Crisis going nowhere slowly

Venezuela’s woes are because words like ‘reinvestment’ and ‘maintenance’ are not part of the Chavista vocabulary.

Juan Guaido returned to Venezuela earlier this week after almost two weeks doing the rounds of Latin American capitals that recognise his claim to be the “interim president” of the country. He defied a government ban to leave the country, so he should be arrested any minute now. Or maybe not.

Despite all the ferocious rhetoric from both Guaido’s camp and Nicolas Maduro’s “elected” regime, there is a curious lack of urgency in their actions.

Maduro has still not arrested Guaido, although in the past he imprisoned other opposition leaders for much lesser offences than claiming to be president. And Guaido has not yet appointed an “interim vice-president” to take over if he goes to jail– which suggests that he doesn’t really expect to be arrested either.

Given the fragmented nature of the Venezuelan opposition – four major parties that have a fragile power-sharing agreement called the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) – Guaido’s reluctance to pick a vice-president is understandable. He only became president of the National Assembly last year because it was the “turn” of his party, Popular Will. So far this is a very slow-moving crisis. The lack of urgency even extends to the US armed forces, which are making no visible preparations to invade Venezuela.

Why is everybody moving so slowly? Because they are all still hoping there can be a peaceful outcome, if nobody pushes too hard.

Guaido’s disappointment came on Saturday, when he had promised that thousands of people would go the borders to bring in the US-supplied humanitarian aid the Maduro regime has been blocking. The masses didn’t show, and the Venezuelan soldiers who are keeping the aid out didn’t defect in significant numbers.

But Maduro can’t be confident either. He knows the desperate shortages of food and medicine (which have caused three million Venezuelans to leave the country in the past few years) have eroded the regime’s popular support.

And the US army really doesn’t want to invade Venezuela. It’s looking forward to being released from seventeen years of unwinnable guerilla wars in the Middle East, and the last thing it needs now is a new counter-insurgency campaign in Venezuela. That’s probably what it would face if it invaded.

Maduro’s regime has certainly lost majority support, but even if only 15% of the population remain loyal to the “revolution”, there would still be a guerilla and terrorist resistance that might last for years.

The Maduro regime is slowly unravelling, mainly because of its spectacular incompetence. Every major oil-exporting economy has been hurt by the drop in oil prices, but only in Venezuela are large numbers of people facing severe malnutrition, and only in Venezuela has oil production fallen – by an astonishing twothirds.

It’s not because of US sanctions, which only began in a serious way in 2017, and it’s not because of “socialism” (Cuba came through a cashflow crisis just as profound after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and nobody starved).

It’s because words like “reinvestment” and “maintenance” are not part of the Chavista vocabulary.