Venezuelans desperate to access aid
CUCUTA, Colombia: Desperate Venezuelans asked yesterday how they would gain access to US food and medicine aid due to arrive via Colombia after President Nicolas Maduro’s Government blocked any humanitarian shipments.
Despite widespread hunger and shortages of staple goods in Venezuela, Maduro vowed to turn back US aid after President Donald Trump’s administration last month recognised opposition leader Juan Guaido as the rightful interim ruler of the South American nation.
Maduro said on Tuesday Venezuelans were ‘‘not beggars’’ and he would not let the country be humiliated.
Venezuelan security forces blocked the threelane border crossing from the Colombian town of Cucuta on Wednesday using two shipping containers and a fuel tanker. Armed Vene zuelan soldiers stood guard at the customs building, pledging to turn back any attempt to cross the border.
The Cucuta crossing was quiet yesterday but Colombian migration officials pulled back a little from the border line, citing rising tensions with Venezuela.
In the Venezuelan border town of Urena, residents signed up to unofficial waiting lists for aid.
‘‘We’re desperate. Our money is not worth anything. Maduro may not like the help, but he should think about people who do not have anything to eat,’’ Livia Vargas said.
Cucuta has been a transit route for many of the three million Venezuelans who have fled in recent years. Thousands of people cross four pedestrian bridges that connect the city with Venezuela on daily entry passes to shop for food.
Pressure is growing on Maduro to step down after major European Union nations this week joined the United States, Canada and Latin American countries in recognising Guaido as Venezuela’s legitimate leader following Maduro’s reelection in a vote critics called a sham.
Guaido, the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, has urged the military to turn on Maduro and support a transition to democracy.
US officials said aid was on its way this week. Colombian and US authorities have remained silent on how they plan to distribute the aid without Maduro’s approval.
Shipments are also due to come from Venezuelan companies abroad, Colombia, Canada and Germany.
Colombian Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo said yesterday planes had arrived in Colombia and paperwork was being handled to send the aid to Cucuta.
Peering through cracks in a sheet metal fence to an area where US humanitarian aid is due to be stockpiled in Cucuta, Venezuelan Yesica Leonett pleaded for information on how her four children could benefit.
‘‘People need help. My children eat boiled banana skins, shredded like meat,’’ said Leonett, who fled Venezuela eight months ago.
Police on the Colombian side of the bridgesaid there had been a huge number of Venezuelans asking when and where the aid would be delivered.
‘‘There’s nothing to tell them because we don’t have any information,’’ a patrolman said. The US would consider lift ing sanctions on senior Venezuelan military officers if they recognise the government of selfdeclared interim president Juan Guaido, White House national security adviser John Bolton said.
‘‘The US will consider sanctions offramps for any Venezuelan senior military officer that stands for democracy and recognises the constitutional government of President Juan Guaido. If not, the international financial circle will be closed off completely,’’ he tweeted.
But aside from one senior general, who recognised Guaido in a video and called on other members of the military to do the same, most of Venezuela’s top military officers have not defected from Maduro.
VENEZUELA is not a socialist state. Under its beleaguered president, Nicolas Maduro, the private sector controls a larger percentage of the Venezuelan economy than the British private sector managed under Margaret Thatcher. Venezuela’s principal income earner, Petroleos de Venezeula S.A. (PDVSA) is, like Norway’s Statoil, publicly owned. It was not, however, nationalised by Maduro, nor by his charismatic predecessor, Hugo Chavez. PDVSA was set up 43 years ago by the socialdemocratic administration of President Carlos Andres Perez. In 1976, Chavez was just 22 years old; a politically invisible army officer, only recently graduated from the Venezuelan military academy.
No less a genuine socialist than the late Fidel Castro, well aware of the consequences of attempting to establish socialism in the Western hemisphere, is on record as warning his Venezuelan comrades against overindulging in fiery leftwing rhetoric at the expense of achieving substantive improvements in the economic and social performance of the nation. Maduro and his United Socialist Party are now paying a very high price for their failure to heed Castro’s advice.
Life was easy for Chavez and Maduro when the price of oil was high. Massive transfer payments to Venezuela’s poorest citizens brought them immediate and impressive relief. The ‘‘Bolivarian Revolution’’, as Chavez liked to call his redistributive efforts (after Simon Bolivar, the heroic liberator of South America from the Spanish Empire) seemed to be as successful as it was effortless.
Until, suddenly, the price of oil collapsed.
Only then did Maduro grasp just how big a mistake he and his United Socialists had made. Economies like Venezuela’s all too easily become the victims of their own good fortune.
The massive export revenues derived from a valuable commodity like oil strengthen the national currency to the point where it becomes virtually impossible for local producers to compete with the cheap imports pouring into the country. All well and good while the currency remains strong. Not so great, however, when plummeting export prices undermine the currency’s value and send the prices of imports rocketing skyward.
It was Maduro’s attempt to fix the exchange rate of Venezuela’s currency that proved his undoing. His political enemies very rapidly learned how to game the President’s hastily improvised currency and price controls. Inflation, which had been set to rise sharply as the price of imports soared, was supercharged by the debilitating economic impacts of Venezuela’s burgeoning black markets.
And all of this, remember, was happening in a political climate characterised by uncompromising class conflict. Not, as the enemies of Maduro and his United Socialists would have you believe, a struggle inaugurated from below, but from above.
Chavez’s democratic mobilisation of the urban poor against the entrenched political power of the Venezuelan elites earned him their instant, bitter, and undying hatred. From the moment he was sworn in as President, the wealthiest layers of Venezuelan society have done everything within their power to drive him and his Bolivarian ‘‘revolutionaries’’ from office.
In this enterprise they have been able to rely on the constant and massive support of the United States. America has no real objections to military officers, like Hugo Chavez, meddling in politics.
Indeed, if the history of the past 100 years teaches us anything it’s that the US rather prefers military to civilian rule in Latin America. What ‘‘El Norte’’ does insist upon, however, is that the military officers in question be staunch supporters of the United States and the capitalist status quo — in that order. It took Soviet nukes to keep Cuba’s leftwing Comandantes, Fidel and Che, from falling victim to American imperialism. Whether Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation can do the same for Maduro and his comrades remains to be seen.
Not that Maduro’s fate is likely to be decided by nukes. Back in the early 1970s, when the US was confronted with another democratically elected socialist president, Chile’s Salvador Allende, the then US president, Richard Nixon’s, advisers told him to make the Chilean economy ‘‘scream’’. It worked then, and it’s working now.
The demise of the Chavez/Maduro Bolivarian Revolution will be the consequence not of too much socialism, but too little. Combine a commoditybased capitalist economy with a leftwing government too inept to transform it from a vulnerable pricetaker into a resilient pricemaker, and the outcome is alltooeasy to predict.
Socialist rhetoric, without socialist substance, produces both the sweetest poetry — and the bitterest disappointment.