The encouraging news from Latin America is that the leftist populists who for 15 years undermined the region’s democratic institutions and wrecked its economies are being pushed out — not by coups and juntas, but by democratic and constitutional means. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina is already gone, vanquished in a presidential election, and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff is likely to be impeached in the coming days.
The
tipping point is the place where the movement began in the late 1990s:
Venezuela, a country of 30 million that despite holding the world’s
largest oil reserves has descended into a dystopia where food, medicine,
water and electric power are critically scarce. Riots and looting
broke out in several blacked-out cities last week, forcing the
deployment of troops. A nation that 35 years ago was the richest in
Latin America is now appealing to its neighbors for humanitarian
deliveries to prevent epidemics and hunger.
The
regime that fostered this nightmare, headed by Hugo Chávez until his
death in 2013, is on the way out: It cannot survive the economic crisis
and mass discontent it has created. The question is whether the change
will come relatively peacefully or through an upheaval that could turn
Venezuela into a failed state and destabilize much of the region around
it.
A democratic
outcome seemed possible in December, when a coalition of opposition
parties won two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly. Rather
than concede or negotiate, however, the Chavista government, now headed
by President Nicolás Maduro, dug in. At its direction, a constitutional
tribunal stacked with party hacks has issued annulments of every act by
the new assembly, including an amnesty for scores of political
prisoners.
Gangs of
regime thugs now roam the streets on motorcycles and attack opposition
gatherings. Meanwhile, the government is essentially shutting itself
down: Last week Maduro ordered that state employees, who make up more
than 30 percent of the workforce, would henceforth labor only two days a week, supposedly in order to save energy.
Days of looting in Venezuela
Play Video0:54
Remarkably,
most of the Western hemisphere is studiously ignoring this meltdown.
The Obama administration and Washington’s Latin America watchers are
obsessed with the president’s pet project, the opening to Cuba. As it
happens, the Castros turned Venezuela into a satellite state, seeding
its security forces and intelligence services with agents. Yet now that
it is decreasingly able to supply discounted oil to its revolutionary
mentor, Venezuela appears to have become an afterthought even in Havana.
Last
week a delegation of senior Venezuelan lawmakers traveled to Washington
to make one more effort to call attention to their crisis. They had a
simple message: “Venezuela will end with a political change, because
there is no other possibility,” said Luis Florido, president of the
National Assembly’s foreign affairs commission. “But the government will
decide how this change happens.”
At
the moment, the slim remaining hopes for a democratic solution rest on a
constitutional provision allowing for a referendum to remove Maduro.
The obstacles to its success are almost comically steep: The opposition
must first persuade some 200,000 people to appear at a government office
(now open two days a week) to vouch for their signatures on a petition,
then collect the signatures of 20 percent of the electorate, or about
4 million people. If the referendum is held, the vote to remove Maduro
would have to be higher than the total reported number of votes he
received in his 2013 election.
All
this has to happen in the next nine months if a new presidential
election is to be triggered. Yet just extracting the necessary forms for
the first petition from the regime-controlled electoral commission cost
the opposition six weeks. On Wednesday, Venezuelans massively departed
from their perpetual lines in front of grocery stores to sign the
petitions — the opposition claimed it collected more than 1 million
signatures in a day. But, said Carlos Vecchio, an exiled leader of the
Voluntad Popular party, “The crisis is moving at 2,000 kilometers an
hour, but the potential solution is going at 2 kilometers an hour.”
The
Venezuelan lawmakers had some practical and specific requests for the
Obama administration, starting with the public release of the names and
alleged offenses of top Venezuelan officials included on a confidential
U.S. sanctions list. They’d also like help finding the $300 billion to
$400 billion they estimate has been stashed in foreign bank accounts by
the Chavista elite; the money is desperately needed to import food and
stave off a foreign debt default.
Most
of all, however, Venezuelans hope for U.S. leadership in pushing Maduro
to accept an election. Said Vecchio: “The moment has arrived when you
can no longer ignore this. Because what happens in Venezuela is going to
affect the whole region.”
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