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The US Should Focus on Democracy at Home, Not in Venezuela
This is not to say the Venezuelan government is perfect nor to endorse the fairness of last month's election. But let's be clear: Venezuelan political disputes should be settled by Venezuelans, not by the United States.
Aug 18, 2024
There is now widespread controversy surrounding the Venezuelan presidential election on July 28th. The National Electoral Council says that current President Nicolás Maduro was reelected with a 51% majority. The opposition, led by Maria Corina Machado, claims that its candidate, Edmundo González, won with an overwhelming majority of the votes cast. The primary questions being asked in the media are “who really won?” and even “how can Maduro be made to step aside?”
Instead the question US observers should be asking is, “what business is this of ours?”
The United States government constantly criticizes elections around the world that it deems to be undemocratic. It claims to support an “international rules based order” and maintain a foreign policy with human rights at its center. But the United States of America isn’t exactly a fair arbiter. It is without question the most hyper-interventionist country in the history of the world. It has repeatedly intervened in the internal affairs of governments it doesn’t like, often invading and overthrowing them, ostensibly, for the cause of democracy. It does not, however, criticize the antidemocratic behavior of its allies, like apartheid Israel or the absolute monarchy that rules Saudi Arabia. As in Orwell’s famous novel, America may claim that all animals are equal. But it’s clear that it believes some animals are more equal than others.
On July 27th, a day before the Venezuelan election, the People’s Forum, a New York City movement incubator, released a letter warning that, “a Western media narrative is already being spun to present the election as inevitably fraudulent – and pave the way for a new regime change operation if the right-wing opposition does not prevail at the ballot box.”
That letter has come under criticism for asserting that, “the campaign has seen energetic participation all across the country and vigorous, democratic debate,” and that since 2002, “Venezuela has held over 30 elections that have been conducted professionally and impartially.” In the days after the most recent election international organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a fact-finding mission from the United Nations have disagreed, citing reports of politically motivated arrests, assaults, intimidation, and even deaths. The governments of Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil are calling for more transparency.
But the credibility of Venezuela’s elections should not be the main issue in question. The main issue is that criticism is used as an excuse to promote US intervention and regime change or to justify more deadly sanctions that kill Venezuelan people. True to form, on Thursday August 1st the U.S. State Department announced that it recognized González as the winner.
In one egregious example of media promoting intervention, a July 31st editorial in the Boston Globe called on the Biden Administration to intervene, saying, “It’s in U.S. interests for the Biden Administration to help deliver the regime change Venezuelans have voted for.” It endorsed the policy of former President Donald Trump, suggesting that President Biden should revive the office of special representative to Venezuela and later quoted the man who held that office under Trump, Elliott Abrams.
But it failed to provide extremely important context about Mr. Abrams. In 1991 Elliott Abrams, who still serves in government, pled guilty to two counts of lying to the US Congress about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair, a secret deal to illegally sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to fund right-wing militias trying to overthrow the left wing government of Nicaragua. Congress had explicitly forbidden military assistance for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. A man who was deeply involved in the attempted overthrow of a Central American government is not a credible voice on Venezuelan democracy.
The United States has a terrible record when it comes to supporting self determination, globally, in Latin America, and in Venezuela specifically. The U.S. has interfered with the affairs of Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Venezuela, and more. Focusing on Venezuela alone there are multiple instances of interference just in the 21st century.
In 2002 the Bush Administration sanctioned a coup attempt against Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. In March of 2015 the Obama Administration unilaterally levied harsh economic sanctions on Venezuela. President Obama declared that Venezuela posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” The effects of such sanctions, and even more punitive ones imposed by the Trump Administration, were studied by the Government Accountability Office in 2021. They found that the sanctions have already killed tens of thousands of people in Venezuela, due to restricted access to food and medicine.
In 2019 the Trump Administration recognized 35 year old opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela, despite the fact that he never ran for the office. They then handed over control on Venezuela’s assets in the United States to Guaidó, a move that the New York Times called, “one of Washington’s most overt attempts in decades to carry out regime change in Latin America.”
