a few points made my elliot abrams at national review a few days ago i hope he is right
President Trump is pressing, harder than we did in his first term (when I served as special representative for Venezuela), for change. This is very much in the interests of the United States. The greatest refugee flow in the history of this hemisphere, the 8 million Venezuelans who have fled, will not stop as long as Maduro is in power. The drug flows out of Venezuela will not stop as long as his regime remains, because it relies on income from drug (and also gold and human) trafficking to survive. And the cooperation between that regime and hostile powers — Cuba, Russia, China, Iran — and terrorist groups like Hezbollah will not stop because they help the regime survive and share its hostility to the United States.
I read and hear the objections: After Maduro may come chaos, as in Libya or Iraq, or divisions such as we see in Syria, and there’s no reason to think what comes next will be any better.
These arguments show a lack of familiarity with Venezuelan history, today’s Venezuela, and Latin American politics and society. The divisions that we see in many Middle Eastern countries — historical and geographical, such as in Libya, or social and religious, as in Iraq or Syria, do not exist in Venezuela’s quite homogeneous society. Venezuela is surrounded by democracies and is one of the rare non-democratic countries in this hemisphere. Venezuela, unlike most Middle Eastern countries, has a history of democracy starting with its overthrow of a military dictator in 1958 and lasting until Hugo Chavez began to destroy it 40 years later. Democratic institutions do not need to be invented, but rather restored and reinvigorated.
Nor is there a case in Latin America where a transition to democracy was followed by the kind of social and political collapse into anarchy that some analysts seem to fear. In Venezuela, a new government will of course have to deal with the military — but that was true of every Latin American transition, and in no case has there been a successful military coup reversing the transition. As to the “colectivos,” irregular paramilitary groups that the regime has organized to intimidate the opposition, they too will have to be dealt with — but their power comes from their ties to the regime. Once its ideological, political, financial, and military support ends, the strength of the colectivos will wane steadily.
Nor are arguments that the Venezuelan opposition is hopelessly divided and incompetent true. The opposition united behind Machado despite ideological differences and past rivalries.
