Two weeks after an overwhelming opposition victory in Venezuela’s national elections, the spirit of 1989 is alive and well.
By Charles Lane
In China, 1989 was when the rulers of the People’s Republic sent troops to crush a pro-democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. And the repressive spirit of that horrific crackdown finds an echo in the attitude of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Maduro claimed he had won on July 28, despite vast evidence to the contrary. Since then, he has unleashed police and paramilitary forces against thousands protesting the attempted fraud. There have been 23 deaths and 2,200 arrests so far.
“I demand from all the powers of state greater speed, greater efficiency and an iron fist against crime, against violence, against hate crimes,” Maduro, who calls himself a socialist, said Monday.
The upshot is that the Biden administration faces a major defeat in what the president has described as the global “battle between democracy and autocracy.”
To be sure, that defeat is not inevitable. But if present trends continue, the costs could be measured not only in the deepening plight of Venezuela’s people, many of whom will join the mass exodus that has already destabilized the hemisphere. Consolidation of a totalitarian regime, supported by China, Russia and Iran, in Caracas would be a geopolitical catastrophe, too.
Situated at the southern edge of the Caribbean Sea, atop the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela, along with Cuba and Nicaragua, would form a critical mass of strategically located, domestically unchallenged dictatorships — all sympathetic, and beholden, to the United States’ adversaries.
One can quibble endlessly about the U.S. policy errors, strategic and tactical, that have brought us to this point, whether those of President Donald Trump, who tried a confrontational approach heavy on economic sanctions, or of President Joe Biden, who tried to coax Maduro into holding free and fair elections by relaxing sanctions.
However, U.S. policy mistakes do not explain the regime’s survival. The key factor has been that regime’s own relentlessness.
“There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern,” George Orwell wrote in “1984,” adding that the fourth factor — “the mental attitude of the ruling class” — is the most important.
It is almost as though Maduro had read those words and taken them to heart, not as the darkly satirical warning Orwell intended but as practical political advice. Equally relentless have been the dictators supporting him. They remember 1989 not as a grand liberation for European peoples but as a disastrous failure of Mikhail Gorbachev’s will to power under Western imperial pressure.
That is true not only of China’s Xi Jinping, who once said the Soviet Union fell because “nobody was man enough to stand up and resist” Gorbachev, or of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has lamented that Soviet officials “just dropped everything and went away.” Also, Cuba is ruled by the political and familial heirs of Fidel Castro, who spent 1989 purging his regime in preparation for a long holdout against democracy, which has succeeded through repeated rounds of savage repression.
Venezuela’s post-election crackdown looks a lot like the one Iran’s regime carried out in 2009 and like Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega’s assault on election-year dissent in 2018.
In contrast, the Biden administration continues to see the Venezuela crisis as a second-tier foreign policy concern. The administration considers it amenable to negotiation, despite the equivocal posture of the neighboring countries — Brazil, Colombia and Mexico — it is expecting to assist. Their left-wing governments can’t quite speak the truth — Maduro is a usurper — partly because of reflexive sympathy for anyone who raises the anti-imperialist banner and partly because, in a world of declining U.S. influence, they’re hedging their bets.
Reportedly, the latest Biden administration stratagem is to offer an amnesty for Maduro and others in his regime who face U.S. criminal charges, in return for their ceding power to the opposition.
Why Maduro would accept is a small mystery. He’s already pretty safe since the United States is powerless to arrest or extradite him. He faces no pressure to leave from the Venezuelan military, the only domestic force that could oust him — and which Cuban intelligence has thoroughly penetrated on Maduro’s behalf. Two veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council — Russia and China — stand firmly behind him.
Perhaps the brave people of Venezuela can find a way to win, and perhaps the United States can find an effective way, through amnesty, sanctions or some combination, to support them.
Otherwise, the lesson of this episode will be: With enough ruthlessness and unequivocal support from U.S. adversaries, a dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere can kill and jail its own people and steal elections — and get away with it.