Given the exhaustive record of U.S. interference and intervention in the politics of Latin American countries, it’s just common sense to be skeptical about pronouncements from Washington regarding Venezuela’s election. That’s asking the fox's opinion on the management of the henhouse. To be clear, this is not to say that the Venezuelan government is perfect or to endorse the fairness of the July 28th election. It is to say that Venezuelan political disputes should be settled by Venezuelans, not by the United States.
With its own presidential election less than three months away, the U.S. has enough on its plate. The recent history of presidential elections in the United States is less than stellar. Two of the last six presidential elections were won by the candidate who received less votes (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald J. Trump in 2016). In 2000 Bush had a co-chair of his campaign purge 173,000 voters from voting rolls as Florida Secretary of State, in a key election decided by 500 votes. Trump tried to stay in power after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. His followers famously stormed the Capitol Building in an effort to stop the certification of that election on January 6th 2021.
The bottom line? We have authoritarianism at home. When it comes to taking action abroad to “defend democracy” America would do well to adhere to the motto recommended by Founding Grandfather Benjamin Franklin: “Mind your business.”
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On the Need for Transparency in Venezuela
Following a disputed election, the government of President Nicolás Maduro has yet to publicly release the full tally sheets of the results. Meanwhile, U.S. officials are keeping quiet about their links to the opposition.
Aug 06, 2024
Since the disputed July 28 presidential election in Venezuela, U.S. officials have been calling for transparency from the Venezuelan government while keeping quiet about their efforts at regime change.
Claiming that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has stolen the election, U.S. officials have been working to bring to power the Venezuelan opposition. With nothing to say about their decadeslong relationship with opposition leader María Corina Machado, who has previously benefited from U.S. funding, U.S. officials have been portraying the opposition as a popular movement that won the election, all without external support or interference.
“The Venezuelan people deserve an election that genuinely reflects their will, free from any manipulation,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on the day of the election.
If U.S. officials are serious about wanting to see an election free from any manipulation, then they must be transparent about the U.S. role in the country. While it remains important for the Venezuelan government to release detailed voting results, just as several leftist leaders in Latin America have requested, it also remains critical for the United States to release detailed records about its relationship with the opposition, something it has spent years trying to keep hidden.
U.S. Manipulation
For decades, the United States has been the primary source of manipulation in Venezuela. With the goal of achieving regime change, the United States has been supporting an opposition movement that has been trying to mobilize the Venezuelan people against the Venezuelan government.
During the early 2000s, U.S. officials worked closely with Machado, the current opposition leader, who has long faced allegations of trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government. With funding from the U.S. government and support from U.S. diplomats, she and her organization Súmate led an effort in 2004 to oust then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in a recall referendum. When it failed, Machado repeatedly cast doubt on the results, even though data collected by her organization indicated that Chávez had won, just as election monitors found.
At the time, former President Jimmy Carter charged members of Súmate with deliberately distributing misleading data for the purpose of manipulating the election. “There’s no doubt some of their leaders deliberately distributed this erroneous exit poll data,” Carter said, as reported by The New York Times.
Since then, U.S. leaders have overseen many additional efforts at regime change, targeting both Chávez and Maduro, all of which have failed. In 2019, the Trump administration made one of the most audacious moves, rallying behind opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who led a failed uprising and later fled the country.
At the same time that they are demanding that the Venezuelan government be transparent about the results, [U.S. officials] are keeping quiet about their own efforts to empower the opposition and achieve regime change.
“Our conundrum, which is to keep the opposition united, has proven devilishly difficult,” then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lamented, as reported by The Washington Post.
In the July 28 election, the Venezuelan people voted in the context of widespread social and economic collapse, which has been facilitated by the United States. During the Trump administration, U.S. officials imposed severe sanctions on Venezuela, trying to make life so miserable for the Venezuelan people that they would turn against the Venezuelan government.
