Sunday, January 27, 2019

U.S.-Centric Views of Venezuela

I've written about the habit in the United States of viewing U.S.-Latin American relations from a U.S.-centric perspective. It is bolstered by leftist Latin American governments, who find it convenient to blame their problems on someone else. This has come fully into view for the Venezuelan crisis so I wanted to respond to the types of arguments I've seen. I was reminded of this because of a letter being circulated by U.S. scholars criticizing the United States while removing all responsibility from Nicolás Maduro himself.

1. The Trump administration is orchestrating a coup. I will leave aside the "coup" concept, which would need more discussion. But this particular framing bothers me because in one fell swoop it relegates millions of Venezuelans, years of protests, countless opposition meetings, etc. into "passive puppets of a few individuals in the White House." I always discuss this with regard to the 1973 Chilean coup as well. The U.S. did not create the coup. Yes, it did everything it could to encourage it and made clear there was a green light of support, but the plans were Chilean. In Venezuela, what we're seeing unfold is Venezuelan.

2. This is all about the U.S. wanting Venezuelan oil. The U.S. already has Venezuelan oil and there is no threat of that changing. Period.

3. U.S. sanctions created the economic crisis. They certainly made it worse very recently by making it much harder for the government to move money internationally, but it was already really bad and had been that way for years because of mismanagement and rampant corruption/theft.

4. This is just like Panama in 1989, Chile in 1973, and Guatemala in 1954. Actually, even those were all different from each other. This is too different from a Central American invasion for those to make much sense. Chile is a better comparison, though Salvador Allende won a fully free and fair election, while Maduro did not (the Chilean opposition did, however, invoke the constitution to bring in the military to give it a veil of legality). Regardless, see #1 above. The critical point is about green lights, not control or imperial puppeteering.

This is a Venezuelan crisis in Venezuela. The U.S. is a powerful country that affects events on the ground, but it did not create them and is not controlling them.

In short, we can be highly critical of U.S. policy while simultaneously denouncing Nicolás Maduro for contributing to the destruction of his own country. Those two can (and in my mind should) co-exist.


5 comments:

shah8 11:42 AM  

For my part, I think there is a countervailing serious issue in that there are lots of white men in good professional jobs who are seriously high on their own supply of self-righteousness (especially on twitter).

The *means do MATTER you GUYS* Who's doing the program matters, you guys. And above all, you have to care about *THE LIKELY CONSEQUENCES* Let's not get all absentee dad about this like we do Brazil.

The basic problem here is that the US wants regime change, and so do the Venezuelans. We have an obstinate, thoroughly rotted establishment that needs to be pulled apart and allow new Chavista-type parties (like we have Peronist and other such personality cultish parties) to reform. That tends to be a hard lift.

That lift has always been made harder because the US has always insisted on a change that brings maximum benefits to US geostrategic interest and the West's multinational corps, and which would probably bring minimal benefits at best to the average Venezuelan and substantial risks of negative issues like death squads supporting a new, but unpopular regime. Had the US ever been interested in a somewhat smaller slice, successfully enticing the Venezuelan military to unseat Maduro would have happened a while ago.

A basic impediment to Venezuelans successfully doing a regime change on its own, has always been that the opposition is mostly a nasty crew of rich ne'erdowells, with a side of nonentities scrambling for a bit of patronage, and anyone who might actually do positive work gets no exposure. So Venezuelans have consistently had a choice of a devil authoritarian government who has a minimal obligation to the populace through it's organization of meager deliveries of goods and services in return for loyalty, or another devil that they know reasonably well and know that they'd be hostile to large sections of the civil society. The US, and the West in general, has played a role in ensuring that such a devil remains the only alternative through patronage networks.

Most of the opposition has little interest in campaigning or making any sort of appeal that bring Venezuelans onto their side (if it meant any actual resources might go to them), and the US establishment certainly doesn't want anyone who might have an inconveniently nationalist backbone. Most of these guys couldn't win any national elections, and they really hate anyone (oh, like say, Capriles Rodriguez) who might succeed, and getting into power without a real election has always seemed like a goal for most of these people.

Which is why this current gambit with Guaido just reifies and amplifies the toxic symbiosis between the US and Venezuelan right. For the US to simply announce one of their membership to be president, and hand them state assets--that's a dream come true and a validations of all their prejudices.

So heading back to "white guys with nice professional jobs in academia, think tanks, and gov't"--> You are obligated to be serious about GOOD OUTCOMES, not good performance of righteousness. Getting rid of Maduro is only a good outcome if you actually get Venezuelan democracy with competitive elections and a recovering economy.

shah8 12:14 PM  

Look at the means!

It's not moral, pragmatic, or particularly legal, and this general set of negativity is very likely to reinforce one another.

Guaido is not really legally allowed to be Venezuelan president because the laws basically talks about it in the sense that we do the 25th amendment here in the US, and Maduro isn't gone or incapacitated. It's not part of any impeachment process either.

Sure, we can usefully ignore the impracticalities of legal tendentiousness and just treat it as sort of a fast impeachment, but that requires the person who is president to be well known, trusted, and obviously in a caretaker mode before new elections. Guaido is none of these things. From what I understand, people outside of the Vargas area he represents do not know who he is or what he stood for, *really*. Few people really has the opportunity to meet him or see him in person, and I'd bet that includes a number of people with local power who probably should have access. Even fewer people know him over a long enough stretch to even trust what they know of him. This is not a recipe for internal order, guys.

More than that, Guaido speaking as if he'd be a real president and make all of these permanent moves like privatizations and debt restructuring, etc, etc, before anyone really has a chance to vote on anything or even have a real election...That isn't going to fly, not really. Especially in the sense that the Venezuelan military is going to want to be consulted, not just grant some desultory amnesty

Beyond the issues of a nonentity being president, the means of empowering him through the external seizure of assets and giving it to Guaido to dispose of as need is a really, really bad legal precedent, and very likely to cause long term dispute and bad feelings. We simply do not want rando geopolitical outfits naming their supporters in foreign countries the leaders and seizing external assets in their names. That's a recipe for a pernicious deglobalization.

Lastly, we need to get serious about democratic politics itself. The cynicism surrounding democracy in general in the world today is killing it, and it really feels like we're headed into new authoritarian order, sometimes--until the sheer expense of authoritarianism governance, especially in the terms of lost consumer/business demand undermines it. Moreover, the world needs generally legit governments to be able to coordinate a number of serious global challenges in finance, resource use, markets, and global warming.

The example in Brazil where white guys with professional job ignore that the leading candidate gets arrested and is a political prisoner, ignore that the Brazillian military leadership has killed a judge and directly threatens other judges if they make decisions based on Brazilian law not to their advantage, ignore the sheer dubiousness and unfairness of Brazil's election, and ignore Bolsonaro's clear unfitness for the job (instead pretending that he's an asshole). There are consequences, the chances of genocide are up, the chances that critical stretches of Amazon might be cut down are up (and that we might all literally have less air to breath), the ability of Brazil to participate and help stabilize the world order is down.

Talking about how Maduro is horrible isn't everything, and doesn't justify everything. Talking about corruption being horrible isn't everything, and doesn't justify everything. YOU ARE OBLIGATED TO CARE ABOUT WHAT ARE LIKELY OUTCOMES. Not just preening self-righteousness.

Greg Weeks 12:54 PM  

I agree with a lot of that and one thing that occurs to me is that perhaps for the first time ever, the Venezuelan opposition came up with a brilliant idea. They pushed Guaidó forward as someone who is young and "untainted" (close associate of Leopoldo López but that gets little attention). So critics (definitely in the US but maybe also in Venezuela) get stuck on the sterile debate of US imperialism while ignoring the bigger question of what Guaidó would actually do if he got control over the state. The letter written by a bunch of US scholars mentioned him once only in passing.

But speaking as a white guy with a professional job, we actually vary, in large part by what kind of professional job we have.

Alfredo 9:54 PM  

To think that this attempted coup is a "Venezuelan" thing only or mostly is not only laughable but sad and disingenuous....the trail leads to Washington most correctly...

Michael,  7:19 PM  

It is naive to imagine that Maduro lacks popular support in Venezuela. It is also naive to state that Maduro is only in power because of the military.
Most Venezuelans would see what the whole thing is about Oil for America. American foreign aid does not come free of charge John Bolton is already talking about Venezuelan oil.
The 1st appointments to the state oil companies is the only action the said president has made. And 17 of 18 people who were appointed to oversee the oil assets belonging to Venezuela are based and currently residing in the USA.
If at all America felt the Maduro was not properly elected why did they fail to call for new elections, instead they seem worried about Venezuelan oil assets.

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