The Rise of Authoritarianism and the Challenge to

International Law
Seventh Reaction Paper :
Answer the following questions:

1. What type of authoritarian ruler Is Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro?

Venezuela has presidential government. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Venezuela an
"authoritarian regime" in 2020, having the lowest score among countries in the Americas. Rather
than a Weberian rational-bureaucratic state, Maduro authoritarianism is a loose confederation of
criminal chieftainships where he plays the role of capo di tutti capi—the boss of bosses.
Normally, Maduro is able to arbitrate disputes between his captains. But sometimes, as in Apure,
the system breaks down and violence erupts.

2. How would you compare Maduro to other strongman rulers, such as Viktor Orban
in Hungary or Gen. Min Aung Hlaing in Myanmar?

The autocratic regime in Venezuela has survived despite a multitude of crises. It has done
so by relying on classic autocratic tools, but also by deploying what I call “function
fusion”: granting existing institutions the ability to perform a variety of functions
typically reserved for other institutions. The military is acquiring civilian and business
functions; organized civilian groups have been given the function of conducting quasi-
military operations; a constituent assembly has acquired the function of legislature and
ruling party combined; and the state is sharing sovereignty with foreign armed forces and
criminal gangs. The regime is adapting the concept of multitasking in the service of
twenty-first–century authoritarianism. This is a risky strategy, but so far it has allowed
the regime to maintain its repressive rule and keep its coalition intact.

3. Why do the authors describe the Venezuelan regime as a criminal enterprise?

Arauquita is a remote Colombian border town of about 5,000 people. In May, thousands of
bedraggled Venezuelan refugees from neighboring Apure State started arriving in Arauquita with
grim stories of aerial bombings and house-to- house searches by Venezuelan soldiers. A tiny war
had broken out in the region, pitting the army loyal to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro
against the Tenth Front—a dissident faction of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia), Colombia’s Marxist rebel group turned drug tracking cartel, which years earlier had
crossed the border and eectively taken over a section of Apure State.

The reasons for the ghting remain shrouded in uncertainty—it might have stemmed from a
dispute over the prots of the Tenth Front’s drug smuggling routes. The outcome of the clashes
has been more revealing, even shocking: the capacity of the Venezuelan state is so limited that it
cannot dislodge the FARC ghters. e Tenth Front remains the de facto authority in the area despite
the Maduro government’s display of repower.

The battles in Apure State may be a sign of things to come. e Venezuelan regime is not just a
military dictatorship but also a criminal enterprise.

4. Do you think Venezuela can be pushed toward democracy by the United States and
European Union?
The European Union (EU) and the United States are usually seen as key players in democracy
promotion around the world. Indeed, the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy engrains
the principle of protecting and promoting democracy and human rights. However, in its external
relations with Latin America, the EU has long lacked a strategic policy in dealing with
autocratization in the region. As one analyst portrays, EU democratization efforts in the Western
Hemisphere assimilate more to a tradition than to a serious policy,[2] preventing the supranational
bloc from playing a more assertive role against dictatorships, such as Venezuela’s hegemonic
autocracy. In Venezuela’s challenging case, the EU remains invested in the country’s
democratization, not only because member states have an institutional duty but also because
Maduro’s regime poses political and security threats to the EU.[3] The Venezuelan autocracy has
survived because of its political and economic alliances with revisionist states,[4] especially China
and Russia, challenging the West’s security.
           Nonetheless, to improve the prospects of democratization in Venezuela, the EU must
revert its recent policy blunders and reconceive its role as a democratizing player. The EU
already seeks to deal with assertions from Russia, democratic backsliding in Hungary and
Poland, and the destabilizing role of Belarus, challenges that should indisputably be Europe’s
primary focus.[5]In far-away Venezuela, instead of taking a leading role, a more effective and
smarter EU approach would complement and support the United States—the Western
Hemisphere hegemon—in its policies towards Venezuela’s democratization rather than
undermine them.

Also in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Moisés Naím says
Washington can take steps to highlight the grave situation in the country, expand targeted
sanctions, and be a powerful supporter of human rights. The policy recommendations are as
follows :

Fight lies with facts : The U.S. government should help Venezuelans and the world understand
the real impact of fifteen years of bad governance by ensuring data is collected and reports are
published and publicized.
Sanction those responsible for human rights abuses : The scope and reach of the micro-
targeted sanctions against specific individuals and their families and business partners should be
expanded.

Avoid the anti-imperialist trap : Oil sanctions should be rejected because they would provide
Caracas with someone to blame for the economic crisis it created.

