The National Assembly of Venezuela, overwhelmingly pro-government since most of the opposition boycotted the elections, approved in a first reading a draft law that would make it necessary for NGOs to obtain authorization from the executive branch in order to function. CREDIT: National Assembly

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 27 2023 (IPS)

The Venezuelan parliament, in the hands of the ruling party, is moving towards passing a law to control non-governmental organizations (NGOs) so that, in practice, they could not exist independently.

The new law “not only puts at risk the work of helping victims of human rights violations, but also all the humanitarian and social assistance work carried out by independent organizations,” Rafael Uzcátegui, coordinator of the human rights group Provea, one of the oldest and renowned NGOs in the country, told IPS.

Ali Daniels, a lawyer who is the director of the NGO Access to Justice, was also emphatic when he told IPS that the law “is contradictory and, by design, is made to be breached, since it is impossible to meet the 20 requirements and 12 sub-requirements that it imposes on civil society organizations.”

The bill, entitled the Law for the Control, Regularization, Action and Financing of Non-Governmental and Related Organizations, was approved without dissent at first reading as a whole in the single-chamber legislature on Jan. 24. It must now be debated article by article in order to be passed.

In the current legislature – which has 277 members, many more than the 165 provided for by the 1999 constitution – the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and its allies hold 256 seats, and the rest are in the hands of groups that refused to take part in the boycott of the 2020 legislative elections called by the main opposition party.

The memorandum for the draft law states that it is inspired by a similar law passed in Bolivia in 2013, and highlights that NGOs “depend almost exclusively on ‘aid’ from Western governments, which generally goes to countries of geopolitical importance and is linked to an interventionist framework.”

Diosdado Cabello, the number two in the PSUV under President Nicolás Maduro and the president of the National Assembly, said that through NGOs opposition groups “conspire against the country. They are not non-governmental organizations. They do not depend on the Venezuelan state, but on the gringo (US) government; they are instruments of imperialism.”

The new law will “put an end to their easy life,” he said.

The PSUV not only has control over the executive and legislative branches, but also the judiciary, the electoral commission, the public prosecutor’s office, the comptroller’s office and the ombudsman’s office. In addition, it has staunch support from the armed forces.

The main opposition parties have been intervened by the judiciary, several of their leaders are in exile or disqualified from running for office, and press, radio and television outlets that provide anything but officially sanctioned news have practically been driven to extinction.

In addition, there are 270 political prisoners in the country (150 members of the military and 120 civilians), according to the daily registry kept by the human rights NGO Foro Penal.

In this context, different NGOs and the bishops of the Catholic Church stand out as critical and independent voices.

NGO programs to assist the needy with food and medicine in Venezuela, a country in the grip of a severe socioeconomic crisis, would be affected if they must meet the numerous requisites laid out in a draft law, warns a statement signed by more than 400 organizations. CREDIT: Alimenta la Solidaridad

Nearly a month after the bill was approved in first reading, it has not yet been officially presented, and the text that was leaked from parliament is setting off alarm bells among civil society organizations.

More than 400 organizations, including several from abroad such as Amnesty International, Civil Rights Defenders, Transparency International, Poder Ciudadano of Argentina, Chile Transparente and the Center for Rights and Development of Peru, produced a document expressing their alarm and rejection of the draft law.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, who visited Caracas two days after the preliminary approval of the draft law, said that when he talked to the authorities “I reiterated the importance of guaranteeing the civic space, and I called for a broad consultative process on the law.”

Hands tied

NGOs complain that, first of all, the new law will declare illegal any existing non-profit association, organization or foundation that fails to adapt to the new provisions, even though this violates the principle of non-retroactivity.

In addition to entities defined as NGOs, the law will also apply to charitable or educational foundations, chambers or other business associations and even social clubs – in other words, any kind of civil association.

It creates a long list of requirements and requisites, including mandatory registration and constant renewals, “without setting a time limit or clear evaluation criteria, or providing any guarantee of due process in case of denial.”

Daniels also said the new law requires a sworn statement of assets from the members, representatives and workers of each NGO, together with detailed information on how they obtain and use funds.

In addition, the new law states that organizations must not only register, but also must obtain express authorization from the government, which could thus decide which ones can and cannot operate.

The draft law on NGOS will affect programs carried out by foundations such as the Catholic Fe y Alegría, which for years has run a network of schools in rural areas and poor neighborhoods, as well as a network of educational radio stations. CREDIT: Fe y Alegría

In the event that the authorities suspect any irregularity, it must open an investigation, and by doing so it can suspend operations of the organization, by means of a precautionary measure.

NGOs are generically prohibited from carrying out political activities, which makes it possible to accuse them in cases of defense of rights or criticism of the State.

The sanctions for failing to comply with requirements include fines of up to 12,000 dollars, “which in Venezuela’s current crisis no NGO can comply with without closing down,” Daniels said. Criminal action can also be taken against the organizations.

Carlos Ayala Corao, former chair of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said the new law “violates the national and international legal system, and seeks to control society.”

Why now?

According to Uzcátegui, the law is the result of a years-long government policy of confronting NGOs, “in first place because we have been effective in attracting the attention of international mechanisms for the protection of human rights.”

“An investigation by the International Criminal Court, unprecedented in this continent, has been launched into possible crimes against humanity (by Venezuelan authorities), a major blow to Maduro’s international image,” Uzcátegui said.

The ICC is carrying out a preliminary investigation into accusations against the president and other political and military leaders, after complaints brought by families of their alleged responsibility in the death of demonstrators in protests, of opponents or military dissidents in interrogations, torture and other crimes.

Complaints from human rights groups, which are studied in investigations by entities such as the International Criminal Court, could have influenced the decision to draft a new law to prevent “political” aspects in the activities of NGOs. CREDIT: Civilisv

Venezuela experienced massive protests, some bloodily repressed, in 2014, 2017 and 2019, and so far in 2023 there have been dozens of demonstrations by public sector workers and pensioners, since the minimum wage and millions of pensions are equivalent to less than six dollars a month.

The head of Provea added that so far this year there have been dozens of workers’ protests against low wages and tiny pensions, “and the authorities are trying to curb this scenario of conflict with the actors of democratic society.”

He also said the new law could be another chess piece in the intermittent negotiations between the government and the opposition, “as are the political prisoners,” ahead of the 2024 presidential elections.

The consequences

If the law is passed, “it will prevent the work of critical voices, of support for victims of rights violations, but the most terrible consequences will not be experienced by the organizations but by the people who are the beneficiaries of our activities,” Uzcátegui stressed.

Daniels said the draft law does not cover companies such as banks, for example, but it does cover their chambers, which are civil associations, or the entities that run schools or soup kitchens, many of them in the neediest areas, and which have registered and act as foundations.

“This is the case of the community soup kitchens run by Caritas (a Catholic organization), or free medicine banks run by the NGOs Convite and Acción Solidaria, or the network of community schools run by Fe y Alegría (created by the Catholic Jesuit order),” Uzcátegui added.

More than 90 organizations called on Colombian President Gustavo Petro (L), seen at a border meeting with his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolás Maduro on Feb. 16, to lobby for the NGO bill to be scrapped. CREDIT: Presidency of Venezuela

Consequences at an international level are also likely, given that most NGOs turn to international donors to finance their activities, and because various international entities do not act directly in the country but do so through NGOs that have become their local partners.

It will also influence the regional political game by following the path taken by Nicaragua, which has outlawed thousands of organizations, and “we are alerting neighboring countries that the crisis in Venezuela will expand and with it emigration, including activists from NGOs seeking refuge,” said Uzcátegui.

During Maduro’s 10 years in the presidency, marked by an acute economic crisis, with a drop of up to 80 percent of GDP and prolonged hyperinflation, more than seven million Venezuelans – almost a quarter of the population – have left the country, mainly to neighboring nations.

More than 90 organizations presented a letter to Colombian President Gustavo Petro, asking him to intervene by making an effort to get the law dismissed and to help persuade the government not to undermine free association as a human right.

Uzcátegui says final approval of the draft law will drive the United States and Europe to impose harsher sanctions on Venezuela.

Thus, “the hardships of the populace and the conflict will increase, when what we Venezuelans need are spaces for dialogue and understanding,” argued the head of Provea.

El Helicoide, a building in Caracas, Venezuela, currently headquarters of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN). Credit: Flakiz/Flickr

By Andrés Cañizález
CARACAS, Oct 20 2020 (IPS)

In mid-September, the United Nations Human Rights Council approved the renewal, for another two years, of the mandate of the Fact-Finding Mission to determine and document the existence of crimes against humanity in Venezuela, under the government of Nicolás Maduro.

In this way, the Council endorsed the work that this independent mission had already been conducting for one year. Weeks before, the team of experts had released a devastating report, prepared after reviewing slightly over 3,000 cases of which it rigorously documented 233.

In order to fully understand what is happening in Venezuela in terms of Human Rights, it may be convenient to pay close attention to one story, one of the many that make up this report. Due to our professional bias, we have stopped at a case clearly linked to freedom of expression and information.

Andrés Cañizález

For this piece, I have picked the events involving Pedro Jaimes Criollo, described in the UN report as from paragraph 727. This case clearly exposes the repressive policy on expression and information. Tweeting just turns out to be a crime, as the government of Nicolás Maduro understands it.

An aviation aficionado, this Venezuelan tweeter’s handles were @AereoMeteo and @AereoMeteo2. Disseminating meteorological and aeronautical information was his hobby, until May 2018.

On May 3, 2018, strikingly a date on which free speech is celebrated (World Press Freedom Day), Pedro Jaimes tweeted the flight path of the presidential plane on which Nicolás Maduro was headed for a ceremony in Aragua State, at the center of the country.

As underscored in the UN report, the tweeter obtained information in the public domain about the models of planes used by the Office of the President of Venezuela, data available on Wikipedia, and tracked the flight using the (equally open and public) FlightRadar24 app.

As of May 2018, there was no law or executive order in force classifying flight information as confidential.

A week after his tweets, Pedro Jaimes was arrested without any warrant by the National Bolivarian Intelligence Service (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional, SEBIN). He was arriving at his home. At the time of his arrest, he was beaten, and so was his sister as she tried to step in. When his family showed up at the SEBIN headquarters in El Helicoide (a 1950s spiral-shaped building), Caracas, officials denied that Pedro was being held there.

Several days after his arrest, this time carrying a search warrant, the SEBIN took some communications and computer equipment from his home. He was charged with using such equipment to interfere with radio communications from planes and airports; he was also indicted of revealing state secrets on Twitter.

In the report, the UN experts indicate that they have reviewed the handbooks of the equipment seized from the tweeter and that, with those devices, it was not possible either to transmit radio signals or to interfere with communications.

Pedro Jaimes Criollo, who did nothing but write tweets based on public information, was subjected to interrogations in which he was beaten with sticks or wooden bats wrapped in plastic or cloth, which leaves no marks. A bag was placed over his head and insecticide was sprayed inside, suffocating him. He was also administered electroshocks.

He was kicked in the head while on the floor, causing him to partly lose his hearing. SEBIN officials threatened to rape him with a wooden stick they had at hand.

That same month of May 2018, Provisional Prosecutor Marlon Mora filed charges against Pedro Jaimes at the Third Miranda State Control Court ([Tercer Tribunal de Control del Estado Miranda] a trial-level category), with Judge Rumely Rojas Muro presiding. He was charged with interference in operational security, revealing state secrets, and digital espionage. Although he was arrested a week after his tweets about Maduro’s flight, the prosecution claimed that he had been apprehended in flagrante delicto.

After over a month, during which time the government did not reveal the holding place of the tweeter despite the fact that his family filed for injunctive relief on several occasions, Pedro was able to call his sister, on a telephone provided by a guard at El Helicoide, to tell her where he was being held.

During the court proceedings on his matter, he was not allowed to appoint his defense lawyers, was denied access to his own docket, and the basis of the indictment was the interviews with the very SEBIN agents who had detained and tortured him.

Long held in abject conditions, for some time, even without access to a bathroom to relief himself, Pedro Jaimes was released while standing trial in October 2019. His matter has since been deferred a dozen times.

“As of the time of writing, Mr. Jaimes continued to await trial, with precautionary measures including monthly presentation at court and a prohibition on leaving the country. He continued to suffer from psychological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and physical trauma,” reads the UN report, released in mid-September.

His crime? Tweeting. His case, not being a unique or standalone story, epitomizes the lack of freedom and the repressive system that prevail today in Venezuela.

Excerpt:

"Humanitarian aid now. We need it," read a banner during a massive demonstration in Caracas on Feb. 12, demanding that international aid blocked at the border of neighboring countries be allowed into the country. The demonstrations were held in 50 towns and cities around the country, in support of Juan Guaidó as acting president and demanding that President Nicolás Maduro step down. Credit: Humberto Márquez/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 16 2019 (IPS)

The international food and medical aid awaiting entry into Venezuela from neighboring Colombia, Brazil and Curacao is at the crux of the struggle for power between President Nicolás Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaidó, recognised as “legitimate president” by 50 governments.

The current situation “offers advantages to Guaidó. It is trying to break the ties between Maduro and the armed forces through the pressure to receive humanitarian aid,” Argentine analyst Andrei Serbin Pont, director of the Regional Coordinator of Economic and Social Research, a Latin American academic network, told IPS.

Serbin said Guaidó should secure the so-far reluctant participation of the Red Cross and the United Nations with respect to getting the aid into the country because “by definition humanitarian aid cannot have political objectives,” which are clearly present in the cooperation offered by governments of the Americas and Europe that refuse to recognise Maduro as the legitimately re-elected president."The struggle over the aid makes many local residents here see that there is hope that this time the opposition will bring about change; people now see light at the end of the tunnel." -- Nadine Cubas

President Maduro said: “It is not humanitarian aid but a rotten gift, which carries within the poison of humiliation of our people and serves as a prelude to military intervention. If the United States wants to help us, the blockade, the financial persecution and the economic sanctions against Venezuela should cease.”

U.S. President Donald Trump and several of his Latin America policy advisers repeat the mantra that “Maduro must go,” and that Washington “does not rule out any option, including the military option” with respect to Venezuela.

The Venezuelan armed forces, which have reiterated their loyalty to Maduro, have been deployed in territorial defence exercises since late January, have blocked road access from Colombia, and are ready to prevent any attempt to bring in the controversial aid shipments.

In the midst of one of the multitudinous street demonstrations that the opposition has held in recent weeks, Guaidó announced that “humanitarian aid is going to come in, no ifs ands or buts. I have given the order to the armed forces to allow it to enter” on Feb. 23.

The unprecedented situation in which Venezuela finds itself, with two supposed presidents, is due to the fact that the opposition and many governments consider invalid the May 2018 elections in which Maduro, 56, was elected for a second six-year term on Jan. 10, and refuse to recognise him as president.

In response, the opposition-dominated National Assembly, considered to be in a state of rebellion by the other branches of government, decided that its president, the 35-year-old Guaidó, would be acting president of Venezuela, starting on Jan. 23.

The border city of Cúcuta in northeastern Colombia has already received 500 tons of medicines and nutritional supplements, while Guaidó announced new collection centers in the state of Roraima in northern Brazil and on the neighboring Dutch island of Curacao, where 90 tons are expected from France, opposition deputy Stalin González told the media.

The aid accumulated so far “consists of emergency medicines and supplements for children under three years of age with severe malnutrition, pregnant or nursing mothers, and the elderly,” Julio Castro, leader of the non-governmental organisation Doctors for Health, told IPS.

The medical aid, according to Castro, “10 percent of what is urgently needed,” for some 300,000 patients, will go to public hospitals and will be distributed by NGOs and religious organisations, with the support of thousands of volunteers responding to the opposition’s call.

Gonzalez said there are already 250,000 volunteers mobilised around the country, including 10,000 health professionals.

Young people from the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela gathered in downtown Caracas on Feb. 12 to express support for President Nicolás Maduro. Credit: AVN

An immediate effect of the bid for aid has been that the government has increased in recent days the delivery of apparently stockpiled medicines and supplies to several public hospitals, according to workers at several hospitals in Caracas and other cities.

