Roots of Venezuela’s crisis run deeper than Chávez, Maduro

The Canadian government, the Lima Group to which it belongs, and Venezuela’s opposition have questioned the official results of Venezuela’s gubernatorial elections of Oct. 15 and variously criticized its government for serious human rights violations, massive corruption, and the mismanagement of the country’s economy. Whatever the faults of Venezuela’s government, and it certainly has its faults, the country’s current polarized impasse might be better understood by also looking at the history and character of the country’s political opposition. To begin, when Venezuelans go to the polls, at least half of the electorate is old enough to remember the 1989 “Caracazo,” the massive and violent urban revolt that was provoked by International Monetary Fund-recommended austerity measures of the then ruling parties and groups that today form the opposition. The official tally of 276 dead was questioned by many who argued that more than 2,000 people lost their lives. Whatever the actual toll, the then government’s response to the riots and looting was harsh enough to be condemned by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights eventually found that the government was responsible for egregious human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings. Turning to the issue of corruption, it tends to be presented as an acute problem that emerged under the “Bolivarian Revolution” that kept Hugo Chávez in power (through internationally observed elections) from December 1998 until his death in 2013. However, these accusations call to mind the shocked amazement of a Bolivian colleague who had spent a week in Caracas in the early 1980s: the Venezuelans, he announced to me as he arrived in Canada, “are writing new chapters in the old history of corruption in Latin America.” Oxford University-based economic historian Rosemary Thorp, in a book published prior to Chávez’s ascent to power, made the same point by referring to a historic “culture confuses the political and the personal and sees control of government in terms of access to sources of patronage.” Patronage tended to stick to the top layers of society during the governments run by today’s opposition parties and groups; it was “democratized,” so to speak, under the Chávez presidencies, which spent profusely on housing, health, and education during the boom years of high commodity prices in the first decade of this century. It did so with visible impacts on poverty reduction in a country where, to cite Thorp, “income is channelled through government” in an “extreme version of a rentier economy,” that is, an economy based on the extraction of rent from natural resources. And that brings us to the issue of economic mismanagement. Neither Chávez’s predecessors nor his own governments were capable of creating strong and well-functioning public institutions, nor reducing Venezuela’s dependency on petroleum exports, despite many optimistic declarations and even expert plans to support economic diversification. Even everyday consumption items, including basic food, were imported by the time Chávez came to power. Roughly speaking, for some time, petroleum has accounted for some 95 per cent of total export revenues, and that export dependency actually increased during the Chávez governments. Political and social crisis broke out when petroleum prices dropped in the 1980s (when the Caracazo took place). President Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela’s people face an even deeper crisis today, after an export bust that followed an unusually long period of unprecedented boom in global commodity markets. In short, Venezuela’s much touted pre-Chávez democratic history and economic development patterns were deeply flawed. Precisely because today’s problems are rooted not only in recent but in past decades of corruption, mismanagement, and rights violations (albeit of different kinds), regime change will not solve them. It may even make them worse if widespread violence breaks out in the current situation of acute polarization between pro-government forces and a divided opposition that has not been able provide a unified or credible leadership that might enjoy widespread popular support. Rather than sanctioning individuals (as Canada and others have done), or taking punitive economic action and threatening military intervention (as Washington has done), all—governments, international banks, civil-society organizations, churches—should concentrate on identifying ways to promote peace, dialogue, and respect for human rights, and to assist the Maduro government in relieving the suffering of Venezuela’s people during a terrible economic crisis provoked by the dramatic bust of international petroleum prices. Sanctions and threats will not help in creating space for dialogue with the Maduro government or between the government and opposition in Venezuela. Liisa L. North is a professor emeritus of political science at York University. The Hill Times