Rally Latin American governments to condemn human rights violations : Washington must
mobilize a group of countries to denounce the jailing and harassment of critics in Venezuela.

5. Why did the democratic movement of Juan Guaido fail?

The opposition launched another attempt to wrest power in January 2019, when Juan Guaidó,
then speaker of the National Assembly, claimed the presidency for himself after the Maduro
government held a crudely rigged presidential vote. Guaido’s challenge electried Venezuelans
and the world. The United States led the charge, with the State Department quickly extending
social recognition to Guaidó as interim president. In all, 60 countries eventually recognized
Guaidó’s claim, including most wealthy democracies and nearly all of Latin America.

The swift U.S. embrace of Guaidó t into a broader pattern of bluster toward the Maduro regime.
For more than a year, President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo, and National Security Adviser John Bolton had taken a tough diplomatic stance
that stressed that “all options are on the table” with regard to Venezuela, even military
intervention. Under the rubric of “maximum pressure,” the United States launched sanctions not
only against regime gures but against key Venezuelan economic sectors, limiting Caracas’s
ability to sell oil abroad in a bid to curtail the regime’s access to the foreign exchange it
desperately needed. Sanctions did not destroy the Venezuelan economy but the regime’s own
economic policies did that, with stunning efficiency, in the two decades before sanctions were
introduced but they deepened the country’s economic crisis and made meaningful economic
recovery impossible.

6. Describe the effort by President Donald Trump to overthrow the Maduro

government.

The top priority of Venezuelan officials when they do sit down for talks with representatives of
the international community has always been relief from the individual sanctions against them. e
chieftains of the regime seem to care more about their freedom to travel and hold property
around the world than about the hardships of ordinary Venezuelans. They have been shaken by
the United States’ announcement last year of a $15 million bounty for help apprehending
Maduro, along with other multimillion-dollar bounties attached to other regime gures and their
cronies.

Trump’s bellicose rhetoric against Maduro and the regime’s top gures was nevertheless
unhelpful in Venezuela. It fed into the Venezuelan opposition’s propensity for magical thinking.
Some radical opposition gures chose to agitate loudly for U.S. military action. ese demagogues
recognized, privately, that the odds of a U.S. intervention actually taking place were vanishingly
small, but that did not stop them from preying on the desperation of their followers.

The Maduro regime, for its part, correctly estimated that the American bluster amounted to
empty threats. It focused on turning U.S. posturing into valuable propaganda. Venezuelan state
TV eagerly carried sound bites of Washington’s saber rattling against the regime. is allowed the
Maduro government to shirk responsibility for the country’s economic problems by blaming
them on supposed U.S. sabotage.

Trump’s pressure did little to change the facts on the ground. They hoped-for cascade of military
defections from the regime never materialized. Instead, the regime waited Guaidó out and
continued to repress and jail his supporters. e steam gradually drained out of his challenge.

7. Who are Venezuela’s allies and how are they helping to sustain Maduro?

Cuba remains Maduro’s strongest and most essential ally. The refusal by China and Russia to
come to Maduro’s aid must have been a rude awakening to him. Both countries see a Venezuela
hostile to the United States as a useful geopolitical chip, and in the past, they have provided
diplomatic cover for and security assistance to the regime. But neither is interested in pouring
scarce resources into what they (rightly) see as a broken sack on the Caribbean. Other
Venezuelan allies, such as Iran and Turkey, have proved more useful, dispatching gasoline
shipments and some finished goods or “recycling and laundering” Venezuela’s gold. But any
broader alliance with these two distant governments is invariably limited. Tehran and Ankara
lack the ability and the will to save Caracas from its economic catastrophe.

This leaves Maduro one last, true, unwavering ally: Cuba. The original Latin leftist dictatorship
has had such a close relationship with the Venezuelan regime that the word “alliance” doesn’t
quite do it justice. In fact, Venezuela is under a sort of stealth Cuban occupation. Maduro
appears to trust Cuban officials more than his own: Cuban spooks—not Venezuelan ones—
stating his own intelligence shop inside the presidential palace, meaning Havana knows more
about what happens in Venezuela than most Venezuelan officials do. And Maduro appears to
prioritize Cuba’s needs above Venezuela’s, as demonstrated by the fact that Venezuela has
continued to supply Cuba with energy throughout this crisis, even as its own drivers have seen
gas stations run dry.
 8. What has happened to the Venezuelan economy since Maduro came to power?

A once large and growing middle class has virtually disappeared, leaving as many as 96 percent
of Venezuelans below the poverty line. e economy has collapsed dramatically, with GDP per
capita having dropped to about a quarter of what it had been before the crisis began in 2013. By
some estimates, the Venezuelan economy has contracted more since 2012 than any other
peacetime economy.

