Please Don’t Let Venezuela Be Trump’s Shutdown Distraction
"Here we go again! 'This Is Very Dangerous': Trump Administration Seizes Venezuela Oil Assets, Renews Threat of Military Action If Maduro Stays "The problem here is that these efforts by the United States to change other countries' governments often lead to catastrophe.""
Nicolás Maduro has presided over a humanitarian nightmare. But there are huge risks to dabbling in regime change.
By Andre Pagliarini January 24, 2019
The fraught situation in Venezuela seems to be coming to a head. On Wednesday, 35-year-old opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself interim president following widespread protests calling for the resignation of strongman Nicolás Maduro, the president and leader of the so-called Bolivarian Revolution that began under Hugo Chávez in 1999. Guaidó was quickly recognized by the United States, Canada, and Brazil. Mexico, under the new administration of leftist Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, did not endorse Guaidó. In Russia, a key Maduro ally, members of parliament condemned .. https://www.apnews.com/098cca00b6d44965850547e9d345d8b3 .. the U.S. recognition, calling Guaidó’s move a “coup.” China, which has helped .. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-13/china-to-give-venezuela-5-billion-loan-as-maduro-visits-beijing .. shore up Maduro’s government in the past, remained silent.
By openly calling on foreign governments for support, Guaidó, an engineer who presides over the country’s National Assembly, presents the sharpest and most consequential threat yet to Maduro’s regime. In recent weeks, Venezuelan opposition leaders have intimated that Maduro is vulnerable and that a small show of force would be enough to force his ouster. Their goal was almost certainly to nudge friendly right-wing governments in Brazil and the United States toward supporting regime change. It remains unclear, however, that the military has turned decisively against Maduro, setting up the possibility of a far-reaching and deadly armed confrontation should Maduro resist ousting. Even if the armed forces have abandoned the president, the drastic step of removing him by force is unlikely to pacify this deeply divided nation. It would almost certainly make a bad situation worse.
Earlier this month, Jorge Borges, an exiled opposition leader whom Maduro has accused of plotting his assassination, explained .. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article224124250.html .. that the president “remains in power, fundamentally, due to two things: the support of the military—really just the upper ranks—and the dictatorial know-how of the Cubans.” Other than that, Borges noted, “Maduro has nothing. There’s no economic support, no diplomatic support, no political support ... I think he’s irredeemably defeated and it’s impossible for him to overcome the crisis he’s created.”
If the regime lacks popular support now, that wasn’t always the case. Venezuela managed to secure real material and social gains for its poorest citizens under Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. With the end of the so-called commodity boom following the global 2008 crash, however, Venezuela began a slow-motion process of economic collapse that the government has been unable to reverse. As a former advisor to Chávez put it .. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/01/venezuela-maduro-chavez-military-intervention?fbclid=IwAR2sIlAc-5g2CO63v6lY_vG0TJ7WfBK3nTHEt3O329n6AZGeZpJZmWnLJjc .. in a recent interview, “even if it’s sensationalized in the international press, the Venezuelan government also suffers from a lack of transparency, from corruption, and there is a general problem of mismanagement, lack of technical skills, and of qualified people in the right places.” [Shades of Mr. Trump's gobment?] Maduro, a Chávez protégé, narrowly won the race to succeed him in 2013. In 2018, Maduro won a second term in an election many consider to have been rigged. As economic conditions have worsened in recent years, the regime has hardened to the point that the government can no longer be considered fully democratic. In May 2018, a 400-page independent report published .. https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/canada-introduces-new-sanctions-on-venezuelan-regime-in-wake-of-devastating-report-on-crimes-against-humanity .. by the Organization of American States concluded that Maduro bore responsibility for a litany of human-rights abuses: murders, extra-judicial executions, and torture, in addition to the ongoing humanitarian crisis linked to economic ineptitude.
Comparing one part of the world to another is always a risky proposition, but the 2003 Iraq War carries important lessons.
