Amid Venezuela Tumult, U.S. Wants Latin American Countries to Lead in Finding a Solution

The Washington Post / Karen DeYoung, Samantha Schmidt

15:44 JST, August 11, 2024

Nearly two weeks after Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro claimed reelection to a third term despite what the United States and others have called “overwhelming evidence” of a massive opposition victory, the future of Venezuela and of U.S. policy there remain in limbo.

The Biden administration, while saying that opposition candidate Eduardo González clearly won more votes, has stopped short of declaring him the victor. Instead, it has called for the release of all official results and for Maduro and the opposition to negotiate a “transition” of power.

Rather than taking the lead in pushing for Maduro to step down and threatening sanctions and other reprisals if he refuses as it has in the past, it has placed its hopes in triad of leftist Latin American governments to persuade him to yield.

So far, efforts of the presidents of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, all of whom have relatively stable relations with Maduro, appear to have achieved little.

Maduro’s attorney general has opened a criminal investigation into opposition leaders currently in hiding, including González. While refusing to release official results of a July 28 vote, which it says Maduro won with 51 percent, the government has accused the opposition of falsifying its own printouts of precinct-level outcomes that show González with more than twice Maduro’s tally.

Maduro has called local opposition organizers “terrorists” and has arrested thousands in security sweeps since the elections. He has annulled the passports of activists and journalists and ordered Venezuelans to delete WhatsApp, a primary tool of opposition communication. On Friday, he decreed that the platform X, formerly Twitter, was banned for 10 days after its owner, Elon Musk, called him a “dictator” and a “clown.”

Amid meetings with both government and opposition representatives, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil have issued communiqués exhorting the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council to release complete results of the precinct-by-precinct vote and allow “impartial verification.”

“The international community is united in our call for Maduro and his representatives to release untampered, detailed tally votes. To date, there is no evidence to back up” the “claim that Maduro won” by the electoral commission, White House National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said Saturday.

“We welcome the engagements from our international partners who are calling for transparency to honor the people’s votes and support a peaceful way forward that respects the will of the Venezuelan people. The United States strongly supports these efforts,” he said.

Two senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic matters, noted that the inauguration of a new Venezuelan president is not scheduled until January, leaving time to build pressure on Maduro from within the hemisphere and beyond.

U.S. efforts in the past – including the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign of increased sanctions on Maduro and his government and recognition of then-opposition leader Juan Guaidó as president – did little to change the situation in Venezuela. Historical resentment of U.S. power in the hemisphere grew, along with the exodus of millions of Venezuelan refugees.

“I think we’re comfortable with the position the three have taken right now,” said one senior administration official on deferring to Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, all of whom aspire to regional leadership. “They have all said there needs to be transparency in the results,” which is required under Venezuelan electoral law. Their “initiative needs some time to develop.”

The three, in varying degrees, are also important to other U.S. goals in the region, including countering drug and migration flows as well as stemming the hemispheric influence of authoritarian actors such as Russia, China and Iran.

“While the United States, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil may have differences in their views on the way forward,” a second administration official said, “we remain united in calling for full transparency … and publication of the voting results at the precinct level.”

“What we want to do is ensure that the United States is working in concert with our allies, in the same direction,” this official said. “We are going to have to see what sort of plan develops from [them] in order to best understand what we can do to support it, if it is in accordance with our own objectives.”

U.S. reluctance to intervene has brought some blowback from lawmakers, especially from the Republican right. In a statement Saturday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) described earlier negotiations with the United States that led to the election as a “farce.”

“The ‘strategies’ presented by this administration have done nothing but empower narco-dictator Maduro and his thugs. It’s disgraceful the Biden-Harris Administration is unwilling to declare the victory of President-elect Edmundo González while the regime has increased the repression,” Rubio said. “Any negotiations are a continued lifeline to the narco-regime.”

Secret talks between the Biden administration and the Maduro government, mediated last year by Qatar, resulted in a draft bilateral agreement to lift Trump-imposed U.S. sanctions that, along with Maduro’s mismanagement of the oil industry, have brought Venezuela’s economy to near ruin. In exchange, Maduro among other things pledged free and fair elections and the release of U.S. and Venezuelan political prisoners.

While that agreement was never signed, the negotiations also led to a deal between Maduro and a united Venezuelan opposition that set a date for last month’s election. Maduro only partially complied, releasing some opposition political prisoners but arresting more. He set the July 28 date, but his Supreme Court prohibited the chosen opposition candidate, María Corina Machado, from running.

U.S. oil and gas sanctions that had been lifted when the election date was announced were reimposed last spring after Machado was banned. González, a relatively unknown former Venezuelan diplomat, was then chosen as the opposition’s fallback. But the administration left the door open for more easing as the vote approached.

Pre-election and exit polls all indicated an overwhelming opposition win. After the vote, observers from the Carter Center said the election was flawed. Opposition poll-watchers quickly gathered printouts from the voting machines that have since been verified by several other governments and news organizations.

Some regional experts have called the Biden administration’s wait-and-see policy more realistic than a sudden rush to action.

“Do we re-create our Cuba policy and make them the pariah, or do we do what’s possible to help them find some space and move in a better direction?” said Caleb McCarry, who worked on Cuba policy during the George W. Bush administration. More than six decades of U.S. sanctions have failed to dislodge Cuba’s communist government.

New sanctions, including on Maduro and other individuals in his government, may still be in the future. But for now, the Biden administration is focused, with allies, on incentives to bring him back to the table and offer him an exit strategy. Possibilities range from lifting U.S. narcotics indictments against him and several of his cronies in exchange for safe passage to a third country, or negotiating a temporary power-sharing agreement with the opposition.

Other Latin American countries that have recognized the opposition’s win, led by Panama, are organizing their own pressure group that U.S. officials believe may be more effective in prompting Petro, Lula and López Obrador to take a stronger stand.

“There are lots of conversations in the hemisphere among all of the governments,” the second administration official said. “They are all talking at some level about what the next steps are.”

For the administration’s part, “we believe the opposition does want to have a dialogue, and we support that,” although “the Maduro side is certainly acting like they have no intention of negotiations.”

“It’s incumbent upon everyone in the hemisphere to make clear that we oppose” Maduro’s actions, “ … and that ultimately Maduro needs to respect the will and the votes that were cast by the Venezuelan people,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters Wednesday.

Even as elements of a dialogue are forming in the region and between those directly involved, there is a recognition within the administration that it is unavoidably a player in whatever the outcome is.

“I’m not going to get into what we will or won’t do,” the first administration official said, although this person and others said possible U.S. actions eventually range from a return to bilateral negotiations with Maduro to more sanctions.

But sanctions are not “going to be a silver bullet,” said Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who focuses on Venezuela. “I think it’s why the U.S. is focusing more on carrots than sticks right now.”

“The situation inside the [Maduro] regime is not all peachy,” Ramsey said. “There are a whole set of interests” who have benefited from the sporadic steps toward easing sanctions the administration has taken “and those people have been rubbing their hands together talking about debt restructuring, talking about global financial reintegration of Venezuela, and they don’t want to go back to the bad old days of isolation and economic pressure.”

“That pressure, while it hasn’t resulted in any kind of formal break or rupture inside the regime – and I don’t think it’s going to – I think it’s playing out behind the scenes very quietly in a way that’s reducing Maduro’s room for maneuver,” he said.