Responses by:
David Smilde, Tulane University and Washington Office on Latin America
Miguel Tinker Salas, Pomona College
Jennifer McCoy, Georgia State University
Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research
Steve Ellner, Latin American Perspectives

Venezuela Needs Honest Mediation, Not OAS Intervention

Mark Weisbrot
Center for Economic and Policy Research

The OAS has no positive role to play in resolving the political crisis in Venezuela, any more than would Senator Marco Rubio or other Florida politicians who seek regime change there. At this point, it should be clear to any informed observer that the organization is currently an instrument of those who simply want to use the current crisis to topple the Venezuelan government.

I say this without exaggeration or hyperbole. People who want to avoid escalating violence or civil war in Venezuela should not pretend otherwise, no matter how much they hate the current government or want to see the opposition in power. They should not try to support a process that is so blatantly illegitimate, ill-intentioned, and dangerous.

In Washington bubble circles, the large media outlets and US government are the ultimate arbiters of political legitimacy. Since these actors and their allies are all willing to pretend that the OAS is currently neutral, some well-intentioned people may want to also pretend that this is the case. They may believe that such intervention as the upcoming May 31 OAS meeting of foreign ministers, despite being controlled by partisan actors, would increase pressure on the Venezuelan government to negotiate.

But it is much more likely to have the opposite effect, causing the government and its supporters to dig in their heels against intervention, which can accurately be described as Washington-led (Rubio even publicly threatened the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Haiti with punishment if they did not cooperate with US efforts against Venezuela within the OAS). It could encourage the government to refuse concessions that they should make to the opposition’s legitimate demands. For those who do not know, because it is almost never mentioned in these discussions, a Washington-led strategy is considered suspect because the US government has been trying to undermine, destabilize, and get rid of the Venezuelan government ― on and off ― for more than 15 years.

Nobody is fooled by the fact that some of South America’s most important governments, including Brazil and Argentina, are contributing to this effort. Their new right-wing governments (with Temer hanging on by a thread to his illegitimate presidency) are closely aligned with the Trump administration.

On the opposition side, this strategy of manipulating the OAS for partisan purposes will likely encourage the more extreme and violent elements of the Venezuelan opposition to pursue a strategy of toppling the government by extralegal means.

For some in the Trump administration, this is exactly the intention, and it has been done before. The renowned humanitarian Paul Farmer, who was Bill Clinton’s deputy special envoy of the UN to Haiti testified to the US Congress on the regime change effort there during the early 2000s: “Choking off assistance for development and for the provision of basic services also choked off oxygen to the government, which was the intention all along: to dislodge the Aristide administration.”

The OAS played a vital role in justifying the brutal treatment of Haiti, and therefore the toppling of its democratically elected government. The organization originally concurred with other election observers that the 2000 elections were “a great success for the Haitian population,” but then changed its position as the US regime change effort got underway. Their reversal was key to de-legitimizing the government, which was subsequently starved and overthrown in a US-backed coup in 2004. That has almost always been part of the playbook of regime change: before a government can be overthrown, it must be delegitimized.

There are other recent examples of the OAS being manipulated by Washington for such purposes. In 2011 in Haiti, and OAS mission did something that was never done before in the history of election monitoring: it simply overturned the results of the first round of Haiti’s presidential elections, without a recount or even a statistical test. The US government then threatened Haiti with a cutoff of desperately needed post-earthquake aid if it did not accept the commission’s results, thus choosing who could compete for the presidency of Haiti. In her memoirs, Hillary Clinton describes how she successfully manipulated the OAS to prevent the democratically elected president of Honduras, Mel Zelaya, from returning after the military coup there in 2009.

And now the OAS has a secretary general, Luis Almagro, who is more openly partisan and hostile to a member government (Venezuela) than any leader of the organization in perhaps decades. Among other interventions, he campaigned vigorously in 2015 in a failed attempt to delegitimize the December National Assembly elections in Venezuela.

Venezuela is still a politically polarized country. Any party that seeks to mediate the conflict must have the trust and confidence of both sides. There are political actors who could play this role, as the Vatican tried to do last year. Those who sincerely want to promote dialogue and negotiation for a peaceful resolution of Venezuela’s crisis should support honest mediation. It is desperately needed, and it won’t be coming from the OAS.

