making his documentary.

Nico Perrino: Sorry, this was just a question I had. Can people leave freely now? Is it like Cuba?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: No, they can leave freely. That’s always been a difference between Cuba and Venezuela because people can leave Venezuela.

Nico Perrino: Okay. But the people Carlos is helping out are people who are targeted because they’re “enemies of the state”.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Correct.

Nico Perrino: And I put that in quotation marks.

Jim Epstein: They’ve had their –

Nico Perrino: Passports taken.

Jim Epstein: For example, Vladimir Petit, yeah, his passport was taken.

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Jim Epstein: And that happened to a lot of journalists in one sweep. I think that was around – I’m going to get the date wrong – 2015, something like that, yeah.

Nico Perrino: Okay, sorry. I cut you off.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: There are other conversations. I think for the Venezuelan regime and now the Castor regime too, they prefer these dissidents to leave. They sort of prefer them outside of the country than inside. But yes, I was 11 when my mom fled. They accused her of blowing up a prosecutor’s car. So, proper terrorism, being the mastermind. No evidence. They had a fake witness that then said he was paid for it.

Nico Perrino: I’m assuming your mom did not blow up this car.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: She did not.

Nico Perrino: Okay. For the record.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: No, imagine when I show up in Miami elementary school, “So, my mom is accused of blowing up a car, but she didn’t do it. I swear.” Hard to explain. The United States government gave her political asylum. The United Nations gave her a passport. So, no, she did not do this. There is no evidence of it.

Nico Perrino: The United Nations gives out passports?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: So, this is what happens. When your own country won’t give you a passport, as it happened with my mom, and she was still waiting for asylum, she didn’t have an American passport. So, in these cases, when you can prove that you are being politically persecuted by your country, that they are denying you a passport, the UN gives you a travel document, which is what my mom used for a very long time.

Nico Perrino: Oh, so the UN does do something productive.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yeah. One of very few things. But I grew up in the States since I was 11 in Miami. Then I went to NYU. I went a little progressive. I wrote an article for Reason.

Nico Perrino: Oh yeah, I see that. My Family Fled Socialism. Then I Voted for Bernie Sanders.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yeah, I’m going to be dealing with that headline – thanks, Jim – for a while.

Nico Perrino: We’ll link it in the show notes. People can get that story.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: But Jim, how did we come together?

Nico Perrino: Well, maybe we shouldn’t go into the details. I wrote an article about your mother and the legal battle she was in.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yes.

Nico Perrino: Which actually is related to free speech issues, but people can look that one up. That will take us into a rabbit hole. Actually, I think the first time I met you was at a conference in Miami. I followed you on social media or something. Yeah. I don’t remember. It’s one of those things where you meet someone online.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Probably social media.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, I have a colleague who is Venezuelan, and I had mentioned that we were recording this and that you made this documentary. She was familiar with you, and she’s actually familiar with Carlos. This Carlos guy, is he fairly prominent? I didn’t dig into how she knows.

Jim Epstein: We’ve been doing a lot of media, so he’s maybe becoming so, but up until a couple of weeks ago, no. I mean, if you Googled Carlos Mora, you wouldn’t find any news articles about him.

Nico Perrino: Okay. So, you wrote an article about her mom?

Jim Epstein: About her mom, and it was sort of free speech-themed.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: And he read my mom’s book.

Jim Epstein: Her mom sent me a copy of her book. Even though it was in Spanish and I read very slow in Spanish, it’s a page-turner. It’s like a thriller.

Nico Perrino: Is it a memoir?

Jim Epstein: It’s a memoir.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yeah.

Jim Epstein: If I had a different set of talents, I’d be like, “We’ve got to turn this into a Hollywood picture.”

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: We’re working on it. Well, that’s what we would like.

Jim Epstein: It’s got the potential. And this is happening before.

Nico Perrino: I know a filmmaker, by the way, if you’re interested.

Jim Epstein: At the time when her mother had to flee, hidden away on a boat, I mean, it’s just incredible. She was hiding out in her apartment in Caracas. This was before there was much of a migration. And then she ends up in Miami, and there’s no Venezuelan community at the time. And there’s also a passage in the book about the Miami airport and the symbolism of the Miami airport. It’s sort of like a modern-day Ellis Island.

All the emotion, not just from Venezuela, but people that have to flee these just torn countries from Latin America that have been destroyed by one thing or another and are now moving to the United States and coming to Miami. It’s an incredibly moving passage.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: But then actually I’m a journalist, so I was the chief reporter at the Daily Mail talking about free speech. And it became impossible continuing to work there and talk against Delcy Rodríguez and the dictatorship. So, I left my job.

Nico Perrino: When was that?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: This was almost a year ago now.

Nico Perrino: Okay. I’ve got a lot of questions about the current state of Venezuela, and I want to get that. But your grandfather was also a journalist?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yes.

Nico Perrino: Who was targeted as well?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Also exiled. Accused of all the things.

Nico Perrino: Do you have any family left in Venezuela?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yes, the Chavista ones, which I do have. Can you believe? Part of my dad’s family, some of my cousins, are still there and they’re Chavistas.

Nico Perrino: So, your grandfather was then on your mother’s side?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yes. So, my grandpa founded a newspaper and a magazine, which is where my mom worked, but then they both got accused of terrorism.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. I mean, watching the documentary – Jim, you were mentioning this earlier – it does seem like Venezuela had this rich tradition of journalism in all forms. And is all that pretty much gone now?

Jim Epstein: Well, it moved online. The timing was, in a way, I don’t want to use the word perfect because that has positive connotations, but as the press was being dismantled. It wasn’t like Fidel Castro, who would just close down newspapers by fiat. Venezuela went through the motions of pretending that it was a democracy, pretending that it wasn’t a dictatorship. So, it would be through suing a newspaper out of business, in the case of Germania’s grandfather. All newsprint was imported, and there’s capital control, so they couldn't get permission to import newsprint. That’s how they suffocated the newspaper.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: That’s how they managed to shut us down.