People like Natalia Vargas, 39, a bank clerk and diabetes patient, hope that “if emergency help arrives, then other medicines that are scarce because they are imported can come. And when you get them, they’re too expensive.”

“I hope that the politicians and the military will reach an agreement to bring in the aid,” she told IPS at her home in La Candelaria, a traditional lower-middle-class neighourhood in central Caracas.

The international aid initiatives are in response to the social and economic collapse that has occurred in Venezuela since Maduro firste came to power in 2013, unprecedented due to the fact that it happened in an oil-rich country and because of the speed of the collapse, without no natural catastrophe or war.

During the last five years and while some three million people left the country, more than 80 percent of Venezuela’s 31 million inhabitants were left in poverty and unable to acquire enough food and the medicines they need, in addition to hyperinflation since 2017, according to the Study on Living Conditions conducted by three of the country’s leading universities.

In the same period, the economy shrunk to half its size, GDP plunged 56 percent, 210,000 of the 490,000 companies in the country closed, half of the industrial park has been operating at 20 percent of capacity, and local agriculture can barely provide 25 percent of the necessary food, according to the 2018 year-end report of the Fedecámaras central business chamber.

The deficit of medicines in pharmacies remains has stood at 85 percent since last year, the president of the Federation of Pharmacists, Freddy Ceballos, said on Feb. 13.

From the town of Cúa, near the east of the capital, Nadine Cubas, 71, who suffers from hypertension and glaucoma, told IPS that “we are far from the border, that aid may not reach the valleys of the Tuy River, where we are, but if it supplies the people in the west then there is a better chance of getting medicines here.”

Cubas added that “the struggle over the aid makes many local residents here see that there is hope that this time the opposition will bring about change; people now see light at the end of the tunnel.”

What the opposition is counting on is this: if the government lets the aid in, it will show weakness and a division in the support of the military, with an unpredictable domino effect, and if it does not allow it in, it will look like an inhumane clique of leaders whose only concern is to hold onto power, opposition deputies Julio Borges and Juan Miguel Matheus told reporters.

This position is in line with the demand that the entry of aid be a first step for the Venezuelan crisis to lead to elections for a new government, as demanded by the United States, the Lima Group of 12 countries from the hemisphere and the majority of the European Union, against opposition by other governments, such as those of China, Cuba, Iran, Russia and Turkey, or calls for a search for a middle path, issued by Mexico and Uruguay.

Borges and Gonzalez said the humanitarian aid that has accumulated will be followed by more aid as the political game unfolds in Venezuela.

Governments such as those of Argentina, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Puerto Rico and the United States, plus the Organisation of American States, have offered more than 200 million dollars in assistance.

Demonstrators in the neighborhood of Cotiza, on the north side of Caracas, where the protests in working-class areas of the Venezuelan capital against the government of Nicolas Maduro broke out on Jan. 21, before spreading to other parts of the country, and which resulted in 40 deaths in the first month of the year due to the brutal crackdown. Credit: Courtesy of EfectoCocuyo.com

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 1 2019 (IPS)

The protests in Venezuela demanding an end to the presidency of Nicolás Maduro in the last 10 days of January, whose soundtrack was the sound of banging on pots and pans in working-class neighbourhoods, had a high human cost: more than 40 deaths, dozens wounded and about a thousand detainees, including 100 women and 90 children under 18.

In Catia, a working-class neighbourhood west of Caracas, a number of young people were shot dead between Jan. 21-25, while National Police and military National Guard commandos demolished improvised roadblocks and barricades made with trash, managing to quash the protests.

“They managed to do it. The local residents say that in the streets where several of these boys fell, silence and solitude have prevailed after 6:00 PM. The pots and pans have not returned,” sociologist Rafael Uzcátegui, head of Provea, an organisation that has been recording human rights violations in the country for decades, told IPS.

These protests have two special elements: they are taking place in neighborhoods and sectors that until recently formed part of the government’s social base, reflecting the anger felt by the poor in the face of the country’s socioeconomic collapse, which has turned their protests into “mini-Caracazos,” recalling the violent protests given that name in February 1989, which resulted in hundreds of deaths.

Furthermore, they have been submerged in the institutional crisis that has had the country in its grip since January and which has put Venezuela at the forefront of world geopolitics, with a struggle for power that is also playing out between the governments of the United States and other countries of the Americas and European countries, on the one hand, and China, Russia and Turkey, on the other.

Maduro, 56, who governed the country from 2013 to 2019, was sworn in on Jan. 10 for a second term after winning an election in May 2018, the results of which were not recognised by the legislature or by most of the opposition or the governments of the Americas and Europe.

The election was called outside the legal timeframe by a National Constituent Assembly composed solely of government supporters, the electoral authority banned the main opposition parties and leaders, and a cloud of irregularities enveloped the campaign and the voting day itself, according to complaints from local and international organisations.

The opposition-controlled National Assembly refused to recognise Maduro’s re-election and the president of the legislature, Juan Guaidó, 35, declared himself acting president on Jan. 23, before a crowd in Caracas, while mass opposition demonstrations were held in some 50 cities.

Since Jan. 21, when 27 members of the National Guard mutinied in a barracks in the neighborhood of Cotiza, north of Caracas, refusing to recognise the re-election of Maduro, “cacerolazos” – pots-and-pans protests – spread, and groups of local residents in poor neighborhoods of the capital and cities in the provinces improvised barricades and clashed with the security forces and irregular civil groups of sympathisers of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

Looting of shops also broke out in several cities in the provinces.

Human rights organisations question the use of the Special Action Force (FAES) of the National Police in Venezuela to suppress popular protests, because these commandos are trained to use lethal force. Credit: PNB

The Jan. 21-25 crackdown left 35 people dead, dozens injured by bullets or plastic pellets, and 850 arrested.

“On Jan. 23 alone, 696 people were arrested – the largest number in a single day of protests in 20 years,” lawyer Alfredo Romero, director of the Penal Forum, an organisation that follows the question of those detained for political or social reasons, told IPS.

The Forum counted 12,480 arbitrary detentions from February 2014 – the year of the first mass protests against Maduro – to October 2018, classifying 1,551 people as political prisoners, of whom 236 were still in prison when the report was produced. The list has now grown with those arrested so far this year.

Since Maduro first took office in 2013, Provea and other human rights groups have reported that at least 250 people have died in street protests.

Romero said the state uses a “revolving door” strategy: when political detainees are released, usually on parole, another group is arrested for similar reasons.

In January, “the order the security forces received was to arrest protesters. It is clear that the government decided to assume the cost of stopping the protest in the poorer areas, which in the past were ‘Chavista’ but have now turned against Chavismo,” he said.

Chavismo was the political movement of Hugo Chavez, president from 1999 until his death in 2013.

For two decades, the urban poor and working-class supported Chavismo, but they have now increasingly turned against Maduro, exasperated by the high food prices, the collapse of services such as water, electricity, health and transport, and the increasingly acute shortage of medicines or cooking gas.

Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in Geneva on Jan. 29 that “just over 40 people have been killed” and of these “at least 26 were allegedly shot dead by security forces or pro-government armed groups during the demonstrations.”

Provea contends that at least eight people were killed in extrajudicial executions in Caracas and two provincial cities when members of the National Police’s elite FAES squad entered their homes.

“FAES receives training for lethal action, against extortion or kidnapping. It is not trained to handle public order situations. Its codes and weapons, which are highly lethal, are not in proportion to the rules of proportional and gradual use of force applicable in situations of popular protest,” said Uzcátegui.

The arrests, which included 100 women and at least 90 children and adolescents, “have been carried out in indiscriminate sweeps, to spread fear and discourage protests,” Romero said.

One such case is that of Jickson Rodriguez, 14, who is epileptic as a result of an old head injury.

He and his young friends were banging on pots and pans near his family’s barbershop on the night of Jan. 22 in Villa Bahia, which is located in Puerto Ordaz, an industrial city on the banks of the Orinoco River, 500 kilometers southeast of Caracas, when National Guard units captured him and six others and took him to a barracks that guards a steel plant.

“Since I wasn’t crying, I was the one who received the most blows. I told the guards, ‘Why are you beating us when we’ve already been arrested?’ and they slapped me. They gave me blows to the head. I told them ‘you can’t hit me on the head, I have epilepsy, and they told me: ‘Shut up, you’re a detainee’,” he told his family and journalists a few days later.

“I found him, handcuffed, after searching for him in various places where they were holding people, the afternoon of the following day,” his mother Rosmelys Guilarte, 39, a hairdresser who also has three daughters, told IPS. “He was beaten on the soles of his feet, so there would be no visible bruises. He had a convulsion while he was in detention, which is why he was handed over to me two days later.”

Jickson “was accused by the judicial police of participating in looting that took place miles from where we were banging on pots and pans that night – something that was impossible. He has orders to report to the authorities every 30 days. I try to get him to rest a lot, this has been really hard on him,” she said from her home.

For Uzcátegui, “the government’s strategy has three components: repression in the face of the discontent shared by most of the population, betting that the current political conflict will wane, and attempts to limit the visibility of the crisis by going after the media and journalists.”

Congressman Juan Guaidó of the Popular Will party, president of the National Assembly since Jan. 5, was sworn in on Jan. 23 before a crowd as Venezuela's interim president. Credit: NationalAssembly

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 25 2019 (IPS)

Venezuela entered a new and astonishing arena of political confrontation, with two presidents, Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó, leading the forces vying for power, while Venezuelans once again are taking to the streets to demonstrate their weariness at the crisis, which has left them exhausted.

Both sides “have sharply raised the stakes, they’re not giving in and the internal and international factors that traditionally operate as mediators show signs of having taken sides,” Carlos Romero, former director of postgraduate studies in political science at Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar and Central Universities, told IPS.

Guaidó, 35, who was appointed president of the single-chamber National Legislative Assembly on Jan. 5, was sworn in on Jan. 23 before a crowd of supporters in Caracas – while hundreds of thousands marched in 50 other cities – as “interim president of the Republic”, to put an end to Maduro’s alleged “usurping” of power, create a transitional government and organise new elections.

“I don’t want a ‘bono’ (stipend) anymore, I don’t want Clap (bags of food at subsidised prices), what I want is for Nicolás to leave”, along with shouts of “Freedom!” and insults against the president were the most frequently chants by people from practically all social strata, who have been hit hard by the crisis, including annual hyperinflation of 1.7 million percent, according to the National Assembly in the absence of official statistics.

The United States, Brazil, Canada and a dozen other countries in the Americas immediately recognisedGuaidó, to which Maduro responded by denouncing that “the imperialist government of the United States is directing an operation to, through a coup d’état, impose a puppet government” in Venezuela.

In response, Maduro cut off diplomatic ties with Washington and gave all U.S. diplomats 72 hours to leave the country.

The United States, through Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, ignored Maduro’s measure and announced that it would keep its diplomats in Caracas as requested by Guaidó, the president they recognise.

U.S. President Donald Trump also called for stronger measures.

For a century, Venezuela has been a supplier of oil to the United States, currently the destination of 47 percent of its exports, while it imports not only U.S. manufactured products, but also inputs such as components to make gasoline. But the flow of trade has not appeared in the breakup equation.

The “Guaidó phenomenon” achieved what seemed unthinkable just a few weeks ago: reviving the mass “open councils” in the streets, which led to the huge opposition marches on Jan. 23.

That is a key date in Venezuela because on that day in 1958 a civil-military uprising put an end to the almost 10-year dictatorship of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1914-2001).

Maduro, 56, in power since 2013, was re-elected on May 20, 2018 in controversial elections in which the majority of the opposition – much of which was disqualified – did not participate, and whose results were not recognised by many governments in the Americas and Europe.

General Vladimir Padrino, minister of defense and head of the high command of the Bolivarian National Armed Force of Venezuela, ratified his support for President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 24. Credit: Miraflores Palace

The president took office on Jan. 10 for a new six-year term. That same day, a majority of governments in the Americas and the European Union (EU) said they did not recognise his government.

The heir to Hugo Chávez, who governed the country between 1999 and 2013, the year of his death, also received the backing of hundreds of supporters on Jan. 23, who crowded around the Miraflores Presidential Palace.

He was also backed by the commanders of the Bolivarian National Armed Force, who on Jan. 24 reiterated their loyalty to Maduro in a series of statements.

Guaidó’s proclamation “is shameful and aberrant,” and part of “a criminal plan that reached the limits of extreme danger,” because “a coup d’état is being carried out against democracy and the constitution,” declared General Vladimir Padrino, defense minister and head of the military high command.

Today in Venezuela “three scenarios have opened up. The first is that President Maduro withstands the pressure from the opposition, from the population in the streets and from the international community, and that the mass movement against him peters out,” Romero said.

The second is that the street protests and international pressure sustain the duality of power, which translates into the elimination of Maduro’s government, either by him stepping down or by an act of force, and new elections are called,” the analyst added.

“And the third is that a third actor enters the scene, which could be international, from the armed forces, or some other factor that intervenes to stop the confrontation if it gets out of hand in the country,” Romero said.

Luis Salamanca, also a professor of political science at the Central University of Venezuela, told IPS: “There can’t be two presidents at the same time in the same territory. That puts the ball in Maduro’s court, and he will have to pull his strings to stop and perhaps arrest Guaidó, but to do that he would have to assess the political costs.”

The crowds returned to the streets of Caracas and dozens of other Venezuelan cities to express discontent over the economic crisis and call for change in the country’s leadership. Credit: National Assembly

Guaidó, for his part, “must have calculated the risks of taking the bull by the horns in the middle of the square. There may be arrests that reach not only him but other members of the Assembly,” Salamanca said.

Parliament was declared “in contempt” two years ago by the government-appointed Supreme Court of Justice. Since then, the other branches of power, all in the hands of government allies, have ignored its decisions, while in 2017 a National Constituent Assembly was elected, also without an opposition presence, which has assumed part of the legislature’s functions.

International factors

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on Jan. 24 for “a transparent and independent investigation” into “the incidents in Venezuela,” because in the context of the protests of Jan. 21-23, at least 26 people were shot dead, according to local media, and dozens were injured and arrested.

On Jan. 18,Guterres had already said his organisation”is willing to use its good offices” to promote a political solution”, since only the U.N. “can solve and provide answers to Venezuela’s problems.”

Washington, Ottawa and the Lima Group (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay and Peru) recognisedGuaidó. Ecuador did as well.

Meanwhile, Uruguay and Mexico distanced themselves to insist on the need for a new “urgent and transparent” dialogue between the parties. Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Suriname were the countries in the region that supported Maduro.

Although the EU did not recognise Maduro’s election and second term, it has not given Guaidó recognition either, although some of its members have done so or have ratified their support for him as president of the legislature.

However, the bloc insists on the need for new elections, with guarantees, in order to return to a state of law in Venezuela.

Two other major global players, China and Russia, have expressed their support for Maduro.

What will happen if, for example, the United States refuses to withdraw its diplomats from Caracas and Maduro’s government imprisons Guaidó?

The new scenario could take one of many directions, while underneath the surface of a situation where the country has two presidents are years of weariness and crisis that has undermined the quality of life of Venezuelans, with growing numbers of people going to sleep hungry every night, and millions forced to emigrate.

The Paraguaná oil refinery complex in northwestern Venezuela, one of the world’s largest, can process a million barrels a day, and is working at just a third of its installed capacity. Credit: Pdvsa

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Dec 19 2017 (IPS)

Corruption in the Venezuelan state oil industry, denounced by the government itself, and with former ministers and senior managers behind bars, is the latest evidence that, in the country with the largest oil reserves on the planet, the industry on which the economy depends is falling apart.

There was a drop “in the production of crude oil, of a million barrels per day,” economist Luis Oliveros, who teaches at the Metropolitan University, told IPS. In December 2013 output stood at 2,894,000 barrels per day compared to 1,837,000 in November 2017, according to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

By 2018 production could drop another 250,000 barrels per day at the current rate, and Venezuela, co-founder of OPEC in 1960 when it was the world’s largest crude oil exporter, is becoming an almost irrelevant player in the global market, Oliveros said.

