by Luigi R. Einaudi
Venezuela’s Role in the Hemisphere: Past and Present
Over the last quarter century, an authoritarian and anti-US regime that began with popular support has destroyed Venezuela’s representative democracy, abused its oil economy, and driven more than seven million of its citizens into exile. It has now run out of steam. In the presidential elections held July 28, the regime disqualified opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, then engaged in persistent and creative harassment of a little-known substitute, only to be met with equally persistent and inventive efforts to make the vote count. The night of a record-breaking turnout, the regime announced its official candidate had won a close vote but provided no documentation. The next day, the opposition used official precinct returns to announce a better than two to one victory. A week later, the whole world knew President Nicolás Maduro had lost to Edmundo González Urrutia. But Maduro has remained in power, responding to all pressures with naked oppression clothed in Orwellian manipulations of domestic “legality”.
The ultimate outcome of the political standoff remains unclear. Venezuela’s constitution calls for the inauguration of a new president to take place in January 2025. In September, González fled to Spain after being accused of conspiracy, forgery, and sabotage. Historically, exile has never been kind to those who seek it, but the cleavages in Venezuela are now so great that it is still timely to consider the international dynamics revealed by the 2024 presidential election.
Along with Central America and Mexico, Venezuela belongs to the Caribbean Basin, the single geopolitical pole most critical to the social wellbeing and national security of the United States. Historically, Venezuela has long played a leading role in the hemispheric debate about the nature of democracy and regional solidarity. Presidents Rómulo Betancourt (1945-48; 1959-64) and Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974-1979; 1989-93) were paladins of representative democracy and sought to support it through the Organization of American States (OAS).
That changed when Hugo Chavez became president (1999-2013). Elected popularly in the wake of economic problems and corruption, Chavez led a charge for “direct democracy.” He weakened Venezuela’s institutions, increased executive authority, and nationalized large parts of the economy without reinvesting. His regime drew on oil revenues to redistribute wealth domestically and aggressively promote ALBA (the Spanish acronym for “Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of our America”, and a word that means “dawn” in Spanish) as a replacement for the traditional Inter-American System. Venezuela imported Cuban advisors and security models, including armed “colectivos” that relieve the army and police of having to be on the front line of repression. Denouncing “representative democracy” as fostering inequality, Chavez worked to undermine hard-won regional jurisprudence supporting democracy and withdrew from the OAS claiming it reflected imperial domination by the United States.
The grand Bolivarian dreams of Chavez and his successors have largely crumbled, but Venezuela’s ties to China, Iran, and Russia have strengthened, making Venezuela a factor in the global rebalancing now underway, not just in the Middle East and with US allies in Europe and rivals in China and Russia, but also in the Americas as its countries open to global competition. Can the United States and its allies assist Venezuela to rebuild a democratic system and combat Russian and Chinese influence in the region?
Lessons of the Caribbean Basin Initiative
A little-remembered initiative of President Ronald Reagan offers some useful lessons for today. Reagan is better remembered for intervention in the civil wars of Central America and hostility to Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba. But forty years ago, the United States also used trade and investment incentives to help stabilize the countries of Central America then under threat from social tensions and communism. The 1983 Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) provided trade and investment incentives to the seven countries of Central America and sixteen island nations of the Caribbean. Duty-free access to the US market for most goods stimulated trade and facilitated investment. Implementation had challenges, especially for the smaller countries. Then, in 2002, the absence of a mechanism to address spiraling oil prices led Chavez’s Petro-Caribe initiative to become a lifesaver for many of the fifteen member and six associate member states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Some would argue the price is now being paid for US neglect of its neighborhood’s struggles at a time when the US administration was focused squarely on the Middle East. The CBI’s impact was of course also reduced over the years by the more open trading practices of the World Trade Organization and changing strategic concerns. Foreign aid dwindled and focused more narrowly on Central America’s Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) and, separately, Haiti. Today’s assistance programs are often more declaratory than real. There is little strategic vision or fresh government money going into the region. The United States is ceding its influence in the Caribbean Basin.
