What Next For Venezuela?

The re-election of Maduro virtually ensures Venezuela’s crisis will deepen

Amid an ever-deepening economic crisis and social collapse, Venezuelans went to the polls on May 20 to vote in a national election.

Despite the perilous state the nation finds itself in, the results have surprised exactly zero observers. Nicolas Maduro, the successor to and ideological acolyte of former president Hugo Chavez, ensured his re-election as the President of Venezuela thanks to certain transparently illicit constitutional and legislative changes that have effectively destroyed the opposition’s chances.

The most powerful opposition parties have been banned from participating in the elections, while other candidates have been jailed by the Maduro regime. The extent of vote-rigging was projected to be so pervasive that many outside observers, including the United States, the European Union, as well as some neighboring countries in Latin America, said prior to the election that they would not recognize the process as legitimate.

There are many ways to parse the democratic illegitimacy of Venezuela’s most recent election.

Obviously, the ruling government’s heavy-handed tampering is the reason the elections are illegitimate. As this report from Brookings puts it:

The tragedy of Venezuela’s opposition is that after struggling for years to forge a common strategy, it finally came together and learned how to win elections — only to have Maduro change the rules. The government has openly manipulated the electoral system and even committed outright fraud, as its own longtime provider of electronic voting systems, Smartmatic, confirmed in the wake of the 2017 Constituent Assembly elections.

But the government’s illiberal measures also explain the sudden, and widespread, distrust felt by Venezuelans concerning their own political processes.

Consider voter turnout, which plummeted to less than half of eligible voters. This represents a 60-year low, and pales in comparison to 2013’s numbers, which saw turnout at around 80 percent. A once-vibrant democracy has been left in shambles due to the dictatorial stranglehold Maduro now firmly enjoys on the country’s institutions.

What comes next now that Maduro has secured the presidency for another six-year term is not exactly certain.

The extent to which Venezuela has collapsed—across a variety of national metrics—in the last few years alone is staggering.

The economy has contracted by nearly 50 percent in the last three years. Double-digit reductions in GDP within each year during that stretch have resulted in a depression significantly worse than America’s own Great Depression almost a century ago. Hyperinflation of the Venezuelan Bolivar has set in, with inflation currently at over 15,000 percent and rising by the day. As a result, the Bolivar is virtually worthless. It now costs a month’s worth of wages just to buy a single carton of eggs.

Millions of children across the country are no longer attending school, with hundreds of them shutting down as teachers are no longer able to be paid, and parents are no longer able to afford even a basic education for their children. Out of school, and with their families going hungry, these children—many of whom are still in single-digit age—try to scrounge together money or food in whatever way they can. From a report in the Miami Herald:

Miguel González, a 10-year old indigenous boy, walks barefoot through the crowded corridors of Maracaibo’s flea market in northwestern Venezuela. He holds a little plastic bag filled with a few pounds of beef skin while a nauseating smell of kept-in-the-open fish, meat and cheese fills the air below a rusty metallic ceiling.

“Please, give me some bones,” he asks, both hands extended to a woman selling meat, who refuses to hand him the leftovers and demands that he leave the premises.

Hunger triggers Miguel’s daily trips to beg for any food or money he can carry home to Carrasquero, a poor town located in the indigenous Wayuu district next to the Colombian border.

“I ask and ask until someone gives me something to prepare a soup at least. We have no food at all at home,” the child tells a reporter. His clothes are torn. His face, hair and feet are stained. …

[Miguel] is one of an unknown number of youngsters who work, sleep, beg for money or food on the streets of Venezuela, where inflation has skyrocketed, forcing waves of people across the border to Colombia and to other countries.

Many major international businesses who previously operated in the country have left in recent years, citing the excessive red tape, regulation, and the deteriorating political situation. In recent days, Kellogg, whose Maracay-based plant employed 400 workers and produced a majority of the nation’s breakfast cereal, ceased operations in the country, joining major companies like General Mills, Kimberly-Clark, and others in leaving. As a major producer of food product within the country, the loss of Kellogg underscores the problems in the nation at present.

Living conditions in Venezuela have degraded at an alarming rate in recent years and months. A shortage of food and other basic supplies has taken a devastating toll on the country’s citizens. On average, Venezuelan citizens have lost an average of 24 pounds last year as a result of malnutrition and hunger. With a poverty rate hovering close to 90 percent, many urban Venezuelans are now moving into the countryside in a last-ditch attempt to obtain enough food to live on.

