In 2018, Henri Falcon tried to save Venezuela. As governor of the populous western state of Lara, Falcon had drawn overwhelming electoral victories and admiring profiles in the Western press for his humble demeanor, military precision, and reputation for finishing infrastructure projects on time and under budget. ("Efficient Revolution" was one of his campaign slogans.) But as oil prices and U.S. economic sanctions plunged the country into a harrowing depression, his ambitions grew humbler. "The overriding priority of my administration will be to make sure that not one Venezuelan child goes to bed without having eaten," he wrote in a somber New York Times op-ed announcing his presidential candidacy.

Just before the op-ed went to press, Falcon was called to a meeting at the U.S. embassy, at which officials expressed their displeasure with him. The hard-right political parties that had plotted the failed but violent 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez reacted to Nicolas Maduro's first election with bloody riots, rolling blackouts, and a strategy of manufactured chaos. But the disgruntled aristocrats, living outside Venezuela while drawing generous salaries from USAID-funded NGOs, had decided to boycott the election, and believed everyone else should, too.

Falcon was incredulous: Replacing Maduro with a competent technocrat like himself was the rational way to save the economically ravaged country from the fate of Somalia or Haiti. But he was told that the White House saw the elections as by definition illegitimate, because the Supreme Court had banned the "most popular politicians" in the country from running. Participating in them was tantamount to collaboration with the Maduro regime. Should Falcon choose to go ahead with his candidacy anyway, they said, he should not be surprised to find himself and his immediate family members on an Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklist, which would effectively lock him out of the global financial system, a cruel irony given that a pillar of his platform was establishing a strict currency peg to the dollar.

In short, the State Department was threatening to financially destroy him -- for running against Maduro.

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