Unfinished Business: The case for paying attention to Venezuela

On Thursday (May 8), the Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened a hearing on the ongoing political and human rights crisis in Venezuela. Deputy Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson, Executive Director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch José Miguel Vivanco, and Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Moisés Naím testified, taking questions from Committee members on the nature of the crisis and its implications.

The vast majority of the hearing saw question after question on the human rights climate under Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro since the start of the protest movement that has wracked Venezuela since early February. The testimony detailed the countless detentions of protestors by government forces, and explored the many allegations against Maduro’s administration of torture, harassment, and police brutality inflicted on the opposition.

And in so many ways, that focus was justified. With the political consciousness both here in the United States and abroad largely captured by the ongoing situation in Ukraine, little time and attention has been devoted to all that has happened in Venezuela. Dozens reported dead, hundreds injured, well over two thousand detained: Venezuelans are suffering through a deep and potent political crisis, with little at their disposal to ensure their own protection.

But it is important to contextualize that suffering on the regional and global levels. Though the hearing was called by the Foreign Relations Committee, very little of the questioning and testimony dealt with just that: foreign relations. However outlandish the human rights violations may be, to ignore their implications—and the implications of Venezuela’s quasi-existential crisis—writ large sets Venezuela, the United States, and the rest of the region up for a very rocky and unpredictable future.

As a result of this hearing, the push for sanctions in the United States Congress could likely continue, and it is critical to understand exactly what the target is, how hard it will be hit, and for what purpose. General sanctions could very well turn Venezuela into a Latin American Iran, and run the risk of deeply hurting whatever credibility the United States might be trying to hold onto in the region. This situation calls for quality, not quantity; the more targeted the sanctions are, the better.

In the absence of rule of law and legal recourse and in an environment in which democratic institutional integrity has all but eroded, the international community must demonstrate that there are consequences for rule breakers. Appropriate information sharing (especially regarding responsible parties in Venezuela) among concerned partners can also underpin effective collective action among a willing coalition of international actors.

So what is, then, at stake?

The crisis and its importance to global geopolitical dynamics does, in some ways, pale in comparison to that in Ukraine. In Venezuela, there is no sphere-of-influence dispute playing out under the guise of self-determination and nationalism. There is, in kind, no immediate or even mid-term risk of interstate armed conflict, and certainly not of a clash between large, nuclear-capable armed forces.

But Ukraine’s importance to international geopolitics is, in many ways, a fitting parallel to Venezuela’s role in regional dynamics here in the Western Hemisphere.

Venezuelan oil assistance ensures the economic stability—even solvency—of much of Central America and the Caribbean. Without that aid, many of these economies would falter, at best—if not collapse entirely—a scenario that could easily devolve into political instability, even chaos. And neighboring Colombia is hard at work to end its own domestic conflict through the hard-won peace negotiations—a process that would be put directly at risk by havoc in Venezuela, which would inevitably spill over across the border.

All of this is not to say that Venezuela’s collapse is necessarily imminent—though the protests’ persistence certainly doesn’t rule that out. Rather, this aims to serve as a reminder, more than anything else, of what’s at stake.

Arrests, torture, police brutality, murder: clearly the respect for human rights is on the line. But losing sight of the bigger picture—of the real threat this crisis poses to regional stability—will only make the (potential) collapse of Maduro’s government worse—for Venezuela, for the United States, and for the Western Hemisphere.

Carl Meacham is director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC.


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Carl Meacham