This despite the fact that it has the largest known deposit of liquid fossil fuels, the 55,000- sq-km southeastern Orinoco oil belt, with an estimated 1.4 trillion barrels of crude, mainly extra-heavy, including proven reserves of 270 billion barrels, according to Venezuelan estimates.

Oil is virtually Venezuela’s only export product, the source of 95 percent of foreign exchange earnings, and by the middle of this decade it represented more than 20 percent of GDP. Most of the business is in the hands of the state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), which has a few partnerships with transnational corporations.

President Nicolás Maduro started a purge on Nov. 28 within PDVSA, in the midst of the hail of corruption allegations and investigations, and asked the new management, led by a general new to the industry, Manuel Quevedo, to make an effort to raise production by one million barrels per day.

The immediate target was to meet the quota assigned by OPEC for 2017-2018, of 1,970,000 barrels per day, said presidential adviser Alí Rodríguez.

“Merely to sustain the current production of 1.85 million barrels per day – let alone increase it – we need to inject between four to five billion dollars into the industry, and the evidence is that this money is not there,” said Alberto Cisneros, CEO of the oil consulting firm Global Business Consultants.

With the economy in shambles, a four-digit inflation rate, different simultaneous exchange-rate systems for a currency that depreciates daily, shortages of food, medicines and essential supplies, and a foreign debt of more than 100 billion dollars, Venezuela does not have the resources that the industry needs, he told IPS.

Against this backdrop, the oil business “also suffers from management problems since PDVSA in 2003, after a strike against the government, dismissed 18,000 employees, half of its workforce,” former deputy energy minister Víctor Poleo (1999-2002) told IPS.

And corruption was dramatically exposed this December, when the Attorney General’s Office sent 67 PDVSA executives and managers to prison for crimes ranging from falsification of production figures to embezzlement and undermining the country’s sovereignty,.

Among these were two former oil ministers of President Nicolás Maduro, in power since 2013, Eulogio del Pino and Nelson Martínez, who were also presidents of PDVSA and its U.S. subsidiary, Citgo, which they allegedly damaged when re-negotiating debts.

Moreover, the Public Prosecutor´s Office is investigating Rafael Ramírez, a former oil minister and president of PDVSA between 2002 and 2014, and until last November Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, for his possible involvement in money laundering operations through the Banca Privada d’Andorra bank.

Petromonagas, a joint venture between state oil company PDVSA and Russia’s Rosneft, extracts crude oil from the Orinoco Oil Belt, in southeastern Venezuela, considered the largest oil deposit on the planet. Credit: Pdvsa

According to the Spanish newspaper El País, which claims access to reports on which Andorran Judge Canòlic Mingorance is working, people close to Ramírez received at least two billion euros (2.36 billion dollars) in illegal commissions between 1999 and 2013.

PDVSA, a company born from the nationalisation of the industry in 1975, and which for years boasted of being one of the top five oil companies in the world, is thus languishing under a cloud of accusations of corruption, incompetence and fraudulent management.

Production “is declining due to a lack of investment and maintenance, starting with the obsolete installations of Lake Maracaibo in the northwest, which produces no more than 450,000 barrels per day,” said Cisneros. Since 1914, more than 13,000 oil wells have been drilled there, and up to the 21st century, the lake basin produced more than one million barrels a day.

The relatively new fields of the east provide the rest of the output, but the figure of 1.3 million barrels per day extracted in the Orinoco Belt, announced by del Pino in the middle of the year, has been questioned by the criminal investigation.

Venezuelan expert Francisco Monaldi, at Rice University in the U.S. state of Texas, pointed out that exports are already below 1.4 million barrels per day (they stood at over 2.5 million at the beginning of the century), and less than 500,000 barrels per day were exported to the United States in November

For a century, the United States was the biggest importer of Venezuelan oil, purchasing 1.5 million barrels per day. And it is still the main source of revenue, as exports to China, which exceed 600,000 barrels per day, are used to pay off debts.

In oil refining, “it is perhaps even worse” according to Cisneros, since the Venezuelan refineries, installed to process 1.3 million barrels per day, “worked a few years ago at 90 or 95 percent of their capacity and now are only working at a third, 30 or 35 percent. We do not even supply our fuel needs,” which in part have to be imported, he pointed out.
To the decrease in the production of gasoline, lubricants and other derivatives are added distribution problems in the 1,650 service stations in this country of almost one million square kilometers, 31 million people and four million vehicles.

One of the problems is the absurdly low price of fuel in the country, the cheapest in the world. One litre costs just one bolívar, which at the official exchange rate is equivalent to about 10 cents, but at the black market rate is equivalent to one-thousandth of a cent: with one dollar you could buy 100,000 litres.

The cost of selling half a million barrels of fuel each day at this low price is a loss of between 12 and 15 billion dollars a year for PDVSA.

In addition, there is a problem of smuggling to Colombia, Brazil and the Caribbean, which Venezuela partially curbs with controls and rationing that cause shortages and huge queues of vehicles at gas stations along the border.

PDVSA has paid back interest in arrears this year for its debt bonds, while a US subsidiary of Chinese company Sinopec -a partner that has contributed more than 50 billion dollars in loans to Caracas – sued the Venezuelan state-owned company before a US court, for 21.5 million dollars over unpaid bills.

The United States imposed sanctions on Venezuela that make it difficult to renegotiate the country’s and PDVSA’s debts.

“Sanctions and default make it more difficult for partners to invest in joint ventures. The Venezuelan oil industry seems to have entered a spiral of death,” said Monaldi.

Cisneros believes that a recovery of the industry “is possible with a different organisational scheme, such as Argentina’s, which has a ‘front company’, Enarsa, and an operator, YPF (51 percent state-owned, 49 percent listed on the stock market).”

To achieve that “there are two possibilities; one is that the current regime reacts with respect to the economy and oil, and another is that there is a political change and the country starts to take advantage of its human, economic and oil resources,” he argued.

By a show of hands, Venezuela’s National Constituent Assembly passed on Nov. 8 the new law against hate, which represents a threat to freedom of expression according to organisations that work to defend free speech. Credit: Zurimar Campos / AVN

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Dec 6 2017 (IPS)

Hate speech in the media or social networks in Venezuela is now punishable with prison sentences of up to 20 years, according to a new law issued by the government-controlled National Constituent Assembly (ANC).

“A laudable objective, such as preventing hate speech that can lead to crimes and other damages, creates new crimes of opinion and is aimed at controlling content and freedom of expression,” Marianela Balbi, executive director of the Venezuelan chapter of the Lima-based Press and Society Institute (IPyS), told IPS.

The “Constitutional Law against hatred, for peaceful coexistence and tolerance” was approved by the ANC, which is made up exclusively of supporters of the government of Nicolás Maduro. The ANC was elected on Jul. 30, in elections boycotted by the opposition. It is not recognised by many governments, while the single-chamber National Assembly, where the opposition is in the majority, rejects it as unconstitutional.

“We do not call it a law because laws, in accordance with domestic and international human rights law, are made by parliaments – in this country, the National Assembly – to allow debate and participation, which in this case did not happen,” Carlos Correa, of the non-governmental organisation Espacio Público, dedicated to freedom of expression and information, told IPS.

It was President Maduro, in power since 2013 and political heir of the late leader of the Bolivarian revolution, Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), who requested the approval of the law against hatred.

“The time has come, through a broad political process of awareness-raising, to punish the crimes of hate and intolerance, in all their forms of expression, and to put an end to them definitively,” Maduro said when presenting the bill in August.

Former minister of Foreign Affairs and president of the ANC, Delcy Rodríguez, said that a comparative study was carried out with similar laws in Germany and Ecuador, and that in addition to establishing penalties, the Venezuelan law incorporated provisions to promote education in favour of tolerance.

In July, Germany passed a law that orders service providers such as YouTube or Twitter to remove content considered criminal within 24 hours.

In Ecuador, former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017) proposed a “law that regulates acts of hatred and discrimination in social networks,” with possible sanctions against service providers, but the legislature shelved the bill after Lenin Moreno became president in May.

The 25-article law passed by the ANC does not define what it means by “hate”. According to the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language hatred is “antipathy and aversion to something or a person to whom one wishes ill.”

“It is serious that this law puts in the hands of a few officials the assessment of what is or is not a hate crime, because the legal instrument lacks a definition,” Alberto Arteaga, former dean of the Central University of Venezuela’s law school, told IPS.

The rapporteur for freedom of expression in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), Uruguayan Edison Lanza, warned that “the law against hatred in Venezuela could severely hinder the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and generate a strong intimidation effect incompatible with a democratic society.”

Lanza lamented the establishment of “exorbitant criminal sanctions and powers to censor traditional media and the Internet, that run counter to international standards on freedom of expression.” In his opinion, “the last free space in Venezuela, the social networks, will be censored.”

The law aims to prevent and repress all expressions that “promote war or incite hatred of national, racial, ethnic, religious, political, social, ideological, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and any other nature that constitutes incitement to discrimination, intolerance or violence. ”

Political organisations will have to reform their statutes to expel any members who spread expressions of hatred. The penalty for not following this rule will be the cancellation of the registration of the party considered to have infringed the law.

Any print or audiovisual media outlets that emit messages punishable by law will be subject to fines, closure or termination of their concession, independently of the penalties that may fall individually on those responsible.

Administrators of social networks and online media outlets must withdraw messages that contravene the law within a maximum period of six hours, or they will be sanctioned.

The penalty for spreading messages that instigate hatred, war, discrimination or intolerance can range from 10 to 20 years in prison.

The sanctions will be imposed by courts and by the state National Telecommunications Commission.

In addition, the law creates a Commission for the Promotion and Guarantee of Peaceful Coexistence, which will dictate the measures that the authorities and official agencies and citizens must follow to fulfill the objectives of the law and avoid impunity.

The new 15-member Commission, appointed by the ANC itself, will be made up of representatives of that body, the executive branch, the other branches of government, excluding parliament, and three social organisations that promote coexistence.

Balbi argued that the new law “establishes a very dangerous discretionality, which is unnecessary to protect aspects such as security or the good repute of people, because they already are covered by the Constitution, other laws and international treaties that Venezuela has signed.”

The National Assembly rejected “the supposed law”, because it was produced by a body that it sees as not having the authority to create laws, and because “it constitutes a gross attempt to criminalise and sanction political dissidence, putting at risk plurality, freedom of expression and the right to information.”

But the decisions by the parliament elected in December 2015 are systematically blocked and ignored by the Supreme Court of Justice, the executive branch and other Venezuelan authorities.

Correa said the new law “is aimed towards building a logic of fear. It seeks censorship and self-censorship. It tries to get into people’s feelings, something characteristic of not only authoritarian but of totalitarian regimes.”
The new law, which entered into force on Nov. 8, has not yet been applied to any institution or person.

By Joaquín Roy
MIAMI, Apr 14 2015 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama has earned a place in history for taking the first steps towards rectifying a policy that has lasted over half a century without ever achieving its primary goal of ending the Castro regime in Cuba.

At the Seventh Summit of the Americas, held in Panama City Apr. 10-11, Obama set aside the tortuous negotiations with his Cuban counterpart Raúl Castro and the impossible pursuit of consensus with his domestic opponents. Going out on a limb, he made an unconditional offer. He knew, or he sensed, that Castro would have no option but to accept.

Joaquín Roy

The Cuban economy is on the verge of collapse and the regime is receiving subtle pressure from a population that has already endured all manner of trials.

Signs of weakening in Venezuela, its protector, with which it exchanged social favours (in the fields of health and education) for subsidised oil, are gathering like hurricane storm clouds over the Raúl Castro regime

Instead of shaking the tree to knock the ripe fruit to the ground, Obama chose to do the unexpected: to prop it up and instead encourage its survival.

Obama is committing to stability in Cuba as the lesser evil, compared with sparking an internal explosion, with conflict between irreconcilable sectors and the imposition of a military solution more rigid than the current level of control. Washington knows that only the Cuban armed forces can guarantee order. The last thing the Pentagon aspires to is to take on that unenviable role.

Thus, between underpinning the Raúl Castro government and the doubtful prospect of attempting instantaneous transformation, the pragmatic option was to renew full diplomatic relations and, in the near future, lift the embargo.

Raúl Castro, for his part, yielded ground on the oft-repeated demand for an end to the embargo as a prior condition for any negotiations, and has responded wisely to the challenge. He contented himself with the consolation prize of reviewing the history (incidentally, an appalling one) of U.S. policy towards Cuba, in his nearly one-hour speech at the Summit.

“Obama is committing to stability in Cuba as the lesser evil, compared with sparking an internal explosion, with conflict between irreconcilable sectors and the imposition of a military solution more rigid than the current level of control”
To sugar the pill, however, he generously recognised that Obama, who was not even born at the time of the Cuban Revolution, shares no blame for the blockade. In this way, Castro contributed decisively to Obama’s triumph at the summit.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has emerged from this inter-American gathering as the clear loser. The key to his failure was not having calculated his limitations and having undervalued the resources of his fellow presidents. Initially, Maduro logically exploited Obama’s mistake in decreeing that Venezuela is a “threat” and imposing sanctions on seven Venezuelan officials.

A large number of governments and analysts criticised the language used in the U.S. decree. In the run-up to the summit, Obama publicly recanted and admitted that Venezuela is no such threat to his country.

Maduro’s weak showing at the Summit was due to a combination of his own personality, the reactions of important external actors (significantly distant from the United States), the weak support of many of his traditional allies or sympathisers in Latin America, and the absence of unconditional support from Cuba.

It should be noted that the United States barely made its presence felt over this issue, although U.S. State Department counsellor Thomas Shannon made an effort to smooth over Maduro’s excesses and visited the Venezuelan president in Caracas ahead of the summit.

Maduro’s actions were already burdened by the imprisonment of a number of his opponents on questionable charges. As a result, protests spread worldwide, especially in Latin America, but also in Europe.

A score of former Latin American presidents signed a protest document which was presented at the summit.

Although these former presidents might be regarded as conservative and liberal, they were joined by former Spanish president José María Aznar (a notorious target of attacks by the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and, afterwards, Maduro himself) and former Spanish socialist president Felipe González, who offered to act as defence lawyer for Antonio Ledezma, the mayor of Caracas, who is one of those imprisoned by the Venezuelan regime.

Maduro’s attempt to have a condemnation of the U.S. decree included in the summit’s final communiqué ended in another defeat. Although efforts were made to eliminate direct mention of the United States, the outcome was that the summit issued no final declaration because of lack of consensus.

In spite of the loquacity of its partners and protégés in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Venezuela’s Latin American supporters showed caution and avoided direct confrontation with Washington.

The same was evidently true of the Caribbean countries; fearful of losing supplies of subsidised Venezuelan oil, they made their request to Obama for preferential treatment by the United States at the meeting of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in Jamaica earlier in the month.

But Maduro’s main failure was not realising that Raúl Castro would have to choose between fear of diminished supplies of cheap Venezuelan crude and rapprochement with Washington. It remains unknown how Cuba will be able to continue supplying Cuban teachers and healthcare personnel to Venezuela, until now the jewel in the crown of the alliance between Havana and Caracas in the context of ALBA.

Translated by Valerie Dee/Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Joaquín Roy can be contacted at jroy@Miami.edu

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 19 2015 (IPS)

For a long time, citizens of the United States have firmly believed that their country has an exceptional destiny, and continue to do so today even though their political system has become totally dysfunctional.

The three pillars of U.S. democracy – legislative, executive and judicial – are no longer on speaking terms,  so dialogue or the possibility of bipartisan policy has virtually disappeared.

In this context, to please his opponents, and with a view to the U.S. presidential elections in 2016, President Barack Obama is increasingly being pushed to act as strong guy.

Roberto Savio

This is the only reasonable explanation on why he has suddenly declared Venezuela a security threat to the United States, just months after starting the process of normalisation of relations with Cuba, a long-time U.S. enemy in Latin America and ally of Venezuela.

The country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, is extremely happy because his denunciations of a U.S. plot with Venezuela’s opposition to have him removed have now been officially justified – by no less than the United States itself. Even the New York Times, in an editorial on Mar. 12, wondered about the wisdom of such move.

