The Red Line: Venezuela

Venezuela, home to the largest proven oil reserves in the world was once the jewel of South America, the envy of the Latin world, but now the country sits on the brink of collapse. Venezuela has gone so far now that other nations like China, Russia, and the US have begun circling like hungry vultures, looking to smash apart the nation and divide up the assets. So this week we sit down and ask where will it all go, how did we get here and what is next for this South American titan. Giancarlo Fiorella - (Bellingcat institute) Nick Mutch - (Conflict Journalist) Christopher Sabatini - (Chatham House).

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Politico: How Trump’s ‘weaponized’ use of foreign aid is backfiring

President Donald Trump has so closely linked U.S. humanitarian assistance to his attempt to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro — even placing goods along the country’s border as an incentive for Venezuelans to revolt — that some groups are citing security concerns and asking U.S. officials if they can strip legally required U.S. branding from aid sent to Venezuela, three aid officials told POLITICO. [...]

The situation reflects broader fears that Trump’s unusually politicized approach to handing out U.S. aid worldwide is backfiring, tarnishing America’s brand and possibly risking the lives of people from Latin America to the Palestinian territories. [...]

“This whole idea that in Venezuela aid was going to be part of a political change process — it’s rare to see it that overt,” said Joel Charny of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which has not yet received U.S. funding for work inside Venezuela. “It’s just not a good way to do aid. If you’re really concerned about the welfare of the people of Venezuela you find the ways that are available to get the maximum amount of assistance to those people.”

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Foreign Affairs: Why Venezuela’s Regime Hasn’t Collapsed

To succeed in ousting Maduro, however, Guaidó will need to get the Venezuelan armed forces on his side. Maduro does not have the charisma of Hugo Chávez, who was the country’s president from 1999 until his death, in 2013, nor has he been able to benefit from the same oil windfall as his predecessor. Since coming to power, Maduro has overseen a country in crisis. Inflation is expected to reach ten million percent this year, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have fled the country, and the ones staying behind lack food and medicines. Unsurprisingly, Maduro is deeply unpopular, and he has relied on the military for his government’s survival. In exchange for suppressing popular discontent, the military has gotten control of PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, and used the government’s mantle of impunity to run and profit from drug trafficking and black-market trading. High-ranking members in the armed forces continue siding with Maduro because they do not want to lose this revenue stream or face prosecution for corruption, drug trafficking, and human rights abuses such as the death of protesters, unjust imprisonment, and torture. [...]

The opposition has also made it costlier for the military to keep supporting the regime by organizing peaceful demonstrations. The number of such protests has gone up dramatically in recent months, from around 700 from October to December 2018 to more than 6,000 in the first three months of 2019. The government, unwilling to respond to the protesters’ concerns, has resorted to repression, imprisoning activists and opposition leaders and at times even firing on protesters. This strategy can easily fail, since it might encourage the defections of officers who are reluctant to use violence against fellow citizens or who worry about facing human rights trials in the future.

Part of the problem is a lack of trust on both sides. There is ample evidence suggesting that low- and high-ranking members of the armed forces are ready to withdraw their support from Maduro. The alleged backdoor deal between opposition and government officials ahead of the April 30 uprising indicates that opposition leaders and individuals close to the president could indeed come to an agreement. How to guarantee and enforce the terms of the deal, however, is a more complicated story. The opposition has a hard time trusting powerful regime insiders, since the latter have often just used negotiations with the opposition to buy time. Guaidó also needs to balance different factions inside the opposition, some of which are more willing to compromise with the regime than others.

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The New York Times: Trump Undercuts Bolton on North Korea and Iran

President Trump was grousing about John R. Bolton, his national security adviser, at his Florida club not long ago. Guests heard the president complaining about the advice he was getting and wondering if Mr. Bolton was taking him down a path he did not want to go. [...]

The disparity was on stark display during Mr. Trump’s four-day visit to Japan that ended Tuesday after he contradicted Mr. Bolton on high-stakes confrontations with both Iran and North Korea. The president declared that, unlike his national security adviser, he was not seeking regime change in Iran and he asserted that, contrary to what Mr. Bolton had said, recent North Korean missile tests did not violate United Nations resolutions. [...]

