Venezuela in crisis

Latin American leaders need to offer help

Venezuela has become a disaster and screams for palliative attention, but should not receive much of America’s.

The late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, was something of a visionary even if one didn’t agree with his socialistic approach. He did tackle some of the problems of Venezuela’s poor. The qualifications of his successor, President Nicolas Maduro, fall far short of what is needed to govern an oil-rich country of 31 million, once South America’s best off.

Venezuelans are now reaching the level of desperation in living their lives. Health care, education and law and order have fallen apart. Deadly conflicts between demonstrators and security forces occur virtually every day in the streets of Caracas, the capital. Mr. Maduro has now engineered the election of an assembly to rewrite Venezuela’s constitution, a feckless attempt to hold onto power when the population clearly says he should step down.

The United States has had checkered relations with Venezuelan governments over the years that basically rule out the United States as a senior player in the hemisphere or having much of any useful role in helping sortout Venezuela’s problems.

An active Organization of American States could play an important role in fixing Venezuela. Here, too, the U.S. has diminished credibility because of the Trump administration’s decision to begin to back off his predecessor’s opening to Cuba, which was popular in the OAS and Latin America in general.

The other, more serious problem with the OAS helping with Venezuela is the fact that Latin American states are still divided in their attitude toward it. Mr. Chavez, followed by Mr. Maduro, has pursued a policy of providing Venezuelan oil cheaply to some Latin American states, including Bolivia, Cuba and Haiti. While countries like Argentina, Brazil and Colombia are insisting that the Maduro government clean up its act, Mr. Maduro is still finding defenders among Latin American states that have benefited from Venezuelan largesse over the years. Thus, the OAS has not presented Mr. Maduro a united front in insisting on reform.

Repair is needed, if Venezuela is not eventually to slip into chaos and extreme violence. Fellow friendly presidents, such as Raul Castro in Cuba or Evo Morales in Bolivia, should offer Mr. Maduro a comfortable exile in their countries, and the OAS should offer peacekeeping forces to maintain order in Venezuela as matters are put back on track. What that should mean is that Venezuela’s resources are once again applied to achieving the well-being of its population, as opposed to taking care of the armed forces who keep Mr. Maduro in power.

If Washington feels obliged to do something in the face of encroaching chaos in Venezuela, it should encourage the leaders of Latin America to step up to the plate and seek to restore peace and order in the state before things get worse. U.S. policy of imposing sanctions on individual Venezuelan figures serves no purpose. Broader U.S. oil sanctions against Venezuela would punish primarily American consumers.