Last week the major Venezuelan newspapers began to cautiously explore political scenarios which assumed that President Hugo Chávez would not be leading his party (The United Socialist Party) in the foreseeable future. Venezuelan elections for the presidency are due on October 7, and while the head of state’s ever increasing absences from the country have been a cause for concern, prior to this most commentators (with one major exception) confined themselves to querying the constitutionality of him not handing over power to the Vice-President in the interim, and governing from Cuba by “internet,” as his opposition rival Henrique Capriles dubbed it. That aside, there has been little speculation about what would happen if Mr Chávez were unable to campaign or were unable to lead his party into the polls. Of course, it is a tricky subject, because the full nature of the President’s illness has been kept hidden from the public, and all spokespersons as well as Mr Chávez himself have vigorously insisted that he is on the road to recovery.
Recent polls indicated that a large majority of Venezuelans were indeed convinced he is recuperating from an undisclosed form of cancer, and that he will lead his party into the general election. Having said that, one might have thought that the formerly unshakeable confidence of at least a few of them might have been undermined by the sight of him at a public mass in his home state of Barinas on April 30, weeping and asking God for a “miracle.” However, most seem to have written it off as another example of the President’s penchant for theatricality. The change in the political firmament which occurred last week, in contrast, was a development of an altogether different order which was much harder to dismiss out of hand.
That development was the establishment of a Council of State, set up under the 1999 constitution, and chaired by the current Vice-President, Elías Jaua, a sociologist by training and former student radical. According to El Universal, four of the other five members are also civilians, namely, José Vicente Rangel, the left-wing journalist and lawyer who was Minister of Defence for a time in the early part of Chávez’s period of office, but who left government some years ago; Roy Chaderton, a senior diplomat and lawyer who at present is the Ambassador to the OAS; Germán Mundaraín, a lawyer who was the Ombudsman for seven years; and Luis Britto García, a writer, lawyer, sociologist, university teacher and Chávez loyalist. The military representative is Admiral Carlos Rafael Giacoppini, who heads the secretariat of the National Defence Council.
The council has clearly been installed to make decisions on behalf of President Chávez, and it has already been announced that its first task is to consider whether Venezuela should withdraw from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, something which the head of state had already indicated he wanted done. There is no doubt that particularly this year, there has been the sense of a power vacuum in Caracas, and in that context there have been references in the media to in-fighting among the various Chávista factions. It is in the light of this that El Nuevo Herald has submitted that the council’s main function is to contain these factional struggles and prevent an outright confrontation between the various groups.
What several of the newspapers have now ventured to suggest is that Mr Chávez will not lead his party into the election and that another candidate will be chosen. While the official line is that there is no candidate other than Chávez, El Nacional has put forward the possibility of it being either Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro, Jaua, or Diosdado Cabello, the President of the National Assembly and a comrade-in-arms of Chávez during the failed coup of 1992. For its part El Nuevo Herald reported political analysts as saying Maduro was the most likely candidate, because he would be “highly competitive at the polls.”
Nelson Bocaranda, a columnist in El Universal, has been the exception to the generalization made in the first paragraph, since for some time he has been giving gloomy assessments of the President’s medical status, which he has attributed to unnamed medical sources. At a much earlier stage he had said that Maduro would be identified to lead the party, and he repeated that again recently. He has also claimed that there have been discussions in Cuba between the senior military officers concerning the political future of Venezuela, although the accuracy of what he has said about those meetings is impossible to gauge. It should perhaps be mentioned that a few months ago Mr Chávez himself identified Maduro and Cabello as candidates for governorships in the elections, and if he held to that it would put both of them out of the running to take over the party.
According to the last Datanalysis poll, the President is still way ahead of his rival in the run-up to the election, with a rating of 44% as against 31% for Capriles; 20% of respondents, the pollster said, were undecided. However, opposition chances would increase dramatically if Mr Chávez himself was not on the ticket, some earlier polls indicating that the President’s party could not win without him. In that kind of a scenario no one knows what could happen. The head of state has never cultivated a successor – quite the opposite in fact; he has made a point of moving anyone who could be a competitor or threaten his dominance. As a consequence, there is no strong figure who could counter centrifugal tendencies and bring an unstable situation under control. As several commentators have pointed out, there are all kinds of firearms on the streets, since the policy was to arm citizen militias, and that in itself is not something conducive to stability. In addition, no one quite knows what role the military is going to play. Its officer corps is presumed to be mostly Chávez oriented, since it has been purged to achieve that end, but it includes elements who have been accused of criminal activity such as drug-trafficking, and it must be assumed that these would not want to be exposed to justice and might conceivably move to protect their interests.
From Guyana’s point of view, the long and the short of it is that we are in no position to predict with any accuracy what is going to happen in the nation to our west in the next few months. Like several Caribbean territories we have become dependent on Venezuela economically through the PetroCaribe concession and our rice exports to that country. We are not as exposed in terms of oil as some countries, since we receive only 50% of our fuel needs from Venezuela, but should those supplies dry up for whatever reason, it would still be a body blow. Certainly Capriles’ foreign policy advisor, Carlos Romero, has been reported as saying that should his candidate win the election, he would end Venezuela’s “asymmetrical” economic arrangements, and PetroCaribe which costs $3.2B would be “re-evaluated.“ Venezuela would, he said, provide subsidized oil to “the poorest countries, such as Haiti, but there will not be subsidies for countries like Cuba…“
Even if Guyana qualified in terms of Capriles’ “poorest” categorization, his party has made the border an election issue, so the Guyana government should not be optimistic about any concessions from that direction. Caricom itself – not to mention Cuba, of course, which according to a Venezuelan opposition lawmaker has received $28.5B from Venezuela between 2005 and 2011 – will have to confront a serious economic situation. There is always the possibility that Mr Chávez will recover sufficiently to be the presidential candidate in October, and if that happens, he may have a good chance of winning. If he does, Caricom will no doubt heave a collective sigh of relief since Venezuelan policy would be unlikely to change – at least in the short term.
If the opposition wins in Caracas, and the result is accepted by the Chavistas, then while it would be a more difficult situation for this country in economic terms as well as in terms of boundary considerations, at least there would be a recognized government in Miraflores with whom we could deal. Instability next door or some kind of military configuration, however, would present much greater problems for us, since one could never be sure what direction these would take, and whether the border controversy would be seized upon by manipulative elements for nefarious reasons.
In the meantime one can only hope that Takuba Lodge and the government as a whole have been doing some contingency planning in terms of policy and diplomatic strategies, and that our embassy in Caracas is monitoring events in Venezuela very closely so that credible analyses can be transmitted back to Georgetown. The one thing the administration should not be doing is assuming that the relatively benign relationship we have had with Venezuela in recent times is necessarily going to continue indefinitely; we should never be in a position where we are taken by surprise. Finally, this is one clear issue where the government could seek input from the opposition so any possible positions worked out in relation to potential scenarios could receive a ‘national’ imprimatur.