Nico Perrino: Well, we actually talk about those sorts of hypotheticals here at FIRE, right? Would it be a violation of the First Amendment for the government to effectively regulate the printing press as in a machine out of business? You couldn’t actually get a printing press and run around what might be more direct control or censorship of the editorial process. And there are court cases that say, “Yeah. No, you can’t do that if the purpose of doing that is to punish the press.” And it seems like that’s what happened in Venezuela.

Jim Epstein: That is, in fact, what they did, or they would sue for defamation because you wrote something critical about a government official.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: My mom was tried in a military trial for defamation.

Nico Perrino: Wow.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: It doesn’t make sense.

Nico Perrino: Well, yeah, there’s a long tradition in free speech circles of kind of hating defamation law because of the ways it can be wielded to silence criticism and opponents of both the government and also people with a lot of money who are willing to make your life miserable by bringing a frivolous lawsuit to shut you up.

Jim Epstein: Sort of one of the last nails was a Globovisión, which was, aside from RCTV, the television station we talked about –

Nico Perrino: Don’t ask me to say it that way.

Jim Epstein: Radio Caracas Television, they sort of took over the mantle of being critical of the regime. It was a news station. Once they were pulled down in 2013, it was a time when social media became an option. And journalists, including Germania’s mother, could move to Miami and do reporting on what was happening in Venezuela and have an audience. And it was hard for the regime to stop YouTube or Instagram. They’ve tried blocking Twitter, but Venezuelans are savvy. They get VPNs.

So, Venezuelans were really early and really entrepreneurial on social media, which is a point I like to make against Americans who say, “Oh, social media is such this terrible force.” Well, actually, for dictatorships, I can’t even imagine life in Venezuela without the steady stream of reliable information.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Well, that’s a big difference with what happened in Cuba and in Venezuela because it’s similar dictatorships, but because of the times that they happened, and the Cubans didn’t have the internet to remain so together or informed. And I feel like the people who remain in Cuba are disconnected from the world in many ways, but Venezuelans were able to sort of not become so disconnected because of social media.

Nico Perrino: Is the internet regulated in Venezuela now, and you do need to use a VPN to get to certain websites?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yes. Thank you, United States. Thank you to the military and their families. All media outlets were blocked. Twitter was blocked. You needed a VPN. But one of the improvements we have seen since Maduro’s arrest is that they are unblocking the media outlets. And it’s crazy how they do it because they never accept that they were attacking free speech, but all of a sudden it’s like, “Okay, now you can access all these outlets.” But you’re never admitting that you went against this freedom before.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Jim, you had sent me before this conversation an article in the Wall Street Journal from 2016 called Venezuela’s Nemesis is Hardware Salesman at a Home Depot in Alabama. And it’s about this website called Dollar Today.

Jim Epstein: Gustavo Díaz, right?

Nico Perrino: Yeah, which kind of cobbles together a bunch of information to give Venezuelans the true exchange rate for the bolívar. Is that correct?

Jim Epstein: Exactly, yeah.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: That is it. And that was a huge crime to just tell people what the dollar was actually worth.

Jim Epstein: And just for context, one of Chávez’s – well, I probably did go into depth in one of the 20-minute outtakes from the film – but Chávez imposed capital controls where he was controlling the exchange rate between the dollar and the bolívar. And this was the nexus of corruption because he could give what we call enchufados, people who are plugged in, direct access to this advantageous exchange rate.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yeah. But also, families would give each other el cupo. I don’t know how you would say it in English, but it’s like “Oh, you’re not traveling to the States?” So, people would collect everyone’s allotted amount of dollars to buy.

Jim Epstein: Eventually it would come in the form of credit cards. Prepaid credit cards that they would distribute. It was a way of giving away government money and bribing people. It was basically a manipulated exchange rate, but there was this fixed and fictitious exchange rate. And Dollar Today is my favorite example of someone from the United States. This guy, Gustavo Díaz, I actually once called him, and he said, “I have to call you back on my break.” He was in the aisles of Home Depot helping a customer.

And on his breaks, he was calling exchange houses on the Colombian border and trying to figure out what the actual exchange rate for the day was so that Venezuelans would know the real exchange rate between the dollar and the bolívar. That allowed Venezuela to informally dollarize at a time of hyperinflation and made it so that families could manage their expenses and feed their families again. So, that’s a great example of information is power. And information is power that happened thanks to the internet.

Nico Perrino: Well, yeah, this is 2016. So, at that time, the rate of exchange, according to Mr. Díaz here, and the true rate of exchange between the dollar and the bolívar was 2,000 bolivars per dollar, which was itself a 44% decline in the value of the bolívar since the previous year, so 2015. But official rates at that time, depending on the type of import, were calculated by the government at 10 bolivars for a dollar or 660 bolivars to dollar. Somewhere in that range.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: And if you say otherwise, you’re a criminal.

Nico Perrino: Straight to jail. Yes. But it started as a Twitter feed.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yeah.

Jim Epstein: Okay, yeah. And that allowed him to spread true information that was so meaningful in the lives of everyday people that the regime's power was based on blocking that information.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. So, you had talked about the various ways that the government would go after dissenters. And one of the things I like in the documentary that I think multiple interviewees say is that authoritarianism, totalitarianism, dictatorship isn't like a light switch. It’s not like one day you just turn it on. The light slowly dims on the democracy. And you can kind of see that in some of the laws that are passed and strengthened to go after speech. And some of them, people could argue, have a valid purpose. I wouldn’t agree with that, but you could argue it.