For more than a quarter century, Venezuela — like Cuba before it — has become a source of repression at home and instability abroad. Migration from Venezuela, like population movements from Mexico, Central America’s “Northern Triangle,” Haiti, and Cuba, has injected often intractable tensions into the domestic politics of the Caribbean Basin and beyond. Colombia has received more than 2.5 million Venezuelans, Peru 1.5 million. Almost 4 million more are spread among more than twenty countries in the Americas and Europe, about half of them in the United States, Chile, Ecuador, and Spain, with smaller numbers straining the capacity of Venezuela’s small Caribbean neighbors. A fresh regional effort, with broader sponsorship and a broader focus than the original CBI, could provide the framework required to address the Venezuelan tragedy. It would give the entire region a sense of hope and enable its peoples to find ways out of their miseries without emigrating.
Updating and Expanding the CBI
Today, the Reagan administration’s CBI should be built back, better and with multilateral as well as bilateral components. Admittedly, a comprehensive initiative to facilitate positive outcomes in Venezuela and give new life to the extended Caribbean Basin would be complicated and challenging. The countries of Central America and the Caribbean islands (including Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as well as the Commonwealth Caribbean), plus Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname, would all have to be engaged, multilaterally as well as bilaterally. But the need to cooperate on common issues is great and failure to do so is deeply unsettling. The well-being and effective sovereignty of each of the Basin’s many countries are affected by transnational corruption and crime, including illegal narcotics and equally illegal arms flows, even when not directly linked to terrorism or existential security questions like the territorial dispute between Venezuela and Guyana. Cooperation across borders is also required by climate change (with sea levels and hurricanes a particular problem for the Caribbean Basin), as well as migration, trade, investment, natural resources, tourism, and communications.
This cannot be just a US project. Increased cooperation on common problems would also benefit the Basin’s larger neighboring countries. The United States, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, and Mexico should all participate, each working on projects of its own choosing, but finding ways to cooperate whenever possible. Others, particularly in the Americas, should be welcome. All can fund their own bilateral projects but should implement them in coordination with the regional initiatives of the OAS, the UN, donor countries, and the international financial institutions. Depending on which elements are stressed, who they involve, and how they are negotiated, there could be something in a comprehensive new CBI initiative for every problem and almost everyone in the political spectrum.
Obstacles to Overcome
The diversity of these countries and the large number of components that would have to be negotiated mean this initiative will be difficult to organize and some parts of it slow to show results. Wars outside the hemisphere and the problems associated with globalization and bad government have demoralized everyone. Beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism and trade controls have created arbitrary impediments, increased corruption, and induced waste. Some believe that had the Free Trade Area of the Americas been adopted when it was proposed a generation ago Latin American economies would have grown exponentially by now, with nearshoring a further potential trade multiplier. But times are what they are, and the political climate is not propitious for ambitious foreign programs, perhaps even in the context of helping stem migration.
Cooperation must also consider the differing interests and capacities of the countries involved. As an aspirant global power, Brazil maintains more embassies in the Caribbean than does the United States and seeks to maintain a posture independent of traditional blocs. Colombia’s internal wars spilled into Venezuela before Venezuelan migrants flooded Colombia. Mexico has long resisted passing judgment on the governments of other countries. Venezuela has long projected its power on the Caribbean and has joint offshore gas production agreements with Trinidad and Tobago. CARICOM has sought strength in numbers through united positions.
