A Venezuela fix
It will take more than Trump threats to end the crisis created by the Maduro government.
It is hard to know whether Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is crazy or stupid or both, but he has made his oil-rich country into the quintessential banana republic and appears likely now to complete its ruin economically and politically.
With polls showing almost 90 percent of the Venezuelan people wanting him and his United Socialist Party gone, Maduro instead is holding a “Constituent Assembly” on Sunday to elect a rump government that is likely to disband the current opposition-led National Assembly and write a new constitution institutionalizing socialism and extending Maduro’s rule, currently set to end in 2019.
Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, but there are severe shortages of food and medicines, public health is suffering, the currency is virtually worthless and there are daily major antigovernment demonstrations.
More than 100 people have been killed by police and military fighting to contain the protests, which government opponents have vowed to step up ahead of the coming vote. They also will boycott the plebiscite.
In sum, the situation is disastrous and getting more dangerous by the day. It is feared that a major blood bath will occur very soon unless something changes.
Much of the world — with notable exceptions including China and Russia — has condemned Maduro and called for sanity, which has been a waste of breath because Maduro says everything is the result of a U.S. conspiracy.
But it is clear that an international attempt must be made to save Venezuela from itself. It is not clear what can be done.
On Wednesday, the U.S. fired a warning shot by issuing economic and travel sanctions against 13 present and former Venezuelan officials.
President Donald Trump has threatened “strong and swift economic sanctions” that according to news reports could include the prohibition of transactions in U.S. dollars by Venezuela’s staterun oil company PDVSA or a ban on U.S purchases of Venezuelan oil, which total about 700,000 barrels a day, much of it by Texas companies.
Both would further damage Venezuela’s staggering economy, but Maduro opponents say they also would add to the Venezuelan people’s suffering and give Maduro more ammunition to blame the country’s problems on the U.S. They argue, too, that it would threaten a growing international consensus against Maduro.
We have argued before and will do so again for a regional diplomatic initiative, as Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski suggested recently, to try to resolve the situation without further violence.
The U.S. has learned the hard way that unilateral sanctions can be problematic — witness our long, failed trade embargo against Cuba, Venezuela’s socialist friend.
Instead, the U.S. needs to give full support to a regional effort, use its wealth and weight behind the scenes and hold in reserve the decision on whether to impose sanctions.
It should start by doing what it hasn’t done sufficiently so far — get strongly behind an effort led by Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro for the hemispheric organization to put political pressure on Venezuela.
Our Secretary of State Rex Tillerson didn’t even bother to show up at a recent OAS meeting of foreign ministers that fell just short of the unanimous vote needed to officially condemn Venezuela. U.S. lobbying might have changed the outcome, observers said.
We won’t drone on about the Trump administration’s mistakes, but it was a serious missed opportunity that we can only hope will come again — and very soon because things are coming to a head in Venezuela.