The OAS Has Contributed to Venezuelan Polarization and Undermined the Call for National Dialogue

Steve Ellner
Latin American Perspectives

Foreign actors such as the Organization of American States need to play a neutral role in Venezuela if they are to contribute to the process of reestablishing stability and avoiding civil war or anarchy. The two sides in the conflict are in a deadlock and at this point neither one is poised to emerge victorious, at least in the near future. Polarization has reached new heights.

Furthermore, neither side has an air-tight justification for its positions and actions. Indeed, the problems the nation is facing defy easy solutions. While the government of Nicolás Maduro has committed its share of errors, the opposition has also assumed positions that do not reflect popular sentiment, which is in favor of national reconciliation and a focus on concrete economic solutions rather than political confrontation.

The Maduro government’s case cannot be dismissed as lacking substance, as if it were an authoritarian regime. The bellicose behavior of opposition street brigades, including the destruction of public property and the killing and wounding of numerous security forces ― over the last two months as well as during a four months period in 2014 ― would be labeled terrorism in the U.S. and elsewhere. Protesters have also systematically blocked traffic in major street arteries, often by starting fires from sidewalk to sidewalk. Furthermore, Maduro has called for open discussions with no strings attached, a proposition that the opposition turned down both in 2014 and 2017. On the other hand, the government provoked the opposition this year by forbidding the electoral participation of governor and former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles for 15 years on allegations of corruption. It also rescheduled state-wide elections, which were slated for December 2016, by one year. While the dozens of deaths related to the protests have occurred under disputed circumstances, the excesses on the part of security forces both in 2014 and this year have been widely recognized, even by the government itself.

This is just the beginning of a list of pros and cons with regard to the government’s democratic commitment, as well as that of the opposition. The point is that the good guy- bad guy narrative is simplistic and does not stand up to the facts.

In spite of the nebulousness and complexity, important international actors such as the OAS as well as the U.S. mainstream media have failed to achieve even a modest degree of impartiality. Specifically, OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro has failed to place himself above Venezuela’s internal politics and to facilitate a peaceful and constructive resolution of the conflict. Instead, his statements without exception have been unequivocally in line with the opposition’s narrative and demands.

Almagro’s openly hostile position toward the Maduro government inadvertently strengthens the hard-line position in the Chavista movement and the opposition, both of which are resistant to dialogue. His intromission and discourse that questions the Venezuelan government’s democratic credentials serve to embolden the radicals in the opposition and further polarize the nation. Almagro conflates pressing economic problems and the alleged authoritarianism of the Maduro government. This line strengthens the hand of the opposition hard-liners who dismiss all actions (including regional elections) that do not contribute to immediate regime change. In contrast, the moderates within the opposition ― although at this point they have no visible national leader ― favor emphasizing economic issues in order to reach out to the popular sectors of the population who are most affected by the economic calamity, attract some of the disenchanted Chavistas, and at the same time accept dialogue with government representatives. The moderates therefore place an accent mark on economic issues more than political ones.

In short, the OAS should assume a balanced position by criticizing both sides for their intransigence and specific actions that contribute to confrontation. Along these lines, the organization should call on the government and the opposition to negotiate in earnest. At the same time, it should name a nonpartisan committee to investigate disputed events.

Has Invocation of the OAS Democratic Charter had a Positive Impact on Venezuela’s Political Process?

David Smilde
Tulane University
Washington Office on Latin America

Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro has played a crucial role in prompting international attention to the Venezuela crisis. I think his invocation of the Democratic Charter could have been done in a more diplomatic way and with a different time frame. However, I think it has been a net positive in generating international attention to a rapidly deteriorating situation in Venezuela.

In my view it is entirely legitimate for Almagro to have invoked the Democratic Charter with respect to Venezuela. However, I felt he did it about a year too soon. In June 2016, the process leading to a recall referendum was in full swing and there were even suggestions of dialogue. In this context, it was predictable that Almagro’s initiative would not garner the support it needed to succeed. There had not been a clear rupture of democracy at that point in time. Furthermore, Almagro had not done the diplomatic work necessary with the ambassadors of member-states to put together a coalition.

