A 'hard hand' in Venezuela

A 'hard hand' in Venezuela
By Editorial Board, Tuesday, April 30, 1:55 AM

ANY DOUBT that new Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro is taking his cues
from Cuba should have been dispelled by events over the weekend. As Mr.
Maduro huddled with the Castro brothers in Havana and recommitted
Venezuela to the heavy subsidies that keep the Cuban economy afloat, his
functionaries back in Caracas made two announcements: first, that a
promised audit of the questionable election that ratified Mr. Maduro as
the successor to Hugo Chavez would be perfunctory, excluding the
materials that the opposition says would show evidence of fraud; and
second, that a 35-year-oldU.S. filmmaker arrested last week on ludicrous
accusations of espionage had been criminally charged.

The dog-eared Castro playbook calls for distracting the public at times
of crisis with crude anti-Americanism — and taking hostages who can be
used for leverage with Washington. For more than three years, Cuba has
been holding Alan P. Gross, a Bethesda-based contractor for the U.S.
Agency for International Development, on patently false espionage
charges, in the hope that he can swapped for five confessed Cuban spies
imprisoned or paroled in the United States.

Now Mr. Maduro has his own "gringo," as he called him: Timothy Tracy, a
Hollywood-based documentary maker who spent several months interviewing
Chavez militants and opposition students before he was abruptly arrested
at the airport last Wednesday. Unlike Mr. Gross, who was hired by USAID
to deliver Internet equipment to Cuba's Jewish community, Mr. Tracy was
not working for any U.S. agency, as the State Department quickly made
clear. Friends described him as a naif who barely speaks Spanish.

Mr. Maduro and the regime's propaganda apparatus are nevertheless
portraying him as a sinister secret agent who was financing "violent
groups" to provoke "a civil war." That, claimed Interior and Justice
Minister Miguel Rodriguez, "would lead to the intervention of a foreign
power to bring order to the country." Fear of a U.S. invasion? Another
Castro cliché.

The real danger in Venezuela is not that an Obama administration
unwilling to provide leadership in Syria would make any serious attempt
to prevent Mr. Maduro's consolidation of power. It is that Mr. Maduro
will follow up on his jailing of an innocent American with a full-scale
crackdown on the opposition. Government spokesmen have taken to calling
Henrique Capriles, who challenged Mr. Maduro in the presidential
election and demanded an audit of the results, a "fascist murderer"; the
prisons minister said she has a cell waiting for him.

On Saturday, authorities arrested a retired general, Antonio Rivero, who
— no surprise — is known for his denunciations of Cuban infiltration of
the Venezuelan military. Mr. Maduro keeps promising he will soon apply
"mano dura," or a hard hand — a phrase that has been a favorite of Latin
strongmen ranging from Anastasio Somoza to Augusto Pinochet.

Mr. Maduro and his Cuban tutors will likely watch to see if there is any
substantial response from the Obama administration or other South
American governments to the seizing of Mr. Tracy. If there is not, don't
be surprised to see Venezuela's jails filled by Mr. Capriles and other
political prisoners.

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