As former officials in the Trump administration recently acknowledged, they expected their approach to cause the Venezuelan economy to collapse and many people to flee the country. Not only did their actions push Venezuela into the one of worst economic collapses in modern history, but they made life so difficult that more than 7 million Venezuelans fled the country in one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
Many Venezuelan migrants have sought entry to the United States, driving the large increase in border crossings, all of which had been anticipated.
The Venezuelan people who have remained in their homeland are still suffering from the effects of U.S. sanctions. Even with the recent election, they have faced few good options, having been forced to deal with a hostile United States.
One of their options has been to support Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the current target of the United States. A vote for Maduro could lead the United States to preserve its sanctions, all but guaranteeing more years of suffering.
Another one of their options has been to side with the U.S.-backed opposition. A vote for the opposition could lead to relief from U.S. sanctions, but it risks bringing to power a right-wing regime that will prioritize U.S. interests and perhaps even transfer the country’s oil wealth to U.S. corporations. Machado, for example, has insisted that she will privatize PDVSA, the state oil company.
Although the Venezuelan government barred Machado from running for office, she remains the main opposition leader, being the driving force behind little-known opposition candidate Edmundo González, who has been serving as her proxy.
U.S. officials have said that public opinion polls display widespread support for González, but critics have questioned their reliability. Analysts at the Center for Economic Policy and Research have reported that support for González has been overestimated, largely due to polling bias.
U.S. Secrecy
Through it all, U.S. officials have been highly secretive about their actions, even while calling for transparency. They have not disclosed which opposition groups they are funding, a longstanding practice.
Neither have they been open about their links to Machado, perhaps due to a critical change in their approach that they began to consider after the 2004 referendum. Once the Venezuelan government began publicizing Machado’s connections to the United States, even charging her and her colleagues with treason, U.S. officials began to consider how they could empower her without appearing as if they were her puppet-master.
During a private meeting on January 10, 2005, then-U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) floated one possibility, advising Machado and her colleagues “to seek international financing from non-U.S. sources” so that the Venezuelan government “cannot credibly label Súmate as a USG-backed organization.”
Machado rejected the advice, however, insisting that Súmate should be able to openly receive funding from the United States, including from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). “Foreign financing for NGOs is legal, despite the GOV’s contention to the contrary,” she claimed. “Súmate will continue to apply for NED and other grants.”
Initially, the U.S. government supported her approach. In 2005, then-President George W. Bush welcomed Machado to the White House, where he openly supported her. Not long after the meeting, Machado announced that the United States would provide Súmate with additional funding.
Concerned about how the Venezuelan government might respond, U.S. diplomats in Venezuela, who were closely coordinating with Súmate, called for some adjustments. Their main advice was to continue supporting Súmate while making it appear as if there was some distance between Súmate and the United States.
“A continuing, too evident, public identification with the U.S. could now be counterproductive,” the diplomats warned. “At the same time, however, we need to ensure that Súmate has the resources it needs to exploit this new vantage point it enjoys.”
Not only have U.S. officials remained silent about these past moves, but they have been employing many of the same tactics. Taking the approach favored by U.S. diplomats, officials in Washington have been trying to appear distant from the opposition while remaining supportive.
During the most recent election, the Biden administration prepared for multiple scenarios, including ways of supporting the opposition in the case that Maduro was declared the winner. With its public diplomacy, it has framed the vote as a struggle by an admirable and heroic opposition against a corrupt and fraudulent government, just as past administrations have done.
In perhaps its most striking move, Biden administration declared that the opposition won the election, even without having access to the data that administration officials repeatedly said is necessary for confirming the results. After spending days demanding that the Venezuelan government release detailed polling data, the administration went ahead and announced the opposition’s victory anyway.
“Venezuelan opposition and civil society provided decisive evidence showing that Edmundo González received a majority of the votes in this election,” State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel claimed.
