Venezuela resists tyranny
EVERY day, Venezuelans pour into the streets in protest against the loss of their freedom and constitutional rights by a tyrannical regime that condemns them to scarcity, illness and hunger.
Social media has given us a wealth of shocking images: the National Guard firing indiscriminately into crowds, killings, tanks moving against demonstrators. A daily Tiananmen while President Nicolás Maduro dances salsa.
But power in Venezuela has continued declining from its glory days under Hugo Chávez. On Tuesday, a rogue faction of the police apparently dropped grenades from a helicopter onto the Supreme Court in Caracas in what Maduro called a “coup plot”. That same day, the president had threatened to take up arms “if the revolution were to be destroyed”.
Venezuela suffered through long periods of dictatorship and achieved constitutional order only in 1959, at the hands of Rómulo Betancourt, the first Latin American convert from communism to democracy.
Unfortunately, democracy confronted an expiry date. In 1998, the Venezuelan people, tired of a two-party regime stained by corruption and social inequalities, voted Hugo Chávez into power. Much more than a populist, he was a redeemer skilled at and addicted to the use of media.
I travelled to Venezuela at various times and spoke to numerous Chavistas, from important government functionaries to social leaders, and was impressed by the spontaneous testimony, in poor neighborhoods, by Venezuelans approving the man who, they say, “took them into account for the first time”.
Chávez’s social commitment seemed genuine, but putting it into practice did not require the installation of a dictatorship. In 2008, the minister of finance, Alí Rodríguez Araque, disagreed with me. “We’re constructing a communal state,” he said, “which the Soviets, the Chinese and the Cubans have not been able to do.”
I also spoke to anti-chavistas from various walks of life. Their principal concern was the destruction of democracy and Chávez’s growing personal domination of the government branches and electoral functions. A protester at a barricade in Caracas this week.venezuela has been beset by three months of protests, with 79 killed and hundreds wounded.
There was a clear drift towards totalitarianism that Chávez had foreshadowed in his first visit to Cuba, when he had expressed his wish to be “el todo” (the embodiment of everything, as Fidel Castro had become in Cuba).
The death of Chávez was followed by the anointment (in a monarchical style) of his successor. But nothing prepared Venezuelans for the disaster that followed.
There has been terrible economic and social destruction. Across 15 years, a trillion dollars of oil income has been squandered, and 80% of Venezuelans have fallen into poverty. The estimated inflation rate this year 720%, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Venezuela has become the Zimbabwe of the Americas, a shameless alliance of corrupt politicians and the military acquiescent to the dictates of Cuba.
Some of these leaders are accused of involvement in international drug trafficking. They have kidnapped the Latin American nation that is richest in oil resources, which they wish to appropriate for themselves, at whatever human cost it may require.
The killings by Maduro’s government are not yet comparable to the genocidal dictatorships of Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. Nor is the government a carbon copy of the Castro regime.
But the pressure towards totalitarianism by the Maduro government has been met with heroic resistance.
It is impossible to know how all this will end. But there is a potential answer, one Betancourt formulated in 1959 and that has been reaffirmed by the OAS secretary, Luis Almagro, whose leadership restored the dignity of the organisation. It is recognised in international law as the Betancourt Doctrine.
“Regimes that do not respect human rights and violate the freedoms of their citizens,” it says, “should be submitted to a rigorous quarantine and eradicated through the collective action of the international juridicial community.”
In solidarity with the courageous Venezuelan people, Europe and the major countries of Latin America could support a quarantine – diplomatic, financial, commercial and political – of the outlaw regime of Maduro.
They might persuade the first Latin American pope to take a stronger stand and pressure Raúl Castro to accept a democratic solution: a halt to the repression, immediate elections, the re-establishment of civil liberties, respect for democratic institutions and the release of political prisoners.
Krauze is a historian, the editor of literary magazine Letras Libres and author of Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America. This was translated by Hank Heifetz from Spanish.
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