How Much of Venezuelas Crisis is Really Maduros Fault?
February 15, 2019
There are several factors for Venezuelas economic crisis, but you wouldnt
know it by listening to U.S. leaders or following corporate media, writes
Steve Ellner.
By Steve Ellner
Special to Consortium News
The recognition by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President
Joe Biden of Juan Guaidó as Venezuelan president is the latest demonstration
of the consensus in Washington over the nefariousness of the Nicolás Maduro
government. Not since Fidel Castros early years in power has a Latin
American head of state been so consistently demonized. But the 1960s was the
peak of the Cold War polarization that placed Cuba plainly in the enemy
camp, and unlike Venezuela today, that nation had a one-party system.
The scope of that consensus was evident by the recent faceoff between two
figures as far apart as President Donald Trump and Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez. In his State of the Union address, Trump attributed
Venezuelas economic crisis to the failed system of socialism. Ocasio-Cortez
responded by arguing that the Venezuelan case is an issue of authoritarian
regime versus democracy.
President Nicolás Maduro, 2016. (Cancillería del Ecuador via Flickr)
President Nicolás Maduro, 2016. (Cancillería del Ecuador via Flickr)
Taken together, the comments by Trump and Ocasio-Cortez complement one
another. According to the narrative that dominates Washington, Venezuela is
a disaster from both economic and political viewpoints. The exclusive blame
for the sorry state of the economy and for the countrys allegedly
authoritarian rule lays with Maduro and his cohorts.
Not surprisingly, the mainstream media have refrained from questioning these
assumptions. Most of their reporting puts the accent mark on state
incompetence and corruption, while skirting the detrimental effects of the
economic sanctions implemented by the Trump administration.
In addition, many on the left point to the economic sanctions as
responsible, at least in part, for the nations pressing economic
difficulties, but few critically examine the mainstreams characterization
of the state of Venezuelan democracy. Some oppose the sanctions but join the
opposition in bashing the Maduro government.
A recent article by Gabriel Hetland, for instance, posted by Jacobin and
NACLA: Report on the Americas claims that Maduro holds onto power through
authoritarian means. The author then turns to the nations economic
difficulties by arguing that the primary driver is the governments
mismanagement of its oil revenue and corruption.
During my participation in a two-month Venezuelan solidarity tour late last
year in the U.S. and Canada, I often heard the statement that knowing the
specifics about Venezuelas economic and political problems is not essential
because the bottom line is the illegality of Trumps sanctions and threats
of military intervention. But does international law end the discussion?
If it could be proven that Maduro is a dictator and a totally incompetent
ruler, would people enthusiastically rally behind his government in
opposition to foreign intervention? I dont think so. Undoubtedly, it is
necessary to take a close look at both political and economic fronts because
the effectiveness of solidarity efforts hinges on the specifics. The
dominant narrative about Maduro and its assumptions cannot be taken at face
value, even while there are elements of truth in it.
How Far Back Do the Economic Problems Go?
The Venezuelan opposition frequently argues that neither the sanctions nor
depressed international oil prices are to blame for the nations economic
difficulties, only the mismanagement of the economy. At best, declining oil
prices contributed to the problems but was not a root cause. Some opposition
analysts deny or minimize the importance of oil prices as a factor by
pointing out that the economies of other OPEC nations are as dependent on
oil exports as that of Venezuela but have not plummeted to the same levels.
The oppositions central argument here is that Venezuelas dire economic
problems predate Trumps implementation of sanctions and even predate the
sharp decline in international oil prices beginning mid-2014. That is,
government follies with disastrous effects came first, followed by the
decline in oil prices and then the sanctions. Two-time presidential
candidate for the opposition Henrique Capriles claimed that the crisis began
prior to the fall of oil prices but for a long time was ignored, repressed
and covered up by the government.
Petare, Caracas, 2014. (The Photographer via Wikimedia)
Petare, Caracas, 2014. (The Photographer via Wikimedia)
There are two fallacies in this line of thinking. In the first place, the
so-called economic war against Venezuela, which eventually included the
Trump-imposed sanctions, preceded everything else. Washington almost from
the beginning of Hugo Chávezs presidency in 1999 did not stand by idly
while he defied the neoliberal Washington consensus as well as U.S.
hegemony. Washingtons hostility seriously harmed the economy in multiple
ways.
For instance, the George W. Bush administration banned the sale of spare
parts for the Venezuelan Air Forces costly F-16 fighter jets in 2006,
forcing the country to turn to Russia for the purchase of 24 Sukhoi SU-30
fighter planes. Furthermore, the international sanctions did not begin with
Trump, but rather Obama in 2015 which were justified by his executive order
calling Venezuela a threat to U.S. national security. That order was
followed by an avalanche of pull-outs from Venezuela by multinationals
including Ford, Kimberly Clark, General Motors, Kelloggs and nearly all the
international airlines.