Mortality rates have also skyrocketed in recent years. With a shortage of around 95 percent for some essential medicines, preventable deaths have soared. The murder rate has also risen to challenge for the highest per capita in the entire world.

Unsurprisingly, many Venezuelans have had enough of this situation and are opting to leave the country in droves. As a result, the instability in Venezuela is increasingly spilling over into other countries in the region, most notably into Colombia. From a Los Angeles Times write-up:

For evidence that the Venezuelan migrant crisis is overwhelming this Colombian border city, look no further than its largest hospital.

The emergency room designed to serve 75 patients is likely to be crammed with 125 or more. Typically, two-thirds are impoverished Venezuelans with broken bones, infections, trauma injuries — and no insurance and little cash.

“I’m here for medicine I take every three months or I die,” said Cesar Andrade, a 51-year-old retired army sergeant from Caracas. He had come to Cucuta’s Erasmo Meoz University Hospital for anti-malaria medication he can’t get in Venezuela. “I’m starting a new life in Colombia. The crisis back home has forced me to do it.”

The huge increase in Venezuelan migrants fleeing their country’s economic crisis, failing healthcare system and repressive government is affecting the Cucuta metropolitan area more than any other in Colombia. It’s where 80 percent of all exiting Venezuelans headed for Colombia enter as foreigners.

Though Venezuela is undoubtedly in crisis, state news service TeleSUR reports on Venezuela as though everything is fine in the country. A glance at its front page shows no reporting on the myriad economic and social issues within the country. What we do find on there, however, are many articles attacking the opposition as “abandoning peace,” as well as paranoid rhetoric about how the Maduro regime is being unfairly targeted by Western nations.

As Venezuela under the Maduro regime becomes more and more of a closed society, the propagandistic rhetoric and strategies frequently deployed by state media outlets, such as TeleSUR, provide outside observers and analysts with clues as to how the Maduro regime effectively interprets the world for Venezuelans.

Clearly, Venezuela is in dire need of social and economic reform. Despite almost every metric imaginable showing that Venezuela is a spectacularly failed state, there is no real possibility for a substantial change of course. Certainly, the majority of Venezuelans do not believe meaningful change is right around the corner.

Speaking to Agence France-Presse, exiled Venezuelans from around the world have expressed utter skepticism that the election would change anything at all. Across the board, these Venezuelans believe that nothing short of a change of government can give Venezuela any semblance of hope for the future. “The election on Sunday [was] a pantomime. It’s a complete fraud,” one person stated.

The economic crisis in Venezuela is starting to have global reverberations. Venezuela’s oil industry, once among the largest producers of oil in the world, has seen its production reduce dramatically in recent years. In the period between December 2016 and March 2018, oil production in Venezuela has gone down by over half-a-million barrels per day, or a drop of nearly 30 percent.

Venezuela’s oil crisis has driven prices upward, with crude oil recently reaching $70 per barrel, a price likely to rise further given the ongoing reduction in Venezuelan production (with some industry analysts predicting a price of $100 per barrel on the horizon).

The sharp downturn in the production of oil in Venezuela has been exacerbated by a recent court decision on the Dutch-owned island of Curaçao. This decision ruled that American oil giant ConocoPhillips was authorized to seize more than $600 million in assets held by Venezuelan state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA. The company recently defaulted on more than $2 billion in debt, prompting other companies to seize PdVSA assets. As many of the refineries used by PdVSA are found on Curaçao and surrounding islands, islands which are currently being targeted by other creditors, oil output by PdVSA is likely to tumble further.

The aforementioned factors point toward a crisis on the scale of that seen in Syria in recent years. In contrast to Syria, however, the situation in Venezuela has received scant international attention from the media and other governments.

It is a situation which before long will require a sustained international response, given the scale of Venezuela’s collapse. The prospect of further sanctions against the Maduro regime following the vote has been raised by the United States as well as a group of Latin American countries. Though sanctions are already in place against Maduro, the proposed sanctions would go after high-ranking officials within his government, as well as directly targeting Venezuela’s oil industry, a move which would place further pressure on Maduro to step down or be removed.

Of course, Maduro has shown no signs of relinquishing his position. This is the worst possible outcome for Venezuelans, who are collectively resigned to a gloomy future so long as Chavez’ hand-picked successor remains in power. The longer Maduro remains in power, the worse Venezuela’s crisis will get, with escalating consequences not only for Venezuela but for Latin America, and in terms of the world’s oil supply at least, the world.