His second effort ten months later came at a much more appropriate moment. The Maduro government had postponed the recall referendum on the most specious of reasons and had made a mockery of the Vatican-facilitated dialogue. However, here again, he rushed ahead and went straight for the jugular—the expulsion of Venezuela. Rather than proposing that the OAS carry out a period of “good offices” as the Democratic Charter calls for, he regarded the UNASUR-Vatican led efforts as functional equivalents of these good offices. While it was predictable that this particular effort would fail, this time around Almagro’s initiative generated a more robust discussion and more support. Nevertheless it did not gain the votes needed to proceed.

But multilateral discussions themselves create new realities. Member countries are forced to get up-to-date on the situation in Venezuela, take positions, and develop common understandings. Thus when Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal, less than 48 hours after the OAS meeting ended, put forward sentences XYZ, it led to an immediate international outcry. This led to the first public division within Chavismo in years, with the Attorney General Luisa Ortega expressing strong disapproval of the TSJ ruling. These two factors emboldened an opposition that had been in disarray for months after the failed effort to mount a presidential recall, with their followers disillusioned and demobilized. Suddenly many Venezuelans felt the world was listening to them and they have not stopped street mobilizations since.

Thus I think that despite a rather undiplomatic and precipitous effort on the part of SG Luis Almagro, the OAS Democratic Charter has been a useful spark to both international pressure on and engagement of Venezuela and domestic mobilization against a clear authoritarian slide in the Maduro administration. The meeting on May 31 will likely have a similar function. Even if there is not a two-thirds majority supporting action with respect to Venezuela, these conversations could funnel into some sort of “group of friends” type effort, like the Contadora Group that facilitated peace in Central America in the 1980s.

I think Almagro’s attempt to invoke the Democratic Charter on Venezuela is entirely legitimate. The argument that it can only be used with consent of the Executive of the member-state in question is absurd. In fact one of the main historical threats to Latin American democracies has been precisely a power-hungry executive. The Democratic Charter was actually developed in the aftermath of the abuses of the Fujimori government in in Peru, another example of democratic deterioration led by the executive branch.

I should point out that my position differs from those who see the OAS’s use of the Democratic Charter as a case of imperialistic intervention, not because of disagreement on the historical facts of the past year or two, but because of some more fundamental beliefs. In my view, basic democratic rights are “universal” human rights and are not subject to national sovereignty. Put differently, it is entirely legitimate for individuals and governments to concern themselves with the affairs of another country when it has to do with people’s basic rights to decide who they want to lead them and hold those leaders accountable at the ballot box, as well as the freedom to express their views freely in media and street protest. These fundamental rights are being violated in Venezuela.

Scholars on the left who see the discourse of human rights as a new form of imperialism have argued that human rights are not “universal” but are actually human constructions with a history. Of course that is true. But the same can be said for the idea of national sovereignty. In fact, the Peace of Westphalia from which the modern idea of national sovereignty emerged was an agreement among princes that essentially allowed them to have exclusive dominance over their subjects without the interference of competing authorities. In doing so it also reduced the opportunities subjects had for playing rulers off of each other. In this sense the discourse of—if not “universal” at least “supra-national”—human rights is an important achievement for humankind, limiting the power of rulers over citizens and thereby strengthening the position of the latter.

And the very idea of supra-national human rights implies the need for extra-sovereign mechanisms for protecting human rights, such as the OAS Democratic Charter. Venezuela enthusiastically signed it in 2001, effectively handing over aspects of its own sovereignty in exchange for the ability to have some modicum of control over democratic conditions in other sovereign countries. It should not cry foul, then, when it finds itself the focus of regional attention for violating the tenets and guarantees of its own democracy and Constitution.

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Venezuela and the OAS

Miguel Tinker Salas
Pomona College

The Organization of American States (OAS) and its current Secretary General Luis Almagro has pursued policies that aggravate the current crisis in Venezuela. Almagro adopted a hostile attitude toward Venezuela since assuming the post that has removed the OAS as a potential mediator in the current crisis. Almagro appears fixated on Venezuela: the country actually has its own tab on the OAS web page, which leads to a speech by Almagro that strangely links the struggle of people of “African descent” with democracy in Venezuela. Rather than providing a way to help mediate the bitter conflict in Venezuela, Almagro has joined one side.

