Venezuela is slipping toward a humanitarian crisis. News of its latest economic low point, or of President Nicolas Maduro’s most recent political tantrum, tends to eclipse this slow-motion disaster. Yet the danger of a Venezuelan implosion is growing.
Venezuela has the world’s highest inflation rate, a collapsing currency and every prospect of defaulting on its debts next year. There are shortages of consumer goods (everything from milk to bread).
In the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, transplant patients have resorted to veterinary medicines to stay alive. Coagulants for treating haemophilia are available only for emergencies. Medicines of every kind are getting hard to find outside the cities. Malaria and dengue fever are on the rise; so is malnutrition.
Every day, Venezuelans form lines at stores that are almost bare. Recently, a man was killed in the town of San Felix and several dozen people arrested as angry shoppers looted grocery stores and attacked state-owned vehicles.
Venezuelans pinning their hopes on December’s municipal elections will likely be disappointed. Leading opposition politicians have been jailed or disqualified from running. Maduro has promised to exclude election monitors from the European Union or the Organisation of American States. He has said he’ll refuse to accept the ruling party’s defeat. The opposition is ahead in the polls, but it’s divided.
Fixing Venezuela’s economy will require measures - ending fuel subsidies and price controls, freeing up exchange rates, cutting public spending - that will be painful because they’ve been delayed so long. Such a programme calls for political co-operation, not the widening repression to which Maduro is resorting.
Venezuela’s neighbours have a special interest in averting this disaster. Brazil and Colombia are distracted by their own troubles, but they can hardly afford to ignore the turmoil at their borders - especially with Maduro using territorial disputes to whip up nationalist fervour. From outside the region, China has bankrolled Venezuela’s profligacy with more than $50bn in loans that lock in oil supplies and sweetheart deals; it too should want to keep its debtor from the brink.
There’s a limit to what outsiders can do. But big neighbours and creditors have influence and should start exercising it. Last month, the UN called Venezuela to account for its use of preventive detention, human rights abuses, censorship and retaliation against those bringing complaints to the UN. The OAS should keep pressing for election monitors and should consider assessing Venezuela’s political conditions under the Inter-American Democratic Charter.
The US, meanwhile, should try some creative diplomacy. The Obama administration can use its opening with Cuba, and its forthcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, to press both countries to push for better Venezuelan behaviour. It should also intensify its own recent overtures to Maduro. True, he has given the US little cause to lift the sanctions and travel bans it rightly put on a handful of Venezuelan officials. These should be kept in place - with a wider target list held in reserve.
At the same time, the US should offer the Venezuelan people generous humanitarian assistance - supplies of badly needed medicines, powdered milk and other basic foods. Its quarrel is with Venezuela’s rulers, not their victims.