Venezuelans’ Health Shouldn’t Be a Bargaining Chip

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Let’s agree, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is Latin America’s ranking tinhorn autocrat. Propped up by thugs, thieves and foreign puppeteers, he betrays little clue or commitment about how to retrieve Latin America’s fastest sinking economy from self-made ruin. His barely two-digit approval ratings don’t do justice to his cruelty and incompetence.

Now forget all that. If international donors and diplomats concerned about Venezuela’s wellbeing want to make a difference, they need to hold their noses and reach out with money, supplies and medicine before the coronavirus pandemic finishes the job that Maduro and his enablers began. However, it’s a measure of the toxic partisanship contaminating relations in the Americas that even a humanitarian interlude to the zero-sum Venezuela diplomacy is far from assured.

Unquestionably, Venezuelans would be better off facing the hardships ahead without Maduro. That reasoning is part of why removing him has been baseline U.S. policy since President Donald Trump took office. To date, however, that plan has failed to dislodge or even significantly dent the Bolivarian cabal in Caracas, even as it has imposed more suffering on ordinary Venezuelans. Doing more of the same in the face of a global health emergency would be misguided and abhorrent.

So it’s tempting to see the most recent U.S. proposal for Venezuela as a diplomatic game-changer. The plan, unveiled on March 31 by the State Department calls for Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaido, recognized by the U.S. and more than 50 other countries as the legitimate interim president, to step aside while a caretaker government prepares new elections. Once a multi-partisan electoral council agrees on the rules for a new ballot and the government releases all political prisoners and expels “foreign security forces” (read: Cuban advisers), the U.S. will lift sanctions and help squire Venezuela to democracy. What’s more, the military high command, a Bolivarian bulwark, would remain through the transition.

On its own, the plan – with its nod to rainbow politics and the promise of lifting crippling sanctions – is a remarkable display of political pragmatism and compromise. Engineering regime change by consensus rather than by insurrection or crack-up would be a huge win for a country deadlocked by factionalism and a crashing economy. Too bad it fails the diplomatic sniff test.

Trump’s new proposal for Venezuela is actually pretty much like the old one aired by Guaido at the Norwegian-brokered conciliation roundtable in Barbados last August. Washington promptly buried that initiative by threatening sanctions against companies doing business with Venezuela, giving Maduro the perfect excuse to walk away from the political talks.

Maybe Trump and his Venezuela hawks finally have come around to backing negotiations just ahead of the coming contagion. What they neglected to explain was how to finesse a prickly power-sharing and transition scheme days after the U.S. Justice Department unsealed drug trafficking indictments against Venezuela’s top ministers and offered a $15 million bounty for information leading to the arrest of Maduro himself, whose “regime is awash in corruption and criminality.”

Technically speaking, it was the Justice Department, not the White House, which released those indictments. But then how to explain Trump’s next move – announced during his April 1 coronavirus press gaggle, no less – to deploy U.S. Navy ships near Venezuelan waters to interdict purported U.S.-bound drug shipments? No matter that Venezuela accounts for less than 13% of the cocaine flowing into the U.S., according to the U.S.’s interagency Consolidated Counterdrug Database.

“They’ve revived negotiation, but by indicting the head of nearly every branch of the Maduro government and then sending in Navy ships, the U.S. hardwired who can and cannot be part of a transition,” said David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at Tulane University. “Washington is trying to turn a political problem into a drug problem.”

You can’t sponsor a democratic transition and sabotage it, too. By putting a bounty on the heads of key regime players, the U.S. may only have emboldened the biggest scoundrels to dig in. “At this point, I don’t think that Maduro feels he has to negotiate,” said economist Francisco Rodriguez, director of the Oil for Venezuela Foundation. “He has this idea that they will emerge well from this pandemic, and he will still be standing.”

That temerity may prove to be foolish. So is doubling down on a political crisis amid a health emergency, not least in a country already afflicted by scarcity and neglect. “If Spain uses ice skating rinks as a morgue, what will be the situation in Venezuela, where hospitals don’t even have running water?” said Geoffrey Ramsey, director for Venezuela at the Washington Office on Latin America. “Unlocking international relief is urgent.” Just one example: Despite Washington’s claims that humanitarian aid will be exempted from restrictions, its sanctions have pauperized public health by all but cutting off Venezuela’s access to foreign exchange and imported medication, Rodriquez said.

Venezuela needs both democracy and emergency assistance. Holding a nation’s health hostage to its politics won’t heal either one.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mac Margolis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He was a reporter for Newsweek and is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”

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