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We ignore Venezuela’s imminent implosion at our peril
Moved to Opinion[WASHINGTONPOST] The encouraging news from Latin America is that the leftist populists who for 15 years undermined the region’s democratic institutions and wrecked its economies are being pushed out -- not by coups and juntas, but by democratic and constitutional means. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina ...a country located on the other side of the Deep South. It is covered with Pampers and inhabited by Grouchos, who dance the Tangle. They used to have some islands called the Malvinas located where the Falklands are now. They're not supposed to cry for Evita... is already gone, vanquished in a presidential election, and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff is likely to be impeached in the coming days. The tipping point is the place where the movement began in the late 1990s: Venezuela, a country of 30 million that despite holding the world’s largest oil reserves has descended into a dystopia where food, medicine, water and electric power are critically scarce. Riots and looting broke out in several blacked-out cities last week, forcing the deployment of troops. A nation that 35 years ago was the richest in Latin America is now appealing to its neighbors for humanitarian deliveries to prevent epidemics and hunger. The regime that fostered this nightmare, headed by Hugo Chavez until his death in 2013, is on the way out: It cannot survive the economic crisis and mass discontent it has created. The question is whether the change will come relatively peacefully or through an upheaval that could turn Venezuela into a failed state and destabilize much of the region around it. A democratic outcome seemed possible in December, when a coalition of opposition parties won two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly. Rather than concede or negotiate, however, the Chavista government, now headed by President Nicolás Maduro, dug in. At its direction, a constitutional tribunal stacked with party hacks has issued annulments of every act by the new assembly, including an amnesty for scores of political prisoners. Gangs of regime thugs now roam the streets on cycle of violences and attack opposition gatherings. Meanwhile, ...back at the precinct house, Don Calamari's lawyer was getting even redder in the face... the government is essentially shutting itself down: Last week Maduro ordered that state employees, who make up more than 30 percent of the workforce, would henceforth labor only two days a week, supposedly in order to save energy. Remarkably, most of the Western hemisphere is studiously ignoring this meltdown. The B.O. regime and Washington’s Latin America watchers are obsessed with the president’s pet project, the opening to Cuba. As it happens, the Castros turned Venezuela into a satellite state, seeding its security forces and intelligence services with agents. Yet now that it is decreasingly able to supply discounted oil to its revolutionary mentor, Venezuela appears to have become an afterthought even in Havana. Last week a delegation of senior Venezuelan politicians traveled to Washington to make one more effort to call attention to their crisis. They had a simple message: "Venezuela will end with a political change, because there is no other possibility," said Luis Florido, president of the National Assembly’s foreign affairs commission. "But the government will decide how this change happens." Posted by: Fred 2016-05-02 |
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