Behind the apparent stagnation, several things in Venezuela are currently in motion. Amid the crisis, political disaffection has reached both the government and the opposition. For this reason, both blocks, weakened to different degrees, have incentives to start new negotiations after several failed attempts
A new and uncertain process of political negotiation between the government and the opposition is being prepared in Venezuela. To assess its chances of success, one should first ponder what is similar and what is different from previous experiences this time. It is important to underline that the initiative occurs as a resumption – at least methodologically – of the effort undertaken in 2019 in Barbados under the facilitation of Norway, whose experts have been involved in two-way consultations for several months. This indicates that the process is being resumed from some of the advances made in the field of trust-building, if not between the actors, at least in the mechanisms for setting the agenda and operating rules.
However, the political circumstances of 2019 and 2021 are entirely different, and this, in my opinion, could favor progress in a negotiation of this nature, provided that the political actors identify this difference and adjust their demands and strategies.
It looks similar, but it is not the same
From a very superficial point of view, the Venezuelan situation seems to be summarized in an inertial stagnation in which the government of Nicolás Maduro resists, undaunted, amid the devastation of the daily lives of millions of people, while the opposition tries to deal with its own strategic contradictions. But behind this apparent stagnation, it is possible to identify a series of circumstances that allow us to understand why political actors today are willing to restart a negotiation process that in the past failed over and over again.
One of them affects the opposition and the government alike: let’s call it general disaffection with politics. It is commonplace to point out the depoliticization that authoritarian regimes entail and provoke, which reduces citizenship to private life or mere survival. But in Chavismo, this effect coexists with its own populist contradiction: electoral metabolism is an unavoidable variable in its operating system, not only in terms of political legitimation but also as a method of distribution of power quotas among the constituent parts of this political archipelago.
The poor result of the 2020 parliamentary elections, with the ruling party running alone or badly accompanied by small sectors detached from the opposition coalition, is a very worrying sign of weakness for honoring the “historic project” and, more pragmatically, for the bases of support of the power itself. This makes it more dependent on alliances with the military and with partners that are not necessarily very reliable. Certainly, the government took full control of the National Assembly but it exposed its internal rifts.
This is nothing new, of course, considering the miserable levels of popularity that the government has enjoyed for several years. But this context acquires a different, paradoxical strategic significance: a weakened opposition no longer functions as a threat capable of unifying the Chavista bloc. Maduro must now pay attention to an infinity of contained demands, rebuild “the project,” offer results, and achieve a level of governance that requires making concessions to rebuild the ruinous condition of the State apparatus. The political function of uniting and distributing quotas of power that systemic corruption fulfills now bears higher costs than benefits for the power because it has destroyed management capacities. In the same way, tolerance towards irregular but until recently useful partners has meant the loss of territorial control in critical areas of the country and highlighted the operational limitations of the Armed Forces and its chain of command.
For the opposition the news is just as bad: its ability to capitalize on the enormous popular discontent has decreased to all-time lows and it has lost political initiative amid strategic inertia. I will not make a review of the conditions and circumstances that led to this state of affairs, but we can affirm that the disappearance of the instance of unitary political direction known as Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (Democratic Unity Roundtable), which started in 2016 and accelerated after the formation of the “interim government” in 2019, was decisive because it prevented the metabolization of important differences over the strategies to promote political change.
The failure of the dominant vision, built on the thesis of “maximum pressure” leveraged by US sanctions, both against Venezuela and government officials, and regional diplomacy. All this was supposed to cause horizontal rifts (between power groups, especially within the military) and/or vertical rifts (in the form of mass mobilizations). But none of this happened and the rifts that appeared within the opposition were cleverly exploited by the regime in its attempt to legitimize the 2020 parliamentary elections, which saw the participation of a tiny “new opposition”, described as “moderate” in contrast to the “extremist” mainstream opposition. So far, the roughly 20 seats of the “new opposition” coalition (against 253 of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela), which has recently been renamed the Democratic Alliance, have not altered the status quo in the new National Assembly.
However, centrifugal dynamics are not limited to this group. On the occasion of the decision not to participate in the 2020 parliamentary elections made by most of the political parties in the opposition, discrete moves began to be made within each of the parties grouped around the “interim government” of Juan Guaidó (Voluntad Popular, Primero Justicia, Acción Democrática, Un Nuevo Tiempo, La Causa R, etc.), which pressed for a redefinition of the strategic course towards the reconstruction of the conditions for electoral participation, considering the forthcoming regional and municipal elections scheduled for November 2021. Since then, other factors, such as social leaders and new groups of activists, have burst onto the public scene and subscribed to the demand for reconfiguration of the strategy for political change that the leadership of these parties, together with the “interim government,” collects and answers to in a new proposal called the “National Salvation Agreement.”
The new theory of change is based on an agenda for negotiations with Chavismo that covers four areas: competitive general elections, humanitarian aid, a vaccination plan, and political guarantees for all. And along with this, the progressive lifting of sanctions according to progress in the agreements.
Eppur si muove
To assess the possibilities of this new negotiation, the previous frame must be completed with two elements that in my opinion could mark the success or failure of the process: the activation of organized civil society actors on the political scene and the signals that the government has sent regarding its willingness to give up part of its hegemonic control over the institutions.
In recent years, many civil society organizations have grappled with the complex humanitarian emergency facing the country. Humanitarian action, which must occur under internationally accepted principles of neutrality and universality, has particular characteristics in Venezuela due to the very nature of the emergency: its origin is eminently political, unlike other cases where it is the result of natural disasters or armed conflicts.
Official public and economic policies have led to a sharp deterioration in the quality of life indicators since at least 2015. The local work of humanitarian and human rights NGOs has required the development of skills for mediation and micro-negotiation with the government, and with political actors in general. And nowadays, a series of organizations are seeking to enhance their capacities for political advocacy in the search for a democratic and negotiated solution that emphasizes the recovery of institutions and the rules of the political game, based on basic consensus on democratic values and respect for human rights.
Fundamentally grouped under the initiative of the Civic Forum – the most visible of several initiatives – NGOs, trade unions, business and union organizations, and youth and academic movements have built some spaces for advocacy and catalysis that have mobilized the political sectors and advanced concrete proposals for political-institutional agreements that pave the way for high-level political accords.
The history of the relations between civil society and the political sphere in Venezuela is extremely complicated and, as in the rest of Latin America, not exempt from corporate motivations. At the same time, the history of these relations under Chavismo has been particularly difficult, but even in that case, it has been possible to raise awareness about the importance of autonomous action, which does not mean neutrality given that the objectives of democratization and reinstitutionalization are political in themselves and take account of the essential role that political actors play in negotiated solutions.
For its part, the Maduro government is determined to regain its capacity to govern and began to take some risks in January 2020, for example, by opening up some spaces for dialogue and negotiation with civil organizations and some political actors. These interactions are not the only signs sent from the ruling power: a set of reforms has been implemented, in practice and without much fanfare, at the economic and fiscal level to improve national revenue; the de facto dollarization of the economy was formalized; progress was made in a project to create special economic zones, which has a strong resemblance to the Chinese concept of “one country, two systems”, and other unprecedented concessions were made, such as the authorization of the operation of the World Food Programme in the country, which implies the recognition of the humanitarian tragedy suffered by the population. But all this occurs in a context in which hostile and repressive gestures against organizations and individuals do not cease and corruption and general misery are exacerbated amid the terrible handling of the pandemic.
Several spaces for “sectoral negotiations” are currently open, including conversations with the main business union, Fedecámaras, under the agenda of influencing economic policies, or the possible creation of a humanitarian coordination body with organizations to ensure conditions of respect and government support for the rules of humanitarian action. There is also progress in the restart of the so-called tripartite dialogue between employers, unions, and the government under the agreements with the International Labor Organization (ILO), which has threatened lawsuits against the Maduro government for serious violations of the right to work and a living wage. A less promising case is the Technical Board for vaccination, in which health experts, members of the government, and representatives of the “interim government” participate. In a fairly predictable logic, the government keeps politicizing the issue of vaccination and, far from agreeing to international assistance for the financing and supply of vaccines through the Technical Board, has preferred to appeal to its allegations that the financial sanctions prevent it from complying with the vaccination plan, which, by the way, has not been made public.
However, the most important effect might come from the appointment of a new National Electoral Council (CNE), whose composition is less unbalanced because it involved the participation of electoral and political experts nominated by civil society organizations specialized in electoral matters and, above all, took place following the legal procedures. This was possible under negotiations between various political actors, especially former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles Radonsky, civil society organizations, and political agents of the Maduro government, in what continues to be a suitable space for negotiations that could lead the new Electoral Council, still under the control of Chavismo, to engage in a program of reforms that could substantially improve the institutional conditions for the next elections. This would serve as an incentive for the electoral participation of the large opposition parties.
This issue touches a central nerve of the strategy of the opposition grouped around the “interim government”, which for now has failed to answer on its participation in those elections or clarify whether it will propose electoral reforms as part of the agenda of the negotiations facilitated by Norway.
There is no doubt that the government’s concessions do not come from a sudden democratic consciousness but the belief that giving oxygen to the electoral path will exacerbate the current contradictions within the opposition regarding the participation or not in the elections. There is no doubt, either, that part of the government’s drive to promote simultaneous sectoral negotiations comes from a calculation that seeks to suffocate the opposition political leadership so that it abstains from taking part in them. But the political fact is that these are opportunities or gaps through which it is possible to advance towards agreements that give shape to the democratic political game that one aspires to, and to that extent, they also pose the risk for the regime of advancing reforms that precipitate the transformation of the system.