The president’s supporters, however, said too much was being made of the differences. Mr. Trump has often surrounded himself with advisers who do not agree and encourages the debate, they said. If the disparate messages keep Iran, North Korea and Venezuela uncertain of how far the United States will go, they added, that can work to Mr. Trump’s benefit. [...]

And in some fundamental ways, the two diverge sharply over their approach to the world. Mr. Trump came to office vowing to pull out of overseas wars and has made diplomacy with North Korea a signature initiative. Mr. Bolton has been an advocate of military action and an opponent of negotiations with North Korea.

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The Guardian: Venezuela’s dead revolution shows the limitations of the crowd

The greatest of historical fallacies is to confuse crowds with power. Venezuela has disappeared from the headlines, because its headlines were about crowds, not about the realities of power. The trouble with crowds is that, sooner or later, they go home. The Arab spring of 2011 was about what took place in the streets of various capital cities. Crowds were reputedly drawn by the much-vaunted rallying cry of social media, but they dissolved in many places into nothingness. [...]

Mercifully, power in a democracy emanates from the ballot box. Probably the biggest crowd in London’s history, against the Iraq war of 2003, had zero impact on the elected government of Tony Blair. Today, no remain rally can reverse the 2016 referendum, just as no leave rally is entitled to claim crowd authority for a no-deal Brexit. That is the problem with crowds. They don’t do subtlety.[...]

We warm instinctively to crowds. They offer comfort and reassurance to us in our opinions. They mobilise emotion among the like-minded, and smother argument in fellow feeling. We sometimes forget that crowds can cut two ways. They can also be harnessed as an aid to leadership, as by the fascist movement, or as rabble to be suppressed as a totem of power. Maduro was able to stage an apparently sizeable rally in his own support. [...]

I believe that where the crowd can be most effective is when deployed tactically against a specific, winnable goal. In the climate change argument, local crowds in the north of England have all but stopped fracking. Anti-GM food campaigners won their war in Europe. Demonstrators against the Sackler family in New York are wrecking its reputation and cutting arts funding. Where power is shamed by publicity, it can concede ground without too much inconvenience. I would love to be a “crowd consultant”.

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Today in Focus: The Venezuela uprising: the story so far

Juan Guaidó described his attempted uprising last month as the “final phase” of his plan to oust Nicolás Maduro. But after a day of chaos and confusion in which Guaidó’s mentor, Leopoldo López, was sprung from house arrest, the Venezuelan president was still in power and many of the plotters had gone into hiding.

The Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, is in Caracas and describes to Anushka Asthana the sense of defiance among supporters of Maduro, and Guaidó’s mood of optimism in an exclusive Guardian interview.

Also today: the Guardian columnist Owen Jones on the headteacher of the public school Stowe, who has claimed Oxbridge is persecuting students from elite backgrounds.

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The New Yorker: An Unflinching View of Venezuela in Crisis

Alejandro Cegarra’s photo series “State of Decay” is an unflinching portrait of Venezuela’s collapse. How this country went from being one of Latin America’s richest societies to one of its poorest is a disaster of bewildering proportions, one that defies easy explanation. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, but since the 2014 crash in world oil prices, on which Venezuela depended for more than ninety per cent of its export revenues, its economy has contracted continuously, unleashing an economic crisis worse than that experienced by Americans during the Great Depression. In the past five years, three million of Venezuela’s thirty-two million people have fled the country. More than half of all Venezuelans lack enough food to meet their daily needs. The country’s hospital system has all but failed; countless Venezuelans have died owing to a lack of medical attention and the scarcity of medicines for treatable illnesses. Hyperinflation is expected to reach ten million per cent this year. On top of everything else, Venezuela’s murder rate is among the world’s highest, making it one of the most dangerous countries in the world to live in.

Shot between 2013 and 2019, Cegarra’s remarkable series of black and white images takes us beyond these statistics. (This year, the project was nominated for a World Press Photo award.) A native of Caracas, Cegarra depicts life in his home town as precariously strung-out and pared-down, shorn of any softness. We see street preachers shouting, inmates weightlifting, children running in fear, bloodstains on the ground, predatory soldiers with masked faces and black helmets, men brandishing weapons, one of them a youngster standing purposefully with a sawed-off shotgun. There are listless people in supermarkets with empty shelves, funerals and mourners, women and children with fear on their faces.[...]

