Venezuelan president’s ugly corruption of his Jewish heritage

At the beginning of this month, Victor Kara-Murza, a British-Russian dissident, was suddenly released from his Siberian strict-regime camp and flown out of Russia as part of a major prisoner exchange. Murderers and spies were taken to the East, free thinkers and human rights activists were taken to the West.

When asked if this exchange opened the way to Russian hostage-taking in the future, Kara-Murza quoted from Sanhedrin in the Mishna: “He who saves one life – it is as if he had saved an entire world”. It is this sentiment which has propelled generations of Jews to participate disproportionately in movements which defend democracy, the rule of law and promote civil rights.

Both Kara-Murza and his mentor, Boris Nemtsov, murdered in Moscow in 2015, almost certainly by Putin’s assassins, are of Jewish origin. They join a long line of honourable activists who were often far from conventional Jewishness but refused to go along with the prevailing wisdom. 

They stand with those who opposed Afrikaner nationalism in apartheid South Africa, embraced the civil rights movement in the US and participated in the broad human rights movement in the USSR. They also stood against the acquiescence of the formal Jewish communal bodies when living under dictatorial regimes such as in Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s.

All this was a consequence of Diaspora Jews being part and parcel of the societies in which lived but at the same time being the latest link in the golden chain of Jewish tradition. It also marked the difference between those Jews who marginalised universalism in Jewish teachings in favour of particularism and a quiet life and those who believed that both universalism and particularism were part of our inheritance and a central ingredient of Jewish identity in the twenty-first century.

There was yet another group of Jews who were uprooted from Jewish tradition, deracinated Jews who embraced authoritarianism and totalitarianism. These were “self-hating Jews” in the real sense in that they buried Jewish values and Jewish morality. Naftali Frenkel, born in Haifa, was responsible for the construction of the Gulag in the Soviet Union.

Genrikh Yagoda was the head of the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB and FSB, and supervisor of the show trials in the 1930s. Lazar Kaganovich was Stalin’s close colleague through many decades and even managed to escape the anti-Jewish persecution during the last years of Stalin’s regime.

President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela – currently attempting to suppress the opposition in the aftermath of a fraudulent election – announced in May 2013 that his Sephardi grandparents had converted to Catholicism. He did this to counteract accusations of antisemitism made against the regime.

This did not stop him from alluding to the Jewish origins of his opponent, Henriques Capriles – whose Polish mother had survived the Shoah. Assuming that Maduro’s Jewish origins are true, he repeats the example of Frenkel, Yagoda and Kaganovich – Jews who went over to the dark side.

During the past two decades under the regimes of first Hugo Chávez and then Maduro, the vast majority of Venezuela’s Jews left for Israel and the United States as well as for Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala. This was despite the introduction of foreign exchange controls in 2003 which made it very difficult to take money out of Venezuela. Few are left today to cope with Maduro’s draconian regime.

The first Jewish immigrants to Venezuela originated with the Protestant Dutch colonies in South America in the seventeenth century. Jews escaping the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions found refuge and freedom of worship in locations such as Recife in Dutch Brazil. Even after Simon Bolivar’s wars of liberation, Jews faced a latent Catholic anti-Judaism. Following thew death of Venezuela’s previous leader Hugo Chávez in 2013, it was said that he would return with Jesus on “resurrection day”.

Chávez was legitimately elected in 1998 and then proceeded to engineer a campaign against Venezuela’s Jews. His anti-Zionism often tipped over into antisemitism. Chávez turned Israelis into Nazis and Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09 against Hamas became “genocide”.

Chávez then accused the US of poisoning Yasser Arafat and aiding “a Palestinian Holocaust”. A demonstration took place outside the main Sephardi synagogue in Caracas – scrawled on the wall outside were “Jews, killers – leave”.

In November 2004, police raided the Club Hebraica in Los Chorros, an upmarket neighbourhood in East Caracas. This came after the murder of public prosecutor, Danilo Anderson. The Club Hebraica was accused of storing Mossad weapons, alleged to have been used in the killing of Anderson.

Chávez was quick to utilise Catholic suspicion of Jews when he commented shortly afterwards that “the descendants of those who killed Christ had taken possession of all the wealth in the world”. All of this was carried out in the name of Venezuelan socialism.

Maduro was Foreign Minister and then Vice-President under Chávez. He built on the growing relationship with the Ayatollahs’ Iran and forged close ties with Ahmadinejad, Khatami and Rouhani during the last two decades.

They have all visited Caracas on numerous occasions and unconditionally supported Maduro despite past questionable election results amidst numerous accusations of drug trafficking and corruption.

This is in stark contrast to the recent findings of the Carter Center – founded over 40 years ago by President Jimmy Carter – which was invited to send observers to this year’s election. It stated afterwards that the election “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic”.

Although Venezuela has been sanctioned by the West, its management of its oil industry has been little short of a disaster. In the first half of 2024, 884,000 barrels were produced each day. In 1997 before Chávez’s takeover, it was 3.2 million barrels per day.

In May 2020, five Iranian ships loaded 60 million gallons of Iranian oil at Bandar Abbas en route to Venezuela to literally keep the Venezuelan economy afloat – despite the fact that in the region of eight million people have left this relatively small country. Three million now live in Colombia and another million in Brazil.

Iran has long wished to create a navy to secure ports in Syria with Russian help to facilitate its weapons delivery to Hezbollah. Its desire to utilise and improve Venezuelan ports may be part and parcel of this approach. In June 2022, Venezuela and Iran signed a 20-year cooperation agreement during Maduro’s visit to Tehran.

Under Maduro, the attacks on Jews have lessened but then again most Venezuelan Jews have left. This, however, did not prevent his Ministry and of Communication and Information in 2021 from terming the Hezbollah-inspired attack in July 1994 on AMIA, the central Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires – “a false positive”.

Many opponents in the last couple of weeks have been killed, arrested or disappeared. But what is different this time is that the latest protests in Caracas come from the working class who live in the impoverished barrios. It is also a sign of the times that several left-wing governments in Latin

America have requested the voting tallies from voting machines.

It is a shift which has been long awaited. Maduro’s regime now has only the military to defend it. In this scenario, Israel will undoubtedly be promoted as a scapegoat for its failures – a precedent which many Jews will readily recognise.