This is the Reason Interview, where we go deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, policymakers,

and visionaries who are making the world more libertarian, or at least a little more interesting.

I'm Zach Weissmuller filling in for Nick Gillespie.

This week our guest is Freddie Guevara, a Venezuelan dissident imprisoned by the Maduro regime in 2021.

Guvara entered politics as a young activist opposing Hugo Chavez's 2007 attempt to rewrite

the Constitution and shut down opposition media.

This propelled him to become the youngest elected city council member in Venezuelan history,

winning 81% of the vote before ascending to the country's National

Assembly.

Guvara now lives in exile and is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center

for Democratic Governance and Innovation.

We spoke about how the machinery of oppression actually works in authoritarian Venezuela.

Whether U.S.-led regime change is possible and why

Venezuela's collapse isn't just a result of Maduro's corrupt regime, but a predictable outcome

of socialism in practice. This is a reason interview with Freddie Guevara.

Freddie Guevara, thank you for coming on the reason interview.

Thank you very much for this invitation.

I wanted to have you on today because you're someone who intimately knows the political

realities of Venezuela as a former member of the National Assembly and an enemy of the Maduro regime.

Maduro obviously is in custody now, but you were arrested by the Maduro regime and jailed in July

2021, and you live streamed that arrest.

I want to play a snippet of that to familiarize the audience with you, with the caveat that we've redubbed it

...