In the second place, oil prices under Maduro have not only been low since
2014 but nosedived, just the opposite of what happened under Chávez. This is
particularly problematic because high prices create expectations and
commitments that then get transformed into frustration and anger when they
precipitously drop. Prices are currently slightly over half of what they
were before the decline, in spite of their modest recovery since 2017.
Three factors explain Venezuelas economic woes, not one: low oil prices,
the economic war against Venezuela, and mistaken policies. Prominent in
the latter category is Maduros lethargic response to the problem of the
widening disparity between official prices set by the government on certain
items in short supply and their prices on the black market. The government
has encountered major problems in distributing basic commodities forcing
Venezuelans to buy those same goods on the higher-priced black market. The
system is conducive to corruption and contraband as many of the products
that are supposed to be retailed at reduced prices end up being sold on the
black market or sent off to neighboring Colombia.
The Dictatorship Label Repeated a Thousand Times
The media are in desperate need of good fact-checkers in their reporting on
Venezuela. Statements about Venezuelan democracy range from blatantly
misleading to accurate with most lying between the two extremes. An example
of the former is the Guardians claim that the Venezuelan government
controls most TV and radio stations which transmit a constant stream of
pro-Maduro propaganda. In fact, of those who tune into Venezuelan TV
channels, 80 percent watch the three major private channels (Venevisión,
Televén, and Globovisión) which cannot be seriously accused of being
pro-government.
At the other extreme is Hetlands assertion in his Jacobin-NACLA piece that
the decision to strip Henrique Capriles of his right to run for office as a
result of corruption charges was politically motivated. The statement is
accurate. Actually, the move was worse than what Hetland discusses. For some
time before that, Capriles, whose political positions have vacillated
considerably, favored a less intransigent stance toward the government than
those on the radical right, which has largely dominated the opposition of
late. The move, in effect, played into the hands of the radicals and
undermined efforts to bring about a much-needed national dialogue.
Those who call Maduro a dictator make two basic assertions. In the first
place, the government is alleged to have brutally repressed the four-month
long peaceful demonstrations designed to bring about regime change carried
out in 2014 and then 2017. In fact, the protests were hardly peaceful. Six
National Guardsmen and two policemen were killed in 2014 and protestors
fired into an air force base in Caracas and attacked a number of police
stations in Táchira in 2017. There are different versions of the
circumstances surrounding the numerous fatalities in 2014 and 2017, thus
requiring an impartial analysis, which the media has hardly attempted to
present. Police repression is reprehensible and repression there was on
both occasions regardless of circumstances, but the context has to be
brought into the picture.
Smoke and fires, Caracas, 2014. (Prensa Presidencial, Govt. of Venezuela via
Wikimedia)
Smoke and fires, Caracas, 2014. (Prensa Presidencial, Govt. of Venezuela via
Wikimedia)
In the second place, the opposition denies that Maduros re-election in May
of last year was legitimate because the election was called for by the
National Constituent Assembly (ANC), whose existence allegedly has no legal
basis. One of the nations foremost constitutional lawyers, Hermánn Escarrá,
has defended the ANCs legality, while others formulate plausible arguments
to the contrary. Again, the mainstream media has failed to present both
sides or to objectively analyze the issue. Nearly all the opposition parties
that refused to participate in the presidential elections in 2018, however,
did participate in the gubernatorial elections of the preceding year that
were convened by the same ANC. The justification for Juan Guaidós
self-proclamation as Venezuelan president on Jan. 23 was predicated on the
illegitimacy of the ANC.
Violation of democratic norms and cases of police repression do not in
themselves demonstrate that a government is authoritarian or dictatorial. If
they did, the United States would hardly be considered democratic. The real
defining issue is whether electoral fraud takes place in which votes are not
correctly counted. That accusation has been largely absent in the
controversy over recent elections, even among leaders of the radical
opposition.
The mainstream media and Washington politicians freely call Maduro an
autocrat a dictator and authoritarian. More than anything that is said
about Venezuelas economic difficulties, the use of these terms has had a
profound effect on policy making. A nations economic problems should not
justify intervention of any sort. The real issue of contention, therefore,
is the state of Venezuelan democracy as depicted by the dominant narrative.
Amazingly enough, there is no major actor in mainstream politics and the
mainstream media willing to challenge that narrative with all its
questionable claims regarding the Maduro government.
Steve Ellner is a retired professor from Venezuelas University of the East
and is currently associate managing editor of Latin American Perspectives.
Among his over a dozen books on Latin America is his edited The Pink Tide
Experiences: Breakthroughs and Shortcomings in Twenty-First Century Latin
America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
