Socialism is a crime, Hayek said it

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 02/11/2024

Guest columnist.
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In the early 1940s, Friedrich August von Hayek, economist, philosopher and jurist, in his book The Road to Serfdom, refuted those who were still trying to find positive things in the evil twins that threatened Europe (Nazism and Socialism). For Hayek, the fact that the worst social elements, for example, mobsters and criminals, occupy important positions in dictatorial regimes was not an unintended error, but its direct consequence, since socialism and Nazism can only be imposed by force and crime.

Bolivian academic Hugo Acha, in his work The Endless War, recounts that in the 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet dictator, gathered his generals and intelligence services in order to find a strategy to defeat the United States militarily. The answer was: There is no military way, but there is a way through the destabilization that the criminal economy can achieve.

The immediate reaction was to have its allies in different parts of the world get in touch with criminal organizations. In the region, this task was entrusted to the Cuban G2. In this regard, Huber Matos, one of the historic commanders of the Cuban Revolution, explains that Fidel Castro always acted contrary to the interests of the Cubans, since from the Sierra Maestra he used his weapons to raid farms, steal animals and traffic marijuana. In addition, his alliance with the USSR can be summed up in one sentence: Cocaine is a revolutionary weapon.

In fact, by the early 1980s, Castro, in alliance with Pablo Escobar and Roberto Suarez, had put the Cuban military infrastructure at the service of drug trafficking, specifically, Bolivian cocaine. For their part, subversive groups such as Sendero Luminoso in Peru and the FARC in Colombia entered the illegal drug market, first as bodyguards for the big fish, then as cartels.

In 1989, Castro, with a vision that was anything but pessimistic, predicted that his revolution could survive the collapse of the Soviet Union. Obviously, he was optimistic, because he knew that narcodollars were much more profitable than communist rubles.

By 1990, at the birth of the Sao Paulo Forum, the FARC, ELN and Shining Path were already quite powerful narco-terrorist organizations that would serve as invasion forces in the destabilizing processes that the region suffered in the following decades.

We could summarize that the Sao Paulo Forum's strategy was a kind of pincer movement that combined democratic institutions with street terrorism. The coca grower Morales is a clear example, since, at the beginning of the 2000s, he used his parliamentary seat to incite his gang members to commit all kinds of crimes. Not to mention his government, where there are plenty of cases of highway robbers burning cities, however, we can cite two episodes, the attack on the Cochabamba governorate in January 2007 and the Calancha massacre in November of the same year, and now he repeats the strategy seeking impunity for the physical and sexual abuse committed against minors.

But drug trafficking is not the only crime committed by the socialists. We must add to this the theft of private property, the creation of poverty and misery, the destruction of freedom of the press, censorship of dissident thought and human trafficking, sometimes disguised as medical and educational missions, Cuba being one such example.

Socialism leaves citizens in a state of total and absolute helplessness. In the words of Carlos Sánchez Berzaín:

Helplessness is worse than slavery. It is the submission or the via crucis witnessed by thousands of human beings without rights, without resources, without options and without protection. Hopefully the democratic world can help to give them back the freedom for which they are fighting alone today.

In conclusion, just as inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, socialism is a criminal phenomenon. Hayek was right, and quite right.

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