Is Venezuela becoming the biggest problem of (Latin) America?
By: More Intelligence
Tags: Refugees, Venezuelan Politics, Venezuelan Crisis, Maduro, Venezuela

Previous week’s legislative elections, in which Maduro and allies won an easy victory, mainly because the opposition have boycotted these procedures, can be seen as a key point in the transfer of the country from a neo-socialist, Cuban-style rebellious country, to something completely different.

The results of these elections mean that now Maduro has a complete control over the country’s political institutions. “The last stronghold” has fell, and at least from a legal point of view, there is almost nothing Maduro cannot do.

It is worth to remind that this situation comes on the background of a destructive economical and social crises that Venezuela is going through in the past years.

The main sector in the local economy, the oil industry, is struggling for years, due to poor management, lack of investment, corruption, and harsh international sanctions imposed on it, mainly by the US.

The situation is so bad, that Senior western Economists say that the economic crises in recent years in Venezuela is considered the single largest economic collapse outside of war in at least 45 years. And since no real war was involved, they tend to blame the situation on poor governance, corruption, and wrong policies of Chavez and afterwards Maduro.

A significant symptom for the economic crises is the rising rate of poverty among the people of Venezuela. According to research by local academic, between 2019–2020 about 65% of the country’s households had suffered some degree of poverty. This rate was about 14% higher than in 2018. The picture become even darker when measuring Venezuelans by income levels-there the findings indicate that almost 96% of the population lives in poverty, as the average income was about 72 US cents a day, something that can be seen only in poor African countries.

As a result, it seems that people are trying to flee for better life. More than 10% of the country’s population have fled the country in the past 3 years. This humanitarian crisis is considered Latin America’s biggest ever refugee crises.

The rising rates of poverty leads large populations in the country to real hunger. A quite recent UN sponsored report tells that Venezuela is having the fourth-worst food crises in the world (“above” her can be found countries like Yemen, DRC, and Afghanistan, all three are ravaged by war). The report found that 9.3 million people — about one-third of Venezuela’s population — lacked enough safe and nutritious food for normal human growth and development last year. It found that 13% of Venezuelan children under the age of 5 are stunted and that 30% are anemic.

Besides the economic and social crises, Venezuela seems to suffer from over-attention by international players, and this is not a healthy attention. Especially in the Chaves-Maduro era, the country had become a battleground for foreign powers interest-mainly the US and Russia. Due to its dependent on foreign oil, China had also joined the party, and to complicate the situation even more, Iran added itself as another supporter of the current regime in Venezuela.

All this international attention seems to only deepen the local crises, mainly because the US is tightening its sanctions on almost everything identifies with the current regime, and the fact that all these “bad actors” (from an American point of view) continue to support the current regime, only justifies, as far as the US is concerned, the need to tighten even further the restrictions.

The recent legislative elections are framing Maduro’s regime more than before as an autocratic regime, and therefore as a target for additional US sanctions and restrictions, that at the end of the day affects mainly the people of Venezuela, and not much the leadership-and especially Maduro and his close circle, which continue to find creative ways to receive money and keep control over the power strongholds-especially the security forces.

The result of all this mixed salad will be a worsening of the humanitarian crises, that will also affect badly Venezuela’s neighboring countries, which will have to deal with the on-going spill of refugees, and deterioration of stability and order in their territory.

As in many other cases in the international arena in the post-Trump era, it seems that the Biden administration will have to re-think on the American strategy towards Venezuela, a strategy that in recent years included mainly the stick. Now they will have to bring in also the carrot. In addition, they will have no choice but to cooperate with the Russians and the Chinese in this regard, in a more give-and-take creative way-such as easing tensions and coming towards Russia and China in other global points of conflict (such as Global trade issues, the Middle East, East Asia etc.), in exchange for them to influence Maduro to leave the office peacefully (in return to not being prosecuted by the US and other international players), since it seems that Maduro is the main (though not the only one) obstacle to the recovery of the Country in the post Chavez era.

It seems that the current situation has gone far beyond the control of the local players in Venezuela, and the need for international intervention-but this time from the useful kind-is essential. It is hard to believe the US wants such a catastrophe in its back yard.