The problem is that, behind Obama’s back, U.S. Republican senators are doing unprecedented things, like writing an admonitory letter to the Supreme Guardian of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, indicating that any nuclear agreement made with Obama would last only as long as he remained in office.

That letter must have made Khamenei and Iran’s hardliners very happy, because they have always said that the United States cannot be trusted, and that the ongoing nuclear negotiations make no sense."This escalation [over Ukraine] has already taken a direction that clear heads should exam with a long-term perspective. Are the members of NATO – an institution that needs conflict to justify its new life now that the Soviet Union no longer exists – ready to enter a war, just to keep making the point? "

We are now facing an extension of the concept of the exceptional destiny of the United States, in which its foreign policy can also be exceptional, not subject to logic and rules.

Across the Atlantic, what is certainly exceptional is that while Europe has practically always followed U.S. foreign policy, even when it is against its interests as is the case of the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the United Kingdom – which has a special relationship with the United States – is now indulging in some divergent action.

Through its Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, the United Kingdom has announced that it intends to join the Chinese initiative for the creation of an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), in which Beijing is investing 50 billion dollars. This has raised the ire of the United States because the AIIB is seen as an alternative to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, in which the United States (and Japan) have powerful interests.

Shortly after Cameron’s move, France, Germany and Italy followed, while Australia will also join and South Korea will have to do so. This will leave the United States isolated, opening up a new “exceptional” dimension – economic might (China) is more attractive than military might (United States).

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has responded to U.S. irritation by declaring that the United Kingdom is joining the AIIB because “we think that it’s in the UK’s national interest”.

Of course, Cameron is playing up to his financial constituency, which is very aware of its interest, even when it does not coincide with U.S. interest. After all, China’s share of global manufacturing output, which was three percent in 1990, had risen to nearly 25 percent by 2014.

Even worse is that Cameron has also decided to cut spending on defence and while the U.K. government currently meets the two percent of GDP target that the United States expects all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to pay into the alliance, it has only committed itself to continuing that until the end of the current Parliament in May.

For the U.S. administration, this could be taken as a sign of weakness by Russian President Vladimir Putin who, it argues, should be put under growing pressure and shown that the confrontation over Ukraine will escalate until he backs down.

This escalation has already taken a direction that clear heads should exam with a long-term perspective. Are the members of NATO – an institution that needs conflict to justify its new life now that the Soviet Union no longer exists – ready to enter a war, just to keep making the point?

The signals are those that precede a war.

U.K. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has declared that Russia is “as great a threat to Europe as ‘Islamic States’.” Troops are amassing in the Baltic States to serve as a deterrent for a possible Russian invasion. The U.S. Republican Congress is overtly asking for the supply of massive and heavy weapons to the Ukrainian army.  Hundreds of U.S. troops have been assigned to Ukraine to bolster the Kiev regime against Russian-backed rebels in the east. The United Kingdom is sending 75 military advisers.

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, the Polish government is supporting the creation and training of militias, and plans to provide military training to any of the many Poles who are increasingly concerned that “the great Russian behemoth will not be sated with Ukraine and will reach out once again into the West.” The same is happening in the Baltic States, which all have a sizable Russian presence and think Putin could invade them at any moment.

Media everywhere have engaged in a frenzy of personal vilification of Putin and in the popular pastime of using Putin and Ukraine to justify military expansionism – to advocate tit for tat what Putin is doing.

It is difficult to look to Putin with sympathy, but this confrontation has again pushed the Russian people behind its leader, and at an unprecedented level that now stands at around 80 percent.

The Guardian has reported veteran Russian leftist Boris Kagarlitsky as commenting that most Russians want Putin to take a tougher stand against the West “not because of patriotic propaganda, but their experience of the past 25 years”, and it would be a mistake to underestimate the role that humiliation can play in history.

It is commonly accepted that Hitler emerged from the frustrations of the German people after the heavy penalties that they had to pay the victors after the First World War. The same sense of humiliation made the war of Slobodan Milosevic against NATO popular with the Serbian population.

It is the humiliation of the Arabs divided among the winners of the First World War which is at the roots of the Caliphate, or the Islamic State, which claims that Arabs are finally going to be given back their dignity and identity.

And it is also humiliation over the imposition of austerity which is now creating a strong anti-German sentiment in Greece, to which Germans respond with a sense of righteous indignation (52 percent of Germans now want Greece to leave the Euro).

Has anyone considered who is going to take over Russia if Putin goes away? Certainly not those who are now in the opposition. Has anyone considered what it would mean to take on responsibility for a very weak state like Ukraine?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has now approved a 17.5 billion dollar relief fund for Ukraine but warned that the country’s rescue “is subject to exceptional risks, especially those arising from the conflict in the East.”

In fact Ukraine needs to plug a hole of at least 40 billion dollars in the immediate term, and economists all agree that the country does not have a viable economy. It will require many years of consistent help to reach some economic equilibrium – if there is no war.

Europe is close to recession and apparently unable even to solve the problems of Greece, but goes headlong into supporting Kiev against Russian-backed rebels. NATO can support Ukrainian soldiers up to their last man, but it is impossible that they will beat Russia. Will the West then intervene or back off and lose face, after many deaths and much waste and destruction?

A widespread view now is that sanctions should starve Russia, which will have lost its revenues from oil. What if Putin does not back down, sustained by the Russian people? Are Europeans ready to go to war to please the Republican Congress in the United States? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Pending legislation calling for U.S. President Barack Obama to impose sanctions against key Venezuelan officials is unlikely to defuse the ongoing crisis there and could prove counter-productive, according to both the administration and independent experts here.

A bill approved overwhelmingly Tuesday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would authorise Obama to freeze any financial assets in U.S. institutions and cancel U.S. visas for Venezuelan officials deemed responsible for “directing significant acts of violence or serious human rights abuses against persons associated with the anti-government protests in Venezuela.”

The bill, a similar version of which was approved by the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this month, would also authorise sanctions against anyone who has provided assistance to government security forces and commit 15 million dollars in support for “pro-democracy” groups and independent media in the South American nation.

“Today we took an important step forward to punish human rights abusers in (President) Nicolas Maduro’s regime,” declared Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who co-sponsored the bill with the Committee chair, Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez.

“The U.S. has tried hard not to become the centre of the debate, realising [...] that it would only help the Maduro government point to Washington as the source of the protests [...]." -- John Walsh, Venezuela specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)
“(N)ow that thousands of innocent Venezuelans have protested courageously and peacefully against the failure that is this chavista government, we can’t allow the government’s repression, violence and murders to go unpunished,” he said in a statement after the 13-2 vote.

On a visit to Mexico Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry noted Congressional support for sanctions and hinted that the administration may feel compelled to impose them.

“Our hope is that the leaders, that President Maduro and others, will make decisions that will make it unnecessary for them to be implemented. But all options remain on the table at this time, with the hopes that we can move the (dialogue) process forward,” he said.

A number of experts, as well as senior administration officials, however, warned that the legislation, however well-intended, could make matters worse in the deeply polarised oil-rich country.

“I think people are really frustrated about what’s happening in Venezuela,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based hemispheric think tank here.

“But the U.S. doesn’t have a lot of leverage, and, while sanctions make people feel good, I can’t imagine them accomplishing much except to give Maduro another reason to attack the United States.

“It also risks alienating Latin American governments,” which, with the Vatican and under the auspices of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), have taken the lead in trying to mediate Venezuela’s divisions through dialogue between Maduro and moderate opposition forces.

“I just can’t imagine any Latin American governments seeing this as a good idea or helpful under present circumstances,” he told IPS.

“The U.S. has tried hard not to become the centre of the debate, realising – correctly, in my opinion – that it would only help the Maduro government point to Washington as the source of the protests and distract attention from the genuine and legitimate grievances that have given rise to the protests,” added John Walsh, a Venezuela specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

“One of the tacks that has been available to (Maduro) to get out of the dialogue and major compromises that it might force him to take is the ability to reframe the protest movement and the opposition as people in thrall to or actually taking orders from the ‘Empire’ as part of an international conspiracy to de-stabilise the government and push Chavismo out of power.”

Indeed, this has been the position taken by the Obama administration throughout the most recent crisis, which began in late February with student demonstrators demanding that Maduro step down.

In hearings before the Foreign Relations Committee two weeks ago, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson stressed Washington’s support for the UNASUR-led initiative.

“This is not a U.S.-Venezuela issue; it is an internal Venezuelan issue,” she told the senators. “…We have strongly resisted attempts to be used as a distraction from Venezuela’s real problems.”

The Senate bill, which is considered almost certain to pass if Majority Leader Harry Reid permits it to go to the floor, comes after the government-opposition dialogue – in which the foreign ministers of Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador have acted as UNASUR’s representatives – broke down last week over, among other issues, opposition demands that all political prisoners be freed.

In a report entitled ‘Venezuela: Tipping Point’ and released Wednesday, the International Crisis Group (ICG) warned that failure to resolve the stand-off could plunge the country into yet more violence, “leaving it unable to address soaring criminality and economic decline and exposing the inability of regional inter-governmental bodies to manage the continent’s conflicts.”

Since February, at least 42 people have died in confrontations between security forces and pro-government gangs known as “colectivos” and opposition forces.

While some opposition sectors have reportedly used violence, independent human rights groups have blamed most of the casualties on the government and its allies. In a harsh report issued earlier this month, Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused security forces of severely beating and, in some cases, shooting at point-blank range, peaceful protesters, subjecting detainees to severe abuse sometimes amounting to torture, and, in some cases collaborating with the colectivos in their attacks on protestors and bystanders.

The increased repression, as well as the impasse in the dialogue, has intensified concern here about the likelihood of further polarisation that will strengthen hard-liners on both sides.

In its report, the ICG called for all sides to consider the appointment of an international facilitator, possibly from the U.N. system, to join the UNASUR-Vatican effort, as well as the deployment of a U.N. technical mission to support it.

While the administration opposes sanctions at this point, one senior State Department official said it hoped to intensify discussions with regional governments, beginning with Kerry’s visit to Mexico, about what more can be done to get the dialogue back on track.

“The real question is for them to sort of compare notes on what they’re hearing out of Venezuela, whether we think the efforts that UNASUR and the Vatican are making are working, and what more can we do from outside that process to either help it along or to be ready to do something more,” the official said.

“(T)he last thing we want to do is torpedo any dialogue that might lead to action, but we’re just as frustrated as the Senate is that nothing has happened yet.”

Kerry reflected that frustration Wednesday, accusing the government of a “total failure …to demonstrate good-faith actions to implement those things that they agreed to do approximately a month ago.”

“I think more high-level consultations with other governments about how they see the situation and to work with them could be helpful,” said IAD’s Shifter.

“But the critical country is Brazil, and, unfortunately, (U.S.) relations with Brazil aren’t good because of the Snowden affair that led to the postponement of (President Dilma) Rousseff’s state visit that was supposed to take place late last year.”

(END)

Faces of mothers whose children were killed in criminal violence peer out from walls in Caracas. Venezuela has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Credit: Fidel Márquez /IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 27 2014 (IPS)

This much is known: at least 33 people are dead and 461 have been wounded. The rest – questions of who, why and what next for Venezuela – has largely been a matter of speculation.

Earlier this month, a group of United Nations independent experts asked the government of Nicolas Maduro to clarify allegations of arbitrary arrests, intimidation of journalists and the abuse of dissidents in what experts say is the country’s worst political turmoil in over 10 years.“These are not random acts, this is a deliberate campaign to cut social links between the government and its mass base by blocking the delivery of social services." -- James Petras

Beginning in early February as sporadic student demonstrations, protests are now a daily occurrence, drawing anywhere from 500 to 5,000 people who say they have taken to the streets against perennial food shortages, soaring inflation and a steep rise in crime, including 21,000 homicides in 2012 alone according to the Venezuela Violence Observatory, representing one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Although initially peaceful, the protests recently turned deadly, with civilians hurling Molotov cocktails from behind their barricades and the National Guard dispatching units decked out in full riot gear to meet them.

For several weeks the media has portrayed the situation as a democratic struggle for human rights, including the rights to freedom of speech and political assembly.

In a Mar. 18 statement to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged Maduro’s government to “uphold its international legal obligations to respect human rights, and, specifically, to end abuses against demonstrators.”

Daniel Wilkinson, managing director of the Americas division at HRW, told IPS the situation is “grave”, particularly the “abuses being committed by security forces, including excessive use of force against demonstrators.”

But other rights groups in and around Caracas, as well as some commentators in the U.S. and beyond, say the violence in Venezuela is neither democratic nor spontaneous, but a carefully orchestrated effort by the middle- and upper-classes to destabilise the revolutionary process set in motion by former President Hugo Chavez, which has long been a thorn in the side of the wealthy.

Silence in the barrios

A Mar. 25 statement signed by over 30 independent Venezuelan human rights activists says protests have largely been confined to affluent sectors in eight of the country’s 335 municipalities.

These neighbourhoods, home to mostly upper- and middle-class Venezuelans who constitute an electoral minority, are now the sites of makeshift barricades where “cables, barbed wire, felled trees, rocks, and spilt grease oil…mix with disused furniture, tires and rubbish that are lit on fire,” according to a recent study.

“The covers of public drains have been lifted, leaving holes in which at least two motorcyclists have died,” added the study.

Contrary to news reports that most of the 33 deaths have occurred at the hands of security forces, the study found that 17 of the victims died at the street barricades, including a pregnant woman who was shot Monday when the bus she was riding in was halted by protesters and its passengers forced to disembark.

“The people you are seeing on the streets constitute the hard-line of the right-wing opposition who decided that they did not want to wait till the next election to get rid of the government,” Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Washington DC-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research, told IPS over the phone from Lima.

Regardless of their political affiliation, the protesters’ demands seem perfectly reasonable on paper: a reduction of the inflation rate that has nearly doubled to 57.3 percent since Maduro took the helm last April, and access to basic supplies and groceries.

Economic growth slowed from 5.6 percent in 2012 to to one percent in 2013, according to the International Monetary Fund, partly accounting for the bare shelves around the country.

But Weisbrot says the protesters are more sheltered from such scarcities than their counterparts in the sprawling barrios of Caracas, home to 50 percent of the city’s 3.8 million inhabitants.

“Demonstrators hailing from neighbourhoods like Los Palos Grandes have servants to wait in line for them at the supermarket, they have access to goods that most Venezuelans do not,” he said, recounting scenes from his recent trip to Venezuela’s capital.

Those sectors that bear the brunt of rising prices and severe shortages are giving the demonstrations a wide berth. A resident of the Petare slum, which hugs the eastern rim of Caracas, recently told reporters about the unrest, “It’s rich people trying to get back lost economic perks. The slums won’t join them.”

Indeed, economic analysts have suggested that the protesters are more aggrieved by the 4.1 percent jump in monthly recreational costs, and the 3.9 percent spike in hotel and restaurant prices, than by inflated healthcare expenses or the cost of flour.

Targeting the poor

Some sources say the above analysis is borne out by protesters’ systematic targeting of public welfare institutions, utilised by the country’s most destitute and marginalised groups, in a deliberate attempt to weaken the nerve center of the Socialist state.

“There have been attacks on government supermarkets that sell food at subsidised prices, on clinics where Cuban doctors provide free medical care, and on educational facilities,” James Petras, professor emeritus of sociology at the Binghamton University in New York, told IPS.

A few nights ago demonstrators torched an experimental university in the western city of San Cristobal, cradle of the protest movement, where several hundred low-income Venezuelan students were receiving subsidised education.

Over the last 12 weeks, Petras says, protesters have also targeted “many centres of social gathering and recreational activities, electrical grids – especially those that supply areas where support for Chavez is strong – municipal buildings, local banks that supply microcredit loans to small-scale enterprises, and the list goes on.”

Fire bombings, arson and other acts of sabotage have cost the country about 10 billion dollars in damages, the government said last Friday in a statement that lambasted such tactics as “vandalism” and “terrorism”.

“These are not random acts, this is a deliberate campaign to cut social links between the government and its mass base by blocking the delivery of social services,” Petras said.