At his swearing-in ceremony, in February of 1999, Chávez promised to transform Venezuela—and over the next decade and a half he did just that. While a global oil-price boom brought a trillion dollars into his treasury, Chávez declared his country to be the chrysalis of a revolutionary political force that he dubbed “twenty-first-century socialism.” He aligned himself with Cuba and spoke out against the United States. Meanwhile, the oil money was spent as fast as it came in, much of it on social programs to alleviate poverty, but also on expensive Russian weaponry for the armed forces and on subsidies to Cuba and other friendly governments that signed onto Chávez’s vision of a world free of Yankee domination.

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Haaretz: The Knesset Candidate Who Says Zionism Encourages anti-Semitism and Calls Netanyahu 'Arch-murderer'

Cassif is third on the slate of Knesset candidates in Hadash (the Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), the successor to Israel’s Communist Party. He holds the party’s “Jewish slot,” replacing MK Dov Khenin. Cassif is likely to draw fire from opponents and be a conspicuous figure in the next Knesset, following the April 9 election. [...]

“I call it ‘creeping genocide.’ Genocide is not only a matter of taking people to gas chambers. When Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the term ‘Judeo-Nazis,’ people asked him, ‘How can you say that? Are we about to build gas chambers?’ To that, he had two things to say. First, if the whole difference between us and the Nazis boils down to the fact that we’re not building gas chambers, we’re already in trouble. And second, maybe we won’t use gas chambers, but the mentality that exists today in Israel – and he said this 40 years ago – would allow it. I’m afraid that today, after four years of such an extreme government, it possesses even greater legitimacy.

“But you know what, put aside ‘genocide’ – ethnic cleansing is taking place there. And that ethnic cleansing is also being carried out by means of killing, although mainly by way of humiliation and of making life intolerable. The trampling of human dignity. It reminds me of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is a Man.’” [...]

Cassif voices clearly and cogently positions that challenge the public discourse in Israel, and does so with ardor and charisma. Four candidates vied for Hadash’s Jewish slot, and they all delivered speeches at the convention. The three candidates who lost to him – Efraim Davidi, Yaela Raanan and the head of the party’s Tel Aviv branch, Noa Levy – described their activity and their guiding principles. When they spoke, there was the regular buzz of an audience that’s waiting for lunch. But when Cassif took the stage, the effect was magnetic. [...]

Cassif terms himself an explicit anti-Zionist. “There are three reasons for that,” he says. “To begin with, Zionism is a colonialist movement, and as a socialist, I am against colonialism. Second, as far as I am concerned, Zionism is racist in ideology and in practice. I am not referring to the definition of race theory – even though there are also some who impute that to the Zionist movement – but to what I call Jewish supremacy. No socialist can accept that. My supreme value is equality, and I can’t abide any supremacy – Jewish or Arab. The third thing is that Zionism, like other ethno-nationalistic movements, splits the working class and all weakened groups. Instead of uniting them in a struggle for social justice, for equality, for democracy, it divides the exploited classes and the enfeebled groups, and by that means strengthens the rule of capital.”

openDemocracy: Nicolás Maduro, the usurper

Between 2009 and 2012 we carried out a research on political leaders in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela. We interviewed 285 leaders, including former Presidents, former Vice Presidents, acting Vice Presidents, mayors, deputies, senators, political party presidents, political journalists and trade union officials.[...]

The second type of leader is ambivalently democratic. He respects the rights of citizens, works cooperatively, but seeks to accumulate personal power. He is the type of leader who believes that in order to strengthen his position he needs to negotiate and make concessions.[...]

Unlike the democratic leader, the ambivalent one respects but does not strengthen democratic institutions. In fact, he can end up weakening democracy in his bid to increase personal power.

The weak usurper of power wavers between challenging and accepting the rule of law and State institutions. The historical context is crucial here, for it can allow, or block, the leader's capacity to increase his autonomy.[...]

His recurrent lies, the shortage of goods, administrative corruption, the profound deterioration of the economy, the rampant devaluation of the Bolivarian currency, political control, the empowerment of military sects, all come together in the usurpation of power and the establishment of a regime showing clearly totalitarian, militaristic and undemocratic tendencies.