Indeed, U.S. officials are once again throwing their support behind the opposition. At the same time that they are demanding that the Venezuelan government be transparent about the results, they are keeping quiet about their own efforts to empower the opposition and achieve regime change.
Until the United States lifts its sanctions and ends its meddling, the people of Venezuela will never participate in elections that are free from manipulation, just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted they deserve.
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Hillary Clinton's Man in Honduras: A Reflection on Juan Orlando Hernandéz
As head of the National Congress following the U.S.-supported coup in 2009, Hernandez—who later ascended to the presidency—was seen as particularly amenable to Washington's desires.
Apr 02, 2024
On March 8, a Manhattan federal court found Juan Orlando Hernández, president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, guilty of conspiracy to import large amounts of cocaine into the United States over nearly two decades.
Mainstream U.S. media generally framed the ex-president’s trial and conviction as a triumph of justice, a service rendered by the impartial U.S. justice system to the people of Honduras.
The great majority of such accounts, however, ignored and obscured context crucial for understanding Hernández’s rise and rule; in particular, how Washington contributed to both. Though the mainstream narrative around the ex-president rightly connects his tenure in office with massive emigration from Honduras, it has elided the degree to which U.S. influence enabled Hernández’s career and thus partially drove the migration that arose in response.
For roughly two centuries, Honduras, the original “banana republic,” has suffered a deeply unequal relationship with the far more powerful United States. One of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, Honduras and its people have endured frequent American military interventions, U.S.-backed coups, and a corrupt, rapacious local oligarchy closely tied to U.S. corporate interests.
Despite Hernández’s ultimate conviction on U.S. soil, he served Washington for many years as a loyal client. The single most important event in the ex-president’s political career was a 2009 coup, which overthrew center-left president Manuel Zelaya (whose wife, Xiomara Castro, won election in 2021 and currently occupies the presidency). Zelaya raised the minimum wage, subsidized small farmers, and authorized the morning-after pill, infuriating the country’s business elite and, in the last case, ultra-conservative religious leaders. Moreover, to Washington’s consternation, he made overtures toward Hugo Chavez’s socialist Venezuela and sought to convert a crucial U.S. airbase entirely to civilian use.
Joint action by Honduras’ military and judiciary — in a manner the U.S. ambassador called “clearly illegal” and “totally illegitimate” at the time — forced Zelaya to pay for these sins in late June 2009. While the White House’s reaction to the coup initially appeared confused, Washington soon recovered its footing. Even as huge protests raged, the Obama administration played a key role in ultimately compelling Honduras’ people and the region’s governments to acquiesce to the regime change as a fait accompli.
Despite widespread repression by the post-coup de facto government, accounts of fraud, and the condemnation of many countries and international organizations (including the normally deferential Organization of American States), U.S.-endorsed elections in November 2009 received Washington’s imprimatur. In her memoirs (the passage excised from the book’s paperback edition with no explanation), then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained that the U.S. sought to “render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future.”
It was in this context that Hernández catapulted into power. After Porfirio Lobo won the 2009 presidential race, Hernández became President of the National Congress as a member of Lobo’s National Party — an institution historically closely linked to U.S. agribusiness. Lobo was Hernández’s mentor and groomed his protege to succeed him. But while Hernández enjoyed success, the coup’s consequences constituted disaster for ordinary Hondurans.
Political violence and repression became routine. The murder rate, much of it due to cartel-related gang violence, soared — it was the world’s highest for three years running. As the economic situation also deteriorated, and Lobo and his son allied with major narcotics syndicates, a huge surge of emigration swelled out of Honduras, with desperate citizens flooding northward. The total number of Hondurans apprehended at the U.S. border exploded — from less than 25,000 in 2009 to nearly 100,000 in 2014 — reaching 250,000 by 2020.
In Washington’s eyes, however, such concerns took a back seat to longstanding strategic needs: above all, Honduras’ openness to foreign investment and its role as a base for American military power. And, as head of the National Congress, Hernandez was seen as particularly amenable to U.S. desires.