“The right wing is very conscious of the link between welfare programmes and the government. This is why there has been no targeting of big businesses, multinational banks or other institutions of the upper classes.”

The government, meanwhile, is sandwiched between international pressure to release the roughly 1,800 jailed protesters and rein in its security forces, and a growing movement in and outside of Venezuela calling for swift action against what they say is a wave of fascism, in which a privileged minority is threatening to destabilise a government that has won 18 of the last 19 elections.

*Correction: March 28, 2014 — An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that protesters in Venezuela fired bullets from behind their barricades. Documented evidence only shows civilians throwing Molotov cocktails at security forces.

Relatives and students march with a banner naming people killed in the protests, in a mass opposition demonstration in Caracas on Saturday Feb. 22. Credit: Estrella Gutiérrez/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 27 2014 (IPS)

Fifteen dead, dozens injured, some 500 arrested and denunciations of torture, illegal repression by security forces and irregular groups and attacks on the press are the fruits of over two weeks of political confrontation in the streets of some 30 Venezuelan cities. 

The state “has tossed the United Nations basic principles on the use of force and firearms [approved in Havana in 1990] into the waste bin, with regulatory bodies like the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Ombudsman’s Office treating them with contempt,” Marino Alvarado, coordinator of the human rights organisation Provea, told IPS.  "In the absence of the state, parapolice bands control certain urban spaces, call themselves collectives and act as an armed wing of the government..." -- Luis Cedeño of Paz Activa

According to eye-witnesses, press investigations and videos circulating on the social networks, several protesters were shot to death by plain-clothes police, by armed groups that intimidated protesters and initiated violent incidents, or by pellets allegedly fired by members of the militarised Bolivarian National Guard.

One of the fatalities, on the morning of Monday Feb. 24, was 34-year-old Jimmy Vargas, who was allegedly attacked with pellets and tear gas by members of the National Guard. He fell from the second floor of a building in San Cristóbal, the capital of the state of Táchira, in the southwestern Andes mountains on the border with Colombia.

To defuse the crisis, President Nicolás Maduro decreed a holiday from Thursday Feb. 27, the 25th anniversary of the protests that left more than 300 dead in Caracas in 1989, to Mar. 5, the first anniversary of the death of former president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013).

This week pro-government and opposition demonstrations continued, and looting and vandalism broke out in cities like Maracay, in the north.

On Sunday Feb. 23 systems engineer Alejandro Márquez was killed, allegedly beaten to death by national guards when he was using his mobile phone to film incidents near a barricade in central Caracas.

Victims of acts of vandalism by demonstrating groups are also among the dead.

On Friday Feb. 21, 29-year-old supermarket worker Elvis Durán died on returning to his home on his motorbike and collided with a wire apparently strung by opposition activists across the street where he lived.

In Valencia, an industrial city west of Caracas, among the denunciations of torture was the story of Juan Carrasco, who was sodomised with a rifle barrel. “My son was brutalised, raped, humiliated by the soldiers in green. They destroyed his life and that of other youngsters,” complained his mother, Rebeca González de Carrasco.

Geraldine Moreno Orozco, a student, died from pellets fired at point-blank range into her face, after she had already fallen to the shots.

In several cities there were reports that young detainees were soaked with gasoline and threatened with being set alight, or were tortured with electric prods. There were also reports of security agents throwing tear gas canisters into homes.

The first protesters to be killed, at the end of a march in Caracas on Feb. 12, died in shooting involving members of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (political police) who were disobeying an order of confinement to barracks, President Maduro said.

Maduro claimed that 30 people have died because the “guarimbas” (barricade shelters) have prevented them from receiving timely medical care.

The Foro Penal Venezolano and the Fundación para los Derechos y la Equidad, two associations of human rights lawyers, are keeping track of complaints of rights violations to present to international bodies. “Government officials responsible could be accused of crimes against humanity,” lawyer Elenis Rodríguez told IPS.

The wave of demonstrations began on Feb. 6 in the capital of Táchira province with a student protest against crime, after the attempted rape of a university student on campus.

The protests expanded when the initial demonstration was harshly put down. In the subsequent demonstrations against the repression, some hotheads threw stones at the residence of Táchima Governor José Vielma, a retired soldier and member of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

Three young men were apprehended, prosecuted and sent to a prison in the northwestern city of Coro. As a result, student protests demanding their freedom spread like wildfire to other cities, and in the Andes region local people turned out in their thousands in solidarity.

On Feb. 12, Youth Day in Venezuela and the bicentennial of a battle in the war of independence, student movements organised marches all over the country, and a sector of the opposition coalition Mesa de Unidad Democrática (Democratic Unity Roundtable), led by Leopoldo López, called for “The Exit” of Maduro’s government.

There were huge rallies led by young people and the middle classes, which political analysts say are motivated by discontent with the government’s erratic policies in the face of the shortage of basic products, inflation and surging crime.

Although the vast majority of demonstrations are peaceful, some are accompanied with stone-throwing, setting fire to improvised barricades built of trash set up in the streets, and other acts of vandalism.

The government issued an arrest warrant for López, of the small centre-right opposition party Voluntad Popular (Popular Will), accusing him of inciting unrest and street violence by calling for “The Exit”. He gave himself up in front of crowds at a rally in Caracas.

Meanwhile, combat planes and military helicopters were sent to Táchira where they overflew the street demonstrations. A parachute battalion was dispatched to clear access roads to San Cristóbal.

A novel element that has emerged is the armed “collectives,” irregular groups usually on motorbikes, who clash with protesters and create trouble in opposition residential areas in cities like Caracas and Mérida (in the southwest), shooting at or destroying vehicles and windows.

In Alvarado’s view, they are “leftwing paramilitaries” who hide behind the cloak of social work in the shanty towns of Caracas and other cities but exercise violence in favour of the government. Maduro has warned against “demonising the collectives” and has praised them in a number of his speeches.

Not all Chavista (supporters of the president Hugo Chávez, 1999-2013) or revolutionary (pro-government) collectives are armed and violent.

Luis Cedeño of Paz Activa, an NGO which works on security issues, told IPS that “in the absence of the state, parapolice bands control certain urban spaces, call themselves collectives and act as an armed wing of the government, in order to benefit from a certain amount of legitimacy and impunity.”

Disarming and dissolving these collectives has become a rallying cry of the opposition.

Alvarado criticised “the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Ombudsman’s Office, which should act ex officio, but have turned a deaf ear, improperly issuing opinions ahead of time in favour of the government and blaming opposition leaders, and also remaining silent when evidence was contaminated by executive branch officials.”

Rodríguez and Alvarado deplore the violations by security forces and other public powers of the Law to Prevent and Punish Torture, approved unanimously by parliament less than a year ago.

“There is no torture in Venezuela,” Maduro said at a press conference on Saturday Feb. 22.

The media have also taken some punches. Journalists’ organisations have denounced 62 cases of aggression during the protests this month. Colombian cable news channel NTN24 was pulled off the air and the same threat hangs over CNN en Español.

In Alvarado’s view, the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) “could make a contribution as mediators, based on the clauses in favour of democracy, human rights and political dialogue in their founding documents.”

Youth rally in Plaza Venezuela, Caracas. Credit: FCU-UCV

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 17 2014 (IPS)

Violence on the streets of Venezuela, with anti-government protests in the capital and 12 other cities, is a sign of hardening stances by both the government and its opponents as President Nicolás Maduro takes a trial-and-error approach to the economy in crisis.

Opposition student protests continued over the weekend in Caracas and other cities, while on Saturday some 15,000 pro-government supporters turned out for a peace demonstration called by the president.“We are living in the turbulence produced by the discontent and unmet demands of Venezuelan society." -- Margarita López Maya

Opposition leader Leopoldo López has an arrest warrant out against him, but he called on government opponents to join him in another march on Tuesday, Feb. 18, to the interior ministry, saying he would be available to the authorities and had nothing to fear.

Three people, two students and a member of a pro-government militia (known as “colectivos”), were shot dead at the end of marches in Caracas on Wednesday Feb. 12. There were dozens injured and some 100 arrests, with complaints that detainees were being held incommunicado, tortured and treated inhumanely.

The protests, paradoxically, began with students complaining that insecurity and violent crime on the streets were invading their schools and universities.

“We are facing a coup d’etat against democracy and the government I preside over,” said Maduro, who was elected in April to succeed the late Hugo Chávez (1954-2013), in his first speech after hearing that unknown persons had fired on dispersing protesters in central Caracas.

The president accused “ultra-rightwing fascist groups” that he said were following “the same script as in April 2002,” when a huge opposition march in Caracas ended with shootings that left 19 civilians dead and sparked a brief coup against Chávez.

On Sunday Feb. 16, Maduro announced the expulsion of three United States consular officials, accused of conspiring against his government, and criticised Washington harshly after Secretary of State John Kerry expressed “deep concern” over the situation in Venezuela and asked for the release of the arrested students.

“The circumstances now are different, and the government either does not know where it stands, which is hard to believe, or is using the outbreak of the crisis to justify the suspension of constitutional rights and govern under a state of emergency,” sociologist Carlos Raúl Hernández, who teaches a doctorate in political science at the Central University of Venezuela, told IPS.

In Hernández’s view, the massive support for the student protests is due to the “enormous discontent growing even in Chavist [pro-government] sectors because of the economic mega-crisis and its appalling mismanagement.”

Venezuela has one of the highest inflation rates in the world, at 56 percent, and over 70 percent in food prices, as well as a severe shortage of basic products, ranging from milk and flour to toilet paper and newspapers, and including medicines, air fares, industrial inputs and car parts.

State controls are increasingly tightened on access to foreign exchange earned by oil exports, and inspections are made and fines levied on commercial and industrial firms. For its part, the business community is demanding payment of millions of dollars in debts acquired under the exchange control regime.

According to historian Margarita López Maya of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), “once the spells woven by the words and presence of the charismatic Chávez were lost, reality has become undeniably stark and unpromising.”

“We are living in the turbulence produced by the discontent and unmet demands of Venezuelan society, which have been gathering force in recent months as a result of long term economic and social upsets,” said López Maya.

With the backdrop of this discontent, the students received support from other citizens when they began their protests in early February in the southwestern Andes.

Three young men, accused of attacking the regional governor’s residence, were sent to a prison in Coro, in the extreme northwest of the country, pending trial.

The protests then intensified.

Leaders of a sector belonging to the opposition coalition, the Mesa de Unidad Democrática (Democratic Unity Roundtable), called for mass protests on Wednesday Feb. 12, the bicentennial of a battle in the war of independence against Spain in which young students joined the patriot army and achieved victory.

The date is celebrated as Youth Day, charging the demonstrations and their violent end with emotional and political overtones.

On Friday Feb. 14, while street protests continued in Caracas and other cities in defiance of Maduro’s announcement that demonstrations would have to have prior authorisation, it was reported that the young people imprisoned in Coro had been released.

This may be a first step towards taking the pressure off the protests, and it coincides with many calls from the international community supporting dialogue and respect for the human rights of all involved in the Venezuelan political conflict.

In Venezuela, human rights organisations like Provea and the Red de Apoyo por la Justicia y la Paz (Justice and Peace Support Network) emphasised the need to investigate and punish those responsible for the deaths and injuries that followed the protests on Feb. 12.

Journalists on the ground documented with eyewitnesses, photographs and videos how allegedly pro-government “colectivos” burst in, stirred up violence and used firearms in areas where people were shot.

In dispensing blame, Maduro accused international media of instigating violence through their reporting and opinion on events.

He suspended the Bogotá-based news channel NTN24 from cable TV and delivered a harsh warning to the French news agency AFP.

In spite of the vividness of the images, Hernández does not believe that the protests will lead to significant political change. Instead they may only stiffen the positions and cohesiveness of the parties in conflict.

“Mass movements only achieve major political change when they are combined with powers that can bring about a military uprising, and this is not about to happen in Venezuela,” Hernández said. “From this point of view, they are street games without a clear end in sight,” he concluded.

Military parade in Caracas. Credit: Venezuelan Ministry of Defense

By Walter García and Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 18 2013 (IPS)

A Venezuelan government decree to control information and “internal and external enemy activity” appeals to concepts of the national security doctrine, which various right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America invoked in the 1970s and 1980s.

Through the decree, left-wing President Nicolás Maduro established the Strategic Centre for Security and Protection of the Fatherland (CESPPA), which “will request, organise, integrate and evaluate information of interest to the nation at a strategic level, related to internal and external enemy activity, coming from all of the state’s security and intelligence bodies and other public and private entities.”

These actions will be carried out “as required by the political-military leadership of the Bolivarian Revolution” – which does not exist either in the constitution or in the country’s laws – and public and private institutions “will be under the obligation to provide all of the information required by CESPPA in the exercise of its functions,” the decree says.

The new office will also have the authority “to declare as reserved, classified or of limited dissemination any information, development or circumstance that CESPPA learns about in compliance with its functions or that is processed by CESPPA.”

Maduro designated, as the first head of CESPPA, Major General Gustavo González López, a former commander of the Bolivarian Militia, a force created by the late Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) to support the army, navy, air force and national guard in interior defence tasks.

CESPPA “brings echoes – both because of its character as a potential censorship body and, even more serious, of an intelligence body oriented towards controlling supposed internal enemies – of the national security doctrine that prevailed in the region in the 1970s and 1980s,” Argentine political scientist Andrés Serbin told IPS.

“It is also highly worrisome that no kind of oversight by the public or by civil institutions, including parliament, is contemplated, and that its first director will be a member of the military,” said Serbin, president of the Regional Coordinator of Economic and Social Research, founded in Managua in 1982 and based today in Buenos Aires.

Fransisco Leal, a political science professor at the University of Los Andes in Colombia, has written that the national security doctrine “maintained the idea that, by guaranteeing the security of the state, the security of society is ensured. One of its main innovations was to consider that in order to achieve that objective, the military control of the state was necessary. Another was substituting the external enemy with the internal enemy.”

The doctrine was part of the U.S. strategy to prevent the spread of communism in the Americas after World War II, according to historian Edgar Velásquez, of the University of Cauca in Colombia.

Through this doctrine, Washington “consolidated its domination over the countries of Latin America, engaged in the Cold War, set specific tasks for the armed forces and stimulated a right-wing current of political thought in countries in the region,” Velásquez wrote in the article “History of the National Security Doctrine” published in 2004 in the magazine Estudios Latinoamericanos of the University of Nariño, Colombia.

One of its characteristics was the training in repression received by members of the military and police from different Latin American countries in the U.S. School of the Americas in Panama.

The wave of democratisation that began to sweep the region in the second half of the 1980s threw the doctrine into question. But there have been no profound reforms of the armed forces.

And once again under the influence of Washington, the armed forces have begun taking on internal security and policing tasks in several countries – this time against the ever-present enemies of drug trafficking and crime.

Going down that path poses “the risk that, in a below-the-surface and not visible manner, the national security doctrine could reemerge on the Latin American scene,” states an essay on the impact on penal law in the region, written by legal expert Mario Zamora, currently minister of public security in Costa Rica.

Under the umbrella of that doctrine, the armed forces heading right-wing dictatorships repressed their political opponents as “internal enemies,” leaving tens of thousands dead, forcibly disappeared and tortured in a number of countries.

Venezuela did not follow that same path. And since 1999, it has had left-wing governments purusing “21st century socialism”, first under Chávez and now under his successor, Maduro.

CESPPA has been created against a backdrop of reiterated denunciations by the authorities of supposed acts of sabotage in the electric system and the economy. On Sept. 30, Maduro ordered the expulsion of three U.S. diplomats who he linked to these developments and the far-right in Venezuela.

Spokespersons for the government and the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) have kept silent about CESPPA since the decree was published on Oct. 7.

IPS sought, without success, comments from several PSUV legislators, including two members of the People’s Power and Media commissions, who declined to comment on the decree until they had “studied it in greater depth.”

CESPPA is described as a body that will coordinate “the working policies of the institutions responsible for security, defence, intelligence and internal order, foreign relations and others that have an impact on the security of the fatherland, in order to provide timely, quality information to the president of the republic.”

