{"id":716,"date":"2017-05-04T23:30:26","date_gmt":"2017-05-04T23:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/?p=716"},"modified":"2017-05-04T23:30:26","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T23:30:26","slug":"as-venezuela-declines-so-does-its-latin-american-influence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/2017\/05\/04\/as-venezuela-declines-so-does-its-latin-american-influence\/","title":{"rendered":"As Venezuela declines, so does its Latin American influence"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A document circulating in Peru, part of a broad political corruption investigation, stands as a quaint piece of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez memorabilia. It\u2019s a 2006 letter allegedly penned by the late socialist Venezuelan president to one of his regional comrades, Peruvian presidential candidate Ollanta Humala. It suggests Ch\u00e1vez gave Humala\u2019s campaign $2 million in what the letter calls \u201crevolutionary aid.\u201d<\/p>\n

Humala, who became Peru\u2019s president in 2011 and left office last year, denies taking cash from Ch\u00e1vez. But the letter recalls something larger: a time when Venezuela wielded clout. A decade ago, as crude prices soared above $100 a barrel, the South American nation with the world\u2019s largest oil reserves was a petro sugar daddy. The firebrand Ch\u00e1vez cast his largesse from the Bahamas to Buenos Aires, buying influence for his left-wing, anti-U.S. revolution.<\/p>\n

Ch\u00e1vez has since died (in 2013, of cancer) and oil prices have imploded. His revoluci\u00f3n today looks as toxic as the tear gas at antigovernment protests in Caracas\u2014and the idea of Venezuela swaying neighbors\u2019 elections is now laughable. When Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro sent food aid to Peru\u2019s flood victims in March, he was globally ridiculed because his country\u2019s shortages are so deep the average Venezuelan adult lost 19 pounds last year.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Maduro\u2019s gross mismanagement, Venezuela is suffering one of the worst economic collapses in modern Latin American history. Its economy shrank 19 percent last year, according to its central bank, while its annual inflation rate hit hyperspace at 800 percent. A socialist revolution that came to power in 1999 vowing to raise up the forgotten poor and bring down the corrupt elite has driven the poverty rate to 82 percent of the population and has itself looted billions of dollars.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have never seen a country going down so fast,\u201d Luis Almagro, secretary general of the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS), recently told the Miami Herald\/WLRN News. \u201cAt every level: politically, economically, socially.\u201d Almagro, Uruguay\u2019s former foreign minister, is a self-described leftist but is arguably Maduro\u2019s harshest antagonist outside Venezuela. In April he persuaded the OAS\u2019s Permanent Council to issue a resolution essentially declaring Venezuela\u2019s democracy dead. The reason: A desperate Maduro, his approval rating down to 20 percent, has neutered the legislative and judicial branches, called off elections, muzzled independent media, and locked up more than 100 opposition figures.<\/p>\n

The OAS resolution was an unusual sign that the rest of Latin America\u2014for once\u2014isn\u2019t shamelessly apologizing for a disastrous and dictatorial left-wing regime. The region has a long and hypocritical history of decrying U.S. imperialismo while defending repressive socialismo. Communist Cuba is Exhibit A, but that country retains a romantic symbolism\u2014standing up to U.S. hegemony and social inequality\u2014that much of Latin America still wants to cling to. Venezuela no longer does, if it ever did, so it\u2019s not getting the usual pass.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s partly explained by the rightward shift much of Latin America has taken since Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s heyday. Consider Peru, the country Ch\u00e1vez apparently thought he could turn \u201crevolutionary.\u201d Centrist President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski has said Venezuela\u2019s regime is \u201cunsustainable and has to go.\u201d Maduro called Kuczynski a \u201cdog\u201d and a \u201ccoward,\u201d hoping Peru\u2019s sizable leftist cohort would chime along.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t. Nor has the Left in Brazil, which has its own problems right now, such as crawling back from last year\u2019s impeachment and ouster of socialist President Dilma Rousseff. She was a staunch defender of the Venezuelan regime. Her replacement, Michel Temer, has expressed support for Venezuela\u2019s opposition.<\/p>\n

The same scenario is playing out in other major South American countries such as Argentina, where left-wing President Cristina Fern\u00e1ndez de Kirchner has been succeeded by the more conservative Mauricio Macri. Even next-door neighbor Colombia, where centrist President Juan Manuel Santos has needed Maduro\u2019s help negotiating peace with Marxist guerrillas, recently signed a letter with 13 other OAS nations demanding that Venezuela restore democracy.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most glaring snub came in December, when the South American trade bloc Mercosur suspended Venezuela for failing to comply with the group\u2019s democratic principles. Shortly after, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodr\u00edguez\u2014whose Stalinist bent frightens even die-hard leftists in her country\u2014was barred from entering a Mercosur meeting in Buenos Aires. Maduro, in Havana at the time, shouted \u201cnothing or nobody will make us leave Mercosur because it belongs to the people!\u201d<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s precisely the problem for the Maduro regime, known as los Chavistas: the seeming indifference if not censure of Latin American people, both working- and middle-class, toward Venezuela\u2019s revolution. In years past even conservative Latin American governments balked at criticizing abusive leftist leaders. They feared offending large swaths of voters at home who admire Che and Fidel and all the other red-beret radicals.<\/p>\n

Now with Venezuela, the politicos don\u2019t appear to feel the same constraint. That\u2019s likely because their citizens have heard food is so scarce there that a fifth of the country\u2019s children are malnourished. Or that Venezuelans are dying for want of antibiotics. Or that protesters have been shot and killed by pro-Maduro motorcycle goon squads known as colectivos. \u201cI think even most liberal Latin Americans have decided the Chavistas don\u2019t share their set of values,\u201d says one South American ambassador to the U.S. who asked not to be named because of diplomatic sensitivities. \u201cThat makes it easier for us to speak out.\u201d<\/p>\n

They\u2019re speaking out even as the Trump administration is levying sanctions against Venezuelan officials such as Vice President Tareck El Aissami for alleged drug trafficking, the kind of gringo \u201cintervention\u201d most Latin American governments don\u2019t want to be seen as endorsing.<\/p>\n

Many smaller countries in Latin America, especially in the Caribbean, still feel grateful for Venezuela\u2019s munificence\u2014and fear the revolution\u2019s demise could harm them. That\u2019s particularly true among beneficiaries of Petrocaribe, the regional fuel assistance program Ch\u00e1vez started in 2005. At its peak five years ago, Petrocaribe sent more than 200,000 barrels of Venezuelan oil per day to such energy-starved countries as Honduras, Jamaica, and especially Cuba, which gets about half the program\u2019s exports. The recipients pay less than half the price upfront and finance the remaining cost at low interest. In 2013, Haiti depended on Petrocaribe imports for 93 percent of its fuel. For Cuba, it was 59 percent.<\/p>\n

But Venezuela\u2019s crisis has turned the spigot down significantly. Jamaica once received 23,000 Petrocaribe barrels per day; this year its allotment has been slashed to 1,300. Cuba\u2019s quota has dropped by more than half, from 110,000 bpd to 53,500. That\u2019s a big reason President Ra\u00fal Castro has reduced the island\u2019s fuel consumption by a third\u2014and why its economy shrank in 2016 for the first time in 20 years.<\/p>\n

The Petrocaribe cutback is largely a result of the deterioration of Venezuela\u2019s state-run oil monopoly, Petr\u00f3leos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Because the price of Venezuelan crude remains below $50 per barrel\u2014and because Maduro\u2019s government has a knack for scaring away investors\u2014PDVSA production is expected to fall in 2017 for the fourth straight year. Meanwhile, Petrocaribe countries still owe Venezuela some $20 billion.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s scary news for an economy that relies on oil for 96 percent of its export earnings. And scarier still when Maduro keeps doubling down on his insistence that Venezuela\u2019s humanitarian catastrophe is the result of a U.S.-led \u201ceconomic war\u201d against him. He made another counterattack in April by seizing General Motors Co.\u2019s Venezuelan assembly plant over a legal dispute, causing the company to stop operations there.<\/p>\n

Maduro, a former union leader whom Ch\u00e1vez anointed as his successor, isn\u2019t entirely isolated. Authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia speak up for him (and lend him cash). He gets moral support, too, from the few regional allies Venezuela has left: Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.<\/p>\n

But those neighbors can\u2019t offer Venezuela the \u201crevolutionary aid\u201d it once lavished on them. Which is why its revolution\u2014and perhaps the idea of revoluci\u00f3n in Latin America\u2014may be going up in clouds of Caracas tear gas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n