What to do about Venezuela

Systematic violation of constitution.  The government has systematically violated the national constitution it drew up itself in 1999, starting when it stacked a constituent assembly to usurp the powers of the elected congress and the supreme court.[1]  It has ceased funding any political parties save its own, the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), which has become an organ of the state and routinely uses the country’s resources. Beyond MVR, the government has created extra-constitutional private paramilitary mobs called “Bolivarian Circles” that routinely threaten, beat and even kill political opponents. The government has recently equipped, armed, and sworn in a new “reservist” army of citizen revolutionaries to act as guarantors of the revolution and act as a check to the military establishment. It has stripped the regime’s critics of basic human rights and driven hundreds of them into exile. It is squeezing the life out of the remaining pro-democracy opposition movements, even charging their leaders with “treason,” “rebellion,” and “disobedience.”

Rhetoric sets policy. Many analysts have viewed the Venezuelan president as a leftist version of the traditional Latin American military strongman—a 21^st century Juan Domingo Perón. This analysis is profoundly flawed. Anti-American rhetoric and proto-Leninist sentiments may long have been tools for electoral or domestic purposes throughout Latin America.  In the case of today’s Venezuela, they are from the get-go a formal part of the regime’s policy as well as instruments for advancing its nationalist agenda.

This assessment is borne out by the facts. In June of 1994, upon his release from prison after his failed coup, the then-cashiered lieutenant colonel traveled to Havana where he received a hero’s welcome from Fidel Castro himself. This man—defeated, fresh out of prison, broke and with no political support of any kind—was given the treatment reserved for a visiting Head of State. Castro was welcoming an old friend—an ally of many years who had provided valuable help and who held great promise for the future.

Clear objective: The undermining of all civil and democratic institutions. Since his first election in 1998, the Venezuelan president has openly and repeatedly explained his objectives. A representative example of this was a nationally broadcast speech in September 2002, where he admitted publicly that he had never been a soldier, but a revolutionary hiding inside the army, working for the revolution until the right opportunity came along.  He has narrated the story of how he kept in close contact with Venezuela’s key communist intellectuals and activists while rising through the ranks of the Venezuelan army. He has explained how they gave him books to read and how they stayed up long nights exchanging views and talking about the eventual revolution. The president admits he was an expert mole placed within the Venezuelan army with the purpose of undermining it and eventually neutralizing it as a counter-revolutionary force.

These admissions provide an understanding of the Venezuelan government’s skilled political maneuvring during the past six years. The regime has undermined all Venezuelan institutions. This has been achieved, in no small measure, thanks to its cynical grasp of how and when to conceal its true purposes – especially  when public opinion  turned against the president’s most transparently authoritarian tendencies. The Venezuelan government has pursued, from the outset, a dual strategy of “photo-op cordiality” with democratic leaders of the hemisphere while seeking to dominate the domestic Venezuelan scene and propagate revolutionary ideology throughout the Americas.