Rocío San Miguel, director of the non-governmental organisation Control Ciudadano para la Seguridad, la Defensa y la Fuerza Armada, has said that “the objectives of this body include turning some citizens into vigilantes and informers [who report on] the rest.”

“All bodies and people will be obliged to supply information that CESPPA requires on practically anything,” she told IPS. “And the decree has not taken into account constitutional provisions, such as the one that establishes that only a law can create regulations for the classification and secrecy of official documents,” San Miguel added.

The Alianza por la Libertad de Expresión (Alliance for Freedom of Expression), which brings together organisations of journalists and civil rights activists, called for “the immediate repeal of the decree….because it runs counter to constitutional guarantees of the right to information and the prohibition of censorship.”

Carlos Correa, coordinator of the Espacio Público organisation, said “the most serious thing is the notion of ‘internal enemy’, because any Venezuelan critical of the government, or any opponent of the government, would fall under that label.”

That definition “used to be used as a rhetorical expression under a logic of war,” he commented. “But now it appears to be a presidential decree, based on regulations.”

The United States has expelled Venezuela’s chargé d’affaires and two other diplomats in Washington in reprisal for the expulsion of three U.S. diplomats from Caracas, both countries said late Tuesday.

The tit-for-tat move comes a day after the expulsion of the Americans, accused of plotting acts of sabotage against the government, the Foreign Ministry in Caracas said.

The ministry called the U.S. move unjustified, saying the Venezuelan diplomats had not been meeting with people opposed to President Barack Obama.

In Washington, a State Department official confirmed the Venezuelan chargé d’affaires Calixto Ortega Rios and the other two had been advised Monday they had 48 hours to leave the United States.

“It is regrettable that the Venezuelan government has again decided to expel U.S. diplomatic officials based on groundless allegations, which require reciprocal action,” the official said.

“It is counterproductive to the interests of both our countries and not a serious way for a country to conduct its foreign policy,” the official.

Venezuela has accused Ambassador Kelly Keiderling and two others of meeting with the Venezuelan far right — the government’s term for the opposition — to finance President Nicolas Maduro’s opponents and “encourage actions to sabotage the power system and the economy”.

The two countries — at each other’s throats politically but eager supplier and buyer of Venezuelan oil — have not had ambassadors in each other’s capitals since 2010.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the allegations were related to the U.S. Embassy workers’ travel to Venezuelan state of Bolivar, home to troubled state-owned foundries and Venezuela’s main hydroelectric plant.

“They were there conducting normal diplomatic engagement, as we’ve said in the past and should come as no surprise,” Psaki said.

Venezuela’s economy is struggling ahead of the Dec. 8 elections. Annual inflation is at more than 45 percent and the government is running short of foreign currency.

The oil-rich OPEC member country has been plagued by worsening power outages since 2010. The opposition blames neglect and poor maintenance, while alleging mismanagement and corruption at struggling state-owned aluminum, iron and bauxite foundries in Bolivar.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Hugo Chavez’s hand-picked successor, blamed sabotage by the “extreme right” for both the blackouts and food shortages, but has provided no evidence. Like his predecessor, Maduro has a history of making unsubstantiated accusations against the U.S. and his political opponents.

In a news conference in Caracas, Keiderling said she and the other diplomats would leave Venezuela on Wednesday before the 48-hour deadline expired. “The work of the embassy will continue. It doesn’t matter very much if it is one person or another” doing it, she said.

She said that if the accusation against them was that they had met with Venezuelans then “it is true. We met with Venezuelans.”

“These meetings with civil society can be with [the independent election monitoring group] Sumate, they can be with a group of women, with mothers who have lost children or with an environmental group that wants to lobby for cleaning a park,” she said. “If we aren’t talking with these people, we aren’t doing our jobs.”

U.S. officials said they may take reciprocal action in accordance with the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations and on consular relations.

“While the government of the United States does not understand that it has to respect our country’s sovereignty there will be simply be no cordial relations nor cordial communication,” Maduro said, speaking from the governmental palace on Tuesday.

“The day that the government of President Obama rectifies the situation we will establish new points of contact to discuss common issues,” said Maduro.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

By Clara Nieto
BOGOTA, May 7 2013 (IPS)

The crisis in Venezuela caused by the violent opposition of followers of Henrique Capriles, who is accusing President Nicolás Maduro of election fraud, and peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas in Havana, are occupying the attention of national and foreign media.

Cuba and Norway are guarantors of the Colombian peace negotiations, and Venezuela and Chile are observers. Commentators and analysts of all stripes are wondering about the role of Venezuela and its late president Hugo Chávez (who died of cancer Mar. 5), and of Cuba and the Castro brothers, in this process that aims to end 50 years of armed conflict.

Achieving peace is a priority for Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

Bogotá and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) chose Havana as the location for the talks. Cuba has been a friendly nation to the guerrillas, which gives them confidence and a sense of security.

Clara Nieto. Credit: Margarita Carrillo/IPS

However, according to José Arbesú, a high-ranking official in the Communist Party of Cuba, his country has not given the Colombian insurgents arms or funding, as it did in the case of Central American rebels decades ago when they were involved in civil wars against brutal and corrupt dictatorships.

Santos sought an understanding with Cuba, talked of inviting the country to be an observer at the Fifth Summit of the Americas, a United States-backed project that excluded the Caribbean island nation, and sought the support of Fidel Castro and President Raúl Castro to hold secret exploratory talks with the FARC in Cuba. These led to a 10-point agenda that is the basis of the current negotiations.

Venezuela and Chávez supported Colombia in this. Santos reestablished good bilateral relations with Venezuela, broken off during the government of former president Álvaro Uribe, and created an atmosphere of peace and collaboration. Recently he stated that this support was crucial for achieving essential agreements in Havana.

Chávez, a friend to the FARC, regarded the Colombian conflict as a threat to the security of Venezuela. A solution was necessary to remove a pretext for the United States to intervene in their countries, he said. Venezuela is surrounded by U.S. military bases in the Caribbean, including seven in Colombian territory that former president Uribe ceded to the United States.

Peace in Colombia is a security issue for Venezuela, and also for Ecuador. Leftist insurgents and far-right paramilitaries cross their porous borders freely, and thousands of undocumented Colombian refugees flock to the neighbouring nations, fleeing the conflict and the chemical spraying intended to eradicate coca crops (ordered by the United States) that poisons their families and animals, and destroys the soil and subsistence crops.

Chávez, the main challenger to Washington’s influence in Latin America, was the architect, along with former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of regional integration systems that exclude the United States (such as the Union of South American Nations, UNASUR).

Chávez was more than a pebble in Uncle Sam’s shoe, and it is in the U.S.’s interests to eradicate Chavismo. This poses a major threat to President Maduro, his successor.

The Venezuelan right, headed by Capriles and supported by the international far right, is already on the move against the new president, purportedly “in defence” of Venezuelan democracy which it claims was violated and abused by “the dictator” Chávez.

Meanwhile, the moment is ripe for Colombia’s peace plans. The most influential leftwing leaders in the continent, Chávez and Fidel Castro, repeatedly stated that the time for armed struggle was over. Chávez asked the FARC to release their hostages unconditionally and to end the fighting.

The conservative Santos, for his part, has co-opted some of the leftwing rebels’ core demands, such as redistribution of land to the destitute and to those whose land was taken by paramilitaries and guerrillas, and offering compensation for victims.

Times have indeed changed.

Uribe’s government, in which Santos was defence minister, hit the FARC hard and killed several of its top leaders. The guerrillas were not defeated, but they have been weakened.

The negotiations are taking place in the midst of conflict, and peace would be a boon. But they are demanding structural changes to ensure an equitable country – Colombia is the most unequal country in Latin America – with opportunities, land, health and education for all.

The Colombian far right, with Uribe at the head, is mobilising against the peace process, and encouraging discontent in the armed forces against the government.

And, if not U.S. President Barack Obama himself, the U.S. Southern Command is also active. General John Kelly, its commander, spoke at length in a presentation to Congress on Mar. 20 about the regional danger represented by the FARC, saying they had acquired surface-to-air missiles and submarines that could reach Florida, Texas or California in 10 to 12 days, and could travel as far as Africa.

Such statements could influence the Colombian military, which is hostile to negotiations with the guerrillas, and undermine the peace process. Kelly mentioned the joint operations carried out with the Colombian army against the FARC – an intervention in internal affairs and public order in the country – and he spoke in favour of the continuation of military action against the guerrillas.

The media are closely observing both these conflicts. In Colombia, most media outlets support the peace process. In Venezuela it remains to be seen whether Chavismo, without Chávez, will fully back Maduro, who is faced with a difficult scenario. There are many who are trying to not let him govern. Colombia needs peace in its important neighbour, and ought to have Venezuela’s support. Maduro has promised that it will.

* Clara Nieto is a writer and diplomat, former Colombian ambassador to the United Nations and author of the book “Obama y la nueva izquierda latinoamericana” (Obama and the New Latin American Left).

Excerpt:

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 23 2013 (IPS)

The challenge for Venezuela is to strengthen democracy, and for its new president, Nicolás Maduro, it is to overcome a potential recall referendum and to further the interests of his political supporters, Marcelo Serpa, of the Latin American Association of Election Campaign Researchers (ALICE), told IPS.

Chavismo, “the political movement that awakened Venezuela,” will remain in force for many years to come, although “it will not rule forever,” said Serpa, a Brazilian economist with a doctorate in communication from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “But no government that does not pay attention to the poorest sectors will be possible,” he said.

Maduro was elected on Apr. 14 as the candidate of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), founded by Hugo Chávez (1954-2013) who was president since 1999 and died of cancer on Mar. 5.

Marcelo Serpa has worked on several election campaigns in Venezuela. Credit: UFRJ

President Maduro must consolidate his administration and face up to hazards such as the appearance of Chavista dissidents within the leftwing Bolivarian movement, said Serpa, who has worked on several electoral campaigns in this country and has just published the book “Eleiçoes Espetaculares – Como Hugo Chávez conquistou a Venezuela” (Spectacular Elections: How Hugo Chávez Conquered Venezuela) in Brazil.

Q: How did Chávez manage to conquer Venezuela and win the affection shown by so many people, even after his death?

A: He tried two ways: the old Latin American-style coup d’état (as an army lieutenant-colonel in 1992), and after doing jail time and being amnestied, he converted his Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 (MBR-200) into a party to reach power in a democratic manner, almost as the saviour of the country.

Q: What was the context in Venezuela when Chávez emerged on the political scene?

A: There were several other attempted coups apart from Chávez’s. Venezuela’s recent history is marked by political instability.

The socio-demographic profile when Chávez became president was this: (the upper-income) categories A, B and C together made up four percent of the population, and the rest belonged to (the lower-income) classes D and E, in an economy that was wholly dependent on oil.

Q: How was he able to attract so many followers?

A: During the two years that he was in prison (after his aborted military uprising), he drew up a government plan and several proposals, including a reform of the system that would take into account the rentier privileges from oil.

The country’s economic model was focused then on oil, which was in the hands of a small élite. Chávez wanted to end the rentier economy, and he wanted all the profits from PDVSA (the state oil company) to go towards spending in Venezuela aimed at putting an end to poverty.

With the new constitution rewritten in 1999, Chávez appropriated those resources for the social programmes and managed, for instance, to eradicate illiteracy.

Q: There has been a great deal of speculation about the lack of transparency in the handling of information about the illness and death of Chávez. What is your analysis of this communication process?

A: I have been to Venezuela several times, and have worked during elections as a communication professional, and in my view the information flow has always been very good.

Chávez had a problem with the international media in particular, and then with the closure of RCTV, the main Venezuelan television channel.

That was controversial, but I have never seen greater freedom of the press than in Venezuela. To say that the press there is not free is not true. Chávez gave interviews to all journalists and gave press conferences every Sunday. He was greatly misunderstood by the international media.

Q: What is his legacy to his political successor?

A: Before Chávez, Venezuela was impoverished; the recipients of oil rents were wealthy, but none of that wealth went to the poor. Today Venezuela still has many problems, but the poorest classes have their needs met to a certain extent. They receive enormous assistance from the state thanks to the oil resources.

Private enterprise has shrunk, which has compelled the state to take on certain functions and commitments that are beyond its possibilities.

Q: What is your view of the Apr. 14 presidential elections?

A: The victory of Chavismo came about on the back of a spectacle-ridden discourse, in which emotion was frankly predominant over reason. When Chávez announced he had to go (to Cuba) for further surgery and that, if he were unable to govern, the people should elect Maduro, polls indicated that 35 percent of Venezuelan respondents did not know who Maduro was.

In October 2012, Chávez beat (opposition candidate Henrique) Capriles by a difference of 10 percentage points. But in this election, it was difficult for Chávez’s prestige to be transferred wholesale to Maduro. I had already forecast a difference of two percentage points between the two candidates.

Q: What is your view of the role of the opposition in this process?

A: The opposition made the same mistake as Chávez: it tried to get to power first by force, and then by democratic means.

Venezuelan politics are aggressive. The opposition was never silenced. Capriles himself was imprisoned (for alleged involvement in a violent protest outside of the Cuban embassy after the 2002 failed coup against Chávez) and then amnestied by Chávez. But the opposition was absent for a long time, and is now trying to reconstruct itself and paying a high price for it, which allowed Maduro’s victory.

Q: What do you predict for the future?

A: A new era is beginning, of Chavismo without Chávez. Venezuela’s path is to strengthen democracy. Chavismo will not remain in government eternally. After so many years of rule, it has a problem of image attrition.

But another kind of government, that does not pay attention to the poorest sectors, will not be possible. A number of (social) programmes have been installed that will have to be maintained. Chavismo has made its mark and will continue to be present for many more years. It was certainly Chavismo that awakened Venezuela.

The presidential term is six years, and a constitutional provision allows for a recall referendum after the halfway mark, in certain circumstances. It is probable that the opposition will try to hold a referendum against Maduro.

What is at stake is whether Maduro is capable of surviving, as much by maintaining his mandate as by furthering the interests of his party. There may even be some Chavismo dissidence within leftwing Bolivarian socialist thought.

Excerpt:

UNASUR presidents back Nicolás Maduro’s triumph and fly to Venezuela for the inauguration. Credit: Presidenty of Peru

By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Apr 19 2013 (IPS)

Nicolás Maduro was recognised as president-elect of Venezuela by a Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) emergency summit held in Lima to discuss the situation in the highly polarised country, where a narrow electoral result triggered social and political tension.

Meanwhile, Venezuela’s electoral authority said it would audit the ballots that were not already scrutinised on election night, in response to opposition demands.

It was after 1:00 AM Friday when Peruvian President Ollanta Humala announced, at the end of a nearly three-hour debate behind closed doors, the bloc’s support for Venezuela’s election authorities, who had declared Maduro the winner of the Sunday Apr. 14 elections.

Humala publicly congratulated the leftwing Maduro, the political heir of the late Hugo Chávez (1954-2013), who stood by his side smiling and looking clearly relieved. On Friday Maduro will be sworn in.

“With this consensus agreement we want to express UNASUR’s position that we will always be involved in the task of accompanying, strengthening and cooperating in the processes of fortifying the democracy that we have today in the region of South America,” Humala said.

“The idea and spirit of UNASUR is to contribute to and cooperate in the solution of problems that can affect democracy,” he added.

A Peruvian official then read out the summit statement, whose second point indicated that UNASUR urged all sectors that took part in Venezuela’s presidential elections to respect the official results announced by the National Electoral Council (CNE).

The meeting hosted by Humala was attended by presidents Cristina Fernández of Argentina, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Sebastián Piñera of Chile, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, José Mujica of Uruguay, and Maduro himself, as president-elect of Venezuela.

Vice President Jorge Glas represented Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, who is on a tour of Europe, and ambassador Marlon Faisal Mohamed-Hoesein took part in representation of Suriname. The only active member of the bloc not represented at the meeting was Guyana.

Paraguay is still suspended over the June 2012 removal of President Fernando Lugo by the country’s legislature.

