Beware of a ‘self-coup’ before Venezuelan elections

Andres Oppenheimer: Beware of a 'self-coup' before Venezuelan elections
BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER
aoppenheimer@MiamiHerald.com

As Venezuela gets closer to its Dec. 6 legislative elections with the
opposition coalition leading by a comfortable margin in all major polls,
there are growing fears that the government will take advantage of a
climate of chaos — and perhaps even create it — in order to suspend the
elections.

Hardly a day goes by without new statements or actions by President
Nicolás Maduro — such as his closing of the border with Colombia this
week — that fuel speculation that he may be seeking to create a climate
of chaos to stage a "self-coup'' and suspend the vote, well-placed
Venezuelan opposition sources tell me.

Maduro has used government-controlled courts to jail leading opposition
leaders such as Leopoldo López under fabricated charges, and to ban at
least 10 others — including charismatic former congresswoman Maria
Corina Machado — from running for Congress in the upcoming elections.

In addition, Maduro has said Venezuela will not allow international
observers from the Organization of American States for the legislative
elections. Instead, he says he will only invite representatives of the
more sympathetic Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) to visit the
country as "electoral escorts," a government invention that critics say
amounts to "electoral tourism" by mostly pro-government foreign diplomats.

But with Venezuela's inflation estimated at nearly 180 percent a year —
the highest in the world — and the economy plummeting by more than 5
percent this year, these and other tricks may not be enough to win the
election.

According to a recent poll by Datanalisis, 87.2 percent of Venezuelans
say that the country's situation is "bad" or "very bad," and 70.4
percent of those polled disapprove of Maduro's presidency. If the Dec. 6
elections were held today, the opposition coalition known as MUD would
win by a margin of 23 percent, the Datanalisis poll shows.

"Until now, the government had resorted to all kinds of ruses to win
elections," says political scientist Maria Teresa Romero. "These tricks
used to work when there was a difference of one or two percentage
points, but they don't suffice when the opposition is winning by nearly
25 percent."

Romero told me that "there is such a generalized discontent, that the
government has begun to charge the opposition with all kinds of violent
crimes. There is a widespread belief that he wants to create a climate
of chaos as an excuse to annul the elections."

There have been dozens of cases of looting across the country in recent
months, and street violence has reached all-time highs. Maduro's
response has been to step up his periodic claims of alleged foreign and
domestic conspiracies, which are getting increasingly far-fetched.

Earlier this week, he presented a video on national television showing a
Venezuelan prisoner facing murder charges claiming that U.S. Sen. Marco
Rubio, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, former Colombian President Alvaro
Uribe, actress Maria Conchita Alonso and top Venezuelan opposition
leaders were paying him and others to help destabilize Venezuela.

The prisoner, Jose Rafael Perez Venta, who faces charges of murdering a
woman and later cutting her body into pieces, claims in the
government-taped video that Rubio and Ros-Lehtinen had personally sent
him envelopes with $1,000 in cash through a third person. Rubio and
Ros-Lehtinen have described the charges as outlandish.

"The accelerating deterioration of Venezuela's political crisis is cause
for growing concern," says the International Crisis Group, a Washington,
D.C., and Brussels-based think tank aimed at preventing conflicts
worldwide. "If not tackled decisively and soon, it will become a
humanitarian disaster."

It adds that "this situation results from poor policy choices,
incompetence and corruption," and it can worsen substantially "unless
the political deadlock is overcome and a fresh consensus forged, which
in turn requires strong engagement of foreign governments and
multilateral bodies."

My opinion: I agree. The fact that Maduro is not taking any measures to
prevent Venezuela's worsening crisis — such as to stop scaring away
investments and to promote a dialogue with the opposition — raises
questions about whether he may be purposely or tacitly allowing the
situation to deteriorate and creating border conflicts in order to have
an excuse to cancel the Dec. 6 elections.

Venezuelan neighbors, especially Brazil and Colombia, are playing with
fire by not actively pressing Maduro to hold free elections with
credible OAS observers. An escalation of political violence could turn
Venezuela into a lawless state from where Colombian guerrillas and drug
traffickers could destabilize neighboring countries, provoke massive
emigration, and disrupt Venezuelan oil supplies to the Caribbean and the
United States.

It's time for Latin American countries to stop looking the other way and
start pressing Maduro to hold credible elections that can help Venezuela
get back on its feet, before it's too late.

Source: Andres Oppenheimer: Beware of a 'self-coup' before Venezuelan
elections | Miami Herald -
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