For example, there’s an insult law which criminalized anyone who offends in speech or writing or in any other way shows disrespect for the president. Protections were extended later to other officials. So, theoretically, if you’re RCTV and you’re hosting a presidential debate, Hugo Chávez could criticize and offend whoever he wanted, but his debate opponent couldn’t say anything critical of him lest, potentially, falling afoul of this insult law, the network broadcasting it would.

Now my understanding is that a lot of these laws weren’t often enforced but were an effort to get the networks, because of fear of their potential arbitrary enforcement, to self-censor themselves.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yes. That’s the beginning of it. Try to get them to self-censor. And that works quite well, and it did in Venezuela with most channels except RCTV. But I was just telling Jim it’s interesting because this law against insults, the names are so soviet. Because Venezuela really went totalitarian after Maduro stole the election in 2024. We’re talking if you were texting against Maduro and someone looked at your phone, you could be sent to jail.

Nico Perrino: Wow.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: And they did that under something called the law against hate. And that was the tool that they really used to go into high gear to just go after anyone who they considered was saying anything remotely. You don’t have to be a politician, a journalist. Just if your neighbor heard you saying something bad about Maduro, they’ll snitch on you, and you go to jail. And then that neighbor gets extra food the next week.

Nico Perrino: Well, this is the point I always try and make for folks. These speech codes with these broad and vague words in them, like offends or shows disrespect or hate, that’s in the eye of the beholder. We might hate hate, for example. We have kind of a conception of what hate speech is in our mind. We might not like it. We might want to see it eradicated from society. None of us likes to be offended or shown disrespect, but do we really want to give the government the power to determine what is offensive, what is disrespectful, what is hateful?

Because we have case studies and what that can turn into. Now we might not think our government is going to do that because we trust the people in power, but I’m sure the Venezuelans, for a period, trusted the people in power too.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: If the structure is there, they can use it against anyone.

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Jim Epstein: It’s discretionary.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Exactly. But I want to also talk about they go way beyond these laws that if you’re criticizing the government. What I would say they really lean into, and they’re still doing that, is their interpretation of democracy activism. They’ll call that terrorism. Because if I’m out here saying Delcy Rodríguez is a dictator, and she should be out, they’ll be like, “Well, what you’re saying, you’re calling people to overthrow the government. That’s terrorism. Straight to jail.”

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: So, if I say, “This is a dictatorship.” They can say, “You’re inciting hatred inside the government. Straight to jail.”

Nico Perrino: Well, you have other laws here that I’ve written down. Article 297A criminalized using any medium to spread “false information that is intended to cause or causes panic in the collectivity or to keep it in a state of anxiety.”

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Exactly. So, if I want to protest, they’ll say, “You’re instigating a riot.”

Nico Perrino: Panic, anxiety. A state of anxiety. There’s also a public disturbance provision which imposed up to 10 years in prison for a public act raising “the danger of a serious accident.” A term that the article describes as kind of vague and subjective. So, if you’re involved in a protest and there’s an accident that happens during it, to jail for up to 10 years.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: You’re a terrorist.

Nico Perrino: You guys talk about this in the documentary, the law of social responsibility in radio and television, which imposed things like sort of draconian.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Ley RESORTE.

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: This is something traumatic for me because you have to understand when I was a kid, you would see before every show, “According to Ley RESORTE.” They would read you the law and remind you of what you’re not supposed to say before every show.

Nico Perrino: And the government could – if I’m understanding it correctly – kind of cut into the programming at any point for up to eight hours. And Hugo Chávez, he was not a concise man when he spoke.

Jim Epstein: You had to run his show. And I think that also fueled a lot of hate. People watching their movie or their cartoons or something and Hugo Chávez comes on. And the television station has no choice but to continue to run his speech. And he would just talk for eight hours sometimes.

Nico Perrino: But the radio frequency spectrum, Jim, is scary. We’ve got to let the government regulate it in the public good. I mean, this is something that FIRE has criticized here in the United States with the FCC and how it abuses its mandate.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Is there anything like that here? Because remember when I was little, I would tell my friends, “Yeah, I would just be watching my cartoons, and the president just decides you’re going to watch him now.” That doesn’t exist here, does it?

Jim Epstein: It doesn’t exist here, but as Nico is mentioning, some of the licensing or a reason we also talk about the way that antitrust laws is enforced and the discretionary nature of it gives the government power over the press, and it’s terrible. I mean, I strongly oppose this. And I think that there’s so many cases. And there’s another reason I wanted to make a documentary is that there’s a lot that Americans can learn from these catastrophic policy mistakes. In Venezuela, it’s always much more extreme than when it happens in the United States typically.

Nico Perrino: I mean, it gets more extreme. It doesn’t always start out that way.

Jim Epstein: It doesn't always start that way.

Nico Perrino: And that’s the warning to Americans.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: I mean, I’m sorry, I’m going to mention we have seen some, maybe not law moves, but intimidation when Trump wants all the outlets to show him speaking.

Jim Epstein: Absolutely.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: I see that, and I get PTSD.

Nico Perrino: A quote from him is literally, “There is something wrong with a country that allows the press to publish purposefully negative stories.” That’s a quote from him two weeks ago. Something wrong with a country that has the First Amendment in effect. That allows you to publish negative stories.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: It’s not a big leap from that to calling them terrorists.

Nico Perrino: No, it’s just I’m watching Hugo Chávez talk about all these journalists, and he’s criticizing the one-sided news, the overly critical news, the negative news, the fake news.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Chávez started all of that. Speaking about Twitter. Chávez was probably the first president to use Twitter the way Trump uses it now. And he would use it similarly. Go against journalists and be funny about it. They’re funny guys. They have charisma.

