Since Hugo Chávez took office as President of Venezuela, in 1999, the country’s government has reported no fewer than eighty plots to assassinate the President and overthrow the Chavismo movement, which continues under President Nicolás Maduro. The usual suspects include farmworkers, the paramilitary, terrorists, and former American and Colombian Presidents, in combination with Venezuelan oligarchs and extremist opposition groups. None of these conspiracies have been convincingly proved by the government. This hasn’t stopped officials from using real or imagined intrigues to attack their opponents. Only a month ago, President Maduro ordered the arrest of the opposition leader Antonio Ledezma, accusing Ledezma of participating in a plot to kill him, supposedly developed in Washington, New York, Miami, and Madrid.
Last week, President Barack Obama signed an executive order imposing sanctions on seven Venezuelan law-enforcement and military officials, who are all accused of violating protesters’ rights during widespread anti-government demonstrations last year. The move inflamed both the narrative of an imperialist conspiracy against Chavismo and the language of its spokesmen. Maduro’s first response was to ask the National Assembly for special powers that would allow him to address the imperialist threat; the Assembly’s Chavista majority granted his request in less than seventy-two hours. Diosdado Cabello, the President of the National Assembly, who is considered to be the regime’s strongman, went on to call upon the people to defend their homeland, and warned that all those unwilling to do so would be treated as traitors. Over the weekend, the Venezuelan government launched two weeks of military drills, displaying weapons made in Russia and China, and officials gave speeches full of strong patriotic rhetoric to conjure up what they have claimed is the “imminent danger” posed by the U.S.
Maduro’s regional allies, the members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), also closed ranks around him. Evo Morales, the President of Bolivia, said that the sanctions contained a hidden “threat to invade Venezuela.” In an official announcement, Cuban President Raúl Castro said, “No country has the right to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign state or to declare it a threat to its national security without any real justification.” Just last night, the ALBA leaders, including Castro, held an emergency meeting about the sanctions in Caracas, and issued a statement demanding that the U.S. “immediately cease the harassment and aggression against the government and people of Venezuela, as that policy encourages destabilization and the use of violence by a section of the Venezuelan opposition.”
Obama’s order, which froze the American assets and voided the American visas of the seven Venezuelan officials, puts into effect sanctions that were approved by Congress in December. The sanctions target only mid-level officials, indicating that Obama wanted to take a cautious approach to confronting Maduro’s government. The language of the order, however, is extremely aggressive, declaring Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” in order to meet the official threshold for applying sanctions. Commentators in Venezuela see the sanctions as a reaction to Maduro’s order to reduce the number of officials allowed to work at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas from a hundred to seventeen. Maduro alleges that some of the current employees were “involved in conspiratorial activities to destabilize the country,” and claims to have videos, audio recordings, and testimonies to prove it. For the U.S., the question is whether sanctions will be effective at putting more pressure on Maduro’s government or whether they will backfire and possibly even jeopardize the strategic objective of overcoming more than half a century’s stalemate with Cuba.
At the moment, the sanctions have presented a much-needed opportunity for Maduro, whose popularity is at an all-time low. Around eighty per cent of the population, which is suffering the ravages of a severe economic crisis, believes that he is leading the country in the wrong direction. David Smilde, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America and moderator of the blog Venezuelan Politics and Human Rights, says that the sanctions are damaging to American interests “for a very simple reason. Maduro’s main strategy has been to portray the very serious problems of governance he is facing as the result of an economic war carried out by the national bourgeoisie, backed by the United States. Declaring Venezuela a national security threat and declaring a state of emergency with reference to it could hardly have fit better into the Maduro government's conspiracy narrative.”
Maduro’s broad authorization from the National Assembly allows him to protect the sovereignty, security, and integrity of the country from any external or internal threat. Practically speaking, this gives Maduro almost total authority, in areas ranging from economic policy to domestic security. The government response to last year’s protests led to forty-three deaths and hundreds of injuries; more than three thousand protesters and opposition members have been detained, among them several elected officials and one of the most prominent opposition leaders, Leopoldo López. Now the government could easily increase its control over the opposition by imposing even more limitations on civil rights, detaining more of its leaders, or conceivably even by suspending the parliamentary elections due to be held by the end of the year.
The sanctions signal an important change in U.S. policy toward the Chavist government. For the past fifteen years, the U.S. has followed the line proposed by John Maisto, its ambassador to Venezuela from 1997 to 2000, which was to judge Chávez (and, subsequently, Maduro) by what he did rather than what he said. Now, however, with the sanctions, the Obama Administration seems to have taken a new position. Fausto Masó, one of the most respected pundits in Venezuela, said that Obama finally wants to gamble in Venezuela because he knows that Maduro is not Chávez. “Chávez was an electoral champion and a solid leader,” Masó told me. Maduro, by contrast, has become increasingly embattled. “In the short term, Chavismo will use the sanctions as nationalist, anti-imperialist propaganda, but in the long term any confrontation will have a debilitating effect on the Venezuelan government,” potentially isolating the country in the midst of the worst economic crisis in its history. For Masó, the main question is whether Maduro will still allow the parliamentary elections. “Until now, Maduro has said the elections will take place, but he could make an executive order to suspend them,” Masó said. “If he does so, we’ll be entering uncharted waters.”
