COMMENTARY
Last December – when Venezuela’s opposition demolished the ruling socialists in parliamentary elections – a lot of folks got ready for an Andean Spring.
It seemed to make sense. Chavismo, the socialist party of the late President Hugo Chávez, had mismanaged and destroyed Venezuela’s oil-rich economy. It had forced Venezuelans to endure epic lines for increasingly scarce food, medicine and other basics. It had left them to suffer South America’s worst murder and violent crime epidemics.
A recall referendum looked imminent – meaning so did the ouster of Chávez’s laughable successor, President Nicolás Maduro. After that, the opposition was sure a new presidential election would end Chavismo’s disastrous 17-year-long rule.
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Here’s what's happened instead: Chavismo isn’t going anywhere. Maybe not for another 17 years.
That felt especially apparent Wednesday morning, when Venezuelans woke up to the news that elections for state governorships – which were supposed to be held in December – won’t take place until next summer at the earliest.
The Chavista-controlled electoral council didn't say why. But the reason is simple. Since conditions in Venezuela are even worse now than they were a year ago – its infant mortality rate is higher than war-ravaged Syria’s, according to a Wall Street Journal report this week – the Chavistas were staring at a catastrophic loss of governorships to match last year’s catastrophic loss of National Assembly seats.
So rather than follow the Constitution, they shamelessly trashed it and postponed the state elections – the same shameless way they recently delayed the recall referendum.
UPDATE: Thursday night the electoral council suspended the recall effort.
That plebiscite now won't be held until 2017; so if Maduro loses it there won’t be a special election to replace him. Instead, his vice president will take over – leaving the Chavistas in power at least until the next regularly scheduled presidential vote in 2019.
But that’s assuming the referendum will ever be held. The Chavistas may devise even more shameless ways to stop it – and other upcoming elections – in order to thwart the delusional “economic war” they claim the opposition and its U.S. patrons are waging against Venezuela.
In other words, inside the dark, desperate recesses of their Marxist cave, it looks like the Chavistas have decided to exchange their democratatorship for a more unabashed dictatorship.
What’s a democratatorship? It’s the kind of democratically elected authoritarianism Chávez exemplified. (Think Vladimir Putin in Russia.) Now that the democratically elected part no longer works for the Chavistas, they’re shifting into naked authoritarianism.
Consider Maduro’s ominous warning on Tuesday. If the opposition parties continue their “temperamental” demand for a recall vote, he said, they risk becoming “illegal” and forfeiting their participation in future elections. He also suggested the opposition-controlled Assembly, whose every move is blocked by the Chavista-controlled Supreme Court, should be dissolved.
LOSE-LOSE HORIZON
All of that “is a real, possible, probable scenario,” Maduro added – raising the real, possible, probable specter of Venezuela dropping what little democratic pretense it's got left for a one-party system, a la communist Cuba or Augusto Pinochet’s fascist Chile.
And the Chavistas can pull it off because they’ve got Venezuela’s military leadership on board.
So if I had to bet, I’d put my money on the scenario Maduro is telegraphing. Opposition parties get outlawed. The Assembly gets axed. Venezuela becomes a more hard-handed, 21st-century version of 20th-century Mexico, when one party ruled just about everything for 71 years.
And more and more hopeless Venezuelans pour into South Florida.
This dark prospect might be avoided if collapsed oil prices rebound – and there are signs that may be happening – but even that enhances the Chavistas’ chances of staying in power. If Venezuela’s economic situation improves thanks to higher crude prices, the socialists may not kaibosh elections – because they stand a better chance of winning them.
If this sounds like a lose-lose horizon for Venezuela’s opposition, that’s because it is. And there’s very little the U.S. can do about it.
America could try isolating Venezuela – because, gosh, that worked so well with Cuba for half a century – but Venezuela right now is the U.S's third largest foreign source of oil.
Which means the only real Andean Spring available to Washington is to help prevent the kind of corrupt and negligent conditions in other Latin American countries that led to the rise of Chávez in his.