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The Washington Post: Trump’s ‘populism’ is just a search for scapegoats

In Venezuela, the Maduro regime has accused companies that refuse to sell things for less than they cost — the result of how high the government has pushed inflation and how low it has set price controls — of waging an “economic war” against the so-called Bolivarian revolution. The government has nationalized factories in response and then sold things at a loss itself, which, of course, has only added to its money-printing needs.

In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lashed out at what he calls the “interest-rate lobby” for trying to force the “mother and father of all evil”— higher interest rates — onto the country as a supposedly quack cure for Turkey's sagging currency and growing inflation. Erdogan, you see, believes against all evidence that lower rates actually cause lower inflation, rather than the other way around, and he has said central bankers would be guilty of “treason” if they didn't go along with that. [...]

But that's almost beside the point. The real story is that, like President Nicolás Maduro's inability to understand that price controls cause shortages or Erdogan's ignorance about the fact that lower interest rates actually lead to higher inflation, the Trump team seems actually shocked to find out that taxing imports so that they cost more makes things, yes, cost more.  

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openDemocracy: The tragedy of the Venezuelan opposition

Let us start with the appearances. The sheer size of the protests and their continuity in time led many to think that the regime’s fall was near. But the truth is that, except from the dissidence of Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz, the government block did not break, at least not in any apparent way, or enough so as to be forced to accept the opposition’s demands: an electoral timetable, the freeing of political prisoners, the opening of a humanitarian channel. On the contrary, while the police, the National Guard and the so-called "collectives" managed to control - although barely - a society which felt tired after more than three months of protests and more than one hundred dead, Maduro took the lead by calling a National Constituent Assembly (NCA). 

From that moment on, the opposition struggled to avoid its establishment and it won some great victories, such as the symbolic referendum on July 16 and the condemnation of Maduro’s initiative by many foreign countries. But the move allowed the government to lead the debate. And here is where the narrative links with the appearances: Maduro had no reason to roll back on his decision, but he made a couple of feints, such as his proposal to postpone the NCA if the opposition was willing to accept it. The indications are that the opposition leadership was so sure that they would manage to stop the initiative that, apparently, they did not prepare for the possibility that the NCA would finally be established. On the other hand, considering that opposition to the NCA was very strong among their followers, it was almost impossible for them to accept participating in it without offending them. The long list of unfulfilled promises which were made during the dialogues between the opposition and the government before the crisis also went against their heeding Maduro’s offer. [...]

And this is where Maduro confirmed that he was a better player. While in the opposition-dominated constituencies people decided not to vote - maybe the loss of middle-class voters who have emigrated began to be felt too -, the government ran an efficient voter co-optation machine through its aid – especially food - distribution channels and its well-disciplined militancy. Some observers say that this is very similar to what the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party does: electoral authoritarianism – that is, a system in which there is no need for massive fraud, you have only to add up many different forms of shifting the advantage to the government’s side so as to win always, with or without a majority. The forms in which the government can do, and does it range from last-minute transfer of middle-class opposition voters to polling stations further away from their homes, or to polling stations located in places they would consider dangerous, to using food distribution councils to mobilize voters. 

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Vox: The collapse of Venezuela, explained

Al Jazeera: Will Brazil be the next Venezuela?

In fact, it is possible that Venezuela will become "the next Brazil". Recent developments suggest that the traditional Brazilian elites have regained their ground and are currently taking measures to entrench their rule. And as Nicolas Maduro's government faces instability, it is likely that in the future Venezuelans will wake up to a Brazilian-style oligarchy ruling their country.

In 1958, three major political parties in Venezuela signed a pact called "the Punto Fijo" to "preserve the country's new democratic regime and prevent single party hegemony". Yet the pact transformed Venezuela into an oligarchical paradise and ushered in a period of exclusionary politics in which the political system - and the president's office - was dominated by the elites from the leading political parties.

This plan did work well for almost three decades. Venezuela, which had had no fewer than 25 national constitutions up to 1961, suddenly became a "stable democracy" in the heart of troublesome Cold War South America. The developmental model adopted by its leaders, which was fuelled by the abundant money flowing from oil exports, transformed the Caribbean nation into a relatively successful rentier state. [...]

At the same time, the judicial system is nowhere near reigning in the pervasive corruption. Last week, the National Congress of Brazil absolved President Michel Temer of corruption charges and allowed him to continue his ill-supported mandate.