For the Trump administration, this is sufficient grounds to push for Maduro’s removal. In an official statement responding to Guaidó’s proclamation, Donald Trump called the National Assembly led by Guaidó “the only legitimate branch of government duly elected by the people” and declared that “the people of Venezuela have courageously spoken out against Maduro and his regime and demanded freedom and the rule of law.” In response, Maduro gave U.S. diplomats 72 hours to leave the country. “The United States does not recognize the Maduro regime as the government of Venezuela,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo replied in a statement shortly thereafter. “Accordingly, the United States does not consider former president Nicolas Maduro to have the legal authority to break diplomatic relations with the United States or to declare our diplomats persona non grata.”
Open conflict remains unlikely, particularly since the governments that in the morning recognized Guaidó’s claim to the presidency added by the late afternoon that they would not themselves expel Maduro from the presidential palace. But that unnerving prospect looms over escalating diplomatic tensions.
Venezuela is a quagmire that defies simple solutions. Even if Maduro were to fall easily with international intervention, as the opposition claims he would, the aftermath is sure to be calamitous and possibly even worse than the status quo. This is to say nothing of the illegality of such a strike—despite the moral, political, and economic failures of Maduro’s leadership—or the dismal record of U.S.-supported efforts at regime change.
As was the case with Iraq, there is no clear plan for what comes next in a post-Maduro Venezuela in the event of an intervention unsanctioned by international law. As Matias Spektor, a professor of international relations at Brazilian university Fundação Getúlio Vargas, noted on Twitter Wednesday afternoon, Guaidó “has no plan for a political transition, no united base, does not control the movement in the streets and there is no organized machinery in the country. He also has no agreement with the Armed Forces, an actor without whom there will be no transition to a democratic government.” President Barack Obama recently said .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/barack-obama-says-libya-was-worst-mistake-of-his-presidency ..that insufficient planning for a post-Gaddafi Libya was his single biggest regret. Although Trump has shown no disposition to learn from his predecessors, the country, the region, and the world would undoubtedly benefit if he took a lesson from Bush and Obama in this instance, particularly given the distinct possibility that any conflict in Venezuela would spill over into neighboring Brazil, or already-unstable Colombia.
Maduro’s government deserves profound condemnation. But the context in which Wednesday’s escalation has taken place matters. Getting tough with Venezuela comes at a politically opportune moment for both Brazil’s far-right new president Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, allowing the former to distract from a disastrous .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/22/jair-bolsonaro-flavio-brazil-davos-scandal-gangs .. first trip abroad and a scandal involving his son and the latter to project strength amid a government shutdown with no end in sight. While the United States and Brazil both ruled out directly military strikes against Maduro, Trump and Bolsonaro have ample motivations to make hay of regime change abroad. Both men may find that a widely reviled figure like Maduro makes for an attractive—and expedient—foil. The challenges in both the U.S. and Brazil are to make sure such immediate incentives don’t overwhelm prudence.
Andre Pagliarini is a visiting assistant professor of modern Latin American history at Brown University. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on twentieth-century Brazilian nationalism.
"Here we go again! 'This Is Very Dangerous': Trump Administration Seizes Venezuela Oil Assets, Renews Threat of Military Action If Maduro Stays "The problem here is that these efforts by the United States to change other countries' governments often lead to catastrophe.""
Attempts at regime change have backfired on Washington before.
By Lindsey A. O'Rourke | January 30, 2019, 12:31 PM
Members of the Bolivarian National Police (PNB) line up to guard the entrance of Venezuela's Central University (UCV) in Caracas, during a protest against the government of President Nicolas Maduro on January 30, 2019. (LUIS ROBAYO/AFP/Getty Images)
Once one of Latin America’s longest-running democracies and the country with the largest proven crude oil reserves in the world, Venezuela has been driven to the brink of collapse by years of economic mismanagement, rampant corruption, and mounting authoritarianism by President Nicolás Maduro’s government.
Starvation and malnutrition are now widespread. Years of recklessly printing money have rendered Venezuela’s currency practically worthless. Hyperinflation reached 1.3 million percent last year and could reach 10 million percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. More than 3 million Venezuelans have already fled the country in Latin America’s largest-ever refugee exodus, sparking humanitarian crises in neighboring states. On Jan. 23, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that “all options are on the table” if Maduro used force to put down the protests that have swept the country in the last few weeks.