The OAS is designed to enable cooperation among sovereign states with different interests, but its web of mutual support and obligation is skeletal from lack of use and funding. Democratic solidarity was envisioned from the start to include incentives for institutional support and good behavior. OAS Resolution 1080 of 1991, which Carlos Andres Perez and I promoted, and which built on Venezuela’s prior Betancourt Doctrine that sought to break relations with dictatorships, explicitly called for “incentives to preserve and strengthen democratic systems.” Although 1080 proved the precedent for the later Inter-American Democratic Charter, incentives were never developed. Sanctions, bounties, and indictments make those who impose them feel good, particularly when aimed at individuals who deserve them. Fresh sanctions now could conceivably aid post-election adjustments in Venezuela. But sanctions tend to undermine trust and solidarity and are hard to remove once established. They generally work best when they are part of a positive strategy, like the one suggested in this essay.
The special July 31 meeting of the OAS Permanent Council to consider a response to the Venezuelan elections made clear that positive regional outcomes are not likely under current circumstances. Seventeen countries voted for a resolution seeking release of electoral data and protection for opposition candidates. Eleven abstained and five did not attend. This blocking minority was held together by opposition to what they consider outside interference in Venezuela’s affairs. The abstaining coalition included much of CARICOM, plus Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia – all of whom would be critical to a renewed and improved CBI. A more positive outcome now will require the United States to engage them multilaterally as well as bilaterally. It will require tailoring sanctions and developing new incentives. It will require mobilizing a variety of resources with bipartisan support and multilateral agreement to ensure a degree of evenhandedness.
Conclusion
Venezuela’s constitution calls for a new government to take office in January 2025. Without changes to reflect the electoral outcome, the current narco dictatorship is entrenching itself. If its leaders stay united, the regime may well prolong its hold and drive three million or more additional migrants into the neighborhood. The best hope is that Venezuelans – regime and opposition – will negotiate the composition of a new government. But to even do that both sides will need help on a multiplicity of fronts. Changes in who is in office will not alone clean up the mess. Links to the democratic world have been lost or abandoned and will need to be rebuilt. Positive balances will have to be found between returning émigrés and those who stayed. At stake will be everything from personal freedom and corruption in Venezuela to regional migration, world trade in oil and illegal drugs, and the risks of armed conflict between Venezuela and Guyana. In the United States, although Democrats and Republicans are both hostile to the regime, developing an effective bipartisan response should be possible. The fact that new administrations will take office more or less simultaneously in both Washington and, hopefully, Caracas creates an opportunity not to be missed. But for that to be possible, Maduro will have to leave. And the United States will need to show unusual interest in its neighborhood, economically and multilaterally as well as politically.
History has shown that even seemingly insoluble problems can be dealt with if they are subsumed into bigger ones in a positive setting. The centuries old Peru-Ecuador conflict broke out into war in 1995, but the lose-lose dispute over territory was turned into a win-win settlement when it was broadened to deal also with trade, development, security, and navigation. The United States, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile helped with diplomatic envoys and military observers who suffered no casualties. The settlement took four years to invent, but the results earned peace and monies for development and is celebrated to this day.
Only Venezuelans can save Venezuela. But working with Canada and CARICOM, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia could provide the personal and institutional incentives needed to facilitate a fresh beginning for Venezuela and the Caribbean Basin as a whole. What is required, above all, is imagination and commitment from all concerned.
Luigi R. Einaudi [leinaudi@outlook.com] is a retired US diplomat and educator. Before joining the Department of State, Einaudi led social science research on Latin America at the RAND Corporation (1962-1973). In a 23-year State Department career, Einaudi served twice (1974-1977 and 1993-1997) on the secretary of state’s Policy Planning Staff, was director of policy planning for Inter-American Affairs (1977-1989), where he wrote the substantive portions of President Reagan’s 1982 and 1983 speeches to Congress on the Caribbean Basin Initiative, then became ambassador to the Organization of American States (1989-1993). From 1995 to 1999, Ambassador Einaudi was the US envoy in the peace settlement of the Peru-Ecuador war. In 2000, he was elected assistant secretary general of the OAS and served simultaneously as acting secretary general in 2004-2005. He is the author of Learning Diplomacy, an Oral History (2023), also published in Peru as Aprendiendo Diplomacia (2024).