And Brazilians are stuck with Temer although an overwhelming majority of them want him out (just 5 percent approve of his government). The congress would simply not listen to the wishes of the public that elected it. This is "business as usual" for Brazil's powerful.

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Politico: What’s It Like to See a Democracy Destroyed?

I found her account incredibly compelling—filled with the absurdities of life as a society unravels. At first, it seems almost comic, as when Dreier spends the day reporting at a plastic surgeon’s office and watches eager would-be beauty queens coming in with cut-rate Chinese bootleg breast implants once others became impossible to find. And Dreier tells me she spent her first year in Venezuela convinced the media narrative about the country falling apart was all wrong.

Then, Dreier recounts, her life changed. First, her friends—middle-class young professionals like herself—started losing weight. She lost power and water. Crime became so rampant her colleagues congratulated her on a “good robbery” when she was held up in broad daylight and all she lost were her belongings. By the time she was grabbed off the street after an interview one day earlier this year, she was overwhelmed with relief when she found out she’d been snatched by the secret police and not far more vicious kidnappers. [...]

But, basically, the U.S., with those sanctions, which are very important symbolically—but, they said that they were going to freeze all of Maduro’s assets, and all the headlines were: Maduro’s Assets Frozen. There’s no reason to think Maduro has any U.S. assets. This is a man who railed every day against the U.S. empire. Why would he put his money in Miami property, or anything here?

So, the sanctions will prevent him from buying things in the U.S. and from doing business with Americans, which he wasn’t trying to do anyway, and Trump gets to say that this is a big, strong step. And Maduro, in Caracas, is also making hay with these sanctions and spending lots of time talking about them, and saying that they prove that the U.S. is a bully and that the U.S. is trying to ruin the Venezuelan economy—so, kind of a gift. [...]

That’s oil sanctions. Ninety-five percent of Venezuela’s revenue comes from oil. It’s basically the only way the government is getting money right now. And the U.S. happens to be the biggest customer for that oil, and one of the very few governments still paying cash for oil. So, if the U.S. put an oil embargo in place, that would have a huge, dramatic effect, immediately, on Venezuela, and the government would probably default. There would be a reshuffling of alliances. But, it always seems to be that there are only bad options with Venezuela, because those oil sanctions would also probably lead to maybe famine-level hunger, to extreme suffering, and nobody really wants that either.

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openDemocracy: Venezuela’s Unprecedented Collapse

The most frequently used indicator to compare recessions is GDP. According to the International Monetary Fund, Venezuela’s GDP in 2017 is 35% below 2013 levels, or 40% in per capita terms. That is a significantly sharper contraction than during the 1929-1933 Great Depression in the United States, when US GDP is estimated to have fallen 28%. It is slightly bigger than the decline in Russia (1990-1994), Cuba (1989-1993), and Albania (1989-1993), but smaller than that experienced by other former Soviet States at the time of transition, such as Georgia, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Ukraine, or war-torn countries such as Liberia (1993), Libya (2011), Rwanda (1994), Iran (1981), and, most recently, South Sudan. [...]

They were right: Venezuela is now the world’s most indebted country. No country has a larger public external debt as a share of GDP or of exports, or faces higher debt service as a share of exports.

But, like Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu in the 1980s, the government decided to cut imports while remaining current on foreign-debt service, repeatedly surprising the market, which was expecting a restructuring. As a consequence, imports of goods and services per capita fell by 75% in real (inflation-adjusted) terms between 2012 and 2016, with a further decline in 2017. [...]

Inevitably, living standards have collapsed as well. The minimum wage – which in Venezuela is also the income of the median worker, owing to the large share of minimum-wage earners – declined by 75% (in constant prices) from May 2012 to May 2017. Measured in dollars at the black-market exchange rate, it declined by 88%, from $295 per month to just $36.

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VICE: Venezuela’s Falling Apart and the President Is Sending Troops to ‘Protect’ the People

The situation is so tense that last week's show of military strength sparked immediate rumors of a coup. What was actually happening was close to the opposite — the launch of a new phase of an anti-crime offensive that some observers see as an effort by Maduro to show the unsettled population that he is still in charge, and intends to remain so. [...]

But, some say, anti-crime operations in Venezuela are not necessarily primarily about the rampant criminal gangs that caused Caracas to be named the most violent city in the world in 2015 with a terrifying homicide rate of nearly 120 murders per 100 000 citizens.

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