Jim Epstein: Chávez and Trump would have gotten along beautifully.

Nico Perrino: Well, he gets along well, apparently, with Kim Jong Un. I think he just had a Truth Social post this morning that he’s the only person in the world that has a really great relationship with this dictator of what is effectively and open air concentration camp in the state of North Korea. That is an open-air concentration camp. Sorry, I get animated about that one.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: As you should.

Jim Epstein: With the media, it’s the MAGA movement, obviously, where there’s parallels. And then, of course, with things like government-run grocery stores and price controls and all sorts of things, it’s the DSA and the progressive left that should be paying attention to the Venezuelan tragedy.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. So, let’s talk a little bit about RCTV. Jim, when we were setting up this conversation, you had mentioned that you have an RCTV T-shirt that you’ll sometimes wear around New York or wherever you are.

Jim Epstein: I did not wear it today, regrettably, and you’re shaming me by wearing yours.

Nico Perrino: Jim said this. And he said he wanted to make RCTV a symbol of press freedom. And watching your documentary, I was like, it kind of is in the way that it stood up to the regime and stood up for free speech and free press principles. So, the only place I could find a Radio Caracas Television T-shirt. And by the way, that name is hilarious because it’s Radio Caracas, but it’s a television station. I know there’s a backstory.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Well, because it started as a radio station. That’s an iconic shirt. I need it.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. And so, I bought the shirt so that I can carry on your project, Jim, of making it a symbol for press freedom. And I was hopeful that you would show up today in it, but …

Jim Epstein: Well, I wear my RCTV shirt around Brooklyn. And actually, I was in DC once with my son and a delivery guy biked by and was like, “RCTV! RCTV!” And it was like, that was great. And then once I was coming out of an elevator, and someone was doing delivery. Because there’s Venezuelans, they were probably doctors and lawyers in Venezuela, and they’re doing delivery and working in restaurants.

Nico Perrino: Well, Carlos had 150 employees in a very successful apparel company, and now he’s a handyman.

Jim Epstein: He’s a handyman, yeah. Exactly.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: That’s also why his story is so great because it really shows everything. The economic decline, how the socialist policies affected his business, but also the political and dissident side, and the migration side. So, you found the right story.

Jim Epstein: Thank you. I was at a checkout at Whole Foods, and the Venezuelan checkout guy wanted to talk about my T-shirt. So, I love wearing that T-shirt because RCTV, I even think there’s no quite analogy in the United States because it was so central. It was like the backbone of the civic culture. It was all the TV networks rolled into one before the internet.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: It was like NBC. People might get the wrong impression that it was like CNN. I think Globovisión was like CNN, only news. But RCTV was not like CNN, only news. It was like the NBC.

Jim Epstein: It had telenovelas. They ran a lot of American shows.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yes.

Nico Perrino: They had a popular SNL-like thing on Monday nights.

Jim Epstein: Yes, yes.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Hilarious.

Jim Epstein: And it was actually César Báez – who is also Venezuelan – he was talking to his partners, and he had a good phrase from them, which was, “It was what was on in your living room.” It was so central. And Radio Rochela, which is this comedy show where they could make fun of politicians, and they could be honest. And so, Chávez’s decision to go after this station and to pull it off the air, it’s a real turning point.

Nico Perrino: Because he doesn’t like some of the comedy that’s being broadcast on a specific television station. I wonder what that sounds like.

Jim Epstein: So, in 2002 – because you asked earlier about opposition to Chávez – there was an attempted coup where Chávez was actually removed from office for about 48 hours. And it looked like it was all over. I mean, we could talk for 15 hours, and there’s people who study just what happened in this period. It’s so complicated. Eventually Chávez does come back to power, but he came back radicalized. And he came back seeking revenge, including against the media, which he felt had supported his removal from office.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: So, that’s when they called them terrorists, and they justified it like that because before the coup there were protests. That’s what led to the coup. And RCTV got the order of showing whatever Chávez wanted them to show. Instead, they used half the screen for Chávez’s thing.

Nico Perrino: That’s creative, yeah.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: And half the screen for the protest. So, then Chávez came back and said, “They are the coup plotters. RCTV is not just showing what’s happening in the streets. They’re inciting this coup.” And that’s how he justified it.

Jim Epstein: And I believe there was a meeting that happened at the presidential palace when Pedro Carmona, who was the interim-term president, and there was stories that Marcel Granier, who is in the documentary, was present at that. Whatever the truth is, whether they did want Chávez removed from power or not, the claim was they were coup plotters, and therefore they couldn’t be on television anymore. That was the justification he gave.

Nico Perrino: Were they involved in plotting the coup?

Jim Epstein: There’s no evidence that they were involved in actually plotting the coup. And when I asked Marcel Granier about it, he said, “We were covering the story as journalists. We talked about what was going on.” Regardless of what was in their hearts and their coverage and if they did want Chávez removed from office, that to me is not a justification to pull them off the airwaves. Chávez really used this, and there was a lot of support from the European and American left for the decision to pull RCTV off the air.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Which was the editorial? That shocked me in the film.

Jim Epstein: That was in The Guardian. Yeah, there was a Guardian letter.

Nico Perrino: Of course it was in The Guardian.

Jim Epstein: One of the many, many things I cut from the film was a long section that does try and put that into perspective, which is that, particularly in the American media at the time, this is happening as the war in Iraq is turning really bad. There’s a lot of anger towards Fox News and Judith Miller and the coverage of WMDs that led to war, and this idea that speech can lead to death and destruction, like it did in Iraq. And there was an attempt by Chávez, among others, to equate RCTV and the Venezuelan media to Fox News.

They were spreading hate and that this was legitimate. We had to stop them. And also, Chávez basically had a whole propaganda campaign about how Bush’s plan was to come after him next. The empire wanted oil. Wanted to steal the oil of third-world countries, and the plan was Venezuela and Iraq, and they were coming.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: That’s so true.

