On Friday evening the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement expressing concern over the political unrest in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and regret at the loss of life. “The Government of Guyana stands with the Government of Venezuela,” the statement read, “and fully supports its efforts at withstanding acts of destabilisation.”
Venezuela has been feeling the impact of student demonstrations over the past two weeks or so, and on Wednesday, three people were killed during a major protest. The official line from President Nicolás Maduro and members of his government is that the aim or the protestors is to instigate a coup, and it was in that context that a bench warrant was issued for the most charismatic of the opposition leaders, Leopoldo López, on a petition issued by the Attorney General. It contained allegations of conspiracy, solicitation to commit a crime, public intimidation, setting fire to public premises, damage to public property, murder and terrorism.
Mr López was present at the Wednesday demonstration for a brief period, it seems, but then so was opposition leader Henrique Capriles whom he has been accusing of pusillanimity in terms of his responses to the government. Mr López, of course, was also targeted by the late President Hugo Chávez because he was seen as a viable opponent, and in addition to harassment was banned from standing for election until 2014. The ban was never lifted despite the fact that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights sanctioned Mr Chávez on the issue. As of Friday evening, however, Mr López was still at his home, and security officers had not at that point forced their way in to arrest him.
Venezuela faces major problems on several key fronts. Its economy is on a downward spiral, with an inflation rate of over 56% last year; there is a severe shortage of foreign exchange, with a two-tier system (which will be familiar to older Guyanese) inevitably making no impact on the foreign exchange shortage. The manufacturing sector is contracting fast, affecting jobs and the availability of goods. It has been reported that the shortage of staples last month was the worst in five years, and the recourse to importation to make good the absence of local manufactures has been partly hampered by the chaos at the ports, where containers have been left unclaimed for months, and in some cases, years. Added to all of that is the administration’s socialist-inspired measures of one kind or another, which are
making the situation worse.
In addition, Caracas is now listed among the leading crime capitals of the world, although the murder of a former beauty queen and reality soap star last month galvanized the government into a temporary flurry of apparent activity, when President Maduro promised he would put forward a plan for tackling the high crime rate. To date, nothing more has been heard of it. In the meantime, a German tourist was killed during the course of a mugging in Margarita, Venezuela’s premier tourist destination, and now the cruise ships have called a temporary halt to berthing there.
Freedom of expression, of course, is not one of the liberal principles of which Mr Maduro seems particularly enamoured, and his government has refused licences for the importation of newsprint on the grounds of a lack of foreign exchange. To date at least six newspapers have ceased to print ‒ and counting. Presumably he would really like to shut down the national heavyweights like El Nacional and El Universal, and no doubt Teodoro Petkoff’s Tal Cual while he is at it. Courtesy of his precedessor, he has the broadcast media more or less under control, although a Colombian TV channel was closed down last week for its reports on the demonstrations, and a small network in the south west of the country is to be investigated for plotting to carry out a coup because of its reports. In addition, Twitter said that Venezuela had blocked images of the demonstration from its service.
There were protests about the newsprint issue by journalists and the trade unions along with some students the week before last, but last week the students were listing the food shortages, the crime situation and the economy as the primary reasons for the demonstration. Given the situation and the traditions of Venezuela, it would be surprising if the country remained protest free. Discontent has been on the increase for a long time, and President Maduro’s reaction to it has been one of greater repression, rather than dialogue and a recalibration of policy. However, according to Stratfor, the global intelligence company, the government cannot afford to crack down too hard without risking more serious unrest in the future.
As for the opposition, with the arrest warrant out for Mr López, the leaders are concerned that this might signal greater repression for them. Whether that is so or not, as one commentator observed, if the demonstrations move to violence it will simply give credence to government accusations that the objective of the action is a coup.
It is not that there wasn’t some violence on the student side; while the overwhelming majority were engaged in peaceful protest, there was a small number of masked demonstrators throwing rocks and molotov cocktails. But the main violence came from the government side, albeit not in an official sense. Armed gangs on motorcycles (or in minibuses), whose members were masked, rode around Caracas and other cities, and were thought to be responsible for the shooting deaths of two students on Wednesday. They also intimidated and arrested human rights activists. They were not attached to any government agency, but were performing the kind of service for the government that the House of Israel once did here. The third death on Wednesday was of a government officer, the circumstances of which are not altogether clear, although the government laid it at the door of the students.
So here you have a situation, some elements of which – the shortages, the socialist experiment, the repression, the thugs, the denial of newsprint – are reminiscent of what happened here some decades ago. And there is the Government of Guyana jumping in with both feet to effectively declare that the Venezuelan demonstrators are bent on destabilization. (Ironically, it was only in our edition yesterday that Mr Hydar Ally of the PPP chirruped smugly about how far press freedom had come under the Guyana Government, and how previously newsprint had been denied the opposition.)
The tenor of what OAS Secretary-General Insulza and the Regional Representative of the UN human rights office had to say were of an entirely different order to Takuba Lodge’s statement, the former requesting a transparent investigation into events, and the UN an investigation into “the possible involvement of armed groups in these violent events.” In addition there was the exhortation for Venezuela to guarantee the right of peaceful meeting and freedom of expression and opinion.
Guyana, it seems, is fixated on PetroCaribe and its critical rice market, which are the likely reasons for it speaking out now in defiance of at least some of the known facts. The only other possibility, given that this statement came so quickly, is that the Venezuelan government is lobbying South American governments for expressions of support, and Argentina and Guyana have obliged.
The situation in Venezuela is unstable; how things will unfold is impossible to predict from this side of the Amakura, let alone how this will affect our economic situation and all the other dimensions of our relationship with our western neighbour. The bottom line is that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not need to speak at this time; it should have held its peace.