The chairman of Peru’s parliamentary commission on foreign relations, Víctor Andrés García Belaúnde of the opposition Popular Action party, stressed the significance of the emergency summit given the political standoff in Venezuela.

“The case of Venezuela is not similar to that of Honduras (where President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in 2009) or Paraguay. Venezuela is the fourth-largest economy in Latin America, and it is also a member and promoter of the creation of UNASUR, and this decision by the bloc will have repercussions throughout the entire continent, if not the world,” García Belaúnde told IPS.

The third point of the Lima announcement ratified what was stated in the Apr. 15 Declaration of the UNASUR Electoral Mission to Venezuela: that any complaint, question or request for an extraordinary procedure raised by any participant in the electoral process should be channelled and resolved within the existing legal framework and the democratic will of the different parties.

It went on to “take positive note of the CNE decision to use a methodology that would permit the total audit of the polling stations.”

In Venezuela, electronic voting machines produce a paper receipt, which voters deposit in boxes. On Sunday, 54 percent of the boxes were automatically scrutinised. The CNE has now agreed to audit the remaining 46 percent.

In the elections, Maduro took 50.8 percent of the vote, compared to 49 percent for opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, a difference of 270,000 votes. On Monday Capriles called publicly for a total recount, and thousands of opposition protesters took to the streets to back that demand. On Wednesday he filed a formal request with the CNE.

The decision to audit the rest of the ballot receipts, which according to the CNE is the only option provided in the regulations for the law on electoral processes, was accepted by Capriles, who said “with this we are where we want to be.”

In the end, the opposition leader did not fly to Lima as had been speculated ahead of the UNASUR meeting.

The fourth point of the UNASUR declaration called for a halt to any “attitude or act of violence that jeopardises the social peace of the country”. It also expressed “solidarity with the injured and the families of the fatal victims of Apr. 15, 2013” and called for dialogue and the “preservation of a climate of tolerance for the good of the entire Venezuelan people.”

Seven people were killed and 61 injured during the unrest on Monday, according to Attorney General Luisa Ortega.

After the UNASUR declaration was read out, Maduro lifted his right fist and hit his chest in a sign of victory.

While the summit was taking place, a group of Venezuelans gathered outside of Peru’s presidential palace, beating pots and pans and waving signs protesting the presence of the president-elect. But they were drowned out by a larger number of Peruvian sympathisers of Maduro and the late Chávez (who died of cancer on Mar. 5, after 14 years in power).

Legislator Freddy Otárola Peñaranda of Peru’s governing Nationalist Party, a member of the foreign relations commission, said UNASUR’s decision was in line with the fundamental principle that each country must resolve its own domestic problems.

“With this resolution, UNASUR is helping our Venezuelan brothers and sisters to find peaceful solutions to their problems under the principle of respect for the self-determination of peoples, “he told IPS.

“Venezuelans have to work out their own internal questions, without meddling by anyone,” he added.

Farid Kahhat, head of the international politics department at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, said that once Venezuela’s CNE agreed to audit the boxes with the ballot receipts, a UNASUR declaration was no longer necessary.

But he told IPS it was important that the bloc called for dialogue between the Venezuelan government and the opposition, and that it did not merely back Maduro’s victory.

By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Apr 17 2013 (IPS)

When the left was in opposition in Latin America, it never tired of repeating that true democracy was not limited to electing governments at the ballot box. Democracy was also needed in the distribution of rights and riches.

Now that self-described leftwing governments predominate in the region, the catch is to make that maxim their political practice. They must fulfil the formality of celebrating clean, fair and transparent elections that produce governments of the majority that do not trample on the minority, nor prevent them from exercising their role of social control.

In the last 15 years in Venezuela – ever since the late Hugo Chávez won his first presidential elections – there have been many elections and popular consultations based on the referendum, recall and plebiscite mechanisms provided in the constitution.

Diana Cariboni. Credit: Courtesy of the author

But there was also a failed coup d’état and an oil industry lockout with the same aim: to overthrow the government.

Meanwhile, the country developed an automated voting system described by the electoral authorities as “perfect,” and praised by institutions above suspicion of authoritarian conspiracy, like the Carter Center.

But the country’s democracy is far from being perfect, and further still from being predictable.

Only six months ago, Chávez gained a comfortable majority with 55 percent of the vote (more than eight million votes) against a rival, Henrique Capriles, who won a not inconsiderable 44 percent (over 6.5 million votes).

On Sunday Apr. 14, Chávez’s heir-apparent Nicolás Maduro secured a victory for the governing party, but with a margin of only 270,000 votes ahead of Capriles.

A number of relevant factors influenced the mood of voters in the last six months: the death of Chávez, after an illness surrounded by questions and secrecy, an economy facing difficulties, and a general climate of uncertainty about the prospects of the Bolivarian revolution in the absence of its leader.

And then on Sunday Apr. 14 a different and complex snapshot was taken of the citizenry, requiring a close reading by government leaders and the opposition.

The voting system was the same on both occasions. But the narrow margin of the result and a list of 3,200 alleged irregularities gave the opposition an opportunity to cast it into doubt.

The authorities claim the system is reliable and accurate. All eyes are on the boxes containing the paper receipts issued by the voting machine when voters cast their electronic votes – basically, ballot boxes full of votes.

There are allegations that some of these boxes have been found on roadsides, containing ballots for Capriles. And he is demanding a “vote by vote” recount.

Electoral fraud is a familiar problem in Latin America, where there is a whole repertory of actions to sway citizens’ votes, most of them taking place before polling occurs.

From Mexico southwards, the tradition of vote-rigging includes transporting voters, impersonation, abduction, forgery of identity documents, coercion, threats, violation of voting secrecy and vote-buying.

In some rural areas of Colombia things have reached such a point that, as polling day draws near, votes command increasingly higher bribes in goods and services on the informal local market, such as bricks, tiles and fuel, as well as cash.

In last year’s presidential elections in Mexico, alleged vote-buying, especially attributed to the victorious Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), took the form of vouchers for consumption of goods in certain shopping centres being handed out almost openly.

But none of this generates much concern abroad, nor is it a hurdle to international recognition of the governments that emerge from these elections.

Did electoral fraud of this kind occur in Venezuela? The opposition has denounced a series of irregularities. And the electoral authorities say they will investigate them when they receive the formal complaints, but that no recount will change the result declared on Monday Apr. 15. So there will be no total recount.

The opposition is accusing the government of misappropriation of state resources during the electoral campaign. The government replies that opposition parties represent large economic powers with vast resources and private media outlets at their service.

Meanwhile, although Maduro and Capriles have both called repeatedly for “peace,” violence has taken over the streets. There have been fatalities, and dozens of people have been injured.

Amid the commotion, something has been lost from view: Venezuelan society has long wanted to put an end to decades of apparent democracy, and oil profits for only a few.

In the last 15 years, the country has made strides in poverty reduction, and many marginalised people were able to learn to read and write, and gained access to education and health care. They were also empowered to speak up, and to feel that one of their own, someone close to them, represented them in the presidency.

But it cannot be forgotten that Venezuela today has serious problems, such as a high crime rate, a weak economy and excessive dependence on oil.

If they do not understand the electoral snapshot represented by Sunday’s results, Maduro and Capriles risk riding the roller coaster of setting at odds the two halves of their nation, instead of leading them to a mirror and showing them the need to coexist and understand each other.

“Venezuela has enormous possibilities. The main problem is for it to find itself,” said Uruguayan President José Mujica, interviewed on Tuesday Apr. 16 by the Telesur television chain. “Human progress is the offspring of labour, and requires stability and commitment,” he said.

“It’s important for the Venezuelan people to learn to walk together, with differences, but with points of agreement. They can’t expect to be exactly the same,” he said. “A nation is a collective message.”

* Diana Cariboni is Associate Editor in Chief of IPS.

Excerpt:

Noisy pot-banging protests broke out in Venezuela’s cities to demand a recount of the votes from Sunday’s presidential elections, which leftwing candidate Nicolás Maduro won. Several people have been killed in violent incidents.

In upscale neighbourhoods in the main cities, residents took to the streets Monday night in favour of opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, who took 48.97 percent of the vote compared to Maduro’s 50.75 percent.

But pots were also banged in poor neighbourhoods and small towns, traditional strongholds of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) of late president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), who died of cancer on Mar. 5.

Demonstrations in several cities, in some of which the protesters numbered in the thousands, ended in clashes with the security forces. Seven people were killed and 61 injured, according to Attorney General Luisa Ortega.

The interior minister, General Néstor Reverol, said two PSUV supporters were shot by motorists who were apparently opposition sympathisers.

Protests were also held Tuesday in a dozen cities in the interior, in front of the offices of the National Electoral Council (CNE), which were heavily guarded by the military National Guard.

“We’re tired of being told lies,” 41-year-old schoolteacher Olga Hernández, beating an old pan in the working-class district of El Valle on the southwest side of Caracas, told IPS. “If the government says it won, why don’t they hold a vote-by-vote recount?”

The pot banging protests, which have been common in Venezuela since 1992, became especially popular during the acute political crisis of 2002-2004, when the opposition attempted to oust Chávez by means of street protests, business shut-downs and a frustrated coup d’etat.

The protests that broke out Monday were in response to Capriles’ call for a recount. But
Attorney General Ortega said the candidate had not filed any formal request, and was “inciting the citizens to take to the streets on the basis of arguments that he should set forth to the CNE.” She said his calls for protests were “destabilising acts.”

She also pointed out that in many countries, presidential elections have been won with a 0.5 percent difference.

On Monday, the CNE proclaimed Maduro the winner with 7,563,747 votes, against 7,298,491 for Capriles, after nearly 100 percent of the ballots had been counted, with the exception of 60,000 cast by Venezuelans living abroad.

Voters in Venezuela use electronic machines that generate a voter-verified paper trail. The voter deposits the paper ballot in a ballot box, and random audits can be carried out.

Based on 3,200 irregularities that Capriles claims were documented, the opposition candidate demanded a total recount instead of the random audits.

On Sunday night, Maduro said he would accept a vote-by-vote recount. But on Monday, the CNE declared him president-elect without responding to the demand. PSUV leaders said the electoral authorities had not responded because no formal request had been filed.

“Everyone knows who is responsible for this violence,” said Maduro, alluding to Capriles. “He will have to answer for the dead that we are mourning. They want to create outbreaks of violence around the country, like in Syria or Libya. But we call on people to reject hatred; we are calling for peace.”

Capriles, meanwhile, said “the illegitimate (candidate Maduro) ordered all this violence to avoid a recount. They are responsible.”

He insisted that “we called for peaceful protests, we are enemies of violence. No to violence!”

A march to CNE headquarters called by the opposition for Wednesday will not be allowed, Maduro said.
.
“You people aren’t going to go to the centre of Caracas to fill it up with death and blood. I won’t allow it. I am going to take a firm stance against fascism and intolerance. If they want to overthrow me, they can come for me. Here I am, with the people and with the armed forces,” he said.

“That march won’t enter Caracas. They are trying to get people killed, to massacre their own people, and then look for an active military officer. I won’t allow it, period,” said Maduro.

The president-elect confirmed reports that some military officers who had reportedly contacted opposition leaders had been detained as part of investigations.

With respect to coverage of the events, he told Venevisión and Televen, the leading TV stations, “Define who you are with, the fatherland, peace and the people, or once again on the side of fascism.”

Meanwhile, Maduro ordered a national broadcast Tuesday of official ceremonies in a health centre and with oil industry workers, which kept the leaders of the opposition from airing their own messages on TV and the radio.

“We are calling for serenity, because what would happen if we marched on your (opposition leaders’) houses? Nothing would be left,” Maduro said.

He was referring to the throngs of pot-banging protesters who gathered outside the homes of the president of the CNE, Tibisay Lucena, and governing party leader William Izarra, in Caracas.

Besieging these homes “is inappropriate behaviour and should not be happening,” said human rights activist Liliana Ortega. “Privacy must be respected.”

The head of the opposition campaign, Henri Falcón, met with Catholic Church bishops Tuesday to ask them to mediate in the crisis.

Nicolás Maduro beat Henrique Capriles in Sunday’s elections. Credit: Courtesy of Maduro and Capriles campaigns

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 15 2013 (IPS)

The political polarisation in Venezuela became even more marked as the country emerged from Sunday’s elections basically divided in half, between two sectors that are antagonistic and reluctant to try to understand each other.

Nicolás Maduro, of the leftwing governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV),
the political heir to late President Hugo Chávez (1954-2013), won the elections with 7,559,349 votes, or 50.75 percent, the National Electoral Council announced after counting 99 percent of the ballots.

But the results were challenged by his main rival Henrique Capriles, the candidate of the heterogeneous opposition coalition, the Mesa de Unidad Democrática (MUD), who garnered 7,296,876 votes, or 48.98 percent. He said he would only accept the outcome of a total recount.

The opposition say there were 3,200 cases of irregularities. They are also demanding scrutiny of some 60,000 ballots cast by Venezuelan voters abroad.

Maduro immediately accepted the call for a recount, although he said: “We have a just, legal, constitutional and popular electoral triumph. We respect the seven million who voted for the opposition; you must respect our seven and a half million.”

The candidate, who has been acting president since Chávez died of cancer on Mar. 5, called for “peace,” and said “I believe in peace as the path to prosperity and socialism.”

He added that “a new stage in the Bolivarian revolution is starting, with greater efficiency, honesty and popular power, for an in-depth rectification.”

Capriles said he would resort to “all constitutional means” to challenge the results. “Electoral irregularities are part of a system that is crumbling like a sand castle,” he maintained.

Groups of voters demonstrated outside of government offices in several provincial cities Monday to demand that the National Electoral Council carry out a recount.

“The game isn’t over yet,” said Capriles, adding that “the government should reflect on what kind of country we have,” in view of the narrow margin.

Under the constitution, the winner of Sunday’s elections will complete the 2013-2019 term to which Chávez had been reelected on Oct. 7 with nearly 8.2 million votes – 55 percent – compared to Capriles’ 6.6 million – 44 percent.

Sunday’s results indicate that the opposition gained nearly 700,000 votes compared to the October elections, while Chavismo lost a similar number.

“Chavismo is no longer the overwhelming force it was for 14 years (since Chávez won for the first time in 1998) and it leaves the country politically split now exactly in half,” sociologist and political analyst Tulio Hernández told IPS.

In any democratic country, “even a narrow win, like Maduro’s, would grant legitimacy, but would require a forging of channels to reach governance pacts with the opposition,” said Hernández. “But this government with authoritarian and statist tendencies won’t do that,” he added.

Carlos Romero, professor of graduate studies in political science in several universities, said he preferred “not to talk about a divided country, but about one represented by two sectors. And the fact that Maduro did not have a comfortable majority doesn’t mean he won’t be able to govern.”

“Of course, for Maduro himself it would be beneficial to recognise that the other half exists, and extend bridges of understanding, because he should take measures in the face of the country’s basic problems like inflation, shortages, drug trafficking and insecurity,” Romero told IPS.

Hernández said Sunday’s elections “show a distancing from Chávez as the big political landmark, with the forces aligned depending on their proximity to or distance from him. They also drew a new political map.”

He pointed out that Capriles won in several of the most populous states with the most commercial and industrial activity, in Caracas and in the 10 biggest provincial capitals, while Maduro was victorious in smaller towns and rural areas.

“The equation is that Chavismo won wherever there is more poverty, more rural population and greater dependency on the state as a source of resources, and Capriles triumphed where there is more private sector activity, higher incomes and more urban life,” the analyst said.

Hernández believes Chavismo will become, in the absence of its late leader, a large political force, but lacking in ideology, “because Chávez’s was like a patchwork quilt,” without a solid party of the kind the communists, social democrats or Christian democrats have, and with several different leaders who could invoke the words of Chávez in different ways.

Diosdado Cabello, the first vice president of the PSUV and the leader of the retired military officers who supported Chávez, has already stated that “we must carry out a critical and self-critical review of why so many poor people continue to vote for the candidates of the bourgeoisie.”