Jim Epstein: And RCTV was going to enable this through manufactured consent, through their propaganda.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: It’s still what they’re doing, by the way. The regime that’s still there, Delcy Rodríguez, they still want to portray the opposition, who is the large majority of Venezuelans, as right-wing fascist terrorists.

Nico Perrino: Well, I mean, we did just take Venezuela’s oil. Trump was literally at the UN saying, “To the victor go the spoils.” That is a direct quote about taking Venezuela’s oil.

Video: What is perhaps the biggest deal ever made. To the victor belong the spoils. You’ve all heard that. Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.

Nico Perrino: So, was he right?

Jim Epstein: The way Trump talks, it’s a dream for the NYU professors who are depicting this as an imperialist invasion, et cetera. The thing is, though, wherever you stand on Trump and the Trump administration, it’s about holding a reason. We often talk about you have to hold two things in your head. You may oppose Trump, and you may not like what he’s doing right now in Venezuela, and at the same time we can celebrate the fact that Maduro is sitting in a jail cell.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Exactly.

Jim Epstein: And that he was running a criminal empire that destroyed the lives of millions of people. And Trump is the one who actually made the orders to pull him out. So, both things are true.

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: And that has benefited the lives of a lot of people. Hundreds of political prisoners have been released, not all. My friends inside Venezuela who couldn’t speak about anything remotely political because of the law against hate are back speaking, are back in the process. So, it’s not a black-and-white situation.

Nico Perrino: I mean, is Venezuela a vassal state of the United States right now? Is Delcy Rodríguez a functionary of the United States?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: She’s pretending to be.

Nico Perrino: Because María Machado was kind of the leader in exile that you had to give her the Nobel Peace Prize to President Trump.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yes. Well, I’ll give you my analysis of what’s going on now.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, please.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Delcy Rodríguez is trying for Chavismo to survive. And she has more time than Trump. Trump only has two years left if we remain a democracy. She just has to get through that. So, she’s doing and saying whatever it is to get there.

Nico Perrino: Oh, okay. Interesting.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: And a secret that a lot of Americans don’t understand, Trump is lying. Venezuela has not paid for Maduro’s arrest because, yes, we have the most oil in the world, but I just told you we didn’t even have an oil rig. Why do you think gas prices aren’t going down here in the States? Trump is lying to you.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. I’ve heard a lot of these executives say that it would take years to build the infrastructure in order to get the oil going again because this is very thick oil, is what I understand.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: It’s thick oil, PDVSA. It’s true. So, actually, if the United States wants to enjoy and exploit Venezuelan resources – which most Venezuelans, we are fine with because we prefer the US to do that than Iran, China, Russia, Cuba – they’re going to have to invest a lot of money. And guess what? Exxon already told Trump, “These people already stole from me. Why in the world would I go back to working with a socialist dictatorship?” So, Trump says a lot of things.

It’s not true that he’s just bathing in Venezuelan oil. Nobody is going to bathe in Venezuelan oil until they find, I think, it’s like a billion that they need at least in this oil deal that’s the biggest oil deal in the world. Where is the money of that investment? The White House still hasn’t said it.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. But on the ground, the situation is better now than it was on January 2nd?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: A thousand percent. Well, politically, but for example, in terms of the economy, things feel worse.

Nico Perrino: Interesting.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: In terms of services, people are spending eight hours without electricity every day. Some towns have no water. And it’s because until you start the democratization process, how are you going to fix these things?

Nico Perrino: Are there supposed to be elections? Are there going to be elections?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: They keep saying there will be elections.

Nico Perrino: Because María Machado said she’s coming back for the elections.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yeah. It’s like Jesus is coming back.

Jim Epstein: The thing about Delcy Rodríguez is –

Nico Perrino: She was the vice president?

Jim Epstein: Yeah. It was like an executive president.

Nico Perrino: Different system. Yeah, sure.

Jim Epstein: And also, it was a band of criminals and a dictatorship, so to even say vice president is to pretend that it was an elected government.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: And she’s been everything. She’s been oil minister, foreign minister, as it happens.

Jim Epstein: Exactly. It’s a mafia organization. And they’re shrewd people. Do not underestimate them. A lot of people underestimated the Chavistas.

Nico Perrino: Oh, okay.

Jim Epstein: Nicolás Maduro was underestimated. Sorry. Yes, he was Chávez’s hand-picked successor, and people thought, “Oh, this guy is uneducated. He’s dumb. He’s a buffoon.”

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: “He’s just a bus driver.”

Jim Epstein: “He’s a bus driver. He’s not going to last.” He was a shrewd operator, and he held onto power when it didn’t look like he would. Delcy is going to try to wait out, as Germania said. Is going to try and wait out the Trump administration. So, the fight is not over. Don’t trust a word she says.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: And she knows how to do it because she’s telling Trump, “Anything you want. You want all the oil? Here it is.” In a democracy, it wouldn’t be that easy, right? Delcy can hand everything over because she’s a dictator, but President María Corina Machado would have to get through Congress. She can’t just hand out the country to Trump the way Delcy can.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Watching the documentary, I don’t know a ton about Venezuelan history, but it seems like Hugo Chávez came to power in a certain respect after something called the Caracazo in 1989.

Jim Epstein: Yes.

Nico Perrino: Which was a result of some austerity measures that were put in place in the country because of rising debt and inflation, is my understanding. And so, he kind of rode in trying to carry the banner of socialism after the Soviet Union fell, but it wasn’t until 1998 that he came to power. But he was even in prison for a while?

