Paul KeenanThe Church reacts to a long-predicted crisis, writes Paul Keenan
May being the month of Mary, it is to be assumed that Catholics across Venezuela are turning the loudest prayers of any faithful community to their patron saint, the Virgin of Coromoto, as they seek hope of deliverance from their ongoing nightmare.
If this is the case, the people’s desperation is matched only by President Nicolás Maduro who, at the start of the month, ordered the nation’s clocks to be set ahead by a half-hour so as to avail of springtime’s extra daylight and thereby reduce electricity demands.
Sadly, a token sliver of daylight does not serve to end the wider crisis that is causing ordinary Venezuelans such suffering. Reports today emanating from the country reveal a society crumbling slowly from within as inflation rockets and basic materials and services dwindle to be replaced by black marketeers and outbreaks of spontaneous looting – the latter adding to an already spiralling crime rate.
One witness on the ground, reporting for the BBC, gave a flavour of things in visiting the main University Hospital in Caracas, the capital. The snapshot account described the woes of queuing patients being compounded by the facility running just one of its lifts to floors where staff work in complete darkness and amid severe shortages of supplies.
Suffering
One physician revealed that “some days” the hospital has no anaesthetic and doctors use their own mobile phones to record x-ray images in the absence of electricity to run computers used to record patient files.
Behind the suffering, and empty supermarkets shelves and hungry victims, is the fact that the crisis was entirely foreseen and loudly predicted.
The Irish Catholic itself sounded such a warning as far back as June last year. In examining Venezuela’s record since the rise of Mr Maduro in 2013, this newspaper stated that the President was “travelling along the wrong path” in seeking to maintain an iron grip on the democratic hopes of his people with the passing of his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.
The effect at that time was the fierce suppression of opposition voices – via imprisonment and, during student demos in 2014, the indiscriminate shooting of protestors.
Add to this the government’s twin-track approach to racing inflation – the imposition of price controls on basic products while printing money – and the portents of doom were writ large. Indeed, by the time this newspaper went to press with that first warning, one Caribbean nation, Trinidad and Tobago, was offering to pay Venezuela in toilet rolls for its oil purchases, such were the shortages even then.
No less conscious of the looming crisis, the Catholic Church of Venezuela had pre-empted many international commentators in sounding its own warning in January 2015 that Mr Maduro’s tactics would lead, ultimately, to disaster and that Venezuelans wanted more than socialist control of their fortunes.
It is to be conceded that neither this newspaper nor the prelates predicted other aspects now assailing Venezuela’s economic wellbeing. So heavily reliant on oil exports, the nation looked on in despair as world prices began to plummet in the middle of last year, an issue compounded by Iran’s coming in from the cold with an eagerness to sell its oil stocks that scuppered plans by Middle Eastern producers to reset the pricing balance.
Adding to this pressure has been a severe drought afflicting Venezuela, serving to reduce pressure at the country’s main hydro-electric Guri dam, a project built specifically to provide a natural source of power so as to allow Venezuela export the bulk of its oil output, hence the electricity outages which have seen University Hospital’s difficulties and the placing of government workers on a two-day week as a further electricity-rationing tactic.
But for all this, important elements of Venezuela’s crisis were spotted and flagged, so that Mr Maduro must take a heavy portion of blame for his country’s deteriorating fortunes.
Events have begun to follow their own inevitable and telling course. Take for example the political sphere. Despairing of Mr Maduro’s apparent willingness to drive Venezuela onto the rocks of economic disaster, the opposition has turned for recourse to electoral law, seeking to spark a referendum to remove the president.
Under said rules, 1% of the electorate must sign a petition within 30 days of its launch to begin the process, followed by 20% of voters signing a follow-on petition towards demanding a referendum. In real terms, the opposition required 200,000 signatures to gain that initial 1%, but in a dramatic outcome, it gained signatures from no less than 10% of the electorate in the space of the first seven days.
In parallel with the will of the people and the accelerating crisis, the country’s Episcopal Conference has felt compelled to issue another letter to Mr Maduro.
Faced with the president’s short-sightedness despite all red flags, and as he altered time itself in search of an answer, the bishops appealed to him to at least allow for the immediate importation, via the Church’s aid organisation Caritas International, of desperately required necessities to alleviate the people’s suffering.
The prelate’s letter came as it was revealed in Rome that the Pope had penned his own letter to Mr Maduro. The insights and appeals of the Latin American Pope can only be guessed at as the Vatican did not offer further details. Whether Mr Maduro can countenance his socialist dream turning for help to the Catholic Church remains to be seen.
Warning
In the interim, then, another warning.
Hard as the pill may be to swallow for the Maduro administration, the Church’s move in importing may well have the added and welcome effect of keeping a lid on those citizens whose patience with the political process is surely wearing thin enough to countenance more direct forms of action.
Those who survived the violence of 2014 must feel they owe the establishment nothing but violent revolt in return for all Mr Maduro has gifted them. The president would be well advised to recognise now, before it is too late, the crucial role of peacekeeper to be played by the Church.