But the prospects for a change of regime in Venezuela look dicey, especially one driven from D.C. While two dozen countries have followed the United States’ lead and recognized the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president, there are good reasons to be wary of Washington’s latest moves. The U.S. history of attempted regime change in the region and Trump’s loose language are both working against an opposition that faces a still formidable foe in Maduro’s regime.
This highlights the dangers of the Trump administration’s loose language when it comes to regime change. While administration officials may see regime change as a morally sound response to the humanitarian crisis unfolding within Venezuela, many in the region are skeptical of Washington’s intentions—for understandable reasons.
When Maduro warned his supporters last week “don’t trust the gringos .. https://www.apnews.com/7d3d2ed7d5ae45dcad96baf0286cbfa6 ,” he evoked a long history of U.S. meddling in Latin America dating back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Gunboat diplomacy drove U.S. policy in the early 20th century. Indeed, as the historian Greg Grandin once summarized .. https://books.google.com/books?id=7OX5QaLkH-YC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q=gunboats&f=false , “by 1930, Washington had sent gunboats into Latin American ports over six thousand times, invaded Cuba, Mexico (again), Guatemala, and Honduras, fought protracted guerilla wars in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti, annexed Puerto Rico, and taken a piece of Colombia to create both the Panamanian nation and the Panama Canal.”
[INSERT: That's not including corporate pressure/action and American sanctions. Or the effect of Saudi Arabia oil gushes to lower the price of oil. Yet still many say the U.S.A., and others bear no responsibility at all for the situation in the region.]
The academic literature on regime changes paints an overwhelmingly negative picture of the prospects of success: Studies have shown that foreign-imposed regime changes do not improve political or economic relations between the intervening and target states. They rarely lead to democracy .. https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/10.1162/ISEC_a_00117 , and, regardless of whether they are conducted covertly or overtly, they increase the likelihood that the target state will experience a civil war.
Yet however ineffective a tool regime change has been, it’s one that the United States has often resorted to. Following World War II, covert action replaced gunboat diplomacy as its preferred form of intervention in the hemisphere. For instance, my recently released book, Covert Regime Change ... http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140107479480 : America’s Secret Cold War, documents 18 U.S.-backed covert regime change attempts in Latin America during the Cold War—10 of which saw U.S.-backed forces assume power. Because Washington’s role in most of these missions was quickly exposed, many of these covert operations have become lasting symbols of U.S. imperialism in the region: the 1954 Guatemalan coup that ousted the democratically elected leader Jacobo Árbenz, the 1961 failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the 1964 Brazilian military coup, the 1973 Chilean coup that gave rise to Augusto Pinochet’s military regime, and the Reagan administration’s support for anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua.
In April 2002, Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chávez, was ousted for two days in a military coup before regaining power. Afterward, Chávez accused the United States of playing a role in the coup and later claimed that the United States was trying to assassinate him. (Declassified U.S. government documents later revealed that while the CIA was aware of the 2002 coup beforehand, Washington did not back the coup and instead issued “repeated warnings that the United States will not support any extraconstitutional moves to oust Chávez.”) Nevertheless, Chávez continued to use the allegations of U.S. meddling as to paint himself a socialist folk hero and undermine his political opponents for the rest of his presidency.
Given this history, many Venezuelans remain suspicious of Washington’s motives, and only 36 percent hold a favorable view of the United States. Consequently, the Trump administration’s recognition of Guaidó is likely a double-edged sword: While it may increase his stature in the eyes of U.S. allies, it is also likely to undermine his legitimacy among Venezuelans wary of U.S. meddling.
There are other practical obstacles in the way of Washington’s hopes. To begin with, recognizing Guaidó is unlikely to bring meaningful change on its own. It is hardly news that the United States wants Maduro out, so backing Guaidó is unlikely to change the existing balance-of-power calculations of Venezuela’s key domestic players.
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