Jim Epstein: He started to become outspoken. A lot of the things that we saw once Chávez was elected began much earlier under Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was president of Venezuela two times, actually, but first in the 1970s. He nationalized the oil company. He tripled the size of government. A fast-growing country really slowed down. Then there was attempts at sort of a neoliberal revolution to privatize companies and to shrink the size of the state. And Carlos Andrés Pérez had come back into office.

It gets very complicated. Anyway, that’s when there was these big riots, and that was a turning point. And they sort of backed some of the liberalization. And Chávez used the Caracazo, which was this political crisis. And that built up his profile leading up to an attempted –

Nico Perrino: He was a lieutenant colonel or something in the military?

Jim Epstein: In the military, yeah. And many people believe a Cuban spy. A left-wing propagandist who was connected with Fidel Castro.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: First thing he did when he was freed, go visit Castro.

Jim Epstein: Exactly. Right, and he’s pardoned. He does an attempted coup in ’92. He’s pardoned.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: He does another attempted coup from prison. He did some wild stuff.

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Jim Epstein: He goes to visit Cuba, and then he’s wildly popular. And again, this is a country that you have to understand the context. It’s not as if Venezuela is doing well right before Chávez. Chávez is elected. He’s a brilliant politician and charismatic communicator. He doesn't look like any other Venezuelan president before him, who are very European-looking, educated abroad types. Chávez grew up in a home with a dirt floor.

He looks like el pueblo. He’s actually a very well-read intellectual. So, he’s a singular talent as a politician, but he’s elected because Venezuela is doing very poorly. It’s been stagnating for many years. The politics are in disarray.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: The inequality conversation is a big one at this time.

Nico Perrino: I mean, this was a story as old as time. When the economic situation isn't good, it creates a fertile atmosphere for radical politics.

Jim Epstein: Yeah.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: The stage was set for an authoritarian populace, anti-US, to take power. But I do think that it’s important to note that Chávez did not campaign as a socialist the first time.

Nico Perrino: That’s interesting because in your documentary it’s kind of striking for me as an American that isn't familiar with Venezuelan politics, just how forthright he is in his socialism and how much he champions it.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yeah. And now they say he wasn’t socialist, but he didn’t run like that. Just like now we have become the annoying nationality that’s warning people about socialism, the Cubans warned us. And they would ask Chávez in interviews, “Hey, are you a socialist? You talk a lot against a free market, against rich people.” And he would mock that. He’d be like, “I would never take private property. I’m a capitalist.”

Nico Perrino: Oh, interesting.

Jim Epstein: I mean, from the get-go, he starts these big social programs. He’s going to fight inequality. He does talk like a left-wing progressive.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: But it was very DSA in the terms that they would be supporting those values but saying, “No, but I’m not a Fidel Castro.”

Nico Perrino: Because later in your documentaries he is holding up books by Vladimir Lenin.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: That’s after the coup when he goes full.

Jim Epstein: Exactly. He radicalizes over time. And then he first uses the word socialism in 2005 in his speech in Porto Alegre, in Brazil.

Nico Perrino: Oh, so all that footage post-2005.

Jim Epstein: The stuff of where he is saying socialism, where socialism is every other word, that is between 2005 and 2013, the last eight years of his presidency. Before that there’s his social missions. He starts bringing Cuban doctors in, but his ties with Fidel Castro were very tight. He rescues Cuba because, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba loses its subsidies.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Needed a new host.

Jim Epstein: It enters the so-called special period when people thought, “How can this regime survive?”

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Which they are in now because they lost Venezuela again.

Jim Epstein: Exactly.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, that’s a big question, right? Is Cuba going to collapse?

Jim Epstein: And then Chávez comes in with oil, rescues Castro. Castro is his mentor. I mean, he reveres Castro. And Castro, eventually, Cuban operatives come and help him build a security apparatus in Venezuela.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: To protect him.

Jim Epstein: And I think it’s an interesting way of looking at it that Chávez is basically a Cuban agent and that what happened in Venezuela was a Cuban invasion. Cuba takes control of the country. And that continues through Maduro. And it really isn't until Maduro is captured on January 3rd of this year that that ends.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: And who was protecting Maduro? Thirty-three Cuban agents.

Nico Perrino: One of the most moving scenes in your documentary, and actually I don’t want to kind of give it away, but part of the documentary is following a family as they try and get into the United States, part of Mr. Mora’s family. And a lot of Venezuelans have come to the United States since the economic collapse, since the crackdown on dissent. I think I was looking at something online that said there was nearly 700,000 over the last couple of years Venezuelans under temporary protected status.

Maybe it was 700,000 Venezuelans here in the United States. Regardless, Venezuelans did have temporary protected status that the Trump administration has gotten rid of that as of last year. So, are Venezuelans having to leave now? Are they having to be illegal?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: It’s horrific what’s going on with Venezuelan immigrants in the States because a lot of them came under the assumption that they would have TPS or could ask for asylum. And they’re essentially all getting denied. People that were waiting for asylum are getting detained by ICE. What’s going on in Miami – I was just there – the community is destroyed. Doral, which was known as Doralzuela, is a ghost town.

And what’s really sad is I know many actual dissidents, so people who are in the United States because they need refuge, because if they were in Venezuela they would get put in jail or much worse because they tried to fight for freedom, and they are now in danger of deportation. So, I know people that have had to say, “Okay, well send me to Mexico because if you send me to Caracas, they’re going to kill me.”

Nico Perrino: You think even now with Delcy Rodríguez?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yes.

Nico Perrino: Okay.

Jim Epstein: Carlos, who has a very legitimate asylum application in process, we’re having a screening on October 13th in New York, and Carlos is going to be there, and we can’t have him go near the airports because of ICE. So, he’s coming from Miami on a train.

Nico Perrino: Is he here legally now?

Jim Epstein: It’s an asylum application.

