Diplomats at UN council shun Maduro envoy

In recognising opposition leader Juan Guaido as president, the US misread the 100,000-strong army’s loyalty to dictator Nicolas Maduro, say Jeffrey Sachs and Francisco Rodríguez

• Irish Examiner
• 28 Feb 2019

Dozens of European and Latin American diplomats abruptly walked out of the UN’s top human rights body to protest an address by Venezuela’s foreign minister, where he floated the idea of talks between president Nicolas Maduro and US president Donald Trump.

Jorge Arreaza told the UN Human Rights Council the two leaders could seek “common ground” over Venezuela’s escalating crisis — even as he blasted alleged US “aggression” against his country.

“We’re calling for dialogue, dialogue with the United States — why not between Presidents Maduro and Trump?” Mr Arreaza said. “Why shouldn’t they meet so that they could try to find common ground and explain their differences?”

He also called for “dialogue between Venezuelan citizens”.

More than 50 other countries have recognised opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president. Many of their diplomats stormed out of the room just as Mr Arreaza arrived to speak to the 47member council.

The US is among the countries that have recognised Mr Guaido, but no US diplomats were present for the walkout: The Trump administration quit the council last summer over its alleged antiIsrael bias.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan vice president Delcy Rodriguez will hold talks with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow tomorrow, the RIA news agency reported, the latest in a flurry of visits by Venezuelan politicians to staunch ally Russia.

Moscow has backed Mr Maduro in the face of a challenge from Mr Guaido, who declared himself interim president in January.

The prospect of Mr Maduro being ousted is a geopolitical and economic headache for Moscow, and Russia has accused the US of trying to engineer an illegal coup.

Russia, alongside China, has become a creditor of last resort for Caracas, lending it billions of dollars as its economy implodes. Moscow has also helped its military and oil industry and provided wheat. Venezuela’s deputy foreign minister, Ivan Gil, and the country’s industry minister, Tareck El Aissami, were in Moscow last week for talks with senior officials.

Meanwhile, Mr Guaido says he is headed back home to Venezuela in another challenge to Mr Maduro.

Mr Guaido slipped into neighbouring Colombia last week to lead an ultimately failed effort to bring humanitarian aid into the crisisstricken country.

After meeting with regional leaders including US vice president Mike Pence in Bogota, Mr Guaido is expected to come back through the porous border in the coming days and resume his political activities in open defiance of a Supreme Court order.

“I’m going to return to Caracas this week,” Mr Guaido said in an interview with NTN24 broadcast. “My role and my duty is to be in Caracas despite the risks.”

ONE month after Juan Guaido, the speaker of Venezuela’s National Assembly, said he was assuming the Venezuelan presidency, currently held by Nicolas Maduro, the country’s political crisis remains far from over.

A full-blown civil war — seemingly implausible just weeks ago — is now becoming increasingly possible. Four people died, and hundreds were injured, in violent clashes at Venezuela’s borders last weekend, when government forces opened fire on an attempt by the opposition to bring aid convoys into the country.

The Maduro regime is authoritarian, militarised, and ready to kill civilians to maintain power. The society is bitterly divided between the revolutionaries, inspired by Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, and a large and aggrieved opposition. Each side despises the other.

What to do to help guide Venezuela away from civil war and toward a peaceful and democratic future?

On this great challenge, US president, Donald Trump’s administration has gravely miscalculated. When the US chose to recognise Guaido as Venezuela’s president — as did a group of Latin American countries — and ban oil trade with the Maduro government, it was betting that the pressure would topple the regime.

As a former senior US official told the Wall Street Journal, “they thought it was a 24-hour operation.”

This type of miscalculation predates the Trump administration. In mid-2011, then US president, Barack Obama, and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced that Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, must “step aside.”

Similarly, in 2003, George W Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ shortly after the US invasion of Iraq. All of these cases reflect the arrogance of a superpower that repeatedly overlooks local realities.

Maduro’s ability to withstand intense US pressure is not a surprise to close observers of Venezuela’s military. The centralised command and control of military intelligence, as well as the personal interests of senior officers who control major chunks of the economy, make it highly unlikely that the army will turn on Maduro.

US provocation might create a schism between military commanders and more junior officers, but that would only make the plunge into a bloody civil war more likely. To date, there have been no defections among high-ranking officers who have control of troops.

Faced with the prospect that regime change will not come quickly, the Trump administration, and some parts of Venezuela’s opposition, have begun considering military action.

Echoing language recently used in a speech by Trump, Guaido wrote, on Saturday, that he would formally request the international community to “keep all options open.”

Similarly, Republican US senator Marco Rubio, who has acted as a selfappointed guru for Trump on Venezuela, warned on Twitter that Maduro’s actions had opened the door to “multilateral actions not on the table just 24 hours ago.”

Actually, these ideas appear to have been on Trump’s mind for some time. As former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe revealed recently, in his book The Threat, Trump said in a 2017 meeting that he thought the US should be going to war with Venezuela.

McCabe quotes Trump as saying: “They have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.” The comments echo Trump’s 2011 statement that Obama let himself get “ripped off” by not demanding half of Libya’s oil, in exchange for US help in overthrowing dictator, Muammar el-Qaddafi.

US military interventions are not driven only by economic and business interests. Being tough on Maduro is also highly popular with many CubanAmerican and Venezuelan-American voters in Rubio’s home state of Florida, which will be a key battleground in the 2020 presidential election.

Advocates of US military intervention cite Panama and Grenada as precedents for rapid US-led regime change. The difference is Venezuela has a well-armed military of more than 100,000 soldiers.

Of course, the US could defeat the Venezuelan army, but one need not be blind to the atrocities of authoritarian regimes to understand that, as has happened repeatedly in US wars in the Middle East, attempts to overthrow them often end in catastrophe.

Even without military intervention, US sanctions policies, if sustained, are bound to create a famine. By cutting off Venezuela’s oil trade with the US and threatening to sanction non-US firms that do business with Venezuela’s stateowned oil company, the Trump adminla. has created one of the most punitive economic sanctions regimes in recent history. But rather than provoking a coup, economically isolating a country that feeds itself with its oil export revenues could lead to mass hunger. Venezuela’s neighbours and world leaders must put aside the US military option. Venezuela needs mediation and new elections, not war. It also needs an urgent, interim period of political truce in 2019 to end the devastating hyperinflation, restore flows of foodstuffs and medicines, and reconstitute the electoral rolls and institutions for a peaceful, credible election in 2020.

A pragmatic approach might involve the current government continuing to control the army, while technocrats, backed by the opposition, take control over finances, the central bank, planning, humanitarian relief, health services, and foreign affairs.

Both sides would agree to a national election in 2020, and to an internationally supervised demilitarisation of daily life, with a restoration of civil and political rights and physical security. This could be overseen by the United Nations Security Council. Chapter VII of the UN Charter gives the Security Council the mandate to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” and to take actions to “restore international peace and security.”

The Security Council is also the right venue, as the US, China, and Russia all have financial and political interests in finding a peaceful solution in Venezueistration All three countries could readily agree to a path to elections in 2020.

Encouragingly, Pope Francis and the governments of Mexico and Uruguay have also offered to facilitate mediation.

Trump and other US leaders say that the time for negotiation has passed. They believe in a short, quick war, if necessary.

World leaders — and those in Latin American countries first and foremost — should open their eyes to the risks of a devastating war, one that could last for years and spread widely.

■ Jeffrey Sachs is professor of economics at Columbia University. Francisco Rodriguez, chief economist at Torino Economics, was an adviser to former Venezuelan presidential candidate, Henri Falcon. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2019.

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