The international realignment
As the third set of factors, we must bear in mind that the geopolitical dynamics have changed, especially after the inauguration of Joe Biden, with the geostrategic turn that this implies and his willingness to favor a sustainable political solution for Venezuela. But to summarize the international context, we can say that the Venezuelan case has become toxic, especially in the hemisphere, as the Americans often say. And this not only due to the issue of migration, which is terrible in itself both for the migrants and the receiving countries but also because Venezuela ends up becoming a variable in the internal political equation of many countries, which amplifies the political conflict through the grammar of polarization. Just as at some point there was an international alignment with the thesis that the Venezuelan crisis could lead to political change in the short term, today’s priority seems to be trying to prevent the conflict from becoming protracted and walking a credible, realistic, agreed-upon, and possibly long path to democratic redesign.
The key: building the agenda
Without a doubt, all these circumstances move the actors to negotiate and warn us that a new round of negotiations may lead to new results if the space of negotiation does not become, as has been the case in the past, an instrument for the staging of the conflict, in which the actors seek to strengthen their position in front of each other, instead of building the basic rules of the political game that allows solving the conflict.
Indeed, what happened both in the 2017-2018 round of meetings and in the 2019 round with the facilitation of Norway was a sort of continuation of war by other means: for each side, it was about “winning” the negotiation or at least not to be weakened in the process. The negotiation seemed to function as one more tactic to gain a position in the conflict, instead of a method to agree on the recomposition of the institutions that, in the end, would allow the regulation of the quarrel to induce the democratization process.
Thus, the Maduro government sat at the negotiating table in 2019 with the aim of improving the conditions to retain power, while the opposition’s objective was to seek the conditions to ensure political change. Between the government’s aspiration to gain stability and the opposition’s ambition to replace Maduro through free elections, a theoretical zone of possible agreement could be identified: agreeing on the conditions of presidential elections in which both parties could be competitive. But the problem is that for the Maduro government, being competitive meant (and still means) being able to govern with financial capacity, that is, ensuring the lifting of sanctions and access to the assets of the Republic currently under the control of the “interim government”, while, for the opposition, being competitive means that a series of institutional and legal conditions are met that ensure not only the neatness of the process but also the recognition and respect of the results.
The truth is that, in 2019, neither party was capable or had the political will to guarantee the concessions that this plan implied. In particular, the issue of the indirect intervention by the Trump administration through the application of new sanctions on the Maduro government while the talks were still ongoing in early August 2019, weakened the negotiating capacity of the opposition and divided the bloc, and at the same time radicalized the government’s position to one of resistance that put on hold the tensions in the Chavista field between those who favored the negotiations and those who rejected it.
Today, some discursive signs do not look very promising: both in the Chavista field and the opposition, there have been very negative public mentions of what each side expects from the new negotiation process, from “saving Venezuela from the dictatorship” to forcing the opposition to recognize the supremacy of Chavismo and the lifting of “criminal sanctions.” The narratives that portray the negotiations as a battlefield continue to create an atmosphere of belligerence that does not offer the common citizen confidence in their effectiveness to rebuild democracy.
The experience accumulated in many political negotiations has allowed us to establish some principles or guidelines that could lead the process to a successful end, but I am only going to mention a couple of aspects that seem very necessary in this case.
In the first place, there is a subjective element that is missing: mutual recognition, a factor that lies deep inside the historical political conflict between the opposition and the government. In the hegemonic mentality of Chavismo, the opposition only exists, in the best of cases, in an ancillary position. For its part, the opposition, under its different configurations, has questioned the legitimacy of the electoral victories of chavismo. In principle, the negotiation itself should be a form of mutual recognition of each party as a legitimate political actor, regardless of their moral qualities or the nature of their strategic objective.
The second aspect is the issue of the representativeness of both parties in the negotiation and the contents of the agenda. As I have wanted to show, the former is no longer the same as in 2019. The emergence of other actors not aligned with the members of the government or with the formal leadership of the opposition, with a more organic vision of the demands of society, intermediation capacity, and a commitment to democratization rather than to the particular agendas of the political actors, makes necessary the inclusion of a new perspective on the table.
But that emergence does not necessarily have to materialize in the group of negotiators, although the formula of the two tracks (political actors and civil society) is frequent; Rather, it is in the setting of the agenda that the experience of those social agents who are or have been catalyzing negotiation processes between political actors should be concentrated.
In the process facilitated by Norway, the period for the construction of the agenda has gone by a rule of discretion and prudence that does not allow knowing its content, but it would not be productive, in my opinion, to put back on the table of comprehensive negotiations the processes that have already shown signs of progress or at least the promise of it, such as the talks on the electoral conditions under the competence of the National Electoral Council, which could risk ending up tied to the fulfillment of other more disputed agreements.
Rather, one could think of a plan of multiple simultaneous processes under the same strategic conception, which would be the fundamental matter of the comprehensive agreement: the reconstruction of the institutional system in such a way that, in the immediate future, whoever is fairly elected can govern within constitutional limits, and whoever remains in the place of the opposition can exercise its role with all the guarantees and freedoms.
Translated by José Rafael Medina