Nico Perrino: Okay.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: So, that’s the thing. These people are waiting for asylum, so technically they’re not illegal here, but if they find you in a place like Miami and you say, “I’m waiting for asylum,” they’re going to detain you.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, okay.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: So, some negative things after January 3rd. I’ve already heard cases of Venezuelans who have gone to present their asylum case, and the judge says, “But what do you mean? We arrested Maduro. It’s all good now. Trump says people are dancing on the streets. Denied. You can go back.” It’s not like that.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. I’m glad you’re here because I’ve been trying to understand how actual Venezuelans feel about both Maduro’s ouster but also the removal of temporary protected status, what they expect for the future of their country. I mean, Delcy Rodríguez was Nicolás Maduro’s deputy. Someone who was, I think, involved in running the secret police, if I read that correctly.

Jim Epstein: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: This isn't a pillar of democracy. This isn't María Machado. I don’t know much about her, but she won the Nobel Peace Prize to the extent that that’s worth anything to anyone. But it sounds like it’s complicated.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: It’s one of the most complex situations, and it’s what Jim was saying. As an American, which I am now, Trump worries me in many ways because of my Venezuelan PTSD. But I can believe that and also believe that Maduro’s arrest was a good thing and also be concerned about what the White House has done since then. Because it’s clear to me, as they have said, that they want to work with Delcy Rodríguez because they’re scared of another Iraq.

They don’t want to go through all the rebuilding of institutions in order to get to democratic elections, but they are underestimating this regime. Again, they have longer than two years. So, Marco Rubio keeps saying, “We have to do the economic recovery and this focus on the oil ahead of the democratization process.” That’s not going to work out because of this oil deal that they signed with Delcy. Who voted for Delcy? So, what happens if there’s a democracy? So, now we’re in a situation where it’s not convenient for the United States for Venezuela to be a democracy because the oil deals will be void.

So, what’s going on here? Because Venezuelans understand that you’re not going to get capitalism and true investment with Delcy Rodríguez there. So, the priority should be in fixing the institutions, paving the way to free elections, not oil. Yes, it’s true what Trump says. Venezuela is not ready for elections tomorrow, not because we wouldn’t win them, but because it’s a dictatorship.

We don’t have a way of making them respect the results. That is true. But let’s prioritize the process so we can get there, and then we can all enjoy the oil bonanza. But with Delcy Rodríguez there, what they’re trying to do, manage her. She’s managing the White House is what’s happening.

Nico Perrino: If you’re a Venezuelan, do you have access to, for example, X without a VPN right now?

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: As of very recently. It’s one of the things that they’ve been doing as concessions, but it’s all cosmetic. There has been no institutional change in the country. So, yeah, they lifted the block on Twitter. They can put it back on tomorrow. The same people are still in power. There hasn’t been any institutional change at all.

Jim Epstein: And by the way, there is a legitimate president of Venezuela because there was an election in 2024, which a lot of very heroic activists engineered to prove that Maduro lost by a landslide. And Edmundo González – who actually it was originally María Corina Machado who was running, and then they blocked her from running, and then she put him forward as a candidate – he won the election overwhelmingly. He’s the legitimate president of Venezuela. He won.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Technically.

Jim Epstein: And instead, we have Delcy Rodríguez, a dictator who has never won an election.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: So, we don’t want a repeat of that. We could go vote tomorrow, win, and then what? They control the military. They control the secret police. What happens then?

Nico Perrino: I guess unless America ousts the military and the secret police and says, “We are going to oversee your elections to make sure they’re free and fair.”

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: But then you would have to be on the ground building a country. Trump doesn’t want to do that. And it’s not necessary for him to do that. We had a democracy, but let’s prioritize that process of fixing the institutions instead of signing the oil deals that no one can back up.

Jim Epstein: Fixing the institutions in Venezuela is going to be a multigenerational process.

Nico Perrino: Is this true? Carlos in there says that every institution that was taken over by the state has failed and is no longer there. Is that a little hyperbolic or is that actually true?

Jim Epstein: He was specifically talking about the nationalizations. And this was a wave of nationalizations that happened beginning really around 2008. And there was a famous shot – I did not use it in the film – of Chávez standing in a historic square in Caracas and saying, “Expropriate that. Expropriate that.” And he’s literally pointing to stores, and then the state is taking them over. But really, he took over the major industrial companies in Venezuela.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: The electric grid.

Jim Epstein: The electric grid, yes. One of the ways in which daily life in Venezuela is most brutal is the fact that the electricity system doesn’t really function. And of course, that also hurts all the industry and all the companies. But there’s an industrial area of Venezuela called Guayana City. Basically, there were a lot of companies there functioning, and Chávez took control of them, nationalized them.

Just because the government nationalizes a company doesn’t mean that it necessarily is going to completely stop production. The way in which he did it, though, he put incompetent political operatives in charge. People that didn’t know what they were doing.

Nico Perrino: People who he knew would be loyal.

Jim Epstein: Exactly.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Generalists.

Jim Epstein: All about political loyalty.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: In charge of the oil business.

Jim Epstein: So, the steel company in Venezuela got to the point where it produced zero steel. In the spirit of what Carlos is saying is absolutely correct. All of these companies fell to pieces, in addition to the country’s farms. I mean, ask yourself, how is it that people had food insecurity? How is it that people starved? And there was a huge takeover of Venezuela’s farms to create these social cooperatives, and those didn’t work at all.

You can go deep into the literature, and it’s sort of like reading an Orwell book or something. This nightmare of when it’s a community cooperative. Nobody is in charge. Nobody actually owns the land. All that land went fallow, and the productive capacity of the agricultural sector totally collapsed. So, it’s as dramatic as Carlos puts it.

