Canada shouldn’t serve as Trump’s flunky in Venezuelan turmoil

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on January 26, 2019.

The Canadian government is making a grave error by following the U.S.’s lead in its attempt to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

After more than a century of using the pretext of democracy promotion to interfere in the affairs of Latin American countries, President Donald Trump’s claim to be acting in the interest of “the Venezuelan people” rings very hollow.

From Haiti at the turn of the century to Chile in the ’70s, Nicaragua in the ’80s and most recently Honduras in 2009, the U.S. has always regarded itself as the protector of democracy in the western hemisphere, even when it involves overthrowing democratically-elected governments in favour of authoritarian strongmen who want to open their country for business.

Juan Guaido, 35, who Canada, the U.S., Brazil and others decided is the legitimate president of Venezuela, hasn’t won a presidential election (although he was elected head of the National Assembly, or congress, in 2015).

His legitimacy as president is equally questionable as Maduro’s.

There are certainly many Venezuelans who oppose Maduro — some of them violently — but there are many who want to see the Bolivarian Revolution began by his popular predecessor Hugo Chavez continue.

In Canada, we’ve only been hearing one side of the story, which is that of the opposition.

A look at some recent history in Venezuela — which is one of two countries that have more oil reserves than Canada (the other being Saudi Arabia) — is in order.

Chavez, a former military officer and leader of a failed coup attempt in the 1992, rebranded himself as a civilian populist and was democratically elected in 1998.

This was followed by a series of sweeping electoral mandates throughout the 2000s, all of them endorsed by observers as free and fair elections.

But there was a break for 48 hours in 2002, when Chavez was ousted by the military leadership backed by the U.S. After mass protests and support from rank-and-file military officers, Chavez was restored as president.

A major problem with Chavez’s leadership was his over-reliance on oil revenues to fund ambitious social projects geared towards the nation’s poor masses.

Once oil prices tanked, so too did the Venezuelan economy, something Albertans can certainly relate to on a smaller scale.

Given the dismal state of the economy, and the slipping of many Venezuelans back into poverty, Guaido’s party took a majority of seats in the 2015 National Assembly election, the first after Chavez’s 2013 death and narrow election of Maduro.

To obstruct his opponents and protect the Bolivarian Revolution, Maduro formed a Constituent Assembly in 2017, which has the ability to override the National Assembly, a move condemned as a power grab by human rights groups who had strongly endorsed the legitimacy of Chavez’s elections, such as the Carter Centre and Human Rights Watch.

The opposition refused to participate in an election they regarded as a sham, so its stacking with Maduro loyalists became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A sneaky political gesture, no doubt, but a relatively mild abuse of democratic norms, compared with many U.S.-backed strongmen.

Clearly, democracy isn’t the issue at hand here.

As the Globe and Mail reported yesterday, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke with Guaido on the phone congratulating him two weeks before he declared himself the president of Venezuela.

This was not an organic, spontaneous movement, like the protests who demanded Chavez’s return to power in 2002, but something that was clearly planned in advance.

In other words, it’s a coup attempt.

But the Venezuelan military supports Maduro, which makes it impossible to stage a coup, so the next step could very likely be the U.S. arming the opposition, as they did in Nicaragua in the 1980s, with disastrous results for Nicaraguans.

Canada has the opportunity to play a constructive role and prevent further bloodshed, but our government has chosen instead to serve as Trump’s flunky.