“The State Department loved Hernandez,” according to Dana Frank, an expert on Honduras at UC Santa Cruz. As Lobo’s heir apparent, “he was young and could stay in power for a long time.” Frank cites a 2010 cable from the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa asserting that “He has consistently supported U.S. interests.”
The depth of American support for Hernández became clear after his 2013 election to the presidency. Despite credible reports of fraud, his National Party’s control over the counting process, and a wave of threats and sometimes lethal violence against opposition candidates and activists during the campaign, the State Department commended the election as “transparent, free, and fair.”
In 2015, a major corruption scandal centered on the misappropriation of funds from Honduras’ Social Security Institute exploded, prompting unprecedented popular demonstrations against Hernandez and calling for his resignation, “There was a real sense that Hernández could fall,” according to Alexander Main, a Latin America expert at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. Fortunately for Hernández, however, the U.S. swooped in, helping to defuse the unrest by prodding the OAS to organize a local anti-corruption body known as MACCIH.
In that same year, according to Frank, Washington gave an “official green light” to a “completely criminal” power grab by Hernández whereby his hand-picked Supreme Court ruled that he was eligible to run for a second term in clear violation of Honduras’ constitution. Washington’s complacent reaction — “It is up to the Honduran people to determine their political future” — stood in remarkable contrast to 2009, when Zelaya’s mere suggestion that the constitution might be amended to permit a second term served as the pretext for the coup that the U.S. subsequently legitimized.
In Hernández’s 2017 reelection bid, the fraud was so blatant and widespread that even the generally conservative OAS declared the incumbent’s victory an example of “extreme statistical improbability” and called for new elections. The State Department, however, stood by Hernández, prodding Mexico and other OAS members to recognize the results, even as security forces suppressed massive and prolonged protests with live ammunition.
Indeed, U.S. training and funding also proved crucial in the creation of the brutal special operations units Hernández’s government used to terrorize opposition and environmental activists. Particularly significant in the military sphere was the role of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the American combatant command responsible for Latin America. Hernández was a particular favorite of John Kelly, SOUTHCOM’s head during Obama’s second term (and then White House chief of staff for Donald Trump), who, as Dana Frank noted, once referred to the convicted drug trafficker as a “great guy” and “good friend.”
Considering the U.S. relationship with Hernández, it is perhaps unsurprising that U.S. officials seemingly turned a blind eye to his deep involvement in narcotics trafficking. As both Hernández’s recent trial — during which a witness claimed Hernandez had privately vowed to “stuff drugs up the noses of the gringos” — and that of his brother in 2019 showed, the drug trade’s reach into the Honduran government was unmistakable, with numerous high-ranking security officials repeatedly implicated.
CEPR’s Main argues that it was “highly unlikely American officials were unaware” of Hernández’s criminality. Indeed, as a document from his brother’s trial revealed, the DEA began investigating the ex-president as early as 2013. As noted in Hernández’s trial, just weeks after his inauguration in 2014, the agency reportedly obtained video evidence indicating his involvement with major drug traffickers. Even after his brother’s 2019 conviction, when it became apparent that millions of dollars in drug money helped underwrite Hernández’s political career, President Donald Trump publicly praised him for “working with the United States very closely” and for his help in “stopping drugs at a level that has never happened.”
Given all this, the U.S. media’s failure to probe the influence of American policy on Hernández’s career begins to look less like an anomalous oversight and more like a manifestation of structural dynamics that tend to reinforce the notion of American innocence. We can see the same logic apply to the frenzied media accounts detailing “caravans” of Central American migrants headed to the U.S. While mainstream news outlets rightly note the relationship between Hernández’s presidency and increased migration from Honduras, they nevertheless fail to connect the two to the impact of U.S. policymaking. Without Washington’s complicity and assistance, Hernandez might have spent 2014 to 2022 in prison, rather than the presidency. Unfortunately, it was the Honduran people who paid the price.
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