Nico Perrino: It was Sam Rayburn who was, I think, Speaker of the House, a long-time congressman from Texas who famously said that any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a skilled craftsman to build one.

Jim Epstein: Totally.

Nico Perrino: So, it takes a lot to kind of rebuild these institutions. They can be destroyed like that.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Yeah.

Jim Epstein: The military had some independence, and Chávez corrupted the military by pushing out every competent person. There’s something that’s happening similarly in the United States right now. Again, it’s happening here at the margins.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: What’s happening in the Department of Justice, I just read regime change.

Jim Epstein: Totally.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: That’s what happened in Venezuela. “Oh, you’re a judge? You’re not going to do what I say? Bye.”

Jim Epstein: Yes. He destroyed the independent judiciary.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: I mean, one of the most famous cases, he imprisoned a judge who refused to imprison a banker. And this woman still I think she’s on house arrest.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. One of the things you need for investment and capital flow into your country is a stable rule of law with predictable rules, not arbitrary enforcement and arbitrary power. And it sounds like Venezuela is a long way from that. And there’s an object lesson in getting rid of that and what can happen to your country.

Jim Epstein: Maybe the only institution that did, to some degree, survive is the free press, ironically, because it moved abroad. Would they move back to Venezuela? If democracy returns to Venezuela and it’s safe, can you get these eight million people? The brain drain, it’s profound.

Nico Perrino: Well, it sounds like if you live in the United States and you’re on TPS, you might have to go back or go to Mexico or somewhere else that would take you. I don’t know.

Jim Epstein: That’s true. It has a lot to do with the passage of time too. People put down roots here. I mean, Cuba, of course, is an example as well. The Cuban Revolution was 1959. If it becomes a democracy again, I don’t think there’s a lot of Cubans who are going back to Cuba at this point, but there certainly would have been in 1972. So, to rebuild a country, it’s much easier to break things than to fix them.

Nico Perrino: So, you have a screening in New York on October 13th. I know you’re here in DC because you have one tonight, right?

Jim Epstein: At the Cato Institute, yeah.

Nico Perrino: So, I know how it goes making an independent film. Is there a way yet for the general public to be able to access and watch it?

Jim Epstein: Not yet.

Nico Perrino: Or is that coming? TBD.

Jim Epstein: That’s coming. TBD.

Nico Perrino: Or TBA.

Jim Epstein: We’re sort of considering our options. If people are familiar with Reason, we have a really big YouTube channel and a huge video operation. We put out tons and tons of videos. And we haven’t decided yet whether we’re going to put this on YouTube or whether we’re going to go with more of a traditional documentary distributor. We’re still sort of weighing that. It’s been really interesting, and that’s a totally separate conversation.

Nico Perrino: Well, one of the things that I loved about coming out with my film was the prospect of getting it into film festivals, doing the red carpet things, doing the director Q&A thing. We weren't able to do that totally with my film because it came out in October of 2020.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Oof.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. We were in a couple of film festivals, but film festivals for people who were in the indie film industry. No big exclusives or either a North American exclusive or a world exclusive. That’s how you get into the big fun ones. But you also have the problem that some of the people who run these documentary film festivals aren’t going to like the message of your film, which is very critical of socialism.

Jim Epstein: Well, it also has a scene in the film of the Venice Film Festival where Chávez is being celebrated on the red carpet.

Nico Perrino: Well, if you have Michael Moore and Oliver Stone and Sean Penn.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Susan Surandon, who just got arrested here. That’s a big point about this project. Nothing like this exists, but a lot of propaganda on the other side exists that’s very fancy. Oliver Stone made a film with Chávez. There is The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. There’s been so many projects that have received the Hollywood treatment and all of this that are propaganda against Venezuelan victims. So, 1000%, Jim, this was a labor of love because this message is not an easy one to get people to support, sadly.

Our tragedy is not convenient to a lot of first-worlders. Our message is not what they want to see. It goes against their view of the world and their ideology. So, that’s been a huge challenge, I think, for Jim and this project.

Jim Epstein: Yeah. I mean, the documentary film world leans fairly left. YouTube is different.

Nico Perrino: Understatement.

Jim Epstein: YouTube is the greatest communication platform in history, and I love it. And we may decide to put the film on YouTube. We don’t know yet. But anyway, if people are interested in the film, the thing to do that you can do now is if you go to reason.com and then just /escaping, that will redirect you to a page where you can put your name and email in. And then we will send you an email when the film is available to watch and how to watch it.

Nico Perrino: Wonderful. Well, I hope people do check it out. Like I said, I watched it twice. It’s quite moving in a way that’s really hard to do in 71 minutes. I mean, it’s a feature-length film, and you just get the message tight, and I like that as a filmmaker myself trying to navigate killing my babies, as you put it before. So, Jim, Germania, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for talking about this. Appreciate it.

Jim Epstein: Great. Thank you, Nico.

Germania Rodríguez Poleo: Thank you so much.

Jim Epstein: Thanks for having us.

Nico Perrino: A reminder: their film is Escaping Venezuela, and you can go to reason.com/escaping to put in your information and find out more about how to watch the film as it becomes more widely available. I am Nico Perrino, and this podcast is recorded by a rotating roster of my FIRE colleagues, including Bruce Jones, Rondald Baez, Jackson Fleagle, and Scott Rogers. The podcast is produced and edited by Emily Beaman. To learn more about So To Speak, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, speaking of YouTube, or our Substack page, both of which feature video versions of this conversation.

We’re also on X by searching for the handle freespeechtalk, and you can send us feedback at sotospeak@fire.org. Again, that is sotospeak@fire.org. Please leave us a review if you enjoyed this episode, and until next time, thanks again for listening. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, FIRE, and the flame logo are registered trademarks of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

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Duration: 65 minutes