The Global Fight for Freedom

This week, three nations reckon with the wreckage of a failed philosophy. In one South American nation, an entitled colony rages after losing the ballot box. In another, once grateful citizens sniff a betrayal. And a country that once chased the socialist dream quietly buries it.

Flashpoints

1. In Bolivia, the Colony Rages
2. Sweden Buries Its Socialist Dream
3. Venezuelans Catch the Whiff of Betrayal

Country names are followed by their 2026 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.

Cockroaches are notoriously difficult to kill. They can withstand crushing forces, survive without their heads for a week, and crowd in protective colonies when threatened.
​
Six months ago, voters delivered Bolivian socialists a crushing force at the ballot box — burying their nearly two-decade reign with a jaw-dropping 3% of the vote.
​
Their head was severed: Evo Morales fled to the coca-growing Chapare region 18 months ago, hiding from a statutory rape warrant for fathering a child with a 15-year-old while president.
​
But the protective colony has closed ranks—and now it’s striking back with the furor of an entitled minority that just lost power.
​
On May 14, thousands of miners from the Bolivian Workers' Central hurled explosives at the police cordon outside the presidential palace, trying to breach the gates. Inside, twenty of their union brothers sat across the table from centrist President Rodrigo Paz.
​
Paz offered carrots. The union brought sticks—of dynamite.
​
The miners have been Morales's political backbone for 20 years and are Bolivia's most pampered constituency. Roughly 200,000 “cooperativistas” — a sliver of Bolivia's 12 million people — control 94% of national gold production. They're tax-exempt, pay lower royalties than private companies, operate outside labor rules, and "cloak themselves in solidarity rhetoric while they blackmail and coerce the government.
​
Thanks to the colony, Paz inherited Bolivia's worst economic crisis in 40 years: 14% inflation, a poverty-fueling 3.3% GDP contraction, collapsed gas exports, and empty hospital oxygen reserves. Paz has tried to liberate the economy, cutting fuel subsidies and requesting emergency capital.
​
The colony answered by blocking 67 highways. Three people died when ambulances could not reach them. From his fiefdom, the severed head marshaled a six-day march through the Andes demanding both Paz's resignation and his own exoneration.
​
This is why strong, balanced democratic institutions are critical. Without them, democracies are subject to capture by special interests.
​
In Bolivia, a constitutional court’s judges clung to office for two years past their expired mandates by voting themselves extensions. And the Bolivian Workers' Central itself — a labor confederation that for two decades has functioned as a parallel state, wielding veto power over economic policy — is able to summon hundreds of thousands to the streets.
​
When the socialists lost the presidency, their colony hunkered down— in the courts, in the bureaucracy, in the unions. Their operational power migrated to the streets.
​
The voters crushed them. Their head was severed. The colony rages.
​
​Sources: Reuters, NPR, Al Jazeera, Mining.com, Human Rights Watch

American democratic socialists like Bernie and AOC love to hold up Sweden as proof socialism works.
​
Not even the Swedes are buying it.
​
In 1850, Sweden was poorer than Congo. Families mixed bark into bread during crop failures. Over the next century of laissez-faire capitalist reform, average income multiplied eightfold, infant mortality collapsed from 15% to 2%, and life expectancy rose by 28 years. A peasant nation became one of the richest on Earth.
​
Then came the socialist experiment. Between 1970 and 2000, public spending hit 70% of GDP and the top income tax rate touched 90% — the same rate AOC pitched in 2019. Real wages went nowhere for 25 years. Not a single net private-sector job was created in four decades. Sweden collapsed from the fourth-richest in the OECD to the fourteenth. IKEA fled to the Netherlands. Behind closed doors, Prime Minister Olof Palme called it "hell.”
​
The reckoning came in the 1990s, when a banking crisis blew up the model. The Social Democrats — the party that built the welfare state — began dismantling it, cutting unemployment benefits, privatizing public services, and eliminating wealth and inheritance taxes by the mid-2000s. The current center-right government has gone further. Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson has now cut taxes three years running. The top rate has fallen to around 50%. Public social spending has fallen to 24% of GDP, matching the U.S.
​
The results speak for themselves. Since 1995, real wages have jumped 65%. The IMF forecasts Swedish growth at 2% annually through 2030 — double France or Germany.
​
Kjell-Olof Feldt, the Social Democrat who served as Finance Minister during the worst of it, put it plainly: "What we believed in as young socialists simply turned out to be impossible in practice."
​
New York City voters who just elected Zohran Mamdani should take note. The Swedes already ran the experiment — and ended it.
​
​Sources: Wall Street Journal, Cato Institute, Libertarianism.org, CBS News

At February's State of the Union—just weeks after the January 3 capture of Nicolas Maduro—Trump gestured upward toward a young woman standing in the First Lady's box, describing how her uncle had been kidnapped and imprisoned by Maduro's security forces for opposing him.
​
"Not only has your uncle been released, but he's here tonight," Trump told Alejandra Márquez triumphantly.
​
Her uncle, Enrique, entered the chamber. Alejandra wept. The room rose. The moment was orchestrated for maximum political impact, but the emotion was real.
​
Trump called it a "bright new beginning for the people of Venezuela," and they agreed — 92% reported gratitude to him.
​
They had reason to hope. In March, journalist Jordan Flores walked through the pink walls of Miraflores Palace — the first time the press had been allowed inside the presidential offices in over twenty years. Hundreds of political prisoners walked free. Protesters reached the National Assembly without being shot.
​
And more seemed to be coming. The Atlantic recently reported the Trump administration is quietly steering toward 2027 elections and "slowly introducing potentially combustible factors"— including the return of Nobel laureate María Corina Machado.
​
But four months in, Venezuelans are sensing that something stinks.
​
Inflation still tops 600%. The minimum wage remains frozen at 28 cents a month, unchanged since 2022. On April 23, interim President Delcy Rodríguez declared the amnesty law fulfilled — though Human Rights Watch documents at least 457 political prisoners still detained, with Machado-affiliated figures like Perkins Rocha kept under house arrest while his co-defendants walk free.
​
Oil is flowing again, but ordinary Venezuelans have yet to see the benefit. Now, they are growing restive. In the first quarter of the year, protests exploded by 144%.
​​
Then came the Strait of Hormuz. With the Iran war strangling global energy markets, Delcy — sitting atop the world's largest proven oil reserves — became Trump's strategic hedge, a pliant puppet too valuable to remove. Elections, a senior administration official confirmed, are no longer on the president's mind.
​
By May, Trump’s approval in Venezuela had dropped to 46%.
​
Even Trump’s SOTU champion, Enrique, has soured: "I don't see any elections in the short term, namely because I see no will from the top two actors: the U.S. and the Delcy government."
​
The nation that cheered in January is hungry. What they're sniffing now is betrayal.
​
​Sources: Wall Street Journal, NPR, Human Rights Watch, The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor
​

Already subscribed? Share this issue with someone who should be reading.