On 12 February, three young Venezuelans were killed during an anti-government protest march in the capital city of Caracas. An avalanche of alarming news reports and US government statements of “deep concern” followed, creating the impression that a peaceful and democratic youth uprising was threatening to bring down a repressive authoritarian regime that had lost touch with the people. President Nicolás Maduro’s catastrophic economic policies and ruthless attempts to crush dissent and press freedom had led to a Venezuelan Spring. As Mexican historian Enrique Krauze said on 28 February in the New York Times: “Clearly, Venezuela is sliding toward dictatorship.” But did this depiction of events bear any relation to reality?

 

Criticism of the Maduro government is not all undeserved. Venezuela’s murder rate remains among the highest in the world. Despite impressive economic and social gains over the last decade—including a 50% decline in the poverty rate—there are currently significant dysfunctions in the economy, including high inflation, an out-of-control black market for dollars and frequent shortages of basic goods.

 

But though crime, inflation and shortages may have created a fertile terrain for the protest movement, the protests were—early on, if not from the very beginning—promoted and organised by opposition politicians and activists with a radical political agenda: la salida, the departure of the Maduro government.

 

On 2 February several opposition leaders, including Leopoldo López, the former mayor of Venezuela’s wealthiest municipality, and the parliamentarian María Corina Machado, called for marches all over the country on 12 February, Venezuela’s Youth Day. The objective was to force a change of government. “They all need to go,” said López. “It’s clear that the problem isn’t only Maduro; it’s all those in charge of public institutions.”

 

Many opposition leaders didn’t support López and Machado’s plan. Maduro lacked the charisma of his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, and Venezuela faced serious economic difficulties. But Maduro didn’t suffer from a deficit of legitimacy: In April 2013, he had won the presidential election by a narrow margin of 1.49%. In December, the opposition had tried to turn municipal elections into a plebiscite on Maduro’s rule, and lost the popular vote by 10 percentage points. Soon after, Henrique Capriles, the opposition’s former presidential candidate, stopped referring to Maduro as “the illegitimate one” and, with other opposition figures, agreed to talks on the crime situation.

 

It wasn’t clear that the 12 February march would draw much of a crowd. But small student protests began before that date. On 6 February one of these protests, in the state of Táchira, grew violent and police detained several students; students then took to the streets in four states and in Caracas, demanding the liberation of all those detained and the departure of the government.

 

On 12 February there were marches of students and young people in a number of cities. In Caracas, part of the march degenerated into riots in which cars were burned, rocks hurled at police and National Guard troops and public institutions attacked, including the state television station, where a journalist was shot. Two opposition protestors and one chavista activist were shot dead. Venezuela’s attorney general, Luisa Ortega Díaz, ordered the detention of López for his alleged role in inciting violence. It was a decision the government perhaps regretted: López’s theatrical surrender to the National Guard and detention on 18 February gave him martyr status, and temporarily unified the majority of the opposition leadership behind the protest movement.

 

The opposition then convened more marches during the day while, in the evenings, young protestors set up barricades and barbed wire across roads, lit bonfires in streets and plazas, threw rocks and Molotov cocktails, and attacked public buildings and vehicles, including commuter buses. In a few instances security forces dealt harshly with them, leading to injuries and a claim that there had been several deaths. At least 15 state security agents suspected of killing or injuring demonstrators and bystanders were arrested. The attorney general provided regular reports on deaths, injuries, arrests and alleged human rights abuses linked to the protests, and took into account allegations documented by the human rights group Provea, seen as close to the opposition.

 

It became apparent from eyewitness reports from both the government and the media that the protestors were responsible for a significant part of the deaths and injuries linked to the protests. People who tried to remove barricades were shot dead. Three motorcyclists were killed by wires strung across roads, a fourth died after skidding on oil poured over the road by protestors. On 6 March, 21 Venezuelan deaths were officially reported; but only seven of the dead had taken part in opposition demonstrations.

 

“The majority of those protesting are Venezuela’s poor,” wrote Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation, in the New York Times. In fact, as the paper itself reported in a rare article, most young protestors were anything but poor, and their protests were in their own middle and upper-middle class neighbourhoods. Life continued as normal in working-class areas.

 

For Venezuelans there was a sense of déjà vu. In 2002 a huge middle-class demonstration had led to violence that served as a pretext for a short-lived military coup against Chávez. Frequent protests also marked the three-month opposition “lock-out” in 2002-03 that sought to unseat Chávez by provoking an economic and social crisis: Venezuela’s GDP fell by 24%.

 

This year’s protests were most reminiscent of the 2004 guarimba (blockade), which also involved young middle-class activists blocking roads with bonfires and barricades. The goal of the guarimba had been, in the words of Luis Alonso, their chief promoter, to create “anarchistic chaos on the national level with the help of all citizens ... so as to force the Castro-communist regime of Venezuela ... to abandon power and take flight as they did during [the coup of] 11 April 2002.”

 

Unlike the United States, South American governments recognised the protests for what they were. On 16 February the governments of the Mercosur group (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela) issued a statement rejecting “the criminal actions of violent groups that want to spread intolerance and hatred ... as a political tool.” Unasur, encompassing all 14 independent nations of South America, adopted a similar stance the same day, “reiterating [their] defence of democratic order ... and underscoring the conviction that any demand should be channelled ... via democratic channels.”

 

On 27 February, the day of the release of the State Department’s human rights reports, John Kerry had nothing to say about Honduras or other Latin American countries with dire human rights situations, but “in Venezuela,” he said, “the government has confronted peaceful protestors by deploying armed vigilantes, by imprisoning students, and by severely limiting freedoms of expression and assembly. The solution to Venezuela’s problems are not found through violence ... but only through dialogue.” Senator Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, introduced a resolution calling for targeted sanctions against Venezuelan officials “complicit in the deaths of peaceful protestors.” On 3 March, Democratic National Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said that the Obama administration was “looking at” the possibility of sanctions against individuals.

 

The Obama administration, though busy with Ukraine, also discreetly led an offensive against Venezuela in the Organisation of American States (OAS). The State Department invoked the need for OAS action early on, but—as is frequently the case—a Central American client state, Panama, formally requested an OAS Permanent Council meeting to discuss the Venezuelan protests. However, the offensive backfired: The OAS Permanent Council issued a declaration on 7 March expressing “solidarity and support for democratic institutions” and backing the Venezuelan government’s efforts “to advance in the process of national dialogue.” Only the United States, Panama and Canada refused to support the statement.

 

Washington’s vigorous support for the protestors strengthened the radical sector of the opposition at a critical moment. Maduro urgently needed to take decisive and potentially unpopular measures to address the economy, including a further devaluation of the Bolivar and an increase in the price of gasoline. Two years without elections—an exceptional occurrence in a country that has held 19 elections over the last 15 years—provided the government with room to take action and get the country back on track. But violent protests and street chaos could cause the government to delay the business of governing, thereby improving the odds of a future electoral defeat.

 

The Venezuelan opposition has received more than verbal support from the United States. The Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations provided the Venezuelan opposition with training and millions of dollars each year and—though the paths that US funds take in Venezuela remain opaque—hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding have poured into youth and student programmes through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Besides revealing relations between the United States and opposition student groups, State Department cables accessed via WikiLeaks described US plans to undermine the previous government, including “penetrating Chávez’s political base” and “isolating Chávez internationally.”

 

 

 

Copyright © 2014 Le Monde diplomatique – used by permission of Agence Global