Venezuelans queueing for food
Last week brought an important and unexpected diplomatic victory for Brazil’s new Foreign Minister José Serra, who convinced governments in Buenos Aires and Montevideo to accept putting joint pressure on Venezuela. Mercosur’s members issued an ultimatum to comply with the bloc’s rules by December 1, or otherwise face suspension. Venezuela joined Mercosur in 2012, but it failed to ratify many of the group’s rules governing trade, politics, democracy and human rights. The ultimatum represents a major policy change vis-à-vis Venezuela, which until then had enjoyed near-sold Latin American support since Chávez’s election victory in 1999.
Venezuela may ask for an extension to comply, but it is unlikely to ratify Mercosur’s many rules. What is often overlooked is that Caracas never intended to adapt to the economic rules and trade norms of the regional body. That is far from surprising: From an economic point of view, Mercosur’s protectionism makes no sense for Venezuela’s economy. As opposed to Brazil and Argentina, which want to protect their industries from competition in China, Europe and North America, Venezuela only exports oil and imports virtually everything it consumes. A growing percentage of the products it imports come from China (which are often tied to Chinese credit), and adopting the common external tariff would generate resistance in Beijing, something Caracas cannot afford. This shows that even regime change in Venezuela would not change the underlying mismatch that its Mercosur membership creates.
While Mercosur’s warning represents a laudable first step, more diplomatic pressure is needed to preserve democracy in Venezuela. Rather than merely pointing to technicalities, Brazil should seek to articulate a joint declaration by Mercosur’s members saying Maduro should allow the referendum to take place before January 10, which would, in case the opposition wins, lead to new general elections.
Beyond defending democracy, however, leaders in Brasília and Buenos Aires should also design a strategy for something even more urgent: helping save Venezuelans’ lives. With the world’s worst-performing economy and the highest inflation rate on the planet, oil-rich Venezuela is sliding ever deeper into a humanitarian crisis which the country will take years, if not decades to overcome. A significant part of the population is no longer having three meals a day. Public hospitals across the country lack even basic medicines. Looting of supermarkets is becoming more common. People with chronic diseases that require medication are forced to emigrate if they want to survive. Brasília and Buenos Aires should therefore lead an international effort to put pressure on the Maduro government to allow the delivery of basic medicines to hospitals across Venezuela. Addressing the humanitarian crisis is not only morally compelling, but also in Brazil’s and Argentina’s national interest: the longer the problem festers, the greater the risk of civil strife in Venezuela, which could create instability on a regional scale.
A recent survey by Datincorp, a pollster based in Caracas, found that 57 percent of all Venezuelans said they want to leave the country, up from 49 percent in May 2015. While fixing a broken economy is hard, convincing the young and educated to come back in a few years will be harder still: with its politics chronically unstable and a well-organized and receptive diaspora in places like the United States and Argentina, many will never return. A brain drain is the worst-possible scenario for an economy that is desperately trying to reduce its dependence on oil and diversify into other industries and services.
Policy makers in Brazil and Argentina were shamefully silent when Hugo Chávez, temporarily empowered by high oil-prices, slowly dismantled his countries’ democracy. Juicy contracts for Odebrecht and other construction firms helped Brazil’s national champions internationalize. The internationalization of Brazilian capitalism became a trademark of Lula’s regional policy, and Venezuela became a key part of it. Chávez’s commitment to protecting democracy, Lula’s advisors privately recognized, was limited, but the economic interests at stake were just too great to risk losing an important client. At one point, Venezuela’s secret service found out that a large Brazilian construction firm had donated money to both Chavez’s party and Venezuela’s opposition ahead of an election. Furious, Chávez threatened to expel the company from the country, and it took Lula’s personal intervention to solve the matter. Other leaders in the region, ranging from Bolivia’s Evo Morales to Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, are just as much to blame.
Accepting humanitarian aid is tricky for any government, even authoritarian ones, because it is an obvious acknowledgement of severe economic policy failures (particularly in Venezuela’s case, as the crisis cannot be blamed on a bad harvest). And yet, convincing a country to accept humanitarian aid is far easier than successfully mediating between an authoritarian government and the opposition, which always generates apprehensions about sovereignty. It is the least Brazil and Argentina can do after having greatly benefited from Venezuela’s bonanza for years.
Read also:
Why Mercosur Is Stuck with Venezuela (Americas Quarterly)
Venezuela on the Edge: Can the Region Help?
Brasil tem obrigação moral de ajudar a Venezuela
Photo credit: REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlings
