VENEZUELA IS a failing state. Despite having the world’s largest proven hydrocarbon reserves, the nation is bankrupt. Basic consumer goods are scarce or unavailable. Purchasing power is falling fast as a result of the world’s highest inflation rate. The healthcare system is in a state of collapse. Infrastructure is in disrepair. Common crime is out of control as the social order begins to break down. The U.S. alleges leading government figures to be engaged in narcotics trafficking and money laundering.

Welcome to the Bolivarian Revolution.

Since 1999, Venezuela has been an experiment in governance and economics. Eschewing the center-left path of much of the rest of Latin America, Venezuela has pursued a more radical course: to remake society itself. The late Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro have intentionally, if incrementally, turned the nation toward a populist, authoritarian vision vaguely identified as “Chavismo.” Using the levers of democracy and the legitimacy bestowed by elections, Venezuela’s government has systematically brought its institutions under executive influence or outright control. Elections themselves have been skewed to provide every advantage to government-supported candidates. Meanwhile, democratically elected opposition leaders have been arbitrarily removed from office, stripped of their budget authority or jailed on trumped-up charges—and sometimes all three. From the courts to the security apparatus, the central bank to the national oil company, the education system and the press to the private sector, independent institutions and organizations have been under sustained Chavista assault.

The government has justified its actions as a defensive response to Washington’s supposed imperialistic designs, turning a long-standing friend and economic partner into an enemy, and seeking to convince the Venezuelan population that it is under active threat by “the empire.” When this approach loses credibility, Venezuela attempts to build nationalistic fervor by picking fights with its neighbors Colombia and Guyana, or its former colonizer Spain. Meanwhile, the government has worked diligently to build a cult of personality around Chávez, linking him in the eyes of the public to the liberator Simón Bolívar. At this point in Venezuela, Bolívar has taken on an almost mystical importance; presenting Chávez and Maduro as his heirs imbues the Bolivarian Revolution with legitimacy even beyond the ballot box, giving the government freedom of action they might not otherwise enjoy in their claimed march toward Bolívar’s vision of a united Latin America.

Despite such soft utopianism undergirded by strident anti-Americanism, the government can be pragmatic when it is in its interests. It has proved to be clear-eyed in pursuing its objectives. Most notably, Venezuela continues to be an important supplier of oil to the United States, its most lucrative market. U.S. willingness to pay market prices coupled with a (now receding) commodities supercycle provided significant resources to underwrite efforts to remake Venezuelan society. An almost unlimited spigot of hard currency over the years allowed the regime to build and maintain majority domestic support through both direct and indirect benefits including cash transfers, community-development projects and social programs. Sales of crude to China, India and others at concessional rates provided additional resources to build international support. In particular, billions of dollars in Chinese loans and assistance, to be paid back by future oil deliveries, have allowed Venezuela to temporize as its economy flags. The costs of such actions will be borne by Venezuelan citizens long after the regime has left the scene, having taken all the benefits up front and left only debts to repay. With so much money sloshing around and limited oversight brought on by atrophying institutions, corruption has exploded and a new class of elites, the so-called Bolivarian oligarchs, or “Boligarchs,” has arisen.

Ironically, the government has been able to reduce the attraction of any political alternatives by painting the opposition as dominated by a callous and cynical oligarchy interested only in self-enrichment, unmoved by the poverty of the majority of Venezuelan citizens. This is a powerful and effective storyline in a nation with an abundance of natural resources, yet a grossly unequal income and wealth distribution. Like most effective propaganda efforts, the government has built its narrative on an element of truth. Venezuela suffered from florid and ostentatious corruption with the arrival of the petroleum industry in the early twentieth century. Politics was seen as a means to distribute the spoils of governance among a well-connected elite. There was little concern for the public good or broad-based economic development.

The international development community also supported Chavista efforts that were intended to reduce poverty, no matter how ephemeral their impact. Various actors and Hollywood celebrities added their voices in support of the Bolivarian Revolution, seeming to value an association with Latin American leftist chic more than appreciating the longer-term damage being done in the name of socialism. Meanwhile, a Latin America that has elevated sovereignty to an absolute principle saw no need to urge Caracas to change course, particularly when the economy was robust and cross border business relations were strong and growing.

 

CHAVEZ’S POPULIST economic policies have proven unsustainable, as the price for Venezuelan crude has collapsed from a high of around $115 per barrel to under $30 per barrel. Yet even as economic gains erode, structural changes that were made to institute populist governance remain. The benefits were fugacious, while the costs are lasting and destructive. Democratic institutions have been bent to the will of the executive, leaning toward authoritarianism the longer the government remains in power. As long as poverty appeared to be decreasing, social justice increasing and the opposition divided, international sympathy allowed the regime to justify its increasing antidemocratic excesses as a legitimate if unfortunate overreaction to years of exploitation by political and economic elites. Even as the regime presented itself under the banner of poverty alleviation and anti-imperialism, however, it moved to consolidate its power, using the veneer of democracy to undermine democracy.

At the same time, Maduro is no Chávez. He lacks the charisma and revolutionary legitimacy of his mentor, despite the strident efforts of the regime and its Cuban advisors to promote him as Chávez’s anointed successor. But facts don’t lie, and Maduro has been unable to justify or explain them away. The International Monetary Fund expects Venezuela’s economy to have contracted by some 10 percent in 2015 and a further 6 percent in 2016. In a futile effort to goose global energy markets, Maduro has taken several recent trips to OPEC capitals and elsewhere in a bid to curtail supply (from the Middle East and Russia), raise demand (in China) or both. To date he has been singularly unsuccessful. He is unlikely to achieve any greater success in 2016, either. Iran is reentering global energy markets, Saudi Arabia continues to value market share over price targets, Mexico is opening further to investors, the shale revolution continues apace, emerging markets are slowing and global environmental actions are achieving greater uptake.

The longer the price of oil lingers at one-third to one-quarter of its previous highs, the faster Venezuela will run out of cash. Production is declining due to a lack of investment, and much future production is already committed to China and elsewhere. Lacking a diversified economy, and having already led a full-scale assault on the activities of the private sector through expropriations, price controls, inefficient regulations, restricted access to hard currency and outright harassment, Venezuela has no obvious engine of new growth. Printing money will only fuel additional inflation. Without oil-backed resources, Venezuela’s economy will continue to deteriorate.

With no positive economic inflection point in sight, Venezuela’s deteriorating condition has caused Maduro’s popularity and that of the Chavista movement to plummet. A waxing share of the Venezuelan populace has grown weary of the model, which has created a new class of corrupt elites, wrecked the economy and made the conduct of daily affairs more difficult for a majority of Venezuelan citizens. Once-improving poverty and social-inclusion indicators have reversed, and are now reportedly worse than when Chávez first came to power in 1999. Other than those in power and their supporters, Venezuelans are not better off than they were seventeen years ago. This has obliterated Chavismo’s ultimate claim to domestic legitimacy.

As the government loses legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, it has had to rely more and more on heavy-handed tactics to maintain control. The Bolivarian Revolution has been revealed at home and abroad as an economically regressive system of authoritarian, caudillo-style governance anathema to the hemispheric values of democracy enshrined in the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which Chávez’s government adopted. As a result, after sixteen years and an unbroken and escalating pattern of behavior, Venezuelans and the international community appear to be less willing to acquiesce further in Chavismo’s antidemocratic excesses.

 

FOR THIS REASON, the year 2015 may be remembered as the beginning of Chavismo’s end. Despite transparent efforts to forestall elections for the heretofore Chavista-dominated National Assembly until a date more favorable for the regime, Maduro was obliged to hold elections prior to the end of calendar year, as required by the constitution that Chávez himself promulgated. After first refusing to set a date, Maduro eventually chose December 6, to coincide with the anniversary of Chávez’s first election and implicitly remind voters what was at stake.

The lengths the government went in its efforts to maintain control of the legislature were unprecedented in Venezuela. The election itself was generally free—citizens were able to get to their precincts and cast their votes—but they were certainly not fair. Leading candidates were thrown into jail or otherwise harassed prior to the elections. Candidate requirements were arbitrarily changed after candidates had already been selected. Districts were redrawn and voter lists massaged. Government speakers dominated the media, and opposition candidates were forced to resort to social media to spread their messages. State resources, including money and personnel, were mobilized to support government candidates. The ballots themselves contained numerous government-sponsored candidates identified by party affiliations and symbols similar to opposition candidates, in a deliberate effort to sow confusion among voters.

The Venezuelan government also attempted to create an atmosphere of crisis and siege in a bid to unleash latent nationalism and build sympathy and support for the regime. The United States was accused of waging economic war against Venezuela, while the opposition’s leadership was accused of being Washington’s stooges. When that didn’t gain popular traction, the government rattled sabers against neighbors Guyana and Colombia. In the latter case, Maduro’s government closed the border with Venezuela’s top trading partner and traditional political rival under a pretense of anticorruption efforts to build a sense of political crisis while creating economic hardship in the opposition-dominated border region. The situation was nominally resolved when Maduro and Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos met in Quito, Ecuador under the auspices of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and pledged to reduce tensions.

Maduro also asked UNASUR to “accompany” (not “observe”) the December 6 elections in an effort to lend them greater legitimacy. UNASUR has no particular credibility or expertise in election monitoring, unlike the Organization of American States (OAS), whose own desire to observe the elections was rebuffed. What UNASUR does have is a mandate to promote the sovereignty of its member nations and lend support to elected executive-branch leaders. Maduro was counting on a quiescent UNASUR mission to overlook government-generated irregularities while offering support for final results that the government was hoping to achieve. He was not counting on the newly elected Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, to write a blistering eighteen-page public letter one month before the elections to the head of the Venezuelan electoral commission, a supposedly independent body dominated in reality by Chavistas, detailing the numerous ways in which the December elections did not meet international standards. The president-elect of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, also spoke out against the Maduro regime, and some 157 hemispheric and U.S. legislators signed a letter expressing concern for Venezuela’s democracy. Former Latin American presidents led by Colombia’s Andrés Pastrana and Bolivia’s Jorge Quiroga and also including Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, Chile’s Sebastian Piñera and others, played a decisive role in keeping the fate of Venezuela’s opposition political prisoners in the global conscience while exposing the antidemocratic practices of the Maduro regime. All this broke the wall of silence fellow Latin American leaders had erected around Chavismo.

 

THE IMPACT was dramatic. Although it had been clear for months, according to tracking polls, that the opposition would win a majority, the scope of ultimate victory was stunning. Opposition candidates won 112 seats, giving them the two-thirds majority of the legislature necessary to rewrite the constitution, reduce the term in office for the president and executive-branch leaders and reverse the destructive economic path that Chávez and his acolytes put Venezuela on beginning in 1999. Of course, an opposition-dominated legislature can do nothing about prevailing oil prices, nor does it control the executive branch or the courts, which will continue to be regime-dominated and aggressively opposed to new initiatives by the legislature. Neither will the opposition control the military.

As it was, the military played a critical and surprising role on December 6. When it became clear that the opposition would win and that exit polling was beginning to describe the vote in historic terms (as it had done in previous elections), the regime sought to keep polls open past their mandated 6:00 p.m. closing time, using the extra time to rush additional supporters to the polls, some with forged identity cards, in order to reduce the number of seats won by the opposition. Indeed, one of the seats was decided by a mere eighty-two votes, while the vote difference for others was in the hundreds rather than thousands. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López unexpectedly foiled these efforts. By declaring publicly, along with his defense chiefs, that voting had concluded and that public order would be maintained, he thus delegitimized the extralegal poll crashing while putting Chavistas on notice that intimidation tactics would not be tolerated. After a lengthy delay, Maduro and the regime were forced to accept the results.

 

THE MILITARY may play an increasingly important if as-yet-undefined role going forward. A look at Venezuela since December 6 shows why. Once it was clear the regime had lost, it shifted into even higher gear in an effort to reduce or eliminate the impact of the elections by the time of the new legislature’s seating on January 5, 2016. Chavismo can be audacious and creative when its survival is at stake. In the dying days of the last legislative term, the regime appointed thirteen new justices to join the already Chavista-dominated Supreme Court, with the authority to interpret the constitution and rule on the actions of the legislature. Despite running the elections, the government then challenged the electoral validity of three opposition legislators, referring their respective elections to the newly replenished Supreme Court in a bid to reduce the opposition majority below the critically important two-thirds threshold. These legislators remain to be seated pending the court’s decision. At the same time, the regime has established a so-called “communal congress,” a parallel, unelected body the government can dominate and for which it may seek to appropriate powers and budget from the actual legislature. These transparently political actions threaten to relaunch the cycle of protests and counterprotests that roiled Venezuela in 2014, pushing the country further down the path toward ungovernability.

Under these circumstances, the military could be tempted to seek stability, although factions may rive the security forces. The instincts of its collective leadership in a political crisis are not known at this point. Military involvement to prevent the government from carrying out the Chavista agenda would undoubtedly be denounced by the regime as a coup, thus opening the door to a full-blown institutional crisis, whereas suppression of democratic protest would threaten basic democratic and human rights. Latin America has striven mightily in the past generation to remove the military from politics, so its engagement in virtually any capacity would be strongly dissuaded by the international community.

Meanwhile, a true humanitarian crisis is looming. As the money runs out, food and necessities like basic healthcare are becoming unavailable, exacerbated by regime steps to cut off public-sector employees and erstwhile supporters for not campaigning and voting with sufficient fervor in favor of government candidates.

The opposition faces a conundrum. Its temptation, assuming it is allowed to function in a normal legislative manner, is to address the economic calamity facing the nation; expectations among voters are high. But the economy requires a fundamental reboot, not merely the window-dressing of new regulations or efforts to stimulate investment. And the economy cannot be restarted without the restoration of Venezuela’s institutions. It is the economic model itself that must be reformed. Working to mask the symptoms of Chavismo without addressing the underlying causes would, even if successful, gift the opposition with the burden of economic adjustment while watching prospective benefits accrue to the government that remains in power and controls the levers of the state. Some economic steps should be taken immediately, including instituting market pricing for Venezuela’s oil and gas for both domestic and international customers (recognizing, of course, that gasoline is virtually free to Venezuelans and raising its price is often considered a third rail of Venezuelan politics). Additionally, restrictions on the private sector should be lifted to regenerate at least some economic activity. Property confiscations should be reversed. Exchange rates should be unified and made transparent to eliminate one of the most brazen opportunities for corruption available to connected Chavistas.

The real work of the legislature and the international community, however, must be to expose the current government and its supporters, showing the true nature of the regime and its autocratic tendencies. Working under the existing constitution, with a two-thirds majority, the legislature can call for a constituent assembly, potentially leading to institutional renewal. It can push through an amnesty for political prisoners, thus releasing from prison some of Venezuela’s natural political leaders, including those imprisoned without cause and most feared by the regime. It can launch investigations for executive-branch malfeasance including individuals engaged in corrupt activities and drug trafficking, as alleged by the U.S. Department of Justice. If these steps do not work, the unified opposition has shown a capacity to mobilize citizens who are tired of the political antics and economic destruction of the Maduro regime. Renewed nonviolent protests against government authoritarianism may be the next step.

 

THE INTERNATIONAL community must not shirk from its responsibility to support democracy in Venezuela, resolving to compel the Maduro regime to acknowledge its democratic and humanitarian obligations. Because Venezuela is a current member of the UN Security Council, the United Nations should consider establishing a contact group of concerned nations to engage with the Maduro government as a means to expand political space for the opposition. The OAS must be similarly engaged, for example by invoking the Inter-American Democratic Charter as appropriate and looking for ways to build democratic institutions in Venezuela. At the same time, Venezuela’s membership in the Common Market of the South, MERCOSUR, should be reviewed using the democracy clause in the Treaty of Asunción that has been applied against other member nations.

Washington has taken a hands-off approach to Caracas, believing that most actions and rhetoric would only backfire by playing into the Chavista narrative of a meddling, imperialistic “empire.” Other hemispheric nations have supported Venezuela in this approach for their own purposes of muting the U.S. voice in the region. What is clear at this point, however, is that without U.S. leadership the international community will not coalesce around an effort to support democracy in Venezuela. Circumstances on the ground have become bad enough that it should be obvious to all but the most ideologically blinkered that the United States is not responsible for Venezuela’s political and economic crisis. In fact, U.S. purchases of Venezuelan crude have helped maintain the regime in Caracas. In addition, the United States is in a stronger position now to play a regional leadership role, given its continued economic recovery coupled with slowdown in South America and the weakening of institutions that exclude the United States (and Canada) such as UNASUR. Recognizing this, the United States should heighten its efforts within international bodies, including the OAS, to promote a prodemocracy strategy for Venezuela now that the regime’s DNA has been revealed. Washington should work with other willing democratic leaders in the hemisphere to call out Venezuela for its antidemocratic abuses, building momentum and support for current (and not just former) leaders to speak out. Because Latin America’s inclination has been to remain silent, this will likely require the personal engagement of the most senior U.S. officials, perhaps deploying some of the political capital recently gained in the region by steps to normalize relations with Cuba. Washington should also engage Beijing, urging it to stop propping up the sinking Maduro regime with concessional loans and restructured financing that only postpones the inevitable and makes future debt repayment to China and other lenders more difficult. And Washington should continue its efforts through U.S. law enforcement to identify Venezuelan individuals engaged in illegal actions, including corruption and drug trafficking, following and exposing the trail wherever it may lead. This will also assist the opposition-led National Assembly in performing its important oversight responsibilities, holding the government accountable for its actions and decisions.

The December 2015 elections were a turning point for Venezuela as the Maduro regime radicalizes in the wake of its massive electoral rebuke. The question now is whether the full potential of the results will be realized or whether they will be diluted or reversed as Chavismo fights back. Democracy itself could be at stake.

Eric Farnsworth is the Vice President of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. He has previously served in the State Department and the Clinton White House.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Carlos Díaz