The position of the OAS sadly reflects the longer history of the organization. Since its founding in 1948, the OAS has served as an instrument to promote US Cold War policies and “free trade” initiatives in Latin America. The OAS legitimated US intervention in Guatemala (1954), suspended Cuba (1962) and supported the US invasion of the Dominican Republic (1965). In contrast, the OAS remained largely silent as South American military governments disappeared thousands. It made only perfunctory statements about the US invasion of Panama in 1989 and the ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 2004.

Almagro has maintained a conspicuous silence on dramatic issues occurring elsewhere in Latin America, including the death and disappearance of thousands in Mexico, the open persecution of journalists, and the attack on democracy in Brazil. His fixation on Venezuela drew the attention of the former president of Uruguay, José “Pepe” Mujica, who criticized Almagro: “I cannot understand your silence about Haiti, Guatemala and Asunción while at the same time you publish responses to Venezuela.” Mujica went on to say, “I believe that at some moment we have to serve as a bridge so that all Venezuela, with solvency, can address its self-determination and we should not divorce ourselves from that path.”

Mujica’s comments underscore an alternative path, one where Venezuelans engage in constructive dialogue about the critical problems the country faces. Venezuela’s problems are profound, but all flow from a dependence on petroleum exports. The oil dependency, evident throughout the twentieth century, fueled a national myth that oil would spur modernity. Dictators and democratic political leaders alike promoted the concept of Venezuela as a privileged nation. US officials recognized that the country’s model of development was unsustainable, even as they were promoting Venezuela as a model democracy. While acknowledging that elites and middle sectors had benefited from oil, the United States National Security Council in 1974 concluded that “Uneven development has left other millions of Venezuelans living in untouched poverty, with so slim a stake in the existing system as to make economic reform and income redistribution imperative.”

Hugo Chávez initiated important reforms and expanded access to oil profits, reaching new sectors of society—the core of resentment against his rule―but never fully challenged the belief that oil would develop Venezuela. Repeated assertions that Venezuela had the world’s largest petroleum reserves only reinforced the national myth. Despite huge oil reserves, OPEC co-founder Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo’s astute observation, “El petroleó es nuestro, lo demás lo importamos,” (“The oil is ours, but we import everything else”) is still true today.[1]

Neither the government nor the opposition have addressed how to diversify the economy, tackle skyrocketing inflation, promote internal production, expunge corruption, invest in collapsing infrastructure, deter crime, or repair the country’s tattered social fabric. The predicament for the opposition is that people who benefitted from the Chávez era reforms will not simply return to the barrios and resume the life that existed in pre-1998 Venezuela. As the population of the country continues to grow, now 32 million, pressure for continued social reforms will only increase.

Government efforts to dissolve the National Assembly (since retracted), delay elections, or convene a National Constituent Assembly have exacerbated the crisis. However, efforts to forcibly topple President Nicolas Maduro by creating conditions of ungovernability (the so-called guarimbas) including the destruction of public and private property, accompanied by appeals for foreign intervention, condemn Venezuela to a future of social conflict and violence. The opposition forces that engage in dog-whistle politics and do not condemn violence can hardly be expected to unite Venezuela and rebuild the nation.

Rather than taking sides in this bitter and difficult conflict, the OAS should join the efforts of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Vatican, condemn violence on either side, and promote dialogue in the country. The horrifying experiences of Colombia and Central America stand as sad testimony of the inability to dialogue or to recognize the humanity of the other in society.  If after a decades-long conflict that left tens of thousands dead, the political forces in Colombia and El Salvador conducted talks that led to peace settlements, then surely the political forces in Venezuela can create the conditions to do the same. The current government must assure regional elections in 2017 and presidential elections in 2018, and respect the outcome of the process. The country needs elections, but it also needs dialogue over what to do before and after those elections are held. Will Almagro and the OAS help Venezuelans carve this path forward, or will they continue to fuel the conflict?

[1] Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, Hundiéndonos en el excremento del diablo, Caracas: Banco Central 2011) p. 44

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Can and Should the OAS Play a Role in the Current Venezuelan Crisis? 

Jennifer McCoy
Georgia State University

The OAS is, in theory, the leading organizational defender of democracy and human rights in the Western hemisphere.  It is incumbent on the OAS member-states not only to defend chief executives when threatened, as they have done primarily when threatened with a military coup such as against Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in 2002, or Honduran president Mel Zelaya in 2009, but also when the elected governments themselves abuse their authority against the rights and interests of their own citizens. This is the Achilles’ heel of the OAS.

