President Trump’s Venezuela policy is in disarray
Venezuela’s humanitarian catastrophe has faded from the headlines since President Trump’s empty threats against Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro have failed to produce results and the U.S. president has become increasingly mute on the issue.
It’s time to put Venezuela back on the front pages.
Journalists moderating the rest of the 2020 presidential debates should place Venezuela among the top foreign policy issues — if the candidates don’t do it themselves. In this year’s Democratic debates, most of my colleagues moderating the debates have shamefully omitted questions about the Venezuelan crisis.
Understandably, Trump doesn’t want to talk about Venezuela these days.
His veiled threats of a U.S. military intervention, which was never a good idea without significant international support, turned out to be what many of us suspected: political theater aimed at winning Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American votes in Florida.
And Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-environment, anti-free trade and antiforeign aid agenda — in addition to his insults such as those to Mexicans as “rapists” and “criminals,” and Salvadorans and Haitians as natives of “shithole countries” — have isolated the Trump administration in the region.
Without a coherent plan and unable to lead an international coalition to force Maduro out of power, Trump’s Venezuela policy is in disarray.
Meantime, Venezuela has become — like Syria — one of the world’s biggest social disasters.
Maduro’s death squads are responsible for about 6,800 extra-judicial executions between January
2018 and May 2019, many of the victims peaceful pro-democracy activists, according to a recent report by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet.
The U.N. report also documented the widespread use of torture against some of Venezuela’s more than 720 political prisoners, including electric shocks and suffocation with plastic bags. It’s a level of human-rights abuse that equals — and maybe exceeds — the worst times of South America’s military dictatorships of the 1970s.
More than 4.7 million Venezuelans have fled Venezuela over the past five years, according to the Organization of American States (OAS). The Venezuelan exodus could reach 10 million people in three years, according to OAS chief Luis Almagro. It already is straining the economies of several Latin American countries and could destabilize them politically, officials in the region say.
Yet, Maduro has been consolidating his dictatorship in recent months. Mexico and Argentina, once active members of the Lima Group of Latin American countries that withdrew their recognition of Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate president following the fraudulent 2018 elections, have switched sides. The two countries’ new leftist presidents now recognize the Maduro regime.
Although it sounds like a joke, the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council — which is a separate institution from U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Bachelet’s office — recently accepted Venezuela as one of its 47 member countries. That was hailed as a major diplomatic victory by the Maduro regime, and further demoralized Venezuela’s opposition.
What should be done? For starters, all U.S. presidential candidates should be asked how to fix what front-running Democratic candidate Joe Biden has called the “morally bankrupt” Trump administration’s policies in the region.
“Trump has badly misjudged what it will take to bring democracy back to Venezuela,” Biden said in a Miami Herald opinion piece. He added that Trump’s empty threats of using military force not only failed to bring down Maduro, but “threatens the international coalition of more than 50 countries that recognize Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela.”
Washington needs to create a strong international anti-Maduro coalition. Instead of vilifying Latin
American immigrants, building a useless wall along the Mexican border, separating refugee kids from their parents, cutting foreign aid to Central American countries and slapping tariffs on friendly governments, the United States should build bridges with Latin America and help create a global agreement to impose effective collective sanctions on Venezuela.
It would be morally reckless if moderators of the upcoming 2020 presidential debates ignore the Venezuelan tragedy and focus exclusively on issues Trump wants us to talk about. They should turn Venezuela’s mass killings and refugee crisis into a major part of the 2020 election agenda.