Dilemma of Repression for Security Forces
At The Monkey Cage, a Sociology Ph.D. student at Yale wrote about the timing of the coup in Sudan, which has lessons for Venezuela.
My research, which draws from a detailed analysis of the police mutiny which overthrew Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in 2011 and from a comparison with the Russian Revolution of 1917, found that most soldiers and police officers facing mass protests defect primarily as a response to the dilemma of repression. They can afford to remain loyal only so long as their job does not require them to kill large numbers of people. When obedience to the regime demands unconscionable acts, rebellion is often the easiest way forward, particularly for reserve units who are rarely deployed for repression.This is familiar because it characterized Venezuela after 1989. Hugo Chávez and other officers resented being told to repress. They did not overthrow the government right then, but started plotting.
Thinking of today, it's useful to think in these terms but unfortunately it is not an analysis that facilitates prediction too well. We will only know when the army hits the breaking point after it's broken. But it does point to reasons why Nicolás Maduro is not arresting Juan Guaidó. Such a move would spark resistance and protests that could take security forces beyond their threshold of acceptable repression.
Unlike Sudan, we don't seem to see signs of security forces splintering in Venezuela. The media has focused a lot on defections but that's an entirely different animal. In the choices of exit, voice, and loyalty, "exit" has the least effect in this context. So far in Venezuela it's been mostly loyalty.
3 comments:
Man, Sudan and Venezuela are very different situations.
Bashir ran out of money for subsidies for food and petrol, and he had no source of legitmacy otherwise, and had no real friends internal and external. Given that the Sudanese military made a business decision, Sudan isn't over yet.
Venezuela understands itself to be at siege. And while I know there is that desire to elide the race element here--but most everyone in the ranks and bureaucracy understands that defeat isn't going to be but a start of a rather vengeance-minded white supremacist government given lots of weapons US & Europe to carry out its plans. There just isn't going to be a capitulation absent a complete exhaustion or war, and more likely the latter. Sure, one could say that's a paranoid point of view, but the US simply hasn't given much oxygen to an alternative possible future. At least someone told Marco Rubio to shut the ^$% up.
And it's fundamentally ridiculous to think that Maduro would have problems finding the police to arrest Guaido, or the troops to repress any demonstration, as needed. Full stop, Guaido doesn't have the public support to be viable as any sort of rallying flag, and he technically isn't acting prez, anyways. Guaido is just a useless bull's tit who's ranking on Maduro's Big List of Problems is pretty darn low at this point.
Obviously they are different situations, just as 1989 Venezuela was different, but the calculus is very similar. CAP certainly found people who would repress but he alienated a lot of others. My point is not that Maduro couldn't arrest Guaidó but that it risks splintering the security forces. I disagree with your last paragraph--if it were true Guaidó would already be in jail.
To the extent that Guaido has any *domestic* cover, it's from the national business class leadership wanting to preserve options, and Maduro going along with it.
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