More than six years ago we denounced at the OAS that Venezuela was suffering from a humanitarian crisis, we denounced systematic violations of human rights and crimes against humanity, the beginning of an incipient migration crisis, extrajudicial executions, torture, political persecution, and the arbitrary disqualification of candidates. We were deemed liars, radicals, at the service of spurious interests, opposed to the union of the Latin American peoples, and much more.
Time gives things their right place. The denunciations were endorsed by subsequent reports from other specialized bodies and by the suffering of the people who had to emigrate and bring the truth about this cruel reality to almost every country in the hemisphere. At this point, in all the countries of the region, someone knows a Venezuelan person who had to emigrate due to those denounced conditions.
Of course, those who take reality as part of a war of narratives want to place the Venezuelan crisis alongside other crises, problems or difficulties that other countries in the region may experience. But this is not a war of narratives, and denying the suffering of millions of people is evidence of an almost absurd ignorance or profound hypocrisy.
There are no parameters to place the biggest migration crisis in the history of the hemisphere alongside other regional crises. A crisis of a global dimension with numbers similar to the migration crisis in Syria after years of conflict or comparable to Ukraine, the victim of a war of aggression. It is impossible to compare other regional situations with a humanitarian crisis that has been the origin of this almost incomprehensible migration crisis for a country that is one of the richest in natural resources in the hemisphere and whose people suffer from sky-high malnutrition and child mortality and the lack to access medicines and food, which has led the country to have 9 million people hungry or at risk of hunger, according to specialized agencies.
It is impossible to compare other crises with this crisis of systematic human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by the regime, which has led to the opening of an investigation by the International Criminal Court for the first time in a Latin American country.
Definitively, all these variables lead us to say that it is ridiculous to compare the Venezuelan crisis with any other crisis in the hemisphere, whether in a quantitative or qualitative dimension.
It has not exactly been the lack of dialogue processes that has affected the country’s political situation, immersed in a deep crisis of deinstitutionalization, lack of guarantees and individual freedoms, and administrative and productive inefficiency. Of course, the accumulation of all these crises can be grouped into a single crisis: the superlative political crisis in which a dictatorial regime was imposed on the country.
There have been more than 10 dialogue processes; obviously, we have participated in some of them, either as the OAS or in a personal capacity.
We have sought solutions from early on to try to avoid reaching this precipice.
Things have not happened because of those of us who denounced that they were going to happen and warned of the wrong path. We always warned that no political situation in the country can be resolved with the continuation of human rights violations and the extreme weakening of political and economic institutions that also lead to productive inefficiency.
The problem has resided in those who sheltered that regime in those phases of deterioration, crisis, collapse, or breakdown of the constitutional order that the country is experiencing today.
Venezuela continues down the path of destruction, lack of guarantees, and lack of options for people’s lives. We still record political prisoners, tortures, extrajudicial executions, and criminal activities such as drug trafficking, illegal mining, smuggling, or corruption.
Deinstitutionalization has reached completely absurd extremes, illustrated by the fact that public health institutions are incapable or inadequate to meet the basic health needs of the population. The country’s food institutions are absolutely incapable of solving the problems that still afflict the population, and force the people to continue leaving the country in desperation. Public security institutions are definitely far from resolving the problems of violence and crime that affect the country, and we have seen how the Ministry of National Defense has been unable to attend to the territorial control of the country and the protection of territorial integrity, to the Bolivarian Army took a beating when confronted with FARC dissidents in Apure.
When we reach that point of deinstitutionalization, we can use the argument of the lack of existing capacities in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to solve the problems of the population. It is clear that something does work, and that is an apparatus of repression that works horrifically well.
We must add that the productive apparatus has been almost completely destroyed, despite the economic-financial bubble directly influenced by the money that had to return to the country for (more) safety after the sanctions began. This return of assets from abroad, where they probably felt unsafe, has brought a logic of exacerbation of inequalities between those who have nothing to eat and the luxury car dealers; between those who do not have medicines and the clients of the luxury stores in today’s Caracas, or between the customers of the luxury restaurants and those who suffer the violation of their human rights at the hands of those who exploit the resources of the country in the framework of illegal mining.
The sufferings of the people hurt a lot. The destruction of the productive apparatus reaches the point that even though the world needs Venezuelan oil because of the war of aggression against Ukraine, the country does not have the capacity to produce it. How bad does the region need that oil, especially the Caricom countries!
A people that lives in the hell of a never forking path. It is natural to conclude that dialogue remains the only hope for a forking path. Dialogue, and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The thing is that, in every dialogue process, the objective of ousting Maduro has been pursued by the forces opposed to the regime or, in many cases, by the mediators themselves, which is probably not the most viable, achievable or realistic strategic objective. This adds up to the intransigence of Rodriguez and his negotiators and the conditioning of each negotiation.
Definitively, Maduro was underestimated many times in his capacities for survival, political management and diplomacy, and consolidated his strength despite an origin with very little legitimacy, which ended up being lost in the following years. The objective of ousting Maduro transformed each negotiation into a zero-sum game that ended up proving impossible: neither the removal of Maduro through negotiations nor an election that could mean his departure from power.
Given that such an objective still seems unrealistic, a negotiation in this context must obviously focus on how Maduro will continue rather than how he will be removed.
This implies cohabitation. Cohabitation is an exercise for which I have hardly seen anyone prepared in Venezuela. But that makes it even more necessary, in the sense that it implies the exercise of real political dialogue, shared institutionality, and shared State powers. Sharing the executive power is complex and very difficult. In a context of permanent tension, it has to be regulated in such detail as the swiss formula of a collegiate system of government. The best regional example is the 1952 Constitution of Uruguay.
Sharing means checks and balances. Without them, cohabitation can become complicity. The cohabitation format discussed in a dialogue process must provide guarantees of checks and balances for those who cohabit. Otherwise, it will be one more frustration.
Without a scheme for sharing power from its base that ensures the effective participation of Chavismo and Madurismo, Guaidó’s group, and other actors, the joint and coordinated action for common objectives toward the future is essentially impossible. The ruling party must assume that, without the opposition, Venezuelan society will continue to be broken, divided, and socially and geographically disintegrated; while the opposition must assume that, without Chavismo and Madurismo, the same thing would happen.
It is very difficult to participate in a questioned electoral process that simply ensures the continuity of what we have now under no or doubtful legitimacy that obviously hopes to have the complacency of many.
Confronted with the all or nothing, the regime says “all”; between the majority or the minority, the former is generally chosen, but that means that the institutional life of the country can normalize or begin to normalize in certain spaces.
From no or doubtful legitimacy, it could move into possible legitimacy. That would open a new path, it would open the hope for the forking path. Otherwise, an entire country will continue to march down a never forking path in the hell of an impoverished, inefficient country marked by human rights violations, migration and humanitarian crises, crimes against humanity, and organized crime.
Translated by José Rafael Medina
