Earlier this month, I wrote a short post about the humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela. I was trying my best to play my usual aspirational role of a post-war Camus, planted between the Scylla and Charybdis of right- and left-wing tyrannies and delivering a firm and impassioned ni to both. Neither Franco nor Stalin! Neither victims nor executioners!
As applied to the present catastrophe unfolding in Venezuela, the Camus principle led me to try to communicate that both the Maduro government and the U.S. strategy of trying to topple him through sanctions -- and replace him with a man who has never been elected to the presidency -- are morally abhorrent.
Everything I've read and seen in the weeks since has persuaded me that both of these statements are still valid; if anything, I feel I failed to say them with sufficient emphasis before, particularly as the humanitarian crisis has gone from bad to worse under the impact of a nearly week-long blackout affecting huge parts of the country.
We learned this weekend some additional evidence of the specific ways the governing regime stole the last election. Likewise, a colleague of mine recently shared with me an eye-popping report about the extent to which the Venezuelan regime is thoroughly permeated and infiltrated by organized crime, becoming a key launching ground for narco-trafficking in the region (much of which has also been linked to powerful actors in the right-wing Honduran regime -- thus we see how like always attracts like, regardless of superficial distinctions of party and ideology).
So yes, nothing about the image or substance of Maduro's rule has been the least bit burnished since my last attempt to venture an opinion on this subject.
What's starting to seem increasingly criminal as well, however, is the way in which U.S. media uniformly seem to neglect to mention the impact our own government's sanctions on oil exports are having on a country already in a state of economic collapse and country-wide hemorrhages in its essential infrastructure. Have recent U.S. sanctions -- which are set to extract $11 billion out of an already desperate country over the next year-- played any role in the extent of the latest humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by this week's power outage?
Much of the press rightly denounced and warned against the likely impact of these sanctions at the time they were announced. But as the extent of human suffering has mounted since then, almost no one seems to be making the link explicit. Instead, one finds over and over again the same cliché, when it comes time in the journalistic accounts to apportion blame. The root of the Venezuelan crisis, we are informed, is "mismanagement."
This is the sort of comfortably vague term that can be used without committing the journalist to any definite and therefore falsifiable claims. Mismanagement. Says Vox last week: the crisis was "largely caused by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s mishandling of the economy." The New York Times likewise attributed the problem on Friday to "years of mismanagement of the country’s economy."
Maduro certainly bears blame in part for the economic crisis. He bears responsibility in any case for running a repressive and criminal authoritarian regime -- one that would deserve one's condemnation even if it was laying golden eggs of prosperity for some of its people (that is, for those not directly on the receiving end of its practices of torture and police killings).
But where has the criticism gone of the U.S. policy of applying mass sanctions to an economy already on its last legs? If there's anything that the history of broad sanctions has taught us, it's that they strengthen rather than unsettle an oppressive governing regime, while inflicting human suffering on the general population, including children. Yet the analysis one sees in the media wholly discounts these sanctions as one of the likely causes or exacerbating factors of the humanitarian crisis.
The lone exception is the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Their chilling analysis suggests not only that the most recent sanctions enacted by Trump may be worsening the the humanitarian crisis, but that earlier, more limited U.S. financial sanctions on Venezuela also played a significant role in first tipping the Venezuelan economy over the cliff after oil prices tanked in 2016. CEPR's Mark Weisbrot has elaborated on the point in an opinion piece in The Nation.
The United States obviously didn't create the global fall in oil prices that set off the crisis initially, but Weisbrot's and his colleagues' point is that the sanctions effectively made it impossible for the Venezuelan economy to recover when this fall set in, or to absorb the shock. Economic dealings with a regime that was so evidently in disgrace with U.S. policymakers were "toxified," as the authors put it, and the Venezuelan economy went from a sudden plunge, into sustained free-fall.
And maybe doing business with Maduro should be "toxified," on moral grounds. But the result of trying to do so, thus far, has plainly not been to unseat the Maduro regime or create a realistic prospect for Venezuelan democracy (a cause that Elliott Abrams and an unelected opposition that was just hobnobbing with Brazilian neo-fascist Jair Bolsonaro are not likely to advance). All it has done is to create a regional refugee crisis and destroy the economy of an entire nation -- and indeed, to lead to the deaths of innocent people, as the situation has grown even more dire this week as a result of the blackouts.
To summarize: the collapse of the Venezuelan economy has been precipitated in part by U.S. sanctions. This crisis is then attributed to the ruling regime, and therefore becomes further justification for the U.S. regime change policy, fueling a vicious circle in which the sanctions come to serve as their own justification.
What we have in this case then is a kind of reverse Pygmalion effect on a society-wide scale. Just as Eliza became a lady from being treated like one, Venezuela has become a failed state through being labeled as one. The United States is in large part seeking to punish the monster of its own creation, and our media have been willing to go along with it. For the most part, they have treated the very evidence of the destructive impact of U.S. sanctions as evidence of the opposite -- namely, of the mismanagement of the ruling regime and the need for its overthrow.
There is of course something that the U.S. government could do immediately that would protect some of the people affected by this crisis. It could help Venezuelan asylum-seekers right now, who have been the victims twice over -- first of their own government, then of the sanctions against it. Namely, it could pass Temporary Protected Status for all Venezuelan nationals in the U.S.
But the U.S. government is hardly likely to do this, as it seems hell-bent on a policy of "heightening the contradictions" in Venezuela in order to destabilize the ruling regime, regardless of the consequences. Within this strategy, the humanitarian situation must always be made worse, before it can (in theory) be made better.
History has never once vindicated this habit of believing that if an abhorrent regime can be taken down by any means -- whether through violence or chaos or destitution -- that something better will necessarily arise in its place. Joseph Conrad was right to deplore what he called "the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institutions," no matter how many times this accelerationist fallacy has resurfaced on both the right and the left (whether in the neoconservative logic of "regime change" or the Marxist doctrine of class warfare).
In deciding policy toward Venezuela, it is not enough to ask whether the current government is rotten (it is). The question is whether its deliberate destruction through foreign economic intervention -- with all the suffering that will mean for the Venezuelan people -- is morally legitimate, and whether doing so may not bring even worse evils in its trail.
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