Paul KeenanVenezuela is on course for political and financial disaster, writes Paul Keenan
By the time he met with Venezuela’s President Nicólas Maduro in a private audience at the Vatican last Sunday, Pope Francis had received a letter from the ordinary people of that country.
Though, for sure, a Latin American Pope will be keenly attuned to matters in Venezuela, the letter, dispatched via the nunciature in Caracas and bearing 17 signatures, surely offered both an immediacy and a ‘street level’ perspective to events unfolding there.
The 17 co-signatories are Venezuelan citizens who, seeing no other means to raise awareness as to the deterioration of human rights in their country and on behalf of imprisoned opposition figures, began a hunger strike in the precincts of Our Lady of Guadalupe church in the capital.
Commencing their protest on May 27, the group’s hunger strike was in answer to an earlier announcement, by imprisoned Leopoldo López, leader of the Popular Will opposition party, of his own hunger strike together with five other opposition members, including a former mayor of the city of San Cristobal, Daniel Ceballos.
Violence
Hunger strikes appear to be the last available weapon to those living in a nation whose president has demonstrated a ready willingness to stamp out popular protest. Witness the violence of February 2014 when police and national guardsmen responded to street protests with indiscriminate shootings, resulting in multiple deaths across the nation – and the arrests of López and colleagues for allegedly organising violent demonstrations.
In choosing Our Lady of Guadalupe as the site of their action, the strikers have also sought to tap into the one powerful international friend they have left.
Throughout the troubled administration of President Maduro, the Church has not been slow in vocalising frustrations of ordinary Venezuelans as well as issuing cautionary messages against allowing matters to deteriorate further.
The most powerful such message came in January of this year when the Venezuelan Episcopal Conference (“those devils in robes” as the frustrated Hugo Chavez once called it) denounced the administration as “totalitarian” and accused President Maduro of taking his country along “a wrong path”.
“The current system is totalitarian and centralised,” the bishops charged. “It puts under the control of the state all aspects of life, as well as public and private institutions. It also attacks the liberties and rights of individuals and associations.”
Another element of the bishops’ message was to prove prescient to current events, too.
Railing against the actions of the administration in closing off avenues of media for opposition voices and seizing control of media outlets where it can (Venezuelans currently can take in a reality show following the life of the president’s wife but find it impossible to view home-grown channels offering alternative political perspectives), the bishops also pointed out that the president had begun to stack the National Electoral Council with supporters of his United Socialist Party of Venezuela, a tactic employed by his late predecessor, Chavez.
The same Electoral Council is set to announce national polls for later this year, with an apparent delay in that announcement now causing concern among the populace. Pressed in early May by neighbouring Brazil for a date so as to calm tensions, the council promised to respond “soon”, hinting at voting in late November or early December but refusing to confirm this.
This concern stands apart from the very real possibility of an election stacked by an administration undoubtedly worried at opinion polls showing overwhelming support for the opposition, with one poll – conducted by the Andres Bello Catholic University – indicating both a large measure of mistrust (60%) for Mr Maduro and the National Electoral Council and a huge margin of support (39.2%) for the opposition over the incumbent (15.5%).
All of which may well be moot, for a number of reasons.
Despite the strength of criticism levelled by the Catholic bishops in January, an unabashed President Maduro seized an opportunity in March when the US, frustrated at ongoing corruption in Venezuela, announced a fresh round of sanctions against leading figures and their interests.
The president duly attacked ‘Yankee imperialism’ and urged the National Assembly to grant him the right to rule by decree, a motion quickly carried and now on the legislative books until the end of this year (at least). Should Mr Maduro seek to thwart electoral change, he is now empowered to do so.
Worse yet, and as potentially damaging to the president as much as his unwilling people, Venezuela is facing into an ever-worsening financial crisis.
According to the markets, one month ago Venezuela’s national currency, the bolivar, stood at 279 to the US dollar. In just 30 days, that exchange rate has become 408 bolivars to the dollar.
The national currency has halved in value, partially as a result of the country’s heavy reliance on a product now glutting the market: oil. The effect is nothing short of crushing on the people facing ever-longer queues for basic necessities, but also on the administration, which, in touting the Socialist Revolution, is beginning to struggle in its attempts to buy the poor’s favour through investment in social programmes (it was reported in February that Trinidad and Tobago offered to pay for Venezuelan oil with toilet paper, a commodity which has virtually disappeared from the nation’s stores).
Result
The major result of such financial woes is that, according to economists, Venezuela could default on its international debts to the tune of $5 billion this October. Could Mr Maduro countenance elections just a month later on the back of such devastating news?
The fuse for further violent discontent may now have been lit. Just days before President Maduro’s arrival in Rome, news leaked that former mayor Ceballos had been transferred from his prison cell to a military hospital as a result of the trauma of his hunger strike.
Upon hearing the reports, the Episcopal Conference issued a statement on behalf of all political prisoners, calling for immediate action on the part of government and for the granting of access for lawyers and the families of those held.
Whether Mr Maduro, in turn, chooses to hear the Church’s words, in Rome or at home, remains to be seen.