The opposition as well, according to Hernández, “now that it is a real alternative with possibilities of governing, has the challenge of giving greater consistency to the amalgam of parties that comprise it and conducting an ideological debate to figure out what it offers the country in terms of state, market, private property, oil and the fight against exclusion and poverty.”

On the international front, there was an unusual break with the traditional automatic recognition of the results and greetings to the winner.

Governments allied with Chávez, such as those of Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba and Ecuador, in Latin America, as well as China and Russia, immediately congratulated Maduro. But others, like the governments of the United States, Spain and France, as well as European Union and Organisation of American States officials, urged a recount.

“The results have surprised the international community,” said Romero. “Most of the governments expected a comfortable win by Maduro, and now it is time for them to reflect on why they did not take a position that was equally distant from the two political camps.”

Nicolás Maduro and Henrique Capriles will face off on Sunday. Credit: Courtesy of Maduro and Capriles campaigns

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 12 2013 (IPS)

Venezuelans will cast their ballots this Sunday to elect a successor to late president Hugo Chávez. The choice is between his political heir Nicolás Maduro – the front-runner in the polls – and the leader of the revitalised opposition, Henrique Capriles.

In the presidential elections that will inaugurate the post-Chávez era, voters will opt for continuity of the late leader’s “21st Century Socialism” or support Capriles’ campaign platform, which promises social and economic progress.

The campaign has been dominated by the figure of Chávez and the powerful wave of grief in the wake of his passing on Mar. 5, 21 months after he was diagnosed with abdominal cancer.

Maduro was foreign minister from 2006 to 2012, vice president after October 2012, and interim president since Chávez travelled to Cuba for his last bout of treatment.

Maduro, the candidate of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), “has not had the time to build his own image and leadership style; he is dissolved in the legacy, and his style is a kind of ‘copy and paste’ version of his late leader’s,” Mariana Bacalao, an expert on political communication, told IPS.

Analyst Manuel Malaver, an opposition sympathiser, said “the competition is between a very powerful government with a very bad candidate, and a weak opposition with an excellent one…I believe if the campaign were longer, Capriles could well beat Maduro, but its brevity gives Maduro a big advantage.”

Nicmer Evans, a government-leaning political scientist, said “there are three actors in the race: Maduro, Capriles and also Chávez, who is the main candidate in these elections, because what is being debated is whether or not his vision for the country will be accepted.”

Chávez won a new presidential term for 2013-2019 in the October elections, with nearly 8.2 million votes, equivalent to 55 percent. His chief rival, Capriles, the candidate of the Democratic Unity Coalition (MUD), received 6.6 million votes, or 44.3 percent.

The Venezuelan constitution states that if a president dies within the first four years of taking office, elections for a successor must be called within 30 days. This stipulation left the candidates with only 10 days to campaign across this country of 916,000 square kilometres, 24 states, 333 municipalities and 30 million people.

Both Maduro and Capriles have been travelling at top speed from one end of the country to another, visiting up to three cities in a single day, in a bid to galvanise first and foremost their faithful supporters among the electorate, which remains highly polarised.

The candidates are attracting crowds to their rallies that are as or more numerous than they were in the 2012 campaign, presaging another high turnout rate, although experts expect that it will not reach the October record of 81 percent. Voting in this country is not compulsory.

“If Capriles increases his share of the vote a bit, and part of the Chavista electorate abstains (studies show that one in four do not want Maduro), the chances for the opposition are very real,” Carlos Ocariz, coordinator of Capriles’ campaign, told foreign correspondents when the campaign got under way.

The polls published up to last weekend (Apr. 6-7), based on surveys carried out in March, put Maduro in the lead, between seven and 18 percentage points ahead of Capriles.

“None of our scenarios contemplates a possible victory for Capriles,” pollsters Germán Campos of Consultores 30.11 and Jesse Chacón of GIS XXI told IPS.

Around 57 percent of Consultores 30.11 respondents said they would vote for Maduro, while the study by GIS XXI concluded there would be a repeat of the results of October, 55 to 44 percent.

The most traditional polling firms, like IVAD and Datanálisis, also predicted a comfortable win for Maduro. But they declined to report new results once the campaign had started. The electoral laws forbid the publication of polling estimates in the week prior to the elections, and all campaign activity had to end Friday Apr. 12.

Just hours before the pre-election media blackout came into force, polling firms DatinCorp and Datamática found a rise in Capriles’ popularity and a decline in support for Maduro.

The gap between voter intentions for Maduro and Capriles found by some of the more traditional polling firms was cut in half five days before the elections, IPS was told.

Because of the brevity of the campaign, both candidates have behaved aggressively towards their rivals, accentuating the acute polarisation that has marked politics in Venezuela since Chávez first became president in 1999.

“Little Petulant Man, Little Bourgeois,” Maduro taunted his rival, while Capriles accused him of “Fresh Lies” and they heaped insults on each other. They also berated the Electoral Council and called on the public to keep alert for possible tricks and supposed plans on the part of the loser to dispute the results.

Maduro, a 50-year-old former bus driver, is married to fellow PSUV leader Cilia Flores. He mocked the 40-year-old Capriles’ status as a bachelor, while Capriles taunted Maduro’s mistakes in Venezuelan geography and his anecdote about feeling the presence of Chávez in the form of a little bird.

“The language the two main presidential candidates have been using is deplorable. They have been banking on polarisation, which has caused so much damage,” complained Marino Alvarado of Provea, a human rights organisation.

“In a country racked by violence on all sides, we have a political leadership that is not setting a good example, with language that contributes nothing to concord or the peaceful solution of conflicts,” he told IPS.

“Let’s hope there is a clear victory for the winner, rather than a narrow difference, for the sake of peace in the country,” said analyst Jesús Seguías of DatinCorp.

Chacón said, “if there is a wide gap, Maduro’s government can begin more comfortably; it will have the challenge of being more efficient, otherwise the voters will call it to account,” while the opposition would be able to regroup.

In Malaver’s view, “if the result of the vote is tight, even if the government party wins, the confrontation in society will remain. These elections will be like the first round, waiting for a final round, because the part of the country that did not accept the concentration of military and state power under Chávez will accept it even less under Maduro.”

The São Paulo Forum expressed its support for Nicolás Maduro in the upcoming presidential elections in Venezuela. Credit: Raúl Limaco/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 2 2013 (IPS)

The São Paulo Forum, which groups leftist political parties and organisations of Latin America and the Caribbean, sees a victory by Venezuela’s acting President Nicolás Maduro in the Apr. 14 elections as key to the future of the left in the region, and to “containing the right”.

Maduro, the new leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and Henrique Capriles, the candidate of the heterogeneous opposition coalition, will face off at the polls to win the six-year term to which the late Hugo Chávez (1954-2013) had been re-elected in October.

“For us the elections here are key, because an eventual defeat (of Chavismo) in Venezuela would mean a setback in the regional process of integration,” historian Valter Pomar, executive secretary of the Forum and a leader of Brazil’s governing Workers Party (PT), told IPS.

“It’s not the Brazilian or Argentine economy that would be affected in the case of a defeat (of Maduro) – which won’t happen – but the entire economy of Latin America, especially the weakest countries or the ones that are lagging the most in terms of industrial development,” Pomar said.

Parties that belong to the Forum, created in 1990 in São Paulo on the initiative of Brazil’s PT – in opposition at the time – currently govern Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Several of those countries belong to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Latin America’s alternative integration bloc founded by Venezuela and Cuba, or are beneficiaries of Venezuela’s Petrocaribe programme, which provides oil to 17 Caribbean and Central American nations under preferential payment conditions.

According to the Forum, Chávez’s initial election as president, in December 1998, marked the start of the rise to power of several of the group’s member parties. And since then, it says, none of them have been defeated in elections.

That does not count Chile’s Socialist Party, defeated by rightwing President Sebastián Piñera in 2010, because it was just one member of the centre-left Coalition of Parties for Democracy that governed since 1990.

The Forum working group, with 38 delegates from 27 parties in 18 countries, met Monday Apr. 1 in Caracas to pay homage to Chávez – who died of cancer on Mar. 5 – and express support for Maduro.

“This is an excellent show of support, which indicates to the popular movements of Latin America and the Caribbean that Venezuela is strategic and that the victory of Nicolás (Maduro) will also be a victory for the people,” Rodrigo Cabezas, a PSUV leader and Latin American Parliament lawmaker who hosted the gathering in Caracas, told IPS.

Maduro, meanwhile, said “this is the time of the greatest expansion of the struggles for the new independence of Latin America from U.S. hegemony and imperial domination. The road is just beginning in this new phase.”

The acting president and candidate, who joined delegates to the Forum in a visit to the mausoleum that holds Chávez’s remains in Caracas, expressed “special recognition of the Cuban revolution, as a forerunner to this Latin American and Caribbean process…It drove in the first peg, liberated the first territory, and generated the dynamic of resisting, fighting and winning,” he said.

“Yes, we are worried that the right is setting up an international operation, not only national operations, to deal us a blow. There is a counteroffensive by the right in the region, as seen in Honduras and Paraguay – the latter involving a coup by parliament,” Pomar said.

He was referring to the Jun. 28, 2009 coup that overthrew Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and the Jun. 22, 2012 toppling of Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo.

Nevertheless, “we see a situation of equilibrium. The right has failed to defeat us in the main countries where we govern, and we have not managed to get them out of power in Mexico, for example. But this relative equilibrium will not last forever,” Pomar said.

According to the Brazilian politician, “what could work in our favour is accelerating the changes in each country and deepening integration, a fundamental issue, because for many countries in the region it is impossible to forge ahead with the processes of change in an isolated manner. That’s why the presidential election in Venezuela is essential for us.”

This is reflected by the fact that the Forum has focused more on the vote in Venezuela than the Apr. 21 presidential elections in Paraguay, where the left is participating without a real chance of winning against the front-runners, who belong to the country’s traditional political forces: the Colorado and Liberal parties.

The Forum working group’s meeting also briefly discussed other international events, particularly the threats to global peace posed by the heated situation between South Korea and North Korea, the conflict in Syria and Iran’s nuclear programme.

Although the group agreed to protest what it called the provocation caused by U.S. military activities in South Korea, there were also voices in the meeting that complained that North Korea’s behaviour “facilitated” Washington’s alleged provocation.

In the debate on the situation in the Korean peninsula, the theory was set forth that the conflict there strengthens U.S. protagonism in the Asia-Pacific region to the detriment of China and its partners in the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa – of emerging powers.

On the regional front, the meeting agreed that the most urgent situation involves the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels, taking place in Havana.

As in nearly every Forum meeting, the Puerto Rican independence activists, this time through the words of Héctor Pesquera of the Hostosian National Independence Movement, insisted that the fight against the remnants of colonialism in Latin America not be forgotten, and called for the release on humanitarian grounds of Oscar López Rivera, who has spent nearly 32 years in maximum security prisons in the United States on charges of seditious conspiracy and armed robbery.

Nicolás Maduro, seen here at the United Nations when he served as foreign minister, is virtually certain to emerge as Venezuela's next president. UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

While the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama says it would like to improve relations with Venezuela in the aftermath of the death Tuesday of President Hugo Chávez, officials and independent analysts here believe any rapprochement will take time and faces political obstacles both here and in Caracas.

Given the wave of sympathy from which his hand-picked successor is expected to benefit, as well renewed divisions among the major opposition parties and the degree of the government’s control over the electoral process and influence with the media, experts here also believe that Vice President Nicolás Maduro is virtually certain to emerge triumphant in an election that could take place as early as four weeks from now.If Maduro were to be elected and lead a government with a broad consensus, it is likely that relations with the U.S. would improve.

“The opposition lost in (the) October (presidential election) and lost again in the (regional elections) in December, and now they’re pointing blame at each other,” according to Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), a Washington-based hemispheric think tank. “I think Maduro is in a very strong position.”

But, in order to secure his victory, the vice president will likely seek to consolidate his political base which shares their late leader’s anti-U.S. sentiment, according to analysts here.

On Tuesday, Maduro announced the expulsion of two U.S. military attaches charged with trying to destabilise the country and suggested that Washington may have played some role in infecting Chávez with his fatal cancer.

“The timing certainly made it look like Maduro was using (the charges against the military attaches), as well as the suggestion that Chávez’s cancer had been caused by a foreign conspiracy, to circle the wagons and create unity before what they knew was the imminent death of Chávez,” said David Smilde, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), who moderates the Venezuela Politics and Human Rights Blog.

“I think yesterday was a part of an election campaign, and therefore not necessarily directly related to the process we’ve had of trying to improve the relationship,” one senior State Department official, who called the Maduro’s charges “outrageous”, told reporters in a teleconference Wednesday.

“(I)t may be a difficult campaign for many. We will no doubt continue to hear things about the United States that will not help improve this relationship,” the official, who insisted on not being identified by name, said.

Still, most observers believe that Maduro will be more willing to engage Washington on a number of issues than Chávez, who had initially welcomed Obama’s election in 2008 but quickly grew disillusioned with the new president and declared Washington’s ambassador in Caracas persona non grata in 2010.

For instance, in late November, Maduro reportedly conducted a cordial telephone conversation about possible ways to improve bilateral ties with Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs Roberta Jacobson.

“If Maduro were to be elected and lead a government with a broad consensus, it is likely that relations with the U.S. would improve,” noted Smilde.

“On the one hand, Maduro is a negotiator and was significant in a breakthrough in diplomatic relations with Colombia. One can imagine a similar improvement with the U.S.,” he noted. “On the other hand, the conceptual anchor of Maduro’s ideology is an anti-imperialism in which the U.S. is the more important symbolic foil.

“Maduro will obviously have to govern in a very different way from Chávez. He doesn’t have the same charisma or appetite for control and power,” Shifter told IPS.

“He’s a union leader with a lot of experience in negotiations, so we’ll see a different style that could offer some opportunity for the United States – not to have a warm and close relationship with Venezuela but at least to open up channels of communication and have ambassadors in both capitals. That would be a step forward from what we have now.”

At the same time, however, Shifter warned that the White House itself will likely move very slowly, so as not to provoke right-wingers in Congress who greeted Chávez’s long-awaited demise with undiluted enthusiasm.

They called, among other things, for the administration to retaliate for the two expulsions, a step which State Department officials said they were reviewing Wednesday.

“Hugo Chávez was a tyrant who forced the people of Venezuela to live in fear,” said Rep. Ed Royce, who has just succeeded the fiercely anti-Chávez and anti-Castro Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “His death dents the alliance of anti-U.S. leftist leaders in South America. Good riddance to this dictator.”

“The problem on the U.S. side of the bilateral relationship is going to be some members of Congress who will be very critical of any sign of rapprochement between the administration and Maduro,” Shifter said. “And they’re not going to want to fight with members of Congress over Venezuela. So they’re going to try to explore these openings but will be quite cautious and careful about doing so.”

Indeed, despite Chávez’s hostility toward the U.S., which reached its zenith after the George W. Bush administration endorsed a failed coup attempt against him in 2002, strong trade relations never suffered during his 14-year tenure.

As noted by Shannon O’Neil, a senior fellow for Latin American studies at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, in an op-ed for BBC Wednesday, the U.S. buys more oil from Venezuela than any other country, while Caracas has been a major consumer of U.S. manufactured exports, particularly automobiles.

“(A)s subsequent Venezuelan governments look to adjust their economic policies in the coming months and years, the experience of their (South American) neighbours provide incentives to forge a more amicable bilateral relationship,” wrote O’Neil.

Since November’s exchange between Maduro and Jacobson, lower-level Venezuelan and U.S. officials have reportedly held occasional meetings in Washington to further explore opportunities for renewing cooperation in what the State Department official called “a little bit of a rocky road”.

“We didn’t really begin the substantive portion of those conversations, …so we really hadn’t gotten very far and were not sure whether the government of Venezuela wanted to continue that road when yesterday occurred,” the official added in reference to Chávez’s death.

The official suggested that possible cooperation on counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, citizen security, and economic and commercial issues would serve the two countries’ mutual interests.

The official said Washington will likely send a delegation to Chávez’s funeral Friday and will push Caracas to permit international election monitors, as well as domestic groups, to observe the preparations for and the conduct of the upcoming elections.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.