Venezuela’s economic implosion tracks back to the destruction of its oil industry, which for over
a century had been at the center of the country’s economic strategy. Oil production had been
drifting down from a peak of 3.7 million barrels per day in 1998 to 2.2 million barrels per day in
2017. But the combination of chronic underinvestment in exploration and maintenance, the loss
of access to international credit markets following sovereign default in 2017, and the imposition
of U.S. sanctions on the oil industry that same year saw the bottom fall out of the industry.
Venezuela now produces a mere 700,000 barrels per day—nowhere near the level required to
fund the imports the country needs to survive.

For a time, in 2017 and 2018, the regime imagined it could ride out the oil sanctions by leaning
on friendly foreign powers. Venezuelan officials hoped that Chinese and Russian oil companies
might be invited in to prop up the collapsing industry. But after a long and tortuous set of
negotiations, both Chinese and Russian armies rejected to take over the mammoth Amuay-
Cardón renery (which boasts the capacity to produce one million barrels per day). Today,
Amuay-Cardón sits idle. Gasoline shortages have become a daily fact of life for millions of
Venezuelans, who must spend up to four days in line waiting for rare fuel supplies to ll their
tanks. e government gave foreign companies lucrative licenses to exploit abandoned and
mismanaged oil elds. Eventually, one by one, these oil companies left the country, as the task of
restoring production proved to be impossible. Venezuela remains, tragically, the country with the
largest oil reserves on the planet. The scale of the economic collapse is clearest in terms of
monetary debasement. After the second-longest bout of hyperination on record anywhere (with
45 months in hyperinationary conditions between 2017 and 2021), the government is preparing
to further debase the bolivar, the nation’s ailing currency. It is the third such “redenomination”
since 2008. Altogether, 14 decimal places will have been lopped o the bolivar, meaning a one
bolivar note in 2022 will be worth 100 trillion bolivars of the 2008 vintage.

As the bolivar becomes less and less useful, Venezuelans have abandoned it in droves,
increasingly choosing to transact in U.S. dollars or in Colombian pesos or Brazilian reais in
border regions adjacent to those countries. Around two-thirds of transactions are now carried out
in foreign currency. e turn to the U.S. dollar has helped create an illusion of normalcy in
formerly affluent areas of Caracas. But it is a mirage: one recent survey has shown that only 40
percent of households receive hard currency remittances from relatives abroad. e other 60
percent have to make do with bolivars. They face an ongoing food crisis, with childhood
malnutrition rates reaching 36 percent according to the World Health Organization and little
prospect of relief anytime soon.
 9. What is the most likely scenario for the future of Venezuela?

One possible future for the country would see the chieftains one rung down from Maduro
increasingly at one another’s throats, with turf wars spilling out into actual bloodshed. Maduro
and his Cuban handlers will, of course, do what they can to contain the chaos, but it is far from a
given that they will succeed. is future looks a lot like Venezuela’s conict-ridden nineteenth
century, when a nominal president in Caracas controlled little beyond the capital and the
country’s custom houses while a wild proliferation of regional caudillos ruled mostly
unchallenged over the other cities and towns. is arrangement was never stable: throughout the
nineteenth century, caudillos routinely tried to storm the capital and take power for themselves.
Sometimes they were successful, other times they were not, but the results were always bloody.

A second scenario would see Maduro maintain his authority over his underlings at least enough
to prevent open ghting between them. With no democracy, no political freedom, no access to
global capital, and no ability to generate foreign exchange, this is the path toward the true
Cubanization of Venezuela: a regime petried in power, built on a substrate of its own people’s
suffering. It is a miserable prospect.

ese are bleak, unpalatable scenarios, but sadly, there are few reasons to expect better. e wishful
hope that the criminals in charge of the Venezuelan regime can somehow be persuaded to accede
to their own ruin is just that—a hope—and certainly not a proper basis for diplomatic action.
Such hopes have distorted policymaking in the United States and elsewhere for too long. e reality
Venezuela faces is dismal, but it must be treated as reality.

10. What did you find most interesting about the article?

The article is very brutal and straightforward. It is making the readers aware that there is no hope
for Venezuela. It calls it “bleak, unpalatable scenarios, but sadly, there are few reasons to
expect better.” I think I enjoyed reading the article. I also wish more authors and leaders of
countries are upfront like him, and do not give us false hopes about them.

11. What would you like to know more about?

I would like to know how the US and the European Union are actually helping Venezuela to
become a democracy. What sufferings the people have to go as individuals and how is their
standard of living.