Governments are reluctant to criticize each other as long as there is a façade of legality to their actions. Take the impeachment processes in Brazil against Dilma or Lugo in Paraguay, or threatened against Bolanos in Nicaragua ― the OAS accepted the first two without question, but acted in the third only after Bolanos himself made use of the Inter-American Democratic Charter to request assistance.

The OAS foreign ministers now have an opportunity on May 31 when they meet to discuss the Venezuelan crisis to not only condemn the clear violations of the Inter-American Democratic Charter and Venezuela’s own constitution over the past year and a half, but also to offer support and incentives to Venezuelans of all political persuasions to engage in a constructive response to the crisis.

What can the OAS actually do?  It is constrained by politics and its own habits of consensus decision-making, but it has important leverage in granting or withdrawing legitimacy from any government or actor in the hemisphere. And legitimacy is crucial in this democratic age. I will address first the constraints, and then the opportunities.

In the last decade and a half, the OAS’ role in the collective defense of democracy has been paralyzed in the midst of hemispheric polarization following a divided reaction to the coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 2002, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. After playing an important role mediating the Venezuelan political crisis of 2002–04, the OAS was sidelined by Latin American efforts to create parallel organizations excluding the U.S. and Canada ― the South American Union (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), pushed for different reasons by Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico.

Now, with Venezuela facing its most severe political crisis since 2002 (and worst social and economic situation in two decades), the OAS is again attempting to create some traction to help resolve the multi-dimensional crisis, or at least spur neighboring countries to do so. With a new, determined Secretary General and new governments in many countries of the hemisphere, the internal politics of the organization are changing and moving toward a growing, concerned majority willing to take a stand.

On April 3, a majority in the OAS Permanent Council declared that Venezuela has altered its constitutional order in violation of the hemisphere’s Inter-American Democratic Charter. Then on April 26, the Permanent Council decided to convene the May 31 meeting of hemispheric foreign ministers. Following a year of OAS debates about the increasingly dire situation in Venezuela, the foreign ministers meeting is the next step for the organization to move from recommending dialogue to resolve the democratic and humanitarian crisis to the possibility of suspending the country from the organization.

In response, and as large street protests entered their fourth week and tallied 29 deaths, the Venezuelan government indicated its intention to withdraw from the OAS. It is the first country in the body’s 70-year history to do so. (Cuba was suspended in 1962 and invited back in 2010, but it never withdrew nor did it accept to come back.) Thus, Venezuela is choosing to preemptively withdraw rather than risk a humiliating suspension.

The OAS could:

1. Support the creation of a smaller, pluralist group of countries such as Ecuador, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico and Colombia, in conjunction with the other organizations of UNASUR and CELAC, to travel to Venezuela, assess, and offer ideas for resolution of the health, economic, and political dimensions of the current crisis.
2. Refuse to legitimize the proposed National Constituent Assembly in its current form, which omits prior public approval for its convening, employs a grossly distorted form of election of members, and lacks a clear public rational for its existence while regularly scheduled elections have been delayed.
3. Work with multilateral development organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and Andean Development Bank (CAF) to offer incentives in the form of loans and guarantees to address Venezuela’s severe financial and fiscal constraints in exchange for the restoration of constitutional provisions including the authority of the institutions and due process for all citizens. After the 2009 Honduran coup, development banks “paused” their loans and grants to Honduras in the wake of the OAS suspension of Honduras. Only the CAF has substantial loans to Venezuela, and in March announced a pause to assess the situation. Offers of financial assistance could be tied to a positive OAS report of progress.
4. Suspension from the OAS is the last resort and strongest sanction the body has. Venezuela’s preemptive move to withdraw, which takes two years to complete, undercuts the isolation effect of a suspension vote. Nevertheless, a suspension decision on May 31 would be a significant symbolic delegitimation of the country’s democratic status, and at the same time would bolster the citizens protesting in the streets.

The OAS should not:

1. Personalize the conflict, as Secretary General Almagro has succumbed to the temptation to do, responding to President Maduro’s provocation at times in personal tones.
2. Take sides in the conflict or assume that one side is in the right and the other in the wrong. It should, instead, focus on positive-sum solutions and mutual guarantees for all, avoiding witch hunts, revenge, or private justice.

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